The Silver Metal Lover(44)

Of course, a robot can just read instructions and then know exactly how to follow them, and get it absolutely right. I kept saying to myself I mustn’t persist in thinking of him as an exceptionally talented man, no I mustn’t. Yet it was difficult, and besides, that’s what I’d asked him to pretend to be.

On the last afternoon of the first week, the caretaker came puffing and grumbling up the stairs to collect the rent, plainly thinking he wouldn’t get it.

“It’s just the one quarter month,” he announced as I stood there, a plum in one hand and a long artist’s paintbrush in the other. “Just the one week. Then I shan’t be up till the first of next month for the three quarters.” As the end of the month was also only a few days off, that meant nothing. He implied, in any case, I’d have run away by then in arrears. “It’s legal, you know,” he said. But already his eyes had gone past me and were bulging on the room. “Well,” he said. “I wondered what your boyfriend wanted the steps for.” He tried to edge in by me, so I let him. He stood and gaped, as if in a famous cathedral. “Not everyone’s taste,” he said, “but it’s cheerful.” Which is more, I thought, than can be said for you.

I waited for him to go on and say: “Now you’ve spent your rent money on all that, you’ll have to get out.” But he only glanced at the huge evergreen plant which Silver and I had dug out of the subsidence the night before and planted in a big cracked beer jeroboam of wondrous amber glass. “That’ll die,” he said.

“Perhaps you’d like to come to its funeral,” said Silver, who was seated on a pillow, reading, at fifteen seconds per page, a job-lot of books we’d picked up that morning.

The caretaker scowled.

“This flat,” he said, “is only supposed to accommodate one person.”

I felt a stab of terror, but Silver said, “I’m not paying her any rent. I’m her guest.”

Grudgingly, the caretaker accepted that this was all right, and Silver smiled at him.

I was already fumbling out the rent and electric money, all in small change by now, when Silver rose and graciously gave the monstrous visitor a tour of the bathroom. I could hear the monster grunting away, things like: “Don’t know I’d want it myself,” or “What’s that white thing in the ceiling? Oh.” And then, surprisingly: “Quite like that.”

They came back, and Silver poured the caretaker, and me, a mug of very cheap and vinegary wine, which the caretaker gulped down. When we finally got rid of him, and the rent, I lost my temper. The beautiful apartment, on which we’d slaved, smeared by that old man’s stupid carping.

“He’s just forgotten how to respond,” said Silver. “And he’s sick. He has to take a prescription medication that gives him another sickness as a side effect.”

“How do you know?”

“The night I borrowed the ladder, we sat around for a while, and he told me.”

“Still trying to make everyone happy,” I said.

“Still trying. Uphill work all the way.”

I looked at him and we laughed. And I went to him and put my arms round him. The carpet floor is nice to make love on, too.

The evergreen plant, by the end of the month, had spread up to the ceiling in a lustrous fan.

Which brings me to the end of the month.





* * *




The night before the first day of the new month, we were sitting out in the subsidence, on one of the girders, watching the stars stare their way past the last of the clinging leaves, and the distant city center blooming into its lights. We often came out there, which had firstly been his suggestion. Sometimes he played the guitar there quietly and sang to me. It was beautiful in the subsidence. Mysterious at dusk, and wild, like the heart of some forest, with the safe edges of civilization around it. Now and then, the white cat appeared, and we’d bring a plate of cat’s meat and leave it by. Despite its apparent homelessness, Silver had spotted, with his faultless sight, the little mark on the hindquarters of the cat, which means it’s had its anti-rabies shots quite recently. I had a wish to lure the cat into the apartment. But that night the cat didn’t come, just the stars. And as I lay against him, wound with him in the cloak, I said, “This is the happiest time of my whole life.”

He turned and kissed me, and he said, “Thank you.”

I was touched suddenly by the innocence inherent in his sophistication. I held him. The coolness though not coldness of his body had never troubled me, and now, from proximity to mine, he seemed warm.

“I don’t even mind that you don’t love me,” I said. “I’m so happy.”

“But I do, of course, love you.”

“Because you can make me happy.”

“Yes.”

“Which means I’m no different from anyone you make happy, you can love us all, so it’s not what I mean by love.” At last, it didn’t hurt; I was arch and unconcerned, and he smiled.

I shall never grow tired of, or familiar with, his beauty.

“I love you,” I said. “Let’s go. out to dinner. Do you mind? Will you pretend?”

“If you’re sure you want to spend money on it.”

“Yes, yes, I do. Tomorrow I’m back to a thousand.”