We are out of date, we know that. It is nearly here, the new world, and who are we to hold it back? We would prefer to get out of the way - to keep to ourselves so as not to detain it. Why does it demand that we stand in the open like everyone else? Why do we, too, have to be counted?
For a long time, we went unnoticed. They had other concerns, the bringers of the future! They had their eye on the new technologies and new investments. Theirs was the fervid South of the country, where everything was happening. The North was the rustbelt; the cities were like broken machines, they did not belong to the present. And who were we who lived in the rustbelt? Ignored, passed by, we knew they would not come for us.
What use could we be? We belonged to the past and the rotting of the past. We belonged to the tower block and the council flats and to those dark estates that were like the estates of Poland. How many of us there were, and all over Europe! How many of us, lost in the past and in the rotting of the past! When was it that time stopped going forward? When was time turned back upon itself?
This was our pride: the city had turned back on itself; it did not look outward. Darkness everywhere - we belonged to it, the city, as it rotted. How was it the city's decay could welcome us? How was it that we were included in its self-demolition? Because it was by decay that our friendship passed. The city was the third term in our friendships. How was it that friendship was folded into the city itself? And how was it that they were lost, those friendships, when the city opened like a new fan?
We no longer recognised ourselves; where were we? Where were our friends? The old haunts disappeared, and when new ones came they were not for us. What of the warren of passages through the old estates? Gone too when the regeneration came. Gone, the towers and flyovers and the old club in its concrete bunker.
2
And didn't it end as the money came from new Europe to our city? Wasn't it then, when the great light came and we had to hide in darkness from the light? What it seemed to take it also gave - music was covered in the newspapers, in new magazines; it was everywhere, but then, too, it was nowhere, for hadn't it retreated from the complex of which, once, it was part?
Then music, which was once the map of our city, withdrew into itself. Music, now, was only music - or if it was not, then it was so only for those in the know, and who were we, whose friendships were failing and for whom the city was turning into a new dawn? We fell apart into private bedrooms; friendship was privatised along with everything else.
This was the time of the narcissism of the Couple: since there was nothing outside, the domestic was all - people moved on, they found other things to do with their lives. Why not? Jobs had come; the regeneration provided for them. God knows, there was even arts funding - it had reached us, here. But it was already too late. We went in separate directions. We had to look after ourselves, we who no longer knew ourselves in the city.
3
It was happening elsewhere, but not for us. We were too late for one world, and too early for another. The internet would not come for several years, and meanwhile? We sold our records and boxed up our tapes; if we read, it was alone, and we kept our books for ourselves, that used to circulate between us. And didn't we retreat into our private idioms? I couldn't understand you - and you, could you understand me?
It was the New Realism: each of us was on the way to a career. How could it be otherwise? We'd missed our appointment with the present, and it was time to catch up. The future was coming, when it would all be different. And wasn't there an interval in which we, even we, could enter its kingdom? But if we did, it would be alone - every man for himself and every woman. Every couple for themselves, that's how it was, we who were now dispersed across the city in flats of our own.
No longer could you call on anyone. Phone first - better still, plan in advance, make an appointment: we'll see each other on Sunday, on Sunday night. And you couldn't meet anyone by chance, everything had to be deliberate - we were to carry calendars in our heads. Feb 15th - ok, we'll see each other then. But when you no longer live side by side? When your room was no longer next to theirs?
Now friendships grew up around work. The world had shifted; if you didn't have a career, what then? There was no one to be unemployed with; the old haunts had gone. No more sitting at the cafe in the sun; no more free gigs and in-through-the-back-door gigs. Everything was official; the future had arrived, pristine and gleaming. New supermarkets and cycle lanes everywhere - how could you resist? Nothing could go underground, because there was no underground.
Friendships took place in the light and by way of the light. That is, there were no friendships, only potential contacts, only those networks which are the negation of friendship and the negation of love. For hadn't it reached love, the New Realism? Wasn't love itself privatised - contracted upon couples in flats who saw only other couples in flats? Contracted upon them, become narcissistic - there was no love, or love had been bent back upon itself, half-destroyed. How was it that love wanted to destroy itself?
The North had become the South, which we had fled. Now the North was the South, when we'd escaped to the North to be away from the South. What we had escaped had come up to find us; we couldn't postpone it any further: the South was no aberration; it was the future and the shape of the future. It was spreading from there, from the South, as it was spreading all across New Europe.
The destruction of love. The destruction of friendship, all the slack taken up - and we, who were the slack, were to be taken up. Time was not to lag behind itself. We were to be on the same time, to set our watches by the future. No more wounds and tracts of time; no longer days wandering in the open. Sadness: the retreat of time, the end of the open day.