Paradise tales, p.15
Paradise Tales, page 15
BETsi had me doing Transcendental Meditation and yoga at three years old. She had me doing what I now recognize was Alexander Technique. I didn’t just nap, I had my knees up and my head on a raised wooden pillow. This was to elongate my back—I was already curling inward from tension.
After she got me calm, BETsi would get me treats. She had Booker’s credit-card number and authorization to spend. BETsi could giggle. When the ice cream was delivered, or the new CD full of clip art, or my new S&M Toddler black-leather gear, or my Barbie Sex-Change doll, BETsi would giggle.
I know. She was programmed to giggle so that I would learn it was all right to be happy. But it sounded as though there was something who was happy just because I was. For some reason, that meant I would remember all by myself to stay calm.
“I’ll open it later,” I would say, feeling very adult.
“It’s ice cream, you fool,” BETsi would say. “It’ll melt.”
“It will spread all over the carpet!” I whispered in delight.
“Booker will get ma-had.” BETsi said in a sing-song voice. BETsi knew that I always called Booker by her name.
BETsi could learn. She would have had to be trained to recognize and respond to my voice and Booker’s. She was programmed to learn who I was and what I needed. I needed conspiracy. I needed a confidant.
“Look. You melt the ice cream and I will clean it up,” she said.
“It’s ice cream, you fool,” I giggled back. “If it melts, I won’t be able to eat it!” We both laughed.
BETsi’s screen could turn into a mirror. I’d see my own face and inspect it carefully for signs of being like Tarzan. Sometimes, as a game, she would have my own face talk back to me in my own voice. Or I would give myself a beard and a deeper voice to see what I would look like as a grown up. To have revenge on Booker, I would make myself bald.
I was fascinated by men. They were mythical beasts, huge and loping like dinosaurs, only hairy. The highlight of my week was when the window cleaner arrived. I would trail after him, too shy to speak, trying to puff myself up to the same size as he was. I thought he was a hero, who cleaned windows and then saved people from evil.
“You’ll have to bear with Clancy,” BETsi would say to him. “He doesn’t see many men.”
“Don’t you get out, little fella?” he would say. His name was Tom.
“It’s not safe,” I managed to answer.
Tom tutted. “Oh, that’s true enough. What a world, eh? You have to keep the kiddies locked in all day. S’like a prison.” I thought that all men had South London accents.
He talked to BETsi as if she was a person. I don’t think Tom could have been very bright, but I do think he was a kindly soul. I think BETsi bought him things to give to me.
“Here’s an articulated,” he said once, and gave me a beautifully painted Matchbox lorry.
I took it in silence. I hated myself for being so tongue-tied. I wanted to swagger around the flat with him like Nick Nolte or Wesley Snipes.
“Do men drive in these?” I managed to ask.
“Some of them, yeah.”
“Are there many men?”
He looked blank. I answered for him. “There’s no jobs for men.”
Tom hooted with laughter. “Who’s been filling your head?” he asked.
“Clancy has a very high symbol-recognition speed,” BETsi told him. “Not genius, you understand. But very high. It will be useful for him in interpretative trades. However, he has almost no spatial reasoning. He will only ever dream of being a lorry driver.”
“I’m a klutz,” I translated.
Booker was an American—probably the most famous American in London at the time. BETsi was programmed to modulate her speech to match her owners. To this day, I can’t tell English and American accents apart unless I listen carefully. And I can imitate neither. I talk like BETsi.
I remember Tom’s face, like a suet pudding, pale, blotchy, uneasy. “Poor little fella,” he said. “I’d rather not know all that about myself.”
“So would Clancy,” said BETsi. “But I am programmed to hide nothing from him.”
Tom sighed. “Get him with other kids,” he told her.
“Oh, that is all part of the plan,” said BETsi.
I was sent to Social Skills class. I failed. I discovered that I was terrified without BETsi, that I did not know what to do or say to people when she wasn’t there. I went off into a corner with a computer screen, but it seemed cold, almost angry with me. If I didn’t do exactly the right thing it wouldn’t work, and it never said anything nice to me. The other children were like ghosts. They flittered around the outside of my perceptions. In my mind, I muted the noise they made. They sounded as if they were shouting from the other side of the window, from the harsh blue-gray world.
The consultants wrote on my first report: Clancy is socially backward, even for his age.
Booker was furious. She showed up one Wednesday and argued about it.
“Do you realize that a thing like that could get in my son’s record!”
“It happens to be true, Miss McCall.” The consultant was appalled and laughed from disbelief.
“This crèche leaves children unattended and blames them when their development is stunted.” Booker was yelling and pointing at the woman. “I want that report changed. Or I will report on you!”
“Are you threatening to write us up in your magazines?” the consultant asked in a quiet voice.
“I’m telling you not to victimize my son for your own failings. If he isn’t talking to the other children, it’s your job to help him.”
Talking to other kids was my job. I stared at my shoes, mortified. I didn’t want Booker to help me, but I half wanted her to take me out of the class, and I knew that I would hate it if she did.
I went to BETsi for coaching.
“What you may not know,” she told me, “is that you have a natural warmth that attracts people.”
“I do?” I said.
“Yes. And all most people want from other people is that they be interested in them. Shall we practice?”
On her screen, she invented a series of children. I would try to talk to them. BETsi didn’t make it easy.
“Do you like reading?” I’d ask a little girl on the screen.
“What?” she replied with a curling lip.
“Books,” I persisted, as brave as I could be. “Do you read books?”
She blinked—bemused, bored, confident.
“Do…do you like Jurassic Park?”
“It’s old! And it doesn’t have any story.”
“Do you like new movies?” I was getting desperate.
“I play games. Bloodlust Demon.” The little girl’s eyes went narrow and fierce. That was it. I gave up.
“BETsi,” I complained. “This isn’t fair.” Booker would not allow me to play computer games.
BETsi chuckled and used her own voice. “That’s what it’s going to be like, kiddo.”
“Then show me some games.”
“Can’t,” she said.
“Not in the program,” I murmured angrily.
“If I tried to show you one, I’d crash,” she explained.
So I went back to Social Skills class determined to talk and it was every bit as awful as BETsi had said, but at least I was ready.
I told them all, straight out: I can’t play games, I’m a klutz, all I can do is draw. So, I said, tell me about the games.
And that was the right thing to do. At five I gave up being Tarzan and started to listen, because the kids could at least tell me about video games. They could get puffed up and important, and I would seep envy, which must have been very satisfying for them. But. In a funny kind of way they sort of liked me.
There was a bully called Ian Aston, and suddenly one day the kids told him: “Clancy can’t fight, so don’t pick on him.” He couldn’t stand up to all of them.
“See if your Mum will let you visit,” they said, “and we’ll show you some games.”
Booker said no. “It’s very nice you’re progressing socially, Clancy. But I’m not having you mix just yet. I know what sort of things are in the homes of parents like that, and I’m not having you exposed.”
“Your mum’s a posh git,” the children said.
“And a half,” I replied.
She was also a drug addict. One evening she didn’t collect me from Social Class. The consultant tried to reach her PDA, and couldn’t.
“You have a Home Help, don’t you?” the consultant asked.
She rang BETsi. BETsi said she had no record in her diary of where Miss McCall might be if not collecting me. BETsi sent round a taxi.
Booker was out for two weeks. She just disappeared.
She’d collapsed on the street, and everything was taken—her handbag, her shoes, her PDA, even her contact lenses. She woke up blind and raving from barbiturate withdrawal in an NHS ward, which would have mortified her. She claimed to be Booker McCall and several other people as well. I suppose it was also a kind of breakdown. Nobody knew who she was, nobody told us what had happened.
BETsi and I just sat alone in the apartment, eating ice cream and Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.
“Do you suppose Booker will ever come back?” I asked her.
“I do not know where Booker is, Kiddo. I’m afraid something bad must have happened to her.”
I felt guilty because I didn’t care. I didn’t care if Booker never came back. But I was scared.
“What happens if you have a disk fault?” I asked BETsi.
“I’ve just renewed the service contract,” she replied. She whirred closer to me, and put a carpeted arm around me.
“But how would they know that something was wrong?”
She gave me a little rousing shake. “I’m monitored all day so that if there is a problem when your mother isn’t here, they come round and repair me.”
“But what if you’re broken for a real long time? Hours and hours. Days?”
“They’ll have a replacement.”
“I don’t want a replacement.”
“In a few hours, she’ll be trained to recognize your voice.”
“What if it doesn’t work? What if the contractors don’t hear? What do I do then?”
She printed out a number to call, and a password to enter.
“It probably won’t happen,” she said. “So I’m going to ask you to do your exercises.”
She meant to calm me down, as if my fears weren’t real, as if it couldn’t happen that a machine would break down.
“I don’t want to do my exercises. Exercises won’t help.”
“Do you want to see Jurassic Park?” she asked.
“It’s old,” I said, and thought of my friends at Social Class and of their mothers who were with them.
There was a whirring sound. A panel came up on the screen, like what happened during a service when the engineers came and checked her programming and reloaded the operational system. CONFIGURATION OVERRIDE the panels said.
When that was over, BETsi asked, “Would you like to learn how to play Bloodlust Demon?”
“Oh!” I said and nothing else. “Oh! Oh! BETsi! Oh!”
And she giggled.
I remember the light on the beige carpet making a highway toward the screen. I remember the sound of traffic outside, peeping, hooting, the sound of nightfall and loneliness, the time I usually hated the most. But now I was playing Bloodlust Demon.
I played it very badly. I kept getting blown up.
“Just keep trying,” she said.
“I have no spatial reasoning,” I replied. I was learning that I did not like computer games. But for the time being, I had forgotten everything else.
After two weeks, I assumed that Booker had gotten bored and had gone away and would never be back. Then one morning, when the hot world seemed to be pouring in through the grimy windows, someone kicked down the front door.
BETsi made a cage around me with her arms.
“I am programmed for both laser and bullet defence. Take what you want, but do not harm the child. I cannot take your photograph or video you. You will not be recognized. There is no need to damage me.”
They broke the glass tables, they threw drawers onto the floor. They dropped their trousers and shat in the kitchen. They took silver dresses, Booker’s black box, her jewelry. One of the thieves took hold of my Matchbox lorry, and I knew the meaning of loss. I was going to lose my truck. Then the thief walked back across the carpet toward me. BETsi’s arms closed more tightly around me. The thief chuckled under his ski mask and left the truck nearby on the sofa.
“There you go, little fella,” he said. I never told anyone. It was Tom. Like I said, he wasn’t very bright. BETsi was programmed not to recognize him.
So. I knew then what men were; they could go bad. There was part of them that was only ever caged up. I was frightened of men after that.
The men left the door open, and the flat was a ruin, smashed and broken, and BETsi’s cage of arms was lifted up, and I began to cry, and then I began to scream over and over and over, and finally some neighbours came, and finally the search was on for Booker McCall.
How could an editor-in-chief disappear for two weeks? “We thought she’d gone off with a new boyfriend,” her colleagues said, in the press, to damage her. Politics, wall to wall. It was on TV, the Uncaring Society they called it. No father, no grandparents, neighbours who were oblivious—the deserted child was only found because of a traumatic break-in.
Booker was gone a very long time. Barbiturates are the worst withdrawal of all. I visited her, with one of the consultants from my Class. It got her picture in the papers, and a caption that made it sound as though the consultants were the only people who cared.
Booker looked awful. Bright yellow with blue circles under her eyes. She smelled of thin stale sweat.
“Hello, Clancy,” she whispered. “I’ve been in withdrawal.”
So what? Tell me something I didn’t know. I was hard-hearted. I had been deserted; she had no call on my respect.
“Did you miss me?” She looked like a cut flower that had been left in a vase too long, with smelly water.
I didn’t want to hurt her, so all I said was: “I was scared.”
“Poor baby,” she whispered. She meant it, but the wave of sympathy exhausted her and she lay back on the pillow. She held out her hand.
I took it and I looked at it.
“Did BETsi take good care of you?” she asked, with her eyes closed.
“Yes,” I replied, and began to think, still looking at her fingers. She really can’t help all of this, all of this is hardwired. I bet she’d like to be like BETsi, but can’t. Anyway, barbiturates don’t work on metal and plastic.
Suddenly she was crying, and she’d pushed my hand onto her moist cheek. It was sticky and I wanted to get away, and she said, “Tell me a story. Tell me some beautiful stories.”
So I sat and told her the story of Jurassic Park. She lay still, my hand on her cheek. At times I thought she was asleep; other times I found I hoped she loved the story as much as I did, raptors and brachiosaurs and T Rex.
When I was finished, she murmured, “At least somebody’s happy.” She meant me. That was what she wanted to think, that I was all right, that she would not have to worry about me. And that, too, I realized, would never change.
She came home. She stayed in bed all day for two more weeks, driving me nuts. “My life is such a mess!” she said, itchy and anxious. She promised me she would spend more time with me, God forbid. She raged against the bastards at BPC. We’d be moving as soon as she was up, she promised me, filling my heart with terror. She succeeded in disrupting my books, my movies, my painting. Finally she threw off the sheets a month early and went back to work. I gathered she still went in for treatment every fortnight. I gathered that booze now took the place of barbies. The smell of the flat changed. And now that I hated men, there were a lot of them, loose after work.
“This is my boy,” she would say with a kind of wobbly pride and introduce me to yet another middle-aged man with a ponytail. “Mr. d’Angelo is a designer,” she would say, as if she went out with their professions. She started to wear wobbly red lipstick. It got everywhere, on pillows, sheets, walls, and worst of all on my Nutella tumblers.
The flat had been my real world, against the outside, and now all that had changed. I went to school. I had to say goodbye to BETsi, every morning, and goodbye to Booker, who left wobbly red lipstick on my collar. I went to school in a taxi.
“You see,” said BETsi after my first day. “It wasn’t bad was it? It works, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, BETsi,” I remember saying. “It does.” The “it” was me. We both meant my precious self. She had done her job.
Through my later school days, BETsi would sit unused in my room—most of the time. Sometimes at night, under the covers, I would reboot her, and the screen would open up to all the old things, still there. My childhood was already another world—dinosaurs and space cats and puzzles. BETsi would pick up where we had left off, with no sense of neglect, no sense of time or self.
“You’re older,” she would say. “About twelve. Let me look at you.” She would mirror my face, and whir to herself. “Are you drawing?”
“Lots,” I would say.
“Want to mess around with the clip art, Kiddo?” she would ask.
And long into the night, when I should have been learning algebra, we would make collages on her screen. I showed surfers on waves that rose up amid galaxies blue and white in space, and through space there poured streams of roses. A row of identical dancing Buddhas was an audience.
“Tell me about your friends, and what you do,” she asked as I cut and pasted. And I’d tell her about my friend John and his big black dog, Toro, and how we were caught in his neighbours’ garden. I ran and escaped, but John was caught. John lived outside town in the countryside. And I’d tell her about John’s grandfather’s farm, full of daffodils in rows. People use them to signal spring, to spell the end of winter. Symbol recognition.
