by J S Hollis
He had just woken up and, uncharacteristically, he stayed in bed and put his SpeX on. His eyes were still squinting when they saw her placid face. The image sent a hollow pulse from his heart to his head. He raised his arm and moved her away. But something nagged at him. After he was showered and dressed, he brought her back, while simultaneously doing up his shirt.
“Hi, Cecil,” she said.
Cecil continued to try to push a button through its buttonhole and then looked up, as if he had heard somebody else in the flat.
“Clara?”
“Why did you flick me away?”
“I didn’t, I just, I came back.”
He heard joyful children’s voices chatting in the fields behind her. How could she be so serious? And then the right hand side of her lip twitched, breaking into smile, and her mouth fissured into a hoarse laugh.
“What are you laughing at?” Cecil asked.
“You’re looking at me like I’m a ghost.”
“Well, what are you?” Cecil remembered their argument. “Actually, you don’t need to answer that one.”
She waited until her laugh had fully subsided. “I’m sorry for putting you through this.”
“No, no, I’m sorry for driving you away.”
“It wasn’t about you, Cecil.” She took a breath. “Apologising for fucking me was pathetic but it didn’t stop me loving you. I know you only want to be a better man. I just needed to choose my path.”
“And what path is that?”
“I’m not entirely sure but I want it to be with you.”
Cecil was stumped. He had been developing a longterm strategy to win her back and it turned out he had never lost her. After Cecil finally finished getting dressed, he took a seat and pondered the miraculous beauty of things. He never pried into what had gone through Clara’s head during those months of silence. All that mattered to him was the result. He didn’t want to know about the calculations. It seemed that Clara had placed the pressure of living with him and the illusion of meaning on one side of the scales and the freedom of irrelevance on the other. He didn’t want to know how delicately balanced the options were.
5
Cast
Cecil and Clara never argued again after that afternoon by the coast. Even on the fateful day of Clara’s death, there was no trace of a quarrel except the knife drawn across Clara’s neck. They disagreed, and regularly, but they negotiated these differences of opinion like ideal diplomats and with an absence of emotion that to many appeared admirable. This film of contentment concealed Cecil’s manipulation of Clara. From the moment she moved into Cecil’s universe, when they started living together, Cecil’s control was built into their relationship like the laws of gravity. The terms of dispute, the baseline of morality, their aspirations, were all his. It is our task in this chapter to try to pierce the film.
This trick of perception was undoubtedly assisted by routine. In a bourgeois fashion that Cecil would later abhor, they had both settled into carefully divided lives: hard work, a touch of volunteering and hobbies to keep them rounded. (Spare time was only spare in the sense that it wasn’t paid work.)
This suited them both. They were fortunate enough to find careers that they were happy to let take over their lives and give them a purpose. Cecil left Future Fabrics in the late thirties to set up Fibrelous – his attempt to bring advanced fibres into everyday clothing and to find a way to reduce waste in the fashion industry.
While Cecil was a perfectionist, he was savvy enough to recognise that society was never going to be flawless. In particular, he recognised that the fashion industry, as he told the Society of Ethical Business, “contained many of the worst elements of the modern human psyche. Vanity, directionless competition and consumerism under which need and want have become completely divorced.” What Cecil tried to do with Fibrelous was create clothing that could be manipulated by the purchaser, at first in terms of colour, then in terms of size and, eventually, it would fix itself.28 His grand vision was that one day a few pieces of clothing could satisfy the wardrobe of the most adventurous and fashion conscious, bringing creativity and identity to the fore.
Clara had no such vision but she didn’t need to. During her first week back in London, she continued to meditate, attending classes on Holloway Road. Some would call it chance, others fate, but whatever the causation, Giles Fu (now more famous as “G”) saw her there. He says that “from the moment I saw her, I noticed a penetrating intensity in her eyes. I felt like I was being read and each word was being passed through her fingers like the finest wool. I knew she had to work for us.” The evidence suggests he acted more rationally. G compulsively delved into the lives of the people he met and Clara was no exception. He saw that she was a psychology graduate with experience of design and a passion for introspection. He approached her after the next meditation and asked her whether she would be interested in developing games that could be played entirely within the confines of the mind.
“I think you’ve got the wrong person,” she said, continuing to smile. For a moment, G looked lost, like a giant child looking for his mother. Then he regained his composure.
“Look. We are talking about delivering a world into people’s heads so that they can play without surveillance. Call it Augmented Imagination. I thought you’d be interested.”
“Augmented Imagination …” She seemed to be tasting the words. “I like that.”
“Great,” G said. “And it’s not just about avoiding surveillance. As our games work inside people’s heads, there are none of the mobility problems that virtual reality faced.”
She was quiet. He thought he’d lost her. She had a very serious face and was looking down at his knees. She looked up. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure I get the virtual reality point. Perhaps we can discuss this over tea.”
They bought teas and G explained Mind Games, which was only a start up then. Clara was suspicious, but not of the idea of using the brain as a platform for software. She was sold on the tagline: “To play is to dream.” She was suspicious of Mind Games’ culture. She feared that Mind Games would be a stereotypical games company. Spindly young men with their backs bent from years of gaming, telling other spindly young men and some paunchy older men that they are creating the “greatest thing ever” with the “most realistic experience” and that this is the real hub of creativity.
G conceded as much with good humour. “I much be one of the paunchy older men,” he said, looking down at his Laughing Buddha stomach. “But we are too male and too young. We need people like you to make us different and better. We are not idealists. We want to make games. Really good games. But what we like about our games is that they are almost liberating. I’d thought that would appeal to a woman with your background in mindfulness.”
“It does appeal,” Clara said, “but what can I contribute?”
“Anyone can be a programmer,” G said in his wise and deep accent that came from nowhere in particular, “but very few people can create new worlds.”
Clara had rejected video games as a child or, rather, she had never accepted them. Somehow gaming had retained a sexual division that she had never sought to challenge. Most women she knew played games but were not gamers. Even assuming such a thing could be masculine or feminine, what was manly about games? Within a couple of days at Mind Games, Clara was hooked and she developed a pride in being a creator of dreams.
Shortly after Cecil started up Fibrelous, he married Clara. There was no proposal. They chose a day to get married and had a small afternoon function. It was an unremarkable affair with the exception of an argument between (a drunk) Emma and a couple of Cecil’s friends about the benefits of alcohol.
Marriage didn’t inextricably lead to children (at least, not in Cecil and Clara’s minds). With their working lives flourishing, neither of them appeared to be interested in procreation. They had discussed it but they both s
aid “I’m not opposed to the idea” in a manner that suggested they were less than enthusiastic about it.
They were hiding their true desires. Cecil returned from a long trip to his factories in Mali late on a Friday evening. As he didn’t like to fly too often, he ensured that any trips he took were comprehensive, which meant he spent weeks away. Clara was waiting in the kitchen of their new house. The white kitchen table was set and Clara played with the projected flickering flame in the middle, trying to anticipate where it would move next.
When Cecil got to the door, she was there ready to hug him. He took off his thin jacket and then took her into his arms. She felt his still crisp shirt against her cheek. His face looked sallow. Sucked dry by recycled air.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
“You know I did. This place feels empty without you,” she said. “Do you want a drink?”
“Cucumber water, please.”
She poured the water into a glass in a steady flow until it was two centimetres from the top and then passed it to Cecil.
“For dinner, we have carrot soup followed by a maqlooba.”
“Our carrots?”
“Yes.”
“How are they looking?”
“Like carrots.”
Cecil didn’t look impressed.
“Well, you’ll find out soon enough.” She kissed him on his head and then motioned towards her hair, which had been straightened.
“I’ve seen it already. It looks great.”
“Not in the flesh.”
“It looks great.” He grabbed her from behind and kissed her.
“I knew you’d like it,” she said.
Clara sat next to Cecil and took his hands in hers, very carefully ensuring that each of her long fingers covered his hands so that his skin became invisible. She looked into Cecil’s eyes and said, “There is something important I want to talk to you about.”
“OK,” Cecil whispered, his chest contractions accelerating.
“I have been thinking about this a lot. I want to have a child.”
“Oh, thank God!” Cecil said. “I thought that you were going to tell me something horrific.”
Clara released his hands. “I wasn’t sure how you would react.”
“Why this sudden announcement? Why couldn’t we have discussed this?”
“I wanted to be confident. I wanted to both want a child and believe it was right for us to have a child.”
“And you’re there?”
“Yes. We are happy. We can afford to raise a child. And every bone and sinew and synapse desperately wants a baby. Are you in? Because I need you.”
“Yes, I’m in. How do we go about this? Go to the clinic next week?” He downed his water.
“Clinic?” Clara asked.
“Well, we need to specify what type of child we want.”
Clara stood up. “I hadn’t even considered that.”
She went to the patio doors, which opened out from the kitchen, and looked upon their garden in which they both took significant pride. The labels for the individual patches were fading in the midsummer sunset. She breathed in the air, convinced that it had restorative powers. And then she listened to the gentle buzzing coming from the street, as the neighbours came and went. “I don’t want to predetermine our child,” she said to the garden as much as to Cecil.
The thick orange soup began to bubble on the stove, which switched off.
“Wouldn’t we deprive the child of being the best it can be?” Cecil said, and Clara turned round from the lush outdoors to look at him.
“But what is that, Cecil?” She paused and thought. “It changes with fashion. When everyone looks the same, won’t the one person who looks different be a thing of beauty? Do we want our child to be incredibly intelligent? Because I am not sure happiness comes with that. Or do we want the child to just be happy, even if ignorance is the price? I am not prepared to make these decisions. All I want is for us to produce a person together. A sign of our love.”
Cecil tapped the table three times with his index finger. “I’m just thinking this through. Aren’t you simply saying you don’t want to go through the rigorous process of identifying the type of person we would want to bring into this world? Is there no middle ground we can find of beauty, happiness, intelligence and humour?”
“Even if the determination clinics could be that precise” – she put up her palm – “which they can’t” – the palm was lowered – “I’m not sure we should be making judgements about what the best type of person is.”
Cecil knew she hadn’t finished. She would look at him when she was done. “Our child is likely to blame us for lots of things. Let’s not let him or her actually be able to say ‘you wanted me this way’.”
“They could just as easily turn round and say ‘why didn’t you determine me? Why didn’t you make me great?’”
Clara went over to the soup and began to ladle it into bowls. “I think that’s easier to deal with. We would just say ‘you wouldn’t be you if we had predetermined you’. It’s like that tram thought experiment. Leaving the tram to hit a group of people feels better than pushing one person in front of the tram to save the group.”
“Are our feelings enough? I need to think about this, and currently my mind is somewhere between here and Timbuktu.”
“Of course, Cecil. You must. But I think I would rather not have a child than have one that we have designed. This is not about pragmatism. Now tell me about Mali,” she said, placing the steaming bowls of soup on the table.
Cecil, as ever, was true to his word. Over the weekend, he sat out in the garden and trawled through the words of philosophers and commentators, old and new. He kept detailed notes in a chart that he delicately constructed to his right, in front of a pine tree. As his understanding developed, he batted ideas off Kingsley until Kingsley suggested that they shouldn’t have a child at all. They were choosing between two options that were already immoral. Emma, no doubt frustrated that her son had not come to her for counsel, interrupted Cecil’s process and told him there was no perfect solution. Cecil said he was looking for the “better imperfect”. But he struggled to find it and resorted to public opinion. He asked the public:
“If each child represents a country and natural conception represents free trade, then intelligent design represents trade tariffs. The best case scenario is that all children are conceived naturally, allowing diversity and fair competition. But if one child is intelligently designed, then by allowing my child to be conceived naturally am I putting it at an unfair disadvantage?”
Some, including Clara, responded to Cecil’s fear by telling him that the analogy was flawed because it ignored the essential importance of the individuality of each human. Humans were not like goods. What made them better or worse was not only undetermined but also indeterminable. However, the majority of respondents said he should do what was best for his child and not worry about where biological determination might lead us. Ninety per cent of new children in England were BDs at that time.29
Cecil confronted Clara with this consensus. She said simply what Cecil already knew. The majority view was irrelevant.
Cecil’s suspicions remained but a few days after Clara had raised the subject, he came to her in the shower and said, “I guess we better start trying to make a baby.” In the absence of a fully formed opposing view, he went with Clara’s position. Clara had won by default. The only other way to win was by being right (in Cecil’s judgement).
You may think that this disproves my point. Cecil succumbed to Clara’s wishes and therefore he can’t have been the archmanipulator. But my argument is more subtle. Cecil’s abuse was epistemological. He was convincing Clara that the only way to make the right decisions was through a form of intense reasoning. Intuitive decisions were, so Cecil maintained, morally wrong. And so Clara allowed Cecil to reaso
n his way to life decisions. And when reason failed (or wasn’t given sufficient time), Cecil delegated the difficult choices to Clara. Leaving her and her way of thinking to bear the blame, further discrediting intuition and leaving reason untainted by its inadequacies.
Sebastian was an unusual child from conception. He was due to be born in early September but refused to budge and gave no indication that he had any intention of budging. Clara was desperately uncomfortable as he grew larger. First, the doctors tried to induce contractions but the drugs had no effect. Then they resorted to a caesarean delivery, which had its own complications. The doctor said, “It was as if he were hanging on for dear life.” Clara’s scars never really healed.
Sebastian was born at four and a half kilograms on 19 September 2042. He lacked the proportions of a newborn. His limbs were long and thin, a mass of hair darkened all but the middle of his scalp and his eyes drooped, already dissatisfied with what life had to offer. A balding adult in all but size.
But with size, little changed. He resisted fattening up with the obstinacy of unleavened bread. Moving from the floor, to the cot and into the arms of some adult, his wide eyes tracked the space around him and passed over his parents’ persistent efforts to amuse and entertain. He refused to react in any other way. Never giggling when tickled or reaching out to the toys put in front of him. He was content to watch.
Clara wondered whether (hoped that) Sebastian was a wise old man trapped inside a baby’s body, amusing himself by watching the adults constantly acting like fools, with their silly voices and contorted faces. Donatella said Clara should be thankful. When Clara’s brother, Carlo, had been a baby, he had grabbed onto anything nearby and refused to release it. They lived in constant fear that by prising his hands from each object, they would break his tiny fingers.
