Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [215]
‘Well, that, obviously.’ I squinted into the sun at her, smiling with relief. I was angry, not at her – at him. But some of it must have leaked into my voice as I said, ‘But did you say to him that you don’t love him?’
‘No,’ Annette said. ‘I couldn’t. It’s not that I still love him!’ She laughed. ‘I don’t, not…like that, but I still care about him. As you do too, yes? And I don’t know if you know this, but I got the feeling he’s really unhappy, and confused and frustrated, and it woulda been like a kick in the teeth.’
A kick in the teeth, I thought – that could be arranged. But I breathed out, and relaxed and forced a smile, and said, ‘Yeah, OK, I’m glad you said what you did. To him and to me.’ I smiled at her more genuinely, and leaned forward to put my arms around her and as I did so realised that I had a cigarette in my hand and that after five years off the damn’ things I was smoking again.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘fuck me.’
‘Yes.’
Which was all very well and wonderful, but afterwards, lying staring at the ceiling, I thought about all she had said, and – more worryingly – all that she hadn’t.
Looking back, I could see that Annette had understated the length of time in which Reid had been ‘gallantly flirting’ with her. He’d done it from the first evening he’d met us after we’d started going together. I’d thought it a joke on me, a compliment to Annette, in as much as I’d thought of it at all. Shortly afterwards, Reid had – to everyone’s surprise – had a brief and tempestuous affair with Myra. Now that I’d thought showed a flash of male-primate teeth, a gesture at me. But strangely, he’d seemed more cutup about its predictable breakup than he had ever been about the ending of his relationship with Annette. Perhaps, like me, he’d unwittingly fallen for Myra, and she hadn’t for him.
Sexual competition had been intertwined with our friendship from the start, and whether we were close or distant, so it apparently remained.
I rolled out of bed and padded through the flat to the kitchen. I sat in a pool of light and smoked another cigarette. Outside, in the black window, my reflection looked ironically back. The government health warning (always an occasion for ironic reflection) told me things I didn’t need to know, and didn’t warn of the real killer: the slight, the subtle, the incremental and irreversible hardening of the heart.
I was working at the college three days a week, and Monday wasn’t one of them. Annette left for work, I cleared up the breakfast stuff and walked Eleanor to the school gates. I picked up the papers, almost bought ten Silk Cut, returned to the flat and whizzed through the housework like a student on speed. Then I sat down with a coffee and a Filofax and a savage bout of nicotine withdrawal.
Normally I’d devote days like this to what I called political work. (I’d almost persuaded Annette it was some kind of elaborate game-plan whereby I’d work my way up, from writing long pieces for obscure organisations and tiny pieces for famous organisations, to being the sort of global mover-and-shaker that a grateful humanity would some day commemorate with statues on the moons of Saturn.)
Today I had more serious plans. I found an old address for Reid in my Filofax, and a current one (with the old one crossed out) in one of Annette’s diaries. I worked my way through every free-market, libertarian, anti-environmentalist or just sheer downright reactionary organisation I’d ever had any contact with, and phoned or sent Reid’s details to their mailinglists. After about an hour that was done, and I wasn’t satisfied, so I set out to cover a few more angles.
I leaned on the doorbell of the Freethinker offices in Holloway Road. Behind me the traffic rumbled past. As ever I felt saddened by the dusty window-display of sun-paled, damp-darkened