Meatloaf in Manhattan (2 page)

He turns the screen towards me so I can see. The 3-D image is of a beautiful room, furnished in art-deco style: porticos and mirrors, statuettes of athletic women holding orbs of light. A subtly lit stage waiting for my song.

I smile. He smiles.

‘Sing it for me again,' he says. ‘Hypnotise me.'

Way across town, on the money side, John Mercy taps his credit card on his keyboard. His two kids are asleep in the loft and his wife is downstairs watching reality on the gigantic TV. He looks out the window. Although it's late and dark, he can see the snow. He wants some excitement. He needs something new in his life. One side of the split screen of his PC is the NASDAQ and FTSE indexes. On the other is rolling countryside, a waterfall, a hill and a shiny city. Sodom and Shangri-La all in one. He clicks an icon on his desktop and Pegasus, his avatar, takes the place of the depressing lines of red digits from the Wall Street stock exchange.

‘Go boy,' he whispers to himself as he keys in his credit card details.

WELCOME PEGASUS, YOU ARE THE 17,025,316 INHABITANT OF ALTERLIFE. A WHOLE NEW WORLD OPENS UP TO YOU.

He first heard of Alterlife from Bill, his architect friend and jogging companion. Bill had set up a company there and was making a whole new revenue stream designing homes and gardens for avatars.

‘It's wild,' panted Bill as he ran beside John, ‘there are people, well avatars, selling all manner of stuff, doing deals, playing the finance markets.'

The thought of another life, away from the safety of the suburbs, family and beach house was a mighty attraction for John.

The snow is building up on the window ledge. The TV drones downstairs. An email pops up on John's laptop screen.

HI PEGASUS, AS A WELCOME TO ALTERLIFE COME TO YOUR FIRST PARTY ON THURSDAY 17
^th
JUNE 2200 GMT AT THE BERLINER

John rubs his bald head and clicks the ACCEPT button.

‘You're on,' says Snowball. ‘Your song got 253 hits at the jury play. That puts you second to last on the bill. Let's order in pizza and watch the show.'

‘That's great,' I reply. ‘But the record company'll be pissed.'

‘Forget them, they did you no favours. What happened to your first record? A bit of airplay. One-hundred-and-eighty-third in the national charts. Then they dumped you. You owe them nothing. Alterlife is the future.'

The Berliner is full to the brim. The avatars in the audience are brightly coloured figures, all shapes and sizes and designs. They sit at tables in clumps and singly, sipping exotic drinks. Some smoke from precious metal and diamond encrusted cigarette holders. Smoking is safe in Alterlife, as no one has to breathe.

‘Make way,' says the compere, the master of ceremonies, straight out of
Cabaret
. ‘We have a delicious surprise for you. Lights and music, maestro. The girls may be beautiful, but the songs are more beautiful still. Let the spotlight fall on Firenze, making her Alterlife debut.'

Firenze stands at the microphone. It's one of those old-fashioned 1950s types, with a big head, haloed by a metal ring. As she begins to sing heads turn, conversations stop. The lyrics drift on the blue-grey cigarette smoke and haunt the room. One by one, the avatars in the audience are mesmerised.

‘Crystalise …' she sings with a cadence and depth that holds the crowd in its grip. The concert is playing live to radio, so the song wafts across the airwaves of Alterlife. That night, Firenze and her melody are on everyone's lips. No one can recall ever hearing anything quite like it before. Neither the avatars, nor their earthly embodiments at their computer terminals.

Within less than a week, Firenze is the hottest ticket in town. The most feted and downloaded of avatars. One day she plays simultaneously at six private parties, at thirteen concerts, and on the premier radio station in the most exclusive sector, VIP, of Alterlife's myriad levels.

Back in New York I can't believe what's happening. My song has seeped through the membrane between this life and Alterlife and back again. Across the USA it's making it on radio waves from Dallas to Portland, San Antonio to New Jersey. For 25 cents, people are downloading it to PCs, iPods and all manner of smartphones. Everyone wants to know who the singer is, but Firenze will do. Within two weeks two million people have bought the song and I've got $50,000 in my bank account. I take Snowball to Las Vegas. We see Rod Stewart singing ‘Sailing' and put $8000 in the slot machines. In the elevator my song is playing and we laugh as we order room service, eat bowls of potato chips and watch
Now Voyager
on pay TV. ‘Who needs record companies, when we can reach for Alterlife?' I joke as I pass Snowball a joint on the balcony, the illuminated city of dreams at our feet. For a present, I buy him a purple Donky Kong tee shirt.

‘Can you stop singing that song?' shouts John's wife as she ruffles the pillows behind her head. ‘I'm trying to read, for God's sake.'

‘What song?' John shouts back from the shower.

‘That song. It's everywhere.'

‘Oh, that song. I didn't realise I was singing it.'

‘No,' says his wife, more to herself than to anyone else. ‘You don't seem to realise much at all anymore.'

He dries himself, puts on his dressing gown and goes downstairs to his study.

He clicks on the black rose icon on his desktop and there is Pegasus, standing in the alleyway, waiting at the stage door of the Berliner where Firenze has returned to top the bill. The stage door opens and she appears. The crowd roars and camera bulbs pop. She is hurried into a pink limousine and whisked citywards. Pegasus takes wing, follows Firenze's car to her hotel, flies through open French windows and settles on a velvet covered sofa in the lounge. When Firenze arrives, breathtaking in an ermine fur coat and crystal glass high heels, Pegasus walks over to her and asks if they can talk.

‘For sure,' she says.

‘You have the most beautiful voice ever,' he says. ‘I love you.'

She does not bat an eyelid.

‘I love you too,' she answers, easy as falling off a log.

‘Snowball,' I say, staring at my half of the split screen, ‘what happens if I tell my avatar to tell another avatar I love him? Well, I think he's a him. A kind of mythical horse. You know the one?'

‘A centaur?' says Snowball chasing bananas, not trying for a big score, but just honing his Donky Kong skills.

‘No, the white, pretty one, with the angel wings.'

‘Pegasus.'

‘That's the one. Such wings. I thought it would be fun for my avatar to fall in love at first sight.'

‘With a groupie horse?'

‘Yeah, I like that. I'm in love with my first groupie and he's a mythical horse.'

On my screen I see Firenze and Pegasus walking along the beach in Alterlife. Out of the sky a bright star morphs into a diamond and Pegasus presents my avatar with a sparkling necklace that catches the moonbeams bouncing from the ripples of the ocean. At that moment a school of dolphins leap high into the air, water cascading from their backs.

I Google ‘Pegasus', my new found love. Perfect. He is ‘the creator of sources in which the poets come to draw inspiration.'

That night I sleep and dream, enfolded in the voluptuous wings of a swan, the sound of the hooves of wild horses thundering into the distance.

Each day more and more money appears in my bank account and each morning me and Snowball find new ways to spend it. On Monday we take a hot air balloon ride over the Manhattan skyline, wintry blue above, sharp and icy below. Back on the ground we eat fish dinners under the Brooklyn Bridge (even though Snowball worries about all the daylight). On Tuesday we get ringside tickets to see Pac-Man (not the computer game, but ‘pound for pound the best boxer in the world') batter the latest Great White Hope into submission. Wednesday we play roulette and blackjack all day and night at The Lucky Nugget, just to prove gambling's a mug's game. Thursday we stay in, eat takeaways. I write some poetry and Snowball studies the online skills of his Donky Kong rivals. On Friday we fly for the weekend to San Antonio to see the Alamo (I buy a Davy Crockett hat and pretend to be John Wayne; Snowball gets a poncho and sombrero and acts out the Mexican Army, ‘Viva la Revolution'). All the while my song keeps playing and Firenze's star continues to rise.

John's Pegasus looks out from the screen, a message from another world, another time. His eye is huge and John can see his own reflection in the horse's shiny black pupil. There's something in Pegasus' look that takes him back to his childhood and the family farm in Ohio. In his mind's eye he sees himself as the small boy sitting on his father's huge chestnut stallion.

‘Look at you the cowboy,' says his father, guiding the horse along the dirt track up the hill towards the house. ‘Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, don't fence me in,' sings his father, as John nuzzles into the horse's mane, holding his balance, fresh air from the prairies filling his lungs. Those were the days when all that mattered was a life of wide open fields, boxcars and endless horizons. But John grew older, found his way to an East Coast college, hit the crossroads and the lure of Wall Street, the American dream, the picket fence, the SUV, the blonde wife and kids and the mortgaged life.

A series of graphs flash across the monitor, all showing the sharp downward trend that John's feared for months. His wife luxuriates in the spa, his children dream in satin sheets, all oblivious to the financial ruin unfolding before his eyes. He feels panic in the pit of his stomach. He clicks the cursor and there is Pegasus, rising up on his hind legs, stretching his angel wings and flying skyward against a star-spangled backdrop.

‘John,' shouts his wife from the landing upstairs, ‘can you come here? We really need to talk about these bathroom tiles.'

Then one morning Snowball gently shakes me from a dreamy sleep.

‘Hey, wake up, you'd better see this,' he says.

He's on a news web page on his laptop, which is unlike him.

‘Look,' he says, pointing his laptop at me.

THE CONTROVERSIAL PLATFORM ‘ALTERLIFE' HAS BEEN TERMINATED FOLLOWING THE ARREST OF ITS FOUNDER AND CEO ON CHARGES OF FRAUD AND INSIDER DEALING.

The link to Alterlife is cut. Its world is blank. Over the next days it emerges that Brad Zakora, the Ivy League computer geek and Alterlife's creator, had mirrored the Madoff Ponzi scheme in Alterlife's stock exchange and transferred ill-gotten funds to his personal bank account in Dubai. In the midst of the maelstrom and financial meltdown, everyone (the record companies, the fans, the media industry) wants to know the identity of Firenze. Within hours hundreds of hopeful singer-songwriters claim ownership and prime-time TV opens its new reality audition:
Finding Firenze
.

‘It's like the movie,' says Snowball, leaping to his feet in our kitchen, the queues of smiling wannabes on the TV snaking around Madison Square Gardens. ‘I am Spartacus!' he yells, with wobbly eyes like Kirk Douglas.

‘No, I'm Spartacus!!' I screech in my campest Tony Curtis voice. We both laugh out loud. He knows I don't want to get into this bunfight. We'd talked about it soon after Alterlife shut down. I'll wait. I figure they'll come to me once the FBI sort through the accounts and see the royalty payments. And if it doesn't happen? Well it's not the end of my world. I've got a new song humming through my head and plenty more years to create music. And I must admit that being a woman of mystery appeals to me. Yet I do miss Firenze, whoever she was, with her long blue hair and slender fingers. And I've become really fond of Pegasus, my mysterious admirer with the wings of an archangel. Two lovers trapped in a void somewhere, in a place I can't see or know. Maybe they'll find happiness together.

John is walking a few steps behind his wife and kids in the shopping mall, deep in the grief of his secret loss.

‘So, peach or pearl?' asks his wife, over her shoulder.

‘What?' he says.

She stops and looks around.

‘The tiles, John, the tiles,' she snaps, the irritation clear in her voice. ‘What's wrong with you?'

He stares at her, with no idea of what to say or do.

With all Alterlife accounts being frozen, the cheques stop coming. So I do some sums and calculate the money we have left in the bank. I subtract next month's rent, bills and food. It's enough, so I type in the numbers from my credit card and buy the tickets for the round trip. Snowball is deep in some jungle landscape with Donky Kong, swinging from branch to vine, collecting coins and points. I can hear pings and zings from the computer and grunts from Snowball.

‘Arrruuuueee,' he shouts, which means he's dead.

He slumps exhausted on the floor.

‘You won't believe it,' he says, to me, to the room, to Donky Kong. ‘Level seven, I got to level seven. Only five other people have. Ever.'

I smile the broadest of smiles, loving the timing, loving the flow of our lives.

‘Ain't that just grand,' I say, getting down on the floor with Snowball, our noses touching. ‘Because Firenze has just bought us tickets to Italy. We'll be in Milan by the twenty-fifth!'

‘You mean …' he gasps, eyes twice as wide as normal, barely comprehending what he's just heard. Then he hugs me near to death and I whisper into his ear.

‘We leave on the eighteenth. First stop Florence and the Uffizi so I can kneel before my Venus. At last, I'll come face to face with my muse. Then, once we've dived into the river off the Ponte Vecchio, it's the train to Milan and de da … the Donky Kong World Championships.'

We roll around the floor, so happy that all we can do is laugh and laugh.

MEATLOAF IN MANHATTAN

Steve is my only contact in New York. One thing I need to know about Steve, said my cousin Richard, is that he's blind. Totally blind. Has been from birth. Fine, by me, I said. Just be great to have somewhere to stay. So I double check the apartment number and ring the bell. Nothing. I ring again. Then there's a shuffling along a corridor and a craggy voice calls out ‘Who's it?' from the other side of the door. ‘It's Frank,' I shout back. ‘Your friend Richard's cousin … he phoned to say I'd be coming.' Bolts are unbolted and the door swings open. There's Steve. Eyes rolling around in his head, long straggly beard, wild hair, skinny body, bloated belly wrapped in a saggy greying vest, saggier underpants propped up by bare stick legs, gnarled feet, blackened toenails.