Machines Like Me

The child had gone quiet by this point. Looking at him again, I thought he had something his father lacked, though perhaps not his mother – a faint but still luminous signal in his expression of intelligent engagement, despite his distress. We stood in a tight little group. From far across the Common we heard, above the traffic, the distant shouts of children by the paddling pool.

On an impulse, I called the father’s bluff. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘He can come and live with me. We’ll sort out the paperwork later.’

I took a card from my wallet and gave it to him. Then I put my hand out to the boy and to my surprise he raised his and slotted his fingers between mine. I felt flattered. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Mark.’

‘Come on Mark.’

Together we walked away from his parents, across the playground to the spring-hinged gate.

The little boy said in a loud whisper, ‘Let’s pretend to run away.’ His upturned face was suddenly alive with humour and mischief.

‘OK.’

‘On a boat.’

‘All right.’

I was about to open the gate when there was a shout behind me. I turned, hoping that my relief didn’t show. The woman came running at me, pulled the boy away and swung at me with an open hand. The blow fell harmlessly against my upper arm.

‘Pervert!’

She was ready to take another swing when John called out in a weary tone. ‘Leave it.’

I let myself out and walked a little way before stopping to look back. John was hoisting Mark onto his raw shoulders. I had to admire the father. There may have been wit in his methods which I’d failed to notice. He had got rid of me without a fight by making an impossible offer. What a nightmare, to drag the boy back to my tiny place, introduce him to Miranda, then see to his needs for the next fifteen years. I noticed that the woman had a black ribbon tied to the arm of her coat. She was trying to persuade John to take his shirt. He was ignoring her. As the family crossed the playground, Mark turned in my direction and raised an arm, perhaps to maintain his balance, perhaps in farewell.

*

In our side-by-side conversations in bed, often in the early hours, a figure presided whose form was becoming clearer as he hovered before us in the darkness, an unfortunate ghost. I had to overcome an initial impulse to regard him as a rival, hostile to my very existence. I looked him up online and saw his face through time, from early twenties to mid-fifties, evolving from girlishly handsome to appealingly ruined. I read his press, which was not extensive. His name meant nothing to me. A couple of my friends knew of him but had never read him. A profile, five years old, dismissed him as ‘an almost-man’. Since the phrase described one of my own possible fates, I warmed a little to Maxfield Blacke, and understood the obvious – that to love the daughter would be to embrace the father. Whenever she returned from Salisbury, she needed to talk about him. I learned about his different pains, or agonies, the shifting prognoses, the arrogant, ignorant doctor followed by the kind and brilliant doctor, the chaotic hospital with surprisingly good food, the treatments and medications, the fresh hopes abandoned then restored. His mind, she found countless ways of saying, remained sharp. It was his body that had turned against him, against itself, with the ferocity of a civil war. How it hurt the daughter to see the writer’s tongue disfigured by ugly black spots. How it hurt the father to eat, to swallow, to speak. His immune system was letting or taking him down.

There was more. He passed a large kidney stone, as excruciating, Miranda believed, as natural childbirth. He broke a hip on the bathroom floor. His skin itched intolerably. Now he had gout in the joints of both thumbs. Reading, his passion, was made difficult as cataracts clouded his vision. The operation was ahead of him, though he hated and feared anyone messing with his eyes. There may have been other afflictions too humiliating to recount. The woman he should have asked long ago to be his fourth wife had walked out two years ago. Maxfield was alone, dependent on health visitors, strangers, and on his daughter, ninety miles distant. His two sons by another marriage sometimes travelled from London, bringing presents of wine, cheese, biographies, the latest wristwatch computer. But they were squeamish about their father’s intimate care.