New Worlds

by Edited By David Garnett

So what should my own daughter do but help me out now and then?

  “You can’t keep a guest stifled all day long,” I reminded her. “He’d become, well...”

  “Stir-crazy,” Paul said unhelpfully. “The isolation from everyday input. He needs to have a good six hours’ experience a day.”

  So Paul was suddenly the expert, who had no guest and would likely never have one?

  Monday to Saturday, Dad’s six hours per day—or longer, ideally!— should obviously occur while I was at home, tele-selling to raise extra income, and while Paul was twenty miles away in the neighbouring Smooth at the Jaguar showroom, smiling, smiling at potential customers for those big sleek lux cars, secretly detesting his clients for their affluence; but he was a superb salesman. After a day of feigning and fawning, the last thing he wanted was to share the evening with my Dad.

  We were contented, I suppose. We were surviving—and Miranda was our treasure, quite as much as our painfully accumulating investments. Just, we no longer felt at all young. Maybe this was true of the majority of people like us. Having Dad in my head didn’t help.

  “I’ll do it tomorrow,” promised Miranda.

  I would have to postpone a certain matter. And count my blessings—mainly the blessing of a daughter who was at least willing to share my duty.

  I was determined that when I grew old and infirm I would never impose myself upon Miranda, nor let Paul do so, either. That day was a long way off. If our investments proved inadequate, maybe Miranda might be wealthy enough to pay for our dotage.

  “Tomorrow will be fine, darling.”

  Paul shivered. In his salesman’s suit and striped shirt and Jaguar-crest tie, he was feeling chilly.

  He didn’t ask what I’d hoped to be doing today, and now instead would do tomorrow, unencumbered of Dad. If asked, I had intended to say that after lunch I would bundle myself up and walk to the park, to the hothouses, where entry was still free. I’d be losing potential sales, but I ached to see orchids in bloom, and be warm, and on my own. Yet if I had Dad in my head I would feel obliged to share the beauty with him, since sitting in on tele-sales could hardly be very exciting for him as his usual recreation.

  I wasn’t intending to go to the park at all.

  The car showroom provided a sort of hothouse for Paul every day, though only polished metal was on display. For the sake of the customers the showroom needed to be kept considerably warmer during the winter than our own little terraced house.

  It was time for Paul to put on his overcoat and rush to catch the bus. Likewise, in another quarter of an hour, Miranda. Dad was stirring. He liked to see his granddaughter off to school. Paul, he could miss. Paul could miss him.

  ~ * ~

  My watch had a time-tally function so that I could be sure Dad enjoyed at least six hours of liberty. If I went to the toilet or when I was getting washed I would of course suppress him. The temptation, then, was to leave him dormant for longer than need be.

  As I settled in front of my as-yet-blank screen, with Dad alert inside me, I announced, “Miranda has swimming heats this afternoon.”

  Oh I’d love to see those.

  “I shan’t see them, either.”

  I heard him as a voice inside me. For him to hear me, I needed to speak aloud. Guests didn’t have access to your private thoughts, only to what you saw and said and did. Some hosts must be having a much harder time than me, if the beloved parent was cranky or overbearing. With a fractious parent inside, one might almost feel schizophrenic. Quite frequently I found myself telling myself a highly factual account of who Cath is, and of what’s-what-in-the-world, as a way of affirming my own identity. I’d never yet felt the need to consult a guesting counsellor, even if the service is free.

  At least no guests are downright senile, since a senile mind can’t make the transfer.

  She wouldn’t really want you there, would she? Not because you’d put her off her stroke. But swimming’s her way of being herself. Launching out.

  “I don’t know, Dad, if that’s a cliche or if it’s wisdom.”

  Actually, Cath, it was meant as a joke.

  Poor old Dad. He did try.

  Another day of insurance, eh Cath?

  “What else, Dad?”

  I’m becoming quite an expert in my old age.

  If only Dad had been more of an expert in managing his own affairs in years gone by! I would never say this aloud; and I trusted Paul never to do so either in Dad’s hearing.

  Dad had been a metal sculptor, and quite well regarded in his day. The hot tang of the workshop always lingered in my memory from my childhood, a metallic taste as much as a smell. Evidently Miranda inherited her artistic gifts from Dad, these skipping a generation. During his career Dad had picked up enough commissions to make an adequate living, though never enough for any nest-egg. Back then, most people didn’t realize how single-mindedly they must try to amass capital to pay for future care. And then the arthritis crept up on Dad. After Mum died, he ended up living in a single rented room, which he always proudly insisted was adequate for his diminished needs— until the arthritis worsened.

  Dad: poor, and old.

  His metal-work was expensive to carry out, so he and Mum had put off having their only child until they were a bit long in the tooth, unlike Paul’s parents.

  Penny for your thoughts?

  No, Dad, no.

  Don’t worry about Miranda. She’ll be fine.

  In the swimming pool at school—or in the waters of the future, infested by the piranhas of finance?

  Finally I switched the screen on.

  But first...

  “Dad, I need to take a leak—”

  Which was true. I nudged the time-tally. With an inner impulse which was now second nature, I pushed Dad down to muse in his own memories, disconnected from what I was doing.

  Chilly in the toilet. Not a room to linger in, despite the Breughel posters brightening the walls. The posters were creatively stimulating for Miranda, but a salutary warning for me and Paul. I could identify with those medieval peasants. Lots of clothes, and tight circumstances, hunger and cold and disease hovering not far away if anything went wrong.

  I’d delayed long enough.

  Before inviting Dad back, I called a certain number to apologize to Mrs Appleby, as she called herself: a cheerful, rosy name.

  So sorry, Mrs Appleby. Can’t make it this afternoon. A family problem. Please, will you find someone else? But please, I do want to do it tomorrow.

  Fair enough for Mrs Appleby to point out with a sniff of disapproval that today was to have been my first.. .engagement, as she phrased it.

  Neither of us were on-screen, although we’d inspected each other visually when we made the arrangement four days earlier; and I’d squirted her a swimming-costume photo of myself, taken a couple of years ago. That was when Paul and Miranda and I had enjoyed a discount weekend break at the West Midlands Tropicdome. Miranda revelled in the simulated ocean surf. I delighted in the jungle garden. Paul was happy gambling with tokens, fantasy value only. The dome was a family venue. Mrs Appleby, whose tactfully phrased advertisement I’d discovered on the Web, had seen that I was very much the same trim person as in the photo. Still had my looks. She’d assured me that many married women were in her data-bank.

  A pause, while Mrs Appleby accessed her timetable.

  “Very well, dear. Tomorrow afternoon. Same place: Meridian Hotel. Room 323. Got it? Two o’clock sharp. This one’s a German businessman. Late thirties. Make sure you count your cash. My agency fee’s already included in the room hire, you’ll recall.”

  “Understood, Mrs Appleby.”

  “Enjoy yourself, dear.”

  Would I? An act of neutral lust with a perfect stranger...

  And a German too. Probably he’d be very polite and efficient. Being only in his thirties, he shouldn’t have acquired a gut. He’d be tanned and athletic—superior to whichever Brit I was passing up. Silver linings!

  I keyed for Ins
ure. Then I nudged the time-tally and opened myself once again to Dad, and scrolled the work log.

  The name Viking Industries took my fancy. I was about to call up its business profile when the name went red. One of my telecolleagues somewhere else in the country had got there first.

  ~ * ~

  Four fruitless calls to companies, and I was scanning the profile of a fifth prospect called KhanKorp. Newly registered, importers of spices. No doubt KhanKorp made its own insurance arrangements within the Asian community. Those arrangements might be lax, and fail to comply with all the increasingly elaborate legal requirements.

  Bruce and the spider, Cath...

  Yes, yes, Dad. When Robert the Bruce was hiding in his famous cave, he wrecked a spider’s web again and again, and each time the spider rebuilt it. Moral: persevere.

  In fact, I only needed to persuade half-a-dozen companies a week to accept a full free on-site survey to cover the leasing of the hardware and software from Omega Insurance, the last word in industrial protection. If one of those surveys scored a contract, I was modestly in pocket. This all still took hours and hours of time.

  Spices! Cinnamon and cardamom and fenugreek...

  Dad had loved curries. Gone were the days when he could taste anything at all, except maybe in memory.

  So call KhanKorp up. Request a window for face-to-face. Smile, smile. Recite the spiel.

  Miraculously competitive rates, fully secured reinsurance, the very latest in pollution and radon detectors and hazard sensors as per the most recent Euro regulations. Avoid crippling fines.

  At all costs be friendly. Be careful of the implication of blackmail. (“Ask yourself, sir, what if the Safety Inspectorate should pay a random visit next week?”)

  At least I didn’t need to pump flesh, as Paul must do before showing off the armour plating of Jags and the pollen and particle filters and the in-car voice-addressable terminal and all else.

  ~ * ~

  KhanKorp was another wash-out. The Khan who dealt with me was quite abrupt. Some Chinese name—Chung Hong, or whatever— handled all such matters. A Triad company, perhaps.

  Just then, ring-ring. On-screen flashed a phone icon—to be replaced, as soon as I accepted, by a young woman’s head and shoulders; and my own mini screen-top camera would now be showing me to her, in my black business dress which I wore over thermal underclothes.

  She was quite an item. A freckled red-head. Gold lam jumpsuit. Huge hoop earrings. Letters pulsed in a spidery sunburst logo behind her.

  “Catherine Neville? It’s Denise Stuart at TV-NET. Excusez the interruption, Cath. I’m interviewing professional femmes who have an elderly guest...”

  She would have found my name in the public register of guests and hosts.

  ~ * ~

  I would be paid an adequate disturbance fee. A simple contract replaced Denise’s image and expanded. I scrolled through quickly— and noticed that I was agreeing to Dad being interviewed as well as me. The human interest of this show might not merely be humanitarian—the experience of women who had accepted a mother or father, for the benefit of those contemplating such a step—but tensions, frustrations, regrets, even conflict.

  The fee’s worth having.

  “Hmm,” I mused.

  I shan’t say anything embarrassing. If you don’t like something I say, Cath, just don’t repeat it.

  That could look awkward. Denise asking a leading question, and me fluffing the lines.

  This could lead on to you becoming a counselling consultant or whatnot.

  Could it? Dad was ever-hopeful.

  You’d be good at it.

  I was enough of a “professional femme” to have use of an up-to-date screen, courtesy of Omega. Really successful working women ought to be able to afford a nursing home, unless love and affection prevented them from abandoning their parent to some gerry-barracks run by a fat insurance company. Denise Stuart must be zeroing in upon struggling pro-femmes.

  With mild misgivings, I assented. It was a change from phoning businesses with veiled threats.

  ~ * ~

  “Have you heard, Cath, the Japanese announce they’ll be able to store old folks’ minds in terabyte computers in another two or three years?”

  Was this true?

  She was trying to catch me off balance. To provoke an exclamation of thank God for that.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” was my reply. “If we could load a mind into any old brain, meat or machine, we wouldn’t need to rely on close relatives.”

  “Would you miss being with your daughter, George?”

  I was a metal-sculptor. What a joke to end up as part of a machine myself.

  “Dad says, I was a metal-sculptor...,” I repeated, et cetera.

  “Do you ever feel un peu suffocated in there, George?”

  It could get a bit crowded for my granddaughter when Cath grows old if Miranda has to look after her Mum and Dad and me as well.

  I paraphrased.

  Denise grinned. “Bien! Now you’ve raised a point there, George. We rush into new technology, don’t we just? A senior citizen in care is going to die sooner or later—unless machines keep him ticking over till he reaches the statutory hundred years of age. Ça coute cher! That really costs! And as yet there isn’t any such statutory limit on elderly guests—unless of course the host applies for evacuation for good reason—”

  Evacuation! Mental abortion. Was she trying to scare my Dad?

  “—whereupon there’s nowhere else to put your mind if you’re still under a hundred, George, since your body was already cremated, n’est-ce pas? The way I read the runes, evacuation’s going to become mandatory when guests reach their century. Do you think your Cath will try to do a runner to some Caribbean island, par example, to keep you going? 1 mean, given the experience to date of sharing her head with you.”

  A Caribbean island was such a fantasy.

  You’re trying to cause trouble, Miz Stuart.

  “You’re trying to cause trouble, Denise.”

  “Is that what your Dad says? Vraiment?”

  “You better believe it.”

  Denise was unruffled. “So how about the wisdom-of-the-ancestors stuff, eh Cath? Old folks used to be revered for all their accumulated know-how. I hear that even the Neanderthals kept their old folks on the go, chewing their food for them when things got tough. But, il faut demander, in a world of ever-accelerating change, what use is old wisdom? How much does your Dad contribute daily to your business activities? Does he impede you? What is your business exactly?”

  She asks too many questions. Steamrollering, and showing off.

  I saw the ideal conclusion to this interview, without voiding my fee.

  “Since you ask exactly, Denise, I represent Omega Insurance, popularly known as the last word in industrial protection. For instance, I’ll call you to ask if you know the latest Euro ruling on radiation emissions from electronic equipment such as must litter your studio—”

  “Merci much, Cath! Au revoir.”

  Denise would trim the interview at You’d Better Believe It. Ending on a note of truculence. She would pose the question: are hosts ever fully truthful?

  Well-handled.

  “You helped, Dad.”

  Some aging relatives committed suicide rather than imposing on their children. Doctors always helped out with a painless dose these days.

  To be deprived of your own body! To be a guest on sufferance in the body of your own child who had grown up! To miss out on so much of real life, even if guests could stroll, dreamlike, down memory lane during the hours of the day when they weren’t summoned to see and hear whatever was ongoing. Had Dad chosen the brave option or the cowardly option? It was hard to be sure.

  As the hours passed I persuaded two businesses to accept safety surveys. One was a small manufacturer of anti-vandal paint of their own patent, which had exotic additives. Potentially hazardous.

  ~ * ~

  When Miranda came home from school s
he was flushed as much with satisfaction as from the hard frost outside. As expected, she had won her heats easily. Dad was ever so pleased.

  “I’ll be looking after you all day tomorrow, Grandad,” she told me cheerfully, and him within. She hadn’t forgotten. “All day at school! That’ll make a change, won’t it?”

  You didn’t tell me this, Cath!

  “I didn’t want to disappoint.”

  “Oh Mum, I promised.”

  We’d long since got used to such conversations involving an unheard voice.