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By Root 480 0

porn. Mark feels queasy. He thinks about the couple of times he’s brought himself off by watching the free porn on the net: two men on the steps of a blue swimming pool, three men dressed as soldiers in a toilet. Both times he had to go in search of something else on there afterwards to make himself feel less degraded. The second time he had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google. He surveys the strewn table. Sure, there’s a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante’s inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.

Bernice is nodding at him, as if in agreement with him.

Oh God. Oh no. He thought he was just thinking but he has, it seems, actually been speaking out loud.

The merest opening of a common buttercup on a piece of wasteground in the light of an ordinary day, Bernice is saying, the mere blowing along a road of a piece of litter, is enough to dispel the so-called truth of every single thing online. But we’re forgetting how to know what’s real. That’s the real problem.

How much of it has he said out loud? He can’t be sure. Oh God. Did he say the word wanked? Did he say the stuff about the soldiers and the swimming pool? Oh God.

Bit of a Luddite approach, though, Jen says.

The internet IS real, Hannah is saying. You can’t just say the internet isn’t real. I have it in my house. That makes it real to me.

I refute the internet thus, Bernice says and knocks her hand into the neck of an empty decanter in front of her so that Jen has to catch it to stop it from toppling.

Hannah starts wailing that Bernice, because she has said the words contemporary and philosophy, is being superior and showing off. It is a fate worse than arty talk. Hugo and Richard are now making threats at each other about Damien Hirst’s skull. It looks like a physical fight will break out.

Mark goes upstairs because he thinks he might be sick.

The bathroom is empty.

Through the open door of the room next to it, Miles seems to be measuring something by stepping and counting, stepping and counting. He looks charming, preoccupied. He sees Mark.

Seven steps long, five wide, he says.

Maybe Miles is a secret estate agent.

He has taken his knife and fork upstairs with him. He puts them on the sideboard, takes the salt cellar out of his pocket and puts it down next to them.

What are they for? Mark says.

Miles shrugs his shoulders.

Eating with, he says.

He presses the light switch, on then off. Both men laugh.

It’s all sound and fury downstairs, Mark says. They’re going to punch each other’s skulls in any minute over whether Damien Hirst’s skull means anything.

Miles shrugs his eyebrows and smiles a resigned smile.

And I think I might be sick, Mark says. Any minute now.

Miles nods. His eyes are kind.

See you, he says.

He means: see you in a minute, when you’ve sorted yourself out.

Mark goes into the bathroom. He sits on the floor until he feels better, less hot. Then he stands up and urinates. As he does, a whole childhood poem he didn