But the ‘it’ was troubling. Would we like to know the sex? Yes please, we said, and squinted at the image I couldn’t see it myself, but apparently it was a girl. I would have a daughter, and although I had never expressed a preference, I must confess that I was secretly pleased. I had experienced, and was continuing to experience, the awkwardness of the father — son relationship, but didn’t all daughters love their dads and vice versa? Probably there was a certain amount of relief, too; wouldn’t our daughter look to Connie for advice and guidance? Wouldn’t she be the role model and soul-mate, as well as the butt of the biggest rows? They’d swap clothes and confide and when adolescence came around, the doors would slam in Connie’s face, not mine. As a father to a daughter, all I’d have to do was provide the lifts, the pocket money, the understanding ear and proud paternal hug at graduation. All I’d have to do was worry about her, and that was entirely within my abilities.
We took our smudged image home and stuck it on a pinboard, surrounded by Post-it notes with all the names we liked — or rather all the names Connie liked, my imagination balking at anything more esoteric than Emily, Charlotte, Jessica, Grace. Perversely, Connie settled on Jane, a name so ordinary that it was practically avant-garde. We rubbed the bump with oil. Connie stopped work and readied the house, I worked long hours on a new project, zebrafish now, and waited for the call.
And here, with some reluctance, I must return to that notion of time as a loop of celluloid. The first snip of the scissors came on London Bridge on the night I met my wife, but where was that second cut? While her affair had been traumatic, it would be worth reliving if only for the happiness of what came after, the winter and spring of her pregnancy during which our marriage once again made perfect sense.
But some things cannot be lived through twice and so, if asked, I think I’d like to make that other cut round about now please.
Could there be a clearer indicator of the dizzying pace of technological change than the demise of the internet café? Once so space-age, so cutting-edge, portals to a world of knowledge and fantasy, until cheap wifi and the smart phone rendered them obsolete, and they became as quaint and anachronistic as the telegram office or the video rental outlet.
In Venice, only one internet café remained, situated in a gloomy little parade of shops near a housing estate in Cannaregio. Exhausted and made lame by my second circuit of the city I took refuge in its cool, dark interior, squeezing past a wall of telephone booths where Indians and Pakistanis, Arabs and Africans chattered urgently, to the computer bays where the poor and desperate joined the scammers, the blackmailers and stalkers, all of us hunched and furtive on swivel chairs leaking yellow foam in the unhealthy glow of the screens. Explosions and laser-blasts could be heard to my left where a nine-year-old boy was hammering his keyboard as aliens disintegrated all around, while to my right an earnest young man stared intently at a page of dense Arabic script. I smiled hello and turned to my computer. The console and keyboard were ancient and filthy, the dirty cream of old Bakelite, but I was exhausted and almost out of credit on my tablet and so I sat there, grateful, in the room that smelt of wet cardboard and instant coffee, and took my quest online.
Doubts had begun to assail me. I knew from Albie’s call to the hotel that he and Cat had been heading this way, but what if they had changed their minds, or left already? In need of reassurance, I searched for
an alchemist, tossing ingredients into a cauldron in the vain hope of finding gold. I searched for
