This Is Yr Life

Chapter Five

At the cemetery, Kyle walked over the snow-covered path that snaked down through the cemetery ahead of him. The snow had fallen overnight and there were footprints that overlapped one another, trodden and set to freeze over like moulds.

At Chloe’s grave, Kyle stood still. He held the flowers out and then pulled his arm back.

‘Hi,’ he said, staring at the grave and the screen. Chloe’s image was walking up and down a path, looking confused.

‘You lost?’ Kyle said, and took a step closer to the grave. He knelt down and placed the flowers on the soil and watched the damp grass seep into the blue paper wrapped around the stems.

‘I hope you like it. They didn’t have any orchids, don’t grow here anymore, obviously.’ But Chloe wasn’t listening, she was staring into the bushes behind her, and with her right hand she was frantically shaking and pointing towards the camera and back into the bushes. As the camera moved closer, she turned wide mouthed and all teeth and gums framed with dark red lipstick.

‘Look,’ she mouthed, and pointed through the branches, putting a finger to her lips, signalling silence.

The camera moved closer to the branches, Chloe’s hands helped pull them down and spread leaves out of the way, and through the gap and into a clearing the lens showed two elephants, tearing leaves from trees that were dwarfed in their presence. Their trucks rolled out like great autonomous arms, ripping thin branches with ease and shoving them into their mouths where they chewed, chewed, chewed, swallowed, and started all over again. The camera stayed still and focused on the elephants for a long time, and Kyle just watched along until they tore their last branch from a near tree and walked off out of sight.

The camera pulled back, and Chloe had her hand over her mouth, as the focus adjusted, Kyle saw she was crying.

He was the first one home that night. Walking through the front door, he heard the usual ding-dong of the opening door and the home-assistant welcoming him as pre-programmed lights illuminated as he stood in the doorway.

It was unusual for the flat to be empty at this time of the evening. Typically, his roommates would be sitting on the sofas drinking beers, vaping, flicking through the TV, or playing video games. Normally, they would nod hello, but only after the assistant had welcomed Kyle first.

And Kyle would normally stand in the doorway for longer than necessary, fiddling with his shoelaces, checking and double checking his pockets for items he didn’t have, but was killing time for reasons he never really understood. After half a minute of standing, one of his roommates would ask how his day was, and he would pretend not to hear at first, say ‘What? Huh? Oh, yeah, same old. Boring drone data job, you know?’ This was his go-to response for talking about work, and they would look at him and nod and then turn back to whatever was on the TV.

‘Where are Lewis and Finn?’ he asked.

‘Their schedule has nothing recorded.’

Kyle hung his coat and started towards his bedroom, getting halfway to the door before stopping, looking around and seeing the sofas empty before him.

‘Do you know when they will be home?’

‘Their schedule has nothing recorded,’ the assistant repeated. Kyle shrugged and took a seat.

‘TV on,’ he said, and the screen, nearly as wide as the wall it was hung on came alive, still on the same channel as what Lewis and Finn were watching last night that he had heard them laughing about as the smell of fruit and syrup filled the flat. When he had gotten up to get a glass of water, he could hardly see through the cloud of vapour that hung in the room, and neither of his flatmates had noticed him come out of his room, enter the kitchen and then return.

Last night, they went to bed around half past two in the morning. Kyle was still awake and remained awake for nearly an hour after the flat had silenced and only the dull noises of the street below them distracted Kyle from the darkness in front of him. There, he lay wondering about Lewis and Finn and what they got up to when they weren’t lounging in the apartment. They wore shirts and ties, some days, but others they left in the morning in shorts, occasionally. He never found out what they did for a living, or if he had done, then he had since forgotten. Kyle assumed, like many others in the city, they worked in tech, but that term had become so broad in recent years that they could do pretty much anything.

He wasn’t sure what he was watching. People in a studio, blue lights dim around the perimeter. Spotlights. A man in a purple suit and what looked like a wig nestled on his head was laughing and pointing and waving his arms around. There was applause. There was ooos and aahhs. There were podiums with names and numbers, and the people behind those podiums looked normal.

Normal.

‘TV volume up,’ he said, and the sound increased second by second until he told it to stop. He figured it was some game show. They were showing videos, old videos of the contestant's lives and having to answer questions about what happened next. Kyle watched and tried to guess but never got it right but those on the screen, on the game show, managed to get them all correct. When the host in his purple suit and his bad hair, streaked with silver and curled into a quiff atop his head, announced the right answer there were screams and hugs and clapping.

‘TV off,’ he said. ‘Search Chloe Kennedy.’

‘Searching Chloe Kennedy,’ the assistant said.

Picture of all kinds of Chloe’s appeared on the screens around him.

‘Panorama view,’ he said, and the pictures surrounded the room on every available screen.

‘Do we have any beer?’

‘... There are six bottles in the fridge, Kyle.’

In some homes across the country, maybe the world, requesting a drink, or anything really would automatically provide you with whatever you required. But the system installed in the building was old, one of the early systems that still had issues here and there but for Kyle, who hardly even used it, was almost intimidated, untrustful of the technology that filled every home in the country, it wasn’t an issue.

‘Would you like a beer, Kyle?’

But Kyle didn’t respond.

The screens that surrounded the room were now full of Chloe, his Chloe. He sat on the sofa just staring at her.

‘Dim the lights.’

Later, close to midnight, Kyle was still sitting on the sofa, scrolling through Chloe’s social media profile. He looked at pictures from her travels; travels he already knew of. But the videos he had seen at her grave were only the start. He saw pictures of her showing small foreign children how to kick a football, how to ride bikes. He saw her with mud or dust or dirt all over her face as she smiled in her baseball hat, tipped slightly up, so the peak pointed towards the sky. Her hair hung unwashed and knotted around her shoulders. She was covered in scrapes and small bruises but still smiling.

She had taken pictures of herself in a village surrounded by derelict huts and plastic bottles littered along the side of the dirt road behind her. Some bottles were hung up in trees, with the sun behind her illuminating through. In the background were silhouettes of crowds of children and adults. But the bodies were crooked and hunched and they held each other.

She carried long bamboo poles, mallets, nets, bricks, and wires. She worked with other sweating Westerners. Their names were tagged, and he browsed the comments.

Making a difference

An experience we’ll never forget

Miss you guys, where to next?

This was one of the best days we had. Miss you CK.

CK.

Kyle looked at the dates, three years ago. He remembered what he had been doing three years ago. He sat in his room and never left his computer desk. He browsed message boards, looked at other people’s photos. He spent days reading about things; he couldn’t remember what they were now. It was the same year where he wanted to learn Chinese and had gone to night classes where he was surrounded by people who acted like they already knew it all. His pronunciation wasn’t on par with the others, but he persevered until one day when he thought he was starting to get it, he failed a quiz and never returned.

From behind the door to the flat, Kyle heard a dinging of the bell. Footsteps. Voices. The door in front of him opened and Finn and Lewis stepped in. Their shirts were untucked. Their hair damp. Eyes heavy, hardly open.

‘Kyle mate,’ said Finn, smiling, dropping his coat on the floor. ‘Taking advantage of the empty flat, eh?’

‘Er, yeah. You know, just chilling.’

‘Who’s that?’ said Lewis, nodding towards the images that surrounded the room.

‘Just a girl.’ Kyle said, closing down the pictures and opening up a random page.

‘Just a girl?’

‘Yeah,’ Kyle said. ‘A girl from work.’

Finn and Lewis looked at each other, nodded, turned back to Kyle. ‘She looked tidy,’ said Finn. ‘Why don’t you have her round, we’re having a party next week.’

‘Yeah,’ Kyle said, ‘That’d be cool.’

Finn and Lewis sat down next to him.

‘Is there any beer in the fridge?’

‘There are six bottles in the fridge,’ the assistant said, again. Finn looked at Lewis, and Lewis looked at Finn.

‘You get it,’ Finn said.

‘Nah mate, you get it.’

‘No, I always get it.’

Kyle, in between them absently flicked through different sites and then, realising he didn’t care what was written, returned to the TV channel. The game show was over, and now there was a documentary about life and death.

‘We watched this last night,’ said Finn. ‘Stoned. Way too intense.’ He pulled out his vaporiser and took a puff and filled the room with not smoke, vapour, but it hazed the screen all the same.

The three of them sat in the living room that filled with pink fog. They laughed and shared vaporisers. They ordered takeaway and took turns collecting the beer from the fridge. When they ran out, Finn brought bottles of whiskey from his bedroom. No mixer. But Lewis and Finn didn’t care. It burned Kyle’s throat, and he winced, trying to hide his displeasure from his roommates. Still, he kept drinking along with them until the darkness overcame him and the room got blurred, and he sat, his eyes slowly losing focus, while they flicked through channels, complaining about the lack of good stuff available.

‘It’s the twenty-first century, why is there still garbage on every channel.’

‘Anything to stream?’

‘Watched it all,’ said Finn.

‘All of it?’

Kyle woke up the next day on the sofa and was blinded by the light screaming through the window. Finn and Lewis were gone. The flat was quiet. He tried to sit up but every atom of his being pained with the movement. Instead, he elected to lie there, staring at the ceiling, his mouth dry, his head slashed with sharp agony every time he opened his eyes.

He laid on the sofa all day, drifting in an out of sleep, undisturbed except for the occasional dinging of the lift at the end of the hall on the other side of the door. There was no noise from either of Finn or Lewis’ room, and Kyle decided that they, too, were feeling as bad as he was. He groped towards the table for leftover takeaway, but it was just out of arm’s grasp. So Kyle laid there for longer and accepted that this was how his day would go. He slept.

In the middle of the night he woke up, no longer feeling weak and heavy, but he was unaware of the time. Sitting up, he looked towards Finn and Lewis’ rooms. Under the door, there was a dim light that illuminated the smallest sliver of floor beneath. From behind the door, he could hear voices, whispering voices that were hard to make sense of, but there was something.

‘Yeah, I don’t know. Bit weird, though, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure, but yeah, weird. Whatever.’