Sitting in the square in front of where he worked, with its four quadrangles of grass surrounded and bisected by paths, it was not difficult for Daniel to imagine that there was an order to things. He sat on a bench in the corner, where he had a clear view from one end of the square to the other. At the far end the branches of the trees formed a grand arch that framed the weak light and brought it low upon the grass, as though it were being filtered through a cathedral window. It was almost empty today - gone were the summer revellers who had crowded the grass. It seemed that this new season might be conducive to rationalising. The uninterrupted view of this recently vacated scene was providing him with the clean empty space he needed to clarify events. Moments hovered into his mind and he held them there, turning them over and examining their illusory smoothness before they softly slipped away again. But there was cruelty in their transparency; past moments so easily recovered and relived, it was as though he could not see himself at all, but another character, with no motivation to have behaved the way they did.
The first time he had slept with Isobel he had not planned it. That was true.
When Will had called him to thank him and he had mentioned that he was in his parents' house in the country for the weekend, he had forgotten that Will had told him this. This seemed as though it could be true.
When Isobel opened the door and told him to come in for a drink he had not intended to sleep with her. It seemed less and less likely that this was true.
After his third drink he did not intend to sleep with Isobel. This was most certainly untrue.
In the near distance he saw a girl from work plodding towards him with a broad grin spread across her face. She was short, buxom and broad-hipped and wore a white v-neck jumper over an open blouse, and a pencil skirt that displayed her figure to its fullest advantage. Still, the badly fitting high-heels she insisted on wearing, the tight skirts and her diminutive stature, all complied to give her the waddle of a much more rotund lady. Sally was the office manager, a role she executed with gusto. She made the job look effortless and gave the impression of efficiency and diplomacy. But Daniel detected a steeliness in her character that told him that if ever he so much as swapped the position of the staples and the paper clips in the stationery cupboard she would find some concealed method of exercising a prolonged and elaborate punishment upon him. She was also renowned as the scourge of lunch breaks, Christmas parties, and after-work drinks as her chatter was not only tedious but voluble. It was too late to bury his face in a book or put his earphones in, and besides, she was not the kind of person who would have recognised such behaviour as a sign that she was not invited to join him. She had already sat down on the bench, removed the lid from her Tupperware and plunged her fork in before saying, 'Well how are you then?'
'Alright Sally, how are you?' Daniel sank lower into the bench and folded his arms, spreading his legs out wide in front of him. He was trying to give the impression of being relaxed but as he muffled his mouth in the neck of his jumper and his head withdrew further and further between the pointed lapels of his trench-coat he looked more like a creature retreating inside its carapace.
'You didn't go to the canteen then?'
Sally liked to begin conversations with a rhetorical question or a statement of fact such as this. It made it easier for her to carry on speaking without having to engage in an actual conversation. Sally liked to soliloquise or impart observations as though they were great discoveries, and she had several recurring themes. Come the end of summer every year, she would place her chin upon her fist and stare out the office window like one of Raphael's dreaming cherubs and say, 'You can almost smell October coming' or 'feel October coming' or 'hear October coming' or something that related to her heightened sensory powers, so in tune was she with the awesomeness of nature. When the first of October had finally arrived Daniel pointed at the calendar and said 'Look Sally. You predicted it again.' No one got the joke and instead he was given suspicious looks by everyone in the office. Another of the marvels of nature for Sally were children. Any time a colleague became a parent and showed her a photo of their newborn or brought the child into the office, Sally would take the picture and hold it up before her face, or cradle the baby in her arms and look at it with the same glassy-eyed gaze she gave a September sky. Then she would look searchingly at the parent and say, 'It's just ... It's just so strange,' with all the awe-struck breathlessness that it seemed she might cry. 'What is it, Sally?' they would ask. 'Well. He has your eyes and his mother's nose. It's like ... It's like he's a mixture of the two of you.'
A long silence followed before Daniel realised that Sally actually expected him to respond with at least the minimum of conversational recognition before she could continue. 'No I haven't been in the canteen in ages, I'm trying to save money.'
pudgy little hand and spread her fingers wide, 'if you spend five pounds five times a week, that's twenty-five pounds and in a month that's a hundred pounds and in a year that's well over a thousand pounds, so it makes sense doesn't it?' She took another mouthful of the cold spinach risotto and continued. 'So on this website you have to put in how much money you spend on everything and how much you would like to spend on everything and I put in really low amounts and I found out I could save two hundred pounds a month.' She paused as though she expected him to be aghast at this figure. 'But it means I've only got ten pounds a week to spend on alcohol.'
'Ten pounds a week? You might as well give up drinking.'
'Yeah but that's only for drinks when me and Lloyd go to our local on a Sunday or for a quick pint in the evening. I've put more aside for after work drinks, and some for going out one night at the weekend. Only one night mind you.'
Daniel laughed. Sally glanced at him and was encouraged. 'And I put another ten pound aside for wine with meals when we eat out.' Now she was laughing too.
Daniel began to play with the belt on his coat, wrapping it around his hands and tightening his fists. He was wondering if Sally would mind if he smoked when he felt something prodding his foot.
'You're going to need to get those mended. The weather's not getting any better, you know. As soon as November arrives it's going to be miserable.' Sally withdrew the toe of her high-heel from the toe of Daniel's brogue and he pointed his foot so that the brown leather of his shoe and the sole parted and opened like a little mouth.
'They're expensive those aren't they? They look like Church's. Lloyd's dad has a pair of those. Handmade, aren't they? Still, good investment all the same, a pair of shoes like that.'
'Yeah, I've had them for years.' Daniel looked down at his shoes once again and pointed his toes back towards himself. 'It's funny, I remember when I bought them not even thinking about the price and I've never been able to afford to get them fixed since.'
'I'm always saying to Lloyd, "Why don't we have any money?" and he says to me, "Sally we've just bought a house" and I have to remember that. I mean it's the most expensive thing you'll ever buy and we're so lucky to have been able to afford one.' She had managed to turn the conversation around to her favourite subject but Daniel was glad for the distraction.
'Where did you say your house was?'
'Near High Barnet, which people always think is miles away but it's really not that bad. You just walk for five minutes and take the bus for ten minutes to the tube and then from High Barnet station you can get the Northern line straight down to Old Street and then I'm practically at work. It only takes me an hour maximum door to door.' She put aside her Tupperware and began pulling a tissue down the length of each finger as if she were removing a pair of gloves. She sat up straight and her blouse spread open to reveal a semicircle of white freckled breast, perfectly plump and smooth. Their shape was of course helped by the presence of a white satin bra. Daniel could tell it was of the cheap variety. He had seen enough bras to know the ones that were from Primark and yellowed before their time.
It seemed impossible to him now but for the first two weeks he had worked at the company he had thought about what it would be like to have sex with Sally. She had a pretty heart-shaped face, was blonde and curvaceous - flirtatious when she wanted to be. She was a particular kind of woman, so specialised a taste in fact, that if any man were to seek her out and actually find her he would treasure her unreservedly as Daniel knew Sally's husband did. For Daniel she would have been somebody to fuck in the stationery cupboard she was always so diligently restocking.
Daniel had only seen Sally and her husband together on a number of occasions but the one that stuck in his mind was the time he saw them driving past him in the vintage MG that Sally was always talking about. He was turning the corner of the square they were sitting in now walking home from work when this little red 1960s soft-top passed by. It was a beautiful car, the kind Daniel thought he would look good in if he ever had the wherewithal to get his driving license let alone afford a car. Sally was positioned awkwardly so that she could speak to Lloyd and watch him at the same time and Lloyd was lifting up his bearded chin so that all you could see of his face was the black hole of his mouth inscribing great belly laughs in the air. Daniel had smiled ruefully and thought of all the efforts both Lloyd and Sally made to appear to be more than the moulds they had so readily poured themselves into. In addition to purchasing this car and arriving at their wedding reception in this statement of their essential difference to be cheered and applauded by all invited, Sally and Lloyd had matching tattoos done just before their big day; not anything boring like each other's names and not anywhere boring that you couldn't see, but a five-pointed star on their right wrists that branded them as being different from other couples.
Daniel looked at Sally now. Sally with her blonde bob and her blunt fringe; that haircut that meant that although she had a boring job, although she had married young and moved to suburbia, she was different, because sometimes she would dye a strip of it pink or maybe black or whatever she fancied because she was impulsive was Sally - you couldn't tell her what to do. How different she would have been from Isobel. Isobel wore underwear that was delicate and transparent like an insect's wings and when she wore the right dress and lifted her hair in the suggestive way she did to reveal the dusty oval of her back like some ancient burial ground, you could see the labels that told you she had spent a lot of money on what she wore. Isobel was all long fine bones and limbs that tapered into tiny hands and feet. She was doe-eyed and sallow-skinned and had hair that tumbled in a wave of Grecian curls down her back. He had gripped big handfuls of it in his fists. In fact it was the only thing he could remember about that evening; burying his face in Isobel's hair and drinking in great drafts of it. The rest was a blank, an event with no subsidiary details.
The event, of course, was that Daniel and Isobel had sex against a garden wall at a party thrown by a mutual friend. Will had not been able to attend due to a family commitment. It was this particular fact that had transformed Daniel and Isobel's small talk into a conversation in which they latched down hard upon the opportunity betokened by each other's sentences. Isobel, knowing how well Daniel and Will knew each other, and knowing how Daniel liked nothing better than to disparage peoples' character, felt comfortable discussing the shortcomings of her boyfriend with someone who would heartily and unequivocally qualify them. 'Daniel, I swear to Christ if I have to attend another of Will's uncles' seventieth birthday parties, I'm going to slit my wrists with the silverware just to cause a distraction. That ought to finish a few of them off! Honestly, it's like Night of the Living Dead every time we attend one of his family does.' Daniel had always admired this about Isobel; how she managed to strike the balance between cruelty and good taste. Daniel thought perhaps it was something you were born with. While people found him entertaining and terribly risque, he always felt that he was one grandiose flight of eloquence away from excommunication. Isobel however, could make an ironic remark without residual traces of malignity shaping her features into an anagram of the words she had withheld. She spoke them, and they were gone. Isobel was such a good sport, so without preciousness or pretence, that there was never a single shred of ugliness in even the worst of what she said. That is why it soon became clear to Daniel as they swapped anecdotes about Will's adorable wetness, and Isobel's eyes periodically widened into doleful moons and her breath caught in a sharp little gasp at the end of each laugh, that her playful criticisms related to a fundamental deficit in some area of her relationship rather than any real ill-feeling towards Will.
The party had been organised to celebrate the summer solstice. Cassie, another friend of theirs from university had invited everyone she knew to her family home in Berkshire and they had all pitched tents in her expansive back garden. On the terrace at the back of her home she had hung Chinese paper lanterns and served vegan canapes. Three times she had tried to cleanse Daniel's aura, each time while handing him a gin and tonic. And while the food was meat free, dairy free, fresh organic produce, the same could not be said of the pills and powders that had been brought down from London to encourage fullest involvement in the various bacchanalian rituals that Cassie had laid on for the evening. Once Daniel had begun to partake in this area of proceedings he could remember little after that although there were a few moments that kept recurring in his mind that he was almost certain he had not fabricated. One was of Isobel at the small round table on the terrace where they had sat conversing for most of the evening, loosening her tresses and staring at the ground like a siren watching her reflection in the pool she was about to bathe in. The other was of them leaning their bodies closer as the drugs advanced their conversations to the deepest depths they were capable of at this point, and all the while their hands turning against each other like two shy animals trying to meet each others' faces but unable to grasp the coordinates that would enable this. There were other moments that Daniel was certain he had fabricated, namely the image of him and Isobel in a state of graceful dishevelment joyfully careering hand in hand down the gentle slopes that lead them to the most distant most private part of the garden. It was evident to him from the rips in his trousers and the dirt that caked his clothes when he woke up the next morning, and the bruises that bloomed on his skin in the days that followed, that he had tumbled and crawled and grappled his way to his tryst with Isobel. He woke the next morning on top of his collapsed tent.
When the guilt and embarrassment abated Daniel surmised that despite his friendship with Will what had happened had been a reasonably uncomplicated exchange; certainly not an act that had been executed with enough consciousness to require acknowledgement. What he had not expected were the many plaintive phone calls from Isobel in the weeks that followed, the clandestine meetings at coffee shops near Will and Isobel's house, and once again the backs of their hands brushing against each other ever so lightly. And while Isobel was clear that what had happened between them had not been a mistake on her part, he felt less capable of explaining his behaviour. How could he tell her that he was so intoxicated that night that if she had vanished into thin air he would probably have carried on thrusting against the wall and clutching at the ivy, completely unaware of her absence? How to tell her that this act was not some carefully considered risk he had been willing to take, but that Will had not existed for him that night? And how to tell her, that more than all of this, he was fundamentally disappointed in her?
This was not the first time that Daniel had a one night stand with someone's girlfriend, in fact it was something that happened quite regularly. He had never crossed this boundary before with a friend as close as Will or with a girl he was as fond of as Isobel but this was familiar territory nonetheless. Something in Daniel's lack of commitment to anyone, most of all himself, made him the right candidate for a brief and undemanding liaison that could be visited and retreated from unscathed. Daniel was a snow-day, a long weekend, a home away from safety when a relationship became tedious. He brought the fun to the party then took the fun home with him and read her poetry, in the morning he made her strong coffee and good eggs and then flipped her from his well-worn sheets back into the bed she had made for herself. And Daniel had been more than happy to comply with this interpretation of himself as the dutiful but unsustainable lover. His life, he knew, was backlit; some idea of depth was discernable and overall he moved easily about the space he had allocated himself. But a harsher luminosity would have revealed the lapses in continuity and so with Daniel there was always an implied distance. Isobel, however, had failed to keep to this agreement. In fact instead of revealing his performance to be a sham, she had foisted an entirely new roll upon him: 'Daniel as potential boyfriend'. And with this Daniel lost any respect that he once had for her.
While Daniel had been going over the particulars of his affair with Isobel, Sally had been relaying the various improvements she had made to her home recently. If Daniel had been trying to be detailed in his recollections in order to discover something about his situation then it was more difficult to understand what kind of truth Sally was trying to reveal by painstakingly detailing the furnishings in her home. When she had told Daniel that she would show him a picture of the "genuine" Persian rug she had bought on e-bay for thirty pounds when they got back to the office and he had expressed no interest, she decided it was time to involve him in the conversation again.
'You live on your own, don't you?' she enquired.
'Yeah.'
'How can you afford it?'
'I can't.'
'Well how come you do it then?'
'Because I can't stand listening to people's inane fucking prattle all day long.'
Sally picked up her Tupperware again and examined it before jabbing her fork earnestly at the last scraps of spinach stuck to the bottom. 'Yeah but couldn't you just live with friends, I mean, people you actually like? Wouldn't that be cheaper?'
He did not answer.
'What about that bloke whose book they've just signed? Will Toynbee? He's a friend of yours isn't he?
'Yeah, he's a friend of mine. Actually it was me who showed them his novel.'
'Had you read it already?'
'Yeah. I knew it was the kind of thing that would sell at the moment. I wasn't surprised when it got snapped up.'
When Will had given Daniel his novel Daniel turned the front page that read LONDON LIVES in bold capitals, then could not bring himself to go any further than the synopsis. It told the story of six friends who had attended university together and whose lives became increasingly entwined when they returned to London to begin their careers. Much drug taking, many tortuous sexual entanglements and of course an untimely death resulted before they all decided that it was time to go their separate ways. When Will asked Daniel to show his book to somebody at work, Daniel explained that his was not a very influential position in the company but he would do his best. Also, he was quick to point out that he himself edited history books and was not on familiar terms with anyone in the fiction department, and those he had met he had not particularly cared for. All of the editorial assistants were attractive over-qualified girls who insisted on wearing beads, bangles and scarves that provided clues to the precise exotic location where they had spent their gap year - which remained their favourite topic of conversation despite almost a decade having lapsed since their travels. Nonetheless he handed Will's novel to one such girl by the name of Hermione and asked her to put it in the submissions pile.
Soon Will was paying regular visits to the fiction editor to discuss his book. Daniel sought some vague comfort in the knowledge that if Will's book ever actually got published, then at least he would not have to suffer the injustice of having to copy-edit it. He could imagine himself pouring over the manuscript of London Lives, carefully noting the errors in the margin, checking for consistency of style and all the while thinking about the disparity between the work and the creator. He would have to align paragraphs about three friends getting drunk and having a heavily detailed threesome when he knew that Will had been dating Isobel for six years, she had told him that the sex was lacklustre to say the least and that if any two people had suggested a threesome to Will he would have nervously made some excuse about having to go to bed early because he had to be up the next morning to collect his sister from the train station. Daniel could see himself making notations beside the various misspellings of the chemicals that Will's characters so regularly ingested because he knew that the closest Will had ever gotten to drugs was taking a valium at a music festival to help him sleep because the noise from the other tents was 'insufferable'.
When Will called him to tell him that he had finally signed the contract and to thank him, Daniel still did not believe it. He was certain that the deal would fall through, that Will had been lying to him or that somebody from work had been lying to him. It seemed too improbable that Daniel, who had worked in the same editorial assistant role for almost five years, had led Will, who had never even needed to work, directly to this kind of success. He congratulated him of course, told him how happy he was for him, but when he put down the phone he looked around his dimly lit studio flat and felt that the few items of furniture he owned had been rearranged. The apertures in the shade on his desk lamp were allowing a harsher glow to soak the surrounds and even the rough woollen blanket he had thrown across his quilt to add a little warmth to the autumn nights looked flimsy. He noticed that the threadbare upholstery on the Queen Anne chair that sat before his desk had finally lost its grip on one corner and foam was oozing out through the little tear. Strangest of all was that he felt he was seeing for the first time the prints that lined his walls in black metallic frames. They acted as a roll call of twentieth century artists that he had collected posters of from the various exhibitions he visited on the weekends, and the overall effect of this cavalcade of luminaries was disordered and garish and inexplicably ugly.
He lurched and ran to the toilet and dry-wretched into the bowl. He sat on the floor and placed his back against the tiles and stayed there in the darkness for a while, breathing steadily to stave off the nausea. When the sickness finally subsided he felt as though he had just woken up after a night's sleep in an unfamiliar house; a little uncertain of where he was exactly, but clear-headed nonetheless. It was apparent to him that he had not been quite effusive enough about just how happy he was for Will. He wanted Will to know that he was so happy for him that there were no words to express it. He bought a bottle of rum, a bottle of coke, two limes and a bag of ice and headed directly for Will's house.
Sally had crossed her legs and edged forward on the bench. She placed her elbow on her knee and her chin upon her fist and looked directly at Daniel. He was discussing a work related matter and where classified information could be gleaned and reinterpreted at a later date she always gave her fullest attention. When Daniel did not continue she prompted him.
'Is that what you'd like to do then? Be a writer?'
'No. It's always been one of those things that I thought I should want to do, that I thought I should be good at. But I could never write ... not in that way. I've always been more interested in the facts of the matter.' Daniel bent forward and with his elbows on his knees he placed his hands in prayer between his outstretched legs. He looked bowed and confessional, like this expurgation was taking its toll. 'You know I've always had a very good memory: people's names, faces, dates. Even things that don't matter to me, people who don't matter to me... In fact with people I don't care about more than anyone else, after only meeting them once I could tell you what they were called and what they looked like and what happened when we met. But it's never stood me in any stead. I still have no fucking idea how I got to this point, how I got to be the way I am. Do you know what I mean?' Sally looked at him the way a child looks at a drunk parent; her eyes were wide and entreating and lacking all comprehension. It seemed as though at any moment she might absently stick her tongue out and try to lick the mucus glistening in her nostril. Daniel knew that he had admitted to something that was to Sally less palatable than breaking some prosaic moral code, that somewhere in the weeks that followed Sally would remember the strange words that the strange boy from the office had spoken to her on a park bench, and feel unsettled. All of a sudden she would look up from the television and Lloyd would ask her what was wrong and she would tell him that Daniel from work had said something weird the other day but she would not be able to remember exactly what it was, only how he said it. And she would not even have the right words to describe that. And now Daniel wanted her to tell him something. In the tranquilised state she had placed herself in he thought it just possible that a single truthful statement might slip out between the tiny gap opening and closing between her lips.
Sally yawned. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her eyelashes fluttered as the yawn seized her face. She looked away from Daniel across the square.
'I think I might be allergic to alcohol,' she said.
'What?'
'I'm allergic to alcohol.'
'Why do you think that?'
'The other night I drank three glasses of wine and I couldn't even move the next day. I swear to God I thought I was going to have to get Lloyd to take me to the A&E. I said to Lloyd, I said "Lloyd, this isn't normal. I used to be able to drink way more than this." And he said I just had a hangover. But I looked it up on the internet. It's a real condition. You can just develop it all of a sudden ... and it's more common in women.' She said the last statement like it was an absolute confirmation of her ailment.
'Maybe you should budget less for alcohol then.'
Sally turned and looked at him. She inhaled a deep breath and a smile of relief spread slowly across her face. It was as though after a long period of confusion she had finally recognised who he was. They had returned to their habitual register and Sally felt that she could leave now.
'Anyway I better get back. It's getting chilly, I should have brought my coat.'
'I'll follow you in soon.'
'Goodbye Daniel.'
Daniel watched as the white V-shape of Sally's back grew smaller and disappeared through the gate. A brown Labrador in his peripheral vision came into focus. It was snaffling at a paper bag, tossing a scattering of leaves with its hind legs each time it tried to nuzzle deeper into it. A man approached and latched the lead to the dog's collar and turned determinedly, tugging the dog along behind him. The dog looked back at the bag one last time, then increased its stride to reach its owner, leaving Daniel the only inhabitant of the square. The thought that filled this vacancy was to phone Will and congratulate him again. He was relieved when he ran his hands across the pockets of his trousers and realised that he had left his phone on his desk. The only thing he found in his pockets were his cigarettes. He removed one from the packet and lit it. He decided that by the time he had finished smoking it would finally be time to go back inside.
Three weeks had passed now and in that time he had congratulated Will so often that it had become embarrassing. He had met Will and Isobel on several nights out and everything had seemed normal between them. Isobel was behaving exactly the way he would have liked her to the first time around. In fact she behaved so expertly that Daniel felt confused about whether or not anything had happened at all. He could visualise himself fucking Isobel against the garden wall more easily than he could on her sofa, despite the fact that he had no actual memory of the former and too full a memory of the latter. But he had not received as much as a text message from her since then. And now whenever they all met for a drink in the pub he wanted desperately for her to place the back of her hand against his beneath the table and look at him the same way she had that night, when she had opened the door and exhaled the words 'Come in' as though she begrudged him his lateness for this appointment. It was a look she had been burnishing for weeks to become strong and lustrous and contemptuous; to communicate that she was prepared to suffer any damage that he could cause but not the desire she felt. And he knew that it was a look he wanted desperately to see again.
J.A. Murrin is a writer living in London.