by Heide Goody
She held one up as everyone took their own and examined them. “You will see it looks and fits like a wristwatch. In fact, it tells the time as well. There are some special components inside each one that measure your activity, and help you to reach your own personal fitness goals.”
Polly put her hand up. “What if you haven’t got any fitness goals and you’re happy as you are?”
“Well, that is fine. It will simply report on what you’re doing. Many people start off without specific goals in mind. But once they start to see what’s possible, they might decide to set themselves some challenges. You can compete in groups as well.”
Sam smiled broadly. She hoped some of this was hitting home, although it seemed like a tough crowd. They stared back at her, mostly unresponsive. She’d expected only a moderate amount of curiosity, but she had the strongest feeling they were just going through the motions. Nevertheless, the material she’d been sent was quite insistent that the benefits were legion, and she should mention them multiple times.
“So, who here has got a smart phone or a tablet?” asked Sam brightly.
There were some murmurs of acknowledgement.
“Lovely! Well, you can download the app to get the most out of your fitness tracker. Why don’t you all take a moment to do that?”
There was an unhurried shuffling as glasses were put on, chargers were found and the wi-fi password queried numerous times, in spite of it being clearly displayed on a laminated card on the wall.
Sam spent the next thirty minutes providing ad-hoc support. Janine kept calling her tablet Facebook, as if it was the only word she was able to associate with it. Polly’s phone had a large crack down the front of it that she claimed was a problem with the app. Bernard kept trying to tell Sam she should get a phone like his, because it was clearly superior in every single way imaginable, even though Sam hadn’t revealed what kind of phone she had. Only Jacob seemed to have a truly competent grasp of technological terms. He was up and running, waiting patiently for everyone else, in no time.
Eventually, everyone in the group had the app installed, opened and synched to their devices.
“Has everyone seen the heart rate monitor?” Sam asked. “You can view the graphs on the app. Once you’ve been wearing your devices for a few days you’ll start to see patterns. You’ll find it really interesting to see how your heart rate changes between different activities. When you’re resting or sleeping it will be different again.”
“Can we wear these in bed?” Bernard asked.
“Yes, you can.”
“But will they be able to see me naked? It’s always connected, you said.”
“No, Bernard.”
“Not even Bill Gates? Is he not going to track where I am and see when I’m naked?”
“There’s no camera. Nobody will see you naked.”
“But will he know if I’m naked?”
“No. The device won’t know.”
Bernard looked troubled. Sam wasn’t sure if he was disappointed that his nakedness wouldn’t be on display to the faceless Silicon Valley overlords.
“And will it know if … someone has a crafty fag when the doctor told them to give up smoking?”
“It’s only monitoring movement,” said Sam.
Bernard raised his arm up and down as though repeatedly putting a cigarette to his lips.
“No,” she assured him.
“But if my heart stops in the night, will it tell me,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“If I die in my sleep will it wake me up to tell me?”
“You’ll be dead, mate,” said Strawb.
“But I’m a light sleeper,” said Bernard. “Infantryman’s reflexes. I’m sure if it buzzes to tell me, I’ll wake up.”
Sam was perplexed, and not just for the obvious reasons. “You told me you were a deep sleeper.”
“Did I?” said Bernard.
“Can we wear them in the shower?” asked Janine loudly.
“Yes, these devices are waterproof to fifteen feet.”
“Very good,” said Janine. “How deep is the swimming pool, Margaret?”
“Hm, that is a good question,” said Margaret. “The deep end is three metres, so what’s that in feet?” She stood up. “I’ll just go and get a calculator.”
“I think you’ll probably be fine,” said Sam. “We should press on with the training.”
“But I need to check,” said Margaret. “We don’t want to break them, do we?”
Sam waited patiently while the issue of the swimming pool was cleared up. Eventually Margaret announced that the pool was in fact only two metres deep, so the devices would be safe. Sam wondered how many of the residents routinely dived to the bottom of the pool.
“Why isn’t my heart working?” Bernard asked. “Should I be worried?”
“You’ve got it over your jumper,” said Sam. “You need to have it next to your skin.”
“So, I do need to be naked.”
Jacob was studying the app on his tablet while taking his pulse manually. “Just checking to see if it’s accurate,” he said.
“Now, let’s see what we can do with this. I bet I can make my heart rate go up if I think about Barbara Windsor in Carry on Camping,” said Strawb with an appropriate if unlovely Sid James cackle.
“Strawb!” said Polly and gave him a playful slap on the arm.
“Can I suggest something different?” Sam said. “We can all go for a walk, then we will really start to see some interesting details. If you’re all happy with the heart monitor, we’ll familiarise ourselves with the step counter and take a short walk. We can discuss the results when we get back.”
There were more delays as footwear was swapped and coats were sorted. Sam led them on a walk around the grounds. She thought the group looked fairly fit and active, but they tottered along paths as if they were taking part in some sort of bizarre dallying competition, where the one who could hold them up the most won a prize. Shoelaces needed to be retied, plants by the path were identified (after much discussion), and the relative grippiness of rubber or leather soles was discussed, tested and continued to be the subject of heated disagreement when they eventually returned to the lounge. The course notes recommended a brisk walk of between half a mile and a mile. Sam wasn’t sure they’d done much more than a couple of hundred yards with all the messing about.
“So, who wants to share the number of steps they’ve done?” she asked.
“I’m so sorry, Sam, do you have much more training material?” Margaret asked. “Maybe you could leave it for us to read later? It’s time for our handicrafting session.”
Sam looked around the lounge. There was no sign of anybody else. “Well, perhaps we can just finish things off in the corner while—”
“—I’m afraid that won’t be possible. I need to facilitate the activities. We have a very busy schedule. Activities here. Trips out. I can’t afford to spread myself too thinly. And I’m sure the others are ready for a break now we have completed the allotted two hours training.”
Sam felt as if she’d been expertly played, but there was nothing she could actually complain about. “Fine,” she said. “I will be needing all of the forms. Everybody must connect their device up as well.”
“I will make sure that happens,” said Margaret smoothly, ushering Sam out.
29
Polly went to make tea while Margaret saw Sam out. Strawb, Jacob and Bernard lounged back in their seats.
“Tea, excellent!” said Margaret when she returned.
Polly poured for everyone. It was nice to make a whole pot and pour it out for others. She enjoyed a frisson of belonging, as if she was part of the gang. “That was fun,” she said, testing the water.
“I do like learning about new technology,” said Jacob.
“I think she meant the part where we deliberately messed up the training, Jakey,” said Strawb.
“Is it bad to say I enjoyed making a mess of things?” said Polly.
“We can’t rest on our laurels,” said Margaret. “There’s more work to do.”
“Is there?” asked Strawb. “Surely we’re done?”
“We need to find ways to get these things to send a convincing data feed,” said Margaret. “If we’re to get our insurance costs down we need to actually use them.”
“We could just get people to wear them while they’re walking around,” said Jacob, with his eyebrows raised.
“If anyone wants to, they are very welcome,” said Margaret. “What I won’t stand for is them being imposed on our community because they think we’re all too simple to realise we’re giving away our personal data.”
“I’m happy for people to see my personal data,” said Bernard. “It’d be nice to think Bill Gates is interested in me.”
“You’re happy for everyone to see every last bit of you,” said Strawb. “No facking shame.”
“I simply do not like the dystopian notion of us being forced into changing our behaviour to suit the whim of our insurers,” said Margaret.
Polly saw the glint of anger behind Margaret’s cool facade and realised this was not only Margaret’s way of keeping the community’s insurance premiums down. There were more complex reasons behind this scheme: emotional, philosophical.
“We will spend an hour or so researching the best ways to increase the step count on these things,” said Margaret. “I will buy a drink for whoever finds the most effective one. Although we probably need a range of options, to make the spread of data look more realistic.”
“A drink?” said Strawb. “A slap up supper for the best one, I say.”
30
Sam hovered in the reception area of Otterside. The fitness app training was complete, waste of time that it was. As long as she got the signed forms from Margaret Gainsborough, she could strike it from her list. She had plenty of other things to do. There was a fake Ice Age zoo escape drill to organise. She needed to check that Greg Mandyke had handed in his final community payback chits. Yet something nagged at her and would not let her leave.
The manager’s door was open.
“Just come to check your CCTV again,” Sam said, walking through.
“Which one do you reckon?” Chesney was holding up two shirts against his chest. Both were shiny and synthetic, with huge ruffles down the front. One was a lurid turquoise, the other a violent pink. “For my show,” he said.
“I didn’t think they were for a court appearance,” said Sam. “Are you trying to blind the audience?”
“Trying to grab their attention.”
“That one’s attention grabbing, definitely,” she said. “That one’s a cry for help.”
“Excellent.” Apparently, a cry for help was precisely what he was looking for.
Sam went into the security office and sat down at the desk.
Bernard had just said he was a light sleeper. Yet previously, when Sam had come asking questions about turkey deaths, Bernard had been weird and blunt about the whole thing, saying he had witnessed nothing the whole night.
“Deep sleeper me,” said Sam, remembering his words. “You can check the cameras. Thanks – I will.”
It took a while to locate the night of Drumstick’s death, then find the cameras which covered the curving length of Otterside’s corridors. The images filled the screen in a nine-by-nine grid. Sam ran it through at high speed, pausing and playing back whenever there was a blip of activity on the camera. There were comings and goings of a general sort up until close to midnight, when things quietened down. With self-contained apartment units, there was little need to be out and about once the bar and café were closed. A few people rolling in from a night out in town maybe, a couple coming out of their flats to shuffle about and check the world was still there before going back into their rooms. Little else.
On the length of corridor where Bernard’s room was: nothing. He didn’t emerge all night. Had she honestly expected him to? There had just been something in his hurried denial of knowing anything about the incident that made him seem – well, to be blunt – guilty.
“Light sleeper. Deep sleeper,” Sam muttered. Was it even conceivable he would want Drumstick dead because he was waking him up with his ‘gobble-gobble’ dawn chorus?
The door to Bernard’s flat remained resolutely closed.
A flicker of activity on one of the screens made Sam pause as she fast-forwarded through. She rewound and played. There was a creeping figure on the ground floor corridor. Actually creeping. People didn’t often creep in real life. People walked, people jogged. People might move quietly or economically or timidly, but no one ever really crept, arms spread as though trying to embody the spirit of a silent spider. It was a pantomime act of a burglar. The figure even had on a dark woollen hat, the collar of a black tracksuit top drawn up around the mouth, almost entirely concealing the face.
Sam would have been unable to identify the person at all, except she had seen that black tracksuit with coloured piping only minutes earlier.
“Janine,” she whispered, “what the hell are you up to?”
31
Polly timed each of her fitness app experiments. It was pretty easy for the first one, given that it involved an actual clock. There was the owl pendulum clock on her kitchenette wall, and she’d attached the device loosely around the pendulum. She would give it ten minutes, but she could already see it was working well. The steps were piling up on the app.
While she waited out the ten minutes, she pondered what to try next. She walked around her flat, scanning everything, in case it might be useful. If she’d still been in her old house, there would be a shed full of tools. She daydreamed for a moment about putting the device on the end of a spinning drill and wondered what it would make of that. Of course, she’d brought nothing like that with her to Otterside. She would have no need of tools in a place where all of the maintenance was taken care of by others. There was a creeping sense of her being subtly stripped of all the things that would pose a nuisance to others when she died. If her flat could be cleared out in less than an hour, she could hardly be the burden that Erin hinted at, could she? If it was a game of wits, she was definitely losing.
The ten minutes was up, and Polly had come across her next idea while going through some drawers. She grabbed a pair of socks and a pillow case and went down to the laundry room. She was pleased to see it was empty, as she had wondered if anyone else had come up with the same idea. She popped the fitness tracker into a sock, then put it inside the other one for extra padding, and put both into the pillow case for good measure. She placed it into the tumble dryer and set the temperature to low. She switched it on and watched the app. Oh, this was good! She sat and watched smugly while the programme completed. She could almost taste that gin and tonic.
Polly found the others back in the lounge later. Bernard came in practically wreathed in tobacco smoke. He was fooling no one.
“So, what ideas have we come up with?” said Margaret.
Jacob raised a hand. He had a laptop on his knee. “I have a spreadsheet to score our ideas. We can also use it to keep track of what we’re doing with the devices afterwards.”
“Good,” said Margaret. “Are we scoring on anything other than the number of steps achieved in a time period?”
“We are awarding points out of ten for a solution that can be scaled up for multiple devices,” said Jacob. “And an extra five points can be awarded for a solution that is thought to be particularly stylish.”
“Very well,” said Margaret. “Who’s first?”
Bernard raised a hand and held up his app. “You know Esther, with the wheelchair? Well I fastened my device onto the spokes, so every time she wheels along it will move.”
They all looked at his app.
“It hasn’t registered any steps,” said Polly.
“Well it wouldn’t. She’s asleep in the cons
ervatory,” said Bernard. “The idea’s sound though. You could do loads at a time as well. She’s got two wheels.”
“Fine. You can have five out of ten for scaling,” said Jacob with a small shake of his head.
“Polly?” Margaret asked. Everyone looked at her. This felt like a test, but Polly shook the thought away.
“I had two ideas,” she said, pointing at the graph on her app. “You can see the first one here where I clocked up five hundred steps in ten minutes by attaching the tracker onto the pendulum of my clock.”
They all nodded in appreciation.
“Impressive, Polly,” said Margaret. “Did it slow the clock down at all?”
“Not sure. It was a very short test.”
“Worth us looking at how many residents have a such clocks. Very inventive.”
“Although scaling is limited,” said Jacob, tapping into his spreadsheet.
“Second idea, Polly?” asked Margaret.
“I put the tracker inside a pair of socks and put it into the tumble dryer.” Polly pointed at the second part of the graph. “A single cycle on cool lasted for fifteen minutes and clocked up nine hundred and fifty steps.”
“Oh now, that is interesting!” said Margaret. “We could put all of them into a cycle every day and say we’re doing a mass exercise class. I like it!”
Jacob nodded. “Full marks for results and scaling,” he said. “I think we might have our winner!”
“Not so fast,” said Strawb, rising to his feet and putting his hands to his hips with a dramatic flourish. “I also had an idea.”
Jacob rolled his eyes.
“What was your idea, Strawb?” asked Margaret.
“I will show you a photo.” Strawb walked around with his phone and showed them all a picture.
“Danny the donkey,” said Polly, with a smile. She recognised his colourful bridle. He was one of the donkeys giving rides to children on Skegness beach.
“Yes indeed. Six donkeys, walking up and down the beach all day. If we slip Trevor a fiver, he’ll make sure those devices get a bladdy good workout whenever we want.”
