Parcel for You..Part 40

 

Vanessa woke up to Spencer poking her repeatedly in the shoulder. ‘Wake up, it’s your birthday!’

 

She didn’t normally outsleep her husband’s shutdown period but her head was foggy and it took a few seconds to realise where she was and process the events of the previous evening. Some of the details seemed absurd enough to be written off as a dream. ‘Oh,’ she sighed and sat up, rubbing her eyes, ‘how is your arm?’

 

‘Like new and I’m hungry.’

 

‘You’re not…are you? You actually feel hungry?’’

 

‘No,’ Spencer shook his head, ‘not exactly but I feel like I should be. They’ve been serving breakfast for an hour, there might not be any croissants left.’

 

Vanessa pushed her face into the pillow, sighed and grabbed her phone. There was a missed call from June, her mother, at seven o’clock, followed by a birthday greeting message. It was the same every year, she called at the crack of dawn to unburden herself with the responsibility of acknowledging her daughter’s birthday.  ‘The worst thing about birthdays, Spencer, is you’re a year older.’

 

‘No, you’re only a day older than yesterday. I wasn’t born of course, I was manufactured, boxed up and then married. I’m excited about your birthday though, especially the breakfast.’

 

The dining room was hushed except for the sound of clinking tea cups on saucers and cutlery handles on the edge of greasy plates. Some people were talking in whispers as if somehow the first people who came down for breakfast had set a library-like tone of awkward silence and it had continued for the duration of the service. 

 

Vanessa headed for a table in the corner, away from people, it looked out onto a view of the distant mountains. She instructed Spencer to remain in his seat while she went to the buffet table to check out suitable food for him to consume. There was something niggling her, she felt aggrieved that a food cartridge had been inserted into him without her approval and now, rather inconveniently, he wanted to have the experience of eating just like any normal man.

 

The atmosphere in the room made her nervous. She loaded coffee, fruit, weetabix and pastries onto a tray and worried unnecessarily about dropping it and causing a scene. As she walked back towards the table, Spencer was looking very pleased with himself as he eyed the food and then pointed out towards the mountains. 

 

He cleared his throat. ‘You’ve got the Black Mountains there to the right hand side, eight hundred and ten meters at their highest point and then further back to the right you can see Fforest Fawr and the smaller geographical protrusions, which are classified as hills.’

 

Vanessa shushed him as she sat down. ‘No need to shout,’ she whispered, ‘it’s a stunning view, I agree, in fact it’s the best thing going for this place.’ 

 

‘Wow. I wish you’d let me go up and choose.’

 

‘I’m still getting used to the idea of your upgrade and I didn’t want you to go mad with all the different options.’

 

‘I can’t go mad, I’m based upon logic and constrained by numerous regulating features. Now, I must eat this very slowly. I’m not really used to having anything greasy.’

 

‘It’s not that greasy.’

 

‘Croissants are considered a high fat food, Vanessa, not something we should eat every day.’

 

‘We don’t eat them every day. Anyway it’s my birthday.’

 

‘Ah yes,’ said Spencer and he made a strange gesture with his hand.

 

Vanessa detected a slight change in atmosphere in the room. Seconds later the waitress approached their table carrying a muffin with a lit candle in it. To her horror, Spencer then broke into song and serenaded her with happy birthday while the rest of the diners watched and smirked, some half-heartedly joining in, others embarrassed on her behalf.

 

She froze and fixed a smile on her face while she waited for the moment to evaporate and for people to turn away and get back to their own business. ‘Well, thank you, Spencer. That was very thoughtful, if not embarrassing.’

 

‘Embarrassment is something I am still unsure about but with my complex emotional capacity, I should be able to master it soon.’

 

‘I don’t know why you’d want to. It’s not beneficial at all,’ said Vanessa as she sipped her coffee and waited for her heartbeat to slow down. ‘I felt as if I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.’

 

Spencer looked very muddled. ‘You want the surface of the earth to eat you?’

 

‘Sort of yes. It’s not nice to be the centre of attention, even on your birthday. I’m perplexed about how you organised this birthday..muffin.’

 

‘I called down to the receptionist when you were in the bath, she was very nice. Hey, look,’ Spencer placed the palm of his hand on the croissant and pushed down until it was as flat as a pancake, ‘it was just filled with air. What’s the point of that?’

 

‘It tastes better, all puffed up that’s all. Most people spread jam on it.’

 

‘Jam?’

 

‘Yes, I got you some here,’ Vanessa pulled a miniature pack of jam from beside her plate. 

 

Spencer appeared delighted as he spread jam on top of the flattened croissant and then proceeded to eat it. The sight of his perfectly straight teeth clamping down on the pastry reminded Vanessa of a nutcracker Christmas decoration she had at home. ‘Oooh,’ he said, ‘apricot. Look, it’s like a bum,’ he showed her the label on the packet.

 

‘Sexual function over-ridden,’ a strange voice sounded from nearby.

 

‘What?’ Vanessa froze.

 

The voice she’d just heard wasn’t one she recognised. It was a woman’s voice and for a moment she thought it had come from Spencer but his mouth was full of croissant and his nutcracker teeth were chopping without any space for words. She looked around at the other people in the room but they were several meters away and the voice had sounded like a voice in a sci-fi film rather than a real person and had come from a space right next to her. ‘Did you hear that?’ she said, checking under the table.

 

Spencer shook his head, taking an inconveniently long time to chew his food before slowly swallowing and saying, ‘No. Am I a noisy eater?’

 

‘No, I just heard a woman’s voice, say something very unusual I think. Maybe it was in my head..’

 

‘Could be the menopause. How old are you again? We need to do some fact checking later and see what is typical for your age group. Ageing is a foreign concept to me but I know it brings tinnitus.’

 

Vanessa looked out of the window at the mountains and then at the other hotel guests, mostly older people trickling out with bellies full of coffee, bacon and beans. She wondered what would happen when she reached her own twilight years with Spencer still suspended in early middle age while her physical body began to creak. This thought made her feel quite depressed and she cast aside the remainder of her birthday muffin.

 

‘We should get back on the road. Charlie will need his water changed and Pat has left a present by the front door.’

 

‘I wish I had a present for you. The engineer said that some of my upgrades were complimentary but I said I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to have all of them so some are disabled.’

 

‘Oh,’ Vanessa looked him up and down. ‘How does that work then?’

 

‘He just installed them but then couldn’t uninstall them so he put in some code to override them.’

 

‘That sounds messy. I just get used to you as you are and then something changes.’

 

Spencer raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s life I guess.’