We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  We had been in the pub for half an hour when Johnson arrived, wearing patched 501s and a dirty T-shirt with a picture of a mole on the front of it. He came over to our table and began kicking morosely at the legs of Moscow’s chair. The little finger of his left hand was splinted and wrapped in a wad of bandage.

  “This is Ed,” Moscow told me, not looking at him.

  “Fuck off, Moscow,” Ed told her, not looking at me. He scratched his armpit and stared vaguely into the air above Moscow’s head. “I want my money back,” he said. Neither of them could think of anything to add to this, and after a pause he wandered off.

  “He’s always like that,” Moscow said. “You don’t want to pay any attention.” Later in the afternoon she said: “You’ll get on we’ll with Ed, though. You’ll like him. He’s a mad bastard.”

  “You say that about all the boys,” I said.

  In this case Moscow was right, because I had heard it not just from her, and later I would get proof of it anyway—if you can ever get proof of anything. Everyone said that Ed should be in a straightjacket. In the end, nothing could be arranged. Johnson was in a bad mood, and Moscow had to be up the Coast that week, on Canvey Island, to do some work on one of the cracking-plants there. There was always a lot of that kind of work, oil work, chemical work, on Canvey Island. “I haven’t time for him,” Moscow explained as she got up to go. “I’ll see you later, anyway,” she promised.

  As soon as she was gone, Ed Johnson came back and sat down in front of me. He grinned. “Ever done anything worth doing in your whole life?” he asked me. “Anything real?”

  *

  The MAX editor was right: since coring got popular, the roads had been deserted. I left EC1 and whacked the 190 up through Hackney until I got the Lea Valley reservoirs on my right like a splatter of moonlit verglas. On empty roads the only mistakes that need concern you are your own; every bend becomes a dreamy interrogation of your own technique. Life should be more like that. I made good time. Ed lived just back from Montagu Road, in a quiet street behind the Jewish Cemetery. He shared his flat with a woman in her early thirties whose name was Caitlin. Caitlin had black hair and soft, honest brown eyes. She and I were old friends. We hugged briefly on the doorstep. She looked up and down the street and shivered.

  “Come in,” she said. “It’s cold.”

  “You should wear a jumper.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re here,” she said. “Do you want some coffee?”

  Caitlin had softened the edges of Ed’s life, but less perhaps than either of them had hoped. His taste was still very minimal—white paint, ash floors, one or two items of furniture from Heals. And there was still a competition Klein mounted on the living room wall, its polished aerospace alloys glittering in the halogen lights.

  “Espresso,” I said.

  “I’m not giving you espresso at this time of night. You’ll explode.”

  “It was worth a try.”

  “Ed!” she called. “Ed! Mick’s here!”

  He didn’t answer.

  She shrugged at me, as if to say, “What can I do?” and went into the back room. I heard their voices but not what they were saying. After that she went upstairs. “Go in and see him,” she suggested when she came down again three or four minutes later. “I told him you were here.” She had pulled a Jigsaw sweater on over her Racing Green shirt and Levi’s, and fastened her hair back hastily with a dark brown velvet scrunchy.

  “That looks nice,” I said. “Do you want me to fetch him out?”

  “I doubt he’ll come.”

  The back room was down a narrow corridor. Ed had turned it into a bleak combination of office and storage. The walls were done with one coat of what builders call “obliterating emulsion” and covered with metal shelves. Chipped diving tanks hollow with the ghosts of exotic gases were stacked by the filing cabinet. His BASE chute spilled half out of its pack, yards of cold nylon a vile but exciting rose color—a color which made you want to be hurtling downward face-first screaming with fear until you heard the canopy bang out behind you and you knew you weren’t going to die that day (although you might still break both legs). The cheap beige carpet was strewn with high-access mess—hanks of graying static rope; a yellow bucket stuffed with tools; Ed’s Petzl stop, harness and knocked-about CPTs. Everything was layered with dust. The radiators were turned off. There was a bed made up in one corner. Deep in the clutter on the cheap white desk stood a 5-gig Mac with a screen to design industry specs. It was spraying Ed’s face with icy blue light.

  “Hi Ed.”

  “Hi Mick.”

  There was a long silence after that. Ed stared at the screen. I stared at his back. Just when I thought he had forgotten I was there, he said:

  “Fuck off and talk to Caitlin a moment.”

  “I brought us some beer.”

  “That’s great.”

  “What are you running here?”

  “It’s a game. I’m running a game, Mick.”

  Ed had lost weight since I last saw him. Though they retained their distinctive cabled structure, his forearms were a lot thinner. Without releasing him from anything it represented, the yoke of muscle had lifted from his shoulders. I had expected that. But I was surprised by how much flesh had melted off his face, leaving long vertical lines of sinew, fins of bone above the cheeks and at the corners of the jaw. His eyes were a long way back in his head. In a way it suited him. He would have seemed okay—a little tired perhaps; a little burned down, like someone who was working too hard—if it hadn’t been for the light from the display. Hunched in his chair with that splashing off him, he looked like a vampire. He looked like a junkie.

  I peered over his shoulder.

  “You were never into this shit,” I said.

  He grinned.

  “Everyone’s into it now. Why not me? Wanking away and pretending it’s sex.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  He looked down at himself.

  “It’s better than living,” he said.

  There was no answer to that.

  I went and asked Caitlin, “Has he been doing this long?”

  “Not long,” she said. “Have some coffee.”

  We sat in the L-shaped living area drinking decaffeinated Java. The sofa was big enough for Caitlin to curl up in a corner of it like a cat. She had turned the overhead lights off, tucked her bare feet up under her. She was smoking a cigarette. “It’s been a bloody awful day,” she warned me. “So don’t say a word.” She grinned wryly, then we both looked up at the Klein for a minute or two. Some kind of ambient music was issuing faintly from the stereo speakers, full of South American bird calls and bouts of muted drumming. “Is he winning?” she asked.

  “He didn’t tell me.”

  “You’re lucky. It’s all he ever tells me.”

  “Aren’t you worried?” I said.

  She smiled.

  “He’s still using a screen,” she said. “He’s not plugging in.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  “Yet,” she agreed equably. “Want more coffee? Or will you do me a favor?”

  I put my empty cup on the floor.

  “Do you a favor,” I said.

  “Cut my hair.”

  I got up and went to her end of the sofa. She turned away from me so I could release her hair from the scrunchy. “Shake it,” I said. She shook it. She ran her hands through it. Perfume came up; something I didn’t recognize. “It doesn’t need much,” I said. I switched the overhead light back on and fetched a kitchen chair. “Sit here. No, right in the light. You’ll have to take your jumper off.”

  “The good scissors are in the bathroom,” she said.

  Cut my hair. She had asked me that before, two or three days after she decided we should split up. I remembered the calm that came over me at the gentle, careful sound of the scissors, the way her hair felt as I lifted it away from the nape of her neck, the tenderness and fear because everything was changing around the two of us forever and somehow th
is quiet action signalized and blessed that. The shock of these memories made me ask:

  “How are you two getting on?”

  She lowered her head to help me cut. I felt her smile.

  “You and Ed always liked the same kind of girls,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I finished the cut, then lightly kissed the nape of her neck. “There,” I said. Beneath the perfume she smelled faintly of hypoallergenic soap and unscented deodorants. “No, Mick,” she said softly. “Please.” I adjusted the collar of her shirt, let her hair fall back round it. My hand was still on her shoulder. She had to turn her head at an awkward angle to look up at me. Her eyes were wide and full of pain. “Mick.” I kissed her mouth and brushed the side of her face with my fingertips. Her arms went round my neck, I felt her settle in the chair. I touched her breasts. They were warm, the cotton shirt was clean and cool. She made a small noise and pulled me closer. Just then, in the back room among the dusty air tanks and disused parachutes, Ed Johnson fell out of his chair and began to thrash about, the back of his head thudding rhythmically on the floor.

  Caitlin pushed me away.

  “Ed?” she called, from the passage door.

  “Help!” cried Ed.

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  Caitlin put her arm across the doorway and stared up at me calmly.

  “No,” she said.

  “How can you lift him on your own?”

  “This is me and Ed,” she said.

  “For God’s sake!”

  “It’s late, Mick. I’ll let you out, then I’ll go and help him.”

  At the front door I said:

  “I think you’re mad. Is this happening a lot? You’re a fool to let him do this.”

  “It’s his life.”

  I looked at her. She shrugged.

  “Will you be all right?” I said.

  When I offered to kiss her goodbye, she turned her face away.

  “Fuck off then, both of you,” I said.

  I knew which game Ed was playing, because I had seen the software wrapper discarded on the desk near his Mac. Its visuals were cheap and schematic, its values self-consciously retro. It was nothing like the stuff we sold off the MAX site, which was quite literally the experience itself, stripped of its consequences. You had to plug in for that: you had to be cored. This was just a game; less a game, even, than a trip. You flew a silvery V-shaped graphic down an endless V-shaped corridor, a notional perspective sometimes bounded by lines of objects, sometimes just by lines, sometimes bounded only by your memory of boundaries. Sometimes the graphic floated and mushed like a moth. Sometimes it traveled in flat vicious arcs at an apparent Mach 5. There were no guns, no opponent. There was no competition. You flew. Sometimes the horizon tilted one way, sometimes the other. You could choose your own music. It was a bleakly minimal experience. But after a minute or two, five at the most, you felt as if you could fly your icon down the perspective forever, to the soundtrack of your own life.

  It was quite popular.

  It was called Out There.

  *

  “Rock climbing is theater,” I once wrote.

  It had all the qualities of theater, I went on, but a theater-in-reverse:

  “In obedience to some devious vanished script, the actors abandon the stage and begin to scale the seating arrangements, the balconies and hanging boxes now occupied only by cleaning women.”

  “Oh, very deep,” said Ed Johnson when he read this. “Shall I tell you what’s wrong here? Eh? Shall I tell you?”

  “Piss off, Ed.”

  “If you fall on your face from a hundred feet up, it comes off the front of your head and you don’t get a second go. Next to that, theater is wank. Theater is flat. Theater is Suicide Coast.”

  Ed hated anywhere flat. “Welcome to the Suicide Coast,” he used to say when I first knew him. To start with, that had been because he lived in Canterbury. But it had quickly become his way of describing most places, most experiences. You didn’t actually have to be near the sea. Suicide Coast syndrome had caused Ed to do some stupid things in his time. One day, when he and Moscow still worked in roped-access engineering together, they were going up in the lift to the top of some shitty council high rise in Birmingham or Bristol, when suddenly Ed said:

  “Do you bet me I can keep the doors open with my head?”

  “What?”

  “Next floor! When the doors start to close, do you bet me I can stop them with my head?”

  It was Monday morning. The lift smelled of piss. They had been hand-ripping mastic out of expansion joints for two weeks, using Stanley knives. Moscow was tired, hung over, weighed down by a collection of CPTs, mastic guns and hundred-foot coils of rope. Her right arm was numb from repeating the same action hour after hour, day after day.

  “Fuck off, Ed,” she said.

  But she knew Ed would do it whether she took the bet or not.

  *

  Two or three days after she first introduced me to Ed, Moscow telephoned me. She had got herself a couple of weeks cutting out on Thamesmead Estate. “They don’t half work hard, these fuckers,” she said. We talked about that for a minute or two then she asked:

  “Well?”

  “Well what, Moscow?”

  “Ed. Was he what you were looking for, then? Or what?”

  I said that though I was impressed I didn’t think I would be able to write anything about Ed.

  “He’s a mad fucker, though, isn’t he?”

  “Oh he is,” I said. “He certainly is.”

  The way Moscow said “isn’t he” made it sound like “innie.”

  *

  Another thing I once wrote:

  “Climbing takes place in a special kind of space, the rules of which are simple. You must be able to see immediately what you have to lose; and you must choose the risk you take.”

  What do I know?

  I know that a life without consequences isn’t a life at all. Also, if you want to do something difficult, something real, you can’t shirk the pain. What I learned in the old days, from Ed and Moscow, from Gabe King, Justine Townsend and all the others who taught me to climb rock or jump off buildings or stay the right way up in a tube of pitch-dark water two degrees off freezing and two hundred feet under the ground, was that you can’t just plug in and be a star: you have to practice. You have to keep loading your fingers until the tendons swell.

  So it’s back to the Mile End wall, with its few thousand square feet of board and bolt-on holds, its few thousand cubic meters of emphysemic air through which one very bright ray of sun sometimes falls in the middle of the afternoon, illuminating nothing much at all. Back to the sound of the fan heater, the dust-filled Akai radio playing some mournful aggressive thing, and every so often a boy’s voice saying softly, “Oh shit,” as some sequence or other fails to work out. You go back there, and if you have to fall off the same ceiling move thirty times in an afternoon, that’s what you do. The mats give their gusty wheeze, chalk dust flies up, the fan heater above the Monkey House door rattles and chokes and flatlines briefly before puttering on.

  “Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I do this.”

  *

  Caitlin telephoned me.

  “Come to supper,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Mick, why?”

  “Because I’m sick of it.”

  “Sick of what?”

  “You. Me. Him. Everything.”

  “Look,” she said, “he’s sorry about what happened last time.”

  “Oh, he’s sorry.”

  “We’re both sorry, Mick.”

  “All right, then: I’m sorry, too.”

  There was a gentle laugh at the other end.

  “So you should be.”

  I went along all the deserted roads and got there at about eight, to find a brand-new motorcycle parked on the pavement outside the house. It was a Kawasaki Ninja. Its fairing had been removed, to give it the look of a ’60s cafe racer,
but no one was fooled. Even at a glance it appeared too hunched, too short-coupled: too knowing. The remaining plastics shone with their own harsh inner light.

  Caitlin met me on the doorstep. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me. “Mm,” she said. She was wearing white tennis shorts and a soft dark blue sweatshirt.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said.

  She smiled and pushed me away.

  “My hands smell of garlic,” she said.

  Just as we were going inside, she turned back and nodded at the Kawa.

  “That thing,” she said.

  “It’s a motorcycle, Caitlin.”

  “It’s his.”

  I stared at her.

  “Be enthusiastic,” she said. “Please.”

  “But—”

  “Please?”

  *

  The main course was penne with mushrooms in an olive and tomato sauce. Ed had cooked it, Caitlin said, but she served. Ed pushed his chair over to the table and rubbed his hands. He picked his plate up and passed it under his nose. “Wow!” he said. As we ate, we talked about this and that. The Kawa was behind everything we said, but Ed wouldn’t mention it until I did. Caitlin smiled at us both. She shook her head as if to say: “Children! You children!” It was like Christmas, and she was the parent. The three of us could feel Ed’s excitement and impatience. He grinned secretively. He glanced up from his food at one or both of us; quickly back down again. Finally, he couldn’t hold back any longer.

  “What do you think, then?” he said. “What do you think, Mick?”

  “I think this is good pasta,” I said. “For a cripple.”

  He grinned and wiped his mouth.

  “It’s not bad,” he said, “is it?”

  “I think what I like best is the way you’ve let the mushrooms take up a touch of sesame oil.”

  “Have some more. There’s plenty.”

  “That’s new to me in Italian food,” I said. “Sesame oil.”

  Ed drank some more beer.

  “It was just an idea,” he said.

  “You children,” said Caitlin. She shook her head. She got up and took the plates away. “There’s ice cream for pudding,” she said over her shoulder just before she disappeared. When I was sure she was occupied in the kitchen I said: