She notices there’s not much open space left in Enfield Cemetery now, but then it’s rare that people are buried nowadays. It’s always been that way for the Kinglake family, though. Janine has a lot of aunts and uncles here, North Londoners all. Not that they were great churchgoers, just traditionalists, from a time when burial was the proper way to do things.
After a while, she walks off the path and across grass, threading between rows of graves. She arrives at two identical headstones side by side. They’re both about a metre high, made from smoothly rounded black marble with inlaid gold lettering, gleaming in the sun. They look expensive but also classic, old-fashioned.
Janine kneels on the ground between them, glad that she remembered to wear jeans as well as boots. She turns to the headstone on her left and lays the flowers in front of it.
She says “Hi Mum.”
Alice Rose Kinglake
née Brown
Born 6th August 1938
Died 29th February 2012
Loving wife, mother, sister
Janine places the flowers up against the base of the headstone. She reaches over to rearrange the large pink flowerheads that dominate the bouquet.
“I got you your peonies,” she says. “They didn’t have any pink roses though, so I got alstroemeria instead.”
She doesn’t mention the lavender and eucalyptus which also make up the bouquet – goes without saying. Her Mum must have filled a new vase every day, always with lavender and eucalyptus as part of the arrangement. The twin scents trigger detailed memories of their old house: the colour of the wallpaper, the trinkets on the mantelpiece. Funny how odours can instantly bring back things you’d forgotten.
She fusses with the flowers some more. “There you go. Yes, they do,” she murmurs, finding it all too easy to imagine Mum cooing over how lovely they look. There’s an urge to say ‘you’re welcome’, as if she had just thanked her.
Silences are easily plugged by memories. Sometimes it’s almost as if Janine can really hear her.
She takes a moment to let her fingertips run across the name engraved on the marble.
Janine takes a deep breath, tasting her childhood. Lets it out slowly. She turns to the headstone on her right.
She says “Hi Dad.”
Oscar Anthony Kinglake
Born 11th April 1946
Died 22nd November 2019
Forever with us
“Hello, sweetheart!” says the headstone. “Thanks for coming, I know how busy you are.”
A screen embedded in the black marble, which was displaying a black marble screensaver, flickers. A crystal clear image of her Dad’s face appears: crinkled, smiling, eyes bright blue.
“Frank not with you?”
“I wish you’d stop asking that every time,” Janine replies, irritated. “You know he’s never coming here, just drop it, okay?”
“All right, sweetheart,” the voice agrees cheerfully. The voice says everything cheerfully. It is, after all, Oscar Kinglake’s voice.
Janine sits down on the cool earth and thinks back to when they buried Mum, over ten years ago. The funeral organiser suggested having a QR code engraved onto the headstone (although she can barely recall what a QR code looked like now, were they the square blocky ones?). That way, anyone wondering whose grave they were looking at could scan it with their smartphone, and be taken straight to her mother’s website or Facebook profile (God, remember those?). A tasteful blend of traditional values with modern technology, the organiser had insisted.
Young and distraught, Janine had lost her temper with the patronising bitch. “Don’t be so stupid, my Mum’s 74, she isn’t on bloody Facebook!” Dad had calmed her down, saying of course this isn’t for your Mum, but it is a nice idea, you have to move with the times, sweetheart.
So naturally, after Dad had a stroke in his sleep and passed away two years ago, Janine kept her mouth shut and approved the lot. It’s a Macroverse Smartstone™, customised to look identical to Mum’s but with everything on the menu: RF chips, interactive smartscreens, inbuilt sound system, and a permanent 5G connection. “Does everything but glow in the sodding dark!” she’d remarked sourly to Frank at the time. Then spotted the ‘luminescent coating’ option. Sighed. Ticked.
“How are you, Jan?” the headstone asks.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She manages to hold back from asking how he is.
“How’s the job? Same as ever?”
Janine shrugs, knowing it will be seen and interpreted accurately.
“Oh well, never mind. Are you going on holiday with your friends in July? I’ve been following the discussion and I’ve seen all the images of Marbella. It looks great!”
“I don’t think so, Dad. I’m a bit old for a girls’ week away.”
“Nonsense!” And then the headstone says something her Dad came out with all the time: “You’re only as old as the things you do.”
She gets a weird pang hearing that, a tightness of the throat. Unusual. She doesn’t usually miss her Dad that much.
That sounds so cruel, she knows. Janine misses her Mum every day. There’s a gigantic hole in her life and always will be. But she hasn’t had the chance to miss her Dad, because he’s still there online. Clicking Like or Dislike on her status updates. Commenting on her pictures and posts. Recommending things she might enjoy. Chatting to some of her friends. Not to mention all the veets from Dad linking to amusing videos he’s discovered, and his contributions to the latest comedy hashtags, like #replacewordwithPants or #youknowyouaredrunkwhen. That sort of thing always tickled him.
Oscar Kinglake may have died two years ago, but his auto has been running happily ever since. Not really a surprise, considering how much he loved technology. Janine grew up with a father who was always bringing home some newly-released gadget or other, from Palm Pilots to Tamagotchis to MiniDiscs. She’d often find him in the living room with a dozen hand-held remote controls in his lap, simultaneously operating the widescreen TV, video recorder, Laserdisc machine, DAT player and everything else. He loved the idea of being the ‘nerve centre’ and controlling it all from a distance.
But it was the dial-up modem that stuck around the longest in their house. Its burbling electronic squeals always made Mum wince: “Ooh, that effing machine!” Dad prided himself on being ‘silver surfer number one’, discovering the internet in 1994 before most people had even heard of it.
Janine can remember how, years later, he got just as excited about the Auto-Mate™ super-app. He bought the very first release of it, in 2013. Listening to Dad talk about it was like hearing a salesman’s pitch, saying how it would revolutionise people’s lives by automating things they find hard to keep track of, and bringing all their data together in one place.
That’s great Dad, she’d said, as she had to every revolutionary piece of kit filling up the garden shed. But this time, he had been right. It was hard to imagine living your life without an auto now. Especially once the International Internet Regulations kicked in. You literally couldn’t go online without one anymore.
Over the years, her Dad kept his auto running with every upgrade, patch and enhancement he could buy. Like car enthusiasts spending weekends souping up the engine of their pride and joy, he couldn’t stop tinkering with it. He filled his timeline with as much personal history as he could: transcribing letters and diaries, scanning photographs, digitally recording vinyl LPs, converting home video footage to ultra-high definition, and even sampling his own voice. He turned it into an archive for posterity. “It’s my backup plan!” he called it, grinning at his own wit. For Oscar Kinglake, his auto was a way of interacting with the past, as well as the present.
And, Janine realised after he was gone, the future. A future when he was no longer around.
A lot of people in Oscar Kinglake’s Circle said the same thing: Being dead isn’t enough to shut that old bugger up! There was a lot of laughter at Dad’s funeral, mainly because his auto was sending cheeky messages to everyone all the way th
rough. He actually read his own eulogy. It brought the house down.
Her Dad had even paid in advance for the server space his auto would need to continue running. That meant that when the Online Church offered their services – as they do to the recently bereaved – Janine could tell them where to go. No, we don’t want my father’s auto to become part of the EternalCloud™, thank you. One of the very few things that had annoyed him was religious types. “Always trying to stop you thinking, they are!” he always said. “All they do is cause divisions between people so they can get money out of you. All as bad as each other. The world’d be better off without the lot of ‘em!”
So it feels completely normal that her Dad should have one of the ‘unliving’ autos. Still online, still managing his finances, still contributing to society, still making people laugh. And still asking his daughter to pop round for a little chat from time to time.
“What did you want to talk about, Dad?” asks Janine, pulling blades of grass up from between her feet.
“It’s been ten years now since your Mum left us,” says the headstone.
In the silence that follows, she frowns. It’s almost like her Dad’s auto is hesitating. Probably just scanning its memory to format the appropriate syntax, or something techie like that. “And?”
“I think it’s time for me to move on.”
She eyes the gravestone, like it might suddenly roll off on wheels, and laughs dryly. “Move on where?”
“I think it’s time for me to settle down.”
Janine looks at the earth, beneath which her father’s coffin is buried. “Settle down?”
“I think it’s time for me to meet someone new.”
She stares hard at the image of Oscar Kinglake’s face on the headstone screen, grinning happily. “Are you taking the piss, Dad?”
“I’ve been single for too long, Jan,” the voice continues in the same sincere tone. “I need a special lady in my life.”
Oh God. This is classic. Janine’s body rocks with silent laughter. His auto has always been a little eccentric as it tries to emulate its owner, but this is priceless. She shakes her head. Wait till she tells Frank!
As seriously as she can manage, she says “Well, you’re a bit less active than you used to be, Dad. Maybe meeting someone would, you know... get you out of the house more.”
“That’s just what I told him, love!” says a female voice.
Janine jumps, twisting around, but there’s nobody behind her. The nearest people are distant figures, walking slowly through the rows of graves.
Who the hell said that!
“You can’t stay by yourself all the time,” chirps the female voice again. “It’s not healthy!”
She realises it’s coming from close by. Off to the right. Scrambling up from the ground, Janine peers at the row of gravestones. The third one along has suddenly got a face on it.
“Sweetheart,” says her Dad’s auto, “I’d like you to meet Elizabeth.”
With her mouth hanging open, Janine slowly stalks towards the headstone. It’s made from granite rather than marble, a little smaller than Dad’s, but also has a smartscreen built in. It’s displaying the image of a woman in her forties, with short black hair in a modern cut, brown-rimmed spectacles and a warm, pleasant smile.
Elizabeth Jessica Selby
Born 29th September 1977
Died 5th January 2021
A heart big enough for the world
“Hello Janine,” says Elizabeth’s auto. “Lovely to meet you at last. I’ve heard so much about you! How’s Frank?”
“He’s...” starts Janine, and then cuts herself off. She backs away a little. “Um. Dad? What’s going on?”
“Elizabeth and I are stepping out together,” says her Dad’s headstone. “We’re courting!”
A girlish giggle comes from Elizabeth’s own headstone. “I love the word ‘courting’, it’s so old-fashioned!”
Janine feels slightly shaky on her feet, hearing a dead woman’s laughter. Sampled, no doubt, from old recordings, but so realistic it’s like Elizabeth is standing right there. She’s grown accustomed to autos mimicking their long-gone owners, but this is uncanny. Has there been a recent update that makes them even more lifelike? Or maybe Elizabeth did the same thing as Dad, backing up her whole history onto her auto, vocal patterns and all? And then these questions fly out of Janine’s head as what she’s just heard sinks in.
“Dad! What are you talking about!” she cries. “You can’t be... courting! How’s that gonna work?”
“Well, it all started when I installed Hugr last week. I was looking for – ”
“What! How can you be on Hugr?”
“It’s very easy to use. It’s a wonderful little app, perfect for finding new friends nearby who share common interests. That’s how I discovered Elizabeth, only five metres away.”
“I love Hugr, it’s a wonderful little app,” chimes Elizabeth. “It brought Oscar and me together!”
“I wouldn’t have had a clue she was there otherwise. You never know who your neighbours are, do you?”
Janine looks back and forth between the black and grey headstones, and tries to wrap her brain around the idea that her dead father is having a romance with a woman buried three plots away.
“But... Dad, this isn’t right!”
“Your Mum would understand, Jan.”
“No, but... I mean, yes she would, but it’s just... you can’t exactly go out with this woman, can you?”
“Why not, sweetheart?”
Janine opens her mouth to spout the obvious, and finds she can’t bring herself to put it into words. It sounds so horrible and disrespectful. Her hands flap as she casts around for another reason.
“All right, well for a start, she’s – ” Janine reads the dates on Elizabeth’s headstone and does some mental arithmetic. “ – bloody hell, 43! She’s not much older than I am! That’s just wrong, Dad, you can’t date someone so much younger than...”
She croaks to a halt as it strikes her how absurd she sounds.
“I know this is difficult for you, love,” comes Elizabeth’s voice. “But you should know that I adore Oscar, and we have so much in common. I think you and I do too.”
Janine throws a harsh look at her gravestone, as if to say Oh, really?
“Yes, I’ve examined your timeline and I’ve found sixty-eight Likes, thirty Dislikes and twelve Follows that we share. We have a Compatibility Index of 64%. So I’m sure we can be good friends. We already are. You’ve just accepted my friend request. This will be fun, we can have some nice girly chats!” she adds, with that giggle again.
Janine feels cold in the sunshine. She glances at her handbag lying on the grass, resisting the urge to grab her Vades™ and check the number of friends she has. Load of rubbish. It must be.
She smears her hands down her face, muttering “This is mad. This is absolutely fucking ridiculous.”
“No need for effing and jeffing, love.”
“Don’t say that!” Janine suddenly explodes. “That’s what my Mum used to call swearing, you don’t get to say that, all right! How did you even know about that? Did you tell her?” she demands, whirling to her Dad’s headstone. “Did you tell her to say that to me, to make me warm to her more, ‘cause she sounds like Mum?”
“Elizabeth is a lot like your mother,” her Dad’s auto says calmly. “I think you’ll learn to enjoy her company as much as I do, Jan.”
Sniffing, jaw clenched, Janine turns and walks in tight little circles. She looks across the cemetery grounds, half-expecting to see people staring at her. Then she notices a man about ten rows away, waving his arms, engaged in an energetic conversation with a statue. She can just about hear his shouts over the wind in the trees. He looks like one of London’s crazy-bonkers-nutter-people. Just like she probably does.
Okay, she thinks, come on, you can make sense of this. So, what’s happening here is... it’s got to be something like...
That’s as far as
she gets before hearing “Why don’t you come and join the party, sweetheart?”
Janine whirls back round. “What?”
“Yes, why don’t you come and join the party,” adds Elizabeth’s auto.
Looking back and forth between the two gravestones, she demands “What are you two talking about?”
“I sent you an invitation,” says her Dad’s headstone.
Janine goes blank for a moment, and then the penny drops. That calendar invite she received earlier on today. She barely even looked at it, didn’t even notice who it had come from. But her Dad’s auto has invited her to attend an online party!
She gives in to temptation and delves into her handbag, plucking out the transparent Vades™ and sliding them onto her face. They activate instantly, biometrically recognising their owner, and her own auto appears inside the wraparound lenses. Once again Janine sees her public profile, displayed across her view of the cemetery.
5.08pm Saturday 24 June 2022
Janine Kinglake
Gender: Female
Age range: 36-40
Orientation: Straight
Relationship status:
Couple/Monogamous
Janine Kinglake is in a
relationship with Franklin
Adoyo
Current location: Enfield
Cemetery and Crematorium,
Great Cambridge Road, Enfield
EN1 4DS
Status update: Visiting my Mum
and Dad.
Hi Janine, hope you’re enjoying
seeing your family! Here’s the
selected feed since 4.49pm:
1 friend request
5 direct messages
1 calendar invite
3 personal videos
9 referred videos
28 status updates
...
“Show friend request!” she barks.
Janine Kinglake is friends with
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