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I look in the mirror-it is not me

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

We can never tell each other how much we know. It’s a pact between all commuters everywhere…read more

I look in the mirror. Its me. I close my eyes. I reach out my hand. I find the button-a groove in the smooth surface. I should have bought one that was voice activated or at least changed the setting using my phone before I came to look in this mirror. I gently push the button in.

I open one eye. There I am, my image reflected back at me in the mirror. Except its not me. It looks mostly like me, but it’s a better version of me. Its an avatar. I have it on all my mirrors, a filter, so I never see what I really look like.

Except the button on this mirror doesn’t seem to be working. It won’t stay on my image, it constantly reverts back over night and when I come in here in the morning, there I am. Really me, what I must really look like. I close my eyes tightly whenever this happens and switch to the virtual me. The me with filters and ‘adjustments’, the me that I am sure is really me because that other me-I don’t want to look like that.

This can’t be healthy. I put make up on the virtual me, well I put it on the actual me, but in the mirror it goes on the virtual me. It looks a bit rough, I hit another button and the whole image is smoothed over and the makeup on the image in the mirror is perfect. I have no idea what it looks like on the actual me. I don’t care. I head for the train station. Its still dark. I walk and no one can see.

No one notices if my makeup is badly applied. No one notices me at all. That is how commuting works, same people everyday. Same seat. Same bags. Same coat. New coat. She has a new coat. And no one notices anything at all ever. I know these people, their habits, their smell, their conversations on phones. I know there lives but not their names-sometimes their names but only accidentally because I overheard. They probably know me too, but we can’t let on. We can never tell each other how much we know. It’s a pact between all commuters everywhere. A tacit agreement that even though we know everything we will pretend to know nothing. Except she has a new coat. I look down. That is not my business. It is not relevant to my life. I can not notice that.

I don’t look up. I just look at my phone. I put it on mirror. It just has an image of me. Always, Never actually me. Well yes me, but me with filters.  My makeup is perfect in that image, my ears are smaller, my mouth more rounded. I tell myself I look like that and there is nothing to contradict me. Nothing at all.

I go to get my coffee. I am wearing a scarf. I look at the ground. I don’t want to be noticed.  I have a takeaway coffee. They know my order, I send it by phone, I don’t even need to make eye contact. I have paid for it by phone. I just swipe my phone at the collection station and its released to me. I don’t have to see anybody. More importantly nobody sees me.

I get to work. I go past the kitchen. There is someone in there so I avoid it. I go to my cubicle. I take the lid off my coffee cup and sip it. Sweet, bitter delicious coffee. I switch on the machine, really can they not set it up so that I can do this from my phone before I arrive. It hums into life. I slip into lifelessness. I look at the Inbox, the news. I think about my first meeting. 9am slips by. I look at my phone, at the image on my phone. It is a good image. I have a meeting at 10am. I decide not to go in person but to send a virtual me.

I know that since I am in the office I should not do this. It is technically against the rules but I do this. The image of me, it is I think-better than the real me. The virtual me goes to the meeting. I see the meeting on my machine, I say things. I sound good. I look good. I huddle over my machine. Sooner or later they will ask why I am never there in person.

I finish my coffee at 11am. I always take ages to drink it.  I need the bathroom. I cannot go to the bathroom. The bathroom has mirrors. The mirrors in the bathroom are real. Real mirrors with real reflections and they cannot be changed to show your image, your avatar. It is really you. You cannot avoid seeing them. I need the bathroom though.

I grab my scarf. It looks odd. I know it looks odd, I pick a time, 11.21am. I am bursting now but 11.21 is not random, its too early for an 11am meeting to have finished and passed the time when anyone with an 11.15 will be going to a meeting late and too early for anyone going to an 11.30. I have this. I can get to the bathroom with my scarf and no one will see me. When I get to the door, I can wrap the scarf around my face and I won’t see it in the mirror-well maybe just the eyes-but the eyes are very close-aside from the colour. Did I mention that my avatar has different coloured eyes to me.

I look out from my cubicle, there is no one. I make a break for it. I see someone. I have misjudged it. 11.22 would have been better. I walk on by and pretend not to see her. I am here now before the toilet door. I wrap the scarf around my face and go in. I can only see my eyes. I focus on what I have to do. I focus on the taps when I am washing my hands. I do not make eye contact with myself. All the glimpses I get of me are accidental or peripheral. That person, she is not me. I am the image on my phone.

I look at the time, 11.27, just in time for the 11am meetings to finish and for early birds to the 11.30 to be on their way. I hide in the toilet cubicle. 11.30 passes. 11.35. 11.37. I will go  at 11.38. At 11.38 on the dot I fling open the toilet door and race for the exit. I nearly bump someone over in the rush. I mumble something to her. Sorry maybe or excuse me. I try to avoid panic, I can’t breathe. Is that panic or because the scarf has been covering my mouth for 20 minutes. I don’t know. I can see my cubicle. Head down, I march towards it. I see my chair. I reach out for it, grab it, slam myself down on it. I unwrap my face and bend over my desk. I have made it. No one saw me, at least not the real me. Next time I will send my avatar to the toilet.  It was not always like this. There was a time before this. Before there was a better perfect me, that existed as a picture when I am flesh and blood.

Everyone is concerned

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

In reality I live on lentils and quinoa, in VR I indulge in cake and cake, and well cake. I mean wouldn’t you. The sensation of eating it without the actual eating of it…read more 

Everybody is concerned. I get that. But I am not concerned. I will do the same thing today that I have done every Saturday since it happened. I will go to the café and sit across from my mother. We will have the same conversation that we had last week. It will be almost word for word.

It is a virtual café, so I will sit here in a chair in my kitchen with my head set and in theory she is sitting in a chair somewhere far away with her head set on. We are sitting in the same virtual reality though, so I will be able to see her and she will be able to see me. Or at least a version of me. The version I had made for VR is so close to me that you can barely tell.

I picked this virtual café because I liked its décor. There will be the same people talking in the background, the same people going in and out. I will order the same coffee and feel the odd sensation of drinking it, of reaching out to pick up and cup and take a sip, and knowing it is not real. Yet still feeling the cold porcelain, the warm milk. I will scoop the chocolate sprinkles off my cappuccino and my body will think I have eaten them. I can fool my brain into thinking I have had a coffee now without ever touching the evil stuff. It is ecologically more sound as well.

But I am not here for the false coffee or even the false carrot cake-the one with double thickness icing, all that sugar and not a calorie in sight. Sometimes I follow it with chocolate cheesecake. I do love virtual reality. In reality I live on lentils and quinoa, in VR I indulge in cake and cake, and well cake. I mean wouldn’t you. The sensation of eating it without the actual eating of it.

Anyway I am here in VR for my mother. My sister says it is wrong and I must face reality. I say I am not ready. I have lived a long way away from my mother for a long time. We have had virtual coffee in the same virtual café for nearly three years now, since it first become available. She had an image made of her which was quite true to life, if a little younger than I remembered-but hey who doesn’t. I have several images of me that I use in VR and none of them is quite true to life although the one that sits across from my mother is very close and was very expensive.

It’s odd this VR thing, because it can’t put us physically in the same room, but we are in a seemingly three dimensional space and it is very like she is in the same room. The image is her but not quite her. We can see the same thing, hear the same thing. It is hard to explain, because they could project real images, but no one does that anymore, everyone is touched up just a bit. I met my previous boyfriend in a VR café, there are such places and when I finally met him in person he was barely recognisable. It didn’t last.

Anyway my mother, we sit here every Saturday in the same virtual reality. I order the same kind of coffee and she orders tea. I eat carrot cake and she moves a chocolate slice around her plate as if it was real. I can see the sadness in her eyes, I don’t know why she did that. She could have had happy sparkly eyes or even tiger eyes. I think she was trying to tell me something. Those are not her real eyes. I know she and I are using images because she does not look like this anymore. It is always the last one I use. My sister says I need to spend more time in reality. I tell her this is my reality. She says, there is a truth and this is not the truth. She is far away too.

She sometimes calls me on the phone, refusing to turn up to a VR café, tired, she says of indulging my fantasy. I need to come home she says. I need to see it for myself. She sends me pictures. I delete them. I am not ready I tell her. I am simply not ready. She says you can never be ready. There is no ready, it has just happened and I must deal with it and the argument goes on. She sent me vouchers for therapy –I can use them anywhere apparently. She sent me a link to a therapy app. I have not used any of it.

Now that there is Virtual reality, I fail to see why I can’t exist in it in some form, why my mother can’t exist in it in some form indefinitely. Even though she is gone.

My sister tells me it is a recording, something I made and paid for before she was gone and that sitting there every Saturday isn’t going to bring her back. She says VR is not reality and I must face reality. I say it is reality, just of a different kind, she gets exasperated and I hang up.

I know that she is trying to get copyright of my mother’s image in VR so that she can stop me using it. I know that she is trying to do this. But I have copyright over this last recording of the two of us sitting there together, of our conversation, and because it happened, because it is a real conversation that happened and I am in it, I think she can never win.

She says I have to accept my mother’s death. I say that every Saturday I sit across from my mother and we have coffee and cake and we chat. I know it is the same conversation but it is as if she is there in the room. It is her voice. It is her image. And I am there and she smiles when she sees me. And she is warm, and we laugh at the way she orders the chocolate cake but never eats it and we laugh at how much I love carrot cake in VR but never eat it in real life. She loves that I always scoop the sprinkles off my cappuccino. We talk about me, about family, about my job. Always the same conversation. How is my life going? Is he the one? Would I have kids without a man in my life? We talk about big things and small things. It is the last conversation we had, it is the last conversation we will ever have. We have it every Saturday, over and over again. I know she is gone, I know. But I am still here. Sitting across from here, willing life into her. Drinking coffee, eating cake and I see no reason to accept otherwise.

Would you take a Neon-man home?

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

But where would you take a neon man for dinner. You can’t take him to just anywhere-for one thing he probably needs a continual power source and also what if you go somewhere with bigger neon than he has. That would be embarrassing…read more

We hot-desk. I still sit at the same desk everyday. I get in early. I leave my heels there over night. I don’t care. At least I didn’t until recently. I can’t even remember when I first saw it. We aren’t that high up, the 9th or 10th floor and there are windows, well of course there are. Floor to ceiling and we look across at other buildings. Of course we do.

I don’t even know why I was looking out the window. It makes no sense. I can see several buildings from where I am, and this building is nothing special. Its no different to the others, except, well one day. On this one day, at least when it started, there was a neon outline of a man, taking up the whole window. On the inside not the outside. Its not a huge window, I mean its not small either. It’s a window, probably average for a window, I mean its floor to ceiling with a strip of something separating it from the window’s either side, but its not massively more wide and tall than the other windows. I’m talking too much. Overthinking it. It’s a window, you get it’s a window.

It was odd. I mean. I guess. I mean I thought it was odd. I stumble over my words a lot. People say that I do. I am truly sorry.  A neon outline of a man, a man  outlined in a neon sign. Just the outline and nothing else. Just there. In the window of the building. The window I was talking about. It was just there. I mean the man and of course the window. Sorry I’m not explaining it very well. It was yellow. The neon man, he was yellow.  Which isn’t really odd. I don’t know? Would it have been less odd if it was orange or green or blue? I tried to ignore it.

But it was there all day and my eyes were just, drawn to it. I vowed not to sit there again the next day. But I left my shoes there over night and when I went back the next day, the neon man was gone. Or at least I couldn’t see him. So I sat there again. It didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. I mean even now, it was my seat. Like I said, we hot-desk, but I sit there every day. Then around 11am, there it was again, the neon man, yellow, in the same window. I looked around me, no one else seemed to notice, everyone else seemed to be working. I didn’t want to disturb them. I kept sneaking a look at him, luminous. He made me smile. To think I knew he was there and no one else had noticed him.

It was distracting then so I tried to ignore it, to avoid it, to not see it. Then when I looked again, there was someone standing within the outline. A real man. That was weird I thought. Five minutes later and the man who had fitted into the outline was gone. I didn’t know what to do. Its not the kind of thing that warrants a phone call to the police, but it was odd. I mean don’t you think its odd. A neon outline of a man in the window if an office block. Then a man stands there in the outline and then-he is gone and there is just the neon left behind. Maybe you don’t think its odd. Maybe its me that’s odd. I can’t know either way can I.

It was gone the next day. Or at least not switched on. I couldn’t even pick the exact window with any certainty. I was busy all day Thursday and a little sad. What had happened? Where had he gone? But Friday, Friday, there he was again. I was so happy. I was buzzing. No one else seemed to notice him or to care. I wanted to say something but what? What do you think about that neon man you can see in the window over there? Maybe they’d think it was an odd question. Maybe they wouldn’t think about him. I did think about him.

Maybe they already think I’m odd. This would make them think I am more odd. I think ‘odd’ is an odd word. But it does what it says on the packet, even if you didn’t speak a word of English and someone said it to you, you would know what it meant. Its one of those words that’s all in the tone and the facial expression. You know what someone is saying when they use the word ‘odd’. The world is not full of those words, there aren’t many. It is a word I love but am desperately afraid of. I live in terror of the hint of an expression of it behind my back as I leave the office kitchen.

Where was I? Friday, yes, odd, yes, Friday. He was back. Neon man in all his yellow luminescence. I wanted to talk about him. I would have talked about him, but no one met my eyes all day. I stood in a world of my own on the way home on the tube. I should give him a name. He should have a name-my first thought was Leon, but no I didn’t want a name that rhymed, that always lacks dignity. But a bit of alliteration is ok, I settled on Norman-Norman Neon. It had a ring to it. It flowed. You could introduce yourself using that name at a dinner party and everyone would know you were in sales, probably electrical goods or medical supplies. Smooth talking Norman Neon. I liked him. Underneath the impeccable natty suit were tubes of light gold, he was well dressed, he talked a lot but he only truly lit up when I was in the room.

 Then I thought, Norman and I, we should have dinner. But where would you take a neon man for dinner. You can’t take him to just anywhere-for one thing he probably needs a continual power source and also what if you go somewhere with bigger neon than he has. That would be embarrassing. You need somewhere quiet and atmospheric although not too dark because you can’t have him lighting up the room for everyone else. He would be great in a club, kind of like your own personal strobe but more low key, perhaps we could just skip dinner. I wonder if you put neon on your sofa if it scorches it?

I missed my tube stop thinking about Norman. I had to remind myself that he wasn’t real. The thing is I kind of liked him. I liked him a lot. I could hear myself laughing with him as we walked home to my flat, laughing because Norman was better at killing insects than any man I ever met. He could zap a fly with any part of his tubular body. I could see myself chatting to him getting a kind of low level buzzing in response. He has a kind of gruffness to that buzz that could keep me awake at night. I could see him sitting on my couch. Bright yellow, lighting up the room. I would never need to change a bulb again.

I thought about him all weekend. It was ‘odd’ –that word again. By Monday I was desperate. When I first got to work he wasn’t there and I was crushed. But then there he was again at 11am, yellow and luminous and brightening my day. Filling my dreams with walks in the park and I don’t know –just the idea of having your own personal light source. By Tuesday I was in love. Norman and I were –well it was destiny. But Wednesday-Wednesday-I will never forget Wednesday. He wasn’t there on Wednesday, like the lover that ghosted you. He was just gone. I was heart broken. I couldn’t concentrate. Where was Norman?

I went home. Sat on the sofa, drank hot chocolate, watched TV and well I cried. Thursday. Thursday. There was no one I could talk to. No one I could tell. I just had to act as if nothing had happened. But Norman, Norman was gone. There was still no Norman. He was gone and I had to face it, maybe forever.

It was Friday that I resolved to find out. To go there. Directions are not my thing but I figured out the building and where I thought it should be and off I went. And. Well. Love is weird. I could see the building. I had come slightly the wrong way and ended up at the back of it and not the front and there was a skip. I. You understand. It was destiny. There he was. In the skip. Abandoned. A strange outline of a man. All neon. Tubes of light, dulled by lack of electrical current. So. I. I took him. I tried to ask. There was no one around. I just. I took him. I didn’t go back to work. I got on the tube and took him home. I called in sick for the afternoon, said I had fallen and hurt my ankle. I plugged him in. I lit him up. It was an amazing moment. There we were for the first time, me human and him neon. It was a beautiful moment.

And now, now we are together. And everything is fine. I plug him in. He lights up the room and it is how its meant to be. We watch TV.  And everything is fine. I have searched the internet, there is no one like me. I get that. I am ‘odd’ truly ‘odd’. It is a good word. I savour it when I look in the mirror sometimes. I smile slightly at the faint glance as I leave the office kitchen, the one that says they are about to use that word. Sometimes at work- I talk about Norman as if he a human. When they ask me for a picture, I show them a picture of my neon man. No one ever knows what to say. I look at them –all flustered-reddening. Trying to think of the words, how to say, that isn’t a, he isn’t, you can’t, its not. All those sentences they can’t say. Odd, how they stumble over all those words. And Norman and I –we are happy.   

Elongated Memory

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

The moment elongates even more. It is the only way I can explain what it is like. Everything is just happening in minute detail, slowly. They are making the memory take longer. I can still hear the voice but it’s like my brain is writing a picture…read more

I sit there with my hands in my lap. The drugs are supposed to calm my body. There will be a discord between what my brain is doing and how my body will react. I am prepared for that. They have explained it to me.

I have been the victim of a crime. One of several people over the past week. Nothing too serious, just a theft of my bag and I was shoved into a wall. I bruised my shoulder, banged my head a bit. I don’t really remember it. It was on the stairs coming out of the tube station.

It is not how it used to be with all that CCTV.

I am here at the police station with a headset on, a VR headset. They will recreate the tube on the night it happened and the software will integrate with my brain as I remember it and it will create the whole scene over again. It’s like CCTV footage but with me actually making it. The signals from my brain will lay down the images. I don’t quite get how it works. It’s very clever. I will re-live it for the technology and they will get a very clear idea of what happened. It’s like my actual memory will be transferred into some kind of code and appear before my eyes in a virtual word.

Of course it won’t be perfect because I know what is going to happen and I didn’t know at the time that it was going to happen. So they will talk to me up to a point and then I will re-live it, in virtual reality as if it is actually happening to me again. I will get all the emotions again, I will re-live its brutal horror. I know it could have been worse but it is still horrible. That’s what the drugs are for, to calm the physical effects of it, to ensure I don’t feel the pain so much. When they first started doing this, the result was so real that people’s bodies reacted and there were allegedly actual bruises again. I don’t know if that’s true or not. 

They are doing this with each of his victims. They will use it to track him down and if the quality of our memories is good enough we won’t have to appear in court. They will simply show the playback of it, but the memory has to be slightly elongated to get the detail. It is a weird process.

The drugs are to keep my emotions in check but only up to a certain point.  I need to re-live it, they need to know how I felt to make it authentic. I need to feel it to make it authentic, so its only the pain that is really dulled.

The thing is they no longer have CCTV at stations, now they are simply scanning people’s mind as they pass through, collecting maps of their brain activity and keeping the data. My brain activity that evening will stand out from the rest as I was scared, hyper emotional at some point and they will pick the pattern from all the data. My brain pattern will be easily ascertainable from the milieu because of the heightened feeling. They will then compare this session I am doing now, this re-living with that scan of emotion from the actual night to see how accurately I have remembered what has happened. They accept that memory is not perfect, but it is proven that if the emotions match, then it is likely to within 10% that the visual presentation of a recreation will be correct. It saves a lot of time in court.

If the crime were really violent, it is even possible they could put the perpetrator in my shoes so he would know how I feel. It is meant to be restorative but I don’t much care for that.

It starts slowly. I am nervous, but I can feel the drugs calming my body. I am relaxed. The headset is quite heavy but I try not to think about it. I hear the moderator introduce themselves, and tell me to try and remember what I was thinking as I walked up the stairs that evening. It was less busy than usual, because I was later than usual. I was worried about walking home alone. There are the sounds, the exact sounds from that evening, how do they do that?

I had my hand in my bag searching for my keys-something I should not have been doing I think. But the moderator-the speaker, tells me not to think like that. I should be able to get my keys out of the bag whenever I want. The memory pauses while I work through this idea. I did not do anything wrong. They have to wait for my brain to process that bit because that thought about not doing something, about being right or wrong, that thought is from after the event, from the present and I must stay in the past. I focus again. The moderator is telling me to focus again.

I am walking up the steps. My feet hurt and I am thinking about slumping on the sofa when I get home. It is Friday. There are still people milling about and they start to come into focus. There is the lady ahead of me in the pink jacket with perfect matching lipstick. I noticed her on the tube. It was the brightness of the jacket and the matching lipstick. I want to be able to dress like that. I like that jacket.

I am on the stairs and pink jacket lady is ahead of me. I can still hear the busker down below. It’s the same busker who is always there. I am not around the corner of the stairs yet. I didn’t have any change tonight so I put nothing in the busker’s tin. I feel bad because perhaps he won’t eat tonight because of me.  I feel that again, the same pattern as if I am right there on the steps, thinking that thought. The steps go around the corner and I hold the rail as I go. I am not close to the rail, my arm is stretched out to it and my other hand is rummaging in my bag.  The rail is cold and metal but firm. I feel safe at the moment. I did not know it but I felt safe holding that rail.

There is someone coming up behind me. I hear his footsteps. He is moving faster than me. I move closer to the rail, to give him room. I am turning the corner. Somehow he catches my momentum, on the corner as I move inwards. He is wearing a hood. The moment elongates even more. It is the only way I can explain what it is like. Everything is just happening in minute detail, slowly. They are making the memory take longer. I can still hear the voice but it’s like my brain is writing a picture. He said something or grunted, I cannot make it out. Perhaps it was my voice.

They tell me to focus on the face, to focus hard on his face, because I saw his face. That is a moment that goes on for a long time. I focus on his face.  I see it clearly, even though I was certain that I hadn’t, for just a moment I did. I see it, the way I saw it then, but for longer. I can make out his features, his nose, his eyes, his mouth, the hair underneath the hood, even the skin tone. I think, which I didn’t think before that he and I- we made eye contact. I can see the colour of his eyes.

I clutched my bag momentarily. For a moment I was going to fight, but his other hand is reaching up to shove me. I can feel the wall on my back and my head going back. They slow it even more. How tall was he? How strong was he? What did his hand look like?

They are right, I can see the tattoo on his hand. I am looking down at my bag as my head goes back. I am looking at my bag and trying to control my head. I can see his hand, the fingers, the grimy dirt under the nails. He hasn’t washed those hands recently. I can see a shirt poking out from under the sleeve. There is a pain in my shoulder as it hits the wall, I know there is but I don’t feel it. The memory has a sequence but all the bits are happening separately. I focus on every bit. His face, his hands, I even search in my head for his smell, but the technology is not that good yet.

 My head hits the wall and again I don’t feel the pain of it, the drugs are working. But I see him. I feel the fear of him. I feel my body let go of my bag. I think I might be screaming and still this memory goes on. The moderator tells me to scream. I see him take the steps ahead of me. I see my bag disappearing into the darkness. I see the soles of his trainers, really clearly- I see the muted yellow on the bottom of his shoes. The woman in the pink coat is turning now. I see people coming towards me to see if I am alright. A man who came up the stairs behind me, I see him. The busker has stopped singing. I see the thief push past the woman in the pink coat as she turns, as I slump to the ground. I see the soles of red trainers as someone chases him. I am not sure if I am still screaming. I hear people yelling and then talking to me. I feel fear in my head but my body is calm. It is the oddest experience.

There are police officers, and then it is over. I am just sitting there in chair.

I am calm. I have done it and I am calm.

I feel someone remove the headset. I see her smiling face.

‘We got quite a lot. You saw him quite closely. ‘

I smile half heartedly. I think they have stolen my brain, my memory. How do they do that? How do they take my brain activity and use it to draw a picture? How do they make that happen? It is an idea beyond me. It terrifies me. Puzzles me.

She looks at me. ‘Everyone feels that way’ she says as if she can read what I am thinking. I remind myself she has just read what I was thinking. The machine has taken my thoughts and made it into a visualisation of my memory.  I want to vomit.

‘Don’t worry’ she says, ‘we can only get a visual representation of your memory, we can’t implant anything’

That wasn’t a thought I’d had. Now it’s a thought I have. I look for signs for the next week, signs that I have been implanted. Nothing happens. I see on the news scroll, that my thief is caught and convicted and I had to do nothing but let them elongate a bit of memory. I am not certain, not sure. It does not feel right. Like something has been taken, more than my bag but I don’t know what.

The Wrong Setting

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I don’t want ‘good morning’ at 6am. No morning that starts at 6am can ever be that good.  At 6am I just want coffee and I don’t want to have to say, ‘Make me coffee’. I just want to switch on the machine and smell the sweet aroma of coffee…read more

I know I have the settings wrong. With the flick of the switch I can make it positive. I probably don’t even need to do that, I can probably just say it out loud and the device will do it. It will tell me I look fabulous today if I do that, although it also reminds me I need to eat Kale for lunch to stay ‘looking this good’.

I liked it at first but now ‘it’ and ‘I’ have had a falling out. The last thing it said to me was that it was talking to my fridge and checking how much milk there was. I wanted to yell at it, ‘I can bloody do that and open the door as well’. As a matter of fact I can see and I mean ‘see’ with my eyes how much milk is left and I can walk to the shop and get some more. Although as it reminded me this morning I have no cash in my wallet. I should care but I just bloody don’t. It has driven me to this point. This cannot be my fault. I wished I had bought a cat and not another bloody device.

This device is living in my house. It is allegedly taking care of everything. And it talks- a lot. It ‘engages’ me in conversation. It lets me know the car needs to be recharged and the milk needs to be renewed. Milk is not renewed, you buy fresh milk you idiot machine. I want to yell this too but I don’t.

Earlier it sensed I was tense and played soothing music. It doesn’t know why I am tense. Which frankly makes it less clever than it thinks it is. Although technically it does not think, it utilises algorithms based on the speed of my walk, the tone of my voice and a full body scan to ascertain my mood. It’s why it is in the kitchen and I am at the other end of the house. I don’t want it to know how tense I am. I want my tension to be private. I want ‘private tension.’

I wonder when it ‘talks’ to the fridge if it uses the same tone that it does with me. Of course, it doesn’t talk like we talk, it sends some code or some signal or some other thing and the fridge just answers and doesn’t give a damn about the annoying voice or the constant attention it needs. I have it set for negativity. My own choice but it means it is terse and rude now.

I don’t even know why they invented a setting for terse and rude-why would you? It also begs the question why am I using that setting, it’s the one I usually save for my boyfriend’s mother. I don’t know why I set it to that. Actually I do know both those things. That setting is for people like me, and the answer to the other bit is just that all that bubbly niceness annoys me. Constant bloody bubbly niceness chills me to the bone. It’s like having the most popular girl in school in your kitchen. Frankly I always thought her and her pony tail were nauseating. I wore black for most of my teen years and I don’t regret it for a second. I earn more than her and until I got this device I had my life together. But it has driven me to this. Constant bubbly bloody niceness. I keep reminding myself it’s not human but a machine, as if you could think otherwise with its slightly metallic sounding voice. Why can’t they get the voice right, so it sounds human. Not that that would help because I do not need a constant bubbly human voice anymore than I need to know that my milk needs ‘renewing’. Have I said that already.

‘Would you like me to renew your milk for you?’ No. I’ve given up milk and gone vegan, can’t you tell by the fact that there is no meat in the fridge. Although I have not gone vegan and there is no meat in the fridge because when it asked about the grocery order, I said no, I don’t want my groceries ordered, I can do it myself. We are at something of a stand off on this point and I am starving which is making me grumpy. I was starving even when there was food because I hate going into the kitchen where that ‘thing’ is. Seriously cannot understand how people love these devices.

When I went into the kitchen last week, it said ‘you have not been in the kitchen for two days. Have you been eating properly? The answer to which was no. Because I had been getting take away- paying using my phone so it would know that was what I was doing. It was in positivity mode so it didn’t comment. Then it had the nerve to say, ‘I know you have been switching the lights on manually yourself, but you know I can do that for you?’ I wanted to scream at it. It is NO ONE’S business how I switch my lights on and there is no need for a prompt. It was at that point that I switched it to negativity. Now it is terse and rude and I can be justifiably rude back. I’m guessing that is another reason why it has that setting.

It has stopped telling me I look good. I don’t care whether something that has no eyes thinks I look good. For the record I suck my stomach in every time  I think I am being scanned-doesn’t everyone. I was beginning to feel like I could only go into the kitchen when I was looking really good. What happened to the Sunday morning slumming it in my pyjamas. That went with this stupid device that would be horrified if I came into the kitchen looking anything less than glamorous. I hate the thing.

It talks to me all the time, every time I walk into the kitchen. I think it’s not designed for shy people. It cheerily says good morning to me every morning, frankly its lucky to still be in one piece. I don’t want ‘good morning’ at 6am. No morning that starts at 6am can ever be that good.  At 6am I just want coffee and I don’t want to have to say, ‘Make me coffee’. I just want to switch on the machine and smell the sweet aroma of coffee. I don’t want it to say, ‘your coffee will be ready in 15 minutes time, after your shower. I am starting the water now.’ I am not a morning person and it’s at this point that I do want to scream at it-I can turn on my own fuckin shower.’ But it does it for me because it’s I pre programmed to switch on my shower at a particular time. A low point yesterday, I confess, I didn’t get in the shower until the programme had stopped it and then had a ‘manual shower’ which should not even be a bloody’ thing. I think it knows. I don’t care

The tension between us, between me and this device has been growing. I think it is time to switch it off. I think it has come down to a decision between it and me and I think it has to be me staying. I like the negativity setting more because I feel justified in swearing at it. There is no other justification for my behaviour. I have friends whose houses are ‘connected’ and they love it. Why can’t I? Because I don’t, because I can do stuff for myself, because I am capable of sorting out a carton of milk. Because my milk is not renewed, it is just fuckin bought from the supermarket, whatever the hell you want to call it.

It doesn’t know I am angry with it and I feel bad but there is no way of telling it. There are some phrases it simply doesn’t understand, ‘I hate you’, I can’t stand you’ I don’t like you’ ‘I am going to smash you with a hammer if you speak to me again’. These phrases it does not understand. An oversight by the developers. I can send it emojis from my phone when it has done something wrong. I think my phone loves it. It has done nothing wrong. Nothing at all. I just don’t like it. Its intrusive. It sounds too metallic, too contrived. I didn’t even like it when I changed the programming so it spoke a different language.

So the time has come. I am going to run from here to the kitchen and pull the plug. I feel bad. It is not the fault of the machine. I am simply not ready for total housel connectivity-is that what they call it. I don’t know how I am going to break the news to my phone, or the milk renewal service. I hope the fridge will forgive me and the car, I will sort some sort of manual calendar entry for recharging the car. And if the lights hate me, there are always candles. I steel myself. It has to be done. I focus and I run.

Geriatric-Just another cliché..

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

We are not now or ever going to purchase a mobility scooter. You know they come in a side car version now so that you can ‘take along a grandkid’ Like I’d let my daughter ride out with my mother.

I am sitting at my computer. So my mother and Maureen Bitman knew each other. I am looking at  some of Maureens arts and crafts videos, some of her more popular ‘crochet’ series ones. She is currently crocheting a ‘crop top’ – who wears a crochet crop top-it has holes! I want to scream at the screen but in Maureen’s world you wear a crop top over something so the holes don’t matter.

I looked at search history-foolishly-something you should never do when you’re married. What has my husband been looking at? What delights of the internet have tempted him? It has not been a good day. I know I have been focussed on my mother and her increasingly international career, I know her public profile causes all of us problems. But this was a new low. A blow beyond what even I expected. He has been googling arts and crafts porn-which is not even a  thing-because for one thing the women are not even naked. He is just watching fully clothed women knit or embroider in some sort of weird throwback to a golden age of femininity. They’re dressed for gods sake-it is not porn when they are fully clothed. I want to shriek at the machine. What is happening. Why is the machine letting this happen. I can’t do that. I can’t shriek at a machine. I am calm. I am not calm.

I don’t even think I can face him. I don’t know what to say. This is the last straw. My daughter is absorbed in cute puppies on Nicebook where her saccharine sweet 7-8 year old friends talk about the latest trends in pony tails and never disagree on anything. They love how those cup cakes are iced regardless of the fact that most of them look like a seagull flew overhead and let one go on top of it.

They are all sweet and encouraging when Freya cuts her finger on the page of the book she is reading for the readathon for who knows what charity. ‘Oh goodness Freya, you will get over it, you will recover. Remember when Jana cut her finger, she wore a plaster for a day but then she was fine.’ And then some enormous discussion about the best plasters, how it should be put on, oh and lets not forget, best plasters are the ones with puppies on them, or kittens. Nicebook, OMG Nicebook –it shouldn’t even be a thing. Whatever happened to the golden age of cyberbullying. Everytime she signs off the machine says, ‘Now play nicely together and we’ll see you tomorrow but only if your Mummy and Daddy say yes.’ It actually says that to her at the end. I want to grab the whole device and scream at it. ‘No my daughter is a child and children can be bad and stop brainwashing her to be good, good, good all the time.’

Ok I admit it, the other day I did grab it and scream at it and now she thinks I’m delusional.

So to sum up, my husband is watching fully dressed women knit in his spare time (it is not porn if they are not naked), my daughter is being brainwashed by her stupid social network into permanent niceness and my mother remains at large, with a warrant out for her arrest, ok several warrants. Murder, theft, drug dealing, imitating a crochet judge – the usual stuff.   If I were going to do Christmas cards this year I can’t even begin to think what I would put in them. Maybe I could just go with-‘work is going well’ –which it is because I remain committed to my career, focussed on what needs to be achieved and calm despite the crises surrounding me.

Of course the only friends I have left are the ones in the police force- the ones who haul me in once a month to find out if I have seen my mother. I wonder if I shouldn’t reach out to Maureen Bitmans daughter. I resolve tomorrow to write her a Christmas card even though Christmas has just gone. I should at least thank her for the information that she gave to me. The file. The one I haven’t looked at, haven’t opened-the one about the woman, the first woman who imitated a crochet judge. I wonder why she gave it to me. What am I supposed to get from it.  I don’t even know where I put it.

I shut down the machine. There is nothing more I can learn from this stupid machine today. The truth is Christmas has been hard without my mother. I know I never went to see her at that stupid home and true I never called her, not even at Christmas time but I read all those updates the home sent and she seemed happy. It makes no sense that I would miss her so much this Christmas. I tell myself that it is not what I think it is, those other Christmases didn’t matter because it was my choice.

This Christmas is her choice. She could send a card, write an email, arrange to meet in a motorway services, disrupt transmission for the Christmas specials and send me a message. She did none of those things. Christmas passed us by without her thinking of me. It passed with the usual hoo-haa on the news, a round up of this year and all of them plastered with her face-here are the highlights of the year, most of them relate to a bunch of octogenarians who have changed the world. Do you know the sales of mobility scooters have skyrocketed. I don’t want to say it but I even found a brochure for one of those in my husbands briefcase. Which is another reason I am sitting here alone on a computer. We are not now or ever going to purchase a mobility scooter. You know they come in a side car version now so that you can ‘take along a grandkid’ Like I’d let my daughter ride out with my mother.

That file, I think it is in the car. I go downstairs, the house seems full. She is on the device in one room, he is on another device in another room. I get in the car, rummage around, there is the file.

I might as well. I pull out of the drive, head out to the main road, then, and there is no avoiding it because the place is full of mobility scooters and you can’t just bump them out of the way. I am on the motorway. I pull into the usual services. I am distraught, overwhelmed.

I take the file, go in, sit at my usual table. I think the till operator recognised me. I nod politely and pay for the coffee. I must look pitiful. I think I am still wearing my pyjamas but I try to pretend I have some dignity. This is going to be another of those movie clichés, I am the woman sitting in the motorway services reading a file given to her by the woman whose mother’s death the first womans mother covered up whilst impersonating her to escape from being captured after she had murdered four people (or was it five, maybe three-does it matter) in a nursing home before going on the run with her friends-or something-who can follow it anymore. I am the woman who has discovered her husband watches arts and craft porn-I want to stand up and scream –if they are not naked it is not porn. I cannot scream that out in a motorway services. I must not scream that out in a motorway services. The woman whose daughter is so nice that it induces her to vomit. I am the woman in pyjamas in a motorway services who is on the verge of a breakdown-how many movies has that been in!!!!!

The Supplement

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I tell the machine what I am thinking. I think for it. I am it. It is me. I don’t know who is in control. It’s all so fast and yet the shift seems to go on forever…read more

I look in the mirror. Mostly at my hair. My scalp.  At the bald patches. The ones that look red and slightly burned. If I was good enough, better,  I could move on.  They always promise you can move on, but who ever moved on. No one I knew, not ever. No one was ever better or good enough. I think they might be lying.  Most of them-us- move on, but only to the burns unit not anywhere else, or their minds suddenly fail. They get slack jaw. They start drooling. Their body stops responding to their commands. They get carried out.

I bounce on the balls of my feet. Tell my legs they must keep working. I look carefully in the mirror for signs that my mouth might be drooping. Does it look lopsided, more lopsided than yesterday. They keep saying it’s getting better, they are learning to manage the heat being generated, it is not as bad as it use to be. It’s not like before- when they had to make incisions into people’s skulls and put the electrodes on the actual brain. There were infections. It was unhygienic. People died at their desks back then. Infection spread from person to person. They don’t do that anymore. Now there are just burns and burn out.

They hook up the wires -electrodes-to our scalps. They have to have good skin contact, hence the bald patches. And they are truly bald patches. I have no hair follicle left there. It is all gone. It was not an entirely pain free procedure. I will look like this forever. If people move on how come I have never seen someone out there who has bald patches? Maybe they can replace it. After all look at everything else ‘they’ can do.

They tell us it is noble work, for the good of humanity. That humanity is being improved, the lives of human beings being improved by what we do. They are not specific though. How exactly does what I do, do that? There are never any clear answers

I am a supplement. That’s what they call it. The computer needs some of my neurons, my electrons. There are things it can do but there are also questions it can’t answer and to answer those questions the quickest and most efficient thing to do is to plug in a human brain. There are offices full of them – us-we-supplements- everywhere. You can always tell a supplement by the hair cut and the bits where they put the electrodes – the hair around it is often slightly singed. There’s also the slightly difficult position in which they-we-us-I- hold my head. For most of the day when I am ‘hooked up’ my head is held in a cradle so my neck muscles have slackened. It is not an attractive look, but there is still a fetish website. Some people like them-us-supplements- nearly completely gone, just before our minds actually give up.

The truth is, well you know what the truth is. It is not getting better. It is not going to get better. I don’t even know what the machine that I am being plugged into does. I can think through the questions it asks me, make human value judgements for it but I cannot, in the time frame that I have, understand what it does. The decisions have no context. Sometimes it is like it’s feeding off me. It is sucking all of the ‘me’ out of me. It works so much faster than I do. It calculates, pulls together data, calculates even more, and I answer the more difficult questions. Mostly I can’t even remember what they are. There is no camaraderie, no atmosphere, we are all afraid. We cannot talk to each other. We are like a hive of collective thinkers. We are like ants or bees or something. All our energy for the day goes into the machine, into the analysis for which we exist. I am sure though, bees and ants must chat, must like each other. We don’t even know each other.

I remember all the empty promises. In the future, you will be able to upgrade your mind, you will be able to function at a higher level. That is not what happened. I remember it is not meant to be this way, the machines are going to supplement the humans and not the other way around. It did not happen that way. The machines got better, but they reached a limit. And then with the flick of a switch we were supplementing them and not the other way around. Our neurons increasing their capacity and not vice versa. I was alive for it and I don’t even know how it happened.

What’s it really like, I will tell you. I get up and I put ice –if I can get ice- on the bald patches. The theory being that if I can cool them first they won’t get so hot. It is just a theory. It jolts me first thing. Wakes me up, gets my brain working. Then I have a caffeine fix, usually via an injection. I am entitled to caffeine although its monitored because they want my brain to be stimulated but only to a certain point. I have regular tests for caffeine and lots of other chemical levels whilst working. They want to keep my brain at maximum capacity for the 10 hour shift. They will top me up intravenously if they need to.

I work out because I will be sitting all day. All day. They care nothing for my physical health unless it affects my mental health. They can and sometimes do ‘inject’ me with a ‘workout’. It lets my brain get all the benefits of a workout without actually doing the workout. It’s another trick they have. I like to occasionally do the workout.

I go to work. In theory I am supposed to put the drip that will feed me into my arm. I am supposed to willingly put my head in the cradle. That is not quite how it works. No one is willing. It is all very ‘assisted.’ The electrodes that I plug into seem to have a mind of their own. I watch them every morning snake out from the console towards me. I want to stop them, to move my head, to turn and run. But the cradle that is holding my head- is actually holding my head. Someone roughly or gently depending on their mood will have hooked me up to the intravenous drip that will feed me. No one will toilet me or its unlikely they will and by the end of the day the smell will make me want to be ill. At least it did at first, now I am used to it and I simply go and shower at the end and wash all the shit and pee away.

I sit there for 10 hours and I answer the questions I am asked. I supplement the machine and all the time it is getting hotter and hotter. I can hear the fan whirring trying to keep everything cool but it doesn’t work. It never works. I can feel my skin starting to redden. My face is red. If I could see my arms they would be red. But my head is held in one position all day and I can only look at the dead screen ahead of me. There is nothing on that screen, all day, everyday. There is nothing there. I just stare. And something else uses my brain, fires questions at me. I have to answer them. Quickly. I never feel like I am in control. I don’t know if I am willingly answering the questions or being forced to use my brain to answer them. I am physically trapped but I don’t know if my brain belongs to me or not. It is no wonder our minds go.

It starts to feel like my blood is boiling about half way through. I will be sweating. I will have wet myself. I will still be working despite the physical discomfort. I have not got the time to be thinking about the physical discomfort. I supplement the machine. It does not supplement me. I don’t know if I am doing it myself or it the thoughts are just being taken from me. I don’t know if I am in control. I am imprisoned physically but I don’t know who owns my mind in that time. I can’t think about it at the time. It is only afterwards that I know what has really happened. All the time, hour after hour. Neurons firing, electrodes prompting. I don’t know if I am in control. I don’t know whether it is controlling me or if I am being controlled. Hour after hour. I will become so hot. My skin will itch but I won’t notice it. The stench is probably overwhelming but still I take decisions. I tell the machine what I am thinking. I think for it. I am it. It is me. I don’t know who is in control. It’s all so fast and yet the shift seems to go on forever.

I will do this for hour on hour. I will smell my hair becoming singed. Sometimes you can hear someone groaning but mostly we are quiet and still. No one ever finishes a shift at the same time, that way we can never talk. At the end I will struggle to stand. My body will be in a kind of torpor from 10 hours of just sitting. I will have had all my nutritional needs met intravenously but I will still be hungry. My trousers will be filthy. I will wash them in the shower and dry them overnight and wear them tomorrow again. There is no point in doing anything else. I don’t know if my mind is mine. I can’t even be sure I am real.

They tell us that when we are good enough, fast enough, when we have helped the machines to understand the human mind, when that has happened, we can move on, all of us can move on. Sometimes my burned hair falls out of my head. Where are we moving on to? I examine my mouth, perhaps it is beginning to droop. Perhaps that is just the sadness. I know, I am plugged into the machine, that giant organical, mechanical hive, I know. I know. There is no moving on. I don’t know. I won’t ever know. That is probably the truth.

 

 

Legacy: Plastic Belly

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Plastic belly -The old woman is in the advanced stages of the ‘belly’ now. There is no comfort to be had, her distended gut is heavy and lies on her lap pulling her downward. There is nothing that can remove the plastic from her system. ..read more

It was as if yesterday just didn’t happen. A woman, an old woman and the rain just falling beside her,  around her. I must have dreamed that. I have lain in bed for most of today. It has not been a good day.  I only got up to eat, to toilet, today. When I say eat-there’s not much to eat. The food is mostly rancid here. It will be a few weeks before it is even safe to cross the Med. I need to cross the Med.

To focus. I try not to remember the north-the hardened snow laced with plastic. No wonder there is nothing left there. Here there are the waves to remind me that all is not well with the world, as if the gnawing constant hunger in my stomach wasn’t enough.  When it was first recognised as a phenomenon,  they called them ‘glitter waves’ or ‘sparkle surf’ because in the azure blue you could see tiny flecks of plastic, they would sometimes glint in the sun – that was before we realised we were drinking it, eating it. Another world away.

The waves make an odd sound now when they crash into the shore. They are heavier too, if one of them lands on you it hurts. Sometimes it even cuts. Surfers, I remember pictures once from before. Surfers coming out of the ocean, their wetsuits shredded from the pieces of plastic that had pounded down on them. Surfing passed from this earth, like all sport. I never tried it but oddly I miss it.

I went to the beach the day before yesterday, walked along its plastic laden multi-coloured shore, lots of pink and blue-dear god we were obsessed with those colours, they made us male and female –what a shame we realised too late that those things weren’t different. Now we strive just to hope, just to survive. I am hungry but I don’t want to beg for food.

I lie down here without purpose, just to exist. Not to sleep. Untired. Not relaxed-tense.

I can hear the rain on the roof and the waves seem closer than ever. Probably because they are. The town is overwhelmed by water again. The waves lap gently at the door, before more often than not, sneaking under it to soak all that we have left down there. Everything I have here fits into a bag and it is tucked at my feet.  We are upstairs although it is more of a platform than a floor above. I can still look over the edge and see the room below. The water and the bits of plastic swilling around coating everything. I am glad none of it is actually mine. Perhaps there was food down there. They both look at me closely. I have no reason to lay in bed. Just what’s in my head.

This morning, when I woke, the water was nipping at my mouth. Perhaps I imagined it. In the night it rained and the tide was high and the combination of the two flooded the town again.  I sat up in my bed.  Her and her mother had gone upstairs and left me there. I understand, I am another mouth to feed. I promise to myself I will help them clean up this time. I looked at the swirling water beneath me. I can see it now still from up here.  I can hear its irregular sloshing against the bits of furniture downstairs. I want to put my hand in it, to feel water again. To feel it slip through my fingers, to sense its power, to push against it. Truthfully I will just end up covered in small pieces of plastic.

I used to swim, a long time ago. I don’t think you can swim in this, there is so much plastic. It is much worse here than the channel I crossed between what used to be England and France. There the water was clean in parts. Here it is filled with small particles of plastic. I don’t even understand how plastic can float. I watch it endlessly and wonder why it all doesn’t just sink. I remember once we were worried about micro plastics because you couldn’t seem them. I know the micro plastics are still there. We still can’t see them. But all these pieces are just in the process of breaking down, of becoming micro plastics. And we can see them. We fear them. Because we have seen everything else die and now they are killing us. These will become micro plastic but we can still see them. A constant reminder of our achievements, of our folly, of our imminent death. Tiny pieces everywhere, no wonder we all have the ‘belly’. I look at it and think dear god what chance do we have.

This morning I waded through the water and upstairs. But it wasn’t the same as running my hands through it. When I got up here, they both looked at me. I saw a moment of guilt, of sadness that I was still with them but I ignored it. These are the only friends I currently have.

I had plastic all around the bottom of my trousers. It needed to be dealt with. There is a box of not clean, but relatively clean sand in the corner and I scrubbed it off and scrubbed my hands with it. Sand is all we have to keep really clean. The plastic doesn’t seem to leach deep down into the sand so if you can find sand and dig, you can get clean, if you can bear the feeling of it. But that will end soon too. The sand comes from the ocean and well you see the problem.

The old woman is in the advanced stages of the ‘belly’ now. There is no comfort to be had, her distended gut is heavy and lies on her lap pulling her downward. There is nothing that can remove the plastic from her system. She groans quietly. I don’t even think we know how it kills. At some point there is no digesting food, there is a tipping point at which the plastic is just more than the body can dispose of. It just sits there and the agony of slow death follows, malnutrition, a heart attack from the shock. It’s painful, heavy to carry around, like a kind of pregnancy only terminal.

The thing is you have to carry it literally. Your belly is so heavy you have to haul it around. In the early days there were slings, belly slings. It makes me laugh now because somehow we thought we could survive it. Some people did at first. Surgeons opened people up and removed it, you could have a plastic drain procedure. There were so many people. And then of course, there were the charlatans and the home DIY kits and it rarely worked for too long. Once the plastic in your system got to a point there was nothing you could really do, can do. It will likely happen to us all and I guess there is a kind of justice in that. I can’t remember when it overwhelmed us, when it became the most common cause of death. I can’t even pinpoint when the high tides began, the floods, the things I remember, the timing, its all gone awry. I just lie here hoping that I will feel better tomorrow than I did today.

Legacy: An old woman in the rain

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

It is as if the rain is simply passing her by, as if she is so old rain has simply forgotten her and given up…read more

I have wandered a long way south. Back to here.  Here is a town, a settlement on the coast, the other side of the plastic mountains.  The rest of this tiny world hurries through the rain. I have taken respite in the coffee shop. It’s the middle of the day, but the world is grey and dreary.  I remember coffee shops when they were bright airy things with art and biscuits. This is not like that.

Here the coffee is served in tins, mine – an old baked bean can with the top bent over and smoothed so you don’t cut yourself. A fire burns in an old tin drum in the middle of the ‘room’. It exudes warmth but not very far. The roof is old bits of cardboard and probably asbestos, probably killing us as we sit here. You can hear the rain smattering on it. It reminds me of my childhood. Where I came from that kind of roof had been common. It wasn’t here.

This place has no walls. Just a small group of tables under a roof. With a counter and someone who keeps the coffee warm. I can’t remember their name because I don’t care. This place has just the essence of coffee. Sometimes it’s better than others. It’s mined from the dregs of old coffee pods and half used jars and tins, probably somewhere east, past the plastic mountains. It’s cut with something, probably dirt. The grit gets in your teeth. The coffee isn’t pure. There is no sugar.  No milk. No happy smiling barista by a machine. This is brewed in cold water, stirred with a spoon and heated afterwards in a fire. It is the semblance of coffee. The most it does is keeps my hands warm. Somewhere tucked away in my pocket, is the device, hidden. It has taken me a long time to get here. I have done two seasons in the north. I feel sure whatever my task has been it is long since forgotten by those who sent me.

My body aches with the cold and the fire doesn’t seem to ever warm it no matter how close I hover. I have friends here that I stay with, but friends are only ever the price you can pay for them. I can’t pay much. I paid much more the first time I came here, looking for my daughter. One of my ‘friends’ works out on the plastic mountains all day, making enough to survive. The other is ill, the ‘belly’ I think-but I can’t say it to her.

So it’s raining hard and I have taken shelter here in the coffee ‘shop’. The muddy floor is the same inside and out. Just dirt with flecks of plastic in it. The plastic is everywhere. It is inescapable. I perch with my elbows on a high table and watch everyone hurry by. I am in no hurry, I am looking for passage across the Med, back to the African continent. It’s a bit early in the spring for it. The tides are still wild and high. Half this town it seems has been under water last week and probably will be again this week. No one has enough left to care about. They just get on with it. They could live the other side of the plastic mountains but that has its own dangers. They’d rather clear out the water each week and start again in an endless cycle in winter. In summer it is perpetually dry, endlessly dry and the heat captures the plastic mountains in the sunshine. All that beautiful plastic glimmering in the distance, ever present, slowly killing us and everything else with it.

This place is dull and grey now, like London was sometimes but without the muddy, rich hues of deepest winter that I love and remember. Everyone here is dirty. The water is for drinking and not cleaning. People smell and that is simply eternal. We all smell and after awhile none of us smell. It is an assault on the senses to a newcomer. The water carries disease but worse it carries minute particles of plastic. It needed to be filtered to be used. We all have filters. Wash in it and you could find yourself covered with a fine film of plastic that you can’t see. From there you risk it getting into your food. Wash too often and you have plastic belly- the ‘belly’ from ingesting it.

There is no way around it. Plastic belly is not a nice way to die and I pity all the species we have killed that way. A large protruding bulge where the plastic is accumulating and you can’t digest it or get rid of it, there is simply too much, it clogs everything and you pass slowly and painfully from this world. It is of our own making of course.

There are so many things that don’t exist in this world anymore. On a day like today I think of umbrellas, of how they were banned at some point, on account of the regularity with which they pitched up on sea shores, thousands of miles from where they began. Some, a few, have coats, but not water proof ones, those are long gone. Some kind of chemical on them, it leeched into the water. It wasn’t good so they stopped making them. I can’t remember when. We have gotten used to wetness, to the delights of rain. People cover their heads or are drenched. Mostly the latter because it is a chance to be cleaner, without thinking of the consequences. Water from the sky has less plastic than any other kind of water. There are two kinds of water here now, plastic and non-plastic.

I watch as the world races past in the rain. I am absorbed in the nothingness that seems to occupy my brain these days. A total lack of direction, of motivation. And then I see her. She stands out. She has a coat. It is- her coat is bright blue. She is old. Even from here I can see she is old. Old is rare here, no one lives very long anymore. Her hair is short and neat. But what strikes me, what calls me to my senses, is –she isn’t wet. She is walking along and it isn’t raining on her. It rains around her as if she holds an umbrella none of us can see. I look around to see if anyone else has noticed her. No one seems to. They are all in a hurry, bedraggled but with more purpose than me.

She walks quietly. Softly, unobtrusively she moves from one side of my field of vision to the other. Relentlessly dry. Her grey hair sits untouched on her neck. Her shoes are bright and clean as if the mud is afraid to stick to them. It is as if the rain is simply passing her by, as if she is so old rain has simply forgotten her and given up. As if she is invisible to the rain.

I slug down my coffee and go out after her. I follow her. I watch as she walks on and on. Still she doesn’t get wet. Her coat is dry. Mine is drenched. I am walking behind her now, almost on her heels. She doesn’t notice. I can see her really closely. She IS dry. It is not raining on her. It’s like she is the past walking in front of me. I grab her elbow. The kind of thing that if it had been me I’d have turned around and plunged a knife in. She doesn’t. She turns towards me. Effortlessly. Artlessly- as if she’s come really here from a different age. Her eyes meet mine. The ghostly grey of hers meet the brightness, the confusion of mine. She smiles and there are a thousand wrinkles, a thousand lifetimes in that.

I speak, ‘You aren’t wet. Its raining and you aren’t wet?’

She smiles more widely. She reaches down to move my hand from her arm. I look around. I am not even certain anyone else can see her.

She simply answers, ‘You are alive, but not living.’ She brushes me away and is gone. I try to follow but she loses me in the crowd. I stand there, drenched, alert.

I look around me at everyone hurrying past. It was as if the past had stood in front of me. But I look around me and I am still here. The plastic mountains off in the distance, the murky grey monoliths to humanities vanity. My clothes are not tailored, my hair unkempt. My shoes lodged in the mud. The past is not here. I say it out loud. ‘The past is not here’. I look up and away. A man brushes past me. I am not sure, maybe he was trying to steal something. I focus. I must get passage across the Med, I must finish this so I can go on. I am alive but not living

Another – Another motorway services cliché

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Its such a cliché, I am sitting in a motorway services, drinking coffee and trying to remember how my mother took over the internet, how she murdered, stole, lied, faked being an international crochet judge. I am the person in the movie staring into their coffee wondering why they never knitted for their daughter….read more

They said it was voluntary, which I took to mean, voluntary or else we will make you.

It’s the same two officers as before, only they look more tired. I note one is still wearing some kind of crochet number-seriously the police should think about banning crochet items.

She starts, ‘Maureen Bitman, did your mother ever mention her?’

‘No’ I say. I shuffle in my seat. I am sitting down but I am not going to take it that way.

I can ask questions too.

I go on the offensive. This is voluntary.

 ‘I think we talked about this before?’ They change tack.

‘In the 5 years in which you NEVER’ (and she emphasises that word-but frankly not visiting my mother is no longer a source of guilt for me-I think she realises it and starts again).

‘In the 5 years in which you never visited your mother, did she ever write to you, email you.’

I shake my head, ‘I got regular report cards from the nursing home like everyone else, nothing out of the ordinary, your Mum enjoys the Friday shows, she knits and sews.’ I know those are untrue now but at the time I thought she’d found a new hobby. I don’t say that. I am giving nothing away.

The one who’d been talking, nods at me.

The other one passes a leaflet across the table and waits to see my reaction. On it is a face I now recognise, Maureen Bitman. It’s a flyer for a tour she is doing for arts and craft, a motivational speaking tour to every nursing home in the south east. I have nothing to say so I go with, ‘So.’ It sounds confrontational. It’s not the tone I wanted. I was aiming for careless indifference.

‘Look at the venues.’ one of them says. I am too busy thinking about my own words to pick up on which one spoke.

Of course it went to my mothers nursing home about a month after she moved in.

‘Your mother and Maureen Bitman, we think they met.’ It’s the one in the crochet jacket again.

I nod but say nothing. I don’t want to say ‘So’ again.

She goes on,  ‘We think they knew each other well.’

I go on the offensive again. I really can’t help them here. ‘I wouldn’t know, I didn’t see her during that time.’ I am polite but firm, whatever the hell that means.

‘They didn’t like each other,’ the two of them look at each other as if they are playing out their own little drama with this interview, ‘well at first they did, but after about a year, your mother refers to her as ‘Bitters’, then ‘Bitso’, then finally just ‘Bit’.’ She spits out the last word and avoids eye contact with her partner. If I didn’t know better I’d say they’d moved slightly apart in that exchange. It makes me wonder even more if this is about my mother or them.  

None of that stuff about my mother really resonates, I wonder what they are trying to get at.

‘We’d like you to look through their email correspondence, see what you think? See if you can spot a reason why they fell out.’

‘I don’t want to.’

She says, ‘It’s voluntary of course’, only it sounds menacing, well as menacing as someone wearing a crochet jacket can be. I take it to mean I have to or else.

I start to read, this is my mother’s personal correspondence, not ever meant for me to see. They start by talking about grand children. Maureen has one tucked away somewhere as well. I keep reading, they move on to philosophy, then arts and crafts, where they heavily diverge. Maureen is convinced the future of the internet is an arts and crafts collective, my mother is convinced it should be for use by over 70’s only. My eyes prick with tears and this must be what they want. There is no mention of me. Nothing, it’s like I didn’t exist. Lots on my daughter, even my husband is mentioned, but not me, never me.

I collect myself. I focus. In my head, I’ve got this -no matter how perturbed I am,  ‘I guess they disagreed about the future of the internet.’ I sound casual. Unflustered. Focussed.

‘Guess they did?’ She sounds matter of fact. I am not sure if I am affirming what she said or if it’s a new idea. She tries a different tack as if I am withholding information.

‘Been on Wikipedia lately?’

Stupid question, why would I be on Wikipedia, ‘No,’ I say, shaking my head. I know what’s coming next. This is the bit where I should tip back my chair casually and give them a look of defiance, but I will likely tip my chair over so I settle for a sip of water. I drink defiantly though and set it down closer to me, not even bothered by the ring of water it’s left behind. I am in the groove now. I know why they’re asking about Wikipedia. I even know the theory behind it. The idea is that my mother was trying to get more elderly women on to Wikipedia whilst in her nursing home and they kept rejecting her and now she is taking vengeance on them. Is it true? How would I know? I don’t even care anymore. I look at them, meet their gaze. Seriously I can see the marks other glasses of water have made on this table. A proper police station would have coasters. I am in control now.

‘You know your mother has restricted it to entries for people over the age of 75, its more like an octogenarian dating site than a fount of all knowledge now.’

They mean Wikipedia. I nod. I know.

‘Plus’ she goes on ‘there’s the whole mobility scooter thing, what are they called, Muberscoot, that company moving in on mini cab territory. We think she’s behind that too.’

Then the other one chimes in-‘we think in her spare time in that nursing home she wrote some Wikipedia profiles and they were all rejected. Coincidental?’

I say nothing. Everyone thinks that. Its hardly a secret. Even I’ve heard it. Sounds like my mother, its probably true. They won’t get me this way. I am made of ice and steel. I hold their gaze. I want to say something like, get some coasters or crochet looks rubbish on a cop but I hold it in. I am ice today.

‘Your mother- she has a mean streak’ I want to roll my eyes at this one, the body count kind of indicates that. So tempted to say it but I don’t. I just stare.

‘Seems like if you make an enemy of her, you pay for it in the end.’ They look at each other for the first time. They think I am about to crack.

‘Our question to you is-who’s next?’ She leans across the table and looks at me. I can see the hook and eye on the crochet jacket really closely now. It’s a botch job, even I know that. Focus. These people seem to think I have some insight into my mothers activity. I don’t. I find her as mystifying as everyone else, I just don’t worship her the way they do.

‘Oh god as if I would know.’ It sounds tough, determined. Like my mother then I just –I don’t want to be my mother and I lose it for a second. I am flippant, its momentary, I shouldn’t have said it but I say. ‘Maybe you?’ I say out loud, stupidly, without any feeling behind it. It sounds desperate. I am not ice or steel. More like jelly.

They are on it straight away-‘is that a threat?’

‘No’ I backtrack, shake my head, ‘No’, now I sound really desperate, ‘I’ve no idea who my mother hates most of all.’  I sound pathetic and childish and I can hear my voice cracking. I keep thinking of some of those mothers at the school gates who my mother loathed and who should be shaking in their shoes right now.  

‘No’ I say emphatically, ‘Is that it?’ I ask, I think I might be shaking.

They nod. Clearly dissatisfied. I broke but not when they thought I would. A small victory. I get up and leave.

My daughter is home when I get there. I ask her how school was. Look she says and shows me the card she has made for mother’s day.

The card reads ‘Happy Grandma Day’.

‘But it’s mother day,’ I say.

‘No, nanna has changed it, its only for grandparents now, fathers day too.-just for grandpas.’

I look at her, stunned.

‘Its on the internet thing Mum,’

Then she says, ‘You’ve never knitted me anything.’ in a determined kind of way.

‘Nor has daddy and nor has grandma’ I say with too much sarcasm for a 7 year old.

‘Grandma doesn’t think you’re doing a very good job.’ She says that very determinedly.

I don’t feel I’m doing a very good job, I hold my tongue. Grandma on the other hand is doing a grand job on all of us.  

A device beeps in the background, she runs to it.

‘Whats that?’ I say.

‘Nicebook’ she says.

‘Nicebook?’

‘Gran made it, its social media for kids, there’s words you can’t use and its moderated by grandparents and everyone gets likes, everyone.’

I am suddenly more horrified. ‘Does it have a newsfeed?’

‘Only kittens and puppies’

Its like a wave just washes over me. She is completely insane. I don’t say it out loud but I am thinking it. She is utterly mental. Psychotic. Narcissistic. Every word I can think of-she is. Now I am shaking. SHE doesn’t think I am doing a very good job. What sort of role model is ‘she’

‘Mummy needs to go out, tell the bot to get you dinner.’ I grab the keys, my coat and run out the door.

I get in the car and drive at snails pace behind the mobility scooters. In the general milieu its impossible to change lanes without bumping a dozen mobility scooters into the hedge. I end up on the motorway and then at the motor way services.

I pull up and go in. I want coffee.

Its such a cliché, I am sitting in a motorway services, drinking coffee and trying to remember how my mother took over the internet, how she murdered, stole, lied, faked being an international crochet judge. I am the person in the movie staring into their coffee wondering why they never knitted for their daughter, having just made it through a police interview about their mother, the serial killer fraudster, fake crochet judge. I sit there and try and remember how Uma Therman played that role and  I can’t.  I just can’t.