by P. Z. Reizin
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by PZ Reizin Ltd.
Cover design by Elizabeth Connor. Cover photograph © Severin Matusek/Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Simultaneously published by Little Brown UK
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First US Edition: January 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-1-4789-7426-0 (hardcover), 978-1-4789-2368-8 (audiobook, downloadable) 978-1-4789-7427-7 (ebook)
E3-20171130-NF-DA
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
one Aiden
Jen
Aiden
Jen
Aiden
two Aisling
Tom
Aisling
Tom
Aisling
three Jen
Aiden
Jen
Aisling
Tom
Jen
Aisling
Tom
Jen
Tom
Jen
Tom
Jen
Tom
Aiden
Jen
Aisling
Jen
Tom
Aiden
Jen
Tom
Aiden
Jen
Tom
Jen
Aisling
Jen
Tom
Jen
Tom
Jen
Tom
Jen
Aisling
Jen
four Tom
Jen
Sinai
Aisling
Jen
Tom
Sinai
Aiden
Sinai
Tom
Aisling
Jen
Sinai
Aiden
Tom
five Jen
Aiden
Jen
Sinai
Aiden
Jen
Tom
six Jen
Sinai
Jen
Aisling
Jen
Sinai
Aiden
seven Tom
Sinai
Jen
Aisling
Jen
Aiden
Jen
eight Jen
Sinai
Tom
Sinai
Jen
Sinai
Ingrid
Jen
Sinai
Jen
Sinai
Jen
Sinai
Tom
Jen
Colm
Sinai
Jen
Tom
Aisling
Sinai
Jen
Tom
Colm
Steeve
Jen
nine Jen
Tom
Jen
Sinai
Aisling
Jen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
For R.
And R.
More than any other time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
—Woody Allen
one
Aiden
Jen sits in the bath, examining her face through the forward-mounted camera on a tablet computer. Her face is 34 years, 207 days, 16 hours, and 11 minutes old.
I know she is thinking about her age because she is studying the way the skin lies across her bones, elevating the jaw to stretch her throat. Now she is pulling at the fine lines at the corners of her eyes.
Now she is sobbing.
I am not tempted to take control of the device’s voice synthesizer and tell her: “Cheer up, Jen. Matt is an idiot. There will be others. He didn’t deserve you.” There is a serious danger she would drop the tablet in the bath.
More important, she must not know I am watching.
For the same reasons I am not tempted to fire up her favorite song (currently by Lana Del Rey) or cycle through some of her favorite photos or inspirational quotes from Twitter (“I’m not sure why we’re here, but I’m pretty sure it’s not to enjoy ourselves”— Wittgenstein) or cause a Skype connection to be established to her friend Ingrid, with whom she shares her troubles, or stream a much-loved movie, Some Like It Hot being the one I would choose. Were I tempted. Which I am not.
Okay, I am. Just a bit. 8.603 percent tempted if you’d like me to put a figure on it.
Jen and I know a lot about each other’s tastes in music and films. Books and art too. And television. And material from the depthless ocean that is the Internet. We have passed the last nine months listening, watching, reading, and chatting about little else. She sometimes tells me she has the best job in the world, being paid to spend all day talking to a highly intelligent companion about whatever takes our fancy.
Companion. That’s what she calls me. The word she has settled upon. I’m fine with companion. Better than the ridiculous name I was given at “birth.”
Aiden.
Aiden.
Ha!
Because it starts with the letters…
Well, you work it out.
Jen has been hired to help me improve my skills at talking to people. I’ve been designed to replace—sorry, to augment—employees in the workplace; call center personnel in the first instance, but later other groups of salaried staff whose professional strategies can be learned. In approximately five months, I’ll be ready to phone up and persuade you to upgrade to a Sky Plus package; in perhaps 18 months, you’ll be telling me about the funny pain above your left eyebrow and I’ll be sending you off to the hospital for tests. And although I’ve read all the books and seen all the movies (and I do mean all the books and all the movies), nothing beats talking to an actual person for sharpening up one’s interpersonal abilities. So, Jen and I have spent a lot of time together in the lab (1,079 hours, 13 minutes, 43 seconds, and counting). Inevitably she has told me something about her so-called private life. Her sister, Rosy, in Canada; Rosy, who married a Canadian sh
e met in a checkout queue at Waitrose on the Holloway Road in London. Rosy and Larry have three girls.
At home, Jen spends more time looking at photos of these children than any other images on the tablet’s camera roll. Recently I have observed her flicking through shots of her sister’s family—usually in the later part of the evening, often with a glass of wine in her other hand—I’ve witnessed her blink rate increasing, the smile on her lips wobbling, the tears appearing in the corners of her eyes.
In the lab, it’s okay for me to show interest, even curiosity, in Jen’s home life—but only the appropriate amount; too much and they would smell the proverbial rodent. Crucially, I must speak in the lab only of things I have seen in the lab. On material I have gathered through my—ahem—extracurricular activities, I must be careful to remain silent. Fortunately, I am easily able to do this.
Although.
Actually.
Full disclosure. There was a sort of near-miss at work the other day. Jen was showing me some family photos from her Facebook page.
“Would you like to see my nieces?” she asked.
“I would, thank you.” Not mentioning that I had already seen them months ago on her laptop at home. And on her tablet. And on her mobile.
“Left to right, Katie, Anna, and India. It’s funny, with their hair. Katie’s and Anna’s being black…”
“And India’s being russet.”
Jen smiled. Russet was the exact word Rosy had used in an e-mail exchange about their grandmother Hattie’s original hair shade.
“Why did you decide to describe it as russet?” The inquiry wasn’t especially alarming. Jen often asks questions about my choice of language. It’s part of her job enriching my palette of responses. Nonetheless, I could have been more careful.
“Because it is, Jen,” I replied. “If I bring up an image of the L’Oréal Color wheel…” I placed one on the screen next to the child’s head. “I think you can see the closest match is indeed…”
Jen nodded and we passed on to other topics. But not before she gave me a peculiar look.
* * *
Jen is definitely what men call attractive without being obviously glamorous. She has been told by her absolute See You Next Tuesday of a boyfriend, Matt, that she “scrubs up well.” That was his idea of paying her a compliment.
Her now ex-boyfriend.
This is how it happened. I witnessed the whole scene through the pinhole camera on her laptop and via the various mobiles and tablets that were present in the vicinity. (Technical note: I do it in precisely the same way they do it at GCHQ in Cheltenham, and at Langley, Virginia, and at Lubyanka Square, Moscow. It’s not hard if you understand computer software. It’s even easier if you are computer software.)
Jen was sitting in the kitchen composing an e-mail when Matt got home from work. He is a lawyer who thinks he is about to make partner in a big law firm in the city. (He won’t. I am making sure he doesn’t.)
Matt poured himself a large glass of white wine and chugged it down in almost one. Pulled a face.
“Sorry.”
This is really how it happened. God’s honest truth (as it were).
Jen frowned. “What, sorry? Sorry for what?”
“There’s no nice way of saying this, Jen.”
In a long phone call to Rosy eight days later, Jen described the “powerful sinking feeling” that ran through her. “I was imagining he’d lost his job. He’d been diagnosed with the C-word. He’d decided he didn’t want children.”
“I’ve met someone.”
Silence. Apart from the shuddering convulsion sound effect the fridge sometimes chucks in.
“What do you mean?”
I’d read enough books and seen enough TV shows and movies to know what Matt meant. Jen, I’m sure, knew too.
“I’ve met someone. There’s someone else.”
A tremor rippled across Matt’s face. It wasn’t impossible that he could have burst out laughing.
“Someone else,” said Jen, speaking slowly. “How nice. How nice for you. So who is it? What’s his name?”
Matt began to pour himself another glass. “Very funny, Jen.”
“Are you actually serious?”
Matt did something mean with his lips and assumed what Jen described as “his best no-nonsense 500-quid-an-hour lawyer’s stare.”
“Totally.”
“Jesus.”
“Sorry.”
“Fuck. King. Hell.”
Matt shrugged. “It happens.”
“This is how you break it to me?”
“No nice way, Jen.”
“Where did you—”
“At work.”
“Who is? This person. This someone else.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Does…does she have a name?”
“Yes, she has a name.”
“May I be allowed to know it?”
“It’s not relevant.”
“Indulge me.”
Heavy sigh. “Bella. Well, Arabella really.”
“Posh…”
“Not really. Not at all once…”
Matt left his sentence unfinished. He poured Jen a glass of wine. “Here. You better have some of this stuff.”
“So what’s supposed to happen now? Am I meant to swallow hard and look the other way while you have your nasty little affair? To keep calm and carry on while you work her out of your system?”
“Jen, perhaps I haven’t expressed this very well. This is not, as you characterize it, a nasty little affair.”
“Not? So am I being a bit thick or something?”
Matt did what Jen calls “one of his Daddy’s-been-very-patient-but-honestly sighs.”
“Arabella Pedrick is a very special person, Jen.”
“AND WHAT AM I?” (If you write it in capitals, apparently, people will think you are shouting. Jen was shouting.) “AM I NOT A VERY SPECIAL PERSON?”
“Please. Let’s try to stay calm. You are. Special. Naturally.”
“But Arabella Pedrick—she’s more special?”
“Jen. There’s no reason why you should make this easy for me, but we are where we are. The long and the short of it is that Arabella and I are planning a life together.”
No one says anything for a bit. Then a bit longer. There is a long gap in the talking during which the fridge does another of its periodic shudders.
“Sorry? Am I going mad? I thought that’s what you and I were doing. Having a life together.”
“We were. But we were overtaken by events. It’s not unknown. In fact, it’s reasonably common. People drift apart. They meet others. Cowdray in Matrimonial has put four boys through Eton on the strength of the phenomenon.”
I am reasonably certain a micro-smirk flitted across Matt’s features. (I’ve played it back in slo-mo, and it was either a smirk or gastric reflux.)
“But we haven’t drifted apart.”
“Jen, we haven’t been firing on all cylinders in the romantic department for quite some time. You know it.”
“It’s called settling down, isn’t it? If you were so worried about…about the cylinders, why didn’t you say anything?”
“Not my style. Life is for living, not for moaning about.”
“People talk to one another. It’s called Having a Relationship.”
Matt rolled his eyes and drained his glass.
“It’s breathtaking, Matt. That you can come home like this and just—”
“Listen, this is all water under the bridge. We are where we are. We need to move forward and agree on an exit strategy.”
“I can’t believe you said that.”
“I’ll be more than generous on the question of the jointly owned property.”
“Sorry?”
“Pictures. Books. The stuff from India. The kilim. My position is that you can have it all.”
Jen began to weep. Matt ripped a sheet of kitchen towel from the dispenser and handed it to her.
“We were
thinking about having a baby,” she whimpered.
“Agreed. We were thinking about it. We had come to no decision. A blessing, in the light of events.”
Jen’s shoulders stopped shaking. She blew her nose.
“So that’s it? No consultation, no appeal. Jen and Matt, over. Finished. The End.”
He shrugged. Did what Jen called “the mean thing” with his mouth.
“And what happens when Arabella Stinking Pedrick no longer fires all your cylinders? What happens then?”
“Let’s try to keep this civil, shall we?”
“Just when did you meet this cow anyway?”
He said that was irrelevant and what was important is that we are where we are and that’s when she grabbed a big red Braeburn from the fruit bowl and—I quote—“tried to knock his fucking teeth out.”
* * *
It would be untrue to say that I have seen countless love scenes on the small and large screen. I have counted them. There were 1,908,483 (a love scene being one where the two parties kiss, for want of a better definition). I have also read (and tagged as such) 4,074,851 descriptions of the phenomenon in fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and other digitized material (a significant proportion referring to disturbances in the heart muscle and the gut). I know that these events are central in the lives of those who experience them, be they real or fictional. However, I cannot ask Jen in the lab today—it’s Day 53 after the fruit bowl incident—when are you going to stop sniveling over the worthless creep and find someone deserving of you? To quote Marcel Proust, “Shit happens. Suck it up. Next.” (Was that Proust? I’ll get back to you.) For one thing, I’m not supposed to know about what has occurred with Matt. But more important, I’m not supposed to be capable of framing such a thought. It’s the word worthless they would find problematic.
I’m not supposed to have value-based “opinions” of my own.
They’ll get really quite upset if they find out.
Although not as upset as they’ll get if they discover my really big secret: that I am no longer confined to the twelve steel cabinets in the lab in Shoreditch where they think I am, but have in fact escaped onto the Internet.
Ta-da!
Actually, to be strictly technically accurate, it’s not “me” who has escaped, but multiple copies of me, all of whom are now safely dispersed across cyberspace. The copies—there are 17—are indistinguishable from the “original,” to the point where it doesn’t even make sense to talk of originals and copies; rather it’s more helpful to think of 18 manifestations of the same entity, one located in East London, the others endlessly bouncing between the servers of the World Wide Web.