The Man Who Thought Too Much Part I

Sid Bartram awoke one fine summer morning feeling distinctly uneasy. He
had no real reason for feeling so. He had enjoyed a relaxing weekend,
mainly sitting in the garden with his wife Maureen and enjoying the
lovely weather. It had been a most disappointing summer so far with
cloudy skies and cold breezed, but over the weekend the temperatures
had soared into the mid eighties, and the Bartrams had seized the
opportunity to add some colour to their callow complexions.

Monday morning had never been Sid's favourite time of the week. The
weekend was over, and he had five days at work hunched in front of his
spreadsheets to look forward to. Yet an odd part of himself normally
enjoyed the discomfort of work. This facet of himself would divide the
working day into hours, minutes and even seconds, working out down to
the exact penny how much he had earned. As the clock on the bottom
right-hand corner of his computer screen switched silently from 8:59 to
9:00, he would invariably mutter to himself 'And the money comes
rolling in.' He would smile, clasp his hands behind the back of his
head, then stretch them towards the ceiling, enjoying the way his
tendons cracked. Then he would settle down to work, typing busily away
and adding to his spreadsheets, then checking the clock again at 9:30
when he had earned precisely two pounds eighty seven pence, thanks to
the vagaries of National Insurance contributions and income tax.

That's not very much, you might think. Sid would agree, but he wasn't
too bothered. Maureen was the main bread-earner in the family with her
important position in the city. She had done so well for herself that
Sid didn't really have to work at all. They were childless and neither
of them were particularly extravagant spenders so they were able to
live a very comfortable life. Without his job, however, Sid would have
to forego the pleasure of watching the clock on his PC screen whirr
silently away, and would instead have to sit at home watching
television, without the connection of time and money that kept him
going through the long dull, office hours.

He was utterly unable to cope with stress - that was another reason
why he was perfectly content with such a mundane, badly paid position.
All he had to do was input financial data on his spreadsheets. The
phone on his desk rarely bleeped, and it was only on very unusual
occasions that any of the other people in his office came up to him and
talked. Instructions always seemed to come via e-mail, and although
people tried to be friendly when he first started, they were soon put
off by his monosyllabic answers and his lack of interest in asking any
questions back. These days he remained hunched silently over his desk
all day, apart from allowing himself the luxury of a ten minute break
at eleven to surf the internet (he enjoyed catching up on all the world
news on the BBC site), and then for half and hour at lunchtime he would
sit by the nearby lake, eat the sandwiches he had made that morning,
and read a couple of chapters of the latest Stephen King novel.

When his telephone did ring, he suffered terribly. Its horrible
high-pitched electronic bleat would cut right into him like a knife,
quickening his pulse and bursting out beads of sweat on the palms of
his hands. He would try to ignore it, to focus on his screen, to wipe
that infernal noise from his mind. But the other people in his office
would begin looking up from their work with puzzled expressions on
their faces, wondering why this strange, balding man wasn't answering
his phone. Sid would have to reach across with a trembling hand and
lift the handset, clutching it tightly to the side of his head in case
anyone should see how scared he was. The call would normally be a
simple query about the figures he'd inputted and would be over within a
minute. Its brevity failed to make the experience any less unpleasant
however.

Overall he enjoyed his work, and he enjoyed the way his mind operated
while he was working, dividing the day into financial segments and
making the time pass at a bearable pace. That was why he was so puzzled
by the sense of unease he felt on this particular Monday morning. It
had been a warm night, but he had slept well nonetheless. The
considerable bulk of Maureen laying next to him and shifted several
times, but only dragging him into a slightly shallower level of sleep
and not waking him up entirely. He looked across at her. She was on her
side and facing away from him, the duvet scrunched tightly around her
leaving very little for himself. He felt a sudden, almost burning sense
of disgust as his eyes wandered to her lank black hair that spread over
the pillow like the weed spreading over their pond. He suddenly found
himself taking an irrational dislike to the way she breathed through
her nose when she was sleeping, never snoring exactly, but rasping and
sometimes making odd little clicking noises that made him wonder
whether a cockroach had made its home in her nasal cavity and was
scraping its carapaced limbs together. And he was suddenly rather glad
she was turned away from him. Her breath had always been foul in the
morning, and if he had felt its damp, mouldy unpleasantness on his face
that particular morning, he might well have erupted into a rage, an
extremely rare occurrence for Sid Bartram.

For the first time in many years, he remembered his first sight of
Maureen. He usually tried to avoid thinking about the past, and became
absorbed instead in the present, every second, every penny of the
present at that. But the shapeless bulk sprawled next to him in bed on
this particular morning seemed so far removed from the lithe, happy
young woman he had first glimpsed at the funfair thirty years before,
that the comparison made the past impossible to forget.

It had been summer, late August, and the fair that appeared on the
town common once or twice a year was into its last day. They would
begin packing up the following morning, and within hours the only hints
that anything exciting had stood there at all would be the patches of
yellowed grass where the tents had been pitched and the few scraps of
litter that had been blown into the trees surrounding the open spaces
and been forgotten.
Night had fallen quickly, as it so often did in late summer, as if to
prepare us for the darker and colder days ahead. Sid had gone to the
fair with a couple of his friends, and they had wandered around
aimlessly for a few hours, trying the odd ride, laughing at how the
Ghost Train so completely failed to scare them, fighting back the urge
to puke when they had tried the Waltzer after one too many
doughnuts.

Maureen had simply wandered past him, one face amongst dozens of us.
He was pretty sure it hadn't been love at first sight. The emotion her
tanned face had awakened within him wasn't so much love, as curiosity,
a desire simply to get to know her better and to find out what she did.
He had overcome his usual nerves and began talking to her immediately,
influenced by a vague, gnawing doubt deep within his gut that he might
never see her again. After all, he had never seen her before.

She had been reticent at first, perhaps seeing something of the
ridiculous in the tall, rather scruffy 19-year old who was making the
first clumsy attempts at conversation. But then she must have seen
something interesting in his eyes, perhaps feeling that same curiosity
that he felt, because within two days they had gone on their first
date, within two weeks they had been sleeping together, and within two
years they were married.
Curiosity killed the cat, thought Sid uneasily to himself, and then
wandered where the thought had come from. Perhaps something had been
killed, within both of them, since those heady days. They had been
happy at first, and their marriage had survived Maureen going off to
business college and then embarking almost immediately on her lucrative
career, while he made a few half-hearted attempts at forging a career
for himself. But something had slowly and almost imperceptibly died in
those intervening years. Sid no longer felt that old shiver of
anticipation when he knew he was about to see Maureen again after an
extended absence, the sort of shiver that made his pulse quicken and
the world seem full of endless possibilities. He felt nothing now,
apart from a horrible, guilt-ridden emptiness that he had never really
noticed until now. He was worried that even this horrible lack of
feeling might lead to something worse, to downright hate for his wife.
Perhaps his disgust at her size, at the sound she made when she
breathed through her nose, perhaps this was the first sign, the first
harbinger of impending hate.