Choice, page 3
‘Not again, Ayush, not bloody again. Bleeding. Heart. Liberalism. May I remind you that the foundation of our discipline is to work out the allocation of resources, which we know to be finite.’
‘May I remind you who used the word “costly” a few minutes ago? I have to take Spencer out.’
That whooshing silence in his ears again. Ayush does not remember its origins, nor whether it began with the sound, as he hears it now, or with the accompanying image, which crosses his mind’s eye when the sound begins. A spherical cosmic body on fire, hurtling through the blackness of space, like a burning coal thrown against a pitch-dark background. The soundtrack, perhaps simultaneous with the image, is a simulation of what that ignited hurtle might sound like, what Ayush imagines it might sound like – like a whispering, a low sussuration, a sighing of breeze, with the barest hint of a crackling here and there, almost imperceptible. Is that really what burning sounds like or is it an imagined stylization of the real thing? An approximation which is touched up and tweaked to seem real? Everything is approximation. This is the silence he hears in his ears, so different from the real silence of the world, which is not the absence of sound at all, but just a momentary stilling of the foreground while planes, buses, cars, people, pigeons, sparrows, dogs, children, construction, all with their specific sounds, carry on in the background.
Outside, in Crocus Park, Spencer and Ayush walk the perimeter of the pond, then Ayush begins to feel confined, and they head towards Herne Hill. The traffic is minimal on Half Moon Lane at this time of night; only one number 37, with its overlit interior. Spencer is surprised and overjoyed: this is going to be a real walk, longer than his usual final toilet break, a curtailed, half-hearted thing, whereas now he can smell the night and its creatures, almost present, shimmering and immediate, behind the undergrowth, not their dying traces in the daytime. Ayush too thinks of the flowers working at night, smelling different, more intense, more liberated, more obscene, somehow, than their polite, corseted daytime selves. There’s the enormous spreading pillar of the jasmine adjacent to the front door of number 41 which it seems to want to devour. The little bells in the small but spreading colony of lilies-of-the-valley near the steps leading to the door are now brown and over. The honeysuckle is out on the low front wall of number 43. Like Spencer, he wants to push his head into everything – even the foxgloves and geraniums and cistuses seem to smell, or want to smell, if he could only just shake off his human form and lower his head and nose into them. In the last available light, the sky is a shade of the ink his father used to call royal blue. Ayush can make out the briefest flitter of a bat across the jagged-edged canvas of that blue strung out between the dipped roofline and the fractals of treetops before it disappears into the orange flare of the streetlamp. The flowers are working to summon their friends, the big, hairy moths and other insects of the night. A whole secret world, invisible to him, to other humans, thank god, a world awake with spinning, weaving, rustling, hiding, killing, devouring, fucking, spitting, marking, secreting, eating, a wild, violent world where, to put on Lukey’s hat for a moment, self-interest and unintended benefits and costs are inseparable, suffered or enjoyed asymmetrically, by different parties. Spencer can hear and smell the night’s dominion. There he goes, sniffing that low mound of fleabane growing out of a crevice in the boundary wall between 51 and the garage with great, slow intent, then raising his leg and sprinkling it with his piss. What would the moth coming to visit it think? What would it think, what would it think? Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. How funny, that the verb for the only agency we have, the only thing left to us, the act of noticing, should be one of cost, as if you’re buying something in exchange. Lukey would be privately smug about it. If Ayush can step on every alternate slab on the footpath and get to the junction of Half Moon Lane with Milkwood, Norwood, and Dulwich Roads and Herne Hill without one false or extra step or break in his stride, then. If he can get to number 153 without a single vehicle going up or coming down the road, then. His breathing ratchets up. For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. If the traffic lights ahead stay green until he hits the front door of the pharmacy, if Spencer doesn’t mark the lamp post whose base he’s sniffing, if, then, if then. Many years ago, before, before . . . before what? Anyway, many years ago, Lukey had once tried to explain to him how economists modelled the world, and Ayush still remembers the bit about how any proposition opened up a palette of possibilities – not Lukey’s phrasing – and then economists went down a series of if this, then thats, proving or disproving them one by one.
When Spencer and Ayush return home, Luke is in the bathroom, cleaning his teeth before getting into bed. He has left the tap running: Ayush can tell because he can hear the boiler in the kitchen humming. He whips out his phone and sets the timer – he’ll have to add a handicap, or whatever the term is, for the lost minutes before he entered the kitchen and before the idea to time the hot water struck him, say an extra minute or two – and starts cleaning the kitchen table to take him away, however feebly, from the threshing inside his chest. He wipes down the placemats with a damp dishcloth, sets them against the backs of the chairs to dry, each mat assigned to its own chair, then wipes the kitchen table in great sweeping arcs, equal number of arcs for each quadrant. He waits for the table to dry, then repeats the wiping exactly, the same number of sweeps, which he has counted (seven), for each quadrant. The boiler stops its music. He leaps to his phone: 2 minutes 38 seconds. Plus two (handicap or reverse-handicap?) makes 4 minutes 38 seconds.
Luke calls out, ‘Oh, I didn’t hear you come back’ – to which Ayush wants to say, to scream, to bellow with all the power in his lungs, ‘Because you’ve had the fucking tap running for nearly five minutes’, but concentrates on arranging the table – as he comes into the kitchen to find Ayush measuring the distance between each placemat with a plastic ruler so that they are equidistant from each other and in perfect symmetry.
‘Are the children asleep?’ Ayush asks in his calmest voice.
Instead of answering, Luke turns back to go upstairs, then thinks twice before reentering the kitchen. He comes very close to Ayush, reaches out his right hand, and very gently brings it to rest on Ayush’s hand that is holding the ruler. Ayush can smell Luke’s toothpaste.
‘Please,’ Luke whispers. ‘Please. Can I help you stop this? It’s easy to get help for this, you know.’
Ayush feels too tired to fight back.
‘I’ve read up about it. It’s one of the things you can actually make better. Trust me. Tell me what I can do.’
Ayush is afraid of uttering a single word.
‘And,’ here Luke pauses, ‘and if there’s something underlying, and this is just the expression of that, it’s best to find out.’
That ‘underlying’ brings Ayush out of his enclosedness. Inside, his bitterness wells up into a very brief laugh, almost a snort. Something underlying, yes. He hears Luke saying, ‘If you’re unhappy at work, you can look for some other job. I want to help you. Please tell me how I can help you.’
The only way Ayush can stop Luke going on is to lean into him and let himself be enfolded.
5
The day starts with a spreadsheet called ‘Daily Figs’; not the fruit, but numbers, figures. Economics is life, life is economics. A meeting to review Q2 sales figures, then straight to a meeting about metadata. Half an hour in between meetings to look at 231 emails. A meeting about sales-rep streamlining in spotty markets. Emails (this time about half of them between colleagues two desks, or one floor, or eight desks four metres two right angles away). Divisional targeted ads rationalization meeting. He thinks he has perfected clenched-jaw-shut-mouth-flared-nostrils yawns to a degree that no one will notice that he’s suppressing them. (During the Zoom Era, he had caught himself stifling a yawn on his square of the screen, and it had looked so obvious that he set himself daily practice sessions to perfect it.) Emails (including from two authors asking for their sales figs which they could find on the company website’s ‘Author Portal’ it had taken seven meetings within four hierarchies to design, and yet, now, Ayush needs to send a memo to ask this to be raised at the next Editorial & Publicity meeting to decide to inform all authors upfront so that it doesn’t eat into Editorial’s time). Meeting with the Production Manager to go through the coming year’s books. Jacket meeting to discuss new cover briefs with the team; Ayush never stays for other editors’ books, running out as soon as he has finished presenting his own. Meeting to discuss comparative digital revenue advantage over scaled-time sectors. Wow, someone from editorial asks a question. The answer is a succession of PowerPoint slides with blue, green, pink histograms. A joke about data visualization; everyone laughs in a way that the only salient thing is the sound’s lack of energy and sincerity. Emails. Meeting for discounts for volume sales in online distributions. Meeting for distribution optimization in the bookstore chain. Recently, unconscious bias meetings, at which everyone looks at the floor, their inner selves caught up in a frenzy of eye-rolling, and Ayush feels a strange sensation, both superiority and a kind of low-stakes paranoia, as he imagines all his white colleagues hating him for the temporary edge his brown skin gives him at these meetings. Publicity meeting about emerging social media platform targeting. A different stripe of herd behaviour obtains here. Publicists work hard for authors who are already successful, well-known; in fact, the more famous an author is, the more publicists work for them, the more attention these writers get, the more famous they become, in a nice, cosy circular feedback loop. Ayush had once dared to ask, in the years when his star was in the ascendant at Sewer, whether it wouldn’t be more equitable to redistribute publicity budgets. While everyone had instantly and in unison, as if directed by a choreographer’s cue, looked at their papers on the table, trying to find the meaning of life in them, Anna had declared, staring at the whiteboard with a kind of truculent energy, ‘We are talking about taking things to another level, not throwing good money after bad.’
Another level – that has stayed with Ayush. His work life has been an education in a recalcitrant knowledge: that publishers and authors are separated by an insuperable line. How can butchers and pigs be on the same side? As Lukey would have put it, ‘The interests of the two groups are not aligned.’ Many people loathe the jobs they have. Some go through with it thinking of the paycheque at the end of the month and all that they stand to lose without the money. Some go a step farther and delude themselves by learning to love the job, or certainly to perform a kind of love, becoming zealously supportive of the industry they are in, giving no sign or murmur of dissent or criticism, certainly not to those on the outside. Then there’s him, at war with wherever or in whatever he finds himself, never settling, or settling down, with what is given. Shouldn’t existence be a quarrel with all that could be better but isn’t? But what does it mean to not belong to your own side, to be at perpetual war with them, to remain perpetually on the outside? For him, it’s the only way to be, and the costs, as Lukey would put it, are enormous.
Meeting to discuss meetings about meetings. The real work, the work that Ayush had thought, years ago, he was getting into, the work of reading and editing, the work of ideas, of conversation – that work is no longer within work hours; it is part of his non-work life, which old-school Marxists, with what looks now like touching naïveté, used to call ‘leisure’.
Ayush is getting the children ready for school. Nothing is straightforward, least of all time.
He has put Cheerios into their bowls, and two mugs of chocolate milk on the side before they’ve sat down at the table. Sasha tries to pour milk into his bowl, misses, and sploshes a generous amount on the table. It creeps and begins to drip down to the floor. He tries to move his bowl and spills half his cereal in the process, some of which lands in the milk on the table. Ayush goes down on his knees to wipe up the spill on the floor but Spencer takes care of it.
‘May I have sugar on my Cheerios please, Baba?’ Masha asks.
‘Try it without, you like it,’ Ayush says.
‘I want sugar,’ she says.
‘I want sugar on mine too,’ Sasha follows.
‘What about a banana, sliced into rings? So you’ll have the big banana rings, fewer in number, attacking the army of small Cheerios, which are greater in number. Then you can decide who will win.’
‘How?’
‘Whichever gets eaten first wins,’ Ayush extemporizes.
They nod but lose interest after the first couple of mouthfuls.
‘Can I have sugar on mine, please?’ Sasha says.
‘No. Finish it without the sugar.’
‘May I have toast then?’ Masha demands.
‘Finish your cereal first.’
‘I don’t want cereal, I want toast.’ Sasha instantly piggybacks on the demand.
Ayush takes in the half-eaten banana, its peel already blackening, the blue bowls, with a painted yellow hedgehog, now drowned under milk and soggy cereal, in their centre, the small off-white puddle on the table, and suddenly remembers that his tea has been steeping for nearly fifteen minutes now. He removes the infuser, pours the tea from the pot into a mug so that it is half-full, tops it up with water from the kettle, then microwaves it for thirty seconds, watching the timer-clock count down from 00:30 to 00:00. There are five beeps. He takes it out, stirs, pours in a splash of milk, stirs briefly again, then says, very slowly and clearly, ‘What would you like your toast with?’
‘Egg, egg,’ says Masha. ‘I want toast soldiers to dip into the yellow of the egg.’
‘Jam,’ says the boy.
Ayush waits for one of them to change her or his mind. ‘Are you sure, both of you?’
They nod.
‘I’ll give you two more minutes in case you want to change your mind, OK?’ His breathing is even.
He puts a saucepan with water to boil, takes out an egg, butter, strawberry jam, egg cup, more cutlery, plates for the toast, thinking about and concentrating on each object in turn, almost letting himself flow into each of the things. This act can save him, if only temporarily. He can hear Sasha saying, ‘If I put strawberry jam in your egg and you mix it, it will be yellow and red’, and Masha responding, ‘Eww, jam and egg cannot be mixed.’ Very soon it enters the usual scratched-LP mode of ‘Yes, it can’/‘No, it can’t’. Ayush will have to look at the time when he sets the timer for the egg. He thinks of the story his father used to tell him when he was a child: when his father was a boy in Calcutta, he was made to stand outside the principal’s office for an hour if he was late for school, as punishment; a mild form of public shaming, and a very effective one, his father had added. Chronic, repeated lateness would involve incremental disciplining, summoning of the parents, even culmination in a short suspension from school.
‘Baba, Baba, can you eat egg and jam mixed together?’ Masha appeals to him for arbitration.
‘I wouldn’t do it,’ he answers, putting two slices of bread into the toaster. The water comes to a boil. He sets the timer on his phone for five minutes and gently drops the egg in. He turns around to see Sasha pouring orange juice into his cereal bowl. Masha watches with equal parts thrill and fear that make up the territory of vicarious transgression. Part of the juice slops outside the bowl. The toast pops up. Ayush turns back, butters both slices, cuts one into soldiers, and spreads the other with strawberry jam, puts it on a plate and places it in front of Sasha.
‘What does one say?’
‘Thank you, Baba.’
Luke comes into the kitchen, dripping water, towel wrapped around his middle, cursing. ‘The bloody shower’s stopped working. The water’s just stopped.’
The children look at each other, delighted shock on their faces.
Luke opens the door to the boiler cupboard and fiddles for a bit. ‘Can’t see anything wrong here.’ He goes to the sink and turns on the hot tap. It emits an untroubled flow of water. ‘What’s going on? This is working. Oh, fucking –’ then bites his tongue.
‘Daddy swore, Daddy swore!’ the twins sing out, unable to hold back any longer.
The timer goes. Ayush lifts out the egg, puts it in an egg cup, cracks the top and slices it off. He places the toast soldiers and egg in front of Masha.
‘I’m sorry. Please forget the word. Don’t use it. Ayush, what’s going on with the shower, do you know? Has it happened to you? Can you call someone to come have a look?’ Saying this, he runs upstairs to get dressed.
‘Daddy, you swore, you said bloody, you said the f-word.’ Masha, beside herself with joy, shouts at his fleeing back. She gesticulates with her arms and sends her mug of chocolate milk flying across the table. Part of it splashes onto Sasha’s plate with the nibbled, unfinished slice of toast on it. He cries out immediately, ‘It’s touched the toast, it’s touched the toast’, and pushes his plate away. His chin begins to quiver and his mouth to pout, then follows an explosion of a wail. He lifts up his plate and flings it against a cupboard. Before Ayush can get to him and try to calm him down, the boy leans forward on his chair and sweeps his hand across the table, spilling everything within his reach, glasses, cups, salt and pepper cruets. His face is like a tomato on the point of bursting. Ayush cries out, ‘Stop it, stop it right now,’ but Sasha is firmly locked inside one of his fits. Ayush picks him out of the chair as the boy tries to hit him and scratch his face – there is no restraining him without some damage, so he lets the child down onto the floor, where he lies on his back and screams and screams and screams. It seems to come not just from his throat and lungs but from his navel, from the very centre of his being. Masha sits on her chair, trembling, looking down at her brother, then she begins to whimper too. Spencer is frozen looking at Sasha become someone else.
