Lydia takes a train from Manchester Terminal to Halifax and puts it on work expenses: Fitz told her this was fine because the whole trip is being classed as “research,” and if pressed he will claim he wanted to know more about the Halifax inkworks and how it influences the local culture. His confidence that this will all be signed off by the embassy makes Lydia uneasy—she’s clearly not the embassy’s favorite person right now—but she literally can’t afford to turn the offer down. Mum’s flat, Lydia’s former home, is on the south side near the inkworks, so she takes the tram through town. Be nice to see the old place. Well, probably not nice, but, y’know: interesting.
Lydia finds a seat on the tram that’s empty except for a discarded paperback—a history of the organic food movement. It looks quite intriguing, so she sticks it in her pocket and sits down. The accents around her are warmly familiar, yet also make her melancholy and uncomfortable. At LSTL they urged her to speak more “neutrally,” and for half an hour every day she had to wear a collar that used low-level sound waves to put pressure on her larynx. When she had the collar on she did sound dead posh, it made her laugh—but she loathed the idea of sounding like that permanently, and quietly fought against it by playing up her accent when the collar was off. She always sounded different from the other pupils and reveled in it—but she knows her accent has faded, and hearing the voices of the other passengers makes her realize just how much.
There’s no need for her to speak while she’s on the tram. She can just listen to music and look out of the window. See what’s closed down since she was last here, that’s always a fun game.
The sun has just set and the light is bad, but at a glance it looks like there are even more of those printed lean-to shacks in the out-of-town retail park than there used to be. Charities give them out for free and they usually last a year or so before they fall apart, assuming no one kicks them down first. Nobody builds houses for the people who use these. Most of them’ll have come in from Lancashire, from homes that are underwater now. Nobody felt it was worth building a sea barrier in Morecambe like the one around Manhattan.
If you lined up all those printed shacks around the coast, you’d probably have a sea barrier. If only someone had bothered to do it at the time. Too late now.
The tram dips down into the underpass. The whole bloody thing is lined with those shacks, there’s barely any room to walk down the pavement—
Another passenger is waving at the corner of her vision. Someone she knows from school? One of her brother’s mates? No—just some random lad. He’s sat down next to her and wants her attention.
Lydia turns to him, shakes her head and goes back to looking out of the window. She glances down to check her suitcase is still clamped between her feet, and reminds herself he’s not going to rob or stab her on a tram, it’s well lit and the tram’s ayaie is good at recognizing crimes. Once she was on a tram going through town when a guy pulled a gun on another guy: the tram automatically diverted and continued to the nearest police station, where the one with the gun got picked up. Everyone knows trams are stupid places to start some shit. But on the other hand, some people are stupid.
Just then the music in Lydia’s ears is replaced by a deliberately primitive, singsong, robotic voice intoning JUST WANT TO TALK TO YOU LOVE WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? while an image flashes in her glasses: the lad grinning, looking well pleased with himself. He’s hacked into the link between her glasses and scroll. This rarely happens to her in Manhattan and she’s been lax about updating her blockers. In a minute or so her scroll will learn how he got in and shut him out, but a minute or so of this is more than she can bear. She takes off her glasses and turns to the lad: a skinny guy, younger than she is, thin mustache, no shirt, tattoos down his jawline to make his face look like it’s been riveted on. A lot of people these days have tats to make themselves look like machines, and Lydia gets the point but feels it’s a bit much to make your face into a permanent ironic joke. The guy’s running his tongue over his teeth and Lydia wishes she had Arthur and Martha with her so she could just wave her hand and they’d tase him. She glances at his mates, who are sitting on the backseat, watching how this plays out, snickering to one another. She’d like to tase all of them too, but as this isn’t an option, maybe she’ll throw that book about organic food at them.
Playing up her old accent as much as possible, she asks the lad what the fuck he wants.
“You got fancy clothes,” he says.
Lydia’s wearing her gold blazer, the one that strobes when the sun gets low in the sky—it’s not particularly fancy, that’s why she wore it. She’s too warm in it but she was wearing it on the hopper and couldn’t be arsed to cram it into her suitcase after she got off. The air-conditioning on the hoppers is always fierce because people associate cold with luxury—and it’s only now that Lydia realizes the blazer makes her look like a rich person, regardless of how fancy it is. Fuck’s sake. That’s not a mistake she’d have made before she left Halifax.
“You new in town?” the lad asks.
“No,” she replies.
“What you doing here?”
“They made me take time off from my job because I punched a lad for being a cunt.”
Over on the backseat, his mates all laugh.
The lad grins. “Good thing I’m not a cunt then, isn’t it?”
“Oh mate,” Lydia says, putting on a mock-sympathetic face. “I’ve got some bad news.”
His mates all laugh again, and in spite of herself Lydia feels satisfied she’s got the better of him in their eyes. She shouldn’t care what they think. She shouldn’t care what anyone around here thinks.
The lad leans in towards Lydia. “Seriously though—”
By now Lydia’s scroll is able to lock him out, but his channel is still open, so before locking it she brings up POV footage of herself punching Anders and pushes it right into his eyes.
The lad raises his eyebrows. “Alright, princess. Just being friendly.” He stands and walks back to his mates.
When Lydia gets to Mum’s flat (fourteenth floor of Wainwright House, thank god the elevator’s working), Mum moans about Lydia arriving on such short notice and how she’s had no time to get anything ready and there isn’t even really anywhere for her to stay what with Mikhaila living in her old room now.
They’d managed to hang on to Lydia’s bedroom while she was studying at LSTL, arguing that she still used it when she came back during the holidays, but now that she’d graduated and moved to another continent that argument didn’t wash anymore. The council told Mum it was either let someone else have the room or move to a two-bed flat. They didn’t even give her a choice about who took the room, so she ended up with Mikhaila, a pale woman with a demeanor like an anxious cat: before she moved here she lived in one of those printed shacks. Mum and Gil seem to like her well enough.
Lydia parks her case in the corner of the living room, almost knocking over a meter-high stack of paperbacks that’s been left on the floor, and takes off her blazer. Mum looks her up and down.
“Glad to see they’re feeding you,” Mum says.
Lydia sighs: She knew a remark of this nature was coming. People assume she’s put on weight because she goes to loads of fancy dinners and buffets as part of her job. But it’s nothing to do with that. The chemical fluctuations caused by the translation process include an overproduction of insulin, and however carefully you eat and no matter how much time you spend working out (Lydia does at least an hour a day in the gym in the residence’s basement and hates every second of it), you’re still liable to gain. She gets a lot of comments about this when fronting the (barely watched) English-language version of Fitz’s feed, but thankfully her sweeper automatically deletes most of them.
“I have explained about this, Mum,” Lydia says.
“I know, I don’t mean anything by it.”
“Then why’d you say it?”
Mum sighs. “I can’t say anything to you these days.”
“Actually you can. You can say It’s nice to see you, Lydia.”
“Of course it’s nice to see you, I just wish you wouldn’t drop in from nowhere and—”
“I can go to a hotel if it’s too much trouble. D’you want me to go to a hotel?”
“Don’t be daft—”
“I can afford it, you know. I’m making good money now so you don’t have to—” And without warning, Lydia breaks into tears.
Mum steps over, puts her arms around Lydia’s shoulders, pulls her in close. “I’m sorry, love. Of course it’s nice to see you.”
“I’ve really fucked up, Mum.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“It really is—you saw the footage of me?”
“Well, yes. So have they fired you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Lydia can’t help but laugh. “I don’t know. They should have done. I think they wanted to and Fitz stopped them.”
Mum raises her eyebrows. “Why would he do that?”
“Because he likes me? Maybe? And thinks I’m good at my job?”
“You can never tell what they’re thinking, them lot. I know you can, but—”
“I can’t read their minds, Mum. I only hear what they want me to hear.”
“There you go then, even you don’t know.”
“He’s a nice fella. I don’t want to make trouble for him.”
“Don’t worry about him, worry about yourself.”
Lydia waits a moment before saying this next part. “I dunno if I’m gonna go back.”
“What?”
“I was thinking, I might just … not go back at all.”
Mum looks puzzled, gives a little shake of her head. “But why?”
“It happened once, it’ll happen again. I do daft things when I’m drunk.”
“Mm,” says Mum, unsure if she ought to agree.
Lydia sighs. “It never used to matter if I did daft things, so I never used to worry. But these days I’m really trying to do things right, and I still can’t … what if I’m just not cut out for all this business?”
“Don’t be silly. Do you want a cup of tea?”
Lydia says yes and goes along with the change of subject. She’ll bring it up again another time, when she’s not so tired and can argue her corner. Because now she’s got some distance on it all, it feels a lot easier to be here, away from all that. Nobody can make her go back.