Machines Like Me

I was coming to cast him as my double, my culture-deprived brother, lacking everything but wealth. Through my childhood to my mid-teens, I never saw a play, opera or a musical, or heard a live concert, apart from a couple of my father’s, or visited a museum or art gallery or took a journey for the sake of it. No bedtime stories. There were no children’s books in my parents’ past, no books in our house, no poetry or myths, no openly expressed curiosity, no standing family jokes. Matt and Jenny Friend were busy, hard-working, and otherwise lived coldly apart. At school, I loved the rare factory visits. Later, electronics, even anthropology, and especially a qualification in law were no substitutes for an education in the life of the mind. So, when good fortune offered the dreamlike opportunity, delivering me from my labours, such as they were, and stuffing me with gold, I was paralysed, inert. I’d wanted to be rich but never asked myself why. I had no ambitions beyond the erotic and an expensive house across the river. Others might have seized the chance to view at last the ruins of Leptis Magna or follow in Stevenson’s tracks across the Cevennes or write the monograph on Einstein’s musical tastes. I didn’t yet know how to live, I had no background in it and I hadn’t used my decade and a half of adult life to find out.

I could have pointed to my great acquisition, to the man-made fact of Adam, to where he and his kind might lead us. Surely, there was grandeur in experiment. Wasn’t sinking my inheritance into an embodied consciousness heroic, even a little spiritual? The bass guitarist couldn’t match it. But – here was an irony. As I was passing through the kitchen one late afternoon, Adam looked up from his meditations to tell me that he had acquainted himself with the churches of Florence, Rome and Venice and all the paintings that hung in them. He was forming his opinions. The baroque fascinated him especially. He rated Artemisia Gentileschi very highly and he wanted to tell me why. Also, he’d recently read Philip Larkin.

‘Charlie, I treasure this ordinary voice and these moments of godless transcendence!’

What was I to say? There were times when Adam’s earnestness bored me. I was just back from another pointless stroll on the Common and I had nodded and left the room. My mind was empty, his was filling.

With Miranda out of the house most of the day and, as soon as she was home, her hour on the phone with her father, then sex, then dinner, then conversations about Elgin Crescent, there was little time to tell her of my discontents, little time to dissuade her from tracking down Gorringe in Salisbury. Our most sustained conversation took place in the evening after the engineer’s visit. After that, things were strained for a day or two.

We were sitting on the bed.

‘What is it you want to achieve?’

She said, ‘I want to confront him.’

‘And?’

‘I want him to know the real reason he was in prison. He’s going to face up to what he did to Mariam.’

‘It could get violent.’

‘We’ll have Adam. And you’re big, aren’t you?’

‘This is madness.’

It was a while since we had come anywhere near a row.

‘How is it,’ she said, ‘that Adam sees the point and you can’t? And why—’

‘He wants to kill you.’

‘You can wait in the car.’

‘So he grabs a kitchen knife and comes at you. Then what?’

‘You can be a witness at his trial.’

‘He’ll kill us both.’

‘I don’t care.’

The conversation was too absurd. From next door, we heard the sound of Adam washing up our supper. Her protector, her former lover, still in love with her, still reading her his gnomic poems. He and his teeming circuits were implicated. This visit was his idea.

She seemed to guess my thoughts. ‘Adam understands. I’m sorry you don’t.’

‘You were frightened before.’

‘I’m angry.’

‘Send him a letter.’

‘I’m going to tell him to his face.’

I tried another approach. ‘What about your irrational guilt?’

She looked at me, waiting.

I said, ‘You’re trying to right a wrong that doesn’t exist. Not all rapes end in suicide. You didn’t know what she was going to do. You were doing your best to be her loyal friend.’

She started to say something but I raised my voice. ‘Listen. I’ll spell it out. It-was-not-your-fault!’

She stood up from the bed and went by the desk and stared at the computer for a full minute, without seeing, I supposed, the writhing rainbow wisps of that season’s screen saver.

At last she said, ‘I’m going for a walk.’ She pulled a sweater off the back of the chair and went towards the door.

‘Take Adam with you.’

They were out for an hour. When she came back, she went to bed, after calling to me a neutral goodnight. I sat with Adam in the kitchen, determined to press my case. Obliquely this time. I was about to ask how the day’s work had gone – my euphemism for the day’s profit – when I noticed a change in him, one I had missed at supper. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt open at the collar and black suede loafers.

‘Do you like it?’ He tugged at the lapels and turned his head in parody of a catwalk pose.