The Assistant

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.