Melanie McGrath - Hard, Soft and Wet

The constant flow of kids from the tournament consoles to the practice machines in the arcade leaves a matt stain from their sneakers across the linoleum. Sam’s number, 437, appears on the electronic call sheet.

‘You been to America?’ Jez has followed me out into the foyer.

I narrow my eyes to slits and nod.

‘Yeah, but I never met Michael Jordan, or Michelle Pfeiffer or Pam Anderson or Mickey Mouse or anybody anyone’s ever heard of.’ The words burn up in the acrid atmosphere of my remembrance. Whenever America is mentioned I feel sour and fondly protective, like a child forced to lend out a treasured possession.

‘Did you get a go on the Sony Playstation?’ Jez has not noticed my sullen mood. ‘They got them all over America.’

‘They’ve got everything in America.’ Jez ignores me, lost in some internal reverie.

‘I’m getting the import version’, he says. ‘The official English version’s bound to be slow speeds.’ Then, in a righteous gush of consumer patriotism, ‘It’s sick how they rip the English off with slow speeds.’

A queue gathers around one of the Streetfighter decks, and the boy in the baggies is there, egging on a teen combatant. It’s pretty quiet now. A party of Arabs sits in a row at the camel-racing booth. Next to them their bodyguards. Shift changes at the token counter. Brazilian hands over to Brazilian, smiles at the bouncer, heads for the black matt door in the black matt wall marked ‘Staff Only’ in black gloss paint. There is no sign of Samantha.

Jez is moving around in the small knot of people standing by the entrance to the arcade. Looking about for his sister, maybe. Seeing me instead, he flashes a wide, young smile and makes his way over.

‘You seen Sam?’

‘Nah, she’ll be all right,’ replies the brother.

Seven p.m. The smell of baking rises from the food court downstairs. Six hours after it began, Button-Eyes is declared Supreme Champion of the South of England Streetfighter Turbo Tournament, first prize a full arcade version of Streetfighter II Turbo. A DJ in Kiss FM uniform jogs onto the makeshift prize-giving podium, raises his mike, waits for the on-air cue from the sidelines. Tips the words out:

‘A totally wicked contest, man, completely MEN-TAL …’

‘Congratulations.’ The DJ pulls Button-Eyes towards the mike, peers down at a piece of paper. ‘Whasyername.’ He smiles and gives the boy a comedy punch.

It is seven thirty and the Streetfighter tournament consoles are open for the free use of whoever remains. Six and a half hours after the first closed their palms round their joysticks, a row of arms begins to beat in front of the screens, like fleshy pistons.

‘C’mon, I’ll buy you a McDonald’s,’ I say.

‘OK,’ says Jez. He wouldn’t mind that at all. Hasn’t eaten since breakfast.

We elbow our way out of the arcade, past a floor of scaffolding with a sign announcing the opening of a new Battletech Centre, head down into Coventry Street. Jez opens the door into McD’s, immediately peels off to one side.

‘I’ll have a happy meal, £2.98.’ He wanders off to find a table in the family section. Not on the top floor where the youth go. Not with me in tow.

We sit and eat in silence for a while.

‘Did you know,’ I say at last, ‘that this part of London is known as the Meat-Rack?’

‘Nah,’ replies Jez, nodding at the mess of waxed paper and mayonnaise on the table in front of me, his face flushed with that smile. ‘Mind if I finish your fries?’

England hasn’t changed much. The Common might be a little greener than I left it. The butcher’s shop has closed down, Blockbuster Video gone up in its place. There are a few nominal additions to the graffiti on the walls outside my flat. As from Tuesday next the tube train drivers will be on strike. A bomb has exploded in Earls Court, no one hurt. Otherwise England is as England always was, an isolated little piece of island washed up on its own dank shore.

I have changed, though. At least, America has changed me. I’ve bought an Apple Mac with the remainder of my savings, and it’s beautiful. A mysterious grey sarcophagus with magic innards. I’ve also got a modem and a subscription to the WELL. England and England’s concerns matter less. I can now be in the same place as my fantasies. America. A few clicks of the keyboard, a tumble of lights, an instant’s wait, and the new frontier comes rushing in toward me.

No one here appears interested in my impending conquest of the digital frontier. After some dark muttering about anoraks and computers the subject is waved away. Meanwhile, my life is becoming very altered. Friends are beginning not to bother to call, knowing that I’ll either be online, or be wanting to talk about being online. They think I’m vacant, pretty vac-ant. But I don’t care.

Also, I’ve met someone. Not face to face, but as good as. It began a few days ago in an idle moment. This is how it happened. I posted a short provocation on the WELL – a small uncommitted riff about the media being our chief source of shared values, and he, this someone I’m talking about, replied with a long treatise, the gist of which was that the situation wasn’t so bad because it at least implied that there was a shared set of values. And so it went on. We e-mailed back and forth exchanging our armchair philosophies and cod theories. A strange textual flirtation started up but the stranger thing is, I don’t know anything about him, except that his handle is Macadamia. He’s my souvenir of San Francisco, my memento. And yet, it’s as though I’ve taken the first step in a series of irrevocable steps towards another life, as you do the moment you first meet a lover’s eyes.

Last night, I e-mailed Nancy.

>I’m very taken with a nut,I said.

And she e-mailed back

>It’s a newbie phase, sweetie. Bob was just the same.

I found a small part of myself hating her for that, but I woke up this morning with the usual pangs, missing America and wishing we were walking through Muir Woods together.

Observation: Why is it that technology designed to be used by women is white, while technology designed to be used by men is black? The washing machine vs the VCR. The tumble dryer vs the remote control. Computers, on the other hand, are grey, which must be one of the reasons they’re so intriguing.

I appear to have given up on the real world. At least, I am spending less and less time in it and as a result I find that it has transformed into a drab waystation for the satisfaction of what Mac calls ‘meat needs’. Food, a bed, a shower.

The most valued part of my day begins around six in the evening, which is morning in California, of course. And also, conveniently enough, when telephone charges fall. It ends at dawn. In between Mac and I compose our e-mail, argue through the finer points of this and that, draw our secret conclusions. We don’t talk about our lives, what we eat for breakfast. We don’t have lives as such to talk about right now, we only have survival tactics: sleep, drink, eat, shit. We don’t go in for revelation. We’re already far too intimate. We chew over the things that matter. The issues.

For example, is the real world binary or analogue? According to Mac, the binary world of 1s and 0s that the computer understands isn’t necessarily a description of real reality because real reality deals more in degrees of grey than in black and white. But then light grey is not-dark grey just as much as black is not-white. Which makes it binary. We considered this conundrum at our respective screens six thousand miles apart and came to the conclusion that we’d got ourselves into a loop. So I called it a day, which it was actually becoming, and fell asleep with sunlight beginning to warm my eyelids.