High-minded though they were, frugality seemed always to escape them. The things they owned seemed to breed. Domesticity, it transpired, came down to a collection of products and a desire to continually augment those products until everything was just so, which of course it never could be, because what, then, would there be to work on? Objects broke, ran out, needed cleaning (which necessitated the use of further, more specialised products). Lacking children as they did, Daniel and Angelica needed something to tend to or they risked falling into the kind of vapid complacency they both professed to fear but also secretly craved. The rough, cluttered, faintly shabby look perfected by several of their friends wasn’t an option. They needed all the same stuff as normal people. Multi-surface sprays that fizzed on contact; moisturisers that toned and lifted and lightly tanned; shampoos that thickened and added shine. Daniel and Angelica dreamed of a better world but still baulked at the smell of each other’s shit, necessitating a variety of lavender-based infusions and, when merely masking the odour wouldn’t suffice, a reserve artillery of heavy chemistry that promised nothing short of a bacterial Armageddon. They had stuff for everything. There was a sense of carefully applied science. Their juicer was powerful enough to wring nectar from a breeze block; their bedding gave off scents designed to stimulate sleep. Their vitamin regimen was rigorous and complex. Daniel hadn’t smoked in months. Each morning before work, after an invigorating ylang-ylang-infused shower and a breakfast of carefully selected nutritionally balanced cereals, he threw carrots and apples and oddly shaped multi-ethnic fruits he couldn’t name into the gaping maw of his juicer and knocked back 250 ml of pure unadulterated well-being. Like so much in his life, it was healthily vile, but the sourness was sweetened by virtue: you could boast about it; it made you a better person.
All their friends were couples. Angelica had been in a long-term relationship (her phrase) and her ex had treated her so badly that she’d taken all their friends with her when they split. Daniel had few friends of his own. Her friends were their friends now. At weekends they took it in turns to play host. One couple cooked, the other brought wine. A sense of competition lurked amidst the camaraderie. The plurals were barbed. And we just had such a great time in New York, did you guys go anywhere this year? Or even the supposed simplicity of How are you two? Couldn’t one be up and one be down?
The most common visitors were Sebastian and Plum, who were visiting this particular evening. Plum was Plum’s given name. She had those kinds of parents. Her sister was called Nasturtium. Sebastian, rather ironically, was not Sebastian’s given name at all but simply a name he happened to prefer to what he’d actually been christened: Walter. Sebastian, much to his chagrin, had those kinds of parents. He’d been baptised and, for a while, home schooled, but had shaken it all loose at the age of eighteen by running away to Goa, where he’d undergone a tie-dyed transformation and returned as Sebastian Freud. His parents were outraged, but Sebastian was past parents. He was past a lot of things. Like Angelica, he’d worked through a lot of stuff. He was narcissistically altruistic. He bragged about his selflessness. His soliloquies were two parts arrogance to one part suggestive condescension. He thought Daniel was repressed. Daniel thought he was a prick. They’d tolerated each other during the days of doing good, which Daniel now thought of slightly more clear-sightedly as the days of impressing Angelica, but in the six months following Daniel’s acceptance of a position at the Jenssen-Meyer Centre, which Sebastian happened to be targeting with one of his protests, their ability to pretend to get along had, to say the least, waned.
Daniel was, broadly speaking, honest about his work in The Centre’s PR department, and honest about the work in which The Centre was engaged. What he was not quite honest about was how he had got the job and the moral flexibility he was encouraged to enjoy now that he had it.
Operating in the field of biochemical crop research, the Jenssen-Meyer Centre was run by two of the eighties’ more notable radical humanist biologists: Lens Jenssen and Colin Meyer. Their credentials when it came to life in the trenches of the nascent environmental movement were, as Daniel had grown adept at pointing out, pretty unimpeachable. Given their background, and the fact that the aim of their work was the creation of a sustainable food source, Jenssen and Meyer were understandably upset to find themselves the target of exactly the sort of protest they probably would have been part of twenty years ago, and so, when it came to selecting someone to manage their public statements, were keen to select someone who had what they slightly euphemistically called an understanding of the dreadlocked crusties currently frightening investors by touting banners in the car park. Daniel, who by that stage felt he had, if he was honest, done enough not only to impress Angelica but also to slough off the slash-and-burn anti-ideology of Katherine’s world-view, and who was beginning, much as he’d enjoyed what he would later think of as his gap-months, to tire of Angelica’s idealism and to miss the sense of professional advancement that had formed the bedrock of his life to date, saw an opportunity to balance one half of his life against the other, and so was excited to find himself shortlisted, which went some way to explaining the zeal with which he interviewed.
Jenssen and Meyer were seen as elitist, he told them. Their image had become secretive; self-satisfied. Their shared background in radical biochemistry; their once-alternative lifestyle which they’d always worn as a badge of pride, wasn’t actually cause for admiration at all. The hippies, far from seeing Jenssen and Meyer as kindred spirits made good, saw them as sell-outs. To them, all engagement with the powers-that-be was suspicious. Hippies didn’t want to achieve anything, Daniel said. They wanted to sit in rented halls and recapitulate old arguments, all the while comforting themselves with the notion that their inability to change anything was simply because society was tilted against them. This meant that Jenssen and Meyer had, in the eyes of the demonstrators outside their building, committed a kind of double sin. Not only had they sold out, they’d also accidentally demonstrated that selling out worked, and for that, Daniel said, the hippies were never going to forgive them. He understood that it might have been a point of personal pride to win over people they thought should have been their friends in the first place, but the truth was it was time to make new friends. Rather than selling the ideological integrity of their research to the alternative set, he suggested, they needed to sell the respectability of their research to the respectable set, because at the moment they were falling between two ideologically opposed stools and doing a grand job of pleasing neither. Just as the demonstrators used Jenssen and Meyer’s background as proof they had no loyalty to firm ideals, so the more conservative amongst the research communities used it as evidence of their potential flakiness. In the end, no one cared about the hippies and what they thought. If Jenssen and Meyer wanted to succeed, Daniel said, building to a crescendo, it was time for a clean break. Fuck the hippies.
From here, naturally, he pointed to his well-documented background in the corporate sphere as well as his less-documented background in the hippie sphere and suggested that if they found anyone with a more perfect balance of the particular elements that this role would require someone to juggle they should let him know. They offered him the job on the spot. He sold it to Angelica as a way of genuinely making a difference, and to her credit she’d given him the benefit of the doubt. Sebastian, on the other hand, had not only failed to stop demonstrating but, probably out of sheer spite, had stepped up his efforts, meaning that the façade of friendship they maintained for Angelica’s benefit was now thinner than ever. Nonetheless, every weekend Daniel had to smile his way through dinner, the phrase fuck the hippies sticking rather uncomfortably in his throat.
The evenings were all much of a muchness, and Daniel found them tolerable only in that they spared him having to spend another evening bonding with Angelica. Angelica always cooked – something lumpy and hearty and altogether heinous – and Sebastian and Plum always brought wine – something dry and unusual with impeccable political credentials.
Tonight was, naturally, no different. They arrived late enough to demonstrate their casual disregard for bourgeois punctuality yet not so late as to relinquish the right to get angry if anyone was ever overly behind schedule for one of their own gatherings. Plum was wearing a dress she’d fashioned herself from a collection of period cushion covers sourced, as she explained, from an amazing little charity shop they’d found while holidaying in Brighton.