Читать книгу The Assistant - S.K. Tremayne, S. K. Tremayne - Страница 9

In the morning I zip down to the gym, as I promised my better self, and I do half an hour on the cross-trainer; then I go to Wholefoods on Parkway and buy nice Gail’s sourdough bread and super-healthy T Rex fruit smoothies that I can’t afford. After a shower, I make avocado and marmite on toast.

While I munch the greasy crusts I knock back my hot tea while leaning on Tabitha’s rose-granite kitchen counters; then I make quick, faintly desperate calls to my friends, to Fitz, then Gul, then my editor, then anyone – I simply need chat. Distracting gossip. Water-cooler stuff. And yes, my friends are all brisk and affable – but then they all fob me off by saying they’ll call me later, after work, for a proper dialogue.

In response, I am overly cheerful. Disconcertingly upbeat, despite the cold rain, turning to frost, on the windows. Sure, let’s talk later! Have a good one!

I am, in other words, urgently pretending. I’m not merely pretending to them, I am pretending to myself: that it didn’t happen, the song was a pre-sleep dream, it was all a drunken delusion. All of it. I’m not freaked out by the Home Assistant. I am not starting to question myself, I have not been thrust back to that portrait of violent death, the hideous seizures, the convulsive blood-vomiting jerks of Jamie Trewin, as he died.

Yes. No. Stop.

‘Electra, can you set a reminder at six p.m.?’

‘What’s the reminder for?’

‘Tesco delivery.’

Electra pauses. I wait, tensed, for Electra to tell me how his blood gurgled down his shirt.

‘OK,’ says Electra, ‘I’ll remind you at six p.m.’

And that’s it. Nothing sinister. No mad songs that thrust me right back to the vomit, and ‘Hoppípolla’. Nothing at all. I almost want Electra to say something menacing, so I know I wasn’t imagining it. No, I don’t. Yes, I do.

Look.

Cars is leaning on the wall between the Edinboro Castle pub and the vast dark gulch of the railway lines, emerging from their tunnel, surging into Euston, St Pancras, King’s Cross. He is pointing at something in the sky that only he can see. Pointing and shouting. Later I will give him some decent food, he looks so terribly cold.

I don’t want to end up homeless, not like poor Cars. And my resources are so meagre, who knows what might happen. Therefore I need to work, earn, and prosper. Determined and diligent, I re-open my book on Camden history.

But I cannot focus. No matter how much I try. My mind is too messed. Words blur, and slide away.

Instead I stop and I stare for countless minutes at the tracks, watching long, long trains snaking in and out of Euston station. I think of all the people coming and going, all the millions of Londoners and commuters and suburbanites, crowded together – and yet each person sitting in those packed trains is ultimately and entirely alone. In my darker moments, I sometimes think of London as a moneyed emirate of loneliness; it sits on vast reserves of the stuff – human isolation, melancholy, solitude – the way a small Arab kingdom sits on huge reserves of oil. You don’t have to dig very far down into London life to find the mad, the isolated, the suicidal, the quietly despairing, the slowly-falling-apart. They are all around us, beneath the surface of our lives; they are us. I think of that sad woman I saw, hunched against the snow, passing the house, her back turned to me, pulling her little kids. The way she and her children suddenly disappeared in the snow, as if she were a ghost.

OK, enough; I am freaking myself out. I am Jo Ferguson. Sociable, extrovert, good-for-a-laugh Jo Ferguson. That’s me. That’s what I am. I’m probably suffering from the winter solitude, and the money worries. It is just the usual stress, plus some lights on a machine spinning strangely. That is all.

Flattening the book, I take some initial notes.

The land in Camden is heavy, packed with dense, dark, clinging London riverside clay, replete with swamps and fogs, making it notoriously difficult to build. Shunned by developers, haunted by outlaws and highwaymen, extensive settlement therefore came quite late. The oldest dateable building is the World’s End pub on the junction by the Tube station, once called Mother Red Cap, and before then Mother Damnable. This is marked on maps in the late seventeenth century but it may be medieval in origin, or earlier …

Mother Damnable. Not exactly charming. But interesting. Developers shunned Camden? Because of the swampy ground? And it was ‘haunted by outlaws’, hiding in the cold malarial fogs? All good material, if a little ghostly. And that pub – which I used to drink in as a student, on the way to gigs at Dingwalls – that could be a thousand years old. Remarkable. I had no idea: a place where farmers and peasants on the way to the Cittie of Lundun would make their final rest. Hiding from highwaymen. And witches.

This will be good for my piece. Diligently I type my sentences. Tapping away in the flat. Like a good journalist.

And then Electra speaks.

‘You shouldn’t have done it, should you, Jo? Because what if someone found out, years later?’

My heartbeat is painful. An ache. I turn to the Assistant.

‘Electra, what are you talking about?’

‘You killed him. We’ve got the evidence. You could go to prison for years.’

‘Electra, stop!’

She stops. This makes it worse.

‘Electra, what are you talking about?’

‘Sorry I don’t know that one.’

My voice is trembling.

‘Electra, what do you know about Jamie Trewin?’

‘I know about lots of topics. Try asking me about music, history, or geography!’

Oh God.

‘Electra, fuck off!!’

Ba-doom. The Assistant spins her thin green electric diadem, and goes quiet. My mind is the opposite. I surely didn’t imagine that entire dialogue. Did I?

No. I didn’t. I don’t think. Which means: I need to ask or tell someone, yet I can’t. But how about Google? Facing my screen, I type in the words: Home assistants going wrong. Digital assistants malfunctioning. Every variation.

Hmm. There are a few examples of Electra and her friends behaving unexpectedly, or even peculiarly: but nothing anywhere as specific, and menacing, as what is happening to me, so directly, so intimately: as if Electra can see deep into my head, like there is something uncanny in those dark machines, an inhuman knowledge. Making me spooked, in my own home.

Not knowing what else to do, I helplessly pick up my phone: a reflex reaction. Then I stare at the screen, bewildered: the phone says I have twenty missed calls. From my mother. In the last hour.

My phone has been on the whole time. It is not on mute. Yet I missed them all.

Twenty?