by Paul Hoffman
‘How do you thank a computer?’
‘Don’t bother. We haven’t got round to teaching it about gratitude yet.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘Ask it for advice about your love life.’
‘What?’ He felt uneasy about this.
‘It’s programmed to behave as an analyst. It’s one of our trickiest research areas but we’ve learned a lot from doing it. And, of course, there’s funding for it. Always a good reason to pursue a research field, in my view. The program’s a bit of a mess at the moment, we’re doing a major rethink, but it can be good fun.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘Do you have any problems with your love life?’ she said, laughing.
‘My love life is perfect.’
‘Then we’ll just have to pretend.’
She typed for a few seconds and then looked at him. ‘NEMO’s got a voice but it’s not patched up to work here, so it’ll just answer on the screen. Tell it your name.’
‘My name is Steven Grlscz.’
I’m sorry, could you repeat your name.
‘My name is Steven Smith.’
How may I help you, Steven?
He looked at Anne.
‘Tell it you’re unhappy,’ she whispered.
‘I’m unhappy.’
Why are you unhappy, Steven?
‘Nobody loves me.’
She giggled and again he was struck by the musical sound of her voice when she laughed.
Why do you think nobody loves you, Steven?
She leant close to his ear and he could feel the warmth of her breath. ‘Tell it, because I’m too good to be true.’
This sent a spasm of alarm through him. But she was, he thought, too subtle to mean it. It was a joke which meant she felt at ease with him. Or perhaps not. Make the best of it, he thought.
‘I’m too good to be true,’ he said.
Why are you too good to be true?
‘Ask Anne Levels.’
Tell me about Anne Levels.
‘She’s bad-tempered and unkind.’
Anne laughed. Good.
Why is she unkind, Steven?
‘I don’t know. But everybody says so.’
She laughed again and hit his shoulder. Even better. Are you thinking of anyone in particular?
‘Not really. Just one or two people who know her well.’
She brushed an imaginary speck of dust from her bosom and said softly in his ear, ‘I think I feel a headache coming on.’
Steven, tell me more about what you think of Anne Levels.
He looked her directly in the eye and put the palm of his hand around the side of her breast so delicately she could barely feel it. ‘The smell of her breath is like apples and her lips are like a thread of scarlet. And there is no flaw in her.’
Steven began laughing and she groaned: they had both noticed NEMO’s reply simultaneously.
Tell me about Anne Levels’ floor.
She sighed. ‘As you can see, NEMO has its limitations.’ She stroked his face. ‘Unlike you, it isn’t perfect.’
There it was again – the affection and the reservation.
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Not a very likeable quality.’
She pouted apologetically. ‘Don’t worry, I’m only joking. Don’t take everything I say so seriously.’
‘If you insist,’ he said, mocking himself.
Martin Beck was working on Anne’s car and thinking. He enjoyed listening to Gau but he did not like him, and he liked him even less after the conversation they’d had the afternoon they’d talked about the sanitary towel. He was thinking about what Gau had said about women. Although Martin was capable of the deepest affection he was not a man of extremes, but he was uncomfortably aware that he was finding it difficult to avoid thinking about Anne more or less all the time. His relationship with Karen was little more than a not-very-close friendship with sex included, and he was surprised it had lasted so long. He didn’t even find her all that sexually attractive. He couldn’t understand why he didn’t. It seemed perverse not to find someone who so exactly fitted the modern conventions of what was gorgeous not to be all that exciting. He liked looking at her naked body but that was the greatest pleasure by far. Her breasts practically pointed at the sky and her stomach was six-pack flat, her legs and buttocks taul. Perhaps that was the problem. That was the current ideal for women, even among women: a boy with big tits. And he didn’t much care for it.
There was nothing boyish about Anne. He laughed as soon as he thought it: she was all woman. There were no straight lines on her. The way her little tummy bulged slightly beneath her clothes was almost as maddening as the way her breasts seemed to be in a permanent state of movement, twin sirens calling innocent men onto the rocks of frustrated desire. And what Karen wanted from him was a mystery, given that what she clearly did want was someone as utterly unlike him as it was possible to be. It went back to what Gau had been saying about how unfathomable women could be. He had never thought about the differences between men and women much before because he had never needed to, and in any case he had moved from teenager to man at a time when that kind of thinking was regarded as reactionary. He certainly liked being around women. He had been elbowed by his girlfriends about as often as he had elbowed them, and when he had been the elbower he had shown, he thought, rather more consideration for their feelings than had generally been shown to him as elbowee. Anne liked him, he knew, but he felt she did not take him seriously. Why not? he wondered. He was at least as good-looking as Steven Thingy. He was as educated, as interested in her and her work. He made her laugh and he had read in innumerable women’s magazines how that was supposed to be a great aphrodisiac. Presumably that was bollocks like almost everything else you read in them. Sighing, he finished off adjusting the timing chain, shut the bonnet with a bad-tempered bang and went inside to clean up.
As he went through her front door, she looked up from her magazine expectantly. ‘What’s the verdict?’ she asked.
‘It’ll be all right for now, but basically the engine’s buggered,’ he replied grumpily. ‘Classic cars are all very well but it needs about three thousand quid spent on it.’ He looked at her pointedly. ‘I did warn you when you bought it.’
She smiled at him sweetly. ‘Some people don’t like their friends to say I told you so – but it’s a quality in you I’ve always admired.’
He went to the bathroom, washed his hands and decided that a certain amount of careful probing might make things clearer. He was pretty confident that Anne had no real sense that he was smitten. Perhaps that was the problem. Maybe he wasn’t intense enough. He came out of the bathroom.
‘So, how’s the great love affair going?’
‘What?’ she said, not looking up from an article on the means by which her pout could be perfected by applying Rouge Pulp, whatever that was, to the centre of her lips then working outwards.
‘You and Steven,’ he said.
She looked at him, puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve just done about two hundred pounds’ worth of work on your car and the least you can do is talk to me.’
Sighing extravagantly she put the magazine down. ‘Actually it’s going very well.’ She paused for a moment as if considering something she had not thought about explicitly before. ‘He’s so . . . attentive.’
‘You mean he opens the car door for you and helps you on with your coat?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’
‘All right, I’m sorry. Attentive in what way?’
She began to wonder why he was asking, but answered anyway, just in case he was becoming more interested in her than she wanted him to be.
‘He’s attentive because he really listens. And I mean really listens. I mean, you know the usual agreement between couples – I’ll let you bore me about your day at the office if you’ll let me bore you. Ten minutes each of:
oh dear, how awful, he didn’t, did he? All that.’ She paused again. ‘But Steven listens. He’s so curious. You can feel his absolute attention on you. You feel the focus. He listens to everything I say as if it were always incredibly important.’
‘That doesn’t bother you, that kind of intensity?’ he said, hoping that a hint might make her find this off-putting rather than thrilling.
She thought about this for a moment. ‘No,’ she said with absolute finality. ‘These days if you really want someone to listen to you carefully, you have to lie on a couch and pay them fifty pounds an hour.’
‘He sounds perfect.’
He missed the microscopic widening of her eyes as this sonared its way into the depths. She laughed, awkward. ‘You know, he is difficult to read. I mean, he’s . . .’ She searched but failed to find the exact word. ‘I don’t really understand him all that well . . . I don’t get a sense of what’s going on inside.’
‘I thought women liked men with a bit of mystery about them.’
She laughed. ‘Not really, only the kind of mystery where you know the answer. Now that I think about it, he’s attentive to everything. He watches people.’
‘You mean he gawps at girls?’ This sounded usefully dubious.
‘No, nothing like that. He watches people, carefully. You know how we met, him drawing my picture? Well, he’s a bit like that all the time. You get the sense that he’s drawing in his head.’ She laughed. ‘And he writes things in little black books.’
This was more like it. Perhaps she was, after all, just a little dissatisfied. Even though she was mocking her uncertainties, there was, he thought, an edge to them.
She had been about to tell him what she had seen Steven doing on the night they had all had dinner together on the boat. At one point in the evening he had been distracted and she had watched him as he looked around the room. He seemed to fix upon an older couple at a table nearby. After a minute or two the man, looking out of the window at the wharfside conversions drifting past, reached over and, without looking, gently stroked his wife’s hand. Anne was about to ask him why he was so interested in the couple when one of Beck’s friends distracted her. As she was talking to him, she felt Steven’s index finger slowly caress her hand. Startled, she turned to him, but Karen interrupted him and he looked away. She had worried about it for several days. Had he copied them? Or had seeing them merely reminded him to touch her tenderly? Or was it just coincidence? And then she realised what Beck was up to. She felt a stab of guilt at talking about Steven in this way, and remembering the touch of his hand now seemed trivial and neurotic. It felt like bad faith. ‘It just goes to show that maybe what my mother said about me was right.’
‘And what was that?’
‘She used to say that I was never satisfied.’ She smiled at him but the edge in the smile was a warning to drop the subject. ‘There’s a little something for you on the dresser.’
He looked and saw a carefully wrapped parcel. He walked over and opened it. Inside was a copy of Orwell’s 1984. A first edition. He was astonished at her generosity and for a moment didn’t say anything.
‘It’s to say thank you for all the work you’ve done on the car,’ she said, pleased at how touched he was.
‘Well, what can I say but thank you back. It must have cost a fortune.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said, going back to the magazine, ‘but if you hadn’t kept going on about how it was a mistake to buy the car in the first place I would have spent even more.’
They had been to Martin Beck’s flat for dinner and were walking to the tube when Steven realised he was failing to make ground with Anne. Somewhere along the way, despite the warmth she felt for him, the desire, the affection, he had stalled. A terrible surge of fear flooded through his stomach then began to die away. It was vital not to give in to the endless unease always at the back of his mind. He reassured himself that everything was in place; it was a question of watching and picking up any clue as to what was present in him, or what he lacked, then acting on it. Be patient, he told himself, feeling her affection for him in the close grip of her arm in his. Be patient.
Arm in arm he could feel, nevertheless, Anne’s sense of intrigue at the elaborate balance of pleasures his personality seemed to offer her. He stopped her and they kissed. Again he felt the pleasure she took in his touch and in touching him: those extraordinary kisses and the occasional soft invasion of her tongue. And yet for all that there was nothing lukewarm in her touch, there was always a point when her passion receded, always the careful, discreet pulling back, the contracting of the pupils, the merest turn of the body, a tensing of the muscles along the inside of her arm. It was everywhere and nowhere and yet her affection and desire for him were also present in the very actions that were telling him he was here but not there. Where was it? How was it done? How could it be so clear yet so impossible to pin down?
They had walked to a quiet row of houses parallel to the Harlesden Road to avoid the late-night emergence from the local pubs. They stopped kissing and began to walk, but as they passed behind the Saracen’s Head, three men stepped out of an alley that connected the two roads. He guided her to the other side, feeling how tense she was.
‘It’s OK, don’t worry,’ he said. The three crossed in front of them and he was obliged to stop in front of a man well over six feet tall and about fifteen stone. The casual clothes he wore were fairly expensive, not Lacoste but pretty close. The second man, much younger and smaller though still heavier than Steven, wore the traditional uniform of cropped hair, Crombie, Ben Sherman and Doc Martens. The third, a tall and elegantly dressed black man, stood some distance behind the others. Incongruously, he was carrying an ancient Tesco’s carrier bag.
‘Lend us a fiver,’ said the big man amiably.
‘Why?’ said Steven,
‘Give it to him,’ whispered Anne. He could feel her terror, and tried to gauge the proportion of fear for herself against fear for him.
‘Yes, go on, give it to him,’ mocked the smaller man, with great bonhomie.
‘Why do you want it?’ said Steven, a touch more aggressively.
The big man looked at him, more affronted than surprised. ‘I need a cup of tea.’
‘We’re dying for a cup,’ said the smaller man.
Steven looked at him directly for the first time. ‘You want five pounds as well?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do. But I prefer coffee. Nes-caf-é.’ He said each syllable as if it were a separate word. ‘Only decaffeinated, mind. I can’t sleep if it isn’t decaffeinated. Can I?’ He looked over at his friend.
‘Five pounds seems rather a lot,’ said Steven, as if this really were a negotiation. ‘I mean, you’re a long way from the Savoy out here.’
‘What’s it to you, pal?’
Steven turned back to the big man. ‘It’s ten pounds to me, and I’m not your pal.’
Anne pulled away from him and opened her handbag. Clumsily she pulled out about thirty pounds. ‘Take this,’ she said, fear shaking her voice and body. ‘Just leave us alone.’
The big man reached over to take it, grabbing her painfully by the wrist. Steven moved towards him but the other two shifted themselves in a slight but clear gesture of menace. Steven stopped as if his initial aggression had vanished with the realisation that they were not just after money. He reached into his pocket. They looked at him, interested in what pointless ritual of appeasement he would choose. He took out seventy pounds which the short man received with the bored automatism of a check-out girl; then he offered his watch, a Rolex, and his credit cards. All were taken in the same spirit.
‘What do you want?’ said Steven.
‘Anything you give us we can take,’ said the elegant black man, revealing that he was the leader. He took out a Polaroid camera from the carrier bag. He pointed it at Steven and blinded him with the flash. He waited patiently for the picture to emerge. ‘I love watching them develop,’ he said pleasantly, then explained, ‘We take one photo be
fore . . . and one after.’
Steven looked lost and then made as if to rescue Anne from the grip of the large thug holding her. He had hardly begun to move when the skinhead produced a Stanley knife from his Crombie jacket. Given that there were three of them it was hardly necessary, serving only as a sharp symbol of Steven’s impotence. Again they watched him silently. Steven, looking feeble, said nothing. Then the black leader spoke. ‘As it happens, we can make a deal.’ He waited as a sudden wary hope came into both Anne and Steven’s eyes. He paused. ‘Give us your wife.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Steven.
‘Simple,’ said the leader. ‘Just give her to us. Then you can walk away.’
Horror and grief spread through Anne as she looked at Steven. She realised that he was, with the most intense and appalled reluctance, considering what he was being offered. He clearly wanted to refuse heroically, but the words would not come. She lowered her eyes.
‘We’re going to take her anyway,’ said the leader reasonably. ‘This way one of you is saved.’
Steven said nothing. Anne spoke softly – a terrible sound. ‘Go on, Steven.’
The leader nodded to the skinhead. ‘Take him down to the Rec and keep him there till I send . . . Bartholomew.’ The other two laughed at his invention and the skinhead gestured mockingly with his free hand for Steven to go ahead.
Anne watched him as he walked on but he did not look at her until he was about ten yards away. Her face was white with fear and grief as the skinhead posed her for the Polaroid he was about to take, gentle as a school photographer with a timid child. In the brief burst of light from the camera, standing under a broken lamp-post it occurred to Steven that he had never seen anyone so alone, so abandoned.
‘Don’t worry, old son . . .’ The skinhead moved close to him, letting his guard down for the first time since he had pulled the knife from his jacket. Steven grabbed the man’s wrist with his right hand and smashed the heel of his left upwards into his elbow. It broke with a loud crack. He screamed and kept on screaming as Steven turned to face the other two. As he walked towards them the big man stepped up to meet him, pulling out a hammer which he fumbled and dropped. He paused for a moment, as if mystified by his clumsiness. As he bent to pick it up, the toe of Steven’s shoe caught him just behind his left ear. He was only stunned though and staggered towards Steven waving the hammer erratically at his head. As he lashed at him, Steven grabbed his wrist in one hand and pulled him over to the edge of the path. In one fluid move he took hold of the back of his head and smashed it down onto a low garden wall. Less than eight seconds had passed between the first blow and the second.