‘Except you were supposed to be exhilarated.’
And then Nancy takes her turn, chooses ‘speed learning’, picks up a software manual and is asleep within seconds.
Later, we pipe a little caffeine while Dave tells us the story of his six-toed cat, Arnie, who is a direct descendant of an identical six-toed cat found stowed away on the Mayflower. After that we sit around in benign but awkward silence; then Dave, smiling, makes his excuses and gets up to go. He’s picked up the thought waves passing between me and Nance and feels excluded. Besides, there really is no follow-up to Arnie, the six-toed feline Pilgrim Father, is there?
SUNDAY
Unwelcome thoughts of home crowd round the breakfast table.
Sorting through Nancy’s clippings box I find the following:
1980s see 19,346 US teen murders, 18,365 suicides.
150,000 young Americans on missing persons register
20% teenage unemployment rises to 40% for African Americans
One in four young African American males in prison, on probation, parole
At lunch, an uneasiness sets in, somehow connected to Dave’s visit.
‘Don’t all those gloomy statistics about kids get you down?’
‘Uh huh.’ My friend pushes aside a half-eaten pop tart, takes some ice cream out of the freezer. It occurs to me that Nancy’s clippings are as much a part of Nancy as her fragile insouciance, whereas for me they’re just statistics strings.
‘So why d’you keep them?’
A bottle of olives appears on the table, followed by some Oreo cookies. She tries a spoonful of ice cream, an olive, a bite of pop tart. Looks unsteady.
‘Pandora’s Box.’ A muffled sound as the other half of the pop tart follows an olive. She scrapes some Oreo filling onto her teeth.
‘It’s my only weapon against the bio-clock. Just to concentrate on what a shitty world it is out there for kids.’ I watch her removing an olive stone and inserting a spoonful of ice-cream.
‘Nancy. You’re not …?’
‘Are you insane?’ she looks at me with her eyes in that crepey position. ‘I don’t even know a friendly sperm bank.’
I remind her of Dave.
‘Oh yeah, like the world really needs another programmer geek in diapers.’
‘That’s harsh.’
Nancy pauses to think for a moment.
‘You’re right. And anyway, it’s untrue. The world needs all the programmer geeks in diapers it can get right now.’
Muir Woods has become a weekend routine. At Nancy’s request a Japanese tourist takes a photo of us marking off the start of the digital age on the slice of redwood trunk, at the very edge where the bark begins to flake away. Climbing up onto the plateau, a weight of sadness falls. I look out over the ocean towards Japan, trying to think myself back to the blue of that wide water. Almost before I’m aware of it, salt tears have begun to scratch at my contact lenses.
It dawns on me that I’m not a part of the grand technological experiment that is Northern California right now, nor a part either of those older dreams it has come to symbolize. I don’t belong to the redwoods, to the frozen yoghurt stands or the piney air. I’ve found myself a project here precisely because I am not from here. There is so much about this new digital world that is alien to me, but utterly familiar to Nancy. I am deflated and left behind, made spare by the sheer pace and scale of the change. I feel like a dazzled rabbit caught in headlights, a mere witness to the ballooning din and flux that is digital America, a self-indulgent stand-in. And as I watch Nancy striding across the plateau towards the woods again, I see she’s given me a vivid fragment of her life to take away and make flourish somewhere else. And I’m overcome by the stillness of understanding. What Nancy has known for a while and has patiently waited for me to discover is that the time has come for me to return to England, though that is where I least belong.
II: Home & Away (#ulink_f6bebb42-db33-5979-8374-9208bd05edcc)
LONDON, ENGLAND, SATURDAY
Lost in the blizzard of youth culture
Saturday night has begun early in the Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus. Samantha, fourteen, breath as short as a running dog, scrapes back the rope of her hair and turns to say something. Behind her, in the belly of the arcade, a swell of pubescent boys fuels the games machines and fills the room with the jangle of defeat and Samantha’s words are obliterated in the greater noise.
Today I’ll come clean. I’ll confess. I feel lost in the blizzard of youth culture.
Samantha, Samantha, oh please tell me do.
How shall I be young again, as young and hip as you?
We break a path across the floor, unnoticed. Me under cover of her.
‘Chopping through the enemy,’ says Samantha. She is through to round four of the Streetfighter II South of England Turbo Tournament. The only girl. This is what it takes to rise through the ranks, according to Samantha: ‘Guts and loads of practice.’
We remove to a bank of Streetfighter consoles pitched up against the back wall of the arcade. Samantha leans into the central deck, opens her callused baby hands, flips the supple wrists, stretches the finger clumps and lets them fall onto the joystick like a final act of homecoming. She closes her eyes for a moment, entertaining some thought, then smiles.
‘Double-jointed, ambidextrous Streetfighting champion,’ she says of herself, not having won the championship yet, but having ambitions.
And so there I am, loading tokens into a Streetfighter deck, about to lose to some peppery girl almost half my age while she waits nerves akimbo for the call-up.
‘I’ve actually never played Streetfighter,’ I say, suddenly aware of how it feels to be one of those antique judges for whom the Rolling Stones is a description of a chain gang.
‘Yeah, I can tell,’ Samantha replies. ‘But that’s all right.’ She winks at me and pushes her hair back again. ‘I ain’t gonna hammer you straight off. Wouldn’t be sporting, would it?’
Apparently Sam and I inhabit the same real-life world, but you wouldn’t know it.
Outside in the foyer a line of Streetfighter decks has been set up for the competition, alongside a sound system, a string of mikes and an outside broadcast unit. A computerized scoreboard hangs suspended from the escalator. About fifty kids, boys, are lined up along the row of decks, hands on joysticks, arms beating out the moves of the final leg of the third round. Behind a cordon another six hundred teens await their call-up for the fourth round. And behind them, so distant you can’t see their faces, another eight or nine hundred folk watching, tip-toeing to catch glimpses of their sons, brothers, nephews, grandsons, stepsons, whatever.
A boy with pudding-bowl hair detonates from the shadow of the arcade, looks Samantha almost in the eye, mumbles:
‘I got fucking mashed, man, and now I ain’t got no more money.’
‘You see my pockets bulging, man?’ asks Samantha in return, hard, with her hands on her thighs, calluses pressed in.
‘This is my brother. Jez.’ Her eyes fill with mock impatience.
‘Sisterly love,’ grins the brother, hair part-concealing a face crazy with electric messages.
Sam and her brother came specially for the tournament, but Jez got knocked out in the second round by a Chinese boy from an arcade in Oxford Street. She hadn’t seen him since. She says he’s not a good loser, but it’s his own fault. He gets too cocky and doesn’t practise enough.
‘Why don’t you play and I’ll pay.’
‘Oh no, man, you don’t have to do that.’ Samantha’s voice sings high with guilty insincerity.
