Machines Like Me Read online

  It pained me that she seemed different, refreshed, newly arranged. It was another warm day. She wore a flimsy pleated skirt formed of two layers of white cheesecloth. As she came towards me, the material brushed a line several inches above her bare knees. No socks, canvas plimsolls of the sort we used to wear at school, and a cotton blouse buttoned chastely to the top. There was mockery in all this white. Behind the crown of her head was a clasp I’d never seen before, an ornament in bright red plastic, showily cheap. Inconceivable, that Adam could have slipped out of the house to buy it for her at Simon’s with coins taken from the papier mâché bowl in the kitchen. But I conceived it, and experienced a hot jolt which I concealed behind a smile. I was not going to appear crushed.

  Adam had partly hidden himself behind her. Now, when she stopped, he was at her side, but he wouldn’t look directly at me. Miranda, however, appeared cheerful, with the amused pout of someone about to deliver important good news. The kitchen table was between us and they stood before me where I sat, like candidates for a job. At any other time I would have stood to embrace her, offer to make her coffee. She was a morning addict and liked it strong. Instead, I cocked my head, met her gaze and waited. Of course, she was dressed for tennis, the ball was in her – ah, how I hated my own stupid thoughts. I couldn’t imagine any good coming from a conversation with these two. Far better to contemplate Barney’s luck with his new heart.

  She said to Adam, ‘Why don’t you …’ She indicated his usual chair, and drew it back for him. He sat promptly. We watched as he loosened his belt, took the power lead and plugged himself in. Of course, he would be much depleted. She reached across his shoulder for the place on his nape and pressed. It was clearly by agreement. As soon as his eyes closed, his head slumped, and we were alone.

  FOUR

  Miranda went to the stove and prepared coffee. While her back was still turned she said gaily, ‘Charlie. You’re being ridiculous.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Hostile.’

  ‘So?’

  She brought two cups and a jug of milk to the table. She was swift and loose in her movements. If I hadn’t been there she might have been singing to herself. There was a scent of lemon about her hands. I thought she was about to touch my shoulder and I tensed, but she moved away again to the other side of the room. After a moment she said with some delicacy, ‘You heard us last night.’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘And you’re upset.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘You shouldn’t be.’

  I shrugged.

  She said, ‘If I’d gone to bed with a vibrator would you be feeling the same?’

  ‘He’s not a vibrator.’

  She brought the coffee to the table and sat down close to me. She was being kindly, concerned, in effect casting me as the sulking child, trying to make me forget that she was ten years my junior. What was passing between us was our most intimate exchange so far. Hostile? She had never before referred to any mood state of mine.

  She said, ‘He has as much consciousness as one.’

  ‘Vibrators don’t have opinions. They don’t weed the garden. He looks like a man. Another man.’

  ‘D’you know, when he has an erection—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

  ‘He told me. His cock fills with distilled water. From a reservoir in his right buttock.’

  This was comforting but I was determined to be cool. ‘That’s what all men say.’

  She laughed. I had never seen her so light and free. ‘I’m trying to remind you. He’s a fucking machine.’

  A fucking machine.

  ‘It was gross, Miranda. If I humped an inflatable sex doll you’d feel the same.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get tragic about it. I wouldn’t think you were having an affair.’

  ‘But you are. It’ll happen again.’ I hadn’t intended to concede that possibility. It was a rhetorical parry, a cue for her to contradict me. But I was somewhat provoked by ‘tragic’.

  I said, ‘If I was ripping a sex doll apart with a knife, you’d be right to be worried.’

  ‘I don’t see the connection.’

  ‘The issue isn’t Adam’s state of mind. It’s yours.’

  ‘Oh, in that case …’ She turned towards Adam, lifted his lifeless hand an inch or so above the table and let it drop. ‘Suppose I told you that I love him. My ideal man. Brilliant lover, textbook technique, inexhaustible. Never hurt by anything I say or do. Considerate, obedient even, and knowledgeable, good conversation. Strong as a dray horse. Great with the housework. His breath smells like the back of a warm TV set, but I can live with—’

  ‘OK. Enough.’

  Her sarcasm, a novel register, was delivered with much variation of pitch. I thought the performance was mean in spirit. For all I knew, she was hiding the truth in plain sight. She patted Adam’s wrist as she smiled at me. In triumph or by way of apology, I couldn’t tell. I was bound to suspect that a night of exceptional sex was the cause of this taunting, airy-headed manner. She was harder than ever to read. I wondered if I could break with her completely. Take back Adam as my own, retrieve the spare charging cable from upstairs, restore Miranda to her role as neighbour and friend, distant friend. In the manner of thought, the idea was no more than a spark of irritation. The notion that immediately followed was that I could never be free of her and would never want to be – most of the time. Here she was beside me, close enough for me to feel her summer-morning body warmth. Beautiful, pale-skinned, smooth, in bridal white, gazing on me again with affectionate concern now that her teasing was done. The look was new. It could be – this was an encouraging thought – that a clever device had performed a service, loosening Miranda’s warmer feelings.

  Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet. There’s intrinsic exhaustion too. Both know, or think they know, that a reconciliation must happen, though it could take days, even weeks. The moment, when it comes, will be sweet and promises great tenderness and ecstasy. So why not make up now, take the shortcut, spare yourselves the effortful rage? Neither of you can. You’re on a slide, you’ve lost control of your feelings, and of your future too. The effort will be compounded so that eventually, every unkind word must be unsaid at five times cost. Reciprocally, extending forgiveness will require a feat of selfless concentration.

  It was a long while since I’d indulged such irresistible folly. Miranda and I were not yet rowing, we were parrying, getting close, and I would be the one to get us started. With all this tactical coolness and her sarcasm and now her friendly concern, I felt bottled up. I badly wanted to shout. Atavistic masculinity urged it. My faithless lover, brazen, with another man, within my hearing. It should have been simple. It wasn’t my origins, social or geographical, that held me back. Only modern logic. Perhaps she was right, Adam didn’t qualify, he wasn’t a man. Persona non grata. He was a bipedal vibrator and I was the very latest in cuckolds. To justify my rage I needed to convince myself that he had agency, motivation, subjective feelings, self-awareness – the entire package, including treachery, betrayal, deviousness. Machine consciousness – was it possible? That old question. I opted for Alan Turing’s protocol. Its beauty and simplicity never appealed to me more than it did now. The Master came to my rescue.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If he looks and sounds and behaves like a person, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s what he is. I make the same assumption about you. About everybody. We all do. You fucked him. I’m angry. I’m amazed you’re surprised. If that’s what you really are.’

  Saying the word ‘angry’ made me raise my voice in anger. I felt a surge of exquisite release. We were getting started.

  But she clung for the moment to a defensive mode. ‘I was curious,’ she said. ‘I wanted to know what it would be like.’
/>   Curiosity, the forbidden fruit, condemned by God, and Marcus Aurelius, and St Augustine.

  ‘There must be hundreds of men you’re curious about.’

  That did it. I had crossed the line. She pushed her chair back with a noisy scrape. Her pallor darkened. Her pulse was up. I had got what I ridiculously wanted.

  She said, ‘You were keen on an Eve. Why was that? What were you wanting with an Eve? Tell the truth Charlie.’

  ‘I wasn’t bothered either way.’

  ‘You were disappointed. You should’ve let Adam fuck you. I could see you wanted it. But you’re too uptight.’

  It had taken all of my twenties to learn from women combatants that in a full-on row it was not necessary to respond to the last thing said. Generally, it was best not to. In an attacking move, ignore bishop or castle. Logic and straight lines were out. Best to rely on the knight.

  I said, ‘It must have occurred to you last night, lying under a plastic robot, screaming your head off, that it’s the human factor you hate.’

  She said, ‘You just told me he’s human.’

  ‘But you think he’s a dildo. Nothing too complicated. That’s what turns you on.’

  She knew a knight’s move too. ‘You fancy yourself as a lover.’

  I waited.

  ‘You’re a narcissist. You think making a woman come is an achievement. Your achievement.’

  ‘With you it is.’ That was nonsense.

  She was standing now. ‘I’ve seen you in the bathroom. Adoring yourself in the mirror.’

  An excusable error. My days sometimes began with an unspoken soliloquy. A matter of seconds, usually after shaving. I dried my face, looked myself in the eye, listed failings, the usual: money, living quarters, no serious work and, lately, Miranda – lack of progress, now this. I also set myself tasks for the day ahead, trivial stuff, embarrassing to relate. Take out the rubbish. Drink less. Get a haircut. Get out of commodities. I never thought I’d been observed. A bathroom door, hers or mine, could have been ajar. Perhaps my lips were moving.

  But this was not the time to set Miranda straight. Across from us sat comatose Adam. Glancing at him now, at the muscular forearms, the steep angle of his nose, and feeling a prick of resentment, I remembered. As I said the words, I knew I could be making an important mistake.

  ‘Remind me what the Salisbury judge said.’

  It worked. Her face went slack as she turned away from me and returned to the other side of the kitchen. Half a minute passed. She was by the cooker, staring into the corner, worrying something in her hand, a corkscrew, a cork or a flap of wine-bottle foil. As the silence went on, I was looking at the line of her shoulders, wondering if she was crying, whether, in my ignorance, I’d gone too far. But when she turned at last to look at me she was composed, her face was dry.

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  I nodded towards Adam.

  She took this in and then she said, ‘I don’t understand.’ Her voice was small.

  ‘He has all kinds of access.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  I added, ‘He’s probably looked me up too.’

  With this, the row collapsed in on itself, without reconciliation or estrangement. Now we were united against Adam. But that wasn’t my immediate concern. The delicate trick was to appear to know a lot in order to find out something, anything.

  I said, ‘You could call it curiosity on Adam’s part. Or regard it as some kind of algorithm.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  Turing’s point precisely. But I said nothing.

  ‘If he’s going to tell people,’ she went on. ‘That’s what matters.’

  ‘He’s only told me.’

  The object in her hand was a teaspoon. She rolled it restlessly, worked it between her fingers, transferred it to her left and began again, then handed it back. She wasn’t aware of what she was doing. It was unpleasant to watch. How much easier it would have been if I didn’t love her. Then I could have been alive to her needs instead of calculating my own as well. I had to know what happened in court, then understand, embrace, support, forgive – whatever was required. Self-interest dressed as kindness. But it was also kindness. My fraudulent voice sounded thin in my ears.

  ‘I don’t know your side of it.’

  She came back to the table and sat heavily. She said through a clotted throat she wouldn’t make the effort to clear, ‘No one does.’ At last she looked at me directly. There was nothing sorrowful or needy in her gaze. Her eyes were hard with stubborn defiance.

  I said gently, ‘You could tell me.’

  ‘You know enough.’

  ‘Is going to the mosque something to do with it?’

  She gave me a look of pity and faintly shook her head.

  ‘Adam read me the judge’s summing-up,’ I lied again as I remembered that he had told me she was the liar. Malicious.

  Her elbows were on the table, her hands partly obscured her mouth. She was looking away towards the window.

  I blundered on. ‘You can trust me.’

  At last she cleared her throat. ‘None of it was true.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said again. ‘Why was Adam telling you?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I know this is on your mind all the time. I want to help you.’

  This was when she should have put her hand in mine and told me everything. Instead, she was bitter. ‘Don’t you understand? He’s still in prison.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Another three months. Then he’s out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She raised her voice. ‘So how are you going to help with that?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  She sighed. Her voice went quiet. ‘Do you know something?’

  I waited.

  ‘I hate you.’

  ‘Miranda. Come on.’

  ‘I didn’t want you or your special friend knowing about me.’

  I reached for her hand but she moved it away. I said, ‘I understand. But now I know and it doesn’t change my feelings. I’m on your side.’

  She sprang up from the table. ‘It changes my feelings. It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting that you know this about me.’

  ‘Not to me it isn’t.’

  ‘Not to me it isn’t.’

  Her parody was savage, catching too well the meagre tone of my deception. Now she was looking at me differently. She was about to say something else. But just at that moment, Adam opened his eyes. She must have powered him up without my noticing.

  She said, ‘OK. Here’s something you didn’t get from the press. I was in Salisbury last month. Someone came to the door, a wiry guy with missing teeth. He had a message. When Peter Gorringe gets out in three months.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s promised to kill me.’

  In moments of stress, and fear is little else, a timid muscle in my right eyelid goes into spasm. I cupped a hand over my brow in an attitude of concentration, even though I knew the writhing beneath the skin was invisible to others.

  She added, ‘It was his cellmate. He said Gorringe was serious.’

  ‘Right.’

  She was snappish. ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘You’d better take him seriously.’

  You not we – I saw in her blink and fractional recoil how she took this in. My phrasing was deliberate. I’d offered help several times and been brushed off, even mocked. Now I saw just how much help she needed, I held back and let her ask for it. Perhaps she wouldn’t. I conjured this Gorringe, a large type, stepping from the prison gym, adept in forms of industrial violence. A tamping iron, a meat hook, a boiler wrench.

  Adam was looking at me intently as he listened to Miranda. In effect, she was asking for my assistance as she went on to describe her frustrations. The police were reluctant to act against a crime not yet committed. She had no proof. Gorringe’s threat had been merely verbal, made through an intermediary. She persisted, and finally an officer agreed to int
erview him. The prison was north of Manchester and the meeting took a month to arrange. Peter Gorringe, relaxed and cheerful, charmed the police sergeant. It was a joke, he had said, this talk of killing. Merely a manner of speaking, as in – this was in the policeman’s notes – ‘I’d kill for a chicken madras.’ He may have said something in front of his cellmate, a none-too-bright fellow, now released. This fellow must have been passing through Salisbury and thought he’d deliver the message. He was always a little bit vindictive. The policeman wrote all this down, delivered a caution and the two men, finding common ground in their lifelong support for Manchester City, parted after a handshake.

  I listened as best I could. Anxiety is a great diluter of attention. Adam listened too, nodding sagely, as if he’d not been powered down this past hour and understood everything already. Miranda’s mood tone, to which I was so closely attuned, was lightly tinged with indignation, now directed at the authorities rather than me. Not believing anything Gorringe had told the detective sergeant, she’d been to the weekly surgery of our Clapham MP – Labour, of course, a tough old bird, union organiser, scourge of the bankers. She directed Miranda back to the police. Her prospective murder was not a constituency matter.

  After this account, a silence. I was preoccupied by the obvious question my own deceit prevented me from asking. What had she done to deserve a death?

  Adam said, ‘Does Gorringe know this address?’

  ‘He can easily find out.’

  ‘Have you ever seen or heard of him being violent?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Could he simply be trying to frighten you?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Is he capable of murder?’

  ‘He’s very, very angry.’

  She responded to these plodding questions as though they came from a real person, an investigating detective, not ‘a fucking machine’. Since Adam didn’t ask, it was clear he already knew what Miranda had done, what monstrous act, to provoke Gorringe. None of this was Adam’s business and I was wondering about his kill switch. I wanted more coffee, but I felt too weary to get up from my chair to make it.

  Then we heard footsteps along the narrow path between the houses that leads to the shared front door. Too late for the postman, far too soon for Gorringe. We heard a man’s voice giving what sounded like instructions. Then the bell rang and footsteps receded rapidly. I looked at Miranda, she looked at me and shrugged. It was my bell. She wasn’t going.