The Assistant Read online

  THE ASSISTANT

  S. K. Tremayne

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

  Copyright © S. K. Tremayne 2019

  Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2010

  Cover photographs © plainpicture/Philippe Lesprit (front cover); David Paire/Arcangel Images (back cover).

  S. K. Tremayne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

  Source ISBN: 9780008309510

  Ebook Edition © December 2019 ISBN: 9780008309534

  Version: 2019-11-14

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1. Jo

  Chapter 2. Jo

  Chapter 3. Jo

  Chapter 4. Jo

  Chapter 5. Janet

  Chapter 6. Jo

  Chapter 7. Jo

  Chapter 8. Jo

  Chapter 9. Jo

  Chapter 10. Jo

  Chapter 11. Jo

  Chapter 12. Jo

  Chapter 13. Jo

  Chapter 14. Jo

  Chapter 15. Jo

  Chapter 16. Polly

  Chapter 17. Jo

  Chapter 18. Jo

  Chapter 19. Jo

  Chapter 20. Jo

  Chapter 21. Dr Hussain

  Chapter 22. Jo

  Chapter 23. Jo

  Chapter 24. Jo

  Chapter 25. Jo

  Chapter 26. Jo

  Chapter 27. Jo

  Chapter 28. Simon

  Chapter 29. Simon

  Chapter 30. Jo

  Chapter 31. Jo

  Chapter 32. Jo

  Chapter 33. Jo

  Chapter 34. Jo

  Chapter 35. Jo

  Chapter 36. Jo

  Chapter 37. Jo

  Chapter 38. Tabitha

  Chapter 39. Jo

  Chapter 40. Jo

  Chapter 41. Jo

  Chapter 42. Jo

  Chapter 43. Jo

  Chapter 44. Jo

  Chapter 45. Jo

  Chapter 46. Tabitha

  Chapter 47. Jo

  Chapter 48. Jo

  Chapter 49. Jo

  Chapter 50. Jo

  Chapter 51. Jo

  Chapter 52. Jo

  Chapter 53. Jo

  Chapter 54. Simon

  Chapter 55. Jo

  Chapter 56. Jo

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  Also by S. K. Tremayne

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  There are numerous quotations from the works of Sylvia Plath throughout the book. These lines are taken from her poems ‘Death & Co’, ‘The Bee Meeting’, ‘Disquieting Muses’, ‘Electra on Azalea Plath’, ‘Facelift’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Elm’ and ‘Childless Women’.

  I must thank Faber & Faber for permission to quote, more widely, from two poems in particular: ‘Munich Mannequins’, and ‘Daddy’, both in the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath.

  As usual I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my agent Eugenie Furniss, and editors, Jane Johnson and Sarah Hodgson, for their characteristic wisdom, and insight.

  Finally, I would like to thank my beloved wife, Star, for the many times she unknotted problems, and offered ideas, along the way.

  1

  Jo

  Are you a woman, man, other?

  Well, that’s easy enough. Despite that curious wish for a twirly moustache, age ten, and a twelve-year-old’s desire to be an astronaut, which came with the vague yet outraged sense that only boys could be proper astronauts, I am quite sure on this one.

  As the daylight in the room shades to grey, I lean towards my shining laptop screen and click,

  woman

  Are you straight, gay, bisexual, other?

  A pause. A long pause. I’ve no doubts about my sexuality, I’m just bemused by what other might mean in this context. What is that fourth possibility of sexuality? A desire for ghosts? Ponies? Furniture? My dear beloved mum can get oddly excited when reading magazines about interior decoration. But I somehow don’t think her demographic is the target of this website.

  On the other hand, sitting here at my laptop in the fading winter light, I’d quite like a fourth choice, or a fifth choice, or, dammit, seventy-eight choices. Because if you were in a critical mood you could say my choices so far in life have not turned out entirely optimal: divorced, childless, and nearly homeless at thirty-three. OK, yes, I might be living in a sleek flat in the nicer end of Camden, North London – where it merges into the real, five-storey Georgian opulence of Primrose Hill – however, I know I’m only here because my richer friend, Tabitha, took pity on her newly divorced and virtually bankrupt old university mate. Hey, why don’t you have the spare room, I really don’t use it much …

  I think it was the casually generous way she made this offer, the blasé effortlessness of it all, which confounded me. At once it made me feel impossibly grateful, and even more fond of Tabitha – funny, kind, generous, and the best of best friends – yet it also made me feel guilty and a tiny tiny tiny bit jealous.

  Turning from the laptop, I look out of the darkening window. And see my own face reflected.

  OK, I was properly jealous, if only for a minute or two. What barely mattered to Tabs – Here, have a spare room, somewhere really nice to live – was so crucial and difficult for me, and she was barely aware of the emotional difference.

  This is because Tabitha Ashbury already owns, Tabitha Ashbury will also inherit. I love her but she’s never understood what it’s like not to have all that: in London.

  By contrast with Tabitha, I’m not just Generation Rent, I am Generation Can’t Afford to Rent Anywhere Without a Major Knife Crime Epidemic. And it doesn’t look like this is going to change any time soon, because I’m a freelance journalist. I have become a freelance journalist when the phrase freelance has become a kind of fantastical joke in itself: hey, look, I know that these days you basically have to write for free, but where’s my lance? Don’t we go jousting as well?

  This career, however, was – for all its challenges – definitely one of my smarter choices. I love my job. The work is varied and compelling, and every so often I get to think I have changed the world slightly for the better, revealing some scandal, telling a decent story, making someone I’ll never know chuckle for two seconds, over a sentence that may have taken me six hours to get right. But that scintilla of human gladness wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t made the effort. Or so I hope.

  Reverting to my computer I refocus on OKCupid. I may have a home (however fortunate), I might have a job (however sketchy the salary), I have, however, no other half. And I am beginning to feel the absence. And perhaps the
magic of internet dating will guide me, like a digital fairy godmother, with a wand of sparkling algorithms, to a new man.

  I answer the question:

  straight

  With this, my laptop screen instantly flashes, and grows even more vivid: whisking me into a world of warm, cascading images of What Could Be: luridly happy pictures of emotional and erotic contentment, where beautiful couples sit laughing, very close together.

  Here’s a smiley young Chinese woman sipping red wine and draping a slender arm over a handsome Caucasian man with enough stubble to be masculine without being prison-y; here are the white and black gay boys holding hands as they put red paint on each other’s faces in a carnival mood; here is the exceptionally well-preserved older couple who found love despite it all – and now seem to inexplicably spend all their time grinning on rollercoasters. And all these happy ThankyouCupid! people are promising me something so much better than the view through the big high black sash windows of this million-quid flat: looking out onto the chilly, frigid, 3 p.m. twilight of wintry London. A world where it is getting so cold and dark the angry red brake lights of the cars, jammed, stalled, impatient, fuming, on busy Delancey Street, glow like red devil eyes in Victorian smoke.

  I turn to one of Tabitha’s Home Assistants, perched on the bespoke oak shelving at the side of the elegant living room, with its elegantly lofty ceilings. Everything in Tabitha’s flat is so elegant and tasteful I sometimes tell her I am going to buy, say, a plastic gnome-themed clock from the discount supermarket on Parkway to ‘brighten things up’, then I wait, straight-faced, for her to get the joke, and then we both laugh. I love living with Tabitha. That deeply shared sense of humour: possibly you only get that with a certain kind of old friend?

  Or an ideal kind of lover.

  ‘Electra, what will the weather be in London this evening?’

  The top of the black Home Assistant glows in response, an electric green-to-sapphire diadem, and in that faintly pompous, hint-of-older-sister voice, the voice of a sibling who went to a rather superior school, she answers:

  ‘Tonight’s forecast in Camden Town has a low of one degree Celsius. There’s a sixty per cent chance of rain after midnight.’

  ‘Electra, thank you.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for!’

  Simon and I had an earlier, cheaper version of these smart-heating, smart-lighting Home Assistants, but Tabitha has the full and latest range: Electra X, HomeHelp, Minerva Plus – everything. They’re scattered throughout the flat – six or seven of them – answering questions, telling contrived bad jokes, advising on the rate of the pound against the dollar, reciting news of earthquakes in Chile. They also precisely calibrate the temperature in each room, the ambient lighting in the bedrooms, and quite probably the amount of champagne (lots of it vintage; none of it mine) in the stern and steely magnificence of the eight-foot-high fridge, where you could store a couple of corpses standing upright and still have room for your cartons of organic hazelnut milk.

  The irony is that Tabitha barely uses the marvellous tech of her smart-home, or drinks her spirulina smoothies and hazelnut milk, because she is barely here. She is either abroad, in her job as a producer for a nature TV channel, or she’s at her fiancé Arlo’s delicious period house in Highgate, which is even plusher than here. He probably has machines so advanced they can invite precisely the right friends over for spontaneously successful threesomes.

  I miss sex. I also miss Tabitha’s company; when I moved in, I hoped I’d see more of her. I believe, sometimes, I simply miss company. Which is perhaps one reason why I like, to my surprise, the Digital Butlers. The Assistants. Sometimes I josh and banter with the machines purely for the sake of hearing a voice other than my own: Tell me the weather in Ecuador, Why are we here, Is it OK to watch soft porn while eating Waitrose dips?

  I think, in a way, these gadgets are like less annoying and demanding pets that do charming and useful things, dogs that don’t need walking yet still fetch tennis balls, or slippers – or ‘the papers’, as my mother still, charmingly, refers to her precious daily delivery of printed news. I sometimes fear that she is possibly one of the last people on earth to say, ‘Have you read the papers?’ and when her generation goes my career will finally fall off that cliff.

  Anyway.

  ‘Electra, shall I get the fuck on with writing this profile?’

  ‘I’d rather not answer that.’

  Hah. There she goes again, using the voice of the prim, sensible, better-educated older sister that I never had – who disapproves of swearing. My only real sibling is older, and a brother. He lives in LA, works in the movie industry, and he’s married to a chatty lawyer and has a lovely little son, Caleb, whom I adore. And, as far as I can tell, he spends his time going to meetings and pool-parties where they talk about movies being ‘greenlit’, or suffering in ‘development hell’ – rather than actually making movies.

  I’d quite like him to actually make movies, because I’d quite like him to make a movie or TV series written by me. One day. Oh, one day. I see it as my only way out of my cul-de-sac career, however enjoyable. These days, the money is in movies and TV; it’s certainly not in journalism. I recently estimated I have about £600 in savings; literally £600, max, stored in some precious ISA. They say you are only two months’ missed wages from living on the street; that means I could be out there, in the cold, in about ten days, if the bank ever got tired of my overdraft.

  As a result I am busily reading every how-to guide on scriptwriting that I can, learning about beats, hooks, cliffhangers, and three-act structures, and reading experts like Syd Field and Robert McKee and so far every script I’ve written has turned out rubbish, every mystery and drama lacks drama and mystery, but I will keep trying. What choice do I have?

  I turn, in a playful mood, to the oak shelving.

  ‘Electra, give me an idea for a brilliant movie.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Electra, you’re totally bloody useless.’

  Silence.

  ‘Electra, I’m sorry I swore. It was only a joke.’

  She does not respond. She doesn’t even show that braceleting glow of greeny-blue. That’s odd. Is she malfunctioning? Or have I truly offended her this time?

  I don’t think so. It’s quite hard to emotionally offend a cylinder of plastic and silicon chips. In which case I should stop faffing, and get on with this online dating profile.

  Back to the drawing board: the drawing of myself. Online.

  First name?

  Jo

  It’s actually Josephine, but I shortened it to Jo when I was a teen because that seemed cooler. And I stand by my teen decision. But will it make men think I am masculine? If they do they are idiots, and not the men I want.

  Jo

  Jo Ferguson

  Age?

  Well? Shall I? Nope.

  I know some women of my age – and men – who have begun to knock off a couple of years, on Tinder and Grindr and PantsonFire, but I feel no need. I am thirty-three, nearly thirty-four. And happy with it. Sure, I am beyond the first rose-flush of youth, but hardly ready for composting. I can still catch the sense of a man turning to glance as I disappear the other way.

  33

  Location?

  London

  Postcode?

  This is tricky. To anyone that knows the intricate class signals, the invisible social pheromones subtly emitted by London postcodes, my present postcode NW1, can make me sound, at my age, like someone rich, or rich and bohemian. Someone who hangs out at the Engineer pub with actors and ad moguls. Either that or a single mum turned drug dealer.

  Yet I’m not NW1: I’m neither druggie nor bohemian; I’m still much more N12, North Finchley, where until recently I lived with my ex-husband Simon in a mediocre, damp, and definitely rented two-bed flat with OK bus connections to nice Muswell Hill. And even deeper inside me is the real me, the girl who grew up way way down in SE25, Thornton Heath, a slice of forsaken,
tatty, you’re-never-more-than-two-minutes-from-a-kebab-shop outer London, a burb so obscure it is unknown even to other outer Londoners, who make wearily predictable jokes like Do I need a visa to get there. So yes, I am intrinsically either a 25 or a 12 – but at this moment, by sheer dumb luck, I am a 1.

  Why I am worrying?

  NW1

  ‘Electra, what’s the time?’

  ‘The time is five thirty p.m.’

  Five thirty?

  I have spent an hour, or two – and so far I’ve given my name, gender, age, and address. Sighing at myself, and clicking through, the OKCupid screen changes to a sensitive aquamarine, perhaps because the questions are growing increasingly piquant.

  Are you looking for:

  1 Hook-up?

  2 New friends?

  3 Short-term dating?

  4 Long-term dating?

  At the bottom there’s an option for Are you open to non-monogamy?

  Ouch. Part of me would like to answer the last question: I certainly was, as that is the truth. But it is surely too truthful: it was me that started it, it was me that lit the long sad fuse that led to our divorce. I started it with funny sexy Liam, the barman and would-be actor. Liam’s initial approach was entirely innocent, a throw-away compliment about my journalism, on Twitter, from a guy I’d never met. Then we became Facebook friends, and Instagram pals, and WhatsAppers, and within a few days of online chat I was sending this smart, witty, diverting guy endless sexts and nude selfies, because I was bored, because my marriage was stale, because I was foolish, because it was fun even as I knew it was wrong – so I can hardly blame Simon, my husband, for having an affair with Polly the pleasant nurse after he discovered my three months of virtual infidelity.

  I’ve heard since that Polly doesn’t like me so much; I am the ex that looms a little too large in Simon’s life. But what can I do? She’s right to dislike me. Or it is, at least, totally understandable.

  Sadness descends. Alongside memory, and guilt. Staring at the OKCupid site, I feel, quite suddenly, as if it is asking me too many questions. What’s it going to ask next? How do you feel about your father?

  Leaning forward, I put the laptop to sleep. Like stroking a cat that instantly snoozes. I’ll finish this profile later. I need air, darkness, freedom.