GAP YEAR

by
Michael Gardiner

A mile away, pending applicants were stacked in four storey blocks. The flats were missing furniture, some front doors. But the applicants were too busy to notice. Each room had a fifty-inch screen, and they spent their days on mattresses watching their profiles, falling asleep from the ache in the retinas.

Yeva was special because she was applicant number one million. She heaved herself off her mattress and opened a curtain. The estate shivered into its psychedelic grey, like it knew it was being watched. She felt her way to her mattress. By this time of evening her eyes didn�t work so well.

�It�s dark outside�.

�Dark, is it?�

Her body tightened, then went loose.

�In the morning � �

She trailed off. Her father watched the information dancing on her face.

�It�s early to call it a day�.

�You say that every night�.

�I know�.

Her eyes flickered. The news emptied out and renewed itself. You couldn�t take your eyes off it, you really couldn�t. Yeva would find herself gazing over the beshitten greens of the Fort and longing for a moment of boredom.

Her father wondered if he was talking out loud, concentrated instead on the pinging in his optic nerves. It was just, she could make him feel so, antisocial. And she might be right. In Soviet days they�d had to read between the lines to get the news. For young people now it was harder: they got every single line and believed the news was doing them good.

By five every day Yeva was staggering about the room, twitching. When she became a student she�d taken to calling these fits her ill humours. Ill humours Christ.

She walked hands out to avoid knocking over the chairs. She�d developed the habit of walking with her hands clasped in front of her, looking devout.

�My happiness rating is wonderful�, she said.

�Eh?�

�It�s wonderful. I never knew I was this balanced�.

His head fell to his hands. She�d lost the plot. Long ago, maybe.

He blamed the drug trials. Full time employment might be good for your security but they were scrambling her head. The clinic had put out a circular diagnosing her with trauma. You�d be traumatised too if you had LSD poured down you experimentally for years, he�d told them. His own online profile had lurched when he�d said it, and Yeva hadn�t spoken to him for a weekend.

Back home party members would have volunteered for drug tests, he thought. But he didn�t hear this statement, and assumed he�d managed not to say it. He was learning, at last.

�Frappuccino�, she told him.

�Eh?�

�Caramel frappuccino�.

Didn�t they have boyfriends, by this age, he thought. How many million fit and able were registered as students for the sake of their profiles, and spent their afternoons face up looking at the screen. Yeva had been on one gap year for twelve fucking years.

�Best time of your life�. This time he heard it, which meant that he�d said it.

She nodded.

�I only wish you got caramel frappucino here�, she said, pouring a tumbler of vodka. In the Fort, the tap water was not to be spoken of.

He felt his shoulders shuffling, and regarded the darkness. It seemed that he�d been waving his hands in front of his face. His vision had been bleached clean by a day at the screen.

�Listen�, he said. �I can�t let you lose the plot. Who would look after me?� She tsked.

�No-one�s going to lose the plot. I got a great happiness rating�.

�Over here�. He waved. �What�s the matter, talking to the wall?�

�Take it easy. I just got all my news at once. I�m saying, I got a good happiness rating. All clear�.

His head shook itself.

�You just worry me. You worry me�.

He lifted his fist to scratch his brain, and remembered his brain was on the inside. He turned back to his profile. In this life you can only look after your own applications.

But the whole fucking profile only made him cringe. Once he�d been told they were crying out for doctors here. Now he was two years from retirement. With all these blanks on his history. He would leave Yeva no estate but a half-completed profile.

Like a ghost a sigh rattled round the Fort, up the stairs, in the flat with the door off its hinges, and landed in Yeva�s chest. She gripped the windowsill and rocked. Beyond the blocks and the haunted bins, she could see the sea. Or she could hear it: she wasn�t sure which. She was sure that something behind the shivering grey must be changing day by day. The weather was what it was: the weather. She narrowed her eyes, and tried to imagine what nature looked like.

� Michael Gardiner
Reproduced with permission

---

Leave a message for Michael on the site forum here