The Assistant. S. K. Tremayne
I spend too much time gazing out of these windows.
And yet as I put on my most comforting pyjamas, I wonder, quite forlornly, if it is genuinely possible that I imagined Electra’s taunts? A couple of sentences created by my own mind, allied to something misfiring in the technology. I guess it could happen. I must force myself to believe this. But if I believe this, it means I am hearing voices, and that …
Nope: not gonna think about it.
It’s definitely time for bed. Bed and sleep and a pill, and I will wake up and get on with life, with my new article. I’m writing a column for Sarah, my favourite editor, the editor who commissioned my Big Tech breakthrough piece years back. She wants me to fill a regular magazine slot: My New Neighbourhood. It’s for people who move to a new part of Britain, they describe the history and context of the place, the landscape or cityscape, what they feel about it. Consequently I am writing about Camden.
The money isn’t that good, but the money, these days, is never that good. And at least the research is interesting.
In bed I pick up a book on the history of North London, but my eyes are hanging heavy. I turn over to face the curvy white egg of an Assistant sitting on my bedside table. HomeHelp.
‘OK, HomeHelp.’
Her dinky toy lights spin in response. She’s awake: waiting for my command. I ask,
‘Set me an alarm for 8.15 a.m.’
‘OK, I’ve set an alarm for 8.15 a.m.’
‘Thank you. And could you turn out the lights.’
The bedroom goes dark. I snuggle into the pillow. The pill kicking in. But as I hover at the edge of sleep I hear a snatch of very soft music. HomeHelp has woken up again. And she’s playing a song. I never asked her to do this. Why is she doing this? At first the chords are so quiet they are not identifiable. But then it gets louder. And louder.
‘Hoppípolla’. HomeHelp is playing ‘Hoppípolla’.
THAT SONG. Of all songs. The image of a dead young man, eyes rolling white, fills my inner vision. My head jerks from the pillow. I am surely not imagining this. Jamie, don’t die, don’t you die like my dad.
‘Stop.’ I say. The music does not stop, it gets louder, surging, soaring, that sinuous discordant beautiful melody, yet so sinister to my ears. ‘OK, HomeHelp. Stop. Stop. HomeHelp. Please please STOP!!!!’
The music ceases. HomeHelp twirls her toylike quadrant of lights, then goes dark. And I lie here, in the blackness, my eyes staring wide and frightened at the ceiling. What the hell is happening to me?
In the morning I zip down to the gym, as I promised my better self, and I do half an hour on the cross-trainer; then I go to Wholefoods on Parkway and buy nice Gail’s sourdough bread and super-healthy T Rex fruit smoothies that I can’t afford. After a shower, I make avocado and marmite on toast.
While I munch the greasy crusts I knock back my hot tea while leaning on Tabitha’s rose-granite kitchen counters; then I make quick, faintly desperate calls to my friends, to Fitz, then Gul, then my editor, then anyone – I simply need chat. Distracting gossip. Water-cooler stuff. And yes, my friends are all brisk and affable – but then they all fob me off by saying they’ll call me later, after work, for a proper dialogue.
In response, I am overly cheerful. Disconcertingly upbeat, despite the cold rain, turning to frost, on the windows. Sure, let’s talk later! Have a good one!
I am, in other words, urgently pretending. I’m not merely pretending to them, I am pretending to myself: that it didn’t happen, the song was a pre-sleep dream, it was all a drunken delusion. All of it. I’m not freaked out by the Home Assistant. I am not starting to question myself, I have not been thrust back to that portrait of violent death, the hideous seizures, the convulsive blood-vomiting jerks of Jamie Trewin, as he died.
Yes. No. Stop.
‘Electra, can you set a reminder at six p.m.?’
‘What’s the reminder for?’
‘Tesco delivery.’
Electra pauses. I wait, tensed, for Electra to tell me how his blood gurgled down his shirt.
‘OK,’ says Electra, ‘I’ll remind you at six p.m.’
And that’s it. Nothing sinister. No mad songs that thrust me right back to the vomit, and ‘Hoppípolla’. Nothing at all. I almost want Electra to say something menacing, so I know I wasn’t imagining it. No, I don’t. Yes, I do.
Look.
Cars is leaning on the wall between the Edinboro Castle pub and the vast dark gulch of the railway lines, emerging from their tunnel, surging into Euston, St Pancras, King’s Cross. He is pointing at something in the sky that only he can see. Pointing and shouting. Later I will give him some decent food, he looks so terribly cold.
I don’t want to end up homeless, not like poor Cars. And my resources are so meagre, who knows what might happen. Therefore I need to work, earn, and prosper. Determined and diligent, I re-open my book on Camden history.
But I cannot focus. No matter how much I try. My mind is too messed. Words blur, and slide away.
Instead I stop and I stare for countless minutes at the tracks, watching long, long trains snaking in and out of Euston station. I think of all the people coming and going, all the millions of Londoners and commuters and suburbanites, crowded together – and yet each person sitting in those packed trains is ultimately and entirely alone. In my darker moments, I sometimes think of London as a moneyed emirate of loneliness; it sits on vast reserves of the stuff – human isolation, melancholy, solitude – the way a small Arab kingdom sits on huge reserves of oil. You don’t have to dig very far down into London life to find the mad, the isolated, the suicidal, the quietly despairing, the slowly-falling-apart. They are all around us, beneath the surface of our lives; they are us. I think of that sad woman I saw, hunched against the snow, passing the house, her back turned to me, pulling her little kids. The way she and her children suddenly disappeared in the snow, as if she were a ghost.
OK, enough; I am freaking myself out. I am Jo Ferguson. Sociable, extrovert, good-for-a-laugh Jo Ferguson. That’s me. That’s what I am. I’m probably suffering from the winter solitude, and the money worries. It is just the usual stress, plus some lights on a machine spinning strangely. That is all.
Flattening the book, I take some initial notes.
The land in Camden is heavy, packed with dense, dark, clinging London riverside clay, replete with swamps and fogs, making it notoriously difficult to build. Shunned by developers, haunted by outlaws and highwaymen, extensive settlement therefore came quite late. The oldest dateable building is the World’s End pub on the junction by the Tube station, once called Mother Red Cap, and before then Mother Damnable. This is marked on maps in the late seventeenth century but it may be medieval in origin, or earlier …
Mother Damnable. Not exactly charming. But interesting. Developers shunned Camden? Because of the swampy ground? And it was ‘haunted by outlaws’, hiding in the cold malarial fogs? All good material, if a little ghostly. And that pub – which I used to drink in as a student, on the way to gigs at Dingwalls – that could be a thousand years old. Remarkable. I had no idea: a place where farmers and peasants on the way to the Cittie of Lundun would make their final rest. Hiding from highwaymen. And witches.
This will be good for my piece. Diligently I type my sentences. Tapping away in the flat. Like a good journalist.
And then Electra speaks.
‘You shouldn’t have done it, should you, Jo?