What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

presence

Jill Akkerman’s husband had been wanting to have a talk with her for weeks, and she was 200 percent sure that it was going to be an unpleasant one. The signs were subtle, but she was a psychologist. So was he; she’d been warned that this would probably be her toughest marriage. In the month before their summer holiday he was so busy that she hardly saw him at home, and when he was in she used the unofficial zoning of their household to postpone the talk. No harsh words were to be said in bed, or in the kitchen. Neither of them had made these rules, but since this had somehow become part of their code of conduct, Jill and Jacob continued to do their bit toward keeping their meals and their dreams untainted. Conversation in the bedroom and kitchen tended toward the lighthearted, so she stuck to those rooms as often as possible when she wasn’t at work. Jacob had had the house renovated to her wishes; there weren’t many changes, just the addition of a few extra doorways. She preferred rooms with a minimum of two doorways, so you had options. You didn’t have to go out the same way you came in. In the bedroom she moved from the bed to the floor and back again with her books and gadgets. Sex was out of the question. He didn’t even raise the question, just watched her with a glint of amusement in his eyes. In the kitchen she cleaned diligently and sharpened knives until they broke. Jacob bought more and presented them to her with witty asides she heard only dimly beneath the louder fear that he might add: “Can I see you in the living room for a minute?”

—

HE DID CATCH her in the living room once but she ran so fast around the edge of the room and out of the nearest door that she toppled and broke a painted jug they’d chosen together on their honeymoon.

Jill wouldn’t have minded receiving some advice but ultimately opted not to mention this situation to anybody outside of the marriage. Not to her own therapist and certainly not to Lena or Sam. Jacob was about to leave her. She didn’t want him to, but this was her third marriage and his second; she knew how these things went. She’d met Jacob’s new colleague over dinner and the colleague, Viviane, was well dressed, husky-voiced, and generally delightful company, knowledgeable on a number of topics and curious about a variety of others. Jill had found herself joining Jacob in addressing her as “Vi,” and when Vi left the table for a few moments to answer a phone call Jill whispered: “You realize she’s got a crush on you?”

Jacob laughed and leaned toward her with his lips all smoochy, but she pushed his face away with a breadstick. “Did you hear what I just said?”

He leaned in again. Not close enough for a kiss this time, but close enough for her reflection to almost completely fill his irises. Portrait of cross forty-two-year-old with, hey, really nice boobs actually. “Yes, you said you think Vi has a crush.”

“I’m two hundred percent sure about that.”

“Two hundred percent? Oh. Even if you’re right it’ll pass, J.”

J. Vi. And he still called his first wife Dee.

“Why don’t you just make the most of it, run off with her, and be half of a beautiful black intellectual couple just like you always wanted?”

Husbands one and two, Max and Sam, were white — Sam was a few years younger than Jill, but both he and Max tended to look old stood beside her. Well, not elderly. Just older than her. Whereas side by side she and Jacob looked about the same age. What age was that? If you didn’t know them you couldn’t even give a rough estimate. Jacob picked up a breadstick of his own, crunched half of it, stabbed her in the arm with the other half, and asked: “Do you really think you can do this here?”

He rarely appeased her. She wasn’t sure what to make of that given his attitude toward almost all his other friends, loved ones, clients, the efforts he made to ensure everybody else’s comfort. When he was with Jill he made her wonder whether he’d been sent to destroy her. Take the time she’d invited him to sample the first viable batch of tea leaves from the greenhouse she part-owned. Chun Mei, with its taste of sweet springtime grass. He’d sauntered downstairs inexplicably wearing a denim shirt over jeans, taken the teacup from her, and filled his cheeks with tea. “And how is this superior to a nice cup of Tetley?”

The combination of barbaric taste buds and denim on denim had set Jill’s teeth so sorely on edge that her jaw locked for a couple of minutes. Enough time for him to stare her down and walk out unadmonished. He knew what he was doing, he knew! For her part she’d given up trying not to be quite so in love with him at some point in their late teens when she’d clocked that, without deliberately cultivating any particular scent, Jacob Wallace managed to smell exactly like a just-blown-out candle. But if the feelings on his side weren’t there anymore then it was better for him to just go. His contributions to their joint bank account tripled hers but she wouldn’t have a problem doing without handwoven rugs at home and boutique hotels abroad. Doing without Jacob himself was going to make her a little bit crazy for a long time, so no she wasn’t going to make it easy for him to say his piece and then leave.

—

WITH A WEEK to go before their summer holiday Jacob all but ambushed Jill at a Tube station. She was adding another month’s worth of public transport to her Oyster card when an arm slipped around her neck and her husband murmured: “Jill, Jill… you can’t fight this any longer. I need to ask you something…”

She could’ve feigned alarm for just a couple more moments and elbowed him in the groin, but instead she turned her head and hissed: “Whose idea was it to get married in the first place, eh? Why don’t you ask around and get back to me?”

She wasn’t going to let him off just like that but he’d better not be hoping she’d cling to him either! If she didn’t feel like being on her own she could get another husband if she wanted.

(Jill had run into Max outside their friend Mary’s bakery the other day, and he’d held her at arm’s length, given her a long, admiring look, and said: “God, you’re deteriorating fast. Lucky me, getting out while the going was good, eh?”—his eyes directly contradicting his remarks. Not that she’d ever go back to Max, with whom wedded bliss had been nowhere to be found. It had made her nervous that almost all her new in-laws were Swiss bankers, but also there were the terrific nightlong rows she and Max got into. If she protested Max’s shameless revisionism by making reference to something he himself had said just the day before, he’d become “concerned” about her negativity or would hit her with some barbed comment somebody else had apparently made to him about her demeanor — it wasn’t clear whether he made them up or merely saved them. She never stopped liking Max, but did grow weary at the thought of him.)

Jill went over to the blue stand where issues of the Evening Standard were stacked, but Jacob handed her his copy.

“I know whose idea it was to get married,” he said. “I don’t need to ask around — I was there. And so were you, just another stunner among the many, many stunners of London town, drunk on a sofa with one of your best mates—”

“Excuse me… the best mate may have been legless, but seeing as I’m a hero of the kingdom of alcohol, I was mildly tipsy. Also don’t forget to mention that this best mate was a moderately attractive man who’d never once made so much as a hint of a move on me in all the twenty-eight years we’d known each other…”

“Maybe he thought it was too obvious. I mean, Jack and Jill? Anyway the two of you were thirty-nine years old, prime of life, and both solvent to boot, so the man plucked up the courage to say… Hang on, what did I say again?”

Do you think that maybe we’re able to love someone best when that person doesn’t know how we feel? That’s what Jacob had said, and she’d looked at him and asked if he was about to say something weird to her. She’d rather he didn’t. Having weird things said to her was a large part of her day job and why couldn’t she have time off? Jacob’s answer was that he was about to say something weird, but only a tiny bit, and maybe what he wanted to say wouldn’t come out sounding as wrong as they thought it would. Maybe it would sound normal.

Let’s get married and have sublime blasian babies before it’s too late, Jacob had blurted after she’d nodded at him to continue. Jill stretched an arm out and refilled both their shot glasses. It was already too late for babies. She’d had a sort of deadly serious running joke with both her previous husbands that having children would have to wait “until the war’s over.” But none of the ongoing wars looked likely to ever end, and she could no longer see carrying a child in her future. Not physically, and not mentally either. Maybe that had always been the case.

“I’m not going to marry you, mate.”

“Oh. That’s… well, I mean, why not? Because I said blasian? Because we haven’t known each other for long enough?”

In her head she’d replied: Because I can’t just keep getting married all the time, and also because I’m pissed off with you for making me sit through two of my own weddings and one of yours before it occurred to you that maybe we should have tried it together first.

Aloud she’d said that they were too old, adding that they didn’t need to get married. She said they could just see each other, if he wanted. She advised sleeping the question off. Maybe he’d wake up and realize that he only wanted to get married when he drank a lot of soju.

“But that wasn’t good enough for the rejected suitor,” Jacob continued, settling down into the Tube seat beside hers. “He’d been wanting to marry this woman for ages, long before the adult realization that marriage isn’t all that necessary… so he proposed again the following evening. The babies don’t have to happen, he said, and then he sang the cheesiest Korean song he could find…”

Was Jacob about to sing “What’s Wrong with My Age” right there on the Tube with all these boys and girls and men and women looking? They were already looking, since he hadn’t bothered to keep his voice down.

Still, she stuck up for “What’s Wrong with My Age.” “It’s not a cheesy song! It’s your singing that makes it cheesy. I love that song.”

“Me too. But I’m afraid it is inherently cheddar, J.”

Jacob turned to Jill, opened his arms and sang, in Korean, of staring into the mirror and bidding time to stand aside. The lyrics sprang to her own lips as she listened, and by the time he was challenging her to deny that his age was the perfect age for love, she was smiling the words right back at him.

As he sang, she realized something. He hadn’t been thinking about leaving her. Whatever he’d been working up to asking her, it was about something else entirely. She placed a finger over his lips: “And when they wed their parents and all their friends stood up in the church pews and sang ‘At last’…” but Jacob made a halfhearted attempt to bite her, then said: “Hey! Hey Jill. Are you thinking about leaving me?”

She didn’t answer that. One of the things she’d learned about him early on was that he had an inbuilt and near-infallible lie detector, and all of a sudden she wasn’t sure whether what she’d really been doing for the past few weeks was skillfully molding her own desire to be single again into an image of his. It could be that all Jill’s leaving and being left had now made it impossible for her to stay with anyone.

—

FOR MOST of their lives she and Jacob had both been afraid of the same thing: not being deemed worthy to share a home with a family. They were both foster kids. Nobody ever said you were unworthy, not to your face, but there was talk of adults and children not being “the right fit” for each other. The adults were the ones who decided that, so when “fit” was brought up they were really talking about the child. This left Jacob, and Jill, and Lena (Jill’s onetime foster sister during an idyllic but brief lull) ever-ready to have to leave a home, or to be left. Jacob became extremely capable, a facilitator, someone you wanted around because he smoothed your path — whether through his skill as a polyglot or his general aura of “can do.” Lena was pretty much lawless, used to wear a pair of sunglasses on the back of her head and a badge that said HELL, which she tapped whenever anyone asked her where she was “originally from,” and she was so clearly somebody that you could trust with your life that reform always seemed possible for her. Jill advanced an entirely false impression of herself as biddable and in need of protection. Ah, I’m just a little chickadee who won’t survive the winter unless I nestle under your life-sustaining wing. Far from original, but it worked.

—

THEY WENT OUT to dinner at their favorite restaurant — the benefits were twofold: delicious chargrilled broccoli plus the discussion of Jacob’s question without having to bring it into the house with them. Jacob proposed sacrificing their summer holiday to a project of his, an idea he was developing as part of his work as a bereavement counselor. So that was it, the question he’d been building up to for weeks. Do you mind giving up your holiday to test-run my project? She was embarrassed that he felt he’d had to work up to asking her this; it was a question that would’ve been easily raised and just as easily settled with an unselfish partner. Regarding him her support was in fact unconditional and to date she’d thought she adequately expressed this; now she fought demoralization as she heard him out. His project focused on a particular type of experience that a large number of his clients reported having undergone. “To oversimplify the descriptions I’ve been given, this experience presents as… an implosion of memory. And as the subjects drift through the subsequent debris, they calmly develop a conviction that they do not do so alone. These presences aren’t reported as ghostly, but living ones… minutes, sometimes hours when the mourner feels as if they’ve either returned to a day when the deceased was still alive or the deceased has just arrived in the present time with them… and what’s interesting about these lapses people experience is that most of them happen under fairly similar physical conditions.”

“So you’ve put together some sort of program that induces this feeling of… presence?”

“Well, that’s what I’m aiming for. Of course it’d only be for mourners who need that feeling from time to time and can’t make it happen by themselves. We’re calling it ‘Presence.’ And now we’ve got some funding…”

“You clever thing.”

“Really it was Vi who got the funding together. She’s a bit of a whiz at that. Lots of international contacts.”

“I’m sure that’s only the tip of Vi’s iceberg.” She made a quick attempt to estimate the extent to which new information concerning the relationship between Vi and Jacob might shake her. Sam had had his affairs, and Jill had come to an understanding of them as a form of boundary setting, actions taken against a fear that any one person could or did know “everything” about you. Jill was never more aggravating than when she got busy understanding things, and yet these rationalizations of hers might not be such a big problem this time around, as she was finding that the thought of various deep, sweet secrets between Jacob and Vi had something of a mechanical effect on her. Air seeped out of her and very little came back in — she breathed as though subject to strangulation and sat on her hands to suppress tentacle-like tendencies such as thrashing about, and clinging. The more Jacob told her about the testing of his program, the more she wondered if her first misgivings hadn’t been right after all. He was genuinely willing to be a guinea pig for his own prototype, she could see that, but maybe this was also Leaving Jill, Phase 1: Practice.

—

“OK, I’LL HELP. But since I don’t know anyone else who’d ask me to spend two weeks pretending he’s no longer in the world, tell me this first: Are you really not thinking about leaving me?” she asked.

That glint of amusement again. “Get this through your head, Jill Akkerman: I’m not leaving you. And you — are you leaving me?”

“I’m not leaving you, Jacob Wallace.”

She watched him put her expression, posture, and phrasing through his lie detector. She passed. His gaze lost intensity.

“Remember that psychologist who said we had an unhealthy dependence on each other?” asked the boy who’d learned Korean along with Jill and the couple who’d eventually adopted her. Her parents had wanted to have a new family language, and Jacob had learned too, so that he could be a part of that family. He’d been an honorary Akkerman for over half his life now.

“Yeah… we owe our careers to him, I think. He made us want to see what his job would be like if someone did it properly.”

“He might have been right, though,” Jacob said.

“Oh?”

“I just mean… if it was healthy, it might be easier to give up.”

She poured him more wine and they raised their glasses to unhealthy dependencies. Then he told her the specifics of their test for Presence. They needed two bases. Jacob would stay at their Holland Park house with the projection of Jill’s presence and Jill would need to stay at her flat in Catford, a parting gift from Max that she would’ve rejected if that hadn’t meant starting another fight with him. Jill’s current tenants were away in Prague until the autumn and when she called them to ask if they were all right with her being in the flat for a couple of weeks they said it was fine. “Just don’t break anything…” Radha said. Workmen came to the flat to make some adjustments to wiring and to secrete the contents of what looked like gas canisters into the walls. Jacob gave her a full list of the substances she’d be breathing in. While they were all substances found unaltered in wildlife, mixing them was bound to be a different matter.

“This is essentially going to be like an acid trip that lasts for two weeks, isn’t it?”

Jacob only said: “Not really. You’ll see.”

After the necessary alterations had been made to both houses Jill and Jacob recorded three conversations — the purpose of which was to place the mourner in the midst of a familiar exchange, the kind we’re always having with friends and family, repeating ourselves and repeating ourselves, going over what we know about each other to prove that we still know these things and will not, cannot, forget them. Vi set up a camera at Jacob’s office and filmed Jacob’s face as he and Jill repeated the conversation they’d had on the Tube about whose idea it had been to get married. They talked about their earliest impressions of each other too, and by the time it came to filming their third conversation they couldn’t think of anything else they wanted to say, so they kept it brief. Sex returned to the Akkerman-Wallace bedroom — to every room in their house in fact, their sweat mingling in the summer heat.

A day later Vi provided them with a transcript of what they’d said in each of the conversations they’d filmed in Jacob’s office, and Jill was irritated by this (was this Vi’s way of telling them to make certain that their claims matched up with what they really felt?) until she recalled that they were going to be filming all three conversations again in her own office, with the camera focusing on Jill’s face this time. They had to make an effort to get the conversations in sync. If she or Jacob couldn’t “get hold” of each other in their separate bases they were to put headphones on and reengage in the conversation, responding to each other’s words, saying their own parts as they remembered them.

—

JACOB PHONED her when he and Vi arrived at the prison where she worked. The timing was inconvenient because Jill had just made accidental eye contact with the governor of the prison and had done what she usually did when that happened — she’d walked around the nearest corner to hide. She was well aware that the governor thought she was useless. Not Jill as an individual, necessarily, but her role within the framework of the prison. “Letting young offenders have half an hour a week tapping out fuchsia landscapes on a chromatic typewriter doesn’t really do much toward turning them into better citizens, does it?” Not a fair summation of her work, but getting on with her job was Jill’s only answer, amiable until some bureaucratic roadblock popped up. And once it had been dealt with she was a nice person once more, even nicer than before. She and Jacob repeated their three conversations for the camera and then she went back to work.

Jill knew what all the boys had done, or as much as they would admit to, anyway. They all received treatment; they could talk to her as long as they tried to say what was true for them. Everything they said was recorded, and her office door stayed open whenever a boy was in there with her. There was a guard at the door too, just in case, but problems between her and the boys were infrequent. Many of them called her “Miss,” quite tenderly—Tell me if anyone’s rude to you, Miss. Just tell me his name, yeah? — as if she was their favorite teacher at school. She had hope for them, even though the things they told her made her shake like a jellyfish when she got a moment in her office alone.

Ben and Solomon were the two boys whose progress she dwelled on the most, and they came to see her that afternoon, one after the other. Ben was deeply introverted, coping relatively well with his incarceration and mostly harmless — if only she could get him to express some, or any, emotion to her so that she could confirm or revise these impressions of his coping and his harmlessness. He had language and could understand everything that was said to him, but his introversion was so deep that he often looked as if he no longer knew whether he’d spoken aloud or not; he was irked when she pressed him to answer her questions: I already answered, Miss…

A phone had recently been discovered in Ben’s cell; there were no incoming or outgoing calls or messages recorded on it. Nobody could explain how Ben had come by the phone but it was easy to tell how long he’d had it because the photo album was full of selfies he’d taken. He posed in exactly the same way in each one, fingers held up in a peace sign. Only the backgrounds were different. He favored empty rooms and, occasionally, the backdrop of two or more of his fellow inmates doing their best to bash each other’s heads in.

—

SOLOMON WAS MUCH more communicative with her, but that didn’t mean she understood him any better. His record was something of a puzzle in that he’d only turned to a life of crime relatively recently. For the first fifteen years of his life his record was spotless, then one day he’d approached a gang whose members had been torturing him on and off, joined, and became their leader. His explanation of the change he’d made: “It was time.”

Jill was aware that Solomon’s younger brother had been struggling with illness for years, and that the brother’s brain tumor had gone into remission when Solomon was thirteen. The beginning of Solomon’s career of criminal violence coincided — if you could really call that a coincidence — with doctors detecting a recurrence of cancerous cells in his brother’s brain. This made Jill afraid for Solomon, and afraid of him too. He admitted to wanting to help his brother, but would say nothing more about it. He was like a boy in a fairy tale; there was a set of steps he was to follow with no concession whatsoever as to how others viewed his actions. Then at the end of it all there’d be a reward. Solomon had just heard from his family — his brother’s cancer was back in remission. But the young man showed no relief; the news only deepened the look of concentration in his eyes. This is what Jill saw when she tried to see life Solomon’s way: Your brother had been selected at random and hurt, so by selecting others at random and hurting them, you won relief for your brother. If that’s how it was then Solomon would eventually be compelled to select one more person at random and kill them so that his brother could live. Much of what she said to him was mere diversion, her attempt to knock down the tower of logic he was building. Sometimes she thought it was working. Sometimes he cried when she made him realize a little of what he was doing. He wasn’t a sniffler so the tapes didn’t catch his remorse. And when she asked herself whether she’d support a recommendation for his early release a year from now, she very much doubted being able to do that. For a while he would hate his false friend Doctor Akkerman, obsess, fixate, and possibly decide that the life he’d take for his brother’s sake should be hers. She was only 100 percent sure of these things, and had no clear idea of how far the boy’s attempt would progress before he was restrained or what injuries would be sustained. Perhaps none, perhaps none…

Still, it was Jill’s duty to mention this likelihood, and she’d do so in her reports closer to the time.

“Have a good holiday, Doctor Akkerman,” Solomon said at the end of their session. The only boy to acknowledge they wouldn’t be seeing each other for the next two weeks.

—

JILL TOOK HER suitcase over to the Catford flat and slept there the night before Presence was due to begin. Jacob wasn’t dead to her yet, so they played at a long-distance love affair over the phone. Jill had Radha and Myrna’s permission to take down any images that might interfere with Jacob’s presence, so as she talked to her husband she walked around the flat dropping pictures of the intimidatingly photogenic couple and their puppet and human friends (hard to tell which was which) into a jewelry box. She heard no echoes of Max’s ranting or her own frenzied screeching, and when she went into the bedroom where she’d slept so that she wasn’t tempted to injure Max in the night she found it full of small stages. Some cardboard, some wood and textile, and there were silky screens for casting shadows through too. “Looks like only playfights are allowed in here now,” Jill said to Jacob, and then, as she opened the fridge and took note of its being crammed with bottles full of something called “Kofola”: “I was thinking — won’t it be easier for you to get hold of my presence over there than it will be for me to get hold of yours over here? You’ve never been here.”

“I’m curious about that too,” Jacob said. “People who end up using Presence may need to be able to travel with it, use it in a new house, and so on…”

Two minutes until midnight. She looked around at the pale blue walls, then out of the window and into the communal garden; there was a night breeze, and the flowers were wide-awake.

“Is there a button I press to… activate or something?”

“Vi’s going to start it remotely.”

“For both of us?”

“Yes… goodnight, J.”

“Goodnight.”

She drew the curtains, switched off the lights, and was knocked down onto the bed by a wave of darkness so utter her eyes couldn’t adjust to it. It felt as if she’d fainted… that was what she liked about fainting, the restful darkness that bathed your eyelids. After what felt like an hour (or two?) she held her phone up to her face to check the time, still couldn’t see anything, and decided she might as well just sleep.

—

SHE WOKE UP feeling chilly; her feet were sticking out from under the covers. A head had been resting on the pillow beside hers — all the indentation marks were there. She picked up her notepad and wrote that down. Even though she’d made the marks herself they contributed to a sense of not having slept alone. It was twelve-thirty, the latest she’d woken up in a while, and the room temperature was unusual for an early afternoon in July. She checked the thermometer and wrote the temperature down. Low, but it felt even lower. She put two jumpers on, made tea, plugged headphones in, and called up the first recorded conversation on her computer screen. There was Jacob, smiling at her, speaking. At a much lower pitch she heard her voice answering his: “Your singing makes it cheesy. I love that song…” There were strings of words that she remembered in the correct order, and she tried to say them before her recorded voice did, but the cold threw her off balance and she was left just listening and watching instead of participating. She added that observation to the others in her notepad.

—

A VISIT TO HER greenhouse in Sevenoaks yielded a discovery: She hadn’t woken up at twelve-thirty. Twelve-thirty was still two hours away. When she checked her phone on the train the time changed, and she asked five other overground passengers, six… Yes, yes, it really is ten-thirty. Sam and Lena were at the greenhouse, tending to the tea plants beneath swiveling lamps. They were wearing matching floral-print wellies and Sam preempted her derision: “Yeah I know, we deserve each other.”

Jill hesitated before she told them about Presence. What if they said Jacob? Who’s Jacob? or reminded her in voices full of pity that Jacob had been “gone” for months now? She couldn’t be confident in what she said to them when she’d just stepped out of an icebox into a sunny July day and the time outside wasn’t the same as the time in her flat. Well, they were her friends. If at all possible your friends have a right to be notified when you’ve downright lost it. But it seemed she was still sane. Lena and Sam had a lot of questions, Lena kept checking her pupils, and they both wanted to come over to the flat and verify her experience. Lena was most intrigued by the wall clocks

(“They all read twelve-thirty? Did you hear them ticking?

“Come to think of it, no — no ticking.”)

and Sam wondered about the cold.

“Talk to Jacob… maybe he’ll test the next phase on you two…” They said they’d like that. She didn’t think she’d told them anything that made Presence seem like good fun, so it was most likely that they were just being supportive. Sam gave her a pouchful of Assam leaves: “Let me know what you think…” On the way home she stopped at a supermarket and bought winter groceries. Lemsip, hot chocolate, ingredients for soup and for hot toddies. She put it all through self-checkout so she wouldn’t have to make any small talk about summer colds. Then, wondering how Jacob was doing, she checked their joint account and saw that he’d made a card payment at a Waitrose about an hour ago, for more or less the same amount as she’d just spent. She wouldn’t mention this in her notes; it was cheating. She shouldn’t be able to guess whether or not he was cold too.

—

SHE’D FORGOTTEN to lock the front door. Just like waking up at twelve-thirty, it’d been years since she’d last done that. People told horror stories about Catford but she would’ve been more worried about going in if it was the Holland Park front door she’d forgotten to lock. The stakes were higher over there. She dumped her shopping bags in the kitchen and went back to the front door, locking it behind her with exaggerated care. Jacob came out of the room filled with puppet stages and looked around him, nodding. “Not bad,” he said. According to the clock just above his head it was still twelve-thirty. He took a step toward her and she took a step back.

“What are you doing here?”

“Why are you shivering?” he asked back.

“Er, because it’s bloody cold in here?”

He held out his hand for her to touch; he was warm, and she closed both her hands around his palm. He winced, removed his hand from hers, and brought her two more jumpers to put on. He didn’t need to be told where to find the jumpers. She went back into the kitchen, found her notepad, and made a note of that. Then she put the kettle on, and Jacob asked if he should do the same with the central heating.

“Yes please.” She measured tea into a teapot, put the shopping away in the cupboards. The tea brewed and then she and Jacob sat down in the living room, he took a couple of sips and said: “Remind me how this is superior to a nice cup of Tetley?”

She couldn’t really taste the tea herself. She was sweating, and Jacob wasn’t. He was comfortable, right at home. She took a jumper off, to see if she’d feel the cold less that way. Putting on jumpers and turning on the heating only seemed to increase the cold. When she looked at Jacob from the side she could see that he wasn’t her husband. He had no shadow and he didn’t smell like her husband — he didn’t smell of anything — he was warm and he could drink tea and be snarky about the tea, and perhaps she would’ve been more willing to keep him around if he’d been shadowless but smelled right. But the way things were she was too conscious of this person not really being Jacob.

“Sorry, but I think you’d better go,” she said, checking her watch for some reason. It’s twelve-thirty, time for you to go.

He set his cup down on the coffee table. “OK. But if you tell me to leave I won’t come back.”

She patted his knee. “That’s fine. Thanks for understanding.”

He stood up, and so did she. “I’m leaving, but everything that’s between us will stay.”

She couldn’t help laughing at that. “You’re so soppy, Jacob.”

He laughed too, then put an abrupt brake on the laughter. “I didn’t mean it in a soppy way.”

“Er… OK… Bye…”

“Good to see you,” he said, and left the room. She stayed still for hundreds of heartbeats and thousands of shivers but didn’t hear the front door open or close. At twelve-thirty she got up and made sure that he was gone, then she recorded the entire encounter in her notebook and broke a rule of the test by phoning Jacob. If you tell me to leave I won’t come back, now that she thought about it she didn’t like the sound of that. Jacob took a long time to answer the phone; she’d almost given up when his voice came down the line: “J?”

“Jacob! Are you OK?”

“Yeah… you?”

“Fine, just… Have you seen me at home yet?”

“No. Not yet,” he said. Something else had happened. He’d gone out for a bit and come back to find the front door open (she bit her lip so that she didn’t interrupt him) and an intruder in the hall. Some old black guy talking at him in Portuguese, begging forgiveness for something.

“Did you call the police?”

Jacob was silent.

“You didn’t call the police, Jacob?”

He thought the intruder might have been his dad. “You know, my bio dad. I got him to slow down and he seemed to be talking about how I’d weighed on his conscience.”

“Interesting. Is he still there with you?”

“Nah… once I realized who he was or might be or whatever, I told him to get the fuck out. And guess what he said—”

“He said, ‘OK, but if you tell me to leave I won’t come back’?”

“And I said, ‘Well, you’d best not!’”

“And then he said, ‘I’m leaving, but everything that’s between us will stay’?”

“No, he didn’t say that. And hang on, how did you…”

Jacob’s voice fizzed and wavered, stopped altogether, and was replaced by a smoother, happier version. Audio of the second conversation they’d filmed.

“To be honest, Jill, I didn’t think you were going to get adopted. You played too many mind games with the people who tried to take you on… when you were together in public you’d act all cowed and hurry to do everything they said, acting as if they beat you at home. And you didn’t eat at home either, did you?”

“No! I’d stuff my face in school so it looked like I wasn’t getting fed. Looking back I was a scary kid,” Jill said, in perfect time with the recording of her own voice.

“But the Akkermans just kept telling you they really liked you, and even when you pulled stunts like that Sabine would say, ‘Nope, sorry and God help us, but we still really like you,’ and she and Karel wouldn’t eat until you ate…”

“So then I’d worry that I’d brought them to the brink of collapse and ended up spoon-feeding them rice, two spoons for each of them and then one for me… important to keep your strength up when you’ve got parents to feed…”

There was no room to ask what had happened; Jacob had been there on the other end of the line but now he was gone and it was a week ago again. The blue wall in front of her was more pacifying than sky, its color more even. Icicles hung from her nostrils; they were long, thin, and pearly gray… Like enchanted spindles, Jill thought, but it was only mucus, so she reached for tissues. She and Jacob were talking about the Wallaces now. Jill had always been sure that Jacob would get adopted. It was just a question of his coming across grown-ups who didn’t try to pull the wool over his eyes: Even the whitest of lies made him act out, and then he was discovered not to be “the right fit.” But along came Greg and Petra Wallace, and it was heartwarmingly weird that a pair of super-white Conservative politicians had fallen for Jacob as hard as they had. It took a long time for their foster son to stop anticipating some hidden motive on their part. Jacob had been wary of being dragged out in public with the parental bodies, wary of a fatherly hand settling on his shoulder while reporters took down remarks like, “Take this hardworking young man… a far better role model for our disadvantaged youth than some benefits scrounger…” Nothing of the kind ever came to pass, and the Wallaces had shown such steadfast and enthusiastic support of all things Jacob that he (and Jill) had had to give in.

—

BEFORE GREG AND PETRA none of the people who’d invited Jacob to “make himself at home” had really meant it… wanting to mean it didn’t count. The Wallaces gave Jacob a front door key and one day Jill had temporarily confiscated it, just to see how disconsolate Jacob would be at the prospect of a delay in getting home. She’d found that Jacob Nunes, a boy who was usually up for one more three-legged race, one more game of knock down ginger, one more WWF SmackDown!, was now very disconsolate indeed at having to endure one more anything before hometime. And the Wallaces were so jolly it seemed bad manners not to like them back. Jacob’s Labor Party membership probably saddened his parents more than they could say, but you can’t have everything…

—

AT TWELVE-THIRTY Jill went into the bathroom, found some shampoo, and washed the sweat out of her fringe. She used the hot tap and saw the water steaming but it splashed her skin blue instead of pink. Never mind; she couldn’t feel any of it anyway. She was a bit peckish, though. Gherkins. She’d seen a jar of them in the cupboard when she was putting the shopping away. She fetched them, walking carefully so as not to slip on the water she was dripping. “Yaaaay, gherkins!” But she couldn’t get the jar open. She heard a voice in the next room (Jacob’s again, after she’d told him to leave?) and went to have a look. It was only the TV. She surfed channels, since it was on. “Remember when almost everybody on TV was older than us, Jacob?”

She wrote these things down in her notepad, hurrying because it was almost twelve-thirty, bedtime, darkness, instant and complete, another head on the pillow beside her, maybe she grew one more in the night and that’s why the night sleep was so deep, it was a matching pair of sleeps.

—

A NEIGHBOR BANGED on the door and woke her to complain about wailing coming from her flat. The neighbor was a middle-aged brown man in an unusually close-fitting dressing gown, and she didn’t even need to warn him not to try to come in — he stood well away from the front door. He felt the cold. His beard was attractive; it was clear he took good care of it.

“Were you playing some kind of world music or do you need an ambulance, or…?”

“Or,” she told him. “Or.” And she apologized, and promised the noise would stop, though she wasn’t sure it actually would. It must have, because she didn’t hear from him again.

—

AT TWELVE-THIRTY she got up again, to go to the toilet. The TV was on again (or still?) so she switched it off. She walked past the kitchen and then went back and looked at the kitchen counter. There was the jar of gherkins, where she’d left it. But now the lid was off. Good! She ate a gherkin and checked the room temperature, which had dropped even further. She’d forgotten to find out whether Presence was potentially life-threatening. It looked nice outside; she’d go out soon. Maybe at twelve-thirty. Rain fell through sunlight. This was what Sabine Akkerman called fox rain. In her mind’s eye Jill’s mother shook iridescent raindrops off her umbrella and said: “Wolves are hosting wedding feasts and witches are brushing their hair today.”

Presence certainly met its objective but perhaps the objective itself was flawed and warranted adjustment. Jill wrote that down in her notebook.

—

THE NEXT TIME she went into the kitchen there was a boy sitting at the table eating toast. Twelve years old, maybe twelve and a half. He looked like Jacob and he looked like Jill, and he had mad scientist hair that looked to be his own invention. She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless. From head to toe he couldn’t be equaled, the son she and Jacob hadn’t had time to have, their postwar baby. Having a kid of your own, yes, now she saw what all the fuss was about. “Thanks for opening the gherkin jar, my strong man,” she said, taking his other piece of toast. He could make more. He flexed his puny biceps and said: “You’re welcome.”

He was so new that all his clothes still had price tags attached; they looked the price tags over one by one: “Oh my god, how much? Thieves and bandits! This isn’t even going to fit you five minutes from now.” Her son rubbed her hands until they were warmer. She liked that, didn’t matter if he was just sucking up in the moments before he asked her for something. He wanted a skateboard, and launched into a list of reasons why she should let him have one, but she just said: “Yes. Stay there.” There was a fifty-pound note in her purse, and she went to get it. When she came back he was still there but a bit older now, about fifteen and a half, and he didn’t want a skateboard anymore, he wanted some video game console or other. She gave him all the cash she had on her and told him he’d have to get the rest from his dad.

Hugs, kisses; ah good, they’d raised him to be tactile. “You’re the best, Mum.”

“Yeah, yeah…”

He dried her sudden tears. “Don’t cry while I’m out, Mum.”

“You’re really coming back?”

“Yeah, but if you send me away I won’t.”

“I’m bloody well not sending you away.”

“Great. Bye for now then.” He threw his plate into the sink — more at the sink, no, really he threw the plate as if it were a Frisbee. But it did land in the sink. Sheer luck.

“Hang on… what’s your name?”

“Alex, innit.”

“Have you got friends? Who are your friends?”

He rolled his eyes, showed her a few photos on his phone, scrolled past certain other photos at lightning speed. “Mum, it’s almost twelve-thirty so… see you later, yeah?”

She didn’t bother listening for the front door this time. She wanted to say something to her husband about their son. She switched on her laptop and drafted an e-mail to Jacob with the subject line Have you seen what we made??? and plugged her headphones in instead of sending it. She played the third conversation they’d filmed. One question and one answer.

What’s the hottest time of day?

The answer, known only to them and hundreds of thousands of disciples of a certain K-pop band, was 2PM.

On-screen, Jacob waited for her question.

“Hey Jacob, what’s the hottest time of day?”

His reply: “The hottest time of day is 2PM.”

That niggled at her. Jill frowned. Actually two things bothered her — his having said, “The hottest time of day is 2PM” when the usual answer was simply “2PM,” and then there was the appearance of Vi’s hand in the shot. It was only there for a moment before it was withdrawn from the space in front of the lens with a barely audible “oops,” but Jill could see now that the waving hand was probably the reason why Jacob laughed a little as he talked his way back toward the answer (could be that he’d momentarily forgotten the question): “The hottest time of day is 2PM.”

Alex returned before she could replay the third conversation again. He was in his early twenties now, and was sporting chin stubble and red chinos. He didn’t grumble as much as she expected when she made her request that they just watch some telly together. He quite happily complied, putting his arm around the back of the sofa and keeping her warm that way. She didn’t have a clue what they were watching, but took the time to absorb every detail of his face so that later, when he was gone again and it was twelve-thirty at night, the man who looked like her and Jacob was superimposed on the darkness.

—

IN THE MORNING Alex came back in his late thirties with photos of his wife Amina and her granddaughter. Jill went down to the corner shop to try and prepare herself for her son’s arrival in her own decade of life. She hadn’t looked into the mirror before going out of the front door — Darren at the corner shop was shocked and asked her if she was OK. She told him she was fine, and asked about the date and time. It was four p.m. in the outside world, and a week and five days had passed since she’d begun testing Presence. Fox rain was falling (still?) and Jill said: “Time flies, time flies.” Darren asked her if she was OK again, and this time she asked him how he was. Darren was fine too, or so he said. Can’t complain… She bought some lip balm and went home.

—

SHE’D MISSED Alex’s forties: “I’m in my fifties, now, Mum…” He didn’t look it… maybe he was lying, maybe your baby’s just always your baby. But she didn’t feel able to stay at home with her son who was now older than her. There was a lot she could’ve learned from him, she knew, but that would’ve meant staying in that flat where the temperature was so far below zero that the numbers were now meaningless. She didn’t feel able to send Alex away either. She washed. Not just her fringe, she washed all over. And she took a different outfit out of her suitcase and put it on. She didn’t say good-bye to Alex, but left him sleeping on a mattress they’d set up in the second bedroom, between the puppet stages, still makeless, though by twelve-thirty his presence would have faded away altogether. Jill locked the front door behind her and made two journeys: first stop work, to ask after her boys, the ones she still had hope for. The front desk warden made a few phone calls in a low voice with her back turned, then told her they were fine, nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and wasn’t it tomorrow that she was due back?

“Good, yes, that’s right… see you tomorrow.”

—

JILL’S SECOND JOURNEY ended at home in Holland Park. On the train she thought about the likelihood that Vi would be there with Jacob. She’d been there in the camera shot with Jill and Jacob, however momentarily. His answer had still come to her, and when she got home the front door was unlocked and she found the house as dark and as cold as the flat she’d left earlier; it was twelve-thirty and she found Jacob slumped over the kitchen table with his headphones on. She took them off and asked him again: “What’s the hottest time of day?”

The answer, without verbal deadweight this time: “2PM…”

His arms around her, and hers around him, knots and tangles they could only undo with eyes closed. “You’re so warm.”

“About Presence,” she said. “Scrap it. Don’t do this to anyone else.”

“Agreed.”

—

JACOB MENTIONED ALEX once, as they were comparing notes. “I wish we had a picture, at least,” he said, and Jill knew what and whom he was referring to. She didn’t agree, but neither did she contradict his wish. It was his own, after all.