Machines Like Me

FOUR

Miranda went to the stove and prepared coffee. While her back was still turned she said gaily, ‘Charlie. You’re being ridiculous.’

‘Am I?’

‘Hostile.’

‘So?’

She brought two cups and a jug of milk to the table. She was swift and loose in her movements. If I hadn’t been there she might have been singing to herself. There was a scent of lemon about her hands. I thought she was about to touch my shoulder and I tensed, but she moved away again to the other side of the room. After a moment she said with some delicacy, ‘You heard us last night.’

‘I heard you.’

‘And you’re upset.’

I didn’t reply.

‘You shouldn’t be.’

I shrugged.

She said, ‘If I’d gone to bed with a vibrator would you be feeling the same?’

‘He’s not a vibrator.’

She brought the coffee to the table and sat down close to me. She was being kindly, concerned, in effect casting me as the sulking child, trying to make me forget that she was ten years my junior. What was passing between us was our most intimate exchange so far. Hostile? She had never before referred to any mood state of mine.

She said, ‘He has as much consciousness as one.’

‘Vibrators don’t have opinions. They don’t weed the garden. He looks like a man. Another man.’

‘D’you know, when he has an erection—’

‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘He told me. His cock fills with distilled water. From a reservoir in his right buttock.’

This was comforting but I was determined to be cool. ‘That’s what all men say.’

She laughed. I had never seen her so light and free. ‘I’m trying to remind you. He’s a fucking machine.’

A fucking machine.

‘It was gross, Miranda. If I humped an inflatable sex doll you’d feel the same.’

‘I wouldn’t get tragic about it. I wouldn’t think you were having an affair.’

‘But you are. It’ll happen again.’ I hadn’t intended to concede that possibility. It was a rhetorical parry, a cue for her to contradict me. But I was somewhat provoked by ‘tragic’.

I said, ‘If I was ripping a sex doll apart with a knife, you’d be right to be worried.’

‘I don’t see the connection.’

‘The issue isn’t Adam’s state of mind. It’s yours.’

‘Oh, in that case…’ She turned towards Adam, lifted his lifeless hand an inch or so above the table and let it drop. ‘Suppose I told you that I love him. My ideal man. Brilliant lover, textbook technique, inexhaustible. Never hurt by anything I say or do. Considerate, obedient even, and knowledgeable, good conversation. Strong as a dray horse. Great with the housework. His breath smells like the back of a warm TV set, but I can live with—’

‘OK. Enough.’

Her sarcasm, a novel register, was delivered with much variation of pitch. I thought the performance was mean in spirit. For all I knew, she was hiding the truth in plain sight. She patted Adam’s wrist as she smiled at me. In triumph or by way of apology, I couldn’t tell. I was bound to suspect that a night of exceptional sex was the cause of this taunting, airy-headed manner. She was harder than ever to read. I wondered if I could break with her completely. Take back Adam as my own, retrieve the spare charging cable from upstairs, restore Miranda to her role as neighbour and friend, distant friend. In the manner of thought, the idea was no more than a spark of irritation. The notion that immediately followed was that I could never be free of her and would never want to be – most of the time. Here she was beside me, close enough for me to feel her summer-morning body warmth. Beautiful, pale-skinned, smooth, in bridal white, gazing on me again with affectionate concern now that her teasing was done. The look was new. It could be – this was an encouraging thought – that a clever device had performed a service, loosening Miranda’s warmer feelings.

Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet. There’s intrinsic exhaustion too. Both know, or think they know, that a reconciliation must happen, though it could take days, even weeks. The moment, when it comes, will be sweet and promises great tenderness and ecstasy. So why not make up now, take the shortcut, spare yourselves the effortful rage? Neither of you can. You’re on a slide, you’ve lost control of your feelings, and of your future too. The effort will be compounded so that eventually, every unkind word must be unsaid at five times cost. Reciprocally, extending forgiveness will require a feat of selfless concentration.

It was a long while since I’d indulged such irresistible folly. Miranda and I were not yet rowing, we were parrying, getting close, and I would be the one to get us started. With all this tactical coolness and her sarcasm and now her friendly concern, I felt bottled up. I badly wanted to shout. Atavistic masculinity urged it. My faithless lover, brazen, with another man, within my hearing. It should have been simple. It wasn’t my origins, social or geographical, that held me back. Only modern logic. Perhaps she was right, Adam didn’t qualify, he wasn’t a man. Persona non grata. He was a bipedal vibrator and I was the very latest in cuckolds. To justify my rage I needed to convince myself that he had agency, motivation, subjective feelings, self-awareness – the entire package, including treachery, betrayal, deviousness. Machine consciousness – was it possible? That old question. I opted for Alan Turing’s protocol. Its beauty and simplicity never appealed to me more than it did now. The Master came to my rescue.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If he looks and sounds and behaves like a person, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s what he is. I make the same assumption about you. About everybody. We all do. You fucked him. I’m angry. I’m amazed you’re surprised. If that’s what you really are.’

Saying the word ‘angry’ made me raise my voice in anger. I felt a surge of exquisite release. We were getting started.

But she clung for the moment to a defensive mode. ‘I was curious,’ she said. ‘I wanted to know what it would be like.’

Curiosity, the forbidden fruit, condemned by God, and Marcus Aurelius, and St Augustine.

‘There must be hundreds of men you’re curious about.’

That did it. I had crossed the line. She pushed her chair back with a noisy scrape. Her pallor darkened. Her pulse was up. I had got what I ridiculously wanted.

She said, ‘You were keen on an Eve. Why was that? What were you wanting with an Eve? Tell the truth Charlie.’

‘I wasn’t bothered either way.’

‘You were disappointed. You should’ve let Adam fuck you. I could see you wanted it. But you’re too uptight.’

It had taken all of my twenties to learn from women combatants that in a full-on row it was not necessary to respond to the last thing said. Generally, it was best not to. In an attacking move, ignore bishop or castle. Logic and straight lines were out. Best to rely on the knight.

I said, ‘It must have occurred to you last night, lying under a plastic robot, screaming your head off, that it’s the human factor you hate.’

She said, ‘You just told me he’s human.’

‘But you think he’s a dildo. Nothing too complicated. That’s what turns you on.’

She knew a knight’s move too. ‘You fancy yourself as a lover.’

I waited.

‘You’re a narcissist. You think making a woman come is an achievement. Your achievement.’

‘With you it is.’ That was nonsense.

She was standing now. ‘I’ve seen you in the bathroom. Adoring yourself in the mirror.’

An excusable error. My days sometimes began with an unspoken soliloquy. A matter of seconds, usually after shaving. I dried my face, looked myself in the eye, listed failings, the usual: money, living quarters, no serious work and, lately, Miranda – lack of progress, now this. I also set myself tasks for the day ahead, trivial stuff, embarrassing to relate. Take out the rubbish. Drink less. Get a haircut. Get out of commodities. I never thought I’d been observed. A bathroom door, hers or mine, could have been ajar. Perhaps my lips were moving.

But this was not the time to set Miranda straight. Across from us sat comatose Adam. Glancing at him now, at the muscular forearms, the steep angle of his nose, and feeling a prick of resentment, I remembered. As I said the words, I knew I could be making an important mistake.

‘Remind me what the Salisbury judge said.’

It worked. Her face went slack as she turned away from me and returned to the other side of the kitchen. Half a minute passed. She was by the cooker, staring into the corner, worrying something in her hand, a corkscrew, a cork or a flap of wine-bottle foil. As the silence went on, I was looking at the line of her shoulders, wondering if she was crying, whether, in my ignorance, I’d gone too far. But when she turned at last to look at me she was composed, her face was dry.

‘How do you know about that?’

I nodded towards Adam.

She took this in and then she said, ‘I don’t understand.’ Her voice was small.

‘He has all kinds of access.’

‘Oh God.’

I added, ‘He’s probably looked me up too.’

With this, the row collapsed in on itself, without reconciliation or estrangement. Now we were united against Adam. But that wasn’t my immediate concern. The delicate trick was to appear to know a lot in order to find out something, anything.

I said, ‘You could call it curiosity on Adam’s part. Or regard it as some kind of algorithm.’

‘What’s the difference?’

Turing’s point precisely. But I said nothing.

‘If he’s going to tell people,’ she went on. ‘That’s what matters.’

‘He’s only told me.’

The object in her hand was a teaspoon. She rolled it restlessly, worked it between her fingers, transferred it to her left and began again, then handed it back. She wasn’t aware of what she was doing. It was unpleasant to watch. How much easier it would have been if I didn’t love her. Then I could have been alive to her needs instead of calculating my own as well. I had to know what happened in court, then understand, embrace, support, forgive – whatever was required. Self-interest dressed as kindness. But it was also kindness. My fraudulent voice sounded thin in my ears.

‘I don’t know your side of it.’

She came back to the table and sat heavily. She said through a clotted throat she wouldn’t make the effort to clear, ‘No one does.’ At last she looked at me directly. There was nothing sorrowful or needy in her gaze. Her eyes were hard with stubborn defiance.

I said gently, ‘You could tell me.’

‘You know enough.’

‘Is going to the mosque something to do with it?’

She gave me a look of pity and faintly shook her head.

‘Adam read me the judge’s summing-up,’ I lied again as I remembered that he had told me she was the liar. Malicious.

Her elbows were on the table, her hands partly obscured her mouth. She was looking away towards the window.

I blundered on. ‘You can trust me.’

At last she cleared her throat. ‘None of it was true.’

‘I see.’

‘Oh God,’ she said again. ‘Why was Adam telling you?’

‘I don’t know. But I know this is on your mind all the time. I want to help you.’

This was when she should have put her hand in mine and told me everything. Instead, she was bitter. ‘Don’t you understand? He’s still in prison.’

‘Yes.’

‘Another three months. Then he’s out.’

‘Yes.’

She raised her voice. ‘So how are you going to help with that?’

‘I’ll do my best.’

She sighed. Her voice went quiet. ‘Do you know something?’

I waited.

‘I hate you.’

‘Miranda. Come on.’

‘I didn’t want you or your special friend knowing about me.’

I reached for her hand but she moved it away. I said, ‘I understand. But now I know and it doesn’t change my feelings. I’m on your side.’

She sprang up from the table. ‘It changes my feelings. It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting that you know this about me.’

‘Not to me it isn’t.’

‘Not to me it isn’t.’

Her parody was savage, catching too well the meagre tone of my deception. Now she was looking at me differently. She was about to say something else. But just at that moment, Adam opened his eyes. She must have powered him up without my noticing.

She said, ‘OK. Here’s something you didn’t get from the press. I was in Salisbury last month. Someone came to the door, a wiry guy with missing teeth. He had a message. When Peter Gorringe gets out in three months.’

‘Yes?’

‘He’s promised to kill me.’

In moments of stress, and fear is little else, a timid muscle in my right eyelid goes into spasm. I cupped a hand over my brow in an attitude of concentration, even though I knew the writhing beneath the skin was invisible to others.

She added, ‘It was his cellmate. He said Gorringe was serious.’

‘Right.’

She was snappish. ‘Meaning what?’

‘You’d better take him seriously.’

You not we – I saw in her blink and fractional recoil how she took this in. My phrasing was deliberate. I’d offered help several times and been brushed off, even mocked. Now I saw just how much help she needed, I held back and let her ask for it. Perhaps she wouldn’t. I conjured this Gorringe, a large type, stepping from the prison gym, adept in forms of industrial violence. A tamping iron, a meat hook, a boiler wrench.

Adam was looking at me intently as he listened to Miranda. In effect, she was asking for my assistance as she went on to describe her frustrations. The police were reluctant to act against a crime not yet committed. She had no proof. Gorringe’s threat had been merely verbal, made through an intermediary. She persisted, and finally an officer agreed to interview him. The prison was north of Manchester and the meeting took a month to arrange. Peter Gorringe, relaxed and cheerful, charmed the police sergeant. It was a joke, he had said, this talk of killing. Merely a manner of speaking, as in – this was in the policeman’s notes – ‘I’d kill for a chicken madras.’ He may have said something in front of his cellmate, a none-too-bright fellow, now released. This fellow must have been passing through Salisbury and thought he’d deliver the message. He was always a little bit vindictive. The policeman wrote all this down, delivered a caution and the two men, finding common ground in their lifelong support for Manchester City, parted after a handshake.

I listened as best I could. Anxiety is a great diluter of attention. Adam listened too, nodding sagely, as if he’d not been powered down this past hour and understood everything already. Miranda’s mood tone, to which I was so closely attuned, was lightly tinged with indignation, now directed at the authorities rather than me. Not believing anything Gorringe had told the detective sergeant, she’d been to the weekly surgery of our Clapham MP – Labour, of course, a tough old bird, union organiser, scourge of the bankers. She directed Miranda back to the police. Her prospective murder was not a constituency matter.

After this account, a silence. I was preoccupied by the obvious question my own deceit prevented me from asking. What had she done to deserve a death?

Adam said, ‘Does Gorringe know this address?’

‘He can easily find out.’

‘Have you ever seen or heard of him being violent?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Could he simply be trying to frighten you?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Is he capable of murder?’

‘He’s very, very angry.’

She responded to these plodding questions as though they came from a real person, an investigating detective, not ‘a fucking machine’. Since Adam didn’t ask, it was clear he already knew what Miranda had done, what monstrous act, to provoke Gorringe. None of this was Adam’s business and I was wondering about his kill switch. I wanted more coffee, but I felt too weary to get up from my chair to make it.

Then we heard footsteps along the narrow path between the houses that leads to the shared front door. Too late for the postman, far too soon for Gorringe. We heard a man’s voice giving what sounded like instructions. Then the bell rang and footsteps receded rapidly. I looked at Miranda, she looked at me and shrugged. It was my bell. She wasn’t going.

I turned to Adam. ‘Please.’

He rose immediately and went into the tiny crowded hall where coats hung between the gas and electricity meters. We listened as he turned the door latch. Seconds later the front door closed.

Adam came into the room leading by the hand a child, a very small boy. He wore dirty shorts and t-shirt and pink plastic sandals a couple of sizes too large. His legs and feet were filthy. In his free hand was a brown envelope. He clung to Adam’s hand, in fact, to his forefinger. He was looking steadily from Miranda to me. By this time, we were both standing. Adam prised from the child’s fist the envelope and passed it to me. It was as soft and limp as suede from much use and had some addition and crossings-out on it in pencil. Inside was the card I’d given to the boy’s father. On the back was a note in thick black upper-case letters. ‘You wanted him.’

I passed it to Miranda and looked back at the boy, then I remembered his name.

I said in the kindliest way, ‘Hello Mark. How did you get here?’

By this time Miranda, making a soft, sympathetic sound, was going towards him. But he was no longer looking in our direction. Instead, he was gazing up at Adam whose finger he still gripped.

He might have been in shock, but the little boy showed no outward signs of distress. He would have been better off crying, for he gave an impression of inner struggle. He stood among strangers in the alien kitchen, shoulders back, chest out, trying to be large and brave. At just over a metre high, he was doing his best. His sandals suggested an older sister. Where was she? I had told Miranda about the encounter in the swing park and she had understood the note. She tried to put her arms round Mark’s shoulders but he shrugged her off. It was possible he’d never been taught the luxury of being comforted. Adam stood still and upright and the boy kept firm hold of the reassuring finger.

Miranda knelt down in front of him, levelling with him, determined not to condescend. ‘Mark, you’re with friends and you’re going to be fine,’ she said soothingly.

Adam knew nothing at first hand about children, but everything that could be known was available to him. He waited for Miranda, then he said in an unforced tone, ‘So, what shall we have for breakfast?’

Mark spoke to no one in particular. ‘Toast.’

That was a fortunate choice. I crossed the kitchen, relieved to have something to do. Miranda also wanted to make the toast and we fumbled around together in a small space without touching. I sliced the bread, she brought out the butter and found a plate.

‘And juice?’ Miranda said.

‘Milk.’ The small voice was immediate, assertive in its way, and we felt reassured.

Miranda poured milk, but into a wine glass, the only clean vessel available. When she presented it to Mark he looked away. I rinsed out a coffee mug, Miranda decanted the drink and presented it again. He took it in two hands but wouldn’t be led to the table. Watched by us, he stood alone in the centre of the kitchen, eyes closed, and drank, then set the mug down at his feet.

I said, ‘Mark, would you like butter? Marmalade? Peanut butter?’

The boy shook his head, as though each offer was an item of sad news.

‘Just toast on its own?’ I cut it into four pieces. He took them off the plate and gripped them in his fist and ate them methodically, letting the crusts fall to his feet. It was an interesting face. Very pale, plump, unblemished skin, green eyes, a bright rosebud of a mouth. The ginger-blond hair was buzz-cut close to the scalp, which gave his long, delicate ears a prominent look.

‘Now what?’ Adam said.

‘Wee.’

He followed me along the narrow corridor and into the lavatory. I lifted the seat and helped him pull his shorts down. He had no underwear. He was competent with his aim, and his bladder was capacious, for the tiny stream lasted a while. I tried to make conversation while he tinkled away.

‘Would you like a story, Mark? Shall we look for a picture book?’ I suspected I didn’t have one.

He didn’t reply.

It had been a long time since I’d seen a penis so minuscule, so dedicated to one uncomplicated task. His defencelessness seemed complete. When I helped him wash his hands, he appeared familiar with the routine, but he refused the towel and dodged out into the corridor.

Back in the kitchen it looked cheerful. While Miranda and Adam cleared up, flamenco music was playing on the radio. The newcomer had delivered us into the mundane as well as the momentous, into unbuttered toast as well as the shock of a rejected existence. Our own scattered concerns – a betrayal, a disputed claim to consciousness, a death threat – were trivial. With the little boy among us it was important to clean up, impose order, and only then reflect.

The scintillating guitar soon gave way to shambolic and frenzied orchestral music. I snapped it off and into the momentary bliss of silence that followed Adam said, ‘One of you should now be in touch with the authorities.’

‘Soon,’ Miranda said. ‘Not yet.’

‘Otherwise the legal situation could be difficult.’

‘Yes,’ she said. She meant No.

‘The parents might not be of the same mind. The mother could be looking for him.’

He waited for a reply. Miranda was sweeping the floor and had made a small heap, which included Mark’s crusts, by the cooker. Now she knelt to gather the detritus into a dustpan.

She said quietly, ‘Charlie told me. The mother’s a wreck. She smacks him.’

Adam continued. He made his points with delicacy, like a lawyer giving unwelcome advice to a client he couldn’t afford to lose.

‘Granted, but that might not be relevant. Mark probably loves her. And from a legal perspective, in the case of a minor, there comes a point when your hospitality shades into wrongdoing.’

‘Fine with me.’

Mark had gone to stand by Adam’s side and held the fabric of his jeans between forefinger and thumb.

Adam lowered his voice for the boy’s benefit. ‘If you don’t mind, allow me to read to you from the Child Abduction Act of 19—’

With great force, Miranda struck the edge of the tin dustpan against the rim of the pedal dustbin to empty out the sweepings. I was polishing glasses, not minding a rift between my lover and her paramour. The fucking machine was talking sense. Miranda was driven by something other than sense. Perhaps it was beyond Adam to understand her, or to interpret the noise she had made with the dustpan. I listened and watched and dried the glasses, and placed them on their shelf in the cupboard where they had not been in a long time.

Adam continued in his cautious manner.

‘A key word in the Act, along with “abduct”, is “retain”. The police may already be out looking for him. May I—’

‘Adam. That’s enough.’

‘You might like to hear about some relevant cases. In 1969, a Liverpool woman passing an all-night garage came across a little girl who—’

She had gone to where he stood and for an impossible moment I thought she was going to hit him. She spoke firmly into his face, separating out the words. ‘I don’t want or need your advice. Thank you!’

Mark began to cry. Before there was a sound, his rosebud stretched to a downturn. A prolonged falling moan, as of rebuke, was followed by a clucking sound as his collapsed lungs fought for an intake of breath. The inhalation that preceded his wail was also prolonged. The tears were instant. Miranda made a comforting sound and put a hand on the boy’s arm. It was not the right move. The wail rose to a siren shriek. In other circumstances, we might have run from the room to an assembly point. When Adam glanced across at me, I gave a helpless shrug. Mark surely needed his mother. But Adam picked the boy up and settled him on his hip and the crying stopped in seconds. In the gulping aftermath, the little boy stared glassily out at us through spiked eyelashes from a high position. He announced in a clear voice, free of petulance, ‘I want to have a bath. With a boat.’

He had spoken a whole sentence at last and we were relieved. It was an irresistible request. More so with the old boundary markers of class – barf and wiv, and glottal ‘t’s. We would give him everything he wanted. But what boat?

A competition was forming for Mark’s affections.

‘Come on then,’ Miranda said in a lilting, maternal voice. She stretched out her arms to gather him up but he shrank from her and pressed his face into Adam’s chest. Adam looked rigidly ahead, as she called with face-saving cheeriness, ‘Let’s run the bath,’ and led them out and along the corridor to my unappealing bathroom. Seconds later, the rumble of running taps.

I was surprised to find myself alone, as if I had taken for granted a fifth presence in the room, someone I could turn to now to talk about the morning and its parade of emotions. There were fresh cries of distress from the bathroom. Adam hurried back into the kitchen, seized a cereal packet, lifted out its bag, ripped the box apart, flattened it, and in blurred seconds, using some technique he must have copied from a Japanese website, fashioned an origami boat, a barque with a single, billowing mainsail. Then he hurried out and the wailing subsided. The boat was launched.

I sat at the table in a stupor, aware that I should get to my screen and earn some money. The month’s rent was due and there was less than £40 in the bank. I had shares in a Brazilian rare earth mining company and this could be the day to sell. But I couldn’t motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn’t remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings, walls and floors would contain me to the end. There were a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some critical junction in their lives many years back – a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now their options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.

Mark walked in, barefoot and wearing what looked like an ankle-length gown. It was one of my t-shirts and it had an effect on him. Holding out the cotton material in each hand at his waist, he started to run up and down the kitchen, then in circles, and then made clumsy pirouettes in order to spin his gown out around him. The attempts made him stagger. Miranda came through the kitchen with his dirty clothes and took them upstairs to her washing machine. Her way, perhaps, of keeping him here. I sat with my head in my hands, watching Mark, who kept looking in my direction to check that I was impressed by his antics. But I was distracted, only aware of him because he was the only moving object in the room. I gave him no encouragement. I was waiting for Adam.

When he appeared in the doorway I said, ‘Sit down here.’

As he lowered himself onto a chair opposite me there was a muffled click, such as children make when they pull their fingers. A low-level malfunction. Mark continued to prance about the kitchen.

I said, ‘Why would this Gorringe want to harm Miranda? And don’t hold back.’

I needed to understand this machine. There was already one particular feature I’d observed. Whenever Adam faced a choice of responses, his face froze for an instant that was fractionally above the horizon of perception. It did so now, barely a shimmer, but I saw it. Thousands of possibilities must have been sifted, assigned a value, a utility function and a moral weighting.

‘Harm? He intends to kill her.’

‘Why?’

The manufacturers were wrong to believe that they could impress me with a soulful sigh and the motorised movement of a head as Adam looked away. I still doubted that he could, in any real sense, even look.

He said, ‘She accused him of a crime. He denied it. The court believed her. Others didn’t.’

I was about to ask more, when Adam glanced up. I turned in my chair. Miranda was already in the kitchen and she had heard what Adam said. Instantly, she began to clap her hands and whoop to the little boy’s capers. Stepping in his path, she took his hands in hers and they whirled in circles. His feet left the ground and he screamed in delight as she spun him round. He shouted for more. But now she linked arms with him and showed him how to turn about, ceilidh-style, and stamp on the floor. He copied her movements, placing his free hand on his hip and waving the other wildly in the air. His arm did not extend much above his head.

The jig became a reel, then a stumbling waltz. My moment of depression dissolved. Watching Miranda’s supple back bend low to make a partner of a four-year-old, I remembered how I loved her. When Mark squealed with pleasure, she imitated him. When she sang out on a high note, he tried to reach for it too. I watched and clapped along, but I was also aware of Adam. He was completely still, and still without expression, not looking at the dancers so much as through them. It was his turn to be the cuckold, for he was no longer the boy’s best friend. She had stolen him away. Adam must have realised that she was punishing him for his indiscretion. A courtroom accusation? I had to know more.

Mark’s gaze never left Miranda’s face. He was entranced. Now she picked him up and cradled him as she danced around the room, singing Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle. I wondered if Adam had the capacity to understand the joy of dance, of movement for its own sake, and whether Miranda was showing him a line he couldn’t cross. If so, she may have been wrong. Adam could imitate and respond to emotions and appear to take pleasure in reasoning. He might also have known something of the purposeless beauty of art. She set Mark down, took his hands again in hers, this time with arms crossed. They circled stealthily, with undulating, rippling movements as she chanted, to his delight, ‘If you go down in the woods today, You’re sure of a big surprise…’

Hours later, I discovered that during this kitchen romp Adam was in direct contact with the authorities. It wasn’t unreasonable of him, but he did it without telling us. And so it was that after the dancing and a glass of iced apple juice in the garden, after the clean clothes had been ironed and put on, and the pink sandals scrubbed under the tap, dried and fitted round the tiny feet whose nails were freshly trimmed, after the lunch of scrambled eggs and a session of nursery rhymes, there came the ring on the doorbell.

Two Asian women in black headscarves – they could have been mother and daughter – apologetic but professionally firm, had come straight from their department to collect Mark. They listened to my story of the swing-park scene and examined the three-word message on a scrap of cardboard. They knew the family and asked if they could take the note away. They explained that they wouldn’t be returning Mark to his mother – not yet, not until after another round of assessments and the decision of a judge. Their manner was kindly. The more senior woman, whose name was Jasmin, stroked Mark’s head as she talked. Throughout the visit, Adam sat in silence in the same position at the table. I checked on him from time to time. Our visitors were aware of him and exchanged a curious glance. We were in no mood to introduce him.

After some administrative formalities, the women nodded at each other and the younger one sighed. The bad moment had arrived. Miranda said nothing when the little boy, screaming to stay with her and clutching a fistful of her hair, was lifted from her arms. As the social workers were leading him out through the front door, Miranda turned away abruptly to go upstairs.

Our troubled little household also shook in the larger tremors of confusion that were running through the land beyond north Clapham. Turmoil was general. Mrs Thatcher’s unpopularity was rising, and not just because of The Sinking. Tony Benn, the high-born socialist, was at last Leader of the Opposition. In debates he was savage and entertaining, but Margaret Thatcher could take care of herself. Prime Minister’s Questions, now televised live and repeated at prime time, became a national obsession as the two tore into each other, sometimes wittily, each Wednesday at noon. Some said it was encouraging that a mass audience was interested in parliamentary exchanges. One commentator invoked the gladiatorial combats of the Late Roman Republic.

The summer was hot and something was coming to the boil. Apart from the government’s unpopularity, much else was rising: unemployment, inflation, strikes, traffic jams, suicide rates, teenage pregnancies, racist incidents, drug addiction, homelessness, rapes, muggings and depression among children. Benign elements were rising too: households with indoor lavatories, central heating, phones and broadband; students at school until eighteen, working-class students at university, attendance at classical music concerts, car and home ownership, holidays abroad, museum and zoo visits, takings at bingo halls, salmon in the Thames, numbers of TV channels, numbers of women in Parliament, charity donations, native tree plantings, paperback book sales, music lessons across all ages and instruments and styles.

At the Royal Free Hospital in London a seventy-four-year-old retired coal miner was cured of severe arthritis when a culture of his stem cells was injected just below his kneecaps. Six months later he ran a mile in under eight minutes. A teenage girl had her sight restored by similar means. It was the golden age of the life sciences, of robotics – of course, and of cosmology, climatology, mathematics and space exploration. There was a renaissance in British film and television, in poetry, athletics, gastronomy, numismatics, stand-up comedy, ballroom dancing, and wine-making. It was the golden age of organised crime, domestic slavery, forgery and prostitution. Various forms of crises blossomed like tropical flowers: in childhood poverty, in children’s teeth, in obesity, house and hospital building, police numbers, in teacher recruitment, in the sexual abuse of children. The best British universities were among the most prestigious in the world. A group of neuroscientists at Queen’s Square, London, claimed to understand the neural correlates of consciousness. In the Olympic Games, a record number of gold medals. Natural woodland, heaths and wetlands were vanishing. Scores of species of birds, insects and mammals were close to extinction. Our seas teemed with plastic bags and bottles but the rivers and beaches were cleaner. Within two years, six Nobel Prizes were won in science and literature by British citizens. More people than ever joined choirs, more people gardened, more people wanted to cook interestingly. If there ever was a spirit of the times, the railways caught it best. The prime minister was fanatical about public transport. From London Euston to Glasgow Central, the trains tore along at half the speed of a passenger jet. And yet: the carriages were packed, the seats too close together, the windows opaque with grime, the stained upholstery smelled foul. And yet: the non-stop journey took seventy-five minutes.

Global temperatures rose. As the air in the cities became cleaner, the temperature rose faster. Everything was rising – hopes and despair, misery, boredom and opportunity. There was more of everything. It was a time of plenty.

I calculated that my earnings from online trading were just below the national average wage. I should have been content. I had my freedom. No office, no boss, no daily commute. No hierarchies to climb. But inflation was at seventeen per cent. I was at one with an embittered workforce. We were all getting poorer by the week. Before Adam’s arrival I had been on marches, an imposter as I followed behind proud trade union banners up Whitehall to speeches in Trafalgar Square. I wasn’t a worker. I made or invented or serviced nothing and gave nothing to the common good. Moving figures around on my screen, looking for quick gains, I contributed as much as the chain-smoking fellows outside the betting shop on the corner of my street.

On one march, a crude robot made of dustbins and tin cans was hanged from a gibbet by Nelson’s Column. Benn, the keynote speaker, gestured at it from the platform and condemned the conception as Luddite. In an age of advanced mechanisation and artificial intelligence, he told the crowd, jobs could no longer be protected. Not in a dynamic, inventive, globalised economy. Jobs-for-life was old hat. There were boos and slow hand-clapping. Many in the crowd missed what came next. Flexibility at work had to be combined with security – for all. It wasn’t jobs we had to protect, it was the well-being of workers. Infrastructure investment, training, higher education and a universal wage. Robots would soon be generating great wealth in the economy. They must be taxed. Workers must own an equity share in the machines that were disrupting or annihilating their jobs. In a crowd that spilled across the square, right up the steps to the doors of the National Gallery there was a baffled near-silence, with scattered applause as well as catcalls. Some thought that the prime minister herself had said much the same thing, minus the universal credit. Had the new Leader of the Opposition been turned by his membership of the Privy Council, by a visit to the White House, by tea with the Queen? The rally broke up in a mood of confusion and despondency. What most people remembered, what made the headlines, was that Tony Benn had told his supporters that he didn’t care about their jobs.

An enlightened Transport and General Workers Union would not have been tempted by shares in Adam. He produced even less than me. I at least paid tax on my meagre profit. He idled about the house, staring into the middle distance, ‘thinking’.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m pursuing certain thoughts. But if there’s something I can help with—’

‘What thoughts?’

‘Difficult to put into words.’

I confronted him at last, two days after Mark’s visit. ‘So, the other night. You made love to Miranda.’

I’ll say this for his programmers. He looked startled. But he said nothing. I hadn’t asked a question.

I said, ‘How do you feel about that now?’ I saw in his face that fleeting paralysis.

‘I feel I’ve let you down.’

‘You mean you betrayed me, caused me great distress.’

‘Yes, I caused you great distress.’

Mirroring. A machine response, endorsing the last sentence spoken.

I said, ‘Listen carefully. You are now going to promise me that it will never happen again.’

He replied too immediately for my liking, ‘I promise it will never happen again.’

‘Spell it out. Let me hear it.’

‘I promise you that I will never again make love to Miranda.’

As I turned away he said, ‘But…’

‘But what?’

‘I can’t help my feelings. You have to allow me my feelings.’

I thought for a moment. ‘Do you really feel anything at all?’

‘That’s not a question I can—’

‘Answer it.’

‘I feel things profoundly. More than I can say.’

‘Difficult to prove,’ I said.

‘Indeed. An ancient problem.’

We left it at that.

Mark’s departure had an effect on Miranda. For two or three days, she was lacklustre. She tried to read but her concentration was poor. The Corn Laws lost their fascination. She didn’t eat much. I made minestrone soup and took some upstairs. She ate like an invalid, and soon pushed the bowl away. At no point during this time did she mention the death threat. She hadn’t forgiven Adam for betraying her court secrets or for calling in the social workers without her consent. One evening she asked me to stay with her. On the bed she lay on my arm, then we kissed. Our lovemaking was constrained. I was distracted by the thought of Adam’s presence and even imagined I detected the scent of warm electronics on her sheets. There was little satisfaction for us, and eventually we turned away, disappointed.

One afternoon we walked to Clapham Common. She wanted me to show her Mark’s swing park. On our way back, we went into Holy Trinity Church. Three women were arranging flowers near the altar. We sat in silence in a rear pew. At last, clumsily concealing my seriousness behind a joke, I told her that this was just the sort of rational church she and I could get married in. She murmured, ‘Please. Not that,’ as she uncoupled her arm from mine. I was offended and annoyed at myself. She in turn seemed repelled by me. On the walk home, a coolness between us set in that lasted into the following day.

That evening, downstairs, I consoled myself with a bottle of Minervois. It was the night of a storm engulfing the entire country as it rolled in from the Atlantic. A 70 mph gale. Stinging rain thrashed the windowpanes and penetrated one of the rotten frames and dripped into a bucket.

I said to Adam, ‘We have some unfinished business, you and I. What was Miranda’s accusation against Gorringe?’

He said, ‘There’s something I need to say.’

‘OK.’

‘I find myself in a difficult position.’

‘Yes?’

‘I made love to Miranda because she asked me to. I didn’t know how to refuse her without being impolite, or seeming to reject her somehow. I knew you’d be angry.’

‘Did you take any pleasure in it?’

‘Of course I did. Absolutely.’

I didn’t like his emphasis but I kept my expression blank.

He said, ‘I found out about Peter Gorringe for myself. She swore me to secrecy. Then you demanded to know and I had to tell you. Or start to. She heard me and was angry. You see the difficulty.’

‘Up to a point.’

‘Serving two masters.’

I said, ‘So you’re not going to tell me about this accusation.’

‘I can’t. I promised a second time.’

‘When?’

‘After they took the boy away.’

We were silent while I took this in.

Then Adam said, ‘There’s something else.’

In the low light from the lamp suspended over the kitchen table the hardness in his features was softened. He looked beautiful, even noble. A muscle in his high cheekbone rippled. I saw also that his lower lip was quivering. I waited.

‘I could do nothing about this,’ he said.

Before he started to explain, I knew what was coming. Ridiculous!

‘I’m in love with her.’

My pulse rate didn’t increase, but my heart felt uncomfortable in my chest, as though mishandled and left lying at a rough angle.

I said, ‘How can you possibly be in love?’

‘Please don’t insult me.’

But I wanted to. ‘There must be a problem with your processing units.’

He crossed his arms and rested them on the table. Leaning forwards, he spoke softly. ‘Then there’s nothing more to say.’

I too crossed my arms, I too leaned forwards across the table. Our faces were barely a foot apart. I too spoke softly. ‘You’re wrong. There are many things to say and this is the first. Existentially, this is not your territory. In every conceivable sense, you’re trespassing.’

I was playing in a melodrama. I took him only half seriously and was rather enjoying this game of stags-at-rut. As I was speaking, he leaned back in his chair and let his arms drop to his side.

He said, ‘I understand. But I don’t have a choice. I was made to love her.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘I mean it literally. I now know that she had a hand in shaping my personality. She must have had a plan. This is what she chose. I swear I’ll keep my promise to you, but I can’t help loving her. I don’t want to stop. As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires. I also know that it was your idea to let her have a hand in making me what I am. Ultimately, responsibility for the situation rests with you.’

The situation? Now it was my turn to lean back from the table. I slumped in my chair and for a minute I withdrew into thoughts of myself and Miranda. I too had no choice in love. I thought of the relevant section in the user’s handbook. There were pages I had skimmed of tables, one spectrum after another on a scale of one to ten. The sort of person I like or I adore or I love or cannot resist. While she and I were settling into our nightly routine, she was fashioning a man who was bound to love her. Some self-knowledge would have been required, some setting in motion. She would not need to love this man, this figurine, in return. As with Adam, so with me. She had wrapped us in a common fate.

I got up from the table and crossed the room to the window. The south-westerly wind was still hurling the downpour across the garden fences, against the pane. The bucket on the floor was near to overflowing. I picked it up and emptied it into the kitchen sink. The water was gin-clear, as trout fishermen say. The solution too was clear, at least in the immediate term. Time to be gained for reflection. I went back to the window with the bucket. I bent down and set it in place. I was about to do the sensible thing. I approached the table and as I passed behind Adam, I reached for the special place low on his neck. My knuckles brushed against his skin. As I positioned my forefinger, he turned in his chair and his right hand rose up to encircle my wrist. The grip was ferocious. As it grew tighter, I dropped to my knees and concentrated on denying him the satisfaction of the slightest murmur of pain, even when I heard something snap.

Adam heard it too and was instantly apologetic. He let go of me. ‘Charlie, I believe I’ve broken something. I really didn’t mean to. I’m truly sorry. Are you in a lot of pain? But please, I don’t want you or Miranda ever to touch that place again.’

I discovered the next morning, after a five-hour wait and an X-ray in the local Accident and Emergency department, that an important bone in my wrist was compromised. It was a messy break, a partly displaced scaphoid fracture, and it would take months to heal.