One way or another the destruction wrought by electronics haunted all these writers’ imaginations. So much ingenuity and invention bringing so little happiness. In their own way, though, they were optimistic and triumphalist, no matter that they pretended otherwise, each recording the victory of the writers’ analogical fancy over nature.
What these writers gloomily and even hysterically prophesied, Kevern thought, was in fact a fulfilment of their private wishes.
Nothing gleamed in the city Kevern looked out on. The people on the streets had not turned into walking computer screens, riding translucent vehicles that sped along on tracks of spun steel. But neither was it a wasteland that could at least quicken the heart with horror. Yes, the bedecked cranes appeared melancholy, reminding him of drunks fallen asleep in doorways after a party, and after a while the brightly coloured retro clothing of the pedestrians and shoppers began to show as desperate, as though they were waiting for a carnival that was never going to start, but traffic lights worked and, though the cars looked even older than his, they still had their doors, their lights, their windscreen wipers, and — Kevern could clearly hear them from five floors up and through closed windows — their horns. There was no congestion, no sense of drivers fleeing an infected city in one direction, or rushing to join the techno-mayhem from another, so the horn-blowing must have denoted more indurated irascibility than specific impatience. Over in the park, men hooded like Eskimos — saying what things were ‘like’ went with the apocalyptic territory, Kevern realised — walked ill-tempered dogs, tugging at their leads, wanting them to do what they had come to the park to do and then be off. Every now and then a dog and his master relieved themselves in tandem. Though only the man appeared to relieve himself in anger. An occasional better-off-looking person walking a better-off-looking dog kept his distance, not afraid exactly, but routinely careful. Neither kind appeared to be taking pleasure in the outing. Kevern kept watching, expecting to see an eruption of hostilities, but nothing eventuated. A quiet moroseness prevailed, that was all. An all-pervading torpor that belied the colours, bored the dogs, and made the very light appear exhausted.
Kevern guessed that if you wanted to see blood spilled you had to wait till it got dark.
The pavements on the main roads were unswept, but they weren’t the debris-strewn sewers piled with wreckage he’d read about in his school anthology. It wasn’t the apocalypse.
There weren’t any powerful similes to be made. Nothing was like anything.
So what was it? It was a city seen through a sheet of scratched Perspex. For all the variegations of hue, it had no outlines. People blurred into one another. Kevern wondered if a wife would recognise her husband if she ran into him anywhere but in their home. Would either miss the other if they never returned home? And yet they had passed three cinemas and two theatres on the drive in, all advertising romantic musicals. Love — that was the universal subject. Love to play guitars to. Love to dance to. Love to sing about. Old and young, rich and poor, the indigenous and the children of immigrants — love!
Ailinn joined him at the window. ‘Well one thing this does do,’ she said, ‘is make you miss the Friendly Fisherman.’
He couldn’t tell if she was exaggerating.
They decided against going out to eat, ordered the Lebanese they’d promised each other — it turned out to be no more than a cold plate of aubergine mushed in a dozen different ways — and went to bed.
The mattress dipped in the middle.
‘Christ!’ Kevern said ruminatively, looking up at the flaking ceiling.
Ailinn agreed with him. ‘Christ!’
iii
They took a late breakfast — mixed mushed aubergines again — in a room that must once have suggested a pasha’s pavilion (mosaic tiled floor, mirrors on the ceiling, carpets on the walls), but now looked bored with itself — a street-corner bric-a-brac shop going out of business. Sensing that the permanent residents of the hotel weren’t looking for conversation, Kevern and Ailinn kept their eyes lowered. They were served mint tea which Kevern failed to pour from the requisite height. ‘It tastes better if you aerate it like this,’ the only other person in the breakfast room not in a keffiyeh called across from a nearby table. He was holding his own glass teapot aloft as though he meant to take a shower from it. ‘And you get more foam.’
Kevern, feeling like a country boy, thanked him.
‘Where are you two from?’ the man asked.
Kevern sneaked a look at Ailinn. How did she feel about talking to a stranger? She nodded imperceptibly. ‘Port Reuben,’ Kevern said.
The man, as broad as a door and dressed like a widely travelled photographer in khaki chinos and a cotton jacket with a thousand pockets, shook his head. ‘Never heard of it. Sorry.’
‘That’s all right,’ Kevern said. ‘We aren’t on the line about it. And you?’
‘I’m not on the line about it either.’
If the man was a comedian, Ailinn wondered, how would her thin-skinned lover deal with him.
Kevern worried for her on the same grounds.
He tried a laugh. ‘No, I meant where are you from.’
‘Me? Oh, everywhere and nowhere. Wherever I’m needed.’
‘Then you’re needed here,’ said Kevern, with a worldly flourish of his arm. ‘Should we take sugar with this?’
The man asked if he could join them and joined them without waiting for an answer. The width of him was a comfort to Kevern. You needed a wide man to advise you in a strange place. Ailinn thought the same. He would have made a good father.
It turned out that he was a doctor employed exclusively by this and a number of other nearby hotels to attend to the mental welfare of their long-term guests. ‘It keeps me busier than you would imagine,’ he said, smiling at Ailinn, as though she, having to deal with the mental welfare of Kevern, would be able to imagine only too easily what kept him busy.
There were questions Kevern wanted to ask but he wasn’t sure about the propriety of asking them while there were guests still eating. Reading Kevern’s compunction, the doctor, who had introduced himself as Ferdinand Moskowitz, but call him Ferdie, leaned across the table as though to gather his new friends into his wide embrace. ‘No one hears or cares what we’re talking about,’ he said. ‘They’re miles away. Depression can do that. It can make you indifferent to your surroundings, uninterested in yourself let alone other people.’
‘And those who are not depressed?’ Kevern asked.
Ferdie Moskowitz showed him a mouthful of white teeth. Kevern imagined him dazzling the Tuareg with them. ‘No such animal here. The only distinction to be drawn is between neurotic depression and psychotic depression, and even then those who start out with the milder form very quickly develop the more serious. Dispossession does that.’