by Simon Ings
Poppy laid out matching cutlery. Glasses. Cups. Cake knives. There was barely any room for food. ‘I’ve made you a cream tea.’ There was a freezer-cabinet cream cake. Dry, feathery home-made scones with cream. A fruit salad with cream in a jug. Everything in tiny portions.
Poppy had laid out plastic laminated place-mats for us, and our plates moved about on them while we were eating. Watching me, Poppy’s anxiety reached fever pitch – she was afraid I might place too much weight on the table’s mechanism. ‘Please don’t lean on the table. Don’t put anything heavy on the table. It’s a let-down!’
I was more concerned with trying to keep my arse on the stool. I kept slipping off, trying to reach things as they spun away from me across the table’s ice-smooth surface. Afterwards I buzzed from all the sugar I had eaten, and the back of my mouth felt fluey, clotted with uncooked flour.
‘We should have eaten outside! In the garden! It’s such a nice evening. We could have eaten outside!’
She insisted on washing up. ‘I know where everything goes.’ Michel and I went into his bedroom and he dug out a cassette tape for us to listen to. We sat on his bed. It was incredibly narrow. ‘It’s a two-foot six.’ Poppy came in to put clothes away.
She gave Michel no privacy at all. How could there have been much privacy, in a space as cramped as this? Michel’s room was as long and narrow as the living space on board a yacht. There was a fluorescent tube in the ceiling, and its grey, pitiless light brought the walls in even further. It felt, sitting in that room, like being squashed into a Tupperware box.
I remember there was this weird, wood-effect plastic panel that went around the wall. ‘It’s to stop the bed from marking the wall,’ Michel explained.
‘What’s the problem with the bed marking the wall?’
‘Mum doesn’t want it to.’
‘The bed’s in the way. She’s never going to know whether it’s marking the wall or not.’
Michel’s bed ran lengthways along the left-hand wall. His desk, narrow as a shelf and veneered in wood-effect plastic, ran lengthways along the right-hand wall. There was a cupboard to the right of the door, which, instead of opening normally, slid along metal runners ‘to save space’. Michel’s bedroom door, the let-down table in the kitchen, the shelf-like desk and the sofa in the living room, its seat so narrow it might have been built for children, were all parts of Poppy’s on-going programme to single-handedly ‘save space’. (Poppy’s talk was modular, a collection of preprocessed jargon phrases strung together. After a few days of this, everything she said began to acquire a meaning beyond itself, like a word repeated so often it turns strange in the mouth.)
Poppy burst into Michel’s room whenever she felt like it. Or she tried to. If you leant against Michel’s wardrobe, it slipped on the thin nylon carpet (sick-green cobwebs on a ground of darker green) and blocked the door. The bang the door made when it hit the edge of the wardrobe was startlingly loud.
‘Oh! Mind the paintwork! Come and move the wardrobe!’
When the wardrobe was in the way the door could only open a couple of inches. Poppy did her best to peer through the gap. Her eye hung in the darkness of the hall, disembodied. An eye without a face. ‘Are you all right in there, you two?’
At night I slept in Michel’s room, on a camp bed that had once been his dad’s. It was made of canvas, stretched over a tubular steel frame. It was comfortable, but if I needed the toilet in the middle of the night, there was no room for me to just roll out of the bed. (I tried it once and cracked my head on the edge of the desk and ended up stuck under the desk, tangled up in the legs of Michel’s bright orange tubular steel chair.) Instead I had to shimmy down to the foot of the bed until it tipped up on end.
The sliding door rattled when I opened it.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘What’s going on out there?’
‘I’m going to the toilet, Poppy. I’m fine.’
The lavatory and the bathroom were separate rooms. The lavatory door had a lock and a key, and Poppy kept the key on the outside of the door. Not on the inside, so you could guarantee your privacy, but on the outside, so she could leave the lavatory window open when she went out and still secure the house. Anyway, this is what she said. It’s just as likely she locked Michel in the lavatory as a punishment, or used to, before I turned up. Certainly that’s what it looked like.
The toilet pan sat under a small, high window. Sitting on the pan, I was just a couple of inches short of being able to lean my head on the door.
‘Is everything all right?’
Back in the bedroom, Michel was awake, sitting up in bed, waiting for me. I leant against his wardrobe, slipping it into the path of the door.
We waited, listening for movement. He pulled the sheets away. It took my eyes, still dazzled from the lavatory light, some minutes to adapt. Michel was already hard. His hand was on his prick, moving a little, as he watched me standing there, framed against the white gloss of his little wardrobe, a child’s wardrobe – you could still make out the silhouette of the plastic bunnies that once decorated its doors. He watched me slip off my T, watched me slip off my pants. I was just as hard as he was. Starlight sheened his thighs, his arms, his prick. Light glistened round the dark bulb of his prick, I wanted to touch it. More. I dared, that night, what I had not dared before. Fingers to my mouth, the salt there, good. I bent my head and felt his hands in my hair, bringing me down, his prick, so beautiful, rigid in the little light – ribbed and veined and very salt.
A bang.
A disembodied eye.
‘Is everything all right?’
EIGHTEEN
Ralf, too, has taken to wearing AR-enabled contact lenses. There is something cold, something faintly repulsive about them. They are supposed to make Augmented Reality more appealing. And they do, in a twisted, self-fulfilling way, by making ordinary human communication just a touch less pleasant. It’s hard to read a person’s face when you can’t read the pupils of their eyes.
Eventually it occurs to him to ask, ‘So what are you doing, Conrad?’
I have signed an agreement locking me out of Augmented Reality for eighteen months following Loophole’s sale. Perhaps I will go back to it. Perhaps not. The whole business has begun to unnerve me. It’s not the same now that the old dev crowd has dispersed.
I took Ralf to task over Bryon Vaux’s party trick. It didn’t even occur to him to apologise. Vaux had given him the impression that the trick was by way of professional joshing. I couldn’t make Ralf understand that Cobb – whoever he was, private detective or actor or pure avatar – had frightened me.
Ralf said to me – he actually said this – ‘You have to bear in mind the difference the new superconductors have made to how we deploy inductive video.’
What he meant was: there is technology out there now that can hijack the optic nerve. No glasses necessary. No lenses. A strong enough magnetic field, well-shaped, bends a mind to the desired shape. The equipment they’d used to have Cobb ‘visit’ me that night – I never found it. Either the devices were too small to spot, or more likely their energies had been directed at me from a distance. A van parked in the street. The house opposite. If you can do that, you can warp any part of the real. Reality has been aerosolised, the senses weaponised against us. Every sensation is Muzak now.
‘Who was Cobb?’
‘Who was who?’ Ralf didn’t know or care what kind of stunt Vaux had pulled on me. And by then I was fed up. Ralf wasn’t curious, and I wasn’t in the mood to try to shake his complacency. Moral issues never trouble Ralf’s type much – for them, all questions have a technical solution.
Now Ralf is back in the lab where he feels most comfortable: a backroom boy. Beneath the puffery he has acquired – Bryon Vaux’s Chief Imagineer – he’s still his old self.
He showed me round. Right now he’s working on a full prosthesis platform: a thin exoskeleton that will do you the favour of punching you in
the stomach when a villainous avatar takes a swing at you. That will trip you over if you miss that virtual step. That will shake your hand. Kiss you. Slap your back for a level well completed. God knows what.
The metro takes me home. I’m back in the old locomotive factory again – third time lucky, I suppose. I walk past a line of parked cars, studiously ignoring the horn blasts – it’s best to keep yourself to yourself on these streets – but the voice is unmistakably Agnes’s. ‘Connie! Over here!’
Hanna climbs from the driver’s seat. She looks exhausted. She shuts her door and leans against it as I approach. Agnes is still strapped into her seat in the back. She waves out her window frantically – a little kidnap victim. ‘Conrad! We were waiting for you!’
‘How long have you been out here?’
‘Not long.’
‘We’ve been ages,’ Agnes cries. ‘Ages and ages!’
‘Hello, Han.’
‘Hello, Connie.’ She seizes my fingers and squeezes them, reminding me of the lack of human contact in my life.
‘Hanna. You should have phoned.’
‘I lost your number.’
‘Mick has my number. What?’
Hanna rubs at her temples. ‘Can we come in?’
I lead them up to my new apartment on the second storey. It’s not ideal here. It’s noisy, for a start, though warmer than the rooftop rooms I’ve had before. ‘There’s not a lot in here.’
‘We’ve eaten, thanks.’
‘I had a kebab! It was disgusting!’
Hanna wants to talk – which is a novelty in itself – but Agnes gets first dibs on my attention. She has lengthened out. She has acquired a whole new set of mannerisms to lay on top of the first set. She is going to be a monster when she’s older. Suddenly the mannerisms fall away and she might be years younger as she asks, ‘Can I play on your keyboard?’
‘Use the headphones.’
‘Okay! Where is it?’
‘The other room. There’s only one other room. If it’s not the toilet, then you’re in the right room.’
Agnes goes off giggling.
‘So?’
Hanna visibly summons up strength and says, ‘Michel and I are separating.’
There is nothing I can say to this. I start preparing coffee.
‘We’ve been in a bad place for a long while,’ she says.
Strange, the way geography creeps in to these announcements. ‘We were in a bad place.’ ‘I needed my space.’ Strange and tiresome. ‘What did he do?’
Hanna ignores my attempt to cut through to the blame. ‘Michel’s very upset about things.’
‘I tried telling you that last Christmas.’
Hanna looks at me as though I were speaking a foreign language.
‘Remember?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t. Anyway. I don’t know whether he told you, but his mum died last week.’
Just dropped in there – another unfortunate event.
‘Poppy died?’
‘He went to sort out the funeral.’
‘When is it?’
‘It was yesterday.’
‘Oh.’ The pot starts to hiss and bubble. I lift it off the plate. ‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘I’m sorry, Connie. It wasn’t up to me. I didn’t go either. I was looking after Agnes.’
‘Agnes didn’t go?’
Hanna shakes her head. ‘Mick didn’t think it was such a good idea.’
‘Right. How do you take this?’
‘Milk.’
I faff around for a while. ‘I would have liked to have been there.’
‘Yes?’
‘I would have gone.’ I never liked Poppy very much but there was something admirable about her. While Dad was tearing himself free and unable to cope with me, she had given me a home. I would have liked to pay my respects.
‘Anyway.’ Hanna takes a seat at the table. ‘He’s stayed on in Sand Lane to sort out her things.’
‘Right. Jesus, Hanna.’
‘I know. It all comes at once, doesn’t it?’
I go and glance round the door. Agnes is on the piano stool, earphones cupped round her head like muffs, bopping away to the piano’s demo track.
I close the kitchen door behind me and sit down facing Hanna.
‘It’s about Agnes,’ she says.
‘I thought it might be.’
‘We were trying for a second child.’
‘I see.’
‘Mick’s found out that he’s not – he can’t have kids. He never could have kids.’
‘She’s mine.’
Hanna stares at me.
‘Yes? Agnes is mine.’
‘You knew?’
‘Of course I knew. Look at her.’
‘Jesus Christ, Conrad, and you never said?’
It’s my turn to stare.
‘You never said a word!’
‘Hanna, I tried. Plus, it’s blindingly obvious.’
‘I don’t believe this.’
‘Hanna, I’m not the one keeping secrets.’
‘I don’t bloody believe you.’
This is probably not the moment to remind Hanna of all the occasions she has slipped from the room, or hung off Michel’s arm, or brought Agnes along ‘for the ride’, or closed the door on me – ‘Goodnight, Conrad.’ Over the years she has deployed the entire arsenal of avoidance against me.
‘You didn’t exactly make it easy for me to say anything.’
‘Anyway.’ She drinks her coffee. ‘Obviously we’re going to need to be together in some fashion. For Agnes. Mick’s a great dad. It’s the last thing I want, to keep him from his child.’
‘I still don’t see why you’re both making such a production out of it.’
She stares at me like I’ve crawled from under a rock. ‘Can you not see . . .?’
‘I can see you playing up to every soap cliché, is what I can see. Agnes is nearly in big school, for crying out loud. Her genes are playing out in the world. They’re her genes now. Not yours, not mine. You’re not telling me Mick can’t see this? I know he has a temper but for Christ’s sake.’
‘It’s not the only problem between us. It’s all come together, is the thing. This. Poppy. When did you last see Mick?’
‘It’s a while.’ Was it as long ago as my interview with Bryon Vaux? ‘A year, easily. He’s always in the summerhouse when I pick Agnes up—’
Catching Hanna’s eye, I realise now that this has been a lie. An excuse. He has not wanted to see me. The business of Agnes’s parentage has been eating away at them a long time.
‘Mick’s been going absent a lot lately.’
‘Is there anyone?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Hanna sounds almost disappointed. ‘I don’t think it’s that. Anyway, I thought you might know where he went.’
‘You don’t?’
‘He says it’s a secret. Something he’s working on. A surprise for us. To be honest, Conrad, I’m not sure he’s well.’
There’s a more practical reason why Hanna has come into town – an appointment at the eye hospital. It’s nothing serious; only that, after years of fighting with uncomfortable contact lenses and a constantly changing prescription, Hanna has decided to have her corneas shaved to a better shape. Since she’s going in for the op, she figures she will have AR layers annealed in at the same time. It’s expensive, but the resolution is very good, far better than anything the unadorned eye can achieve.
‘How do you turn it off?’
‘Oh, Conrad.’
‘How do you turn it off?’
‘They teach you all sorts of ways of controlling the layers. Blinks and glances. You know.’
‘Okay,’ I say, in my most not-okay voice.
‘Honestly Conrad,’ Hanna laughs, ‘I thought this was your kind of thing.’
It was. It really was. First vests, then wraprounds, then lenses, and now this. But there is a difference between a product, something you have to go out and find, and a util
ity, something sewn in, something so integral to you that you barely notice it unless it goes wrong. AR can only ever work as a utility. Hanna knew this years ago. She teased me about it, practically the day I met her. And she told me that in the end, it was not good, if AR became what it always had to become – a kind of Muzak, smoothing and glamorising the real.
Even as I have come around to her way of thinking, however, she has come around to mine. ‘I just don’t see the harm in it,’ she says.
Agnes is tucked up in my bedroom. Hanna has slipped in beside her. The kitchen-diner’s large; there is a pull-out couch.
Click-clack.
I’m sitting up before I’m even awake.
Click-clack.
I know this sound. I swing myself off the couch, tensed against the slightest sound, a thump, a creak, as I lever my weight from the frame. Silence.
Click-clack.
It’s coming from the bedroom. A shutter sound. Christ. I take a knife from the magnetic strip on the wall and edge towards the door. I open it, lean round. The bedroom door is open. There is a figure at the window, a box raised to her face.
Click-clack.
‘Agnes.’
She turns. She motions, ‘Shh.’
I slip past the bed – Hanna is still sleeping – and up to the window. When they refurbished the building they put in soundproof glass. A fancy kind, and very effective. Below us, a car burns in silence. Kids are dancing round it to a music we cannot hear.
Click-clack.
This is her father’s camera, the bulky one he got the Christmas I stayed with them.
‘Go back to bed.’
‘I want to watch.’
‘Go on.’
‘Is that our car?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It could be.’
‘You’re parked on the other side of the building.’
‘Agnes?’ Hanna’s awake.
Agnes puts down the camera and climbs into bed, snuggling down with her mother.
‘Why are the curtains open?’
I draw them. ‘Goodnight.’
I sit a while with my phone, watching mash-ups, mapping feeds, behaving, in other words, much like every other concerned householder tonight. (The lights are on all over the estate.) The gossip feeds are buzzing, but it looks as though tonight’s action is headed west, away from us. Nothing happens. Nothing much. I see some young men wielding bats, crossing the square below my kitchen window. Vigilantes. Good. We look after our own in here, most of the time.