Consent Read online

  Steph is a children’s entertainer, not successful. She offers franchised toddler music lessons that haven’t caught on. Even so her rent has been very prompt lately, and Frances wonders whether Greg has begun shielding his girlfriend from the market. It would explain her willingness to forgive his long and unpredictable hours, even to feel grateful for them. She would be ashamed of this fact, but Frances has never dared to raise it. For more than a year she has waited for the return of the true Steph, but her hopes are wavering. It is sad but calming, to lose hope. It reduces her emotional exposure.

  See you soon then, babes.

  Steph jokingly calls people babes. The joke is about people who do it without joking.

  Yeah. See you soon.

  Frances has no boyfriend, which works well. The point was tested in the summer when she holidayed alone for the first time, not fully by choice, yet took delight in the silent meals spent watching other diners, the reading marathons, the ample but respectful male attention, on the whole. At the beach she seemed to summon a game of football by flinging down her towel. She’d be woken by the scattering of young men’s sand across her toes, or calves. Sometimes she’d roll the ball back. Older men were evening specialists, she noticed. They had a way of offering coffee that made vivid what they would really like to give her, and she’d not in principle been opposed to letting one or two, but in the end preferred peace. As a rule she waits for desire to stab sharply before acting, in one or another of the available ways. Overall she would guess, and she has some evidence, that she is more sexually satisfied than any of the married women that she knows.

  She wakes up in cold water, hungry. She hooks out the bathplug with a toe and feels the level tugging down. In the fridge she finds a prawn curry with rice, which she pushes out of its sleeve into the microwave. She goes to the boiler, slides the switch to constant and hears the stomp of the gas. The dishwasher needs emptying. The microwave pings. Inside, the food tray is soft and hot. Steam puffs out as she peels away the film. The curry section is edged with bubble holes and the rice section is a block of hissing grains. The latch clicks in the hall. It will be Stephanie.

  I’ve been uncomfortable with eye contact all my life. I find it like being in a mirrored lift. We look into each other’s eyes and suddenly I am looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you … It’s too much. I spin out. But I’m probably oversensitive. Or the reverse. I’m a pachyderm. Hide is a good word for what I’m covered with. That might explain my need to confess.

  *

  I first noticed Frances because she was carrying an outsized brick of a bag on her shoulder. It bounced against her hip, making her slender body limp in time. I was in a meeting room on the side wall of a large office. She was in the main space outside. She put the bag on the floor and unzipped it. I could not see what she was doing from where I sat, so I returned to my own business until my attention was caught again by a bent white rectangle of light. It flickered into place before her, half on the far wall, half stretched along the floor. With some fiddling she was able to shift the image upwards, but not far enough. In the end she propped the projector’s front feet on its own travel case so that, after a quick zap around the room, the image settled near the centre of the wall. Others looked over from their desks. A man standing beside her made an announcement to them. I could not hear his words through the glass, but they had the effect of gathering a crowd. Some brought pen and paper, some trundled their chairs along like pets. She must have had a remote control in her hand, because the image on the wall changed. Consent, it said in large navy letters, and in small ones in the corner QTel Delivery 3. Below that was her email address.

  By this point maybe forty people were waiting, maybe eighty or more. There was a cheer when she began to speak, which swelled when it was realised that cheering was allowed. This startled my meeting, and the people with their backs to the glass turned round. There was some explaining, then we returned to the matter at hand. The others did. Someone asked me what the ultimate unit cost would be if we scaled up. They only wanted a ballpark figure but I had to be asked three times.

  The crowd must have been struggling to see her as much as I was, because a small table was dragged over, on which eventually, with an uncertain smile, she agreed to stand. That got another cheer, ignored this time by those around me, and from her platform with flushed cheeks she began. Consent was a flexible working structure newly applied to the business, and it was succeeding. She and the new structure were popular anyway, and when she was done they clapped her down. Some who were finishing notes had to clap one-handed against their thighs or notepads. Some stayed to ask questions. Packing up the projector she was badgered on all sides. I too was being asked things again, but by then I was no longer listening, nor cared to pretend.

  *

  I could easily have missed her. That’s what I dwell on, alone here in the dark, exhausted, my flask of tea gone cold, writing this. What if I had missed her?

  I was able to discover that she was a consultant, and where she worked, but of course I didn’t know that she would come. I was in the Rising Sun, the pub opposite her office, a fine rectangular brass boozer, stripped floorboards, big as a barn, windows from the waist up and old photographs of itself on the walls. It was only a Monday afternoon but the place was filling. I sat at my window table for a long time listening to the other drinkers.

  One guy – young, not thirty – he had girlfriend trouble. I could not quite see him, but I heard clearly. He and another man got straight to it when they were settled with their drinks, this chat he’d planned. There was a gap, he said, a chasm that was growing. She had annoying habits. Just habits, but annoying. He’d not brought them up because he worried it was picky of him to mind but now, he said, just four months into this relationship he’d yearned for, she was already dwindling in his feelings. The mate listened, in his way. Rise above it, he said. Women, he said. There were a few pats on the shoulder, offered timidly as though to a wild animal, lest too much sympathy tip the man into sobs. You had to wonder whether the first man was a poor judge of confidants or just not rich in friends. You couldn’t exclude the possibility that he had his own annoying habits. Anyway, I reached below the table for my notebook to record some of this, and as I rose I saw her. Waiting at the kerb, hair tossed by the wind, a soft-shouldered tiredness, but absolutely Frances.

  When a gap in the traffic appeared she burst across. Clutching my bag, I pushed through sheets of drinkers and just made it to the door in time to see her vanishing into a small supermarket along the way. I could so easily have missed her.

  Taking the basket after hers I went up the adjacent aisle at barely a saunter, my blood loud. I passed sugar, eggs, flour, baking materials and tinned goods before stopping to consider some instant porridge. She stood at the chiller cabinet on my right, holding a green prawn curry and a traditional paella from the super-premium range. She read the labels and in the end put both in her basket with an overpriced Chablis, the most expensive white wine available chilled, I established, and probably therefore either a present or a celebration, most likely for herself given the time, which was nearly ten. Queueing with my porridge I watched her operate the automatic check-out, which she did with smooth familiarity, not hunting for buttons. With the shopping and two black bags, one slung over her shoulder, she looked quite burdened on the walk to the station. Nevertheless she went some way along the platform, to where I presumed the exit at her station would be. Despite the train being only two minutes away, she sat down and pulled a paperback from her bag and was soon absorbed enough for me to stare safely. The mist of down on her calm skin, her eyes’ busy processing of the type. She was so absent in one way, so fiercely present in another. Truly reading is a variety of sleep. No other memory of the night has stayed so livingly.

  After watching maybe unwisely long, when the train came I considered it good policy to join a different carriage. I got glimpses through the jostling window frames, and when she to
ok off her coat I knew we would be on a while. Trains are my turf. I’ve had years of practice on them. For instance, I know that if you spend time looking at the map then you are planning or measuring your remaining journey and therefore unlikely to be going anywhere routine, like work or home. She did not glance at the map, nor even at the passing platforms, and we went through many stations. I expect I was tired as well. I admit I did lose some alertness. My notes say that she sat near a woman with a polythene-covered tray of leftover sandwiches on her lap, but I have no memory of that. Then at one stop, in that slack pause after the passengers had got off and on, she just grabbed everything and ran. The doors were already closed when I realised. Had I been spotted? This was my first concern, but pretty soon I decided that I hadn’t. She’d got lost in her book was all, and saw where she was just in time. I watched her standing on the platform, reaching up through her coat sleeves. The train gears engaged. The roll began and she approached the exit, which was indeed right there.

  *

  I hope I’m not making this sound easy? This isn’t easy. With practice I’ve overcome many technical problems in my work, it is true, but many other problems still stand before me, the moral and philosophical problems mostly, which as the years advance cast longer shadows in the mind. I try to escape them by declaring rules, or laws, or principles. Essentially I want to renounce my right to change. In the end, though, all my rules become brittle, friable, woodwormed with exceptions.

  I try to remind myself that discovery in general need not be a happy business. Einstein was as prodigious a discoverer as there’s been, yet he spent years opposing Minkowski’s conception of spacetime, as derived from his own special theory of relativity, before finally adopting it. For years more, he insisted that the universe was static, despite having helped to prove it was expanding. One may achieve great things reluctantly, is the point, with all one’s efforts pushing the other way.

  When I started out, for instance, I had that rule I’ve mentioned about not making contact with my subjects or influencing their lives. This was part practical, to avoid detection, but the larger part was ethnographic, because I had the notion that what I witnessed would be inauthentic if contaminated by my fingermarks. Then the exceptions came. The first was a divorcee called Carmen G, my eighth subject and most longstanding at the time. At the end of a marriage begun too young, Carmen had embarked on a dating campaign, seems the best word, and hurrying to make an assignation one evening left her phone on the train. I saw it when she stood up, wedged sideways into the top of the gap between her seat cushion and the carriage wall. In normal life I would instantly have returned the phone, but was this normal life? I was only there because she was my subject, after all, and I had my rule, which meant leaving the phone where it was. It was a crowded train, however. Had I not been in my seat, somebody else would have been, and that person might have spotted the phone and given it back to her, which would make it interfering on my part not to. The chance was small, but it was not negligible. No matter what I chose therefore, even if I didn’t influence Carmen’s behaviour on this occasion, I wouldn’t know that I hadn’t. This was just the beginning of my confusion. What if I were not the only person in the carriage who was studying Carmen that day? What if somebody less scrupulous than myself was engaged in a project similar to my own and they picked up the phone and gave it back to her? What then? According to my rules that would contaminate their project but not mine, which seemed ridiculous. How could the same data be accurate in the hands of one person but not another’s? What if I saw this other researcher try to steal her phone? Would it be my duty to prevent them? What if they got close in the crush as we disembarked and, in a bold experiment, put a hand up Carmen’s skirt? That would be interference by any standard, but would Carmen’s reaction, whatever it might be, remain authentic in my eyes? I was having relativity problems of my own. What if the person groping Carmen had somehow heard about my project, and done so for my benefit? Would this be OK if I did not know? I still worry quite a bit about this, but I think I did learn from the Carmen experience that it is better to relax and try to accept whatever judgements seem right at the time. The phone I delivered to Lost Property.

  So I’ve more or less given up on rules, though that isn’t to say I’m wanton. Just a few weeks ago I was studying Amelia P, subject eighty-three. Like Laura, Amelia lived with her parents, but unlike Laura she was seldom there, being consumed most evenings and weekends by a devotion to her job that quite defeated my attempts to understand it. She underestimated herself, I suppose, yet this came with an industrious nature. As a result she was often surprised by her success. Without question she could have become more than a suburban branch manager for a mobile phone company, yet this she seemed glad to be. Excited even. You only had to see her bounce through the mornings, or watch how tenderly she inspected the shop’s display units, smoothing a dog-eared poster like the collar of a child. So many hours she spent in that shop and not in the world. And for such little pay. It occurs to me now, but didn’t then, that there is a resemblance between the affirmative self-denial of overwork and the bitter pleasure taken in thinness by anorexics. In that sense perhaps it wasn’t the job itself that Amelia loved so much as having work to do, which suggests some sorrow she was running from, and foretells her being caught. She was also short, Amelia. Short enough to make petite a euphemism, so perhaps that was mixed in there. She often mentioned it. I don’t know. I broke all my rules with Amelia, loose as they were. We spent quite an amount of time together. There were moments I wondered if she might be interested in me.

  It began when I visited the shop about six weeks ago and started talking to her colleague Rav about a contract, a new mobile phone contract, meanwhile looking around for somewhere suitable to drop a wallet I had fitted with a recording device. (I’ll talk more about equipment later.) The plan, not one I’d tried before, was to leave the wallet where it would be found by the staff after I had left, in the hope that it would stay in the back office until I returned and there gather information about Amelia. Carelessly, however, I had brought the wallet loose in a bag with several other items, and in my haste to fetch it while Rav was looking for a demonstration handset I allowed the contents to spill out. When Amelia first saw me I was scooping two lengths of cable back into a holdall. Together we reached for the UHF transmitter at my feet.

  Here’s something I have learned: any lie can be made more digestible by mixing it with two parts truth. When caught looking furtive, therefore, the trick is not to claim innocence but to account for your actions in a way that accounts for the furtiveness as well. Be honest about your feelings, which you can’t hide, but obscure their cause. I remember being accosted at a motorway service station by a subject who returned from the toilet early with her baby son to find me trying to fix a microphone to the underside of her banquette. After some feeble bluster on my part, I’m sure, I sighed and said that I was in fact a private investigator being paid to collect evidence on a man believed by his wife to be an adulterer, and that it was his habit to meet his mistress here. Amused, the subject insisted that she was not here to meet anybody’s husband. I said I knew that, but hadn’t known the table was occupied. She was so delighted by the story that I don’t think she even considered not believing it. In the end I had to deter her from staying to watch the man arrive.

  So I was a private investigator again. That’s what I told Amelia, and laughed that I perhaps wasn’t a very good one, and she laughed too. She asked about my work. Was the shop being investigated? No, I said. I just needed a phone. Investigators need lots. We talked, and soon I felt her purpose. The company, she said, had a regular problem with clients who disappeared without paying their bills, not only at this branch but nationally. The sums owed were rarely large, so it was rarely worth the cost of tracking down the debtors singly. Together, however, the debts amounted to a lot. Some were chased for the sake of appearances. She was willing to be candid about that. But as the rest were too small to sell to coll
ection agencies they were generally written off. The company had non-payment insurance, but that itself was expensive, and worth it only because it made the losses more predictable, taking the sting from the extreme years. On its own this might have been a bearable expense, but concern was now filtering down from the top that it might get known they were soft on debts, and that this might attract a lower class of client, which might in time bring down the brand. Each year branch managers were made to be more stringent about new clients’ paperwork and credit ratings. They’d even had to refuse some renewals. Marketing denied it, but she also thought she saw this snobbery in the drift towards firmer pricing, which was emptying the shop and draining morale. I tried not to show surprise that she was telling me all this, as we perched on stools, her head hardly at my chin. As she went on to say, she had an idea.

  People who disappeared without paying their phone bill would not in fact be difficult to find, she guessed, if you knew what you were doing. Having found them, she also guessed, you would often find that they had not paid other debts as well. If so, the cost of tracking down feckless clients might be defrayed by selling their contact details on to other creditors, or to a debt consolidation company. Indeed your non-paying clients might actually turn out to be a profitable asset, as long as you had the idea first. To test this, you’d just need a list of absconders, a capable investigator, and the cost of a few trial runs. She was wasted in a mobile phone shop, as I say.