Machines Like Me

Fun and games was not an expression that either of us ever used. As Adam came by us to go into the bedroom, he stopped. ‘I have a suggestion. We talked of going to Salisbury, then we held back. I think we should visit your father and while we’re there, we could drop in on Mr Gorringe. Why wait for him to come here and frighten us? Let’s go and frighten him. Or at least talk to him.’

We looked at Miranda.

She thought for a moment. ‘All right.’

Adam said, ‘Good,’ and went on his way, while I felt it right there in my chest, the cool clutch of a cliché: my heart sank.

*

Towards the end of that period, the plateau that lay between my Turing visit and the Salisbury excursion, there accumulated just over £40,000 in the investment account. It was simple – the more Adam earned, the more he could afford to lose, the more he invested, the more rolled in. All achieved in his lightning style. During the day, my bedroom, my usual refuge, was his. The curve on his graph stiffened, while I began to take in my new situation. Miranda was firmly against moving the computer onto the kitchen table. Too intrusive, she argued, in our communal space. I saw her point.

Unemployment had passed eighteen per cent and made constant headlines. I thought I belonged with this unhappy workless mass. In fact, I belonged with the idle rich. I was delighted by the money but I couldn’t spend all day thinking about it. I was restless. Travelling in luxury with Miranda through southern Europe would have suited me, but she was tied to London and her course. She dreaded something happening to her father when she was away. The threat from Gorringe, increasingly unlikely, still had the power to constrict our ambitions.

House-hunting might have filled my time but I had already found the place. It was a wedding cake on Elgin Crescent, coated in an icing of pink and white stucco. Inside, wide oak floorboards, vast muscular kitchen humming with brushed-steel gear, a conservatory in belle-époque wrought iron, a Japanese garden of smooth river stones, bedrooms thirty feet across, a marbled shower where you could stroll under differently angled torrents. The owner, a bass guitarist with a ponytail, was in no hurry. He was in an almost-famous band, and he had a divorce looming. He showed me round himself and barely spoke. He handed me into each room and waited outside while I looked. His condition of sale was cash only, £50 notes, 2,600 of them. Fine by me.

This was my only employment, going to the bank to collect another forty notes – £2,000 was the maximum daily withdrawal allowed. For no good reason, I didn’t use a safety deposit box at the bank. I vaguely assumed I was doing something illegal. Certainly, the vendor was if he was hiding funds from his ex-wife. I stuffed the cash into a suitcase which I stowed under my bed.

Otherwise, I was free to be at a loss. It was that time of year, September, when everyone was starting at something fresh. Miranda was planning her thesis. I walked on the Common and wondered about resuming my education and getting a qualification. Time to take the proper measure of my intellectual reach and study for a degree in maths. Or, the other route, dust off my father’s priceless saxophone, learn bebop’s harmonic arcana, join a group, indulge a wilder life. I didn’t know whether to be more qualified or wilder. You couldn’t be both. These ambitions wearied me. I wanted to lie down on the worn-out grass of late summer and close my eyes. In the time it took for me to go the length of the Common and back, so I tried to comfort myself, Adam at home in my bedroom would have earned me another £1,000. My debts were settled. I’d paid a cash deposit on a glamorous urban pile. I was in love. How could I complain? But I did. I felt useless.

If I really had stretched out on that tired grass and closed my eyes, I might have seen Miranda walking towards me in her new underwear, as she had from the bathroom the night before. I would have lingered on that beautiful expectant half-smile, that steady look as she came close and rested her bare arms on my shoulders and teased me with a light kiss. Forget maths or music, all I wanted was to make love to her. What I was really doing all day was waiting for her return. If we were busy or she was tired and we didn’t make love in the evening or early morning, my concentration would be even weaker the next day, my future a burden that made my limbs ache. I went about in a dim state of semi-arousal, a chronic mental dusk. I couldn’t take myself seriously in any domain that did not include her. Our new phase was brilliant, stunning; everything else was dull. We loved each other – that was my only coherent thought during a long afternoon.