Wolves (11 page)

Still, after Michel’s recent run-in with the school, I couldn’t altogether shake off the suspicion that, as he worked through our photographs, he was actually studying me. My bobble hat. My pantaloons and pushchair. Mum’s hand in mine, pulling me to attention. ‘I’d better start cooking. Dad will be home in half an hour.’

We went downstairs and Michel sat at the kitchen table, watching me chop vegetables. He had this intense look – you’d think I was performing surgery. ‘You can cook,’ he said.

Dad had one of those Japanese knives; the weight of the blade did all the work. You just had to mind your fingers. It was the easiest thing in the world to cut up a few vegetables, throw them in a tray and bung them in the oven. The fish went on top about fifteen minutes before we sat down to eat.

‘You cook fish,’ he said.

‘Do you like fish?’

‘Sure.’

It felt good to have found something I could do and that Michel couldn’t.

Dad walked into the kitchen and dropped his briefcase by the piano. ‘Hello,’ he said, in the voice he used with our guests, and gave a reserved-judgement smile. The photographs were spread out on the dinner table. ‘Goodness. Conrad. You’re showing off your baby pictures?’

Mum came down to eat with us more or less when I called her. She wasn’t usually so accommodating.

Dad asked her, ‘What time is your train tomorrow?’

‘After eleven.’

‘After eleven?’

‘Quarter past eleven. Eleven twenty. Eleven twenty-one at the third beep.’

‘I can run you down in the car, but you’ll be waiting there a while.’

‘You can run me down in the car?’

‘I can run you over.’

‘You can run me over?’

‘Do you want me to give you a lift or not?’

‘No, Ben, it’s okay.’

‘You’ll have to make your own way to the station then. I need the car. I’ll be leaving around eight.’

I said to Michel, by way of explanation, ‘Mum’s off on a protest.’

‘Sara,’ Dad said, ‘is going to get herself cold, wet, scared, arrested and very probably beaten.’

‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’

‘Certainly kettled. Hosed. Maybe gassed.’

Mum joined in, mimicking him. ‘Blinded. Blown up.’

There was an awkward silence as Mum and Dad remembered, far too late, what I’d told them about Michel’s family.

Michel looked from me to Dad and back again. ‘What? You want me to say “beheaded”?’

‘Let’s all calm down,’ Dad said.

‘Let’s not,’ said Mum.

I said, ‘Let’s just eat the fucking fish I caught.’

‘
Caught
?’

‘Cooked. Let’s eat the fucking fish I cooked.’

‘Does this sort of thing run in the family?’ Michel asked Mum, trying to jolly things along, to give as good as he was getting, to join in.

Mum said, ‘You wouldn’t believe the things that run in this fucking family.’

‘Enjoy your tent that I paid for,’ Dad said.

‘I bloody will, Ben. Thanks.’

When he left (by the front entrance, off to the housing estate and his widowed mum’s bungalow) Michel said to me, with admiration, ‘She’s quite a character, your mum.’

The following morning I traipsed after Mum to the station, ‘helping her with her bags’, breathing in her second-hand smoke. She had no time for my preferred, round-about way into town. ‘I need to get going.’ She had us cut straight across the estate.

Our hotel used to have a view. I remember clover. Watercress. (Peppery – it made me sneeze.) Now even the water was gone: canalised, buried deep, a maze. I remember them lowering big concrete pipes into the ground. Diggers and pile-drivers and drills. Lakes of mud.

The housing estate was made of all the same shape of bungalow: small, square, with roofs of red tile. The roads were curved, generating fractional differences in the sizes of neighbouring gardens. Because the bungalows were all exactly alike, the people who lived in them had each tried to make their own bungalow stand out from all the others. The walls were clad in a smooth render, and each house was painted a different colour. Eggshell blue. Sand yellow. Moss green. The driveways were different. One had tarmac newly laid. There were marble chips in it. It looked like a cake. Others had laid various grades and kinds of gravel. Someone had laid bark chips. Each bungalow had a garage, and each garage had a different kind of door. Some were metal. Others were wood, with little windows. On and on like this, your head ended up full of this junk: how some verges were well-tended, as though for a game of miniature bowls, while others were overgrown, a mass of weeds, dandelions and clover, and still others were so bare and dusty they looked new-sown. On and on and on. Mum had told me that places like this matured; that new trees would grow. But here she was, going away again. For all her efforts the world had yet to be saved; and the estate looked as raw and as ugly as it always had.

On the railway platform, Mum stared down at her great, clod-hopping black boots. She was trying to find words. Something right for the moment. ‘I thought you were going to walk with me.’

‘I did walk with you.’

She ground out the butt of her cigarette. ‘You lagged behind.’

‘I wasn’t lagging behind, I was trying to catch up with you.’

‘We didn’t talk at all.’

‘You didn’t want to talk to me.’

‘I did.’

‘Well.’ I told myself I was not going to cry. I was bloody well not going to.

Mum stared at her feet, casting glances that never quite reached me. For one horrible moment I was sure she was going to try to apologise. ‘Christ, it’s cold,’ she said.

‘It’s going to be colder in the tent.’

‘Will you visit me?’

‘No.’

‘Give me a hug.’

Her head rolled against mine. Her newly shorn hair bristled against my cheek.

‘What?’

‘You feel like a man.’

‘I do?’

‘I’d better go,’ I said.

By the time I saw him, standing at the far end of the westbound platform in army drab and big black glasses, I was on the footbridge, crossing lines. Committed to departure. His hair, too long for regulation, made a white halo against the shredded sky. At his feet, a duffle bag almost as big as he was.

A grey mitten of cloud folded itself over the sun and the man’s hair went out, went grey, became unremarkable.

What could I have done? What could I have said? I couldn’t even be sure that this was the same man who had exposed himself to me. Mum waved, dismissing me, and I returned her wave automatically, a puppet strung on wire. Impossible, on such weak evidence, to break the conventions of farewell. So I left her there with him.

Normally I would have walked back along the river; instead I found myself heading for the estate, the way I had come with Mum. It didn’t matter anymore. The water meadows were gone and nothing would bring them back. Michel was wrong. If the world fell apart tomorrow and humanity vanished in a puff of smoke, the waters here, cracking free of their concrete prison, would never run as they used to run. They would find new courses. The old stream beds – ribbons of silt and sand that webbed this place, mystifying gardeners – would blear and vanish over time, a network of collapsed veins. Michel’s bleak, muscular view of collapse was no more than a boy’s romance. No one can say what will succeed our present dispensation but one thing is for certain: it will not resemble the past.

I
am glad that I live within walking distance of the Middle. I need the air, after a day spent in an office chair, rolling from desk to desk in an open-plan office lit only by a narrow lightwell.

This city picks and scratches at itself like an animal kept in too small a cage, pining for its lost reflection. It obsesses over its own archaeology. In the shade of parking garages and electricity substations, stubs of classical brickwork, lacquered with a weatherproof resin, poke up through gravel beds and well-tended lawns. New buildings clad apologetically in glass contort themselves around the city’s ancient leavings. They hollow themselves out where they can; they arc above, they grope beneath. At its centre the city has begun to resemble the root system of a neglected houseplant. The Middle has packed itself around itself to the point where its surface has eroded away entirely. Inside its tangle of windowless malls and pedestrian bridges, its banks of stairs and escalators, its short-haul lifts and cantilevered walkways, no-one thinks about ‘ground level’, or even expects the numbers on the lifts to match up. There is something exhilarating about this – some atavistic hint of forest canopy.

I keep my glasses on for the walk home. I want to keep tabs on illusory light. It’s easy enough to find if you know where to look – spilling from this atelier or that; welling up through the stairwells of the more on-trend basement clubs. Augmented reality is still the preserve of the very few, the initiated, the early adopters. Geeks, frankly. More rarely you sometimes see its early, clumsy forays into the real world. A shop-front spills its frocks onto the sidewalk. They pick themselves up and spin away down the road. A traffic experiment – ghost barriers descend across a road held up anyway by red lights. Cutting through a mall, I see movie actors wandering through crowds who are queuing to see their latest releases. These avatars go largely unseen, though they’re swollen to more than life-size – seven-foot giants of the half-silvered screen. A few spectacled punters have spotted them, but they are already too sophisticated, too jaded, to want to interact with them. This is one of the difficulties with Augmented Reality. The bald idea has already worn thin. My half-silvered, AR-enabled spectacles are new (and expensive – the firm bought them for me). But Augmented Reality – the pasting of images over the real – is
old
: old as the ghost train and the distorting mirror.

I have moved back to the old locomotive factory where I used to live, before I met Mandy. Developers have taken down one whole corner of the building; of course they have left the facade. It’s supported on iron braces, a gigantic theatre flat. They are planning to put something glass in place of its stacked-matchbox apartments and its flights of heavy, narrow stone stairs.

This redevelopment has reduced the number of apartments and puts pressure on the rest of the building, because nobody living here wants to move. There are even families here, their children living three to a room on stacked bunk beds. The rooms are so small, the ceilings so high, people have subdivided their own living spaces vertically. Every few years the freehold company turns over in its sleep and orders the removal of these tree-house mezzanines, thrown up in contravention of the building code. The ban never sticks. The courtyards are stacked with lumber.

The loss of one whole corner of the building has set the landlords subdividing again. Someone else was already living in my old apartment, but I have found another, higher up in a neighbouring wing, with a view of an identical courtyard. This apartment has been cut up into two: a cursory division of space that gives my neighbour and me half the enjoyment of the living room window. The party wall has been roughly cut around the profile of the frame. We have a pane each. There’s gap between the wall and the window, wide enough to pass notes through. Not that we do.

There are inconveniences, living here – chiefly the noise and the moths.

The man I live next door to has been stamping and shouting in an effort to get the family below us to shut up. They have an autistic child. It’s hard to tell sometimes if she’s crying in distress or simply hooting. Unconsciously, her parents have been placating her – or at any rate, drowning her out – with a wall of sound. Music, variety shows, film-clips, game loops. Noise-suppressing headphones worked for a while. Then construction work started behind the factory facade. At work, tying illusory sound to illusory vision, we use cranial gloves to stimulate the acoustic nerves. This is kit even the brashest early adopter would hesitate to sport in public, though the pundits say its day will come. Moving about my flat with its meshwork on my head makes me feel like a cyborg in a movie, but I value the near-silence it generates, and I can play music through it without disturbing anyone else.

The moths are a bloody nuisance, to be honest. They are small and white and they fetch up everywhere, a little pile of wings and dust in the corner of every windowsill, the back of every drawer.

It’s nearly a year since I returned from visiting Michel and Hanna, and ironically enough it’s me who lives the kind of cramped and straitened life they spent so much time and energy preparing for. Living here requires a kind of sea discipline. You let things slip just a little in this box, and all of a sudden you’re ankle-deep in chaos and kipple. Even when the place is tidy and half-way clean, I can’t bring anyone back here.

There are a couple of women at work who are fond of me. It’s all very casual. A night out and a room in one of the boutique hotels round the back of the Ministries. I don’t really have the money for this kind of thing, but I’d sooner spend my money like this than on a bigger apartment, further from the centre.

Right now, and like everyone else in the company, I am pretty much living to work.

The company’s been going for about six years and it needs to become more than just a handful of graduates and freelancers with a common idea. Money would make a real difference, but there’s precious little of that, so we pull monstrous hours instead, bonding over our mutual pain and exhaustion.

What do we do? We play three-dimensional animations over printed targets, turning a headline, say, or a picture, a logo or a photograph, into a multimedia portal. The work is simple to explain, and it’s relatively easy to generate business. The problem is in making any real money. Because the technology is new, we have to spend a lot of time educating our clients about what is possible (a constantly evolving brief); at the same time, we’re constantly being blindsided by competitors who stumble across technology and outsourcing arrangements that undercut us – sometimes by tens of per cent.

Work here is a potent cocktail of commercial promise, too much encouragement, and the imminence of collapse. People new to the company quickly become addicted to the adrenaline. We rely far too much on interns, burning them out and replacing them like cheap batteries. They’re all would-be entrepreneurs, creatives, video artists, writers. They’ve put their personal ambitions on hold to be a part of this bigger thing, this young company that could so easily swallow the world, if only it were given the right breaks. They are young, and their arrogance is neatly balanced by their insecurity. They want to be part of something bigger than they are.