“Your body seemed to relax. Now that’s interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
Alison had just walked into the room. Katie retreated back inside herself instantly. She gazed down at her fingers, twisting and turning around themselves in her lap.
“Hello, Alison. Where have you been?” asked Eva.
Alison looked a mess. Her eyes were ringed with dark shadows; her hair was lank and lifeless. She wore a grey hairy sweater over her tartan flannel pajamas, the corner of a white tissue poking from one sleeve. She shambled across to one of the padded chairs and slumped into it.
“Sleeping. What else is there to do?”
Eva looked at Katie, but Katie was concentrating again on the program on the viewing screen. Pictures of sheep being funneled through a gap in a hedge were replaced by a shower of chocolate buttons falling into a pool of chocolate. The image flicked to a cartoon group of eight mice eating rice from little bowls.
“We were just watching a program about an expression that defines itself, weren’t we, Katie?” said Eva brightly.
“Have you seen Nicolas? Do you know where he is?” asked Alison, deliberately changing the subject.
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s in his room.”
“I hope so. I’m not in the mood to be stared at.”
Eva said nothing. Alison brought her knees up underneath her chin and wrapped her arms tightly around her legs.
“Doesn’t he creep you out? The way he’s constantly staring at your tits?”
“I thought he was your friend.”
“You don’t have any friends in this place, Eva. Remember that.”
“Ignore her. She’s always like this when she’s down.” Katie’s words came in a flurry, her eyes still fixed firmly on the screen.
Eva turned to get a better view of Alison, twisting on one leg of the chair, feeling it flex beneath her weight as she turned.
“Would you like a hot drink, Alison?”
“No. And don’t change the subject. You’re not telling me that you don’t find it offensive, the way Nicolas stares at your tits?”
“I don’t like it, no. But then again, he’s not in this place because he’s normal, is he? Nor are we. Let’s show him some tolerance. It never seemed to bother you that much before.”
“It didn’t,” said Katie. “Ignore her.”
“Shut up Katie. I wasn’t speaking to you. Watch your bloody program.”
Eva looked on, aghast. Yesterday they had been plotting together, brothers in arms, today…From the adjoining chair, Alison picked up a paperback someone had apparently dropped in a bath. It was swollen to twice its normal size, the pages curling up and around themselves. She flicked through it for a moment or two, before crossly hurling it to the floor.
“Bloody Nicolas!” she shouted, then turned to glare at Eva. “Do you know why he’s in here?”
Eva shook her head. Alison’s mood swings were disconcerting.
“I don’t know why. He seems lacking in confidence.”
“Too bloody true. I’ll tell you what, one good fuck would sort him out. I’ll tell you what else, I’m not going to be the one to provide it.”
She glared across the room. “What about you, Katie? Would you do it? That would put a smile on both of your faces, wouldn’t it?”
“This conversation diminishes us all, Alison. Please go back to your room until you’re feeling better.”
Eva and Alison stared in shock at Katie’s response, but she remained glued to the screen.
Alison breathed in deeply, trying to regain her composure. “I was talking about Nicolas. He’s got a massive inferiority complex. He also thinks he’s the most important person in here. In the world.”
“That sounds like a contradiction,” Eva said hesitantly. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to speak to Alison when she was behaving like this.
Alison gave a bitter laugh. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a classic pattern for loonies. Most of the people in here are the same. You certainly are.”
Eva kept silent.
“Look at you with your delusions of grandeur, the way you believe you should have got that promotion, and yet you also think that you’re stupid and of no consequence. You’ve got no friends, and yet you know you deserve lots-”
“Alison.” Katie spoke again without looking up from the screen. Alison paused, brushed lank hair away from her eyes, but then continued.
“Nicolas. He told me something once, about how he started a pension when he began work. Doesn’t that tell you something about the man? What sort of twenty-year-old is bothered about a pension?” She laughed again. “Anyway, he got back the details telling him what he could expect when he retired. Gave him his projected earnings based on the job they thought he’d be doing then, taking into account his intelligence and personality quotient and so on. He wasn’t happy. He thought he’d be doing far better.”
Eva nodded. “I can see that being upsetting. Nobody likes to be told they are a loser, especially at that age.”
“That’s not all. It wasn’t a huge step from there to finding his life expectancy. You know what it was? Sixty-eight. You know what that means?”
Eva was uncomfortable on the hard plastic chair. She got up and and sat down next to Alison, accidentally knocking over a half-full cup of coffee someone had abandoned by the leg of the chair. Eva swore as brown liquid splashed across the vinyl floor.
“Leave it,” said Alison. “Listen. Nicolas was told that he would die at sixty-eight. Well below the average. That means low social class.” She gave a bitter laugh. “It will be even lower now. Knock another ten years off for being in here.”
Eva waved dismissively.
“So what? It’s only an average. It’s not a prediction.”
“It’s still a judgment. And a pretty accurate one nowadays. It changes day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. Haven’t you ever called up your details on a screen? Watched those numbers after the decimal point whizz up and down? Picked up a gin and tonic and watched your life expectancy drop by a few seconds? Hah!”
She smiled entirely without humor.
“You know what, Nicolas is addicted to that stuff. He got his family tree from the Mormons’ database. Ran a simulated medical history on it back two hundred years. He figured out the likelihood of him dying of everything from AIDS to Huntington’s chorea. How about that for a pleasant way to spend the evening? Watch him at three o’clock in the afternoon. That’s a laugh.”
She shook her head and smiled.
“It’s all there, mapped, mirrored, and striped by data-banks the world over. Everything about you, and me, and Nicolas. They know us better than we know ourselves. They send us ads for products we didn’t even know existed. The drinking water tastes funny one day and two years later you find out by chance that you’d been dosed with the cure for an incipient embolism you had no idea ever existed.”
“Yeah?” Eva laughed bitterly. “Tell me about it. You know how I got here.”
Alison sighed angrily. “No, you still don’t get it. We talk about Social Care and we think of them watching our every move. And then we think about the Watcher, and we think that it’s like Social Care except more so, but that’s wrong. We fall into the trap of thinking that it’s simply something that watches us get undressed before we get in the bath, or listens in when you call your mother, but it’s worse than that. It’s looking right inside you. It sees every heartbeat, it knows your every thought; it knows you better than you know yourself.”
Her pupils dilated as she spoke. It was as if a tap had been turned in her heart, and all the feelings and emotions were flooding slowly upward, gurgling and lapping up inside her body to fill her up to the brim.
“No wonder poor Nicolas is the way he is,” she said softly. “He only has to look at a girl and he knows that the Watcher is there, analyzing his every thought and guilty emotion. He’s a twenty-seven-year-old man with a thirteen-year-old boy inside him who has never had the chance to grow up.”