Michel accepts another cocktail from the tray and sits back in his chair. It’s autumn but hot, and the roof-garden stinks, quite frankly, of damp vegetation and rot.
Michel came to celebrate my birthday, not sit through my litany of professional disappointment, but I cannot stop. ‘When people go out of their way to adopt a new technology, they want something useful for their effort, not gimmicks, not games, not even stories. And the fact is, AR is all gimmick. That’s its point. It gimmicks and games the world. You know, Hanna had this pinned years ago, when you first introduced me to her. She knew straight away it was arse-about-face.’
Michel nods and smiles, patient with me. He is surely weary by now of my mordant view of my work.
Outwardly the party is a success: an exclusive club; friends and workmates; even a girl who’s sweet on me, off snorting cocaine with her girlfriends in the upstairs loo. The fact is, though, the club is the club – our workplace, a budget option. The colleagues outnumber the friends. Plus, I discovered today that Mandy has been given her own programme on national radio. For some while she’s been reading her poetry at comedy clubs and bars across the city. She has become a minor urban celebrity. Now, with her 3.30pm slot, there will be no getting away from her. She has new hands now. Slimmer. Stranger. Too many fingers. She shows them off in the mugshot the newsfeeds have run. Becoming writer in residence at a service hospital south of the city, she lucked into some neurological experiment or other. They give her a cachet, those wild arachnid hands. They’ve pushed her up the rankings faster than any improvement in her poetry. I don’t know why I feel angry. A defence mechanism, I suppose, knowing what I did, or rather, failed to do for her. Perhaps somewhere, in her ever-expanding opus of radio-friendly doggerel, there is a chilly piece about me. Maybe there isn’t even that.
Michel, meanwhile, has sold the film rights to his first novel. The Shaman, it’s called, and though the book advance was tiny, times being what they are, the film option was so big Michel’s agent thought it was a printing error. Even parcelled out the way it is, in dribs and drabs over a dozen years, and hedged around with all manner of new writing commitments which Michel must religiously fulfil, the deal is a life-changer.
‘Bryon Vaux wants an original treatment for the next one.’
The name means nothing to me.
‘You know. Vaux. Friendly Fire.’
Friendly Fire came out a couple of years ago. It was the culmination of a long line of modish, cynical war films that compensated for acts of unlikely heroism ‘in the field’ with liberal conspiracy theories back home.
‘I’ve not seen it.’
‘Be happy for me, Connie.’
Jesus. ‘Of course I’m happy for you, Mick. What am I saying? Why do you need me to be happy for you? Fuck you.’
Michael grins, at which point it occurs to me that he is working and writing for one of the most powerful media producers on the planet. He is more than a friend now. He is a contact.
‘How’s the family?’ (You can almost hear the crunch of gears.)
Michel nods – a successful sommelier contemplating his cellar. ‘Not bad at all, thanks.’
Michel and Hanna’s daughter is exactly the same age as Loophole, and a deal chubbier and healthier. They’ve had to abandon their sailing plans because of her, though the runaway success of Mick’s writing would probably have scotched them on its own. This is the first time I’ve seen Mick since that visit, and I haven’t seen Hanna at all. She never comes into the city; perhaps, even if she did, she would avoid me. I think of her sometimes. Who am I kidding? I think of her all the time. Her hands. The taste of her mouth. Christ, and since then she has had a child. Impossible not to wonder about that. ‘Do you still have the boat?’
Michel nods. Without enthusiasm, he says, ‘We’ll have it finished, then decide what to do with it.’ The boat was their project, the thing that bound them together, the myth they shared. Now that they have some, they’re throwing money at it. But they have a child now. They don’t need a dream.
‘He wants to shoot something on those new cameras.’ So much for a proud father’s tiresome anecdotes about his family. Michel wants to talk business. We’re back with Vaux again. ‘He wants the next one to spill out of the screen, out of the cinema, I mean. To be distributed. I told him some of my ideas. He’s keen.’
‘That’s great. Great.’
It’s not until the following morning, waking in an unfamiliar bed, that it occurs to me – Michel is trying to put some work my way.
Eight months on, Michel brings Hanna and their daughter Agnes into town to see what Loophole has made for them.
We’re meeting just outside the north-eastern suburbs, where the railway, after passing through several deep cuttings, embraces the earth at last and disappears into a mile long tunnel. The tunnel’s brick ventilation chimneys crop up in the portfolios of virtually every film and photography student in the city. Not that you can see the chimneys now the bracken is out. The hills’ trademark gold and brown is vanished for the summer under this shaggy, silly green.
Where the tunnel begins, so does the granite, and the suburbs leave off entirely here, lending the city a sharp edge you would otherwise find only in storybooks. The houses rise in tiers against ferny rock-faces. They are always wet, even at the height of summer, because this is where the peat beds drain. At night, the culverts echo round the town, filling the streets with a sound that is part magical river, part overworked toilet mechanism.
The station is built into the foot of the gorge, and the road bridge runs over the rail line at an unlikely height. I lean against the parapet, a favourite of suicides and graffiti artists, waiting for the train. I recognise Michel by his thinning hair, Hanna I do not clock at all at first, and little Agnes is hidden from me by the natty pink parasol attached to her buggy. There is a lift to street level, a new all-glass contraption, already tagged. Mick and Hanna are practised pack-horses now; ignoring the lift, they carry the buggy out of sight, up flights of covered stairs. They’re flushed when they emerge from out the entrance. Michel sees me and makes some comic business, staggering towards me. Hanna’s got the buggy. Agnes is asleep.
‘Don’t worry about her,’ says Hanna, loudly, in reply to my murmured hello. ‘At this time of day she’d sleep through the Last Trump.’
Michel says, ‘Nights are a different story.’
‘Here.’ I rummage about in my bag and pull out two pairs of goggles. ‘Gifts.’
They are similar to the goggles Dad’s blind soldiers wore years ago. The cameras in their earpieces are smaller and neater now. The lenses are half-silvered, rather than black.
The top half of her face hidden behind balloon lenses, Hanna takes my hand and lets me lead her over to the parapet and a view over the city, rising behind industrial parks and new housing estates. Michel stands a little behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders.
‘Ready? Blink twice.’
I dig out a pair of goggles for myself and, as I turn to face the city, the lenses blink, shiver, and seem to fill with blue paint. The paint drains away until the lenses are half full. ‘Try not to move your head.’ The paint spills and spreads over the city. The land turns blue, then freezes and fractures. Planks, spikes and planes of blue fall from the buildings and bed down between them. The blocks turn and shuffle.
The city is buried under a torrent of blue geometric shapes, a child’s building blocks, dropped and scattered, none of them smaller than a house. There are glitches. One high tower stubbornly clings to its blue coat. Elsewhere, landmark buildings have evaporated entirely, deleted by the program as it struggles to integrate reality and artifice.