by Robert Webb
‘Same here, more or less.’
‘Sexual partners?’
‘Stop saying “sexual partners”. I’m trying to concentrate on my art.’ They sat in an enjoyable silence for a moment, the atmosphere charged with irony as well as the wooziness of their three hours in the college bar.
‘It’s about trust really, isn’t it?’ Luke said.
Kate stopped drawing and looked at him. ‘Trust?’
‘Well,’ Luke shifted position slightly, ‘when someone you like turns into someone you love. Or when …’ His wide hazel eyes searched the orange curtains of her window as he found the words. ‘… you share anything intimate, like your secrets. Or your body.’
‘Or the secrets of your body.’
‘Yeah,’ he said simply.
‘You’re quite mature, Luke, if I may say so. For a boy.’
He slightly bristled at that but his smile was never far away. ‘Boy? Excuse me, I am nearly twenty, you know.’
‘Oh, your advanced years are not in question. I meant for someone of your sex.’
‘Stop saying sex. You’re concentrating on your art.’
She raised a hand in solemn apology.
‘Well,’ Luke shrugged. ‘Yeah, fair enough. Girls do seem to understand mysterious stuff in a baffling kind of way. Why do you think that is?’
Kate wasn’t sure if she was being humoured or if this guy was the real thing. She replied, ‘My mother would call it women’s intuition. I call it paying attention. Women are interested in how men’s funny minds work because we might need that knowledge to survive. So we end up anticipating things and it looks like a magic trick.’
His expression didn’t falter – another encouraging sign. He could take a bit of feminism on the chin without moaning. Just about. ‘I see – all is revealed! You’re the Girl from the Future.’
Kate smiled ruefully to herself and murmured, ‘All girls are.’
She had encountered the boundaries of her artistic talent. Which is to say she had drawn a stick man with an acid-house smiley face and a massive knob and balls. She was considering the exact moment to reveal her masterpiece.
She said: ‘Actually, you’re almost elderly – I only turned eighteen last week.’
‘Happy birthday. Hang on, so … in your year, you must have been …?’
This was a mistake. Kate didn’t mind telling guys about the karate championships – they were usually more fascinated than intimidated and most of them didn’t believe her anyway. But York was a clean slate – these new students didn’t need to know about her early A-levels. She was determined that no one here was going to call her a freak.
‘Dunno,’ she said, ‘some kind of admin thing when I started school.’ He had been charmingly open and she regretted the evasion. She thought he deserved a secret of her own. ‘Anyway, you’re right about trust. The fight stuff we were talking about in the bar …’
‘The Deptford Karate Kid!’ Luke exclaimed.
Kate wrinkled her nose but went on. ‘Indeed. Well, that all started as a self-defence thing after an unpleasant experience with a man that I trusted.’
Luke’s face fell a million fathoms. ‘Oh Christ, I’m sorry.’
Kate wondered what the hell she was doing. Rule number one of getting laid was: Don’t Tell Boys You’ve Been Assaulted. ‘Thanks. It’s all right.’ She sensed him trying to control his alarm and came to his rescue. ‘It was just a groping: nothing serious. I mean, it was serious – you’re really not supposed to feel up a thirteen-year-old on a Geography field trip …’
‘Bloody hell … a teacher?’
Kate nodded. ‘But nothing horrifying. At least I didn’t think so but maybe I was playing it down.’
‘Maybe you still are.’
Kate inspected the blunt point of her pencil. There it was again – his emotional boldness. There was considerably more to this boy than a pretty face. And chest. And legs.
‘Sorry, that was …’ he started.
‘No, you might be right.’ Kate liked to think of herself as being difficult to offend: one of the few qualities she admired in her mother. ‘Anyway, Dad was all for killing the bastard.’
‘Naturally.’
‘I couldn’t tell Mother. She’d have just said, “Darling, this is what comes of wearing scarlet leg-warmers.” But I could talk to Dad. He was going to run the fucker over in his taxi.’
Luke compressed his lips to stifle a laugh.
‘I know,’ she grinned. ‘Anyway, I said that would be a bad idea and asked him to get me some sort of self-defence lessons instead so that he didn’t have to worry. All for his sake and very silly. You can be Rambo but still freeze in the moment if you get blindsided by … well, by a betrayal like that.’
That didn’t seem to compute in Luke’s head: why wouldn’t she fight? But she watched him reach out for it with his imagination. ‘Yes … yeah, I think I see.’
‘And I know it’s corny but I did love The Karate Kid and David Carradine on TV so I spent weeks with Dad and the Yellow Pages, driving around in his cab after he finished a shift. We must have covered half of London before we found a sensei who would teach a girl.’
She was quietly pleased to see that Luke was now gazing at her like he was sharing a room with Debbie Harry. ‘Anyway, blah blah, me me me. But you’re right: it’s all about trust.’
‘I trust you,’ said Luke.
Kate stared at him. ‘Why on earth would you trust me? You’ve only known me for three hours.’
He shrugged good-naturedly but his innocence was invincible. ‘I just do.’
They looked at each other then – both allowing a pause to open up. A long one. Kate dragged her eyes away from his and they wandered again over his body. She said softly, ‘I’m afraid I can’t do boxer shorts either. You’re going to have to take those off too.’
Luke hesitated. He looked down at his knees and a vulnerable smile played around the corners of his lips.
Kate asked, ‘Do you really trust me?’
Luke met her eyes and answered by slowly hooking both thumbs into the waistband of his underwear. He took a breath and leaned back, suppressing a shiver as his shoulders made contact with the cold wall behind him. His heels found the edge of her bed and he levered himself up for a moment, the flags of the world sliding forwards towards Kate as they passed up his thighs, over his knees, down his shins and off the ends of his feet. In a moment of bravado he chucked them to one side like a shy stripper but they landed on her pillow, which he immediately thought inappropriate so scrambled to toss them onto the floor. Kate laughed, chewing the end of her pencil. He sat up against the wall, his right leg still arched, his wavering semi-erection emerging from dark pubic hair, finding a temporary resting place against his left thigh.
He said, ‘Sorry, I think I’ve changed position, haven’t I?’
‘What?’
‘I was supposed to stay still.’
‘Oh yes! Well, that’s okay,’ said Kate, rediscovering some composure. ‘Not … all of you has to stay completely still.’
Luke’s lips parted and his breathing became faintly audible as the astonishing girl he’d just met leaned forward and stared frankly at his nakedness. She saw that he was still fighting his own modesty but stayed where he was for her enjoyment, his hard-on growing and climbing towards his navel with languid throbs. She crossed her legs in response to her own arousal but then uncrossed them and stood, moving towards him and slowly hitching up the skirt of her denim dress. Careful not to tread on his bare feet with her oversize boots, she straddled him on the bed, her knees either side of him and her fingers wrapping around the hard warmth of his cock. She leaned in to his ear as she felt his hands on her breasts and uttered the first serious thing she ever said to him.
‘I trust you too.’
Chapter 4
Kate’s eyes drifted over the ruins of the 10,000-day kitchen. She noticed a card wedged between a stack of box files. It was the invitation to Luke’s funeral. S
he’d designed it herself – one of the many practicalities she’d been grateful for in the early weeks. The undertaker, the bills; the decisions on what to do with Luke’s possessions, clothes, the manuscripts of his endless, unpublished novel. All this had kept her distracted from the reckoning she knew was waiting for her down the road. She expected grief, but grief wasn’t the problem.
In the pathologist’s office, he had explained about the tumour. ‘There’s nothing you could have done,’ the doctor concluded. ‘The problem with this kind of thing is that it’s almost symptomless.’
Kate froze like she had just been casually introduced to a mortal enemy. ‘Almost?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘you can hardly ever tell.’
Kate said, ‘But there are symptoms? Sometimes you can tell?’
The doctor broke his finger-steepled pose and lightly touched the surface of his desk. ‘In the interests of your own peace of mind, I’m not sure that—’
‘Symptoms like what?’ she insisted.
The doctor blew out his cheeks and sat back in his leather chair. ‘Well, for example, migraines? Frequent headaches?’
‘No migraines. No more headaches than most people.’
‘Okay, well … did Luke ever show excessive irritability? Mood swings?’
Kate frowned as if she’d just been asked the stupidest possible question. ‘He was a writer.’
‘I see, yes, fair enough,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve a friend who’s an authoress and she can get very … anyway. Um, frequent numbness in the same area? Pins and needles?’
Pins and needles!
‘Yes,’ Kate said slowly. ‘He … he complained of pins and needles in his right foot.’
‘When did this begin?’
Kate shook her head in confusion. ‘Always,’ she said. ‘I mean, only from time to time when we first met but … well, it’s been more frequent in the last few years as he …’ The ground was starting to give way from beneath her. ‘… as he got more tetchy, but I thought that was the book. The stupid book! And you don’t go to the doctor with pins and needles, do you? I mean, do you!?’
The doctor looked down at his desk. ‘No, of course you don’t.’
10,000 days since we met and he was alive for the first 9,732. That was 9,732 chances to tell him to go to the doctor. That was 9,732 days when I didn’t notice he was ill.
She turned the funeral invitation in her fingers. It reminded her of an airline boarding pass – the vital document that crosses a certain threshold and turns instantly into annoying rubbish. She had expected the funeral to be some kind of cathartic gateway – some escape into a new world of healing. The reality was just a shit party – one where the fun people suddenly didn’t drink any more and the serious people overdid the eye-contact and made jokes for the first time since childhood.
Since then, and until she discovered the Petrov file, she had merely gone through the motions at work. Most of her energy was invested in hiding from her friends.
Kes was the easiest. He was a TV actor and the artistic director of a London theatre. He got drunk one night and sent Kate a 3000-word email mainly about his dead aunt. He apologised on the phone three nights later and Kate made sure that her end of the conversation was warmer than polite but not so warm that he could possibly miss the offence. She wasn’t offended: she just wanted to be alone. He had then taken to sending her amusing postcards. Fine.
Amy was much harder. The loyalty of a Yorkshirewoman is difficult to wear down but not impossible. For three months she made regular appearances on Kate’s doorstep with homemade soups and broths. She would arrive with news of her NGO job and the latest way her boss had screwed up, as well as back-issues of Smash Hits and tickets to musicals that she couldn’t really afford. During one unbidden lunch visit, Kate waited for Amy to go to the loo and then glumly hacked her phone so she could track it. She used a bit of sticky plastic separating layers of smoked salmon to trace a thumbprint from Amy’s wine glass and activated her iPhone to give herself location permissions. After that day, Kate tended to be out when Amy was within a couple of miles of the house. Kate felt bad about this, especially when she got a text saying, ‘Do *you* know why my phone smells of fish?’ But the intrusion had become intolerable. In her more old-school moments, Kate just didn’t answer the door. By month five, Amy had given up.
And then there was Toby. He was no sweat because he just wasn’t around. He was a civil servant and his life had disappeared into the Brexit bin-fire. For her wedding day, many years ago, Kate had asked him to take the place of her dad and walk her down the aisle. But that level of intimacy seemed to belong to the same place as all things Luke – the vanished world of her younger self.
If Kes, Amy or Toby had any idea that Kate was blaming herself for Luke’s death then the response would have been swift and unanimous: a) that’s ridiculous, b) come to think of it, that’s probably quite common, and c) did we mention that drowning yourself in guilt over this is still disastrously misplaced and wrong?
He was my husband. He trusted me. I was supposed to look after him. My clever, beautiful man could have married anyone but he married the freakazoid from Deptford.
‘You shouldn’t blame yourself,’ Kate’s mother had said, as if she’d heard the phrase somewhere and was trying it out for the first time. To Kate’s ear it was an accusation. A perfectly good point – on which she had now impaled herself.
On an impulse she took out the memory stick. Opening her laptop and disabling the wifi, she mounted the disk and pressed ‘play’ on the encrypted video for the eighteenth time since she’d stolen it.
A medium-sized hotel conference room with about fifty people seated. The camera was aimed at a small podium from a fixed position in the middle of the room. The audience applauded as the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Fiona Moncrief, took to the little stage. Kate didn’t have strong feelings about this politician, although she disliked the way the fifty-nine-year-old managed to comport herself with the permanently wounded dignity of a duchess in a chippy. The camera zoomed in to a mid-shot of Moncrief at the podium, speaking without notes. She trilled through the usual formalities and then noted that, ‘It’s fitting that I’m here in Newcastle this morning, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day. Many of the ships involved in that momentous operation were manufactured here in this great shipbuilding city. It was the spirit of Tyneside the Nazis were dealing with on that day and as we all know – they didn’t like it up ’em!’
It wasn’t the tone-deaf appropriation of a line from a beloved sitcom that got Kate’s attention. It was the oddly jarring mention of the time and place. Because here was the thing: Kate had established that on that particular morning Fiona Moncrief was nowhere near Newcastle. She was in Bayeux. There was live news footage of her sitting in the cathedral for one of the D-Day commemoration ceremonies. Her presence there was easily confirmed by a dozen news reports with precisely no reference to Newcastle to be found anywhere. She had spoken before in Newcastle, and she had spoken in many rooms like this one. But not this room on this day. So what the hell was going on? And then, about halfway through the speech, Moncrief segued into this passage:
‘… why we honour our proud history. And that’s also why I love semolina. I just can’t get enough of the stuff. Sometimes when I’m in the kitchen and my pervert husband is feeling aroused, we smear each other with semolina and lick it off each other’s genitals and laugh until we vomit. That’s how we get our cheap thrills. It’s fucking sick, isn’t it? But that’s just what we’re like. And Britain should also look to the future. Not resting on our laurels but engaging with the challenges of …’
The rest of the speech returned to the anodyne but with one more gratuitous reference to the time and place. Moncrief then turned her back to the audience, lifted up her tweed skirt and mooned her naked arse. It was to wild applause she then faced the audience again, gave them the finger and performed a teenager’s mime of fellatio. Only then did she wave like a normal
politician and leave the stage.
Kate still had her hand over her mouth as she stared at the final frame. The video was, of course, impossible. The whole thing was manufactured. Kate forced herself to eliminate the other possibilities. Moncrief had lost her mind: it can happen to anyone but then what of the audience? One might rather expect word to get around. And was it possible that they would laugh and cheer at such a display of utter madness? What about the insistence that she was in a place that she could not possibly be on that day? No, it was the most awesome demonstration she’d yet seen of deep-fake video: where previously captured footage of a subject is rendered to make them say and do something quite different. As far as Kate was aware, up until now the necessary AI had been unequal to the challenge of fooling the human viewer at this level. But this was different.
Kate took a gulp of her pre-lunch wine and tried to remain calm. The technical brilliance was dazzling but the implications filled her with alarm. Whoever had created this wanted the viewer to fully comprehend its artifice. This wasn’t a bit of fun. This was a warning. If they could do this, they could do anything: Robert De Niro secretly filmed at a party making racist jokes; a video conference call in which George W. Bush planned the destruction of the twin towers; paparazzi footage of the German chancellor on holiday slapping the pool boy; an admission of murder here, a declaration of war there. The mind boggled. The message was unequivocal: all bets are off – you can never trust anything you see on a screen ever again.
If no one trusts a news bulletin in a dictatorship then that’s no problem because nobody seriously expects the truth in the first place. But in a democracy, if suddenly everything is possible and nothing is true …
No wonder Petrov was keen to recover the file: the embedded metadata tied it to his organisation like a pair of concrete flippers. It was clearly a cock-up: the team behind the video hadn’t even got round to disguising the original IP address – a server which happened to be located in a Mayfair office leased by one of Petrov’s subsidiary media companies. What she was looking at was a work-in-progress which Petrov’s team had inadvertently shared with BelTech. If it was made public that Petrov – who owed his wealth and position to the Kremlin and was heavily rumoured to be one of its more active proxies – had people working for him who were capable of this, then he was finished. The technology was unstoppable but only effective if nobody knew where it came from. If Kate blew the whistle then every dodgy video from now till the end of civilisation would come with an accompanying finger pointing squarely at the Russian state, whether they created that particular lie or not. That would not work out terribly well for Mr Petrov. It wasn’t just Charles who was crapping himself.