Machines Like Me

by Ian Mcewan

  Adam was awake sooner than that. When Miranda came back into the room, he was already on his feet. ‘I should get to work,’ he said. ‘The Fed is likely to raise its rate today. There’ll be fun and games on the exchange markets.’

  Fun and games was not an expression that either of us ever used. As Adam came by us to go into the bedroom, he stopped. ‘I have a suggestion. We talked of going to Salisbury, then we held back. I think we should visit your father and while we’re there, we could drop in on Mr Gorringe. Why wait for him to come here and frighten us? Let’s go and frighten him. Or at least talk to him.’

  We looked at Miranda.

  She thought for a moment. ‘All right.’

  Adam said, ‘Good,’ and went on his way, while I felt it right there in my chest, the cool clutch of a cliché: my heart sank.

  *

  Towards the end of that period, the plateau that lay between my Turing visit and the Salisbury excursion, there accumulated just over £40,000 in the investment account. It was simple – the more Adam earned, the more he could afford to lose, the more he invested, the more rolled in. All achieved in his lightning style. During the day, my bedroom, my usual refuge, was his. The curve on his graph stiffened, while I began to take in my new situation. Miranda was firmly against moving the computer onto the kitchen table. Too intrusive, she argued, in our communal space. I saw her point.

  Unemployment had passed eighteen per cent and made constant headlines. I thought I belonged with this unhappy workless mass. In fact, I belonged with the idle rich. I was delighted by the money but I couldn’t spend all day thinking about it. I was restless. Travelling in luxury with Miranda through southern Europe would have suited me, but she was tied to London and her course. She dreaded something happening to her father when she was away. The threat from Gorringe, increasingly unlikely, still had the power to constrict our ambitions.

  House-hunting might have filled my time but I had already found the place. It was a wedding cake on Elgin Crescent, coated in an icing of pink and white stucco. Inside, wide oak floorboards, vast muscular kitchen humming with brushed-steel gear, a conservatory in belle-époque wrought iron, a Japanese garden of smooth river stones, bedrooms thirty feet across, a marbled shower where you could stroll under differently angled torrents. The owner, a bass guitarist with a ponytail, was in no hurry. He was in an almost-famous band, and he had a divorce looming. He showed me round himself and barely spoke. He handed me into each room and waited outside while I looked. His condition of sale was cash only, £50 notes, 2,600 of them. Fine by me.

  This was my only employment, going to the bank to collect another forty notes – £2,000 was the maximum daily withdrawal allowed. For no good reason, I didn’t use a safety deposit box at the bank. I vaguely assumed I was doing something illegal. Certainly, the vendor was if he was hiding funds from his ex-wife. I stuffed the cash into a suitcase which I stowed under my bed.

  Otherwise, I was free to be at a loss. It was that time of year, September, when everyone was starting at something fresh. Miranda was planning her thesis. I walked on the Common and wondered about resuming my education and getting a qualification. Time to take the proper measure of my intellectual reach and study for a degree in maths. Or, the other route, dust off my father’s priceless saxophone, learn bebop’s harmonic arcana, join a group, indulge a wilder life. I didn’t know whether to be more qualified or wilder. You couldn’t be both. These ambitions wearied me. I wanted to lie down on the worn-out grass of late summer and close my eyes. In the time it took for me to go the length of the Common and back, so I tried to comfort myself, Adam at home in my bedroom would have earned me another £1,000. My debts were settled. I’d paid a cash deposit on a glamorous urban pile. I was in love. How could I complain? But I did. I felt useless.

  If I really had stretched out on that tired grass and closed my eyes, I might have seen Miranda walking towards me in her new underwear, as she had from the bathroom the night before. I would have lingered on that beautiful expectant half-smile, that steady look as she came close and rested her bare arms on my shoulders and teased me with a light kiss. Forget maths or music, all I wanted was to make love to her. What I was really doing all day was waiting for her return. If we were busy or she was tired and we didn’t make love in the evening or early morning, my concentration would be even weaker the next day, my future a burden that made my limbs ache. I went about in a dim state of semi-arousal, a chronic mental dusk. I couldn’t take myself seriously in any domain that did not include her. Our new phase was brilliant, stunning; everything else was dull. We loved each other – that was my only coherent thought during a long afternoon.

  There was sex, then there was talk, on into the early hours. I knew everything now: the day of her mother’s death, which she remembered clearly, her father, whose kindness and distance combined to inflame her love for him, and always Mariam. In the months after her death, Miranda had gone to a mosque in Winchester – she didn’t dare meet the family at prayer in Salisbury. After she resumed the visits in London, her lack of belief began to get in the way. She felt fraudulent and stopped going.

  We talked parents, as serious young lovers do, to explain who we were and why, and what we cherished and what we were in flight from. My mother, Jenny Friend, community nurse for a large semi-rural area, had seemed during my childhood in a state of constant exhaustion. Later, I understood that my father’s absences and affairs wore her down more than her job. They never liked each other much, though they didn’t fight in my presence. But they were terse. Mealtimes were subdued, sometimes taken in rigid silence. Conversations tended to be routed through me. My mother might say to me in the kitchen, ‘Go and ask your father if he’s out tonight.’ He was well known on the circuit. At his peak, the Matt Friend Quartet played at Ronnie Scott’s and recorded two albums. His kind of mainstream jazz had its largest audience from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. Then the young, the cool, turned away as pop and rock swept in. Bebop was squeezed into a niche, somewhat churchy, the preserve of frowning men with long, querulous memories. My father’s income shrank and his infidelities and drinking increased.

  When she heard all this, Miranda said, ‘They didn’t love each other. But did they love you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank God!’

  She came with me on the second visit to Elgin Crescent. The bass guitarist had a lined face whose sadness was accentuated by a drooping moustache and large brown eyes. I saw us through those eyes, a hopeful, young married couple, seriously rich, about to repeat all his own mistakes. Miranda approved, but she wasn’t as excited as I was. She knew about growing up in a large town house. But as we went from room to room, it touched me that she wanted to link arms.

  On the way home she said, ‘No sign of a woman’s presence.’

  Her reservations? Not the house itself, she said, but the way it had been lived in. Or not lived in. Dreamed up by an interior designer. Austere, lonely, too perfect, in need of being roughed up. No books beyond the untouched giant art editions stacked on low tables. No meal was ever cooked in that kitchen. Only gin and chocolate in the fridge. The stone garden needed colour. As she was telling me this, we were walking south along Kensington Church Street. I was feeling sorry for the vendor. It wasn’t exactly Pink Floyd he played for, but it was a band with stadium aspirations. I had treated him briskly, in a pretend businesslike way, protecting myself and my ignorance of house-buying, assuming all power and status were his. Now I saw that he too might be lost.

  I thought about him the next day, even considered getting in touch. This face of sorrow haunted me. I couldn’t escape the memory of the mournful moustache, the elastic band holding the ponytail together, the web of lines from the corner of his eyes, diverging fissures that reached round to his temples, almost to his ears. Too much dope-induced smiling in the early years. Now I could only see the house through Miranda’s eyes. A dustless void, empty of connection, interests, culture, nothing there that announced a music
ian or traveller. Not even a newspaper or magazine. Nothing on the walls. No squash racket or football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.

  I was coming to cast him as my double, my culture-deprived brother, lacking everything but wealth. Through my childhood to my mid-teens, I never saw a play, opera or a musical, or heard a live concert, apart from a couple of my father’s, or visited a museum or art gallery or took a journey for the sake of it. No bedtime stories. There were no children’s books in my parents’ past, no books in our house, no poetry or myths, no openly expressed curiosity, no standing family jokes. Matt and Jenny Friend were busy, hard-working, and otherwise lived coldly apart. At school, I loved the rare factory visits. Later, electronics, even anthropology, and especially a qualification in law were no substitutes for an education in the life of the mind. So, when good fortune offered the dreamlike opportunity, delivering me from my labours, such as they were, and stuffing me with gold, I was paralysed, inert. I’d wanted to be rich but never asked myself why. I had no ambitions beyond the erotic and an expensive house across the river. Others might have seized the chance to view at last the ruins of Leptis Magna or follow in Stevenson’s tracks across the Cevennes or write the monograph on Einstein’s musical tastes. I didn’t yet know how to live, I had no background in it and I hadn’t used my decade and a half of adult life to find out.

  I could have pointed to my great acquisition, to the man-made fact of Adam, to where he and his kind might lead us. Surely, there was grandeur in experiment. Wasn’t sinking my inheritance into an embodied consciousness heroic, even a little spiritual? The bass guitarist couldn’t match it. But – here was an irony. As I was passing through the kitchen one late afternoon, Adam looked up from his meditations to tell me that he had acquainted himself with the churches of Florence, Rome and Venice and all the paintings that hung in them. He was forming his opinions. The baroque fascinated him especially. He rated Artemisia Gentileschi very highly and he wanted to tell me why. Also, he’d recently read Philip Larkin.

  ‘Charlie, I treasure this ordinary voice and these moments of godless transcendence!’

  What was I to say? There were times when Adam’s earnestness bored me. I was just back from another pointless stroll on the Common and I had nodded and left the room. My mind was empty, his was filling.

  With Miranda out of the house most of the day and, as soon as she was home, her hour on the phone with her father, then sex, then dinner, then conversations about Elgin Crescent, there was little time to tell her of my discontents, little time to dissuade her from tracking down Gorringe in Salisbury. Our most sustained conversation took place in the evening after the engineer’s visit. After that, things were strained for a day or two.

  We were sitting on the bed.

  ‘What is it you want to achieve?’

  She said, ‘I want to confront him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I want him to know the real reason he was in prison. He’s going to face up to what he did to Mariam.’

  ‘It could get violent.’

  ‘We’ll have Adam. And you’re big, aren’t you?’

  ‘This is madness.’

  It was a while since we had come anywhere near a row.

  ‘How is it,’ she said, ‘that Adam sees the point and you can’t? And why—’

  ‘He wants to kill you.’

  ‘You can wait in the car.’

  ‘So he grabs a kitchen knife and comes at you. Then what?’

  ‘You can be a witness at his trial.’

  ‘He’ll kill us both.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  The conversation was too absurd. From next door, we heard the sound of Adam washing up our supper. Her protector, her former lover, still in love with her, still reading her his gnomic poems. He and his teeming circuits were implicated. This visit was his idea.

  She seemed to guess my thoughts. ‘Adam understands. I’m sorry you don’t.’

  ‘You were frightened before.’

  ‘I’m angry.’

  ‘Send him a letter.’

  ‘I’m going to tell him to his face.’

  I tried another approach. ‘What about your irrational guilt?’

  She looked at me, waiting.

  I said, ‘You’re trying to right a wrong that doesn’t exist. Not all rapes end in suicide. You didn’t know what she was going to do. You were doing your best to be her loyal friend.’

  She started to say something but I raised my voice. ‘Listen. I’ll spell it out. It-was-not-your-fault!’

  She stood up from the bed and went by the desk and stared at the computer for a full minute, without seeing, I supposed, the writhing rainbow wisps of that season’s screen saver.

  At last she said, ‘I’m going for a walk.’ She pulled a sweater off the back of the chair and went towards the door.

  ‘Take Adam with you.’

  They were out for an hour. When she came back, she went to bed, after calling to me a neutral goodnight. I sat with Adam in the kitchen, determined to press my case. Obliquely this time. I was about to ask how the day’s work had gone – my euphemism for the day’s profit – when I noticed a change in him, one I had missed at supper. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt open at the collar and black suede loafers.

  ‘Do you like it?’ He tugged at the lapels and turned his head in parody of a catwalk pose.

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘I was tired of wearing your old jeans and t-shirts. And I decided that some of that money you keep under your bed is mine.’ He looked at me warily.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You might have a case.’

  ‘About a week ago. You were out for the afternoon. I took a taxi, my first of course, to Chiltern Street. I bought two suits off the peg, three shirts, two pairs of shoes. You should have seen me, trying on trousers, pointing at this and that. I was completely convincing.’

  ‘As a human?’

  ‘They called me sir.’

  He sat back in his chair, one arm sprawled across the kitchen table, his suit jacket neatly swelled by impacted muscle, not a crease in view. He looked like one of the young professionals beginning to infiltrate our neighbourhood. The suit went well with the harsh look.

  He said, ‘The driver talked the whole way. His daughter had just got a place at university. First ever in the family. He was so proud. When I got out and paid, I shook his hand. But that night I did some research and concluded that lectures, seminars and especially tutorials are an inefficient way of imparting information.’

  I said, ‘Well, there’s the ethos. The libraries, important new friendships, a certain teacher who might set your mind on fire …’ I trailed away. None of this had happened to me. ‘Anyway, what would you recommend?’

  ‘Direct thought transference. Downloading. But, um, of course, biologically …’ He too trailed away, not wishing to be impolite about my limitations. Then he brightened. ‘Speaking of which, I finally got round to Shakespeare. Thirty-seven plays. I was so excited. What characters! Brilliantly realised. Falstaff, Iago – they walk off the page. But the supreme creation is Hamlet. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about him.’

  I had never read it or seen it on stage, though I felt I had, or felt obliged to pretend I had. ‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘Slings and arrows.’

  ‘Was ever a mind, a particular consciousness, better represented?’

  ‘Look, before we get on to that, there’s something else we need to talk about. Gorringe. Miranda’s dead set on this … this idea. But it’s stupid, dangerous.’

  He gently drummed with his fingertips on the table surface. ‘My fault. I should have explained my decision—’

  ‘Decision?’

  ‘Suggestion. I’ve done some work on this. I can take you through it. There’s a general consideration, then there’s the empirical research.’

  ‘Someone will get
hurt.’

  It was as if I hadn’t spoken.

  ‘I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you it all at this stage. That is, don’t push me when I exclude some final details. The work is ongoing. But look, Charlie, none of us, especially Miranda, can live with this threat, however improbable it is. Her freedom has been compromised. She’s in a state of constant anxiety. It could go on for months, even years. It’s simply not endurable. That’s my general point. So. My first task was to find the best possible likeness of Peter Gorringe. I went on the website of his and Miranda’s old school, found the year photographs and there he was, a great lump in the back row. I found him again in the school magazine, in articles about the rugby and cricket seasons. Then, of course, the press coverage during the trial. A lot of head-under-the-blanket, but I found some useful shots and merged what I had into a composite, high-definition portrait and scanned it. Next, and this was the enjoyable part, I devised some very specialised face-recognition software. Then, I hacked into the Salisbury District Council CCTV system. I set the recognition algorithms to work, mining the period since he came out of prison. That was a bit tricky. There were various setbacks and software glitches, mostly due to problems marrying up with the city’s outdated programs. Using Gorringe’s surname to locate his parents’ house on the edge of town was a great help, even though there are no cameras where they live. I needed to know his most likely route past the nearest camera. At last I was getting good matches and I’ve been able to pick him up in various places when he arrives by bus into town. I can follow him from street to street, camera to camera, as long as he’s in or near the centre. There’s one place he keeps returning to. Don’t trouble your head trying to guess what it is. His parents are still abroad. Perhaps they prefer to stay clear of their convict son. I’ve come to certain conclusions about him that make me think it’s safe to pay a visit. I’ve told Miranda everything that I’ve told you. She knows only what you know. I won’t say more at this stage. I simply ask you to trust me. Now, Charlie, please. I’m desperate to hear your thoughts about Hamlet, about Shakespeare playing his father’s ghost in the first production. And in Ulysses, in the Nestor episode, what about Stephen’s theory?’