Machines Like Me

by Ian Mcewan

  But we did know that God failed to protect Gorringe from certain misfortunes of legal timing. With Miranda’s case not yet come to light, Gorringe stood before the law with one rape already on his account. When it came to sentencing, the judge assumed that he would have received a longer term for the assault on Miranda had it been known that it was his second offence. No allowance, then, for the time he had already spent inside. The judge was in her early fifties and represented a generational shift in attitudes to rape. She made an implicit reference to the vodka bottle of the first case when she said that she did not believe that an unaccompanied young woman walking home at dusk was ‘asking for trouble’. Miranda had made her statement and wasn’t in court. I was in the public gallery, sitting across from Mariam’s family. I could hardly bear to look their way, their radiating misery was so intense. When the judge handed down Gorringe’s eight-year sentence, I forced myself to look across at Mariam’s mother. She was openly crying, whether from relief or sorrow, I would never know.

  Miranda’s case came round all too soon. Her barrister, Lilian Moore, competent, intelligent, charming, was a young woman from Dún Laoghaire. We met her in her chambers in Gray’s Inn. I sat in a corner while she talked Miranda out of a ‘not guilty’ plea, her first impulse. It wasn’t difficult. The prosecution was bound to make much of her recorded description of her revenge on Gorringe. His statement, made from prison, dovetailed with hers. They were remembering the same evening. Miranda’s ‘not guilty’ plea would bring a longer sentence in the likely event of a successful prosecution. And, of course, she dreaded a trial. A ‘guilty’ plea was entered, though she tormented herself that she was somehow letting Mariam down.

  The April evening before she was due in court for sentencing was one of the strangest and saddest I’ve ever spent. Lilian had told Miranda from the beginning that a custodial sentence was likely. She had packed a small suitcase and it stood by the door to our bedroom, a constant reminder. I brought out my only bottle of decent wine. The word ‘last’ kept occurring to me, though I couldn’t mention it. Together, we cooked a meal, perhaps a last meal. When we raised a glass, it was not to her last evening of freedom, as I silently thought, but to Mark. She had been to see him that afternoon and told him she might have to be away for work for a while, and that I would be coming to see him and take him out for treats. He must have sensed there was some deeper meaning, some sorrow in this ‘work’. When she came to leave, he clung to her, yelling. One of the helpers had to prise his fingers from her skirt.

  During the meal, we tried to hold off an invading silence. We talked about the fiercely supportive women’s groups who would be outside the Old Bailey the next morning. We told each other how marvellous Lilian was. I reminded her of the judge’s reputation for mildness. But at every turn, the silence came in like a tide and to speak again was an effort. When I said that it was as if she might be going into hospital tomorrow, the remark was not helpful. When I said I thought it was likely she would be eating with me at this table tomorrow night, that fell flat too. Neither of us believed it. Earlier in the day, in a better frame of mind, somewhat defiant, we had thought we’d make love after dinner. Another last. Now, in our sorrow, sex seemed like some long-abandoned pleasure, like playground skipping or dancing the twist. Her suitcase stood guard, barring entrance to the bedroom.

  Next day in court, Lilian made a brilliant speech in mitigation, conjuring for the judge the closeness of the two young women, the brutality of the assault, the vow of silence that Mariam had imposed on the accused, the traumatising shock of her dearest friend’s suicide and Miranda’s sincere desire for justice. Lilian referred to Miranda’s clean record, her recent marriage, her studies and, above all, her intended adoption of an underprivileged child.

  It was a statement in itself, a bleak one, that Mariam’s family were not in the public gallery. His Honour’s judgement was long, and I expected the worst. He emphasised Miranda’s careful planning, the cunning execution, the deliberate and sustained deception of the court. He said that he accepted much of what Lilian had said, and that he was being lenient when he sentenced Miranda to serve one year. Standing upright in the dock, in the business suit she had bought for the occasion, Miranda appeared to freeze. I wanted her to look my way so that I could send her a sign of loving encouragement. But she was already locked up in her thoughts. She told me later that at that moment she was confronting the implications of having a criminal record. She was thinking of Mark.

  Until then, I’d never considered what humiliation it was, to be taken down the courtroom steps and escorted to prison – by force if you tried to resist. Her term began in Holloway prison, six months after the deed. Adam’s luminous love had triumphed.

  Gorringe now had a reasonable basis on which to appeal his sentence: one outrage, not two, and time already served. But the law moved slowly. Cheaper and more efficient DNA testing was undermining all kinds of convictions. All kinds of self-declared innocent men and women were clamouring to have their cases reopened. There was a logjam at the Appeal Court. Gorringe, only partly innocent, would have to wait.

  On Miranda’s first full day inside, I went to visit Mark at his reception class in Clapham Old Town. It was a single-storey prefabricated building by a Victorian church. As I walked up the path, passing under a heavily pollarded oak, I saw Jasmin waiting for me by the entrance. I knew straight away, and felt that I had always known. Her tight expression, as I came closer, was confirmation. We had been refused. She took me into the building and then, not into the classroom, but along a linoleum corridor to an office. As we passed, I saw Mark through an interior window, standing at a low table with a few others, doing something with coloured wooden blocks. I sat with a cup of weak coffee, while Jasmin told me how sorry she was, how the matter was out of her hands, though she had done her best. We should have told her that there was a court case pending. She was investigating the appeal procedure. In the meantime, she had managed to get a single concession from the bureaucracy. Given the close attachment already formed, Miranda would be allowed one audio-visual contact with Mark each week. My attention was wandering. I didn’t need to hear any more. I was thinking only of that point in the afternoon when I would break the news to Miranda.

  When Jasmin was finished, I said I had nothing to ask or say. We stood, she gave me a quick hug and led me out of the building by another corridor that avoided the classroom. It was almost mid-morning break and Mark had already been told I wasn’t coming that day. He might not have cared, for early season snow was falling and all the children were excited. The next day he would be told again that I wasn’t coming, and the same the next day, and the next, until his expectations began to fade.

  *

  Miranda served six months, three in Holloway, the rest in an open prison north of Ipswich. Like many middle-class, educated criminals before her, she put in for a job in the prison library. But a number of famous poll-tax martyrs were still waiting for their release. In both prisons, the library posts were already filled and there was a waiting list. In Holloway, she took a course in industrial cleaning. In Suffolk, she worked in the nursery. Babies under one year were allowed to stay with their prisoner mothers.

  In my first few visits to Holloway, it seemed to me that to lock someone up in this Victorian monstrosity, or in any building, was a form of slow torture. The bright visiting room, its child art on the walls, the companionable plastic tables, the haze of tobacco smoke, the din of voices and wailing babies, were a front for institutional horror. But I was guiltily surprised by how quickly I became used to having my wife in prison. I accustomed myself to her misery. Another surprise was Maxfield’s equanimity. There was no avoiding it, Miranda had to tell him the entire story. He applauded the motives for her crime, and just as easily accepted her punishment. He had spent a year in Wandsworth in 1942 as a conscientious objector. Holloway didn’t trouble him. While she was in London, the housekeeper brought him to see her twice a week and, according to Miranda, was good
company.

  We visitors were a community within which the incarceration of a loved one became a mere inconvenience. As we queued to be searched and checked in and out, we chatted cheerfully, too cheerfully, about our particular circumstances. I belonged in a band of husbands, boyfriends, children, middle-aged parents. Most of us colluded in the view that we and the women we were visiting didn’t belong here at all. It was a misfortune we learned to tolerate.

  Some of Miranda’s sister-inmates looked frightening, born to give and receive punishment. I wouldn’t have been as resilient as she was. To conduct a conversation in the visitors’ room, we sometimes had to double down and concentrate hard to shut out exchanges between people on our table. Blame, threats, abuse, with ‘fuck’ and its variants at every turn. But there were always couples who mutely held hands, and stared at each other. I guessed they were in shock. When the session was over, I felt bad about my little surge of joy as I stepped outside into the clean London air of personal freedom.

  For the final week of Miranda’s incarceration, I travelled to Ipswich and slept on the living-room sofa of an old school friend. It was the time of an exceptional Indian summer. I drove the fifteen miles each late afternoon to the open prison. By the time I arrived, Miranda would be finishing work. We sat on the grass in the shade by the reeds of a choked-up ornamental pond. Here, it was easy to forget that she wasn’t free. Her weekly calls with Mark had continued over the months and she worried desperately about him. He was closing up, he was slipping away from her. She was convinced that Adam had helped bring the case against her in order to ruin her adoption prospects. He was always jealous of Mark, she insisted. Adam was not designed to understand what it was, to love a child. The concept of play was alien to him. I was sceptical, but I heard her out and didn’t argue, not at this stage. I understood her bitterness. My unspoken view, which she would not have liked, was that Adam was designed for goodness and truth. He would be incapable of executing a cynical plan.

  Our appeal was delayed, partly because of illness, partly because the adoption agency was being radically reorganised. It wasn’t until Miranda was moved from Holloway that the process officially began. There was a chance we could persuade the authorities that her criminal record was not relevant to the care she could provide. We had a good testimonial from Jasmin. During the summer, I was drawn into the kind of labyrinthine bureaucracy I would have associated with the declining Ottoman Empire. It depressed me to hear that Mark had behavioural problems. Tantrums, bed-wetting, general naughtiness. According to Jasmin, he had been teased and bullied. He no longer danced or flitted about. There was no talk of princesses. I didn’t pass this on to Miranda.

  She’d been consulting local maps and had a clear idea of what she wanted on her first day of freedom. The morning I collected her, the weather was beginning to turn and a cool strong wind was blowing from the east. We drove to Manningtree, parked in a lay-by and set out on the raised footpath that follows the tidal River Stour to the sea. The weather hardly mattered. What she had wanted and found was open space and a big sky. It was low tide and the vast mudflats sparkled in intermittent sunshine. Tiny bright clouds raced across a deep blue sky. Miranda skipped along the dyke and kept punching the air. We walked six miles before lunch, which I’d prepared as a picnic, at her request. To eat it we needed to get out of the wind. We came away from the river to shelter against a barn of corrugated iron, with a view of coils of rusting barbed wire partially submerged in beds of nettles. But that didn’t matter. She was joyful, animated, full of plans. I’d been keeping it from her as a surprise, and now I told her that during her time inside I’d saved almost £1,000. She was impressed, delighted, and she hugged and kissed me. Then, she was suddenly serious.

  ‘I loathe him. I hate him. I want him out of the flat.’

  Adam remained concealed in the cupboard in the hall, just as we had left him, following the deed. I hadn’t carried out his final request. He was too heavy and awkward for me to lift alone and I didn’t want to ask for help. I felt both guilt and resentment and tried not to think about him.

  The wind shook the barn’s roof and made a booming sound. I took her hand and made my promise. ‘We’ll do it,’ I said. ‘As soon as we’re home.’

  But we didn’t, not immediately. When we arrived home, there was a letter for us on the doormat. It was an apology for the slowness of the appeal process. Our case was under further review, and we would hear a decision very soon. Jasmin – very much on our side – sent a neutral note. She didn’t want to get our hopes up. Over the months, it had sometimes seemed to go our way, other times, it looked like a lost cause. Against us: it was bureaucratically inefficient to make an exception to the rule – a criminal record nullified an adoption request. For us: Jasmin’s reference, our heartfelt statements, and Mark’s love for Miranda. I hadn’t yet made it into his cast of significant adults.

  We were man and wife, together again in our own strange alignment of two tiny flats. We were in a mood to celebrate. What were we doing, eating dry cheese sandwiches by a collapsing barn when here we had wine, lovemaking, and a chicken to defrost? The day after we came back, we had friends round for a homecoming party. The next day we spent sleeping then clearing up and sleeping again. The day after that, I set about earning some money, though with minimal success. Miranda put her academic work in order and went to the university to re-register for her course.

  Her freedom still amazed her; privacy and relative silence, and small things, like walking from one room to another, opening her wardrobe to find her clothes, going to the fridge to take what she wanted, stepping unchallenged into the street. An afternoon with the college bureaucracy diminished the elation somewhat. By the next morning, she was beginning to feel back in the world and the inert presence in the hallway cupboard oppressed her, just as it had in prospect. She said that whenever she passed near, she felt a radioactive presence. I understood. I sometimes felt the same.

  It took half a day on the phone to arrange a visit to the King’s Cross lab. It so happened that my appointment would fall on the day we were expecting the final decision on our appeal. We’d been told we would hear by midday. I rented a van for twenty-four hours. Under my bed, jammed against the skirting board, was the disposable stretcher that came with my purchase. I took it into the garden and dusted it down. Miranda said she didn’t want to be involved in the removal, but there was no way round it. I needed her help carrying him to the van. Before that, I thought that I could get him out of the cupboard unaided and drag him onto the stretcher while she remained in our study, working on an essay.

  When I opened the cupboard door for the first time in nearly a year, I realised that just below the level of conscious expectation, I’d been anticipating a putrefying stench. There was no good reason, I told myself, for my pulse rate to rise as I pulled away the tennis and squash rackets and the first of the coats. Now, his left ear was visible. I stepped back. It wasn’t a murder, this wasn’t a corpse. My visceral repulsion was born of hostility. He had abused our hospitality, betrayed his own declared love, inflicted misery and humiliation on Miranda, loneliness on me and deprivation on Mark. I no longer felt sanguine about the appeal.

  I dragged an old winter coat from across Adam’s shoulders. I could see the dent on the top of his head, beneath the dark hair, which gleamed with artificial life. Next to come away was a skiing jacket. Now his head and shoulders were revealed. It was a relief that his eyes were closed, though I didn’t remember lowering the lids. Here was his dark suit, beneath it, the clean white shirt with rolled button-down collar, as crisp as if he had put it on an hour before. These were his going-away clothes. When he believed he was leaving us to meet his maker.

  A faint scent of refined instrument oil had accumulated in the confined space and, once more, I recalled my father’s sax. How far bebop had travelled, from the wild basements of Manhattan to the stifling constraints of my childhood. Irrelevant. I pulled away a blanket and the last of the coats. Now he was full
y exposed. He sat wedged sideways, with his back to the side of the cupboard, knees drawn up. He resembled a man who had drifted to the bottom of a dry well. Hard not to think he was biding his time. His black shoes shone, the laces were tied, both hands rested in his lap. Had I placed them there? His complexion was unchanged. He looked healthy. In repose, the face was thoughtful rather than cruel.

  I was reluctant to touch him. As I put a hand on his shoulder, I tentatively said his name, and then again, as if I was trying to keep a hostile dog at bay. My plan was to topple him towards me then ease him out of the cupboard onto the stretcher. I cupped my free hand round his neck, which seemed warm to the touch, and pulled him over, onto his side. Before he hit the cupboard floor, I caught him in an awkward embrace. This was a dead weight. The fabric of his suit jacket became bunched up against my face as I lowered him. I got my hands into his armpits and, with immense difficulty and much grunting, twisted him onto his back while dragging him from his confinement. Not easy. The jacket was tight and silky, my grip was poor. The legs remained bent. A form of rigor mortis, perhaps. I thought I might be doing damage but I was beginning not to care. I pulled him out, inches at a time, and rolled him onto the stretcher. I straightened his legs by pushing down on his knees with my foot. For Miranda’s benefit, I covered him, face included, with the blanket.

  Enough magical thought. My attitude now was brisk. I went outside to open up the van doors, then fetched Miranda.

  When she saw the covered form, she shook her head. ‘Looks like a dead body. Better to uncover his face and tell people it’s a mannequin.’