Machines Like Me

Miranda’s story was a version of such a key. Our conversation, in the form of our love, could properly begin. Her secretiveness, withdrawals and silence, her diffidence, that air she had of seeming older than her years, her tendency to drift out of reach, even in moments of tenderness, were forms of grieving. It pained me that she had carried her sadness alone. I admired the boldness and courage of her revenge. It was a dangerous plan, executed with such focus and brilliant disregard for consequences. I loved her more. I loved her poor friend. I would do everything to protect Miranda from this beast, Gorringe. It touched me, to be the first to know her story.

Telling it was a liberation for Miranda too. Half an hour after she had finished, when we were alone in the bedroom, she looped her arms around my neck, drew me to her and kissed me. We knew we were starting again. Adam was next door, charging up, lost to his thoughts. It was true, the old cliché about stress and desire. We undressed each other impatiently and, as usual, my plaster cast made me clumsy. Afterwards, we lay on our sides, face to face. Her father still didn’t know what had happened. Miranda still had no contact with Mariam’s family. The visits to the mosque had at first brought Mariam closer, then they seemed futile. She wished Gorringe had got a longer sentence. She remained tormented by her schoolgirlish vow of silence. A simple message, to Sana or Yasir or to a teacher, would have saved Mariam’s life. The cruellest recollection, the one she tortured herself with, was when Sana, embracing her at the extremes of grief, had whispered the question in her ear. It was Sana who found Mariam in the bath. That imagined sight, the crimson water, the lithe brown body half submerged, was another torture, the cause of night-long waking terrors and hideous dreams.

Lying on the bed in the darkening room, lost to all else, we seemed to be heading towards the dawn. But it was not yet nine o’ clock. Mostly, she talked, I listened and asked occasional questions. Would Gorringe return to live in Salisbury? Yes. His parents were still away and he was living in the family house. Was Mariam’s family still in town? No, they had moved to be closer to relatives in Leicester. Had she visited the grave? Many times, always approaching with caution in case one of the family was there. She always left flowers.

In a long conversation it can be difficult to trace how or when the subject comes to shift. It may have been mention of Surayya, the love of Mariam’s life. That little girl must have led us to Mark. Miranda said she missed him. I said I often thought about him. We had failed to find out where he was and what had happened. He had disappeared into the system, into a cloud of privacy regulation and the unreachable sanctuary of family law. We talked about luck, the hold it had over a child’s life – what he is born into, whether he is loved, and how intelligently.

After a pause, Miranda said, ‘And when it’s all against him, whether someone can rescue him.’

I asked her if she thought her father’s love came near to making up for her absent mother. She didn’t reply. Her breathing was suddenly rhythmic. In just a few seconds, she had fallen asleep and was curled against me. Gently, I rolled onto my back, staying as close to her as I could. In the half-light, the ceiling looked charmingly ancient rather than stained and disintegrating. I followed the jagged line of a crack that ran from a corner of the room towards the centre.

If Adam had been driven by cogs and flywheels, I would have heard them turning in the silence that had followed Miranda’s story. His arms were folded, his eyes were closed. The tough-guy look he had in repose, recently softened by adoration, appeared harshly reinstated. The flattened nose looked flatter still. The Bosphorus dockworker. What could it mean, to say that he was thinking. Sifting through remote memory banks? Logic gates flashing open and closed? Precedents retrieved, then compared, rejected or stored? Without self-awareness, it wouldn’t be thinking at all so much as data processing. But Adam had told me he was in love. He had haikus to prove it. Love wasn’t possible without a self, and nor was thinking. I still hadn’t settled this basic question. Perhaps it was beyond reach. No one would know what it was we had created. Whatever subjective life Adam and his kind possessed couldn’t be ours to verify. In which case he was what was fashionably referred to as a black box – from the outside it seemed to work. That was as far as we’d ever get.

When Miranda had finished her story, there was the silence, and then we had talked. After a while, I had turned to Adam. ‘Well?’

He took a few seconds, then he had said, ‘Very dark.’