Free Some Great Thing by Colin McAdam

don’t know.”
    “Will you be going to dinner on Thursday?”
    A LL THOSE MEN IN brown trousers. Whom would he befriend? They all have faces like clocks, expressions changing predictably as time ticks to ten, twelve, two, four thirty, home! when their true selves appear. Would any of them invite Simon home?
    He never liked men.
    A T THE PROSPECT OF possible naked scrutiny, he tends to withdraw, momentarily. His confidence, like his penis, retreats. That explains why he was rather quiet in the car with Renée. It is not because he found her unattractive or uninteresting. Certainly not. In fact, he watched her through her window over the previous night or two, once he had got her address.
    M ANY OF THEM WERE below him anyway, these brown-trousered types. No need to consider befriending them. Rising in the public service was achieved by saying nothing to the right people.
    But surely some were interesting. Hobbies, stories, collections of dreams on display in their homes. Certainly Simon was interesting.
    B UT HE WAS THE type of man, you see, who inspired distrust. It wasn’t his fault.
    As a boy, he was sometimes asked by his mother to read aloud for his father’s friends when they came to dinner. What a precocious little monkey we have. He read with perfect enunciation. His apple cheeks were meant to charm. But there was a tacit acknowledgment shared between him and those friends of his father’s, an acknowledgment that he didn’t understand many of the words he read and that his charms were purely superficial. No one trusts aboy who seems clever; and he knew he wasn’t clever. We will call you a genius, we will notice your beauty, but we will never be convinced. He accepted their lack of conviction.
    The tie he wore at school when he strode into his teens was always perfectly tied with a neat little dimple. “Simon is always so
neat
,” the girls would always say. “You always dress so
well
.” The other boys hated him for the notice of the girls. And beneath the girls’ admiration was that hint of distrust.
    How fruitful this became when he grew up. Women watched him when he entered a room. He was charming at cocktail parties. He always had witty things to say when he had an audience. (And nothing to say when there was only one other.) The other men in the room, seeing the women so blatantly attracted, would distrust him, call him a poseur. To the women, this suggestion of being untrustworthy, hollow at the center, made him sexy. In this adult world, the consequence of his suspicious charm was that instead of being beaten up after school, he was promoted. People distrusted him to the extent that they felt he must be, should be, powerful.
    Women loved him; men, despite themselves, ensured his rise because he could attract so many women. His rise made the women all the more amorous and all the more suspicious, and soon.
    If his latest appointment owed something to the lingering force of his father’s legacy, it was also the product of widespread distrust. And so here he was in this pale blue office.
    D INNER WAS ON THURSDAY , and Simon had agreed to drive Renée. So on Wednesday, at around midnight, he found himself standing on the fence outside her house peering through a window down her hallway upstairs. He had a good view, could see clearly, but the bedroom, the bathroom, the livelier rooms of a stranger’s house, couldn’t be seen from outside. He saw her cross the hallway once.
    It was not something he had done before. I think it was completely out of character. At other moments in his life as he walkeddown nighttime streets he had stopped, as we all do, to look into brightened windows. (“What a dramatic painting!”; “I wouldn’t have put plants there.”) But the stops were brief, they never gave him what he hoped for, and he never, very rarely, thought of going closer to the windows and watching for almost an hour.
    Renée had given him her address so he could pick her up for dinner, and without