A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

The thing is that Sammy is ill. I mean very ill. He might be okay but we don’t know yet. Ive always felt responsible for him and now I feel that more than ever. I don’t know why exactly but I needed to tell Adam about it. I think he will understand.

Its a funny thing, isn’t it, that you start off wanting nothing from each other and that is almost the whole point, the freedom that we had, and then you do want things and youre happy to give them, time and all the rest. And then you find there are some things that its too much to give or sometimes to take.

Please tell him that he doesn’t have to do anything or answer this message if he doesnt want to. But I would love it if he did. Tell him I know we can’t put everything right but we can still do this. Tell him I’m pleased the American man was at home that day.

Sending love to you all

Neil

She didn’t reply. Not that day, nor the next, nor the day after that. Two days was a decade in this instantaneous age. You got twitchy if clients didn’t respond within an hour, knowing that they, like you, were bound to their lesser lives by the beeps and permanent-emergency throbs of their supposedly liberating gadgets. After two days, Neil began to abandon hope.

The apparition was joltingly surreal: two human faces frowning at the glass, thirteen floors and a couple of hundred feet up. It always took Adam a moment to remember the man-bucket, the cords and the sponges. Then the dilemma over whether to acknowledge them — with some tough-guy nod, blokeish cock of the head or ingratiating smile — a sharp example of the moral discomfort routinely inflicted by London, a place in which you were always rubbing up against less fortunate neighbours, importunate strangers. If he nodded or smiled at the men through the window, he and they would lock eyes in the shared knowledge that he was sitting in an ergonomic chair on the cushy side of the glass, while, a metre away and on the other, they were dangling from the roof. If he didn’t, he would imply that they had no human claim on his attention.

The trying etiquette of inequality. The whole routine, Adam knew, must be wearyingly familiar to the less equal. He went for a pursed smile and raised-eyebrow combination. One of the window-cleaners, the older of the two, gaunt and wearing a hoodie although it was a warm, clear morning, whispered something to the other; Adam thought he saw the younger man smirk as they heaved themselves out of view.

He shook his head at his own involutions. This would never be his city.

Laurel materialised beside his desk. ‘Leisure Services?’

‘Yup. Twenty minutes,’ Adam said. ‘Just need to spell-check it.’

‘I need to syndicate,’ Laurel said. ‘Adam, I really do.’

Laurel’s mis-shaven cheeks were marbled in a scraped yellow and pastel red. He was strangely gauche for a person of his seniority, Adam had noticed, for someone with a solid career at one of the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms behind him. It was as if all the resources bestowed on him by evolution had gone into the substance of his work, the time-and-motion equations, leaving nothing over for social or cosmetic fripperies. In the past couple of years Laurel had grown slightly stooped, as if his height had become embarrassing to him; Adam found him intangibly camp — something in the stretch of his vowels and tight cross of his arms — though Laurel didn’t seem to be aware of the effect. He had a wife, two or three kids, but in three and a half years Adam had never heard him speak of them.

‘Twenty minutes max.’

‘Clients this afternoon.’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Okay. See you at the meeting?’ — a statement intoned as a question. Laurel smiled and loped away. He had the power, Adam had concluded, most of it, anyway, which was why he didn’t mind when Hardy interrupted him. He had the long-haul confidence to be eclipsed.

Neither Alan/Hardy nor Craig/Laurel was his friend. The pair of them were yoked and segregated by an invisible barrier that everyone else could see, those two on the inside, the rest of the staff peripheral. They weren’t his friends, but Adam trusted them. He trusted them when they implied that he was safe.

Since the new government came in, slashing and burning, public-sector consultants had been reviled. Not so much as bankers or journalists or the politicians themselves, but up there, in the league table of infamy, with estate agents or squeegee merchants. They were indolent and dispensable, a luxury of the incontinent boom. They were parasites. They were fucked.

The work had slowed, and Adam had worried again. They all worried. They were right to worry. He received a string of emails inviting him to leaving drinks for people he hadn’t previously known existed. Sometimes the fall guy would follow up with his or her own valediction, rashly Replying All — some tragic, adrenalin-driven gush about how he would miss everyone and hoped they stayed in touch, or the snarky observation that she had enjoyed the job, most of the time . The various, equally pointless bearings of the tumbrel.

Yet Hardy had winkingly implied, one afternoon when they had shared a lift, that he was safe. He asked after Adam’s family and Adam made a nervy crack about how expensive they were. Hardy mumbled something about a permanent contract just as the doors opened and they were released. Afterwards, when he was recounting the conversation to Claire, and he tried to conjure the precise phrases, the actual formulation, which had created the impression of security, Adam couldn’t grasp them. But he had been pretty sure that he was safe. He had his harness; he was strapped in.

He tried and failed to log on to the shared Leisure Services file. He felt the bile rising, in a way that only tailgaters and malfunctioning computers could induce. Password incorrect : he had distractedly input the one he used for his credit card and Amazon accounts. Bank accounts, shopping accounts, email accounts, newspaper subscriptions, multiple computers — Adam sometimes felt he had become the sum of his passwords, that his lazily disguised pet names, phone numbers and ‘meaningful dates’, the odd extra digit or letter affixed as required, were his new DNA, the double helix of the touch-screen age. If they got scrambled, you were lost.

Finally his fingers remembered the necessary sequence: ruby , followed by the six digits of her birthday (no space). He called up the document, ran the promised spell-check, passed an eye over the formatting. He emboldened the sub-headings and introduced some bullet points in the executive summary (‘… service optimisation … customer footfall … DCMS strategy …’). He added his name to the unobtrusive middle of the list of authors.

He saved and closed the document and emailed it to Laurel, cc-ing Hardy. Outside his window the cords attached to the bucket were twitching, as if, somewhere below, condemned men were hanging and choking at the end of them.

He had sworn off MySpace. He had vowed never to look her up again, had weakened once or twice and finally, the previous winter, when he was setting up a new computer, found that he had forgotten his log-in details. He had guessed and guessed, but on that occasion he couldn’t remember them, which, for once, was more a riddance than a loss. The need to re-register had been enough to dissuade him, one of those tiny online impositions that had become demoralising obstacles, in this case turning the pursuit of Rose from casual hobby to blatant obsession. He had resisted Facebook and almost forsaken Googling, though he permitted himself Chaz and Archie. Also, every few months, Neil.

These days Adam could tolerate mentions of California, California was always everywhere, but Colorado still made him shiver. Once he switched off the television when a report about the poor little girl in Boulder came on; Claire had glanced across at him, but let it be. At the end of term, on prize day, as he watched Ruby climbing the stairs and crossing the stage, he thought of her striding across the campsite, alone in front of everybody.