Читать книгу Contacts - Mark Watson - Страница 13

Branches, like gnarled old trolls’ nails, scratched at the train on its way past; small handfuls of rain were thrown at the windows. The train didn’t sound like it was enjoying it. It was surprising, James thought, how noisy sleeper trains were, given that you were meant to sleep on them.

He’d always loved buses, planes, trains. A train barrelling past, a plane swooping as close as a bird as he negotiated the M25 interchange with some important client: getting right over their heads, so they could see the underside of the fuselage, the little marks in the metal. As children, James and Sally had a whole series of books in which animals bustled around a town, putting out fires or teaching kindergarten classes of smaller animals. The junior-level computer games he wrote as a nerdy child were always about things like being an air-traffic controller (‘press A to reroute the flight; B to never compromise with terrorists’). Even when he first met Karl, he was working in idle moments on a game called ‘National Rail’, where you had to get around the country as fast as possible using real train routes – something Karl had found hilarious. ‘You’re making a game about something that isn’t even fun in real life? What’s next, Jamie, a game about getting your central heating fixed?’

Sure enough, it had never seen the light of day, just like James’s similar pet project ‘Bus Magnate’. But he never lost enthusiasm for the sight of a train zipping past, a plane soaring at its almost impossible angle into the sky. These sights meant people had places to go, places that might be better than here. Transport in action still gave him something of the warmth of those old Richard Scarry books, of their agreeable sense that there was a plan. Or had, at least, until recently. Until the sacking. Until he began to lose faith in the idea of plans altogether.

And yet he had been on a sleeper train only once before: with Karl and Michaela, on a trans-European holiday jaunt which was only a bit more than five years ago but might as well be fifty years, as the memory, along with all his others, receded into the darkness down the track. Even though James and his dad had gone to Edinburgh every year by tradition – right up until Mr Chiltern’s death – they’d never done an overnighter. Largely this was because of an intuition on James’s part that sleeper trains were something of a thin man’s game. That had been backed up by his experience tonight so far. The bed he was lying on was barely wide enough for a healthy-sized child. The word ‘cabin’ on the website had possessed a certain grandeur, evoking the QE2, that sort of thing; the reality was a room which, to a man of James’s dimensions, felt a little like a cell. His plan had been to put away two or three beers quickly and then fall asleep until the moment came, but it was already clear that might be more difficult than he’d imagined.

Still, the beer was helping; as the first can signed off, he could already feel its contents nudging the dimmer switch of his mood. It was quite a while since he’d really enjoyed a drink. When they got on the train at Euston – each passenger checked in by a vigorous, curly-haired Welsh woman who said things like, ‘We’ll be in at seven, but you can occupy until seven thirty’, there had been a large number of benign beer drinkers, in red scarves and rosettes, on the way to some sporting event that James wouldn’t know about at the best of times, and would certainly now miss as he would be dead. He’d eyed them for a second, listened to their oiled, jolly bantering, with what was almost regret. Might things have been different if he’d been more of a drinker – if he was a bit better at relaxing? For some people happiness, or at least a sort of hazy, zoned-out contentment, seemed that easy.

But, as he reminded himself now, he had been that person once. He’d had a gang, even if it was a smallish one, and largely drawn from friends Karl introduced him to. In his years working for the tech start-up, they used to go to the pub almost every night. Karl – because he was working on a web encyclopaedia, as part of the project – would entertain the group with his knowledge of various historical figures’ lives, and James – because he paid more attention to detail – would quietly correct that knowledge.

‘This woman, can’t remember the name; they reckon she was the one who came up with DNA, but being a bird, they took the Nobel Prize off her …’

‘Rosalind Franklin. Actually, she never got the prize.’

‘What’s his name, Neil Armstrong, the geezer that walked on the moon: do you know, he said the “one small step for man” bit slightly wrong; he messed it up because he’d got the yips being up there – fair play, really – and also did you know he once punched a bloke who claimed that they never went to the moon at all?’

‘That last bit was Buzz Aldrin, I think.’

The start-up, where Karl and James worked in their mid-twenties, had been creating a platform called OnLife: a portmanteau of ‘online’ and ‘life’, which Karl feared was a ‘dogshit name for something that’s supposed to be cool’. Karl had tried to point this out once to Jacob, the handsome dimpled blond whose company it was – but unfortunately, he had used exactly those words, and had been drunk, and Jacob was from some nebulous but severe American background which meant he disliked both swearing and drinking. Even if the name was always a bit tin-eared, though, the actual project had at one time seemed very exciting. It was based on the notion that the internet’s best things would not remain free for ever. Email couldn’t always be free; nor could massive resources like Wikipedia, nor connection tools like Facebook. One day, in Jacob’s view, there would be a single hybrid of all these entities – a single place you went to do, as he put it, ‘everything you want to do with a computer, and some stuff you don’t even know you want’. When this megalith came along, people would subscribe to it in their masses.

So James and Karl’s job had been to write code for a sort of web encyclopaedia which could also use algorithms to predict the sort of facts you probably wanted to search for. Other people in their office and flat-share were responsible for building other parts of this internet planet. A Taiwanese man called Yan – who never spoke a word of English to them – was creating a messaging service. Katarina, the only woman in the set-up, was coding a personal organizer which would allow your computer’s diary to sync with your mobile. There were twelve people employed by the company, and all of them were working on good ideas, ideas that would become very popular. But the overall conceit – that people would one day pay for what was currently free – proved a disastrous one. The consumer testing went badly. And even as Facebook’s share value was darting upwards like a spider climbing a wall, Jacob’s funders, whichever rich Californians were bankrolling his experiment, pulled out overnight. James was grumbling to himself over a line of code, something he’d wrestled with for three hours already, when Karl shuffled into the office, late as usual. He began a good-natured reproach – Karl averaged around half as much time actually working as James did – but Karl cut him off with an unusual edge to the humour in his tone.

‘I wouldn’t be sweating over that too much, Jamie, my man. I don’t think Jacob’s going to show up for the meeting.’

‘And what makes you say that?’

‘It’s a hunch,’ said Karl, ‘based on a couple of clues in the voicemail he’s just left me, which said he was about to get on a plane, our company didn’t exist any more as of this morning, he’d already got a job lined up for the Federal Reserve back home, and he was sorry but he didn’t think we’d ever meet again.’

All but James and Karl moved out of the flat after that, and by now James’s core friendship group was scattering too, on the various winds that always blew groups apart in their late twenties: marriages and children, New Zealand holidays that became permanent stays, nervous breakdowns triggering dramatic career changes, and so on. But even well into his thirties, now driving cars for a private hire firm and helping people fix their computers on the side, James would have said he was broadly happy, most of the time. There were still the nights out with Karl, when Karl came back from whatever monstrous job he was currently trying out. There were the Edinburgh trips; there were dates and little tentative romances. By now there were certain mental ulcers, too, rubbing away at him, flaring up. He was aware that he was a little heavier than he’d like, that a decade and a half of sitting down had left its mark on his body; he worried that it was getting late to meet the right person, that it was never going to happen simply by having pleasant chats with people in the back of his car. Once Michaela had entered his life, these problems, along with all other remaining ones, disappeared. But in time Michaela herself had then disappeared.

Despite being dumped by her, and thrown aside by Karl, James had never imagined himself as a person for whom unhappiness could be this thick and choking; a person who would go home at night and simply not know what to do with himself. He understood there would be crises, even in an unremarkable life, but it turned out there was something worse than the adrenalin of a crisis: the endless flat grey afternoon of depression. The terrible night he had cried in front of Steffi, three months ago, had been the first time he’d really understood how hollow he felt, and had been feeling, and would keep feeling. Even after googling ‘depression’ – an act which released a flood tide of pop-ups that said things like, It’s OK not to be OK and Take a mate for a pint, he would have thought it impossible that he would ever be desperate enough to call the Samaritans. Until the morning, midway through January, when he’d gone ahead and done it.

He’d woken at eleven on a Saturday, having slept badly, and the emptiness of the day ahead descended on him as if the plasterwork had come crashing down from the ceiling. He had no plans; nobody would want to see him. Everyone had kids, or they were in couples having brunch, or they were just mysteriously away as people so often seemed to be when you were yearning for them. His last online date had ended in a humiliation so complete that he couldn’t imagine opening the app again; it felt as if everyone else there could see him, pitied him. Thoughts like that were irrational; they were not the sort of thoughts James was used to having – not until he lost the job, if it was possible to identify a turning point. Since then, they’d been more and more common, and it was exhausting to carry them around.

He went into the hall, made sure Steffi was out. His body felt heavy, his legs reluctant to carry him even this couple of dozen steps. Her bedroom door was open – chaos inside, as usual, as if she’d had a fight with herself in there. In the bathroom, the shower was dripping. James went to turn it off, returned to his room, picked up his phone and typed the strange word into Google. S-a-m. The algorithm finished it off for him. The future Karl had once predicted was here, now; maybe the phone knew you were miserable just from the way you sat on the edge of the bed with it.

His fingers went over the numbers on the screen. 116 123. It felt too short for a phone number. Even as the dial tone sounded in his ears, James doubted that he was going to go through with this. He wasn’t even certain he expected it to be answered. Calling the Samaritans felt like something you did at midnight, not before lunchtime. But it was answered, almost straight away, and it was too late to go back. It was a woman’s voice. She asked what he wanted to talk about. James swallowed and clawed at his scalp and managed to say that he was very lonely, and that he’d been thinking about … not being here any more.

The Samaritan did a good job of sounding surprised and concerned, even though this must be how many of her calls began. In her kind, Home Counties voice – a voice he could imagine speaking authoritatively on Jane Austen, or the need for better cycle lanes – she gently steered him towards more concrete discussion. James found he was, if not enjoying it, at least pleased to be able to answer the questions. He’d once remarked to Michaela, during the cult for Scandinavian murder shows, that he quite liked the idea of being a witness. Being quizzed by the police, ‘helping their investigations’. She’d laughed. ‘How are you going to infiltrate a criminal gang?’ she asked. ‘You literally phoned the Revenue this morning to tell them you owed them more tax.’

‘When were you last in a relationship?’ asked the Samaritan.

‘About two and a half hours ago. I mean, years ago.’ He was annoyed with himself for the slip of the tongue. ‘Two and a half years ago. And that relationship was four years long. It was the only proper one I’ve had. If you see what I mean.’

‘With a woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you say a bit about her?’

‘Her name was Michaela.’ Straight away he thought he should have kept her anonymous. ‘We met doing a weight-loss course. We were both, er … Overweight. And then we set up our own health-and-fitness business, which was successful. But she left unexpectedly.’ Unexpectedly, he thought, even to Michaela. It was the way Michaela always did do things. He’d believed her when she said that she never planned it this way, she never meant to hurt him so badly.

‘She’s in Berlin now. With someone else.’

‘That must be difficult,’ said the Samaritan.

‘It is.’

A silence seemed about to fall, but the woman caught the conversation expertly and tossed it back into the air. ‘And do you have a support network?’

‘A …?’

‘People you can talk to, people you trust.’

‘It’s difficult.’ James scratched his scalp, fingered one of the untidy curls. He was more than due a haircut, he was starting to look like someone you’d move away from at a bus stop. But even this had been beyond him, the past couple of weeks. He remembered last time at the barber’s. The awful creak of the chair as he settled into it; the way he caught, in the mirror, the stylist eyeing his body in a way he was used to people eyeing it. Like a house that needed some work. He’d have to go to a different place next time. All this took time and mental energy. ‘My – er – main friend. Well, he became my boss. And recently sacked me. So we haven’t been – we haven’t spoken much since then.’

‘And close friends, family?’ asked the woman.

The word made James think immediately of being young. ‘Family’, like ‘Christmas’, was an idea that belonged to his past, not his current situation.

‘I was very close to my dad. My father. But he’s dead – he died.’ He’s dead had never stopped sounding brutal, winding him, in the saying or the hearing of it. ‘My sister and I, actually, were close too, but we had a disagreement.’ James felt that he wasn’t holding up his end of the conversation very well, even though that was a strange thing to think about a Samaritans call. His list of setbacks didn’t seem substantial enough to justify having called; having confessed to being in despair. He searched for a way of explaining why the thing he was trying to tunnel through felt thicker than the sum of these parts.

‘You know – Tony Hancock, when he … well, when he died,’ said James. ‘He just said too many things seemed to go wrong. Something like that.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,’ said his younger listener, ‘but I do understand the feeling, of course. And it can seem like that for a long time – but also, life can change very quickly for the better.’

The slight easing that James felt, after the chat, lasted about a week – maybe more. But it wore off like aspirin, a little at a time, and he didn’t feel he could call up again. They must have more urgent cases to deal with, and he didn’t want to become a regular; he wasn’t a hypochondriac bothering a GP. What he needed was someone to sit and talk to. What he needed was to have friends again. And that urge had led to his ‘opening up’ to Steffi, someone who wasn’t really a friend, and that had been a terrible misjudgement which embarrassed both of them.

Well. It was gone, now. James listened to the footsteps padding up and down in the corridor; the lilt of the Welsh woman’s peppy voice as she chatted to the sports fans. ‘Yes, be a good game, I should think! You should get some sleep though, mind!’ People he didn’t know; people who couldn’t affect him. Nothing could really affect him any more. It had been as easy as the single touch which slid flight mode into action.

Departing from his own life, he could look back on it like one of Karl’s pub biographies. This fella, can’t remember his name. Girlfriend leaves him for a geezer in Germany. Best mate gives him the sack. He gets the hump, jumps off a bridge. It was a comforting thought, James reflected, allowing himself to open the second beer. That everyone ended up being a minor curiosity, given time; all lives ended up as footnotes, often full of factual errors. He needn’t have seen himself all this time as a major character, every decision triggering grave consequences. Everything he’d done wrong would pack down into an anecdote for future Karls. Something to pass time between rounds at the bar; something very quickly forgotten.