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.
I’ve been here a little over three years, and by many I’m counted an old hand. I no longer get off on the company’s narrative. I’m not cynical about its prospects, but I’m prepared to be realistic. This company, so small, so undercapitalised, could well remain small and undercapitalised forever. It doesn’t have to die, but nothing says it will ever actually come to life. Things can stay half-realised forever. Companies. People.
These days, I prefer the company of the coders. I haven’t much in common with them. There’s not a mathematical bone in my body. I don’t share their love of trivia, their taste for science fiction, their distrust of the body. What I do enjoy – what I admire – is their love of the work for its own sake. These are the people who wander round the office abstracted all day, shifting several dozen variables around in their heads, trying to make them fit, trying – in their own arcane manner – to assemble them into something beautiful. Beauty counts for a lot with them, though some of them have a funny way of showing it.
I thought at first that Ralf’s persistent star rating of everything from a cup of coffee to a gallery visit was a tiresome conversational gambit. I’ve come to understand that it is actually a kind of fetish – without it he would be lost in a world robbed of meaning.
‘How did the presentation go, Ralf?’
‘Three stars.’
‘Weren’t you at your sister’s wedding last weekend?’
Ralf strokes his goatee beard. He’s a couple of years older than I am, due for his thirtieth birthday next month, but he has to grow his bristles out a lot to make them show. ‘I would struggle to give it more than two.’ Ralf shaves his head. He is heavy-set, with sloping shoulders. He wears baggy jeans, and stands always with his legs splayed. He looks like a three-stage rocket.
Ralf likes putting people right. You come up with a theory about something, and Ralf says, ‘I think we ought to label that an hypothesis.’ It’s the easiest thing in the world not to take him seriously and I should know because for the first couple of years, I really didn’t. I knew he was talented. I knew he knew far more than me about subjects I considered ‘my own’, including some corners of the fashion business. But even while we worked together, brandspacing the show factory of a major automobile manufacturer, still I considered him one of the backroom crew – one of life’s more capable functionaries.
Since coming back to work, however, I have been struck by the sheer adultness of what we cheerfully call ‘the dev team’. They have quietly acquired an independent existence. After work they gather in their own preferred members’ club. Past the listed frontage its interiors are retro plastic and bespoke plywood. There is a noisy dining room on the third floor. In each cubbyhole there is a jet-lagged sprawl of men and tablets, laptops, clever phones and empty cocktail glasses. This is where the true if unacknowledged movers of our industry come to relax.