A day later Vi provided them with a transcript of what they’d said in each of the conversations they’d filmed in Jacob’s office, and Jill was irritated by this (was this Vi’s way of telling them to make certain that their claims matched up with what they really felt?) until she recalled that they were going to be filming all three conversations again in her own office, with the camera focusing on Jill’s face this time. They had to make an effort to get the conversations in sync. If she or Jacob couldn’t “get hold” of each other in their separate bases they were to put headphones on and reengage in the conversation, responding to each other’s words, saying their own parts as they remembered them.
—
JACOB PHONED her when he and Vi arrived at the prison where she worked. The timing was inconvenient because Jill had just made accidental eye contact with the governor of the prison and had done what she usually did when that happened—she’d walked around the nearest corner to hide. She was well aware that the governor thought she was useless. Not Jill as an individual, necessarily, but her role within the framework of the prison. “Letting young offenders have half an hour a week tapping out fuchsia landscapes on a chromatic typewriter doesn’t really do much toward turning them into better citizens, does it?” Not a fair summation of her work, but getting on with her job was Jill’s only answer, amiable until some bureaucratic roadblock popped up. And once it had been dealt with she was a nice person once more, even nicer than before. She and Jacob repeated their three conversations for the camera and then she went back to work.
Jill knew what all the boys had done, or as much as they would admit to, anyway. They all received treatment; they could talk to her as long as they tried to say what was true for them. Everything they said was recorded, and her office door stayed open whenever a boy was in there with her. There was a guard at the door too, just in case, but problems between her and the boys were infrequent. Many of them called her “Miss,” quite tenderly—Tell me if anyone’s rude to you, Miss. Just tell me his name, yeah?—as if she was their favorite teacher at school. She had hope for them, even though the things they told her made her shake like a jellyfish when she got a moment in her office alone.
Ben and Solomon were the two boys whose progress she dwelled on the most, and they came to see her that afternoon, one after the other. Ben was deeply introverted, coping relatively well with his incarceration and mostly harmless—if only she could get him to express some, or any, emotion to her so that she could confirm or revise these impressions of his coping and his harmlessness. He had language and could understand everything that was said to him, but his introversion was so deep that he often looked as if he no longer knew whether he’d spoken aloud or not; he was irked when she pressed him to answer her questions: I already answered, Miss . . .
A phone had recently been discovered in Ben’s cell; there were no incoming or outgoing calls or messages recorded on it. Nobody could explain how Ben had come by the phone but it was easy to tell how long he’d had it because the photo album was full of selfies he’d taken. He posed in exactly the same way in each one, fingers held up in a peace sign. Only the backgrounds were different. He favored empty rooms and, occasionally, the backdrop of two or more of his fellow inmates doing their best to bash each other’s heads in.
—
SOLOMON WAS MUCH more communicative with her, but that didn’t mean she understood him any better. His record was something of a puzzle in that he’d only turned to a life of crime relatively recently. For the first fifteen years of his life his record was spotless, then one day he’d approached a gang whose members had been torturing him on and off, joined, and became their leader. His explanation of the change he’d made: “It was time.”
Jill was aware that Solomon’s younger brother had been struggling with illness for years, and that the brother’s brain tumor had gone into remission when Solomon was thirteen. The beginning of Solomon’s career of criminal violence coincided—if you could really call that a coincidence—with doctors detecting a recurrence of cancerous cells in his brother’s brain. This made Jill afraid for Solomon, and afraid of him too. He admitted to wanting to help his brother, but would say nothing more about it. He was like a boy in a fairy tale; there was a set of steps he was to follow with no concession whatsoever as to how others viewed his actions. Then at the end of it all there’d be a reward. Solomon had just heard from his family—his brother’s cancer was back in remission. But the young man showed no relief; the news only deepened the look of concentration in his eyes. This is what Jill saw when she tried to see life Solomon’s way: Your brother had been selected at random and hurt, so by selecting others at random and hurting them, you won relief for your brother. If that’s how it was then Solomon would eventually be compelled to select one more person at random and kill them so that his brother could live. Much of what she said to him was mere diversion, her attempt to knock down the tower of logic he was building. Sometimes she thought it was working. Sometimes he cried when she made him realize a little of what he was doing. He wasn’t a sniffler so the tapes didn’t catch his remorse. And when she asked herself whether she’d support a recommendation for his early release a year from now, she very much doubted being able to do that. For a while he would hate his false friend Doctor Akkerman, obsess, fixate, and possibly decide that the life he’d take for his brother’s sake should be hers. She was only 100 percent sure of these things, and had no clear idea of how far the boy’s attempt would progress before he was restrained or what injuries would be sustained. Perhaps none, perhaps none . . .
Still, it was Jill’s duty to mention this likelihood, and she’d do so in her reports closer to the time.
“Have a good holiday, Doctor Akkerman,” Solomon said at the end of their session. The only boy to acknowledge they wouldn’t be seeing each other for the next two weeks.
—
JILL TOOK HER suitcase over to the Catford flat and slept there the night before Presence was due to begin. Jacob wasn’t dead to her yet, so they played at a long-distance love affair over the phone. Jill had Radha and Myrna’s permission to take down any images that might interfere with Jacob’s presence, so as she talked to her husband she walked around the flat dropping pictures of the intimidatingly photogenic couple and their puppet and human friends (hard to tell which was which) into a jewelry box. She heard no echoes of Max’s ranting or her own frenzied screeching, and when she went into the bedroom where she’d slept so that she wasn’t tempted to injure Max in the night she found it full of small stages. Some cardboard, some wood and textile, and there were silky screens for casting shadows through too. “Looks like only playfights are allowed in here now,” Jill said to Jacob, and then, as she opened the fridge and took note of its being crammed with bottles full of something called “Kofola”: “I was thinking—won’t it be easier for you to get hold of my presence over there than it will be for me to get hold of yours over here? You’ve never been here.”
“I’m curious about that too,” Jacob said. “People who end up using Presence may need to be able to travel with it, use it in a new house, and so on . . .”
Two minutes until midnight. She looked around at the pale blue walls, then out of the window and into the communal garden; there was a night breeze, and the flowers were wide-awake.
“Is there a button I press to . . . activate or something?”
“Vi’s going to start it remotely.”
“For both of us?”
“Yes . . . goodnight, J.”
“Goodnight.”
She drew the curtains, switched off the lights, and was knocked down onto the bed by a wave of darkness so utter her eyes couldn’t adjust to it. It felt as if she’d fainted . . . that was what she liked about fainting, the restful darkness that bathed your eyelids. After what felt like an hour (or two?) she held her phone up to her face to check the time, still couldn’t see anything, and decided she might as well just slee
p.
—
SHE WOKE UP feeling chilly; her feet were sticking out from under the covers. A head had been resting on the pillow beside hers—all the indentation marks were there. She picked up her notepad and wrote that down. Even though she’d made the marks herself they contributed to a sense of not having slept alone. It was twelve-thirty, the latest she’d woken up in a while, and the room temperature was unusual for an early afternoon in July. She checked the thermometer and wrote the temperature down. Low, but it felt even lower. She put two jumpers on, made tea, plugged headphones in, and called up the first recorded conversation on her computer screen. There was Jacob, smiling at her, speaking. At a much lower pitch she heard her voice answering his: “Your singing makes it cheesy. I love that song . . .” There were strings of words that she remembered in the correct order, and she tried to say them before her recorded voice did, but the cold threw her off balance and she was left just listening and watching instead of participating. She added that observation to the others in her notepad.
—
A VISIT TO HER greenhouse in Sevenoaks yielded a discovery: She hadn’t woken up at twelve-thirty. Twelve-thirty was still two hours away. When she checked her phone on the train the time changed, and she asked five other overground passengers, six . . . Yes, yes, it really is ten-thirty. Sam and Lena were at the greenhouse, tending to the tea plants beneath swiveling lamps. They were wearing matching floral-print wellies and Sam preempted her derision: “Yeah I know, we deserve each other.”
Jill hesitated before she told them about Presence. What if they said Jacob? Who’s Jacob? or reminded her in voices full of pity that Jacob had been “gone” for months now? She couldn’t be confident in what she said to them when she’d just stepped out of an icebox into a sunny July day and the time outside wasn’t the same as the time in her flat. Well, they were her friends. If at all possible your friends have a right to be notified when you’ve downright lost it. But it seemed she was still sane. Lena and Sam had a lot of questions, Lena kept checking her pupils, and they both wanted to come over to the flat and verify her experience. Lena was most intrigued by the wall clocks
(“They all read twelve-thirty? Did you hear them ticking?
“Come to think of it, no—no ticking.”)
and Sam wondered about the cold.
“Talk to Jacob . . . maybe he’ll test the next phase on you two . . .” They said they’d like that. She didn’t think she’d told them anything that made Presence seem like good fun, so it was most likely that they were just being supportive. Sam gave her a pouchful of Assam leaves: “Let me know what you think . . .” On the way home she stopped at a supermarket and bought winter groceries. Lemsip, hot chocolate, ingredients for soup and for hot toddies. She put it all through self-checkout so she wouldn’t have to make any small talk about summer colds. Then, wondering how Jacob was doing, she checked their joint account and saw that he’d made a card payment at a Waitrose about an hour ago, for more or less the same amount as she’d just spent. She wouldn’t mention this in her notes; it was cheating. She shouldn’t be able to guess whether or not he was cold too.
—
SHE’D FORGOTTEN to lock the front door. Just like waking up at twelve-thirty, it’d been years since she’d last done that. People told horror stories about Catford but she would’ve been more worried about going in if it was the Holland Park front door she’d forgotten to lock. The stakes were higher over there. She dumped her shopping bags in the kitchen and went back to the front door, locking it behind her with exaggerated care. Jacob came out of the room filled with puppet stages and looked around him, nodding. “Not bad,” he said. According to the clock just above his head it was still twelve-thirty. He took a step toward her and she took a step back.
“What are you doing here?”
“Why are you shivering?” he asked back.
“Er, because it’s bloody cold in here?”
He held out his hand for her to touch; he was warm, and she closed both her hands around his palm. He winced, removed his hand from hers, and brought her two more jumpers to put on. He didn’t need to be told where to find the jumpers. She went back into the kitchen, found her notepad, and made a note of that. Then she put the kettle on, and Jacob asked if he should do the same with the central heating.
“Yes please.” She measured tea into a teapot, put the shopping away in the cupboards. The tea brewed and then she and Jacob sat down in the living room, he took a couple of sips and said: “Remind me how this is superior to a nice cup of Tetley?”
She couldn’t really taste the tea herself. She was sweating, and Jacob wasn’t. He was comfortable, right at home. She took a jumper off, to see if she’d feel the cold less that way. Putting on jumpers and turning on the heating only seemed to increase the cold. When she looked at Jacob from the side she could see that he wasn’t her husband. He had no shadow and he didn’t smell like her husband—he didn’t smell of anything—he was warm and he could drink tea and be snarky about the tea, and perhaps she would’ve been more willing to keep him around if he’d been shadowless but smelled right. But the way things were she was too conscious of this person not really being Jacob.
“Sorry, but I think you’d better go,” she said, checking her watch for some reason. It’s twelve-thirty, time for you to go.
He set his cup down on the coffee table. “OK. But if you tell me to leave I won’t come back.”
She patted his knee. “That’s fine. Thanks for understanding.”
He stood up, and so did she. “I’m leaving, but everything that’s between us will stay.”
She couldn’t help laughing at that. “You’re so soppy, Jacob.”
He laughed too, then put an abrupt brake on the laughter. “I didn’t mean it in a soppy way.”
“Er . . . OK . . . Bye . . .”
“Good to see you,” he said, and left the room. She stayed still for hundreds of heartbeats and thousands of shivers but didn’t hear the front door open or close. At twelve-thirty she got up and made sure that he was gone, then she recorded the entire encounter in her notebook and broke a rule of the test by phoning Jacob. If you tell me to leave I won’t come back, now that she thought about it she didn’t like the sound of that. Jacob took a long time to answer the phone; she’d almost given up when his voice came down the line: “J?”
“Jacob! Are you OK?”
“Yeah . . . you?”
“Fine, just . . . Have you seen me at home yet?”
“No. Not yet,” he said. Something else had happened. He’d gone out for a bit and come back to find the front door open (she bit her lip so that she didn’t interrupt him) and an intruder in the hall. Some old black guy talking at him in Portuguese, begging forgiveness for something.
“Did you call the police?”
Jacob was silent.
“You didn’t call the police, Jacob?”
He thought the intruder might have been his dad. “You know, my bio dad. I got him to slow down and he seemed to be talking about how I’d weighed on his conscience.”
“Interesting. Is he still there with you?”
“Nah . . . once I realized who he was or might be or whatever, I told him to get the fuck out. And guess what he said—”
“He said, ‘OK, but if you tell me to leave I won’t come back’?”
“And I said, ‘Well, you’d best not!’”
“And then he said, ‘I’m leaving, but everything that’s between us will stay’?”
“No, he didn’t say that. And hang on, how did you . . .”
Jacob’s voice fizzed and wavered, stopped altogether, and was replaced by a smoother, happier version. Audio of the second conversation they’d filmed.
“To be honest, Jill, I didn’t think you were going to get adopted. You played too many mind games with the people who tried to take you on . . . when you were together
in public you’d act all cowed and hurry to do everything they said, acting as if they beat you at home. And you didn’t eat at home either, did you?”
“No! I’d stuff my face in school so it looked like I wasn’t getting fed. Looking back I was a scary kid,” Jill said, in perfect time with the recording of her own voice.
“But the Akkermans just kept telling you they really liked you, and even when you pulled stunts like that Sabine would say, ‘Nope, sorry and God help us, but we still really like you,’ and she and Karel wouldn’t eat until you ate . . .”
“So then I’d worry that I’d brought them to the brink of collapse and ended up spoon-feeding them rice, two spoons for each of them and then one for me . . . important to keep your strength up when you’ve got parents to feed . . .”
There was no room to ask what had happened; Jacob had been there on the other end of the line but now he was gone and it was a week ago again. The blue wall in front of her was more pacifying than sky, its color more even. Icicles hung from her nostrils; they were long, thin, and pearly gray . . . Like enchanted spindles, Jill thought, but it was only mucus, so she reached for tissues. She and Jacob were talking about the Wallaces now. Jill had always been sure that Jacob would get adopted. It was just a question of his coming across grown-ups who didn’t try to pull the wool over his eyes: Even the whitest of lies made him act out, and then he was discovered not to be “the right fit.” But along came Greg and Petra Wallace, and it was heartwarmingly weird that a pair of super-white Conservative politicians had fallen for Jacob as hard as they had. It took a long time for their foster son to stop anticipating some hidden motive on their part. Jacob had been wary of being dragged out in public with the parental bodies, wary of a fatherly hand settling on his shoulder while reporters took down remarks like, “Take this hardworking young man . . . a far better role model for our disadvantaged youth than some benefits scrounger . . .” Nothing of the kind ever came to pass, and the Wallaces had shown such steadfast and enthusiastic support of all things Jacob that he (and Jill) had had to give in.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 14
