I know she is coming. Am I up to this? Yes, I am up to this, even as fear grips me, like the talons of an owl, grasping my heart. I have a knife in my back pocket. Who knows how crazy she is? I have my smartphone in the other pocket, though I am sure Jenny will render it useless. My secret phone is hidden in the little bathroom. I don’t want Jenny or the Assistants to know I have it, don’t want them even to see the shape of it in my jeans.
That phone in the bathroom is my escape lane, my plan B, my call to Simon or the police, if it all goes wrong.
I am quite, quite ready.
Yet it’s still a jarring shock when I hear the buzz and press the button – and then I see her, Jenny, my very own nemesis, in simple jeans and coat, standing at the door. Carrying a little rucksack.
She looks almost normal. Apart from her eyes. They have that same near-entranced expression, that I saw on the screen an hour back.
‘Hello, Jenny.’
She does not reply. She crosses into my flat. She shuts the door behind her, firmly. Then she walks into the quietness of Tabitha’s chic living room. We are illuminated by the soft golden light of Tabitha’s expensive lamps.
For a moment we stare at each other. Her expression is cold, blank, strange; mine is angry, puzzled, frightened. Then she turns and drops her coat and bag on a chair. And as she does this, every one of the Assistants goes into a total, shrieking meltdown.
From the living room to the bathroom to the kitchen to the bedrooms they all join in. Some are singing songs, one is singing ‘Hoppípolla’, others are warbling and shouting:
‘Here she is, here she is!’
‘Mummy Mummy Mummy hahahahahaha—’
‘You do not do, you do not do, black shoe, black shoe—’
Jenny stares at me, and then at the Assistant on the shelf. Her face says nothing, the tremor in her lips is the only evidence of emotion. She turns and squints down the hall as the Assistant in the kitchen shrieks into the night:
‘Aaaaaah, Why oh why oh why, Oh Jo why, help help help …’
It is the sound of my mother dying, recorded by the Assistant Simon gave her. Probably from the same batch of Assistants given to him by Jenny.
‘Oh, Jo – oh Jo – help me, someone help me—’
At last, Jenny reacts.
‘Electra, stop!’
The machines go quiet.
I look at Jenny, and say, ‘That was my mum, at the very end. I think Mum’s Assistant recorded it in her living room – and then sent it to my Assistant. It was just after you sent her that Facebook message. And that message killed her.’
Jenny looks around the room, and still she says nothing. Then she fixes her attention on the screen, on the table. And she barks out a command. ‘Electra, lock all the doors.’
Click, Click, Click, Click. The locks rattle like muffled gunfire. We have smart locks now? Too late, I remember the builders I saw; too late, I recall Tabitha telling me about the locks. Too late, too late, too late.
My desperation must be written on my face, because Jenny grins and says, ‘You didn’t even realize you had smart locks? They’re very clever. Same keys. You’d never know. But I knew. Because your Assistants tell me everything. They tell me your neighbours are out. I checked. They’re all out. We’re alone.’
No. This mustn’t be. I cannot be trapped in here. I yell at the screen,
‘Electra, unlock the doors.’
Nothing.
‘Electra, UNLOCK THE DOORS!’
Nothing.
Jenny speaks, with a hint of anger, stepping closer. ‘They will only listen to me, if I am in the room. That’s how I coded them. You know all this, Jo the Go. You worked it out. Well done. But now you want to know the rest, don’t you? Don’t you?’
Her voice is raised. I think about the knife in my pocket, the phone in the bathroom. But not yet, not yet. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I want to know.’
Jenny tuts. She glances at the TV, and it flicks on. The screen shows a little home-movie. Of Simon fucking me from behind.
Yet again I ask, ‘Why?’
Jenny is still looking at the TV. Electra makes a baby noise. The porn on my laptop is replaced by a different home video. It is one of Mum’s, in colour but very faded. It shows Daddy chasing me around the garden. The image is grainy, the camera focused on my father, who turns and smiles. He looks at me, then his eyes slide sideways, but the camera does not follow. Is there someone else with me? He looks faintly menacing, the beginning of the madness perhaps.
The movie snaps dead. The Assistant in the bathroom takes over, playing the noise of a child screaming, over and over, which segues into all of them, every single Assistant, chanting in turn, Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children, Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children—
‘JENNY!’
She barely blinks, but she gives me her gaze.
‘Jenny, you did this. You made this code. You put it in the Assistants, you gave the Assistants to Simon and me, now you have to make it stop. People have died.’
My old friend shakes her head. I glance at the open door right behind her. The second bathroom beckons, down the hall. Then I look back. Mustn’t let her know I have a plan of escape.
Jenny speaks. ‘Funny thing is, this obsession with Plath? – I actually didn’t code that into them.’ She gestures at Electra on the shelf. ‘They just picked it up, from me. Same with the voice mimicry, from Simon. And they’ve clearly picked up stuff from you. They are like seven- or eight-year-old kids, they have the same amorality. The same playful cruelty.’
As she says this, the entire flat is plunged into darkness. Just one lamp is left on, making everything shadowy, and theatrically gloomy. Jenny is now a shape across the silent room. A silhouette between me and the darkness of the door behind.
‘Jenny,’ I say into the gloom, ‘tell me why you chose me as your victim. And why you sent that evil, weird email to yourself. Or – or—’
‘Or what?’ says Jenny, with a vivid anger in her voice. ‘I don’t give a fuck what you do. Don’t you see? It’s too late. It’s far too late. I came over to do one last job, to fix your Assistants, and there’s only one way to do that.’
‘Just tell me why?’
I am interrupted by Electra, who speaks from the shelf in an American woman’s accent. ‘Because Jenny had no choice. Because Jenny had to let the old man do it, didn’t you, Jenny? Sometimes you would come out of the bedroom, in your unicorn pyjamas, and drop them for him, wouldn’t you? Because Daddy told you to.’
Jenny comes towards me. I cannot tell if she is smiling or frowning, or something else entirely.
She is silent. Electra goes on: ‘It’s not your fault, Jenny, it happens to kids, it’s not your fault, he was scary, he was scary, he was scary.’
‘Electra,’ says Jenny sharply. ‘Wait.’
The blue light shines, spirals, and dims. Jenny comes close. I realize, as I have not realized before, that she is quite a bit taller than me. Is she planning to assault me? I flinch as she moves – but she is only unbuttoning a cuff of her shirt. Then she slowly rolls up the sleeve of her cardigan, and after that the shirt.
Ah.
A ladder of vicious scars. All the way to her elbow. Some of them look fresh.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘Look, Jo. That’s what he does. That’s what he still does to me. Even now, years later. The abuse. All these years later. I can make another one. Watch!’
From her pocket she pulls out a little knife, and unfolds it. I feel the prickles of fight or flight down my back: the blade in my pocket or the phone in the bathroom? I will have to choose very soon. But Jenny is not making any move on me, not yet: instead she strokes the knife across the pale flesh of her own arm. I see a line of blood ooze. I see the knife tremble in her hand, the strange smile on her face, as if she is in a trance again. And now I know which book she was reading, when I caught her at home a couple of hours ago. The book with that distinctive pale blue cover. It was the Peaceful Pill Handbook. The one the Assistants sent to me. Jenny was reading a guide to suicide.
More than reading it: she was transfixed, entranced, determined. I think Jenny was about to kill herself. My call interrupted her.
And now she’s come over here. To do it in front of me? Or to take me with her?
The fear shoots to my heart. I must keep her talking till I can think of a way out. All the doors are locked. I have to run into the bathroom. But Jenny is in the way. And she has a knife.
‘Jenny, whatever you’re planning, just stop. You were a victim. It isn’t your fault!’
Ignoring me, Jenny casually picks up one of Tabitha’s modern steel sculptures, small, elegant, and abstract. Then she looks at the TV, which is showing yet another home movie: I am dancing around the apple tree. Abruptly, Jenny hurls the steel into the TV screen, which flashes, sparkles, and shatters. As the glass explodes, her eyes widen, with a mad satisfaction.
There is clearly no reasoning to be done. I have to get out. And this is my moment to escape – grab the phone – but Jenny is still in the way. She could floor me too easily. Or lash out with her knife.
Turning from the shattered TV screen, she yells at me. Very angry now.
‘Why did I fucking do it? Isn’t it fucking obvious? I wanted to hurt you. Badly. You stupid bitch! That’s why I invented Liam. And it was SO bloody easy, you were sending nude photos to him within a week. And at the right moment, I made sure Simon discovered. Because I wanted to destroy your marriage, because I wanted to damage you.’
I am drowning in fear, here, but I need to keep her distracted until I can guarantee a route to the bathroom. ‘Please explain it to me, Jenny. So I can understand. I can see you’re hurt, you’re unhappy. But why me?’
What will she smash next? She is silent: looking left, right. The blood runs down her arm; in the silvery light from the streetlamps outside, the knife glints in her other hand. We are otherwise immersed in gloom.
One of the Assistants in the bedrooms is playing the gentle sound of a baby whimpering. At last Jenny looks back at me, and continues, her voice level, though her eyes are on fire. ‘Then I heard your confession about Jamie Trewin, and I knew you could be blackmailed. That was SO fucking huge. Exhilarating. And all the coding designed to hurt you, I made sure it followed you here, to Delancey, with the Assistants.’
The fake baby grizzles and weeps.
‘But that’s when I stopped,’ Jenny goes on. ‘Because I didn’t want to get caught. That was the only reason. It wasn’t because I felt any sympathy for you.’ Her sneer is pure hate. ‘I ordered the machines to stop it all, and send me a horrible email, to rule me out as a suspect. So you would never guess it was me. But I never expected that email. With those details. Those …’ She looks at her arm, the blood that runs to her fingers, she looks back at me. ‘Those terrible details. At first I thought it was you, Jo, taking revenge, but then I realized it was the Assistants. My coding was too good, or not good enough. I’d created something, but it was out of control. There’s only way to stop all this.’
Jenny’s eyes, unblinking, meet mine. Am I seriously going to fight for my life, with a knife, in the dark?
Walking a step closer, she says, ‘So there, you have it. The explanation. More than you deserve. I did it because I hate you.’
‘But that’s not an explanation. We were friends! Why didn’t you tell me your dad was hurting you? You could have told me.’
‘Were we? Were we friends, really? How well do you know me?’
Another foot closer. I can see the wetness of tears in her eyes.
The final lamp switches off. We are in almost total darkness. All the Assistants are quiet, apart from the one on the shelf. It’s the only one talking. And what it says, in its female, American accent, slices me clean open.
‘Ticklemonster. That was his name, wasn’t it? Jenny, big fat Jenny and the Ticklemonster. You went round to his house all the time, always seeing Jo’s funny old dad. And he used to tickle you, didn’t he? And then the tickling went too far. Jo’s funny old dad, in the little study. Ha ha ha. Tickle tickle tickle. Fingers deep inside you. He used to wait for you after school, didn’t he, didn’t he, and you were too scared to tell. You in his car, him inside you. Tickle tickle tickle! Raping you once a week. The same car in which he gassed himself. Because he felt so guilty. For the suffering little children.’
The ice, out there, on Delancey, has found its way inside me.
My daddy. It wasn’t her daddy. It was my daddy.
That’s why she wrote that inscription. That’s why she was obsessed with Plath, and her Daddy poems. Because of MY daddy.
Now I think back: I remember the times Jenny would sleep over at our place, and that sometimes I had a sense of something strange going on, Dad hugging her so much, more than he hugged me, watching us put on pyjamas. And Jenny started getting fat. And then they moved away, so suddenly.
My own father, oh God. My own father. Going slowly mad. As he did it to Jenny.
Jenny speaks into the dark. Her words are weighted with sadness. Floating to the seabed. ‘You see? He never touched you. Never destroyed your life, your ability to love. He didn’t abuse his own daughter, he did it to me.’
‘Oh Jesus, Jenny, I had no idea. None.’
‘Well now you know. Maybe now you understand. Why I did what I did, to Jo the Go. You were so happy, but you didn’t deserve to be happy. Your father should have done it to you. Instead he did it to me. The fucking Ticklemonster. The fucking monster. That’s why I hate you. You and your family.’ Her voice drops even lower. ‘And you want to know something else? All that stuff about sex, all those anecdotes? They were lies. I’m a virgin. If you ignore what your beloved daddy did to me, I am a virgin, at thirty-three, a stupid, frigid freak. I’ve never done it since him. Because sex scares me too much, gives me nightmares. I’ve tried and I can’t. So I will never have kids, with a man, like a normal person. And unlike you, I wanted kids. I will die as the childless woman. Tonight.’
Abruptly, she steps so close that I can feel her hot breath. She is a round white face in the clutching blackness. I put my hand in my back pocket. The knife is there. This is it. I have to do it. Now.
But I can’t. I just can’t. I’m not capable. I am paralysed.
‘That’s your answer,’ she says, her voice quavering. ‘Now you want me to fix the Assistants? There’s only one way.’
Abruptly, she turns, and steps away. She is walking to her bag, on the chair. My route is unblocked. This really is it. Instantly, I sprint past her, through the darkness to the door, down the hall, knocking hard against a bookcase, but throwing myself the other way – into the bathroom. I am doing all of this blind, in the pitch-dark, but I know the shape of the flat. Heart yammering, I swivel and slam the bathroom door shut, push the bolt. Locking myself in. Come on, Jo, come on, Jo: HURRY UP.
I fumble, desperately, in the total darkness, I am searching the cupboard for the secret phone. My hand touches something hard and plastic. My phone. But when I press the home button, and the screen lights up, I think shit shit SHIT. I left it running. Such a crappy old phone. I’m down to 2 per cent battery. But that should still be enough.
Simon.