by Mark Watson
‘I don’t know the song, I’m afraid … ’
Agatha put a finger to my lips for a moment, as Pattie used to do, and began to steer me, diagonally like a chess bishop, in a waltz. My cheeks were warm. When the dance was over, we looked at each other. My face reddened with her scrutiny.
‘Thank you so much for the room,’ she said. ‘So nice.’
She leaned to grasp my arm again as a new song began, one about Africa. I broke free with a little more force than I had intended. Agatha looked put out for a second; then she resumed her dancing, thrusting out her hips and belly, the aliveness of her seeming to fill the room entirely. I poured out a drink and sat in the corner armchair, glancing up every now and again to see her moving as if there were a hundred other dancers in the room.
By the following afternoon I had ensured this was as far from my mind as all the rest of the year’s business with Agatha. I certainly did not care to think about how she was spending the day, alone in that single room in the east of the city.
In our house all was very much as usual. Pattie began chopping vegetables almost before dawn; the smell of roasting meat filled the hall. Caroline and Brian arrived at noon. There was a game of charades, something Ed normally enjoyed because of its generally non-verbal nature; but this time he got into a terrible tangle trying to mime a film. He threw his hands around, seemed to be pedalling a bicycle, to be climbing something. The living room descended into greater and greater hysteria.
‘What the hell is it!’ Caroline managed to say, her face streaming.
‘Oh, good heavens,’ said Ed in mock chagrin, ‘it’s Around the World in 80 Days. I was miming the Pyramids, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House … ’ – and that was as much as he could explain before everyone disintegrated into mirth again. ‘I suppose, I suppose – I suppose it was a little ambitious,’ said Ed, laughing as much as anyone else.
Later, in the soporific lull between dinner and dessert, Caroline announced that she had something to share’. I felt Pattie stiffen; her hand crept under the white tablecloth to perch on my knee. The news was what she had desperately hoped to hear.
‘You are going to be grandparents!’ said Caroline.
This was a festive announcement, all right! I got to my feet and applauded as if we were at the Proms and slapped Brian on the back and finally took Caroline by the arm.
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘even if I haven’t always been the most exciting father, I shall be a decent gramps.’
‘Oh, Dad,’ said Caroline, a little tearful. ‘You’ve been wonderful, and you’ll be wonderful again.’
That night, of course, Pattie talked of nothing else. Did I think they would have a boy or a girl? (It was difficult to say at this point, I told her.) Ought we to make Ed’s room into a nursery, or wait until we knew what colour it should be? What sort of names might they go for? (Again, I felt this depended upon the gender.) Did I fancy they would have more children after this one?
If I could have seen the future, I would have told her: he will be called Christopher, he will be a boy of placid temperament, straight hair, studious bearing, a little like a young Chas; he will love coming to visit us, playing a board game featuring hippos which requires us all to pound away at levers, his favourite food will be jam sandwiches, and he will make us both as proud as Punch. The present was my business, though, not the future. I lay looking at the ceiling, registering with something like guilt my impatience to be back at the Alpha, ready for the big event.
I caught a bus very early in the morning. Agatha was already there; I shuddered to think what time she had left home. While the rest of London woke to a grey sluggishness, to hangover and anticlimax, the Alpha was bracing itself for action. We jam-packed the atrium with long tables fetched up from the cellar; ran strings of fairy lights around the balconies. Well before the notional start time of twelve o’clock, the needy had begun to arrive. Their faces were ruddy with burst veins, or else sallow almost to the point of transparency; they had missing teeth, yellowed fingers; they smelled of cigarettes and drink and of lives lived against the grain. They sang lustily and swore and belched. The wealthy guests arrived later and we ushered them to the bar, where they were glad-handed by Howard and peeped out nervously at the uproar.
Chas’s favourite Christmas present had come from Ella: it was a program which allowed the computer to speak in a human voice. It meant that he could type words and have them read back to him, and so judge how accurate he had been.
‘I spent the whole of Christmas Day experimenting with it,’ he told me.
‘Yes, the rest of your presents might as well not have existed, eh?’ said Sarah-Jane, patting Chas’s head. Something in the quality of her smile – a certain restraint, a bottled frustration – made me fear suddenly for Ella. Sarah-Jane might not have been Chas’s mother to begin with, but she certainly felt that way now, and she would not look kindly on a rival. Ella had done a marvellous job of getting Chas to trust her. Now she had to ensure it was not too good a job. There were things she still did not understand about the Hotel Alpha.
At about one, everyone sat down for a meal. The noise of all the diners, full-throated and anarchic, wafted up towards the skylight. Cutlery was dropped; toasts were proposed, songs sung, and when Howard rose to give an after-dinner speech there was a loud, ragged cheer which made Chas beam and Sarah-Jane roll her eyes.
After this came the auction. The first lot was a porcelain toilet-roll holder which looked like a dog, and bore the inscription Dogs leave pawprints on your heart.
‘Let’s start with five hundred,’ Howard hectored. ‘Am I bid five hundred? I am, because I’m going to bid it myself! Five hundred f---ing quid! For this piece of c--p! Which I already own, people!’
There was a lot more of this bravado, and everybody got caught up in it, myself included: I hardly even noticed the colourful language. Howard’s audacity teased seven hundred pounds out of Mike Swan, who went up in his green jacket to collect the prize’, while the audience whistled and whooped. Swan came back to join me at the top table, grinning at his own rashness.
‘Seven hundred pounds!’ I marvelled.
‘Luckily,’ he said, ‘the old Guide is paying me pretty well at the moment. As long as people keep wanting to stay in hotels, I shouldn’t come to regret this. Mind you,’ he added, ‘not sure why I bought something for the home. Hotels are my home.’
‘I don’t see much wrong with that,’ I remarked.
The shows of extravagance escalated; there was a pair of lederhosen which fetched nearly a thousand despite the manifest falseness of Howard’s claim that they had been worn by Mozart. Howard was in his element here: he bathed in the audience’s laughter, looking bigger and taller and more youthful every minute. Then, as he embarked on a particularly outrageous auction – a ghastly full-length portrait of a nude by a talentless artist which brought ribald hollers from the onlookers – there was a strange electronic noise. Agatha and I looked at each other, puzzled. The noise had the insistent rhythm of an alarm.
‘Hello?’ said someone loudly into the falling quiet.
We scanned the atrium until we could see the speaker. It was Lara Krohl, the South African now charged with various mysterious operations to do with publicizing the hotel. She had produced from her handbag an item about the length of a brick, though somewhat thinner. It appeared to be a walkie-talkie.
‘I’m at the Alpha. Yah, at Howard’s thing,’ she said, seemingly quite indifferent to the curious looks of the crowd. ‘I’ll call you back.’
She lowered the gadget from her ear and put it back in her bag, meeting the room’s stare without embarrassment.
‘I think after that,’ said Howard, ‘a pretty big bid would be appropriate … ’
Lara Krohl raised her hands in a show of good nature and made a huge offer, which was instantly matched by Howard. The two of them traded friendly insults across the room and the carnival went on. Agatha shook her head and, partly in jest, grasped the little cr
ucifix brooch pinned to her blouse.
‘I’ never seen a telephone quite o’ that kind! You, Graham?’
I confirmed I had not. ‘And if it means that people can hold their private conversations wherever they like – well, I’m not sure I want to see it again, either, thank you.’
Agatha nodded and rolled her eyes. But most people there, I felt, had not seen the incident for what it was: an intrusion. They had looked at the portable telephone and wondered, not why anyone would wish to interrupt the whole room in such a manner, but: how can I get one of those?
4
CHAS
I knew about Ella’s present, the computer program that could speak back to you, ahead of time: we’d chosen it together, even though Sarah-Jane said it was not the point of Christmas to do that. It was called ‘Speech Pro’, and after tearing off the wrapping paper I immediately badgered JD to set it up on the computer: something he agreed to when he realized the potential for entertainment from swear words. The first phrase uttered by the computer’s toneless voice was ‘I am a bender’. I laughed along uneasily for a while. By teatime his attention had long been stolen by some other toy, and I had the computer to myself.
Howard and Sarah-Jane were on the sofa, chuckling at Only Fools and Horses in a lulled, dutiful way. Sarah-Jane had thrown together the lunch remains into a buffet which only JD was interested in. I went back to our room, sat in the low chair and began to type.
Chas (third key from left, bottom row; sixth along, middle row; and so on) York lives in the Hotel Alpha.
It took four goes before the phrase read back by the computer sounded exactly as I hoped. When finally it was ‘York’ and not ‘Tork’ that came out of the speakers, ‘Alpha’ and not ‘Aloha’, the excitement in my stomach was about more than a single victory. I’d been typing phrases into the computer for a while now, ever since Ella had figured out that it would remove the huge obstacles that writing presented to me: the fact that I didn’t know the shapes of letters, had no mental reference for the way they combined into words. I was already quite good at typing. But until now I’d always needed Ella, or Howard, to tell me whether I had got it right or not. Now I could do without anybody’s help. The computer could talk to me.
From her first session, when my heart skipped at the presence in the atrium of that crushed-candle perfume, Ella’s role in my life was to free me from some of the rules which had bound it so far.
‘So, tell me about yourself,’ she said, setting down what might be a textbook with a promisingly heavy thump as we sat for the first time at the living-room table.
‘I have no vision at all, not even to tell dark from light,’ I recited with a sigh, ‘and it’s not true that your other senses get better when you’re blind, but you use them better. I have this thing called imagine-seeing,’ I added, ‘where I feel a sight like it was a smack, or something hot. And that’s about it.’
‘OK, but I wasn’t really asking about your blindness. I don’t really give a toss about that. I want to know about you. What you want to learn. What you want to do with your life.’
The skin rose under my shirtsleeves and at the back of my neck.
‘I haven’t really thought about what to do with my life,’ I admitted. More accurately, it had never occurred to me there was anything I could do with it.
‘Well,’ said Ella, ‘time to start.’
The routine of her visits came to feel like the backbone of my life. Howard had bought me a talking watch which declared the time at the press of a button, and in the moments before Ella’s arrival each morning I prowled the atrium, pressing the button again and again. She always seemed to bring the weather in with her: the heat of a summer day, the tang of rain. She let me hang her coat and scarf in the hall. The coat retained the smell of her perfume so deeply that it was almost like holding her for a moment.
We took on most of the regular school subjects, leaving aside PE by mutual consent, despite Howard’s offer to get a long-jump pit installed in the atrium. He was probably joking, Ella said; probably, I agreed. When she left, after sessions which were sometimes a couple of hours and sometimes lasted till late afternoon, I kept away the heavy feeling of time by throwing myself into whatever tasks she left as homework.
Howard read me novels. I listened to performances of Shakespeare which Ella had taped from the radio. She and I solved maths problems by talking them through, step by step, the numbers suspended on imaginary scales in my head. We tackled elementary physics the same way. Soon I could analyse a poem read out to me or orally decode simultaneous equations. All this was probably some way ahead of my contemporaries. But by another measure I was so far behind them that I might as well have been wearing nappies.
It was the writing. Where was I meant to start? We spent a miserable morning with Ella holding my hand on the pen and manipulating it into feeble-feeling slopes and loops, but even then I couldn’t see the letters to replicate them, and there was no visual register of words to check them against. I lost my temper and told Sarah-Jane to go away when she came in to check on us, feeling embarrassed by my incompetence as if I’d been caught out doing something wrong.
Then Ella thought of using the computer.
‘Right, mister. You can learn a sequence of letters, can’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Repeat after me. Q-W-E-R-T-Y-U-I-O-P.’
‘Q-W-E-R-TY-U-I-O-P.’
‘Wow, you’re good.’
‘It’s just remembering.’
Very quickly I had memorized the standard keyboard’s three rows of letters, like a spy drilled with a code. Ella led me out of the living room. It was both thrilling and alarming to have her at large in the house. I sat at the computer in our bedroom which gave out its bleeps and moans as it fired gradually into life, and used the wait to collect myself, trying not to think about what our room must look like, how childish it must seem to her, the embarrassing items that were probably lying everywhere. Ella positioned three of my left-hand fingers gently on the keys.
‘Right. This is your Q. This is A. This is Z. So if you go three along from the Q, what letter are you on?’
It was easy; just a memory game. ‘R.’
‘OK. Type me an R. Very good. Now, type “Chas”.’
I wrote VRAS at my first attempt, then CJAS; got it right on the next one. We played like this for ten or fifteen minutes. Letters, words, all writing on the page had been part of the dark ninety-nine per cent of my universe, but it turned out that they could be codified. Somebody had matched up the letters with pressable buttons. It was within my power to express whatever I wanted after all. Thanks to computers, and thanks to my tutor.
From now on, as soon as I had handed Ella her coat and listened to her near-noiseless shuffle out through the atrium, I always headed immediately to the computer, where I would practise writing words and get JD to read them back to me. We had more complex games to play now, relying on strategy rather than the slaughter of cosmic visitors: games called ‘Sim City’ and ‘Railroad Tycoon’ which made us into the commanders of a town or a transit empire. I still enjoyed this kind of thing, the earnest discussions of our fictitious subjects’ needs, the clandestine sessions when we were meant to be asleep. But nothing was as important as writing those words. What I really wanted from computers was not what JD wanted, an escape to a fantasy universe. To me, the machine was pretty much the opposite: a portal to the real world.
Gradually, and much to my own surprise, I started to go outside. The whole family, including Graham and Ella, attended a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The theatre foyer smelled of money and shoe leather and buzzed with fussy discussion. The pages of the programme, raised to my nose, gave off an almost unbearably delicious smell of newness. A little hum went round the place when the play was about to start, nervous giggles and shushing. I tried to concentrate on the words and not on the smell of Ella’s perfume, or the low, knowing way she muttered out her laughs.
‘I can’t alw
ays tell what’s going on,’ I confessed to JD in the interval.
‘Nor can I, and I can bloody see it.’
The trip had been organized by Lara Krohl; her PR company had helped Howard get the tickets at notice so short it would have been beyond anyone else. To thank her, Howard took everyone to a restaurant after the play, and we ended up in the Alpha Bar. It was long past bedtime for me and JD, but it was a Friday night, as Howard pointed out to a half-heartedly censorious Sarah-Jane.
All I wanted was to stay near Ella, and at a certain point of the night I followed her and Lara Krohl to the smoking room with what seemed a very adult sense of conspiracy and rebellion, even though Howard had said it was all right. I could imagine-see the little flaps of flame flickering up from the matches, the clouds of smoke they blew out. They discussed Howard, Lara once or twice beginning to make observations which Ella seemed to snuff out.
‘What are you going to do, Chas, when you grow up?’ asked Lara Krohl.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, do you want to be a writer? Or something to do with maths? Maybe an accountant in the City … ?’
She was, as Neil Kinnock had recently said about Major, obviously not in touch with reality.
‘I don’t go outside,’ I explained, ‘so I’ll work in the hotel.’
‘You don’t go outside at all?’
‘Not really. I mean, tonight we did, but generally I avoid it. I went to the zoo once but it wasn’t a success. That’s why there was a fuss when I tried to chase you that time, to tell you the capital.’
‘The funny thing is,’ said Ella, ‘you might find by the time you need a job, you can actually get away with never leaving your house. We were just talking about this, Lara and I.’
‘Yah, we were,’ Lara agreed. Their exchanges contained a tentative note; I sensed that it was only the smoking that had brought them together here. My cleverness at realizing this produced a sort of internal swagger. ‘Give it a few years, everything is going to be on computers. Do you use a computer?’