by Simon Ings
On the railway platform, Mum stared down at her great, clod-hopping black boots. She was trying to find words. Something right for the moment. ‘I thought you were going to walk with me.’
‘I did walk with you.’
She ground out the butt of her cigarette. ‘You lagged behind.’
‘I wasn’t lagging behind, I was trying to catch up with you.’
‘We didn’t talk at all.’
‘You didn’t want to talk to me.’
‘I did.’
‘Well.’ I told myself I was not going to cry. I was bloody well not going to.
Mum stared at her feet, casting glances that never quite reached me. For one horrible moment I was sure she was going to try to apologise. ‘Christ, it’s cold,’ she said.
‘It’s going to be colder in the tent.’
‘Will you visit me?’
‘No.’
‘Give me a hug.’
Her head rolled against mine. Her newly shorn hair bristled against my cheek.
‘What?’
‘You feel like a man.’
‘I do?’
‘I’d better go,’ I said.
By the time I saw him, standing at the far end of the westbound platform in army drab and big black glasses, I was on the footbridge, crossing lines. Committed to departure. His hair, too long for regulation, made a white halo against the shredded sky. At his feet, a duffle bag almost as big as he was.
A grey mitten of cloud folded itself over the sun and the man’s hair went out, went grey, became unremarkable.
What could I have done? What could I have said? I couldn’t even be sure that this was the same man who had exposed himself to me. Mum waved, dismissing me, and I returned her wave automatically, a puppet strung on wire. Impossible, on such weak evidence, to break the conventions of farewell. So I left her there with him.
Normally I would have walked back along the river; instead I found myself heading for the estate, the way I had come with Mum. It didn’t matter anymore. The water meadows were gone and nothing would bring them back. Michel was wrong. If the world fell apart tomorrow and humanity vanished in a puff of smoke, the waters here, cracking free of their concrete prison, would never run as they used to run. They would find new courses. The old stream beds – ribbons of silt and sand that webbed this place, mystifying gardeners – would blear and vanish over time, a network of collapsed veins. Michel’s bleak, muscular view of collapse was no more than a boy’s romance. No one can say what will succeed our present dispensation but one thing is for certain: it will not resemble the past.
TEN
I am glad that I live within walking distance of the Middle. I need the air, after a day spent in an office chair, rolling from desk to desk in an open-plan office lit only by a narrow lightwell.
This city picks and scratches at itself like an animal kept in too small a cage, pining for its lost reflection. It obsesses over its own archaeology. In the shade of parking garages and electricity substations, stubs of classical brickwork, lacquered with a weatherproof resin, poke up through gravel beds and well-tended lawns. New buildings clad apologetically in glass contort themselves around the city’s ancient leavings. They hollow themselves out where they can; they arc above, they grope beneath. At its centre the city has begun to resemble the root system of a neglected houseplant. The Middle has packed itself around itself to the point where its surface has eroded away entirely. Inside its tangle of windowless malls and pedestrian bridges, its banks of stairs and escalators, its short-haul lifts and cantilevered walkways, no-one thinks about ‘ground level’, or even expects the numbers on the lifts to match up. There is something exhilarating about this – some atavistic hint of forest canopy.
I keep my glasses on for the walk home. I want to keep tabs on illusory light. It’s easy enough to find if you know where to look – spilling from this atelier or that; welling up through the stairwells of the more on-trend basement clubs. Augmented reality is still the preserve of the very few, the initiated, the early adopters. Geeks, frankly. More rarely you sometimes see its early, clumsy forays into the real world. A shop-front spills its frocks onto the sidewalk. They pick themselves up and spin away down the road. A traffic experiment – ghost barriers descend across a road held up anyway by red lights. Cutting through a mall, I see movie actors wandering through crowds who are queuing to see their latest releases. These avatars go largely unseen, though they’re swollen to more than life-size – seven-foot giants of the half-silvered screen. A few spectacled punters have spotted them, but they are already too sophisticated, too jaded, to want to interact with them. This is one of the difficulties with Augmented Reality. The bald idea has already worn thin. My half-silvered, AR-enabled spectacles are new (and expensive – the firm bought them for me). But Augmented Reality – the pasting of images over the real – is old: old as the ghost train and the distorting mirror.
I have moved back to the old locomotive factory where I used to live, before I met Mandy. Developers have taken down one whole corner of the building; of course they have left the facade. It’s supported on iron braces, a gigantic theatre flat. They are planning to put something glass in place of its stacked-matchbox apartments and its flights of heavy, narrow stone stairs.
This redevelopment has reduced the number of apartments and puts pressure on the rest of the building, because nobody living here wants to move. There are even families here, their children living three to a room on stacked bunk beds. The rooms are so small, the ceilings so high, people have subdivided their own living spaces vertically. Every few years the freehold company turns over in its sleep and orders the removal of these tree-house mezzanines, thrown up in contravention of the building code. The ban never sticks. The courtyards are stacked with lumber.
The loss of one whole corner of the building has set the landlords subdividing again. Someone else was already living in my old apartment, but I have found another, higher up in a neighbouring wing, with a view of an identical courtyard. This apartment has been cut up into two: a cursory division of space that gives my neighbour and me half the enjoyment of the living room window. The party wall has been roughly cut around the profile of the frame. We have a pane each. There’s gap between the wall and the window, wide enough to pass notes through. Not that we do.
There are inconveniences, living here – chiefly the noise and the moths.
The man I live next door to has been stamping and shouting in an effort to get the family below us to shut up. They have an autistic child. It’s hard to tell sometimes if she’s crying in distress or simply hooting. Unconsciously, her parents have been placating her – or at any rate, drowning her out – with a wall of sound. Music, variety shows, film-clips, game loops. Noise-suppressing headphones worked for a while. Then construction work started behind the factory facade. At work, tying illusory sound to illusory vision, we use cranial gloves to stimulate the acoustic nerves. This is kit even the brashest early adopter would hesitate to sport in public, though the pundits say its day will come. Moving about my flat with its meshwork on my head makes me feel like a cyborg in a movie, but I value the near-silence it generates, and I can play music through it without disturbing anyone else.
The moths are a bloody nuisance, to be honest. They are small and white and they fetch up everywhere, a little pile of wings and dust in the corner of every windowsill, the back of every drawer.
It’s nearly a year since I returned from visiting Michel and Hanna, and ironically enough it’s me who lives the kind of cramped and straitened life they spent so much time and energy preparing for. Living here requires a kind of sea discipline. You let things slip just a little in this box, and all of a sudden you’re ankle-deep in chaos and kipple. Even when the place is tidy and half-way clean, I can’t bring anyone back here.
There are a couple of women at work who are fond of me. It’s all very casual. A night out and a room in one of the boutique hotels round the back of the Ministries. I don’t really have the mo
ney for this kind of thing, but I’d sooner spend my money like this than on a bigger apartment, further from the centre.
Right now, and like everyone else in the company, I am pretty much living to work.
The company’s been going for about six years and it needs to become more than just a handful of graduates and freelancers with a common idea. Money would make a real difference, but there’s precious little of that, so we pull monstrous hours instead, bonding over our mutual pain and exhaustion.
What do we do? We play three-dimensional animations over printed targets, turning a headline, say, or a picture, a logo or a photograph, into a multimedia portal. The work is simple to explain, and it’s relatively easy to generate business. The problem is in making any real money. Because the technology is new, we have to spend a lot of time educating our clients about what is possible (a constantly evolving brief); at the same time, we’re constantly being blindsided by competitors who stumble across technology and outsourcing arrangements that undercut us – sometimes by tens of per cent.
Work here is a potent cocktail of commercial promise, too much encouragement, and the imminence of collapse. People new to the company quickly become addicted to the adrenaline. We rely far too much on interns, burning them out and replacing them like cheap batteries. They’re all would-be entrepreneurs, creatives, video artists, writers. They’ve put their personal ambitions on hold to be a part of this bigger thing, this young company that could so easily swallow the world, if only it were given the right breaks. They are young, and their arrogance is neatly balanced by their insecurity. They want to be part of something bigger than they are.
I’ve been here a little over three years, and by many I’m counted an old hand. I no longer get off on the company’s narrative. I’m not cynical about its prospects, but I’m prepared to be realistic. This company, so small, so undercapitalised, could well remain small and undercapitalised forever. It doesn’t have to die, but nothing says it will ever actually come to life. Things can stay half-realised forever. Companies. People.
These days, I prefer the company of the coders. I haven’t much in common with them. There’s not a mathematical bone in my body. I don’t share their love of trivia, their taste for science fiction, their distrust of the body. What I do enjoy – what I admire – is their love of the work for its own sake. These are the people who wander round the office abstracted all day, shifting several dozen variables around in their heads, trying to make them fit, trying – in their own arcane manner – to assemble them into something beautiful. Beauty counts for a lot with them, though some of them have a funny way of showing it.
I thought at first that Ralf’s persistent star rating of everything from a cup of coffee to a gallery visit was a tiresome conversational gambit. I’ve come to understand that it is actually a kind of fetish – without it he would be lost in a world robbed of meaning.
‘How did the presentation go, Ralf?’
‘Three stars.’
‘Weren’t you at your sister’s wedding last weekend?’
Ralf strokes his goatee beard. He’s a couple of years older than I am, due for his thirtieth birthday next month, but he has to grow his bristles out a lot to make them show. ‘I would struggle to give it more than two.’ Ralf shaves his head. He is heavy-set, with sloping shoulders. He wears baggy jeans, and stands always with his legs splayed. He looks like a three-stage rocket.
Ralf likes putting people right. You come up with a theory about something, and Ralf says, ‘I think we ought to label that an hypothesis.’ It’s the easiest thing in the world not to take him seriously and I should know because for the first couple of years, I really didn’t. I knew he was talented. I knew he knew far more than me about subjects I considered ‘my own’, including some corners of the fashion business. But even while we worked together, brandspacing the show factory of a major automobile manufacturer, still I considered him one of the backroom crew – one of life’s more capable functionaries.
Since coming back to work, however, I have been struck by the sheer adultness of what we cheerfully call ‘the dev team’. They have quietly acquired an independent existence. After work they gather in their own preferred members’ club. Past the listed frontage its interiors are retro plastic and bespoke plywood. There is a noisy dining room on the third floor. In each cubbyhole there is a jet-lagged sprawl of men and tablets, laptops, clever phones and empty cocktail glasses. This is where the true if unacknowledged movers of our industry come to relax.
Ralf has brought me here tonight to talk through some work. He has not told me what. ‘What will you drink?’ he asks me and before I can answer he has snapped his fingers at a passing waiter. I have never seen anyone do that – let alone get away with it – outside of an old movie. I sense some shift, some change in him. I was expecting to meet the rest of the dev team here tonight, but Ralf and I are on our own.
‘I want to ask you something.’ Ralf’s show of self-possession would be unremarkable in any other man. Coming from Ralf it’s frightening.
‘Go ahead.’
‘How wedded are you to your work?’
What kind of question is that?
‘I don’t mean the company,’ says Ralf. ‘I mean the work.’
I shrug. ‘The work’s the work.’ This will hardly do. I try again. ‘The work’s the important part. The company—’ I’m not sure where I’m going with this. ‘The company can get in the way of the work. If you know what I mean? It’s a frustrating time. What about—’
‘Drink up.’
‘We’ve only just got here.’
‘Put your spectacles on,’ Ralf says. ‘I want to show you something.’
Ralf must be on better relations with the club than I realised, because he has mounted this surprise of his in their basement – a cramped, windowless null-space that must once have been furnished, going by the patches of glue still adhering to the poured concrete floor.
The room is quite empty. I stand, waiting for the system to kick in and for something to appear in this neutral and depressing grey interior. After a while I reach up to reboot my spectacles.
‘There’s no need. Leave it. It’s working.’
‘It is?’
‘It’s working.’ Ralf’s eyes glitter in the half-light. It occurs to me that he’s not wearing spectacles. Whatever it is he wants me to see, he will not see it. He says, ‘Why don’t you explore?’
I walk round the room, trying to prepare myself for God knows what surprise.
‘Stop. Now. Take half a step to your left. Yes. Now, turn a little to your right. There. Now. Gently. Sit down.’
‘Sit down?’
‘Yes.’
I make to sit on the floor and the back of my knee catches the edge of something. I jolt, turn, and straighten in a single movement, staring at empty space. I reach out and touch—
‘There you go.’
I explore it with my hands. It’s a chair. I step back and take off my spectacles. A regular chair. Chrome, wood, a padded vinyl seat. ‘Oh. That’s neat.’ I look around the room. ‘You hid the cameras, too.’ There they are; I can see them now. There is one in each corner of the room.
‘Of course. If you’d seen the cameras, you’d have guessed the trick straight away.’
I put my spectacles back on. ‘What happens if I move the chair?’
‘Let me show you.’ Ralf picks up the chair and carries it across the room. The lines of the chair stutter in the air, wheel, turn to grey-blue wireframe, and disappear again in an instant. He sets the chair down and steps away. The chair folds itself out of the air, folds itself back in again and disappears.
‘It’s brilliant.’
It is. The effect is seamless. I step towards the place where I know the chair to be. It takes me a moment to spot the four spots, grey on grey, where the chair’s feet connect with the floor – a junction no camera trickery can mask. ‘What’s all this for?’
Ralf barks one of his trademark humourless laughs.
‘You tell me. Seriously. Tell me. I need to know.’
As if I’m not pulling fourteen-hour days as it is. ‘Well, Ralf, I think it’s a great demo, but—’
‘I’m leaving the company.’
‘You are?’ Does the dev team know? Does the company know? What will they do without him? ‘What will you do?’
He casts his hand about the empty – the seemingly empty – space. ‘This. Ideas like this. Ideas without an immediate return. I want to play with this stuff, and I want you to monetise what I come up with. If you can. If you can’t, then probably they weren’t good ideas in the first place. That’s the thing, you see. I have lots of ideas. I just don’t know how to rate them.’
I don’t understand this. ‘And for this you need to quit your job?’
‘I’m setting up on my own.’
‘Oh.’
‘Will you join me?’
‘Oh.’ Christ. ‘How?’ This whole conversation is becoming more and more strange. ‘Who’s going to pay for all this?’
‘I will.’ He sees my confusion. He smiles. ‘Whose club do you think this is?’
This certainly goes some way towards explaining how Ralf – Ralf, of all people – gets away with clicking his fingers at the staff.
Strictly speaking, Ralf does not own the club. His sister manages it. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t own the building. The family do – at least, they run a property company that operates, not just these premises, but the entire block and several beyond it.