‘A key word in the Act, along with “abduct”, is “retain”. The police may already be out looking for him. May I—’
‘Adam. That’s enough.’
‘You might like to hear about some relevant cases. In 1969, a Liverpool woman passing an all-night garage came across a little girl who—’
She had gone to where he stood and for an impossible moment I thought she was going to hit him. She spoke firmly into his face, separating out the words. ‘I don’t want or need your advice. Thank you!’
Mark began to cry. Before there was a sound, his rosebud stretched to a downturn. A prolonged falling moan, as of rebuke, was followed by a clucking sound as his collapsed lungs fought for an intake of breath. The inhalation that preceded his wail was also prolonged. The tears were instant. Miranda made a comforting sound and put a hand on the boy’s arm. It was not the right move. The wail rose to a siren shriek. In other circumstances, we might have run from the room to an assembly point. When Adam glanced across at me, I gave a helpless shrug. Mark surely needed his mother. But Adam picked the boy up and settled him on his hip and the crying stopped in seconds. In the gulping aftermath, the little boy stared glassily out at us through spiked eyelashes from a high position. He announced in a clear voice, free of petulance, ‘I want to have a bath. With a boat.’
He had spoken a whole sentence at last and we were relieved. It was an irresistible request. More so with the old boundary markers of class – barf and wiv, and glottal ‘t’s. We would give him everything he wanted. But what boat?
A competition was forming for Mark’s affections.
‘Come on then,’ Miranda said in a lilting, maternal voice. She stretched out her arms to gather him up but he shrank from her and pressed his face into Adam’s chest. Adam looked rigidly ahead, as she called with face-saving cheeriness, ‘Let’s run the bath,’ and led them out and along the corridor to my unappealing bathroom. Seconds later, the rumble of running taps.
I was surprised to find myself alone, as if I had taken for granted a fifth presence in the room, someone I could turn to now to talk about the morning and its parade of emotions. There were fresh cries of distress from the bathroom. Adam hurried back into the kitchen, seized a cereal packet, lifted out its bag, ripped the box apart, flattened it, and in blurred seconds, using some technique he must have copied from a Japanese website, fashioned an origami boat, a barque with a single, billowing mainsail. Then he hurried out and the wailing subsided. The boat was launched.
I sat at the table in a stupor, aware that I should get to my screen and earn some money. The month’s rent was due and there was less than £40 in the bank. I had shares in a Brazilian rare earth mining company and this could be the day to sell. But I couldn’t motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn’t remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings, walls and floors would contain me to the end. There were a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some critical junction in their lives many years back – a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now their options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.
Mark walked in, barefoot and wearing what looked like an ankle-length gown. It was one of my t-shirts and it had an effect on him. Holding out the cotton material in each hand at his waist, he started to run up and down the kitchen, then in circles, and then made clumsy pirouettes in order to spin his gown out around him. The attempts made him stagger. Miranda came through the kitchen with his dirty clothes and took them upstairs to her washing machine. Her way, perhaps, of keeping him here. I sat with my head in my hands, watching Mark, who kept looking in my direction to check that I was impressed by his antics. But I was distracted, only aware of him because he was the only moving object in the room. I gave him no encouragement. I was waiting for Adam.
When he appeared in the doorway I said, ‘Sit down here.’
As he lowered himself onto a chair opposite me there was a muffled click, such as children make when they pull their fingers. A low-level malfunction. Mark continued to prance about the kitchen.
I said, ‘Why would this Gorringe want to harm Miranda? And don’t hold back.’
I needed to understand this machine. There was already one particular feature I’d observed. Whenever Adam faced a choice of responses, his face froze for an instant that was fractionally above the horizon of perception. It did so now, barely a shimmer, but I saw it. Thousands of possibilities must have been sifted, assigned a value, a utility function and a moral weighting.
‘Harm? He intends to kill her.’
‘Why?’
The manufacturers were wrong to believe that they could impress me with a soulful sigh and the motorised movement of a head as Adam looked away. I still doubted that he could, in any real sense, even look.
He said, ‘She accused him of a crime. He denied it. The court believed her. Others didn’t.’
I was about to ask more, when Adam glanced up. I turned in my chair. Miranda was already in the kitchen and she had heard what Adam said. Instantly, she began to clap her hands and whoop to the little boy’s capers. Stepping in his path, she took his hands in hers and they whirled in circles. His feet left the ground and he screamed in delight as she spun him round. He shouted for more. But now she linked arms with him and showed him how to turn about, ceilidh-style, and stamp on the floor. He copied her movements, placing his free hand on his hip and waving the other wildly in the air. His arm did not extend much above his head.
The jig became a reel, then a stumbling waltz. My moment of depression dissolved. Watching Miranda’s supple back bend low to make a partner of a four-year-old, I remembered how I loved her. When Mark squealed with pleasure, she imitated him. When she sang out on a high note, he tried to reach for it too. I watched and clapped along, but I was also aware of Adam. He was completely still, and still without expression, not looking at the dancers so much as through them. It was his turn to be the cuckold, for he was no longer the boy’s best friend. She had stolen him away. Adam must have realised that she was punishing him for his indiscretion. A courtroom accusation? I had to know more.
Mark’s gaze never left Miranda’s face. He was entranced. Now she picked him up and cradled him as she danced around the room, singing Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle. I wondered if Adam had the capacity to understand the joy of dance, of movement for its own sake, and whether Miranda was showing him a line he couldn’t cross. If so, she may have been wrong. Adam could imitate and respond to emotions and appear to take pleasure in reasoning. He might also have known something of the purposeless beauty of art. She set Mark down, took his hands again in hers, this time with arms crossed. They circled stealthily, with undulating, rippling movements as she chanted, to his delight, ‘If you go down in the woods today, You’re sure of a big surprise…’
Hours later, I discovered that during this kitchen romp Adam was in direct contact with the authorities. It wasn’t unreasonable of him, but he did it without telling us. And so it was that after the dancing and a glass of iced apple juice in the garden, after the clean clothes had been ironed and put on, and the pink sandals scrubbed under the tap, dried and fitted round the tiny feet whose nails were freshly trimmed, after the lunch of scrambled eggs and a session of nursery rhymes, there came the ring on the doorbell.