by Luke Tredget
‘Looks like a suspiciously even flow to me,’ says Anna, returning to the waterfall. The invisible spray coming from the green water is like tiny cold pinpricks on her face.
‘Apparently it slows to a trickle sometimes,’ says Zahra.
‘Do you think they take numbers off the tally as well? For when couples split up?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s ask them.’
Both of them stare into the pool for a time, the green water giving back wobbling versions of their own faces, until footsteps approach them from behind.
‘You must be Anna,’ says a surprisingly normal-looking man – short, with pink blotchy skin and a narrow face – who is coming at her with his hand raised. ‘I’m Linden. We spoke on the phone.’
He shakes hands with Zahra as well, then leads them to a lift. Zahra asks Linden the question about whether failed couples have their number taken off the Kismet grand total, and Linden explains that the number is removed only when either partner switches off with a new partner.
‘I suppose you don’t know if people have split up otherwise,’ says Zahra.
‘Oh, we know if they’ve split up,’ says Linden. ‘But a significant number get back together. Much more than people seem to realise.’
At the eighteenth floor Linden leads them along the central aisle of an open-plan workspace, which has the same large and kidney-shaped desks as Anna’s old office. The sight and sound of professional normality – the distant trill of someone’s desk phone, the scuttling noise of a fast typer, the background static hum that is to her the very sound of thought – fills Anna with a sudden and profound shame, and she is relieved when the desks give way to an empty, carpeted space. It is unclear what purpose this area serves, but it must be some kind of antechamber or vestibule, for they turn from it into a marble corridor with floor-to-ceiling glass walls on either side. They walk past several grand meeting rooms, and Anna is glad to have accepted Zahra’s offer to come with her, and not to be facing such a formidable corporation on her own. This feeling of advantage is short-lived, and disappears when Linden opens the door to yet another long boardroom, where no fewer than five men in suits are waiting for them.
‘Anna,’ says a baby-faced and American-accented man, who stands up from the centre of the table and comes round to them. He introduces himself as Tim, head of customer relations for Kismet UK, and says that it is a pleasure to meet her, and how sad he is that it’s happening under such unhappy circumstances. Then he directs her to shake hands with each of the other men – Charles from legal, Ramesh from IT and tech, Duncan from communications, and Pablo, who will be taking notes. Anna says hello to each before taking a seat and looking again at this Tim, who is rubbing his hands and appears set to kick things off. She tries to work out his age. He can’t be older than thirty-five, and it is incredible that he has risen to such a senior position. But his being North American helps explain this, as it did with Ingrid; Anna has always felt that New World people move through life at a different pace.
‘Let’s begin, shall we?’ says Tim. ‘I imagine we’re all busy, and that’s why we’re going to make this as simple as possible. We feel terrible about what happened. And embarrassed. We have no knowledge of a breach like this happening before. We had no idea it could happen. But we have made sure that it will never happen again.’ Tim pauses, his eyes locked with Anna’s. There is a slight shine to the skin of his boyish face, which makes her think of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
‘I’m deeply sorry, Anna. I really am. And this apology comes from Raymond himself.’ Linden passes her a printed email from Raymond Chan, addressed to Anna, saying he is shocked and furious at what happened, and has urged the London team to do whatever is necessary to make it up to her. ‘He really is personally invested in this, and that’s why we want to make you a simple offer of reparations, no questions asked. We have considered the case and believe that £30,000 is a generous offer.’
Anna blinks, surprised. It’s more than she expected. She could live for a year for free.
‘No questions asked?’ says Zahra, suspicious.
‘Well,’ says Tim, smiling. ‘Naturally, such a payment would be a settlement. As in, we would consider the matter closed.’
‘You mean I wouldn’t be able to write about it?’
‘Exactly,’ says Tim.
‘Or document it in any recordable format,’ says Linden, at the far end of the long table. He has a black attaché case in front of him, which gives Anna another jolt of shame. ‘The terms of the settlement will prohibit you from discussing the nature or the details of the incident, or corroborating the claims of others.’
‘A gagging order, essentially,’ says Zahra.
‘Call it what you will,’ says Tim, smiling good-naturedly at her. ‘But really we just want this issue closed, so we can all move on. You must agree it’s a generous offer?’
‘No, I don’t agree that it’s generous,’ says Zahra, who told Anna they should negotiate, whatever is offered. ‘This amount is insignificant compared to the profits Kismet makes on any single day. Whereas the damage done to Anna has been colossal. She’s lost her job, her partner, and now her home is at risk. Her mental health was already fragile before the event, which could, from a medical perspective, be described as traumatic.’
‘We appreciate these facts,’ says Tim, with a calming, flat-palmed downward movement, as if he is squashing the air in front of him. ‘And we accept that Kismet is, in part, culpable. This is precisely why we have made such a generous offer. But the bottom line is, from a legal perspective, there’s no case to answer.’
‘In a criminal sense. But we could still launch a civil case, citing corporate negligence.’
‘Absolutely not,’ says the guy to Tim’s right, a bald man that Anna thinks was the one from legal. ‘The possibility of this hack wasn’t known during our last technology audit, which was only six months ago. No court would find us negligent for not protecting against a technology that we didn’t know existed.’
Zahra accepts this coolly, lifting her eyebrows as if to suggest he shouldn’t be so sure. Then she resumes her argument along a different tack: she speaks of Anna’s profession as a journalist, and her links with major newspapers and broadcasters.
‘She could easily spin this into a series of articles, even a book. Imagine the potential damage.’
‘With respect,’ says the man from communications, ‘you’re overstating the reputational risk of such a story.’
‘This offer really is generous,’ says Tim again, as friendly as he has been throughout. ‘And, in addition, we’re willing to add free use of the service, for as long as it takes Anna to sign off again.’
‘You think she wants to go back on Kismet after what happened?’
‘This won’t happen again,’ says the Asian guy from the technical team. ‘If that’s what you’re worried about. We’ve tripled the firewall for this kind of attack.’
Tim smiles at Anna again, and seems keen to demonstrate more sensitivity to her mindset.
‘I know it will take time,’ he says. ‘It could be several months before you feel comfortable going online again. But you shouldn’t let this creep stand in the way of getting what you really want. His little test didn’t prove anything.’
‘You don’t think it proved anything?’ says Anna.
‘Of course not. One-off examples are baseless, since we have always accepted that the matches aren’t perfect anyway; there will always be outliers and surprising results. All he proved is that, in your isolated case, the figure of 62 was perhaps a bit low – it should have been higher, at least in the seventies. Hence why you were susceptible to believing it really was a super-high score.’
‘Right,’ says Anna.
‘And, of course, he proved what a callous individual he is. Did you know he has been a tax avoider for decades? He has spent most of his adult life abroad to avoid paying tax on an inheritance. He was almost jailed for it ten years ago. He slipped away on a tech
nicality that time, but we’re confident we’ll get him for this. Isn’t that right, Linden?’
‘Well … we’re working with police to establish grounds for arrest,’ Linden says.
For the first time there is a crack in Tim’s composure, and he glares at Linden for a second before turning back to Anna.
‘We’ll arrest him, don’t worry. And if he tries to harass you, be sure to let us know. Has he been in contact?’
‘No,’ she lies.
‘Good. Well, let’s hope it stays like that. And you can slowly return to something like a normal life. So …’ He brings his fingers together and looks around the room. ‘I feel like we’re getting close to an agreement. Wouldn’t you say, Anna?’
All the men watch her, and she turns to Zahra; Anna can tell she thinks it’s a good offer, despite her tough talk.
‘It would be good to think about it,’ she says, and they all appear surprised. ‘I am allowed to think about it, right?’
Each man around the table speaks over the others in their eagerness to agree with her, saying, ‘Of course, of course,’ and ‘Take your time.’
Saturday
After the meeting at Kismet Anna suggested they go to a cafe to debrief, but Zahra was having none of it – she insisted they go to a bar, to celebrate. She ordered a bottle of champagne and wouldn’t stop talking about how good the offer was, and how she thought they could squeeze them for even more. She wanted to go for dinner as well, but Anna didn’t want to carry on drinking; she said she felt tired and went home. When she got there she changed into lounge pants and a hoodie, which she continued wearing for the next three days.
During this time she didn’t say a word to anyone, other than a brief salutation to the man in the corner shop and the delivery boy who brought her a pizza. But keeping herself cooped up wasn’t due to apathy and depression, or not exclusively. She actually felt okay on Thursday and Friday, in comparison to previous weeks. And on Saturday, there is even a moment when she feels happy: as she steps out of the shower, she is captivated by the sight of the bathroom window. It gives on to David’s overgrown garden, the red-brick house beyond and the empty blue sky above, and these are obscured by the mottled glass into glowing banks of colour – green, red and blue – that blur into each other and appear to radiate their own energy, like an electrified Rothko painting. The fact that she can appreciate this proves that her brain still retains the potential for pleasure and happiness; perhaps this modicum of calm will grow, day by day, until her sadness is blotted out and relegated to being a mere memory. But just an hour or so later, something equally random – the sound of workmen drilling a few streets away, which she had already decided was the most lonely sound in the world – sends her mood into a nosedive, which turns into a tailspin when she unwittingly glances at the blue squiggle on the calendar. The fleeting moment of happiness was simply an illusion caused by the higher dose of Zoloft the doctor prescribed, which is also obscuring the fact that her whole life is going to unravel, is unravelling, has unravelled; Anna can no longer concentrate on mortgage repayment calculations, and has to go and curl up on the sofa and focus on her breathing.
Later in the afternoon, she returns to her computer to find an email from Geoff. She isn’t sure where he is right now, or how he found her email address, though in a weird way she feels that the answers to these two questions are the same. It seems as if he has retreated to an ethereal space where he can watch everything from a safe distance, while also having access to all information; she imagines he has somehow gone into the internet.
It is a long email, perhaps the longest she has ever received from anyone ever, stretching to several thousand words. It is a manifesto as much as a message, a business proposal, written in a hasty, messy and often clunking prose. It begins with his life story, and why he wanted to do this in the first place, how he was always forced to be on the outside of the normal world, never felt included anywhere, and how his ultimate ambition was to tackle the global corporate elite which he feels is the main cause of unhappiness in the world. This turns into a kind of diatribe on why Kismet deserves to be targeted, how they are the worst of the worst, how they are exploiting people’s mental fragility with a calculated mendacity that hasn’t been seen before. He makes reference to psychological papers on ‘confirmation bias’, the series of forums that are full of disgruntled users, all of whom are silenced and paid off by Kismet, and the dubious professional credentials of the ‘statisticians’ who carried out the ‘independent’ research on which Kismet bases its claims. He even makes a lengthy diversion into Freud and the superego.
Reading all this provides the answer to why he wanted her help with the writing, and why he never made it as a journalist: his spelling and grammar are all over the place, and many of his sentences don’t make sense at all.
In the second half of the email he sets out a proposal for the series of articles that they will write together – or, he clarifies, that she will write. It will be a dissection of their time together, their meeting on the South Bank, in Somerset House and beyond, with Anna explaining her thought processes in relation to the number and the psychological theories mentioned above. It will be a journalistic first, someone writing up the findings from an experiment they didn’t know they were part of, that they didn’t know was an experiment.
‘I’m sure the Guardian would bite your hand off for something like this,’ he writes, and says that they could serialise the articles over months to let attention gather, and put Kismet on the back foot. In the meantime, before the series gets picked up, he’s willing to pay her a salary. It is only in the final paragraph that he makes reference to her feelings, and says that he hopes she is okay and that she hasn’t taken the news too badly. He says that he understands if she is still ‘cross’ with him, and if she wants to work together they can ‘archive the sex and romance stuff’, or even just communicate by email.
‘Though that would be a shame, I feel,’ he says, in his closing remark. ‘The truth is I miss you. Regards. Geoff.’
Anna is tempted to write back immediately. Something along the lines of ‘fuck off’. But she doesn’t. She scrolls up and down, marvelling at the spelling mistakes. She remembers what he said about failing his exams and not going to uni and her heart goes out to him for a second. Then she decides to ignore the email and do something else instead, something useful. She begins cleaning the kitchen, but thirty minutes later she is back at her laptop, reading his message again. This time she works through the links he sent, starting with the upset Kismet users in America. Many of the forum posts have links to local news stories, and while none of these repetitive cases is surprising – in fact they are similar to ones she has already read – she does notice something sinister. Someone talks of a Kismet settlement they received and a message they got from Raymond, and Anna sees it is identical to the one she was given just the other day.
Without wanting to, she moves straight on to the academic and psychoanalytic articles that Geoff sent her. She has cheese on toast for dinner, which she eats while reading, and then stays up past midnight, trying to get her head around the id, ego and superego.
On Sunday, despite having planned to spend the day exploring the options that £30,000 would give her for starting a business, going on a round-the-world trip, paying off a chunk of the mortgage, or a combination of all three, she is once again drawn to Geoff’s email. This time she rereads the proposed structure of the articles – their initial meeting, going to Somerset House, spending the night together, their countryside break, deciding to switch off Kismet – and she is able to imagine them as words on a page, columns in a paper or website. She takes her notebook to the sofa and jots down her main memories of each meeting, trying to recall conversations that were especially interesting, or things Geoff did which seemed funny or impressive or attractive. All of the memories are tainted, and she views them as if through a dark smog, but they are not entirely negative. Neural pathways have been created in her mind, so
that even if she isn’t amused by the memory of their wrestling on the bed, or aroused by the idea of taking her clothes off in Somerset House, she nonetheless remembers feeling the feeling, can grasp its shadow, the imprint it left within her. These thoughts give rise to a sudden desire to look at Geoff’s face, to see if he really is as handsome as she remembers, but she has no picture of him. This feels like a terrible shame, regardless of how things turned out. She tries to concentrate her mind on what his face was like, but for some reason the image slides from her mind’s eye; she can remember him only in the act of turning, and his face exists for a flash before sliding away, refusing to stay still and be scrutinised.
As she thinks this her phone, resting on the arm of the sofa, starts ringing with a call from an ‘unknown’ number. She stands up and watches it from the centre of the room, wondering what the chances would be of him calling her right now, at the precise moment she was trying to picture his face. But she realises the odds are probably not that long, since she’s been thinking of him all day, and yesterday too. The phone rings twice, three times, four times. Anna clenches every muscle in her body and grits her teeth, holding herself back from touching it. On the sixth ring, she considers that it might not be Geoff; maybe Pete is trying to call from someone else’s phone, wanting to talk about the money and mortgage arrangements, or even just to see how she is. The phone rings a seventh, then an eighth time, and she senses whoever is on the other end is just as determined to speak to her as she is to resist the call. It rings a ninth, tenth, eleventh time. She stands there watching it.
Wednesday
