An hour later I stopped drawing to order some cake and stretch my back. An hour after that I went back to the supply shop and bought five canvas boards and some oils, and I went home, assuring the cab man I would give him double what was on the meter if only he would go slowly through the seething mass of steel.
I painted for seven days straight. If she had still been alive, Michael’s mother would have left me again, and this time it would have been quite deserved. I worked as only someone who lives without dependents or lovers can, but somehow, for the first time in years, I thought I felt the touch of her hand on my shoulder as I paused for breath or to get water for myself or the paint, and I cried a little, as old men sometimes do. Death has a tendency with age to gather in around one, taking first the luminaries and friends of that subtly older generation one assumes will last for ever, and then picking off strangers and old flames, old enemies and finally one’s family, until what you might call without irony a skeleton crew remains, each of us fighting to be the last – or perhaps the second last, to leave some poor sod the one who truly dies alone. Eleni was among the first of those I loved to go out of the world.
It began with a more mundane leave-taking. A little more than two weeks after Michael’s third birthday – that would make it the middle of ’79 – she cooked me a very fine breakfast. She sat across the table with her hands folded and told me that she must go. She knew it was unfair, but she must. It was the only honest course.
I cried out, as if I had been shot, and then I was very calm. If this was the honest course then there must, I reasoned, be a dishonest one. Had she taken a lover? No, she said, not yet. It was all very proper, but she was lying to her heart and to God, and she must follow the call in her even if it meant breaking the written law.
I entertained the hypothesis rather than accepting the reality. I thought perhaps if I understood the new life she was making, I might cause her to choose the old one instead. I asked her, in that spirit, how often I would be allowed to see Michael.
Michael, she replied, would stay with me. I should please bring him to visit her often. We would establish a regular pattern, so that he would not be too upset.
So it went on, back and forth. If I seem to you very reasonable, very model in my inaction, it is this great distance of time that makes it so. In between reasonable questions I railed at her, and we both shrieked and howled.
Finally, I asked who she was going to. Was he richer, younger, stronger? A better lover, a kinder man? She said: ‘Marion,’ and after that I didn’t try to argue anymore. Marion was the singing teacher at her school, a thin redheaded woman with fluttering fingers that made me think of birds.
That’s how it was. It was an upheaval and it hurt, but in time it came to be ordinary. Eleni and Marion were never far away when I needed them. Michael was furious and then resigned and finally delighted to have acquired an additional parent, and I found that my jealousy was limited to competition for time and company, not for love. I had other relationships, but always circumscribed, always finite. It was rather a lot to ask of any woman that she compete with the nearby mother of my son, share the kitchen and the living room with her each week. Some managed it, others did not, but none ever stayed.
In 1999, Eleni and Marion moved to the south of France, and a few months later they died there together, in the clear Mediterranean Sea. Eleni had an inoperable tumour, and they had chosen a very Roman passage home.
I wish I could say ‘ancient history’ after all these years, but I can’t, and still less when her gentle ghost comes to pay me a visit. Still, I believe she had a happy ending, in so far as anyone does.
*
A week after the meeting at the Fire Judges I moved my bed into the living room to be nearer the work. When I woke I painted and when I was tired I slept. It was the exact experience to which I had laid claim long ago but never truly found. I existed in the work and it in me and that was all. I was ridden by the brush.
I was immersed, too, in a kind of odd fugue triggered by Annie’s remarkable photographic project. My granddaughter was doing something I did not fully understand with her identity: it was not what I would have done, nor what Michael might have chosen, nor his mother, and nor indeed Annie’s. It was entirely her own – a way of being British out of Ethiopia that knew its past but was not tied to it, and it had taken her to an interrogation of colour and mind that had not occurred to me as an artist or as a man. I began to question colour itself, to wonder about it as I never had before. I found myself considering the spectrum as an arbitrary designation. Why, after all, should there be seven colours? The answer is that there are not, as my parents could have told me. The rainbow is a continuum of infinitely many colours. Seven is no more a real count than Father Christmas was always red and white. (He was green and silver until the Coca-Cola Company made him their messenger, in case you didn’t know.) Which, in turn, means that between green and blue there are interim colours, just as orange and yellow come between red and green. Even by the crude standard of our inherited awareness of the rainbow there are missing tints which have no names.
Paint, I realised, had a secret history bound to language and thought, and as I began to read about it, I understood that it was among other things my history, because woven through it was the strange journey of the different colours that are called black. Both black and white have – ho ho – a chequered history, and they were themselves susceptible for centuries to fine divisions of quality and kind. The old northern Europeans had swart and blaek: the wicked and elf-filled matte black, and the fertile luminosity of a darkness that filled the night with shapes and benign magic. Likewise the Romans had ater and niger, and that first word now forgotten is the root of ‘atrocious’, while the other, originally the same happy, effulgent black the Teutons knew, bequeaths us our modern ‘Negro’ and its associated racial slurs, as well as the country of Nigeria.
By an effort of will, I pulled myself around. I did not wish to scrutinise black as if it was anomalous. Instead – in line with Annie’s determination – I looked at white. White – wite and blank or albus and candidus – could be just as dangerous as black, or just as godly, in the ancient world: a leprous sickness or a guide in the storm. The Christian Bible must carry some blame for the slow shift to a more binary view of black and white, unequivocal as it is about the role of light in the Creation and the place of darkness in sin – but so too must the entrenchment of profit as a new god, for black was the colour of working men, where white was for the nobility.
I realised as I said all this aloud to my canvas that I had conducted my entire examination of colour in English. Why so, and not in Amharic or, for a particularly scholarly investigation, Ge’ez? Well, there were good and sufficient reasons in my own history, so I need not feel too much guilt about it, but was there a sense of a brightness in ጥቁር, or a sickly flavour to ነጭ? I had never studied the philology of Ethiopia and did not know. It might be the journey of the rest of my life to unravel the cultural history of colour to my own satisfaction, and I had things to do first, obligations to discharge and, yes, art to make. Perhaps the work would be done better in ten years, after I had unravelled more of this fascinating digression – but art is never pure and commerce, like mortality, is uncompromising in its adherence to schedules. Annie’s investors had a right to expect timely delivery from me, and so did she.
I ordered larger canvas, stretched on heavy frames, and converted the living room entirely into a studio. The rest of the house began to feel fusty and useless, so I closed and locked many of the doors. I was aware of the irony that, having wanted to connect with a wider world, I was now shutting it out, but it afforded me only amusement, especially after Annie loaned me one of the desktop computers of immense power that the Fire Judges seemed to consider necessary, and gave me remote access to something called the Spine. This was a box in an attic somewhere (‘Actually it’s an old nuclear shelter in Belsize Park’) and I had my own bit of it where I might keep images and i
deas, and what is called read-only access to the rest, meaning that I might see almost anything the company was doing, but not alter it, this being a protection against accidental erasure. Since the Spine was evidently the digital equivalent of a safe, or possibly an engine room, I was grateful for the boundary. Even so, the protections around it were ferocious, and Annie insisted – in a rare moment of straightforward technical lecturing – that I know them off by heart.
‘Authentication on steroids,’ Annie said. ‘Username and password, that’s standard. We start there, then we add a dongle.’
‘Excuse me,’ I asked, ‘a what?’
‘A physical key. Don’t ask why it’s called that, no one knows. A physical object that proves your right to access a given resource. These days it’s usually your phone. In our case it’s a little doodad you wear around your wrist.’
‘Think of it like a credit card,’ Colson suggested. Annie rolled her eyes.
I am somewhat notorious in the family for mistrusting the modern apparatus of consumer credit and wearing habitually a bracelet made from a number of 1967 gold krugerrand. It is a piratical affectation that I am mostly forgiven, and very dashing, no doubt, upon an old fart, but I wear it because I have never entirely let go the fear that one day I might once again need to run. I explained this to Colson, who looked fascinated and then approving. ‘Digital financial transactions,’ he said, ‘are in their naive optimistic stage. Good call. Security should be wearable. Or …’ He raised his hand.
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘If you’re a total lunatic, you can have the chip encased in plastic and implanted in your arm so that you can Obi-Wan your way around the office. I don’t recommend it.’
‘But still: Obi-Wan,’ Colson said, which made me smile. He pointed at my arm in support of his position. I slipped the dongle around my wrist, next to the bracelet.
Annie sighed. ‘Settle down, boys. All right. Something you know and something you have. Two factors. Okay? But we need more than that. The dongle itself has a biometric scanner. Most people use fingerprints or retinal scan, even aural topology scan, but there are issues with those. Once they’re compromised, that’s it – you have a finite number. And they lend themselves to rather ugly forms of violence. We’re trialling microbial cloud analysis. The sensor in the dongle is actually patterned after canine nasal cells, which always sounds a little bit weird.’ Yes. To these silicon children, biology is outré. ‘Anyway: everyone has a distinct collection of biomass on and around the skin. Recognition is about ninety-six per cent accurate, so not perfect, but it’s incredibly hard to fake. For full-access login, we have predictive neural modelling and response.’
‘What’s that?’
Colson shook his head. ‘It’s the absolute creepiest thing in the world.’
‘The machine asks you a string of random questions,’ Annie said, ‘and measures your answers against its analysis of your personality. It’s not predicting your answer, it’s determining whether it’s the sort of answer you’d give. Over time, it also notices if you’re changing in significant ways. That’s why Colson hates it.’
‘It’s fucking intrusive,’ Colson growled. ‘In theory, it could decide you’re emotionally unstable and tell your boss. If you vary too much from your previous behaviour, it might lock you out of your own files. There’s potential for abuse, Annie, and you know it. The alcohol anklet people could use it to say you’re backsliding. And those probation futurecrime fuckers, they’d love it: if your connectome gets too much like the one you had when you were a sinner, off to jail you go! And sooner or later, someone’s going to say it can detect defections and whistleblowers before they can decide what they’re going to do themselves. Maybe you see something, I don’t know, you’re an oil exec and you see the results of a spill. The system might lock you out for insufficient faith in the corporate ethos. Loyalty-based access.’
Annie glanced at me. ‘Colson believes the world is on the brink of a collapse into pre-liberal government. The erasure of the twentieth century.’
‘It is,’ Colson said firmly.
‘Be that as it may—’
‘Loyalty-based access. It’s the automation of the merger of a religion of the state with corporate power in the form of information.’
‘We’ll code it out.’
‘Someone’ll code it back in.’
‘They won’t be able to.’
‘They’ll try.’
‘That’s why we haven’t sold it,’ Annie said, a little exasperated, and then to me once more: ‘Five requirements. It’s like putting ingredients in a cauldron for a magic spell. A significant object, your name, a secret word, your body. Then eventually, connectome: your soul.’
‘Your mind,’ Colson growled.
‘Magic,’ Annie reminded him. ‘Anyway: by the time you’ve used the system for a while, it’ll know you well enough for the PNMR. It means no one sees your work before you’re ready, no one gets our software who shouldn’t have it. I just want you to understand it enough to appreciate that it’s important.’
‘PNMR,’ I said. ‘Magic spell. I understand.’
‘That’s another thing,’ Colson said morosely, ‘it’s a terrible name. Peenmar. Penny Mar. PenMar. It’s crap. It needs a new acronym.’
‘I like Penny Mar. It would make a great campaign. “Who is Penny Mar?”’
‘Creepy,’ Colson said, ‘as fuck.’
They bickered happily. I was pleased by them: Annie’s energetic creation paired with Colson’s blend of making and paranoia. It made for an excellent team. For myself, I wondered if I had taken on too much. I’d been prepared for technicalities. I had not considered that I would be asked to grapple with philosophy of self. Annie had been right, though, that the mysteries of the machine would not long remain obscure to me, and by the end of the month I was using the in-house messaging system quite freely. I still insisted on communicating by post as well, because I found a qualitative difference in the opinions of others depending on the medium in which they were conveyed. Colson, in particular, I insisted write his comments on paper, which I think was the most shocking thing he’d ever had to do in his – to me – rather short life. His electronic responses were terse to the point of thoughtless, but his written ones were quirky and energetic, and he quickly got rather fond of the whole business of stamps and handwriting and started to respond to my sketches with little postcards he bought from a newsagent down the road from the office. YES! MORE! I LOVE IT! RIGHT ANGLES! he wrote once, on the back of a truly horrible picture of the Queen. I kept that one, because it had a fierce joy in it, and an unexpected eccentricity that pleased me no end. There’s nothing better in the professional life of an artist than the moment of seeing one’s work kindle in someone that look of enlightened obsession. He told me later that it started when he bought a fountain pen and the scratch of nib on paper awoke in him the same fruitful concentration as working with his hands.
Little by little I constructed a world; a new London emerging like a white bubonic plague from the comfortable shambles of the old. I settled for my model on the Russian architect Lubetkin, who designed the old penguin enclosure at London Zoo. His geometric structures were beautiful but hard, a mathematical absolutism that demanded people play by machinic rules, rather than softening the edges of the razor to allow biology and culture their place. Indeed, the penguins have for some time inhabited a more organic setting, leaving the brutalist post-deco pit near the aardvarks a monument to the temporary triumph of theory over life.
That was my guiding principle in the design: that Annie’s world was one derived from a heedless benignancy that based its assumptions on fine ideas rather than messy truths, and in the process birthed not a Utopia but a kind of great Procrustean bed on which the whole of Britain must lie. It was the spring before the vote on our relationship with the European Union, and so I started from what I saw all around me. I imagined that we might lose the vote, despite the obvious absurdity of that outcome, and from there I conjured a
Europe made weak by division in the face of predatory Russia, and limping along just offshore, a Great Britain buckling under rising debt and the asinine policies of a Conservative administration hostage to its more ridiculous fantasists. I pictured a rising authoritarianism on both the Left and the Right, and internationally a flagging centrist instinct struggling to find a voice that could not be shouted down. What if, I asked myself, the great liberal project that was the underpinning of all British political parties was truly not stuttering but collapsing under the weight of its own Victorian contradictions? What if Annie’s generation became persuaded that predictability and security for the many were more important than those caught in the sharp corners of the government machine? It had been in my life an unchallenged tenet that a nation should strive to accommodate all its citizens, even if that occasionally meant the tail wagging the dog. How, though, if the new formulation of democracy for the coming century did not accept that? How if it rejected the presumption of innocence in favour of a scientific and inquisitorial finding of truth? From this cauldron I conjured a state constructed on the sacrifice of privacy in exchange for a power that seemed direct and real, but was at heart undermined. I built it to be seductive, yet unsettlingly flawed, and I expressed those flaws in how it looked and felt. Nowhere was the truth of Ethiopia as I knew it more evident than in the map and image of the capital, the new buildings decreed by the Emperor rising above the old ones: the future emerging from and crushing the past. I made my new London in the spiritual image of my old Addis Ababa, and always, always, there must be the hint of Annie’s Minotaur: the subtle, unforced error which made everything in the game world fraught where it might have been fine.