Felix: Roma baby
Felix: Lmao
Felix: Here with some girl I met on tinder, ill tell you when im back
Mick: How are you in rome with someone you met on tinder?
Mick: This needs way more explanation hahaha
Dave: Wait what!! did a wealthy old lady pick you up on the internet?
Mick: Ohhhh
Mick: Hate to say it but ive heard about this
Mick: You are gonna wake up with no kidneys
After this exchange, Felix closed out of that group chat and opened another, which was titled ‘number 16’。
Felix: Hey has sabrina been fed today
Felix: And not just biscuits she wants wet food
Felix: Post a picture when its done I wanna see her
No one responded or saw the messages right away. At the same time, in a different part of the city, Alice was recording a segment for an Italian television programme on which her voice would later be dubbed over by an interpreter. From a feminist perspective, it’s about the gendered division of labour, she was saying. Felix locked his phone and continued walking, crossing partway over a bridge and pausing to look down the river at the Castel Sant’Angelo. Through his headphones he was listening to ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’。 The quality of light was very crisp, golden, casting dark diagonal shadows,
and the waters of the Tiber below were pale green, milky. Leaning on the wide white stone balustrade, Felix took out his phone and flicked over to the camera app. The phone was several years old and for some reason opening the camera app caused the music to skip and then switch off. He removed his headphones irritably and took a picture of the castle. For a few seconds then he held the phone out at arm’s length, headphones dangling loose over the side of the bridge, and it was not clear from this gesture whether he was trying to see the existing image better, getting a new angle in order to take a different photograph, or simply thinking about letting the device slip soundlessly out of his hand and into the river. He stood there with his arm outstretched and a grave-looking expression on his face, but maybe he was just frowning under the glare of sunlight. Without taking another photograph, he wound up the headphones, pocketed the phone and walked on.
Alice was giving a reading at a literary festival that night. She told Felix there was no need for him to attend, but he said he didn’t have other plans. Might as well hear what your books are about, he said. Seeing as I’m not going to read them. Alice said if the event was really good maybe he would change his mind and he assured her he would not. The event was outside the city centre, in a large building that housed a concert hall and exhibitions of contemporary art. The corridors of the building were busy, with various readings and talks going on at the same time. Someone from the publishing house came over before the event and took Alice away to meet the man who would interview her onstage. Felix wandered around with his headphones in, checking his messages, his social media timelines. In the news, a British politician had made an offensive statement about Bloody Sunday. Felix returned to the top of his timeline, refreshed it, waited for new posts to load, and then did the same thing again, several
times. He didn’t even seem to read the new posts before pulling down to refresh again.
Alice was at that point sitting in a windowless room with a bowl of fruit in front of her, saying: Thank you, thank you, that’s very kind of you, I’m so pleased you enjoyed it.
About a hundred people attended Alice’s event. Onstage she read for five minutes, then engaged in conversation with an interviewer, and then took audience questions. An interpreter sat beside her, translating the questions in Alice’s ear and then translating Alice’s answers for the audience. The interpreter was fast and efficient, moving a pen rapidly across a pad of paper while Alice was speaking, then delivering the translation aloud without pausing, and then striking through everything she had written and beginning again as soon as Alice resumed. Felix sat in the audience listening. When Alice said something funny, he laughed, along with the others in the audience who could understand English. The rest of the audience would laugh later, when the interpreter was speaking, or else they wouldn’t, perhaps because the joke didn’t translate or because they didn’t find it funny. Alice answered questions about feminism, sexuality, the work of James Joyce, the role of the Catholic Church in Irish cultural life.
Did Felix find her answers interesting, or was he bored? Was he thinking about her, or about something else, someone else? And onstage, speaking about her books, was Alice thinking about him? Did he exist for her in that moment, and if so, in what way?