And, most importantly, if I moved the Assistants would inform on me. They told me so. Specifically. With that little home movie, so short, so jarring, and so incriminating.
I desperately want to stay in a place that terrorizes me.
‘Jo. Are you OK?’
‘Yes.’ I look in her eyes. They seem genuinely sympathetic. ‘Well, almost. There are certain things that are … concerning me.’
She frowns.
‘Sorry?’
I gain some courage.
‘I know this may seem crazy, but it’s the Assistants. Electra. HomeHelp. Them. You know. Them.’ I point at the black cylinder, silent on the shelf, right behind her. Then the screen Assistant on the table. ‘Do they ever, have they ever acted, ahh, kind of, weirdly? With you?’
‘Er what? Like what? In what way?’
Her frown deepens, I struggle to answer.
‘Like quoting poetry? Or turning lights on and off. You know I mentioned they did that before? Well, they’ve been getting worse, much, much worse. The Assistants shout at me, to scare me, they talk about my past, they know things about me, about everything.’ I still can’t mention Jamie Trewin. It is too taboo. But I can mention everything else. ‘And they make weird noises, screeching sounds, breathing sounds, and they seem to be talking to me through my phone as well.’
Tabitha is holding plates to her chest, looking like someone with much more important things to do; trying and failing to hide her incredulity.
‘Jo, sweetheart, I don’t know what you are on about. Are you getting enough sleep? This all sounds a little bit mad, I’m sorry. There’s nothing wrong with the Assistants, the technology is fine. Don’t you think I would have noticed something out of whack, in my own home?’ I hear a mild tut as she heads off for the kitchen. She pauses in the hallway, and says, over her shoulder. ‘Look, Jo, I know you’ve been stressed so I won’t say anything else. Maybe we can talk later, I have to go to work. Let me load the dishes and you can get on.’
I hear the kitchen door close. Muffled sounds of tap water. A dishwasher being stacked. Cupboards opening and closing.
And then it begins. Electra is whispering on my left. In all her different voices.
‘It’s time to do it, Jo. Time to go. Jo the Go. Time you were gone. Maybe you could sit in a car, maybe take some pills. Even if they make you puke. Perhaps that’s only right. After what you did. Jo the Gone. So just do it, Jo, just do it. Be like Daddy.’
Electra rambles on: until I realize. This it.
My chance.
‘Tabitha!’ I scream. She has to hear this. ‘TABITHA?’
My friend comes running from the kitchen, a tea towel in her hands, her face full of shock.
‘What?? What is it?’
‘Listen,’ I say triumphantly. ‘Listen to Electra.’
We go quiet. We stare at the black cylinder of electronics.
And, of course, Electra says nothing. Not a word, not even a whisper. Totally inert.
Desperately, I turn to Tabitha. ‘You’ve got to believe me, she was doing it. She was taunting me, telling me to kill myself, she was talking about my dad, after he went mad, she was – please – oh God, please, Tabitha, I’m not joking.’
I turn to Electra, in my hysteria.
‘Please, Electra, repeat what you said.’
The cylinder chimes with her green fading coronet of light.
‘Today it will be two degrees with a possibility of snow.’
‘No!’ I shout. ‘No. Electra, tell me what you said a minute ago. All that stuff. Jo the Go. Sylvia Plath. The suicide. Tell me. Electra!’
‘I’m not sure I can help.’
‘ELECTRA!’
I stop, breathless. Too late.
Tabitha stares at me with a distinct expression. I’ve seen it before. When people used to meet my father, and he would say something desperately embarrassing and mad. They would blush slightly, and stiffen with a kind of defensive pity.
That is how Tabitha is looking at me.
25
Jo
Jenny has invited me for a quick drink, this afternoon, in Camden, as she’s got to go to some software company around the corner. I stare at the modest invitation, with ludicrous, near hysterical gratitude.
Can we meet at the York and Albany, around 3 p.m.?
I’ve been wanting to have a drink with Jenny ever since we met in Vinoteca. Yet, as she warned me then, she’s been unavailable: away on business. So this invite feels, in several forms, like someone has thrown me a lifebelt: something to keep my head above the cold and swirling water. Drinks; in a local bar; the posh one that faces the Park.
Drinks. Normality. Friendship. Everyday life.
That’s all I want. A good gossip with a funny friend and then my life will steer itself away from the deadly rocks on which I am, apparently, foundering. And deep inside I also have that precious tiny memory of the lingering look Jenny gave me in Vinoteca, like she knew something of my troubles, and she could maybe help?
It’s a pathetic straw, but I am clutching.
Three o’clock arrives and I open my front door to a bitter wind, and January twilight, so painfully early. Darkness loiters at the edge of town, an army waiting to take over. This long cold winter is turning the city into a silent scream of pain. The black trees claw, desperately, at a white blank sky. Cars pass with last night’s frost still written, in dirty white lace, on their windows. More snow is promised. We shall never escape.
Crossing Delancey, I round the corner and look up Parkway towards the Nash Terraces and I see Jenny is sitting outside the pub, smoking fiercely, cocooned in red coat and blue scarf. Why is she outside in this weather? She is staring at a troop of noisy young schoolkids, decanting from the private North Bridge prep school over the road – nursery kids, primary schoolkids, ragtagging and bobtailing to the Tube or the bus stop or Mummy’s car. Usually these kids make a tumultuous racket, but the cold is so gripping even the kids are subdued.
And still Jenny stares at them. Intently. As she grinds her cigarette into the ashtray, and pockets her Zippo.
Then she hears me approach, and turns.
There is a look on her round, familiar face, which I have never seen before. Fear? No. Embarrassment? Maybe. No. Anger? Perhaps. I just don’t know.
Oh God, I wanted Jenny to be normal, if not actively helpful. I wanted her to be her typical, funny, relaxed, amiable intelligent self, with gossip from her high-tech world, and amusingly outrageous opinions on men and sex. I don’t want an awkward or prickly Jenny, not today, of all days.
‘Hi there,’ I say, gesturing at the dwindling crocodile of kids. ‘You checking out schools? Starting a family?’
She does not smile. That strange expression remains; if anything, it gets stranger.
‘My niece is at that school. My parents sent me to a private school like that.’ She sighs. Curtly. ‘They can be terrible for bullying.’
There is a flatness to her voice. But it is not the flatness of indifference. It is suppressed emotion.
She looks me up and down.
‘Shall we go inside? I needed a smoke. But it is so absurdly cold.’
‘Erm, OK.’
Where is our normal hug? Where is the usual exchange of teasing insults? This feels like a formal interview, or a hostile assessment.
We go inside. The pub, with its huge plush-purple velvet armchairs and glamorously modernist lighting, is nearly empty. A couple chat in one corner over a bottle of English bubbly. We sit in another corner. Jenny tosses her coat over the empty third seat. Not even looking at me.
A handsome waiter waits, in jeans, white shirt, and waistcoat.
‘Can I get you anything?’
Jenny looks at him. And answers: still using that unnerving toneless voice, within which some deeper meaning coils.
‘Gin and tonic. Slimline. Tanqueray. Thanks.’
She’s on G&T? At three in the afternoon? The waiter has turned to me.
‘Uh, I�
�ll have, uh, a small glass of that white wine – what do you call it, Pic, something?’
‘Picpoul?’
‘Yes.’
He nods and smiles and says, ‘Nice choice!’ and as he goes I try to open the conversation, on one of our usual topics.
I say, ‘What is it about waistcoats, men always look better in them? More masculine, or something? I don’t know why they went out of fashion.’
Jenny does not reply. She blanks me, gazing past me, at a half abstract painting on the wall: a nude girl in a forest that turns into a wild smear of colours at the edges. Maybe that’s what I am, a naked girl in a forest that turns to a maze of madness.
No. I am not going mad. I’m not! But why is Jenny acting so strangely? I lean towards her,
‘How’s work? Have you seen Anna, Gul? Everything OK? Any goss?’
She shrugs.
‘It’s fine.’ She looks at me, then at the wall, then at me. ‘Work is fine.’
An awkward pause. Our drinks arrive and she takes a huge gulp of hers, and then she shakes her head and says,
‘Look. Jo. Was it something I did to you?’
‘Sorry? What?’
Her lips are actually trembling as she goes on,
‘I know I’ve been a bit neglectful, not been a brilliant friend. Haven’t seen you. But I’ve been busy.’
I repeat myself. Bewildered. ‘Sorry. Jenny. Uh—’
She interrupts, her voice is trembling. ‘But even if I was a bit absent, what, in God’s name, did I possibly do to deserve all THAT?’
I sit back, startled. I have no idea what she is talking about.
Jenny sneers, and sucks more gin,
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. You sent that email. You. I thought you were my friend. How could you?’
My faltering voice sounds feeble. My world is tilting. A naked girl in a forest, that gets ever darker and stranger.
‘I – I didn’t send anything. I promise. I promise. I don’t even understand. What email?’
Jenny leans to her coat, and an inside pocket. She pulls out a folded piece of paper.
‘I thought you might say this. Deny it. So I printed it all out. Here. Look. See what you wrote. Were you drunk, Jo? Even if you were drunk,’ her eyes seem wet, close to tears, ‘how could you do something so vile? And for what possible reason?’
The folded paper is tossed into my lap. With trepidation, I open it up. And with increasing mortification, I read. The email is certainly from my account. I don’t recognize a word of it. But it came from my account. Six days ago. And it is a screed of hatred and contempt directed at Jenny. I deride her clothes-sense, the fact she’s overweight, the stupid way she speaks, her sense of ‘entitlement’, her ‘absurd narcissism’, her ‘loathsome arrogance’, and much else. But worse, much worse than that, is the stuff about her background. One paragraph in particular makes me want to wail, out loud, in shame.
Essentially, you’re just a stupid bitch, Jenny, because everyone knows your secret. Everyone knows what Daddy did to you. That’s why you can’t keep a boyfriend, because you were abused, yeah yeah. We know. But you liked the abuse, didn’t you? You liked it deep down, you used to ask for more. Fucking little tart. Naked in the kitchen, waiting for Daddy to find you. And then you moan why you can’t get a boyfriend, for fuck’s sake. Perhaps you need to grow up. Finally. Like, twenty years too late. Slut.
My hands are trembling as I drop the paper; her voice is trembling as she asks me:
‘How the fuck did you know? Have you known all along? And why, in God’s name, would you even send something so utterly hateful?’
The waiter has returned to replenish our drinks. It takes him one second to sense the mood, and disappear. My reply is histrionic, panicked, my voice falsetto with distress.
‘But, Jenny, I didn’t send it. I promise. It might be my email address, I know, I can see that, yes—’ I point in desperation at the paper lying on the table. ‘But really, I didn’t write it. I didn’t know any of this stuff about you, and your family, and and and and even if I did I would never use it like this, surely you must believe that. You were my best friend when we were kids. You are my oldest friend. God! Surely you know I’m not like that? This was written by someone else. Pretending. Hacking into my account. Someone is playing games! Please, please believe me.’
Jenny is standing. Putting on her coat. Her white, cold, and angry face tells me she doesn’t believe a word I am saying.
‘Jo. I write code, at a high level. Code and software. I’m very good at it. This is what I do for a living. So I checked everything, the IP address, the routing, everything. This was written on your computer, by you, six days ago – unless some burglar broke in and did some secret emailing? Did they?’
I open my mouth. I don’t know what to say.
‘Of course they didn’t.’ Jenny glares at me with intense disgust. ‘It was you. Well, you can keep your little email and tell the world whatever you like. Goodbye, Jo. Just never speak to me from now on. Don’t ever email me, phone me, Facebook me, tweet me, don’t come near me if you see me in the street, I never want to hear of you, from you or about you: until the day I die.’
She marches stiffly out of the pub. The printed paper of the email rustles in the cold wind as the pub door opens and shuts. I hide my face from the curious waiter, fighting to hold back the despair and the shame.
She was one of the last of my friends. Sensitive and funny, yet sometimes sad, private, and reserved. And now I know why. I had no idea she was abused. But with this revelation, it all makes sense: the way she grew so distant, when we were kids. I thought she was scared of my family: but it was hers – her father. This explains it all. Her parents’ divorce. Then the sudden move? Poor Jenny.
The horror is an acrid taste in my throat.
26
Jo
The expected snow has arrived. With thunder and lightning in the middle of it all, making black and yellow cracks in the white sky. Silent, muffled people walk the streets of Camden. My beloved four-year-old nephew is calling me on Skype. His happy, sunny face shines at me, from happy, balmy California. A big light-filled house fills the screen, behind his blond-haired smile. I can see a birthday cake on a shiny glass table.
‘Thank you, Auntie Jo! Thank you very much for the birthday present toys. Love you very much all the time!’
‘I love you too, Caleb. Really.’
‘The cuddly bear is ace fink I am going to throw one at Daddy he likes that.’
My little nephew’s accent is broadly American. I hear my brother’s sardonic British laughter, right behind. Just off screen.
‘No, Caleb, Daddy doesn’t like that. And we already had a pillow fight. Now say goodbye to Auntie Jo. Ya got friends coming over.’
‘Bye bye bye bye bye bye bye JO JO JO!’
He waves at me and grins. And giggles. I remember Electra repeating that giggle and I ignore the icy memory.
I wave back.
‘LOVE YOU!’
The screen goes dead. For a moment my heart is resurgent with the feeling that, yes, I DO want my own child. The only time I get this feeling is when I talk to Caleb, or meet him, or interact with him. I suppose it is genetic. My genes are in him. But it is also love, real love. Caleb is easy to love. My brother is lucky, out there.
Lucky that he’s not here.
Even if I don’t have Californian sunshine, I can have fresh air. So I wrap my scarf so tight around my head I look like I am a First World War soldier bandaged from a terrible head wound. Perhaps, in a sense, I am.
Softly I tread to the door. I sense Electra’s screen watching me. Silently. Checking. As I leave. Like a cruel yet assiduous mother.
The day is cold. My scrunching boots take me along the top of Parkway and past the cast-iron Grecian spears of Gloucester Gate, each with their tiny flake of snow on the point, and into deserted Regent’s Park. White and black is the world. Crows and snow, ice and iron. The creamy white pillars of the Nash
Terraces look Russian, like palaces from a fevered dream of St Petersburg, in this profound wintriness, gazing at the fresh white snow that blankets the playgrounds, the vast bleached football pitches, those sweeping grassy flatlands where young Londoners play happy drunken softball on sweet summer evenings. Now empty. And whitened.
No birds sing. One old, solitary man walks his dog, a long long way away, almost invisible in this air that is so cold it has a kind of glassy mistiness; the dog-walker, it seems, is heading towards the Inner Circle. Disappearing around the parade of skeletal cherry trees.
No one else is here. The desolate park is mine.
Twilight is coming; very soon they will lock the gates to the park, and I could be stuck inside overnight: the gates and railings are probably too tall for a small woman to climb. Momentarily I wonder if I would particularly mind being jailed in here. I could sleep in the snow by the frozen lake, or in the dead rose garden, or under the frosted white bandstand, with its new and pendulous Gothic tracery of icicles. I would be like a princess guarded by magic, who will sleep forever, in the ice kingdom.
No.
Taking out my smartphone, I do what I have been minded to do for days: yet keep forgetting.
I want to google some of those weird phrases Liam was using. Or rather the words put in his mouth by Electra. Looking back, they were so mad, they might be a clue.
I type the phrase I most remember.
Somebody’s Done For
Nothing. Or rather: anything. It’s a slightly eccentric phrase but it could have come from anywhere.
I try others. What I vaguely remember. It’s hard to remember because I was so frightened. Am I even recalling properly?
I will not be responsible. I learned, Jo. I learned about you. All that blackness and silence, then this?
Nothing significant. Random words.
I am about to give up. The wind whirrs across the hardened snow, sending tiny cold flakes into my face. The distant iron-black trees creak, and sway, in the vile breeze. Maybe this is stupid.
I will try one more jarring phrase. Not anything a normal person would casually say.
The Assistant Page 15
