Paradise Tales (19 page)

You see, I was supposed to be a genius. My mother thought she was a genius, and had selected my father out of a sperm bank for geniuses. His only flaw, she told me, was his tendency toward baldness. BETsi could have told her: baldness is inherited from the maternal line.

She showed me a picture of herself in an old
Cosmopolitan
article. It caused a stir at the time.
“The New Motherhood,”
it was called.
Business women choose a new way.

There is a photograph of Booker looking young and almost pretty, beautifully lit and cradling her swollen tummy. Her whole face, looking down on herself, is illuminated with love.

In the article, she says: I know my son will be a genius. She says, I know he’ll have the right genes, and I will make sure he has the right upbringing.
Cosmopolitan
made no comment. They were making a laughing stock out of her.

Look, my mother was Booker McCall, chief editor of a rival magazine company with a £100 million-a-year turnover and only fifteen permanent employees, of which she was second in command. Nobody had a corporate job in those days, and if they did, it was wall-to-wall politics and performance. Booker McCall had stakeholders to suck up to, editors to commission, articles to read and tear to pieces. She had layouts to throw at designers’ heads. She had style to maintain, she had hair to keep up, shoes to repair, menus to plan. And then she had to score whatever she was on at the time. She was a very unhappy woman, with every reason to be.

She was also very smart, and BETsi was a good idea.

I used to look out of the window of the flat, and the outside world looked blue, gray, harsh. Sunlight always caught the grime on the glass and bleached everything out, and I thought that adults moved out into a hot world in which everybody shouted all the time. I never wanted to go out.

BETsi was my whole world. She had a screen, and she would show me paintings, one after another. Velasquez, Goya. She had a library of picture books—about monkeys or fishing villages or ghosts. She would allow me one movie a week, but always the right movie.
Jurassic Park
,
Beauty and the Beast
,
Tarzan on Mars
. We’d talk about them.

“The dinosaurs are made of light,” she told me. “The computer tells the video what light to make and what colours the light should be so that it looks like a dinosaur.”

“But dinosaurs really lived!” I remember getting very upset. I wailed at her. “They were really really real.”

“Yes, but not those, those are just like paintings of dinosaurs.”

“I want to see a real dinosaur!” I remember being heartbroken. I think I loved their size, their bulk, the idea of their huge hot breath. In my daydreams, I had a dinosaur for a friend and it would protect me in the world outside.

“Clancy,” BETsi warned me. “You know what is happening now.”

“Yes!” I shouted, “but knowing doesn’t stop it happening!”

BETsi had told me that I was shy. Did you know that shyness has a clinical definition?

I’d been tested for it. Once, BETsi showed me the test. First she showed me what she called the benchmark. On her screen, through a haze of fingerprints and jam, was one fat, calm, happy baby. Not me. “In the test,” BETsi explained, “a brightly coloured mobile is shown to the child. An infant who will grow up to be an outgoing and confident adult will tend to look at the mobile with calm curiosity for a time, get bored, and then look away.”

The fat happy baby smiled a little bit, reached up for the spinning red ducks and bright yellow bunnies, then sighed and looked around for something new.

“A shy baby will get very excited. This is you, when we gave you the same test.”

And there I was, looking solemn, two hundred years old at six months, my infant face crossed with some kind of philosophical puzzlement. Then, they show me the mobile. My face lights up, I start to bounce, I gurgle with pleasure, delight, spit shoots out of my mouth. I get over-excited, the mobile is slightly beyond my grasp. My face crumples up, I jerk with the first little cries. Moments later I am screaming myself purple, and trying to escape the mobile, which has begun to terrify me.

“That behaviour is hardwired,” BETsi explained. “You will always find yourself getting too happy and then fearful and withdrawn. You must learn to control the excitement. Then you will be less fearful.”

It’s like with VR. When they first started making that, they discovered they did not know enough about how we see and hear to duplicate the experience. They had to research people first. Same here. Before they could mimic personality, they first had to find out a lot more about what personality was.

BETsi had me doing Transcendental Meditation and yoga at three years old. She had me doing what I now recognize was Alexander Technique. I didn’t just nap, I had my knees up and my head on a raised wooden pillow. This was to elongate my back—I was already curling inward from tension.

After she got me calm, BETsi would get me treats. She had Booker’s credit-card number and authorization to spend. BETsi could giggle. When the ice cream was delivered, or the new CD full of clip art, or my new S&M Toddler black-leather gear, or my Barbie Sex-Change doll, BETsi would giggle.

I know. She was programmed to giggle so that I would learn it was all right to be happy. But it sounded as though there was something who was happy just because I was. For some reason, that meant I would remember all by myself to stay calm.

“I’ll open it later,” I would say, feeling very adult.

“It’s ice cream, you fool,” BETsi would say. “It’ll melt.”

“It will spread all over the carpet!” I whispered in delight.

“Booker will get ma-had.” BETsi said in a sing-song voice. BETsi knew that I always called Booker by her name.

BETsi could learn. She would have had to be trained to recognize and respond to my voice and Booker’s. She was programmed to learn who I was and what I needed. I needed conspiracy. I needed a confidant.

“Look. You melt the ice cream and I will clean it up,” she said.

“It’s ice cream, you fool,” I giggled back. “If it melts, I won’t be able to eat it!” We both laughed.

BETsi’s screen could turn into a mirror. I’d see my own face and inspect it carefully for signs of being like Tarzan. Sometimes, as a game, she would have my own face talk back to me in my own voice. Or I would give myself a beard and a deeper voice to see what I would look like as a grown up. To have revenge on Booker, I would make myself bald.

I was fascinated by men. They were mythical beasts, huge and loping like dinosaurs, only hairy. The highlight of my week was when the window cleaner arrived. I would trail after him, too shy to speak, trying to puff myself up to the same size as he was. I thought he was a hero, who cleaned windows and then saved people from evil.

“You’ll have to bear with Clancy,” BETsi would say to him. “He doesn’t see many men.”

“Don’t you get out, little fella?” he would say. His name was Tom.

“It’s not safe,” I managed to answer.

Tom tutted. “Oh, that’s true enough. What a world, eh? You have to keep the kiddies locked in all day. S’like a prison.” I thought that all men had South London accents.

He talked to BETsi as if she was a person. I don’t think Tom could have been very bright, but I do think he was a kindly soul. I think BETsi bought him things to give to me.

“Here’s an articulated,” he said once, and gave me a beautifully painted Matchbox lorry.

I took it in silence. I hated myself for being so tongue-tied. I wanted to swagger around the flat with him like Nick Nolte or Wesley Snipes.

“Do men drive in these?” I managed to ask.

“Some of them, yeah.”

“Are there many men?”

He looked blank. I answered for him. “There’s no jobs for men.”

Tom hooted with laughter. “Who’s been filling your head?” he asked.

“Clancy has a very high symbol-recognition speed,” BETsi told him. “Not genius, you understand. But very high. It will be useful for him in interpretative trades. However, he has almost no spatial reasoning. He will only ever dream of being a lorry driver.”

“I’m a klutz,” I translated.

Booker was an American—probably the most famous American in London at the time. BETsi was programmed to modulate her speech to match her owners. To this day, I can’t tell English and American accents apart unless I listen carefully. And I can imitate neither. I talk like BETsi.

I remember Tom’s face, like a suet pudding, pale, blotchy, uneasy. “Poor little fella,” he said. “I’d rather not know all that about myself.”

“So would Clancy,” said BETsi. “But I am programmed to hide nothing from him.”

Tom sighed. “Get him with other kids,” he told her.

“Oh, that is all part of the plan,” said BETsi.

I was sent to Social Skills class. I failed. I discovered that I was terrified without BETsi, that I did not know what to do or say to people when she wasn’t there. I went off into a corner with a computer screen, but it seemed cold, almost angry with me. If I didn’t do exactly the right thing it wouldn’t work, and it never said anything nice to me. The other children were like ghosts. They flittered around the outside of my perceptions. In my mind, I muted the noise they made. They sounded as if they were shouting from the other side of the window, from the harsh blue-gray world.

The consultants wrote on my first report: Clancy is socially backward, even for his age.

Booker was furious. She showed up one Wednesday and argued about it.

“Do you realize that a thing like that could get in my son’s record!”

“It happens to be true, Miss McCall.” The consultant was appalled and laughed from disbelief.

“This crèche leaves children unattended and blames them when their development is stunted.” Booker was yelling and pointing at the woman. “I want that report changed. Or I will report on you!”

“Are you threatening to write us up in your magazines?” the consultant asked in a quiet voice.

“I’m telling you not to victimize my son for your own failings. If he isn’t talking to the other children, it’s your job to help him.”

Talking to other kids was my job. I stared at my shoes, mortified. I didn’t want Booker to help me, but I half wanted her to take me out of the class, and I knew that I would hate it if she did.

I went to BETsi for coaching.

“What you may not know,” she told me, “is that you have a natural warmth that attracts people.”

“I do?” I said.

“Yes. And all most people want from other people is that they be interested in them. Shall we practice?”

On her screen, she invented a series of children. I would try to talk to them. BETsi didn’t make it easy.

“Do you like reading?” I’d ask a little girl on the screen.

“What?” she replied with a curling lip.

“Books,” I persisted, as brave as I could be. “Do you read books?”


She blinked—bemused, bored, confident.

“Do … do you like
Jurassic Park
?”

“It’s old! And it doesn’t have any story.”

“Do you like new movies?” I was getting desperate.

“I play games.
Bloodlust Demon
.” The little girl’s eyes went narrow and fierce. That was it. I gave up.

“BETsi,” I complained. “This isn’t fair.” Booker would not allow me to play computer games.

BETsi chuckled and used her own voice. “That’s what it’s going to be like, kiddo.”

“Then show me some games.”

“Can’t,” she said.

“Not in the program,” I murmured angrily.

“If I tried to show you one, I’d crash,” she explained.

So I went back to Social Skills class determined to talk and it was every bit as awful as BETsi had said, but at least I was ready.

I told them all, straight out: I can’t play games, I’m a klutz, all I can do is draw. So, I said, tell me about the games.

And that was the right thing to do. At five I gave up being Tarzan and started to listen, because the kids could at least tell me about video games. They could get puffed up and important, and I would seep envy, which must have been very satisfying for them. But. In a funny kind of way they sort of liked me.