We’re waiting on the doorstep of Anjali’s house in Hampstead, shivering a little in the evening chill, when Jaime asks, ‘Do you think I look OK?’
I assure him that he looks terrible. His elbow is sharp in my ribs when the door opens. Anjali sings our names. Her speech always sounds as though it’s punctuated by exclamation marks. I suffer that habitual jolt at the difference between her Me & My feed – sarcastic, savage – and her real-life, rather more charming aura. As she leans in, the sequins of her dress catch on mine, and her perfume passes into my hair like jazzy smoke. The uncertainty of etiquette hovers between us; my kisses attempt to connect with her cheeks, hers evaporate into air. She leaves a lipstick echo on Jaime’s stubble. I roll my eyes at him and he rolls his eyes back.
We enter a room that reminds me of how childless houses look: velvet curtains without splatter, unblemished white walls, tidy floors. The party’s in that sober phase of the evening when the small talk is pinched and polite. Jaime changes the music, as always, puts on his new favourite composer: Scriabin. He is wearing ripped black jeans and a T-shirt with The Hurdy Gurdy Men on it; his penguin tattoo peeks out beneath his left sleeve. 318Everyone else is in smart dress. The looks they give him suggest admiration rather than disapproval, though. This annoys me. There’s a part of me that wants them to disapprove of my husband.
Someone is telling an anecdote about Emily’s divorce and its messy aftermath. Then I cringe because I realise that I know one of the listeners. Eleanor and I used to be friends. I’m not even sure if we’ve fallen out. Our emails and meetings simply thinned out around a year ago because we were both busy. I took a month to reply to her last one, then she never responded and I assumed she was peeved with me, though Jaime says I have a tendency to over-analyse.
Jaime is off chatting to Eleanor and Mariette, who are cooing over the latest band he’s managing. There’s something about the music – the blurry piano notes – that is making me feel wistful, in danger of melancholy. A guy with thinning hair is hovering on the sidelines of their conversation, and he looks so grateful when I start talking to him that I immediately warm to him. He asks the predictable question. I tell him I’m an artist and add my reluctant postscript: I’m paying the bills by working as an art therapist at Cybersenx. He starts telling me about the dream he had last night, which involved a giant serpent coiled around his neck.
‘I woke up with an erection,’ he confesses in a whisper, his words blowing ripples across the bubbles of his drink.
I guess it could be worse. If I were a doctor, people would be rolling up their sleeves and surreptitiously showing me their rashes. I decide to fuck with the guy and tell him he has a repressed anguine fetish, echoing a rare case study that Freud recorded in 1913. When he looks alarmed, I touch his arm and laughingly tell him not to worry. But he only looks more 319worried. Now I feel bad. It’s six o’clock, my phone tells me. Three more hours before we can make polite excuses and leave. I check my Good Parenting app, praying there might be a problem with Finn, but he’s safe in the third stage of pre-REM sleep.
I escape to the toilet. Black-and-white pictures of Hollywood icons adorn the walls. James Dean, Marlon Brando, Rupert Weitz. Their beauty is accentuated by crimpled foreheads and sullen lips. When men brood, their expressions imply mystery, profundity. When women hide an inner ache, they cover it with a smile. My cheeks are already hurting and I’ve only been here thirty minutes. A Me & My status update starts composing in my mind: Perhaps the female smile is the biggest deceit of all facial expressions, a mask that not only hides mystery but deflects it, implying we are a sex of trivial concerns. I have measured out my life with updates unposted. Scrunching up toilet roll, I hear Jaime’s voice complaining that I’m using too much, that global warming will be triggered by my fanny alone. I rise, wash my hands and look into the mirror.
‘What did you expect?’ I hear my mother’s voice in my mind. She used to tease me when I pointed to the tiny avian lines at the corners of my eyes. Vanity is the fear of mortality: the accumulating evidence that we will one day be nothing but bone and ash. It’s always a shock to see the slump of my cheekbones; the lines on my face, once feathery pencil strokes, now scored deep and harsh. Only my eyes look the same, bright and sharp beneath crinkle-patterned lids. My husband has always discouraged Botox, fillers, sheens, pupil enhancements, brow grafts – transhumanism treatments, he calls them, saying that they look unnatural. Jaime has grey in his hair, but he has gained the sexy gravitas that comes with age.
I want to splash water on to my face, the way that people 320do in movies when they’re freaked. But I’m not sure anybody does that in real life. It would wreck my makeup and probably unpeel another decade—
‘2047,’ asserts my phone.
I reel at the lost years. A new narrator shapes our present. 2019: that’s when I was last in real time, making my way through the autumn woods that fringed Fate’s cottage, facing his front door, terrified to knock.
A new story. It’s 2047, and we have a son.
Back in the lounge, I find the heat has risen with the influx of guests. The setting here is benign compared to the harsh winds of Carpathia, that dictatorial winter. I want to hug Jaime and whisper, We made it, we made it, but he is laughing with Eleanor. I attempt to eye-vibe him for an early departure. His lack of response doesn’t even feel like resistance; more as though the connection between us has burnt away. A sadness gathers in my stomach. I can already tell that our relationship is different in this book. Our roles have shifted: Jaime is the amnesiac and I am the knower. How come Jaime has the glory of ignorance and I the cruelty of knowledge? Did he drink more Grand Kuding than me, or receive a more concentrated dose?
The party hums around me. A headache is beginning to tap my temples. I grab another glass of wine. Every time this enlightenment comes, the whiplash is fiercer. A rush of memories: the Czar’s palace, the yukuri, our flight as birds, and before that Manchester, the record shop, my exhibition. The samskaras of these invented lives seem softer, however; worse is the pain of those months before I visited Fate: the funeral, singing ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ in a battle against hysteria, my life losing shape and form. 321
I slip out into the empty hallway, resting my wine glass on a cabinet. Compelled by some intuition, I rifle through my bag; my fingers curl around a pillbox, decorated with a peacock lid. Inside I find a blue 100 mg lozenge of Amzipan. I consider what Jaime would want me to do: to tap him on the shoulder, tell him this is a book and seek to find a way back home. I consider our bodies, the rot of time and how with each story the danger of never being able to return grows stronger. I weigh this pill in my palm – the risk it poses versus my desire to shake off this self-consciousness, to seep into this world – and swallow it down with a mouthful of wine.
As I return to the living room, the Scriabin is no longer a torment. I can feel the drug muting the notes; there’s a lovely smudging around the edges. Everyone is being ushered into a candlelit dining room. A long oak table, our names on quaint ivory place cards, each accompanied by a QR code that connects to all of the guests’ Me & My pages.
Anjali’s Help serves us watermelon and wheatgrass soup and pours Chardonnay into our glasses. Jaime is sitting three people away, next to Eleanor. I’m next to an old man with charming white hair and aristocratic features. Surreptitiously, I check his handle, and draw some swift conclusions from his feed: retired CEO, leftie, chauvinist. There is an empty seat where Emily should be.
I notice a RoMcKenzie on Anjali’s wall. Well, this is daring: few upper-middle-class Londoners would have Robo sapiens art on their wall. But perhaps it’s a sign of fashions shifting. It’s always the way: art once loathed inevitably becomes art accepted, art loved.
Jaime entertains everyone with the story of a band who are 322embarrassed that they have more robo groupies in their fan club than homo. I can feel that the entire table has been won over by him; he has become so much more confident with middle age. I notice Anjali flicking me sympathetic looks and I give her a faint smile. There is something I need to tell him, I think, reaching for my iPhone. It came to me in the toilet, but now it’s slipped away.
The evening buzzes on and the alcohol flows, and the conversation inevitably turns to Tottenham. This has been the middle-class horror story of the last fortnight: a married accountant, a happy family man with two children, who made the mistake of walking alone down Tottenham High Road late on a Tuesday. A gang of thugs set upon him, calling ‘Robo, Robo!’ Even when their knives drew blood, they were still convinced he was an upgrade. Only when they plunged their metal into his heart and discovered that there were no wires to pull out – his blood now wet on their hands, the sirens shrilling closer – did they realise their mistake. Jaime points out that at no point in history has it ever been wise to go walking in Tottenham at night. Anjali adds that one of the killers had been abused by a robot as a child. Eleanor chimes in that the government shouldn’t have slashed robot security budgets.
The atmosphere is sober now, and everyone looks grateful at the distraction of the doorbell. In comes Emily, scattering city scents. She sits down, takes a drag of her vape and announces that she’s late because she’s just had sex with an HT904. She exhales strawberry-scented vapour as though she decided to save her post-coital chat for the group.
‘Oh, Emily, you could have just pretended that you got 323held up in traffic,’ Anjali chides her, giving the Help a nervous glance. The Help then turns to Emily to pour her some wine and she gives him a wink.
‘What? Nobody can scorn a woman for taking pleasure in sex, right? Our babies are made in test tubes, so our bodies are no longer vessels for reproduction. They no longer exist to serve life, they exist for our own delight! Hell, my grandmother fought for all this – back then the very idea of a woman enjoying sex was still a scandalous thing. Now, a century on, we understand the benefits of a seven-inch vibrator attached to a six-foot metal sex god.’
Laughter. A toast: ‘To Emily! To sex!’ Chinks and swallows. iPhones flashing, photos uploaded and auto-tagged. Jaime’s wedding ring glints in the candlelight and sparkles its gold shadow-tail across my plate.
Come midnight, we’re shivering on the steps of Anjali’s house. My voice sounds loud and hoarse when I sing my goodbyes; Anjali’s ebullient punctuation is contagious. I had a good evening and I’m all aglow. Gradually, the wine unwound me. I ended up on the sofa with Eleanor at one point, chatting about our lives, with each of us apologising for losing touch. When Jaime came in and said he was tired, he had to pull me up and drag my coat on to my shoulders. Eleanor kissed us both goodbye and hugged me tight.
The eyescan in the car zips my pupil. I rest my head against Jaime’s shoulder and we watch the screen display our passage into traffic. He could drape his arm around me, he could touch my leg, but his fingers remain laced in his lap. The skyscrapers are mostly silhouettes. The lights that are on, suspended in darkness, look like stars. We only really see the clouds in the 324evenings these days. The corps are petitioning against the 8 p.m. ad curfew but the government has not yet caved. There is an app on my phone that identifies various cloud formations, from the thin white veils of cirrostratus to the thunderstorm broil of a cumulonimbus. When Jaime first bought it for me I thought it twee, but now it is a lifeline; I sit in my office, swiping through pages, feeding off their beauty. Night clouds are wraithlike, obfuscatory, hiding their stories.
‘It was a nice evening,’ I say sleepily. ‘It was good to catch up with Eleanor.’
‘She’s doing well.’ Jaime’s tone is taut, but when I look up at him, he smiles. ‘There was something I was going to tell you,’ he says. ‘But I’ve forgotten.’
Déjà vu of a déjà vu. I wish I could remember too.
‘Hey!’ I sit up, neck craning back to the street.
‘What?’
‘I thought I just saw Mum …’
‘It can’t have been her,’ Jaime says, eyes fixed on his phone.
‘No, you’re right,’ I frown. ‘I should call her, pay her a visit. It’s been ages since we …’ I trail off, aware that he’s not listening to me.
Home. The car slides into our garage. The doorman greets us. We get into the lift, pressing number 42. We’re so tired that the distance from the lift to our front door seems mammoth. Tiptoeing into the flat, we take off our coats, pee without flushing. I peek into Finn’s room. He is lying on his front and, in that moment, I lose my faith in the Good Parenting monitor’s algorithms, and I fear his chest is still, and I am praying, pleading. Then I see it rise and fall, and I sigh relief. I kiss his head, and whisper ‘I love you’ in his ear. In the kitchen, the Help is in the corner in sleep mode, his red light flashing. I still always feel 325that he’s watching me, like the God that I thought might be looking down at me from the clouds when I was a child. I slip into bed next to Jaime, touched to find that he has warmed my side for me via his Hot Water Bottle app.
I surface, the first act of a dream breaking. Jaime’s fingers are tendrilling over my pubic hair; he knows just how to tease me, an act finessed over the years.
My body is responding to him, but there is something mechanical about its reaction. I murmur that I’m too tired and he murmurs that he’s tired, but we keep on going. I close my eyes and feel myself becoming liquid. But something is wrong: something in the background; something in the centre of my heart, some place that refuses to open up to him. I picture it as the size and hardness of a small piece of granite. I become more and more conscious of it, until that’s all I am aware of, and I stare up at him. His eyes are hollow with betrayal. It’s as if I’ve told him I’ve never loved him, that he’s a waste of space.
He withdraws and turns his back to me. I quickly rub his shoulder and kiss his spine, but the gesture feels more maternal than romantic. I lie with my face pressed into the pillow for a while, watching the edge of the curtain being puppeted by a draught, trying to understand the poison inside me. What has he done to create such repulsion? Our history, our past – it began with a wedding, and then there were the happy years, and Finn. But then what happened? My tiredness is torturous now, my eyes begging release. I am aware of his snoring as I sink. We sleep.