In Arcadia

(A story that never quite found its place – but its 90% there)

-1-

Nick can’t sleep.

It’s been going on for months and it’s starting to affect his mental health. It’s starting to affect his business, too. And worrying about the effect that his lack of sleep is having on his mental health and his business is contributing to his sleeplessness.

“It’s a negative feedback loop,” Nick tells his girlfriend Anais.

“It’s one in the morning,” Anais tells Nick. Anais has to be up at five thirty to lead a yoga class. Nick’s lack of sleep is starting to affect her mental health and business too.

Nick is usually a good sleeper. It’s part of his personal success routine. He’s been working on getting his sleep requirement down to five hours a night, in order to give himself more time every day to either exercise and read useful books, like other successful people.

“It’s a matter of mind-set,” says Nick. “I just need to establish the right mental pattern.”

Nick is a personal trainer and fitness blogger. He has thirty thousand followers on Instagram. He earns money through his online promotional partnerships with lifestyle brands and other companies. He can charge three hundred pounds for an Instagram post promoting exercise equipment, or active wear, or vitamin supplements, or male grooming products and cosmetic surgery procedures, or gyms and health spas.

“My mind-set is I’m going to kill you if you don’t let me get to sleep,” Anais says.

Anais is a fitness model and personal trainer. She has fifteen thousand followers on Instagram. She has partnerships with sportswear and underwear and swimwear brands and companies selling beauty products and vitamin supplements. Because she has fewer followers than Nick, she earns less money per promotional post than he does. It’s nothing to do with age or gender. It’s all about the number of eyeballs.

Nick is fifty-two. He’s twenty-five years older than Anais. He’s had a lot of work done.

“I could probably look at my supplement regime, too,” he says.

The work that Nick has had done includes hair replacement surgery, an eyelid lift, a nose job, dermal filling, tattoo removal, and a number of cosmetic dentistry procedures. The supplements he takes included glucosamine and chondroitin, Viagra, omega-3, saw palmetto, beta sitosterol, testosterone, creatine, oestrogen blockers, selective androgen receptor modulators including ligandrol and cardarine, and a range of legal and illegal pro- hormones.

He works out for two hours every day and lives on turkey breasts and whey protein.

“I’m going to go sleep in the other room,” says Anais.

Anais was a client of Nick’s before they got together. He was the one who encouraged her to set up her own business. Before that she was drifting through life. Now she has a plan for achieving her goals. He’s proud of her.

After she’s gone he lays awake until he hears the birds start singing, and then decides that he might as well get up and get on with the day.

-2-

Nick has an early-morning session with his client, A.J. Junior. They meet in the park at 6.30am to do interval training. The day is already hot. It has rained overnight and steam is coming off the trees.

A.J. junior is sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette when Nick gets there. He smells of vodka and red bull.

“Morning boss,” he says to Nick.

A.J. Junior is twenty-two. His father, A.J. Senior, is also a client of Nick’s. A.J. Senior has asked Nick to whip A.J. Junior into shape. A.J. Senior made his fortune in the UPVC sash window installation business. He’s a self-made man and he wants his son to be the same.

A.J. Junior just wants to have a good time until he can inherit the old man’s money.

“Have you been to bed?” Nick asks.

“Nope,” says A.J. Junior

A.J. Junior has ten thousand followers on Instagram. He posts pictures of himself and his friends going to nightclubs and getting off with models and hanging out in Ibiza and Ayia Napa. He’s a celebrity on the local club scene.

He puts in a good fifteen minutes with Nick before he has to stop to throw up and lie down under a tree.

“I need to either drink less or do less drugs,” he says. “Or do more.”

Nick thinks it’s been a decent session, all things considered. He knows he can’t help A.J. Junior until A.J. Junior wants to help himself. He knows this because as well as being a fitness trainer, he’s also a qualified lifestyle coach. He’s completed the David Turner Mentoring Programme.

David Turner has over a million followers on Instagram. He can charge £10,000 to promote a brand or product. The David Turner Mentoring Programme costs £5,000. It includes a two- day seminar presented by David Turner himself.

The David Turner Mentoring Programme taught Nick how to help his clients Break Negative Patterns of Thought and Maintain Relentless Focus on the Future. David Turner took Nick and the other seminar attendees through the story of his Personal Growth Journey from Addiction to Adeption, and his discovery of the principles behind The David Turner Method.

Nick knew most of it already from reading David Turner’s autobiography.

“Don’t waste your time trying to understand the past,” David Turner told them. “Don’t go looking for the man you used to be.”

Nick has used this line with a number of his clients. Most of them are middle-aged men who wanted to get in shape like Nick. Most of them won’t make it. They can’t let go of the men they used to be.

The thing is, A.J. Junior is in good shape. In spite of his lifestyle. Not as good as Nick, but not far off. He has to be. He spends half his time being photographed with his shirt off at pool parties.

And he doesn’t have to work at any of it.

That’s the advantage of being twenty-two and rich.

“Same time next week?” Nick asks A.J. Junior. Nick is thinking about signing up to become a David Turner Trainer. This is the next step after becoming a David Turner Mentor. It costs a further £20,000 and will qualify Nick to lead David Turner Seminars and teach others how to become David Turner Mentors.

That’s when you really start pulling the money in.

A.J. Junior, lying under the tree, waves weakly as Nick leaves.

-3-

People follow Nick on social media because they want to look like him, or because they want to have the lifestyle that they imagine he has, or because they want to have thirty thousand followers like he does.

In order to keep all those followers engaged, Nick has to create and post new and unique online content every few days. If he stops posting new and unique content, his followers will take their eyeballs somewhere else. It’s these eyeballs that Nick sells to his promotional partners.

That’s the trade off.

But over the last two months Nick’s follower numbers have started dropping week on week for the first time in five years. And he’s running out of ideas.

The online content that Nick regularly creates and posts to engage his followers includes:

• Workout photos and videos
• Informal day-to-day snaps (selfies, pictures of food etc.)
• Product reviews and recommendations
• News and personal updates
• Inspirational speeches
• Hints and tips

And so on.

Nick has to plan, create, edit and publish all this content himself. That’s his actual day job – along with training and coaching and inspiring people. Nick is a content provider. He films everything himself in his spare room/ home gym/ office. It’s exhausting.

That afternoon Nick records a piece to camera about setting and exceeding personal goals. It’s mostly cribbed from the David Turner Mentoring Programme. It’s all about permanent self-reinvention and not living in the past.

“You are the story you choose to tell yourself,” Nick explains. “You can start telling a new story any time you want.”

Then he shows his followers how to create their own Adeption Schedule, with each hour of the day optimised for personal development.

Nick likes sharing technical, scientific stuff like this. He doesn’t like talking about himself. Some influencers turn everything into a daily rags-to-riches tale, all about their struggles with low self-esteem, and poor body image, and an abusive background. Nick has seen grown men with twenty-inch arms sob while recounting the stories of their awful childhoods and eventual triumph over self-hatred.

And it works too. Audiences (and advertisers) love emotional content. Nick thinks he could probably put on ten thousand new followers if he started being more touchy-feely.

“Throw them a bone,” is what Anais says. “Loosen up a little. Talk about The Obstacles You’ve Overcome to Get Where You Are. What harm could it do?”

Anais is always talking about her feelings in the social media content she produces. About her hopes and fears and the personal journey she’s been on as a woman and a human being. She doesn’t filter out anything.

Nick doesn’t want to go down that road. The past isn’t relevant. As far as he’s concerned, today – just like every other day – is the first day of the rest of his life.

-4-

“Everyone’s running faster and faster just to stay in one place,” says Tony Armani. “It’s getting harder and harder to just to maintain the progress you’ve already made, let alone grow.”

They’re at the gym, lifting weights. It’s chest day. Nick is spotting for Tony Armani.

Tony Armani has over a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. He can earn two thousand pounds for a single promotional post. He has had: a brow lift, cosmetic fillers, hair replacement surgery, chin tuck, non-surgical facelift, surgical facelift, nose job, and liposuction.

Tony Armani isn’t even his real name. Nobody can remember Tony Armani’s real name anymore. Even Tony Armani can’t remember.

“It’s no wonder some people end up burning out,” he says. “Or just giving up. Especially civilians.”

Civilians is what Tony Armani calls people whose income isn’t dependent on their appearance. People who don’t have to maintain rigorous training regimes just to earn a living.

Everyone is at the gym, despite the early-evening heat. It’s full of gigantic men working on various muscle groups, trying to be the best versions of themselves that they can be. Everyone is supporting each other. It’s an inclusive atmosphere. Once you’re in, you’re in. Even women are welcome, although there are no women there this evening.

“I lost three clients this month,” says Savage Dan Savage. He’s working on his shoulders and upper traps. “Good ones, I thought. Committed to it. Just gave up and stopped turning up to sessions. Didn’t even answer their phones or emails. Nothing.”

“Same thing happened to me,” says Luke ‘Rocky’ Robbins. “Four regulars. Just disappeared.”

The other men all nod, and Nick does too. Along with his declining social media followers, he’s lost five of his regular personal coaching clients already that year. All middle-aged men.

“Where are they all going?” he asks.

“Slipping through the cracks,” says Tony Armani. “Opting out. Barricading themselves in their sheds. Who knows? Remember what happened to Doctor Dave.”

Everyone knows about what happened to Doctor Dave. He had two million followers at his peak. His own exercise class franchise. An apartment in Dubai. Then he had a breakdown at a luxury festival out in the desert and just walked out into the dunes. And that was that.

Dubai is where all the top influencers go to create content in the winter. It’s the luxury holiday capital of the world. It has everything you need, including year-round sunshine, beaches, and bars. Everyone wants to be in Dubai. Nick can’t imagine why anyone would walk away from that.

“So what’s the solution?” Nick asks.

“Arcadia” says Tony Armani.

“What’s Arcadia? A nightclub?”

“It’s a cult, that’s what it is,” says Savage Dan Savage.

“It’s not a cult,” says Stone Cold Shrinesh P. “It’s a new synthetic growth hormone from Israel.”

“No, it’s a drug,” says Luke ‘Rocky’ Robbins. “They developed it in Belgium. Ravers, you know.”

“I thought it was like hypnotherapy,” says Mikey Peters, “for giving up smoking and that sort of thing.”

“Isn’t it a swinger’s club?”

“It’s a social media platform. Like LinkedIn but for lifestyle and personal fitness influencers. By invite only.”

“It’s definitely a drug. People get addicted. It happened to a friend of my cousin.”

“It’s a Russian fitness programme.”

“Lads, it’s an exclusive spa and wellness experience, that’s all.”

“It’s a rip-off.”

“It’s like extreme brain training. It’s scientifically proven.”

“It’s a drug. You can buy it on the street.”

And so on.

Everyone is still arguing when Nick and Tony Armani finish their session and go off to shower and change.

Drinking their juices on the steps outside the front of the gym, watching all the fit and optimistic young men and women heading off for home or out for the night, the two of

them consider the promise of the gigantic summer evening. It’s impossible to be immune to it, even at their age.

“Imagine if you could just reboot,” says Tony Armani, almost wistfully.

“Reboot?” says Nick.

“If there was a way to short-circuit your mental operating system. A hard reset. Fry all the established connections and start again. Completely free of… of yourself.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Why not?”

“You sound like Doctor Dave.”

Tony Armani doesn’t say anything to that. He sips his juice. Nick wonders if Tony Armani is more vulnerable than he lets on. He wonders if this might lead to an opportunity to steal some of Tony’s brand partnerships and followers from under him. Because business is business, after all.

“Is there?” asks Nick.

“Is there what?”

“A way to reboot yourself. To start all over again.”

“Jesus, I hope so,” says Tony Armani. “Otherwise… look at us all, Nick. We’re fucked.”

-5-

Nick had never been interested in getting married or settling down before he met Anais. He’d always imagined that a full-time relationship would mean the end of his potential for personal development. He also didn’t want to stop having sex with different young women every week. That was one of the attractive things about the exercise and lifestyle coaching business. As long as you stayed in shape.

And then, on his fiftieth birthday, in a nightclub in Zante, it happened. Just like that.

“You’re like me,” he’d said, amazed, as the two of them watched the sun come up together.

“But younger and better,” Anais told him.

She was right, too.

Anais was well on her way to having a promising career even before they’d begun working together. She knew what she was doing. Nick was able to let her take over sessions with his less demanding clients from the start. But with Nick’s advice on Focussing on The Future You, and regular guided Adeption sessions, Anais had grown her outlook rapidly. Soon she was taking customers away from the older, male trainers that Nick knew. She could train harder than them, she could stay up later than them, she could recover faster than them.

And she had no fear.

When Nick gets home that evening Anais is running her weekly support group, which is her name for having five or six women round the flat to do yoga and talk about their feelings. The women are a combination of Anais’s friends and clients. They’re all sitting on the floor.

It makes Nick nervous to have this many women in yogawear in his home. Nick never mixes his friends and clients. He doesn’t understand how Anais can manage it.

“Hello, ladies,” says Nick, cautiously.

“Nick’s been losing followers,” Anais tells everyone, just like that, “and I’ve been telling him he needs to open up more.”

The women all agree that this is definitely a good idea. Of course they do.

“It’s not something to be embarrassed about,” they tell him. “It happens to everyone at some point.”

“I don’t…,” says Nick, “I mean, I’m not–”

“Have you tried creating more personal content?” the women ask. “People love that. We need men who are comfortable talking about their feelings. As a society.”

“Exactly!” says Anais. “There’s got to be traction in a man your age sharing how it feels to still be out there, still being forced to compete.”

“A man… my age?” says Nick.

“Ah, you know what we mean…”

Nick excuses himself and goes into the spare room/ home gym/ office. He pretends he has to do some admin. He sits at the desk and listens to the women as they move on from discussing what he needs to do with his life and go back to empathising with each other again. He opens his laptop and tries to make a list of great social media content ideas. He types “talking about feelings” and then deletes it.

The latest personal email from David Turner – the subject line offering Nick The Chance to Move On to The Next Level – is still there, unread, taunting him.

He closes the laptop again.

-6-

It’s after midnight and still over thirty degrees when Nick drives into town. The weather is ridiculous. There are young people out everywhere, taking photographs of each other to share on social media. All the young men have their shirts off. It’s going to be a night of great content.

It’s been a long time since Nick has been down this end of town. He can see how much the skyline of the city has changed. He hardly recognises the estate.

He told Anais that he needed to run an errand. She didn’t believe him, but she was too tired to argue. Anyway, she has to be up first thing to teach another class.

Nick has been parked up on the street in front of the flats for less than thirty seconds when a young man sticks his head in through the car window and asks him what he wants.

“Arcadia,” says Nick.

“What?”

“Arcadia.”

“Never heard of it,” the young man says.

“Who has?” Nick asks.

The young man looks up and down the road, then looks back at Nick. “Are you still here?” he asks.

Nick drives round the corner to try again. This time a group of four or five boys approaches as he pulls in. None of them look older than twelve.

“Is this a Ferrari?” asks one of the boys.

“That’s right,” says Nick.

“No it isn’t,” says one of the others. “It’s a Porsche.”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Nick says.

“Shouldn’t you?” says the boy.

Five hundred yards further down the road Nick pulls up under a streetlight to have a rethink. After a couple of minutes, a very tall man appears alongside the car. He is the tallest man that Nick has ever seen. He looks like a basketball player.

“Arcadia?” Nick asks, leaning out of the car window.

“Do I know you?” the tall man says, looking down at Nick.

“I don’t think so.”

“You look familiar.”

“I used to round live here. A long time ago.”

The man considers Nick’s car.

“You’ve come a long way,” he says

“I’ve got money,” says Nick, holding out two fifties.

“Wait here,” says the man, taking the cash and disappearing into the darkness.

Five minutes later, just as Nick is starting to think that he’s been ripped off, three men dressed in black drag him out of the car, shove a sack on his head, and push him into the back of a blacked-out Mercedes.

-7-

Nick hasn’t had a drink in twenty years. As far as he’s concerned, alcohol is empty calories. Especially for a man his age. Most of his friends feel the same way. The ones who don’t are already well into the process of fading away, or falling apart, or blowing their lives up so spectacularly that they’ll never be able to put the pieces back together.

Nick’s dad was a big drinker. Of course he was. Everyone’s dad was a big drinker back then. By the time the men of their generation reached fifty, there were ruined. If they even managed to reach fifty.

All the same, when the men sitting either side of him in the back of the car lift up the sack and put the hip flask to his mouth, Nick takes a swig.

What else is he going to do?

“I’ve got money,” he tells them, which is mostly true. He has a nice flat and a nice car – although he’s mortgaged up to the eyeballs, and the monthly car repayments are killing him.

“I’m from round here,” he’d says. “I’m just like you.” And that’s mostly true too.
He even offers to give them free life-coaching.

“You don’t have to waste your time trying to understand the past,” he suggests, through the cloth bag. “You don’t need to go looking for the men you used to be.”

It doesn’t help.

The alcohol, or whatever it is, is rough. It makes Nick lose the feeling along the sides of his tongue. And the bag stinks of weed. Or maybe the whole car does. It’s strong enough to make Nick feel sick.

Anais doesn’t drink either, but she smokes a lot of skunk. Nick has to leave the room whenever Anais and her friends make a night of it. It makes him dizzy.

“Think about what it’s doing to your brain,” he tells her, but Anais just fills her lungs with smoke, and then leans over and does a slow motion back-walkover, right there in the middle of the room, and holds it, and holds it, and holds it.

Every single time.

-8-

Because that’s what the men in the car tell him to do, Nick waits for five minutes before taking the sack off his head. Then he discovers that he’s sitting on a white leather sofa in the living room of a flat.

There are no curtains on the windows, and Nick can see the lights of the city spread out below. He reckons the flat is on the fifth or sixth floor. He knows exactly where he is. He remembers it from his childhood.

The only other person in the room is a boy sitting on the floor in front of the TV, playing a game that Nick has never seen before on the Xbox. He’s one of the boys who surrounded Nick’s car earlier in the evening.

“So what happens now?” Nick asks the boy, because there’s no one else to ask. His throat is dry from breathing the stale air inside the sack.

The boy turns around, as if he’s only just realised that Nick is there. Then he nods at the table in front of Nick, where there’s another game controller.

“Seriously?” Nick asks, but the boy turns back to the game without saying anything.

Nick waits for another couple of minutes to see if anything else is going to happen. When it doesn’t, he picks up the controller and starts playing the game.

The character that Nick is controlling is walking through the sort of landscape that Nick has seen in countless other games. A wasteland with crumbling concrete buildings and burnt-out cars and a low orange sun on the horizon. It’s the sort of environment where you expect snipers or zombies. Or both.

But there’s nobody shooting. And no zombies. There’s nothing much happening at all except for Nick’s character walking, and now and then these weird sounds in the distance.

Nick is aware that he doesn’t have a gun or any kind of weapon. If he’s going to fight someone it will have to be with his bare hands. He doesn’t know where the boy’s character is, if they’re supposed to be teaming up against the same enemy or playing against each other. He doesn’t even know if they’re playing the same game. So far there don’t seem to be any enemies, or allies, or anyone else in the game at all.

Except for whatever is making those weird sounds.

Nick wonders if he’s supposed to be solving a puzzle or trying to find some treasure. He wishes he had a map. He wishes he could find some higher ground so he could get a sense of where he is, and where he’s going. He doesn’t like the fact that everything is just slightly too familiar. The streets. The buildings. The derelict shopping centre that reminds him of the place where his father used to take him and his brother to get their hair cut on Saturday mornings.

They would get the bus all the way over there because the old man liked the atmosphere and the conversation. They used to spend hours in that place, listening to the men talk. Nick can still smell the hair oil, and feel his father’s slap round the back of his head whenever Nick complained about being bored and wanting to go look in the toyshop.

He keeps walking, toward the sunset. The sun seems to have been setting for hours, without ever actually dipping below the horizon. That’s what happens in video games, Nick knows. Like the endless days you remember from childhood.

Then things started falling from the sky.

“What the actual fuck?” says Nick.

First a dining table and chairs crash into the empty car park to Nick’s right. Then a caravan lands on the roof of the abandoned petrol station on his left and bursts open. Next, a series of television sets explode, one after the other, onto the road in front of him.

The dining table and chairs belonged to Nick’s parents. They were very proud of them. The caravan is where they’d all lived for a while before they’d got the flat. The television sets had been rented, one after the other. Nick recognises his first car too, and his old front door, and his father’s hi-fi system, and the bunk beds that Nick and his brother shared when they were kids.

As all of them, in turn, falling to the ground and shattering around him

Nick keeps walking, focussing on not getting flattened by the falling objects. He doesn’t want to get killed by some random thing from his past.

Then he rounds a corner and there’s the block of flats itself, looking exactly like it did when it was all still owned by the council. Before the facelift they’d done sometime in the mid-2000’s. Nick can even pick out the window on the fifth floor. It still has the same curtains.

All the windows are reflecting the huge bonfire that’s burning on the recreation ground in front of the flats. The roar of the flames is echoing back off the wall of glass.

Nick watches as two men come out of the entrance to the block. They’re carrying a red sofa between them, one of them at each end. It looks exactly like Nick’s old family sofa.

Behind them are more people carrying tables and lamps and framed pictures, an exercise bike, a set of barbells. There’s a line of people coming out of the block of flats now, all quietly removing everything from Nick’s past.

And at the end of the line, they’re throwing it all onto the bonfire.

-9-

When Nick finally looks up from the game the boy is gone, and the door to the flat is wide open. Nick has no idea how long he’s been playing for. The sky over the city is already getting ligh.

Nick goes outside onto the landing and sees that nobody is about. Probably there hasn’t been anyone there all night. Likely he could have walked out at any time, right from the beginning.

Then he sees the boy running across the grass at the front of the block, and makes his way down the stairs after him.

By the big metal bins at the side of the block two men with their shirts off are fighting. It looks like they’ve been at it for a long time. They’re both bloodied and moving slowly. Their punches are landing with wet smacks and they’re panting for breath. They look up as Nick approaches.

“Which way did he go?” Nick asks them.

The two men shrug. Then they go back to punching each other.

When Nick gets back to his car, the very tall man is standing there. Waiting. Nick wonders if he’s been there all night.

“Did you see the boy?” Nick asks.

The very tall man looks down at Nick.

“There are boys round here all the time,” the very tall man says. “What do you want with them?”

“Your friends kidnapped me.”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Did they put it in the drink?” Nick asked.

“What drink?”

“I know what this is about,” said Nick. “I know what it’s all about. I grew up around here.”

“You already said that.”

They stand in silence for a while, until the very tall man points.

“That him?”

In the distance Nick sees the boy. He’s running down the street, lit up under the streetlights. He’s moving fast enough that nobody is ever going to catch him. Nick and the very tall man watch until he’s gone from sight, heading north, out toward the suburbs.

“You should get on your way now,” the very tall man tells Nick then.

“All done am I, then?” says Nick.

“Finished,” says the very tall man.

Nick gets in the car and aims for home. He has no idea if he’s safe to drive. He doesn’t know if what they gave him is still in his system, or what it might have been. Or if they even gave him anything at all.

He wants to get back home in time to see Anais off to her class, to tell her his plan.

He’s just started recording himself on the phone when he sees the bonfire outside the flats and he has to stop driving because he’s crying so hard.

– END –