Love and Robotics

by Eyre, Rachael

  Lucas sighed. “She’s mentally deficient like her uncle. I don’t even think she’s mine.”

  It couldn’t have lasted more than two minutes, from her father sneaking his scrubber in to his betrayal. When she grew up and learned what those dreadful words meant, she hated him. If there was any justice in the world her feelings would kill him. She had never told Alfred.

  As fate would have it, it was Gussy who died, leaving her and Marcus with a father who didn’t want them. Marcus moulded himself into a facsimile of Lucas, convinced that way lay love. Gwyn ran away to Chimera whenever she had the chance. It was the only place she could be herself.

  At sixteen she was sure she liked girls and told her handful of friends. They shrugged it off: “How do you know when you haven’t slept with a boy?” Though the idea turned her stomach, she decided she would lose her virginity before the year was out.

  It wasn’t easy. None of the boys on the estate were her class. She’d been friends with them for too long to find them erotic. Perhaps she could go to the club in the village, but they were in awe of her too. How can you make love if your partner’s tugging his forelock?

  Just as she was going to give it up as a bad job, a boy called Niall came to work on the farm. He was well spoken and had been to boarding school. In some lights his slender build and wavy hair were like a girl’s. He spoke boastfully of the places he’d been. The boys listened, entranced. Only Estelle, Gwyn’s oldest ally, was unimpressed.

  “Got a right gob on him, that one. If Lux is so marvellous, why doesn’t he bugger off back there?”

  Gwyn saw what she meant, but he was the one boy who came close to making her feel normal. Her friends had listed the symptoms: “He kisses me and I go weak,” “He looks at me and my tummy backflips.” Maybe it was indigestion.

  Niall watched her confusion, flattered and amused, and took to following her about. “Your stalker’s here,” Estelle would say acidly. Gwyn let him fall into step beside her. Estelle left by the next gate, curls bouncing angrily, and Niall carried on talking.

  After a week he reached for her hand while they were feeding the pigs. She blinked, stammered “Thanks,” and agreed to meet him at the Hanged Man that evening.

  Unsurprisingly her first time was a disaster. She arrived twenty minutes late, making Niall grumble - he’d only booked the room for two hours. They kissed on the bed. She was a head taller so he kept missing and bumping his forehead on her chin. It reminded her of a mother bird retching down her chick’s throat. How could anyone find this pleasurable?

  He started to take his clothes off, making no move to touch her or help her undress. When she saw it, it was difficult to keep a straight face. It had the girth and potency of a pencil. She reached over to touch it. It was cold and squishy, the same texture as mushy peas. However inept her fumblings were, they worked. He pushed inside her and made a few lunges.

  This was her initiation into womanhood? It was boring.

  After what could only have been five minutes, he groaned and collapsed on top of her. She pulled herself out from underneath him. Blood ran down her legs. “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “Home.”

  “Do you want to -”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Perhaps she should have considered his feelings. He clearly wasn’t as experienced as he made out, and leaving him to foot the bill must have hurt his pride. At the time she was disillusioned, angry and sore. The blood flowing between her thighs refused to stop. Though it proved one thing: she was definitely gay.

  The next morning she rose early, determined to speak to Niall before the others got up. She’d make it clear it had only been a one off. There was no reason why they couldn’t be friends.

  She went down to the lake. Niall liked to go there first thing; watching the ducks in flight helped him to think. Instead of a lone figure there was a gang of rough boys from the pub, sharing a bottle of hooch. Niall was in the centre, talking at the top of his voice.

  “I could hardly say no, could I, her being Lord Rusty’s niece? She pins me against the wall, gets her tits out. Ginger pubes, I kid you not!”

  “Ugh!”

  “Get away!”

  “Even worse, her flaps hang out! But, you know, first time I’ve taken a girl’s v-plates. ‘Course, she’s a bit simple, so she thinks I love her -”

  She approached him from behind, fury swelling. Simple. Her father’s favourite descriptive. She tapped Niall on the shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  She punched him in the face, giving him a black eye. When he whined, “It was only a bit of fun,” she gave him another to match, and booted him into the lake.

  “Are you going to tell your cronies you only lasted five seconds?”

  “She’s a bleedin’ firebrand,” one of the boys muttered. She shoved him into the water as well. The rest took to their heels.

  “Fuck off! I’ll set my uncle on you!”

  She shut herself up in her room for the rest of the day. At nineteen ten there was a knock at the door. “Go away!”

  “Gwynnie, I’m worried about you.”

  She let Alfred in. He hovered by the door, taking his hat off and balancing it on his hand.

  “Any reason why you’ve given Niall Perrin two black eyes?”

  She told him everything, including the conversation by the lake. His expression darkened. As she finished he planted his hat back on his head.

  “So I don’t have to let him out of the animal trap? Good.” He went whistling down the landing, gun under his arm.

  After two hours’ penance in the trap, Alfred juggling a scold’s bridle and reading aloud punishments for rumour mongering, Niall was banished from the estate. They never heard from him again.

  Chances were Alfred knew. When Lucas died - about time - she moved in, and he became her guardian. She was convinced he’d asked Vita to show her a good time on her eighteenth. Although their affair burned out within six months, they remained friends.

  She wished she could say the same for her other exes. She’d be looking for love, they’d want an adventure before marriage beckoned. She was a lovely girl, she’d make some lucky woman very happy, it couldn’t be them because they weren’t like that. She knew the script. Which was why Pip bowled her sideways.

  She’d been reading a blood book, wondering if this do at the Palace would ever end, when she saw a girl grinding a cigarette out against the wall. The iconoclasm of the action appealed to her. “You okay there?” she called out of the window.

  The girl looked up. She was wearing an extraordinary dress, woven from gold pieces of string, and her hair was shocking pink. Yet she had brilliant hazel eyes, a pert friendly face and a cracking figure. Hmm, Gwyn thought.

  The girl liked what she saw too. “What’re y’ doin’ out here?” she asked. “Are y’ somebody’s bodyguard?”

  “Hardly,” Gwyn laughed. “Minding my uncle’s pride and joy. He’ll go ballistic if someone nicks it.”

  The girl leant in the window. “What if I’m a bandit?”

  “I’d be sorry to turn you in.”

  Lots of straight women hit on Gwyn. But she sensed this girl’s interest was more than academic. “What’s your name?”

  “Pippa Profitt. One fs, two ts. My ma remembers it as one fanny, two tits.”

  Gwyn wished she hadn’t said that, it made her wet. “Gwyn Wilding.”

  “Oh. Your unc’s -”

  “Uh-huh. Go on, I’ve heard them all. ‘You seem so normal’, etc.”

  “Wasn’t sayin’ that. Y’ look like him.”

  “No beard, let’s hope.”

  “Dunno, y’d suit a nice muzzy.”

  By the time Alfred and Josh came over, they had been talking an hour. “Won’t they miss you in there?” she asked.

  “Doubt it. I’m just makin’ up numbers. This is much more fun.”

  She’d scribbled her number in eye pencil and stuck it in the window. Gwyn’s gaze kept drifting to it as she dr
ove back. She ignored her Auntie Elaine’s mantra about calling the next day - just as, three days later, she had gone down on Pip in the old picture house in Lux.

  She was used to girls sneaking around like they didn’t want to be seen with her. Pip kissed her and held her hand on a crowded street. She was used to doing all the work in bed. Pip conducted a symphony with her fingers and tongue. Four months into the relationship, she couldn’t deny it: she, Gwyn Wilding, was besotted. She was considering moving out and starting up her own garage.

  Pip was practical as always. “Y’ can’t just set up shop. Y’ need a business degree, backers.”

  After an afternoon poring over every brochure in existence, Gwyn opted for Lowe University. Not only did it boast the best business school in the country, it was decidedly liberal. It was the first university with a robot professor.

  “Don’t tell Grizzly, he’ll have kittens,” she said. Pip didn’t seem convinced.

  Lowe was everything she could have asked for. Bar the odd prat with a chip on her shoulder, nobody made fun of her background. In fact, she had a bustling industry in sending Alfred things to autograph. Half her classmates fancied him, which was weird. She divided her time between work and play, earning a good Second. Best of all, Lowe was halfway between Langton and Lux, so if she wasn’t running up to Chimera, she was going down to see Pip. She missed Alfred horribly when he was travelling, but enjoyed receiving silly postcards from wherever he happened to be that day.

  She was young and in love, and wanted the world to share her good fortune. She was about to have a very rude awakening.

  The worst day of her life started with a bang. She’d always been sensitive to noises; the sound of an immaculately kept vehicle was her favourite. She would know Trudy, Alfred’s vix, anywhere. Her low purr made Gwyn think of a chain smoking temptress.

  As it pulled into the college forecourt, her heart raced. She went to the window. Even before she’d checked she knew Glover couldn’t be driving. Grit confettied the kitchen windows. The flower bed had been totalled.

  “Nanny!” She hurried downstairs before the porters had her arrested.

  Nanny was Nanny: unrepentant and affectionate, decked in mouldering furs. “Somebody else wants you,” she said, once she’d laid off smothering her in lipstick.

  Of course she knew about Nick. Cora’s confession had made international headlines. Still, she wasn’t prepared to find Alfred gaunt and yellow in a wheelchair. Looking down at him, a novelty in itself, she realised for the first time he was mortal.

  “Not very pretty, eh?” He’d seen her dismay. “Give us a hug.” Thankfully his smell - tobacco, cologne - was the same.

  She’d wanted to show them more of Lowe, but Alfred was anxious to get home. Nanny didn’t argue. Was he worse than she thought? His last few letters had been vague, as though they were written in code. It annoyed her. He used to tell her everything.

  Though Nanny rabbited all the way home, she was only half listening. She kept glancing into the mirror, where she could see him dozing in the back. After a skilled game of doubles, she and Nanny caught each other out.

  “Is he alright?”

  Nanny shrugged. “Just needs some rest, but he’s that stubborn. D’you know what I found him doing at two in the morning? Tuning the piano!”

  “He looks dreadful.”

  “He seems happy enough. Probably ‘cause - ” A most unNannyish discretion stopped her mouth. “You won’t hear it from me.”

  Gwyn’s imagination veered from one scenario to the next. A foreign gigolo? She couldn’t think what else could involve this much secrecy. One of his dodgier exes, like Ramon Cazalet? She’d thought Nanny called him a guerrilla because he was so hairy.

  “How come y’ didn’t know?” Pip asked afterwards. “Everyone else did.”

  Perhaps that was why she reacted so badly. She hated being the last to know.

  The first few hours were a reunion with Chimera. She put her room back the way she liked it, patted and talked to her horse Bess, wandered in the grounds. That tree root was where she once stumbled and cracked her skull, this gargoyle where she’d learned to spit. She always had the impression that if she sat in the shade for long enough, she would see ghosts - her grandparents, perhaps, or her mum and Uncle Ken. Never Lucas.

  She knew she was procrastinating. She was itching to have a look at Trudy - the breathlessness had a spot of catarrh. Changing into her overalls and shoving her hair beneath a cap, she went in search of the vix. Halfway there she crashed into Josh. There was an awkward dance of apology.

  He seemed very agitated. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were coming back today - ”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, not too rudely.

  “I’ve been staying, you see -”

  “Nobody said anything to me.”

  At the time she’d assumed Alfred had let him stay out of good manners, and grown bored with him. He’d been known to forget someone was staying and ask over the top of his paper, “Sorry, who are you again?” So because she was in love, and wanted everyone to share in her joy, she said, “We’ve never talked, have we? Why don’t you lend us a hand?”

  He walked with her down the drive and helped give Trudy her treatment. It wasn’t the ordeal she’d expected. He was useful and could commit things to memory, she knew, but going away had given him something to talk about. He even made her laugh.

  “That’s a nice shirt,” she said early on. “You don’t want to mess it up.”

  He hung it over a nearby tree. Here was proof she was as gay as a kite. The most desirable man on the planet was stretching in front of her, shirtless, and she didn’t so much as shiver.

  They had been working for two hours, swapping spanners and anecdotes, the network playing full blast, when something creaked over the pebbles. Alfred in his wheelchair, getting cross as the wheels stuck. She couldn’t see very well - she had her head in Trudy’s belly - but Josh dropped his screwdriver and went to help.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Helping Gwyn with Trudy. You?”

  “These damned exercises. I don’t think they’re doing any good.”

  “You look thirsty. I’ll get drinks.”

  Josh was there and back in minutes, bearing a pitcher of lemonade. He had footstools under his spare arm so he and Gwyn could sit. She took her drink unwillingly, only to find herself knocking it back.

  “This is great! What’s your secret?”

  “I’d have to kill you first,” he grinned.

  Since when did Josh make jokes? Had his last recalibration given him a sense of humour? She was about to smile, laugh - and stopped dead. Although he was on a stool, and Alfred in his chair, there was barely three feet between them.

  As Josh rubbed the back of his neck, pushed back his hair, Alfred watched him. Not like somebody yearning for something they would never have, though that would be shocking enough. Like somebody who knew and cherished every inch of him. Josh met his eye and teased him - encouraged him.

  Bile rose in her mouth. She couldn’t be seeing this. It wasn’t, he couldn’t -

  “Gwynnie, are you alright?”

  Experience had taught her never to confront anyone before she had evidence. There might be an innocent, logical explanation - though neither were adjectives you associated with Alfred.

  That night, and the nights that followed, she built up her stock of information. They slept apart, but in every other respect, they were united. If Alfred told a story, Josh chipped in - not to interrupt, but to overlap, and sometimes take over the honours. They sat together at meal times, shared glances full of meaning. They walked together, read together, laboured through the hated exercises. The time Alfred overbalanced out of his chair and landed flat on the drive, he wouldn’t let anyone else near him, just Josh.

  She passed by the library half an hour later. The door was ajar, she wasn’t spying. Alfred was sitting on the chaise longue, weeping with pain, while Josh picked stones from hi
s leg. When the job was done, the artificial kissed his knee and laid his head against it.

  Alfred’s expression affected her powerfully. She recognised it because she’d worn it herself. It was worse than any unnatural lust could be.

  If she hadn’t known it was impossible, she would have sworn it was love.

  Satellite

  Josh knew his absence had been noted. It was like that game where you tried not to blink. CER didn’t want to be first to relent, and he certainly wouldn’t. He’d already done the unthinkable; He was willing to go further. What if he never went home again?

  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like the answer. He’d go to Ozols and confess. Alfred and I are in love. She had to be sympathetic, with all those romance magazines stuffed down the back of her couch. She could swap him with a pre-programmed copy. No one need ever know.