Machines Like Me

‘It was a revelation. A friend from school came to see me. We had half an hour in the visitors’ room. He told me about the suicide and that was a shock. Then I learned that you were her friend, that you two were very close. So, revenge. I almost admired you for it. You were brilliant in court. No one dared not believe you. But that wasn’t the point. A few days later, when I’d talked this through with the vicar, that’s when I began to see it for what it was. It was simple. And not only that. It was right. You were the agent of retribution. Perhaps the right word is angel. Avenging angel.’

He shifted position and winced. His left hand cradled his broken wrist against his chest. He was looking at Miranda steadily. I felt her upper arm tighten against my own.

He said, ‘You were sent.’

She slumped, for the moment unable to speak.

‘Sent?’ I said.

‘No need to rage against a miscarriage of justice. I was already working through my punishment. God’s justice, realised through you. The scales were balanced – the crime I committed against the crime I was innocent of and sent down for. I dropped my appeal. The anger was gone. Well, mostly. I should have written to you. I meant to. I even went round to your dad’s place and got your address. But I let it drop. Who cared if I once wanted you dead? It was all over. I was getting my life together. I went to Germany to stay with my parents – my dad’s working there. Then back here to start a new life.’

‘Meaning?’ Adam said.

‘Job interviews. In sales. And living in God’s grace.’

I was beginning to understand why Gorringe was prepared to name his crime and identify himself out loud. Fatalism. He wanted forgiveness. He had served his time. What happened now was God’s will.

She said, ‘I still don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why you raped her.’

He stared at her, faintly amused that she could be so unworldly. ‘All right. She was beautiful and I desired her and everything else got blotted out. That’s the way it happens.’

‘I know about desire. But if you really thought she was beautiful …’

‘Yes?’

‘Why rape her?’

They were looking at each other across a desert of hostile incomprehension. We were back at the beginning.

‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never said to anyone. When we were on the ground I was trying to calm her. I really was. If she’d just seen that moment in a different way, if she’d looked at me instead of twisting away, it could have been something—’

‘What?’

‘If she could have just relaxed a moment, I think we would’ve crossed into … you know.’

Miranda was pushing herself up from out of the soft clammy sofa. Her voice trembled. ‘Don’t you dare even think it. Don’t you dare!’ Then, in a whisper, ‘Oh God. I’m going to …’

She hurried from the room. We heard her yank the front door open and then, her retching and the liquid sound of copious vomit. I went after her and Adam followed me. There was no question, this was a visceral response. But I was sure she had the door open before she started to be sick. She could easily have turned her head to the left or right and thrown up on the lawn or the flower bed. Instead, the contents of her stomach, the colourful buffet lunch, lay thickly over the hall carpet and the threshold. She had stood outside the house and vomited in. She said later that she was helpless, out of control, but I always thought, or preferred to think, that here, at our feet as we left, was the avenging angel’s parting shot. It was tricky, stepping over it.

NINE

The journey home from Salisbury, again in heavy traffic and rain, was mostly in silence. Adam said he wanted to make a start on the Gorringe material. Miranda and I were, as we told each other, emotionally drained. The sherry and wine were bearing down on me. The windscreen wiper on my side was mostly lifeless. Intermittently, it smeared the glass. On the slow crawl through outer London, towards what I was beginning to think of as my former life, my mood began to slip. My life transformed in a single afternoon. I was trying to take the measure of what I’d agreed to – so easily, so impetuously. I wondered if I really wanted to become a father to a troubled four-year-old. Miranda had been pursuing the matter for weeks – privately. I’d had a few minutes and made my delirious decision out of love for her – nothing else. The responsibilities I’d assumed were heavy. Once we were home, my thoughts remained dark.