by Mark Watson
‘How has work been?’ I asked Ed, who was standing in the queue with us, hands in the pockets of his anorak.
‘It’s all right,’ said Ed. ‘Ten years. Ten years.’ He rubbed his face as if he were going to add something, but did not. Perhaps sensing a duty to his mother, I ventured: ‘And how is life, in general?’
‘Yes,’ Ed remarked, gazing out across the milling crowds, ‘it’s all right.’
That was as much as I could get out of him: life was all right, work was all right. I could not really ask for more. Part of the reason we enjoyed trips to the rugby was that it had always provided an outing with minimal conversation. It came complete with its own circumscribed topics: the turnout, the standard of refereeing, the decision to buy or not buy Bovril. Those had always been enough. Perhaps it was a little late in the day now to start quizzing him.
We took the train afterwards from St Margarets to Waterloo under one of London’s best autumn skies, a collaboration of pink and purple with wispy grey clouds. From Waterloo we decided to walk the considerable distance back to the Alpha, showing Christopher St Martin-in-the-Fields, Charing Cross Road with the tourist melee around Leicester Square, the bookshops with their ancient bound volumes in windows. The further we walked, the more relish I felt in the anticipation of the Alpha, as if it were a loved one waiting at the end of a great journey. How ridiculous it was, after three and a half decades, that I still caught my breath at the sight of the brickwork partly shielded by the rustling cedars, the magnificence of the atrium as one looked all the way up to the skylight. Perhaps, I thought, nothing had changed with the world after all.
Yet when I came home that night, Pattie was tap-tapping patiently at the keyboard, her back to me. I began to tell her about the game, but she had already looked up the result. I ate my ham and chips at the table, rustling through the newspaper. It had clouded over outside and begun to rain. There was the tapping of drops on the pane, and the tapping of Pattie’s keys from along the hall. And it occurred to me that if someone were to ask me at this moment, I would say the same as Ed. Life is fine, I suppose; work is more or less fine. But it was rather unlikely anyone was going to ask me.
If I rather resented computers’ sudden influence, I was glad of one thing at least: they had come at a perfect time for Chas as his twenties approached. Yes, he could use a computer, all right. One afternoon in September he was sitting next to the reception desk, his hands dancing across the keys with the astonishing fluency they had, so that strangers were never able to believe he could not see what he was doing. He continued to hunch his shoulders and mutter, whereas JD carted his significant weight about the place with a proprietorial swagger; but all the same he gave the impression, as he sat with the laptop, of something like complete contentment. The computer – the same one Ella had given him, though souped-up over the years and repaired numerous times – had been the key to the life he had now. It had been the reason he got his job.
That job was for Lara Krohl and her ‘PR’ firm. He wrote, as far as I could make out, advertising materials and statements for the press and so on. Today, as on many days, Krohl was using the Alpha as a ‘mobile office’, which meant pacing incessantly from atrium to bar and back again, telephone pressed to her ear, a stream of barely comprehensible instructions issuing from her mouth. ‘OK, whack that over to me.’ ‘Hack into my s--- and find the file, can you, the password’s oh-five-oh-six.’ ‘Tell him if he doesn’t get his a--- in gear, I’ll have his b------s for breakfast.’
‘It sounds like your boss may be in for an unusual breakfast,’ I remarked as she went by, looking the same as she did every day: dark hair scraped back from her forehead, white shirt and black trousers, laptop under her arm and a paper coffee cup in the non-telephone hand.
Chas grinned. ‘She’s a bit stressed.’ His fingers traced their rapid paths across the keyboard, never letting up. ‘We’ve got this relaunch tomorrow.’
‘What are you actually … working on?’
‘This is a release for a chain of gyms. Lara’s client has, literally, fifty. Take a look.’
‘Fitness World is proud to announce the unveiling of another ten state-of-the-art integrated fitness centres, offering an innovative design concept … ’
I looked back from the letters neatly lined up on the screen to Chas’s face, still in its aspect of pleasurable concentration.
‘Are there any mistakes in it?’ he asked. ‘The computer doesn’t pick up everything, frustratingly Not even this new software is perfect. I’m waiting for a patch.’
I thought of the patches on Mike Swan’s old sports jacket. ‘A … ?’
‘A patch is a computer program which corrects problems with a previous program, basically.’
‘Ah. Well, there aren’t any spelling mistakes,’ I assured him, ‘but I would find it hard to say if there are mistakes in general, because although I understand all the words individually … ’
‘They’re gibberish.’ Chas laughed. ‘Yeah, sorry about that. You’ll have to forgive all the industry-speak.’
How inevitable it was, and yet how peculiar, this turnaround. This boy who used to hang on our words, groping for meaning in the nothingness in front of him, was so much more fluent than us in the language of the times. I looked at him with a combination of emotions. There was the bemused pride one feels as a father being outstripped by a son; only as an afterthought came the reflection that he was not really my son after all. We had lived together for so long that it was sometimes hard to remember that.
‘We’re doing a relaunch,’ Chas elaborated, ‘because there’s been stuff written on the net about the gyms – bad reviews posted by some rival or something.’
‘Isn’t there a way of monitoring that sort of thing? Otherwise, what’s to stop any Tom, Dick or Harry writing whatever they like?’
‘Nothing’s stopping them,’ Chas agreed with a laugh. ‘That’s what the Internet is for.’
‘You see, I find that a bit troubling. The idea that any opinion is as good as any other. Mike Swan, for example – you know, the hotel reviewer – well, he was telling me that there are … websites now which allow people to post their own reviews, even if they can’t tell a good hotel from a pair of long johns.’ I had seen Swan less often of late; when he did appear, there were dark patches under his eyes and his manner was distracted. ‘He’s struggling, I think, to sell as many guides as he used to. Don’t you think … ’
The conversation, along with many other conversations under the Alpha’s roof at that moment, went no further. Ray, the red-headed barman we had appointed a few years back, came bustling into the atrium.
‘Something terrible’s happened.’
Even now, nearly two decades after the fire, these words could rouse me instantly into readiness. I walked round the desk. Chas got to his feet; he stood almost as tall as me now, and that – as much as his cleverness – continued to surprise me, no matter how used to it I ought to be.
‘What? In the bar?’
‘No, no. In New York.’
Already a good number of people had collected around the television, which was mounted in a corner. Before you knew it every one of them seemed to be talking on a mobile phone.
‘They’re saying a hijack,’ someone reported over my shoulder. ‘They’re saying loads of planes were hijacked.’
‘They’re saying four, but nobody knows what’s going on,’ said somebody else. An American woman was shouting into her own phone: ‘What the hell is this? What the f---ing hell is this?’
Then the television showed an aeroplane flying into a tower. Now there was pandemonium: forty or fifty people in the bar. Sentences criss-crossed, syllables collected in the air like rubbish on a breeze.
‘They’re saying four planes.’
‘What are they saying about Washington?’
‘It has to be a bomb.’
‘Can you hear me?’
The telephoners began to walk in circles, exchanging frowns as they got in
each other’s way, all of them with their eyes still pointed up at the little screen. Above us, newsreaders went on describing the scene; but all we could hear were each other’s voices.
‘This is going to screw the launch completely,’ Lara Krohl was saying behind me. ‘This is going to be headlines. Trust me. We need to act fast on this.’
This was very much as I would have expected her to react, but then came something less expected. She put a hand on my sleeve. I turned round. Her eyes were small and dark, marble-like, and quite unreadable.
‘Is Chas OK?’ she asked.
I followed her stare. Chas was sitting very still, his face pointing down at the floor. Howard’s arm was round his shoulders.
‘Perhaps he’s thinking about Ella, his tutor from years back,’ I explained. ‘She left very suddenly; she and Agatha – you remember Agatha, my colleague – both of them did.’
‘Yah,’ said Lara, ‘right.’
‘And both of them said they were going to America, you see. So naturally, although it was years ago – well, at a time like this, one imagines … ’
‘Yah, yah, right, I get it,’ snapped Lara Krohl. I glanced up, thinking this was rude even by her standards; but then I saw the look on her face. It was a look which only lingered for half a moment. The mention of Agatha, or of Ella, had stirred something in her which she did not want to be stirred.
Half a moment: then she shoved the computer onto the edge of a table and was tapping away like everybody else. The look had been taken back like a word typed and deleted off a screen. But I had heard Chas say that a file erased from a computer could often still be found there, if you knew how to look. It was a similar situation here. She had deleted that twist of her mouth, that twitch of the eyelids, but they would be remembered, nonetheless. They would be remembered by me, all right.
6
CHAS
Graham and I never discussed the departures of Agatha and Ella, not in the several years that saw me develop from pining adolescent to where I was now. The conversation just never happened. We didn’t seem to have the tools for it. Howard wasn’t keen on the subject, either: he’d made that clear from the beginning. And in the end, maybe it was better for me not to bring it up. As I couldn’t go to New York, I had to regard anyone who did as gone altogether. Although Ella and I carried on writing letters for a while, I was the one who let it lapse in the end, and not just because it was hard work dictating to Howard and awkward having him read her replies. The time we spent together was now a chunk of a past I felt increasingly disconnected from. I was hell-bent on the present.
What that present consisted of, as I went into my twenties, made me feel reasonably optimistic. I was gauche and timid, a full-blown agoraphobic in all but official diagnosis, with a continued dependence upon others to read out the headlines, point out the toilet, tell me what colour clothes I was wearing. All the same, I was making a more credible stab at a life than I’d once thought was possible. I had my own little studio in the York household, a bedroom with an en suite which Howard and Sarah-Jane had created around the time of my eighteenth. And, of course, I had a job.
On my old laptop, now kitted out with all sorts of smart keys that allowed it to speak to me, I wrote press releases for the army, a new fragrance supposedly created by a supermodel, a dozen films, the 2001 London Marathon. Lara looked after the biggest stuff. Important people with affairs to cover up, or unimportant people with affairs to publicize, went straight to her, but gushing to the media about a sensational new product or event: those jobs were shared between a team of six or so, some working from home and some in an office in Canary Wharf. Most of that team – I gathered from the nights they spent drinking at the Alpha – found it grim, unrewarding work. They wanted to be at the launch nights, fetching production-tab cocktails for actors. Or they’d set out on an artistic path and ended up here in the suburbs of creativity. I on the other hand had soared beyond any realistic expectations. Not only was I working, but I was good at it.
‘PR is insincere, obviously,’ Lara told me when I began my job, which she had offered me after three weeks’ temp work which I tackled so fanatically that she was left with little option. ‘But you need to be sincere about the insincerity. In other words, you have to believe what you’re saying, even if it’s crap. People can smell it otherwise.’ This wasn’t a problem for me. We did press for a new hospital wing which was apparently an eyesore, and a designer’s London Fashion Week output which JD said looked like the result of a factory accident, and since I couldn’t see them I was happy to write that they were breathtaking or innovative. I was the closest thing that existed to Lara’s dream: a machine that expressed human emotions and opinions without needing to connect to them myself.
When I wasn’t on a computer for work, I was using one for leisure. These years were both exhilarating and maddening. The Internet posed the most dramatic version yet of the problem that had shaped my life: everything was out there, but someone had to show me where it was. Although I could sometimes get Graham or Suzie to read me an Internet page, the way I used to hear the headlines, it wasn’t till Howard finished his meetings and conferences and drinking sessions for the day that I had a light to navigate the web’s million tunnels. As always, you could hear him a long way off: the half tuneful whistling of ‘Satisfaction’, the heavy tread on the floorboards. The sweet smoke-cloud muscled in alongside me and the computer whined and whirred its way online.
After the terror attacks, we spent a lot of time looking up the new words which were suddenly everywhere, like a song everyone was singing. Al-Qaeda; suicide bombing; Islamic fundamentalism. We began at the BBC webpage and catapulted from one link to another. Howard read to me and sipped whisky; Sarah-Jane brought cups of tea and told us not to stay up too late. There were frequent detours from the ‘war on terror’, as it was being called, because Howard kept finding things more interesting than the destruction of the Western world. It might be an explanation of a magic trick, or a picture of a new electric car someone was working on. ‘Listen to this! This will blow your mind!’ The net was a great new toy for Howard as well as a priceless tool for me. At one time he had chosen knowledge for me: now we were discovering things together. That at least was what it felt like.
One night I was trying to find out something about the origins of ‘jihad’. Months after 9/11 Lara was still getting almost daily enquiries from airlines, companies with Arabic owners, anyone with a connection to the Islamic world who wanted us to convince their clients they were perfectly safe to do business with. New ad copy had to be written; mentions of Islam had to be toned down; someone asked Lara if a website could be made to look ‘a little bit less Muslim’.
‘Jihad means literally “struggle”, Howard read in a booze-thickened voice, ‘and it can refer either to a Muslim’s attempt to live by the Koran, or the more general struggle to defend Islam, by whatever means possible, including violence.’ I was typing as fast as I could, making a note of useful phrases. My newest software could read chunks of text aloud, allowing me to cut-and-paste them straight into my own work. Howard made a disapproving noise by clicking his tongue. ‘Including violence, indeed. I thought we’d seen the end of all this. The IRA with their fucking bombs in hotels. Used to have a special phone number if someone checked in sounding Irish and we weren’t sure about them. Never got a bomb, of course. Got the fire instead.’
My fingers stopped on the keyboard. He had never really mentioned it before: at least not unprompted like this. I found myself full of questions, not all of which had a clear shape.
‘Do you remember – I mean – did you see my mother much before it happened?’ I asked. ‘Do you remember what she was like at all?’
‘I only saw her two or three times,’ Howard said. ‘It was Graham who checked her in. She was – well, the two of you didn’t have anywhere to go. The dad … your dad had cleared off somewhere. No, I only saw her once in the lobby with you, playing with a ball. And then once … you know. On th
e night.’ He cleared this throat. ‘On that night.’
‘What was it like? Did you try to save her as well?’
‘Why are you asking about this all of a sudden, mate?’ said Howard, not angrily but at a diminished volume which made me aware of a prickliness in the air.
‘No reason. I don’t know. It’s just a big thing in my life, but I don’t remember it at all.’
‘Of course it is,’ Howard agreed in an easier tone. ‘Of course it is. Well, yeah. There was no time. You were screaming for her. That was the hardest thing – you were begging to go back to her. But she was out cold. Graham tried to get in and drag her out, but he couldn’t.’
He let a long silence go by.
‘Graham and I never talk about it,’ he said.
With each moment of quiet that passed, I could feel the topic – which had landed so unexpectedly in the conversation – floating away once more. Howard must have drained off his whisky; he set the glass down on the desk. It was hard to know if he was upset or irritated by the discussion, even though he was the one who’d started it. I asked him to look up something else. The computer hummed in thought, and the moment passed.
The hotel was hosting a singles night which would show, in Lara’s words, that ‘the Alpha is fun, it’s modern, it’s sexy’. I could almost hear Graham snorting across the desk as I parsed this into a press release. It would be, apparently, ‘a night of love in one of the capital’s coolest spots’. By the time a DJ hauled his decks and speakers into the bar and the first hopefuls were drawn in on the wash of frothy pop, I’d taken up residence in the IT Suite: secluded from all the fuss, but without the feeling of hermitism that sometimes settled on me if I retreated to my rooms too early in the evening.
The synthetic quiet was bolstered rather than broken by the hum of machines. It seemed a long time since this was the smoking room adults occasionally smuggled me into. I had been working for a couple of hours on a piece for our gym client – ‘get away from the stress and strain of today’s uncertain world …’ – when I registered with slight irritation the presence of a newcomer. There was a female cough, then some fiddling with keys or personal effects and a Howard-like tapping. I made a show of typing extra-fast to avoid being interrupted by small talk, and waited for the modem’s screech.