He caught her wrist and pulled her to him in a big bear hug. 'We'll work it out,' he said. She breathed in his scent. He'd washed himself with the girls' No More Tears baby shampoo again. His chest hair was as soft and fluffy as a baby chick. 'We'll get there.'
She loved the fact that he said 'we'. He always did this. Even when he was working on some renovation project around the house, a project where she was contributing absolutely nothing except staying out of the way, he'd survey his work, wipe his dusty, sweaty face and say, 'We're getting there.'
Unselfishness came naturally to him. She kind of had to fake it.
'You're a good man, Samuel,' said Clementine. It was a line from some TV show they'd watched years ago and it had become her way of saying, Thank you and I love you.
'I am a very good man,' agreed Sam, releasing her. 'A fine man. Possibly a great man.' He watched the little Holly and Ruby shapes move about under the sheet. 'Have you seen Holly and Ruby?' he said loudly. 'Because I thought they were right here but now they seem to have disappeared.'
'I don't know. Where could they be?' said Clementine.
'We're here!' trilled Ruby.
'Shh!' Holly took games like this very seriously.
'Hey, what time is this afternoon tea at Erika's place?' said Sam. 'Maybe we should cancel.' He looked hopeful. 'Give you a full day of practice?'
'We can't cancel,' said Clementine. 'Erika and Oliver want to, how did she put it? She wants to discuss something.'
Sam winced. 'That sounds ominous. They didn't use the words "investment opportunity", did they? Remember when Lauren and David asked us over for dinner and it was all a ploy to try to get us into their bloody environmentally friendly washcloth business or whatever the hell it was?'
'If Erika and Oliver offered us an investment opportunity, we'd take it,' said Clementine. 'We'd definitely take it.'
'Good point,' said Sam. He frowned. 'I bet they want us to join them on a "fun run".' He put Holly's inverted commas on the words "fun run". 'For a worthy charity. So we'll feel obliged.'
'We'd slow them down too much,' said Clementine.
'Yeah, we would, or you would. My natural athletic ability would get me through.' Sam frowned again and scratched his cheek thoughtfully. 'Oh jeez, what if they want us to go camping? They'll say it's good for the children. Get them outdoors.'
Erika and Oliver were childless by choice, but although they had no interest in having children of their own they took an active, rather proprietary interest in Holly and Ruby. It was almost as if it were good for them, as if it were part of a systematic approach they were taking to being well-rounded, self-actualised people: We exercise regularly, we go to the theatre, we read the right novels, not just the Man Booker shortlist but the Man Booker longlist, we see the right exhibitions and we take a real interest in international politics, social issues and our friends' cute children.
That was unfair. Probably monstrously unfair. Their interest in the children wasn't just for show, and Clementine knew that the reasons they kept their lives in such tight, tidy control had nothing to do with competitiveness.
'Maybe they want to set up trust funds for the girls,' said Sam. He considered this, shrugged. 'I could live with that. I'm man enough.'
'They're not that kind of wealthy,' laughed Clementine.
'You don't think one of them has some terribly rare genetic disease, do you?' said Sam. 'Imagine how bad I'll feel then.' He winced. 'Oliver looked kind of skinny the last time we saw them.'
'The marathon running makes them skinny. I'm sure whatever it is it will be fine,' said Clementine distractedly, although she did feel a mild sense of unease about today, but that was probably just the audition, already tainting everything, creating a permanent undertone of low-level fear for the next ten weeks. There was nothing to be frightened about. It was just afternoon tea on a beautiful sunny day.
chapter six
A kid in a shiny wet black raincoat stood poised on the edge of the ferry, a coil of thick heavy rope looped over one arm. Sam watched him from his seat by the ferry window. The kid squinted through the torrential rain to see the wharf emerging in the grey mist. His young, unlined face was cove
red with raindrops. The ferry rolled and pitched. Cold, salty air filled Sam's nostrils. The boy lifted the noose at the end of the rope and held it high like a cattle wrangler astride a horse. He threw it, snagging the bollard first try. Then he leaped from the ferry to the wharf and pulled tight, as though he were dragging the ferry to him.
The kid looked like he was no more than fifteen and yet there he was effortlessly snaring a ferry wharf. He made some sort of signal to the ferry captain and called out, 'Circular Quay!' to the waiting passengers with their umbrellas and raincoats, and then he wrenched the gangway from the ferry to the wharf with a serious metal bang clang. The passengers hurried across it onto the ferry, shoulders hunched and huddled against the rain, while the boy stood tall and fearless.
See, now, that was a good honest job. Wrangling wharves. Herding office workers on and off ferries. He was only a kid, but he looked like a man, standing there in the rain. He made Sam feel soft and doughy, sitting docilely in his damp wool trousers, his pinstriped shirt. The kid probably hated the idea of an office job. He'd say, 'No way, I'd feel like a trapped rat.'
A rat pushing a lever to get cheese. Like those old experiments. Yesterday Sam had sat at his desk like a rat using his little finger to push the letter p on his keyboard and his thumb to push the spacebar, over and over, with a space in between each p, until his screen was filled with nothing but p p p p p p p p. He did that for maybe twenty minutes. Maybe even half an hour. He wasn't sure. That had been his biggest achievement at work yesterday. A screen filled with the letter p.
He watched the group of passengers streaming onto the ferry shaking their umbrellas, their faces grumpy and over it before the day had even begun. The kid probably didn't realise that a white-collar worker could spend a whole day in his office doing nothing, literally sweet fuck-all, and still get paid for it. Sam felt himself break out in a cold sweat at the thought of how little he was achieving at work. He had to get something done today. This couldn't go on much longer. He was going to lose his job if he didn't find a way to focus his mind. He was still in his trial period. They could sack him without too much paperwork or stress. At the moment he was getting away with it because of his team. He had four tech-savvy, everything-savvy twenty-somethings reporting directly to him. They were all smarter than him. He wasn't managing them, they were managing themselves, but that couldn't go on forever.
If Sam had had a blue-collar job, he would have lost it weeks ago. He thought of his dad. Stan the Man couldn't go out to a plumbing job and just sit there staring into space, could he? He couldn't mindlessly bang a spanner against a pipe for twenty minutes. If Sam had been a plumber then he would have been forced to focus and his mind wouldn't be slowly unravelling, or whatever the hell was happening to him. Wasn't there a great-aunt somebody or other on his dad's side who'd had a (hushed voice) 'nervous breakdown'? Maybe he was having one of those. His nerves were disintegrating, crumbling to dust like porous sandstone.
The ferry lurched off, back across the harbour to deliver everyone to their jobs, and as Sam looked at his fellow passengers it occurred to him that he'd never really belonged. He wasn't one of these corporate people. He'd always liked his work well enough, it was a relatively stimulating way to pay the bills, but there had been those times, as he stood at the front of the room with his PowerPoint presentation, for example, when he'd feel, just for a moment, like it was all an act, an elaborate act, like he was just pretending he was the 'businessman' his mother had always dreamed he would be. Not a doctor or a lawyer, a businessman. Joy had no idea what a businessman actually did all day, except that he wore a tie, not overalls, and his fingernails were clean, and that if Sam got good marks at school, which he had, then the glamorous life of business would be his reward. He could have insisted he do a trade like his father and brothers - his mother wasn't domineering, just enthusiastic - but instead his teenage self had dopily, sleepily gone along with it, without ever really considering what he actually wanted, what would give him satisfaction, and now here he was, stuck in the wrong life, a middlingly good middle manager, pretending to be passionate about marketing energy drinks.