‘Singing,’ Howard mutters.
‘Singing?’ Her eyes narrow. ‘Did you actually have a shower?’
‘Hmm?’ Howard realizes he’s neglected a key element of his cover story. ‘Oh yeah, I just didn’t wash my hair. The water’s cold.’
‘It’s cold? How come? It shouldn’t be cold.’
‘I was cold, I mean. In the shower. So I got out. It’s not important.’
‘Are you coming down with something?’
‘I’m fine.’ He sits down at the breakfast bar. Halley stands over him, examines him carefully. ‘You do look a bit flushed.’
‘I’m fine,’ he repeats, more vehemently.
‘All right, all right…’ She walks away, puts on the kettle. He turns to the window, silently trying out the name Aurelie.
Their house lies several four-lane miles from Seabrook, on the front line of the suburbs’ slow assault on the Dublin mountains. When Howard was growing up, he used to ride his bike around here in the summer with Farley, through fairy-tale woods ticking with grasshoppers and sunshine. Now it looks like a battlefield, mounds of sodden earth surrounding trenches waterlogged with rain. They’re building a Science Park on the other side of the valley: every week the landscape has morphed a little more, the swell of a hill shorn off, a flat gashed open.
That’s what they all say.
‘What have you got there?’ Halley comes back with two cups.
‘Book.’
‘No shit.’ She takes it out of his hands. ‘Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That.’
‘Just something I picked up on the way home. First World War. I thought the boys might like it.’
‘Robert Graves, didn’t he write I, Claudius? That they made into a TV series?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He did.’ She scans the back of the book. ‘Looks interesting.’
Howard shrugs non-committally. Halley leans back against her chair, watching his eyes buzz restlessly over the counter surface. ‘Why are you acting weird?’
He freezes. ‘Me? I’m not acting weird.’
‘You are.’
Interior pandemonium as he desperately tries to remember how he normally acts with her. ‘It’s just been a long day – oh God – ’ groaning involuntarily as she pulls a cigarette from her shirt pocket. ‘Are you going to smoke another of those things?’
‘Don’t start…’
‘They’re bad for you. You said you were going to quit.’
‘What can I tell you, Howard. I’m an addict. A hopeless, pathetic addict in the thrall of the tobacco companies.’ Her shoulders slump as the tip glows in ignition. ‘Anyway, it’s not like I’m pregnant.’
Ah, right – this is how he normally acts with her. He remembers now. They seem to be going through a protracted phase in which they’re able to speak to each other only in criticisms, needles, rebukes. Big things, little things, anything can spark an argument, even when neither of them wants to argue, even when he or she is trying to say something nice, or simply to state an innocuous fact. Their relationship is like a piece of malfunctioning equipment that when switched on will only buzz fractiously, and shocks you when you’re trying to find out what’s wrong. The simplest solution seems to be not to switch it on, to look instead for a new one; he is not quite ready to contemplate that eventuality, however.
‘How was work?’ he says conciliatorily.
‘Oh…’ She makes a gesture of insignificance, flicking the dust of the day from her fingers. ‘This morning I wrote a review of a new laser printer. Then most of the afternoon I spent trying to get hold of someone in Epson to confirm the specs. Usual rollercoaster ride.’
‘Any new gadgets?’
‘Yeah, actually…’ She fetches a small silver rectangle and presents it to him. Howard frowns and fumbles with it – card-thin and smaller than the palm of his hand.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a movie camera.’
‘This is a camera?’
She takes it from him, slides back a panel and returns it. The camera issues an almost but not quite inaudible purr. He holds it up and aims it at her; a pristine image of her appears in the tiny screen, with a red light flashing in one corner. ‘That’s incredible,’ he laughs. ‘What else does it do?’
‘Make every day like summer!’ she reads from the press release. ‘The Sony JLS9xr offers several significant improvements on the JLS700 model, as well as entirely new features, most notably Sony’s new Intelligent Eye system, which gives not only unparalleled picture resolution but real-time image augmentation – meaning that your movies can be even more vivid than they are in real life.’
‘More vivid than real life?’
‘It corrects the image while you record. Compensates for weak light, boosts the colours, gives things a sheen, you know.’
‘Wow.’ He watches her head dip slightly as she extinguishes her cigarette, then lift again. Miniaturized on the screen she does indeed seem more lustrous, coherent, resolved – a bloom to her cheeks, a glint to her hair. When he glances experimentally away from it, the real-life Halley and the rest of their home suddenly appear underdefined, washed out. He turns his eye to it again, and zooms in on her own eyes, deep blue and finely striated with white; like thin ice, he always thinks. They look sad.
‘And how about you?’
‘Me?’
‘You seem a bit down.’ Somehow it’s easier to talk to her like this, mediated by the camera viewer; he finds the buffer making him audacious, even though she’s sitting close enough to touch.
She shrugs fatalistically. ‘I don’t know… it’s just these PR people, God, they sound like they’re turning into machines themselves, you know, ask them anything at all and they feed you the same pre-recorded answer…’ She trails off. The backs of her fingers move across her forehead, barely touching it; the viewer picks up fine lines there that he has never noticed before. He pictures her here on her own, frowning at the computer screen in the alcove of the living room she has made her office, surrounded by magazines and prototypes, only smoke for company. ‘I tried to write something,’ she says thoughtfully.
‘Something?’
‘A story. I don’t know. Something.’ She seems happier too, with this arrangement, liberated by not having to look into his eyes; she gazes out the window, down at the ashtray, kneads her bracelet against the bones of her wrist. Howard suddenly finds himself desiring her. Maybe this is the answer to all of their problems! He could wear the camera all the time, mount it onto his head somehow. ‘I sat down and told myself I wasn’t getting up until I’d written something. So I stayed there for a full hour and God help me, all I could think of was printers. I’ve spent so long cooped up with this stuff that I’ve forgotten how actual human beings think and behave.’ She slurps her tea disconsolately. ‘Do you think there’s a market for that, Howard? Epic novels starring office equipment? Modem Bovary. Less Than Xerox.’
‘Who knows? Technology’s getting smarter every day. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before computers start reading books. You could be on to something big.’ He places his free hand on hers, sees it jump in Lilliputian form into the corner of the screen. ‘I don’t understand why you don’t just quit,’ he says. They have had this conversation so many times now, it is an effort to keep it from sounding mechanical. But maybe it will turn out differently this time? ‘You’ve got a bit of money saved, why don’t you take some time off and just write? Give yourself six months, say, see what you come up with. We could afford it, if we tightened our belts.’
‘It’s not that simple, Howard. You know how hard it is to find someone who’ll give me a work permit. Futurlab’s been good to me, it’d be stupid to quit there with things as they are.’