But a few people would already have read it, and some perhaps were trying to contact him right now, hammering in vain on the screen-door he had pulled shut across his phone. James wasn’t so detached from his life that he couldn’t see that. If Michaela and Karl saw the message, they would certainly try to get in touch. Their brains would shine a beam on everything good about James, everything (as his message said) they had shared. The mad escapades of years gone by, like the time they raced around all the Monopoly squares in London; or that night they spent grovelling around on hands and knees to capture a frog that had found its way into the flat during a storm. Michaela would remember how he always brought her a morning coffee although – in his own words – he felt like an absolute dingbat trying to say ‘matcha latte’ to the youthful, band-T-shirt-wearing baristas who probably discussed him after he’d gone. Karl would remember watching middle-of-the-night foreign films after a shift, joining the action an hour late, debating who the killer might be only to discover at the end that it hadn’t been a murder mystery in the first place. Both of them would remember the fun things, the filtered memories, and the hysteria of the moment would make them forget that they were the ones who’d helped to cast him into this grim place.
Even people with less invested in James, which was almost everyone else amongst his contacts, would be concerned. Humans were naturally programmed to think that way, for their own protection. They’d say that he ‘wasn’t in his right mind’, that he was a ‘danger to himself’. They would convince themselves that this was a tragedy which needed averting, from which they could emerge as a hero. They would be reacting, in other words, not to James’s actual situation, but to the drama. So their reactions would be fished out of the first-aid kit everyone had for dramas. And they would be wrong. It was a long time since he’d felt so decidedly in his right mind: so calm and in control. As for being a danger to himself – no, it was the opposite. He’d been a danger to himself when he was alive, when he was still trying to make out that he could cope with what that required. He was safe now.
He put the phone down on the sad little ledge that passed for a bedside table here. It was odd how small the phone looked, all of a sudden – a trick of the mind, perhaps, now that it had been stripped of its powers. It was an object again, inert like a brick, rather than an ever-watchful second brain. It might as well be a toy.
James had a momentary flashback to his first encounter with an iPhone. It was 2007 and he’d just moved in with Karl and two other coders. Karl had brought the phone home from an Apple event which they’d all been invited to because, at that time, their start-up had been regarded as a pacesetter.
‘Look at it, man,’ Karl had said, holding it out like a bar of gold on the kitchen table. ‘You just touch the screen, like this. Not you.’ He playfully swatted James’s hand away. ‘Compulsory hand-wash before you even go near it, fam. This thing cost an arm and a leg. Look at it. You flick through – beautiful, isn’t it. Your conversations, it shows you like this. You’ve got all your apps, you’ve got all your music on it, like an iPod. It’s like a computer but the size of a phone. These things are the future, man, for sure. Ten years’ time, they’ll own us.’
‘How did you …’ James almost stepped back from the question, feeling it was the sort of thing his mother would ask – much too square for conversation with Karl. Karl wasn’t much like the programmers James had met while getting his degree, or in the past couple of years touring as a freelancer around the IT departments of companies which had only just upgraded their equipment from abacuses. Karl had pecs like Argos catalogues, his black skin was covered in tattoos of objects that James thought you could probably do violence with, he was keen on romantic adventures which always backfired. On their first week in the flat together, a woman had turned up in their kitchen shouting that Karl would be ‘judged by history’, and yet half an hour later they’d been having sex so loudly that James had to try to drown it out with a documentary about someone he didn’t recognize touring India’s railways. Yes, Karl was a lot cooler than James. Still, sometimes the cool found it useful to have the less cool around. James considered himself difficult to beat when it came to knowing the rules of board games and how long to put things in a microwave for.
‘How did I afford it?’ Karl raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that what you were going to ask?’
‘Sorry if it’s a rude question.’
‘It’s a fair question, fam. Because it actually brings us on to something I wanted to ask you about. This is a bit difficult. I got the phone by making use of my credit card, right. But that does bring me close to the credit limit, which I didn’t realize, so I’m going to have to ask you a favour.’
James smiled. It was promising, having this man who hardly knew him, ask a favour. James felt he was at his best when helping out, being a steady pair of hands, as his school report described him – something which Sally criticized as faint praise (‘you’re better than that’) but which James himself was pleased with. ‘How close to the credit limit, and is the favour helping you with the rent this month?’
‘Close to the point of being, arguably, over it,’ said Karl, ‘and yes, although I feel like a dick, I’m going to have to ask you if you could pay a bit of it on my behalf.’
‘How big a bit?’
‘A very big bit,’ Karl conceded, ‘by which I mean, all of it.’ James laughed out loud, and Karl brandished the phone by way of explanation. ‘Again, yes, I probably shouldn’t have bought it, but: look at this, right. This app is a fishpond and you can send fish to people who have the same phone. We need to copy this idea. This is what everyone is going to want.’
‘Imaginary fish?’
‘Connection. Networks. The world is one massive team, fam. We don’t know the half of it yet.’
The James of then nodded, agreeing as he always did, thinking sheepishly that although this was almost certainly true, he himself didn’t need much of a network beyond what he already had: his family, a couple of friends, and now Karl himself. The James of now, ten years on, winced at the crack of the ring-pull, which sounded rather dramatic in this enclosed space: as if he was trying to make some sort of point by opening the can. When in actual fact he wasn’t trying to express anything at all. He, ‘James’, was nothing any more – that was the idea. He was passive here, with the creaking and moaning of the train’s body around him. Everything could just carry on without him. This wasn’t an act of aggression, just withdrawal.
He swigged from the can, feeling the metallic taste crawl across the back of his tongue. The moment of sensory engagement brought James back into being himself, and he looked at the gagged phone and thought how strange it was that you could go, so quickly, from that to this. From being protected, feeling that you had a place in the world, to this: sitting on a sleeper train, with a bag of beers, knowing you were going to commit suicide shortly after the sun came up.
‘Suicide’. He wrinkled his nose. It was a very attention-seeking word. And notion. James remembered the way he’d once had to stop the car because the radio reported that a friend of James’s celebrity passenger, Hamish, had ‘taken his own life’ in Los Angeles. Hamish had sat, thumping the window over and over again, while James reached back and offered him a hand, an intimacy he would never normally risk with a customer.