A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

We thought they were such nice boys.

Seven forty-three. The leaves on the tree outside their front window were still thick and green. It was the tallest tree in the street, its trunk reaching to the eaves of the subdivided house, the shade cast into their kitchen. Adam had imagined its strong branches saving him as he leaped from the window to escape a fire or when cornered by a burglar. He had dreamed of a burglar climbing up it, too, his face obscured by the foliage. Someone was screaming, not Adam, someone else, a woman. A woman or a girl.

‘What about the life insurance?’

He had dreamed that dream three or four times, here in the rented flat in Shepherd’s Bush, with their spider plant, and the yucca plant, and the ugly, square dining table that they had bought in an auction house instead of one from Ikea, and the sofa that was from Ikea, Harriet’s sofa, sometimes, and, in the gaps between his bedsits, Neil’s. The Greeks ought to have a complex for this syndrome, Adam thought — the impulse not to usurp his parents, or to fuck them, but to be them. The headlong fast-forward to the age of dinner parties and being someone, practised little bickerings and wordless attunement, his too-real too-fast life.

He put his plate in the dishwasher. He put his book in his bag. He hung his security tag around his neck, a pre-emptive adornment that he had regarded as defeatedly gauche when he first observed it on his departmental colleagues, but had fairly soon adopted.

‘Love you,’ Claire called from the sink, not turning round.

At ten to eight Adam trotted down the stairs, past two other Dinky abodes, three piles of unclaimed post. The front door boasted geometric, stained-glass panels, relics of an Edwardian household wholeness. He stepped out onto the begrimed pavement.

Farid, Bimal, Jess: later they came to be bound up together in Neil’s internal accounting, memory shaping one of its false contiguities for his convenience. In fact he had known Bimal for ever, in the ordinary way of knowing, and in the end he concluded that he never knew Farid, not really. Of the three he was only close to Jess, and yet, looked at in a practical way, she left the shallowest indentation on his life, her mark on him swiftly filling out and disappearing, like a fingerprint on rubber.

For all Bimal’s pursuit of Neil, the two of them hadn’t been especially tight at school. Both had been marooned in the unsatisfactory netherworld between the tough, cool kids and the bullyable pariahs, an intermediate caste whose members ought to have formed mutual-defence alliances, but didn’t. Bimal’s family lived a couple of streets from Neil’s in a near-identical semi; as a child, whenever Neil ran into Bimal’s father, he was invariably wearing a suit, because of which Neil had assumed he must be an accountant or a doctor. He learned only as an adult that the man had worked for the gas board for thirty years. Neil’s default image of Bimal was glimpsed from behind his own mother’s back, when they had both been twelve, or thereabouts: Bimal standing on the doorstep, smiling goofily as he tried to sell some tomato plants he had grown in his father’s greenhouse, his father standing in the driveway in his suit. His mother had bought one of the plants, Neil remembered, and kept it on the kitchen windowsill. Bimal had grown up tall and plausible, and wore contact lenses instead of his thick-rimmed spectacles, though he retained his throwback bowl haircut as if it were a mascot.

It was less affection that had kept them in touch than some half-acknowledged intuition that they might prove useful to each other one day — as now, at HappyFamilies, they were. The idea had come to him, Bimal confided, while he was working at a computer-software firm. A colleague had returned from a long weekend in St Petersburg with a bespoke set of matrioshka dolls, each figurine hand-painted with the image of one of his own relatives. The likenesses were creditable, and the dolls had been absurdly cheap, knocked up overnight, the colleague said, by an artist he met in a street market. People would pay proper money for these, Bimal had reflected. He had begun to think of other ways in which punters might be helped to celebrate themselves, to feel immortal and resplendent, which was how everybody wanted to feel these days. Tea towels silk-screened with family photos, snow-shakers that used the photos as a backdrop, classic film posters — Vertigo, The Italian Job — with a loved-one’s visage substituted for Jimmy Stewart’s or Michael Caine’s.

After a long courtship Neil was persuaded by the World Wide Web. In Bimal’s revised business plan, the customers would browse the products online, order online, upload their photos online, pay online. Virtually no overheads. No gravity: magic.

‘That’s less than I’m earning now,’ Neil told Bimal when they discussed terms. ‘And that’s saying something.’

‘Plus your four per cent,’ Bimal said. Bimal wanted him, Neil suspected, as much to redeem his own teenage loneliness as for his putative sales acumen.

‘Seven.’

‘Five and a half.’

‘Six.’

‘Done.’

Neil’s business card said Marketing Director, but his most valuable skill lay in what quickly became their main preoccupation. Angel investors, small-time venture capitalists, the directors of greeting-card and novelty firms: Neil proved to be good at soliciting money. Where Bimal was rambly, overenthusiastic, Neil was more focused ( Don’t waste the customer’s time ), less sentimental. He was learning to read the rich, their vanities and contradictions; how they tended to resist that label, referring chippily to other, slightly wealthier people whom they instead placed in that bracket, yet at the same time seemed dimly baffled that you were not already rich yourself. Six per cent of HappyFamilies was Neil’s forward-dated ticket out of subterranean bedsits; his chance to one day do something for his nephew — a tutor, maybe the odd holiday — since, heaven knew, the boy’s father never would.

He met Jess when she and her boss pitched for a contract to design their logo. At first sight he would have guessed New York rather than Hull. She was working for one of the voodoo marketing agencies that were infesting London, developing their minutely nuanced offerings in a warp-speed, boom-time corporate evolution — ‘brand’ and ‘image’ combined with ‘management’, ‘strategist’ and ‘consultancy’ in increasingly exotic combinations. She had interestingly short hair, a fancy, clingy suit, a dirty laugh and a twenty-a-day smoking habit.

When their eyes locked during that meeting Neil thought the ocular come-on was a negotiating technique. You’ll have to try harder than that, he thought. In his self-image he remained the pasty and narrow-shouldered also-ran of his adolescence, his perception fixed at the harshest moment, like a clock stopped during an earthquake, the moles on his cheek and neck still the visual magnets they had been in the bathroom in Harrow. His hair had begun to recede at the temples, giving him (he thought) an unwholesome widow’s peak, like something out of The Munsters . By his own reckoning he was still a proposition that no grown woman was likely to prefer to, say, Adam.

On the pavement afterwards Jess held onto him for longer than their handshake required.

‘You’ll hear from us.’

‘Will I?’ She laughed aloud at the pregnancy of their farewell, nervous and brassy at the same time. He like the unapologetic, male way she smoked, and, later, the taste of smoke in her mouth.

‘Fuck it, let’s hire her,’ Bimal said. ‘We need a designer anyway.’ Bimal frequently wanted to hire people, and almost as frequently to fire them, which for a time resulted in a gruesome attrition rate.