‘Not fucking likely,’ said Dermot. Tina smiled genuinely; Roger smiled tolerantly.
She’d done a game terrine with tiny new potatoes and fresh garden peas in some sort of mint dressing.
‘This is what the middle class have for tea is it then?’ asked Dermot. ‘Any more wine?’
Roger looked uncomfortable at being tagged as middle class. Tina didn’t seem to mind.
‘Only the ones with good enough cooks,’ she said. ‘The rest of them make do with takeaways. What do you have then? Fish and chips? Kebabs? Tripe and onions?’
‘Aye, pet. And we have cabbage on Saturdays as a treat.’
‘What do you do?’ Roger asked Dermot.
‘Nothing really. I don’t have what you’d call a trade. I pick up jobs. You can get by like that.’
‘Nothing longer term? What about pensions?’
‘Bollocks to pensions. I’m too young for pensions. That’ll all sort itself out.’
Tina raised one eyebrow, her code for a good point being made. I was in a private pension scheme because programming jobs weren’t lifelong. Sometimes they lasted as long as the project. Sometimes the projects were canned and the programmers got their cards. Besides, there were always people headhunting from other companies.
Roger took a sip of wine to allow him time to compose himself. He couldn’t have been five years older than Dermot, but managed to look twice his age. He had grey creeping in at his temples and a touch of middle-age spread at the waist, but it was more his attitude. He was like a father. Dermot was cheerfully playing the part of an unruly child, and Tina and I were the well-behaved children watching the show.
Except that Tina seemed to want to spar with Dermot.
‘So you’re working class then?’ she asked. ‘Only we thought that they’d gone. Everyone has an office job now. And if you don’t actually have a job, you can hardly be called working class, can you?’
‘I was born working class,’ said Dermot.
‘I doubt that,’ said Tina. ‘I really doubt that. There were lots like you at college, kids who pretended to live on the frontline. What were they doing at college then? Advanced scaffolding techniques? New movements in welding? No, they were doing media studies and art classes.’
‘Being working class is a state of mind,’ said Dermot.
‘I thought you were born into it.’
‘It’s a state of mind you’re born into. It’s a way of being.’
‘That’s Zen Buddhism, I think you’ll find. How many of your jobs involve any manual labour? Excluding things like manually writing on paper with a pen, or manually sitting at a desk.’
‘Enough. When I met him,’ Dermot pointed at me, ‘I was working in a burger van. Cooking burgers. And kebabs. That was manual.’
‘But it wasn’t exactly foundry work. You just come across as a middle class white boy doing lowlife jobs to make yourself more interesting.’
‘You don’t know anything about me. How can you sit there judging me when you live in this fucking cottage? You’ve never been to the real world.’
‘I could ask Mick what he knows about you. He’s known you for a while, hasn’t he?’
‘He doesn’t take a blind bit of interest. As long as he’s getting along with his own life, that’s all he thinks about. I don’t think he’s ever asked what I do.’
‘No,’ said Tina. ‘He’s not like that. Are you, Mick?’
The two of them looked at me.
‘I don’t like to intrude,’ I said. ‘I don’t like to pry into people’s business.’
‘You don’t want to know about them, more like,’ said Dermot. ‘I mean, you’re more remote than these two and they live in a cottage in the fucking sticks. You live in Dudley. Do you know any of your neighbours?’
‘Not to talk to. I’ve seen them. They’re not the sort of people I’d talk to.’
‘No? You’re a snob mate. They probably don’t want to talk to you. Any more of this wine then, Roger?’
Roger went to get another bottle from the attic.
‘What are we going to do about him?’ Tina asked.
‘Our Mick?’ asked Dermot. ‘We’ll have to get him to take an interest. We’ll have to get him a hobby. Bring him out of himself.’
‘I think he’s been out of himself,’ said Tina. They exchanged a look.
‘Then we’ll have to sort his life out,’ Dermot said.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my life,’ I said. ‘Except for my friends.’
Roger returned with another bottle.
‘This should stand,’ he said.
‘Stand it here,’ said Dermot.
V
Tina and Dermot got on fine after that. They seemed to have something in common, a shared way of seeing the world. I remembered how Tina had once tried to get me to swim in the frigid Borth sea. She and Dermot shared some sort of adventurous or mischievous gene. They were ready to do something ridiculous, any time.
Whenever the four of us went out, Roger and I would sit and disapprove of them while they talked up a storm.
I suppose I was detached. I didn’t have any great interest in other people. I liked them around. I didn’t want to know their life stories.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Not even now, knowing all that I know. There’s nothing wrong with being detached.
Better that than being attached to something dangerous.
I
Nothing changed for years. We all kept in touch, I kept getting better jobs, programming moved on and I followed it at a safe distance.
In 1998, my years of staring at monitors did the inevitable damage. Like everyone else, I read the warnings about spending ten minutes an hour away from the monitor. Like everyone else, I ignored them. I was spending most of my time either playing video games or programming, and screen resolutions were getting higher every six months. New graphics cards meant that you could get more dots per inch on the screen, and every time that happened the rez went up and the text got smaller. Ten-point Times New Roman – which used to look like a headline – now looks like it’s in the next room.
I was squinting, and getting headaches. I had begun to get strange visual effects, shadows off at the edges of my vision, dots flickering in and out of my field of view.
‘Go to the fucking optician,’ advised Dermot. Tina agreed with him. Roger agreed with both of them.
I went to the optician, and discovered that I was short-sighted. Everything more than a couple of feet away was blurred. He tested me out and gave me a prescription. I went to a big High Street store to get the frames, because they had a better selection. A week later I picked up my spectacles. I tried them on, and everything went from a cheap fuzzy lo-rez to a sharp digital hi-rez.
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