Oh, and did I mention she’s in Accounts? And let’s face it, at thirty-four, way too old to be stuck in middle management. Catch me still hanging around as executive programmer eight years from now.
Infuriatingly, Jane hits the off switch on the remote.
‘Oh nice, Jane. Give me that. How am I supposed to restore the settings if it’s off?’ I turn it back on and click onto the menu. ‘Christ on ice. What have you done? Pass me the keyboard.’
‘I’m sorry. I was only trying to record Ángeles de la Calle,’ which is the soap Jane is happily addicted to, a remake of a 1951 Mexican telenovela, only sexified, modernised, stripped of context and colour. A bit like Gaborone. A real bleach job. And particularly perverse, considering you can stream the original on the Retro channel. Okay, so it’s unwatchable, unless you’re a total fanboy or an academic, or alternatively, stoned with the subtitles turned off.
‘I already set that up for you.’
‘But with the rugby—’
‘It’s a clever system, Jane. It would have registered the reschedule automatically. Oh, never mind.’ I reboot home™ manually, so it defaults back to the original settings. God only knows how she managed to do so much damage with the remote. ‘There. It’s all set up for you.’ But I do it in such a way that it’s going to cut off the last two minutes of the episode, overriding the download manager that normally insures against such eventualities. And you know what these things are like. Can you say cliffhanger? She’s going to die.
‘Can you do me a favour and not touch anything in future?’ I snap. Jane looks so miserable, I almost recant, until I open the fridge and see that she hasn’t bothered to place a grocery order.
There’s only ice cream. Thank God Communique has twenty-four hour chefs, which is one major benefit (apart from the sea view, of course) that made defecting from New Mutua all worth it.
I don’t ask if there’s anything Jane wants, although when I place the order with the kitchen, I throw in a side of avo maki. Keep your friends close and your enemies and all that. I’m just going to ignore the contradiction in how this philosophy pertains to my ruining her soap. The rules of contempt decree that you have to play nice occasionally.
I take a shower and decide the only way I’m going to get the dust (and okay, that man) out of my hair is to cut it off. So when the doorbell goes ten minutes later, I’m busy hacking through my braids with a pair of sewing scissors. Naturally, I assume it’s my sushi. But home™ logs the SIM as Toby. I waver about whether I really want to let him in, whether I can handle him right now, decide what the hell, and instantly regret it as he lopes in still wearing his peel, fresh from a surf on the Communique beach. He’s soaked. And his backpack is squirming.
‘You’re dripping on my carpet.’
‘Nice hair,’ he responds with real admiration, and leans down to kiss me on the mouth, a little too intimately. I shove him off, but, unlike Mpho, he’s not bothered by the rejection. ‘Gotta towel?’
Jane steps into the lounge to see who it is, and her face clouds. She and Toby share a prickly antipathy, although she flat out refuses to admit it’s because he’s not corporate. She’s internalised enough feel-good talkshows to know you should never confess to being a bigot.
I’ve been cohabiting with her for eight months now, assigned as live-ins according to synchronous personality matching by Seed. The overlap of our schedules is usually only an hour or so a day, not including weekends. I don’t know how she manages to be so bad at number-crunching that she has to work overtime so frequently. Maybe she’s trying to impress someone, get that promotion which is always and forever going to pass her by in favour of a smarter, better, more attractive candidate.
Not that I’m complaining. It means we stay out of each other’s way, and she’s oblivious to how I really spend my down time. (I could even confess to having maybe given Seed a little nudge in this direction, but hacking Communique’s central database would be a violation of company protocol, and subject to a downgrade at the very least.)
Toby is still bitching. ‘What is up with the security pricks? Like I haven’t been here a squillion billion times before. Scratch that your visitors should have free rein.’
‘Yeah, but then who knows what kind of streetside degenerates would wander in.’
‘People like me, most probably,’ Toby grins.
This is old routine. Even though I’ve hooked Toby up with a Communique Preferred Visitor’s card, he has a habit of losing it. I don’t let on how much this irritates me, because then he’d only do it on purpose, the same way he always ups the slang to get under my skin.
‘Poor baby. Lumped in with the civilian dregs again?’
‘Separate entrance and all. Back of the train. Can you tell?’ He sniffs himself suspiciously and then flumpfs into the couch, still wearing his peel. Jane bites off a little squeal of dismay.
‘But never mind my travails. How was Gabs?’
‘Shit. Thanks. It’s this big push on Push—’ Toby snickers gratifyingly. ‘But their cellular network is a shambles. It doesn’t have the bandwidth to cope with the content, and there have been horrendous glitches with Bula Metalo’s ads conflicting with the defusers. So it’s ads or social control. Your choice.’
‘Sounds like a good time to be a criminal in Botswana.’
‘Uh, yeah, apart from that whole death penalty thing.’
‘Hectic. Forget the work shit. I only asked to be polite. Did you get it?’ Toby grins lopsidedly in that way that girls find attractive, although, honestly, he’s more interesting than beautiful, especially since he’s started cultivating his beard.
Jane is still hovering in the alcove anomaly squeezed between the kitchen and the lounge, which is but one of many factors that reveals our apartment was originally intended for one inhabitant and then converted, which only makes me more bitterly resentful about being lumped in with tedious finances girl.
‘C’mon, let’s get you that towel,’ I say, downplaying his comment, and because I’m dying to see what’s in the bag. And yeah, okay, because otherwise Jane is going to have a coronary about the couch. I’m not completely heartless.
‘Should I call you when the food is here?’ she chirps.
‘You got edibles coming?’ Toby perks up. I might have suspected he would have the munchies.
‘Straight from Communique’s premier chefs.’
We traipse into my room and I close the door. Toby unpeels, weaseling out of the skintight suit that protects him from all the pollutants in the water. He’s not wearing anything underneath.
Jane assumes we fuck, but Toby and I worked that out of our systems years back. And besides, he’s too promiscuous. I know that sounds hypocritical coming from me, but I’m careful. I throw the towel at him.
‘You’re still not eating enough.’
‘Girls like a boy on the skinny. And besides, it’s not insufficient food. It’s oversurplus drugs.’
‘Speaking of which.’
Toby grins, and like a cheap magician, summons a joint of sugar between his fingers. But when I reach for it, he holds it above his head.
‘Uh-uh. Did you get it?’
‘Maybe. You gonna tell me what’s in the bag?’
‘Maybe,’ he shoots back. I pass him a lighter, and all play is put aside as he sucks the joint to life.
‘Do you ever worry about her?’ He jerks his head at the door.
‘Uh. No.’
‘Surely, surely, sugar and, hmm, let me see…’ He sniffs delicately at the length of the joint, takes a long drag and smacks his lips together, playing connoisseur. ‘Just a hint of vanilla and a touch of bliss isn’t exactly on the employee preapproved list?’