Free Noughties by Ben Masters Page A

jumpers which he rubs in moments of nervous energy—is this kid private school or what?
    “You fiddling with your touchy-feelies, Scott?” I ask.
    “No,” he says, hastily placing both hands on top of the table and blushing profusely.
    “Bless him?” says Abi. I flinch as my bladder ups the ante.
    As I was saying, what we are facing here is a problem of conceptualization. We just don’t know where to place ourselves, and neither will history. The Roaring Twenties and the Swinging Sixties we ain’t. Can’t be. We resist totalizing models and interpretations; we don’t provide the chronological shorthand. We’re a loose bunch: a confused series of tenuously associated, random events. How will we be referred to? How will they homogenize us? Or will we be overlooked as an untimely mass of singularities? We have no foreseeable narrative, untaggable as we are. Ours is a lost period, shopping around for identity, spiraling off in referential chaos.
    “Back in a sec,” I say, rising from the table. Need the toilet—time to break the seal—will be pissing like a racehorse from now on—the three rooms leading there are rammed—playing dodgems on a full bladder—reached capacity—at least five people give me the glare as I buoyantly pass—collisions and spillages—lube me up—fetid smell—slide me through—suspiciously wet door handle: the Gents.
    What we do have, down here in the fledgling twenty-first century, is performance. Our entire tangible lives are performance; we are consummate professionals. The performance of self is nothing new of course; but it’s never been so rampant, so vital, so fundamental.
    “Where’s Eliot?” Sanjay will be saying at our table, just returned from the bar.
    “Toilet,” someone will reply (“Toilet?” if that someone is Abi), and Sanjay will say “typical” because it’s typical for me to be in the toilet.
    Performance: rampant, vital, fundamental. Our lot follow celebrities, red circles flashing round their defects—their unforgivable cellulite and unthinkable lack of abs—and adjust ourselves accordingly. We turn on MTV, where the M stands for Materialism, and make our demands, warp our expectations, perform performance. Even our language is performed: the twenty-first-century phrasebook all cliché and slang, empty razzmatazz and Neanderthal droning.
    Undo fly—keep head up—stare straight ahead—do not look down—do not eye the steaming stainless steel—dripping bubbling reflection—I am not inspecting your tackle—I repeat, I am not inspecting your—I am strictly focused on the job in hand—ten seconds of dry delay—seriously, I am not looking at … and we’re away.
    Performance is foremost a qualitative notion, here in the twenty-first century. It has a competitive edge. For instance, one of the girls I knocked into on the way to the toilet was a strong 7 and her friend a close 6 (10 being absolutely hypothetical, of course); the cocky barman, with his irresistibly punchable five-year-old face, is a Grade A bell-end. Moreover, the condom machine in the toilet boasts that it can make me “last longer” and “raise my sexual game,” just as the junk mail on my BlackBerry promises “prosperouslovemaking” and offers to “boost” my “manhood” for only a few dollars a month. He that farthest cometh behind, fainting follows, in this, our most twenty-first of centuries.
    Shiver and repackage—quick check of the mirror—rower type next to me delicately tweaking each strand of hair—someone vomming in the cubicle—another, the next along, having his beeriod—rower type now surreptitiously testing his guns—anonymous character still chucking up. Ready to reload, I set off for the bar.
    A blip in time then, this, the awkward, tentative first decade. Sure, we remember the ’90s well enough to associate with the twentieth century still, but why would we want to do that? Let’s run away from that. We’re the veterans of the twentieth and