Lungs, Larynx, Lips

I regret to inform you that this week’s story is about “AI” (the boring kind being constantly stuffed down your throat, not the fun kind you get in sci-fi stories). But it’s also about what our voices mean to each other and ourselves, and other things that actually matter, so I hope that you'll forgive me.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

We spent a day on the river. It was changing faster in those days, finding broad new meanders that took us back almost to where we started, cutting through its own banks so that we never saw places we expected to. It was hardly worth planning the trip: you might end up anywhere. And besides, we thought, why must we draw maps with the land still and the river turning, and not a straight blue line with the land twisting around it?

Tuesday

I wished that somebody would at least turn over the page on the flip chart. It was unbearable, to have it sitting in the corner while we were chewed out. To be asked “What have you been doing all morning?”, when the evidence was right there in red marker pen. Bagel quoits, crossed out twice. Underneath it, underlined, exclamation-marked, Donut quoits! And to be held in such contempt, when in my heart I was still proud of our ideas.

Wednesday

I had forty leaflets left before I could go home and I knew down to the roots of my teeth that I could chuck them all in the bin and the world wouldn’t change. They were all heading there anyway. The only difference would be that forty-one people had a better day. But some stupid part of me, the part that used to do the homework over the summer holiday even though nobody ever checked, kept me standing in the cold handing out leaflets to folk who didn’t want them. Desperate, I did something make-or-break. I read the leaflet.

Thursday

After Mrs Clements’ passing, a hollow book was found among her possessions, and in its hand-cut void a silver key and an inscrutable map. Her heirs and their hangers-on spent many years searching for the lock that little key opened, with the dubious help of the map and without it. Not one of them found, or thought to seek for, the true treasure, which lay in the text she had so carefully trimmed away.

Friday

In the streets they were calling for impossible things: lush forests unbound by fences, great public halls full of books to read for free, a teacher for every child. Decent enough folk, turned feral by false promises. None of us liked the medicine we had to dispense that day. Myself, I would have sooner been in the crowd, calling for a better world. But mine was the burden of wisdom. People could have been hurt.

Saturday

The driver shook my arm, although I wasn’t sleeping. “You can’t be in there, mate.”

“Why not?” I said. “It’s my skip. There was nothing in the terms about it.” I was a little more brusque than I intended, I think because of the cabinet corner poking into my back. I tried to focus instead on the pillow of shredded papers under my head. I lay still, and smiled my it’s-OK smile, so practised all the detail had worn away. But after ten minutes he got back in the loader, promising to be back tomorrow. I sat up, and looked around at all the ruined things, and wondered how I might conceal myself.

Sunday

I stepped out onto the cloud. I knew from childhood computer games that it would hold me: the trick is to jump each time you sink, until you make it to the important cloud where you don't sink at all. But it was only vapour, that wrapped me in white as I fell. It was only in falling – falling and not seeing, wrapped up in fog – that I realised I should have hit the ground already, that something was holding me after all.

I have been reading...

• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Norman Denny). Normally I like to have a couple of books on the go at a time, in different forms or genres, but when a novel will occasionally interrupt the narrative to, for example, walk you through the entire Battle of Waterloo, it hardly seems necessary.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Lungs, Larynx, Lips

The first time I heard my sister’s voice come out of that thing, I cried and I couldn’t say why. It was the most natural thing in the world to cry at hearing her again. It was the most natural thing to cry at my baby sister being worked like a ventriloquist’s dummy. One of those things had me crying and I still can’t tell you which.

Joan hasn’t spoken in two years. It hurts me, because she used to talk to everyone. If I were robbed of speech by a bleed on the brain, I’d call that a good excuse. But Joan got all the words that passed me by. She hated foreign holidays because she couldn’t bear not being fluent. And now she’s in there, all on her own. They say she hears us but she can’t understand; that her lips and her tongue and her breath all work but language, the whole structure of it, is gone. And sometimes I wonder: why doesn’t she even try, why does she just sit there in silence? But I try not to wonder that, because the only reason I can think of is that she knows. She knows that now there’s nobody on the planet who speaks her language now.

So it’s hard for me to see her silent. But I know it must be harder for Tony. Admittedly, he’s never been much of one for the wisdom of his elders, but for your mum to be there and never speak to you—well, it’s unbearable even if you never listened to her. Everyone else talks to her like you talk to a goldfish, or a houseplant, or a grave. I talk to her like I used to at night when we were girls, when I knew she was already asleep. But Tony talks to her like she’s going to answer, every time.

And now she does, and he’s happy. He bought this little gadget that fastens to her top like a brooch, and it talks in her voice, and it calls me “Beely” instead of “Amelia” like only she ever has. It tells us it’s feeling happy or sleepy or tired but never scared. Tony fixed it on her and he started asking all these questions, about the house where he grew up and the music she likes and the time we all went to Dublin together, and it answered them all like it was her, and I thought: “If that’s your mum, why are you showing her off like a kid with a new toy?” But I didn’t say it, because just for once he didn’t look frightened.

He tells me it’s built up out of all her old letters and recordings and diaries and emails and texts, and it can look around at us and at her and work out exactly what she would say. And sure enough, it asks for food just when I think she’s getting hungry, and when I repeated one of her old jokes it jumped in and gave the punchline. I could almost believe it. I’ve seen so many things now that I thought were impossible. But there’s another language that Joan still speaks, even if Tony doesn’t. The language of the eyes.

I’d never say I’m closer to Joan than Tony is, but nobody really knows their own parents. Not if they’re decent parents. Sisters see everything. So I can look in Joan’s eyes and it’s like we’re talking. I could do it when we were young and I can do it now. The eyes might be a little yellower but the language is the same. That’s how I know when she’s hungry or cold, when she wants music or quiet, when she needs me there and when she needs me gone. We used to talk for hours, me with my words, her with her eyes. Until she fell asleep, sometimes, and I just kept talking, like when we were girls. Now that little thing talks back, and her eyes can’t get a word in except for “stop it, stop it, stop”. But if I take it off her, Tony’s phone will buzz and he’ll send an ambulance.

endless endless twisting in here in me, can’t thoughts feelings into a one without it, got him my boy bluff as ever leaping in he never and I he never does, Beely does it all wouldn’t want him to looks at me wanting what I can’t while she but it doesn’t everything at once I hear them but it’s the same mess twisting Beely looks and says I know and he bad tooth hope it gets now I hear this thing too his make believe tongue sounding like I am and better pretend if needs she looks but doesn’t stop it stop

I worry about Tony. He’s stopped telling me when he’s visiting. He says his mum already knows and she can tell me. After he’s been with her he doesn’t talk to me, won’t tell me how she was or if she’s eaten or been to the toilet. He says I can talk to her myself now.

Worrying about him wasn’t supposed to be my job. I was supposed to be the fun spinster aunt, all the good times with none of the responsibility, the one he could always talk to because I wasn’t anyone’s mum. After that, I wasn’t meant to worry about him because we were both busy worrying about Joan. That’s what made the worry bearable: sharing it. Now he’s not worried any more. I have to worry about both of them, and I’m all on my own.

I wish I could take that little brooch off my sister so I could scream at it without her hearing. I wish I could shout so loud that spit flies from my mouth. I wish I could tell it what my life looks like now until I heard her voice say she was sorry. I want to find out if they made it so it can sob.

Instead I’ll make her chicken pasta like I do every Thursday, and like every Thursday she won’t eat it. She never eats it, but it upsets her if I don’t make it. I think she remembers that it used to be her favourite. The brooch doesn’t understand things like that. It saw her ignore it, so next time it said to me: “Thank you, Beely, but I’m not so keen on that.” And every time it sees her leave the bowl only for me to bring out another the next week, it gets more insistent. “You know I don’t like chicken pasta, Beely.” “Beely, why do you keep bringing me this?” It can’t see the look in her eyes. It doesn’t speak that language. And I can’t explain. I can’t talk to it. I won’t do that to my sister.

leg’s fallen got to move but why did we yellow anyway talks now that I can’t understand tingle paint shouldn’t only I read before yellow and sang but asleep and it’ll hurt water must by the clock drink or void books hurts more the longer you leave it always talked foot nonsense before anyway didn’t then blue I think and how we chose blue get brushes know I know me if only I know me that’s not new move then and I don’t read but I sing more

heard it everyone talking visit go so much can’t need house left too much quiet stop

I’ve decided I’ll show him. I worry it’s cruel of me. He thinks he’s got his mum back. I’d do worse than he has, if I thought that was on offer. But it’s all a trick. When Joan’s husband died, she had a few recordings of him, and she used to sit and talk to them, pausing him so she could speak. The strangest conversations, as she fit herself around the words on the tape. They say grief makes us mad, but I think it’s just so big we have to invent new ways to let it in or keep it out, each of us, every time.

Some of those ways are good and some are harmless and some are poison, and Tony’s way, that little robot voice, that one is poison. It only works because he wants it so badly he pretends. He doesn’t let himself notice the strange melody of her voice, the way she’s always on her best behaviour, like she’s on the phone to the bank. He twists his mum to fit what’s on the tape. He’s going to forget who she is.

So just for once I’m going to be the wicked aunt, the harpy. I’m going to twist him up first. It cost silly money, but now I have it, my own little brooch with my own little robot Tony inside it.

I thought it would be harder. I thought I would need to fake his signature or say he was in a coma or something. All I had to do was tick a box. You can’t even pick up a parcel that easily. I just ticked a box, to say I had the right to use all the materials I was providing, to give them over to this American company forever “for the purpose of training the neural network”. It’s hard to see how anyone can tick a box like that. How anybody can have a right to that. But tick it I did, and sent off every scrap of Tony’s words that I could find so they could pack it into this little box. The only fair way to do it, and not fair at all.

looking for and never when it is he comes under did I already did she it talks but doesn’t ask maybe dropped did I ever if it asks they don’t listen already looked there if foreign bet he’s need a sandwich wee stretch scratch there sounds like me but it’s the same nonsense as the rest of them

“What’s this for?” he asked me when I showed it to him. “A spare?” Shiny silver, his one. I chose the one I thought he’d like. I don’t know why.

“Not a spare,” I said. “This one’s for you.”

“What? To take home? I had been thinking about—”

“To wear. It’s you. Your voice. I had it made.”

He looked at me like he did when he was little and I told him giraffes sometimes get their necks tangled into knots. Like he didn’t believe me, but he couldn’t work out why someone would lie about something so crazy.

“Look, you know I don’t like that thing. You know I think your mum doesn’t like it. And I understand you feel you’ve got her back. I don’t want to take that away from you. But you deserve to know whether it’s real or not, and there’s no way we’re ever going to agree about that, except this.”

“Except what?”

“You wear that, and go in and talk to her. But not you talking. Not with your voice. Through that. If it’s as real as you say then it should feel just the same. Like it’s coming from you.” I fixed the brooch to his shirt pocket with its little magnetic clasp. I’d practised doing it: the magnets hold so tight my old fingers can barely separate them. “From the heart. And if it doesn’t feel like that for you, well, then it’s not like that for Joan either. But if it does, I’ll stop whinging. I’ll accept it. I’ll even talk to it. God knows I’d love to talk to her again.”

He adjusted how it sat on his shirt, like it had to be turned just right to work. Maybe it did, for all I knew. All those little sensors trying to give it something to say. Then he nodded, slowly, and went in to see his mum, without another word.

“Hello, love,” Joan’s brooch said, like it had a hundred times, like Joan had thousands. “Here for anything special?”

“No, mum,” came the voice that was almost Tony’s. “Just popped in to say I love you.”

And as the conversation continued, he turned to me with tears in his eyes, and said, that’s it, that’s it, that’s exactly what I wanted to say.