Mick had been impressed by the robot. But for Joe it was a stepping stone to something even better.
“Think about it,” he’d said. “A few years ago, tourists started switching over to nervelinks instead of robots. Who wants to drive a clunky machine around some smelly foreign city, when you can drive a warm human body instead? Robots can see stuff, they can move around and pick stuff up, but they can’t give you the smells, the taste of food, the heat, the contact with other people.”
“Mm,” Mick had said noncommittally. He didn’t really approve of nervelinking, even though it essentially paid Andrea’s wages.
“So we’re going to do the same. We’ve got the kit. Getting it installed is a piece of piss. All we need now is a solid link.”
And now Joe had what he’d been waiting for. Mick could practically see the Nature cover-article in his friend’s eyes. Perhaps he was even thinking about taking that long train ride to Stockholm.
“I hope it works out for you,” Mick said.
Joe patted the correlator again. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”
That was when one of Joe’s undergraduates came up to them. To Mick’s surprise, it wasn’t Joe she wanted to speak to.
“Doctor Leighton?”
“That’s me.”
“There’s somebody to see you, sir. I think it’s quite important.”
“Someone to see me?”
“They said you left a note in your office.”
“I did,” Mick said absent-mindedly. “But I also said I wouldn’t be gone long. Nothing’s that important, is it?”
But the person who had come to find Mick was a policewoman. When Mick met her at the top of the stairs her expression told him it wasn’t good news.
“Something’s happened,” he said.
She looked worried, and very, very young. “Is there somewhere we can talk, Mister Leighton?”
“Use my office,” Joe said, showing the two of them to his room just down the corridor. Joe left the two of them alone, saying he was going down to the coffee machine in the hall.
“I’ve got some bad news,” the policewoman said, when Joe had closed the door. “I think you should sit down, Mister Leighton.”
Mick pulled out Joe’s chair from under the desk, which was covered in papers: coursework Joe must have been in the process of grading. Mick sat down, then didn’t know where to put his hands. “It’s about Andrea, isn’t it.”
“I’m afraid your wife was in an accident this morning,” the policewoman said.
“What kind of accident? What happened?”
“Your wife was hit by a car when she was crossing the road.”
A mean, little thought flashed through Mick’s mind. Bloody Andrea: she’d always been one for dashing across a road without looking. He’d been warning her for years she was going to regret it one day.
“How is she? Where did they take her?”
“I’m really sorry, sir.” The policewoman hesitated. “Your wife died on the way to hospital. I understand that the paramedics did all they could, but…”
Mick was hearing it, and not hearing it. It couldn’t be right. People still got knocked down by cars. But they didn’t die from it, not anymore. Cars couldn’t go fast enough in towns to kill anyone. Being knocked down and killed by a car was something that happened to people in soap operas, not real life.
Feeling numb, not really present in the room, Mick said, “Where is she now?” As if by visiting her, he might prove that they’d got it wrong, that she wasn’t dead at all.
“They took her to the Heath, sir. That’s where she is now. I can drive you there.”
“Andrea isn’t dead,” Mick said. “She can’t be. Not now.”
“I’m really sorry,” the policewoman said.
SATURDAY
For the last three weeks, ever since they had separated, Mick had been sleeping in a spare room at his brother’s house in Newport. The company had been good, but now Bill was away for the weekend on some ridiculous team-building exercise in Snowdonia. For tedious reasons, Mick’s brother had had to take the house keys with him, leaving Mick with nowhere to sleep on Friday night. When Joe had asked him where he was going to stay, Mick said he’d go back to his own house, the one he’d left at the beginning of the month.
Joe was having none of it, and insisted that Mick sleep at his house instead. Mick spent the night going through the usual cycle of emotions that came with any sudden bad news. He’d had nothing to compare with losing his wife, but the texture of the shock was familiar enough, albeit magnified from anything in his previous experience. He resented the fact that the world seemed to be continuing, crassly oblivious to Andrea’s death. The news wasn’t dominated by his tragedy; it was all about some Polish miners trapped underground. When he finally managed to get to sleep, Mick was tormented by dreams that his wife was still alive, that it had all been a mistake.
But he knew it was all true. He’d been to the hospital; he’d seen her body. He even knew why she’d been hit by the car. Andrea had been crossing the road to her favorite hair salon; she’d had an appointment to get her hair done. Knowing Andrea, she had probably been so focused on the salon that she was oblivious to all that was going on around her. It hadn’t even been the car that had killed her in the end. When the slow-moving vehicle knocked her down, Andrea had struck her head against the side of the curb.
By midmorning on Saturday, Mick’s brother had returned from Snowdonia. Bill came around to Joe’s house and hugged Mick silently, saying nothing for many minutes. Then Bill went into the next room and spoke quietly to Joe and Rachel. Their low voices made Mick feel like a child in a house of adults.
“I think you and I need to get out of Cardiff,” Bill told Mick, when he returned to the living room. “No ifs, no buts.”
Mick started to protest. “There’s too much that needs to be done. I still need to get back to the funeral home.”
“It can wait until this afternoon. No one’s going to hate you for not returning a few calls. C’mon; let’s drive up to the Gower and get some fresh air. I’ve already reserved a car.”
“Go with him,” Rachel said. “It’ll do you good.”
Mick acquiesced, his guilt and relief in conflict at being able to put aside thoughts of the funeral plans. He was glad Bill had come down, but he couldn’t quite judge how his brother—or his friends, for that matter—viewed his bereavement. He’d lost his wife. They all knew that. But they also knew that Mick and Andrea had been separated. They’d been having problems for most of the year. It would only be human for his friends to assume that Mick wasn’t quite as affected by Andrea’s death as he would have been had they still been living together.
“Listen,” he told Bill, when they were safely under way. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Andrea and I had problems. But it wasn’t the end of our marriage. We were going to get through this. I was going to call her this weekend, see if we couldn’t meet.”
Bill looked at him sadly. Mick couldn’t tell if that meant that Bill just didn’t believe him, or that his brother pitied him for the opportunity he’d allowed to slip between his fingers.
When they got back to Cardiff in the early evening, after a warm and blustery day out on the Gower, Joe practically pounced on Mick as soon as they came through the door.
“I need to talk to you,” Joe said. “Now.”