The Spaniards, I knew, had a reputation for late dining and I contemplated taking a ‘disco nap’, as Albie would put it, then setting out to explore. But the bed was so large and comfortable, the sheets cool and white and of such a high thread count, that I found myself lowering the mechanical shutters and settling down at nine fifteen. Plenty of time for tapas tomorrow, when I’d see my son again. I fell asleep, lulled by the most wonderful, unshakeable faith in the future.
There has never been a shortage of topics to keep me awake at night, but as a teenager I was especially haunted by the prospect of nuclear war. The public information films intended to educate and reassure the populace sent everyone, us children in particular, into a frenzy of morbid fantasy and I was convinced that at some point, whether in Washington, Peking or Moscow, a button would be pressed — I imagined an actual button, large and red, like the stop button on an escalator — and soon my mother and father and I would be hunting for mutant rats in the smouldering remains of Ipswich city centre. There’d be no more ‘don’t touch that, it’s dirty’ in the post-apocalyptic Petersen family cave. The only question would be: do we eat Douglas or Karen first? So worried was I by this prospect that, unusually, I confessed my night terrors to my father. ‘Well, if it does happen, you won’t have time to do anything about it. Three minutes of panic and then you’ll be crispy bacon!’ he reassured me. Given three minutes’ warning, what would we say to one another, my family and I? I imagined my father rushing to turn off the central heating.
Rightly or wrongly, that specific fear has faded. But the anxiety has not passed and now the face that I imagine in that future wasteland is not my own, but Albie’s.
Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject.
Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again.
By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.
‘So what you’re saying,’ said Connie, looking up from her novel, ‘is that the future, basically, is going to be a bit like Mad Max?’
‘Not exactly. But it might have elements of that.’
‘So Mad Max, it’s like a documentary, really—’
‘All I mean is the future world might not be as hospitable as the one that you and I grew up in. That dream of progress is dead. Our parents imagined holiday camps on the moon. We … we have to get used to a different notion of the future.’
‘And you want Albie to choose his GCSEs based on this Mad Max-like vision of the future.’
‘Don’t tease me. I want him to do subjects that are useful and practical; I want him to do something that will get him a job.’
‘You want him to be up in the gilded tower. You want him to have a robot butler.’
‘I want him to be successful,’ I said. ‘Is that a strange ambition for my son?’
‘Our son.’
‘Our son.’
At that time, Albie was not doing well. Instead of providing a sense of calm, the countryside enraged him. He showed no interest in learning the binomial names for the common British birds, and the frogspawn I procured for him held no appeal. He missed his friends, the cinema, the top deck of buses; he missed eating chips on the swings in the playground. But wasn’t the countryside one wonderful giant playground? Apparently not. Albie went for walks with great reluctance, glaring at warblers, kicking the heads off flowers as he passed. If he could have burnt the countryside down, he would have. At school his grades were consistently poor, as were reports of his behaviour. He did not work, he did not concentrate, sometimes he didn’t even turn up. Connie, though concerned, took all this in her stride, but I was angered and shocked by it. I had not expected obedience to be genetic but neither had I anticipated these calls from the headmaster’s office, these letters home. My own son took me by surprise. He was not what I had expected, was not like me at all. Most hurtfully of all, he seemed to take a perverse pride in this.