Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath

be a solitary cell or even a womb.

      Across the corridor in another room technopagans flip through the World Wide Web and patrol the alternative spirituality channels in Internet Relay Chat, pondering the Jungian archetypes over leaden carrot cake.

      And all this time Daniel is looming over his mixing desk, shaking his tentacles and mixing the Radio One Top 40 live.

      Afterwards he says: ‘That was the first Radio One Top 40 ever mixed live into a set. Hahaha.’

      I doubt anyone noticed Daniel making musical history, but that’s the way it goes.

      TUESDAY

      I phone the editor of iD on a whim.

      ‘Daniel, oh yes. After our piece about him appeared, he called wanting to write for us and he didn’t stop ringing until I’d given in.’

      ‘Guts.’

      ‘Yeah,’ the editor chuckles to herself. ‘Daniel is definitely a one-off.’

      Memories of my late teendom include a tumble of hopeless crushes, Steppenwolf, Jaws, electro-pop, Saturday Night Fever, suicide bands. And a permanent rictus of raw and unrequited rage. All the usual teenage apparatus, in other words.

      WEDNESDAY

      E-mail from Mac, requesting my public key. Whatever that is.

      THURSDAY

      More discoveries. A public key lets Macadamia send an encrypted message. What message, he won’t say. Some time after midnight he forwards software called Pretty Good Privacy, along with a list of instructions which will supposedly enable me to generate some secret codes called keys.

      Note: Though we both live in London, we work on California time. Like I said, we’re sadsacks.

      >The US government has classed pgp as munitions. Exporting it from the USA is illegal, like running guns writes Mac.

      I can’t imagine what he has to tell me that’s so secret. That he’s a hitman perhaps? A secret agent? Herpes carrier? Cricket fan?

      In order to send or receive a PGP-encrypted message, I have to command the software to generate two keys, a public one which I can give out to Mac and a private one, which I have to keep to myself. The public key can only encode. It can’t decode. So the principle is that I send Mac my public key, he encodes his message with it, sends it back to me, and I decrypt it using my private key. If he sends the message via an anonymous mailer, a computer which removes all reference to his name and e-mail address, it’s almost untraceable and almost completely secure.

      Oh well, however shocking or terrible the message is, I don’t care. Mac makes me laugh and I like the way his mind works and we’re only friends in any case.

      

      A long paragraph of capital letters and keyboard symbols appears on the screen some time after two. I instruct the programme to decrypt and stand back. The hard disk light topspins on-offs. Symbols flip as fast as numbers on the propaganda boards advertising the savings you make by switching telecom companies. In America. Eventually, four lines of message emerge from the chaos, like Poseidon coming up to quell the sea. Line one: Mac’s real-life name. Lines two to four: his address and phone number.

      >Mac, your name and number are in the phone book. I just looked them up.

      Phone numbers? This isn’t the point of virtual life at all. The point of virtual life is to remain apart, distinct, ethereal, untouched by the mess of reality. The point of it is its sheer mystery.

      >I won’t phone you, Mac, and you won’t phone me.

      Sometimes people have to be told things they ought to know already.

      TUESDAY

       Britpop bands

      First Tuesday of every month the Electronic Lounge meets at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The apparent pinnacle of the ‘underground’ e-scene.

      Daniel is a regular, of course. I’m not, but I’m pretending to have checked it out a couple of times in order to avoid – can I say this? – the embarrassment of being uncool. Today Daniel is decidedly down. He left his new T-shirt on the bus. He has scrawled ‘I am in a bad mood’ in gothic letters on my notepad. I offer him a Camel by way of compensation.

      ‘Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t take drugs,’ he moans.

      The Electronic Lounge is filling up with young people in extreme outfits. Platform shoes, kipper ties, fat glasses, trousers made of plastic. All part of the underground now. Just about everything is underground. Mainstream life is what happens to the characters in Neighbours.

      ‘Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?’ I discover a line from an Adam and the Ants hit on my tongue. Very early eighties. Daniel misses the reference (he would have been five) but his face blooms purple all the same.

      ‘Thanks very much,’ he says, avoiding my eye.

      Over Coca Cola (Daniel) and Jim Beam (me) Daniel confesses he hasn’t had much of a love life for years. This takes me by surprise. Conventional wisdom suggests teens are hard at it from an ever earlier age. If you believed everything you read in the papers, you’d think the entire population under twenty had degenerated into a busy whirl of nymphomaniacs and prepubescent pervs.

      ‘You know what really pisses me off about that T-shirt?’ says Daniel, backtracking.

      He sees someone he knows over my shoulder, waves at whoever it is.

      ‘No, Daniel, but you’re going to tell me.’

      ‘I got it in the sale at Slam City Skates. Reduced from, like, fifty quid.’ He begins rooting around in his bag, then pulls out a bar of chocolate and signals to someone else he knows.

      ‘What’s the worst thing you can imagine, Daniel?’ I ask, as a sort of comforter. ‘The very worst thing?’ Like losing a T-shirt not so bad, blah blah. A look of concentration falls over his face.

      ‘My parents break-dancing.’ He tinkers with a follow-up idea.

      ‘Or them having sex,’ he says.

      Glancing over to the crowd gathering at the bar discussing techno, multi-media applications, the direction of narrative in computer game design. I feel suddenly overcome by the weight of my ignorance. It would be easy to write the whole thing off as trivial, but there’s something more enduring about the e-scene than that, which is to say that a tribe of under-agers in thrall to technology might really constitute the future in the making.

      ‘What I think I meant was, what’s the scariest thing you can imagine?’ I continue, attempting to draw Daniel back into some kind of seriousness. He picks up the change in mood.

      ‘My parents dying, I suppose. And growing old too quickly. Hahaha, it seems as though I was seven yesterday hahaha.’

      And it seems as though I was seventeen. The screwy truth of the matter is that we speed through the years so fast we can hardly tell we’ve lived them. Even boys of seventeen worry about how to put the brakes on.

      ‘Do you know what really pisses me off?’ asks Daniel, readying himself to leave me in favour of his younger friends.

      ‘Quite a lot at the moment, I’d say.’

      ‘No, but what really pisses me off?’

      I bite my lip and pretend to consider. Let’s see.

      ‘Uh uh, I can’t think.’

      ‘What really pisses me off is Britpop bands.’

      WEDNESDAY