The Weightless World (3 page)

‘So it’s a computer?’ Ess is virtually bouncing in his chair. ‘
Inside
your specs?’

‘I’ve got internet, email, video, apps, pics, docs. Pretty much the whole show. Only no keyboard, no physical controls of any kind. Totally voice-operated.’

‘It just listens to what you want, then beams it into your eye?’

‘Beams it smack into my eye.’ Harry’s smile broadens and there it is: a flaming white square where the pupil of his right eye should be. The effect is unsettling. After all, how old is this man? Sixty-five? Seventy? Two hundred and ten?

‘That’s fantastic. You know, my young associate here loves this kind of thing. Don’t you?’ But before I can answer Ess is addressing Harry again. ‘He gets all the gadgets. The second some new toy comes out, he’s first in the queue. Crack of dawn in his duffel coat. At the moment he’s forever pawing his… what is it?’

‘Tablet,’ I say.

‘His tablet. His tablet computer. Forever fondling it in his lap, like a kitten.’

‘Sure,’ Harry says. ‘Tablets are cute.’

I nod, smile. But I’m pissed off. I point at his computerised specs and say, looking very directly at Ess, ‘It has a camera.’

‘A camera? Good lord!’

‘Still and video. You can just sit there filming people. You can have a conversation with someone and film them the whole time and they’ve no idea you’ve done it.’

‘Is that so.’ Ess’s grin stalls; his excitement falters. For the first time he seems to register a proper wariness of our unkempt interlocutor. ‘That’s… ingenious.’

Harry taps his specs, indicating a black clip. ‘Lens cap. Courtesy cover.’

‘So people know you’re not filming them,’ Ess supplies unnecessarily.

‘It should be bright red or something, I know. They’re still working out the detail.’

‘Have you been here a long time, Harry?’ Ess asks.

‘You mean in the country? Or in this bar?’ The two of them laugh at this in a way I just have to go along with. ‘Yes to both. I adore this bar and I adore this country. It’ll be five years in October. Gone native.’ He spreads his arms, as if in surrender.

‘And now you run a tour company.’ I’m smiling as I say this.

‘I do, though I wouldn’t say that’s all I do. Sure, I have interests in Adventurers, but I have interests in a number of areas. I guess I like to think that primarily I’m a builder.’ He slumps his shoulders and dips his head, all bullshit humility. ‘I used to be a software guy. That’s why I first came out here, tech conferences, the Asian Future, so forth. Then one day I decided I didn’t want to go back, so I didn’t. I stayed and I became a builder. Among ah, other things. That’s kind of the life-arc for me. From America to India, from software to hardware. From the abstract to the concrete.’

‘Is that what India is?’ I ask, still smiling. ‘“The concrete”?’

‘For me it is. I know for other folks it’s metaphysics, mythology, but for me, yes, it’s the concrete. A brick between my palms. Grit under my fingernails.’ A smooth bullshit chuckle. ‘How about you gentlemen? My role at Adventurers is pretty hands off, so I’ve barely had a glimpse of your itinerary. What brings you to these shores?’

I’m ready to field this one – to trot out the cover story Ess outlined on the plane: we’re workmates, in the country to celebrate a former colleague’s wedding at a somewhat remote location – when Ess says, ‘Would you believe we’re here on business?’

I open my mouth then shut it again.

‘Isn’t everybody?’ Harry snorts into his cappuccino. ‘What’re you selling?’

I open my mouth.

Ess says, ‘As it happens, we’re here to buy.’

Shut it again.

‘No kidding.’ Harry nods thoughtfully in his smartspecs. ‘You’re kind of against the traffic, aren’t you? I thought it was all sell, sell, sell with you guys. I mean it’s the same with my guys. No one in the States buys a plane ticket to India unless they know they’re coming back with like a hundred IT contracts.’

‘Not us,’ Ess says. ‘We’re buyers. Ardent buyers.’

‘May I ask, buyers of what?’

I slump in my chair. What’s the use?

‘Oh…
boring
stuff.’ Ess laughs, discreetly nudges my shoulder again. Great. He’s messing with me. ‘We’re in aerospace. Resolute Aviation. You might have heard…?’

‘Wow. You kids are in the shit. I mean
wow
.’

‘There’s no doubt some truth in that,’ Ess says, with strained neutrality. ‘Down but not out, I would say.’

‘Down but not out. Yes, sir, sign me up to that.’ Harry holds his cup out between our tables and we clash it with ours. ‘I guess you heard about the bombing? In Bangalore?’

I’m ready to change the subject, to protect Ess’s sensitivities, when Ess says, ‘Awful business. And yet isn’t this reality now? Bombs, terrorism, fanaticism. This is simply global reality. There’s no escaping it. If it doesn’t get you here, it’ll get you somewhere.’

‘That’s an interesting view.’ Harry smiles a humble smile. ‘You know there were bombs here? Right here in Leopold’s. 13 July, 2011. I was home sick that day. I turned on the TV…’ He waves a hand, as if clearing a pall of smoke. ‘Don’t listen to me. You guys make up your own minds. People come out here with so many fixed ideas, they already know what they’re going to see. Bombs, temples, bombed temples. That’s the danger. India’ll pretty much let you see whatever you’re expecting to see.’

An hour or so later we’re all on our feet, shaking hands again. Harry and Ess exchange cards then Harry makes a mild but
prolonged fuss when he realises that Ess has somehow managed to pay his bill without his noticing.

‘I can’t let you do this,’ Harry murmurs, his hands clasped in a begging gesture.

‘You can and you have.’ Ess slaps him on the back. ‘Don’t give it another thought. We’re far from hard up. Isn’t that so, Mr Strauss?’

I nod, smile.

Still, Harry is oddly difficult to reassure. Outside on the pavement he lingers with stooped shoulders, dipped head, clasped and begging hands. ‘You’re sure I can’t…?’

‘Put it from your mind, Harry.’ Ess winks at me. ‘We’re not on our uppers just yet.’

One day Ess came into The Hanged Man looking extremely pleased with himself. Unusually he’d called earlier to say that he had appointments all morning and I should work from home then come to meet him for lunch ‘at the usual place’ (guarding his words on the phone). As he swung down next to me under the horse-brasses he seemed ready to break into song.

‘Look.’ He held up a folded piece of paper. ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘I’ve no idea what that is.’

‘It’s what we’ve been waiting for.’ When I looked no more enlightened, he said, ‘It’s the code, the access code. For the company account. For Tarik’s fee.’

‘Ah. His “sizeable sum”.’

‘Got it off Cantor this morning. Wee bastard put up quite a fight, I can tell you, I had to chase him round the Playpen to get it. But get it I did.’

‘That’s great.’

‘Great? It’s
incredible
, you little heathen. It’s
momentous
.’

I nodded, smiled. Because what I knew and he didn’t – what I knew because Martin Cantor had told me – was that Ess hadn’t got anything. The code didn’t work, the account didn’t exist. Resolute hadn’t given him a penny. We were going to India with the company’s blessing, but not with its money.

Back at the hotel Ess says he thinks he will spend the afternoon resting in his room, and suggests I do the same. This time I don’t fight him. My shoulders feel locked in an unbreakable hunch and I can barely ungrit my teeth long enough to say I’ll meet him for dinner. As I head up the stairs – the needle-pain in my back still being infinitely preferable to riding up in the lift alone with the thin-grinning attendant – Ess lingers at the reception desk. I suffer no illusion about his ‘resting’. No doubt he’ll spend the afternoon chatting up as many of the staff members as will let him, pressing the flesh of the other guests, holding court in the dining room.

In my room on the third floor I shut the curtains, strip naked and lie spread-eagled on the bed. For a while I listen to the soft throb of the air-conditioning, the raucous gossip of the birds outside the window, the restless
click-click-click
of the needle in my back. Then I lie spread-eagled on the floor. I fall asleep and wake up surrounded by shadows. In the bathroom, as this morning, I can’t work out how to make the intercom-like apparatus over the bath dispense hot water. My second cold shower of the day. My hair is turning to cardboard but I feel savagely alert. As I change into a shirt and jeans for dinner, I notice that the pain in my back has pretty much disappeared.

The Ess I meet on the roof terrace is a gloomy Ess indeed. We’ve had a setback, he tells me. Asha has called. Her current job – the one with the Spanish clergymen – has overrun and she won’t be able to join us this evening after all. In fact she
won’t be able to join us until tomorrow evening at the earliest. While he tells me this he moves his arms lightly, airily, but the disappointment bears down on him, compressing his eyelids and lips.

For Ess the news is a double blow. As much as he’s keen to begin the next leg of our journey, I know he’s been looking forward to seeing Asha again. Since his return from India last year, he’s had a great deal to say about Asha Jarwal, about her professionalism, her fearlessness, her no-nonsense strangeness. Almost daily he has recalled for me his first meeting with her, at the office of the Adventurers tour operators, where (he insists) it was immediately evident that she was in charge, despite her being the company’s youngest, and only female, employee. He recalls that when he approached her at the reception desk, in a clanging, whirring Colaba back street, she glanced up from the report she was jabbing into an old-fashioned desktop, silenced him with a raised finger and a brusque hiss – he acts it out for you, the finger, the hiss – jabbed into place the final characters of her report, printed it out of a choppy printer, frowningly reviewed it, smartly filed it in an adjacent cabinet and then turned and smiled at him with beaming courtesy, as if she had only that second seen him. ‘Like the woman who raised her finger and hissed at me and the one who smiled at me were two completely different people,’ he will say, admiringly. ‘Pure Asha!’

I feel terrible for him. But at the same time I’m delighted. The news that we won’t be venturing into the countryside at first light is indescribably wonderful. Nonetheless I work hard to keep a glum look on my face over dinner, throughout which Ess attempts crestfallen little bursts of conversation. Then we sit for a while with our coffees watching the sky darken and the lights of the city come out, a vast brilliant web growing quickly more complicated.

‘Well,’ he sighs, ‘at least tomorrow we can have another stab at finding a nice gift for your Alice.’

‘Yeah,
yeah
,’ I agree enthusiastically. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Have you talked to her? Since we arrived?’

‘We said maybe we’d Skype. About nine-ish. Allowing for the time difference.’

He squints at his watch. ‘It’s nearly nine now.’

‘… Is it?’

‘Go on, scoot. Speak words of love to your Darling.’

Alice and I met, very boringly, through friends.

To be precise, Alice met me through a friend, and I met her through a colleague. A few years ago there was a keen bean in admin called Guy who kept trying to organise work socials: after-hours drinks, weekend walks, all sorts of crap I wasn’t interested in. I formed the habit of deleting Guy’s all-staff emails as soon as they appeared in my inbox, but at last he wore me down and one Friday night I found myself with a bunch of the admin kids in the worst bar in Yeovil. Some of the girls had brought friends, and one of these friends was Alice. A peculiar effect of the bar – the lights, something at the molecular level – forced the two of us into a corner, where I remember we had a pleasant conversation, and where Alice remembers she took the piss out of me for three hours.

‘You just took it,’ she says, ‘just stood there and took it. Hour after hour. Unbending. Unflinching. How could I fail to take pity on you? It was so
sweet
.’

‘It wasn’t
sweet
,’ I try to tell her. ‘I just didn’t know what you were doing.’

‘And all that time I was thinking you were
so
not my type. And that’s true, isn’t it? You are so not my type.’

For the last two months we’ve shared an attic flat in Hawks Rise. It’s the same flat I started renting seven years ago, when I got a job at Resolute and realised I had a weekend to find somewhere to live. Alice tells me the place is far nicer than I deserve, and regularly scolds me for not making the most of it. And so for the last two months she’s been making the most of it – putting in new blinds, putting down new floors, replacing the bed, replacing the cupboards. At present we’re deadlocked over the couch. She wants a new one. I don’t see much wrong with the one we’ve got. ‘But it’s a
ghost couch
,’ she wails. ‘You can’t sit on it, you just fall right through it. You sit down and it’s like there’s nothing even there.’

She may be right. Alice is very clever. She’s twenty-six, she has a PhD in Politics (Dr Alice Darling) and she teaches at Exeter University. She’s taught there for five years on a knotted string of part-time, fixed-term contracts. Currently she lectures two mornings a week and says fairly often that if the university doesn’t give her anything better soon she’s going to lose her mind and ‘just blow the fucking place up’.

Oh, and she’s beautiful. Did I mention that? She’s beautiful.

One night about a month ago Ess came to the Hawks Rise flat for dinner. It was the first, and to date only, time he and Alice met. He brought a bottle of wine, which he and Alice drank, and Alice made spaghetti Bolognese. I was horribly nervous, but Ess and Alice quickly settled into a favourite-uncle, favourite-niece sort of rhythm and sat talking warmly at the table, Ess surprisingly restrained, modest, moving his brows and smiling gradually as he spoke, Alice gamely listening and twisting the ends of her hair, the really blonde bits, the bits that are practically white. Afterwards she said she thought he was a remarkable man and she didn’t know why I’d had to be such a gibbering wreck all night.

I was pleased; also irritated. Alice thought Ess was remarkable, but only because of how well he was doing, how bravely fighting his illness, how valiantly battling his demons. She’d never known him when he was
really
remarkable. Which, as far as I was concerned, was the whole point. She should have thought he was remarkable not because he was struggling to overcome a mental collapse but because he was
a remarkable man.

Back in my room on the third floor, I keep my Skype date with Alice.

The software’s unfamiliar – neither of us has used it before – but promptly at nine Alice’s grinning contact photo appears in the Skype icon surrounded by aquatically pinging circles, impact rings. I tap the photo and all at once there she is.

‘Hello, Darling!’

‘Hello, Jug-head!’ A reference to my ears, which are not fortunate. An equally likely greeting would be ‘Hello, Baldie!’ – a reference to my supposedly delusional belief that I’m going bald. Only it’s not delusional. For at least six months my hairline has been thinning, withering, turning to feathers and soot. ‘Good grief, I can see you! Your funny little face, your fizzy little eyes…’

‘And I can…’ Then I can’t, her face smearing about in the screen. Sitting on the bed, my tablet laid across my raised knees, I wait until she’s got herself good and comfortable on the ghost couch in our Hawks Rise flat. Finally the laptop sways to a standstill in her lap and there she is, again, grinning, clever, beautiful, looking as if she may cry.

‘How are you, then? Is it shocking? Have you been
deeply
shocked?’ She laughs. Alice’s laughter is quite a thing, not at all the sound you’d expect to come out of her. It is a boom, a lusty and barrelling
ho ho ho.
She actually sits there and says, ‘ho, ho, ho’. Like she’s Father Christmas or something.

‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘It’s…’ But I’ve no idea what it is, so I just shrug and say, ‘It’s okay. How about you?’

‘I’m fine. Just working.’ Her appearance – chunky non-retro specs, hair tied up in a rubber band, porridge-coloured sweater – tells me she doesn’t mean working as in rushing about campus, delivering lectures and leading seminars, but working as in sitting at her desk with her laptop and her papers and her books, as in
thinking
. This, I know, is what Alice considers to be her real work: her vocation, her calling.

‘Anything interesting?’

‘I could tell you, but you literally wouldn’t understand the sounds I was making. It’d be like another language to you. Alien clicks and gutturals. Anyway, it’s boring, let’s not talk about it.’ I know also that she doesn’t mean this, that Alice doesn’t for one second believe her work is boring, but I nod and smile anyway. ‘I’ll probably call it a day in a bit, go over and see Dan. Any messages, or…?’

‘Tell him I’m drinking gallons of the water,’ I say.

‘Oh, no!’

‘Gallons of it. Straight out of the tap. And I feel
amazing
.’

‘He won’t think that’s funny. He’ll just think you’re a dick.’

When Alice’s brother Daniel found out I was travelling to India he spent a lot of time on his computer researching the country, then a lot of time afterwards telling me that as long as I got the recommended shots I would probably be okay
as long as
I didn’t drink the water.
He printed out for me about ten pages of traveller’s advice that all converged in the view that if I ate a leafy salad I was as good as dead. Even in the taxi to the airport I’d got his text: ‘Have a nice time but do NOT drink the water.’ Dan is seventeen and he goes to a boarding school in Exeter. He has MS and no one thinks he’ll see twenty.

Obviously, I’m kidding about my drinking from the tap. Bottled water is my constant companion. And I’m actually
less worried by the water than I am by mosquitoes – airborne hypodermics crammed full of malaria. But I’ve been brittled with repellent since the plane, and I take my pill twice a day. I have a net, too, though I’ve not used it yet.

Alice says, ‘And how’s the Grand Poobah?’

‘Ess? He’s having the time of his life. I’ve never seen him so happy.’

‘Are you having the time of your life too?’

‘I’m okay.’ I should leave it at that. But instead I say, ‘Maybe a bit worried about where everything’s leading.’

‘Oh really? Why? You’re doing what you can. What else can you do?’

‘Nothing.’ I give a trembly sort of shrug. ‘There’s nothing else I can do.’

‘And you don’t know. It may be all right. Everything may just… turn out all right.’

‘How is everything just going to turn out all right?’

‘You don’t know. Maybe you’ll get there, and you’ll meet this Tarik bloke, and he’ll show you this machine of his, and… you know… it’ll work.’

‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’

‘But you don’t
know
, do you?’ Apart from the very first second after I told her about it (‘Ess wants to go to India to buy an antigravity machine’), Alice has maintained an annoying agnosticism on the subject. I’m fairly sure she does it only because from the start I was so definite in my own view (that it’s bollocks – a madman’s dream, a psychotic’s folly). So she wavers, she prevaricates. ‘Who
does
know any more? These days it’s not obvious what’s possible. Maybe there was a time when everyone knew what was possible and what wasn’t, but we bloody well don’t now. Every other day there’s some sparkly new gizmo, and we all stand round and go
Aaah
, and ten minutes later it’s just one more fucking thing taking up room in your coat pocket.
Look at what we’re doing now. This is videophone, yeah? This is science fiction. This is
Blade Runner
.’

‘You pulled such a face…’

In the very first second after I told her about it, Alice crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out – hilarious lunacy.

‘Yes I did, but you know since then I’ve had time to
reflect
…’

Someone knocks on my door.

‘… And I just think it’s not clear any more, the line’s blurred, the ground’s shifted…’

The knock comes again.

‘Someone’s knocking on my door,’ I say.

‘Does that mean you have to go, or…?’

‘That means I have to go.’

‘I love you, Jug-head.’

‘I love you too.’

In the hallway outside my room Ess is waiting. His gloom of half an hour ago has vanished. He’s excited, animated, his eye crinkles beaming.

‘We’re going out,’ he says. ‘Harry called. Drinks at the Oberoi. Are you ready?’

Outside the hotel Ess hails a yellow-hooded cab and we tear away from the kerb straight into the worst traffic jam I’ve ever experienced. Several miles’ worth of motionless vehicles thud their horns as if speaking to each other, as if drolly discussing the blockage ahead. I feel we must be only seconds from catastrophe – shattering windscreens, exploding engine blocks. Nonetheless our driver is calm. Squashed against me on the backseat, Ess peers out at it all cheerfully. I know what he’s thinking:
We’re putting an
end
to the wheel
. No more cars. No more traffic jams. No more road accidents. No more
roads
…