Dave Hutchinson - Sleeps With Angels

“Tutu,” I said.

“Tutu,” he repeated sourly. “Whose only talent seems to be attending parties and getting falling-over drunk.”

“There was the chat-show,” I said.

“ Tutu Talks , yes. Possibly the worst chat-show ever seen on European television — and there’s an awful lot of competition. How can it happen that two people with no apparent creative talent at all can produce a son who writes novels of exquisite beauty, while two of the greatest actors this country has ever seen — from families with an acting tradition that goes back generations — have a daughter with no artistic talent at all?”

I shrugged. “Beats me.”

He said, “It’s genetic,” and all of a sudden, without any warning at all, a veil fell upon the world. Marcin must have seen it in my face, because he sighed and said, “What?”

I looked at my watch. “I’m supposed to have another half an hour,” I told him in a pathetic little voice.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “It’s neurochemistry, Jarek. It isn’t rocket science, okay?”

I looked round the restaurant. Everything was dull . Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. Everything. Like listening to a concert while wearing earplugs. I sighed.

Marcin got up and tossed his napkin on the table. “Fine,” he said. “We’re not hungry,” he told the waiter, who was approaching with our starters, and he headed for the exit.

“Something came up,” I said to the waiter. I dropped some euros on the table and followed Marcin up the stairs.

Outside, everything was disappointing. Ordinary . I caught up with Marcin at the Cathedral and said, “Genetics.”

He shook his head irritably. “It doesn’t matter, Jarek. You’re not interested, and you seem to be immune anyway. So no big thing, yes? Forget it.”

“The hangover pill.”

“It’s not —”

“A hangover pill, I know, I know. But you know when you give it to rats?”

He sighed. “Yes?”

“How do you know it’s working?”

Marcin thought about it for a while. “The rats smile.” He looked up at the great brick edifice of the Cathedral. “Have you ever seen a rat smile?”

“Not so far as I’m aware, no.”

He grinned, and there was something otherworldly about that grin. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “The most beautiful thing you ever saw.”

I moped around the flat for the rest of the weekend, watched television, sat on the balcony and looked at the boats in the harbour and the tourists on the other side heading for the Old Town. Everything was dull, flat, uninspired. Uninspiring . Marcin phoned a couple of times to ask how I was feeling, and by Sunday night I was able to report that I had a banging headache and a sore throat.

“If your fucking pill has given me the flu, I’ll kill you,” I told him.

“Hm,” he said. “It’s probably nothing. Take some paracetamol and drink plenty of fluids.” And he hung up.

Monday morning I felt vaguely achy and feverish, but we were in the middle of a big commission for an American bank so I went to the office and sat feeling miserable.

Tuesday was more of the same, with added shivering and a blocked nose. I tried to call Marcin at the hotel where he’d been staying on his visit, but they said he’d checked out.

I barely made it in to the office on Wednesday. I had a Skype conference with a man in Chicago and a man in New Jersey and when it was over I had no idea what we had been talking about. I was sweating and my eyes felt as though they’d been lightly sandpapered. Tomek, one of the partners, helped me home in the afternoon, told me he really enjoyed working with me but no way was he going to get me undressed and help me into bed, and left me on the sofa.

And then the rest of the week just… went away.

It was the following Tuesday before I felt well enough to go back to work, but I still didn’t feel up to doing much apart from contemplating firing Tomek for his failure to come to his boss’s aid in his hour of need. Nobody else seemed to be in the mood for work, either. Tomek and his wife Hania were sitting at one of our big draughting tables, sketching. Agnieszka was doing some embroidery. All the momentum had gone out of the office.

At one point, Agnieszka brought me a coffee and then held up the piece of cloth she’d been working on. I looked at it. Then I looked at her.

“What?” I said.

“What do you think of it?” she asked.

It was an embroidered image of some species of rustic scene. Not very well embroidered. “Very nice,” I told her. I raised my voice. “Everybody?”

The rest of the office raised their heads from whatever they’d been doing. Bartek Kowalski appeared to have been sculpting something from a chunk of styrofoam packing block

“Go home,” I told them. “We’re not getting anything useful done. Go and get this out of your system and let’s come back tomorrow with our minds on the job, please. Okay? Now go.”

Everyone started to get up and gather their things together and get their coats. Agnieszka stayed where she was. “Did you mean it?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Go home. Get some sleep. Whatever.”

“No,” she said, holding up the piece of embroidery. “Do you really like it?”

“It’s lovely,” I assured her. “Now go. Get out of here. I’ll lock up.”

After everyone had gone I sat in the office for a while, feet up on my desk, head tilted against the back of my chair. The German ergonomicists, who I had been assured by the salesman had developed this model of chair, had not countenanced anyone treating their furniture in quite this way, so it was more than a little uncomfortable and after a while I took my feet down off the desk and got up and wandered through the office. I had not, I realised, yet shaken off the sense of loss I’d felt when Marcin’s hangover tablet — cognitive enhancer, whatever — wore off. Which was rather alarming. My history of recreational drug use had never been very illustrious or — Marcin’s occasional little gifts apart — adventurous. It had never affected me like this before. I felt vaguely heartbroken .

I locked up the office and went to the cinema and watched Wajda’s Katyn again. It suited my mood. After the film, I bumped into a couple of designers I knew in the foyer and we went to a restaurant, where I tried to work up some enthusiasm for the food, and afterward we went on to a party. Not a hit-and-run but a civilised drinks party, responsible professionals, canapés, darkwave playing quietly on the Bang & Oluffson so as not to disturb the neighbours. The host and hostess, whom I knew slightly, were showing their guests some quite spectacularly-bad watercolours they’d done, and when they asked me what I thought of the paintings I smiled and nodded and said, “Very nice.”

The hostess looked critically at me. “You don’t look very happy, Jarek,” she said.

“I’m fine, Iwona,” I told her. “I’ve had flu.”

“Ah,” she said. “You should try one of these.” And she took from her pocket a familiar-looking little plastic envelope and handed it to me.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“At the university,” she said. “One of the Sociology Faculty was handing them out. He said it was some kind of experiment. You know, something about whether you’d take drugs from a stranger.” She laughed. “Of course, he’s not a stranger so I didn’t count, but he gave me a few anyway. Try it. He said it was just vitamins.”

I opened the envelope and tipped its contents into the palm of my hand. It was a round, floppy tablet just like the one Marcin had given me, but someone had printed a clock face on this one. The hands of the clock stood at five to midnight.