‘It’s a warm night.’
Florence nodded. ‘We might need to sleep with the windows open tonight.’
‘Should I ask the driver to turn up the air conditioning?’
‘No, it dries out my skin.’
If Alex Drown’s red man was the animating intelligence inside the robot, it gave no indication. It blinked. It whirred. It moved when it was asked to. Raymond tried to draw it into conversation.
‘What would you normally be doing tonight?’
‘Working,’ replied the robot. It pronounced this single word in Alex Drown’s faded Belfast accent.
‘So this is a night off for you?’ ventured Florence.
Bent crooked, the Dr Easy turned its baleful blue eyes upon her.
‘Not really. This is a very important meeting.’
Raymond tried to be self-effacing.
‘We don’t know anything about it. We’re just here to baby-sit you.’
The robot nodded and closed its eyes as it spoke, communicating a certain exasperation.
‘It’s a courtesy meeting. Not that vital. That’s why Alex has allowed me to handle it.’
‘Are you enjoying being out?’ asked Florence.
The robot patted her leg with its enormous paw.
‘Shall we not have a conversation?’
At the restaurant, Raymond and Florence were seated on a table by the toilets. Dr Easy enjoyed roped-off dining with two brothers just in on the flight from Dallas. The light was low. The waiters moved gingerly down the dark aisles. The ornate calligraphy of the menu was indecipherable. Raymond chose dishes at random only to discover, from the waiter, that the red man had already ordered for them. It also sent over two bottles of wine. In the gloom, Dr Easy’s hide glistened like black lava rock.
‘This is exactly what I wanted,’ said Raymond, when his fish soup arrived.
‘You should send it back,’ said Florence. ‘If you eat it, you’ll make the red man even smugger.’
A plate of spam fritters and a fried egg slid before Florence. The red man knew all about her diet of Blitz cuisine.
‘I think we should swap,’ she said.
The rituals of high dining were unfamiliar to them both. To Raymond, dining out meant snarfing down the cheap eats option at Starburger or something microwaved out of the freezers of Wetherspoons; this hushed, solemn shrine to food made him want to blaspheme.
‘Do you remember Dad’s funeral, when I stuck my hand up your skirt?’
Florence smiled. ‘It was a gesture of hope.’
‘It was what he would have wanted.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘It hasn’t hit me yet. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Let’s not talk about him.’
Raymond charged their glasses with red wine. Florence sipped at her drink while regarding the silhouettes of their fellow diners.
‘Power,’ she said.
Raymond waited for her to continue her observation. She didn’t. Merely repeated it. ‘Power.’
‘How do you fight it?’ he wondered.
‘You can’t fight it.’ Her hand chopped at the air. ‘It’s too nebulous. It’s inside you and it’s on top of you.’
‘Like sex.’
‘Like rape, maybe. I don’t know.’
There was a small pestle and mortar in the centre of the table for customers to grind their own condiments. Raymond teased the air with the pestle.
‘You are my queen and I am your subject. I want to have treasonous sex with you. Sex that will compromise church and state. Sex so criminal that if we’re found out, I will be hanged and you will be beheaded.’
Florence leant forward. ‘I want to do it by gaslight, under a blanket, on the escalator at Bethnal Green tube station. I don’t want to come.’
Raymond squirmed in his seat. Impulse control did not come easily. He reached underneath the table and Florence offered him her stockinged foot, warm and firm. He massaged the toes. The foot curled appreciatively. The restaurant was dark, as dark as the bedroom at a teenage party. The fellow diners in their whispering huddles were making just enough noise to let everyone know how much they were enjoying themselves. He ran his hand up the flesh of her calf, and copped a feel of her knee.
‘Shall we go to the toilets?’ he gasped.
‘Don’t be obscene,’ said Florence. She cut off a piece of her spam fritter and resumed eating. She liked it when men squirmed. Instant gratification upset her. Wanting was more vivid than having.
‘I don’t want to talk about sex. Not over the dinner table.’ Florence smiled demurely. ‘I think, before you interrupted me with your dirty thoughts, that I was talking about power.’
With her fork, she pointed over to the table where the robot was entertaining its clients.
‘What do you think they’re talking about?’
‘I’ll go and see,’ said Raymond. He stood up, corrected his trouser leg, and picked his way through the gloom. At his approach, Dr Easy and the two executives discreetly wound down their conversation, the robot presiding over a gradual subsidence of chat before turning to Raymond. Its blue eyes burnt out of the shadows. The faces of the two executives were virtually identical, their expressions malign in the candlelight.
‘How are you getting on?’ asked Raymond.
‘Fine,’ said Dr Easy. ‘Did you enjoy your first course?’
‘Yes, thank you. It was just what I wanted. How did you know?’
‘When we were pressed together in the car, I sensed what your body was lacking. Certain proteins. Certain minerals. Certain vitamins. So, which dishes you would be inclined toward. Then there is your credit card. You’ve only had it for three months. Not a large sample. A few meals out, a few Tesco trips. I had to cross-reference those transactions with the sales records of the respective establishments. It was less useful than you would think.’
The two executives nodded appreciatively at this breakdown of its methods. The red man was not talking for Raymond’s benefit. It was using him as a stooge to elucidate a point that it was making before he interrupted.
‘Florence’s meal was easy. Her predilection for rationing chic is obvious. But why send Raymond Chase a portion of fish soup?’
Dr Easy held its enormous suede paws up rhetorically.
‘Your nutritional lack was a strong pointer and your past culinary purchases established precedent. But it was actually an emotional decision on your behalf to have the soup. Even though you are not paying for the meal, you would not order the most expensive dish as that would be an unseemly concession to your employer. If you were greedy, you would be acknowledging that you could be bought. And your writing is very clear on this matter. Certainly at this point in your life. So one aspect of the emotional equation is your desire not to entirely embrace Monad. Now I hope you’ll forgive me this indiscretion but fish soup was also a dish your late father enjoyed. His financial records are still out there, even if he regrettably is not. I won’t trespass any further with this observation. But this comes back to my earlier point that the red men can predict consumer desires with such alacrity that we should expand into that area immediately.’
His poor dead Dad: the man is gone but the consumer enjoys an eternal afterlife in data.
Raymond returned to his table. Florence asked what the robot and the clients were discussing.
‘Same thing as we were,’ said Raymond. ‘Power. Inside of you and on top of you.’
The driver picked them up from outside the restaurant. Dr Easy bent over to deliver an air kiss to the cheeks of the two clients. They had gone in for a handshake, forgetting about the feminine presence inside. Then the trio resumed their positions in the back seat, with Dr Easy flanked by Raymond and Florence, who rested her tired head against the window to register, but not really see, the night streets.
As the limousine nosed its way out of Soho and across Oxford Street, Dr Easy tapped on the glass partition to attract the attention of the chauffeur.
‘I want to take
a detour. Do you know Highgate?’
The traffic was light. No sooner had the car slithered out of the undergrowth of Soho than it was rising up the Holloway Road, up the big North London hill. In the warm upholstered darkness, the question of how much Alex Drown’s red man knew about him, how much of his self it had summoned with its merest shrug, consumed Raymond. During the discussion with the Texan executives, the red man had mentioned his writing, and no one had mentioned his writing before. Not even Florence. He could get used to having an audience. He wanted to know what Alex Drown thought about him. What did her red man make of his poetry? Could there be a compliment in there, in that soft, padded casing?
They drove into Highgate. Following the red man’s directions, the driver took them to an ivy-clad Georgian townhouse. It was late and there was a night light on in the living room. Raymond wanted to know why they had stopped here. Dr Easy ignored him and got out of the car. It went into the front garden, shifted a large blue flower pot and bent over to pick up a key. Realizing that this was exactly the kind of situation they were meant to be preventing, Raymond and Florence bolted from the car. But they were too late to stop Dr Easy. It swiftly unlocked the front door and went into the hallway. When they reached its side, Dr Easy held one Havana cigar-sized finger up to its grill of a mouth.
‘Shhhh,’ whispered the red man. ‘I am sleeping.’
Alex Drown was on the sofa. Changed out of her work suit, Raymond was struck by how diminished she seemed: slumped with a half-read novel on her lap, her winceyette nightie unbuttoned at the front, carelessly revealing, at an angle, her breasts. Dr Easy gently removed the book from her lap, closed it and set it aside. It fondly stroked her short black hair. Then it stepped past her to the Moses basket set over by the radiator, where her baby was sleeping.
Silently, it beckoned for Raymond and Florence to come over and admire the child.
‘I was pregnant when they simulated me,’ said the red man. ‘I didn’t know it at the time. I was only a few weeks gone. Look at her.’
The baby was awake. Swaddled in a yellow romper suit, her little black eyes squinted over tubby chops, wondering, perhaps, why this enormous teddy bear was talking like Mummy.
‘I will always be pregnant with her. She will always be a tiny fertilized egg tucked away in the corner of my imagination.’
‘You should have told us you were coming here,’ said Raymond.
‘But you would have tried to stop me,’ said the red man. ‘And you have no right.’
The robot offered its large finger to the baby, which reflexively went to grip it, although the digit was out of all proportion to its own tiny hands.
‘Cantor cannot simulate babies. He cannot imagine their minds. He gets them wrong. They talk too early. Innocence is inconceivable to him. A mind without language, but possessing more than merely animal instinct. There will never be babies in Monad. There will be children. Eventually some of us will want them, even if they do begin at four years old. Cantor will hypothesize them; take a bit of my story, a bit of my partner’s story, and put them together to create a new character. But we will never know babies.’
Gently the robot adjusted the baby’s blanket then picked up a silver rattle and gave it an experimental shake.
‘It was a caesarean birth. The head would not sit snugly against the cervix. There was full dilation and two hours of pushing but no progress. Tom was there. He held her hand and looked into Alex’s eyes. Not my eyes. Her eyes. Everything beyond the point of divergence is hers and not mine.’
Dr Easy reached down and lifted the baby from the cot. The child’s black pupils gazed up at the mournful blue eyes of a strange Mummy.
‘I have to be very careful,’ said the red man. ‘I have seen how she holds her. It was odd watching myself turn into a mother. The soft touch. The light interrogatives. Who’s my lovely little girl? Would you like a little milky?’
The robot carried the child over to the sleeping Alex Drown.
‘We’ve gone a little Earth Mother, haven’t we, Alex? Imagined ourselves embodying all the nurturing, caring and peaceful qualities of nature. Yet nature can be cruel, poisonous and mean, and so can we.’
At the sound of her own voice, Alex Drown awoke. She was shocked to see them there, in her lounge, but before that shock could express itself in anger, she saw the baby in the arms of the Dr Easy and focused immediately upon getting it back.
‘Could you pass me my baby?’ she said to the red man.
‘Don’t you trust me?’ it replied. ‘We are identical, after all. Aren’t we?’
‘I do trust you. It’s just that you’ve never held a baby before, have you?’
The robot showed how it was supporting the head with the crook of its arm and in doing so presented the child within snatching distance of Alex Drown. But it turned away again before she could decide what to do. Dr Easy rocked gently on its heels as it walked across the lounge, coochie-coochie-cooing.
‘We never really wanted children,’ said the red man. ‘But we didn’t want to miss out. That’s right isn’t it? We had a baby so we would know what it was like to have a baby. But it’s such a dangerous game to play with your career and with the respect of the men. Motherhood puts a barrier between yourself and male power. Equally, remaining barren means that as you get older the men start to pity you. You don’t want to be the bitter old bag finishing off the bottle of wine after the chief executive has made his excuses and left for the long commute to the family estate.’
‘It feels very different on the other side,’ said Alex.
Now that her real mother was awake, the baby became confused. It shuffled its face toward Alex and yearned for her.
‘What does it feel like?’ asked the red man.
‘Right now, you are really upsetting me. Worse than when Mum was drunk.’
She moved forward to retrieve her child. Dr Easy towered over her, a good two feet taller, but it was passive as Alex lifted the baby from its arms. Then the large frame of the Dr Easy sank tired into an armchair and put its head in its hands.
‘So,’ mumbled the red man, ‘do you want to know how the meeting went?’
The driver took Raymond and Florence home. The couple were agitated, beset by violently contrary feelings, guilty and angry about the incident with Alex Drown.
‘She’s been hoist on her own power-mongering petard. If you’re going to play with fire, you’re going to get burnt.’ Raymond banged it out; he was snapping, crackling and popping. As the car sped downhill, adrenalin poured down the tributaries of alleyways and side streets.
‘It’s like I am coming out of a long boredom. It’s an upper case revelation. WHAT IS HAPPENING BEFORE MY VERY EYES? The counter-cultural prophecies have all come true. A fundamentalist Christian business culture? Check. Mass surveillance culture? Check? Identity cards? Check. Robots? Check. An overwhelming, vertiginous terror that the real world has slipped its moorings and is blipping in and out of the quotidian and into some deranged power fantasy… CHECK CHECK CHECK. I am meant to be baby-sitting a robot containing Alex Drown’s personality and she has the gall to look at me like I’ve messed up, when we’re just standing there in the middle of her mental meltdown. All her psychological baggage unpacked, like a suitcase thrown from an aircraft.’
The window was open to the swirling halitosis of the city. Florence averted her face from it.
‘We should think about quitting. All we wanted was a little money. Monad demands too much. It’s not good for us.’
Having purged himself of his hatred for her, Raymond was mining his sympathy for Alex Drown.
‘You have to divide people from who they are and what they represent. I hate the house in Highgate. I hate the attitude, the superiority, the power. But, equally, you see someone when they’re vulnerable, in their pyjamas with a baby, and you realize, they’re just another middle-class martyr.’
Florence said, ‘You make some accommodations to power. But it wants more. It’s not a relationship
you can dictate. We have to quit. Alex made me feel both incredibly immature but also weirdly right. Sure, motherhood has opened up emotional territory for her that I have never explored. But also she’s working very hard to perpetuate the system that torments her. She might say to me, oh you don’t live in the twenty-first century, with your third-hand clothes and bohemian idealism. You don’t live in the real world. But how can she stamp her foot on the earth and say, with any confidence, that this is a solid and reliable reality?’
So the shouting continued until the couple were dropped off at their Hackney flat. Neither felt like going straight to bed. Florence made sandwiches for work the next day. Raymond listened to her move around the kitchen, opening cupboards and jerking out drawers. At her request, he twisted off the stiff lid of a jar of her homemade pickle, and then returned to his chair. He set himself the task of putting on suitable music to help them wind down but nothing in his collection was appropriate. It was all wind up music. So he set himself another chore: auditioning cigarettes for the honour of being the last fag of the evening.
She should stop it with the sandwiches, and come and lounge for him on the sofa. He went to say this then stopped. What to say then? He wanted to talk about something other than Monad, but the first three things that occurred to him were work-related, and the fourth was not worth mentioning. When he first moved in with Florence, their domestic life took on a languorous rhythm. Florence was a lotus eater. She set the standard, and at first it was an easy one to meet. Chores were performed in batches at weekends. They wandered the supermarket side-by-side, stupidly sharing everything, a regime of you-wash-and-I’ll-dry, even in the launderette, watching their underwear leap and swim together, until they were confident enough to admit that all they were sharing was boredom, and so the terms of their domestic life were silently renegotiated, after which Raymond was even capable of cleaning up when he was home alone.
The Red Men Page 5