S. K. Tremayne - The Assistant

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.