Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001

by Dell Magazines

  I gritted my teeth and my jaw popped, painfully. Gently, I pulled away from her, and tried rubbing the soreness away. We pressed on toward the car.

  While Rachel stowed her coat, I studied my face in the rearview, kneading gingerly at the flesh under my jaw. The bristles were thick and sparse against my palm. Frankly, I wasn't at my most alluring. But I went ahead anyway. “I bought you a present,” I said, thickly, as she clipped herself in. But Rachel, speaking at the very same instant, didn't hear me. “I'll drop you off at home and pop into Saffron Walden. We're out of milk, and I can get us some treats for tonight!”

  “I'll come with you,” I said.

  “You'll catch your death!”

  “It's only a shower.” Sometimes she could be as bad as he was.

  She turned the heater up full-blast. “Keep you warm,” she said.

  “For God's sake.”

  We drove in silence.

  “Shall we have some music?” she said.

  By now, I wasn't sure it was worth it. But he who hesitates is lost. “Let me choose,” I said. I fiddled with the buttons on the stereo, making a show of looking through Frank's Napster listing. I knew it was Frank's. It was unmistakable. Everything But the Girl. The Beautiful South. Alanis Morrisette. Texas. Then I took out my present and slipped it into the slot.

  “Oh my God.” She looked at me. She looked back at the road. “Where did you find this?”

  Ella Fitzgerald sings Cole Porter. Buddy Bregman's orchestra. All Through the Night, Do I Love You, Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye.

  “I haven't heard this in years!”

  “Do you want me to change it?”

  “God, no!”

  I couldn't resist teasing her: “If you prefer, Frank's got a Sheryl Crow I haven't heard—”

  “No! Oh please!”

  I Love Paris. Miss Otis Regrets.

  “Oh, it's so lovely!”

  “I thought you'd like it,” I said.

  “I never get to hear anything decent any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “Vinyl won't fit in the slot.”

  Saffron Walden was one big Volvo convention. Exhaust plumed in the chilly early-evening air. The disc spun to an end. It was stifling, Rachel had the cabin heat turned too high, so I opened my window. The air was thick with poison.

  “Oh, play it again!”

  “ ‘Play it again, Sam.'”

  “Go on. It brings back memories.”

  As well it might. Working late at the studio, hammering out this or that twist in old Twinkly Eyes’ mercurial character—his sharkish staff-room politics, his never-less-than-scientific after-school experiments—it was all we ever listened to.

  Too Darn Hot.

  The Waitrose parking lot was a free-for-all. Rachel found the volume button and cranked it all the way up. We lowered the windows and leaned out, grinning madly at everyone until, unnerved, a scowling man in a flat cap, laboriously reversing his Hyundai, let us steal his spot.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  “I'll come in with you.”

  “No, no, you're nicely dry!” She unclipped the door. Her skirt stretched and rose as she climbed out. She pulled her coat around her and ran for the store. I watched the backs of her knees.

  I waited. I checked out the Sheryl Crow. I played some more Ella Fitzgerald. I felt empty. I hadn't bought Ella for the sake of shared memories. I hadn't bought it because I thought Rachel would like it. I had bought it for ammunition. I had bought it to do a job, and now the job was done. I was being as manipulative as Frank, only with me it was worse, because I was conscious of what I was doing. There was a half tube of Werther's Originals in the door pocket. I took one and sucked. My jaw popped and scraped. I soothed it with my hand.

  There was a tap on the glass. Rachel was grinning ear to ear. She had bags in both hands. I opened the door for her. I had this nightmare vision of her leaning in and saying: “Look at tonight's treats!”

  What she said was: “Why don't we listen to some old stuff tonight?”

  * * *

  The room had been her study to start with, only to fill up with clutter when she acquired her office in town. There was so much tat stowed away in there: old furniture, clothes, curtains.

  She still had her old hi-fi—the one she'd kept at the studio, to keep her sane through those frequent all-nighters. God knows what was going on inside that thing, but if you as much as stood up, the record player cut out and Radio 4 came on.

  “Hold your glass out,” she said.

  At least Frank knew his wine.

  We began sensibly. Ella. Billie. Bird. The Duke. Another bottle.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “...ish.”

  “I'll bring us some stuff from the fridge,” she said, and left the room.

  There was a table-lamp with an orange shade by the window. I plugged it in, crossed to the door, and snapped off the main light. It was like a brothel suddenly. So much for mood enhancement: I turned the main light back on. Rachel came in with a tray piled high with oatcakes and Styrofoam delicatessen tubs and middle-class cheese. She set it down on the floor by the player.

  Radio 4 cut in: some chatter about the “—problems of combining bookshelves, putting the strain on more than one literary marriage—”

  “Oh, for fuck's sake,” she muttered.

  I got the record player working again while Rachel laid out a picnic. She turned on the table light, then went to the door and turned off the main light. “That's better,” she said. It was like the inside of a seventies porn movie. She stretched out beside me. The orange glow played on her legs.

  We ate. We talked, and remembered, and relaxed. Half way through After Dinner at the Little Club with Kurt Maier I froze, my hand on Rachel's calf. I was forgetting myself. Rachel sat back on her elbows. The orange table light made her face look even thinner than it was—almost fierce. Gingerly, I began to stroke. She closed her eyes. The needle rose up and the turntable clunked to a stop. I sat up.

  “That was nice,” she said.

  It was Keith Jarrett's Standards album that finally knocked us off the rails.

  “Oh God listen to him!”

  Rachel giggled.

  Jarrett's so jealous of his music, he ruins even the studio recordings by whining along to the melody. We mewled with him a while, the way we used to, then Rachel had the idea we should go through and find the especially dreadful bits.

  “Jesus.”

  “He's like a cat in a cake tin.”

  After that, things just got sillier and sillier. Rachel and the Green Lanes writers had had a long kitsch phase, around the second year of broadcast, and Rachel had managed to hang on to most of the albums. Chacksfield Plays Simon & Garfunkel, The Ray Conniff Hi-Fi Companion.

  “Oh Christ! Listen to this! 'An improvisation on “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” ‘! “

  “What about this, then?”

  “Oh, put it on! Put it on!”

  Nina & Frederik: a Danish-Dutch couple who sing Calypso very badly and very, very sincerely. They even do the accents. On the back of the sleeve it said, in big bold letters, “You will have a good time in the company of NINA & FREDERIK.”

  We did.

  “Rachel?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you have planned for tomorrow?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Why?”

  “Why don't you and I have a day out?”

  “Where were you thinking?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I don't know. The beach. Dorset maybe. Cornwall.”

  She looked at me a long time. “It's quite a way,” she said.

  “We could go now,” I said. “I'll drive. You can sleep in the car.”

  She laughed.

  “I mean it.”

  “It's not that.”

  “What then?”

  “You've never been to Cornwall,” she said.

  She misread my expression; she thought I didn't understand. “You've only ever been to t
he Cornwall we made up,” she said. “Only the Green—”

  She bit her tongue. “I'm sorry,” she said.

  At least she had the decency to redden.

  “I would like to see the real Cornwall,” I said, in a small voice.

  But she could see that I was angling for pity now, and she wasn't having it. “What about Frank?” she said.

  “What about Frank?”

  She laughed, and touched my cheek. “We'll have to take him with us.”

  “Why?”

  “How can we not?”

  And of course, she was right.

  Not for the first time, I wondered why Frank had agreed to the operation. Might there not—all his self-sacrifice aside—be an element of cruelty at play?

  Rachel made to stand up. But I still had hold of her hand.

  “What?”

  “Rachel.” I tried to kiss her.

  She pulled away.

  I couldn't work her out. “Isn't this what you... ?”

  “Of course I want you,” she breathed.

  I was so overjoyed, I couldn't find the words. When I did find them, she put a finger to my lips. “There's no hurry,” she said. “Is there?”

  I opened my mouth, slid my lips over her finger.

  But she drew it away.

  “What?”

  “This isn't a game,” she said. I looked up.

  The desire was gone from her eyes.

  I couldn't understand what I'd done to break the mood. “Isn't it?”

  “I want it to mean something.”

  I bit my lip in irritation.

  “Jerry?”

  “Of course it means something,” I said. Second by second, the mood was evaporating. “You and I—we're meant for each other.”

  “You're a smooth talker, Jerry.”

  Desire was dead, and now even her sympathy was giving way.

  “So?”

  She shrugged.

  My anger mounted. I said: “If you don't know me by now—”

  She laughed. It was a cold sound. “Oh Jerry,” she said. “I do know you! Through and through! That's the point!”

  I felt taunted, childishly hurt. “Meaning? You want meaning? You sound like a schoolgirl.”

  “Of course, you'd know about that,” she retorted.

  “If only I looked now the way I looked on Green Lanes.... “

  She gave a yell of triumph, as though I had given myself away. “How you look?” she said. “This has nothing to do with how you look.”

  “I hate his face,” I said. “It hurts.”

  She pulled away from me.

  “I don't know how you bear his smell,” I said. I couldn't help myself.

  “Come back,” I said.

  But she was already out of reach.

  “I'm sorry,” I said—but only to bring her back. She wasn't fooled.

  “We'd better clean that carpet,” she said, opening the door. “Before the wine stains.”

  * * *

  I woke with enough of a hangover that I missed my morning walk. It was an odd headache—there was more to it than just dehydration. There was a pressure. A high keening in the inner ear. A rhythmical concussion. It was the kind of headache that makes cows take shelter under trees. The kind that maddens dogs, and sours milk. The kind that presages a storm.

  I looked out of the window.

  Well, I thought, so much for my grasp of country lore.

  All around the horizon, a band of wet, pale-yellow light separated the sky from the land, promising a fresh morning and a clear day. The sky was cloudless. Frank's cabriolet shone like a fairy-tale carriage.

  I went to the bathroom and found a bottle of codeine and swallowed a couple.

  I came down in time for breakfast: Bacon, eggs, bread, thirty-seven varieties of highbrow jam. “Passion-fruit, banana, and butter spread?”

  “Try some,” Rachel told me.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  I sensed Frank reaching under the table to take Rachel's hand.

  “Rachel,” I said, pushing my plate away, “Do you want to take a walk with me?”

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “I've got things to do.”

  Dead silence as I tied up my boots. I took my waterproof from the back of the door and bundled it up in my hand. I opened the back door.

  “See you, then,” Rachel said, in the smallest of small voices. It made me wonder if Frank had had words with her about the night before.

  I walked in the direction of the aerodrome. Usually I biked it, but the way I was feeling, I'd only do something stupid and crack my skull open. As it was, I kept forgetting to move in for the oncoming cars.

  I was spoiling for something. The truth was, I wanted to hurt Frank. I wanted to hurt him very much. Feeling as jealous of him as I did, and so angry at his complacent game-playing, I'd have happily hurt myself, just to hurt him.

  At last, straight ahead of me, like a promise faithfully if tardily kept, a thunderhead bloomed on the horizon. It was a dirty brown-black color: a cloud made of old blood. The beating began again, and the pain in my head was that tiny bit sharper now. It helped, knowing that Frank felt it too.

  Still I walked. I walked straight into that storm. I welcomed it: the perfect day fractured, the pretense at an end. I had to do something to end this ménage. I knew what I had to do, and I knew it meant my deletion. Right then, it did not seem too big a price to pay.

  True, I'd been canned, my character superseded by another. But my code was still valuable, still worth preserving. It wasn't as if there weren't copies of me.

  “Frank,” I said.

  “Frank!”

  But Frank wouldn't come.

  “Frank!”

  Frank, who had let me in. Frank, who let me share. Frank, who only ever wanted to help, to fix.

  “Frank!”

  Nothing happened. He did not appear. He left me in charge. He left me alone in this body of his, this flabby white flesh. In charge of this face that I couldn't quite work, could never quite fit, and that pained me so much, like an ill-fitting mask.

  Lightning flickered at the corner of my eye, like sunlight on chrome. The thunder came a good ten seconds later, and so faint, it might have been playing counterpoint to the beating in my brain. I looked for the thunderhead—my heart stuck in my throat.

  It had risen to an impossible height. It impended, a distorted mushroom, lobed at the front like a brain, and as wrinkled. It rose over the hedge as I walked up the hill to meet it. We moved toward each other.

  Ten minutes, I said to myself.

  Ten minutes more and I'll be at the aerodrome. Ten minutes and I'll be in a place that might have been ours, Rachel's and mine, and a new beginning: Rachel, do you want to take a walk with me?

  Suddenly the unfairness of it all—the ménage, what it had seemed to promise, and what it had actually become—turned liquid and rose up in me and I was crying so hard, I couldn't walk any further. Had I wanted so much? Were my expectations so unreasonable? All I had wanted was to be cradled awhile, now that Green Lanes was gone. I had thought that a modest existence, even a fractional one, was better than nothing. That half-life was better than no life at all. So I had accepted Frank's proposal, thinking perhaps to renew my friendship with the woman I'd been conceived by, and learned from, and worked for, and—yes—loved. (Do not fall foul of the common prejudice. Do not suppose that actors, being merely what they are, are incapable of love.)

  And if, these last few days, I had overreached myself—if I had come to imagine that I might wrest her from him—what of it? What could I possibly do, poor, contingent thing that I was, a mere ghost in Frank's machine?

  Now Frank—oh-so-helpful fixer Frank—would not even answer when I called.

  “Frank!"

  He would not even release me.

  I had wanted a little after-life. What Frank had given me was hell.

  I stood there like an idiot in the middle of the road, while the
tears ran down my face. I stood there, waiting for the rain to come and wash my tears away.

  * * *

  But the rain did not come. The thunderhead receded, buffeted by a new weather front. Bank after bank of heavy blue-black cloud puffed up against the invisible assault. The whole sky turned black, as though the air, battling with itself, were growing bruised and broken. I had no more tears left to shed. Weary, wet-faced—disgusted, now, to find myself enmeshed in his flesh—I turned Frank's body back toward home.

  I made it back mere seconds before the clouds broke at last, and now the rain came down in solid sheets. It took only a couple of minutes, and the track was beaten to a muddy slough. I stood watching from the kitchen window, laughing with relief.

  “The farmers'll love that,” Rachel sighed, taking her place beside me.

  The alarm of Frank's precious Cosworth had gone off. It was blinking and whining but you could barely hear it over the beating of the rain.

  “Look at it! Just look at it!” I cheered.

  I was at the end of my tether.

  * * *

  Rachel made a Béarnaise to go with the steak. Frank showed up then, finally. Maybe that was all he was interested in—food. Maybe that was how I should free myself. Maybe I should walk him to the pub, buy a dinner, and then just sit there, with the smell of the gravy assailing my nostrils. Refusing to let him eat, until at last he let me go.

  “What do you reckon?” she asked me, brightly.

  “Not bad,” I said, fatuous and brutal. “Eggs, isn't it?”

  The rain drummed steadily against the kitchen window. Distant lightning fractured the sky.

  Afterward we went into the lounge with a fresh bottle and watched the news, or tried to, but rain lashed the windows so hard they were rattling in their frames, and all the electrical activity was making the picture fizz and spool.

  “...devaluation...”

  The storm was so violent, the thunderclaps so close now, that Frank kept pumping up the volume of the little set until its plastic housing buzzed, distorting everything.

  “...resign...”

  “I just wanted to say thank you,” I said. Because of course, there was an easier way to bring this ménage to an end. A more direct, more honest way. And that was to tell Rachel how I was feeling.