by Mark Watson
‘I can type pretty well.’
‘Virtual reality, that’s what they call it,’ Lara interrupted. ‘Someone was telling me about this thing called the Internet.’
That was the first time I heard the word. ‘It’s a way of linking computers around the world,’ Lara explained, ‘so you can all see the same thing, wherever you are. Like with TV. Give it ten years, maybe a little more – ’ there was that rasping delivery of hers again, ‘yars’ – ‘and you’ll be able to ask computers any question you like. Like an encyclopaedia, but—’
‘But who will have told it in the first place?’ asked a humorous voice. Graham had come in, as he always did, without ceremony.
‘Sorry?’ said Lara Krohl with a note of impatience; I saw she was fonder of interrupting people than being interrupted.
‘I imagine,’ said Graham, ‘that however clever computers get at trotting out information, humans will still have to tell them all that information in the first place. A computer is hardly going to review a hotel or predict the weather on its own, is it?’
The next morning, the mood at breakfast was a little subdued; for once there was no chatter from the radio, and Howard seemed to absent himself unusually quickly with a remark about a conference he had to get to. When I came out of the bathroom, Sarah-Jane was waiting. She asked me to sit down at the kitchen table. There was some faint noise from the atrium, followed by Agatha’s cackle, and I wished to be there. This felt too much like the time they told me about the fire.
Sarah-Jane put her hand on my left knee.
‘We always want what’s best for you, Chas. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That lady, Lara. I don’t want you talking to her without me or Howard there. All right?’
‘Why not?’
Sarah-Jane crossed one leg over another with the familiar rustle of skirt. ‘She knows a lot of journalists. And journalists – some of them are people who might not want the best for you, like we do. They want to write things about Howard, or the hotel. So … ’
‘Lara is a friend of Ella’s, though.’
‘Ella – ’ I heard Sarah-Jane’s voice inch a degree higher and her inflection slide northwards – ‘doesn’t always necessarily think about the … what we call the bigger picture.’
‘I don’t give a toss,’ I said. There was a silence pure enough for me to discern the gurgling of water in the pipes that ran down the outside of the building.
‘Where did you get that expression?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think I know,’ said Sarah-Jane.
It took me half a minute to muster a reply to this, and it rang hollow in the air. I realized that she had left me alone at the table.
As it turned out, Sarah-Jane herself admitted that she’d been needlessly cautious. Lara was, as I had thought, a friend, not a foe. As the hotel’s head of PR, her job was to keep journalists on our side. Howard trusted her, and Ella seemed to like her too. The matter was soon forgotten by everyone else, but it kept an unwelcome place in my memory. What was there to write about Howard, or the hotel? What did Sarah-Jane mean by ‘the bigger picture’? It went in the file of things I didn’t understand, a file which only seemed to get bigger.
It was disappointing to learn that knowledge wasn’t the same as understanding. Knowledge I had, for sure. A year into Ella’s tuition, having reached what had seemed the huge milestone of ten years old, I knew more than I would once have dreamed possible. I not only knew how many people lived in China, and what it meant that China had a Communist government, but I could make the philosophical argument that there was no way anyone could know for sure that China existed unless they’d been there. Since nobody had – not even Howard, certainly not Graham who had barely been as far as Chinatown – we had no empirical proof of it, so it made no difference if you were sighted or blind.
‘Do you see what I mean?’ I jabbered at JD, who was shuffling around on his top bunk, his mind quite likely on a very different subject. ‘Even though other people can see, they still don’t see ninety-nine per cent of stuff with their own eyes. They rely on others’ word. They don’t know China exists.’
‘It definitely does,’ he said in a sleepy voice. ‘It was on TV.’
‘But I mean … oh, never mind. I’m just trying to make the point that other people aren’t better than me.’
‘I definitely agree with that bit,’ said JD.
At night, when I had taken the eleven times table up to a thousand and exhausted the mental map of QWERTY sequences, I sometimes fell into thinking about that conversation with Lara. You’ll be able to ask computers any question you like. Until recently I would have said that Howard could answer all my questions perfectly well, and if not him then Graham, and failing that there was the encyclopaedia. Now, in the anteroom between childhood and the teenage years that were already claiming JD, I realized there were questions of a category that made them hard to look up and harder still to ask out loud.
I wondered about my father. It was odd that – as I understood it – there was a man out there somewhere who had been my dad before Howard met me. Wherever this man was, he was not in the Alpha, and beyond these walls, it didn’t matter much to me if someone were down the road or in Peking. Still, it would be nice to know who he was, even if it was just a name, and whether he was interested in seeing me. It was curiosity, not yearning: there was nothing to yearn for when Howard gave me all the fathering I needed, but the curiosity would not disappear altogether. It whispered at me on long nights; it was there in the swing of the Alpha’s doors, in the faint breath of the idea that one day he might walk in.
That curiosity also had other matters to wrestle with. JD now made reference to women and sex as if we were boringly familiar with the subject and had been all along. He talked in bed about how sexy Ella was.
‘She wears these dresses – you can sort of see her breasts, see the shape of them. And the way she walks! You are so lucky to spend all that time with her.’
Less lucky, I wanted to retort, that I couldn’t see or picture any of it. Even so, I felt that I already knew every detail of Ella that he reported to me from her smell and her voice alone. My feelings about her, over a couple of years’ teaching, had developed from puppy-like enthusiasm to something tenser. Occasionally, when JD was asleep, I would run my hands over my body, the areas Sarah-Jane described as private parts’, which were nonetheless more of a mystery to me than to her. I knew more about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the properties of a regular triangle than I did about my own penis. I was starting to think that wasn’t the ideal way round.
As Ella became a more and more fixed part of my life, I did manage to hold the odd conversation of a personal nature. I asked one day what she was planning for her birthday on the fifth of June.
‘Oh, nothing big. Going out for a few drinks near where I live with some mates.’
She lived – I knew – somewhere called Manor House, which sounded appropriately regal. I tried to imagine how going out into the world, drinking alcohol in a place of your choosing, could seem like ‘nothing big’.
‘And is your … your husband going?’
Ella laughed in the low and slightly indulgent way which always made me wonder whether I’d said something clever enough to amuse her, or just been comically naive. This time it was clearly the latter. ‘I don’t have a husband, I’m afraid.’
‘I mean – boyfriend?’
‘Not even.’ She patted me on the shoulder and I felt the middle of my body warm in a manner that was lovely and awful. She gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘You’re the closest thing I’ve got, Chas.’
I knew this was a joke, and that it was best to concentrate on the lessons themselves and not the person giving them. I practised typing for two hours a day or more, writing little pieces about the news which Graham and Agatha had read out to me, reports for Howard to read when he came home from his conferences. I was good at it now, and fast. My eleve
nth birthday rolled around in spring, and the 1992 election I had sagely predicted was set for the night beforehand: Howard and Sarah-Jane agreed I could stay up and watch the results come in. ‘God knows,’ said Sarah-Jane, ‘you know more about it than I do, pet.’
‘Everyone knows more about it than you, Captain,’ Howard teased her. ‘You’re the only one who thinks Kinnock is going to win.’
We sat on the sofa as well-educated men delivered the news in small chunks separated by great intervals of inconclusive chatting. Howard had been drinking beer, Sarah-Jane and I were on cocoa; when midnight passed, they opened a bottle of champagne and gave me a taste. It fizzed on my tongue and swam sourly down my throat, producing a grimace which made the two of them laugh. Howard ruffled my hair. ‘To our magnificent son,’ he said, and their glasses chinked together with mine. I fell asleep some time around two, by which time we knew that the present government was going to hold on to power, as Howard had predicted – or wished; you could never tell the difference. Sarah-Jane muttered that she would die before we saw Labour back in. Howard said she had some years left in her yet, and the couch creaked as the two of them play-fought. I curled up into a ball and dreamt woozily that I was at some sort of university, receiving a qualification which I showed proudly to Howard.
There was an Ella session planned for the next day as usual, birthday or not. Graham and Agatha were preoccupied talking to a man called Saunders who had come in to pay a bill he apparently owed. This had caused a lot of laughter and excitement. ‘After twenty-five years,’ said Graham, ‘well, you can see why we were starting to worry a little bit. Ha, ha!’
‘I told you I’d drop in with it,’ said the man. ‘Just one of those jobs that you don’t get round to, you know?’
There was more laughter; Howard came over, as did Mr Swan the hotel reviewer, who promised to write about the incident in his next book. Graham found the original ledger where he’d recorded the man as a guest in the sixties. Agatha, still hooting, went off to direct the housekeeping trollies with Mrs Davey: the two women rumbled past me as if they themselves were on wheels. All this was of limited interest and had distracted everyone from my birthday. I was just about to embark on a minor sulk when the doors opened. There was that tang of new air in the atrium, and I heard the flat footsteps that never failed to accelerate my heart.
‘Just the man I wanted to see!’
Ella’s hand was on my arm, the lurking aroma of her perfume filling the space around me. ‘I’ve got your present, but you need to come out with me to get it. Ready?’
It rained on our faces. The pavement fizzed with a wet-London smell I remembered from my few previous sorties. Ella described what we were passing: grey square buildings, backed-up queues of cabs at lights. A siren came from somewhere, and I flinched and snatched at her arm. She laughed, squeezing my shoulder. My dick, I thought to myself, felt like the CN Tower in Toronto: 553 metres high, built for communications and as a show of Canada’s manufacturing prowess. In a doorway there was a confusion of bassy chugging pop music, and a smell of newness.
‘This is Dixons,’ Ella informed me. ‘And we are at the counter … ’
She broke off and addressed someone. ‘Just picking up,’ she said. I had a prickly inkling of what might be coming.
‘Put your hands out.’
I did, shifting my weight from foot to foot. A box was lowered into my clutches.
‘This,’ she said, ‘is your very own laptop computer.’
‘It can’t be!’
‘It’s about time, don’t you think?’
I was almost too delighted to say thank you properly, and I repeated it twice just to be on the safe side. Ella said we should pop to a cafe before going back, and offered to take the laptop in its bag. No, no, I said, I’ll carry it. I hardly even noticed the part about the cafe until we were there and Ella was ordering doughnuts and cups of tea. The plastic bag, weighed down with its priceless cargo, stayed next to my shin where I could feel it.
As we headed back towards the hotel, it was almost too much, the cocktail of wonders: the new computer, the suddenly unthreatening hugeness of London around us, the smell of her coat and the rough touch of its sleeves. My dick hung stiff like the Hindenburg, the biggest dirigible ever built. Walking back into the Alpha, I felt so glutted with happiness that I almost expected congratulations. Instead there was trouble.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Sarah-Jane demanded. ‘Do you know how worried—’
‘We just nipped out for a doughnut and a laptop,’ I said.
‘A doughnut! What about your birthday tea?’
‘I’ll still be hungry.’
‘And what exactly is a laptop,’ asked Sarah-Jane, ‘when it’s at home?’
‘A laptop is like a portable computer,’ I said. ‘It’s an incredible thing to have. They think in a few years it’ll be really common. It means I can—’
‘It must have been expensive,’ Sarah-Jane said, addressing Ella. ‘You really shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Oh, it’s fine, I … I know someone in Dixons,’ said Ella, ‘and anyway, it’s fine.’
I got the impression the two of them were looking at each other in a not altogether pleasant way, and the feeling made me uncomfortable; I brushed past Sarah-Jane and went to the living room to sit and wait for Ella. We made our way through the lesson as if nothing had happened. I asked if Ella would stay for tea.
‘I really don’t think … I’m not sure I’m invited,’ she said with a wry laugh.
‘You’re invited by me! It’s my birthday, isn’t it?’
She leant in and kissed me on my cheek. It felt as if someone had rested a hand against my groin.
‘All right then. I’ll sing you Happy Birthday, at least.’
But the party went on longer than that: it went on, in fact, beyond my own bedtime. Well after dark, I was still conscious of high, edgy laughter and chatter: first just the suggestion of it in the atrium, and then a cloudburst of noise as people spilled into our living room. I heard bottles being opened, comments and giggles and mock-outraged responses. Howard’s bassy voice underpinned it all. Was Ella there? Part of me wanted to slip out of bed and join them. Another part felt a resistance to the whole thing, perhaps brought on by the feeling that what had started as my birthday was now something else, something beyond me. I buried my face in the pillow and thought about my new computer, and the rest of the night went by in half-heard dispatches. There was more laughter, and – though I could have dreamed it – spikes of irritable talk, even an argument which might have been about any one of the billion subjects I was still not the master of.
I would come to look back on that series of adventures – the election night, the trip out to get the laptop, and the unspecified activities of the birthday evening – for a long time to come, because from then on nothing was quite the same.
It took a few days to register that I had crossed some sort of a border, whatever it was. We went on a family trip to Yorkshire for the weekend to see Sarah-Jane’s parents; it was a lot further outside than I generally cared to go, but I was able to spend almost the whole time in my room tapping at the computer, the function of which Sarah-Jane’s parents could not understand at all. We’d hired a car rather than been driven by Graham, which was unusual, and we got back too late on Monday for an Ella session, so I went to the desk for the papers. But Graham seemed preoccupied – I could tell he was writing something with his scratchy fountain pen – and Agatha wasn’t there at all.
‘She has gone away for a little trip,’ he said when I asked. His tone discouraged further questions. Something was not right about it, and about the atmosphere of the Alpha in general. Once or twice I heard Sarah-Jane on the phone, her voice agitated, the words maddeningly out of reach. Howard seemed to be away at conferences several nights in a row.
On a Wednesday morning I took Ella’s coat to hang it up and noticed with surprise the absence of perfume. There was the sound of her scraping back
a chair and sitting down; she cleared her throat and put a couple of books down on the table.
‘How come you aren’t wearing perfume?’ I asked. ‘And is it a different coat?’
It was as if I’d spoken a password. Ella’s hand came out to rest on top of mine. There was no sparking of the usual circuits inside me. Her skin was cold to the touch.
‘Chas, listen. In a couple of weeks I’m going to America.’
‘To Washington, DC? That’s the capital, even though people think—’
‘To New York.’
‘How long for?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. I’m moving there permanently.’
Water gurgled in pipes; a heavy vehicle went by on the street outside with a genial engine roar.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘I need … ’
But Ella’s voice seemed to snag on something. She swallowed very loudly. Her hand squeezed mine. I realized she might be about to cry and experienced a feeling of total helplessness, or defeat.
‘Is there something I should be doing—’ I began.
‘No, no, no. Oh, Chas.’ She kept clearing her throat, but her voice was still high and wispy and so unlike her usual one that it was like an inferior actor was standing in for her. ‘There’s so much which I … it’s hard to explain.’
‘Try.’
‘I need to – sometimes in a person’s life they need to change something,’ she said. ‘A change of scenery.’
‘I don’t have any scenery,’ I said rather bitterly, and regretted it: Ella began to sob. I reached out for her arm and she latched on to me, rubbing my shoulder in a comforting manner as if I were the one crying. Soon she collected herself. ‘I can’t be doing this here,’ she muttered. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll pull myself together. It’s fine. We’ll be fine.’