A Calculated Life (10 page)

She opened her eyes—an hour and a half had passed—and rested her mind awhile. One more attempt. This time she plunged through Europe-wide data for car ownership, fuel types, manufacturers, dealerships, scrap prices. She glimpsed a near-perfect proposition. But it lay beyond her grasp.

Patience
.
Something will emerge soon.

Most of the residents had dispersed by the time Jayna reached the canteen for lunch. She bowed low over her soup and noticed a scattering of crumbs across the table and three water rings. Good: the others had been and gone.

As normal for a Saturday afternoon, she set out from the rest station towards the Entertainment Quarter. Two blocks along, however, she turned southwest into Portland Street. Automated road cleaners were slowly clearing and spraying the gutters, sucking debris from the pavements. Steeling herself against any loss of nerve, she resumed her ongoing study of the city streets: the pattern of paving slabs and kerbstones, the incidence of cracking, and the distribution of manhole covers and grids. But her thoughts still bolted ahead.
I do actually like Dave
. She swept her colloquialisms.
He wears his heart on his sleeve. That’s it…he’s emotional, raw. He’s even slightly unpredictable; perfect for me. I can learn so much from him, if he lets me
.

The bookshop came into view and, as though she might otherwise turn tail, she made a rapid-fire commercial assessment. An unprepossessing frontage, shop floor area, say, of thirty square meters, a gross profit margin of between 10 and 15 per cent of turnover, depending on their stock control, working capital, and liquidity ratios. Behind-the-wall earnings, most likely, many times the shop’s turnover. The bookshop itself was a brand-building operation, she guessed…a myriad of unseen trading operations generating the bulk of the profits, and hence shareholder dividends, related to less exciting products delivered from warehouses located at transport hubs…

And now she stood at the shop entrance. Judging by the restricted opening hours, Jayna decided the shop assistant must be a simulant of the Frank or Freda variety, no doubt stuffed full of data on all things bookish—paper and binding quality, number of printings in each edition, number of issues incorporating minor changes, preferred editions, etc., etc. The perfect shop manager to deal with an erudite customer base.

Entering, she saw Dave at the far end of the shop but she turned to the female assistant. “May I browse?”

“Feel free. We have something for everyone—literature, classics, children’s and illustrated, local history, travel and topography, decorative arts, things Japanese”—exactly, Jayna thought, a Freda—“and a section on regional maps printed mostly pre-1800…”

Dave guessed that Jayna had deliberately ignored him and he played along. “Jayna. Hi! Thought I knew the voice.”

“Hello, Dave. I didn’t expect to see anyone I knew here. Do you come here often?”

He hid a broad smirk by looking down at his feet. For all her brains, she came out with some rubbish lines. Forcing the smile off his face, he looked up. “I bought a couple of books for Olivia from here. What about you?”

“Just passing; thought I’d look in.” She selected a book at random, flicking the pages, settling on the imprint.

“Don’t you love the smell of old books?” he said.

Jayna was a blank. What was he talking about? Of course. An olfactory signal—pleasant memories. She looked at the small book in her hands then turned her back to the assistant to shield their conversation. “Let’s go to your place, Dave. How long will it take?”

“Err…it’s five stops out from the terminus on Line 3.” This was all moving a bit fast and his eyebrows were darting. “How long have you got?”

“I need to be back by five-thirty.”

“Okay. That’s do-able.”

“You leave now ahead of me and I’ll follow you in three minutes. Wait at the platform till you see me and I’ll join you on the shuttle.”

“What’s the cloak and dagger for?”

“I’ll explain later.”

Slowly he returned his book to the shelf, making time to think. “You look a bit too tidy for my neighborhood. I’ll give you my top shirt when we meet up.”

“All right. Now say ‘goodbye’ to me and go. Please.”

He complied in a roundabout way partly for Freda’s benefit. “Look, Jayna, I’m sorry. I have to rush. Great to see you, though.” He leaned towards her—tilting his head twenty-five degrees from the vertical—moved his face towards her right cheek and placed his mouth against her skin. Simultaneously, he grasped her right upper arm and pulled her towards him; she pitched a half step forward, off balance. He pressed his mouth more firmly against her cheek. He released her. “Let’s meet up soon.” And he headed off.

She didn’t think. She simply preserved the impression; his mouth on her face, his hand on her arm. And she held on to his smell. She waited. Waited. But no memories were triggered. Jayna couldn’t work out why she liked the smell of his hair, his skin. This was something very simple; too basic for words. Only a shadow of Dave’s touch remained. As she stared at the open book in her hands, she predicted that whenever she thought of this encounter she would always recall this little book. She flicked the pages, lifted the book, and inhaled molecules of old ink and paper. That too. She’d remember that.

Striking southwards, she tried to conjure images of Dave’s life in the enclaves. And because the evidence of her eyes might later obliterate these imaginings, she decided to fix her mind-images—his street,
his apartment, his belongings, his beehives. She could test her reality gap. But beyond the images, what else? Could she and Dave become so familiar and so totally at ease in one another’s company, if she visited him often, got to know his neighbors well enough to pass conversation, if she and Dave shopped for groceries, walked through his local park on Sunday afternoons…Could they become the very best of friends? She imagined one possible future:
he’s meeting me at the shuttle station and I’m waving, he’s walking towards me, we’re holding hands and walking through the streets together…we’re drinking coffee at a pavement café.

Leaving the commercial district, she walked along the glass-walled buildings of the sprawling university complex. The pavements widened and the dense canopies of whitebeam gave intermittent shade to the weekend pedestrians. Relegated, she thought, these whitebeam; just a form of sunblock now. But, once upon a time, they were the stuff of industry—the cogs, literally! As the sun flashed at her each time she strode out of the shade, it seemed the trees and sunlight conspired to send a message. For she made a firm decision to do more of this—take more walks through the city. Only, in future, she would walk without purpose, finding new places by chance. She passed two young women lying like bookends along a low wall, head to head; the space around them filled with chatter and shrill laughter. Luxury. Empty time.

Out in the open, she crossed the no-man’s-land in front of the terminus. What were the chances, she wondered, of meeting someone from Mayhew McCline? And what would she tell them? Part of the truth: she’d been modeling the transport sector on and off for six months and not once had she traveled down a shuttle line. Anyway, if she had to, she could justify visiting Dave. Benjamin had given her clearance, of a kind.

Dave watched from the platform and held his over-shirt in his hand. Seeing Jayna approach, he stepped onto the waiting shuttle. She followed. There were nine other passengers in the compartment
and Dave led her to a bench seat at the far end. The carriage was more utilitarian than she had expected: stripped down metal, no livery, wooden slatted seats, windows that opened manually, no air-conditioning.

“So what was all
that
about?” said Dave.

“I don’t want anyone to know I’m meeting you.”

“Why should the shop assistant matter? What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know for sure, Dave, but I don’t think it would go down too well at the office. And the shop assistant was a simulant so if anyone asked questions she’d have perfect recall.”

“It’s your weekend. It’s nobody else’s business.”

“They wouldn’t see it like that.”

“They don’t fucking own you.”

“No. Not quite. Well, yes, they do really.”

The carriage juddered. They looked out as the shuttle gathered speed and within half a minute they were flying noiselessly away from the city center. The buildings blurred; she hunted for a recognizable feature. It made her eyes hurt. So she relaxed and tried to absorb the visual cacophony. And, this way, she sensed that the built forms were gradually changing in character from large bulks with shiny, reflective surfaces to smaller, less dazzling blocks with irregular rooflines; more complexity and more greenery. She grasped she was witnessing the compactness and semi-structured order of the suburbs. Despite the shuttle’s speed, it was apparent that security wires lined the tracks.

At the precise moment this realization crystallized, the shuttle burst into a landscape so unrestricted that she gasped. An almost unreachable horizon, a high blue sky stretching across the entire landscape. She placed her hand flat against the window, for she wanted to stand out there, alone amid the giant discs of green and yellow that lay squat and unbounded on chocolate brown soils. She wanted to stand out there and feel the size of the planet through her feet. This was the first time she had appreciated—through the kind
of revelation only granted, she now realized, to a witness—that the Earth really did curve, but so slightly. She felt less than tiny. She felt like a negative presence; a scratch of an entity on the skin of a planetary body.

The circular fields’ bright colors grayed towards the horizon. These were the irrigated expanses of Outer Manchester, at one time a rain-fed region for cereals and livestock. Now, crops sprang to attention only at the command of overhead gantries with their clouds of water droplets. The discs gave way to endless, fuzzy lines etched across the bare earth as though the farmers were primarily tasked with an empirical study in perspective.

“The vineyards,” she said.

“The olive farms lie south of here. And the citrus groves are farther west, closer to where I live,” said Dave.

“It’s beautiful.”

“I know,” he said. “But way out of reach.”

She turned to him. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a business; no room for day-trippers.”

Facing forward again, she detected something low and shapeless emerging through the heat haze. Even as they sped closer she discerned no punctuations; no towers, no spires, no cranes. This had to be the first enclave, she thought. The shuttle slowed towards the station and the new urban landscape became a reality. No clear signs of economic activity, no factories, only three small warehouses on a siding; minor distribution depots, she supposed. She caught sight of street lights but no vehicles, and monotonous blocks of low-rise housing units, four to six storeys high, clearly set out on a grid pattern, untidy with clothes hanging from balconies, which—as far as she could make out—were largely relegated to household storage. Several balconies, however, were boarded up, possibly to make additional rooms. She wondered if the architects for these miserly buildings had sketched patio furniture for these ostensibly desirable indoor-outdoor spaces.

The shuttle pulled into the station. Functionality laid bare; no advertising hoardings, no wrought-iron squirls hinting at former glory days. No romance had ever been connected to this place, she thought. “It’s not what I expected.”

“I did warn you.”

“Yes, but are all the enclaves like this? Aren’t there any parks?”

“Parks? You’re thinking of the inner suburbs. We’ve passed those. Our shuttles don’t even stop there. We’re pushed out to the enclaves as fast as possible.”

“I know…but I didn’t realize the enclaves looked like this.” She sighed. “I guess I didn’t translate the data too well.”

At each shuttle stop, the urban vista remained a monochrome. But the intervening countryside transformed into a sea of citrus—a whispered reminder, she thought, of the country’s wild and wooded past, when great oaks were felled and carved into giants just like Olivia’s
Jesse
.

“Put the shirt on, Jayna. We’ll be there in two minutes.”

She felt her throat tighten. Her breathing became shallow. Her imagination had failed her. Already the reality gap was huge.
I should peer between the lines of data; interpolate rather than extrapolate. I could have deduced something closer to the truth. I simply wasn’t looking for it
.

CHAPTER 7

S
tation Five: two concrete platforms,
a concrete pedestrian bridge, no platform buildings, no personnel; only the sound of children, screeching, beyond the station perimeter wall. Dave and Jayna walked through an unmanned gateway, out onto a vast hardstanding, bare except for the faded markings of parking bays and the scattered intrusions of lusty flowering weeds. She traced the faint painted lines with her steps and called to Dave above the clamor of the children, “Did your family own a car?” He shook his head. She recalled one of those barren facts: private car ownership in the enclaves, in the ten years following the Major Relocations, fell from an average of 30 per cent to zero.