‘Pithy. I like it. Except for the image of Hannibal Lecter having sex. No one needs that in their head.’
‘I came up with it between Euston Square and Great Portland Street. It’s one of the many ideas I’m not going to be able to use.’
‘No – obviously not.’
‘I’ll have to make something up. Honestly, you should hear the recording. It’s like picking through a train wreck.’
‘Hmm. That actually sounds pretty interesting.’
‘It is interesting. Probably more interesting than whatever bullshit I end up writing. But that’s not the point. It’s still unusable.’
‘Maybe a second opinion would help?’
I thought about and quickly dismissed this suggestion. I didn’t really want Beck to listen to the recording. Not all of it. I changed the subject.
‘Listen: have you ever heard of something called the Monkeysphere?’
Beck looked at me like I’d started speaking in tongues.
‘How about Caborn’s number? They’re essentially the same thing, but one has a catchier name. It’s sciencey,’ I added. ‘I thought you might have heard of it.’
‘I haven’t,’ Beck assured me.
‘Right. Well, it’s basically a theory of primate societies. Professor Caborn is an evolutionary psychologist. He spent a lot of time examining monkey brains and discovered a correlation between the size of the brain and the size of the monkey’s social sphere. So baboons tend to form cliques of, say, thirty, and chimps fifty, and so on. Are you following so far?’
‘Yes: the brainier the monkey, the more monkey friends it has. Is this going somewhere?’
‘Yes. Be patient.’ I took a deep glug from my wine glass. ‘So Caborn’s number is a theoretical limit. It’s the number of social relationships a monkey can cope with, as determined by the size of its brain. Or, put differently, it’s the maximum number of monkeys that can live together before their society becomes unstable and fragments.’
Beck looked at me for several seconds. ‘I’m confused. What does this have to do with Miranda Frost?’
‘Nothing. This is a new topic, or a tangent, at least. I should have made that clearer. Anyway, just let me finish. Caborn’s number applies to humans, too. Actually, I think it refers specifically to humans; the monkeys are just context. You see, Professor Caborn drew a graph with different primate brain sizes on one axis and the average size of their social groups on the other. And from this he was able to extrapolate the maximum size a human society should be – or can be – before it starts to break into pieces. Turns out it’s about one hundred and fifty. Humans can maintain up to one hundred and fifty meaningful social relationships, but no more. After that . . . I don’t know. Our brains overheat or something. They haven’t evolved to cope with very large populations.’
‘Our brains overheat?’
‘Okay, I’m paraphrasing. Trust me, this is credible science, backed up by a mass of supporting evidence. So, for example, guess the average clan size in a traditional hunter-gatherer society?’
‘Er, one hundred and fifty?’
‘Bingo! Same story for pre-industrial villages. And guess what the Amish do if their communities grow to more than one hundred and fifty.’
‘They start to strangle each other?’
‘No need. Their communities split into two at this point – invariably. Because the Amish have figured out that below the one fifty threshold, society is essentially stable and self-regulating. Everyone knows and is emotionally connected to everyone else, so there’s a natural drive towards cooperation, reciprocal generosity, trustworthiness – stuff like that. It’s only when the population creeps past Caborn’s number that things start to go wrong, people begin to feel a little more anonymous in the group, less mutually dependent. Morals take a small but noticeable dip. Basically, people lose their capacity to care about everyone else in the community, so the social glue starts to fail.’
‘Okay, that’s all very interesting . . . And where has this sudden interest in evolutionary psychology come from?’
I shrugged. ‘I was reading about it last night, when I had the insomnia. I just kind of stumbled on it online and it seemed weirdly pertinent. You know, because of Simon.’
‘Simon?’ Beck let the name hang in the air a few moments. ‘This is to do with Simon?’
‘Right. Because we knew next to nothing about him. He wasn’t really a person to us, not in any meaningful sense – just a face we passed on the stairs every so often. We lived yards apart but never interacted, and his death was just a weird blip in our day. It had no emotional significance whatsoever.’
Beck grimaced, the way people do when you say something true but unacceptable. And this made me smile a little.
‘Not in our Monkeysphere,’ I concluded.
I couldn’t sleep again that night.
By twelve thirty, I was back at the computer, alone, banging my head against the brick wall that was the Miranda Frost recording. There was simply no point of entry. Anything vaguely relevant disintegrated within a couple of sentences; contrarily, anything that struck me as interesting – anything worth writing about – was irrelevant, had no place in a broadsheet interview.
I wondered if the problem was focus. I couldn’t seem to grip anything in my mind for more than a few seconds. My thoughts kept jumping, like a scratched CD. And all the while, Miranda and I kept twittering in the background, our voices muted and tinny. There was a strange interior logic to what we were saying, a back-and-forth, tennis-match rhythm, but no wider sense of meaning, or even reality.
I thought again about the speed in the freezer, and again decided not to. It might have helped me concentrate, but, just as easily, I could have found myself staring at the wall and grinding my jaw until sunrise. Instead, I drank a pint of water, opened the window as far as it would go, and lit another cigarette.
The wind was picking up. Its sound combined with that of the fizzling rain to create a sweeping curtain of white noise. I perched on the edge of the window sill, stuck my head out and let the dirty city air buffet my face. Then, without thinking too much about what I was doing, I returned to my laptop and started transcribing the interview.
I played the recording from the beginning and I wrote out each sentence in turn, one after another, changing or omitting not a single word; and the more I typed, the clearer everything seemed.
After a couple of hours, I’d almost reached my two thousand words, and all that was left was my account of discovering Simon’s corpse. At this point, I went back through the dialogue and added some expositional gloss here and there. Then I returned to the top of the document and added a long but satisfying title: Something Different: Miranda Frost interviews Abigail Williams, literary harlot (words Abigail Williams; invective Miranda Frost).
Then, at approximately quarter to four in the morning, I started writing the companion piece.
‘Simon’s flat was a mirror of ours . . .’
My mind was as clear and keen as a shard of glass.
4
GONZO
To: jessica.pearle@observer.co.uk
From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013, 6:48 AM
Subject: MF Interview
Jess, hi
First, let me apologize. The death I spoke of was my neighbour’s: he was close to me geographically, but not in any other sense. I’m afraid I misled you with a half-truth because I was in a bit of a flap about the Miranda Frost interview, which did not go at all as planned. You’ll understand when you read the attached article.
Also attached is a companion piece, which I felt compelled to write. It follows on directly from the ‘interview’; please read them in turn, as this is the only way they make sense.