Machines Like Me Read online

  I turned to Adam. ‘Please.’

  He rose immediately and went into the tiny crowded hall where coats hung between the gas and electricity meters. We listened as he turned the door latch. Seconds later the front door closed.

  Adam came into the room leading by the hand a child, a very small boy. He wore dirty shorts and t-shirt and pink plastic sandals a couple of sizes too large. His legs and feet were filthy. In his free hand was a brown envelope. He clung to Adam’s hand, in fact, to his forefinger. He was looking steadily from Miranda to me. By this time, we were both standing. Adam prised from the child’s fist the envelope and passed it to me. It was as soft and limp as suede from much use and had some addition and crossings-out on it in pencil. Inside was the card I’d given to the boy’s father. On the back was a note in thick black upper-case letters. ‘You wanted him.’

  I passed it to Miranda and looked back at the boy, then I remembered his name.

  I said in the kindliest way, ‘Hello Mark. How did you get here?’

  By this time Miranda, making a soft, sympathetic sound, was going towards him. But he was no longer looking in our direction. Instead, he was gazing up at Adam whose finger he still gripped.

  *

  He might have been in shock, but the little boy showed no outward signs of distress. He would have been better off crying, for he gave an impression of inner struggle. He stood among strangers in the alien kitchen, shoulders back, chest out, trying to be large and brave. At just over a metre high, he was doing his best. His sandals suggested an older sister. Where was she? I had told Miranda about the encounter in the swing park and she had understood the note. She tried to put her arms round Mark’s shoulders but he shrugged her off. It was possible he’d never been taught the luxury of being comforted. Adam stood still and upright and the boy kept firm hold of the reassuring finger.

  Miranda knelt down in front of him, levelling with him, determined not to condescend. ‘Mark, you’re with friends and you’re going to be fine,’ she said soothingly.

  Adam knew nothing at first hand about children, but everything that could be known was available to him. He waited for Miranda, then he said in an unforced tone, ‘So, what shall we have for breakfast?’

  Mark spoke to no one in particular. ‘Toast.’

  That was a fortunate choice. I crossed the kitchen, relieved to have something to do. Miranda also wanted to make the toast and we fumbled around together in a small space without touching. I sliced the bread, she brought out the butter and found a plate.

  ‘And juice?’ Miranda said.

  ‘Milk.’ The small voice was immediate, assertive in its way, and we felt reassured.

  Miranda poured milk, but into a wine glass, the only clean vessel available. When she presented it to Mark he looked away. I rinsed out a coffee mug, Miranda decanted the drink and presented it again. He took it in two hands but wouldn’t be led to the table. Watched by us, he stood alone in the centre of the kitchen, eyes closed, and drank, then set the mug down at his feet.

  I said, ‘Mark, would you like butter? Marmalade? Peanut butter?’

  The boy shook his head, as though each offer was an item of sad news.

  ‘Just toast on its own?’ I cut it into four pieces. He took them off the plate and gripped them in his fist and ate them methodically, letting the crusts fall to his feet. It was an interesting face. Very pale, plump, unblemished skin, green eyes, a bright rosebud of a mouth. The ginger-blond hair was buzz-cut close to the scalp, which gave his long, delicate ears a prominent look.

  ‘Now what?’ Adam said.

  ‘Wee.’

  He followed me along the narrow corridor and into the lavatory. I lifted the seat and helped him pull his shorts down. He had no underwear. He was competent with his aim, and his bladder was capacious, for the tiny stream lasted a while. I tried to make conversation while he tinkled away.

  ‘Would you like a story, Mark? Shall we look for a picture book?’ I suspected I didn’t have one.

  He didn’t reply.

  It had been a long time since I’d seen a penis so minuscule, so dedicated to one uncomplicated task. His defencelessness seemed complete. When I helped him wash his hands, he appeared familiar with the routine, but he refused the towel and dodged out into the corridor.

  Back in the kitchen it looked cheerful. While Miranda and Adam cleared up, flamenco music was playing on the radio. The newcomer had delivered us into the mundane as well as the momentous, into unbuttered toast as well as the shock of a rejected existence. Our own scattered concerns – a betrayal, a disputed claim to consciousness, a death threat – were trivial. With the little boy among us it was important to clean up, impose order, and only then reflect.

  The scintillating guitar soon gave way to shambolic and frenzied orchestral music. I snapped it off and into the momentary bliss of silence that followed Adam said, ‘One of you should now be in touch with the authorities.’

  ‘Soon,’ Miranda said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Otherwise the legal situation could be difficult.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She meant No.

  ‘The parents might not be of the same mind. The mother could be looking for him.’

  He waited for a reply. Miranda was sweeping the floor and had made a small heap, which included Mark’s crusts, by the cooker. Now she knelt to gather the detritus into a dustpan.

  She said quietly, ‘Charlie told me. The mother’s a wreck. She smacks him.’

  Adam continued. He made his points with delicacy, like a lawyer giving unwelcome advice to a client he couldn’t afford to lose.

  ‘Granted, but that might not be relevant. Mark probably loves her. And from a legal perspective, in the case of a minor, there comes a point when your hospitality shades into wrongdoing.’

  ‘Fine with me.’

  Mark had gone to stand by Adam’s side and held the fabric of his jeans between forefinger and thumb.

  Adam lowered his voice for the boy’s benefit. ‘If you don’t mind, allow me to read to you from the Child Abduction Act of 19—’

  With great force, Miranda struck the edge of the tin dustpan against the rim of the pedal dustbin to empty out the sweepings. I was polishing glasses, not minding a rift between my lover and her paramour. The fucking machine was talking sense. Miranda was driven by something other than sense. Perhaps it was beyond Adam to understand her, or to interpret the noise she had made with the dustpan. I listened and watched and dried the glasses, and placed them on their shelf in the cupboard where they had not been in a long time.

  Adam continued in his cautious manner.

  ‘A key word in the Act, along with “abduct”, is “retain”. The police may already be out looking for him. May I—’

  ‘Adam. That’s enough.’

  ‘You might like to hear about some relevant cases. In 1969, a Liverpool woman passing an all-night garage came across a little girl who—’

  She had gone to where he stood and for an impossible moment I thought she was going to hit him. She spoke firmly into his face, separating out the words. ‘I don’t want or need your advice. Thank you!’

  Mark began to cry. Before there was a sound, his rosebud stretched to a downturn. A prolonged falling moan, as of rebuke, was followed by a clucking sound as his collapsed lungs fought for an intake of breath. The inhalation that preceded his wail was also prolonged. The tears were instant. Miranda made a comforting sound and put a hand on the boy’s arm. It was not the right move. The wail rose to a siren shriek. In other circumstances, we might have run from the room to an assembly point. When Adam glanced across at me, I gave a helpless shrug. Mark surely needed his mother. But Adam picked the boy up and settled him on his hip and the crying stopped in seconds. In the gulping aftermath, the little boy stared glassily out at us through spiked eyelashes from a high position. He announced in a clear voice, free of petulance, ‘I want to have a bath. With a boat.’

  He had spoken a whole sentence at last and we were relieved. It was an
irresistible request. More so with the old boundary markers of class – barf and wiv, and glottal ‘t’s. We would give him everything he wanted. But what boat?

  A competition was forming for Mark’s affections.

  ‘Come on then,’ Miranda said in a lilting, maternal voice. She stretched out her arms to gather him up but he shrank from her and pressed his face into Adam’s chest. Adam looked rigidly ahead, as she called with face-saving cheeriness, ‘Let’s run the bath,’ and led them out and along the corridor to my unappealing bathroom. Seconds later, the rumble of running taps.

  I was surprised to find myself alone, as if I had taken for granted a fifth presence in the room, someone I could turn to now to talk about the morning and its parade of emotions. There were fresh cries of distress from the bathroom. Adam hurried back into the kitchen, seized a cereal packet, lifted out its bag, ripped the box apart, flattened it, and in blurred seconds, using some technique he must have copied from a Japanese website, fashioned an origami boat, a barque with a single, billowing mainsail. Then he hurried out and the wailing subsided. The boat was launched.

  I sat at the table in a stupor, aware that I should get to my screen and earn some money. The month’s rent was due and there was less than £40 in the bank. I had shares in a Brazilian rare earth mining company and this could be the day to sell. But I couldn’t motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn’t remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings, walls and floors would contain me to the end. There were a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some critical junction in their lives many years back – a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now their options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.

  Mark walked in, barefoot and wearing what looked like an ankle-length gown. It was one of my t-shirts and it had an effect on him. Holding out the cotton material in each hand at his waist, he started to run up and down the kitchen, then in circles, and then made clumsy pirouettes in order to spin his gown out around him. The attempts made him stagger. Miranda came through the kitchen with his dirty clothes and took them upstairs to her washing machine. Her way, perhaps, of keeping him here. I sat with my head in my hands, watching Mark, who kept looking in my direction to check that I was impressed by his antics. But I was distracted, only aware of him because he was the only moving object in the room. I gave him no encouragement. I was waiting for Adam.

  When he appeared in the doorway I said, ‘Sit down here.’

  As he lowered himself onto a chair opposite me there was a muffled click, such as children make when they pull their fingers. A low-level malfunction. Mark continued to prance about the kitchen.

  I said, ‘Why would this Gorringe want to harm Miranda? And don’t hold back.’

  I needed to understand this machine. There was already one particular feature I’d observed. Whenever Adam faced a choice of responses, his face froze for an instant that was fractionally above the horizon of perception. It did so now, barely a shimmer, but I saw it. Thousands of possibilities must have been sifted, assigned a value, a utility function and a moral weighting.

  ‘Harm? He intends to kill her.’

  ‘Why?’

  The manufacturers were wrong to believe that they could impress me with a soulful sigh and the motorised movement of a head as Adam looked away. I still doubted that he could, in any real sense, even look.

  He said, ‘She accused him of a crime. He denied it. The court believed her. Others didn’t.’

  I was about to ask more, when Adam glanced up. I turned in my chair. Miranda was already in the kitchen and she had heard what Adam said. Instantly, she began to clap her hands and whoop to the little boy’s capers. Stepping in his path, she took his hands in hers and they whirled in circles. His feet left the ground and he screamed in delight as she spun him round. He shouted for more. But now she linked arms with him and showed him how to turn about, ceilidh-style, and stamp on the floor. He copied her movements, placing his free hand on his hip and waving the other wildly in the air. His arm did not extend much above his head.

  The jig became a reel, then a stumbling waltz. My moment of depression dissolved. Watching Miranda’s supple back bend low to make a partner of a four-year-old, I remembered how I loved her. When Mark squealed with pleasure, she imitated him. When she sang out on a high note, he tried to reach for it too. I watched and clapped along, but I was also aware of Adam. He was completely still, and still without expression, not looking at the dancers so much as through them. It was his turn to be the cuckold, for he was no longer the boy’s best friend. She had stolen him away. Adam must have realised that she was punishing him for his indiscretion. A courtroom accusation? I had to know more.

  Mark’s gaze never left Miranda’s face. He was entranced. Now she picked him up and cradled him as she danced around the room, singing Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle. I wondered if Adam had the capacity to understand the joy of dance, of movement for its own sake, and whether Miranda was showing him a line he couldn’t cross. If so, she may have been wrong. Adam could imitate and respond to emotions and appear to take pleasure in reasoning. He might also have known something of the purposeless beauty of art. She set Mark down, took his hands again in hers, this time with arms crossed. They circled stealthily, with undulating, rippling movements as she chanted, to his delight, ‘If you go down in the woods today, You’re sure of a big surprise …’

  Hours later, I discovered that during this kitchen romp Adam was in direct contact with the authorities. It wasn’t unreasonable of him, but he did it without telling us. And so it was that after the dancing and a glass of iced apple juice in the garden, after the clean clothes had been ironed and put on, and the pink sandals scrubbed under the tap, dried and fitted round the tiny feet whose nails were freshly trimmed, after the lunch of scrambled eggs and a session of nursery rhymes, there came the ring on the doorbell.

  Two Asian women in black headscarves – they could have been mother and daughter – apologetic but professionally firm, had come straight from their department to collect Mark. They listened to my story of the swing-park scene and examined the three-word message on a scrap of cardboard. They knew the family and asked if they could take the note away. They explained that they wouldn’t be returning Mark to his mother – not yet, not until after another round of assessments and the decision of a judge. Their manner was kindly. The more senior woman, whose name was Jasmin, stroked Mark’s head as she talked. Throughout the visit, Adam sat in silence in the same position at the table. I checked on him from time to time. Our visitors were aware of him and exchanged a curious glance. We were in no mood to introduce him.

  After some administrative formalities, the women nodded at each other and the younger one sighed. The bad moment had arrived. Miranda said nothing when the little boy, screaming to stay with her and clutching a fistful of her hair, was lifted from her arms. As the social workers were leading him out through the front door, Miranda turned away abruptly to go upstairs.

  *

  Our troubled little household also shook in the larger tremors of confusion that were running through the land beyond north Clapham. Turmoil was general. Mrs Thatcher’s unpopularity was rising, and not just because of The Sinking. Tony Benn, the high-born socialist, was at last Leader of the Opposition. In debates he was savage and entertaining, but Margaret Thatcher could take c
are of herself. Prime Minister’s Questions, now televised live and repeated at prime time, became a national obsession as the two tore into each other, sometimes wittily, each Wednesday at noon. Some said it was encouraging that a mass audience was interested in parliamentary exchanges. One commentator invoked the gladiatorial combats of the Late Roman Republic.

  The summer was hot and something was coming to the boil. Apart from the government’s unpopularity, much else was rising: unemployment, inflation, strikes, traffic jams, suicide rates, teenage pregnancies, racist incidents, drug addiction, homelessness, rapes, muggings and depression among children. Benign elements were rising too: households with indoor lavatories, central heating, phones and broadband; students at school until eighteen, working-class students at university, attendance at classical music concerts, car and home ownership, holidays abroad, museum and zoo visits, takings at bingo halls, salmon in the Thames, numbers of TV channels, numbers of women in Parliament, charity donations, native tree plantings, paperback book sales, music lessons across all ages and instruments and styles.

  At the Royal Free Hospital in London a seventy-four-year-old retired coal miner was cured of severe arthritis when a culture of his stem cells was injected just below his kneecaps. Six months later he ran a mile in under eight minutes. A teenage girl had her sight restored by similar means. It was the golden age of the life sciences, of robotics – of course, and of cosmology, climatology, mathematics and space exploration. There was a renaissance in British film and television, in poetry, athletics, gastronomy, numismatics, stand-up comedy, ballroom dancing, and wine-making. It was the golden age of organised crime, domestic slavery, forgery and prostitution. Various forms of crises blossomed like tropical flowers: in childhood poverty, in children’s teeth, in obesity, house and hospital building, police numbers, in teacher recruitment, in the sexual abuse of children. The best British universities were among the most prestigious in the world. A group of neuroscientists at Queen’s Square, London, claimed to understand the neural correlates of consciousness. In the Olympic Games, a record number of gold medals. Natural woodland, heaths and wetlands were vanishing. Scores of species of birds, insects and mammals were close to extinction. Our seas teemed with plastic bags and bottles but the rivers and beaches were cleaner. Within two years, six Nobel Prizes were won in science and literature by British citizens. More people than ever joined choirs, more people gardened, more people wanted to cook interestingly. If there ever was a spirit of the times, the railways caught it best. The prime minister was fanatical about public transport. From London Euston to Glasgow Central, the trains tore along at half the speed of a passenger jet. And yet: the carriages were packed, the seats too close together, the windows opaque with grime, the stained upholstery smelled foul. And yet: the non-stop journey took seventy-five minutes.