that anyone has ever asked me to write Star Wars.
On the night of the answerphone message, I was thirty-three years old, married but temporarily living alone in our small flat in East London, and in dire need of a shave and some natural sunlight. I’d published one book seven years earlier, written two more that nobody wanted, and thereby managed to pull off the impressive feat of having a failed literary career in my mid-twenties.
And, you know, that is what it is.
I had written new adventures for Thunderbirds, Stingray, Doctor Who, Sapphire and Steel, He-Man, The Tripods, Thundercats. . . I took these projects seriously, and though I wasn’t the best writer in the field, and I certainly wasn’t the quickest, I was quietly proud of several of the audio plays I’d helped to create. By and large, I enjoyed the work, and the fans of the old shows generally liked my stories more than they hated them – which is a bigger deal than you might perhaps imagine.
And now I had an idea for the Captain Scarlett script that’d stumped me for months, a genuinely good idea, the first good idea, in fact, in God knew how long. I jumped up, jotted down an enthusiastic page of notes, then climbed back into bed and turned off the light.
I lay there for a while, listening to the distant traffic and the hum of the city.
‘Why knocks an angel in Bethlehem?’
What does that even mean? I thought. Why knocks an angel? It’s nonsense. It’s nonsense and that’s probably because it isn’t what the voice was even saying.
Alone in the dark, I shuffled across to Imogen’s side of the bed.
Don’t worry about it. Just let it go. Tomorrow’s another day.
Imogen’s pillow felt icy cold and had stopped smelling of her a long time ago, but I pressed my face against it anyway, eyes shut tight, waiting for unconsciousness to rise up like dark water.
5
Imogen in Green
Ten hours later, on the morning of the following day, I was one of 927 people watching my wife sleep.
If that seems like a very specific number to be quoting, it’s because the website had a viewer counter under every camera window, so I could always see just how many people had clicked through. If the number was a big one – and 900-plus was pretty big – I’d make a note on a Post-it.
I’d been watching Imogen sleep for most of the morning, through the fuzzy green night vision of Dorm Cam Two. All that time, she’d been lying on her side, facing out, with the duvet pulled up under her chin. That’s how she always slept, although when she slept like that at home, she’d usually do it turned away from me, facing the wall. This meant that by watching Imogen on a computer screen and from 8,383 miles away, I’d learned more about how my wife looked sleeping than I ever did from lying next to her in bed. Something about that made me think of the trouble scientists have studying very small things in laboratories.
I drained my ‘I ♥ coffee’ mug and glanced across at the answerphone on the desk.
It just sat there being quiet and unremarkable.
I set the mug down and scrubbed my fingers through my hair.
On-screen, the duvet rising and falling with my wife’s breathing and a slight digital fuzzing were the only things to give the image away as a live feed and not a flat, dead picture. And, as none of the webcams had sound, the scene was utterly silent too.
In every traditional sense, nothing at all happened.
The counter clicked up to 945 viewers.
I crossed out the old number on the Post-it, added the new one, and then pinned it up on the board.
It’s both compelling and reassuring to watch a person living in real time. The long pauses. The stillness. Sleeping, staring, thinking, reading – all played out in their vast and blank entireties. Putting those familiar little islands of talking, arguing and laughing that we always think of as what people do into wide, empty oceans of context. And then, at the other end of the scale, the opposite of those stillnesses – the rare, powerful, private things – the truthful, the revelatory, the sexual. Those one-in-a-million moments that probably won’t happen while you’re watching, but just might, just might, just might . . .
The phone rang, loud in the quiet flat.
I jumped, grabbing the handset before it could ring again.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Euston,’ said Imogen. ‘This is Eagle One.’
On the screen, my wife’s green body slept soundly. ‘Hello, stranger,’ I said. I half-expected the tremble of adrenaline to come through in my voice, so the hardness I heard there instead surprised me.
‘Don’t be like that, I haven’t got long.’
‘No, I wasn’t. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘I did say I didn’t know if I’d be able to call.’
‘I know, that’s fine. I’m not. I wasn’t meaning anything.’
‘Promise?’
‘Yeah. It’s just the first time I’ve said anything all day. I’m . . . strange.’
‘Ah, that’d do it,’ Imogen-on-the-phone said. ‘I did want to call when I got back, but we ended up being on site longer than I thought and it would’ve been like three a.m. or something over there.’
Imogen-on-the-screen showed no signs of waking up. She just carried on taking her slow, deep breaths – in . . . out . . . in . . . out . . .
‘It’s fine, I’m just feeling a bit weird, a bit . . .’ The word I wanted to use was flat, but I didn’t. ‘. . . abstract. Hello?’
‘Hello. I’m here. Hello?’
‘Hello. I can hear you.’
‘What did you say? Abstract?’
‘Yeah, like, as in, not all here.’ I looked down at the phone. ‘It’s not seeing people, I think. I should probably go out later, walk around a bit.’
‘That sounds like a good plan. You should definitely do that. Get some sun and have some fruit.’
‘I think I will.’
‘Sun and fruit stop a person from being abstract, that’s a well-known fact.’
‘I did not know that.’
‘Oh yeah, there’s nothing better for it.’
‘I’ll take action.’
‘You should. Hey, so. Did you get your Thunderbirds off?’
‘Captain
