Truly Madly Guilty(14)
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 f*ck-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.
So what? Suck it up. What percentage of people on this ferry felt passionate about their jobs? It wasn’t a God-given right that you would love your job. People said to Clementine all the time: ‘You’re so lucky to do what you love.’ She wasn’t grateful enough for that privilege. Sometimes she’d answer, ‘Yes, but I’ve always got the fear of wondering if I’m good enough.’ Her neuroticism about her music had always baffled and bugged him, just play the damned thing, but now for the first time he understood what she meant when she said, ‘I just feel like I can’t play today.’ He saw again his computer screen filled with the letter p and felt the panic rise. He couldn’t afford to lose his job, not with their mortgage. You have a family. A family to protect. Be a man. Pull yourself together. You had it all and you risked it all for what? For nothing. He looked out the window as the ferry dipped into a swell of green-grey water laced with white froth and he heard himself make a sound: a mortifying high-pitched squeak of distress, like a little girl. He coughed, so people would think he’d just been clearing his throat.
He found himself remembering the morning of the barbeque. It was like remembering someone else, a friend, or someone he’d seen playing the role of a father in a movie. Surely it had been somebody else, not him, strolling about, strutting about his sunlit house, so sure of himself and his place in the world. What happened that morning? Croissants for breakfast. He’d tried to set up the mock audition for Clementine. It hadn’t really worked. What happened next? He had meant to take the girls out so Clementine could practise. They couldn’t find Ruby’s shoe with the flashing sole. Did they ever find that damned shoe?
If someone had asked him that morning how he felt about his life he would have said he was happy. Pleased about the new job. Actually kind of psyched about the new job. He was all smug about how he’d negotiated flexible hours so he could continue being a hands-on dad, the dad his own father never got to be, and didn’t he just lap up all the praise he got for being such an involved father, and laugh sympathetically, but enjoyably, over the fact that Clementine never got any praise for being an involved mother?
He might have had doubts about his role in the corporate world but he’d never had doubts about his role as a father. Clementine always said that she could tell when Sam was talking to his dad on the phone because his voice went down a notch. He knew he was more likely to tell his dad about some manly DIY project he’d completed around the house than a promotion he’d got at work, but he didn’t care about the bemused expression his dad got when Clementine said what a great job Sam did doing Holly’s hair for ballet (better than her) or when he took Ruby off to change or bathe her. Sam was one hundred per cent secure in his role as a husband and a father. He thought his own father didn’t know what he’d missed.