Though I had got another job at the Clyst St Mary Cyberlife site, (across the complex from my old job – a building I thankfully never again had to visit), I hadn’t been able to get back into a house or flat there, so I had rented a one bed place in the Sowton and Digby suburbs not far away.
Alice had been some sort of legal clerk before CyberV, but she didn’t yet know what she wanted to be after. And it didn’t matter, because my job paid enough to provide for the both of us. Our lives were strange then. It was as Alice had said when she was Ailyss - we missed CyberV like someone had removed all of our limbs, and only we could understand the emptiness it had left inside each of us.
Seen now, I realise that our relationship was one of happy memories and shared remembrances of phenomenal times. It’s amazing how often sex was prefaced by things like, ‘Do you remember that nest of yetis?’ or ‘I was just thinking about the time we had to wrestle that giant crocodile, weapon-less and naked.’ More the second one. And, before we knew it, thrilling stories became oft-repeated rituals performed to ward off the eerie spectre of absent conversation.
Of course, this is how I see it now, with the benefit of hindsight. But then I did what I was always most apt to do in any relationship – family, friendly and romantic... and that was to take hold of everything that vaguely resembled closeness or love and bury myself deep inside, oblivious to anything else. To invest my heart, my very soul and every hope for the future, in my own fantasy and fabrication.
So, looking back, I see that maybe Alice did the brave thing that I didn’t have the courage to do. God knows, I probably would have married her before admitting to myself that what I called love was attachment, nothing more than the natural desire not to be alone.
About nine months after she had moved in, I came home from work to find her things gone and a simple note: You were right at Supali.
We had both been right, so it seemed. But all that really mattered now was that the only perfect thing in my life had turned out to be a lie. I couldn’t deal with it and I was a very angry person for a long time after.
Chapter 6
The next five years just sort of flew by. I was in the first half of my twenties when I started CyberV, and, at that age, years were still pretty major things that seemed full to the brim with various experiences. The three years in CyberV had been a little like being at school again, where just a single year stretching out in front of you might as well have been a whole lifetime, so dim and far away was the thought of the end of it.
Sitting alone in my Digby and Sowton flat, it occurred to me that I had suddenly become old without realising it. Once Alice had left, the last anchor holding time to the ground left with her and, no longer tethered, time ran rampant, consuming days, then weeks, then months and years to feed its ever-growing, insatiable hunger. Suddenly last week felt like yesterday and, when I would sometimes lie awake at night (as, on occasion, I always have) just thinking about the past and the sequence of events which have made up the story of my life, it was with horror that I began to realise how quickly the story moved once I had left my teenage years behind, accelerating ever onwards as if it knew no terminal velocity.
Soon I was past thirty and it was as if I had never been to CyberV at all. I had no friends outside of a few casual work buddies, worked the same job and rented the same place. The only family member I would care to have anything to do with – or would care to associate with me – was on the opposite side of the planet and the date at which I could choose to return to CyberV was approaching.
For a while I was fairly obsessed about returning. Maybe for six or eight months after Alice had left I had continued to dream about CyberV during all of my waking hours and many of my unconscious ones, but after that it had become just a series of memories, like the rest of life. However, when I got up one morning to find a mail on the Cymedia Centre from CyberV, reminding me that I was eligible to participate in the game again in another three months’ time, I had been filled with thoughts of the glory days back in CyberV.
What did I have that was keeping me there? If spectacular life failure had driven me to CyberV the first time, what was different now that might keep me from returning? Nothing. I had been a much better man (or elf) in that other reality, but I seemed not to have brought any of that experience back with me. Maybe Alice had had a point: I was in the wrong world. One single world couldn’t be right for absolutely everybody.
But then was this to be my life from now on? Three years of adventure followed by three years of abject misery, returning each time to a body three years older and a mind none the wiser? It all sounded an awful lot like giving up - a conscious decision to have as little to do with this life as possible. In a way, one could view it as only one step away from suicide.
So, I did what I do best: I procrastinated. The day when I could have returned came and went and my mind swayed one way and then the other, then back again. Part of the problem was that, given the opportunity to sign up for the rest of my life to a CyberV game, I probably would have gone for it. The main thing that kept me in the real world was the fear of having to return to it. Weird, huh?
But then one day, late in April, I found a reason to stay.
It was a cold day, and damp too, so that I found myself reminded of winter in the midst of approaching summer. With an unexpected Tuesday off work – something about ‘accrued overtime benefits’, or some such – and, not really knowing what to do with it, I had just taken off and started walking on a whim. I picked a direction and just headed that way, trusting on my own internal compass sense when I found my route diverted.
Apparently my own compass sense wasn’t so great, because I’m pretty sure I took a rather meandering route as it was more than three hours later that, my under-used legs going numb, I crossed the Alphington Road and headed in the general direction of St Thomas.
The area immediately beyond the main road had been a regeneration zone until recently, and all the houses were new build ecohomes, all purposefully individual and interesting until, after about three or four streets, you see a pattern emerging, order beneath a thin veneer of chaos. A microcosm of our world over a square kilometre or two of open-plan housing, or so it seemed to me.
But, coming out the other side into a small, ornamental park, the vibe shifted and suddenly I felt part of an older, culturally richer city again. I never did this; I never saw this: People just hanging out in the park. Mums wheeling their babies around or watching their toddler stagger back and forth in the way that toddlers do, like their next step will be the one that sends them flat on their face. A couple sitting under a tree – feeling close to nature while feeling close to each other. People walking, but walking like they’ve nowhere to be.
The park opened out onto another, even bigger park. Arriving in the middle of one side of it, I looked left and then right, finding that it stretched several hundred metres in either direction, and was, on average, probably about three hundred deep. Most of it was marked out as football or rugby pitches, one beside another, beside another.
How come, for all my years in the city, had I never seen this place before? It was huge, wondrous and full of people, all running around or stretching out as the sun finally began to tear apart the clouds overhead. And, what seemed most amazing of all was that hardly any of them were interacting. A few people chatting on benches here and there, some playing football, but, on the whole, they were having nothing to do with each other.
If you imagined walls and doors and windows separating them all out from the others, then this could have been the regeneration zone behind me. But this was the park, and so none of them were alone.
I found a spot on the drying grass to sit down and joined in the feeling. It was then that I spotted two even more amazing things about the park. The first was a huge tree (I didn’t know which kind, but made a mental note to look it up when I got home) at the opposite side from where I sat. It was monstrous and its branches loomed over the park - a leviathan against the
tiny figures who idled past mostly oblivious to it.
Then, beyond the tree, above and to the right, was the other amazing thing: A line of about three or four houses and then a three-storey block of flats, all in the old, redbrick sort of style that denoted them as being probably at least a hundred years old. They stared out imperiously across the park from about twenty metres above it.
Soon I got up and had a wander around the park, pausing to look back up at the block of flats occasionally, pleased to find that there were few places where they could not be seen from. Which meant, of course, that the flats had a great view of most of the park.
I made my way out of the park and around, wandering small, terraced streets until I found what had to be the road with the flats on... Cordery Road. It was a fairly drab neighbourhood, not far from a main road; it wasn’t exactly welcoming but, I supposed, wasn't threatening either. Cordery Road quickly opened up into what turned out to be a little square and there, off to the left, were my flats.
I so very badly wanted one of the two top flats, but ultimately had to feel extremely fortunate to find one on the middle-floor for sale, (on the left, as seen from the park). The place was rundown and the price, therefore, well within my budget, despite the rare view.
Two months later and I was in my new home. It couldn’t have been much more impractical for work and was a questionable investment at best, but it was mine and I loved it and, more than that, it gave me the slimmest of reasons not to return to CyberV.
Never much of a DIY-er, my initial enthusiasm was nearly dampened by several near-fatal accidents and an exceptionally short lifespan in some of my work, but I persisted long enough for experience to start overcoming my handycap, as it were. The flat was spacious with surprisingly high ceilings; also, it was so bare and in need of redecoration that there was almost nothing I could do that wouldn’t make it look better.
I was happier for a while and hanging out in the park cured my loneliness a little; or, sometimes, just watching from my window was enough. But, as is often the case in life, what once was comfortable routine ultimately dilutes and becomes less and less rewarding, until the routine is the bars of your prison – the comforting bricks and mortar of your own cell.
I started living vicariously through the regular visitors to the park below, making them into imaginary characters in my mind. Before long I had cast myself in the role of the ghoulish vampire in the castle on the hill, feeding off of the energy of the unwary villagers below, needing their lives to be able continue with my own.
In some ways I had become a more capable man since buying my own place, better at turning my hand to a problem, where once I would have just found a tradesman on the Cymedia Centre. I got things done and interacted with other individuals in a way that – at the very least – made it seem like I was interested in their lives. But it became apparent that most of living in the real world beyond my Cymedia bubble was just learned habits, that real thoughts and feelings almost never had to surface just to get through day-to-day, week-to-week.
It was both a relief and a disappointment. I had always assumed that my inability to really connect with anyone around me was born of some emotional lesson that I had yet to learn, some sort of openness, maybe, which I needed to find the courage to achieve. That maybe the rest of the world worked hard in communicating with each other and gained some sort of genuine closeness as a result. But this appeared not to be the case.
I could joke with the plumber and close the door enjoying a warm little glow about my cheeks, feeling that we had changed the flow of each other’s day just a little bit, and, more importantly, that I had fitted in, successfully fulfilling my role as customer. But thirty seconds later I would be alone in the silence of the flat. And, like a junkie reaching for his stash, I would go the window and stare out at the people in the park, stealing a little bit of their happiness to ward off my demons for a while.
I could live with being the monster up on the hill – since about the age of twelve I had been fairly indifferent to the need to fit in. What I did require, however, was my ghoulish bride. No matter how much we use progress to separate our lives from each other, we can’t quell that need for at least one other human being’s understanding, to know that some vaguely accurate reflection of who we are can exist outside of ourselves in at least one other person’s thoughts. That this person can love us for who we really are, even if the notion seems preposterous.
But however much I could fake civility and normal human behaviour when I needed hot running water, it was far beyond me to do that socially... with women. Not that it isn’t possible – I’ve seen people do it... gloriously – but I could never understand how, and certainly could not replicate it myself.
Of course, rather than try to be normal and interesting and all that, one could just try to be oneself. That’s what ‘they’ say, isn’t it, ‘Just be yourself’? Well, ‘they’ are a bunch of fucking idiots.
‘She’s just a person, like you’, ‘they’ would say. No she’s not; she’s judge, jury and executioner over my right to exist as a member of human society. And, when I start speaking my mind and doing that honesty thing and she either gets the ‘Who stuck me with the weirdo?’ look, or the ‘I’m so bored, please let me see someone I know’ neck-craning exercise, then I die just a little more inside.
And you know what the worst thing of all is...? That none of them are probably anything like the person my ghoulish bride would be anyway. ‘They’ say there’s plenty more fish in the sea. But what do you do when there’s plenty of cod and mackerel and herring and bass, but you want hake, and the Spanish have fished all the hake.
A metaphor too far, maybe, but the point stands. If you’re clinically inept at even making one woman want to spend five minutes with you, how the hell are you going to find the right one?
As I hit my thirty-third birthday, I was finally letting go of ‘She’ll be out there, and you’ll know her when you see her.’ ‘They’ will see you wasting your life away on ‘some days’ if you give them half the chance. But fortunately, thanks to those wonderful people at Cyberlife, a solution presented itself.
* * *
Chapter 7
They said that I should come and pick you up from the Bristol Complex, if possible. There’s a standard forty-eight hour gap between the termination of one home location and the implementation of another and, if I’d understood then what I was soon to realise, I would have suffered with public transport to come and get you. More than that, I would have booked a hotel somewhere and we could have roamed around, making the best use of every moment before having to be back inside your habitation zone.
But, as it was, I had already travelled up to the huge facility in ‘9a’ twice already; once for an interview as part of the application process and once more after acceptance to gather all sorts of information necessary to get the order process going. Oh yeah, baby, you were an order process. Not having a car, I couldn’t see why they shouldn’t just bring you straight to me, straight to the house where you were going to live, the place that was going to be your home.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve never been as purely, perfectly nervous as I was that morning, waiting for you to be delivered to me. Firstly, I was nervous about the whole affair in the same way that I was always nervous of close situations with strangers. There would be two or three CyberG people coming with you, so I would have to perform my ‘please don’t see how weird I am’ normality dance, finding places to stand or sit, wearing the right expressions, not over-laughing and trying to prevent my limbs from expressing their feminine side.
Then there was you; essentially a stranger who was being forced to share her life with me. Despite all the chats and the endless literature that CyberG had sent me, I still didn’t know just who you would be when you arrived or whether it would take you 3.142 seconds to decide that you loathed me.
I don’t know, pi is as good a number to be despisable in as any…
…Nope, I’m pretty sure that
‘despisable’ isn’t a real word.
But there was something else too, something unexpected. Never a father and occasionally feminine but never actually female, my paternal feelings have always been restricted to lounge window voyeurism. I’ve always thought that a child is, in a way, a dream made real. Idealistically, at least, it’s the dream of two people’s love coming together and producing something… a result, if you will. You are making a new life in your image, a perfect person with all of your good points and forewarned about your mistakes… Or so the idea goes. And in a way, that’s what you were… my creation, my need for love and companionship made flesh.
I can only assume that this was what the nauseous excitement – screaming loud above all the other turbulent thoughts buzzing around my head like a swarm of insects that morning – must have been. And when the ‘bleep-bleep-ring’ of the intercom sounded just before eleven, I froze for a moment, unsure whether I would even be able to answer it. I needed my left hand to hold the right one steady so that I could press the buttons on the com’s screen.
“Hello?” I squeaked, straining to see you properly on the small screen, though your face was half-blocked by one of the men’s shoulders anyway.
“Hi there Mr. McNamee, it’s Matt from CyberG, we spoke earlier.”
“Hi there. Um… sure, come up. It’s a floor up, Flat 4.”
I kept my eyes firmly on the screen, acting on my hilltop monster instinct to see as much secretly before the risk of eye contact came into the equation. There was a second or two of you in profile, your hair dark on the low-res screen and pulled tightly back from your temples.
Despite their friendly nature, there was something creepy and goon-like about these CyberG guys; dressed in what seemed like black versions of hospital scrubs, they lacked the innocent nerdiness of the people I had dealt with up in 9a. They were like half-cybernetics employees, half-bodyguards.
A New Start Page 29