Bonding, page 27
At the airport, Sunny looked spaced out, as if he’d just survived an alien abduction – one that he had enjoyed intensely but that now seemed a little worrying. I caught him texting Tom while we waited: This is above our pay grade
Tom didn’t reply. Then later, having thought about it: Stay quiet. Keep out of it. You weren’t here
Niall fell asleep as the plane took off. He snored beside me for the whole two hours. I had to wake him once we’d arrived at Gatwick.
‘Do you think Grace will forgive me?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘What am I going to do?’
‘You’ll have to talk to her.’
He looked at me as if I’d suggested he eat the green holdall he was carrying.
‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘just talk to her.’
44
The first quarter sales report arrived in July. By the time Tom and Grace sat down to go over the numbers, they had already discussed what they’d do next. The plan was to wait out their contract and then make a quiet departure.
‘It’s unusual,’ Grace said as she looked at the sales feedback.
Patients were clustered around urban centres. Certain populations were displaying greater uptake. At a glance, the picture seemed to mirror the trajectory of property price growth, or of ABC1 advertising demographics, although on closer inspection it wasn’t quite so simple. What the figures suggested was that Eudaxa was spiking among early adopters, in the jargon of the technological adoption model. These were people who displayed certain traits: openness, curiosity, low fear – none of them obviously associated with depression. On the contrary, sales seemed to be rising in areas of relative wealth rather than those in which depression rates were historically highest. The numbers were modest but growth was strong.
‘It’s all off-label,’ Tom said. ‘Either that or it’s people with private shrinks. I don’t believe these referrals are clinician-led. I think a lot of this is driven by patients.’
‘That shouldn’t be possible.’
‘It’s what we wanted.’
‘Not to this extent,’ she said quietly. ‘The data should have foreseen this.’
•
After work, Grace went to the gym. There was a queue around the Woodway Curves, a new breed of running machine that let you power your own movement. According to the description on the wall, the Curve was: ‘more natural than other machines’ and had ‘the organic feel of the Earth’s surface’. The woman next to her looked close to tears, her jowls bouncing erratically, her T-shirt emblazoned with the words Nevertheless she persisted.
Stepping onto the machine, Grace caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. She rarely thought much about her appearance but that night, she couldn’t help herself. Her skin looked more or less OK, but there were hollows under her eyes. She should probably do something about it, although the thought hardly filled her with enthusiasm. It was just another chore on the long list of things that filled her time. She’d always felt quite detached from her appearance. She viewed it objectively, as a fact of life, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of its significance. It hadn’t escaped her attention, for example, that beauty standards had escalated in her lifetime. The skinny, muss-haired women of her mother’s generation wouldn’t have cut it in today’s environment. A kind of arms race had taken hold, where what were sold first as innovations quickly hardened into expectations. There was hair to shape, remove and dye, skin to resurface and scars to remove. Nails had become a billion-pound industry; eyebrows alone brought millions into the economy. There was a kind of camp absurdity to it all that only masked the amount of work involved. Appearances were money now in a sense that hadn’t been the case when she was young. It had become normal to exploit how you looked in a way that once had been the province of professionals: you took your own portraits, you edited them, you uploaded them – another time-consuming activity that had gone from optional to conventional. And of course, beauty meant youth, just as it always had. She was pragmatic about the way she looked but she also knew the deal. It was exhausting. She was already dead tired. She couldn’t wait until this job was over.
Trying to slam the brakes on her anxiety, she forced herself to think about the practicalities. She and Niall were splitting up. It was done. She couldn’t afford to indulge her feelings for him, even though she felt as though he’d ripped her heart out and then, moronically, tried to shove it back inside her. It was too late to salvage anything. Although predictably, Niall had done nothing, so despite the fact that she was aching for him, she’d had to take the lead as usual. She’d already asked him to move out. What she hadn’t banked on was his reluctance. He had told her it was his home as much as hers, which had led to the first real argument they’d ever had. She had realized, to her disbelief – and even Niall had seemed surprised at himself – that he was actually prepared to fight her for her earnings rather than just passively consume them. The shock still hadn’t quite worn off. She blamed herself for the millionth time; she felt unbelievably stupid. Then she did what she always did: she got strategic. First things first, she’d have to play for time. She was going to need every penny of her bonus, which meant holding on until after the divorce – otherwise she’d have to split it with him. It all factored into her decision to keep her head down at work for a while. With a little luck, if she timed things right, she’d be able to exit Eudaxa by the spring. It was a little later than she’d hoped, but she had a feeling Floyd would want to keep her around.
45
Nothing much happened for several weeks. The summer faded slowly into autumn. It was a bright, cold October day when Tom and I found ourselves in Ikea. This was the sort of thing we now did. It was fun, playing at ‘ordinary’ life. It was a novelty for both of us and, for that reason, it became a joke. I bought him a bamboo soap dispenser and he bought me a miniature cactus. We ate lunch in the cafe and counted the days until his contract was up. He had another eight weeks at Neura and then he would be free.
That night Floyd was celebrating his birthday. He’d thrown a party at the Bloomsbury Hotel. It would be the last of these events that Tom would have to go to, which coated the whole experience with an aura of relief. It must have been around nine by the time we arrived. There was another event going on in the hotel, something connected to the Frieze art fair. I’d been a little anxious all day that Lara would be there; she usually made an appearance at these things. Although anxious wasn’t the right word. I hadn’t felt anxious since Ibiza. If anything, I’d felt a little lighter than usual. I had a strong feeling that everything would be OK. And if Lara was there, so be it, she was my closest friend when it came down to it.
Grace had already arrived by the time we got there. She was standing at the bar with a man I couldn’t place.
‘Grace?’ he was saying. ‘Hi! How are you?’
She shook his hand.
‘You don’t remember me?’ he said. ‘It’s Ian. Ian Dunstan. From Cambridge.’
I knew then that I’d seen him at Floyd’s lecture. He was the guy who’d been on stage that day. He was wearing the same black shirt and jeans. He introduced himself as an altruistic investor – a patron of both the sciences and the arts. He’d helped Floyd organize the party because he wanted to connect him to the ‘art crowd’.
‘Floyd’s an artist himself,’ Dunstan said, a little buzzed on his Terra Organico Prosecco. ‘I think it’s fascinating what he does. He paints with chemicals, systems – with information. With enough data, you can paint with life. Subjectivity is becoming the province of the sciences. Don’t you think that’s a fascinating phenomenon? This is territory that used to be dominated by philosophers, artists, poets.’
Grace ordered another vodka soda. I got the feeling she was past the point where she could even be bothered to feign an interest in this stuff.
‘He’s a smart guy,’ she said cordially.
Tom scanned the room. He looked bored.
‘He’s a radical,’ Dunstan ploughed on. ‘And I don’t just mean in a symbolic sense.’ He waved dismissively at the artists. ‘What Floyd is doing is hacking reality.’
He paused to gauge Grace’s reaction. She smiled benignly, then she glanced at Tom as if she was hoping he’d rescue her.
‘You know, Warhol said that good business is the best art but he was wrong. Technology is the best art. That’s what I tell my kids, anyway.’ Dunstan looked around for his offspring. ‘You should meet my son, he’s at Cambridge. And my daughter Sofia’s here too. She’s the real geek in the family,’ he chuckled. ‘These kids breathe this stuff like air.’
There was something different about Grace that night. She didn’t look so haunted any more. On the other hand, she wasn’t her old self. It wasn’t necessarily true, I thought, that what didn’t kill you made you stronger. Sometimes it just made you harder. It seemed like she’d stopped caring about anything or anyone, except Evie maybe.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked her later.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason.’
She downed her vodka.
‘I’m not getting paid enough for this shit.’
The two of us wandered through the lobby towards the Frieze party, which was just getting started. She sat down on a sofa and surveyed the scene.
‘I don’t know what I’m doing here,’ she said.
‘You should go home, we can cover for you.’
‘I don’t have a home.’
‘I’m sorry, Grace,’ I said, although it sounded empty, probably because I’d repeated it so many times.
‘Do you want to dance?’ I asked her.
‘What?’
‘We could dance.’
She looked at me as if I’d spoken in Japanese. They were playing ‘Totally Wired’ by The Fall.
‘Let’s dance,’ I said, pulling her up.
She resisted for a while, then she started bobbing uncertainly in front of me. It was a few minutes before she began to let go. We found ourselves in the middle of the dance floor. It was loud, the lights flashing across her face. Before long she was sweating, lost in sound, as if she’d finally managed to escape the world.
After a while, something caught my attention. There was something going on upstairs. A line of people was streaming steadily towards the stairwell. They looked young, early twenties or so, some of them even younger than that. Curious, I left Grace dancing and followed the trickle upstairs. I found a small gathering in one of the suites. It was a sort of make-out room, people draped on the deep velvet sofas. The lights had been turned down low. Drone-like music masked the quiet hum of voices. I made my way around the lounge, stopping by a door that led to a bedroom. Inside, a girl was kneeling on the sheets. She looked young, around sixteen. She was crouched on all fours, naked, her dress scrunched around her neck. Her buttocks were turned towards two men who were also nude. They looked easily ten years older than her. They were both dark-skinned, perhaps East African or Middle Eastern. The room reeked of sex. I noticed that both of the men had been circumcised. The girl turned slightly and I recognized her. She was Sofia Dunstan from @peaceoutsofia.
She caught my eye and I realized she wasn’t sober. She seemed blissfully, rapturously high. It crossed my mind that I should speak to her. I tried to hold her gaze but she didn’t respond, just tossed her hair and arched her back as if she was enjoying the performance. One of the men moved towards her, his erection solid as he grabbed her thighs. I realized the other guy was holding something. He began to record them as I watched. He was masturbating in the corner while I stood in silence. She spread her thighs, the first man pulling apart her buttocks, positioning himself against her, exposing her for the camera. Suddenly, the second man looked up. He noticed I was watching, stood and closed the door. He smiled sheepishly as he shut me out. I thought of knocking, or going downstairs to find her father, but I wasn’t sure if that was right. I felt misplaced, like an adult at a teenage party. I could tell the girl had taken something but I wasn’t so sure about the men. She’d seemed high but not exactly wasted. And whatever was going on, she had seemed to want it.
I hovered awkwardly outside for a while. The people passing by gave me strange looks. There was a heavy atmosphere in the suite, as if the other guests knew something I didn’t. I wasn’t drunk but I felt dislocated. I had a sudden, nightmarish illusion that the party was pulsing around me, like an organism with a coherence of its own. I couldn’t breathe. I needed to get out. I pushed through the crowd to the bathroom where I splashed cold water on my face.
I didn’t say much during the rest of the night but in the taxi home, I told Tom what had happened.
‘It was Sofia Dunstan,’ I said. ‘You must know her. From @peaceoutsofia.’
He looked blank. I brought her up on my phone. She’d been posting from the party only hours earlier.
‘She’s Dunstan’s daughter.’
‘And?’
‘It’s Eudaxa.’
‘Probably.’
‘So, what now?’
He looked out of the window.
‘We can’t control everything,’ he said.
‘He’ll find out.’
‘Maybe.’
‘What then?’
‘We’ll deal with it,’ he said wearily.
Outside, it had started to rain and the street lights gleamed sharply on the glass.
•
‘Jesus,’ Grace said.
She’d only just got out of bed the following morning when she got the call from Floyd. The two men, it transpired, were kitchen porters. They were both immigrants, both recently arrived in the UK. They claimed to have been approached by Dunstan’s daughter in the car park; they said that she’d accosted them after their shift. It wasn’t clear how they’d ended up in her room but the implication was that she’d invited them. And just to make things worse, one of them had decided to share the video.
The footage, inevitably, had made it back to Dunstan, who had immediately spoken to his lawyers. He was not only suing the hotel but also Neura Therapeutics.
‘And that’s not all,’ Floyd had continued. ‘They failed to file a privacy injunction in time.’
Not only was the footage circulating in private but it had already started to disperse.
‘What do you want to do?’ Tom asked Grace.
The three of us were sitting in her kitchen. It was later that day. I watched her light a cigarette.
‘Nothing,’ she said, exhaling out of the window.
The smoke dissipated slowly into the garden.
‘The company’s insured,’ she said pragmatically. ‘They’ll deal with this. They’ll probably buy in some crisis management PR.’
‘So, no change from us?’
‘Exactly. We ride it out. We stick with our messaging, that’s all.’
Better together with Eudaxa it said on the sticker she’d attached to the lid of her laptop.
‘All conflict is good conflict?’ Tom said.
‘I can’t believe I actually said that.’
‘You’ve trained me well.’
She smiled calmly and examined her cigarette. Once she’d finished, she took out a tissue as she always did, wrapped it neatly and threw it away. It was only later as we were leaving, that I caught her looking at him for reassurance.
•
It was less than a week before the story hit the papers.
Rape Suspects Deny Using Off-Label Substance To Rape Teen Saying Everything They Did Was Consensual
What followed was a small flurry of attention, most of it confined to social media:
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH WHITE WOMEN?
Her body, her choice. No one else’s business
THIS DRUG IS LITERAL WHITE GENOCIDE
This medical company is affiliated with Openr.com who CONDONE sexual assault #BelieveBritishGirls
Just another case in the long and bloody history of white women using black men’s bodies and then abandoning them, often to their deaths
DUMB AS A ROCK RICH WHITE BITCH MAKES SHITTY LIFE CHOICES, GETS WHAT SHE DESERVES
The sexual assault implied in this case is racist, pure and simple.
•
By December, an icy calm had fallen over the city. It was freezing even by London standards and the streets were quieter than usual. There had been strikes on the trains and buses and the lure of a day spent indoors, free from the encumbrance of travel, had taken half the population off the streets.
‘She was right,’ Tom said as he tossed a pan of pasta together with cheese and tomatoes for dinner that night. As he and Grace had watched in silence, Eudaxa’s online presence had grown. The drug’s mentions had accumulated fast, hitting first the thousands and then the millions. It was a mini-maelstrom that criss-crossed the world, traversing the outer reaches of Brazil, through to China, Kazakhstan and back to England. The first few surges of interest took the view that Eudaxa was immoral, just another disingenuous exercise dreamt up by the one percent, and that anyone defending it was a brainwashed, virtue-signalling moron.
A second wave coalesced in the USA, after the story was picked up on public radio. These responses clustered around the conviction that the rape charge was racist. Eudaxa, they argued, was a force for good, a potentially radical weapon in the battle against unconscious bias. #Whynot? trended in this space, followed by #Herbodyherchoice.
Before long, the word #Eudaxa had begun to spike. There was a definite heat around the product. And the lack of a conventional publicity campaign only seemed to fuel the intrigue. A news cycle was born, one that slid from comments to memes to traditional news outlets and back again. It was a wild spiral that over time – through the sheer weight of repetition – had begun to acquire an authority of its own. People poured energy into their positions. Dissenters were ostracized. Sales rose.
Tom seemed sanguine as he ate his penne.
‘Floyd’s not complaining,’ he said. ‘Thank God.’
Floyd, in fact, was loving the attention. Neura Therapeutics was growing so fast that his own reputation had expanded. He’d joined a public speaking agency. He’d even been approached by a TV company that wanted to make a documentary about his life. He seemed more than comfortable with all of this. I’d noticed he’d started dyeing his hair.
