‘Like a virgin,’ she sings, squeaky like Madonna, and then giggles.

‘And once again, this is my mum we’re talking about. Please.’ But I giggle too.

We sit in silence for a while.

‘John, what about the way the children reacted?’

‘Like, to Winifred?’

‘Yes.’

‘As if they knew?’

‘They did know. Not that she was a robot – but something.’

‘Maybe it’s like dogs.’

‘Dogs?’ Charlotte arches an eyebrow.

‘Hearing stuff or knowing someone’s coming, or whatever they can do?’

‘Smell?’

‘I don’t know, dogs – they can tell things like when their owner is on the way home. So they say.’

‘Dogs say?’

‘Very funny. No, people who know dogs. So the children have sharper senses maybe.’

‘They could hear a little bit of Winifred’s machinery whirring away?’

I laugh. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘No, I don’t know either. They could sense something.’

‘Would a dog, I wonder?’

‘Be interesting to find out.’

‘It was funny about Miss Jackson.’ I laugh again at the thought of it.

‘Who?’

‘The teacher at the kids’ school.’

‘Oh – yes, funny.’

We both look at the road ahead for a while, speeding towards us.

‘You don’t think…?’

‘No! No… no! Definitely not. We’d have heard. Wouldn’t we?’

Margaret

I wake up each morning feeling better and better. It’s quite a change. For years – it feels like forever – I felt a little worse each day. Like most people, I suppose. You get used to it. Starting from the age of about 30, and especially after having babies.

I was stuck with the wreckage of my body, I thought. Now it seems I’m not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I conclude I had some kind of dementia, and the nanobots are somehow able to repair my brain. I’d rather not think about them circulating inside my head, but whatever they’re doing works.

Winifred is like a walking encyclopaedia. She is a walking encyclopaedia, come to think of it. She can whizz off into the internet while she’s talking to you, and fetch answers to anything, winnowing out the crazy ones first. I asked her how she did that – decided what was valid information, and what not, and she said, ‘Peer-reviewed literature,’ and that was all.

Her theory about what happens in care homes is interesting. She has a somewhat dry delivery, I must say. What she said was this:

‘The sheer effort of endlessly remaking a personality becomes too much for the residents. Social imperatives no longer have any force: nothing depends on what any of them do or don’t do or say. The inmates stop trying and sink into mere biological existence, while the staff’s social structures don’t include the inmates any more than a zoo-keeper’s might include the fish in an aquarium.’

‘I’m like some kind of exotic fish?’

‘No, what I meant was—’