Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

I’d thought a lot about this. I’d been thinking hard about it for days. Of course I didn’t love the man. He didn’t love me either, whatever he’d decided to tell himself. (What did he know of me, after all, except that I’m pretty and that I have a brave face I’ve learnt to put on when I’m scared?) But there was a bond between us now, I’d decided, which in a way was much stronger than love. And love could grow from that bond, is what I’d thought, maybe not constantly like the lantern flowers of Eden, but perhaps, if we were very lucky, on a recurring basis like the flowers back on Earth.

That is what I’d decided in those strange quiet days of waiting. If we stayed on Eden there would be a bond between us of necessity, stronger in a way than ever existed in almost any marriage on Earth. Necessity was as deep as love and maybe deeper; that was what I had told myself, and perhaps love could grow from it. That was what I’d made up my mind to believe.

But right now I still wanted to hurt him.

“A calculation?” I sneered. “Yes, that’s about right, mate, a calculation. If Mehmet had stayed, it would have been him who had laid down here with me just now. If…”

But he didn’t let me finish.

Tommy:

It was bad enough to look at her up in the tree, just like I watched those girls in the tree all those years ago when I was a kid at school, asking for them to accept me into their game. It was worse when I tried to tell her how I felt and she trampled on that (just like those little girls did when they all laughed at me and told me to leave them alone). But it was when she mentioned Mehmet that I got really mad.

“You goddam women are all the same!” I found myself yelling at her. “You fool us, you lie to us, you twist us round your fingers. You offer us something sweet, something so sweet that we’d give up everything we have just to possess it – everything! – and then you take it away again and trample on it, and tell us it doesn’t mean anything to you at all!”

I’ve been told I’m ugly when I get like that. My eyes bulge and spit comes flying out of my mouth. She looked at me with disgust.

“I suppose this is what happened with all your other women,” she said, speaking very quietly and coldly. “As soon as they try to inject a tiny note of reality, as soon as they admit that Tommy Schneider isn’t the one thing they’ve been pining for since the day they were born, then Tommy Schneider flies into a rage and runs off to find some other woman who doesn’t know him yet, so that she can dry his tears and take him to bed and tell him he’s perfect and wonderful. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what always happens, yes? Well, you’ve got no one else to run to now!”

“You don’t get it!” I told her. It was such an old, old script she’d recited there and I felt so weary of it: “ None of you get it. I don’t want you to think I’m perfect. I know I’m not. I’m nothing special at all. I’m good at flying space ships, that’s all. I’ve never asked anyone to think I’m perfect. I’ve just wanted someone to make me feel that I’m wanted anyway for what I am. Why is that so hard to understand?”

And then I grabbed her. I honestly don’t know what I intended to do next. To shake her? To beat her against the ground? To rape her?

I never found out because next thing I was in the pool with those little shining fishes darting away all around me.

“I don’t think I told you I was in the British national judo team,” said Angela from the bank.

“No. Now that you mention it, I don’t believe you did.”

Angela:

There was a moment there, looking down at him in the water, when I really panicked. I’d made the wrong decision! I was trapped with a violent brutal man without any possibility of escape!

Then I got a hold on myself. Don’t be so silly, I told myself. You made a choice between this and death, that’s all, and death will always be an option. (Maybe that’s how my ancestors thought too, out in the cane fields? It’s this or death – and death will always be there for us, death will never let us down)

Tommy:

I climbed out of the stream. My anger had vanished, the way anger does, so you wonder where it comes from and where it goes to and whether it’s got anything to do with you at all.

“Since we’re the entire population of this planet,” I said, “I guess we’ve just had World War One.”

That made her laugh. She took my hand again and then we lay down together again in the moss, as if nothing else had happened in between.

Angela:

“ Hoom – hoom – hoom” went a starbird far off the forest as we pulled back from each other.

I thought to myself, well there is something about him that is okay. And I cast back in my mind and realised that I’d read many, many bad things about Tommy – that he was a serial adulterer and a liar and all of that – but I’d never actually heard it said, or even hinted at, that he ever hit a woman or beat her up.

And I thought too that, after all, I had been a fool to go straight for the place that would hurt him and frighten him the most, even though, God knows, I had a right to be angry. No one reacts well when you deliberately prod their deepest wounds. And there was some wound in Tommy, some old wound to do with love.

Of course I knew that the time would soon enough come again when I would hate him again and want to do everything in my power to hurt him. There would be a World War Two and a World War Three and a World War Four. But this peaceful place we were in now would still be there, I thought. With any luck it would still be somewhere to come back to.

“ Aaaah! – Aaaah! – Aaaah !” called back a second starbird, far off in the opposite direction to the first one.

“ Hoom – hoom – hoom ,” returned the first. It had got nearer since it last called. It was just across the pool.

“They don’t give a damn, those starbirds, do they?” Tommy said. “They don’t even notice that great wheel burning up there in the sky.”

Tommy:

Angela didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to. I was just speaking my thoughts aloud.

But then, five or ten minutes later, after we’d been lying there in silence all that time looking up at the stars, she spoke:

“No they don’t,” she said. “You’re right. This dark Eden, it’s just life to them, isn’t it? It’s just the way things have to be.”

Nature is profligate. All possible worlds exist. In one of them there was once an art gallery in Red Lion Street, London WC1, and its manager was a woman called Jessica Ferne. On one particular grey November day, when Jessica was thirty three, she spent the morning in her office as usual. She made phone calls about her next exhibition and then experimented on her PC with images of the art objects that she planned to exhibit, trying out different arrangements and juxtapositions. Then at lunchtime she put on her jacket, gave some instructions to her secretary, and walked through her gallery and out onto the street. As ever each exhibit stood alone – a pair of mummified hands, a flashing light, an assemblage of human bones – each one contained and separated from the rest of the world by its frame, its label, its pedestal.

Outside an electric cleaning vehicle went by and then some lawyers in robes. Red Lion Street was part of a subscriber area, but at the end of it were the open streets of London, where anyone could go. The boundary between the two areas was marked by a gate with a uniformed security guard in attendance. As Jessica approached it an elderly woman tried to walk in through the gate and it started bleeping. The guard stepped forward and politely refused her entry.