The town I grew up in was a friendly place. At least, it was friendly to us. Because of the hotel, we were known to people – a local business, a source of summer jobs. Women fussed over my father. Febrile with a late and hopeless heat, they imagined they could save him from his ‘impossible’ wife. While Mum remained in hospital under psychiatric observation, they steeped us in sympathy and relationship teas. We whiled away hours like that, separately and together, in strange sitting rooms, breathing stale desire.
Some of those women tried to get to Dad through me. One in particular, distracted from her main purpose by what she called my ‘charm’, decided to pull up her top and get her tits out. They were very large but her nipples were tiny. Sucking one was like rolling a sugar cake decoration around in my mouth.
She helped me with her hands and tongue. She was quite rough. She took my hands and placed them on the back of her head. I wound my fingers in her hair and dared to pull her onto me. She made a little moan and slid me right down her throat. I rocked against her. After a minute of this she gagged and pulled away. ‘There are condoms in that drawer when you’re ready.’
I had never handled a condom before. I couldn’t make it unravel. Maybe it was inside out. I turned it round. That wasn’t right either.
‘Give it to me.’ The moment she leant over me I began to wilt. She wiggled me about and took me into her mouth again but it didn’t do any good.
‘Do you mind if I wank for a bit?’ she said, trying to turn me on.
‘No, I don’t mind.’
She laughed. ‘You’re such a gentleman.’
This is the sort of thing you say to a child.
I moved around the bed, curious to see her put her fingers inside herself, but all she did was fiddle. It reminded me of Dad worrying at a grease mark on our immaculate bar top. I ran my feet along the insides of her thighs, and she seemed to like that. She took hold of my foot and rested it against her sex. She rubbed my toes against her, making them wet.
At last she took pity on me. ‘Well,’ she said, gathering her clothes, ‘that was naughty.’
I used her bathroom. Her medicine cabinet was full of products she had brought back from overseas trade fairs; pharmaceuticals with names unsuited to the domestic market. Polysilane Upsa, Neo-Angin. Smecta. Spassirex. The shower looked fancy, but it wasn’t up to much. I remember the whine of the pump, and a sound in the pipes like a child draining juice from a carton.
The way home from her house led me beside the river, along the track I took to school. Its bark-chip surface had worn away, and the ground was soft after days of rain. I should have known better than to attempt the track in trainers. The wet soaked through my socks.
A serviceman picked his way towards me. I recognised him by his hair – albino white and wild. He was in trouble. His vest
tick-tocked
,
tick-tocked
, useless in this maze, and he wove from one side of the track to the other, unable to plan his line. How easily he might have stumbled off between the trees. The river ran behind them, sluggish and slow-moving; it made no sound.
Dad’s blinded servicemen didn’t often come this way into town. Their goggled, low-resolution blindsight handled the box-like architectures of the housing estate much more easily. The ambiguous and busy undergrowth of the track tended to confuse them. Here, they’d have been better served by a stick, a dog, a sense of hearing.
The white-haired man walked with a defensive, mechanical stiffness. I recognised it. I recognised
him
. We approached each other. In army boots he overcame the uneven ground. My presence confused him. When I veered left, he veered right, straight towards me. I skipped to one side to avoid him. He stopped and turned to me. The sun glittered off his goggles and winked in the lens of the camera mounted on his left earpiece. His chest chattered monotonously as he stood, perfectly still, the machine at his hip repeating, in regular pulses, the scene before him. Boy against foliage.
I said, ‘Good afternoon.’
His face showed no recognition. His hand worked at his fly and his erection slid into the light, hard and white and as long as a dagger.
‘W
hat do you do, Conrad?’
We are sitting, Hanna and I, against the upturned hulk of a fishing boat, staring at the waves.
‘I work for an AR company.’
The contrast between Hanna’s life of muscular simplicity and my day job could hardly be greater. Hanna planes and scrapes, drills and sands. I spend my days stroking glass panels, bringing images to life against their printed target. This is what AR stands for: Augmented Reality. ‘We turn newspapers and magazines into rich media. Every newspaper photograph becomes its own TV channel . . .’
The ocean has piled the shingle steeply, and even on a day as calm as this, the waves churn and plunge with a terrible violence. No way could you ever swim in this. The pebble bank is very high, and where we’re sat, half way down its stepped incline, we have no view of the desert expanse at our back. Even the tops of the lighthouses are hidden. We are trapped between the pebble wall and the roaring sea.
‘Basically,’ I tell her, ‘it’s advertising. It’s about laying an advertising layer over the physical world.’
‘Is it difficult?’
‘Not especially. Mathematically it can mess with your head but intellectually it’s on a par with casting a ghost onto a sheet of glass. An old stage trick.’ The core of our AR business is a billboard system. Image recognition software running on a smartphone or a pair of web-enabled spectacles sews moving pictures over a static target. Someone walking past an ad for the latest movie will see the hoarding spring to life, screening its trailer.
‘And everyone can see your ghosts?’
‘Anyone stood behind some web-enabled glass. It’s all a bit art-student at the moment, but there’s a lot of commercial interest.’
Hanna thinks about this. She says, ‘But it’s all the wrong way round. People are having to go out of their way to see your advertising.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re having to put on funny glasses, or raise a phone to their faces. Who goes to that much trouble just to see an advert?’
‘At the moment, yes, you’re right.’ I pick up a pebble and throw it into the sea. ‘But web-enabled glasses look like they’ll be flying off the shelves next year. It’s only a matter of time before the web becomes wearable, just another form of clothing between you and the world.’ Biting the bullet, I describe the future as my employers see it: a giant mall overlaid with proprietary information. ‘Sale, Last Three Days!’ ‘Next Bus 5 mins.’ ‘NOW – Happy Hour.’ Image overlaid with image, veiling the Real with arrows and exclamation points.
‘Bloody hell,’ she says.
I put what gloss on it I can, ‘With AR, you can thread private and public spaces through each other. You can turn public spaces into private screening rooms. Augmented Reality will change how space is used.’
‘You mean you’re privatizing it.’
‘What?’
‘You’re privatizing civic space.’
‘No—’
‘Yes. That’s what you’re doing. You’re doing away with personal perception. You’re directing people to see things a certain way. You’re telling people what to pay attention to.’
People who know nothing about advertising always assume people are defenceless against it. ‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘Really? Why not?’
I do my best to explain why AR is worthwhile. Virtual Reality was crack cocaine, spiriting its wraiths away to NeverNeverLand, and that is why it never really took off. Augmented Reality is different. ‘AR exists to heighten the present moment . . .’
‘Conrad.’ She waits for me to look at her. ‘It
stifles
the present moment. It replaces reality with a – a recording.’
How easy for Hanna to take the moral high ground, free of the burdens of ambition or responsibility or any interest beyond her own self-fantasy! ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re surely not going to tell me that your bloody boat trip is
authentic
, are you?’
Hanna smiles and shrugs and backs off and pretends not to understand. Of course she understands; she’s not stupid.
Hanna spends the rest of the day indoors with her maps and guides, her lists of foreign vocabulary and her text books. (Her language teaching is supposed to feed and equip the couple as they circumnavigate the earth.)
On board the boat, meanwhile, Michel plugs a loft-lamp into the extension lead and fits a sheet of ply across the width of the cabin to make a desk. The cabin doubles as his study.
He helps me on board. ‘You’ll like this,’ he says. Shoved deep in the bows is a grey plastic attaché case. Inside are maps. He spreads them over the plywood table.
A lot of the hills round here are called islands. Isle of This, Isle of That. ‘It’s in the place names, see? The land round here has been dry land, farmland, for only a couple of hundred years.’
It has been easy, an enjoyable thing for Michel to re-imagine this place, to make islands of these gentle hills and to trace and shade with a blue pencil the line of imaginary coastlines of the future. When we were children, school friends, Michel and I would play this same game, poring over my Dad’s old maps of the town, seeing which streets we could inundate, transforming familiar ground with a meshwork of inlets and peninsulas. There is something magnificent in the continuity of Michel’s obsessions. He hasn’t changed at all.
At the same time, how can he be so childish? ‘So how far into your book are you?’ I say, to prick his fantasy.
‘About three hundred thousand words.’
Which shuts me up.
He folds the maps away. ‘This stuff’s just the scene-setting, the research. In the end, so long as you’ve done it, so long as important bits of it are parked in the back of your head, none of this world-building nonsense matters. But I thought you’d like to see it.’ He knows I do not take his literary ambitions seriously.
‘So what’s next?’ I ask him.
‘I’ll have to find myself an agent.’
‘Good luck.’ But he has read my reaction, and gauged my disapproval, so there is no point in my keeping silent. ‘And this book of yours is going to help fund the voyage?’
‘That’s the idea.’ Then he casts his hand around the cabin and says something so off-point, so unexpected, it is night before I think to measure its implications. He says, ‘If, that is, we ever sail.’
Come nightfall, it is raining – a proper ocean squall, sudden, short, the wind a knot trying violently to solve itself, the rain like spray from a fire hose.
We can none of us get to sleep. Around midnight Michel and Hanna stumble out of their bedroom fully dressed and make tea. Mugs in hand, we brave the weather. Laughing and cursing, we clamber aboard the boat.
We stand, the three of us, in the cabin, looking through its rain-beaded Perspex at the silhouettes of the inland hills. These are the same hills Michel pointed out to me this afternoon. They mark the old coastline, before the land was claimed and drained for pasture. The villages perched on these hills (Isle of This, Isle of That) were ports, once upon a time. Big, successful towns – their skylines are dominated by churches so big they could be cathedrals. These days, of course, it’s all overpriced coaching inns, antiques, second-hand bookshops, cloth mice.
The sky is clearing, but the hills are smudged, as though a thumb has smeared charcoal into the orange haze cast by port cities to the west. Standing here, it is easy to imagine the flood to come.
Lift the boat from its trestles.
Watch the trestles twist away on the dark water, disappearing behind the house.
Then, lift the house.
There is Hanna, working indoors, surrounded by her books. Turn the house slowly round so she can face the sea. She raises her head. She sees a flash, a storm, and she smiles to think of all she has to learn.
On board the boat, meanwhile, Michel (eyes down, pen poised, a head crammed full of fantasy) does not feel the subtle current bearing him inland, over flooded levels, past the comically bloated corpses of drowned cattle, towards the hills the maps have down, even now, as islands. Isle of This. Isle of That. On the shore, axes ring out as the townsfolk, troubled by a revenant folk-memory, chop wood for boats of shallow draught and, salivating, eye the skies for teal, widgeon, wintering geese.
Rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees and nowhere is there a defined boundary between land and estuary.
Here and there, banks of shingle rise incrementally above the shallow sea like a new medium, neither sea nor land – an unreliable medium where men and livestock founder and blue lights flicker mysteriously in the hours before morning.
Of the towns the miniature railway once served, only roofs remain. A bell sounds under the waves at every turning of the tide, from a church built beside an old military canal. The waterway’s route is marked now by the makeshift floats – old soda bottles, plastic canteens that once held washing powder, all treasured now and irreplaceable – that mark the dropping points of lobster pots.
Fishermen appear, steering strange coracles. Oyster divers, boys with bags around their hips and wooden nose plugs, dive for a catch that breeds within the rotten brickwork of the canal. Lobsters and crabs have scratched themselves crafty tunnels here, switchbacks, false entrances, so that the boys come up with their fingers bloody, nipped by claws.
North then, crossing over the drowned canal, careful to avoid the tower where the bell rings out each turning of the tide, to the mirrored waters that once were marsh, and will be marsh again, to where Hanna spins, safe in her chalet, anchored to the shingle by the strangest material: filaments of copper wire, optic fibre, plastic pipe, their uses uncertain now, forgotten, as the future pins the past under the water, drowning it.
‘If, that is, we ever sail.’
Already afloat on a sea of words, already embarked upon his private voyage, Michel stands at the porthole, pointing out clusters of light on the hills. Old port towns, landlocked by centuries. They were islands once and now they’re islands in his head, and he is happy to have found a way, half-way respectable, maybe even remunerative (his book might be good, for all I know) to live inside his ideas of the Fall.