The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  Clare, still naked from the waist down, paces back and forth, smoking her umpteenth cigarette as she offers these explanations for her peculiar life. Lying on her sofa with my eyes closed, fighting to breathe, I wonder, does she really expect me to believe her.

  Aphrodite foods and supplies

  APHRODITE FOODS AND SUPPLIES, the sign glows faintly blue in the dingy north London half light, is an emporium owned by Jarly’s landlord Dimitri. It juts from the ground floor of the tall Victorian building in whose bleak attic Jarly leaves his body while he is off wandering the cyberverse. From its open doors emanate, now and at most o’clocks, mournful eastern Mediterranean musics.

  I am here to dine chez Jarly, an invitation he issued on Shades in a fit of bonhomie after he’d killed someone we both disliked. I don’t think I was expected to turn up, because Jarly seems surprised to see me. There’s no food in the flat, hence the visit to Dimitri’s.

  ‘Go ahead,’ says Jarly with a wave, ‘choose anything you like.’

  Around the walls are arrays of tins that have the feel – a slight taint about the metal, oily discolorations of the label – of having sat in warehouses at Limassol for several years. They bear names in Greek script which decode to things like kalamares, hathapodi, houmous, dolamadakia, imam. Jarly walks down the aisle rapping the tins and jars with his knuckles, picking up packets, examining them briefly and putting them back.

  ‘Checking the calories?’ I ask, because it’s what I do.

  ‘Don’t be a middle-class git, Bear.’

  ‘So, Jarly. Who is your big mate?’

  We pull up before a counter presided over by a stocky balding man who, judging by the scowl that crosses his face when he catches sight of Jarly, must be Dimitri himself.

  ‘Dimitri, this is Bear.’

  His landlord is gruff but polite to me – well, I am twice Jarly’s age, grey-haired, dressed in the suit which I had been forced to wear to a business meeting earlier in the day.

  ‘I hope Jarly isn’t giving you trouble, Mr Dimitri.’

  ‘Jarly give me trabble, I give him dabble.’

  Seems Dimitri is pleased with this, or has said it before, because he repeats it.

  ‘Jarly, you give me bladdy trabble, I give you bladdy dabble.’

  On the wall behind the proprietor hangs a fading map of the eastern Mediterranean showing the extent of present day Greek influence, and Cyprus, an island the shape of a swordfish, across whose belly runs a red and bloody cut. Dimitri, catching my glance, asks, ‘You ever been to Cyprus, Mr Bear?’

  ‘Once, a few years ago.’

  ‘Yes? Enjoy yourself? Great place. Music, great. Food, great. Wine, great. You like fishing, fishing’s great. Not just Cyprus fish. Fish swim through the Suez Canal to visit Cyprus. Big ocean fishes. Sharks too. Think I’m joking?’ After a pause, ‘Hey, Mr Bear, you know why I call this place Aphrodite’s? Because Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was born in Cyprus. You know this? Just near Paphos, where I am building my house. Homer says so. You know Homer, Mr Bear?’

  ‘Only that the dawn has rosy fingers and ancient Greek wine must have been blue.’

  Dimitri looks puzzled. ‘You know how come Homer knew Cyprus? Because Cyprus was a Greek island.’

  ‘Fucking figs,’ says Jarly, slapping his head, and vanishes down an aisle.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Mr Bear,’ says Dimitri, ‘I don’t say we Greeks are the only Cypriots. Always we have welcomed guests. King Richard the Once, he got married in Limassol. Saint Andrew came to Cyprus. When I was a boy, before the Turks invaded, my father would take us to the monastery of Saint Andrew and we would fill bottles with the holy water . . .’

  The Monastery of Apostolos Andreas

  It’s an odd thing, and it won’t do to tell Dimitri, but I already know this story and the place he’s describing. Two years ago, Eve and I went to northern Cyprus, the part occupied by Turkey, to see our old friends Todd and Lori, who were teaching at the University of the Eastern Mediterranean in Famagusta – Gazi Magosa as the Turks call it. One day they took us on a long drive to their favourite beach. We went out along the Karpas peninsula to the very tip of the swordfish-beak, past hamlets where chickens scratched in the dirt, the remains of Greek communities enclaved by the invading Turks. The only traffic for miles was tractors. Todd told us that there were only about a hundred Greeks left in the Karpas. Dipkarpas, the largest village, was one street with a hardware shop and two cafés at which a few elderly men sat over their coffees. On one side of the street was the Greek café, on the other, the Turkish. Turkish Cypriots were forbidden to settle in Dipkarpas, said Todd, but the Turkish government had encouraged people from the mainland to go there, promising them a house, some land and a tractor. A lot of these people were hicks from the interior, who had never known electricity. In Dipkarpas they fitted right into the earthy lifestyle, but in cosmopolitan Magosa, where mainlanders were housed in modern apartments abandoned by fleeing Greeks, they put chickens in the washing machines and strewed straw on the marble floors to warm them. These stories were told to him, Todd said, not by Greeks, but by scoffing Turkish Cypriots.

  It was a long, dusty drive through the Karpas. By late afternoon the last of the land was overwhelmed by the ocean and we came to the monastery and the holy spring. We heard its story from a very old lady dressed in black, whom we found filling candlesticks in the church. She gave us candles to light and showed us where to fill our bottles. But what I chiefly remember is neither history nor holy water, but the simple pleasure of saying ‘kalimera’ to someone who rarely heard her own language on an outsider’s lips.

  ‘Pay for the fuckin’ figs, Bear, and while you’re about it, why don’t you get some of that red wine? But fuck’s sake hurry up.’

  ‘Hahaha,’ says Dimitri, ‘Jarly is saving all his money to pay last month’s rent. You know why he got no money Mr Bear? Because he tap tap tap on that computer all day.’

  ‘What’s the big rush, Jarly?’ I say when we’re back outside. ‘Anyway, I thought you were entertaining me to dinner. Is this it? Figs and bladdy Mavrodaphne?’

  ‘An’ if tha believes that tha’ll believe anything,’ says Jarly. He lifts his sweater to reveal, beneath his wasted ribcage, a sucked-in hollow where his stomach ought to be, and slides from his waistband a large rounded object still coated in frost.

  ‘I’ve hacked us a chicken.’

  Aftermath

  Bear, I don’t want any secrets between us. Secrets are barriers. I went home from college wearing my disgrace like a suit of armour, but when Angela opened the door, all I saw was a grey woman whose life hadn’t gone as she’d planned. I felt quite sorry for her. This lasted three days. On the third day we were talking about my course: poetry and drama. Angela recited a poem she’d always liked. It was about a cat, an awful poem, sugary and sentimental. This desire to hurt her just rose up in me. I said, ‘That’s not real poetry, this is poetry.’ I picked up a magazine I’d brought back and began reading out a poem I liked. Angela got up, grabbed the book from my hands, ripped the page out and tore it into tiny pieces. Her face was twisted and hateful. I backed away. She followed me. She stalked round the room after me saying, ‘Clare is clever. Clare is wise. Clare is always right.’ With each step she threw bits of poem at me like confetti and when it was all gone she left the room. No-one else said anything. I picked up the pieces. I was crying. I sat at the kitchen table and tried to sellotape the bits together. I couldn’t do it, my hands were shaking so much. Then I got my stuff and walked out of my father’s house. I’ve never seen her since.

  Exit Clare with bare behind. Watching the twin globes of her backside waltzing a retreat, I’m thinking that somehow I must drag myself off her sofa and into my car. I must get home. But in a few moments she returns and with a sad smile hands me an envelope full of torn scraps. ‘One odd thing,’ she says. ‘Later, I arranged the pieces, like a jigsaw, but mistakenly assembled them the wrong way up. There was a beautiful poem – which I’d
never noticed before – on the reverse.’

  Hoyo de Monterrey

  Lilith says ‘That’s Calypso.’

  The ‘meet’ at the Goat and Compass is mainly of Shades players with a sprinkling of those who belong to the secret society of the Vortex – maybe sixty people crowded into a smoky pub off the Gray’s Inn Road. Lilith is in her fifties, tall, with fading fair hair pulled back into a bun and kind eyes that turn down softly at the outer edges. She wears gold-rimmed half-moons perched on the end of her nose and her expression, as she gazes over them and across the room, is a mixture of compassion and amusement, with something perhaps hard at its centre. She might easily be taken for a headmistress, a magistrate, or a judge at a village dog show, were it not for the fact that she is wearing leather trousers and smoking a monstrous stogie.

  ‘Hoyo de Monterrey gauge 47,’ she says, noticing my interest. ‘Ask Zerubabel, he taught me to smoke.’

  She takes a long drag, aims the glowing tip of her cigar at a woman on the far side of the room and after a long pause says in a series of smoky hiccoughs, ‘That’s Calypso. The only woman in history to go on holiday with her husband and three lovers.’

  The woman, as if overhearing this remark, although she can’t have, turns towards us. She’s extremely pretty, hair falling like dark silk to her shoulders. There’s a small crowd around her, some of whom I know from the early Telecom Gold days. No other women. As she glances in our direction, I catch – or perhaps I imagine it – a green flash of eyes.

  ‘Five of them,’ says Lilith, ‘in three gypsy caravans. Horse-drawn painted wooden wagons. Cally and hubby up front, Cabbalist and Chorley next, Morgan on his own bringing up the rear. The amazing thing is, none of the men knows about the others.’

  Windowsills

  Somewhere along here, among these neat houses, tidy gardens and cherry-blossom-showered pavements of a zero-dogshit zone, Clare lives. For more than half an hour I have been lost in a labyrinth of identical streets named, typically for an estate built on green fields, after the trees and flowers they have replaced. Holly Avenue, Elm Drive, Bluebell Close, Cedar Road, Beech Road, Hawthorn Road, Meadowsweet Rise. It’s a neighbourhood full of people who mow the lawn on Sundays, catch the 8.01 to Waterloo every weekday, on Saturdays drive to supermarkets stacked with food and know beyond doubt that they are leading normal lives . . . Except that this place can’t possibly be normal because Clare lives here. Clare is the least conventional person I know. Do the neighbours know about her? Do their curtains twitch to whispers of her reputation? Do they have any idea that she is immortal? Which of these prodigiously timbered replicas of Ann Hathaway’s cottage shows signs of being inhabited by a witch? (Oh why the hell did I forget to bring her address?) The houses appear all exactly alike until you look closely, when you see how each, in small ways, proclaims its individuality. Here a pottery plaque warns cave canem. There a hedge has been clipped into the shape of a lopsided bird, or tipsy dinosaur. In a window across the road, there’s a model . . . Wait a minute . . .

  On the windowsill stands a gaily painted model of a traditional gypsy caravan...

  . . .This is it. The real life home of Calypso the Shades witch. Lugging my old Apricot out of the car, I am caught in a storm of petals, tumbling in the breathless air like powdery precursors of snow.

  Calypso gains immortality

  He met Calypso (this is my retelling of Lilith’s retelling of Cabbalist’s story) soon after she started playing Shades. She was a natural charmer who had a trick of hanging on his every word and gazing at him with huge green eyes (remember, Bear, this was in cyberspace). Steve – his real name – had been around roleplaying games on the net for years, and suspected that Calypso in real life would turn out to be dumpy, fifty and probably male. But he was wrong. When Clare – her real name – turned up to a meet he saw that she really was pretty, with dark hair, eyes as vast and green as any lovelorn single man could desire – and she knew how to use them too. Unfortunately she’d brought her husband along, but he was a quiet fellow who didn’t seem to mind the attention his wife got from other blokes.

  It is always important to draw the distinction between player and character (said Lilith, lecturing). On Shades, Steve might be Cabbalist the Wizard, complete with immortal swagger, but in that strange and fearful dimension that Shades players call real life, he was just Steve, a banker and, many thought, a bit of a something-that-rhymes-with-it. He had reached his mid twenties with no social life apart from that lived through the computer screen and his sexual experience involving other people was limited to one-handed typing. (This is Lilith’s wickedness, I disclaim responsibility.) He knew how to flirt with cyber females (cool guys do this in terse unpunctd lwr cs remrks) but hadn’t met many real women. So when Clare turned the green lamps of her eyes upon him, Steve was overwhelmed. She not only seemed to like him, but unlike the few girls he had tried chatting up at work, didn’t appear to find his manner weird and his talk boring. She listened with interest to his tales of computer errantry, battles with wraiths and morlochs, magical skirmishes with necromancers in the dead of night and strategies for waging war against fellow players. She asked many questions and behaved as if she were in the presence of a master.

  Steve, or more accurately his wizard, Cabbalist, began helping Calypso with advice, guiding her round the game, and making her gifts of fabulous jewel-crusted daggers, black pearls, strangely glowing crystals and all the other treasures that lay hidden in the land. When she confided to him that she was too bad at fighting ever to reach witch, he suggested that she tell him Calypso’s ID and password. Using his own account, he would log on as her and play her character. In this way Calypso quickly gained points and powers and within three months stood on the threshold of immortality. It is tedious and laborious work, amassing points in Shades. The same routines must be repeated over and over. On an empty game, with no-one else competing for treasure, an expert can make about 7,500 points an hour, but people were almost never alone. Steve found it hard to score half of that, meanwhile fending off attacks from other players and the ghoulish automatons that roamed the game with murder in their hearts. He was not a first rank duellist – fighting in Shades is an art in itself – and points were inevitably dropped fleeing to preserve life.

  Steve could only play Calypso when Clare wasn’t using the character. Nothing would irritate him more, after he’d spent three or four hours adding 20K to Calypso’s score, than logging in next day to discover that she’d got into a fight and lost it all again. As weeks passed, the assailants grew fewer (except for Jarly, whose killers always attacked on sight) and losses were more than offset by Calypso’s popularity, which drew a constant stream of baubles and gewgaws from mortals and invisible immortals. The gifts were often accompanied by kisses, hugs and whispered endearments, against all of which Steve had to steel himself, thanking the donors in monosyllables. Playing her character broke every rule of the game. If caught he’d be hauled before the game’s archwizards, have his wand snapped over his head and lose his immortal life.

  Steve soon had new worries. He was playing three or four hours a day (at a cost to himself of £3 an hour) and witchhood was still far off. To please Calypso, he started spending more time on the game. He was often late for work and his boss remarked on the dark rings under his eyes. But Calypso didn’t seem to appreciate either his help or the risks he was running. Steve didn’t like the way she would flirt with other male players. She was capricious. There were times when he’d come onto Shades and find her already there. He’d say hello and she would ignore him. Even when he loaded her with gifts that would once have made her gasp in wonder – the unicorn’s horn, princess’s crown, hermit’s hoard of jewels and gold – she’d mutter taciturn thanks and wrap the silence back around her like a cloak.

  Steve took Calypso’s score to 196,000 and suggested that she might enjoy completing the job herself. He took a day off work to be there when typographical peals of bells rang out over the game proclaiming �
��Calypso has reached immortality’. But this was one of those times when she was being taciturn and to his congratulations made no reply. It also peeved Steve that when Calypso became a witch she immediately changed her password.

  ‘The most telling thing about this story,’ Lilith said, ‘and my wrists ache, Bear dear, from the effort of typing it all to you, is that if, by hitting you very very hard over the head with a golf club or forcing a bottle of Ukrainian peppered horilka down your throat, I could make you see double, and if you were then to re-read what I’ve typed, inserting the name Morgan alongside that of Steve, then everything I’ve told you, bar some minor details, would still be true.’

  War in cyberspace (nothing to do with Geno of course)

  Old time cybergypsies rarely talk of ‘surfing the internet’. They tend to think of present-day netsurfers as tourists, flown in their millions to the gaudy electronic resorts of the world wide web by package tour operators like Compuserve and America Online. Cybergypsies detest the commercialisation of the internet and some still avoid it altogether. It’s important to understand that when cybergypsies speak of ‘the Net’, they’re not thinking of any one network, and certainly not just of the internet, which is a ragbag collection of networks and stand-alone systems, some parts connected by trans-continental and sub-oceanic cables, others by the digital equivalents of string and chewing gum. Contrary to common belief, the internet is only part of the global computer matrix and was until recently, for cybergypsies, probably the least interesting. Cybergypsies like free-flowing, live, subtle interaction and internet chat is banal and brutish, compared with the range of expression afforded by Shades, or a Fidonet bulletin board. Under the fingers of a maestro like Branwell, the keyboard can be as eloquent as a human voice, with nicely timed pauses, silences, disingenuous Freudian slips, and droll changes of mind. In the heyday of Shades, the cybergypsy universe consisted mainly of privately run bulletin board networks. Fidonet at its peak had 50,000 boards and perhaps 5,000,000 users around the world. Other nets were tiny: three, four or six boards dedicated to a purpose. There were many solo systems. Some networks were, and remain to this day, secret, their existence unguessed at, never publicised. Cybergypsies roam the internet end to end, but it is these obscure nets which were their homes and heartlands.