Ruth was meeting Larry at eight, so David walked her down to the cab office on Greek Street. As he kissed her goodbye he pressed his fingertips, ever so gently, against the small of her back. When he got home he googled disegno and wrote an entry about it on The Damp Review. It was the Italian word for drawing but meant, apparently, much more than that. As Michelangelo had perfected it, disegno was a sublime kind of problem-solving, and the work of art an ideal solution, reconciling the often conflicting demands of function, material, subject, verisimilitude, expressivity…David got bored with typing the list out, and cut and pasted the rest of it…formal beauty, unity and variety, freedom and restraint, invention and respect for tradition. He also posted a second entry prescribing a trip to the National Gallery for anyone bored with shopping, or Hollywood, or crappy weekend newspaper supplements.
On The Damp Review David posted critiques of films mostly but also his thoughts about books, TV shows, plays, restaurants, takeaways, whatever took his fancy. Or didn’t. He found it easier to write on disappointments. Hatreds, easier still. And it was his: they might have the television, the newspapers, the books, but the internet was his. Democratic, public, anonymous—it was his country and he felt grateful to be born in the generation that inherited it. He didn’t tell his family or friends about his site. Not even Glover knew what he got up to in his bedroom.
He’d begun another little project recently, gathering information on all the people he’d lost touch with over the years. He didn’t contact anyone directly but followed the footprints they left on their strolls through the virtual world. His nemesis from primary school had become a scuba instructor in the Virgin Islands. He found some photos on Rory’s brother’s Flickr account that showed a burnished and shaggy dropout hoisting a tank of air, thick-skinned as a seal in his wetsuit. David and he had been love rivals for Elizabeth S——, who he also found, eventually, on Facebook. She had retained her tragic, android beauty, though she was now holding a kid of her own.
He’d joined Friends Reunited under the pretence of being another boy from his class, the only person he’d ever hit, now a leading banking litigator. David took his bio from the law firm’s website, where a photo showed him still to be the vulnerable and round-eyed, slope-shouldered boy he’d known. Then he searched MySpace for students at PMP, the private college where he taught, at the same time as checking Arts & Letters Daily, where he found an interesting article on the life of Chaucer. He printed out eight copies for his A-level group and was trying to staple the sheets together when he heard Glover come in from church.
An old western was on the television in the living room. Glover had changed his clothes and now lay on the floor with one arm tucked up into his red T-shirt. The shape of his fist bounced gently off his chest, like a beating cartoon heart.
‘I think this is bust.’
Glover looked up as David wagged the black stapler, pulled the arm out from under his T-shirt and motioned for David to throw it. He caught it neatly, sat up and turned it over in his hands, as if looking for its price. Then he snapped it open and nodded.
‘It’s jammed. I can see it. The magazine can’t push up to the top.’
‘The magazine of staples?’
‘Yep.’
‘That’s very nice.’
‘One of the best.’
Last year David had photocopied the list of collective nouns for animals from his old dictionary at school and stuck it to the fridge. Glover and he had got into the habit of repeating them, and occasionally testing each other. (‘A sloth?’ ‘Bears…A fluther?’ ‘Jellyfish.’) David didn’t know exactly why he’d grown so fond of them. They seemed to hint at all the differing ways to proceed. A labour of moles. A zeal of zebras. A shrewdness of apes. With Glover, from the very start, David felt they fitted; that they lived in the same collective noun. He wanted good things to happen to him. He wanted good things to happen to them both. Glover worked the offending staple out with the point of a biro.
‘Ah, cheers.’
‘Interesting yesterday, with Ruth.’
‘Was the Bell not pretty empty for a Saturday?’ David clacked the stapler lightly a couple of times.
‘I know it sounds stupid, but I never considered a painting as representing, instead of just straight depicting.’
David thought it did sound stupid and it made him feel fond of his friend—it was these little reminders of Glover’s very average mind that made his good looks so much easier to stand.
‘If I’d had a teacher like that I might have done my homework.’ Glover lay back down on the carpet, where two cushions angled his head to the screen. They watched four men on horseback ford a river, then arrive in an empty one-street town. A man dived through the window of the saloon and began shooting at them.
David said, to no response, ‘Sugar glass.’
Glover had slipped his hand back up into his T-shirt and was gently tapping on his chest again. The cartoon heart. He was always in such a good mood after church. David didn’t think it was righteousness particularly, or smugness; more that he’d done his duty and could now relax. Still, it was intensely irritating. David felt excluded from his happiness, his secret. Over another burst of gunfire he said, ‘How was God today?’
‘Fine. Thanks.’
‘What did you learn? What was the sermon?’
Glover sighed and blinked hard at the screen.
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Of course.’
‘Ermm, something like, without a shepherd sheep are not a flock.’
‘Correct. They’re not. They’re autonomous.’
‘They’re sheep.’
‘Autonomous sheep.’
An outlaw was hiding in a barrel with a shotgun, staring out through a knothole in the wood. David prodded again. ‘You don’t have to sneak off, you know.’
‘I don’t sneak off. You’re not up when I leave.’
What’s the opposite of coincidence? What’s the word for nothing happening that might suggest a hidden plan? Glover found significance in the darkest corners of his life. Whatever found him could not have missed him, whatever missed him could not have found him. Once, when David had been turned down for the job of Deputy Head of the English Department, Glover had assured him that everything happened for a reason. David hadn’t protested, but at that moment some deep tectonic movement had occurred. They might share the same flat but they lived in different universes. Folk-tale determinism! David was not surprised by much in the routine progress of his days, but that surprised him. If life turned on any principle it was haphazard interaction and erratic spin. He thought it much too obvious for argument: you make your own luck.
They were silent as the adverts came on. Glover and David considered themselves expert judges