Beautiful World, Where Are You Read online

  4.

  Alice, I think I’ve also experienced that sensation you had in the convenience shop. For me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth. And I always end up thinking: I don’t even want to be up here. I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, I don’t even think they improve my life. They just create waste and make me unhappy anyway. (Not that I’m comparing my dissatisfaction to the misery of actually oppressed peoples, I just mean that the lifestyle they sustain for us is not even satisfying, in my opinion.) People think that socialism is sustained by force—the forcible expropriation of property—but I wish they would just admit that capitalism is also sustained by exactly the same force in the opposite direction, the forcible protection of existing property arrangements. I know you know this. I hate having the same debates over and over again with the wrong first principles.

  I’ve also been thinking lately about time and political conservatism, although in a different way. At the moment I think it’s fair to say we’re living in a period of historical crisis, and this idea seems to be generally accepted by most of the population. I mean the outward symptoms of the crisis, e.g. major unpredicted shifts in electoral politics, are widely recognisable as abnormal phenomena. To an extent, I think even some of the more ‘suppressed’ structural symptoms, like the mass drowning of refugees and the repeated weather disasters triggered by climate change, are beginning to be understood as manifestations of a political crisis. And I believe studies show that in the last couple of years, people have been spending a lot more time reading the news and learning about current affairs. It has become normal in my life, for example, to send text messages like the following: tillerson out at state lmaoooo. It just strikes me that it really shouldn’t be normal to send texts like that. Anyway, as a consequence, each day has now become a new and unique informational unit, interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before. And I wonder (you might say irrelevantly) what all this means for culture and the arts. I mean, we’re used to engaging with cultural works set ‘in the present’. But this sense of the continuous present is no longer a feature of our lives. The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content. So when we watch characters in films sit at dinner tables or drive around in cars, plotting to carry out murders or feeling sad about their love affairs, we naturally want to know at what exact point they are doing these things, relative to the cataclysmic historic events that structure our present sense of reality. There is no longer a neutral setting. There is only the timeline. I don’t know really whether this will give rise to new forms in the arts or just mean the end of the arts altogether, at least as we know them.

  Your paragraph about time also reminded me of something I read online recently. Apparently in the Late Bronze Age, starting about 1,500 years before the Christian era, the Eastern Mediterranean region was characterised by a system of centralised palace governments, which redistributed money and goods through complex and specialised city economies. I read about this on Wikipedia. Trade routes were highly developed at this time and written languages emerged. Expensive luxury goods were produced and traded over huge distances—in the 1980s a single wrecked ship from the period was discovered off the coast of Turkey, carrying Egyptian jewellery, Greek pottery, blackwood from Sudan, Irish copper, pomegranates, ivory. Then, during a seventy-five-year period from about 1225 to 1150 BCE, civilisation collapsed. The great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed or abandoned. Literacy all but died out, and entire writing systems were lost. No one is sure why any of this happened, by the way. Wikipedia suggests a theory called ‘general systems collapse’, whereby ‘centralisation, specialisation, complexity, and top-heavy political structure’ made Late Bronze Age civilisation particularly vulnerable to breakdown. Another of the theories is headlined simply: ‘Climate change’. I think this puts our present civilisation in a kind of ominous light, don’t you? General systems collapse is not something I had ever really thought about as a possibility before. Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life.

  Unrelatedly, and in fact so unrelatedly that it comes in at a sharp ninety-degree angle to my last paragraph, do you ever think about your biological clock? Not that I’m saying you should, I’m just wondering if you do. We are still pretty young, obviously. But the fact is that the vast majority of women throughout human history had already had several children by the time they reached our age. Right? I guess there’s no good way of checking that. I’m not even sure if you want to have children, now that I think of it. Do you? Or maybe you don’t know one way or another. As a teenager I thought I would rather die than have babies, and then in my twenties I vaguely assumed it was something that would just happen to me eventually, and now that I’m about to turn thirty, I’m starting to think: well? There isn’t anyone queuing up to help me fulfil this biological function, needless to say. And I also have a weird and completely unexplained suspicion that I might not be fertile. There is no medical reason for me to think this. I mentioned it to Simon recently, in the course of complaining to him about my various other unsubstantiated medical anxieties, and he said he didn’t think I needed to worry about that one, because in his opinion I have a ‘fertile look’. That made me laugh for like a day. I’m actually still laughing about it while I’m writing this email to you. Anyway, I’m just curious to know your thoughts. Considering the approaching civilisational collapse, maybe you think children are out of the question anyway.

  I’m probably thinking about all this now because I saw Aidan randomly on the street the other day and immediately had a heart attack and died. Every subsequent hour since I saw him has been worse than the last. Or is it just that the pain I feel right now is so intense that it transcends my ability to reconstruct the pain I felt at the time? Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse—we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing. Maybe that’s why middle-aged people always think their thoughts and feelings are more important than those of young people, because they can only weakly remember the feelings of their youth while allowing their present experiences to dominate their life outlook. Still, my intuition is that I actually feel worse now, two days after seeing Aidan, than I felt in the moment of seeing him. I know that what happened between us was just an event and not a symbol—just something that happened, or something he did, and not an inevitable manifestation of my failure in life generally. But when I saw him, it was like going through it all over again. And Alice, I do feel like a failure, and in a way my life really is nothing, and very few people care what happens in it. It’s so hard to see the point sometimes, when the things in life I think are meaningful turn out to mean nothing, and the people who are supposed to love me don’t. I have tears in my eyes even typing this stupid email, and I’ve had nearly six months to get over it. I’m starting to wonder if I just never will. Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of self permanently. Like the way I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty and it was so painful and awkward and bad, and since then I’ve always felt like exactly the kind of person that would happen to, even though before then I didn’t. And now I just feel like the kind of person whose life partner would fall out of love with them after several years, and I can’t find a way not to be that kind of person anymore.

  Are you working on anything new out there in the middle of nowhere? Or just taking recalcitrant local boys out on dates? I miss you! All my love. E.

  5.


  In the chilled section of a convenience shop, Felix was browsing a selection of ready meals with a slightly unfocused look on his face. It was three o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday and white light fixtures hummed overhead. The doors at the front of the shop parted but he didn’t turn around. He replaced a ready meal on a shelf and took out his phone. There were no new notifications. Inexpressively he put the device back in his pocket, lifted a plastic box off the shelf as if at random, walked over to the till, and paid. On his way out of the shop, in front of the fresh fruit display, he paused. Alice was standing there looking at apples, lifting the apples one after another and examining them for defects. Recognising her, he began to stand a little differently, straighter. It was not clear at first whether he would greet her or just exit without saying hello—he himself didn’t seem to know. Holding the ready meal in one hand, he tapped it on the side of his leg absent-mindedly. At that, maybe hearing him or just becoming aware of his presence in her peripheral vision, she did turn, and noticed him, and immediately tucked her hair behind her ears.

  Hello there, she said.

  Hey. How are you getting on?

  I’m good, thanks.

  Make any friends yet? he asked.

  Absolutely not.

  He smiled, tapped the ready meal on his leg again, and looked around at the exit. Ah here, he said. What are we going to do with you? You’ll go mad up there on your own.

  Oh, I already am, she said. But then maybe I already was before I arrived.

  Mad, were you? You seemed pretty normal to me.

  Not a word I often hear in connection with myself, but thank you.

  They stood there looking at one another until she lowered her eyes and touched her hair again. He glanced over his shoulder once more at the exit, and then back at her. It was difficult to tell if he was enjoying her discomfort or simply taking pity on her. For her part, she seemed to feel obliged to continue standing there as long as he wanted to talk.

  Have you given up on the old dating app, then? he said.

  With a smile, looking directly at him, she replied: Yes, the last attempt didn’t exactly inspire confidence, if you don’t mind my saying so.

  Did I put you off men entirely?

  Oh, not just men. People of all genders.

  He laughed and said: I didn’t think I was that bad.

  No, you weren’t. But I was.

  Ah, you were alright.

  He frowned in the direction of the fresh vegetables before speaking again. She looked more relaxed now and watched him neutrally.

  You could come around the house tonight if you want to meet people, he said. Some of the gang from work will be there.

  Are you having a party?

  He made a face. I don’t know, he said. I mean, there will be people there, so. A party or whatever you would call it, yeah. Nothing big, though.

  She nodded, moving her mouth around without showing her teeth. That sounds nice, she said. You’ll have to remind me where you live.

  I’ll throw it into Google Maps for you if you have it, he said.

  She took her phone from her pocket and opened the app. Handing him the device, she said: Are you off work today?

  He typed his address into the search bar without looking up. Yeah, he said. They have me on really random shifts this week. He handed her back the phone to show her the address: 16 Ocean Rise. The screen displayed a network of white streets on a background of grey, beside a blue area representing the sea. Sometimes they hardly need you in there at all, he added. And then some weeks you’re in every day. Drives me mad. He looked around again at the till, seemingly in a different mood now. I’ll see you this evening, will I? he said.

  If you’re sure you’d like me to come, she answered.

  Up to yourself. I would go off my bean if I was out there on my own all day. But maybe you like it.

  No, I don’t really. I’d like to come, thank you for asking me.

  Yeah, well, no big deal, he said. There’ll be a fair few people there anyway. See you later, then, have a good day.

  Without making eye contact with her again, he turned around and left the shop. She looked back at the box of fresh apples, and, as if now feeling it would be inappropriate to continue examining them in any detail, as if the whole process of searching for bruises on the exterior surface of fruit had been rendered ridiculous and even shameful, she picked one up and proceeded to the refrigerator aisle.

  * * *

  16 Ocean Rise was a semi-detached house, with the projecting left half of the facade in red brick and the right half painted white. A low wall separated its concrete front yard from that of its neighbour. The curtains were drawn on the window facing the street, but the lights were on inside. Alice stood at the door wearing the same clothes she had been wearing earlier. She had put powder on her face, which made her skin look dry, and she was carrying a bottle of red wine in her left hand. She rang the bell and waited. After a few seconds, a woman about her own age opened the door. Behind her the hallway was bright and noisy.

  Hi, said Alice. Does Felix live here?

  Yeah, yeah. Come on in.

  The woman let her inside and closed the door. In her hand she was holding a chipped mug that seemed to contain some kind of cola. I’m Danielle, she said. The lads are just down here. In the kitchen at the end of the hall, six men and two women were seated in various positions around the table. Felix was sitting on the counter by the toaster, drinking directly from a can. He didn’t get up when he saw Alice enter, he just nodded his head at her. She followed Danielle into the room, toward the fridge, near where he was sitting.

  Hey, he said.

  Hi, said Alice.

  Two of the people in the room had turned to look at her, while the others continued the conversation they had been having before. Danielle asked Alice if she wanted a glass for her wine and Alice said sure. While she was rooting in the cupboard, Danielle said: So how do you know each other?

  We met on Tinder, said Felix.

  Danielle stood up, holding a clean wine glass. And this is your idea of a date? she said. How romantic.

  We already tried going on a date, he said. She said it turned her off men for life.

  Alice tried to catch Felix’s eye, perhaps to smile at him, to show that she found this remark amusing, but he wasn’t looking at her.

  I wouldn’t blame her, said Danielle.

  Putting her bottle down on the counter, Alice looked at the CD library stored along the kitchen wall. Lots of albums, she said.

  Yeah, they’re mine, Felix replied.

  She ran her finger along the spines of the plastic jewel cases, withdrawing one slightly from its slot so it hung out like a tongue. Danielle had by then started speaking to a woman who was sitting on the kitchen table, and another man had come over to open the fridge. Gesturing in her direction, he said to Felix: Who’s this?

  This is Alice, said Felix. She’s a novelist.

  Who’s a novelist? Danielle asked.

  This lady here, said Felix. She writes books for a living. Or so she claims.

  What’s your name? the man asked. I’ll put it into Google.

  Alice watched this all unfold with a look of forced indifference. Alice Kelleher, she said.

  Felix watched her. The man sat down on an empty chair and started typing into his phone. Alice was drinking her wine and gazing off around the room, as if uninterested. Hunched over his phone now, the man said: Here, she’s famous. Alice did not respond, did not return Felix’s gaze. Danielle bent down over the screen to see. Look at that, she said. She’s got a Wikipedia page and everything. Felix slid off the countertop and took the phone out of his friend’s hand. He laughed, but his amusement did not seem completely sincere.

  Literary work, he read aloud. Adaptations. Personal life.

  That section must be short, said Alice.

  Why didn’t you tell me you were famous? he said.

  In a bored, almost contemptuous tone of voice she answered: I
told you I was a writer.

  He grinned at her. I’ll give you a tip for next time you go on a date, he said. Mention in the conversation that you’re a celebrity.

  Thank you for the unsolicited dating advice. I’ll be sure to disregard it.

  What, are you annoyed now because we found you on the internet?

  Of course not, she said, I told you my name. I didn’t have to.

  For a few seconds he continued looking at her and then he shook his head and said: You’re weird.

  She laughed and said: How insightful. Why don’t you put that on my Wikipedia page?

  Danielle laughed then too. A little colour had come into Felix’s face. He turned away from Alice and said: Anyone can have one of those. You probably wrote it yourself.

  As if she were beginning to enjoy herself, Alice responded: No, just the books.

  You must think you’re very special, he said.

  What are you being so touchy about? said Danielle.

  I’m not, Felix replied. He handed the phone back to his friend and then stood leaning against the fridge, arms crossed. Alice was standing at the countertop just near him. Danielle looked at Alice and raised her eyebrows, but then the doorbell rang and Danielle went out to get it. One of the other women put on some music, and some of the men at the other end of the room started laughing about something. Alice said to Felix: If you’d like me to leave, I’ll go.