Not From Above!

by Alexander Mayor

  The front of the coffee shop would work just as before. Let them come. Gaggia machine, pastries, moderately ludicrous descriptions of bean flavours scribbled on a blackboard. Tick, tick, tick. But then as one walks farther into the seating area to the rear, things get a lot more interesting…

  The ceiling will gradient from the original dull beige to a painted trompe l’oeil resembling nothing less than a late August sunset over Jaipur. Birdsong will gradually be discerned from recessed speakers. Actual birds are also encouraged to frolic, entering the space via a nut-and-pipe system that connects to the rear. (Seen you and raised you, Owl Café.) The tile flooring gives way to fake grass and box hedging as the punter, muffin and enormocino in hand, wanders back in search of seating and succour. The transition is deliberately provocative. ‘Are we inside or out?’ ask the coffee-curious. ‘This café makes me nervous,’ a woman in her early thirties will say. ‘Why are there no seats? And why is there a man hanging in the sky holding a bunch of flowers, Mummy?’ Ah, the questing minds of innocent children, always straight to the heart of the matter.

  Your questions are salient and timely, young scamps. For ’tis I, in the harness in which I hang, made of fabric coloured to appear invisible against the ‘sky’, in which I hang for four to six hours daily, wearing a pale blue suit, holding a bunch of flowers, feet 2 inches above the floor, one foot forward, as if I’ve stepped out of the sky. I’m told it’s terribly affecting. I toyed with calling it ‘Love From Above’ but that felt too on the nose, so ‘The Limitless Potential for Encounter With One’s True Object of Desire’ it is. Long titles show you’re serious.

  But back to all the doing that must first be done! The build phase commences on Thursday and, all being well, the scene painters will begin the sky fresco in early February. I have to tell you, I can’t wait.

  A smudgy orangey six-by-four photo sits above my fridge, a relic of when photos were seldom and papery. Ten children are sat at a long table covered in coloured card, industriously crayoning under the watchful eye of their teacher.

  ‘It’s not what you paint, it’s how you look that makes you an artist.’ That’s what Miss Rogers, our art teacher, had said. I loved her, of course, without knowing what that meant yet, feeling it instinctively. The interest she took in our class was so honest and delightful. She had the carefree charm of the funny people we watched in sitcoms while we waited for our hair to dry before bedtime. I might have been only 10 years old, but I somehow knew she had provided us an adult truth more far-reaching than any of the stern policies our own parents had thus far shared.

  We did our best work for Miss Rogers, each of us hoping to win her affections with works that brought innovations of all kinds to the staid world of paints, felt-tips and crepe paper. She didn’t know it, but she was a legislator: she’d made the rules, with a careless mussing of our hair in reward for paintings variously ambitious, garish and tacky. Our destinies were chosen, our audiences set.

  I gazed over at the two lads who were knocking out part of the front wall of the flat. I’d always hated the gloominess of my little basement digs. I felt instinctively that Miss Rogers would approve of these alterations and preparations. Soon everyone would be able to look anew, see afresh. And, dare I say, learn?

  My upstairs neighbour, Roger, had voiced concerns about the structural effects, but I’d put him at ease. No dug-out oligarch’s disco dungeon, this! And the architects had assured everyone that replacing the front of the apartment with reinforced glass would add value to the whole block. I assured them it was modernism and upgrades, dialling down the performance-art dimension. Let those dice fall where they may, but on another day. Who knows how many will actually care to linger and drink in the view of this, the world’s very first ‘Romantopticon’? Surely better not to create anxieties about merely potential threats at this stage. I gave the two busy workers a cheery wave and made a facial expression of hearty goodwill and common purpose.

  Wednesday morning was all London plain, unending grey sheets pulled firmly down like blinds. I had just emerged from the tube at Old Street roundabout. The station, despite years of surrounding gentrification, remained a reminder of the car era’s bury-the-pedestrians principle, all grim tunnels and dank walkways.

  But grey’s a great background for colour, I find, and 10 minutes’ brisk walk east and the old mood had lifted as I approached the cool canalside office that was my destination.

  The thing about digital stuff is, you’ve got to be a revolutionary. There’s simply no point creating your own version of the Jammie Dodger or the custard cream. Your new e-morsel must redefine the very contours and topography of biscuitdom.

  This all-or-nothing quality was something I found terribly appealing. After all, what was my own project if not a my-way-is-the-entire-highway attempt to reset what a sloth-like culture called ‘romance’? The team at Unthk embodied the anything-goes peppy get-go I thrive on, so I knew we’d be on to a winner with the app part of the equation.

  Existing body-toning photo apps are strictly for your entry-level developers. Sure, you can project an ideal, gloss up your hair and thin that paunch, but I had something more… comprehensive in mind.

  The algorithm Edward and team have come up with is nothing if not merciless in its commitment to creativity. Its ambitions for me are as high as those that I would hope for from myself. Higher, if anything. Samuel, the fresh-faced developer leading my highly agile team, handed me a bundle of print-outs.

  ‘Print-outs! How analogue!’ and I softly punched his upper arm.

  ‘Yeah! Still, you’re gonna want to see it all laid out, I reckon…’ and he started to arrange the A4 sheets out on the four old school desks that formed the office’s main communal workspace. The logic was simple yet overwhelming, imperious yet almost unbearable. One app, yet millions of profiles to choose from, all of them somehow me. One of those ideas where success is the moment someone yells at a pub table, ‘Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?’ Well, quite.

  Together we reviewed the algorithm’s first flush of creativity:

  #

  Name

  Height

  Salary

  Location

  Hair

  Fun Fact

  Picture Props

  1

  Ralph Peat

  168.6

  £22k

  Keswick

  Brown

  Freckles

  Tank helmet

  2

  Jez Bump

  172.4

  £40k

  Chiswick

  Blond

  Coke habit

  Coldplay wristband

  3

  Gary Partling

  169.5

  £150k

  NYC

  Mousey

  Doesn’t know own middle name

  ‘Blessed emoji’ t-shirt

  4

  Alan Framp

  157.8

  £N/A

  Hove

  Toupee

  Can limbo

  Complicated briefcase

  5

  Chris Tools

  182.0

  £250k

  Antibes

  Bald

  Still buys CDs

  Leatherman tool

  6

  Clive Watson

  165

  £50k

  Ipswich

  Loose perm

  LARPing

  Inflatable sword

  7

  Terry Sparks

  190.4

  £29k

  Glossop

  Side-parting

  Antiques fetish

  Pictured in armour

  The app had really got into the swing over the weekend, probing every nook and cranny of human variability, its hound-like nose truffling for the good stuff.

  I confess, in just a few minutes, in their wildly different ways, I’d fallen in love with them all. What a pageant of manhood! Such a palette of gentlemanly possibilities, each wit
h my face reimagined with every tolerable twist of genetic and social status. Once we hit a million variations (Wednesday around 8.47pm, if progress continued at the current clip), this thing would be ready for the world. But would the world, for its part, be ready for this #AllofMe era?

  You can always see farther, so keep looking – that’s the mantra. Together, by detailed plans and programmed actions, we can divine and define the chemistry of our intentions. That sounds a bit perfume ad, sure, but I’m paraphrasing from that historian’s TED talk. Ultimate awareness born of mathematical certainty and sheer hard work.

  These efforts aren’t gimmicks. Many people make that mistake, don’t beat yourself up about it. I’ve just found a way to live in the present. That may sound obvious, but it isn’t. Most people are either 10 minutes behind the now, or stuck in the foreshadow of hopes based on where two further decades might take them. For all the artistry (and computational expense) involved, my approach keeps me absolutely bang up to date. No true artist cares about ‘legacy’ – your gift is to be in the present moment. Simply, I am all of me.

  Sometimes my head aches for days. I call it the pain of plans, the weight of wonder(ing). On these occasions, I will retreat to the sofa bed in the lounge, farthest from the noise of the street, to recuperate. Absolutely no caffeine, head steady under duck-down pillow, a light duvet, and lie inert until it all passes. (I keep a notebook and pencil under the coffee table, but I’ve never had an idea worthy of the name in this state.)

  To be alive is to be alert to everything everyone else might have missed, to be sure. And though I (we) detest the time lost to reverie, there’s always the delicious possibility that the avenues of the mind that we wander down in slumber might take us somewhere new.

  I will see you everywhere. You will see me everywhere. We will smile and everything about us worth caring about will be registered, swallowed and understood. For we are becoming inevitable, you and I. As I write these words, even with the gathering heat at the temples, I both know this to be true and almost unbearable. What wonder awaits.

  Availability

  I walk into many unfamiliar buildings. Double glass doors at street level, a bored out-of-hours security guard, a book into which I will scribble my name though neither of us can foresee a situation in which this information will be referred to. These unremarkable buildings often bear names that are poorly thought-out stabs at grandiosity. Regal House. The Summit Building. Temerity Tower. Okay, I made that one up, but you get the idea.

  It’s a walk-on part, of course. And you don’t need a lot of training to pencil your name in the book and find the lifts – they’re located with an insistent regularity, perhaps to prepare you for the many other consistent features of the modern office job. As an outsider on the inside I’ve developed the ability to look at home among any combination of rounded-edge ersatz modernist office furniture. You walk at a confident speed directly forwards, letting your peripheral vision establish your relative position to the kitchen, toilets, meeting rooms and, worse-case scenario, ‘ideas lounge’. There’s a point where nonchalance and indifference meet in the middle of the graph – that’s the bit to aim for.

  The magazines on the coffee table vary depending on the building’s prevailing inhabitants. Nobody picks up magazines any more, of course, but I find them interesting, a little window into the local customs, wisdoms, the royalty and the rotters of this or that particular community. Cover star Margaret has encouraged 30 co-workers to plant a garden on the roof of her company’s headquarters. Her smile is appealing, but she looks a little distant. I wonder if her own flat has a garden?

  Soon a door opens and we gather to begin. The facilitator is rummaging among his notes. It’s not very convincing, but part of the drama in which we must all play our regular roles. The paper is already scribbled on with crossings through or completely blank. But they all do this, you see. While you sit around a table trying to simultaneously suss out the other participants’ level of knowledge, ambient sanity and potential threat to your own largely imaginary credentials, the session convener will feign interest in something on the desk. A laptop will be toyed with, head dipped, to ensure there are just a few seconds or even a minute in which to establish the required state of nature in the room, some sort of level playing field between the leader and the led. ‘I have gathered you all here this evening…’

  It’s always more or less the same, despite the subject at hand and the intentional randomness of the participants. During the pre-task we have already self-identified using tick boxes, averred interests in ‘x’ and ‘y’, given assurances that our bona fides are intact with regard to wage, occupation, star sign and past experience. Now, it is show time.

  The city has many economies. Daily sales of products, clothing, food, are the obvious ones, of course, captured in pored-over charts of demand and supply that are usually presented as a fair picture of the nation’s beating pulse.

  Then there are the under-table traders, contra-legal professionals and vice-sourcers. But in a way these are just as obvious and necessary, darker but just as timeless functions of the city’s emotional matrix. For to make Friday night ultra-peppy, please to dial Jules, Zeppo, ‘Freddie’, ‘H’.

  But somehow more obscured are we labourers of the edges. We’re performing strange, shifting, transactional roles. Ones that underpin long-nurtured dreams and ambitions for which the city is both booster and detractor, fertiliser and desert. Leaflet distributor. Call-centre occupant. Out-of-work actor/in-work historical torture re-enactor. And then, of course, there’s market research.

  This, my new world, seems entirely populated by mittel people, usually in mid-life, available mid-week. We’re valued for our education and professionalism, yet somehow motivated by small envelopes containing untaxable denominations, grounded and established, yet able to mobilise trending opinions at a moment’s notice.

  I started doing it when the session guitar gigs came to an abrupt halt after three years of drinking away the goodwill of some nice people who were actually paying alright, now I look back on it. I like to think of it as a return to school drama productions. I tend to don the suit I got for Spider’s wedding – a costume always adds to the performance. Maybe I’m not quite a gumshoe, but in case pop music comes back begging, I thought it might be worth using a nom de plume, and thus ‘Harry Banks’ was born. A bit stolid, but all solid.

  I get a call from Eleanor, which I’m pretty sure is her real name, to establish a few basics, even though we both know that I’m yessing-up to propositions that can’t possibly be true because we agreed to their counterfactuals only last week. Purchasing and procurement experience – check. Familiarity with barrel lengths – yup. Grasp of kill percentages and destruction dynamics in built-up areas – sure thing. It never seems to affect my eligibility on the day, though, so that’s pretty sweet.

  I didn’t finish my degree, but I did read a lot in tour buses as we trundled slowly across the matrix of Welcome Breaks that define a musician’s England. There’s time to talk around subjects and you soak up radio phone-ins, the tiny details that drive local news, the passingly solved problem of other minds.

  Also – total winner this – the previous tenant of my little shared flat in Archway never cancelled his subscription to The Journal of Project Management, so I flip through that for notes on mood and style. It’s a perfect, specification-free, lorem ipsum job – no one, but no one, ever asks for details once you’ve uttered the words ‘I’m a project manager.’ Bingo!

  I got started with the small stuff. I mean, it’s dead easy to have opinions about Nespresso coffee makers, LCD TVs or an energy company’s iffy use of a lovable penguin in an ad campaign. ‘Bring it on!’ I thought. Two hours of opinioneering (okay, I made that up) for sixty pounds in a brown envelope, plus it gets you out of the house; you’re meeting people, all those things that are supposed to be good for you.

  And sometimes we’re not just opinion providers; we become a kind of jury. A disparate rag-t
ag bunch who’ve been convened to save the world from some really awful ideas. There was the small group of guys who had to assess four potential ’creative routes’ for a male-targeted mint breath spray called ‘Ice Me’. That one got ugly. Or the time myself, a child psychologist called Esther and a novelist called Steve ganged up to destroy five separate adverts for ‘Addy’, an energy-bill-obsessed, deal-lovin’ animated elephant who’s always lookin’ out for you. You’re welcome, world! (Somehow the salad bar chain Tossed was green-lit in the teeth of our delectably well-articulated objections. You can’t win them all.)

  You could call me (Harry) the opinioniser, the thoughterator, the insightifier. I find I read a lot more these days too. Sometimes I download demo software to get a feel for the professional life, and I now use an online diary to ‘time manage’; it all adds to the quality of the performance and the texture of the feedback.

  My double Harry is a bit of an overachiever, though I admit I’ve a soft spot for him. The beautiful Chinese girlfriend Jin-Li does something impressive for IBM in Beijing and they’re both about to invest in some rather nice property in east London.

  And Harry’s had some great jobs, especially when you consider that he’s only 36. That’s kind of the perfect age to be in a city like London. You’ve long built on educated foundations, you’ve been around, travelled, had fun with night people and started to think a little longer-term. At 36 you can meet the eyes of a 52-year-old future you, whilst still delivering just-credible opinions on the latest fads to the twenny-summn’ brigade. Your consumption patterns form powerful stories that people will pay for. Thirty-six, I’m telling you, just stick with that.