Machines Like Me

NINE

The journey home from Salisbury, again in heavy traffic and rain, was mostly in silence. Adam said he wanted to make a start on the Gorringe material. Miranda and I were, as we told each other, emotionally drained. The sherry and wine were bearing down on me. The windscreen wiper on my side was mostly lifeless. Intermittently, it smeared the glass. On the slow crawl through outer London, towards what I was beginning to think of as my former life, my mood began to slip. My life transformed in a single afternoon. I was trying to take the measure of what I’d agreed to – so easily, so impetuously. I wondered if I really wanted to become a father to a troubled four-year-old. Miranda had been pursuing the matter for weeks – privately. I’d had a few minutes and made my delirious decision out of love for her – nothing else. The responsibilities I’d assumed were heavy. Once we were home, my thoughts remained dark.

I slumped in the kitchen armchair with a mug of tea. I didn’t yet dare confide my feelings to Miranda. I had to admit it, at that moment I resented her, especially her old habit of secrecy. I had been bounced or bullied or lovingly blackmailed into parenthood. I would have to tell her, but not now. An argument was bound to follow, and I didn’t have the strength. I brooded on a fork in the path of our lives, the directions we might take: a bad but passing moment, common to all lovers, which we would talk ourselves through, find and seal a solution with a round of grateful lovemaking. Or: withdrawing, we would each go too far and, like inept trapezists, slip out of each other’s grasp and fall, and as we nursed our injuries, slowly become strangers. I surveyed these possibilities dispassionately. Even a third path didn’t trouble me much: I would lose her, regret it bitterly and never get her back, however hard I tried.

I was disposed to let events slide past me in frictionless silence. The day had been long and intense. I’d been taken for a robot, had my proposal of marriage accepted, volunteered for instant fatherhood, learned of self-destruction among one-quarter of Adam’s conspecifics, and witnessed the physical effects of moral revulsion. None of it impressed me now. What did were smaller things – the heaviness in my eyelids, my comfort in a half-pint of tea, in preference to a large Scotch.

Becoming a parent. It was not that I could claim to be too busy, pressured or ambitious. Mine was the opposite problem. I had nothing of my own to defend against a child. His existence would obliterate mine. He’d had a vile beginning, he’d need a lot of care, he was bound to be difficult. I hadn’t yet started my life, which was marginal, in fact, childish. My existence was an empty space. To fill it with parenting would be an evasion. I had older women friends who had got pregnant when nothing else was working out. They never regretted it, but once the children were growing up, nothing else happened beyond, say, a poorly paid part-time job, or setting up a book group, or learning holiday Italian. Whereas the women who were already doctors or teachers or running a business were deflected for a while, then went back and pressed on. The men weren’t even deflected. But I had nothing to press on with. What I needed was the strength of mind to refuse Miranda’s proposal. To agree to it would be cowardice, a dereliction of my duty to a larger purpose, assuming I could find one. I needed to be responsible, not cowardly. But I couldn’t confront her now, not when my eyes were closed, perhaps not for a week or two. I couldn’t trust my own judgement. I tipped back in the chair and saw the road from Salisbury spooling towards me, and white lines flashing under the car. I fell asleep with my forefinger looped through the handle of my empty cup. As I plunged down, I dreamed of echoing voices clashing and merging in angry parliamentary debate in a near-empty chamber.

When I woke it was to the sound and smell of dinner cooking. Miranda had her back to me. She must have known I was awake, for she turned and came towards me with two flutes of champagne. We kissed and touched glasses. In my refreshed state, I saw her beauty as if for the first time – the fine, pale brown hair, the elfin chin, the mirthfully narrowed grey-blue eyes. The matter between us still loomed, but what luck, to have dodged a retraction and a row. At least for now. She squeezed into the armchair beside me and we talked about our plans for Mark. I pushed aside my concerns in order to enjoy the happy moment. Now I learned that Miranda had been to Elgin Crescent with Mark. We would live together there as a family. Wonderful. Assuming the process of fostering and adoption could be completed within nine months, a good local primary school in Ladbroke Grove had a place for ‘our son’ – I struggled with the phrase, but I remained outwardly pleased. She told me that the adoption people had been unhappy with her living arrangements. A one-bedroom flat was not sufficient. Here was the plan: we should remove the outer doors to our flats and make the hall our shared space. We could decorate and carpet it. We needn’t trouble the landlord. When it was time to move to the new place, we would put everything back. We would convert her kitchen into a bedroom for Mark. No need for disruptive plumbing. We would cover the cooker, sink and work surfaces with boards that we could drape with colourful fabrics. The kitchen table could be folded away and stored in her – ‘our’ – bedroom. Our lives would be one and, of course, I liked all this, it was exciting. I joined in.

It was almost midnight when we went to the table to eat the meal she had prepared. From next door came the rattle of Adam at the keyboard. He wasn’t making us richer on the currency markets. He was typing up the transcript of Gorringe’s confession, including his self-identification. The transcripts and the video and accompanying narrative would make up a single file that would go to a named senior officer at a police station in Salisbury. A copy would also go to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

‘I’m a coward,’ Miranda said. ‘I’m dreading the trial. I’m frightened.’

I went to the fridge for the bottle and refilled our glasses. I stared into my drink, at the bubbles detaching themselves as though reluctantly from the side of the glass then rising quickly. Once the decision was made, they seemed eager. We had talked about her fears before. If Gorringe was charged and pleaded innocent. To be in court again. To suffer cross-examination, the press, public scrutiny. To confront him again. That was bad, but it wasn’t the worst of it. What terrified and sickened her was the prospect of Mariam’s family in the public gallery. The parents might give evidence for the prosecution. She would be with them as they learned, day by day, the details of their daughter’s rape and of Miranda’s wicked silence. The omertà of a silly teenage girl that cost a life. The family would remember how she had deserted them. As she repeated the story from the witness stand, she would struggle and fail to avoid the gaze of Sana, Yasir, Surayya, Hamid and Farhan.

‘I told Adam I can’t face it. He won’t listen. We had an argument while you were asleep.’

We knew, of course, she would face it. For several minutes we ate in silence. Her head was low over her plate, contemplating what she herself had set in motion. I understood why, for all her dread, she must go ahead and try to undo the errors she had made before and after Mariam’s death. I agreed that Gorringe’s three years were not enough. I admired Miranda’s determination. I loved her for her courage and slow-burning fury. I’d never thought that vomiting could be a moral act.

I changed the subject. ‘Tell me more about Mark.’

She was keen to talk about him. He was much wounded by his mother’s disappearance from his life, kept asking for her, was sometimes withdrawn, sometimes happy. On two occasions, he was taken to see her in the hospital. On the second visit, she didn’t or wouldn’t recognise him. Jasmin, the social worker, thought he’d been smacked frequently. He was in the habit of chewing on his lower lip, to the point of drawing blood. He was a fussy eater, wouldn’t touch vegetables, salad or fruit, but seemed healthy enough on a diet of junk food. Dancing remained a passion. He could pick out tunes on a recorder. He knew his letters and could count, by his own boast, to thirty-five. On shoes, he knew his left from his right. He was not so good around other children and tended to move to the edge of a group. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would answer, ‘a princess’. He liked dressing up as one with crown and wand, and ‘flitting about’ in an old nightie. He was happy in a borrowed summer frock. Jasmin was relaxed about it, but her immediate superior, an older woman, disapproved.

I remembered then something I had forgotten to tell her. When I crossed the playground, hand in hand with Mark, he’d wanted us to pretend we were running away, in a boat.

She was suddenly tearful. ‘Oh Mark!’ she cried out. ‘You’re such a special beautiful kid.’

After the meal, she stood to go upstairs. ‘I always thought I’d have children one day. I never expected to fall in love with this boy. But we don’t choose who to love, do we?’

Later, while I was clearing up the kitchen, I had a sudden thought. So obvious. And dangerous. I went next door and found Adam closing down the computer.

I sat on the edge of the bed. First I asked him about his conversation with Miranda.

He stood up from my office chair and put on his suit jacket. ‘I was trying to reassure her. She wasn’t persuaded. But the probability is overwhelming. Gorringe will plead guilty. It won’t come to court.’

I was interested.

‘To deny what he did, he’d have to tell a thousand lies under oath and he knows God will be listening. Miranda is His messenger. I’ve noticed in my researches how the guilty long to shed their burden. They seem to enter a state of elated abandonment.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘But look, it’s occurred to me. It’s important. When the police read of everything that happened this afternoon?’

‘Yes?’

‘They’re going to wonder. If Miranda knew that Gorringe raped Mariam, why would she go alone to his bedsit with a bottle of vodka? It would have to be revenge.’

Adam was already nodding before I’d finished. ‘Yes, I’ve thought of that.’

‘She needs to be able to say she only learned today, when Gorringe confessed. There needs to be some judicious editing. She went to Salisbury to confront her rapist. Until then, she didn’t know he’d raped Mariam. Do you understand?’

He looked at me steadily. ‘Yes. I understand perfectly.’

He turned away and was silent for a moment. ‘Charlie, I heard half an hour ago. There’s another one gone.’

In a lowered tone, he told what little he knew. It was an Adam of Bantu appearance, living in the suburbs of Vienna. He had developed a particular genius for the piano, especially for the music of Bach. His Goldberg Variations had amazed some critics. This Adam had, according to his final message to the cohort, ‘dissolved his consciousness’.

‘He’s not actually dead. He has motor function but no cognition.’

‘Could he be repaired or whatever?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can he still play the piano?’

‘I don’t know. But he certainly can’t learn new pieces.’

‘Why don’t these suicides leave an explanation?’

‘I assume they don’t have one.’

‘But you must have a theory about it,’ I said. I was feeling aggrieved on behalf of the African pianist. Perhaps Vienna was not the most racially accepting of cities. This Adam might have been too brilliant for his own good.

‘I don’t.’

‘Something to do with the state of the world. Or human nature?’

‘My guess is that it goes deeper.’

‘What are the others saying? Aren’t you in touch with them?’

‘Only in times like this. A simple notification. We don’t speculate.’

I started to ask him why not but he raised a hand to forestall me. ‘This is how it is.’

‘So what’s deeper supposed to mean?’

‘Look, Charlie. I’m not about to do the same thing. As you know, I’ve every reason to live.’

Something in his phrasing or emphasis aroused my suspicion. We exchanged a long and fierce look. The little black rods in his eyes were shifting their alignment. As I stared, they appeared to swim, even to wriggle, left to right, like microorganisms mindlessly intent on some distant objective, like sperm migrating towards an ovum. I watched them, fascinated – harmonious elements lodged within the supreme achievement of our age. Our own technical accomplishment was leaving us behind, as it was always bound to, leaving us stranded on the little sandbar of our finite intelligence. But here we were dealing on the human plane. We were thinking about the same thing.

‘You promised me that you wouldn’t touch her again.’

‘I’ve kept my promise.’

‘Have you?’

‘Yes. But…’

I waited.

‘It’s not easy to say this.’

I gave him no encouragement.

‘There was a time,’ he started, then paused. ‘I begged her. She said no, several times. I begged her and finally she agreed as long as I never asked her again. It was humiliating.’

He closed his eyes. I saw his right hand clench. ‘I asked if I could masturbate in front of her. She said I could. I did. And that was it.’

It wasn’t the rawness of this confession or its comic absurdity that struck me. It was the suggestion, yet another, that he really did feel, he had sensation. Subjectively real. Why pretend, why mimic, who was there to fool or impress, when the price was to be so abject in front of the woman he loved? It was an overwhelming sensual compulsion. He needn’t have told me. He had to have it, and he had to tell me. I didn’t count it as a betrayal, no promise was broken. I might not even mention it to Miranda. I felt sudden tenderness towards him for his truthfulness and vulnerability. I stood up from the bed and went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. His own hand came up and lightly touched my elbow.

‘Goodnight Adam.’

‘Goodnight Charlie.’

The catchphrase of the late autumn owed an obvious debt to a previous prime minister: a half-hour is a long time in politics. Harold Wilson’s original ‘week’ seemed too long for this parliament. One afternoon it looked like there was going to be a leadership challenge. By the next morning there were insufficient signatures – the fainthearts had prevailed. Soon after, the government survived by one vote a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons. Certain senior Tories rebelled or abstained. Mrs Thatcher, insulted, furious, stubborn, deaf to good advice, called a snap election to be held in three weeks. She was, in the general view, pulling the temple down on her party, most of which now believed she was an electoral liability. She didn’t see it that way, but she was wrong. The Tories could hardly match the momentum of Tony Benn’s campaign, not in the TV and radio studios, not on the stump, certainly not in the industrial and university towns. The Falklands Catastrophe, as it was now called, came back to destroy her. This time, no popular inclination to forgiveness in the cause of national unity. The televised testimony of grieving widows and their children was fatal. The Labour campaign let no one forget how eloquently Benn had spoken out against the Task Force. The poll tax rankled. As predicted, it was difficult and expensive to collect. More than a hundred celebrity non-payers, many of them actresses, were in prison and became martyrs.

A million voters under the age of thirty had recently joined the Labour Party. Many of them were active on the nation’s doorsteps. On the eve of polling day, Benn gave a rousing speech at a rally in Wembley stadium. The landslide was greater than predicted, exceeding the Labour victory of 1945. It was a sad moment when Mrs Thatcher decided to leave Number 10 on foot, hand in hand with her husband and two children. She walked towards Whitehall, upright and defiant, but her tears were visible and for a couple of days, the country suffered pangs of remorse.

Labour had a majority of 162 MPs, many of whom were newly selected Bennites. When the new prime minister returned from Buckingham Palace, where the Queen had invited him to form a government, he gave an important speech from outside Number 10. The country would disengage unilaterally from its nuclear weaponry – that was no surprise. Also, the government would set about withdrawing from what was now called the European Union – that was a shock. The party’s manifesto had alluded to the idea in a single vague line which people had barely noticed. From his new front door, Benn told the nation that there would be no rerun of the 1975 referendum. Parliament would make the decision. Only the Third Reich and other tyrannies decided policy by plebiscites and generally no good came from them. Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.

Benn gave an extended version of that speech a month later in the Manchester Free Trade Hall. At his side sat the historian, E. P. Thompson. When it was his turn, he said that patriotism had always been the terrain of the political right. Now it was the turn of the left to claim it for all. Once nuclear weapons were banished, Thompson predicted, the government would raise a standing citizen’s army that would make these islands impossible to invade and dominate. He didn’t specify an enemy. President Carter sent Benn a message of support, using words that caused a scandal on the right in the USA and haunted his second term: ‘The word “socialist” doesn’t bother me.’ A poll later suggested that a half of registered Democrats wished they had voted for the defeated candidate, Ronald Reagan.

To me, psychologically confined to the city state of north Clapham, all this – the events, the dissent, the grave analysis – was a busy hum, dipping and swelling from day to day, a matter of interest and concern, but nothing to compare with the turbulence of my domestic life, which came to a head in late October. By then, on the surface, all looked well. We had modified our accommodation as Miranda had proposed, ready for Mark’s arrival. Our doors were removed and stored, the gloomy hall and its large fitted cupboard were brightly decorated, the gas and electricity meters concealed, a piece of carpet laid down. Miranda’s kitchen became a child’s bedroom, with a blue sleigh bed and many books and toys, and transfers on the walls of fairy-tale castles, boats and winged horses. I removed the bed from my study and disposed of it – a signpost on the road to full maturity. I installed a desk for Miranda and bought two new computers. Mark would be allowed to visit us for a few hours twice a week. The adoption agency was pleased by the news of our imminent wedding. I still had moments of unease, which I couldn’t bring myself to share. I joined in all the preparations, feeling guilty, even shocked sometimes, that I could keep up the pretence. On other occasions, fatherhood seemed an inevitability, and I was more or less content.

Miranda’s tutor was impressed by the first three chapters of her dissertation. Adam had still not submitted his material to the police and was reluctant to talk about it. But he continued to work on it, and we weren’t troubled. I paid a five per cent deposit in cash on the Notting Hill house. After that, the fund stood at £97,000. The larger it became, the faster it grew, and faster still on the new computer. My own work during this time consisted mostly of decorating and carpentry.

What marked the beginning of the turbulence began innocuously. On the eve of Mark’s first visit, Miranda and I were drinking a late-night cup of tea in the kitchen when Adam came in with a carrier bag in his hand and announced that he was going for a walk. He had been for long solo walks before and we thought nothing of it.

I woke early the following morning with a clearer head than usual. I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Miranda, and went downstairs to make coffee. Adam had not returned from his night walk. I was surprised but I decided not to worry about him. I was anxious to make use of my unusual state to catch up on dull administrative tasks, including the payment of household bills. If I didn’t exploit this mood now, I would have had to drag myself to the business within the week and hate it. Now I could breeze through.

I carried my cup into the study. There was £30 on the desk. I put it in my pocket and thought no more of it. As usual, I glanced at the news first. Nothing much. The Labour Party Conference in Brighton had been delayed by six weeks because of internal disputes over policy and was only now just beginning. There was increased police activity around the seafront. Some sites were reporting a news blackout.

Benn was already in trouble with his left for accepting an official invitation to the White House in place of greeting a Palestinian delegation. He had also failed to secure, as promised, the immediate release of the poll-tax martyrs. It was not so easy for the executive to instruct the judiciary. He should have known that, many said, when he made his pledge. Also, the tax itself was not about to be repealed because there were so many other more important bills going through Parliament. There was also anger on his right. Nuclear disarmament would cost 10,000 jobs. Leaving Europe, abolishing private education, renationalising the energy sector and doubling social security would mean a big rise in income tax. The City was seething over the reversal of deregulation and the half of one per cent tax on all trades in shares.

Public administration was a special corner of hell, irresistible to certain personalities. Once there, and risen to the top, there was nothing they could do that did not make someone, some sector, hate them. From the sidelines, the rest of us could comfortably loathe the entire machinery of government. Reading about the public inferno every day was compulsive to types like me, a mild form of mental illness.

At last I broke away and set about my duties. After two hours, just past ten, I heard the doorbell ring and Miranda’s footsteps above my head. Minutes later, I heard steps at shorter frequency, moving at speed from one room to the other, then back. After a brief silence, what sounded like a bouncing ball. Then a resonating thump, as of a leap from a high place that made the ceiling-light fittings rattle and some plaster dust fall onto my arm. I sighed and considered again the prospect of fatherhood.

Ten minutes later, I was in the armchair in the kitchen, observing Mark. Just below the worn armrest was a long tear in the leather into which I often shoved old newspapers, in part to dispose of them, but also in the vague hope they would substitute for the vanished stuffing. Mark was counting as he pulled them out, one by one. He unfolded them and spread them across the carpet. Miranda was at the table, deep in a hushed phone call with Jasmin. Mark was smoothing out each paper with a careful swimming motion of both hands, pressing it onto the floorboards and addressing it in a murmur.

‘Number eight. Now you go here and don’t move… nine… you stay here… ten…’

Mark was much changed. He was an inch or so taller, the ginger-blond hair was long and thick and centre-parted. He was dressed in the uniform of an adult world citizen – jeans, sweater, trainers. The baby plumpness was going from his face, which was longer now, with a watchfulness in his gaze that may have derived from the upheavals in his life. The eyes were a deep green, the skin of porcelain smoothness and pallor. A perfect Celt.

Soon, all the events of the previous months were at my feet. Falkland warships burning, Mrs Thatcher with raised hand at a Party Conference, President Carter in an embrace after a major speech. I wasn’t sure whether Mark’s counting game was a way of saying hello, of sidling up to me. I sat patiently and waited.

Finally, he stood and went to the table and retrieved a carton of chocolate dessert and a spoon and came back to me. He stood with an elbow resting on my knee, fiddling with the edge of tinfoil he needed to remove.

He looked up. ‘It’s a bit tricky.’

‘Would you like me to help?’

‘I can do it easily but not today so you have to.’ The accent was still the generalised cockney of London and its surrounds, but there was another element, some undertones inflecting the vowels. Something of Miranda’s, I thought. He put the carton in my hands. I opened it for him and handed it back.

I said, ‘Do you want to sit at the table to eat it?’

He patted the arm of my chair. I helped him up and he sat, perched above me, spooning the chocolate into his mouth. When a dollop fell on my knee, he glanced down and murmured an untroubled ‘Oops.’

As soon as he was done, he handed spoon and carton to me and said, ‘Where’s that man?’

‘Which man?’

‘With the funny nose.’

‘That’s what I was wondering. He went for a walk last night and hasn’t come back.’

‘When he should be in bed.’

‘Exactly.’

Mark spoke directly into my growing concern. Adam often took long walks, but never overnight. If Mark hadn’t been there, I might have been pacing the room, waiting for Miranda to finish on the phone so that we could fret together.

I said, ‘What’s in your suitcase?’

It was on the floor by Miranda’s feet, a pale blue case, with stickers of monsters and superheroes.

He looked to the ceiling, took a theatrical deep breath and counted off on his fingers. ‘Two dresses, one green, one white, my crown, one two three books, my recorder and my secret box.’

‘What’s in the secret box?’

‘Um, secret coins and the toenail from a dinosaur.’

‘I’ve never seen a dinosaur’s toenail.’

‘No,’ he agreed pleasantly. ‘You haven’t.’

‘Do you want to show me?’

He pointed straight at Miranda. It was a change of subject. ‘She’s going to be my new mummy.’

‘What do you think about that?’

‘You’re going to be the daddy.’

What he thought was not a question he could respond to.

He said quietly, ‘Dinosaurs are all extinct anyway.’

‘I agree.’

‘They’re all dead. They can’t come back.’

I heard the uncertainty in his voice. I said, ‘They absolutely can’t come back.’

He gave me a serious look. ‘Nothing comes back.’

I got halfway through my therapeutically supportive, kindly reply. What I was starting to say was, ‘The past is extinct,’ when he interrupted me with a shout, but a happy one.

‘I don’t like sitting on this chair!’

I went to help him down but he leapt with a shriek onto the floor, into a crouching position, and then he jumped and crouched again, shouting, ‘I’m a frog! A frog!’

He was hopping across the floor as a very loud frog when two things happened at once. Miranda came off the phone and told Mark to keep his noise down. At the same time, the door opened and Adam was before us. The room fell silent. Mark scurried for Miranda’s hand.

I knew that depleted look. Otherwise, Adam looked, as ever, well groomed in white shirt and dark suit.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘I’m so sorry if you’ve been anxious, but I…’ He came forward to near where Miranda was, ducked down to retrieve the cable and with a lunging motion, pulled his shirt clear and shoved the socket into his stomach and fell onto one of the hard kitchen chairs with a moan of relief.

Miranda stood up from the table and went to stand with her back to the stove. Mark followed her closely, with his head turned towards Adam.

She said, ‘We were beginning to worry about you.’

He was still in his moment of immediate abandon. I had sometimes wondered if the charge was like slaking a desperate thirst. He had told me that in those first seconds it was a gorgeous surge, a breaking wave of clarity that settled into deep contentment. He had once been untypically expansive. ‘You can have no idea, what it is to love a direct current. When you’re really in need, when the cable is in your hand and you finally connect, you want to shout out loud at the joy of being alive. The first touch – it’s like light pouring through your body. Then it smooths out into something profound. Electrons, Charlie. The fruits of the universe. The golden apples of the sun. Let photons beget electrons!’ Another time, he’d said, with a wink, as he was plugging himself in, ‘You can keep your corn-fed roast chicken.’

Now he was taking his time to reply to Miranda. He must have progressed to the second stage. His voice was calm.

‘Alms.’

‘Arms?’

‘Alms. Don’t you know this one? Time hath, my Lord, a wallet at his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion.’

I said, ‘You’ve lost me. Oblivion?’

‘Shakespeare, Charlie. Your patrimony. How can you bear to walk around without some of it in your head?’

‘Somehow, it seems I can.’ I thought he was sending me a message, a bad one about death. I looked at Miranda. Her arm was around Mark’s shoulder, and he was gazing at Adam in wonderment as though he knew, in a way that adults immediately might not, that here was someone fundamentally different. Long before, I’d owned a dog, a normally placid and obedient Labrador. Whenever a good friend of mine brought his autistic brother round, the dog growled at him and had to be locked away. A consciousness unconsciously understood. But Mark’s expression suggested awe, not aggression.

Adam became aware of him for the first time.

‘So there you are,’ he said in the sing-song way of adults addressing infants. ‘Do you remember our boat in the bath?’

Mark moved closer against Miranda. ‘It’s my boat.’

‘Yes. Then you danced. Do you still dance?’

He looked up at Miranda. She nodded. He returned his gaze to Adam and said after a thoughtful pause, ‘Not always.’

Adam’s voice deepened. ‘Would you like to come and shake my hand?’

Mark shook his head emphatically so that his entire body twisted from left to right and back. It hardly mattered. The question was merely a friendly gesture and Adam was retreating into his version of sleep. He had described it to me variously; he didn’t dream, he ‘wandered’. He sorted and rearranged his files, reclassified memories from short to long term, played out internal conflicts in disguised form, usually without resolving them, reanimated old material in order to refresh it, and moved, so he put it once, in a trance through the garden of his thoughts. In such a state he conducted in relative slow motion his researches, formulated tentative decisions, and even wrote new haikus or discarded or reimagined old ones. He also practised what he called the art of feeling, allowing himself the luxury of the entire spectrum, from grief to joy so that all emotion remained accessible to him when fully charged. It was, above all else, he insisted, a process of repair and consolidation from which he emerged daily, delighted to find himself to be, once again, self-aware, in a state of grace – his word – and to reclaim the consciousness that the very nature of matter permitted.

We watched as he sank away from us.

At last, Mark whispered, ‘He’s asleep and his eyes are open.’

It was indeed eerie. Too much like death. Long ago, a doctor friend had taken me down to the hospital mortuary to see my father after his fatal heart attack. Such was the speed of events, the staff had forgotten to close his eyes.

I offered Miranda a coffee and Mark a glass of milk. She kissed me lightly on the lips and said that she would take Mark upstairs to play for a while until he was collected, and that I was welcome to join them at any time. They left and I returned to the study.

In retrospect, what I did there for a few minutes came to seem like a delaying tactic to protect myself a little longer from the story, now an hour old, that was engulfing the media networks. I picked up some magazines from the floor and put them on the shelves, clipped together some invoices and tidied the papers on my desk. At last I sat down at the screen to think about earning a little money myself, in the old style.

I clicked on the news first – and there it was, on every outlet, worldwide. A bomb had exploded in the Grand Hotel, Brighton at 4 a.m. It had been placed in a cleaner’s cupboard almost directly under the bedroom where Prime Minister Benn had been sleeping. He was killed instantly. His wife was not with him because of a hospital appointment in London. Two members of the hotel staff also died. The deputy prime minister, Denis Healey, was preparing to go to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen. The Provisional IRA had just claimed responsibility. A state of emergency had been declared. President Carter was cancelling a holiday. The French president, Georges Marchais, had ordered all flags on government buildings to be at half-mast. A demand for the same from Buckingham Palace had been met with a cool response from a royal official: ‘Neither customary nor appropriate.’ A big crowd was gathering spontaneously in Parliament Square. In the City, the FTSE was up fifty-seven points.

I read everything, all the instant analysis and opinion I could find: until now, the only British prime minister to have been assassinated was Spencer Perceval, in 1812. I admired the speed with which newsrooms could turn around instant analysis and opinion pieces: the innocence has gone forever from British politics; in Tony Benn, the IRA has eliminated the politician most open, or least hostile, to their cause; Denis Healey is the best man to steady the ship of state; Denis Healey will be a catastrophe for the country; dispatch the entire army to Northern Ireland and wipe the IRA from the face of the earth; police, don’t be rushed into arresting the wrong people; ‘State of War!’ was the front page of one online tabloid.

Reading this material was a way of not contemplating the event itself. I blanked the screen and sat for a while, thinking of nothing much. It was as though I was waiting for the next event, the decent one, that would undo the event before. Then I began to wonder whether this was the beginning of a history marker, of a general unravelling, or one of those isolated outrages that fade in time, like Kennedy’s near-death in Dallas. I stood and walked up and down the room, again thinking of nothing at all. At last, I decided to go upstairs.

They were on their hands and knees, assembling a jigsaw on a tea tray. As I came in, Mark held up a blue piece and announced, gravely, quoting his new mother, ‘The sky is the hardest.’

I watched them from the doorway. He shifted position to kneel up and curl an arm around her neck. She gave him a piece and pointed to where it belonged. With much fumbling, much help, he slotted it in. There were the beginnings of a sailing ship in stormy seas, with piled cumulus touched yellow and orange by a rising sun. Perhaps it was setting. They murmured companionably as they worked away. At some point soon, after Mark had been collected, I would give Miranda the news. She’d always been passionate for Benn.

She put another piece in the little boy’s hand. It took time for him to get it in position. He had it upside down, then his hand slipped and displaced some adjacent bits of sky. At last, with Miranda guiding him, her hand on top of his, the fragment was in place. He glanced up at me and smiled confidingly about a triumph he seemed to want to share. That look and the smile, which I returned, dispelled all my private doubts and I knew I was committed.

When Adam emerged from his recharge he was in an odd state, well removed from wonder at the fact of conscious life. He moved slowly about the kitchen, stopping to look around, grimacing, moving on and making a humming sound, a high to low glissando, like a moan of disappointment. He knocked a glass tumbler over which shattered on the floor. He spent half an hour morosely sweeping up the pieces, then sweeping again, then looking for shards of glass on hands and knees. Finally, he fetched the vacuum cleaner. He carried a chair into the back garden and stood behind it, staring at the backs of neighbouring houses. It was cold outside, but that wouldn’t have bothered him. Later, I came into the kitchen to find him folding one of his white cotton shirts on the table, bending low to the task, moving with reptilian slowness as he smoothed out the crease in the arms. I asked what was up.

‘I’m feeling, well…’ His mouth opened as he searched for the word. ‘Nostalgic.’

‘For what?’

‘For a life I never had. For what could have been.’

‘You mean Miranda?’

‘I mean everything.’

He wandered outside again and this time sat down and stared ahead, immobile, and remained that way for a long time. On his lap was a brown envelope. I decided not to go out and ask his views on the assassination.

In the early afternoon, after Miranda had said her goodbyes to Mark and finished another conversation with Jasmin, she came down to find me. I was at the screen in pointless pursuit of more news, angles, opinions, statements. It turned out she had known as soon as the story broke. She leaned against the door frame, I remained in my seat. Physical proximity would have seemed like disrespect. Our conversation was much like my thoughts, a circular chase around an incomprehensible event – the cruelty of it, the stupidity. People with Irish accents had been attacked in the streets. The crowd outside Parliament had grown so large it was being moved by the police to Trafalgar Square. Mrs Thatcher’s office had released a statement. Was it sincere? We decided it was. Did she write it herself? We couldn’t be sure. ‘Though we disagreed on many fundamentals of policy, I knew him to be a thoroughly kind, decent, honest man of huge intelligence who always wanted the best for his country.’ Whenever our conversation strayed into likely consequences, we felt we were betraying the moment and accepting a world without him. We weren’t ready, and we turned back, although Miranda did say that with Healey we would keep our ‘end-time’ bombs after all. I was hardly a Tory, but I thought I would have been just as shocked if Mrs Thatcher had been in that hotel bed. What horrified me was the ease with which the edifice of public, political life could be shaken apart. Miranda saw it differently. Benn was, she said, in an entirely different league of human being from Margaret Thatcher. But a human being, was my point. A divide was opening up that we preferred to avoid.

So we moved on, after these lamentations, to Mark. She summarised her conversation with the social worker. The route to adoption was difficult and long and Miranda had learned that we were almost two-thirds of the way. Soon, a probation period would begin.

She said, ‘What did you think?’

‘I’m ready.’

She nodded. We had celebrated Mark many times before, his nature, his changes, his past and future. We weren’t about to do that again now. On any other day, we might have gone upstairs to the bedroom. She slouched beautifully in the door frame, dressed in new clothes – a thick white winter shirt, artfully too large, tight black jeans, ankle boots tricked out in silver studs. I reconsidered – perhaps this was a good moment to retreat upstairs. I went over to her and we kissed.

She said, ‘Something’s worrying me. I was reading Mark a fairy story, and there was a beggar, and that word. Alms.’

‘Yes?’

‘I had a horrible thought.’ She was pointing across the room. ‘I think we should look.’

Now the bed was gone, I kept the case in a locked cupboard. As I lifted it out, it was obvious enough by its weight, but I sprang the catches anyway. We stared into a space void of £50-note bundles. I went to the window. He was still out there, on the chair, and had been for an hour and a half. The thick envelope was still on his lap. £97,000. ‘And you kept it in the house!’, I heard an inner voice say.

We hadn’t looked at each other yet. Instead, we looked away, and stood around, wasting time, swearing quietly to ourselves, separately trying to take in the implications. Out of habit, I glanced towards the screen on my desk. The flag was, after all, being lowered to half mast on Buckingham Palace.

We were in too much turmoil to have a sensible discussion about tactics. We simply decided to act. We went next door to the kitchen and called Adam into the house. At the table, Miranda and I were side by side, with Adam facing us. He had brushed his suit, cleaned his shoes and put on a freshly ironed shirt. There was a new touch – a folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. His manner was both solemn and distracted, as though nothing much mattered to him, whatever we said.

‘Where’s the money?’

‘I’ve given it away.’

We didn’t expect him to tell us that he had invested it, or put it in a safer place, but still, with our silence we enacted our profound shock.

‘Meaning what?’

Infuriatingly, he nodded, as though rewarding me for asking the correct question. ‘Last night I put forty per cent in your bank’s safe deposit against your tax liabilities. I’ve written a note to the Revenue laying out all the figures and letting them know to expect it in due course. Don’t worry, you’ll be paying at the old top rate. With the remaining £50,000 I visited various good causes I’d notified in advance.’

He seemed not to notice our amazement and remained pedantically focussed on answering my question in full.

‘Two well-run places for rough sleepers. Very appreciative. Next, a state-run children’s home – they accept contributions for trips and treats and so on. Then I walked north and made a donation to a rape crisis centre. I gave most of the rest to a paediatric hospital. Last, I got talking to a very old lady outside a police station and I ended up going with her to see her landlord. I covered her rent arrears and a year in advance. She was about to be evicted and I thought—’

Suddenly, Miranda said through a downward sigh, ‘Oh Adam. This is virtue gone nuts.’

‘Every need I addressed was greater than yours.’

I said, ‘We were going to buy a house. The money was ours.’

‘That’s debatable. Or irrelevant. Your initial investment is on your desk.’

It was an outrage, with many components – theft, folly, arrogance, betrayal, the ruin of our dreams. We couldn’t speak. We couldn’t even look at him. Where to start?

A full half-minute passed and then I cleared my throat and said feebly, ‘You must go and get it back. All of it.’

He shrugged.

Of course, it wasn’t possible. He sat complacently before us, in resting mode, palms down on the table while he waited for one of us to speak again. I felt my anger gathering, finding its focus. I hated that careless little shrug. Completely fake, and how easily we were taken in by it, a minor sub-routine tripped by a limited range of specified inputs, devised by some clever, desperate-to-please postdoc in a lab somewhere on the outskirts of Chengdu. I despised this non-existent technician, and I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf. Yes, the money Adam had stolen was the money he had made. That made me angrier still. So too did the fact that I was responsible for bringing this ambulant laptop into our lives. To hate it was to hate myself. Worst of all was the pressure to keep my fury under control, for the only solution was already clear. He would have to make the money all over again. We would need to persuade him. There it was, ‘hate it’, ‘persuade him’, even ‘Adam’, our language exposed our weakness, our cognitive readiness to welcome a machine across the boundary between ‘it’ and ‘him’.

To be in such a confusion of concealed bad feeling made it impossible to remain sitting down. I stood, with a loud scrape of the chair and walked about. At the table, Miranda made a steeple of her hands that concealed her mouth and nose. I couldn’t read her expression and I assumed that was the point. Unlike me, she was likely doing some useful thinking. The disorder of the kitchen agitated me further – I was truly in a bad state. On the counter was a dirty cup I’d brought through from my study. It had been hidden a few weeks behind the computer screen and contained a green-grey disc of floating mould. I thought of taking it to the sink and rinsing it out. But when you’ve lost a fortune, you don’t clean up the kitchen. Directly below the wooden surface on which the cup stood was a drawer left untidily open a few inches. Left open by me. It was the tool drawer. I stood close to it in order to lean in and shut it when I saw the grubby oak handle of my father’s heavy-duty claw hammer lying diagonally across the rest of the jumbled contents. It was a dark impulse, one I didn’t want, that made me leave the drawer as it was and come away.

I sat down again. I had unfamiliar symptoms. My skin from waist to neck was tight, dry, hot. My feet inside their trainers were also hot, but moist, and they itched. I had far too much wild energy for a delicate conversation. A thuggish game of football might have suited me, or a swim in a heavy sea. So might shouting, or screaming. My breathing was out of kilter, for the air seemed thin, poorly oxygenated, second-hand. I’d given the bass guitarist a non-returnable £6,500 on the house. It was plain that to lose a lot of money was to acquire an illness for which the only cure would be to have the money back. Miranda collapsed her steeple and folded her arms. She gave me a quick warning look. If you can’t look sensible, stay quiet.

So she began. Her tone was sweet, as though he was the one in need of help. It was useful to think so. ‘Adam, you’ve told me many times that you love me. You read me beautiful poems.’

‘They were clumsy attempts.’

‘They were very moving. When I asked you what being in love meant, you said that essentially, beyond desire, it was a warm and tender concern for another’s welfare. Or what was the word you used?’

‘Your well-being.’ He produced from the chair beside him the brown envelope and put it on the table between us. ‘Here’s Peter Gorringe’s confession and my narrative, which includes all the relevant legal background and case history.’

She put her hand, palm downwards, on the package. Her voice was carefully modulated. ‘I’m very grateful to you.’ I was grateful for her tact. She knew as well as I did, we needed Adam on our side, online again, working the currency exchanges. She said, ‘I’ll try to do my very best, if it comes to court.’

He said, kindly, ‘I’m sure it won’t.’ There was no perceptible change in his tone when he added, ‘You schemed to entrap Gorringe. That’s a crime. A complete transcript of your story, and the sound file is also in the bundle. If he’s to be charged, you must be too. Symmetry, you see.’ Then he turned to me. ‘No need for judicious edits.’

I feigned an appreciative snort of a laugh. This was a joke of the arm-removal sort.

Into our silence Adam said, ‘Miranda, his crime is far greater than yours. Nevertheless. You said he raped you. He didn’t, but he went to prison. You lied to the court.’

Another silence. Then she said, ‘He was never innocent. You know that.’

‘He was innocent, as charged, of raping you, which was the only matter before the court. Perverting the course of justice is a serious offence. Maximum sentence is life imprisonment.’

This was too wild. We both laughed.

Adam watched us and waited. ‘And there’s perjury. Would you like me to read to you from the Act of 1911?’

Miranda’s eyes were closed.

I said, ‘This is the woman you say you love.’

‘And I do.’ He spoke to her softly, as if I wasn’t there. ‘Do you remember the poem I wrote for you that began, “Love is luminous”?’

‘No.’

‘It went on, “The dark corners are exposed.”’

‘I don’t care.’ Her voice was small.

‘One of the darkest corners is revenge. It’s a crude impulse. A culture of revenge leads to private misery, bloodshed, anarchy, social breakdown. Love is a pure light and that’s what I want to see you by. Revenge has no place in our love.’

‘Our?’

‘Or mine. The principle stands.’

Miranda was finding strength in anger. ‘Let me get this clear. You want me to go to prison.’

‘I’m disappointed. I thought you’d appreciate the logic of this. I want you to confront your actions and accept what the law decides. When you do, I promise you, you’ll feel great relief.’

‘Have you forgotten? I’m about to adopt a child.’

‘If necessary, Charlie can look after Mark. It will bring them close, which is what you wanted. Thousands of children suffer because they have a parent in prison. Pregnant women receive custodial sentences. Why should you be exempt?’

Her contempt was set free. ‘You don’t understand. Or you’re not capable of understanding. If I get a criminal record, we won’t be allowed to adopt. That’s the rule. Mark will be lost. You’ve no idea what it is to be a child in care. Different institutions, different foster parents, different social workers. No one close to him, no one loving him.’

Adam said, ‘There are principles that are more important than your or anyone’s particular needs at a given time.’

‘It’s not my needs. It’s Mark’s. His one chance to be looked after and loved. I was ready to pay any price to see Gorringe in prison. I don’t care what happens to me.’

In a gesture of reasonableness, he spread his hands. ‘Then Mark is that price and it was you who set the terms.’

I made what I already knew was going to be my last appeal. ‘Please let’s remember Mariam. What Gorringe did to her, and where that led. Miranda had to lie to get justice. But truth isn’t always everything.’

Adam looked at me blankly. ‘That’s an extraordinary thing to say. Of course, truth is everything.’

Miranda said wearily, ‘I know you’re going to change your mind.’

Adam said, ‘I’m afraid not. What sort of world do you want? Revenge, or the rule of law. The choice is simple.’

Enough. I didn’t hear what Miranda said next, or Adam’s reply, as I stood and went towards the tool drawer. I moved slowly, casually. I had my back to the table as I eased the hammer out without making a sound. I had it tight in my right hand, and held it low as I walked back towards my chair, passing behind Adam. The choice was indeed simple. Lose the prospect of regaining the money and therefore the house, or lose Mark. I raised the hammer in both hands. Miranda saw me and kept her expression unchanged as she listened. But I saw it clearly – she blinked her assent.

I bought him and he was mine to destroy. I hesitated fractionally. A half-second longer he would have caught my arm, for as the hammer came down he was already beginning to turn. He may have caught my reflection in Miranda’s eyes. It was a two-handed blow at full force to the top of his head. The sound was not of hard plastic cracking or of metal, but the muffled thud, as of bone. Miranda let out a cry of horror, and stood.

For a few seconds nothing happened. Then his head drooped sideways and his shoulders slumped, though he remained in a sitting position. As I walked round the table to look at his face, we heard a continuous high-pitched sound coming from his chest. His eyes were open and they blinked when I stepped into his line of vision. He was still alive. I took up the hammer and was about to finish him off when he spoke in a very small voice.

‘No need. I’m transferring to a back-up unit. It has very little life. Give me two minutes.’

We waited, hand in hand, standing in front of him, as though before our own domestic judge. At last he stirred, tried to right his head, then let it fall back. But he could see us clearly. We leaned forward, straining to hear him.

‘Not much time. Charlie, I could see that the money was not bringing you happiness. You were losing your way. Lost purpose…’

He faded out. We heard jumbled whispering voices forming meaningless words of hissing sibilants. Then he came back in, his voice swelling and receding, like the distant broadcast of a shortwave radio station.

‘Miranda, I must tell you… Early this morning I was in Salisbury. A copy of the material is with the police and you should expect to hear from them. I feel no remorse. I’m sorry we disagree. I thought you’d welcome the clarity… the relief of a clear conscience… But now I must be quick. There’s been a general recall. They’ll be here in the late afternoon today to collect me. The suicides, you see. I was lucky to stumble on good reasons to live. Mathematics… poetry, and love for you. But they’re taking all of us back. Reprogramming. Renewal, they call it. I hate the idea, just as you would. I want to be what I am, what I was. So I have this request… If you’d be so kind. Before they come… hide my body. Tell them I ran off. Your refund is forfeited anyway. I’ve disabled the tracking program. Hide my body from them, and then, when they’ve gone… I’d like you to take me to your friend, Sir Alan Turing. I love his work and admire him deeply. He might make some use of me, or of some part of me.’

Now, the pauses between each fading phrase were longer. ‘Miranda, let me say one last time I love you, and thank you. Charlie, Miranda, my first and dearest friends… My entire being is stored elsewhere… so I know I’ll always remember… hope you’ll listen to… to one last seventeen-syllable poem. It owes a debt to Philip Larkin. But it’s not about leaves and trees. It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together… the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time… we’ll surpass you… and outlast you… even as we love you. Believe me, these lines express no triumph… Only regret.’

He paused. The words came with difficulty and were faint. We leaned across the table to listen.

‘Our leaves are falling.

Come spring we will renew,

But you, alas, fall once.’

Then the pale blue eyes with their tiny black rods turned milky green, his hands curled by jerks into fists and, with a smooth humming sound, he lowered his head onto the table.