I
Six years after her MSc and four years after a gruelling post at BMW, Vesna took a very well-paid job as a Technical Trainer with Aleph-Null (who worked with innovative electronics in the automotive industry and related sectors) and moved, with Sean, to Vienna.
Sean, a cultural commentator with the uncanny ability to cut through exactly what was wrong with the long-awaited follow-up to a decades-old franchise of first-person-shooter video games for one hundred and fifty pounds an article, had always felt outshone by his partner.
Vesna, with her serious training and real job and priorities, marrying him notwithstanding, seemed far more in-keeping with the 21st century than he did. If Vesna had taken a careful look around and decided how best to use her talents in the pursuit of a meaningful, challenging life rewarded by fiscal and material comfort, Sean was committed to ephemera, poking around in the dying embers of the arts in search of what? A charred piece of meat? The nub of a melted trinket? It was difficult to see how their friends could conclude anything else. But a lot of their friends had babies and were busy forming tenuous alliances with other people who had babies, so maybe they didn’t think about him or Vesna at all.
‘I’ll be a kept husband!’ Sean said, repeatedly, in company, until it wasn’t funny anymore. Vesna said that he could probably deal with it.
‘I probably can deal with it.’
‘Something you need to get used to,’ said Vesna, ‘is differentiating between the expectation – that is to say, all the garbage you’ve filled your head with, from sitcoms to video games – and actual lived experience.’
As part of Vesna’s remuneration package they were given a flat in the converted Swedish Embassy; it was cold and beautiful, with floor-to-ceiling windows in its off-yellow interior walls. The dark tables were elegant and unfussy but still staunchly impractical – brushing past, one could knock over everything.
He could handle it. He got very into coffee. He worked slowly on an article about games within games, and why hidden secrets, or the mere implication of a hidden secret, fascinated and disturbed its audience so. Video games which required the player to visit some real-world location, or undertake to understand that it was, in fact, a game, or tinker with the systems file of their own computer in order to complete them… These would produce reams of speculative discussion and copy, to which Sean was happy to contribute.
