“I just mean . . . if it was healthy, it might be easier to give up.”
She poured him more wine and they raised their glasses to unhealthy dependencies. Then he told her the specifics of their test for Presence. They needed two bases. Jacob would stay at their Holland Park house with the projection of Jill’s presence and Jill would need to stay at her flat in Catford, a parting gift from Max that she would’ve rejected if that hadn’t meant starting another fight with him. Jill’s current tenants were away in Prague until the autumn and when she called them to ask if they were all right with her being in the flat for a couple of weeks they said it was fine. “Just don’t break anything . . .” Radha said. Workmen came to the flat to make some adjustments to wiring and to secrete the contents of what looked like gas canisters into the walls. Jacob gave her a full list of the substances she’d be breathing in. While they were all substances found unaltered in wildlife, mixing them was bound to be a different matter.
“This is essentially going to be like an acid trip that lasts for two weeks, isn’t it?”
Jacob only said: “Not really. You’ll see.”
After the necessary alterations had been made to both houses Jill and Jacob recorded three conversations—the purpose of which was to place the mourner in the midst of a familiar exchange, the kind we’re always having with friends and family, repeating ourselves and repeating ourselves, going over what we know about each other to prove that we still know these things and will not, cannot, forget them. Vi set up a camera at Jacob’s office and filmed Jacob’s face as he and Jill repeated the conversation they’d had on the Tube about whose idea it had been to get married. They talked about their earliest impressions of each other too, and by the time it came to filming their third conversation they couldn’t think of anything else they wanted to say, so they kept it brief. Sex returned to the Akkerman-Wallace bedroom—to every room in their house in fact, their sweat mingling in the summer heat.
A day later Vi provided them with a transcript of what they’d said in each of the conversations they’d filmed in Jacob’s office, and Jill was irritated by this (was this Vi’s way of telling them to make certain that their claims matched up with what they really felt?) until she recalled that they were going to be filming all three conversations again in her own office, with the camera focusing on Jill’s face this time. They had to make an effort to get the conversations in sync. If she or Jacob couldn’t “get hold” of each other in their separate bases they were to put headphones on and reengage in the conversation, responding to each other’s words, saying their own parts as they remembered them.
—
JACOB PHONED her when he and Vi arrived at the prison where she worked. The timing was inconvenient because Jill had just made accidental eye contact with the governor of the prison and had done what she usually did when that happened—she’d walked around the nearest corner to hide. She was well aware that the governor thought she was useless. Not Jill as an individual, necessarily, but her role within the framework of the prison. “Letting young offenders have half an hour a week tapping out fuchsia landscapes on a chromatic typewriter doesn’t really do much toward turning them into better citizens, does it?” Not a fair summation of her work, but getting on with her job was Jill’s only answer, amiable until some bureaucratic roadblock popped up. And once it had been dealt with she was a nice person once more, even nicer than before. She and Jacob repeated their three conversations for the camera and then she went back to work.
Jill knew what all the boys had done, or as much as they would admit to, anyway. They all received treatment; they could talk to her as long as they tried to say what was true for them. Everything they said was recorded, and her office door stayed open whenever a boy was in there with her. There was a guard at the door too, just in case, but problems between her and the boys were infrequent. Many of them called her “Miss,” quite tenderly—Tell me if anyone’s rude to you, Miss. Just tell me his name, yeah?—as if she was their favorite teacher at school. She had hope for them, even though the things they told her made her shake like a jellyfish when she got a moment in her office alone.