Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath

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      >Mac, your name and number are in the phone book. I just looked them up.

      Phone numbers? This isn’t the point of virtual life at all. The point of virtual life is to remain apart, distinct, ethereal, untouched by the mess of reality. The point of it is its sheer mystery.

      >I won’t phone you, Mac, and you won’t phone me.

      Sometimes people have to be told things they ought to know already.

      TUESDAY

       Britpop bands

      First Tuesday of every month the Electronic Lounge meets at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The apparent pinnacle of the ‘underground’ e-scene.

      Daniel is a regular, of course. I’m not, but I’m pretending to have checked it out a couple of times in order to avoid – can I say this? – the embarrassment of being uncool. Today Daniel is decidedly down. He left his new T-shirt on the bus. He has scrawled ‘I am in a bad mood’ in gothic letters on my notepad. I offer him a Camel by way of compensation.

      ‘Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t take drugs,’ he moans.

      The Electronic Lounge is filling up with young people in extreme outfits. Platform shoes, kipper ties, fat glasses, trousers made of plastic. All part of the underground now. Just about everything is underground. Mainstream life is what happens to the characters in Neighbours.

      ‘Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?’ I discover a line from an Adam and the Ants hit on my tongue. Very early eighties. Daniel misses the reference (he would have been five) but his face blooms purple all the same.

      ‘Thanks very much,’ he says, avoiding my eye.

      Over Coca Cola (Daniel) and Jim Beam (me) Daniel confesses he hasn’t had much of a love life for years. This takes me by surprise. Conventional wisdom suggests teens are hard at it from an ever earlier age. If you believed everything you read in the papers, you’d think the entire population under twenty had degenerated into a busy whirl of nymphomaniacs and prepubescent pervs.

      ‘You know what really pisses me off about that T-shirt?’ says Daniel, backtracking.

      He sees someone he knows over my shoulder, waves at whoever it is.

      ‘No, Daniel, but you’re going to tell me.’

      ‘I got it in the sale at Slam City Skates. Reduced from, like, fifty quid.’ He begins rooting around in his bag, then pulls out a bar of chocolate and signals to someone else he knows.

      ‘What’s the worst thing you can imagine, Daniel?’ I ask, as a sort of comforter. ‘The very worst thing?’ Like losing a T-shirt not so bad, blah blah. A look of concentration falls over his face.

      ‘My parents break-dancing.’ He tinkers with a follow-up idea.

      ‘Or them having sex,’ he says.

      Glancing over to the crowd gathering at the bar discussing techno, multi-media applications, the direction of narrative in computer game design. I feel suddenly overcome by the weight of my ignorance. It would be easy to write the whole thing off as trivial, but there’s something more enduring about the e-scene than that, which is to say that a tribe of under-agers in thrall to technology might really constitute the future in the making.

      ‘What I think I meant was, what’s the scariest thing you can imagine?’ I continue, attempting to draw Daniel back into some kind of seriousness. He picks up the change in mood.

      ‘My parents dying, I suppose. And growing old too quickly. Hahaha, it seems as though I was seven yesterday hahaha.’

      And it seems as though I was seventeen. The screwy truth of the matter is that we speed through the years so fast we can hardly tell we’ve lived them. Even boys of seventeen worry about how to put the brakes on.

      ‘Do you know what really pisses me off?’ asks Daniel, readying himself to leave me in favour of his younger friends.

      ‘Quite a lot at the moment, I’d say.’

      ‘No, but what really pisses me off?’

      I bite my lip and pretend to consider. Let’s see.

      ‘Uh uh, I can’t think.’

      ‘What really pisses me off is Britpop bands.’

      WEDNESDAY

      It’s been six months since I compiled my first e-mail at Nancy’s house in Strawberry Point.

      THURSDAY

      Apple Mac is in a parental mood and has imposed a curfew, allowing me to switch it on, but refusing to log me onto the Net so that I am effectively grounded.

      My first impulse is to contact Mac, but, since the computer has crashed, I can’t send e-mail. I take to the manual, get no further than the index. Mac’s phone number lies on my mind like aversion therapy. Best sort the thing out myself.

      So my next idea is to reach for the help button and tap in ‘HELP’. ‘This cannot be found,’ bleeps the Apple Mac. I do it again. The same message appears. Rationally speaking, I am aware that the computer either recognizes an instruction or it doesn’t. I know it can’t interpret. But this is a crisis. Why doesn’t the damned thing just do something useful? If it’s supposed to be so clever…

      I try:

      Internet

       PPP comms help TCP help Internet and so on

      Eventually I call up the company which sells me my Internet connection.

      ‘Is it a TCP error?’

      Shrug.

      ‘We’ll send you the software.’

      Go and boil your head, in other words.

      FRIDAY

      A floppy disk containing forty-two programme files arrives. No instructions. Most of the files appear to be compressed, so I have to decompress them before they can be used. But they haven’t all been compressed using the same compression software. Some are .hqx files, others .sea files, .sit files, .cpt files. Some of these I know to be self-decompressing while others require separate decompression software, which I don’t have. I can download it, but only if I can get online. And I can’t get online, because I can’t decompress the software files.

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