The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  <*>nod

  You Nod

  Dreamdancer: Briefly, the NHS said there was no treatment available, but they put me in touch with a private consultant. He has an ‘experimental’ treatment which is supposed to be . . .

  <*>A bell sounds urgently in the distance . . .

  Dreamdancer: . . . very effective in certain cases. Trouble is it’s very expensive and it’s a 4 dose course.

  Bear: How much does it cost per dose?

  Dreamdancer: 900 pounds for the treatment but that includes the hospital bill each time.

  Bear: What does the treatment consist of?

  Dreamdancer: A series of injections . . .

  Dreamdancer: It’s an extract of some African plant.

  <*>A single note, deep and resonant, rings across the land.

  Dreamdancer: Between us Morg, my stepbrother and I raised enough for two treatments, so I was able to have the first one okay, but I had trouble with the second.

  Bear: Who’s the specialist you’re seeing?

  Dreamdancer: Morg was a bit stretched financially to really be able to afford to help, and I felt guilty . . .

  Dreamdancer: . . . about taking anything from him in the first place, so I tried not to have the second dose . . . asked for the money back.

  Bear: Did they give it back?

  Dreamdancer: The specialist’s name? . . . not sure of spelling . . . grin.

  <*>The sound of a drawbridge moving reaches your ears.

  Dreamdancer: Unfortunately I was very ill and had to go and have it done anyway.

  Bear: If you’re ill, the only thing that matters is for you to have the treatment. Money must come second.

  Dreamdancer: That’s what everyone tells me, but now Morg is in a bind, my brother is too, and so am I.

  Bear: When is the next dose due?

  Dreamdancer: I was supposed to pay the next instalment on Tuesday coming. I did my usual sensible thing and did a runner.

  Dreamdancer: Just up and hid for a few weeks.

  Bear: Surely the man can’t refuse to treat you if you need it?

  Dreamdancer: Well, someone has to pay the bills . . .

  <*>who

  Eyegor the stubborn Necromancer (49)

  Dreamdancer the Morgan’s Witch (1024) (Safe)

  Bear the lizard hurling Wizard (1024) (Safe)

  Lor the awesome Seer* (10)

  Beermat the Vlad’s Bimbo Novice (1091) (Safe)

  Dreamdancer: Whole situation wasn’t helped by the Gulf War and beds being short.

  Dreamdancer: Had first dose in a local private hospital.

  Bear: If your life is threatened, I think he’d have a moral duty to continue the treatment.

  Dreamdancer: And now I need to find more money, about 2000 . . . a lettter came in my absence . . .

  Dreamdancer: . . . saying that if I didn’t arrive for treatment before date ‘X’ I would be in breach of clause ‘Y’ and liable for the monies not yet paid.

  Dreamdancer: That was three days after I didn’t turn up for 2nd treatment.

  Bear: Well, I think this sounds rather severe.

  Dreamdancer: I’ve not been well enough to deal with it.

  Bear: You need some help.

  Dreamdancer gives you an exciting little hug.

  Dreamdancer: Any help would be welcome, but I don’t want to cause you any trouble.

  Bear: It wouldn’t be any trouble.

  <*>Dreamdancer grins infectiously.

  <*>Dreamdancer kisses you slowly and sexily!

  Bear: I know some people in the medical establishment who could investigate. Let me have a) doctors’ names b) gist of what they told you c) details of treatment, dates and cost. This can be sorted out.

  <*>Dreamdancer sighs . . .

  Dreamdancer: It’s not me I worry about, it’s Morgan.

  The simple truth

  According to legend, Jeffrey Archer and his family are watching television coverage of the disaster in the Zagros, when his son asks, ‘Dad, can’t we do something for the Kurds?’

  Archer picks up the phone to the Head of BBC TV, and says, ‘I am organising a concert to aid Kurdish refugees. Will you help?’

  ‘Of course. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Give me one of your television channels for a whole evening.’

  The biggest rock concert since Live Aid is on the road, proceeds to be disbursed by the Red Cross. People at the Kurdish Cultural Centre are delighted and ring to ask how they can help. The reply is that they can’t.

  ‘We were the first to start raising money,’ says Sarbast, who seems personally hurt by this rebuff. ‘The Kurdish Disaster Fund has already sent food and supplies to Kurdistan. We got lorries through where others couldn’t. This is about our people. Why won’t they let us be part of it?’

  No-one can answer this. Nor why, amazingly, not a single Kurdish musician has been invited to perform.

  I draft a press statement which Sarbast, ignoring the concert producers, faxes to Jeffrey Archer’s office, asking that he intervene personally on our behalf. The producers back down. They agree to let a Kurdish performer join the stars on stage. We arrange for the singer, Sivan, to come over from Sweden. He is backed by the KCC’s own band. The concert attracts an audience of two hundred million and closes with Sivan and Chris de Burgh on stage with the Kurdish Cultural Centre’s band. Jeffrey Archer announces that £57 million has been raised, most of it pledged by governments, with the concert itself generating donations of about £3 million. Meanwhile our own advertising appeals have raised nearly £500,000, some of which at least has come from the net. So far as we know, we were the first people to have fundraised on the internet. The people at the Kurdish Cultural Centre ask what they can do as a thank-you.

  Exactly one week after the Simple Truth concert, the Kurdish Cultural Centre’s band come to Sussex to play at the spring fair of our children’s primary school. Catz the Mouze-Hunting Wizard, who is visiting for the weekend, helps to set up their loudspeakers. Last week these musicians played to an audience of two hundred million, this week, to less than two hundred. It’s drizzling and the small audience of stolid Sussex folk is bemused by the middle eastern quartertones. Spring blossom is everywhere, whirling in the rain, matted damply to the children’s hair, plastered onto amplifiers and instrument cases and I think of the almond petals that fell, three years earlier, in Halabja.

  An affair of the heart

  Clare needs a computer because hers has gone wrong. She can’t bear the thought, she says, of being away from Shades even for the short time it will take to repair.

  ‘Bear, I hope you don’t think it’s a cheek to ask, but have you got anything you could lend me for a few days?’

  As a matter of fact, I have. Cybergypsies are notoriously averse to parting with old equipment. My study in the overgrown house in Sussex has begun to resemble a computer museum. The old Eff-One that survived the curse of Rollright still sits in a corner. Clare implores me to let her borrow it, and asks if I will drop it off at the weekend. She gives me a long, complicated set of directions to her house. I leave them behind, only to regret it when I find myself lost in a maze of little streets all exactly alike. I start to feel irritated, edgy. Oddly hyped up. I decide to give it five more minutes and then go home. I’ll have to think of some excuse. Then I see a gypsy caravan in a window and know I’ve found her.

  She opens the door with a shy smile on her face, her head held slightly to one side, looking up at me with enormous green eyes.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  I stand there with my arms full of computer. It is raining petals, they are flying past my face and all around me.

  ‘I’ve been looking out for you.’

  ‘I got lost.’

  Still smiling, she steps aside to let me in.

  Ten minutes later I have installed the thing, plugged it in and checked that its modem works and will connect her to Shades. While doing this I’ve been aware of her hoverin
g behind me. On Shades we are friends but now there is an awkwardness between us. I realise that this is only the third time I have seen her in ‘real’ life. The first time was across a room at last summer’s Shades meet, the second at Gawain’s party when she laughingly explained why her skirt, made of shredded office secrets, was so tantalisingly short. Now we’re making stilted small talk. Strange how cyber characters can be good friends, while their fleshly owners are tongue-tied strangers. Calypso I know fairly well, but Clare is a mystery to me. I decide that I will finish my coffee and go.

  ‘Won’t you stop for something?’ she says. ‘I hate eating alone and Alain’s away on a trip.’

  Over a lunch of omelette and salad – with a few flicks of a knife, she turns radishes into roses – we talk. Mostly about Shades, of course. Mutual friends. Clare opens a bottle of wine and pours two generous glasses. It tastes sharp, metallic, but instantly thickens my tongue. Maybe it loosens Clare up too, because she starts telling me how fed up she is with people on Shades picking on her, gossiping, making insinuations – she pronounces this word oddly, but seems to relish it, because she uses it several times.

  ‘You know me. You don’t believe these insinyations, do you?’

  It’s a disarming trick, like a lisp, that speaks of innocence. But remembering the stories about the caravan holiday with the three lovers, I do not know what to reply.

  Clare is seriously beautiful, dark hair curving down around high cheekbones, clear green eyes. What on the net seems playful flirtatiousness is in life a charm as potent as perfume. You feel the intensity of her regard. She smiles and puts you at your ease. Her eyes read your lips as you speak. She makes you feel that you and you alone are the centre of attention. That you are fascinating, entertaining, good to be with. It would be so easy to misinterpret her interest.

  It was the gypsy caravan in the window that had identified her house to me. Now I see that the room is full of caravans. There must be a dozen: big ones, little ones, gypsy caravans with horses, and without. Some are made of wood and painted, others are done in porcelain and glass.

  ‘Gifts from friends,’ she says, when I ask her. ‘Steve gave me that one . . . Cabbalist the Wizard,’ she explains.

  ‘And this,’ pointing to another one, ‘is from Chorley the Necro. I can never remember his real name, everyone just called him Chorley even when we were on holiday together.’

  ‘Your husband . . . doesn’t he mind all these guys showering you with gifts?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘Why would he? Alain knows that without friends I would curl up and die.’

  I say nothing and her eyes hold mine. At last she smiles.

  ‘I think it’s you.’

  ‘What is?’ It’s a cliché, but I feel my heart is beating faster.

  ‘You must have sensed it. I don’t feel I can keep anything from you. I don’t want to. You know I think it really is you.’

  She looks at me with wonder.

  ‘What is?’ My heart thuds and a hollow breathlessness settles on my chest.

  ‘You asked if Alain minds me having friends. The answer’s no. Well, really the answer’s I don’t know and don’t care.’

  ‘I’d be worried if Eve had so many admirers,’ I hear myself labouring to say. ‘You’re so . . .’

  She beams at me.

  ‘So . . . ? No, well, tell me Bear . . .’ She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, ‘Are you my friend?’

  ‘Yes of course.’

  She removes her hand. Then it’s back.

  ‘It is you,’ she says. ‘It really is you.’

  ‘What is?’ I ask again, breath coming too quickly. The room is stifling and the wine has tied a band of pain around my head, just above the eyes. It’s a warm day, why are the windows closed? But they aren’t. They are ajar.

  ‘I don’t want you to just be a friend,’ says Clare, leaning forward to me. There is a roaring in my head and it’s hard to breathe.

  ‘I’m not looking for just a friend. I’ve got lots of friends. So it’s not an ordinary friend I’m looking for.’

  She unshutters her huge eyes and shines them at me.

  ‘Bear, I want a soulmate.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Just that . . . a soulmate.’ Smiles, flash of eyes, gestures heavenwards, a Swedenborg signal that means all angels.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ I say, ‘but what is a soulmate?’

  ‘If you need to ask, you can’t be it.’

  ‘Do you mean a lover?’

  Her fingers slide off mine. She leans back. Reaches for her bag, finds a cigarette, fishes for a lighter.

  ‘By that I suppose you mean sex,’ she says, in a voice that has gone suddenly hard. ‘Don’t you think that if I want sex, I can have as much as I like?’

  The hand that lights her cigarette is flickering.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she says, and leaves the room.

  My heart is racing, banging. I sit there stupidly.

  Clare re-enters the room wearing a tight tee shirt – she very obviously has nothing on underneath it – and a short leather skirt. She comes directly to me and climbs astride my lap.

  ‘Is this what you want?’ she says, ‘because if you want it, you can have it.’

  There is a pulse pounding in my temples.

  ‘Are you listening?’ Clare takes my face in her hands. ‘You can have this’ – she drops her hands and fiddles at her waist – ‘but I want more. I warn you.’

  The skirt slides to the floor. Underneath she is naked. I notice that her pubis is shaved, like a parson’s nose, and then I am hit by a wave of pain. I’m coughing, unable to breathe, and the lights are going out.

  Clare is laughing. ‘Yes that surprised you . . .’

  She puts her face very close to mine, her huge eyes gaze into mine from an inch away. Then they retreat, close and her mouth twists and opens, comes on mine. No, she must not. She’ll kill me. I struggle to push her off, get up. Can’t. Her mouth is stopping mine. I can’t breathe. Asthma attack, some part of my brain tells me. Must be. I shove Clare away hard, fight to breathe and there’s fluid – I can hear it – rattling in my lungs. She jumps off me. I’m on my feet, the room thudding in and out of focus. Choking, I stagger to the sofa and through a fog of terror, hear her voice, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’

  The pain is indescribable and still the full breaths won’t come. Distantly, through my panic, I hear Clare’s voice. ‘Oh God, don’t say you’re having a heart attack. No, you’re just tired. Lie there and rest. Oh God, it’s my fault. I know it. I’m sorry. You probably think I’m a tart and it’s true. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve done.’ She talks and talks. Gradually, breath returns. Clare is talking about her childhood, how she hated her stepmother. She walks up and down smoking. ‘He saved me. Alain did . . . I was headed for the gutter. Maybe I still am.’

  An hour later, the pain is less. I open my eyes. Clare is sitting, still without her skirt, at the foot of the sofa. The pain still pounds behind my eyes. Somehow I get the car home. The next day email arrives signed Calypso: ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been thinking of you all day.’ A week passes, and my doctor tells me what had happened to me in Clare’s house.

  ‘You have hypertrophy of the left ventricle. Causes progressive heart failure. Good job we caught it, two more weeks and you’d have been knocking on the pearly gates.’

  Prophecies

  With hindsight it is easy to see that the heart thing, or something else just as dramatic, had to happen. Something had to change. From the instant the Rollright witch gave me the key to cyberspace my old life vanished. Night after night into the small hours, with jobs undone, letters unanswered, bills unpaid and work the next morning, I’d sit tapping keys and piling up debt while upstairs, alone in our bed, Eve grew despairing. My promises to her about the house, the garden, were forgotten as voices from cyberspace lured me away. At first these were the voices of real people, but gradually my life became pe
opled by cyber-entities, imaginary beings, bodiless golems which nonetheless had the power to act, start chains of cause and effect that ricocheted back into the ‘real’ world and rebounded on Eve who had no chance to understand what was happening. All she knew was that I had persuaded her to come from a comfortable house to this damp, rotting place, then abandoned her. Eve had been more than my lover, more than a wife, she was my greatest friend. We had shared everything, ideas, travels, discoveries. Now there were all these places, creatures and things I had seen but could not share with her, partly because it was too difficult to explain, partly because I no longer dared. And the Grolius curse was reasserting its pattern. The hours I was keeping were so extreme that a day could go by without speaking. More than once, I came home to find a note taped on the computer screen, because that’s where Eve knew I’d go as soon I got inside the door. Riddled with guilt, with contempt and anguish, I nevertheless lacked the power to fight the addiction. On the contrary, while my guilt grew, my experiences and pleasure multiplied.

  ‘Around the world thoughts shall fly in the twinkling of an eye.’ So the original Rollright witch, Mother Shipton, had prophesied. I had the huge power to travel the world in an eye-blink, conjure sprites from the past: spirits at my command came bringing weird intelligence and knowledge of arcane sciences and arts. Like Dee and Nostradamus, I crouched over the phosphorescent crucible of my screen, conversing with demons and angels. Outside, the garden which had begun to be under control reverted joyfully to the wild and on windy nights as I sat at the computer the brambles came tapping again at the windows.

  A thing from that time. Winter, darkness come early. An evening of blustery gusts, I’m at home, have promised to collect our small son from school. By 5.15 p.m., pick-up time, it’s already dark. In my study, lit by the flickering light of the screen, I suddenly notice that it’s 6.30. Eve will kill me. Rush to the car and drive on leaf-slippery lanes to the school. Now 6.45, a remote place, no houses near. A teacher must have stayed behind with him. Perhaps he’ll be in the school office. All is dark, no lights anywhere. I pull up in a panic, the night loud, air full of drops of water, not rain, but raining from the trees. Sudden silence drops drumming on the bonnet of the car as I get out, wind chucks under my chin with cold unfriendly fingers, somewhere a door is banging. It’s pitch dark, not a soul around. Where is he? Someone must have taken him home with them. Why didn’t they call? Who else might have come by this lonely lane? I walk round, the yard empty, area by gate empty, door to the school shut and, I try it, locked. Now I’m really scared, don’t dare leave, don’t know where to go next. Bushes caught by the wind, shaking wildly. Then out from the deep shadows by the gate a small figure steps, satchel over his shoulder, comes forward with a little brave smile, as if to say he’d always trusted I would come, had just waited to make sure it was me. He doesn’t reproach me or say how cold or terrified he must have been. I touch his chubby child cheeks, tears are rolling down my face. He says, ‘Don’t worry Dad, I was only a bit scared, I knew you’d come.’