Help the Witch

by Tom Cox

  ‘We have that figured out in the future. We have ways of sorting it. You really don’t need to worry about that. People and robots have been time travelling for a long time in the part of the future where I come from. We have worked a lot of stuff out. Also, they’re not feet. They’re called rotorsocks.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  A strong gust of wind harassed the tops of the trees, and a few acorns detached from the branches and became a form of boisterous dry rain, almost hitting the robot and me.

  ‘Would you like to see it?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘The future.’

  It was a vast question: probably the vastest I’d ever faced. ‘Why not,’ I concluded.

  I had lost my job the previous month. This being only four months after my aunt, the one human being in the world I’d been genuinely close to, had been crushed to death in a tractor accident on the farm where she had lived and toiled. In all honesty, I was feeling quite gung-ho and nothing-to-lose about the point life had brought me to, so when the robot slid open a metal plate in his chest cavity and invited me to step inside, I did so with little hesitation. He was a much taller, wider robot than I’d realised, when I’d first seen him bumpsliding up the holloway on his rotorsocks, and I was able to climb inside his rib cage with little trouble, although it did help that I had become very thin of late, particularly since losing my aunt and my job.

  There were some clanking, rusty sounds, like gears grinding, sounds far more clanking and rusty than I would have imagined might emerge from a robot devised in the very distant future, as opposed to merely the future. Then I felt a sensation that reminded me of the time I crossed the Channel from Dover to France on a hovercraft, except exaggerated a hundredfold, and more redolent of spinning than forward motion. This lasted what I took for about five minutes, but what you probably couldn’t put a time length on in this limbo state between centuries (or was it whole millenniums?).

  After that all was very silent, silent in a blanker, more bottomless way than even the woods when I walked in them at 3 a.m., searching for something I could not name, and while I’d been dimly aware of metal in front of me before, now it was too dark to see anything at all. I reached to touch the back of the robot’s chest cavity, to give myself some spatial awareness, but I could feel nothing. I am still in this deep, silent blackness, writing this now, except I don’t have a pen, and when I reached out with what I thought was one of my hands to touch my other hand, it wasn’t there. One hand might still be there, but I cannot find another part of my body to use to check and make sure. There is absolutely no way of telling. I cannot feel anything of myself, in fact, physically, but I am still having these thoughts and recording them for posterity. I do not know where the robot has gone.

  JUST GOOD FRIENDS

  The illusion of an excess of choice had ruined modern romance. This is what, after three years in a cycle of being seduced by that excess of choice, recoiling at the ice-cold lie of of it, then being seduced by it again, Helen had concluded.

  ‘But everyone goes online now,’ Helen’s friend Donna Rooney had said. ‘It’s just a fact of life. It’s so hard to meet people these days.’

  Donna was one of the fortunate ones: Mark had been only the second man she’d met romantically via the internet, the pair’s intertwined needs had immediately appeared simple and compatible and there had never been any sense of either of them keeping the other in any kind of holding pattern while they waited to see if anything better came along. Also, Donna’s statement, Helen felt, was a commonly spoken misinterpretation: seeking romance in a virtual environment wasn’t an alternative or replacement; it was an extra way to meet people. The real world hadn’t vanished; it was still there, with its pubs and evening classes and museums and friends of work colleagues and dance floors and attractive strangers eating apples on park benches.

  When you first looked at a dating app or website, even when you’d narrowed your focus down to those of an appealing social demographic or appearance or age group, the excitement was that of being presented with a large train entirely full of available people. It was only later that you realised just how crowded with other available people the carriages on that train were, all jostling for the attention of the available people you liked, loudly eating crisps, wiping their greasy fingers on the upholstery and pushing their way down the aisles, sometimes, in the process, knocking you off balance so you fell backwards onto the emergency buzzer.

  It had recently occurred to Helen that she no longer wanted to be part of that jostling and, more to the point, would be better matched in the long term to a person who was also not part of it. Someone who had not had their brain reconditioned by it. Shopping for love, she had noticed, seemed to put people in an accelerated, attention-deficit headspace. Conversations were quickly forgotten, names, even. A tall and photographically imposing person who entered rooms with surprising deftness, Helen had returned from the toilet towards the end of another nonplussing encounter, unnoticed by her companion for the evening, a fellow academic named Brian or Steve or Carl, to spot, via a gap between his right shoulder and ear, that he was already back on the app through which they had met, scrolling towards his next target. She could not find it in herself to be incensed, having often done the same herself, although to her credit she did always wait until she had at least boarded the train home. That was the internet all over, though. ‘This has been a disappointing life experience. But do not worry. Look what I have for you next!’ it told you, without end.

  It was in the spirit of a greater slowing down, as well as a new philosophy about romance, that in March of her thirty-fifth year Helen removed the SIM card from her smartphone, transferred it to a clamshell model of almost a decade’s vintage, and set off to the opposite side of the city for the first of ten evenings of Buddhist meditation. January had been frittered in a series of intense but counterproductive conversations with an IT consultant called Jamie who, despite clicking ‘like’ on all of Helen’s last seventeen photographs, showed no inclination to set a date to meet in the flesh. February had been sucked away with worry about her mum’s surgery. It was only a few hundred years ago, in pre-Gregorian times, that the new year began in March, and that made a lot of sense to Helen today. Years were real and legislated expressly by nature, but months were just stories we told ourselves to give our lives structure. On the street where Helen lived – a line of Victorian terraces petering out into a patch of messy almost-countryside, blemished with rotting machinery and aloof horses – it felt like spring was finally sprinkling its colours over an invisible wall, and this struck her as a far more logical point for a year to begin. The new season seemed to follow Helen through the door of the Sweetland Meditation And Yoga Centre, where the walls were green and lilac and two nonthreatening crew-cutted men sat on a worn sofa sipping peppermint tea: thin, light people, leaflike in their aura.

  It became very apparent, after only minutes of her first session, that Helen was not immediately sexually attracted to any one of the other sixteen people in the room, and she silently reprimanded herself for the disappointment she felt at this realisation. This was not what her March new year’s resolution was about: it was about prioritising her own passions, putting herself in good places, throwing herself into activities that interested her. Besides, as she was reminded by her teacher, Preminand, the space she was in was one where goals were not important. There was no ‘correct’ way to meditate, she was told. She suspected that this must be at least partly untrue, since surely if someone was here in the room fighting or playing table tennis, that would be the opposite of the correct way to meditate. But even if she was not getting her breathing exercises totally right, or totally succeeding in blocking out thoughts of unreturned emails and job lists, it was a relief to be forced to just sit still on a cushion by someone for a couple of hours and do nothing: a task that should have been achievable at home but always ended up befuddlingly beyond her reach.

  On the way home her new state of
stillness and calm was such that the voice of the narrator of the audiobook in her earphones seemed to be running at double speed. Turning into the avenue, she was aware of colours in the dark: new petal shapes, front-door aesthetics. A dark blue Japanese off-road vehicle she often saw parked at the end of the road was not here and she appreciated the texture of the gravel in the space where it normally sat. A pile of lentils had been spilled on the pavement. Two cats – Mitsky, who lived with Deborah and John from number 14, and another, fatter one she thought of as Ginger Ron – sat together on the wall opposite her house in a silence that suggested they’d been disturbed mid-gossip.

  After the third of the weekly sessions, a girl called Andrea with perfect posture and a nest of unapologetic hair said she was meeting a friend at the Horse and Star and anyone else who fancied a drink was welcome to join them. Five meditators, including Helen, took her up on the suggestion. The pub was just the sort Helen liked: nicely dingy, slight suspicion of woodworm, jukebox, no shiny black vinyl chairs or gastro menus boasting of tautological pan-fried meals. The seven of them commandeered two four-seater benches either side of a long, pockmarked, coffin-shaped table. Behind them, teenagers just slightly too complicatedly dressed to be goth fell laughing through the door leading to the crypt beneath the bar at intervals of around a minute, allowing half-grumbles of subterranean local punk rock to waft into the room.

  The conversation turned to Buddhist practices as alternative to therapy, and Helen attempted to bring Peter, a quiet man perched next to her, into the fold, but instead drifted into her own separate discourse with him. Helen had arrived late for that evening’s session and, seeing her searching in vain for a cushion to perch on, Peter had been kind enough to fetch one from the store cupboard. Now they spoke of the metta bhavana, the ‘loving kindness’ meditation they’d been introduced to earlier in the evening, in which they were asked to bring more and more people into their heart. Helen admitted it had got a little out of control in the end, as she’d found all sorts of unexpected people and animals arriving in her heart, including her postman, a cow, three neighbourhood foxes and a stoat she’d seen last year on holiday on the Gower Peninsula. Everyone had then split into pairs to talk about a person in their life they felt a particular love for, and why. Helen told Peter she had talked about her mum: her unfussy strength, her lack of self-pity, especially after her recent operation. Peter did not say who he had talked about with his partner.

  ‘How is your mum now?’ asked Peter.

  ‘She’s doing well,’ said Helen. ‘She is made of something tougher than me. Something a bit leathery.’

  ‘I’m really glad to hear that.’

  Jet-black-haired and a little haunted around the eyes, Peter had a strong, large nose, but was otherwise delicate-featured, and arranged himself like a man keen to hide his tallness. It was only when she saw him stand to go to the bar and order more drinks for the two of them – a lemonade for him and a strong wheat beer for her – that she got a sense of his full height. She noticed that he would periodically stroke the table, paying it close attention. He told her it was oak, felled at least forty years ago. He asked her about her job. He told her that he’d heard that the museum where she worked was very nice, but had not had chance to visit himself. Each time she attempted to ask him a little about himself, he had a very skilled way of diverting the conversation back to her.

  Outside, the Fens had brewed up one of their thin mean winds then faxed it east, where it zipped down the alleys and streets of the city. A tiny woman from the course who seemed to have been hugely enjoying her own body all evening, running her hands across her arms and chest at regular intervals, instigated a session of goodbye hugging. Helen wrapped her arms briefly and awkwardly around Peter and wondered precisely where in his jacket he resided.

  The weekend was much warmer and Helen headed to her favourite spot near the river with a book. Three men in wetsuits swam smoothly with the current, like big pacifist leeches, and tantalising snatches of conversation from passing walkers blended not unappealingly with experimental prose.

  ‘No way is that a real dragon. I’ve already seen five.’

  ‘Good old Johnny Two Dicks. Always there when you need him.’

  ‘So that’s her uncle, right? The one who saw Mandelson at the gym. He has no respect for boundaries.’

  ‘Is it good?’

  It took Helen a moment to register that the last sentence was directed at her. She turned to see Peter standing behind her, looking no more evident in a shirt than he had in his coat the other evening.

  ‘It’s quite trippy. That might be something to do with the fact that it’s translated from Japanese. I don’t know. Or maybe it would be even more trippy if you read the original Japanese version. I’m finding it slow-going.’

  ‘I’m a really slow reader. I tend to still read a lot of stuff I loved as a kid.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that.’

  They walked back in the direction of the city, keeping to the river most of the way. Peter stopped to help two men carry a large canoe out of the water and Helen was surprised at how little exertion he displayed in doing so. She asked him what his plans were. He said he had just fancied a walk in the sun, and had no particular destination in mind. Helen said she’d wondered about catching a film later at the Picturehouse but was playing her afternoon similarly by ear. Peter asked her a little more about her job at the museum. It was closed today for refurbishment, but there was no actual work going on and Helen said she could open up and show him around if he liked.

  ‘So it’s your job to categorise stuff when it arrives?’ he asked, as Helen unlocked the museum’s archive area.

  ‘That, and various other stuff. Payroll. Interviews, sometimes. There aren’t enough of us working here that everyone can settle to just one role. A lot of what I do is about rejection. People don’t realise how many donations we receive that are totally worthless or irrelevant. I spend a lot of time gently letting people down.’

  Helen showed Peter some of the more interesting recent arrivals: two Victorian eel traps, a hammered dulcimer made by a local craftsman, and a writing desk that had originally been used by a student in the university halls in the late seventeenth century. Whenever a curio was made out of wood, Helen noticed that Peter inspected it particularly carefully, taking time to appreciate its joins and grain. At the pub afterwards, he asked her about her mum’s recovery again, and about the life-sculpture class she had started: another of the resolutions of her deferred new year. His flair for filing away small pieces of personal information for later was as impressive and generous as his selfless conversationalism. He drank two lemonades and she drank two pints of strong dark ale from a local craft brewery. The ale made her more talkative and all this left her with the feeling of having monopolised the evening. Outside, in another small unexpected Fenland breeze, Peter struggled to make the zip on his jacket – an anorak, not the bomber from the other day – click into place and she assisted, feeling more like a mum than she had felt within living memory. As she solved the problem, he stood patient and still and trusting.

  Helen had spent time alone in the company of plenty of ethereal men before. A couple of years ago she had dated a musician who had played lute at a folk-classical concert held at the museum. The musician spoke sparingly and when he did it was largely in his own whispered lexicon of Beat literature references and angular observations about cloud formations and the Milky Way. To Helen this, initially, was intriguing in the way an overheard conversation in a foreign language can be intriguing but later came the realisation not dissimilar to the one that you might have about the same overheard conversation in a foreign language, upon having it translated for you and finding out that it was really just about that week’s shopping list, or somebody’s marginally painful foot blister.

  The musician was well read in a posturing, self-conscious way, a little lazy, and had a surprising lack of emotional depth, especially for someone who found so much of it with an ins
trument in his hands. Peter was different. His ethereality had no posturing to it and she never hit an emotional wall when talking to him. As he turned the conversation again and again back to her, she saw a listening softness in his eyes, and found herself telling him more and more: about work, about her mum, even about some of her romantic disappointments. After dates with so many men who had been so keen to have their opinions heard, their stories laughed at, she enjoyed this contrast, but after their fifth evening together in as many weeks, it occurred to her how truly little she knew about him. One fact was that he worked ‘with wood’.

  ‘You mean carpentry?’ she asked.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Peter.

  He had very nice hands: long-fingered without being bony. Hands you’d be very unlikely to find on a building site but which might craft something unique and memorable out of timber. A big contrast to her last but one boyfriend, Richard, who grew potatoes, and had hands that were all palm, deep and thick; such a contrast, so exotic, that when she first touched one of Peter’s hands, she held on to it for an awkwardly long time. This was on their fourth date (were these dates? she still wasn’t sure), when he walked her home past the dark blue Japanese off-road vehicle and the last of the spilled lentils and Ginger Ron the cat on his wall, then, by way of farewell, offered the most gentle of handshakes. By the beginning of June, a serene time of the year, slowed by the effects of a full ten weeks of breathing exercises and mindfulness, Peter and Helen had seen each other – outside the confines of the meditation course – nine times. In those encounters, he had not once come close to kissing her. Something intangible, in rivalry to the draw of his gentle, sweet face and artist’s hands, had made her hold back too, despite not being much of a holder-back, on the whole. Nonetheless, when she took off to spend four days with her mum on the west coast, she felt the need to give him notice about it, in a manner that you might not quite feel the need to do with someone who was just a friend.