Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“She said she’d wait for me there. In the green wood. But… but I keep falling .”

“ Falling? How do you mean?”

He flinched. He’d become agitated again. More agitated than before. His breathing had become quicker, his eyes constantly on the move.

“I don’t know who you are! I’ve never met you before! Why do you keep asking me all these questions?”

He started to run. With my stupid feet and my stick, it was useless for me to try and follow.

“Stop! Come back! I won’t hurt you!” I cried out after him, but he didn’t even look back.

The penny piece had the head of a king on it, like an old coin from before the plague, but it was new coin, an English coin, minted only a year ago. The trouble was we’d had no king in England for over forty years.

I had a strange moment of terror, as if the world had suddenly turned out to be nothing but a painted backdrop and I had glimpsed for one moment what lay behind.

Two women passed by me hand in hand, both laughing.

“…anyway Mandy went round to Gill and Sarah’s,” one of them said, “and there was the most God-awful row. Typical Mandy, Gill said, but she’s hardly the one to talk. Anyway, what Liz said about it was…”

Jazamine in the green wood, who the stranger loved. Who was she? What kind of world did she inhabit?

I stooped to pick up one of the crumpled forget-me-nots that had fallen at my feet.

Later I went over to the Men’s Pub. It was very quiet. At the back some boys were playing Ninja Assassin, the pub’s one surviving video game. At the bar Harry Higgins was conferring with his diminutive sidekick Peter Hemlock and with Rod Stone, the landlord.

They looked up with irritation as I came in. They were MRP activists, all three, and had no doubt been discussing politics. Like most people, they didn’t feel able to talk freely about such things in front of me because of who my parents were.

I belong to neither camp. Neither the men nor the women accept me as their own.

But Harry was an instinctive, compulsive networker. He made it his business to be friendly to everyone , to cultivate every possible connection.

“Jack! Nice to see you mate!” he exclaimed. “Let me buy you a pint. I expect you need it!”

I accepted the drink, but I could see his welcome was ambiguous. His face smiled but not really his eyes and he was anxious to resume his talk with Peter and Rod out of my hearing. So after Rod had pulled my pint for me, I carefully chose a seat some distance away from them and put some music on the antique jukebox so they could plot and scheme in peace.

“I want you / I want you so bad / I want you-ou-ou / I want you so bad it’s driving me mad, it’s driving me mad….”

The jukebox and the music on it, like Ninja Assassin , was old stuff, from the golden age, the days before the Plague.

“…I want you…”

I thought about a girl like Beatrice in a green wood, bathing in a woodland pool, with the green leaf-light on her skin.

Presently Lily Tulip came in, balancing precariously on her high heels. She wore a tight silver dress slashed to the very top of her silk-envaginated thigh. Her eyelashes were heavy with mascara, her ear-lobes hung with fake jewels.

The three men greeted her from the bar. Harry whistled.

“Hi guys,” Lily simpered at them, then glanced across at me, knowingly, like an old fisherman casting out his line. I looked quickly away.

But I watched her all the same, in little furtive glances, as she settled down at her accustomed table, crossing her long legs sheathed in blue silk, and sipping her blue curacao.

“…I want you so bad…”

God help me, Lily wasn’t what I wanted at all, yet I could see myself going to her before the night was out.

Then the door flew open and in burst the stranger.

“The wood,” he blurted out to the room in general, “I’m trying to find my way into that wood…”

“The wood ?” asked Rod Stone.

“Over behind here,” he gabbled in that impossible-to-place accent of his. “You can see the green branches over the rooftops. I keep following roads that seem to lead there but they always turn out to be dead-ends.”

He turned to me.

“There was a public baths at the end of the first road,” he told me, without giving any sign that he remembered our earlier meeting. “I went in and it was full of naked old women. It was strange. They didn’t even try and cover themselves. They just laughed. And then at the end of the next road I tried there was a couple arm in arm on a bench in a garden, watching their children play, but both of them were women.”

“That seemed unusual to you, did it?” Harry asked, with a quizzical glance towards Peter and Rod.

The stranger stared at him blankly.

“There’s a little scrap of a wood just behind here,” said Rod with a shrug, “if that’s the one you mean. You can get to it through the back door there. There’s a gate at the bottom of the beer garden. Just follow the hedge.”

“And in the middle of the wood there’s a pool?”

Again I thought of a girl like Beatrice wading in a warm pool, with rushes and willowherb and forget-me-nots.

Harry frowned: “I don’t remember a pool down there.”

“There isn’t one,” said Rod.

But the stranger was already heading off.

“Wait a minute!” Harry called. “Can’t I get you a drink? You’re new in town aren’t you?”

He never missed a chance to make a contact.

“How about something to eat?” I asked, getting up to join them. I remembered how hungry he’d been several hours ago and I doubted he’d eaten since. “You must be famished.”

He looked at me. I don’t know if he remembered me or not, but he nodded anyway and I bought him a couple of pies while Harry got him a pint and introduced us all.

“Harry Higgins, mate. Convenor of the local Men’s Rights crowd for my sins. Anything you need, let me know. We blokes have got to stick together these days, eh?”

The stranger stared blankly.

“This is Peter, my treasurer,” Harry went on, “and Rod here is my deputy when he’s not too busy pulling the only decent pint in town.”

He glanced at me.

“Oh, and this is Jack,” he said, his voice perceptibly cooler. “He’s one of us too at heart, aren’t you Jack my old mate? It’s just that his mum’s on the other side and his dad…well, Timothy’s a lovely bloke of course but he’s sort of gone native , as they used to say in the old days. Fair comment, Jack?’

I grinned painfully.

“Oh, but he’s such a good man,” squeaked Rod in a cruel falsetto.

“So what do you call yourself, my friend?” asked Harry. “Whereabouts do you hail from?”

The visitor’s mouth was full of pie and he had his eye on the door at the back of the pub. He mumbled a name that no one heard and said he came from Birmingham.

“Birmingham, eh? Well I couldn’t quite place that accent of yours, but I’d never have had you down as a Brummie!”

“And how do the slits treat you up there these days?” asked Rod Stone.

“Slits?”

“Slits,” Rod repeated impatiently. “ You know! Bumpies, pussycats…”

“…doublebums…” offered Peter Hemlock.

“…women!” exclaimed Rod.

Understanding dawned. “Oh… women… well…”

He glanced uncomfortably between their faces, wondering what sort of reply they wanted. “Well, you know…”

“We know, mate, we know,” said Harry sympathetically. “Still you’ve got a strong champion there in John Thompson.”