Machines Like Me

She sprang up from the table. ‘It changes my feelings. It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting that you know this about me.’

‘Not to me it isn’t.’

‘Not to me it isn’t.’

Her parody was savage, catching too well the meagre tone of my deception. Now she was looking at me differently. She was about to say something else. But just at that moment, Adam opened his eyes. She must have powered him up without my noticing.

She said, ‘OK. Here’s something you didn’t get from the press. I was in Salisbury last month. Someone came to the door, a wiry guy with missing teeth. He had a message. When Peter Gorringe gets out in three months.’

‘Yes?’

‘He’s promised to kill me.’

In moments of stress, and fear is little else, a timid muscle in my right eyelid goes into spasm. I cupped a hand over my brow in an attitude of concentration, even though I knew the writhing beneath the skin was invisible to others.

She added, ‘It was his cellmate. He said Gorringe was serious.’

‘Right.’

She was snappish. ‘Meaning what?’

‘You’d better take him seriously.’

You not we – I saw in her blink and fractional recoil how she took this in. My phrasing was deliberate. I’d offered help several times and been brushed off, even mocked. Now I saw just how much help she needed, I held back and let her ask for it. Perhaps she wouldn’t. I conjured this Gorringe, a large type, stepping from the prison gym, adept in forms of industrial violence. A tamping iron, a meat hook, a boiler wrench.

Adam was looking at me intently as he listened to Miranda. In effect, she was asking for my assistance as she went on to describe her frustrations. The police were reluctant to act against a crime not yet committed. She had no proof. Gorringe’s threat had been merely verbal, made through an intermediary. She persisted, and finally an officer agreed to interview him. The prison was north of Manchester and the meeting took a month to arrange. Peter Gorringe, relaxed and cheerful, charmed the police sergeant. It was a joke, he had said, this talk of killing. Merely a manner of speaking, as in – this was in the policeman’s notes – ‘I’d kill for a chicken madras.’ He may have said something in front of his cellmate, a none-too-bright fellow, now released. This fellow must have been passing through Salisbury and thought he’d deliver the message. He was always a little bit vindictive. The policeman wrote all this down, delivered a caution and the two men, finding common ground in their lifelong support for Manchester City, parted after a handshake.

I listened as best I could. Anxiety is a great diluter of attention. Adam listened too, nodding sagely, as if he’d not been powered down this past hour and understood everything already. Miranda’s mood tone, to which I was so closely attuned, was lightly tinged with indignation, now directed at the authorities rather than me. Not believing anything Gorringe had told the detective sergeant, she’d been to the weekly surgery of our Clapham MP – Labour, of course, a tough old bird, union organiser, scourge of the bankers. She directed Miranda back to the police. Her prospective murder was not a constituency matter.

After this account, a silence. I was preoccupied by the obvious question my own deceit prevented me from asking. What had she done to deserve a death?

Adam said, ‘Does Gorringe know this address?’

‘He can easily find out.’

‘Have you ever seen or heard of him being violent?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Could he simply be trying to frighten you?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Is he capable of murder?’

‘He’s very, very angry.’

She responded to these plodding questions as though they came from a real person, an investigating detective, not ‘a fucking machine’. Since Adam didn’t ask, it was clear he already knew what Miranda had done, what monstrous act, to provoke Gorringe. None of this was Adam’s business and I was wondering about his kill switch. I wanted more coffee, but I felt too weary to get up from my chair to make it.

Then we heard footsteps along the narrow path between the houses that leads to the shared front door. Too late for the postman, far too soon for Gorringe. We heard a man’s voice giving what sounded like instructions. Then the bell rang and footsteps receded rapidly. I looked at Miranda, she looked at me and shrugged. It was my bell. She wasn’t going.

I turned to Adam. ‘Please.’

He rose immediately and went into the tiny crowded hall where coats hung between the gas and electricity meters. We listened as he turned the door latch. Seconds later the front door closed.