Machines Like Me

by Ian Mcewan

  It was almost midnight when we went to the table to eat the meal she had prepared. From next door came the rattle of Adam at the keyboard. He wasn’t making us richer on the currency markets. He was typing up the transcript of Gorringe’s confession, including his self-identification. The transcripts and the video and accompanying narrative would make up a single file that would go to a named senior officer at a police station in Salisbury. A copy would also go to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

  ‘I’m a coward,’ Miranda said. ‘I’m dreading the trial. I’m frightened.’

  I went to the fridge for the bottle and refilled our glasses. I stared into my drink, at the bubbles detaching themselves as though reluctantly from the side of the glass then rising quickly. Once the decision was made, they seemed eager. We had talked about her fears before. If Gorringe was charged and pleaded innocent. To be in court again. To suffer cross-examination, the press, public scrutiny. To confront him again. That was bad, but it wasn’t the worst of it. What terrified and sickened her was the prospect of Mariam’s family in the public gallery. The parents might give evidence for the prosecution. She would be with them as they learned, day by day, the details of their daughter’s rape and of Miranda’s wicked silence. The omertà of a silly teenage girl that cost a life. The family would remember how she had deserted them. As she repeated the story from the witness stand, she would struggle and fail to avoid the gaze of Sana, Yasir, Surayya, Hamid and Farhan.

  ‘I told Adam I can’t face it. He won’t listen. We had an argument while you were asleep.’

  We knew, of course, she would face it. For several minutes we ate in silence. Her head was low over her plate, contemplating what she herself had set in motion. I understood why, for all her dread, she must go ahead and try to undo the errors she had made before and after Mariam’s death. I agreed that Gorringe’s three years were not enough. I admired Miranda’s determination. I loved her for her courage and slow-burning fury. I’d never thought that vomiting could be a moral act.

  I changed the subject. ‘Tell me more about Mark.’

  She was keen to talk about him. He was much wounded by his mother’s disappearance from his life, kept asking for her, was sometimes withdrawn, sometimes happy. On two occasions, he was taken to see her in the hospital. On the second visit, she didn’t or wouldn’t recognise him. Jasmin, the social worker, thought he’d been smacked frequently. He was in the habit of chewing on his lower lip, to the point of drawing blood. He was a fussy eater, wouldn’t touch vegetables, salad or fruit, but seemed healthy enough on a diet of junk food. Dancing remained a passion. He could pick out tunes on a recorder. He knew his letters and could count, by his own boast, to thirty-five. On shoes, he knew his left from his right. He was not so good around other children and tended to move to the edge of a group. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would answer, ‘a princess’. He liked dressing up as one with crown and wand, and ‘flitting about’ in an old nightie. He was happy in a borrowed summer frock. Jasmin was relaxed about it, but her immediate superior, an older woman, disapproved.

  I remembered then something I had forgotten to tell her. When I crossed the playground, hand in hand with Mark, he’d wanted us to pretend we were running away, in a boat.

  She was suddenly tearful. ‘Oh Mark!’ she cried out. ‘You’re such a special beautiful kid.’

  After the meal, she stood to go upstairs. ‘I always thought I’d have children one day. I never expected to fall in love with this boy. But we don’t choose who to love, do we?’

  Later, while I was clearing up the kitchen, I had a sudden thought. So obvious. And dangerous. I went next door and found Adam closing down the computer.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. First I asked him about his conversation with Miranda.

  He stood up from my office chair and put on his suit jacket. ‘I was trying to reassure her. She wasn’t persuaded. But the probability is overwhelming. Gorringe will plead guilty. It won’t come to court.’

  I was interested.

  ‘To deny what he did, he’d have to tell a thousand lies under oath and he knows God will be listening. Miranda is His messenger. I’ve noticed in my researches how the guilty long to shed their burden. They seem to enter a state of elated abandonment.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But look, it’s occurred to me. It’s important. When the police read of everything that happened this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They’re going to wonder. If Miranda knew that Gorringe raped Mariam, why would she go alone to his bedsit with a bottle of vodka? It would have to be revenge.’

  Adam was already nodding before I’d finished. ‘Yes, I’ve thought of that.’

  ‘She needs to be able to say she only learned today, when Gorringe confessed. There needs to be some judicious editing. She went to Salisbury to confront her rapist. Until then, she didn’t know he’d raped Mariam. Do you understand?’

  He looked at me steadily. ‘Yes. I understand perfectly.’

  He turned away and was silent for a moment. ‘Charlie, I heard half an hour ago. There’s another one gone.’

  In a lowered tone, he told what little he knew. It was an Adam of Bantu appearance, living in the suburbs of Vienna. He had developed a particular genius for the piano, especially for the music of Bach. His Goldberg Variations had amazed some critics. This Adam had, according to his final message to the cohort, ‘dissolved his consciousness’.

  ‘He’s not actually dead. He has motor function but no cognition.’

  ‘Could he be repaired or whatever?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can he still play the piano?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he certainly can’t learn new pieces.’

  ‘Why don’t these suicides leave an explanation?’

  ‘I assume they don’t have one.’

  ‘But you must have a theory about it,’ I said. I was feeling aggrieved on behalf of the African pianist. Perhaps Vienna was not the most racially accepting of cities. This Adam might have been too brilliant for his own good.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Something to do with the state of the world. Or human nature?’

  ‘My guess is that it goes deeper.’

  ‘What are the others saying? Aren’t you in touch with them?’

  ‘Only in times like this. A simple notification. We don’t speculate.’

  I started to ask him why not but he raised a hand to forestall me. ‘This is how it is.’

  ‘So what’s deeper supposed to mean?’

  ‘Look, Charlie. I’m not about to do the same thing. As you know, I’ve every reason to live.’

  Something in his phrasing or emphasis aroused my suspicion. We exchanged a long and fierce look. The little black rods in his eyes were shifting their alignment. As I stared, they appeared to swim, even to wriggle, left to right, like microorganisms mindlessly intent on some distant objective, like sperm migrating towards an ovum. I watched them, fascinated – harmonious elements lodged within the supreme achievement of our age. Our own technical accomplishment was leaving us behind, as it was always bound to, leaving us stranded on the little sandbar of our finite intelligence. But here we were dealing on the human plane. We were thinking about the same thing.

  ‘You promised me that you wouldn’t touch her again.’

  ‘I’ve kept my promise.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes. But …’

  I waited.

  ‘It’s not easy to say this.’

  I gave him no encouragement.

  ‘There was a time,’ he started, then paused. ‘I begged her. She said no, several times. I begged her and finally she agreed as long as I never asked her again. It was humiliating.’

  He closed his eyes. I saw his right hand clench. ‘I asked if I could masturbate in front of her. She said I could. I did. And that was it.’

  It wasn’t the rawness of this confession or its comic absurdity that struck me. It was the
suggestion, yet another, that he really did feel, he had sensation. Subjectively real. Why pretend, why mimic, who was there to fool or impress, when the price was to be so abject in front of the woman he loved? It was an overwhelming sensual compulsion. He needn’t have told me. He had to have it, and he had to tell me. I didn’t count it as a betrayal, no promise was broken. I might not even mention it to Miranda. I felt sudden tenderness towards him for his truthfulness and vulnerability. I stood up from the bed and went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. His own hand came up and lightly touched my elbow.

  ‘Goodnight Adam.’

  ‘Goodnight Charlie.’

  *

  The catchphrase of the late autumn owed an obvious debt to a previous prime minister: a half-hour is a long time in politics. Harold Wilson’s original ‘week’ seemed too long for this parliament. One afternoon it looked like there was going to be a leadership challenge. By the next morning there were insufficient signatures – the fainthearts had prevailed. Soon after, the government survived by one vote a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons. Certain senior Tories rebelled or abstained. Mrs Thatcher, insulted, furious, stubborn, deaf to good advice, called a snap election to be held in three weeks. She was, in the general view, pulling the temple down on her party, most of which now believed she was an electoral liability. She didn’t see it that way, but she was wrong. The Tories could hardly match the momentum of Tony Benn’s campaign, not in the TV and radio studios, not on the stump, certainly not in the industrial and university towns. The Falklands Catastrophe, as it was now called, came back to destroy her. This time, no popular inclination to forgiveness in the cause of national unity. The televised testimony of grieving widows and their children was fatal. The Labour campaign let no one forget how eloquently Benn had spoken out against the Task Force. The poll tax rankled. As predicted, it was difficult and expensive to collect. More than a hundred celebrity non-payers, many of them actresses, were in prison and became martyrs.

  A million voters under the age of thirty had recently joined the Labour Party. Many of them were active on the nation’s doorsteps. On the eve of polling day, Benn gave a rousing speech at a rally in Wembley stadium. The landslide was greater than predicted, exceeding the Labour victory of 1945. It was a sad moment when Mrs Thatcher decided to leave Number 10 on foot, hand in hand with her husband and two children. She walked towards Whitehall, upright and defiant, but her tears were visible and for a couple of days, the country suffered pangs of remorse.

  Labour had a majority of 162 MPs, many of whom were newly selected Bennites. When the new prime minister returned from Buckingham Palace, where the Queen had invited him to form a government, he gave an important speech from outside Number 10. The country would disengage unilaterally from its nuclear weaponry – that was no surprise. Also, the government would set about withdrawing from what was now called the European Union – that was a shock. The party’s manifesto had alluded to the idea in a single vague line which people had barely noticed. From his new front door, Benn told the nation that there would be no rerun of the 1975 referendum. Parliament would make the decision. Only the Third Reich and other tyrannies decided policy by plebiscites and generally no good came from them. Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.

  Benn gave an extended version of that speech a month later in the Manchester Free Trade Hall. At his side sat the historian, E. P. Thompson. When it was his turn, he said that patriotism had always been the terrain of the political right. Now it was the turn of the left to claim it for all. Once nuclear weapons were banished, Thompson predicted, the government would raise a standing citizen’s army that would make these islands impossible to invade and dominate. He didn’t specify an enemy. President Carter sent Benn a message of support, using words that caused a scandal on the right in the USA and haunted his second term: ‘The word “socialist” doesn’t bother me.’ A poll later suggested that a half of registered Democrats wished they had voted for the defeated candidate, Ronald Reagan.

  To me, psychologically confined to the city state of north Clapham, all this – the events, the dissent, the grave analysis – was a busy hum, dipping and swelling from day to day, a matter of interest and concern, but nothing to compare with the turbulence of my domestic life, which came to a head in late October. By then, on the surface, all looked well. We had modified our accommodation as Miranda had proposed, ready for Mark’s arrival. Our doors were removed and stored, the gloomy hall and its large fitted cupboard were brightly decorated, the gas and electricity meters concealed, a piece of carpet laid down. Miranda’s kitchen became a child’s bedroom, with a blue sleigh bed and many books and toys, and transfers on the walls of fairy-tale castles, boats and winged horses. I removed the bed from my study and disposed of it – a signpost on the road to full maturity. I installed a desk for Miranda and bought two new computers. Mark would be allowed to visit us for a few hours twice a week. The adoption agency was pleased by the news of our imminent wedding. I still had moments of unease, which I couldn’t bring myself to share. I joined in all the preparations, feeling guilty, even shocked sometimes, that I could keep up the pretence. On other occasions, fatherhood seemed an inevitability, and I was more or less content.

  Miranda’s tutor was impressed by the first three chapters of her dissertation. Adam had still not submitted his material to the police and was reluctant to talk about it. But he continued to work on it, and we weren’t troubled. I paid a five per cent deposit in cash on the Notting Hill house. After that, the fund stood at £97,000. The larger it became, the faster it grew, and faster still on the new computer. My own work during this time consisted mostly of decorating and carpentry.

  What marked the beginning of the turbulence began innocuously. On the eve of Mark’s first visit, Miranda and I were drinking a late-night cup of tea in the kitchen when Adam came in with a carrier bag in his hand and announced that he was going for a walk. He had been for long solo walks before and we thought nothing of it.

  I woke early the following morning with a clearer head than usual. I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Miranda, and went downstairs to make coffee. Adam had not returned from his night walk. I was surprised but I decided not to worry about him. I was anxious to make use of my unusual state to catch up on dull administrative tasks, including the payment of household bills. If I didn’t exploit this mood now, I would have had to drag myself to the business within the week and hate it. Now I could breeze through.

  I carried my cup into the study. There was £30 on the desk. I put it in my pocket and thought no more of it. As usual, I glanced at the news first. Nothing much. The Labour Party Conference in Brighton had been delayed by six weeks because of internal disputes over policy and was only now just beginning. There was increased police activity around the seafront. Some sites were reporting a news blackout.

  Benn was already in trouble with his left for accepting an official invitation to the White House in place of greeting a Palestinian delegation. He had also failed to secure, as promised, the immediate release of the poll-tax martyrs. It was not so easy for the executive to instruct the judiciary. He should have known that, many said, when he made his pledge. Also, the tax itself was not about to be repealed because there were so many other more important bills going through Parliament. There was also anger on his right. Nuclear disarmament would cost 10,000 jobs. Leaving Europe, abolishing private education, renationalising the energy sector and doubling social security would mean a big rise in income tax. The City was seething over the reversal of deregulation and the half of one per cent tax on all trades in shares.

  Public administr
ation was a special corner of hell, irresistible to certain personalities. Once there, and risen to the top, there was nothing they could do that did not make someone, some sector, hate them. From the sidelines, the rest of us could comfortably loathe the entire machinery of government. Reading about the public inferno every day was compulsive to types like me, a mild form of mental illness.

  At last I broke away and set about my duties. After two hours, just past ten, I heard the doorbell ring and Miranda’s footsteps above my head. Minutes later, I heard steps at shorter frequency, moving at speed from one room to the other, then back. After a brief silence, what sounded like a bouncing ball. Then a resonating thump, as of a leap from a high place that made the ceiling-light fittings rattle and some plaster dust fall onto my arm. I sighed and considered again the prospect of fatherhood.