Джонатан Коу - Middle England

‘Morning, sweetie,’ he said. ‘I’m just popping out to get some stuff.’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Sleep well?’

‘Very well.’

‘I was going to get bacon, eggs …’

‘Sounds lovely.’

‘… mushrooms, tomatoes, fresh orange juice …’

‘Do you spoil all your girlfriends like this?’

‘Want a Sunday paper?’

‘Why not?’

‘ Sunday Times OK?’

‘I’d prefer the Observer. ’

‘I’ll get them both.’

He drew away and sleepily she reached up, placed her arms behind his neck and pulled him back towards her for another kiss. In the process, the duvet slipped away from her body, a reminder that Sophie was naked, while Ian was fully clothed. The situation excited them both. As a consequence, it was another twenty minutes before Ian went out on his shopping expedition.

When he was gone, Sophie waited a few more happy, post-coital minutes before getting out of bed. She noticed there was a white bathrobe hanging on the back of the bedroom door, and, slipping into it, she pulled open the curtains. She had walked home with Ian the night before – or rather, early in the morning – but, being somewhat the worse for drink, and pulsing with anticipation after taking the decision to sleep with him for the first time, she had not taken much notice of where he lived. This morning’s view was unfamiliar, and it took her a few moments to orientate herself. She appeared to be in one of the newish developments of flats behind Centenary Square. She could see the rear of Baskerville House, and the massive construction site where the new Library of Birmingham was beginning to take shape. (The noise from that must be pretty deafening during the week, she thought.) There were few signs of human life out there this morning, apart from a man walking his dog across a stretch of grass and two teenage boys sitting at opposite ends of a see-saw in a children’s playground, looking bored. Traffic hummed past unceasingly somewhere in the near-distance. It was a typical Birmingham Sunday, it seemed: for everyone but her.

She had not slept with many men in her life; for Sophie it was a commitment as well as an adventure. Last night, and this morning, felt like a delicious tiptoe into the unknown. Being left alone for a few minutes in Ian’s empty flat was an unexpected bonus. So far, in the course of three longish but rather one-sided conversations, he had managed not to give too much away about himself. Here, perhaps, was an opportunity to get to know him better.

Her first instinct when visiting someone else’s home was always to look at the books. The academic reflex, deeply ingrained and quite irresistible. It didn’t get Sophie very far today, however. She already knew that Ian was, by his own admission, ‘not a great reader’. She also knew that she herself probably read more than was healthy for her, set too much store by reading, had a kind of neurotic obsession with literature and its supposed moral benefits. All the same, what she found on his shelves was disappointing. A handful of sporting autobiographies, some reference books (also mainly to do with sport), some bestselling novels from a few years back, two or three road-safety manuals. She counted them: fourteen books in all. There were about the same number of DVDs, mainly James Bond and Jason Bourne films. The DVD player was on the floor next to a widescreen TV, and a weird-looking electronic device with handles that was either some sort of elaborate sex toy or (more likely, Sophie realized, with some relief) a games console. She picked it up and turned it around in her hands, briefly curious about this bizarre object whose functions were so mysterious to her. None of her previous boyfriends, it occurred to her, had ever owned anything like it.

There was a square coffee table in the centre of the living space, with a fair number of watermarks and coffee stains on the surface, and one copy of a magazine – called Stuff – on its lower shelf. The sofa and the chairs were probably from IKEA: at least, they bore a marked resemblance to the sofa and chairs in every flat she had ever rented herself, all of which had come from IKEA. There were no plants anywhere to be seen, although there was a large framed reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers on the wall.

The far end of the living space consisted of an open-plan kitchen. There was nothing much in the fridge, apart from beer, butter, cheese, milk and a pack of sausages that were eight days past their ‘best before’ date. The freezer was empty apart from ice cubes and a box of Magnums, of which only two remained.

This was disappointing: Sophie was learning almost nothing here about the man she was in the process of choosing as her new partner. When a quick tour of his bathroom yielded even more meagre information, she gave up and put the kettle on to make coffee. While waiting for it to boil, she retrieved the copy of Stuff and sat down at the kitchen table to read it.

The front cover showed a young, attractive brunette clutching an iPad to her hip while pouting and staring into the middle distance. Despite the presence of the tablet in her hand, it looked as though she was planning to spend the night clubbing rather than working, since she was wearing a white mini-dress which barely covered her crotch, with sheer panels exposing large portions of her cleavage and midriff. Flicking through the magazine, Sophie could see that this was a recurring pictorial theme, and that she was being invited into a strange parallel universe in which cutting-edge technology was used exclusively by beautiful young women who only liked to work, take photos or play games while wearing lingerie and swimwear. The cover promised a preview of the iPhone 5 (‘How Apple will reinvent the smartphone wheel … again’), a round-up of ‘Killer Tech that will change the future’, a nostalgic survey of ‘39 Gadgets that Changed the World – Starring Sky+, Wii and 10 years of iPod’ and a feature on ‘How to build your own FPS’. Sophie, needless to say, had no idea what an FPS was or why anyone would want to build it: floral-patterned sofa? Freshly painted shed? Turning to the relevant article, she discovered that in fact it was an acronym for First Person Shooter, and this referred to a subgenre of games based around someone firing a gun (obviously) seen from the perspective of the person doing the firing. Once again she felt the mild, transgressive frisson of stepping outside her own comfort zone, and she read on with increasing fascination, stumbling over terminology she had never encountered before – megatextures, game engine, radiosity, latency – and becoming so absorbed in the article that she found it quite frustrating, for a moment at least, to be interrupted by the opening of the front door. But she was glad to see Ian again, especially when, as soon as he set eyes on her, he stopped in his tracks, laden with shopping bags, and said:

‘Wow.’

‘Wow?’

‘I can’t believe it’s you. I can’t believe it’s you, here, in my flat. You look … incredible.’

He was not paying her an idle compliment. With her hair still tousled and her body still glowing from their last bout of lovemaking, and the white bathrobe hanging so loose that it was almost falling off her, Sophie looked like every Stuff reader’s masturbation fantasy made flesh. She only needed to be fondling an Olympus PEN EP-3 (‘sleek metal casing and what is apparently the world’s fastest autofocus’), or drooling over her BlackBerry Bold 9900 (‘packs in a touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard, and runs the zippy new BlackBerry 7 OS’) for the vision to be complete. No wonder Ian looked happy. He kissed her again, a long and tender kiss on the mouth, to which she responded with lingering eagerness, before he pulled away reluctantly and said, in the voice of a man who could not quite believe the turn reality had taken, lost in a waking dream: