Page 108 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“I just mean . . . if it was healthy, it might be easier to give up.”

She poured him more wine and they raised their glasses to unhealthy
dependencies. Then he told her the specifics of their test for Presence. They
needed two bases. Jacob would stay at their Holland Park house with the
projection of Jill’s presence and Jill would need to stay at her flat in Catford, a
parting gift from Max that she would’ve rejected if that hadn’t meant starting
another fight with him. Jill’s current tenants were away in Prague until the
autumn and when she called them to ask if they were all right with her being in

the flat for a couple of weeks they said it was fine. “Just don’t break
anything . . .” Radha said. Workmen came to the flat to make some adjustments
to wiring and to secrete the contents of what looked like gas canisters into the
walls. Jacob gave her a full list of the substances she’d be breathing in. While
they were all substances found unaltered in wildlife, mixing them was bound to

be a different matter.
“This is essentially going to be like an acid trip that lasts for two weeks, isn’t
it?”
Jacob only said: “Not really. You’ll see.”
After the necessary alterations had been made to both houses Jill and Jacob
recorded three conversations—the purpose of which was to place the mourner in
the midst of a familiar exchange, the kind we’re always having with friends and

family, repeating ourselves and repeating ourselves, going over what we know
about each other to prove that we still know these things and will not, cannot,
forget them. Vi set up a camera at Jacob’s office and filmed Jacob’s face as he
and Jill repeated the conversation they’d had on the Tube about whose idea it
had been to get married. They talked about their earliest impressions of each
other too, and by the time it came to filming their third conversation they

couldn’t think of anything else they wanted to say, so they kept it brief. Sex
returned to the Akkerman-Wallace bedroom—to every room in their house in
fact, their sweat mingling in the summer heat.
A day later Vi provided them with a transcript of what they’d said in each of
the conversations they’d filmed in Jacob’s office, and Jill was irritated by this
(was this Vi’s way of telling them to make certain that their claims matched up
with what they really felt?) until she recalled that they were going to be filming

all three conversations again in her own office, with the camera focusing on
Jill’s face this time. They had to make an effort to get the conversations in sync.
If she or Jacob couldn’t “get hold” of each other in their separate bases they