Luke Kennard - The Transition

She gave them each what looked like a giant After Eight mint: a very thin square touchscreen computer in a protective sleeve.

‘Pretty,’ said Genevieve.

‘I was told this was a pilot scheme,’ said Karl. ‘It looks …’

The towers went through the sky sequence again.

‘… fairly well established. We’ve been going for eleven years,’ said the woman with the earpiece. ‘We try to stay under the radar.’

The lift opened on a wide balcony full of couples. Instantly shy, Karl stood to admire a giant hyperrealist painting of a pinball table, Vegas neons and chrome. He stared at the electric-pink 100 POINTS bumpers and the matte plastic of a single raised flipper. He felt Genevieve take his hand. She did this rarely.

‘What a waste of a wall,’ she said.

‘I like it.’

‘You like pinball? You like bright colours?’

‘I like the painting.’

‘You’re such a boy. Boys love bright colours. Like bulls,’ said Genevieve. ‘That’s why underwear is brightly coloured. Do you remember that bag I had, the one with the Tunisian tea advert with the sequins? Grown men stopped me on the street to say they liked my bag. I told Amy and she was like, what they mean is I like your vagina .’

Karl paused to make sure Genevieve had finished her train of thought. She had barely said a word for the last two weeks, but today she had opinions, theories. It was like she had been recast. It had taken him three years of marriage to learn that it was best to let her recalibrate without too much comment. Get a little depressed, then a little high in inverse proportion. Balance the ship.

He looked at the reflection of the pinball table’s garish surface in the painting of the large ball bearing that dominated the right-hand side of the canvas. It was so convincing he expected to see a reflection of his face peering into it. As you got closer you could almost make out the fine brushstrokes.

‘I just think it’s incredible anyone can paint something that looks so much like a photograph,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said Genevieve, ‘but on the other hand so fucking what, you know?’

A brushed-silver bar served free cappuccinos and muffins in three flavours: banoffee, apple and cinnamon or quadruple chocolate.

‘Quadruple? I can’t choose!’ said Genevieve.

‘Have one of each,’ said the barista.

Handsome boy, thought Karl. Slightly wounded expression. An RSC bit-player face.

‘ Really? ’

‘Three muffins, Genevieve?’ said Karl.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ said the barista.

‘I never do.’

She sounded too grateful. But then everyone Karl could see wore the glazed, winsome expression of the all-clear, the last-minute reprieve. The hundred or so young couples, the other losers who had accepted The Transition in lieu of some unpayable fine or term of incarceration, looked up from checking the impressive spec of the free mint-thin tablets they’d been handed at the door to admire the sun-dappled view over the city from the 360-degree window: Really? And they looked at each other, too. A preponderance of attractive, well-adjusted young people of every creed and orientation. They were athletic or willowy, at worst a kind of doughy, puppy-jowled fat which spoke of donnish indolence rather than profligacy. Inconspicuously smart or very casual – torn jeans, neon T-shirts – because they were good-looking and could get away with it. The couples were casing the joint, talking, making one another laugh. You wanted them as trophy friends. Thirty-somethings who could pass for teenagers.

Gradually, the lights dipped.

‘It’s getting dark,’ said Genevieve.

The stage held a glossy black podium and a large glass screen. There were rows of designer chairs. The chairs were spindly, improbably supporting fleshy orange pads which, when you pressed them, took a while to reshape, like a stress toy. Karl sat down, expecting to feel hung on a strange apparatus, but it was more like a hug. As the orange pads cupped his buttocks, moulded to the small of his back and pressed his shoulder blades he realised he was sitting in a modern classic: Eames meets Brutalism in contemporary Norway, an alien catcher’s mitt . He drafted five-star reviews in his head; it was unusual to actually experience the product first.

Genevieve sipped her coffee.

The rows filled in around them. A man sat on the corner of Karl’s anorak and didn’t notice, pulling Karl slightly to the right. Karl leaned towards him, then back. His coat was still trapped. He cleared his throat. He tried to make eye contact with Genevieve, who was eating her apple and cinnamon muffin. He leaned in again. He couldn’t look at the man’s face without putting himself uncomfortably close to it. He looked at the man’s shoes. Brogues, a slight residue of shoe polish. He stared ahead at the empty stage. Now he had left it too long to do anything about it. If he pulled the corner of his anorak out, the man would wonder why he hadn’t done so immediately. You actually sat there for two minutes without telling me I was sitting on your coat? What’s wrong with you? Karl tensed his right shoulder and cricked his neck so that he appeared to be sitting more or less straight.

‘It’s Stu,’ said Genevieve. ‘Karl, it’s Stu.’

‘Yep,’ said Karl, looking up to see a tall man with a Mohican approaching the podium.

‘Why is it Stu?’

‘Shh.’

‘Is he the boss or something?’

‘Genevieve, shh.’

Stu put his hands on the lectern, cleared his throat and looked at the big glass screen which was hanging to his right, seemingly without support. It flickered and a white oblong, off centre and barely a quarter of the size of the overall screen appeared. It was a clip-art image of a man with a briefcase taking a big step. Stu looked at the screen. Slowly the words WHAT’S STANDING BETWEEN YOU AND SUCCESS? appeared in Comic Sans by the side of the clip-art businessman, who had a perky smile. There was a wonky blue parallelogram behind him.

‘What’s standing between you and success?’ said Stu.

Karl, to his surprise, felt disappointed. To the extent that he yanked the corner of his anorak free from his neighbour, who looked startled. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up and how good the free coffee is, the medium is the message and the medium is fucking PowerPoint. It was a dismal feeling, like the moment when a delayed train is finally cancelled.

But then the lights went out completely and the clip-art businessman smeared and flickered into a dance of glitches up the glass screen. Karl’s knee-jerk delight at something boring going wrong was hijacked by an orchestral overture via invisible speakers, and a long, low cello improvisation. As the soundtrack dissolved into electronic pops and gurgles, the image left the screen, a jagged mess of pixels, and bounced over the panoptic window, bursting into smaller copies of itself, a screensaver taking over the world; it covered the whole room, morphing into clip-art houses, clip-art office cubicles, cups of coffee, ties and cufflinks, clip-art strong, independent women, clip-art harried-looking commuters. The seats by this point were vibrating and Karl’s laughter was distorted, like a child in a play fight. The images seemed to peel off the glass and float along the rows. The room was swimming in obsolete icons and logos, slogans and mangled business-speak – push the change, be the envelope – clip-art Filofaxes and aeroplanes, shoes and computers duplicating, fanning out like cards, whirling and distending, blittering into fragments. The cello piece was melodic, abrasive, fearfully attractive, and the windows resolved into operating systems and programs Karl remembered from childhood, a museum of dead technology, single ribbons of green text, and then the music stopped and darkness was complete – until a spotlight picked out Stu adjusting the point of the second spike of his Mohican.