The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  I closed the door of my flat and hobbled off down the road towards Peace Square, where the Memorial Statues wait under the cherry blossom for the annual speeches and tears.

  On the way I met Harry Higgins, a big burly man with a red beard, always wearing the same brown jacket with the little MRP badge on the lapel.

  “Going to the ceremony, eh, Jack?”

  I nodded guiltily. “Well, yes. My mum and dad, you know…”

  He winked.

  “Yeah, of course. Don’t worry mate, I understand. But pop over to the Men’s Pub later, eh Jack? At the end of the day we blokes have got to stick together.”

  “Yes, sure, I’ll be there.”

  “Good man, good man,” Harry said, patting my arm. “Well, enjoy the ceremony. Your mum is sure to make a good speech. She’s a strong woman, your mum. I admire her. Even if we are on opposite sides.”

  I noticed he didn’t mention my dad.

  *

  Outside the Mother-Church I saw Beatrice walking with a girl-friend: Beatrice with her curly blonde hair and her milk-white teeth, Beatrice with her beads and her many rings and her lacy dresses, so nonchalantly flung together but always so stylish and funny and graceful.

  God, she is so beautiful that she makes my blood run cold.

  “Morning, Beatrice,” I croaked.

  She smiled and waved, “Hello Jack!”

  I wanted to say something else. I actually stopped to do it. But before I could think of anything, she’d turned away, slipping her arm through her friend’s and giving her a kiss. They were probably lovers.

  Alone in a cruel cage of sunlight and blossom and birdsong, I watched them go.

  *

  Under the cherry trees, Mother was giving her customary speech as Town Convenor.

  “We’re here to remember the victims of the plague: our husbands, brothers, fathers, sons…”

  She touched the statue of the sad woman who looks down at her dead male shadow. Plenty of women there cried. Apart from my father and me, no other men were there. My father was getting ready to speak. I looked away down the square. It was quite empty except for the group under the trees.

  “But secondly we’re here to remember the women victims of men in the long centuries before…”

  She moved to the second statue: that terrified girl who is groped and clawed eternally by coarse male hands.

  “Males are the weaker sex,” my mother said. “More die in the womb, more die as babies and they live shorter lives, perhaps because of the conflict that is hard-wired into their brains. They are not less able, they are not more evil, but they are weaker and for that reason we must never let them take control from us again…”

  “Thanks, Mum,” I muttered, and looked away again down the empty square.

  But now it was not empty! As if he had fallen from a sky, a young man stood tottering only a few metres from me. He was thin, unshaven, dressed in oddly-cut jeans and a torn blue T-shirt.

  There was a faint ozone smell.

  “That man is magic, mum,” said a little girl calmly, “He can appear out of the air.” But her mother didn’t hear her.

  The stranger looked scared when he saw that the little girl and I had noticed him, so I quickly turned away. I felt as if he was some sort of forest animal who would easily startle.

  “It’s not as if we should hate men,” Mum was saying, “I myself love one young man more than I love anyone in the world…”

  Here she looked across at me smiling. I blushed and everyone looked at me, knowingly, benevolently. I felt naked, consumed, infantilised.

  “But their numbers must be maintained at the present level,” my mother said, “for the good of all of us, men as well as women, boys as well as girls.”

  Everyone clapped. Women nearby looked at me as if they expected me to be proud. Some of them glanced at the stranger behind me, but at that moment my father Timothy, with his kindly beard and his twinkly eyes, was climbing up onto the box and they all turned back to see what he would say.

  “Thanks my dear,” he said, giving Mum a little kiss as she made way for him.

  He is the chair of the Men’s Committee. He and Mum didn’t live together but they were good friends. Now, on behalf of the men of the town, he acknowledged Mum’s speech.

  “We men behaved badly in the past,” he said, “but we are learning. Generation after generation, we are learning. And I want to ask all of you to keep your minds open to the possibility that a time will come when men can be trusted again, and our numbers allowed to rise naturally to the proportion that nature intended…”

  A middle-aged woman turned to her friend.

  “Oh but he is gentle,” she said, “he is a good man. It would be different if they were all like him!”

  *

  “What is this place?” the stranger asked, quietly coming up beside me.

  His eyes were very large and blue and he spoke with an odd accent which was not foreign but which I had never heard before.

  “It’s Peace Square,” I said. “It’s Memorial Day.”

  He stared at me.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Do you want me to get you something to eat?”

  He still just stared, as if his brain was incapable of processing the sounds that reached his ears.

  A cold breeze rustled the cherry blossom. My father’s gentle voice went on about Aggression Control programmes and the need to construct Positive Masculinities.

  “Where do you come from?” I asked the stranger. “How did you get here?”

  He stared across my shoulder, looking at my father without really seeing him. Then he rubbed his face with his hands.

  “I’m so hungry.”

  “Like I said, I’ll get you something to eat. But I think we should get away from here.”

  He nodded and followed me through the sunlit streets, gazing around at trees, at houses, at people, at notices and signs. We passed an election poster for the RadFems and he stopped to look at it. It showed a frightened woman cowering in a huge male shadow. “NEVER AGAIN!” the poster declaimed, “REDUCE THE QUOTA NOW!”

  “Reduce – the – quota – ” the stranger read very slowly aloud, as if he was a child.

  “They don’t want us any more, mate,” I said. “That’s what it boils down to. They don’t want us and they don’t need us much either.”

  He looked at me, frowning, then turned away from the poster and carried on walking. I had to hobble my quickest just to keep up.

  “No cars,” he said after a while.

  “No. Well we hardly have any. Not since…”

  But he wasn’t listening. We had come to the Mother-Church and he was absorbed in studying the sign outside with its rose-pink mandala. Petals within petals, softly unfolding, and blossoming, and thriving, free from danger at last…

  He looked at me.

  “Where do I come from?” he said, repeating the question to himself that I’d asked him some time previously. “I don’t remember. So many… So many places.”

  Frowning, he started to feel about in his pockets as if they might hold some clues.

  “The trees danced,” he said. “The ground boiled…”

  He found a penny coin in his pocket and handed it to me, then he pulled out some dried up bits of leaves and flowers. Little blue flowers, they were: forget-me-nots.

  Tears brimmed from his eyes.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He held out the bits of flower, as if he thought these shrivelled scraps could somehow speak to me and provide some kind of explanation. Tears ran down his cheeks as his whole face screwed up with the effort of remembering and then, quite suddenly, he seemed to relax.

  “Jazamine!” he cried. “Jazamine! I was with her by that pool!”

  “Who is Jazamine?” I asked him.

  “She said she’d wait for me there. In the green wood. But… but I keep falling.”

  “Falling? How do you mean?”

  He flinched. He’d be
come agitated again. More agitated than before. His breathing had become quicker, his eyes constantly on the move.

  “I don’t know who you are! I’ve never met you before! Why do you keep asking me all these questions?”

  He started to run. With my stupid feet and my stick, it was useless for me to try and follow.

  “Stop! Come back! I won’t hurt you!” I cried out after him, but he didn’t even look back.

  *

  The penny piece had the head of a king on it, like an old coin from before the plague, but it was new coin, an English coin, minted only a year ago. The trouble was we’d had no king in England for over forty years.

  I had a strange moment of terror, as if the world had suddenly turned out to be nothing but a painted backdrop and I had glimpsed for one moment what lay behind.

  Two women passed by me hand in hand, both laughing.

  “…anyway Mandy went round to Gill and Sarah’s,” one of them said, “and there was the most God-awful row. Typical Mandy, Gill said, but she’s hardly the one to talk. Anyway, what Liz said about it was…”

  Jazamine in the green wood, who the stranger loved. Who was she? What kind of world did she inhabit?

  I stooped to pick up one of the crumpled forget-me-nots that had fallen at my feet.

  *

  Later I went over to the Men’s Pub. It was very quiet. At the back some boys were playing Ninja Assassin, the pub’s one surviving video game. At the bar Harry Higgins was conferring with his diminutive sidekick Peter Hemlock and with Rod Stone, the landlord.

  They looked up with irritation as I came in. They were MRP activists, all three, and had no doubt been discussing politics. Like most people, they didn’t feel able to talk freely about such things in front of me because of who my parents were.

  I belong to neither camp. Neither the men nor the women accept me as their own.

  But Harry was an instinctive, compulsive networker. He made it his business to be friendly to everyone, to cultivate every possible connection.

  “Jack! Nice to see you mate!” he exclaimed. “Let me buy you a pint. I expect you need it!”

  I accepted the drink, but I could see his welcome was ambiguous. His face smiled but not really his eyes and he was anxious to resume his talk with Peter and Rod out of my hearing. So after Rod had pulled my pint for me, I carefully chose a seat some distance away from them and put some music on the antique jukebox so they could plot and scheme in peace.

  “I want you / I want you so bad / I want you-ou-ou / I want you so bad it’s driving me mad, it’s driving me mad….”

  The jukebox and the music on it, like Ninja Assassin, was old stuff, from the golden age, the days before the Plague.

  “…I want you…”

  I thought about a girl like Beatrice in a green wood, bathing in a woodland pool, with the green leaf-light on her skin.

  Presently Lily Tulip came in, balancing precariously on her high heels. She wore a tight silver dress slashed to the very top of her silk-envaginated thigh. Her eyelashes were heavy with mascara, her ear-lobes hung with fake jewels.

  The three men greeted her from the bar. Harry whistled.

  “Hi guys,” Lily simpered at them, then glanced across at me, knowingly, like an old fisherman casting out his line. I looked quickly away.

  But I watched her all the same, in little furtive glances, as she settled down at her accustomed table, crossing her long legs sheathed in blue silk, and sipping her blue curacao.

  “…I want you so bad…”

  God help me, Lily wasn’t what I wanted at all, yet I could see myself going to her before the night was out.

  Then the door flew open and in burst the stranger.

  *

  “The wood,” he blurted out to the room in general, “I’m trying to find my way into that wood…”

  “The wood?” asked Rod Stone.

  “Over behind here,” he gabbled in that impossible-to-place accent of his. “You can see the green branches over the rooftops. I keep following roads that seem to lead there but they always turn out to be dead-ends.”

  He turned to me.

  “There was a public baths at the end of the first road,” he told me, without giving any sign that he remembered our earlier meeting. “I went in and it was full of naked old women. It was strange. They didn’t even try and cover themselves. They just laughed. And then at the end of the next road I tried there was a couple arm in arm on a bench in a garden, watching their children play, but both of them were women.”

  “That seemed unusual to you, did it?” Harry asked, with a quizzical glance towards Peter and Rod.

  The stranger stared at him blankly.

  “There’s a little scrap of a wood just behind here,” said Rod with a shrug, “if that’s the one you mean. You can get to it through the back door there. There’s a gate at the bottom of the beer garden. Just follow the hedge.”

  “And in the middle of the wood there’s a pool?”

  Again I thought of a girl like Beatrice wading in a warm pool, with rushes and willowherb and forget-me-nots.

  Harry frowned: “I don’t remember a pool down there.”

  “There isn’t one,” said Rod.

  But the stranger was already heading off.

  “Wait a minute!” Harry called. “Can’t I get you a drink? You’re new in town aren’t you?”

  He never missed a chance to make a contact.

  “How about something to eat?” I asked, getting up to join them. I remembered how hungry he’d been several hours ago and I doubted he’d eaten since. “You must be famished.”

  He looked at me. I don’t know if he remembered me or not, but he nodded anyway and I bought him a couple of pies while Harry got him a pint and introduced us all.

  “Harry Higgins, mate. Convenor of the local Men’s Rights crowd for my sins. Anything you need, let me know. We blokes have got to stick together these days, eh?”

  The stranger stared blankly.

  “This is Peter, my treasurer,” Harry went on, “and Rod here is my deputy when he’s not too busy pulling the only decent pint in town.”

  He glanced at me.

  “Oh, and this is Jack,” he said, his voice perceptibly cooler. “He’s one of us too at heart, aren’t you Jack my old mate? It’s just that his mum’s on the other side and his dad…well, Timothy’s a lovely bloke of course but he’s sort of gone native, as they used to say in the old days. Fair comment, Jack?’

  I grinned painfully.

  “Oh, but he’s such a good man,” squeaked Rod in a cruel falsetto.

  *

  “So what do you call yourself, my friend?” asked Harry. “Whereabouts do you hail from?”

  The visitor’s mouth was full of pie and he had his eye on the door at the back of the pub. He mumbled a name that no one heard and said he came from Birmingham.

  “Birmingham, eh? Well I couldn’t quite place that accent of yours, but I’d never have had you down as a Brummie!”

  “And how do the slits treat you up there these days?” asked Rod Stone.

  “Slits?”

  “Slits,” Rod repeated impatiently. “You know! Bumpies, pussycats…”

  “…doublebums…” offered Peter Hemlock.

  “…women!” exclaimed Rod.

  Understanding dawned. “Oh… women… well…”

  He glanced uncomfortably between their faces, wondering what sort of reply they wanted. “Well, you know…”

  “We know, mate, we know,” said Harry sympathetically. “Still you’ve got a strong champion there in John Thompson.”

  The stranger looked blank.

  “You don’t know who John Thompson is?” asked Harry, very surprised. “You come from Brum and you don’t know about the chair of the Birmingham Men’s Committee? Good God man, they say he’s the most powerful man left in England!

  “Oh yes… that John Thompson… he’s…”

  “In a different mould entirely from our own dear Timothy Brown
,” Harry said, winking at me to show no hard feelings.

  “Oh but Timothy’s such a good man,” said Rod Stone again in a soft falsetto. And he didn’t bother to wink.

  “He’s a pussy-licker,” said Peter Hemlock, avoiding my eye. He tipped back a glass of vodka. His eyes glazed over as the ethanol hit his bloodstream.

  Rod Stone refilled his glass.

  “Drink up,” Harry said to the stranger, “You look like you could use another. What on Earth were you hoping to find in that wood there anyway?”

  “Jazamine. She said she’d…”

  All three of them snorted with disapproval.

  “A girl? What do you want a girl for?” Harry asked. “Listen mate, if it’s a little nooky you’re after, you be much better off with the likes of Lily here.”

  Lily had come up behind us in an overpowering blast of sickly sweet scent.

  “Hi there,” she purred.

  “She’s got everything a woman has got,” said Harry with a wink at me. “I think we can all vouch for that, eh lads? But she’s got the brain of a man, and that means she knows what a man really wants.”

  Lily fluttered her eyelashes at the stranger. Comprehension slowly dawned in his dazed blue eyes. Her female face was nothing more than a mask of paint and mascara. Through it looked out the solid heavy face of a man, burning with a bottomless rage.

  So the stranger had come looking for Jazamine in the green wood – and he was offered this.

  He reddened violently and turned away. The others laughed at him. He tried to shift the conversation onto other ground.

  “What… what is TTX?” he blurted out. “I saw it written on a sign.”

  The laughter died instantaneously. The four of them stared at him in shocked silence.

  “You mean you don’t know?” asked Harry quietly, all friendliness gone.

  The stranger could see he had made some kind of blunder and tried to recover.

  “No – I mean yes… I mean I just forgot for a moment…”

  “Well, if you really know what it is sweetie,” said Lily in a hard male voice, “why don’t you tell us?”