I look at the scrap of paper. DI Howell. I pick up the phone, and hold the receiver to my ear. My fingers think about pressing the buttons, but instead they turn the piece of paper over and over, twisting it around, curling it into new shapes. The dialling tone seems to become more insistent. What am I going to say? The dial tone is replaced by the BT woman’s voice telling me to hang up and try again. I listen to her metallic tones, inhuman yet mysteriously comforting. Again she tells me. A third time. I replace the handset and sit down, staring at the paper. At the moment it feels like this is replacing my mind with a big bubble of nothingness that’s expanding to force every other thought out of my head. I have to clear my conscience. I have to do this. I’ll never be able to move forward unless I get this out of the way. But maybe something will happen to get rid of the problem for me. Maybe Adam will tell the police for me. Maybe they’ll find me somehow. Maybe the real killer will step out and tell them what happened, and the memory will come back. Again I pick up the phone. Again I can’t dial the number. I’ll have something to eat first. You can’t be expected to make this kind of call on an empty stomach. I go into the kitchen and spend an inordinate amount of time making a sandwich. As I finish cleaning up after myself, the thought of calling comes back to me like a bad curry. Eventually, my fingers make it all the way through the number, and it connects. I hear the bored voice of a switchboard operator. I hang up. This is worse even than calling a girl when you’re a teenager. Of course it is. What am I thinking? I want somebody to do this for me, take the decision out of my hands, take care of everything for me, let me get back onto the conveyor belt of my life. Even a different conveyor belt would be OK. I can’t do this over the phone. I decide to go down to Camberwell, find this Howell, and tell him everything. I get on a bus, and another bus, and another one, and eventually I’m at the station. I can see why Adam complains so much about having to come down here. At least he can get taxis on expenses. It all seems rather unreal, as if I was going to Dixons to take back a faulty stereo, rather than help police with their inquiries. It gives me a strange frisson to say those words to myself. But that is all I’m doing. I’m going to tell them what I can remember, and then go home. But what if they think it was me? What if they’re right? I can’t do it. I can’t go there. The more I try to think about it, the worse it gets. Every time, I get so far in my memories, and come up against nothing. A big, solid, unforgiving nothing, as if I’d forgotten to press record for that part of my life. He isn’t how I’d imagined him. He’s a well-spoken, smartly dressed man. In a way I’m disappointed. I’d kind of been hoping for a TV detective, a hard-bitten cop with a drink problem, a receding hairline, and a regional working-class accent. He does at least have bags under his eyes. He asks me again. Again I tell him I don’t remember. He’s getting tired of this, he says. So am I, I tell him. Let’s go through it from the beginning, he says. I tell him as much as I can remember. He thinks I’m wasting his time, he says. Go home, he tells me.
I’d like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other… But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image. the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule and clarity. We place this small projection of ourselves all around us, and we make ourselves reliant on it. the more we surround ourselves with a narrowed notion of existence, the more narrow existence becomes. We conform to the range of motion the system allows. We must be more orderly, more logical. Answer the question, Yes or No, OK or Cancel. We think we are creating the system, but the system is also creating us. We build the system, we live in its midst, and we are changed.