‘You mean, confess?’ asked Audrey, her swift hands pausing, some glimmer of common sense illuminating the dark recesses of her lovesick mind, but only for a moment, not long enough. Her lover was as married as she was, glooming over his Christmas Eve whisky in some other household, missing her as she was him, lost to her for the season.
‘It’s hardly confessing,’ said Maureen. ‘It’s just being honest. How can a marriage as close as yours and Alan’s work if you’re not honest with one another? I think you owe it to your marriage, and to Alan, to tell him all.’ Then Maureen went out for a walk with the children, in the woods, where the leaves were wet with mist, and tried out ‘Come on, everyone!’ as she produced Mars bars from her bag. How they rushed. It worked.
Audrey told Alan about the affair, as the two of them filled Christmas stockings. She told him all about her secret love, about trystings in the backs of cars and offices, and behind hedges – it had been going on since the summer – and how she really loved Alan. If only he was a bit kinder and nicer to her it need never have happened, but he’d let things get stale and how much she valued her marriage.
‘Don’t talk like the back of a women’s magazine,’ was all Alan said, before hitting his wife from one side of the room to another, and by Boxing Day Audrey had packed her bags and gone. She’d had to go, screaming and hysterical, leaving the children, the matrimonial home and all, but it didn’t help her a bit in the divorce. Technically, she’d deserted. And her lover decided to stay loyal to his wife, as married lovers will. They want excitement, not legality. Just as well there was Maureen there to help the family through the rituals of that dreadful Christmas Day – Maureen knew the domestic ropes so well, as Alan’s mother had observed. And by the next Christmas Maureen was not just installed in the house but pregnant as well, with her first child, and calling out ‘Come on, everyone!’ at meal times, along with the best, though she didn’t often cook herself, having help in the house, and a very good job (considering the local wage structure) running the local branch of the Farmer’s Union.
‘Don’t say that!’ Alan would beg. ‘Don’t say “Come on, everyone!”’
‘Why not?’
‘It irritates me. I don’t know why.’
‘Then you’re just being irrational,’ said Maureen firmly, and went on doing it. For a time her ‘Come on, everyone!’ was rather less peopled than Audrey’s had been – but the family friends soon drifted back and everything was just fine, and the damp and droopy rhododendron leaves which rustled in her past, in her dreams, stood up fine and straight and glossy in some glorious imagined sun.
The girl, Mandy Miller aged twenty-three, had made an appointment to see Josie Toothpad, the well-known literary guru, at eleven a.m. But already it was six minutes past, and Mandy’s face had not yet flashed up on Josie’s screen. Six minutes late: six minutes’ worth of ungratefulness, adding to the burden of Josie’s day.
Mandy was privileged; Josie did not normally see aspiring writers: her time was considered better spent writing haiku. But the Authors’ Guild, in this the year 2050, apparently saw promise in the girl, whose writing profile peaked at lyricism and fell to a disastrous trough around compromise, in a decade where such profiles usually ran as straight and flat as the heart trace of someone newly dead. So Josie had decided to be generous with her time.
Josie filled in the unusual waiting minutes playing solitaire. She hadn’t done that for ages. Click, click; cards flying, red and black slicing the screen. Her scores still ran in the six thousands, she was glad to see. Then the familiar melancholy settled in, that stuffy sadness which so often accompanies any obsessional activity and in particular the playing of cards – so much chance, so little skill. Josie adjusted the dial of her drip-feed as Dr Owen her personal physician had so often asked her not, increasing the flow of uppers as opposed to downers. But now she felt edgy. She stopped playing cards, and put her drip-feed back to normal, and meditated. But the edginess wouldn’t go away: it was moving into something remarkably like anxiety; a generalised foreboding. Josie turned up the voltage of the muscle contractors, which kept her limbs viable and strong, but for once the tingling sensation didn’t please her; rather it irritated. She turned the voltage down again. Personal monitors on the banks of screens around the room showed a steady, profound green. She should be in a state of tranquillity, but was not. The gap between what she felt and what the screen said she felt was unusually wide. Perhaps that in itself was the source of her anxiety.
Josie punched in a query to Zelda, her personal therapist. Zelda’s sweet, reassuring face appeared without delay on the main screen and softly asked Josie to profile her current emotions, choosing four appropriate adjectives from the available selection. None seemed to apply. Josie felt bored and closed Zelda, but Zelda wouldn’t be closed. Zelda just blanked out and reappeared before even a mouse had time to click. That was extraordinary.
Zelda said, ‘I’ve been waiting for a call from you, Josie. It’s your birthday, and it’s your right and your privilege to consult me, as you come to terms with the downside of being 132 today.’
The pause between the one, the three and the two were minute but discernible. It was crass of Web Central, Josie thought, to thus remind Heaven-on-Earthers that Zelda was a machine. And Zelda had got it wrong: Josie’s birthday was six days past. What’s more, Zelda once closed had not stayed closed, which could only mean Zelda was now operated directly from Nex Control. Since last week’s acquisition of Web Central’s main shareholding, Nex Control could override the Web Central computer. Which meant, Josie supposed, Nex Control could break into a transmission any time they liked, as an aircraft captain would choose to break into the soundtrack of a film you were watching, with warnings of turbulence. An archaic image, which almost made Josie laugh, for who went anywhere physically, any more? Space was in your head: vast quantities of it, as much as you wanted. You travelled the universe freely through the voices in your mind.
There was something wrong with the transmission: Zelda’s whole face flickered so that her smile looked like a smirk.
Then Zelda blanked out mid-sentence.
‘Is your cup half-empty or half-full? The choice is yours, the options –’
At the time of the takeover, Nex Control had promised there’d be no changes in management style. Promises, promises. Josie remembered enough about pre-Web life to know that the State was never to be trusted: States dealt in lies, as Nietzsche had pointed out; they spoke in all tongues of good and evil, and in the end what was Nex Control but another State, gobbling up smaller territories, grabbing up Web Central, asset stripping?
When in doubt, keep your head down, don’t make waves. Josie completed her mood profile, punching in ‘tranquil, reflective, industrious, confident’. Web Central valued feedback. Web Central had been created by a consensus of newly-young idealists; their computer’s stated mission, to create a Web Heaven and keep it non-political, pacific and angst-free for its subscribers. But that had been fifty years ago: language could have changed, the very words now have a different meaning. Years and years ago, Josie remembered, she had visited the Soviet Empire and watched armies marching around, chanting, ‘Mir, mir, mir,’ and being told mir was their word for peace! That