Machines Like Me

by Ian Mcewan

  ‘Do I?’

  I saw now that there was a scar, three or four inches long, a vermilion sickle shape on his neck. He was waiting for her.

  ‘You killed my friend.’

  ‘What friend is that?’

  ‘The one you raped.’

  ‘I thought you were the one I raped.’

  ‘She killed herself because of what you did.’

  He leaned back in his chair and placed his big white hands on his lap. His voice and manner were thuggish, self-consciously so and not convincing. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I heard you want to kill me.’ She said it jauntily and I flinched. It was an invitation, a provocation. I looked past her to Adam. He sat rigidly upright, hands on knees, staring ahead in that way he had. I shifted my attention back to Gorringe. Now, I could see the puppy beneath the skin. The lines, the hollow, unshaven skin, were superficial. He was a kid, possibly an angry kid holding himself together with his laconic blocking answers. He didn’t need to respond to her questions. But he wasn’t cool enough not to.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I thought about it every day. My hands around your neck, squeezing harder and harder for each of the lies you told.’

  ‘Also,’ Miranda continued briskly, like a committee chair, working her way through a typed-up agenda, ‘I thought you should know what she suffered. Until she didn’t want to live. Are you able to imagine that? And then what her family suffered. Perhaps it’s beyond you.’

  To this, Gorringe made no reply. He watched her, waiting.

  Miranda was gaining confidence. She would have mentally rehearsed this encounter a thousand times, through sleepless nights. These weren’t questions, they were taunts, insults. But she made them sound like the pursuit of truth. She adopted the insinuating tone of an aggressive cross-examining barrister.

  ‘And the other thing I want is … just to know. To understand. What you thought you wanted. What you were getting. Did you get a thrill when she screamed? Did her helplessness turn you on? Did you get a hard-on when she wet herself in fear? Did you like it that she was so small and you’re so large? When she begged you, did that make you feel bigger? Tell me about this big moment. What actually made you come? When her legs wouldn’t stop trembling? When she struggled? When she began to cry? You see, Peter, I’m here to learn. Do you still feel big? Or are you really just weak and sick? I want to know everything. I mean, was it still good for you when you stood and pulled up your zip and she was lying at your feet? Still fun when you left her there and walked away across the playing fields? Or did you run? When you got home did you wash your cock? Hygiene might not be your thing. If it is, did you do it in the handbasin? Soap, or just hot water? Were you whistling? What tunes were you whistling? Did you think about her, how she might still be lying there, or making her way home in the dark with her bag of books? Still good for you? You see what I’m getting at. I need to know what pleased you about the entire experience. If you got a thrill not just out of raping her but out of her humiliation afterwards, perhaps I won’t have to go on thinking that the friend I loved died for nothing. And one more—’

  In a loping movement, Gorringe was out of his chair at speed and bending towards Miranda with his arm swinging in a wide arc towards her face. I had time to see that his hand was open. It was going to be a slap, an extremely hard one, far more violent than the sort men in movies once gave to women to bring them to their senses. I had barely begun to lift my own hand in her defence when Adam’s rose to intercept and close around Gorringe’s wrist. The deflected sweep of his fast-moving arm provided the momentum that smoothly swung Adam to his feet. Gorringe dropped to his knees, just as I had, with his captured hand twisted above his head and about to be crushed, while Adam stood over him. It was a tableau of agony. Miranda looked away. Still maintaining the pressure, Adam forced the young man back to his chair and, as soon as he was seated, released him.

  So we sat in silence for several minutes as Gorringe nursed his arm against his chest. I knew that pain. As I remembered, I had made more fuss. He had appearances to keep up. Prison culture must have toughened him. Late afternoon sunlight suddenly shone into the sitting room and illuminated a long bar of orange carpet.

  Gorringe murmured, ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  But he didn’t move, and nor did we. We were waiting for him to recover. Miranda was watching him with an expression of plain disgust that retracted her upper lip. This was what she had come here for, to see him, to really see him. But now what? She surely doubted there was anything meaningful that Gorringe could tell her. He suffered the failure of imagination that afflicted and enabled all rapists. When his weight was on Mariam, when she was pinned to the grass, when she was in his arms, he failed to imagine her fear. Even as he saw and heard and smelled it. The lifting curve of his arousal was not troubled by the idea of her terror. At that moment, she may as well have been a sex doll, a device, a machine. Or – I had Gorringe completely wrong. I had the mirror image of the truth. I was the one with the failed imagination: Gorringe knew the state of mind of his victim all too well. He entered her misery and thrilled to it, and it was precisely this triumph of imagining, of frenzied empathy, that drove his excitement into an exalted form of sexual hatred. I didn’t know which was worse or whether there was some sense in which both could be true. They seemed mutually exclusive to me. But I was certain that Gorringe didn’t know either and that he would have nothing to tell Miranda.

  As the sun through the plate glass at our backs sank a little lower, the room was filling with light. The three of us sitting in a row on the sofa would have appeared as silhouettes to Gorringe. To us he was illuminated like a figure on a stage and it seemed appropriate when he, not Miranda, started to speak. He pressed his right hand against his chest with his left as though taking a vow of honesty. He had dropped the thuggish tone. Pain at this level was a tranquilliser, an enforcer, stripping the affectation out, coaxing his voice back to that of the undergraduate he might have become without Miranda’s intervention.

  ‘The guy who came to see you, Brian, was the one I shared a cell with. He was in for armed robbery. The prison was short-staffed so we were often locked up together for twenty-three hours a day. This was right at the beginning of my term. The worst time, everyone says, the first few months, when you don’t accept where you are and you can’t stop thinking about what you could have been doing and how you’re going to get out, and getting your appeal together and getting angry with the solicitor because nothing seems to be happening.

  ‘I was getting into all sorts of trouble. I mean fights. They told me I had anger problems and they were right. I thought because I was six two and played rugby in the second row I could look after myself. That was crap. I knew nothing about real fighting. I got my throat slashed and could have died.

  ‘I came to hate my cellmate, as you do when you’re shitting in the same bucket every day. I hated his whistling, his stinking teeth, his press-ups and jumping jacks. He was a vicious little runt. But somehow, in his case, I kept control of myself and he delivered my message once he was out. But I hated you ten times more. I used to lie on my bunk and burn with hatred. Hours on end. And here’s the thing and you might not believe it. I never connected you with the Indian girl.’

  ‘Her family was from Pakistan,’ Miranda said softly.

  ‘I didn’t know about your friendship. I just thought you were one of those spiteful man-hating bitches or you woke up the next morning and felt ashamed of yourself and decided to take it out on me. So I lay on my bunk and planned my revenge. I was going to save up the money and get someone to do the business for me.

  ‘Time passed. Brian got out. I was moved a couple of times and things began to settle into a kind of routine when the days are all the same and time begins to go faster. I went into a kind of depression. They gave me anger-management counselling. Round about that time, I began to be haunted or obsessed, not by you but by that girl.’

  ‘Her name was Mariam.’

&nbs
p; ‘I know that. I’d managed to put her right out of my mind.’

  ‘I can believe you.’

  ‘Now she was there all the time. And the terrible thing I did. And at night—’

  Adam said, ‘Let’s have it. What terrible thing?’

  He spelled it out, as though for dictation. ‘I attacked her. I raped her.’

  ‘And who was she?’

  ‘Mariam Malik.’

  ‘Date?’

  ‘The sixteenth of July 1978.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Around nine thirty in the evening.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  Possibly, Gorringe feared what Adam might yet do to him. But he seemed eager rather than intimidated. He must have guessed there was a recording. He needed to tell us everything.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Tell us your name, address and date of birth.’

  ‘Peter Gorringe, 6 St Osmund’s Close, Salisbury. Eleventh of May 1960.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Then he resumed. His eyes were half closed against the light.

  ‘Two very important things happened to me. The first was more significant. It started out as a bit of a scam. But I don’t think it was chance. It was guided from the start. The rules were you could get more time out of your cell if you came on as all religious. A lot of us were on to it and the screws understood but they didn’t care. I put myself down as Church of England and started going every day to evensong. I still go every day, to the cathedral. At first, it was boring but better than the cell. Then a little less boring. Then I started to get drawn in. It was the vicar mostly, at least at the beginning, the Reverend Wilfred Murray, a big fellow with a Liverpool accent. He wasn’t scared of anyone, and that was something in a place like that. He started taking an interest in me when he saw I was serious. He sometimes dropped by my cell. He gave me passages to read from the Bible, mostly from the New Testament. After evensong on Thursdays he’d go through them with me and a few others. I never thought I’d find myself volunteering for a Bible-study group. And it wasn’t for the benefit of the parole board, the way it was for some. But the more I became aware of God’s presence in my life, the worse I felt about Mariam. I understood from Reverend Murray that I had a mountain to climb in coming to terms with what I’d done, that forgiveness was a long way off but that I could work towards it. He made me see what a monster I’d been.’

  He paused. ‘At night, as soon as I closed my eyes, her face would be there.’

  ‘Your sleep was disrupted.’

  He was immune to sarcasm, or pretended to be. ‘For months, I didn’t have a single night without nightmares.’

  Adam said, ‘What was the second thing?’

  ‘It was a revelation. A friend from school came to see me. We had half an hour in the visitors’ room. He told me about the suicide and that was a shock. Then I learned that you were her friend, that you two were very close. So, revenge. I almost admired you for it. You were brilliant in court. No one dared not believe you. But that wasn’t the point. A few days later, when I’d talked this through with the vicar, that’s when I began to see it for what it was. It was simple. And not only that. It was right. You were the agent of retribution. Perhaps the right word is angel. Avenging angel.’

  He shifted position and winced. His left hand cradled his broken wrist against his chest. He was looking at Miranda steadily. I felt her upper arm tighten against my own.

  He said, ‘You were sent.’

  She slumped, for the moment unable to speak.

  ‘Sent?’ I said.

  ‘No need to rage against a miscarriage of justice. I was already working through my punishment. God’s justice, realised through you. The scales were balanced – the crime I committed against the crime I was innocent of and sent down for. I dropped my appeal. The anger was gone. Well, mostly. I should have written to you. I meant to. I even went round to your dad’s place and got your address. But I let it drop. Who cared if I once wanted you dead? It was all over. I was getting my life together. I went to Germany to stay with my parents – my dad’s working there. Then back here to start a new life.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Adam said.

  ‘Job interviews. In sales. And living in God’s grace.’

  I was beginning to understand why Gorringe was prepared to name his crime and identify himself out loud. Fatalism. He wanted forgiveness. He had served his time. What happened now was God’s will.

  She said, ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why you raped her.’

  He stared at her, faintly amused that she could be so unworldly. ‘All right. She was beautiful and I desired her and everything else got blotted out. That’s the way it happens.’

  ‘I know about desire. But if you really thought she was beautiful …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why rape her?’

  They were looking at each other across a desert of hostile incomprehension. We were back at the beginning.

  ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never said to anyone. When we were on the ground I was trying to calm her. I really was. If she’d just seen that moment in a different way, if she’d looked at me instead of twisting away, it could have been something—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If she could have just relaxed a moment, I think we would’ve crossed into … you know.’

  Miranda was pushing herself up from out of the soft clammy sofa. Her voice trembled. ‘Don’t you dare even think it. Don’t you dare!’ Then, in a whisper, ‘Oh God. I’m going to …’

  She hurried from the room. We heard her yank the front door open and then, her retching and the liquid sound of copious vomit. I went after her and Adam followed me. There was no question, this was a visceral response. But I was sure she had the door open before she started to be sick. She could easily have turned her head to the left or right and thrown up on the lawn or the flower bed. Instead, the contents of her stomach, the colourful buffet lunch, lay thickly over the hall carpet and the threshold. She had stood outside the house and vomited in. She said later that she was helpless, out of control, but I always thought, or preferred to think, that here, at our feet as we left, was the avenging angel’s parting shot. It was tricky, stepping over it.

  NINE

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

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

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

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

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