Machines Like Me

Later that night, I asked her about it. ‘It was nothing,’ was all she said before she changed the subject. Was I real? Meaning did I really love her, or was I honest, or did I fit her needs so exactly that she might have dreamed me up?

I crossed the kitchen to pour the last of the wine. The broken fridge door handle needed a sharp sideways pull to engage its lock. As my hand closed round the cold neck of the bottle, I heard a sound, a creak above my head. I had lived long enough beneath Miranda’s feet to know her steps and their precise direction. She had moved across her bedroom and was hesitating in the threshold of her kitchen. I heard the murmur of her voice. No reply. She took another two steps into the room. The next would bring her onto a floorboard that under pressure made a truncated quacking sound. As I waited to hear it, Adam spoke. He pushed his chair back as he stood. If he was to take another step he would need to untether himself. This he must have achieved because it was his tread that landed on the noisy floorboard. That meant they were standing less than a metre apart, but there was no sound until a minute had passed, and now it was footsteps, two sets, moving back towards the bedroom.

I left the fridge door open because the sound of it closing would betray me. No choice but to shadow them into my bedroom. So I went and stood by my desk and listened. I reckoned I was right under her bed when I heard the murmur of her voice, a command. She must have wanted air in the room, for Adam’s steps tracked across the room towards the Victorian bay. Only one of its three windows opened. Even that one was hard to shift on a warm or rainy day. The old wooden frames shrank or expanded, and something was wrong with the counterweight and hardened rope. Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.

And how was my mind as I stood directly below, in an identical bay, reproduced by the thousands in late-Victorian industrial-scale developments? They had spilled across the five-acre fields of hedgerow and boundary oaks that adorned the southern limits of London. Not good – my mind, that is. Embodied, it told all. Shivering, moist, especially on the palms, raised pulse, in a state of elated anticipation. Fear, self-doubt, fury. In my bay, old fitted carpet, stained and worn since the mid-fifties, extended right to the skirting boards. In Miranda’s, the carpet gave way to bare boards that, two world wars back, must have been polished to a nut-brown gleam. Some poor girl in white apron and mob cap, on all fours, waxed cloth in hand, never could have dreamed of the kind of being who would one day stand in the place where she crouched. I heard him plant his feet on the old wood, I imagined him stooping to grip the window by the metal fixtures on its lower frame and heave upwards with the strength of four young men. There was a silence of straining resistance before the entire window shot upwards and hit the top casing with a rifle crack and a shattering of glass. My snort of delight could have given me away.

No shortage now of marginally cooler air filling the room. My glee faded as Adam’s footsteps returned to where Miranda waited by the bed. As he went towards her, it might have been an apology that he muttered. Here was the sound of her forgiving him, for her brief sentence was followed by the entwined mezzo and tenor of their laughter. I had trailed after Adam and was once more by the bed, six feet under. He had the manual skills to undress her and he was undressing her now. What else would occupy their silence? I knew – of course I knew – that her mattress made no sound. Futons, with their Japanese promise of a clean and simple life of stripped-back clarity, were the fashion then. And I myself felt washed in clarity, senses cleansed as I stood in the dark and waited. I could have run up the stairs and prevented them, burst into the bedroom like the clownish husband in an old seaside postcard. But my situation had a thrilling aspect, not only of subterfuge and discovery, but of originality, of modern precedence, of being the first to be cuckolded by an artefact. I was of my times, riding the breaking crest of the new, ahead of everyone in enacting that drama of displacement so frequently and gloomily predicted. Another element of my passivity: even at this earliest moment, I knew I had brought the whole thing down on myself. But that was for later. For now, despite the horror of betrayal, it was all too interesting and I couldn’t stir from my role of eavesdropper, the blind voyeur, humiliated and alert.