by Mike Ashley
She went up and was dismayed to see Nicholas’s personal assistant, Tracy Wordsworth, already changed and limbering up. She almost turned and left, but then Tracy saw her and smiled and it was too late, she was committed.
It was murder! If this was what it took to get down to a slim ninety kilos like Tracy then maybe Maddy would be better off sticking to her natural weight. After barely five minutes she hurt. Deep inside, her muscles were trembling with the effort of moving and stretching in ways the body just wasn’t designed for.
“It gets easier every time,” Tracy reassured her, as Maddy resorted to watching from the side.
Thank goodness for the cakes. Or rather, thank goodness for Dr Bull’s new NutriMentPlus, which was being trialled in the Amenity Centre today. It knew exactly what she wanted, and almost as soon as the interval started, Maddy was drawing deeply on a toffee-cream smoothy (with extra choc-shavings). She looked around at the shabby interior of the gym. The high windows showed blue sky. She remembered the feelings of being uncontained when she was outdoors, and she remembered the taste of the air. “I’m going outside,” she told Tracy. Fresh air would be far more beneficial than sitting here feeling guilty and looking at svelte young women doing things she could only dream of. You could get that on the vee, after all.
Tracy hesitated, then said, “I think I’ll join you. If you don’t mind, that is.”
Maddy smiled. It was a mad kind of day. Things were just happening, unplanned, unpondered.
Out in the main concourse, the kids seemed to have given up on their games early. They were drifting out of the great darkened rooms lit only by vee screens and going . . . outside. The ExerThighsTM escapees followed.
“It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” said Tracy.
Maddy looked around. It was. The air and sun were good. This was far better than sitting in the gym and feeling bad. Out on a grassy area, some kids had a ball. Maddy recognized it from the vee: the sims of the old greats playing against each other. The kids were playing soccer. They stopped to watch, part of a growing crowd drifting out to enjoy the sunny day. It was really quite exciting . . . quite revolutionary.
After a while, the ball came towards them and, as if by instinct, Maddy swung a foot at it. She made contact, and the ball flew back into the melee. Tracy squeezed her arm and winked at her. “Come on, Maddy,” she urged. “Let’s show ’em!”
They trundled out from the crowd of onlookers and, more by surprise than skill, Tracy took the ball off the feet of one of the young lads. She kicked it roughly in the direction of Maddy, who lumbered towards it. A kid chest-high to her, but almost as broad, got there first and paused with a foot triumphantly trapping the ball, then he saw that she was not going to stop and raised his arms protectively. Maddy barged into him and some part of her made contact with the ball. A big cheer went up, and then she realized that others from the watching crowd were joining in, too.
One, however, remained aloof. One member of the crowd stood back, watching, making notes, talking into a phonemic stuck to his jaw. Gideon Eden had a job to do, an experiment to observe, to report upon. Outbreaks of spontaneity have to be observed minutely if they are to be understood.
6
In which Nicholas van Pommel is consternated and Dr Bull and Gideon, his assistant, reach a critical point
She woke. She wished she hadn’t. She felt as if she had been dragged back and forth over a cattle grid (she was a great fan of The Farm). It hurt when she moved. It hurt in different ways if she lay still.
She filled the bath. She would need to get a bigger one, if her ExerThighsTM regime made no difference. The hot water helped a little. She had grass stains on her knees, grass mowings in her hair. Bruises. One big one on her shin from where one of the little buggers had caught her.
She slumped on the sofa and called up the vee. She really must tilt the screen a little. Some day. “Nicholas?” He popped up in a buddy window – still labelled “sweetheart” instead of “buddy” she saw, with a mixture of guilt and amusement.
“Maddy,” he said. He seemed quite animated today. “Are you okay? Did you hear about the uprising?”
“Uprising?”
“At the Amenity Centre. People just upping and leaving their screens. Going outside. Rowdiness! Unruliness! Anarchy!”
“I was there,” she said softly, wondering what had happened to their long silences.
He stared at her. “You were there? You were affected?”
She nodded, feeling slightly defensive. “I went outside. It was a nice day. Tracy was there, too.” She wondered about mentioning the football, but decided to defer that in the good old Sunny Meadows fashion.
“What’s happening?” Nicholas said, shaking his head.
It was only then that Maddy, too, wondered what was happening, or more specifically, what had happened the day before at the Amenity Centre. So many people, just getting it into their heads to do something different . . . It wasn’t bad, though, was it?
“What if this insanity spreads?” he added.
What indeed?
“Bud and Suze are back together again,” she told Nicholas. “She should know better by now.”
He paused to think, then nodded. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he said.
Over in Dr Bull’s old house, they were discussing matters more weighty than the state of Bud and Suze’s half-scripted relationship.
“Well, Gideon?”
“All is ready. Preliminary trials are complete. The technology appears robust enough to cope, and we have observed the impact on the populace.”
“At last. Now we can extend the experiment to all of Sunny Meadows. Let operations commence!”
7
In which it will be seen that the epidemic invades the entire town, and what effect it produces
In the following weeks the madness, instead of subsiding, became more widespread. No corner of Sunny Meadows remained untouched by moments of spontaneity and enthusiasm, by altercation and dispute and simple acts of doing. The streets, normally deserted save for the automated delivery vehicles, saw people out in the fine weather. Walking. Adolescents gathered in great crowds to play football with the one football known to exist in Sunny Meadows. Screen buddies visited each other, in person, and they watched Bud and Suze or Celebwatch or Truth or Dare? together, all in the same room.
Maddy’s neighbours, old Mrs and Mr Oliver, started having rather noisy parties with their good friends the Blanchards. In a very short matter of time, Maddy’s neighbours were Mrs Oliver and Mr Blanchard, although the parties continued apace. Maddy didn’t know what to make of it all (although it rather tickled her to see the colour back in her neighbours’ cheeks), but Tracy told her that this kind of thing was happening all over. “Life is speeding up,” Tracy told her. “People aren’t just sitting back – they’re grabbing their opportunities with both hands. Have you seen Nicholas lately?”
Maddy shrugged. They were outside the Amenity Centre again, the ExerThighsTM class having moved outdoors to take advantage of the extended fine spell. Not that anyone really knew if this weather was unseasonably good or merely typical – whatever, they could still make the most of it. She wondered what Tracy meant by her mention of Nicholas. Perhaps she was planning to seize him with both hands. Maddy looked at her new sort-of-friend and knew she couldn’t possibly compete.
“Okay, exergroup, time to get back to it!”
Maddy scrambled to her feet, not wanting to be last into position. Claude, their ThinstructorTM (PENDING), thumbed the soundbox and the beat started pumping out. Copying his actions, as well as she could, Maddy shifted from foot to foot with the music, pointing to the sky, pointing to the thigh, pointing to the sky . . .
The music drew unwanted attention. Some kids who had been playing soccer now stopped and shuffled over to watch and gesture and gurn, and then . . . point to the sky, point to the thigh . . . a whole crowd of them aping the rigorous, scientifically-devised routine of the ExerThighsTM programme.
It came to a head when Denise Mackay (down ten kilos since starting the programme, but still packing a mighty haunch) stopped in mid ab-flex and yelled, “Will you kids just fuck off and die?”
They stared at her. Everybody stared at her. Denise was the mildest, meekest, most god-loving grandmother you ever could hope to meet, in Sunny Meadows or almost anywhere else. She did flowers in vases and she always took trouble to smile at everyone she passed, just to be sure she covered all the ones whose faces she half-recognized but whose names wouldn’t come.
She stood there, hands on hips. Just daring any one of them to be stupid enough to react.
Someone is always stupid enough. Indeed, Dr Bull, although not present at this incident, had many years before published a paper that empirically demonstrates this very point: if a situation requires someone to do something stupid, you can always find someone stupid enough to do it.
Little Danny Rogers burst out laughing. He couldn’t contain it. He was there at the front of the crowd, and this old, round woman was glaring at them all, using language she must have learnt from the vee because oldies didn’t speak like that in the normal run of things.
Her eyes locked on him.
She screeched and took a great stride towards him, and then another. She was on him in seconds, an impressive act in itself. Danny Rogers barely knew what had hit him, let alone what had landed on top of him, squeezing the air from his lungs and the urine from his bladder.
After a second or two of rather bemused silence, broken only by an old woman’s squawking and a small boy’s rather muffled protests, one of the gang of youths tried to haul Denise Mackay off their compatriot. The old woman swung an arm and caught him in the jaw with a fleshy elbow. As he stumbled back, all hell broke loose. Teenagers piled in, at least a few of them subsequently staggering back shortly afterwards; then Claude bellowed at his class, “That’s one of ours, that is!” and threw himself into the battle in support of Denise.
Maddy followed Tracy in, body-checking a dreadlocked young girl as she did so. She would have more bruises in the morning. And aches, and pains, and she would have to try to soak it all out in the bath, and she would both regret it and puzzle over it. She knew all this. “Take that, fuckwit!” she yelled, punching a tall, barrel-bellied boy in the chest.
Back in Dr Bull’s grand old house, he and his assistant were somewhat removed from events. They thought this advisable because, while it is not possible to predict the detail of spontaneous chaotic flourishings, the generality can be all too predictable.
“There is fighting at the Amenity Centre,” Gideon told his master. “And I believe a young people’s rave event is to take place in Festival Fields this evening. The Advisory Board have reached three decisions at their latest vee-meeting—”
“Unprecedented!” gasped the doctor, his eyes flaring with excitement.
“—and someone has painted the entire frontage of Dewberry Mall.”
“Colour?”
“Many, Dr Bull. Many.”
The doctor chuckled.
“Doctor . . .” Gideon hesitated, as if about to broach a sensitive subject. “Do you think that, perhaps, and in the light of current happenings, we might have misjudged the levels? Do you not think that they are a trifle high?”
Dr Bull fixed him with his staring eyes, and the young assistant might easily have seen in that look just a hint of the madness that had spread through Sunny Meadows. “We have only just begun, my boy! If anything, I’d say that the levels are too low. This is an experiment, not a humanitarian exercise.”
8
In which the Sunny Meadownians adopt a heroic resolution
It was not long afterwards that the long-running, off and on (although mostly, it must be said, off) dispute with the neighbouring New Town development was fanned into sparky life, once again. New Town, which was both older than Sunny Meadows and not really a town at all, but more a sprawling suburban stain (pretty much like Sunny Meadows, after all, then) had, until this point, been blissfully unaffected by the madness recounted in these pages. Indeed, many residents of New Town must, by now, have long since put aside any memory of what was, for those of Sunny Meadows, a festering casus belli.
As a great man once said, winning is not everything, it’s the only thing. He also said that a game of football is hardly a matter of life and death – it’s more important than that. And what’s more, you only sing when you’re winning. On that bitter day in February 1974, New Town Athletic won, and then they sung about it and forgot. But Sunny Meadows Wanderers lost, by a single goal, scored from the penalty spot after a decision made by a short-sighted, dim-witted, one-sided, black-shirted representative of Beelzebub.
“Wilkins dived like a bleeding Stuka,” yelled one belligerent fan now, as, many decades on from that fateful day, a crowd of newly-invigorated Sunny Meadownians gathered to watch the local youths (those not injured in the ExerThighsTM incident of two weeks before, at least) kick a ball around an area of grass. The said Wilkins, did, it must be said, go on to play a season and a half of professional football in League Division Three, but his reputation as a divebomber followed him wherever he went.
There were general mumbles of agreement.
“So what are we going to do about it, then?”
“Demand a re-match!” cried one, and then several more.
“And what if they refuse?”
“We’ll deal with that if we have to,” said one ominously rumbling voice. “Just let ’em dare.”
9
In which Gideon, the assistant, gives a reasonable piece of advice, which is eagerly rejected by Dr Bull
“Was I not right?” Dr Bull popped a fat pink marshmallow into his mouth.
Gideon dipped his head in acknowledgement. “Of course, Dr Bull. Your hypothesis has been emphatically supported. The solution to the problem of our current malaise is merely a matter of devising the appropriate biochemical stimulation. The experiment has been a success.”
Dr Bull nodded. “Exactly! Biochemistry, I tell you.”
“Do you not think that matters have gone far enough, now?” asked the young assistant, rather tentatively. “Do you think, perhaps, that these poor fellows should not be excited any further? It would be a simple matter for me to re-set the parameters.”
Dr Bull had that look in his eye again. That glint of the popular madness. “Just you try!” he growled.
10
In which it is once more proved that a distant view can sometimes be all the clearer
Maddy drove Nicholas out over the Queensbury flyover.
“Do you think we should?” he asked nervously. “The structure is unstable, you know. One day . . .”
“Then do something about it,” she told him. “You’re on the Advisory Board. Take action. Until then . . . well, let’s live a little!”
He pulled himself up in his seat. “I’ll have you know that the Advisory Board is looking into the matter. And I’m going to advise them to take action, what’s more.”
He said it as if he didn’t realize he was agreeing with her. He said it as if he was putting her right on a matter of grave importance. Maddy glanced across at him, and wondered what had happened to them . . . what had happened to her town. It was all very well that people seemed to have a bit more drive about them these days, but you could take a thing too far.
For a moment, from the top of the flyover, they could look back over Sunny Meadows. Maddy couldn’t tell which part was hers, where her street was, her little maisonette. It all looked the same.
They found the countryside. Maddy had seen countryside on the vee – she was a big fan of The Farm, after all – but all these square fields and manicured hedges seemed so wild to her. She wondered whether this picnic was really a good idea.
The car found somewhere to park that was right by the river, so they didn’t have to go far to eat. Maddy had been baking. She had made a quiche, and she had made a salad from Wal-Mart; she had made eggs, too. Perhaps th
at was too much egg for one meal, she had thought, when she was packing the bag this morning, but by then it was too late. They spread a blanket, just like she had seen, and put the food out on it. The ground was uncomfortable, but she wasn’t going to complain. Nicholas seemed to be calmer out here, and she didn’t want to stir up his animosity again.
It was peaceful, apart from the insects and the stones in the ground. It was unlike anything Maddy could quite recall.
Nicholas had a small box with him and, after they had eaten, he placed it on the blanket with a flourish. When Maddy opened it up she saw that it contained a selection of cakes, courtesy of NutriMentPlus. She could tell that from the way they were square, to make packing and delivery easier.
He must have sensed her disappointment. “Maddy? What is it?”
It was hard to put into words. It was a feeling she hadn’t quite recognized herself until now. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought we could do it differently today. Eat differently. So I made everything. None of this came from the outlet.” NutriMentPlus was supposed to give you everything you wanted, before you even realized you wanted it, but Maddy had fumbled her way towards the realization that what she really wanted was to be the same side of a hundred kilos as Tracy Wordsworth. And she wanted this lovely man as he was now, in the flesh.
Spontaneity struck again. Nicholas reached for a rectangular chocolate eclair and hurled it into the river. A jam tart followed.
Maddy took a doughnut and hurled it out into the middle of the flow. She collapsed back on her elbows, laughing more than she could ever remember laughing. This was turning out to be quite a memorable day!