The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  Can it just be coincidence that, one day after Slasha’s chat with Jesus Slutfucker, Josh calls me to ask about Satanbug? Slasha gave Geno a copy of Satanbug. Could it have been marked? All it would take is a tiny change to the code – like a radioactive trace put into the bloodstream – so that its route back into the UK could be traced? But why suspect me? Josh doesn’t know I know Geno. Surely he doesn’t imagine I’m the channel by which American viruses are entering Britain? Tired worries scrape the inside of my skull like metal buttons clattering round in a laundromat. Pointless. Geno is about to send me Slasha’s picture. I’ll soon know if it was Carmine. I sit and watch the Satanbug virus drip into my system.

  The bug arrives zipped, compressed, ergo safe. Amazing how many ‘experts’ don’t realise that viruses can’t infect you unless you actually run them. The tiny .com files in the zip envelope are the monsters: sat-bug.com is the virus itself, test1.com is an infected file. Geno’s typing back to me:

  >there are two satanbug viruses, i think... i am really not sure who wrote the first one, i think it was viper or priest but various people have claimed responsibility, strange you should mention it, i got the second version from the brit girl who likes to have her ass beat and then again today from brother jack. both seem to be the same and undetectable... okay here comes slasha.

  ‘Bear, what are you doing?’

  My heart leaps like Basho’s frog. My wife is standing in the doorway in her nightie, shading her eyes against the light.

  ‘Eve!’ I say lamely, ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘I can’t sleep. What are you doing?’

  ‘Just finishing some writing. I’ll be up in a minute.’

  ‘It’s three-thirty, you’ve got work in the morning.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  She’s frowning. I can’t tell if she’s upset.

  ‘You’re not writing. What are you really doing?’

  Luckily she doesn’t come any nearer. The picture of Slasha has just arrived, Geno is back online, busy hammering his keyboard, the letters come skittering across the screen:

  >...maybe all brit women like to be beat i dunno :) american women seem not to like it so much, one redneck up here just got his dick cut off (real big in the news) for beating and raping his wife...

  Eve is shivering. I get up, go over and put my arms around her. She doesn’t respond. From the corner of my eye I watch Mr. Slutfucker’s outpourings scattergun across my screen.

  ‘I’ll be up in a second,’ I tell her. ‘Promise.’

  Eve says quietly, ‘You do this every night.’ She removes herself from my arms and is gone.

  I wait till I’m sure she’s back in bed, then examine the gif. A blowsy, puffy faced woman stares out of the screen at me. Nothing like Josh’s ex-girlfriend. Coincidence, after all.

  Castle Perilous

  From the rest of the world it’s invisible. Driving by in the lane, we don’t know it’s there. All we see are trees – oak, ash, hawthorn, hazel, hornbeam, cherry – raising leafy battlements and towers. But there’s a gate. Ducking, we enter a cave of leaves, at the far end of which is a smudge of light. Roots writhe at our feet. Eve peers into the green chaos, pulls back a branch to reveal the perfect rose-shape of a camellia.

  ‘We’d be crazy to take this on,’ she says. ‘We’ll never cope.’

  We’re within feet of the house before we see it, its walls hung with clay-tiles in the style of the Sussex Weald, bricks greened by the gloom of the trees. Paint is flaking from its window frames, squares of cardboard stand in for missing panes of glass. The front door is sentried by brambles that drop soft, spiky spears to bar our way. Everywhere, things drip on us and the light is green. I fall in love with it immediately.

  We find the owner Grolius – an old man with a shock of white hair that explodes in all directions from under a sailor’s cap, beard to match – sitting on a log by the back door.

  ‘That’s right, front door doesn’t open,’ he says, when we explain our abrupt appearance. ‘Off its hinges. Frame’s all rotten, wants replacing. I’ve had to nail it shut.’

  He seems dejected to learn why we’ve come. The house is on the market, he tells us, because his wife wants to move.

  ‘She’s fed up, wants to see the back of it. Told me I had to bloody well get the place smartened up. Well, it does need a lick of paint here and there. Bit of weeding maybe. Though I don’t like killing things.’

  Such is apparent. He walks us round a garden in revolution, an uprising of flowering, seeding weeds. Everywhere, things are tied up, tied back or tied together – nothing is pruned. No blade has ever been taken to these plants, no stem severed, no sap shed, no root from its mother’s womb untimely ripp’d.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Eve says, and I can tell she’s not keen.

  ‘Bless you. There’s not many would agree,’ says Grolius, tying one more knot into a cats-cradle of twine that is trying unsuccessfully to confine a climbing rose.

  ‘Had a couple here two days ago, walked round with their noses in the air. Caught ’em giving dirty looks to the daisies in the grass. Can’t rightly call it a lawn I daresay. To me grass without daisies is like a night without stars. They went off saying “Sorry, don’t think it’s really quite us”.’

  ‘Don’t worry Mr Grolius, we’re not put off,’ I tell him, not looking at Eve. ‘It’s charming, your garden.’

  ‘It’s a real bit of old Sussex,’ says Grolius proudly. ‘Land’s never had nothing done to it. Not the garden, not the paddocks. No chemicals, no fertilizers. The plants here’s been growing in these parts since time out of mind. Got some rare ones. That one, there. Rare one, that is.’

  Eve whispers to me, ‘It’s a grape hyacinth.’

  She can name them all, lungwort, toadflax, lilac, syringa, peony, thrusting from the wreck of what had once been a horticulturalist’s garden. A garden fork stands rusting in a bed of roses, bindweed twining up its shaft: Eve mutters that it would make a perfect cover for a book called ‘The Idle Gardener’.

  The orchard is as overgrown as the rest of the place: about twenty apple and pear trees with brambles rearing in their branches and, lost in blackberry jungle, six rotting hen houses.

  ‘I’m leaving the hens,’ says Grolius. ‘There’s only five left. Don’t want no extra for them. But I want you to know they was family pets.’

  Eve gives a little laugh.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she tells him, ‘we wouldn’t eat them.’

  ‘One other thing,’ he says, waving at an elder tree which is growing through the broken frames of a once elegant greenhouse, offering its bitter plates of white flowers to us as we pass, ‘you’ll think me odd for saying so, but the elder, if you want her out, even if you want to break a branch of her, you must ask her pardon first.’

  ‘Be honest with you,’ says the old man, leading the way back to the house, ‘she has got it all worked out, my wife, when people come to view the place. Tricks learned off the estate agent. Get the coffee brewing. Real beans, got to grind ’em first, instant won’t do. Stick Mozart on the gramophone. Flowers all over the house. But I never did any of that because I didn’t want anyone to buy it.’

  Eve glances at me in dismay. Grolius, wading chest-deep in cow parsley, stops to push at a leaning laburnum.

  ‘I did my best to put ’em off,’ he tells us. ‘It’s why I don’t mend things. Break my heart to leave this place, Mrs . . . ?’

  ‘. . . Bear,’ says Eve, horrified yet relieved by these disclosures. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Grolius, we won’t buy it. Will we, Bear?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Oh no, certainly not.’

  But this makes Grolius even more mournful. ‘Oh dear. Oh dear, I thought you liked it. Don’t you like it, Mrs Bear?’

  ‘Well, yes, it’s lovely,’ says trapped Eve.

  ‘Then you will have it’ says Grolius. ‘No, I insist. It’s no good me trying to hold onto it. See, the thing is, Mr and Mrs Bear, to be frank, I can’t hold on
. Me and my wife, we’re separating. She’s found a place she wants and she needs the money quick.’

  His eyes moisten. He tells how he and his wife no longer speak. They live in the house like two strangers, cook for themselves, do their own washing, avert their eyes and no longer bother to mumble greetings when they pass. They communicate by note. I catch Eve’s glance and guess what she’s thinking, which is what I’m thinking, that this will not ever happen to us.

  As we leave, all we can see of Grolius in the undergrowth is the sailor’s cap, hair going off like fireworks, and a waving arm. Later, we realise we hadn’t really noticed the house, except that it was dark and smelt of damp and apples – the typical smell of an unheated English country cottage.

  ‘We can’t live there,’ Eve says firmly. ‘It’s falling to bits. The walls are damp, there’s a horrible black mould up near the ceilings. There’s no proper heating. The children will get ill. The garden’s a wilderness. There’s too much to be done, and you’re away in London all the time. We’d never cope.’

  The day before we move in Grolius telephones full of apologies that another apple tree has blown down. And we needn’t worry about the hens because, well, the old fox, he’s scoffed the lot.

  Our packing cases, thirty tea-chests of books, leave no room in the house. We take the two small children and huge dog and go outside to explore.

  Grolius’s log is still outside the back door, a limp wet object flattened upon it.

  ‘Look, Bear,’ Eve says, ‘he’s left you his cap.’

  Without the exotic presence of Grolius, the place reverts to what it really is, a damp house in a soggy wilderness. I’m also aware that Eve only agreed to move because I promised her I’d work hard to restore the house and help her coax a garden from the wild. She doesn’t say so, but I know she’s regretting the comfortable little house we left behind, friends miles away. For a whole month after our move it rains continuously, but we nonetheless set to, pruning and digging. Under the ashes of a bonfire, I find an old midden and fork out things that must have been thrown away when the house was young, a belt buckle formed of rust, a china doll’s hand and angular bottles of dark blue glass embossed with the name of a long ago paregoric.

  Beyond the orchard a green lane runs to a meadow where the grasses are up to Eve’s shoulders. We tread paths through and trample a dell in the centre. We lie hidden, in a circle walled with grass, and make love with only the passing clouds as witnesses. Afterwards, with her head cradled on my shoulder, Eve sleepily murmurs, ‘Bear, what did Grolius mean about the elder?’

  The day after we move in our four-year-old daughter jumps around the floor of the drawing room.

  ‘Ooh look, like a bouncy castle.’

  Something our surveyor has missed: in one corner the floorboards spring a good four inches. Lifting them reveals the joists to be black and spongy. An odour like mushrooms. Wet rot. The whole lot will have to come out.

  I earmark the small room next door as a study and move my boxes in. Books, stationery, computer, and a small box containing the modem.

  Jamrach & Sons

  Geno’s board, with its zoo of artificial life and arsenal of cyber-weaponry, makes me think of Jamrach’s, an emporium which flourished in the London of a century ago. It stood in notorious Ratcliffe Highway, ‘a skirmish of crimps and foreign sailors with long knives’, Jack the Ripper’s part of town: a place of twopenny whores, lascar curry houses and opium dens; Doctor Watson visited it in The Sign of Four (‘So help me gracious, I have a wiper in this bag, and I’ll drop it on your ’ead if you don’t ’ook it!’). Jamrach’s offered for sale a menagerie of lions, tigers and bears, panthers and elephants, alligators, monkeys, parrots and (w=v)ipers, accompanied by ‘the largest and most varied collection of arms, curiosities and savage and civilised art brought together for trade purposes in the world’. Stacked in corners were fantastic gods and goddesses, strange arms and armour, wonderful carvings in ivory, priceless gems of old Japanese pottery, a life-size golden Buddha, shrunken heads, a clay mask with violently protruding tongue, gorgeous seashells, pasha’s tails, crania bearing signs and tokens of violent death, among them the skull of an undoubted cannibal.

  Just such a jumble are the bulletin boards of the cybergypsies, a glorious chaos of objects, trophies, curios and booty brought back by travellers from remote regions of the metaverse. Shrunken heads, cannibalism, strange gods, sacred masks, wild animals – yes, you’ll find all these in cyberspace, as well as other things you wouldn’t necessarily expect: Neanderthal remains, curare, cobra and rattler venoms, blueprints for atomic bombs, immortality potions, iron neck-collars, slave helmets, leather underwear, and latter day Burkes and Hares purveying real human skulls, whole skeletons, arms, legs, etc. (‘Everything clean & in good condition, with no holes’.)

  Lorelei

  Listen, Eve. There’s a cave in the hillside, hollowed out by the lick of a watery tongue on limestone. It runs back twenty feet, then narrows to a crack from which, according to tradition, lost underground passages depart for the world of faery. Nothing otherwordly about the place now. The dirt floor is littered with the usual tourist wrack, crumpled cola cans, cigarettes dissolving into splats of horse-manure, pre-owned condoms and an embrasure of sooty stones where visitors – boyscouts, new age travellers, gypsies, tramps, take your pick – have lit many fires. In one corner a child has dropped a pink plastic bracelet. On the walls – no Pêche Merle this – generations of graffitists have left messages of the utmost puerility.

  Whoever wrote this, he was a sexist

  Joey is a wanker

  Effie loves her own finger

  Some older scratches further back in the cave: a date, 1781, and initials which look like S.T.C.

  All of this Laura Hunter, Lorelei to her friends, regards with weary disgust. Emerges, stands blinking in the sunlight looking across to where the land slopes to a flatscape of fen and dyke. There is her goal, an ivy-strangled castle which totters rather than rises from a moat over which mists hover like strips of ether-soaked gauze. It’s everything she detests.

  Lorelei levers her heels with fastidious revulsion from the Oxfordshire loam. Living in London, she has not seen fields for years and is surprised that there are so many left. She’s here to scout locations for a fashion shoot. The art director wanted a castle, so Lorelei, mainly to get out of the office, has volunteered to do the recce. She’s a junior copywriter in a London ad agency famous for the startling campaigns it created – surreal posters for Benson & Hedges cigarettes, funny TV commercials for Hamlet cigars and Heineken lager. The agency is in its third golden age, living on its own myths in a world where glasses of Cinzano will forever drench Joan Collins’s décolletage and gruff Yorkshire folk always use Hovis for their butties. Lorelei’s contribution to the Hovis ads is one line, spoken by a flour-dusted baker to a boy who has rowed three miles to buy a loaf: ‘Ee lad, yer not ’alf as green as yer cabbage looking’.

  In the real world there is fear of recession and the agency’s backers, locked in sullen conclave, are talking of ‘downsizing’, but advertising folk are used to living high on the hog and are in the habit of mistaking eccentricity for talent, so they turn a blind eye when Laura borrows her boss the head of copy’s hired Porsche and abandons it, driver’s door flung wide, at Heathrow airport because, as she later points out, she has no idea where the car park is, no time to find out and no intention of missing her flight to New York, after all she’s only going for the weekend. That, anyway, is how she tells it. New York is a typical Lorelei bolthole. She has friends in Greenwich Village who’d known Mapplethorpe and Warhol. ‘Linger on, your pale blue eyes,’ sings Lou Reed in her ear and suggests they go roust out Moe Tucker in Georgia. She dances with Mick Jagger (no, someone cooler, David Bowie) during a cyberslut night at Jackie 60 (thi is a slip-up, not everything she says can be taken at face value, but who among us is entirely what we seem?), until her skin glistens like armour, shouting to him on the crowded dance floor that
she is going to discover the secret of immortality.

  A cynic might say that Lorelei lives out a set of clichés. Hers is exactly the sort of life you’d imagine for a girl as smart, intelligent and attractive as she appears. She’s bright, a double first from Cambridge in Eng. Lit., and naturally she’s attractive – twenty-three, slim, a natural blonde – men’s jaws plummet past their balls at her very description. Lorelei likes medieval French poetry, the music of Thierry Robin, clothes, parties, dancing, fast cars and sex, provided the sex isn’t heavy and the lover not too serious and vice versa. If a thinking man had to design an ideal girl, it might well be Laura H.

  This then is the amazing bint who stands surveying the falling-down castle, comparing it to other castles she knows. She thinks of Carcassonne in the Languedoc, razed in the anti-Cathar crusade of Simon de Montfort in 1209, restored as nineteenth-century fantasy by Violet le Duc; Sleeping Beauty’s Castle in Orlando, created as a first generation fantasy by Walt Disney; Castle Drogo, a beetling granite crag on the edge of Dartmoor, William Randolph Hearst’s castle, a sort of portmanteau castle-of-castles assembled from bits of real buildings, glued together by pastiche, including details from the Doge’s palace in Venice. Castles have always been fantastic. Never were they designed purely to be functional, but always, even in the middle ages, to express dreams of power or unction. This is true, Lorelei reflects (Eve, if you’re wondering how I know what she’s thinking, just take my word for it), for every castle she can think of, imaginary or real, from Fata Morgana’s cloudy keep to the crenellations described by Tristram Shandy’s Quixote-inspired Uncle Toby with flourishes of his walking stick; Macbeth’s castle – ‘heaven’s breath smells wooingly here’; Monty Python’s castle of the Holy Grail, from whose ramparts enemies were pelted with tandoori’d chicken-legs; the grim battlements of Bunratty Castle in County Clare, provided with ‘murder holes’ for pouring boiling oil onto enemies; and Carcassonne itself, from whose eyries defenders could shit from a great height upon besiegers. (Laura-Lorelei’s imagination is caught by Carcassonne’s doom: brought about by a faith which taught that the world was made by an evil creator, that human spirits are fragments of deity imprisoned in flesh, and must escape the universe of mass, energy, space and time.)