They set out and Savvy immediately puts on the car’s radio – Bloomberg, and a soul-numbing stream of finance blather, market updates, cocksure soundbites from CEOs and crypto pundits, broken up at scheduled intervals by the news: war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, the Queen’s funeral (today being the first day of her lying in state). And not a word about the thing that matters most, the one thing that should be headline news today and every day until the end of the world.
Is it getting colder? She looks out the window. They are starting to climb.
Alex can’t help but find it a bit bizarre, the funeral thing. Four miles of queuing for people to pay their last respects to someone most of them have never even met. She isn’t anti-monarchy, nor a republican, or anything like that – who cares who’s on your stamps or whose box your cross goes in? Doesn’t change who really runs the world. And she’d seemed a decent sort, from what you could tell; kindly, well-mannered, like somebody’s posh gran (if your gran had a net worth of £365 million) – which she was, in a sense: the nation’s gran. Just not Alex’s.
Definitely colder. The distant snow-tipped peaks loom steadily closer.
She’d actually gotten a telegram – her own gran, from the Queen – when she’d hit one hundred. And then died a few weeks later, almost like she’d been hanging on just for the milestone. Though not actually a telegram, just a card. (Can you send telegrams anymore? Is there any point?) Alex had seen her one final time. There was no queue, just the quiet procession of close family, wandering into the bedroom in ones or twos, to say their last goodbyes. She’d sat there a moment at the bedside, holding her cold hand, kissed her on the forehead, stood up and walked back out.
Did she write them herself? The telegrams (cards)? Probably someone else, or a photographed signature. Or one of those autopen thingies, like authors secretly use for signing their books, which copies your signature for you. An auto-autograph? But understandable. Must be a lot to send. Now that’s a queue that never ends.
She leans forward and twiddles the radio until she finds a music station.
Savvy gives her an annoyed look.
“Come on, now,” she says, “you promised: no work! We’re supposed to be on holiday!”
He laughs. “OK! OK!”
But it boggles her mind, really – the queuing, the public grief. Does that make her unpatriotic? Hard hearted? But especially the blokes – which, statistically speaking, must include a fair percentage of your far-from-mushy types: hardened criminals, cut-throat businessmen, soldiers and veterans – people who had cut actual throats – wife beaters and cheaters, child maintenance avoiders, men with restraining orders and suspended sentences. People not used to shedding a tear, you’d have thought, and all going wobbly-chinned over some nice old lady they’d only ever seen on the telly.
Even celebrities who die – even celebrities you really like – they’re just strangers, aren’t they? Public personas? (And who knows what’s truly going on behind that mask…). So, you might feel a bit sad. But grief? Something else going on there, surely. Something parasocial. Some emotional compensation or projection or something. What She represents? A Queen-shaped hole in the primitive psyche.
Who knows.
They drive a few more miles as she hums along to a steady stream of Europop, to which she doesn’t know the words, trying to mask her anxiety.
He looks across at her.
“Want me to read your mind?” he asks.
God, not this game again.
To which her answer would have to be, Not especially. For at this very moment it’s thinking, What if you find out that I’m not who you think I am?
Closely followed by, And what will I do then?
Before pinballing through a string of increasingly desperate options: Clonk you on your fat head and steal your car? Make for Switzerland? Run for the hills? Like Julie Andrews gatecrashing The Great Escape.
Until finally arriving at resignation: No point. The expensive car’s likely fitted with some sort of biometric anti-theft device built into the driver’s seat, programmed to recognise the unique imprint of his butt cheeks; Switzerland is probably where half these fuckers live anyway; and how far would I get on foot before they release the dogs? Or the drones. Or the guys with guns on snowmobiles, like something out of James Bond. Or is it Jason Bourne?
She looks out again at the snow-tipped hills and down at her thin summer dress.
Or there’s always freezing to death.
No, the success of her plan depends on him not finding out. Or at least, not yet.
But obviously, Alex shares none of these private quandaries with the man in the driving seat. Instead, she coyly cocks her head, recrosses her legs in the copious footwell, and gives him her best fake-enigmatic smile: Ah, wouldn’t you like to know…
And with some types of men, of course, it’s all about the mind reading. They don’t want feminine mystique; they want to assuage their male paranoia. And if they’re paying for it, they want unrestricted access. Although, technically, she’s not selling anything, Your Honour; more a sort of payment in kind. But still, there is a type of man that will conclude that all this – the clothes, the jewellery, the hotels and resorts, the first-class wining and dining – is something which entitles him to certain privileges beyond the physical; that it buys him total transparency: mental, emotional, the personal and the private. Not that they’re especially interested in what they discover there, she’s found; they just want to know that it’s a box they can open, should they desire to, a room to which only they have the key. She has ways of accommodating that “access”, naturally, so that it looks convincing: a goofy little backstory (“I wanted to be a hairdresser, you know? But it turns out I’m allergic”); a range of sweetly half-baked and unthreatening opinions on the burning topics of the day (“What if they built like a migrants’ island? I mean, transport wouldn’t be an issue. They’re already in boats, aren’t they?”); texts to her “friend”, worrying about her tan lines showing in that new dress; internet searches on what to have for lunch that won’t make her bloat. The sort of thing men like him think women like her think about – well, the sort of woman he thinks she is, anyway. And yet, so far, this particular man hasn’t even asked “Alex” her last name. Ha! Maybe he thinks she doesn’t have one; like Madonna, or Banksy. She was curious about this, at first, even a bit annoyed. All that effort to create a fake persona, and he’s not even interested.
But what man wouldn’t give his eye teeth to truly know what’s going on inside a woman’s mind? Soon, probably, they won’t have to, if Elon Musk has his way. Then, with a few little clicks and taps, anyone with a deep enough pocket will have all the bedtime mind-reading he could wish for. Who wouldn’t want that? But not him, apparently. Perhaps he’s partial to his eye teeth. (Come to think of it, they are rather prominent – this better not turn out to be some crappy vampire cult.)
But the reason, she’d eventually learned, is that Savvy likes to think of himself as a “reader” – of people in general, but especially of women. A solver of human enigmas – a useful trait, in the high-flying, dick-swinging seas in which he swims and claims to be a shark; seas in which, at other times, he is an iceberg, cool and imperturbable, with hidden subaquatic depths. Someone anyway who wouldn’t need digital snooping to read another’s intentions, to sniff out a bullshitter or a false friend. Savvy: his own favourite word for this quality he claims to possess (repeated so often that it’s also become her private pet name for him), sometimes accompanied by a wink and a little knowing double-tap of his right temple, which often sets off his interactive glasses, and there will then follow a comical interlude during which she must suppress a smirk as he tries to casually disengage whatever digital processes he’s inadvertently set in motion. Truth is, as even their slender acquaintance has taught her, poor Savvy is about as sharp as a marble and deep as a midsummer puddle. (Well, maybe not these summers, of course, but from times when your Julys and Augusts could be depended upon to deliver enough rainfall to barely cover your toes.)
“You are naughty,” he says, reading her like a book to which he’s only seen the cover, moves his right hand from the wheel to caress the bare skin of her right knee cap, and begins to slide it up her thigh.
He also likes to drive. Doing it for yourself is the new thing, apparently – among the rich, anyway. When automation is everywhere and the highest of hi-tech is cheap as chips, the monied will make a show of not needing it. Which is ridiculous, really. For that’s just what these little principled rebellions are: for show. Intended to make an ostentatious virtue of not needing the thing they could so easily have (and often will, at their first genuine inconvenience). And that’s the real difference: having that choice. And a virtue that you can ditch when it suits you, that’s optional, well, that’s not a virtue at all, then, is it?
“But I’m afraid we’re on the clock.” He sighs and gives her a sad face, which she mirrors back with an exaggerated baby-pout and a little frown, and he returns his thigh-groping hand back to the wheel and his head back toward the road, just as the self-drive autopilot kicks smoothly in to break and swerve around the blackened carcass of some giant roadside roadkill (what the hell was that?).
They emerge through yet another tunnel, round another mountain-hugging bend, and the road opens up onto a stunning vista of valleys and hills, of a sun-kissed lake fringed with terracotta-tiled villas and white-walled hotels, a stage for my-superyacht’s-bigger-than-yours measuring contests, tossers on speed boats and wankers on jet skis. Another exclusive resort, another private enclave for the über-loaded. Much in fact like the last one he had taken her to. And the one before that.
“Oh, it’s beautiful!” she exclaims, figuring that’s what’s expected of her.
“That it is.” He nods slowly. “Maybe we’ll stop by on our way back.”
She frowns. “We’re not stopping now?”
He shakes his head and gives her a mysterious smile.
“Somewhere a bit more special.” He winks theatrically. “Totally off-grid. Almost no one knows it’s even there!” He beams.
“Oh! How exciting!”
At fucking long last.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi/fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. All instalments are free, but you can support my writing by taking out a paid subscription, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments.