With his mother, he’d once visited his Aunty Adele before she moved, before she was divorced. Her brick house seemed indistinguishable from many others, the front façade strapped back and forth by whizzing cars and bicycles; a kind of incessant monotony unseen in the green world. But it held a certain charm and, though now a distant memory, that blur of frenzy occupied a special place in Shaun’s eleven-year-old mind.
After his aunt’s divorce she moved into the city along with Elton – Shaun’s older cousin – but to which part the boy wasn’t sure. At night in his room, listening to the chuck-chuck of Marsh Frogs in a nearby pond, he conjured an image of that inner-city location and contemplated an excursion there as others might consider a trip to Moscow or Marrakesh. It was far away and exotic and some day he’d go, he was sure of it. Some day he’d navigate that foreign land; it would broaden his knowledge, allow an appreciation of things he knew only from films, books and the internet. Some day.
ELTON BRIGHT – Shaun’s older cousin – would rather contract the self-replicating Storm Worm virus on his PC than be subjected to a half hour in the bush. He’d rather lose his warrior status on Guild Wars 2 than venture to a place where trees replaced power poles, where grass supplanted the grey exactitude of concrete.
He didn’t need it. He had everything he could possibly want in his blacked-out bedroom: friends, information, games, videos, and the entire world to traverse, from the loftiest mountain, real or imagined, to the inner workings of another’s mind. Elton could tell you what a friend from Switzerland – that he’d never met – had for breakfast that morning, and what he’d dreamt about last night. It was all right there on the net; was there any reason to go outside?
On this day, as he sat in his darkened man-cave, awaiting responses on Twitter, he spontaneously and unconsciously unzipped his trousers and released his penis. Well, why not?
It was not at all uncommon for Elton Bright to be sitting at a screen conversing in one chat room or another, and not at all uncommon for his member to rise. Yet the two events – the conversing and the rising – were unconnected and an erection was no more irregular than a yawn or a cramp in the foot. Sometimes he’d shuck down his pants and stroke the thing like a family pet. And sometimes while he did it, he’d click on www.sweetly.com stored in his Favourites to observe some anonymous girl’s body, a young woman, purportedly a teenager, posing naked in a wheat field, astride a bicycle or sprawled in the sun next to a hotel swimming pool. But he rarely took interest in pornography – that other kind of imagery featuring the full gamut of sexual deviation – although he sometimes wondered who did. In Australia, it was a 1.5-billion-dollar industry with most viewing it for free, so how many Australians weren’t looking at it? For Elton, that question was more fascinating than the imagery itself. It wasn’t that he felt any sense of taboo; in fact it was the familiarity that rendered it dull, like looking at the back of one’s own hand – no surprise could be found there at all.
He’d first discovered digital nudity at the age of five. On his father’s computer, an innocuous Search word had brought forth a naked woman who seemed to be drawing nutrition from her own breast, prompting instinctual recollections within him. Another woman appeared to be crawling – something he’d done himself only a few years earlier – and a naked man was pressing his body against her buttocks, causing her breasts to oscillate magically, like a ball on a string. He grunted, she groaned, and none of it made any sense at all. At seven, with his own laptop, he’d chanced upon all manner of male and female body parts not unlike some of the peculiar fruit and vegetables he’d observed in his mother’s shopping trolley. It all seemed rather homely and commonplace. So, these days, when he sat stroking himself, he often continued in an online conversation – or sometimes he brought up a picture of some trim girl just to share that brief, casual event.
He preferred this to any thought of a real-life partner, knowing that, unlike three minutes of an MP4, actual encounters always incurred further complications. Even his mother’s profession – which he understood completely yet kept secret (not even she knew he knew) – involved transactions he was not prepared to accept. So a completely passive, naked girl on the screen who would leave the room at the click of a mouse worked fine. He’d catch the stuff in a Kleenex, crump it into a ball and while typing a message to a friend in Spain, toss it into the bin. The bin itself was occasionally emptied, particularly when his room took on the musty smell of a caged animal and threatened to disrupt his online concentration. It was his one concession to untidiness. In all other respects his body, his clothes and his bedroom were as neat and clean as an unoccupied hospital ward, and he had a large collection of selfie pics on his iPhone to prove it.
Elton was the quintessential Gen Y modern male.
But he did not see himself as such; he was just a normal person living in a time when technology had triumphed, when sanity had at last prevailed. He was overjoyed that society had permanently escaped the twentieth century, a bygone era when a totally different world existed. Back then, life was literal rather than conceptual, and people were impressed by things that today only excited the dull and naïve: garden blooms, sunsets, mammals in the sea, a kite in the sky, a ‘stolen’ kiss. Back then, even a wink was wonderful, while ecstasy could be found in a ripe apple.
What an absurd, disturbed, witless world it must have been. And how isolated. Elton could not imagine having a mere handful of friends. He had several thousand, in fact he was more popular than all his forefathers put together. And without difficulty he could stay in contact with each one of those several thousand friends, conversing regularly, confirming the stupidity of other people’s lives, sharing anecdotes and playing games. Some of his friends he had even killed for.
ELTON LIVED with his mother Adele at 42 Frederick Street, the centre terrace in a block of three. Her bedroom upstairs adjoined her son’s but was right at the front of the building. Her window faced the main thoroughfare, and from there she could look out across a sea of single-storey rooftops; a choppy vista of red tiles and tin running all the way to the horizon. In the distance, the irregular central-city monoliths stood clustered amid an amber monoxide glow.
When Adele had first moved to that inner city suburb, the urban image from high up seemed exciting and epitomised everything important about making a fresh start. But now she rarely bothered to glance out; familiarity had sucked the novelty right out of it and the view had become as predictable as the boys who kicked over the council bins on Thursday evenings.
Elton, whose bedroom was right behind hers, couldn’t care less about the view, now or ever. On the day they moved in, he pulled a single drape across his own small window and pinned it shut with a line of thumbtacks, denying the trifle of daylight that had previously limped through the smeary pane, any possibility of backlighting one of his monitors. He invested a little of his estranged father’s money on a long melamine benchtop which now ran the length of one wall with a return on each end. Atop it sat four monitors, two of them connected to the one hard drive, the others operated from laptops and all wirelessly connected to the internet. In front of this there were two ergonomic office chairs and it was from one or other of these that, all day and night, Elton met, talked and played games with his several thousand friends.
To suggest that Elton was agoraphobic would not sit well with the young man. Hadn’t he undertaken a science degree? Hadn’t he managed a whole year of it even while his parents were going through the last ludicrous stages of divorce? You must complete your studies, his father had commanded. If you want to make me proud, please finish the course. And so he did, one year at least, not to make his father proud but to obligate him: he had two years to go. Now, with the intermittent conscience money from his corporate father’s canny dealings, Elton could afford to defer before deciding on the actual trajectory of his life. But he’d already decided that a professional career was objectionable – one in the family was enough. And surrounded as he was by his devoted circle of worldwide friends, it just didn’t seem necessary to go anywhere.
Except