“It’ll be a new year in two days’ time, and I have absolute zero to look forward to,” Mats complained. “I hate my life. All the crappy art appreciation classes I took at school are never going to give me the things I want. Kids in Africa have a better time than I do.”
“I don’t think they do, actually,” Daz suggested.
The two students had so little in common it was perhaps only proximity that connected them. Mathew’s parents were not, in truth, missing him. Having given in to their son for too long, they had allowed him to attend art college in the hope that he would eventually weary of trying to be outrageous. His parents were not outraged, or even vaguely shocked, by his attempts to test the limits of their liberality. If truth be told, they found him rather boring, a bit of an angry student cliche, incapable of understanding that the world’s axis was not set through his heart.
Mats considered himself more sensitive than those around him, but his convictions had the depth and frailty of autumn leaves. His parents could see he was adrift but had run out of solutions. They were comforted by the knowledge that he could only fall as far as his trust fund allowed, and were happy to let him get on with the gruesome task of self-discovery. What he really wanted, he told them unconvincingly, was to become a citizen of the world. Finally they shrugged and left him alone.
“The problem is that I haven’t been properly equipped to deal with the future,” Mats continued, “and there’s no nurture system for highly sensitive people.”
Daz had heard all this before, and had other things on his mind; his sister was pregnant and broke, his mother increasingly suffered mental problems and was probably going to lose her flat. Oddly, listening to Mats moaning about his life didn’t annoy him; it had a curiously calming effect, because his fellow student was so fake that you could make him believe anything. Conversely, Daz attracted Mats because he was real. There was a loose-limbed lying craziness that sometimes took Daz to the brink of a mental breakdown, which was all the more frightening because his nerve endings crackled like exposed live wires. It took guts to be nuts, and Daz was braver than most.
Mats hadn’t stopped complaining for almost twenty minutes. “I mean,” he was saying now, “what’s the pointin creating real art when it’s denied an impact? I don’t know anything that can change anything.”
“I do,” said Daz, cutting him off. “I know a trick.”
“What kind of a trick?”
Daz jumped up and brushed out his jeans, then headed into the rain-stained block of flats behind them.
“Where are you going?” asked Mats as they moved through the dim concrete bunker that passed for the building’s foyer. Daz just grinned, dancing across orange tiles to smack the lift buttons with the back of his fist.
“There’s only one place it works,” said Daz, stepping into the lift, three narrow walls of goose-fleshed steel that reeked of urine and something worse. He pumped the panel, firing them to the top floor. When they got out, he pushed at the emergency exit and took the stairs to the roof three at a time. Montgomery House was required to keep the door unlocked in case of fire evacuation. Mats didn’t like thirty-storey tower blocks, too much working-class bad karma forced upright into one small space, but he felt safe with Daz, who had chased storms from the stairwells since he was two-foot-six.
“Is it cool to be up here?” Mats asked, all the same. The hazing rain had dropped a grey dome over the top of the block. He walked to the edge of the roof and looked down, but the ground was lost in a vaporous ocean.
“There’s some kids run a pirate station from one of the flats, that’s that thing over there.” Daz pointed to the makeshift mast attached to the satellite TV rig propped in the centre of the gravelled flat-top. “Touch their stuff and they’ll cut you up. No-one else ever comes up here.” The wind moaned in the wires strung between the struts of the satellite mount. Five blocks, all with their own pirate sounds. “When they’re not chucking vinyl, they’re taking each other’s signals down with bolt-cutters. Give me your mobile.”
“Fuck right off, I got about three calls left before it stiffs.”
“Come on, check this,” said Daz, snatching the mobile away from Mats. He flipped it open and punched in 7–2–8–2–6, waited for a moment, held it high, punched in the same numbers again, waited, held it high again, did it twice more, making five numbers five times, then turned the phone around so that Daz could see.
Behind them, the makeshift transmitter released a melancholy hum, like a phasing analogue radio. Mats could feel the crackle of electricity rustling under his clothes, as though he was about to be hit by lightning. Something had happened to the phone’s screen; the colours had turned chromatic, and were cascading like psychedelic raindrops on a window.
“You screwed up my phone, man. What did you do?”
“7–2–8–2–6, you figure it out.”
“I don’t know,” Mats admitted, “you paying your congestion charge?” A lame joke, seeing as neither of them owned any kind of vehicle.
“Try texting the number, see what comes up.”
Mats went to MESSAGES, and tapped in the digits. “Oh, very mature. How do I clear the screen?”
“Can’t, you have to put in a text message to that number to get rid of it.”
“What is it, a glitch in the system?”
“Must be, only works on a Nokia, and only when you’re near a mast, getting a clear signal.”
“I don’t get it, what’s the point?”
“You didn’t type in the text yet.”
“Okay.” Mats’ fingers hovered over the pinhead keys. “I don’t know what to write.”
“C’mere.” Daz pulled him beneath the hardboard shelter beneath the illegal transmission masts. “Ever wonder why ancient curses used to work? ‘Cause they’re ancient. Victims sickened and died, they wasted away when they discovered they were cursed. Belief, man.” He thrust his outstretched fingers at Mats’ brain, then his own. “There’s no belief anymore, so curses no longer work. Who do you believe now? Do you think God will answer your prayers and sort out your life? No. Do you buy the whole Judeo-Christian guilt-trip? No. Do you believe your computer when it tells you your account’s overdrawn? Yes. The new world order can’t survive on images of demons and the fiery pit, ‘cause we’re just slabs of flickering code running to infinity. The only things you have faith in are digitised. Digital society needs digital beliefs. Most people’s brains are still hardwired to analogue. Not our fault, that was the world we were born into, but it’s all gone now. So change your perception.”
Mats glared at the tiny silver handset. “What, with this?”
“What I think? A programmer somewhere spotted an anomaly in his binary world and opened up a crack, a way through. Then he leaked it. A five-digit number punched in five times, somewhere near a powerful signal, near a transmitter, all it takes to open the whole thing up. Send the message. Make it something that could alter the way you see the world.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, use your imagination.”
Mats stared at the falling rain. Unable to think of anything interesting, he typed MY PARENTS LIVE IN A BIG HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY, then sent the message to 7–2–8–2–6.
MESSAGE SENT
“Now what?”
“That’s it, dude.” Daz was grinning again.
“You fuck.” Mats angrily stamped to his feet and shoved his way into the downpour. “You almost had me believing you.”