Capital

offered to take Parker away for the weekend to cheer him up after he had lost his job; so here they were in a fluffed-up little Cotswold hotel with a view out of the window of hills and sheep and stone walls and an annoying fan noise from the kitchen which mercifully cut out at half past eleven. It was Daisy’s idea, her treat for Parker, and she was happy to do it: Daisy was a solicitor and was already earning money. She and Parker had been girlfriend and boyfriend since the last year of sixth form, five years ago now.
    A weekend like this felt like a very grown-up thing to be doing, and to be paying for with your own money. It was exciting. It should be exciting, anyway. It should also feature lots of giggling and getting tipsy in the bar and going for long walks and sex. Instead, what it featured was lots of watching Parker look depressed, and listening to him talk about how unfair everything was, and how much of a bastard his former boss had been for sacking him. Daisy knew that Parker had signed all sorts of confidentiality agreements with his old boss and that there were limits to what he could say; limits which, she noticed, Parker was careful not to cross, so that although she knew that his boss had been a bastard and had sacked him for no reason, and was a total bastard, a bastarding bastard of bastardness, who had sacked him for no reason whatsoever at all, the bastard – although she knew that, she didn’t know much more. Except that it was the very worst thing that had ever happened to anyone, ever.
    Well – there was no denying that it was hard. Daisy knew that Parker had always wanted to be an artist. He had wanted it from the age when other boys wanted to be racing car drivers or astronauts or pop stars. He couldn’t remember any time when that hadn’t been his main, his only, ambition. His idea about being an artist had been a dream of autonomy, of the freedom to dream and think however he liked, and to turn that dreaming and thinking into making, into – well, not things in the crude sense, because that could easily be a debased and commodified form of art, but into thoughts, into provocations that made other people think and dream too. And that would make him acknowledged; that would make people see him, see him for himself. He wouldn’t be anonymous any more. He would make things and he would be known and that would be his life. Instead, what he was was some other artist’s now-sacked former assistant. So it was hard for him, Daisy could see that.
    Abruptly and without warning, Parker swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. This was the other side of his comatose sleeping, and it was something Daisy had never got used to, even though she must have seen it a thousand times: when Parker woke, he immediately came to full consciousness and began to be physically active. There was no transition period ; it was as if he had an off/on switch. He stood up stark naked, stretched his arms over his head, and headed for the en suite loo. Already, merely seconds after getting up, his body language was slouchy and downbeat and depressed. His trim, narrow-shouldered, compact body didn’t look like its usual self. Daisy felt rays of gloom emanating off him. Oh, yes, that was another thing Parker was good at: projecting his negative moods.
    Daisy, as she had done many times before, listened to the noise of Parker’s extraordinarily powerful and lavish weeing – that was another part of his skill set, he had a bladder like a carthorse – and then to the noise of his electric toothbrush. When he came back into the room she had sat up slightly in bed with the top sheet pulled up just over her tits, in the faint hope that this might give him ideas.
    ‘What shall we do today?’ she asked.
    But Parker was still doing Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen. He shrugged.
    ‘Don’t mind.’
    ‘We could go and walk to that village with that church that has the dirty statue you told me about. The pagan one where she’s opening her legs and showing her vulva, the old pre- Christian artefact. What’s it called, a Sheela-na-gig?’ This, Daisy knew, was right up Parker’s street: he had spoken about it before, more than once. Her idea was the equivalent of offering a child an ice cream.
    ‘Could do,’ he said. And these two words were almost a declaration of war. Parker and Daisy had both grown up in Norfolk, where the most boring people she had ever known would use this phrase as a way of