CHAPTER FOUR: The futures

He went away for four months, and I cleaned his beautiful big house every day. But he didn’t phone me once.

And when he came back, he wasn’t OK. He looked thin and white and sick. I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t listen. I was just the cook and cleaning woman. He had a lot of new friends now. And some of these friends were very strange.

I first met the Futures one night in November. There was a party at Al’s house, and when I went there after work, I saw a big black car outside. It looked like a boring car, and when I went inside, I thought the people looked boring too. But that was only on the outside. Inside, they were as dangerous as wild animals.

A businessman in a dark suit sat opposite Al, with a young woman on the arm of a chair beside him. The man was about forty years old with grey hair. The woman was much younger – about twenty-four maybe. She had long black hair, and was wearing a blue dress. At first I thought she was the man’s daughter, but then Al said:

‘Hi, Ellen! Meet my new friends – Dan Future and his wife Linda. We met in New Mexico.’

There were about ten other people there, talking and listening to music. We had one or two drinks, and Al and Linda went for a swim in the pool. I sat and watched the beautiful evening sun over the sea, and Dan Future sat beside me. We watched Al’s thin body “when he got slowly out of the pool, and Dan said: ‘Life’s so very short, don’t you think?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

He smiled; he had beautiful white teeth. ‘My father died last year. He was sixty-five. That’s not much, is it? Sixty- five years of life.’

‘Well, maybe not,’ I said. ‘But. . .’

‘Think how many times the sun has gone down in the evenings. Ten billion times, maybe, a hundred billion? A hundred billion evenings as beautiful as this, but my father sat and watched maybe only a few hundred of them. We only live a short time, like birds, you know.’

‘Yes, I see,’ I said. I looked at him, surprised. Businessmen don’t usually say things like that; but then businessmen didn’t usually come to Al’s parties. Dan Future’s hair was beautifully cut, he had an expensive watch, nice clothes – he looked strong and healthy. Why did he want to talk about death? The only sick person in this house was Al. What did Dan Future know about that?

He smiled again. ‘We don’t have to die, you know. Soon, people are going to live a hundred and fifty years, maybe more. You just need to have money, that’s all. I told your brother about it in New Mexico, and he was very interested. Maybe you are, too?’

Oh, no, I thought, the man’s crazy. ‘Are you, er… do you belong to one of these new churches?’ I asked.

‘No, no. I’m a scientist. I can tell you all about it, if you like…’

But he didn’t, because at that minute Al came up to me, and said: ‘We need some more drinks, and food! How about some food, Ellen? There are some hamburgers in the freezer!’ And so I went to get them.

Al had the money, and I didn’t. And I was a woman. So I got the drinks and cooked, and about ten o’clock I went home. And I didn’t learn any more about Dan Future and his crazy ideas. Not then.

But I learned a lot about them, two weeks later.