The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  Looking for a way to get a couple of weeks alone with Eve, I’d remembered Gliomach’s challenge. He was vastly amused when I said we were going to come hunting for him in Ireland.

  ‘Okay, bring a laptop. I’ll leave clues for you every night on the Butterfly Effect and you can tell me how you’re getting on.’

  My name is that of an old Aussie fast bowler,

  I publish the Beano than which is none droller,

  I was a commie before Marx was a brother,

  I built a tower in Dunmanus plus one other,

  Line up my towers from shore to shore

  And when you have done that I’ll tell you more.

  And that was it. No real name, no address, only a string of inscrutable lyrics and strange attempts to be helpful: Get plastered in Cronin’s, they do a lovely drop, ask Sullivan about the towers.

  I find Eve on deck, trying to scrape her hair under a scarf, stray bright strands whipping in the wind.

  ‘I knew I was mad to come.’

  ‘You’ll be fine once we get ashore. We’ll be in Cork by . . .’

  ‘Bear, don’t talk. Not now. It’s eight o’clock in the morning and I feel as if I’ve been up all night drinking ouzo.’

  She goes to the rail and leans over. Where the ship’s metal hull smacks down onto the waves, the water is smashed to lace beneath the surface in silent explosions that fizzle up to the top as foam, and are rapidly left behind.

  ‘Shall I get you a coffee?’

  Her head twists to stare at me. Wearing sunglasses, travelling incognito so I can’t see her eyes. Somewhere close by, a stomach rolls over in surrender.

  ‘What am I doing? When my friends ask where we went I’ll say, “Bear asked me along on a quest to look for a man he’d never met, whose name we didn’t know and who could be anywhere in Ireland.’”

  ‘Not anywhere. We know he lives out west.’

  ‘They’ll say, “Who was this mystery man and why was it so important to find him?” And I’ll say, “I’ve no idea. In fact I know virtually nothing of what my husband has been doing for the last several years.’”

  ‘But this is why we’re here. So I can explain.’

  ‘Bear, listen to yourself. You’ve just said that we are here so you can explain why we’re here.’

  As we edge down the crowded stairs to the car deck, we hear a mother talking to her small daughter. ‘Fock, it was that rough, the fockin puppy’ll be plastered all over the fockin roof.’

  Grabbing the girl

  ‘What did you say?’ The Land Rover roars and chugs up an Irish hill. Two hours after disembarking from the ferry, I am still queasy.

  ‘You were addicted,’ says Eve. ‘I kept telling you so. You used to deny it. So what’s changed?’

  ‘Did I ever deny it? Maybe I did. I don’t think I realised . . .’

  ‘Didn’t realise?’ she says. ‘Are you serious? Have you forgotten the time we were driving to London, you stopped for petrol and said you were going to molest the girl behind the till?’

  I do remember this. I’d been playing Shades for about a year and was probably spending four or five hours a night on the game. I had begun to think in game commands. Eve would say something and I’d reply, ‘Nod’. She’d ask if I wanted a coffee and I’d say ‘Grin.’ I began referring to myself in the third person (in multi-user games you type ‘ fancies another glass of wine’ and the game fills in ‘ fancies another glass of wine’).

  ‘Bear thinks this crème brulée is magnificent,’ I’d announce to Eve’s embarrassment, at the dinner parties to which we were decreasingly frequently invited. I would use net abbreviations to people who didn’t understand them.

  ‘Bear disagrees. IMHO that won’t work. The answer AFAIK . . .’

  One evening Eve and I were on our way to visit a Shades friend, either Gawain or Branwell, when the fuel warning light came on. At the next service station I pulled in and said to Eve, ‘Car needs a restam. Going to grab the girl.’

  Those reality failures were warnings which I ignored, even after congestive heart failure dropped my stam to near zero. But it’s easy to miss such warnings, so quickly does one learn to accept the weirdness of cyberspace. Ah Eve, I never dared tell you about the time when, shortly after Bear gained immortality, I came across a car shunted sideways up a bank in a narrow lane south of Croydon. There were two shaken women inside. They said they’d swerved to avoid someone racing down the hill. The other driver had failed to stop. I can’t explain why, but I immediately read the situation as a scene from Shades. Two novice players had fallen into a crumbly-sided pit at Mocad Lane South, and were yelling for help. As an immortal, I could use my powers to rescue them. I towed their car off the bank, but its front wing was buckled. It couldn’t be driven. I lent my mobile phone to one of the women so she could call her husband. Then I drove the two of them to a coffee shop where they could keep warm until he arrived. They were profusely grateful. ‘How lucky we were to meet a real gentleman,’ one of them said. I left thinking, ‘Actually, ladies, you have just met a Shades Wizard.’

  A voice in my head instantly retorted, ‘Forty-one years old. Such puerility, how is it possible at your age?’

  ‘I begged you to give up,’ says Eve, still brooding. ‘You should have stopped and if you’d really cared about me and the children you would have. You knew how destructive it was. Apart from anything, the bills were crippling us. But oh no, what did you do? You dragged your oldest friend into your beastly fantasy world. Lori phoned me and we compared notes on being modem widows. I could have bloody well killed you.’

  ‘But Eve, I didn’t have to drag Todd into cyberspace. He was already there. He just hadn’t got there by modem.’

  The barber of Fakenham

  One day I get an excited call from Todd (guru-to-be of The Butterfly Effect), green-fingered grower of five-fingered leaves, and in the whole history of the universe one of my favourite people. There’s something deeply good about someone who makes tea in a teapot. Todd has had an experience which he describes to me over the phone. I am so taken with it that I ask him to repeat his story so I can write it down.

  Todd drives in to Fakenham, a small, unremarkable Norfolk market town, for a haircut. On his way to park the car he sees Fanthorpe’s Barber Shop, which he has never noticed before. He doesn’t . . . (at this point there is an indecipherable squiggle in my notes – a word that looks like, but which of course cannot be, ‘ayqlecal’). Todd, anyhow, does not ayqlecal because Fanthorpe’s looks expensive. Too ornate. The name on the window is done in antique letters of bottle green outlined in gold. He goes off to look for another barber but, mysteriously, can’t find one. An hour later he is standing on an unfamiliar pavement . . . outside Fanthorpe’s. Struck by the coincidence, Todd notices that beside the door is a sandwich board on which is painted, in sturdy letters of fishingboat blue, the motto ‘HAIRCUT SIR? STEP INSIDE NOW’.

  The sign makes the shop seem a great deal more friendly, so Todd does as it asks. He pushes open the door. As he steps inside he is aware that whatever had been going on in there has stopped. The very silence draws him further. There is no turning back. The barber, an eccentric-looking man whose fair hair curls wildly round his face, says some words of greeting which instantly put Todd at his ease. He feels utterly at home. He feels that he knows the place, yet there is no sense of déjà vu. Todd sits down and immediately a banter springs up between him and the barber. It’s not the usual haircutting banter. It is funny, uplifting. Todd tells me, ‘I don’t know this bloke from Adam, yet there I am, behaving as if he’s an old mate.’

  The barber asks Todd how he wants it (his hair). Will he prefer it shaved, or squared off at the back? Todd chooses square.

  ‘Oh, oh, square back?’ cries the barber.

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with a square back?’ Todd asks.

  ‘Not a lot,’ cries the barber, ‘Very popular style . . . in the sixties.’ This reply sets Todd’s senses reeling. He has di
fficulty framing words to convey his exaltation. Meanwhile, the amazing barber is doing all kinds of other things. He seizes the phone and speaks rapidly into it. But Todd notices that he has not dialled a number.

  A dapper old gentleman is sweeping up hair off the floor. The barber says to him something like, ‘Will you take this to Norwich?’ and the old fellow replies in a cultivated accent, ‘Michael, I really think that’s going a bit far.’

  Todd has the strongest feeling that this exchange is not a real conversation but a piece of theatre, possibly even staged for his benefit. It feels like a knowing and witty attempt to demonstrate the surreality of everyday life, like one of Castaneda’s follies. (Does he mean Castaneda, or Don Juan? Castaneda’s home page on the web is in Spanish and offers ‘tensegrity’ courses in Mexico City. Todd and Lori, when they visit us a few weeks later, bring the video: sombre, terrifying women making tigerish clawing movements, aggressive and utterly humourless. Eve is much taken with it.)

  Without warning the old fellow leans on his broom and says in an impassioned voice, ‘Don’t let Billy know I’m here. I don’t want to go and see Billy. I don’t want to go and do his fucking car.’

  The effing and blinding is strange from such a nice old man. It is just one of a series of such non-sequiturs which convinces Todd that these performances are not, after all, intended for his benefit, but are genuine dislocations of reality. They are happening in this place because this place is unlike the outside world.

  At some point the barber remarks that he has opened up a bodypiercing unit. Todd joshes him about which parts can be kebabed.

  ‘We can pierce you wherever you like,’ says the barber, ‘but nothing below the belt.’

  ‘What about a nipple?’

  ‘Make an appointment,’ is the unerring reply.

  He hands Todd a card which bears the number of the woman who does the piercing. Astonishingly, the card uses exactly the same graphic of the sun as has been chosen by Todd and a friend for invitations to their Solstice 2000 party.

  With coincidences arriving thick and fast the barber plunges his strong fingers into Todd’s hair and begins to massage into his scalp a nautical-smelling lotion. It is a magic elixir, the man explains. Very expensive. It contains a large amount of rum which has been left by John, or Gervase, or else Harvey. The barber rattles off the names as if Todd should know who these people are. And Todd feels that he should; does know, has merely forgotten. At last he pays and leaves. As he steps through the door back into the real world, Todd realises that he is elated.

  Peacemarchers

  When did I first accept that I was an addict? It must have been shortly after Todd’s epiphany, as though his barber had served up an hors d’oeuvre (or as Keet calls it, a hars doofer), a taste of things to come. My own life was by then already pretty strange. The friends I was making, both real and imaginary, were increasingly eccentric and surreal occurrences were becoming routine, but I didn’t notice, because I was used to deranged realities. Then five bizarre things happened in as many days. It was shocking to realise that four of the five had their roots in cyberspace – as if the weird characters of my inner life had staged a breakout and were roaming at liberty, like dangerous lunatics on the lam, in the unready landscapes of the real world. I say real, but by then it was no longer possible to distinguish real life from fantasy. This was when I admitted that Old Mother Jarly had been right when he predicted that I’d end up ‘using’ . . .

  Eve says, ‘Listening to you makes me angrier.’

  After this there is silence for a few miles.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘What?’ says Eve.

  Ahead of us – we’re overtaking fast – are what look uncannily and impossibly like . . . the Land Rover shoots past. In the mirror, tiny figures are receding. Eve, turned to me, has not seen them. Am I imagining this? I must have made a mistake. Amazing how the mind instantly invents all kinds of far-fetched explanations when it cannot accept what it has actually seen. We drive on in silence. It seems an age before the next junction. I ease the car off and swing it around.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I have to check that they were real.’

  She sighs and closes her eyes.

  ‘This whole trip is ridiculous.’

  ‘You didn’t see them? It’s uncanny. Look, aren’t we in Ireland? Didn’t we get off the ferry this morning? Half an hour ago didn’t we pass through Waterford? Pinch me if I’m dreaming, but isn’t this the N22 to Cork?’

  Hammering back the way we’d come, a hedge obscures the view of the opposite carriageway. It’s several miles before we can do another U-turn. We should see them again soon, if they exist.

  ‘Well, you certainly saw something’, she says.

  Ahead of us the tiny dots are bobbing along the road. I slow the car and crawl up behind a group of strangely clad people walking in single file along the road to Cork.

  ‘How odd,’ says Eve. ‘They look just like Indian villagers.’

  The round blobs resolve to turbans bundled on top of heads, soft watermelon mounds such as you see in Rajasthan.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘they are Indian villagers.’

  The cloths draped round their hips, the ends loosely held in swinging hands, are dhotis, loincloths of the sort Mahatma Gandhi (to Churchill’s great scandal) wore to Buckingham Palace for his audience with King George VI. They wear rustic waistcoats, below which long shirt tails hang. The only incongruous detail of their garb (perhaps, given its fundamental incongruity, the only normal thing) is that their shiny brown shins are tucked into woollen socks and stout walking shoes. What business an Indian villager can have to transact amongst Irish meadows, I cannot conjecture: but possibly they are on their way to Cork, about fifteen miles distant.

  There are eight marchers, led by an upright and majestic old man. We stop a few yards ahead and wait for them to catch up. They come to Eve’s window and crowd round it. Their dark eyes roam over us, our clothes, the inside of the car. I have the strangest feeling that they think we are exotic.

  ‘You are from?’ The classic Indian opening.

  ‘We’ve just come over from England.’

  Murmurs of approval. ‘Oh, he speaks Urdu.’

  ‘Originally, you are from?’ asks the old man.

  ‘Nakhlau’, says another when I reply, ‘no wonder he speaks Urdu. They speak a very decent Urdu in Nakhlau.’

  ‘How long you have lived in England?’

  ‘Is this your wife?’

  ‘Wife is from?’

  ‘How many children you have?’

  ‘How much land have you?’

  ‘Why children are not with you?’

  ‘Do you grow crops?’

  ‘Wife’s parents are where?’

  ‘In England, you must be keeping a cow?’

  ‘Where are your children?’

  ‘If not a cow you must be keeping a goat.’

  ‘The children are with grandparents,’ one of them informs the earlier questioner. ‘They go to school in England.’

  ‘In which standard do they study?’

  ‘For how long you are on holiday?’

  ‘What kind of car is this?’

  ‘How very strange,’ says the old man, ‘to meet someone who speaks our language.’

  No-incidence

  ‘Wait, wait, wait. Never mind us. What are you doing here?’

  ‘We have come here from Punjab. We are walking round the world for the sake of peace.’

  They tell us the name of their village, on the Pakistani side of the border. They say they have been walking for months. There are so many questions I want to ask, but traffic is slowing, we are causing a queue.

  ‘Are you going to Cork, baba? Where could I find you?’

  The old man nods. I give him the name of our hotel and say, ‘Please, promise you will call us when you arrive.’

  As we pull away I realise that I haven’t asked to whom they’re trying to bring pe
ace. Catholics and Protestants in Ireland? Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent? Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab? Or even Eve and Bear?

  ‘Eve, it’s midday on the 15th of July. We’re on the N22, twenty miles east of Cork. Please find some paper and write it down. One day someone somewhere will be able to confirm that this really happened.’

  A couple of miles on Eve says, ‘I have a name for happenings like that. I call them no-incidences.’

  She explains that no-incidences are far rarer and much stranger than coincidences: ‘A co-incidence is an unexpected conjunction of familiar things. You’re walking along a street in a strange town and in the space of a few minutes bump into two people from your home village, neither of whom knows the other person is there. Or you happen to be thinking about the work of Heinrich Böll and then suddenly read his name in a newspaper. Coincidences make us look for significance, some hidden meaning, as if the universe is trying to pass on a message. A no-incidence is a one-off event so unlikely that it can’t be compared to anything else.’

  In which case, Eve, the things that happened during the week of weirdnesses were the purest no-incidences. As was Todd’s barber.