bed and sleep like a corpse until it was time to get up and go to work. This suited him fine.
By the second week, however, he found he was coping with the exertion of gut-hauling rather better, which meant that he had enough stamina to allow him to sit staring aimlessly at the walls of his room for an hour before falling asleep. By the end of the fourth week, he could manage three hours of aimless staring with no bother at all. This wasn’t good. Staring at the walls proved to be a primitive form of meditation, in the course of which he analysed his life so far, and ended up reaching the conclusion that it hadn’t been going so well lately. Alone, all the money gone, living in a ghastly little shoebox and spending all day loading still-warm intestines into a galvanised box on wheels; it wasn’t, he couldn’t help thinking, the sort of life he’d quite reasonably anticipated five years before, when he was appointed as the youngest ever Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits professor of multiphasic quantum dynamics at the University of Leiden.
Still, he told himself, it could be worse; at least he had a job, and somewhere to live.
The week after that, he was consoling himself that at least he had a job; furthermore, he had kind, understanding employers who didn’t mind him turning up to work looking like he’d slept in a cardboard box in the supermarket car park. This was just as well, since the landlord of the horrible little room had thrown him out for smelling overpoweringly of entrails. The cardboard box had been a lucky find. It was big. If he curled up in it like a hibernating dormouse, he could close the flaps and imagine they were the roof of a tiny, tiny little house. Generally speaking it was peaceful in the car park after 2 a.m., when the last of the local kids had gone home. Count your blessings, he told himself, it could be worse.
But then it rained, reducing his beautiful cosy box to brown porridge, and Theo started to feel despondent. His boss, a man with a heart of gold and absolutely no sense of smell, took pity on him and let him sleep beside the guts skip, but only short-term, until he could get himself fixed up with a proper home. He couldn’t, he pointed out as kindly as he could, have employees sleeping rough on the premises indefinitely. It lowered the tone.
Still, Theo told himself, as he wandered the streets one night, waiting for it to be time to go to sleep, think of all the money I’m saving not paying rent. He sat down in a shop doorway and fished out the crumpled brown envelope in which he kept his money. He counted it. Not quite enough for the man he’d once been to buy half a pair of his customary brand of socks, but, to someone lulled to sleep each night by the placid drip-drip-drip of stale blood from the hole in the guts skip floor, a tidy sum. You could buy all manner of things with that much money. Some of them in bottles.
There was a late-night off-licence just down the road. He stood up, folded the notes round his right hand and stuffed it in his overall pocket. Booze had never been one of his problems; but, given his present circumstances, he could see no reason why he shouldn’t go for the complete set. In the distance, the liquor-store window glowed a sort of golden amber, like a lighthouse guiding him home.
Inside the store it was bright and warm. A tired-looking woman stared at him, and her expression changed just a little bit. Just a little bit can mean so much – the length of a nose, the gap between lower lip and chin. Scientific studies of the human face have established that the difference between heart-stopping loveliness and look-the-other-way ugly can sometimes be as little as a quarter of an inch. On this occasion, just a little bit was plenty.
“Small bottle of lemonade, please,” Theo said. “The cheapest you’ve got.”
Later, with his back snuggled against the sharp edge of the skip and his invisible hand loosely holding a half-empty bottle of something that tasted like neat citric acid but wasn’t, he reflected on rope theory. It was a hypothesis of his own: a bit like string theory, except that it was more robust and slightly less prone to tangling itself into knots.