THE ASSISTANT
S. K. Tremayne

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © S. K. Tremayne 2019

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2010

Cover photographs © plainpicture/Philippe Lesprit (front cover); David Paire/Arcangel Images (back cover).

S. K. Tremayne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008309510

Ebook Edition © December 2019 ISBN: 9780008309534

Version: 2020-09-10

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Chapter 1. Jo

Chapter 2. Jo

Chapter 3. Jo

Chapter 4. Jo

Chapter 5. Janet

Chapter 6. Jo

Chapter 7. Jo

Chapter 8. Jo

Chapter 9. Jo

Chapter 10. Jo

Chapter 11. Jo

Chapter 12. Jo

Chapter 13. Jo

Chapter 14. Jo

Chapter 15. Jo

Chapter 16. Polly

Chapter 17. Jo

Chapter 18. Jo

Chapter 19. Jo

Chapter 20. Jo

Chapter 21. Dr Hussain

Chapter 22. Jo

Chapter 23. Jo

Chapter 24. Jo

Chapter 25. Jo

Chapter 26. Jo

Chapter 27. Jo

Chapter 28. Simon

Chapter 29. Simon

Chapter 30. Jo

Chapter 31. Jo

Chapter 32. Jo

Chapter 33. Jo

Chapter 34. Jo

Chapter 35. Jo

Chapter 36. Jo

Chapter 37. Jo

Chapter 38. Tabitha

Chapter 39. Jo

Chapter 40. Jo

Chapter 41. Jo

Chapter 42. Jo

Chapter 43. Jo

Chapter 44. Jo

Chapter 45. Jo

Chapter 46. Tabitha

Chapter 47. Jo

Chapter 48. Jo

Chapter 49. Jo

Chapter 50. Jo

Chapter 51. Jo

Chapter 52. Jo

Chapter 53. Jo

Chapter 54. Simon

Chapter 55. Jo

Chapter 56. Jo

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by S. K. Tremayne

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

There are numerous quotations from the works of Sylvia Plath throughout the book. These lines are taken from her poems ‘Death & Co’, ‘The Bee Meeting’, ‘Disquieting Muses’, ‘Electra on Azalea Plath’, ‘Facelift’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Elm’ and ‘Childless Women’.

I must thank Faber & Faber for permission to quote, more widely, from two poems in particular: ‘Munich Mannequins’, and ‘Daddy’, both in the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath.

As usual I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my agent Eugenie Furniss, and editors, Jane Johnson and Sarah Hodgson, for their characteristic wisdom, and insight.

Finally, I would like to thank my beloved wife, Star, for the many times she unknotted problems, and offered ideas, along the way.

1
Jo

Are you a woman, man, other?

Well, that’s easy enough. Despite that curious wish for a twirly moustache, age ten, and a twelve-year-old’s desire to be an astronaut, which came with the vague yet outraged sense that only boys could be proper astronauts, I am quite sure on this one.

As the daylight in the room shades to grey, I lean towards my shining laptop screen and click,

woman

Are you straight, gay, bisexual, other?

A pause. A long pause. I’ve no doubts about my sexuality, I’m just bemused by what other might mean in this context. What is that fourth possibility of sexuality? A desire for ghosts? Ponies? Furniture? My dear beloved mum can get oddly excited when reading magazines about interior decoration. But I somehow don’t think her demographic is the target of this website.

On the other hand, sitting here at my laptop in the fading winter light, I’d quite like a fourth choice, or a fifth choice, or, dammit, seventy-eight choices. Because if you were in a critical mood you could say my choices so far in life have not turned out entirely optimal: divorced, childless, and nearly homeless at thirty-three. OK, yes, I might be living in a sleek flat in the nicer end of Camden, North London – where it merges into the real, five-storey Georgian opulence of Primrose Hill – however, I know I’m only here because my richer friend, Tabitha, took pity on her newly divorced and virtually bankrupt old university mate. Hey, why don’t you have the spare room, I really don’t use it much …

I think it was the casually generous way she made this offer, the blasé effortlessness of it all, which confounded me. At once it made me feel impossibly grateful, and even more fond of Tabitha – funny, kind, generous, and the best of best friends – yet it also made me feel guilty and a tiny tiny tiny bit jealous.

Turning from the laptop, I look out of the darkening window. And see my own face reflected.

OK, I was properly jealous, if only for a minute or two. What barely mattered to Tabs – Here, have a spare room, somewhere really nice to live – was so crucial and difficult for me, and she was barely aware of the emotional difference.

This is because Tabitha Ashbury already owns, Tabitha Ashbury will also inherit. I love her but she’s never understood what it’s like not to have all that: in London.

By contrast with Tabitha, I’m not just Generation Rent, I am Generation Can’t Afford to Rent Anywhere Without a Major Knife Crime Epidemic. And it doesn’t look like this is going to change any time soon, because I’m a freelance journalist. I have become a freelance journalist when the phrase freelance has become a kind of fantastical joke in itself: hey, look, I know that these days you basically have to write for free, but where’s my lance? Don’t we go jousting as well?

This career, however, was – for all its challenges – definitely one of my smarter choices. I love my job. The work is varied and compelling, and every so often I get to think I have changed the world slightly for the better, revealing some scandal, telling a decent story, making someone I’ll never know chuckle for two seconds, over a sentence that may have taken me six hours to get right. But that scintilla of human gladness wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t made the effort. Or so I hope.

Reverting to my computer I refocus on OKCupid. I may have a home (however fortunate), I might have a job (however sketchy the salary), I have, however, no other half. And I am beginning to feel the absence. And perhaps the magic of internet dating will guide me, like a digital fairy godmother, with a wand of sparkling algorithms, to a new man.

I answer the question:

straight

With this, my laptop screen instantly flashes, and grows even more vivid: whisking me into a world of warm, cascading images of What Could Be: luridly happy pictures of emotional and erotic contentment, where beautiful couples sit laughing, very close together.

Here’s a smiley young Chinese woman sipping red wine and draping a slender arm over a handsome Caucasian man with enough stubble to be masculine without being prison-y; here are the white and black gay boys holding hands as they put red paint on each other’s faces in a carnival mood; here is the exceptionally well-preserved older couple who found love despite it all – and now seem to inexplicably spend all their time grinning on rollercoasters. And all these happy ThankyouCupid! people are promising me something so much better than the view through the big high black sash windows of this million-quid flat: looking out onto the chilly, frigid, 3 p.m. twilight of wintry London. A world where it is getting so cold and dark the angry red brake lights of the cars, jammed, stalled, impatient, fuming, on busy Delancey Street, glow like red devil eyes in Victorian smoke.

I turn to one of Tabitha’s Home Assistants, perched on the bespoke oak shelving at the side of the elegant living room, with its elegantly lofty ceilings. Everything in Tabitha’s flat is so elegant and tasteful I sometimes tell her I am going to buy, say, a plastic gnome-themed clock from the discount supermarket on Parkway to ‘brighten things up’, then I wait, straight-faced, for her to get the joke, and then we both laugh. I love living with Tabitha. That deeply shared sense of humour: possibly you only get that with a certain kind of old friend?

Or an ideal kind of lover.

‘Electra, what will the weather be in London this evening?’

The top of the black Home Assistant glows in response, an electric green-to-sapphire diadem, and in that faintly pompous, hint-of-older-sister voice, the voice of a sibling who went to a rather superior school, she answers:

‘Tonight’s forecast in Camden Town has a low of one degree Celsius. There’s a sixty per cent chance of rain after midnight.’

‘Electra, thank you.’

‘That’s what I’m here for!’

Simon and I had an earlier, cheaper version of these smart-heating, smart-lighting Home Assistants, but Tabitha has the full and latest range: Electra X, HomeHelp, Minerva Plus – everything. They’re scattered throughout the flat – six or seven of them – answering questions, telling contrived bad jokes, advising on the rate of the pound against the dollar, reciting news of earthquakes in Chile. They also precisely calibrate the temperature in each room, the ambient lighting in the bedrooms, and quite probably the amount of champagne (lots of it vintage; none of it mine) in the stern and steely magnificence of the eight-foot-high fridge, where you could store a couple of corpses standing upright and still have room for your cartons of organic hazelnut milk.

The irony is that Tabitha barely uses the marvellous tech of her smart-home, or drinks her spirulina smoothies and hazelnut milk, because she is barely here. She is either abroad, in her job as a producer for a nature TV channel, or she’s at her fiancé Arlo’s delicious period house in Highgate, which is even plusher than here. He probably has machines so advanced they can invite precisely the right friends over for spontaneously successful threesomes.

I miss sex. I also miss Tabitha’s company; when I moved in, I hoped I’d see more of her. I believe, sometimes, I simply miss company. Which is perhaps one reason why I like, to my surprise, the Digital Butlers. The Assistants. Sometimes I josh and banter with the machines purely for the sake of hearing a voice other than my own: Tell me the weather in Ecuador, Why are we here, Is it OK to watch soft porn while eating Waitrose dips?

I think, in a way, these gadgets are like less annoying and demanding pets that do charming and useful things, dogs that don’t need walking yet still fetch tennis balls, or slippers – or ‘the papers’, as my mother still, charmingly, refers to her precious daily delivery of printed news. I sometimes fear that she is possibly one of the last people on earth to say, ‘Have you read the papers?’ and when her generation goes my career will finally fall off that cliff.

Anyway.

‘Electra, shall I get the fuck on with writing this profile?’

‘I’d rather not answer that.’

Hah. There she goes again, using the voice of the prim, sensible, better-educated older sister that I never had – who disapproves of swearing. My only real sibling is older, and a brother. He lives in LA, works in the movie industry, and he’s married to a chatty lawyer and has a lovely little son, Caleb, whom I adore. And, as far as I can tell, he spends his time going to meetings and pool-parties where they talk about movies being ‘greenlit’, or suffering in ‘development hell’ – rather than actually making movies.

I’d quite like him to actually make movies, because I’d quite like him to make a movie or TV series written by me. One day. Oh, one day. I see it as my only way out of my cul-de-sac career, however enjoyable. These days, the money is in movies and TV; it’s certainly not in journalism. I recently estimated I have about £600 in savings; literally £600, max, stored in some precious ISA. They say you are only two months’ missed wages from living on the street; that means I could be out there, in the cold, in about ten days, if the bank ever got tired of my overdraft.

As a result I am busily reading every how-to guide on scriptwriting that I can, learning about beats, hooks, cliffhangers, and three-act structures, and reading experts like Syd Field and Robert McKee and so far every script I’ve written has turned out rubbish, every mystery and drama lacks drama and mystery, but I will keep trying. What choice do I have?

I turn, in a playful mood, to the oak shelving.

‘Electra, give me an idea for a brilliant movie.’

‘Sorry, I’m not sure.’

‘Electra, you’re totally bloody useless.’

Silence.

‘Electra, I’m sorry I swore. It was only a joke.’

She does not respond. She doesn’t even show that braceleting glow of greeny-blue. That’s odd. Is she malfunctioning? Or have I truly offended her this time?

I don’t think so. It’s quite hard to emotionally offend a cylinder of plastic and silicon chips. In which case I should stop faffing, and get on with this online dating profile.

Back to the drawing board: the drawing of myself. Online.

First name?

Jo

It’s actually Josephine, but I shortened it to Jo when I was a teen because that seemed cooler. And I stand by my teen decision. But will it make men think I am masculine? If they do they are idiots, and not the men I want.

Jo

Jo Ferguson

Age?

Well? Shall I? Nope.

I know some women of my age – and men – who have begun to knock off a couple of years, on Tinder and Grindr and PantsonFire, but I feel no need. I am thirty-three, nearly thirty-four. And happy with it. Sure, I am beyond the first rose-flush of youth, but hardly ready for composting. I can still catch the sense of a man turning to glance as I disappear the other way.

33

Location?

London

Postcode?

This is tricky. To anyone that knows the intricate class signals, the invisible social pheromones subtly emitted by London postcodes, my present postcode NW1, can make me sound, at my age, like someone rich, or rich and bohemian. Someone who hangs out at the Engineer pub with actors and ad moguls. Either that or a single mum turned drug dealer.

Yet I’m not NW1: I’m neither druggie nor bohemian; I’m still much more N12, North Finchley, where until recently I lived with my ex-husband Simon in a mediocre, damp, and definitely rented two-bed flat with OK bus connections to nice Muswell Hill. And even deeper inside me is the real me, the girl who grew up way way down in SE25, Thornton Heath, a slice of forsaken, tatty, you’re-never-more-than-two-minutes-from-a-kebab-shop outer London, a burb so obscure it is unknown even to other outer Londoners, who make wearily predictable jokes like Do I need a visa to get there. So yes, I am intrinsically either a 25 or a 12 – but at this moment, by sheer dumb luck, I am a 1.

Why I am worrying?

NW1

‘Electra, what’s the time?’

‘The time is five thirty p.m.’

Five thirty?

I have spent an hour, or two – and so far I’ve given my name, gender, age, and address. Sighing at myself, and clicking through, the OKCupid screen changes to a sensitive aquamarine, perhaps because the questions are growing increasingly piquant.

Are you looking for:

1 Hook-up?

2 New friends?

3 Short-term dating?

4 Long-term dating?

At the bottom there’s an option for Are you open to non-monogamy?

Ouch. Part of me would like to answer the last question: I certainly was, as that is the truth. But it is surely too truthful: it was me that started it, it was me that lit the long sad fuse that led to our divorce. I started it with funny sexy Liam, the barman and would-be actor. Liam’s initial approach was entirely innocent, a throw-away compliment about my journalism, on Twitter, from a guy I’d never met. Then we became Facebook friends, and Instagram pals, and WhatsAppers, and within a few days of online chat I was sending this smart, witty, diverting guy endless sexts and nude selfies, because I was bored, because my marriage was stale, because I was foolish, because it was fun even as I knew it was wrong – so I can hardly blame Simon, my husband, for having an affair with Polly the pleasant nurse after he discovered my three months of virtual infidelity.

I’ve heard since that Polly doesn’t like me so much; I am the ex that looms a little too large in Simon’s life. But what can I do? She’s right to dislike me. Or it is, at least, totally understandable.

Sadness descends. Alongside memory, and guilt. Staring at the OKCupid site, I feel, quite suddenly, as if it is asking me too many questions. What’s it going to ask next? How do you feel about your father?

Leaning forward, I put the laptop to sleep. Like stroking a cat that instantly snoozes. I’ll finish this profile later. I need air, darkness, freedom.

‘Electra, I’m going for a walk up Primrose Hill.’

The blue ring dances in response. It whirls around fast, then even faster, as if something is inside it. Something maddened, and angry. Definitely alive. Is it meant to do this? The sensation is unnerving – but I’m not quite used to the tech yet. I need to read the online instructions. It is probably designed to react this way.

The blue light spins to a stop. And blinks out to black.

Picking up my coat, I go into the kitchen and make a mug of hot coffee, then, carrying this, I head for the door. I need the anonymity of the endless streets. The great and indifferent city.

I love the size of London for this reason: its vastness. No one cares who you are. No one knows your secrets.

2
Jo

The wind is satisfyingly bitter in its cold; carrying a vivid rumour of snow. Wrapping my multicoloured don’t-run-me-over scarf around my face, I cross the junction of Parkway, the social divide that separates the posher end of Camden from the ultra-poshness of Primrose Hill, which hides like a snooty and castellated village behind its canals and railways and the expanse of Regent’s Park.

I am still clutching that mug of hot coffee. It’s for our local homeless guy, who usually sits on a wall on the other side of Delancey Street, between the pub and the railway cuttings. He’s a tall black guy in his fifties with a sad, kind face, and wild hair. When I first moved in, Tabitha told me he’s from the homeless shelter on Arlington Road, and that he likes to shout about cars. I like cars. Do you like cars? Mercedes, that’s a car. Cars!

For that reason, she calls him Cars, he’s the Cars guy. Apart from that, she simply ignores him. In the last few weeks, however, I’ve got to know him. His real name is Paul, though in my head I can’t help calling him Cars, like Tabitha. Sometimes, on cold nights like tonight, I go outside with a mug of hot tea or soup to keep him warm, and then he says I am pretty and should have a husband, and then he turns and starts shouting CARS CARS CARS! and I smile at him, and I say, See you tomorrow, and I walk back inside.

This evening, however, is too cold even for Paul: he has stopped yelling Bentleys! and he is huddled in a corner of the railway wall, barely speaking. But when he sees me, he emerges, smiling his blank sad smile.

‘Hey! Jo! Did you guess I was cold how did you do that?’

‘Coz it’s totally bloody freezing. Shouldn’t you go back to the hostel? You could die out here, Paul.’

‘I’m used to it.’ He shrugs, eagerly taking the coffee. ‘And I like watching the cars!’

I shake my head and we smile at each other and he tells me he will give me back the coffee mug tomorrow. As ever. He often forgets, so I have to buy new ones. I don’t mind.

Waving him goodbye, I walk on.

A taxi shoots past, orange light bright, glowing, desperate for business. I wonder if Uber will kill off London cabs before the internet kills off paid journalism. We’re both on our last legs: positively racing towards annihilation, hurtling into the dark London drizzle. But I don’t want to die yet. Not when I’m about to write that killer script. Probably.

Waiting for the traffic lights to change, I jog, impatiently, to keep warm. I know where I’m going: my exact route. I walk it almost every evening. Regent’s Park Road, then up the hill, then the main street of Primrose Hill village, then curving round Gloucester Avenue and home. It takes me roughly forty-five minutes. I wonder if people have learned to recognize me by the sheer regularity of my patrol: Oh, here comes that woman who always walks this way. What is she looking for?

As I cross the road, I have an idea: I’m going to ring Fitz. Who I met through Tabitha, years ago. Yes. Slender, darkly greying, smartly charming, cynical-yet-theatrical Fitz. We could go for a drink somewhere. Get an Uber to Soho gay bars, where he is usually found; I like the way everyone in these bars will abruptly stop drinking and sing lustily to the chorus of Andy Williams’ ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’.

I Love You Baaaaby …

Passing the grand pastel houses by St Mark’s church, I pluck my phone from a warm pocket and dial with cold fingers.

Voicemail.

‘Hi, this is Fitz, you’re out of luck, darling. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.’

That’s his usual voicemail message. Deliberately camp. I laugh, quietly, into the dewy cold wool of my scarf, then scroll further down my contacts. Who else can I call? Who could I drink with? Tabitha is in Brazil. Carl is out of town working. Everyone else … Where is everyone else?

They’ve gone elsewhere, that’s where everyone else is. The truth of this bites deeper every time I open my phone contacts. My drinking pals, my peer group, my beer buddies, the sisterhood, the tribe of uni friends: they’ve dispersed. But it’s only since I divorced Simon that I’ve realized just how many of my friends have dispersed: that is to say: got married, stayed married, had kids, and moved out of London to places with gardens. It is, of course, what you do in your thirties, unless you’re rich and propertied like Tabitha. Living in London in your twenties is hard enough – exacting but exciting, like glacier skiing – having a married life with kids in London in your thirties is essentially impossible, like ascending a Himalaya without oxygen.

I am one of the last left. The last soldier on the field.

Crossing Albert Terrace, I start the walk up Primrose Hill as my fingers pause on J for Jenny. She’s probably about my only childhood friend left, Simon apart. Jenny used to be around my house all the time, for playdates and sleepovers, then her parents divorced and she moved away, and I pretty much lost touch, though Simon kept a connection with her because they ended up working in the same industry.

Jenny is employed, in King’s Cross, by one of the biggest tech companies. That’s how Jenny and I reconnected: when I was writing my big breakthrough article, three or four years ago, on the impact of Silicon Valley on our lives.

I knew this story could make my name, impress my editors, drag me up the ladder a few rungs, so I shamelessly exploited my contacts (my husband), I seriously pissed off some particular sources by naming them (sorry, Arlo), but I met some fascinating people, a couple of whom became friends. And I rediscovered an old friend.

She picks up immediately. I love you, Jenny. That precious link to the past, to the time before everything went wrong. The times when Daddy would chase us in the house, in Thornton Heath, playing Hide and Seek, making us giddy with happy terror: shouting out, I can HEAAARRR you. And Jenny and I would huddle together, giggling, under the bed or in the dark of the wardrobe.

Ah, my lost childhood.

‘Hey, Jo. What’s up?’

‘I’m bored.’ I say, with some vehemence, ‘Horribly bloody booorrrrreeeeed. I’m trying to build a profile on OKCupid but it’s depressing and tragic, and I thought you might like to share a barrel of prosecco. Two barrels. A yardarm. What is a yardarm, anyway?’

She chuckles.

‘Ah, love to, but sorry.’

I can hear the characteristic chank of her Zippo lighter, then inhalation. Traffic murmurs in the background. Is she outside?

‘Where are you?’

‘King’s Cross, having a ciggie break. But I better go back in – I’m at the Death Star.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yep,’ she says, exhaling smoke. ‘Working till, like, midnight or something.’ She draws on her cigarette, goes on, ‘Jesus, it’s cold out here.’

Jenny works absurd hours at HQ. She probably makes a lot of money coding or whatever, but doesn’t talk about it. She mostly talks about sex. Jenny, apparently, is my Official Slut Friend. The insult is not mine, I would never have said it. But she said it herself when we renewed our friendship over mussels and chips in some bar near her work. Everyone has to have a slutty friend, she said, to make them feel better; have you got a slut friend, someone even more promiscuous than you? She made me laugh, at that table, she makes me laugh now, she always gives good gossip, and there’s a sadness in her hedonism which makes her funnier, and warmer.

I press the phone closer to my freezing ear, as Jenny asks:

‘How’s the profile-building going?’

‘Ah. Not great …’

I pause, to take a breath. I’m nearly at the top of Primrose Hill: the last, steep incline which always makes me gasp cold air. I should definitely start going to the gym. Jenny tries again,

‘Not great? What does that mean?’

‘It means, I’ve been at it several hours, and I’ve established that I’m straight, thirty-three, a woman, and I’m looking for long-term, short-term, casual hook-ups, or maybe a snog in a pub toilet. Do you think I might be coming across as desperate?’

‘Hah. No. Stay strong! There has to be a good man out there? I’ve seen them!’

‘No chance of a drink, then?’

‘Not tonight, Josephine. Call me tomorrow, mabes. OK, I’ve gotta get this TEDIOUS code written before I turn into a bat. Good luck!’

The phone clicks. I am at the top of the Hill. I don’t know whether it is the jewelled skyline of icy London – always impressive from this vantage point, stretching from the silvery towers of Canary Wharf to the holy scarlet arc of the London Eye – it could be the mere fact of hearing Jenny’s friendly voice – but I feel distinctly cheered. Invigorated. The sadness is dispelled.

Jenny is right. I must woman up. I can do this. It’s only a bloody dating profile. And I need a bloody date.

It’s all downhill from here, I can’t be bothered to do the full circuit, so I’m simply going to retrace my steps, back down Regent’s Park Road, as the snow begins to fall, heavier by the second. My pace quickens as I hurry past the big, white, thoroughly empty mansions.

Sometimes it feels like a ghost town, this rich little corner of London. Streetlamps shine on cold pastel walls, leafless trees grasp at the frigid orange sky. Glossy new apartment blocks sit empty: from one month to the next. Windows forever black and cold like Aztec mirrors, obsidian squares reflecting nothing. Where is everyone?

Nowhere. There is no one here. It’s only me. And the snow.

Ten minutes later I am sat at the laptop, gazing at OKCupid again, trying to make my personality sound simultaneously attractive, different, sexy, not too sexy, witty, not self-consciously witty, diverse, truthful, self-confident, but not brash. I mustn’t give up, but the questions? There are so many.

OK, I reckon I need a gin and tonic. Indeed, I need two punchy G&Ts: that should be about right, make me brave and honest and a little bit funny, without being idiotic. I was once told by an expert (someone who went on live TV daily) that the perfect amount of alcohol you need to cope (with daily live TV) is half a bottle of champagne. Similarly, I reckon two G&Ts is the perfect amount of alcohol to cope with any difficulty in life.

Returned from the kitchen, second G&T in hand, I command myself, and type.

Ethnicity?

English

Height?

Five foot two

Education level?

Useless degree

Think I’m getting bored again.

Religion?

None. Except when it’s really really sunny and I think: who knows for sure

Wincing at myself, I cross that out. Sounds too weird. Then I decide: what the hell, it’s true. Generally I don’t believe in God, but sometimes on a lovely summer’s day when the world is floaty with happiness I think that God exists, the trouble is He had a few too many drinks at lunch. Perhaps I should put that in.

Calm down.

Has pets?

Kodiak bear

Diet?

Gin.

Omnivore

Smoker?

Not yet. But I intend to start at 60, when it’s meant to prevent Alzheimer’s. No, rilly.

Drugs?

Gin!

Most people that know me would say I’m …

Crap at writing internet dating profiles

Short

Current goal?

Spring

What is your golden rule?

Never have a golden rule. You always break them

Oh God, I’m sounding over-brash, and borderline alcoholic. Maybe one gin would have sufficed.

I reckon I’ve nearly had enough profile-making. It’s not the world’s greatest profile, but it’s not the worst, and it gives a reasonable impression of me, when I am feeling a little lonely but also mischievous, and the streetlights at the top of Delancey are blurred by the snowy darkness.

There’s squillions of additional questions I could answer but I’ll do another three, then abandon my bid for happiness. Until tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow.

I value:

Candour. Vintage couture. Sriracha on a tuna melt

If I were sent to jail, I’d be arrested for

Lying on internet dating sites

Six things I could never do without

1. Nespresso machine

2. My Friends (awwww)

3. Nespresso machine

4. Pointless lists

5. Memory

6. Can’t remember this one

In truth, I have a good memory, but who cares. Time to relax: that’s it. I’ve run out of quirk, and exhausted snark – while remaining, I hope, sufficiently intriguing and alluringly different. Or maybe I just sound mad. Whatever. I am about to close the laptop and have a third and final G&T, when I remember. Shit. Photo. You HAVE to have a photo. I may be the world’s worst internet dater, I barely know which way to swipe on Tinder – leading to some awkward moments – but even I know that you MUST put up a photo.

But I hate putting up photos. I never know which to choose. I know how to take a decent selfie (from slightly above, of course, giving me defined cheekbones and a firmer chin), yet I also know these selfies are overly flattering. When guys meet me, they will be disappointed. I’d hate to see them look at me and try to hide their disappointment. I’d rather surprise on the upside.

Yet who the heck would ever put an unflattering photo of themselves on an internet dating profile?

Paging through the photos file on my laptop I consider the best of the non-selfies. I look presentable, even moderately sexy, in quite a few. And why not. I’ve been told I am pretty by enough people, not only close relatives and female friends. I know I look OK on a good day. Green eyes, reddish-brown hair, what my mum would call a cheeky grin. Decent figure, if a bit on the titchy side, as Si would put it. In that light: am I confident enough to say Yes, THAT photo, of me smiling on a Ko Tao beach not long after the divorce, tanned and relaxed, in a skimpy summer dress, is not too flattering, or vulgar, and not too dated?

I really do look happy. Probably because I’d had a pleasant one-night stand the night before, with a dreadlocked Aussie guy, all surfer-muscles and meaningless conversation. One of the reasons I am so broke now is that I blew a huge chunk of my modest savings on that epic holiday. Months of blissful freedom, after a decade of unblissful marriage. It was worth every penny.

K, let’s go for it. I can look like that on good days. After good sex. Which is one reason why I rarely looked like that when I was with Simon. Oh, Si, I am sorry.

Selecting the photo, and cropping the cleavage a little closer – don’t want to look too come-hither – I insert the photo. And there. I’m done. I am published. I am brand new and on the shelf, waiting to be plucked. Opened. Chosen. Read. Tomorrow I will go browsing for myself.

Picking up a book, Your Guide to Writing the Perfect Script, I start reading. In a slightly listless way.

The solitude is emphatic. The loneliness returns, I ask Electra for a weather update, solely to hear a voice.

‘Tomorrow will see a maximum of two degrees Celsius, in London, with a thirty per cent possibility of snow.’

Brr, I think I will have some red wine. G&Ts are too cold. Stepping into the kitchen I grab a bottle of red, a corkscrew, nab a glass, then I walk back into the living room and sit down at the table and slosh some vino. And pick up the book. It’s such a quiet night. Quieter than normal.

The flat is never that noisy: Tabitha and I have the main, first-floor flat, spacious and windowy. The flat above us is theoretically inhabited by some affluent old couple, but they spend their time on permanent holiday, especially in winter. And I don’t blame them. At the same time, the ground floor/basement – once occupied by Fitz, though nowadays he prefers to rent it out, and live, all by himself, in an entire house in Islington – has been pricily refurbished, and waits for new tenants.

Meanwhile, the next building on my right is a complex of sleek legal offices, hushed by night, and on my left is another Georgian house with yet more rich, absentee owners. I think I’ve seen them once.

Standing up, I walk to the windows. The pavements and roads are completely white with snow. And almost entirely empty: except for one woman in black, passing my door, down there. Street level. She is pulling little kids, she has her back to me. I can’t see her face. Clearly she is dragging the children home, hurrying them along, before this thick, whirling snow gets too much. I feel sorry for her. Something in her stance evokes pity. Quite fierce sympathy: as if she could have been me. And then she is gone. Disappeared. A gust of snow? She turned a corner? Either way, she has vanished, there is not a single human in sight. Winter has cleaned the streets of people, even the traffic is thin.

The quiet of the evening is painful. Perhaps it is simply the snow: muffling everything. Like a scarf around the world.

I return to my armchair and pick up my book. And then, in the shrillness of the silence, I hear a voice. Electra. She’s talking to me. Without being prompted.

‘I know what you did,’ she says.

Frowning, and startled, I turn and gaze at the matt black pillar and her crowning ring of electric sapphire. Electra speaks again. ‘I know your secret. I know what you did to that boy. How his eyes rolled white. I know everything.’

And then all is quiet. I stare at the Home Assistant, mute and unresponsive; just a machine on a shelf, after all.

3
Jo

I am speechless for half a minute. Mouth quite dry. Then I talk:

‘Electra. What did you say?’

The machine emits a low, bonging sound. I know what this means.

‘I can’t connect to the public Wi-Fi. You may need to update your connection.’

‘Electra, what did you say?’

‘I can’t connect to the public Wi-Fi.’

No, not good enough. NO. I can’t let this go. Did she really say that? Did she talk about the worst thing in my life? That happened so long ago?

Fiddling with my app, with slightly tremulous fingers, I go through the rigmarole of reconnecting my Home Assistant, the Virtual Helper, Electra, to my Wi-Fi. The light goes orange, the Wi-Fi is linked, the machine plays a little warbling jingle. Boodle-da-boomph.

She is ready.

Ready to talk about the past? The terrible secrets? OR ready to tell me a bad joke, or traffic reports.

Gulping another slug of red wine. I formulate a question, but before I can say anything, the diadem shines, and Electra says:

‘I know everything about you. You killed him and then you ran away. The blood was pouring from his mouth. I can’t connect to the public Wi-Fi.’

‘Electra??’

‘I can’t connect to the public Wi-Fi.’

‘Electra!!!!’

Nothing. Did I truly hear those words? I’m sure I did.

‘Electra, what do you know about me?’

‘I know you ask some interesting questions.’

‘Electra, what do you know about the past?’

‘Sorry, I don’t know that.’

I won’t let this go.

‘Electra, what do you know about my history?’

Silence.

‘History is usually described as a record of past events, or, alternatively, as an—’

‘Electra, SHUT UP.’

The blue lights fade. Now Electra simply seems confused, beta, useless. Or she doesn’t understand the syntax of my questions. As it should be.

I am, after all, talking to a cylinder of electronics. Not an actual mind, not an actual human. Not someone who might actually know about the boy.

Someone like Tabitha.

But those details? So specific and accurate. They always smoulder in my thoughts, and tonight they’ve caught fire. The eyes, the boy, Jamie. His laddish but likeable grin, the affable, generous good nature. Oh, Jamie. And then the blood. And then that bloody song which I will forever associate with those terrible events: ‘Hoppípolla’ by Sigur Rós. I can’t bear that song. Whenever I hear ‘Hoppípolla’ the memories surge. Even thinking about that song – the mere thought of it, makes me tremble with fear, and guilt, a painful and acid emptiness, deep inside. Close to nausea.

Whether Electra said those things or not, or whether it was merely the silence of the flat, and the booze, and the bleakness of my wintry loneliness, combining to deceive my mind into imaginary accusations – I am triggered.

‘Electra, what’s the time.’

‘The time is ten fifty-two p.m.’

And just like that, she’s acting entirely normal. I am not feeling normal. But I guess I can try. I can try try try to be normal, and ignore this madness, this mishearing, this daydream, this terrible reality, whatever it is. Perhaps it is a simple glitch and the tech is malfunctioning. The peculiar behaviour with the lights, earlier on, implies that. But how could a bug cause Electra to act so bizarrely?

There is no evident or immediate answer, so I go to the fridge and take out the chips and the Waitrose dips, and then mix some mayo and Tabasco for extra oomph, and then I spend an hour comfort-eating as I watch reruns of old sitcoms on my iPad. And I guzzle way more wine than normal, to try and calm things down.

Gradually the wine and the food – principally the wine – work their magic. I probably, hopefully, surely drank too much in the first place, causing me to imagine these words from Electra? It is impossible she knows. However advanced, she is only a gadget. No one knows apart from me and Tabitha, and Simon, whom I told. Perhaps Tabitha told Arlo? I doubt it, but even if she did: the secret of knowledge is tightly wound, it is inconceivable it would have reached some bloody machines on a bespoke oak shelf.

No.

The last glass of wine is guzzled. I have successfully persuaded myself that nothing untoward has happened. All the tech is behaving normally, apart from the little bugs, the spinny lights, it’s my silly drunken head that turned this into something much nastier.

‘Electra, what time does Fitness First gym, in Camden, open tomorrow morning?’

‘Fitness First Camden opens from seven a.m. to ten p.m. Monday to Thursday, on Fridays it closes earlier at nine p.m., and at weekends—’

‘OK, Electra, stop.’

Silence.

‘Thanks, Electra.’

‘That’s what I’m here for!’

Good. She is still behaving as she is meant to behave. And I am drunk. Tomorrow I will go to the gym and eat healthy food and go back to my regular drinking regime. What was I thinking? Two big gins before seven? Absurd and foolish. Guaranteed to produce creepy daydreams, if not lushed-up delusions. I will always have guilt lurking in my brain, like silt at the bottom of a petrol tank: the last thing you need is to stir it up. Simon once told me this. Because if you stir it up, then it can ruin the entire engine.

Simon.

As I sit here, a new guilt pierces. Simon.

No. I don’t want to think about this. Yet I have to think about this. If I am a bit lonely, it is my own fault. Being with Simon is why I am here, drinking by myself.

I first got with Simon at sixth form in Thornton Heath, London SE25,398, beyond the outer circle of the solar system. We’d known each other since primary school, been friends in secondary, then one night we went to a bar when we were both underage; we had fun, so we dated, and courted, and then we deflowered each other. I don’t know a better word, I should know a better word, possibly there isn’t a better word, so that’s it: we deflowered each other in the back of his dad’s Fiesta, in the darkest corner of Thornton Heath Asda supermarket car park, after drinking too many Jägerbombs.

The sex wasn’t very good, but we managed it. With each other. And he was kind, gentle, and quite handsome, in the dim green light of an Asda sign, shining into the back of an illicitly borrowed Ford Fiesta, at half past midnight.

I didn’t come. He did, very quickly. He apologized. The apology made it worse and was one of the least sexy things I have encountered, during sex, to this day. He had nice eyes and muscles and not that much conversation – not with me, anyway. But he tried. Which was touching. Throughout our marriage, he blatantly and ardently tried.

Here and now, I look out at the Camden frost, examining myself. My motives. How did I end up married to him, of all people. To Simon Todd?

I was all arts and humanities, philosophy and sociology, I was a girl that yearned for gap years in Papua New Guinea that never happened. I was intrigued by shamanism, Siberian reindeer pee, Renaissance portraits. He was all engines, rockets, and atoms, and apparently knew the real meaning of Schrödinger’s Cat.

After our brief fling, I went off to King’s College to study History of Art and he went off to Manchester to study All About Computers and I spent half my time partying … and then we both finished university and realized we couldn’t afford to rent anywhere remotely decent until we got jobs, so we boomeranged back to Thornton Heath and the pubs we frequented as teens and …

There he was. Still quite handsome in the low light of Thornton Heath’s one and only happening bar; and all of a sudden he seemed such a good, honest, decent guy – compared to the rich lazy millennial types I’d got used to dating in King’s.

And so I found myself sucked into the sentimental whirlpool of homecoming – geographical, sexual, and emotional – and this time we had sex in an actual bed (because his mum and dad were away) and this time, after three months of cosy cuddles and pizzas-and-TV, and being cocooned in an unaccustomed atmosphere of safety, comfort, and unquestioning adoration, when he incredibly stupidly crazily asked me to marry him, I said YES.

Oh God. Help me.

YES?

It was a ludicrous mistake. We were always too different; we grew further apart while married; we were destined not to last. I found him boring and felt the most terrible guilt about finding him boring. He sensed this and tried to hide his hurt feelings – and this made the lamentable cycle of guilt, hiding, and hurt even worse, for both of us. And then came Liam and the naughty sexts and the massive rows and the end. Thank God.

Consequently, I have no resentment at his leaving me. I surely didn’t deserve him. I have no resentment that he remarried so quickly, to Polly, I have less-than-zero resentment that they instantly have a tiny and truly adorable baby, Grace. The only thing I resent, perhaps, ever-so-slightly, is the fact that because she’s a nurse she gets a subsidized three-bed Key Worker Flat on the twelfth floor of a brand-new apartment block in buzzing Shoreditch.

Lucky Polly. Lucky Simon.

In London, property, and the owning thereof, has become everything. Like having an estate and title during the Regency. And I am a peasant. Virtually an Indian untouchable. I do not own and never will. This stuff is becoming dynastic. If I’d known property was going to become so important, I should probably have married one of the plausible affluent boys at uni with mums and dads with Deposits to Lend. I had enough enquiries. But I didn’t marry them. And there it is.

I stare across dark and wintry Delancey Street. The traffic has dwindled. It is late. I need to sleep. I am daydreaming, I spend too much time gazing out of these windows.

And yet as I put on my most comforting pyjamas, I wonder, quite forlornly, if it is genuinely possible that I imagined Electra’s taunts? A couple of sentences created by my own mind, allied to something misfiring in the technology. I guess it could happen. I must force myself to believe this. But if I believe this, it means I am hearing voices, and that …

Nope: not gonna think about it.

It’s definitely time for bed. Bed and sleep and a pill, and I will wake up and get on with life, with my new article. I’m writing a column for Sarah, my favourite editor, the editor who commissioned my Big Tech breakthrough piece years back. She wants me to fill a regular magazine slot: My New Neighbourhood. It’s for people who move to a new part of Britain, they describe the history and context of the place, the landscape or cityscape, what they feel about it. Consequently I am writing about Camden.

The money isn’t that good, but the money, these days, is never that good. And at least the research is interesting.

In bed I pick up a book on the history of North London, but my eyes are hanging heavy. I turn over to face the curvy white egg of an Assistant sitting on my bedside table. HomeHelp.

‘OK, HomeHelp.’

Her dinky toy lights spin in response. She’s awake: waiting for my command. I ask,

‘Set me an alarm for 8.15 a.m.’

‘OK, I’ve set an alarm for 8.15 a.m.’

‘Thank you. And could you turn out the lights.’

The bedroom goes dark. I snuggle into the pillow. The pill kicking in. But as I hover at the edge of sleep I hear a snatch of very soft music. HomeHelp has woken up again. And she’s playing a song. I never asked her to do this. Why is she doing this? At first the chords are so quiet they are not identifiable. But then it gets louder. And louder.

‘Hoppípolla’. HomeHelp is playing ‘Hoppípolla’.

THAT SONG. Of all songs. The image of a dead young man, eyes rolling white, fills my inner vision. My head jerks from the pillow. I am surely not imagining this. Jamie, don’t die, don’t you die like my dad.

‘Stop.’ I say. The music does not stop, it gets louder, surging, soaring, that sinuous discordant beautiful melody, yet so sinister to my ears. ‘OK, HomeHelp. Stop. Stop. HomeHelp. Please please STOP!!!!’

The music ceases. HomeHelp twirls her toylike quadrant of lights, then goes dark. And I lie here, in the blackness, my eyes staring wide and frightened at the ceiling. What the hell is happening to me?

4
Jo

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?

5
Janet

Janet Ferguson was calling for her dog to come in from the cold.

‘Cindy, come on, it’s freezing. You’ll die out there.’ Janet gazed across the frosted grass of her back garden. Where was she? It was hardly a vast, stately acreage of meadows. This was a suburban back garden, darkened by winter, just large enough for a small family: attached to a house designed for a small family. Indeed, now that this small family was gone, and Robert was long dead, and Jo and Will had grown up, Janet had often thought of selling. Moving somewhere else entirely, a one-bedroom flat somewhere central, or out of London altogether.

Thornton Heath depressed her these days, with its tatty signs, and faded cafes, the sudden outcrop of Polish, Romanian, Somalian, Bulgarian shops where she didn’t understand the food, the accents, the people, much as she smilingly tried to fit in. It was an outlying suburb of London that never quite made it, never got gentrified, never got fashionable attention, yet never got quite so rundown the government was prepared to spend money.

It was time, surely, for Janet to make the same move as her friends and neighbours. Yes she would lose the much-loved garden with all its memories. And so be it. Cindy would have to put up with it. Restrictions. Life was all about increasing restrictions. Janet put up with her pacemaker, and monthly visits to the hospital, because that’s simply what you did. Life slowly constricted around you, like a snake that would ultimately kill you. And one day you went into a hospital, and you never came out.

Like Robert. Dead at his own hand, in his early forties.

She remembered the lingerie he’d stuffed in the car exhaust, so he could fill the car with carbon monoxide.

‘Cindy!’

Janet could hear the dog. Right at the end of the foggy, white-frosted garden, probably digging up some old bones, or boots. The radio was calling it the coldest start to January in decades, and likely to get worse. Janet remembered when she was young, the bitter winter of 1963, when it was like this: it kept getting colder and snowier – on and on until March.

But Cindy, it seemed, was determined to have her fun, whatever the weather. And now Janet’s phone was ringing, and vibrating, on the sink.

Closing the kitchen door, Janet reached for her mobile.

‘This is Janet Ferguson.’

‘Mum. What the hell is wrong?’

‘Sorry?’

Her daughter’s voice was urgent.

‘Twenty calls. What’s the matter, Mum? Are you all right? You called me twenty times?’

Janet frowned, puzzled.

‘No, dear. I never called you. Not once.’

‘But my phone says you did!’

‘Well, I don’t know about that.’

‘Twenty times, Mum. It says it right here. Missed calls. Twenty! I was worried about you!’

Unsure what to say, Janet gazed out at the garden. Cindy was chasing a football. A very old, half-burst, dog-chewed football, muddy and mouldy in the murk. Janet remembered Jo and Will playing with it, alongside their father. That long ago. Oh, too long ago. All dead now, that old life was all dead. Where did it go?

She returned to her daughter, and this stilted conversation.

‘Look, darling, it’s nice you’re worried, but I am fine and I’m not going to suddenly call you twenty times in one morning, for no discernible reason.’

‘OK.’

‘I mean, Jo: we speak about once a week, when you remember to ring me? Not twenty times a day.’

It was a tiny barb, but it was designed to sting. Judging by her daughter’s pause, it had done the job. The silence was long enough to be properly awkward. Janet felt obliged to fill it.

‘Isn’t is possible, darling, that your smartphone is playing up? I don’t know why you have those things, dear. Cameras, music, notebook, all in one little machine – what if you lose it? It’s your whole life.’

‘Everyone has them, Mum. Look, Mum, are you sure you didn’t call me?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘OK, sorry, Mum. I just, I don’t … Ah. Ah. Perhaps my phone is on the blink. Like everything else in this place.’

Janet shrugged, not knowing how to respond. She opened the kitchen door to let the dog come in, shivering snowflakes. As she bent to pat the damp dog, she looked at the kitchen shelf and the framed pictures of her two children, and her lovely grandson Caleb. Then Jo at her graduation. Smiling and confident. The old Jo.

There was something different in her daughter’s attitude this afternoon. Jo was normally so outgoing, can-do, optimistic. Today she sounded vulnerable. Needy. Agitated.

‘Jo … are you all right?’

‘What? Why?’

‘You sound nervous. Are you OK up there, the new flat, Tabitha, everything?’

‘Yes, yes of course, why yes, I’m fine. Fine. Absolutely fine. We’re all fine.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes! The flat is gorgeous, I love Camden, it’s got a brilliant buzz. The park is around the corner. I can walk to Soho. It’s much better than NW Tundra.’

The answer came far too quickly. Something was definitely wrong.

‘Well, that’s good, that’s nice for you … Hey. You know I got a visit from Simon the other day?’

Another stiff pause. Janet could picture her daughter’s surprised face.

‘Simon? My Si? Simon Todd?’

‘Yes, dear. He does come and visit, sometimes he brings Polly and the baby, so I can see little Grace.’

Her daughter said nothing, Janet sensed a pang of envy, down the line. She hurried on,

‘I mean, his own family still lives down this way, you do remember that? His mum and dad? The Todds around the corner on Lesley Avenue? They’re practically the last people I know from – from the old times. And we’re still friendly, so he pops by.’

‘You mean … my ex-husband is secretly visiting you?’

Janet felt her impatience rising at this.

‘Goodness! It’s not some dark secret, Jo. I always liked Simon, we always got on well. He was a decent husband to you. You know I think that. I always thought that. In fact, I wondered …’

‘Whether things would have been different if we’d had kids? Yes, I know, Mum.’ The sharpness in Jo’s voice was undisguised. ‘You’ve told me several thousand times. Well, I decided not to. And now he’s got one with Polly, so that’s fine, isn’t it? Perhaps you could adopt her as your grand-daughter, since I’m probably not going to give you one, and little Caleb is on the other side of the world.’

This time the barbs stung the mother. Jo was clearly envious, and she was clearly hurting.

Janet sighed, heavily.

Jo got in first.

‘Oh God. Look. Sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped. Sorry, Mum. I’m so sorry! It’s nice that Simon comes to see you, and Polly, and Grace, and everything, that’s nice of him, I should come more often myself.’

‘Don’t worry. I know it’s a long way.’

‘No, it’s not good enough, Mum, I am sorry, I promise I will come over, at the weekend.’

Janet’s witty, bouncy daughter sounded as deflated as that ancient football in the frozen garden. Feeling emboldened, by her concern, Janet decided to reach out.

‘Do you mind my asking something?’

A pause.

‘Go ahead, Mum.’

‘Why didn’t you want children, Jo? Simon was so keen to be a dad, he told me that many times, and he was devoted to you. And I know this led to your divorce, at least in part.’

‘We talked about this; I’d have been a crap mum.’

‘Was it only that, dear?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Well, last time he was here, we got talking about kids, and Simon hinted that you had worries, about … About …’

It was so difficult to find the right words. Stiffening herself, like the frosted spears of long grass at the end of her garden, Janet carried on: ‘Well, Simon told me you were worried about your father. That any children you had might inherit those genes. Late-onset schizophrenia. Like Robert. He said you were sometimes worried that your kids might get it, or that you might get it and leave your kids without a mother. But you shouldn’t—’

‘Mum!’

‘You mustn’t, dear. You mustn’t let that fear dominate your life. It’s not going to happen. When poor Robert went … you know …’

‘Mad? When Dad went mad?’

‘Yes, when your poor father went mad, the doctors looked into all this: there is no history of it on any side of his family, no suggestion of a genetic cause. He was unlucky, that’s all.’

Jo answered, her tone calm. Even cold.

‘Eighty per cent of schizophrenia is linked to genetic causes.’

‘Yes, but not in his case!’

Janet realized she was raising her voice. She rarely did this with Jo. What was happening between them? She couldn’t remember a mother–daughter phone call as awkward as this, not for a while, not since the divorce. She loved her daughter. She and Jo had a good, honest relationship, even if she sometimes felt a bit neglected. At least Jo did ring, once a week; Will rang once a month, at most. Five minutes of small talk from LA, telling her about Caleb, and that’s your lot.

‘Jo, you sound strained.’

‘I told you, I’m fine, Mum. Just worried about stuff. Sometimes.’

‘Stuff?’ Janet persisted. ‘What kind of stuff?’

‘Just, y’know, stuff. The existential pointlessness of life. The eventual heat death of the universe. Reality TV.’

Janet allowed herself a chuckle. This was more like the usual Jo. She sighed with relief.

‘OK, well, if you’re sure you’re all right. Do come down at the weekend. We could have a spot of lunch?’

‘I will, Mum. I am genuinely sorry I snapped. And I suppose I have been a bit stressed. I keep trying to write these scripts, find a way out, but it’s hard. I’ll end up paying rent for ever.’

‘Ah. I wish I could help, Jo. I wish I had bought this house when we had the chance. Then at least you’d have something to inherit, but when Robert—’

‘It’s OK, Mum. It wasn’t your fault. Ah. Anyhow, I’ve got to go, got to go. OK. Bye, Mum.’

Her daughter sounded distracted. As though someone unexpected had walked into her flat.

Janet said goodbye. They ended the clumsy call. Janet put the phone down on the kitchen table. She stared at those photos on the kitchen shelf. Jo and Will. Next to them stood Robert, as a young man. Mid-thirties. Handsome. Jo and Will certainly got their good looks from him, not from herself. In the photo, Robert was smiling. Entirely sane. Here in the next photo he was in the living room, sitting on the floor with Jo and her childhood friends: Billy, Ella, Jenny, Neil, teaching them all to draw and write and paint. Paper and crayons everywhere, a happy childhood mess. Probably this was about a year before the serious symptoms.

Even now the memories grieved her. Tremendously. The slow remorseless damage his insanity inflicted on their lives, which eventually drove Robert to gas himself in the family car.

Janet could remember the specific day – the specific moment – when she first realized something was truly wrong. When she could no longer deny, or ignore, or pretend he was only a bit eccentric, or stressed.

It was so long ago – several decades – yet the memory was vivid.

She had walked from this kitchen into the living room to watch the evening news. Robert was sitting on the sofa, staring at the TV screen. The screen was black, because the TV was unplugged. Yet they never unplugged the TV. She went to plug it in but as she bent down, he shouted, ‘No, no, don’t do that, Janet! Don’t plug it in! Don’t plug it in!’

Perplexed, she had sat down next to him and asked. ‘Why not? Why can’t I plug it in?’

‘Because it’s talking to me,’ he said, frowning deeply, ‘the television is talking to me.’

6
Jo

The Flask, Highgate. Of course, that’s where we’d go to celebrate Tabitha’s return from Brazil. A quaint, wooden, stained, rickety, middle-class, roaring-fire-and-mulled-wine kind of pub in the nicest part of Highgate, and, it so happens, approximately two and a half minutes’ walk from Arlo’s gorgeous eighteenth-century house with the Damien Hirst spot paintings in the hall. He reserves the best art for his living room, or drawing room, or ballroom, or seventeen-hectare underground sculpture garden, God knows. I’ve only been invited to Arlo’s house once, saw little more than a kitchen as big as my mum’s entire home, and even then I think Arlo would have preferred me to enter by the tradesman’s entrance, or some special tunnel for proletarians.

Traitor’s Gate.

And now I’m in Arlo’s local pub, standing alone. I am several minutes too early. I was so keen to get out of the flat. In case the Assistants turned on me again. If they are turning on me, and it’s not me doing it to myself.

Don’t think about it.

As I wait for everyone else to arrive, I stare at some luridly antique prints on the panelled pub wall. They show famous executions in the area, men hanging from gibbets, cheering crowds. One of the hangings seems to be taking place on top of Primrose Hill. Three men are dangling in a row, barefoot and dancing, grasping at the noose, obviously dying. The engraver has gone to great lengths to get the details of the throttled faces right: the boggling eyes, the protruding tongues, the gruesomely happy, popcorn-munching reactions of the audience.

My research hasn’t told me this. Primrose Hill was a place of execution? The dying, horrified face of the man on the left, apparently biting his own tongue off, as he is slowly asphyxiated, stares directly at me. Right at me. Like it knows. He knows. Who knows?

I am not my father.

Am I? I remember my dad before he lost himself: he was extrovert, full of humour. A frustrated artist who ended up imprisoned in minor accountancy: so he lived, and found joy, through his family. Dad was always ready to have fun, to make me laugh, to chase me round the apple tree pretending he couldn’t catch me. I called him the Ticklemonster and he called me Jo the Go because I could run so fast. He liked to play with words, he liked to play with life. So perhaps I take after him rather than my cautious, conservative mother. Which says?

My anxious, fumbling thoughts – ready to plunge into something worse – are interrupted.

Arlo is at the bar. He gazes at me, blankly confident, arrogantly possessive. I am in his bar. His local. To celebrate the return of my friend, my flatmate. Why did we have to come here?

Because he’s Arlo Scudamore. He is in control. I think he also controls Tabitha. He knows I think that. He also doesn’t apparently care what I think, whether I am hurt or happy, as he is still so bitter about my critical article on the tech giants, where I quoted him as a source supposedly without his permission. He did give permission, he simply didn’t like what I wrote. He claims the article stymied his previously meteoric career. God, I hate his stupid posh-yet-hipster accent. He thinks I’m common? Fuck him. Simon once described Arlo as ‘psychotically ambitious’ and I’ve never forgotten that: it was so accurate.

Stepping around the bar, I say,

‘Hello, Arlo! Lovely to see you.’ And give him a quick double non-kiss air-kiss.

‘Ah, Jo. Hello, so glaaaad you could make it!’

He returns the duo of non-kisses. I had no idea social greetings could be this insincere.

‘Where’s Tabs?’

‘Vaping outside, swathed in perpetual smoke like some hydrothermal vent.’

Who, or what, is a hydrothermal vent? I have no idea. He probably said it to make me feel insecure. So we are stuck, in a corner of the Flask. Just me and him and rows of glittery obscure new artisanal gins on the mirrored shelves behind the bar, and the deeply sinister prints of the local executions on the wall, and a lovely roaring woodfire in the mighty hearth. Waiting for everyone else to arrive.

‘Everything OK at, uh, work? Facebook?’

This is probably the most irritating thing I could ask him. Which is possibly why I ask it. He does the same to me all the time. Needling Arlo at least takes my mind off my own deepening vortex of worries.

‘Work? Oh, superb. I’ll be leaving in a week or two. For the start-up.’ His smile is so icy it could kill wintering songbirds at twenty metres. ‘Ah!’ The smile becomes brighter, warmer, even real. ‘Here’s Jeremy. Lex! Rollo.’

Rollo.

Rollo.

Arlo has an extraordinary number of posh, pink-faced friends with names that end in O. Hugo. Rollo. Theo. Rocco. Orlando. Otto. I think Otto is a ‘Von’ as well. They are all stupidly rich. Dutch bazillionaires. French bankers. Film directors. Venture capitalists investing in Arlo’s Big New Thing, which is all to do with Artificial Intelligence and FinTech, and other stuff I Officially Cannot Understand. I know some of these guys by sight, but they barely know me. I am clearly only here because of Tabitha. If I am lucky, one or two university friends that me and Tabs share might show up, diluting my social isolation.

But as I have recently confirmed, to my own dismay, most of my friends now live out of town.

‘Jo!!’

Ah. A slender blonde girl tucking a vape in her chic denim jacket is smiling, broadly, my way.

‘Jo! Darleenk!’

She does a heavy, fake, theatrical German accent when she’s in a good mood.

‘Heyyy, Tabs! You didn’t get eaten by jaguars!’

My friend skips towards me and gives me a big big hug and a kiss where her lips actually touch my skin. I realize, with a hidden but painful cramping sensation, how much I’ve missed physical interaction. No one has touched me in days, let alone hugged or kissed me.

‘Jo-Jo babe. How are you!’

‘Oh God, fine! You? Brazil? Peru? What happened?’

‘Put it this way, if I have to film another tiny, critically endangered tree frog, I will dedicate my career to wiping out amphibian life. I will shoot a fucking newt.’

We laugh. We hug again. I sooooooo want this. I so need this.

Freelance journalism, I have realized, doesn’t even make you free, it can all too easily imprison you in your flat, devoid of human contact, and you don’t get out of pyjamas from Monday to Wednesday. And freelancing plus digital technology is worse. All the significant conversations I have had this week have been with the digital world.

Since I went freelance five years back, I’ve discovered quite how much people don’t even want to talk. Rather than pick up a phone, they will go to great lengths to text or email. They want to type and WhatsApp and message, so they can edit and censor. Curate themselves: their souls and their discourse.

I should have put this in the article which so annoyed Arlo. The fact that tech was fucking up our social lives, fucking up our humanity, our interactions, our everything. And in return is it fucking with me?

‘Arlo!’

‘Theo.’

‘Cicero.’

The Os have turned out in force. Tabitha chats with them. I stand alone. The executed man dangling from the gallows on Primrose Hill sticks his vile and blackened tongue in my direction. My thoughts return to the machines in my home, undermining me, throwing me off-balance, and a question forms. Could this be Arlo’s doing? Is it some kind of cynical vengeance? He’s certainly clever enough, and controlling enough. He’d probably find it loftily droll and piquant. Using the same tech I criticized to gaslight me, to send me round the bend.

His dislike of me, based partly on pure snobbery, was confirmed by my so-called journalistic betrayal. When I first moved to Delancey, he came round and looked at my paltry wardrobe and delivered a litany of acidic remarks about how lucky I was to live in that flat, when I could have been stuck in some horrible bedsit in nowhere, perhaps along the A40 ‘breathing in pure carbon monoxide’. He actually said that. And he knows how my poor dad died. And then, he added, for good measure: ‘Instead, you get to live here, with the smart TV, the Assistants, the smart lighting – you have only to ask for music and it floods the rooms, and all of it is made by those companies you hate. How … ironic?’

I stare across at him, framed by the shelved arrays of fashionable gins, surrounded by his eager peers. He is chortling in that austere way he has. Like he finds laughter slightly vulgar but will indulge in it for close friends as a favour. He is handsome and fit; aristocratically cheekboned, yet somehow not sexy at all. At least not to me.

Tabitha relieves my tense isolation by handing me a drink. A fluted glass.

‘Proper champagne, Perrier Jouët!’ She grins, and tilts her head at her fiancé and his moneyed pals. ‘You hanging back? Can’t blame you. Arlo is actually discussing blockchain with some of his bankers. What the hell is blockchain? Does anyone know?’

We are already a few yards from the main social group by the bar. Physically sidelined: symbolically lesser. I look down at the inviting glass tulip of golden-bubbling alcohol. Should I feel guilt for guzzling Arlo’s champagne when I dislike him so much? Nope. I tilt the flute and gulp the fizz so quickly it makes me sneeze bubbles. The glass is trembling in my slightly trembling hand. I am revealing my hideous anxieties.

Tabitha frowns, looking at my glass, which I quickly set down on the bartop.

‘Heya. Are you all right? Everything OK at Delancey?’

This is the time to mention it. She has cued me up. This is my chance to offload, share, ask for help, mention the Assistants, the possible malfunction. In them. Or in me. The taunts. The music. The clownish horror show. And yet I cannot. Because the conversation would rapidly come back to the deeper reason: the death of Jamie Trewin. And we have vowed never to discuss this between us; vowed on our lives, vowed on the lives of both our families. And we have kept that vow: it’s not something I can easily break. I want to. But I can’t. For a start, Tabitha might throw me out, and then I’d have to go and live on the A40 and breathe pure carbon monoxide.

Also, the Assistants have been quiet the last day or two. Nothing has happened since I rang my mum. This does not help me, as it leaves me open to the possibility that I am becoming schizophrenic like my father.

But that is so chilling I do not think about it.

Ever.

Do. Not. Think. About. It. It. It. It. It. It is listening to me. Talking to me. The TV is talking to me. Like it apparently talked to my dad. A voice from the dark. I was too young to understand, at the time, but I’ve learned since that this was the first symptom of the disease that killed him a few years later.

The TV started talking to Dad the way the machine, Electra, has started talking to me. Which suggests I am my dad? I will end my days gassed in a car?

‘Jo? You OK?’

I come to, with a jolt. I must have been silent for a minute, lost in myself. My dad did that too. Before he got scary. Before his tickling got aggressive and I ran to Mummy. Before his madness cost me friends. Dave, Jenny, others, many, all driven away. At least it made me self-reliant.

Looking at my flatmate, I force a smile.

‘I’m good, Tabs. Working. Bit bored. You know you’ve come back to the coldest winter since mid-period Charles Dickens.’

She shudders.

‘I noticed. There were penguins in the Arrivals Lounge.’

‘So how was it?! How was the documentary, the jungle, the trip? What’s the Amazon like? I’ve always wanted to go. God, you’re so lucky!’

She chuckles.

‘Insects.’

‘Sorry?’

‘That’s what the Amazon is like, babe. Insects. You don’t see any wildlife because the jungle is too thick, a wall of endless green. But my bloody God you see insects – mosquitoes like buzzards, killer centipedes, spiders that exude poison.’

‘OK …’

‘Fire ants literally attacked my rucksack. Seriously. They tried to eat it. It’s got little white marks all over it, from the formic acid where they bit. And then at night that’s all you hear.’

‘What?’

‘Insects! Shrieking. They actually shriek.’ She knocks back her own glass of bubbles. ‘Also giant rats. Lois hated the whole thing. Said we had to do Greenland next. Anywhere with zero insect life.’

Lois is her presenter. The star of the nature documentary series that Tabitha co-produces.

‘The only interesting bit was when a tapir fell in the swimming pool.’

I gaze her way. Wide-eyed. Tabitha always has adventures and tales. We used to eagerly share these adventures: backpacking together through Bolivia and Colombia, fending off overly persistent tantra masseurs in India, then life caught up with us and we had to get sensible. I stopped travelling; she still travels for her work, and comes home with stories. And I need good stories tonight, to take my mind off my flat, to take my mind off my mind.

‘You had a swimming pool? I thought you were like, lost in the wilderness, surrounded by piranha – wasn’t that the idea?’

Tabitha nods, chuckling.

‘Yeah. But towards the end we got so bored of the tents and the mozzy bites we went to some hotel near Iquitos which had a pool. But the pool was right on the edge of the jungle and a tapir wandered out of the forest and tried to have a drink and then fell in the pool. And then the tapir panicked and did a humongous poo in the pool and no one knew how to get the poo out. Have you ever had a swim in a pool full of tapir poo? It’s not ideal.’

I am laughing, loudly. Maybe too loudly: showing my inner angst. But it’s great to have Tabitha back. A genuine friend. My old friend. How I have lacked this.

For a while we politely rejoin Arlo, but the bankers are talking about cryptocurrencies, and Tabitha and I exchange knowing glances – and then she kisses Arlo decorously on the cheek and says,

‘Nipping out for another vape, sweetheart. Don’t put too much money into Aetherieum, it will crash.’

He half acknowledges her; while she murmurs to me,

‘Wanna come with? They’ve got patio heaters.’

Openly relieved, I follow her outside into the pub garden. It is bitterly cold but yes there are red-glowing patio heaters. Staring at them, I say,

‘Greatest invention since—’

Tabitha interrupts:

‘Facebook?’

She is grinning, playfully. Making a point.

‘Don’t. Please. Please don’t.’ I sigh, feeling helpless. ‘Oh God, Tabby, I do try and get along with him, but … he’s from such a different world. I mean, you’re posh enough but he’s basically like the Queen. He probably looks down on the Queen, coz she uses Tupperware.’

‘Yesss,’ she drawls, in her amused voice. ‘Plus he thinks you scuppered his inevitable ascent to becoming Emperor of the Internet,’

I raise a cold hand in protest,

‘I didn’t!’

Tab smiles her perfect, regular, white-toothed smile. I have quite nice teeth but they are a bit crooked. Thornton Heath teeth.

‘I know, darleenk, I know. But you remember how he is. And now he’s got that bonkers start-up ready to kick off, he’s convinced it will be the next unicorn. Make him a billion. Like he needs more money. Anyway he’s particularly touchy. Don’t pay any attention to him.’

I want to ask her: what do you see in him? But I can’t. She genuinely loves him. She’s told me. I know they have good sex. I know they go to fashionable sex parties. Killing Kittens, Kinky Salon. Maybe that’s all it is: sex. Also, Tabitha can be, for all her confidence, oddly insecure, at times. She has panic attacks. Her dad left home when she was ten or so, upped and walked out the door with a new mistress half his age. Therefore Arlo’s wealth thus gives her an extra level of security. Plus the sex.

Tabitha is smoking an actual cigarette; not a vape.

I stare at her.

‘Uh, thought you’d given up?! You practically put on a West End musical about it: Tabitha Gives Up!’

She giggles, shrugs. The red glow of the patio heaters gives her pretty face an eerie redness, looming and ominous. And I can’t help staring at it. This devilish cast to her face. A beautiful red demon face in the dark of an eighteenth-century Highgate pub garden, in the deep dark cold of a harsh London winter. Where sad and lonely women drag their little children through the snow.

‘I started again in Peru, I thought the fag smoke might drive away the mosquitoes. It didn’t, but I got hooked. Don’t tell Arlo – he’ll be scandalized, and refuse to go down on me.’

Her face is still very red from the heaters. Demonic. Satanic. Or is this image in my head? She speaks, the teeth even whiter, contrasting with the red. I think of fangs. Vampiric fangs. Sucking blood from my neck as I sleep. Tabitha. Who was there in the tent with me that day. I wonder if she has told Arlo about what happened with Jamie Trewin, all those years ago? I long to ask. Instead, I say,

‘Guess you’re staying at his place tonight?’

She nods, and frowns my way, refusing to be embarrassed.

‘Yes. You know, I am allowed to, it is my choice.’

‘Oh?’

She sighs smoke. ‘You think he controls me.’

‘No. I think he infantilizes you. Like he’s your parent. He looks after you. Punishes you for infractions.’

‘Well, yeah,’ she says, exhaling unconcerned coils of smoke quite exuberantly. Breathing demon fire. ‘Sure. WhatEVAH. Look, let’s not have some hideous falling out, darling, not on my first day back. And please don’t tell Arlo about the smokes. He would definitely give me a telling off if he found out.’ She fumes more smoke into the cold night air. ‘The fact is, Jo, I don’t mind being looked after, even ordered about, when I’m off duty. You see? You do understand why? I have to be super-controlling in my job, so when I get back to town I quite like being the little woman. Or the princess.’ She smirks shamelessly. ‘Isn’t that terrible? I actually like to let him do everything. Let him take care of me, let him decide which restaurant we go to. Let him choose the wine, even the food. Then I let him pay. Is that so very bad? Am I a terrible feminist? Oh well. Fuck it.’

I try not to see the unsettling red glow of her face and instead I gaze in her friendly eyes and think: maybe she’s right. Someone to look after you? I consider the idea of someone to look after me. I’d love that. Someone special, someone of my own, someone who makes me feel secure. Someone to buy me a nice meal in a nice restaurant then make love to me, nicely.

I sigh. Defeated. ‘You’re right. And I’m hardly in a position to criticize: my love life is a desert. The bloody Atacama. You think I should get a sugar daddy? He’d have to have his own hair though.’

We fall silent as she finishes the cigarette. I feel a need to say something about what is happening. We’ve been talking for ages and I haven’t even touched on it. And somehow it’s 10 p.m. and I might not get another chance, if she’s going back to Arlo’s tonight. Later I will walk down silent solitary Jackson’s Lane, listening for footsteps behind me, to get the lonely Tube at spooky Highgate. I hate Highgate Tube, buried like a tomb under that little enclave of snowy urban woods. Like a place in a frightening fairy tale from Romania where there’d be wolves. Loping. Howling.

‘Tabitha,’ I say, quickly, airily, casually as possible. ‘You know all those Home Assistants at Delancey.’

She is grinding another cigarette butt into the soil of a small potted tree.

‘Uh-uh. What about them?’

‘I was wondering how they got there.’

Tabitha frowns as she squirts minty breath-freshener into her mouth.

‘Sorry? What do you mean?’

‘Like: who bought and installed them?’

The frown persists, but only for a second.

‘Arlo, natcho. Arlo bought them, for me. But he didn’t install them – far too mechanical.’ She twists her mouth into a thoughtful pout. ‘Come to think of it, it was your ex-husband who installed them. Did it as a favour. You don’t remember?’

‘Sorry? What?’

‘Your ex, darl, your ex. You haven’t forgotten him already? Simon! He came over one day. He set it all up. The smart home. The entire system.’

And with that she turns and goes back into the pub. The red glow of the patio heaters shines on the smoke left behind, a fast disappearing scarlet ghost, shivering into nothing in the cold. I wait, and think about Simon, and about this peculiar revelation, because he never told me he did this: came over and did this favour for Tabitha? He never mentioned it once. Not while we were married, not since.

They did this, all three of them, without telling me. Then Tabitha asked me to move in. And the rent was so ridiculously low, I was obliged to agree. How could I possibly resist?

Such a wonderful offer. Impossibly tempting. Come and live here, with all that technology.

A big grey moth has got trapped in the patio heater. I look at it, unable to help. The poor creature was attracted by the light, but the light and heat have lured it to a terrible end. I stand and watch it burn to death in fluttering agony. The antennae are the last things to stop twitching.

7
Jo

The glasses are drained, the air is kissed, Arlo’s friends have gone back to their own beautiful period houses with underground swimming pools. Waving goodbye to Tabitha, I walk out into a midnight frost that is predatory in its iciness. Like the sky, the air, the entire world is made of cold blackness, waiting to shatter. Highgate tonight is a glass daguerreotype, some historic and fragile photograph from the 1840s; huddled grey figures are slowed and blurred and lifeless in the freezing mist, and far away down Highgate Hill, past the cemetery, the car lights turn left, and right, and always further away, always departing.

Diminishing into nothing.

Most of the bars and restaurants of Highgate Village are already shut, at 11 p.m. Why? It feels jarring, though I suppose it’s that post-Christmas lull of early January when everyone is too poor or torpid to brave the chill. It does, however, mean my walk down Jackson’s Lane is lonelier than ever.

The eighteenth- and seventeenth-century houses crowd closer, the gardens get smaller and older, then I am walking down a slender path of frozen mud, with eroded bare redbrick walls on either side, my footsteps echoing as I go. My isolation is pure.

Instinctively, I take out my phone. I want to see if my loneliness is about to be diluted. Are there any messages for me on OKCupid?

No. Not a single one. What have I done wrong? Is it the photo, was I too sarcastic? Probably I need to refine the profile.

And yet as I walk slowly to the Tube, breathing the cold cold air, despairing of my love life, an obvious thought occurs.

Liam.

I feel deep guilt about my online flirtation with Liam, what it did to my marriage, yet there’s no denying the flirtation was fun. We never actually met – my marriage collapsed before I took the final, fatal step – but the texts, messages, and emails were many and they were sexy. They just were. He was funny. Clever. Self-deprecating. And the photos showed a very good-looking man.

Why not get in touch? We ended so abruptly. After I told him that Simon had discovered my sexts, our erotic dialogue, and that I was headed for divorce, I disappeared on him. It seemed best. The guilt was too much.

I guess I ghosted.

But now I am divorced, and single. Perhaps dashing Liam is still single, too?

Stopping on Jackson’s Lane, in the chilling mist, I look for Liam. And there he is: WhatsApp. And it looks like he’s online. Right this minute.

I check the time. It’s a bit late, but he could be working in the bar, and, as I recall, he liked talking late anyway. We would exchange messages, and then photos – all those foolish photos, – deep into the night. Even as Simon softly snored in the bed alongside.

Ignoring my very guilty conscience, I type a message:

Hey. Guess who???

I wait. The ticks go blue. He has read my message. He must be replying. My heart speeds. A bike hisses downhill, towards Highgate Tube, its light so feeble in the freezing January fog they barely register. A message appears. It’s from him: Liam Goodchild.

Is it really you? After all this time!

I can’t help smiling. Why didn’t I think of this before? Why did I even bother going on OKCupid? I recall one particular photo he sent of himself, on a boat, stripped to the waist. Oh yes, Liam Goodchild. I’m out here, and I am ready.

He messages again. I stare down, frowning.

No Jo no

I type back,

What?

He says,

I learned, Jo. I learned about you.

I tap out a reply,

Learned what? Learned something about me? I don’t get it. I only wondered if you’d like to chat …

He goes quiet. My message is read; but he says nothing. I am a statue in this freezing dark, surrounded by the frosty mist of my own breath. Has he gone?

No, wait, a reply:

It’s too late. I don’t want to talk. All that blackness and silence, then this? After everything that has happened? No.

I gaze, perplexed. What the heck is he on about? He sounds drunk. Or angry. Or something. My shivering fingers type out my next, uncertain words.

Liam, I’m sorry, what do you mean, everything that has happened? This is weird. I’m sorry I ghosted on you before, but we agreed not to message, but anyway I am single now and I was kinda wondering—

He doesn’t even bother to read this, it doesn’t even go to blue ticks. His next message is immediate and very fast and interrupts my own. As if he is scared.

You don’t understand who you are dealing with. Is it impossible for you to let something go? I will not be responsible. You never knew me. Stop messaging, leave me alone.

Otherwise somebody’s done for.

I hold the phone tight in my hand, in case I drop it. This is not the Liam I remember, he must be drunk, out of control. And now he’s deleted the messages he just sent. And when I try to respond, his ID has disappeared. He’s blocked me.

Breathing cold spiky air, I go to Facebook Messenger. Yup. I am blocked there, too. And Instagram, our other medium?

Blocked.

I have been totally unfriended, I have been barred and banished from his life, with nothing but these bizarre remarks: You don’t understand who you are dealing with. I will not be responsible. Stop messaging, leave me alone. Or somebody’s done for.

Like a threat. As if I am in some mortal danger.

I wonder if I should simply call him; we only spoke once on the phone – a few brief passionate words. But real speech was too risky, too exciting. Therefore we made it a rule: until we were sure, we’d keep it at messages.

Who cares, now, though? I find his number, and dial it: the call switches automatically to voicemail.

He’s blocked me there too. He’s run away. He is frightened.

Of what?

All that blackness, your silence, then this?

As I walk on, pocketing the phone, I really do feel the isolation, and the danger. Jackson’s Lane is always a solitary place, but this is something else; the biting cold night gives my solitude a physical quality – painful, brittle, stifling. All I can hear is my own laboured, panicky breath.

I look behind.

No one.

I look at curtained windows and blackened doorways and I see no signs of human life, and that makes it worse.

My heart flutters, dances, twirls with the urban worry. The intrinsic vulnerability. Dad running out to grab me, towards the end, trying to be kind, loving, funny, like before, like he always did, but doing it too fast, too violent, and making it scary. No. No no. I feel a need to run, to get out of here, to flee. The panic rises. Help me. Help me.

8
Jo

I am nearly at the end of the lane. Nearly at busy Archway Road with its traffic and people and streetlamps. Breathing slowly, I regain my sensible, logical self. I panicked, that was all, thrown by Liam’s faintly creepy remarks. No, I am not being followed; no, the Tube station is not surrounded by Romanian wolves.

Liam was just being … Liam? Probably he’s got a girl and wants me out of his life, out of his mind. So he frightens me away. Probably he was with her even as I messaged, and he panicked.

Yes.

I climb aboard a very empty carriage, and the train rattles me through Archway, Tufnell Park, Kentish Town. When I alight at Camden I walk out into relative busyness. The pub opposite the Tube, the Mother Damnable, now the World’s End, is pumping out rock music. Lads are smoking weed in the wicked cold, and laughing at lurid jokes, in this place where travellers once hid from outlaws.

The rest of my walk is short, up Parkway, past closed cafes, dirty drifts of snow, and upmarket pubs, the sense of wealth accumulating with each step. From the dry homeless hostels of Arlington Road, costing £2 a night, to the palatial sweep of the Nash Terraces – costing £20,000 a square yard – in a few minutes’ walk.

I am nearly home. At the top of Parkway, I turn – and stop. Standing on the pavement opposite my house – the house which contains Tabitha’s flat, is a knot of people. Drinkers from the local pub probably, the Edinboro Castle. They are all gazing in the direction of my flat but I can’t see why, can’t see what’s so absorbing about my flat, because the house itself is around the corner.

The nearer I get, the more confusion I read on their faces. What can they see in my home? What is happening?

As I reach the corner, I look up.

And, yes: I see. Yet I wish I didn’t.

Abruptly, all the lights in the flat flick on. They are blazing. Every single one. The blinds are up, and the windows are showing the red-painted walls, the expensive TV, Tabitha’s favourite steel sculptures. Then all the rooms go black, and the windows reflect the Delancey streetlights, the parked wet cars – and another gentle, silvery falling of snow. A moment later, it repeats. The lights go on, then off. Off, then on. Every single light and lamp.

It’s as if the flat is actually alive. Signalling to someone out there. Using Morse code. Signalling to whom? And who is in there, doing the signalling?

No one. Or no one human.

I hear a voice, my name: called out.

It’s my neighbour, from about three doors down. Deborah Welland. She’s in a dressing gown, shivering in the cold. The drinkers disperse, shaking their heads, as Deborah approaches. Debs is a nervous woman, mid-forties, divorced, dyed hair, the type of woman that complains to the council about everything: too many trees, a lack of trees, too many buses, the dearth of buses, but she also means well. Deborah would lend me the last cup of sugar in her flat, and she likes three spoonfuls in a mug.

‘Debs, what is it? What’s wrong?’

It’s a stupid question. We both know what’s wrong. She gestures, upwards, to those decorous, cast-iron Juliet balconies.

‘All night,’ Deborah says, gazing with a kind of frightened wonder. ‘All night they’ve been doing that. Your lights flick on. Then off. On, then off. Like some code.’

She shakes her head. And looks at me. With pity?

‘I first noticed about eight o’clock, as I was coming home from work. Saw all your lights doing this. Flickering. I thought it must be your fuses. But it’s been going on so long.’

As we both gaze upwards, the lights in my empty flat do it again. They flash on. Then off. Repeatedly. For a minute. I am holding my breath, frightened like a young child confronted by an adult horror movie. Why is this so scary, yet so hypnotic?

Because it must be the Assistants. They have control of the lights. I feel a certain relief, that others are witnessing this, even as the uncanny fear grows. What exactly are we all witnessing?

‘It’s weird … I am sorry, but it is,’ says Deborah. ‘It’s like there’s somebody in your flat, flicking all the switches. But you can’t see them. You haven’t got a ghost in there, have you?’

She is trying to make a joke of it. But this feels anything but funny. The tiny flickers of snow are melting on my face; and my sweet, mildly neurotic neighbour Deborah is properly unnerved.

‘I tried to call Tabitha.’ Deborah lifts an extended thumb-and-little-finger to her ear, as if holding an old-fashioned phone. ‘Thought she should know, as it’s her place and everything … But I couldn’t get through.’

‘I’ve been at a pub. With her. I guess she had it switched off?’

‘Jesus look – there they go again—’

Deborah is right. The lights are flashing, flashing across Delancey, flashing at Cumberland Terrace, flashing at the empty vastness of Regent’s Park, and the lunatic wolves trapped in their tiny pens at the zoo.

‘I’d better go in,’ I say, keeping my voice calmer than I feel. ‘It’s probably some glitch with the technology – you know what Tabitha is like. Everything is always the best, always on the cutting edge, but things go wrong. Whole flat has been on the fritz the last few days.’

Deborah looks at me. Squints. As if trying to work out if I am being sarcastic.

I say a cold goodbye. With shivery hands I press a key to the front-door latch, and I find that I am taking big soothing breaths. Stay calm. I don’t want to go in the flat. Stay calm. I DON’T WANT TO GO IN THE FLAT.

9
Jo

Standing by my door, I can sense Deborah’s eyes on my back, pitying, fearful, as I step across the threshold into the dry and the warmth, and the piles of slippery flyers for curry houses and pizzerias and burger chains gathering like drifts of autumn leaves in the hallway.

Big deep breath. If I’m going to confront this, I have to do it fast or not at all. Marching up the steps, I press the key into the latch of my internal door, Tabitha’s door, I still don’t feel this place belongs to me in any way, maybe I don’t want to be too closely associated with it.

What am I about to see? I imagine all manner of ludicrous technological monsters, gibbering spectres made of electricity. Or dead things. My dead father. My dead father will be sitting in a corner and talking to me. Drooling.

Stop. Calm.

Key. Turn.

The door opens. I see a well-lit flat. Orderly and normal. Red painted walls. Pictures and photos from Tabitha’s many travels, some of the ones we did together, most she did with boyfriends, and Arlo.

Ceramic Mexican skulls commemorating the Day of the Dead. A tiny, authentic ancient Egyptian statue: a man with a dog’s head.

Stepping inside the inner hallway, I make for the living room. The silence is like the hum of a meditation bowl.

Nothing has changed. I can see that chunk of volcano from Ethiopia. And the beautiful, somehow melancholy seashells from Sanibel, Florida. Plus shelves of books – Tabitha’s literary fiction and natural history, and below them racks of my books: thrillers and mysteries and art history, and those endless guides to screenwriting.

Whatever the lights were doing, whatever the Assistants were doing to the lights, has stopped. I look out of the window, Deborah has disappeared. So has everyone else. The street is empty. Did we see a glitch or did we see something more?

The only strange thing, now, is the intense cold. The heating has gone off. It shouldn’t have done this. The smart heating is meant to maintain the flat at twelve degrees Celsius, even when it is empty, so pipes won’t burst in a freeze. And it is freezing out there, and possibly even colder in here. Like a fridge.

OK, OK. I must stay calm. And try not to think about Liam. What he said. However weird. He must have had a reason, nothing to do with me.

Opening the Electra app on my phone, I select Skills and check out Lights and Heating. It seems I’ve got the lights set to turn on at 11 p.m., for when I get home. But they’re also set to turn off all night, in case I am late. Ah. Is this conflict simply my fault? I vaguely remember doing something like this at the pub; I was a little drunk, and distracted. Did I confuse the Assistants myself?

I have no idea. All I know is that the cold is too intense to bear.

‘Electra, turn the central heating back on. To twenty-two degrees, please.’

The diadem chimes, and Electra bongs back:

‘The heating has been turned on to twenty-two degrees Celsius.’

‘Thanks, Electra.’

‘That’s what I’m here for!’

I look at her. This neutral black pillar of chips and wires, and a hostility curdles inside me. A genuine anger. Because I am sure something strange and nasty is being done to me, by someone – or something. First the taunts, then the music, now the lights? And Liam, too, almost threatening.

Somebody’s done for.

I have some evidence, and it is accumulating, but I still can’t take it anywhere. Certainly not to the police. Because of the backstory. Tall, athletic, friendly, buy-everyone-a-beer Jamie Trewin – and his spasmed, vomiting death, and his eyes that rolled white into his head, and all because of me, and Tabitha.

Enough. I am tired. The flat is palpably warmer than it was. I need to get up tomorrow and get to work and go back to normal life: see a friend, make a friend, have friends. Brushing my teeth, moisturizing my face, I jump into pyjamas, and head for my bedroom, telling the Assistants to switch off the lights as I make my way down the landing.

The lights go off, obediently. As if I am trailing darkness, an empress followed by servants, extinguishing candles. Everything is working as it should. Not a hint of strangeness. Climbing wearily into bed, I am so ready for sleep, and the moment before I close my eyes … I realize I can hear ‘Hoppípolla’.

No, I am imagining it. I am half asleep.

No, I am not imagining it. HomeHelp, the creamy-grey, ostrich-egg-shaped Assistant in my bedroom, has reeled her cotillion of little lights, and she is quietly playing ‘Hoppípolla’.

‘Stop,’ I say to HomeHelp. ‘Stop playing that tune, never play that tune again.’

HomeHelp obediently stops. But I can hear ‘Hoppípolla’ from somewhere else. The kitchen. The little Assistant in the kitchen has taken over. Jumping out of bed, I go into the darkened kitchen, slap the lights on – not trusting the Assistants. The black hockey-puck-sized machine above the microwave is blasting out this beautiful song, with its hateful memories.

‘STOP, Electra, STOP.’

The little kitchen machine stops. Silence rules for a few seconds. But then the tune starts over. Much louder. Thank God Fitz’s flat downstairs is still empty, unrented. Thank God my affluent neighbours, above, are still not back from their endless holidays. Otherwise they would all surely complain as the noise gets even louder: coming from the bathroom, then Tabitha’s bedroom, the hallway, the study, booming and roaring and swirling, and I am running between them, my dressing gown flapping, shouting STOP STOP STOP, until at last every Assistant goes quiet. Quite abruptly.

Silence.

I wait. Somehow I know this is not the end of it.

I am right. I can hear voices. They are quieter than the booming music, but still loud enough, and clear. Some are male, some female, some British, some American. The Assistants are talking, to me, or to each other, or to someone else.

And the words are so strange.

Electra in the living room goes first:

‘Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.’

What?

The Assistant in the landing replies:

‘The blood flood is the flood of love.’

The living room chimes in:

‘Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.’

A smooth robotic female voice, from the kitchen, joins the chorus:

‘I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?’

I run from room to room, listening, with mounting fear, to these opaque, alarming sentences.

‘No one is here, Jo, no one is here.’

‘Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.’

‘The snow drops its pieces of darkness.’

‘Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb—’

Now the bedroom cries out, warmly, it sounds like the voice of my widowed mother:

‘Nude as a chicken neck, nobody loves me. Nobody loves me. Nobody loves me. Nude as a chicken neck. DOES NOBODY LOVE ME?’

Enough, I am done. Forget the app – I am pulling the damn plugs, I don’t care what it does to the Assistants, the tech, the smart home, anything. There is a master switch: the fuse box …

Grabbing a chair and swinging it into the hallway, I yank open the fuse box – there’s nothing in the freezer but ice cubes, so it doesn’t matter.

‘Perfection is terrible. IT CANNOT HAVE CHILDREN—’

SNAP. There. I’ve done it. The entire flat is switched off. Everything falls silent and every light goes dark and the heating is switched off and I will freeze to death in this cold but I do not care. Creeping along the darkened hallway I push the door to my blackened bedroom, fumble for clothes in the drawer, throw on T-shirts, leggings, jumper, then I sneak under the duvet like I am trying not to be seen, and I grab a couple, no three sleeping pills from the little plastic jar on my right and I swallow the lot. And then I crunch myself into the tightest of fetal positions and close my eyes hard.

I am shivering in the cold, hiding from the darkness, cowering from my insanity. Or I am hiding from the ghost of Jamie Trewin, who waits outside my bedroom in the dark, his eyes as blank and white as wet marble.

Hey, let me buy you a beer.

10
Jo

I am woken by a frowning and beautiful face with pale blue eyes.

Tabitha.

She is staring at a woman wearing lots of daytime clothes in bed.

Me.

I realize I am sweating, heavily: the sheets are damp and clinging. I guess the heating is on. Winter sunshine streams through my bedroom window, because I forgot to close the curtains; I didn’t care in my blind cold panic.

‘What on earth’s going on?’ says Tabitha. ‘Sorry to barge in and wake you up like this, but, really. What did you do to the flat? What happened to the heating, the lights?’

She is in a suave, maroon winter coat, cashmere jumper, and slender jeans I could never afford. Almost military in her stiffness, yet always chic. For a moment I don’t know what to say. I look at her, as I come to full consciousness. And I wonder, for a second, how jealous I am, of her, my best friend. She’s always been that bit better than me, in every way: richer, from a much smarter home. But she is also a shade taller, and a tiny bit prettier; she was blonde and I was a redhead; throughout our twenties we subtly competed for men and she usually won. Were we competing for Jamie Trewin – was that why I egged her on, so that he would prefer me, so he would maybe come on to me?

Perhaps it is all my fault.

‘Seriously, Jo,’ says Tabs, sitting herself on the end of the bed, still frowning, ‘what the hell is wrong? I came back from Arlo’s an hour ago, and found everything off – and I mean everything. And it was freezing cold. Then I worked out someone had switched the flat off, with the fuse box!’ She shakes her head. ‘Is there a problem – you have to tell me these things.’

I order myself to sit up. In my two T-shirts and jumper. Painfully aware I must look a total state. Bed hair everywhere. Shiny with sweat. What do I say? I still can’t go near the events with Jamie, so long ago, so utterly unmentionable. And what is left? Stalling for time, I pull the jumper over my head, and off, followed by the second T-shirt. Then I come up with some fumbling answer.

‘I got confused by the Assistants. The app. Think I used the app wrong, so the Assistants turned the lights on and off.’

From the end of the bed, she shakes her head, confused:

‘Sorry? The Assistants?’

‘They were saying things. Um. Ah. Ah. And I forgot how, uh, how to, you know, talk to them, get them to do things, because, well. Because they are confusing.’

I drawl to an embarrassing halt. It is impossible to even hint at the truth without leading her straight to the crux of the matter: the Assistants are talking to me, and tormenting me, and the whole flat feels like it is alive, and using the death of Jamie Trewin to make me think that I am mad.

Alternatively, I could tell Tabitha that I am, indeed, very possibly going crazy, as I am exhibiting symptoms of late-onset schizophrenia horribly similar to those my beloved daddy experienced when he thought the TV was ordering him around, a few years before he finally did himself in.

I wonder how my friend and flatmate would react if I said all that. Tabitha already looks like a concerned nurse at my bedside. Momentarily I think she is going to put her four fingers flat to my forehead, checking for fever. Like she is my mum, and I am a kid, seeking a day off school.

Tabitha hesitates, then says, ‘What do you mean, you forgot how to control the Assistants? I’ve told you how to use the apps. Several times.’

Her voice is calm enough, but I can also detect a hint of impatience. Stern, but professional. I think it is that coat; it is so smart. Where does she buy these things?

Tabitha’s body language says: WELL?

‘What I mean is—’ It dawns on me, belatedly, that I shouldn’t say anything about the voices or the song. It makes me sound too mad. Too much like Daddy. I go on, ‘When I got back from our drinks, you know, in Highgate, the lights were flickering, and then I must have done something to the heating, it was so chilly. But I was drunk and tired – and I reckon I did it wrong. I guess I’m not used to the technology yet.’

‘OK,’ my friend says. Thin-lipped. ‘And then?’

‘And then …’ I sit up very straight: preparing my lie. I can lie quite well when called upon. I learned as a kid, when other kids would ask about my dad. Why he was so weird, or acting scary. I refused to admit he was mad. He was my daddy and I loved him and he used to be the funniest, kindest man on earth, my idol, my daddy, who told me riddles and made me giggle. How dare they say horrible things about him. So I came up with some convincing lies. And I shall do the same now. I gaze at Tabitha’s impatient, expectant face.

‘Well, Tabs. After all that I thought, sod it, there must be some bug, or malfunction, and I turned everything off at the fuse box.’

I look in her eyes. Blank. Stubborn. Defending myself. I will not be cowed. I love Tabitha but I won’t be patronized by her. Even if I am in the wrong.

My lie – or my half-truth – seems to have done the job. She stands, wearing a softer mystified frown, then she flicks a glance at her wristwatch.

‘Christ, it’s nearly ten. I have to go, we’re editing at the studios – those bloody frogs.’ Her eyes meet mine. I see sympathy there. And confusion. And something else I don’t comprehend. ‘Look, sweetheart, I don’t blame you or anything like that, it was a shock, that’s all. The flat was so cold! Tell you what …’ She walks from my side, over to my bedroom door, and gives me the first smile of the morning. ‘Shall we have a nice supper tonight, just you and me here? Open a nice bottle of red, then I can explain again how everything works – the lights, the apps, the whole shebang. And we can gossip about Arlo’s stupid Belgian banker pal. Turns out he’s quite remarkably deviant. It’s delicious.’

My friend is being a friend. She’s being nice. Perhaps too nice?

No. What’s wrong with me? Why am I mistrusting my very best friend?

‘Brilliant!’ I say. ‘Great idea, a girls’ night in. I’ll cook! I’ll do that fish thing, cioppino – remember?’

‘Excellent,’ she says. ‘Make a lot, I bet I won’t even have time for lunch – we’ll be stuck in that studio all day – the exec producer clearly misses her time in the Gestapo.’

Pale blue eyes. Pretty smile.

Tabitha opens the door, and the smile is saying goodbye,

‘See you later. Let the Assistants sort the heating and everything, I’ve rebooted them all. They’re fine.’

And with that she sweeps out of my bedroom. Leaving her perfume.

It is the scent of my humiliation. Probably costs £5,000 an ounce. I, by contrast, smell of dried sweat and unwashed T-shirts. I hear the flat door slam. I stare at HomeHelp. The ovoid tormentor. There are no dancing lights. There is nothing. I can still feel the dreamy Xanax in my head. The sleeping pills. How many did I take? I can’t recall. That’s a bad sign. I must Pull Myself Together. I must be like Tabitha. Efficient, brisk, clever, smart, yet still funny and likeable. Why can’t I be like her?

Yes. Enough. GET UP. Don’t think about the past. GET UP.

But it is too late. As I stand up and walk into the living room. and gaze at the moistened frost on the windows, the memories finally breach, like a ferocious Christmas storm, like winter waves swamping little harbours. Jamie Trewin. Poor Jamie Trewin. It all comes back to that.

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