Jenn Ashworth
Someone made a speech about her unique vision and incomparable talent. They weren’t going to name who they were describing until they called the winner up to the stage but Eve sat through it with her hands twisting in her lap and the dread closing over her head in dark waves. And yes, it was her – she’d won, and it was thousands of pounds.
She went up to the stage and her lips stuck to her teeth and her eyelids dragged on the suddenly sticky surface of her contact lenses. She should have been pleased and certainly tried her best to appear so. She smiled as people clinked their cutlery against their wine glasses. She’d made a proper effort, wearing a good dress and uncomfortable shoes. The little award and the big cheque were handed over and afterwards there was champagne, and she mingled among the white tablecloths, nodding and making sure her face was appropriately arranged for photographs that would, they assured her, appear in their trade journal the very next month.
* * *
When the issue arrived at the office Eve stared at her own face on its cover. Who was this person, who had worked tirelessly on a project, enhanced her company’s reputation and won a significant and unexpected amount of money? Were those really her own eyes? How was it possible? What had possessed her? She rolled the magazine up and put it in the bottom drawer of her desk. Steven would want to frame it in the downstairs toilet. Guests would ask about it. She’d have to make a joke or enjoy being the subject of someone else’s joke. She stared at the carpet underneath her desk. One of the senior partners had asked to meet with her that afternoon to have a conversation about what came next.
It had been the same with the bread-baking. She’d tried it once, as a mindful activity that might relax her on the weekends, and something educational for the younger children to help out with. The weighing and measuring would be good for their maths. It would kill a rainy morning. The dough was sticky and grey in the first few attempts and refused to rise. She persevered. It was a good thing to do. Eventually she got the knack of mindful kneading and the little loaves swelled and browned in the oven. She became so competent a baker that a return to shop-bought bread had felt like a drop in standards and was experienced by her family as akin to an insult.
“What, no loaf?” Steven asked once. “Have you fallen out with us?”
Now she rose at five to put the dough in the oven for forty minutes before everyone else rose at seven to eat it. She’d have to pull things like this – prizes and magazine covers – out of the bag all the time from now on.
Eve kicked off her shoes and crawled under the desk. She lay down, her cheek against the expensive, regularly cleaned wool loop pile. She’d chosen the carpet from a thick album of samples that she’d been presented with last year. That had been work too. Creating the right impression. She turned onto her back and stared at the underside of her desk. Her email and instant message alerts and calendar reminders pinged first on her desktop computer, then a half second later on her mobile phone. She preferred not to answer these electronic demands for her attention. And as she lay motionless, she noticed that taped to the underside of her desk was a business card. She quickly peeled back the tape and retrieved the card, got up and sat in her office chair to inspect it.
It was a tasteful card made of creamy, thick paper with deckled edges. A navy blue ‘W’ in an understated font. Underneath, a phone number, and the phrase ‘professional assistance’. Someone had spent time and effort on designing and producing this card. Someone – a whole team of someones, perhaps – had been keen to give the right impression. The impression she got was of a company that was expensive and had good reasons to be discreet. That name! She crawled out from under her desk and rang the number. It was as she’d hoped, only better.
* * *
When she got home that night, Steven was beating eggs while watching a video of a man in a chef’s outfit talk him through the procedure on his tablet. Omelettes were his new obsession. An organic, protein-heavy diet was good for the health, he’d said. And though anyone could knock up an omelette it didn’t cost anyone anything to learn how to do it properly. The French way. Sometimes, when he wasn’t looking, she did it herself, using a folding plastic contraption that went in the microwave that she’d bought from a pound-shop and was not French at all.
“What will you do with the money?” he asked her. He really was only curious. He had plenty of his own, after all. The prize itself was enough for him: evidence, Eve thought meanly, that his careful nurturing of her potential through the years of their marriage had finally come to fruition.
“I haven’t thought about it much,” she lied. He carried on beating. In about two minutes he was going to say, ‘It’s all in the wrist’ and wink at her and she might scream or break a window. She might lie down under the kitchen table and pretend to be deaf. She might begin undressing and walk out onto the street without a stitch on and start singing the National Anthem on the village green. But all this would take effort, and the little lie didn’t.
“I’d like to reinvest some of it. I have an idea for another project,” she said, and sketched out the idea – using lots of jargon so he’d be impressed and stop listening.
Steven left the eggs to settle and started grating cheese. There were two plates warming under the grill. Steven didn’t like eating from cold plates, or from plates that were only hot because they’d just come out of the dishwasher.
“And I also thought I could set up some kind of fellowship. A paid internship. For people who want to get into the business but don’t have any connections. From disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Steven smiled and poured the eggs into the hot pan.
“What a nice idea,” he said. He liked helping people from disadvantaged backgrounds become more like himself. Isn’t that what he’d done to her? For her, she corrected herself. “Here, eat up. You don’t look well. Did you skip lunch?”
He pushed the plate over to her and she picked up her fork gratefully. It was a very good omelette. Later, she sat in her car and called W to set the whole thing up.
* * *
W messaged her the address of an out-of-town hotel. There she would meet with one of their agents and he would ‘take her particulars’. A small conference room had been hired. She’d wondered, as she’d parked in the hotel car park, if this would feel like having an affair. To have your particulars taken sounded wonderfully mid-century and could be a euphemism for almost anything. She marvelled at the energy some people had for taking each other’s particulars in the backs of cars and empty boardrooms and in hotels like this one, during the day. It was happening all over the place, according to Steven.
The hotel was cheap-looking and drab, and the lobby smelled like old frying pans. The conference room contained a vase of artificial flowers with dusty petals and bulbous orange plastic stamens that did not attempt to convince. A man stood by the window, waiting for her.
“Take a seat,” he said. She’d have to tell Steven she was sleeping with this man if he somehow discovered she’d been out of work that afternoon. He would be big about it – perhaps even indulgent. Wasn’t being mature about things like this what people like them did? Eve saw immediately this man was not the type you’d start something clandestine with. He was mild, neat-haired and wore a suit that looked bespoke. He gestured towards a chair.
“It can feel awkward,” he said gently, “to start. But I find this works better if I just,” he produced a tablet from a briefcase, “work through the preliminary questions, and we can save some time at the end if you want to ask me anything. Water?”
There was a jug and glass. The water in the jug had dust swirling on its surface and Eve did not touch it. But she sat, and he used the tablet to record her answers to a dizzying variety of questions, from her waist measurement to her morning routine to the various tasks she performed for her children and husband each morning and evening.
“I’m not sure that you need to know…” Eve protested, as the questions progressed into the third hour and into the darker chambers of her marriage.
“Everything,” the man said with a reassuring smile. “Even if you don’t think it an important detail, you just don’t know what would turn out to be important.”
It was as if he was a policeman and she a witness to a crime. The crime of her own life. Eve risked a smile. Now someone would surely see why she was so tired – why the whole business of her existence was so unbearably relentless she’d rather just be rid of it entirely for a while. Eventually, they got to the end of his list. He’d never introduced himself. She thought of him as ‘W’ – a name like a spy, or if he and his company were the same thing.
“I think that’s all we need now.” He flipped the cover down over the tablet’s screen and tucked it away. “Now if you could just roll up your sleeve.”
“My sleeve?”
His hands were still in the briefcase, putting the tablet back, then he retrieved a pair of latex gloves, and a kit for taking blood.
“You’re okay with needles, are you?”
She wanted to ask the man if he were a nurse, or in some other way qualified. Did you need special training to handle a syringe? Even hairdressers would give you Botox these days. The man’s fingernails were absolutely flawless and disappeared inside the latex gloves. She complied.
“Sharp scratch,” he said, and filled one vial after another. Her blood was dark, and she turned away as she heard it squirting into the bottles. She thought of Steven, pressing organic oranges through the juicer on Sunday mornings, listening to the radio and humming. Doll-like, she stared out of the window and blinked slowly, keeping her face free from any expression of pain or disgust.
* * *
That night she lay beside her husband in her long-sleeved nightdress even though it was a warm night, because she didn’t want him to see the little round plaster on her inner elbow. He’d made some kind of almond and clementine cake from a recipe book, and they’d had it after dinner, and because he’d baked, Eve had felt obligated to make proper coffee in the pot with the matching cups, and now she was awake, ruminating. There’d been something not quite right about the man from W’s bedside manner. She began to wonder – in a paranoid manner that seemed very reasonable (in fact, the worst of the paranoia was in not being able to entirely trust her own sense of disquiet) if this man was altogether there. If he was, well, real. She stared into the dark, listening to the tick of Steven’s alarm clock. He hadn’t dispensed any of the usual niceties. No congratulations on her being able to answer all the questions so fully, no response to her answers. It would have been nice, she thought, if he’d commented on how impossible and exhausting the maintenance of all her various lives had become – to tell her he quite understood her predicament. Once he’d taken her blood – such a lot of it – he’d plucked two strands of her hair from the nape of her neck and tucked them into a little plastic bag. Then he’d rubbed a cotton swab around the inside of her mouth, declining eye contact while he did so. Eventually, he’d turned his back to her while packing his things away. It was as if he was giving her privacy to recompose herself into a person after the detailed autopsy he’d just performed was complete.
“All done. We’ll contact you. Couple of weeks.”
“I see.” She’d stood, reached for her handbag. Her feet were numb after so long sitting in the chair and hurt once she put her weight on them.
“And where will I go, while it all…happens?”
The man had smiled again. He seemed to have no other setting. She may as well tell him she was planning to use the time she was in the process of buying to perform an axe murder or a terrorist attack and all he’d do is dispense that tight, precise little smile of his.
“Well, that’s up to you, Mrs. Smith. We’ll give you a telephone so we can contact you privately in case there’s some problem or emergency but,” (he must have caught her look of disappointment) “we’ve been operating for nine years now and never had to disturb a client.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I know I need to stay out of the way. But where will I live?”
“We give you a flat. Nothing luxurious, I’m afraid, on your current scheme.” He glanced at his watch and handed her a brochure and she looked through pictures while he listed the options for upgrades and instalment plans, apologising for the flat’s tiny size and dated furnishings, which he repeatedly referred to as ‘simple’ and ‘uncluttered’.
“No, this one is perfect,” she’d said. And it was. She’d felt the way actresses in films always seem to feel when they fall in love. A recognition, a coming home. So there you are, she’d thought, gazing at the brochure.
And now, lying with Steven, she tried to think of it again – to enjoy the feelings of desire she had for it – her own flat for three whole months. But the man himself kept intruding into her fantasy. The not-quite-rightness of him.
Of course. He was one of those. The thought came to her suddenly, and once it arrived it felt like someone had thrown a rock in her face. He was one of those things the company made. It would make sense – they probably didn’t get paid in the usual way, so it would be economical to have the assistants administering the scheme. And perhaps it would work as advertising too. Give the client a good old look at the product before asking for the first instalment. She shuddered and closed her eyes, making up her mind to dream of the flat and not of the man from W, if ‘man’ was the right word for what he was.
* * *
Two weeks later, she was summoned back to the hotel. She braced herself and managed not to scream or vomit at the sight of what waited for her. W had done an excellent job; exactly as promised. The agent – the same one as last time, or another one, waited discreetly while she inspected it.
“Will he be able to tell?” she asked eventually.
The woman – the thing – was standing quite still, staring unblinking into the middle distance. She breathed, and when Eve drew close and put a hand on her arm, her skin was warm. She had an urge – an almost unbearable one she would certainly have given in to if she had been alone with it – to slap it, to push it over, to pull its hair. But she contented herself with tugging its bottom lip down gently and inspecting a minute chip on the front bottom tooth, caused by her falling from her bike and hitting her face on the kerb when she was eleven years old. She touched her own tooth with her tongue, as if to reassure herself she was still there.
“Your husband?”
Eve nodded.
“Oh no, I shouldn’t think so,” he said. “It’s never happened before. Not in…”
“Nine years,” Eve finished. This one had definitely been programmed with the sales patter.
“Yes,” he said. “Isn’t she beautiful? The lab were very pleased with how she turned out.” The man clasped his hands in front of him, like a well-trained butler. “You must think of this period – this next three months – as a kind of alibi.”
“What a word.”
“Yes. A watertight alibi allowing you to be absent from your own life. You can do what you want with the time. One of our clients wrote a novel. Another went trekking in Nepal. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for a once in a lifetime experience. The time doesn’t count. You’re still there, for all intents and purposes.”
That was sales talk if ever she heard it, and she’d already paid the first two instalments.
“And what happens afterwards? To the…” she gestured uncomfortably. Was it rude to talk about these things while their backs were turned? Before they were activated? Was it – she – on standby, or was she somehow aware, hearing but not responding, like a patient in a coma?
“Hello?” Eve whispered. The assistant did not respond. Its breathing continued, soft and even and regular. Eve was standing close enough to smell its hair, and it smelled of her own shampoo – which of course had been one of the questions.
“Once the commission ends the assistants remain the property of the agency, I’m afraid. Your image and your data belong to you, of course. But the component parts, the raw materials. We decommission them safely. There’s a decreation process and a recycling programme.” He was being deliberately vague and smiled apologetically. “It is humane, though not especially pretty. Your data is kept on our system for five years, in case you’d like to book again.”
Eve sat down heavily and he pressed a glass of water into her hand.
“Some people want a closer look. Would you like me to activate? I have the others in hotel rooms upstairs. I can ask them to come down?”
Eve shook her head quickly, her mind full of operating theatres and butchers’ shops and the lairs of serial killers – imagining and trying not to imagine the decreation process. The recycling of parts. She supposed everyone was recycled, once you came down to it. She’d read that the water in her body was a thunderstorm last week and would be part of a fancy soufflé served in a Parisian café in a month’s time. Her suitcase was at her feet. Seeing one of the things was enough – having the whole team in front of her would only be like naming the pigs that were destined to become bacon.
“No need,” she said, picked up the suitcase and asked the man at reception to call her a taxi to Flat 19.
* * *
The name of the flat was some kind of joke. It was three rooms above an empty workshop – the type that would have belonged to a mechanic or a joiner but was now blissfully empty – in a decrepit coastal town less than twenty miles from her home. There was no flat 18 or 20, and no flat number 1, either. She wondered what the postman thought, delivering letters, then supposed that if W regularly stashed its clients here, like cadavers in cold storage, there would never be any need for letters.
If she had wondered how it would be to have this time, unfettered and untethered, Eve would have supposed she’d have spent it eating chocolate in front of the telly, catching up on some box sets, reading trashy thrillers, ordering takeaway and sleeping. The team of deputy Eves, overseen by the man from W who assigned them their tasks, and he himself overseen by a team of shadowy others, all connected with some vital technology somewhere, would keep things ticking over. They were all at least as competent as she was, and more so. So there would be literally nothing for her to do. Eve might have imagined long baths in the afternoon, getting squiffy on fizzy wine before 6:00 p.m. and not bothering to wash her hair or shave her legs. But as she had not allowed herself to imagine what she might do with the time – she hadn’t dared to – when it finally arrived, she locked the door of the little sea-view flat behind her, and found herself unable to do anything except sink into the little armchair in front of the window and stare, unseeing, out at the water.
At the southern end of the little bay was a nuclear power station. She had no idea how they worked, and did not wonder, only regarded its blocky shape on the horizon, sometimes obscured by mist. Once every three days there would be a test alarm that echoed out from the station, over the wide bay and the cold flat water and into the flat. At first that was how she measured the time, emerging from her inner drifting only to note the siren, wailing out over the featureless bay, the sound bouncing around sea and rock and beach, and disturbing her only for a moment before she sank blissfully inwards again.
Of course, there were memories that drifted in and out like the clouds that drifted across the sky. Andrew would need new football boots, and there was a presentation to prepare for the Lessing account, and someone ought to come and look at the bifold doors in the kitchen, which leaked a little in rainy weather, and Jenny was going to need a dress for the end of term prom and someone needed to write a cheque for Esme’s swimming lessons. There were Gantt charts to organise for the team, and a mole on Steven’s back that needed looking at. She should visit her mother and get her to do something about the fence in her back garden, which was sagging.
Each of these thoughts she dispatched, as if they were misdirected letters, mentally redirecting them to the appropriate assistant. The man from W had explained the natural human flexibility to ricochet a self between a legion of roles and functions in life – the way we were never quite ourselves, but always somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, someone else’s friend or lover or daughter – was beyond the current capabilities of the company to replicate. They resolved this by creating a team of assistants, all different versions of Eve, and dispatched each to their individual work from a hotel, where they waited until they were required. The administration of the scheme sounded incredible, but W’s man had shrugged off questions. “We have our own team co-ordinating things,” he’d said.
Eve sometimes imagined the assistants sitting, as she was, inert and staring unseeing into the dark of an unheated hotel room until they were requested. But eventually the inner roar of thought fell silent for longer and longer periods, and she sank into the blankness. She’d heard stories of Zen masters sitting in caves for years on end, staring at nothing while the snow fell around them and their feet rotted into gangrene. It was not waiting, what she was doing, because she was not expecting or anticipating anything. Apart from the siren coming and going every three days and reminding her to eat something, she let go of time entirely.
* * *
The agency had issued her with a phone for emergencies and promised to contact her on it to arrange her debriefing and return interview. She’d left it in a drawer in the kitchenette of Flat 19 and it had run out of charge. On one of the siren days, disturbed from her unselfed nothing by the gentle wailing, she retrieved this phone, plugged it into the wall and looked at the date and time on her screen. Four more days. That was all.
W had been sending her updates, little videos and pictures of the Eves about their business: dropping the kids at school, presenting to her colleagues, sitting on the train with a travel cup of coffee on the table in front of her. Eve swiped through the pictures hungrily and felt a great and powerful love for them, these little parts of herself, granted agency to do their work without her interference. How diligent and careful they were. How relentlessly efficient. These Eves, she realised, were precisely what Steven had in mind when he’d picked up the girl from the wrong side of the tracks at university and ended up marrying her while she was still grateful and pliable.
What would the agency do, she wondered, if she failed to turn up to her re-orientation appointment, where detailed reports, video montages and online records of her various selves would be shared to bring her up to speed and assist her in making a seamless, if reluctant, re-entry to her own life? Maybe she could message Steven and ask to meet him somewhere private. She’d take him out to the beach. Buy him a bag of chips which he’d sneer at, complaining about the cholesterol and the carbs. She’d explain the situation to him. Point out what a wonderful job her understudies were doing. Perhaps he’d prefer, she’d suggest, to keep things the way they were. Perhaps he’d like that better? Was there a way of suggesting it that would make him feel it was his idea in the first place? Would he agree to remortgage the house and pay W whatever they asked so she could come back to the flat? Or if not the flat – she looked around desperately at the drab little walls she’d barely noticed, the cloudy sand-scoured glass of the kitchen window, the grease spots on the tiles behind the cooker – then somewhere else. Nowhere else. She’d walk into the sea if she had to.
Eve clutched at the phone, swiping and scrolling. It was hopeless. Steven would never agree to it – her having her cake and eating it. Or having fewer cakes or eating none of them. Or hiring someone else to eat her share of the cake. He was always going on about authentic this and artisanal that. Spoke cuttingly about his sister, who sometimes brought counterfeit handbags home from trips abroad and bestowed them on her nieces. He’d never let the girls keep them. People can tell, he’d say. People who matter can always tell.
She knew without trying that not being able to tell would be so humiliating for him he’d simply refuse to believe it. The agency wouldn’t back her up. Would vanish discreetly into the ether along with the assistants, leaving her trapped again in the competent prison of her life with a husband who’d commit her to a rehab or a rest home or a sanitorium somewhere. Wherever he put her away, it would be no Flat 19. There’d be wholesome group craft activities. Batik and macramé before lunch, brisk walks in the grounds among some council-planted daffodils, then a group encounter session for the inmates to talk about their mothers in the afternoon.
Eve used the phone to write a text message. She sent it to herself, to the mobile phone she’d handed over to W so they could clone it for the Eves to use while she was away. It was forbidden. There were many clauses in the contract on this matter. But they were her assistants, Eve reasoned. Who else was she supposed to call on? W would not help. Steven would not help. She’d ask the Eves.
* * *
The Eves came at the time and place she’d asked them to. This was a surprise: she imagined that they’d been assigned or programmed or instructed not to know of the existence of the original mother. But there they were: she saw them on the beach from a long way off. They were gathered, huddled, almost, as if sharing a secret or gossiping about an absent colleague. She wondered what they were speaking to each other about. Or if they even needed to speak at all. Perhaps they could communicate some other way, some signal or impression passed between their dark heads like messages carried in radio waves.
Shh, they were saying. Look sharp, she’s coming.
A passer-by might have noted the general similarity between this group of women, but Eve was not striking in her looks and a group of averagely sized brown-haired white women on a beach in winter was hardly a remarkable sight apt to draw attention. The Eve that went to the office was wearing a good wool jacket and sensible leather shoes. The Eve that existed for the children seemed softer, somehow, in her jogging bottoms and with her shiny, scrubbed clean of make-up face. There was an Eve designed just for visits to her mother: not too successful, not too downtrodden, always wearing the god-awful purple cardigan her mother had presented to her the Christmas just gone and ready to smilingly absorb another instance of artless passive aggression. There were another couple of Eves she didn’t recognise; one in impractical shoes, a too-tight silk blouse and a pencil skirt, the other one faded somehow, less defined than the others and seeming to exist only to display a long camel-coloured coat and some expensive looking choker sparkling around its neck. These two had been brought into being to answer some desire of Steven’s the algorithm had detected, no doubt. Eve approached them all, walking carefully over the wet rocks and sand. She’d chosen the beach as a peaceful, private place, out in the open. But the waves crashed noisily and gulls screeched overhead, tossed around by the wind.
Eve had explained the decreation process to them in the message she sent. She’d done it brutally and cruelly, assuming that their end was forbidden knowledge they did not know. She’d told them about the deleting of data, the dismantling and recycling of parts. She’d made it sound worse than it probably was, but it had got them here, hadn’t it? They’d gathered, and they waited. It was clearly the first time they’d met each other. Eve smiled to see her internal conflicts made flesh: Work Eve could not stand to be too near the Eve meant for the task of relating to her mother – they looked like two different women, thrust together by circumstance, and it was clear these two would never be friends. But seeing them like this felt the way it sometimes felt to see the children playing together nicely, unaware of her presence. Being able to witness their private conversation and rituals – how they were when mother was not in the room – invoked a rush of tenderness in her.
“Hello,” she called, still some way away now, but hurrying closer. The wind whipped away her voice and she slipped on a seaweed covered rock, hurt her wrist breaking her own fall, then righted herself and carried on. “Hello,” she said, “hello, all you lot. It’s me. I’m here.”
Would they all also feel the rush of love she was feeling now? That gratitude, and understanding of their sometimes difficult and unattractive ways? They all only wanted the best for her, after all – and deserved much better than they were destined for. She’d planned to try to explain the situation. To soften the gruesome brutality of her earlier messages. To help them understand what they were and where the responsibility for living and directing a shared life as complex as theirs most appropriately lay. Finally, she’d propose a compromise, and ask each of them to work together on hammering out the details of it. They would have to take some kind of vote.
Let’s be democratic about this, she’d planned to say. Let’s put our heads together.
There would be some solution. Some rota system. Perhaps she could go back to the agency and give them more money. Take out a loan. Get each of the Eves to take out their own loan. They’d need to be more: the multiplicity of her could expand infinitely, Eve thought, giddily – populate a city with deputies and create one dark nothing at its centre where Eve herself could wait. They could (this last thought came reluctantly, and even as it flickered through her mind, she knew she didn’t mean it, would never do it, would never ever give it up) even share the flat and take turns with the drudgery that took place outside of it.
* * *
Eve remained curious about what was left of herself until the very end. Curious at her own surprise that these women who were the best, most efficient and well adapted parts of herself would be as reluctant to release their grip on her life as she was to take it up again. Curious at the relief and – yes – even gratitude she felt as she finally reached them and saw, as they turned one by one to face her, they were all quite prepared and organised, each of them holding a large and jagged rock from the shore’s edge.
Of course. Of course! They’re going to stone me, Eve thought joyfully, and laughed.
The first rock struck her – hard – on the side of the head. There was no pain, only the sudden heat of her own blood swiping down the side of her face and neck like the stroke of an unseen hand across her skin. A blessing, really. Eve turned to watch the grey rocking surface of the sea as the beach rose up to meet her and the women, who continued to hurl their rocks, screamed to each other like gulls.