Machines Like Me

Again, silence. I was waiting to say my piece. She was looking straight ahead, not at me. Her eyes were clear, without tears. She looked composed, even determined.

Then she said, ‘I think about all the talking you and I do in bed, sometimes through the night. The sex is wonderful and everything else, but it’s the talking into the small hours … it’s the closest … It’s what I used to feel with Mariam.’

Here was my cue, the right moment, the only location. ‘I came out to find you.’

‘Yes?’

I hesitated, suddenly unsure of the best order of words. ‘To ask you to marry me.’

She turned away and nodded. She wasn’t surprised. She had no reason to be. She said, ‘Charlie, yes. Yes please. But I have something to confess. You might want to change your mind.’

The light in the garden was fading. Some blackness was coming down. I’d assumed I was a poor substitute for Mariam, but a sincere one. I remembered what Adam told me on the Common. Her own crimes. If she was about to say that she’d been having sex with him, despite her promises, then we were finished. It couldn’t, it mustn’t be that. But what else, what other crime could she own up to?

I said, ‘I’m listening.’

‘I’ve been lying to you.’

‘Ah.’

‘During these last weeks, when I’ve said that I’ve been at seminars all day …’

‘Oh God,’ I said. Childishly, I wanted to put my hands over my ears.

‘… I was on our side of the river. I was spending my afternoons with …’

‘That’s enough,’ I said, and made to get up from the bench. She pulled me back down.

‘With Mark.’

‘With Mark,’ I echoed feebly. Then with more force, ‘Mark?’

‘I want to foster him. With a view to adopting him. I’ve been going to this special playgroup where they observe us together. And I’ve taken him out for little treats.’

I was impressed by the speed of my own partial adjustment. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was scared you’d be against it. I want to go ahead. But I’d love to do this with you.’

I saw what she meant. I might have been against it. I wanted Miranda to myself.

‘What about his mother?’ As if I could close down the project with a well-placed question.

‘In a psychiatric ward for the moment. Delusional. Paranoid. Possibly from years of amphetamine addiction. It’s not good. She can be violent. The father’s in prison.’

‘You’ve had weeks, I’ve had seconds. Give me a moment.’

We sat side by side while I thought. How could I hesitate? I was being offered what some would say was the best that adult life could afford. Love, and a child. I had a sense of being borne helplessly away by events on a downstream flood. Frightening, delicious. Here at last was my river. And Mark. The little dancing boy, coming to wreck my non-existent ambitions. I experimentally installed him in Elgin Crescent. I knew the room, close by the master bedroom. He would surely rough the place up, as required, and banish the ghost of its present unhappy owner. But my own ghost, selfish, lazy, uncommitted – was he up to the million tasks of fatherhood?

Miranda could no longer keep silent. ‘He’s the most sweet-natured fellow. He loves being read to.’

She couldn’t have known how much that helped her cause. Read to him every night for ten years, learn the names of the speaking bear and rat and toad, the gloom-struck donkey, the bristly humanoids who lived down holes in Middle Earth, the sweet posh kids in rowing boats on Coniston Water. Fill in my own hollow past. Rough the place up with well-thumbed books. Another thought: I had conceived of Adam as a joint project to bring Miranda closer to me. A child was in another realm and would do the trick. But in those first minutes I held back. I felt obliged to. I told her I loved her, would marry her and live with her, but on instant fatherhood, I needed more time. I would go with her to the special playgroup and meet Mark and take him out for treats. Then decide.

Miranda gave me a look – pity and humour were in it – that suggested I was deluded to believe I had a choice. That look more or less did it. Living alone in the wedding-cake house was unthinkable. Living there just with her was no longer on offer. He was a lovely boy, a wonderful cause. Within half an hour, I saw no way round it. She was right – there were no choices. I folded. Then I was excited.

So we passed an hour making plans on the comfortable old bench by the concealed lawn.

She said after a while, ‘Since you saw him, he’s been fostered twice. Didn’t work out. Now he’s in a children’s home. Home! What a word for it. Six to a room, all under-fives. The place is filthy, understaffed. Their budget’s been cut. There’s bullying. He’s learned how to swear.’