The computer arrived on an afternoon when Paul was not at home, in a container that was two thirds the width and height of the front door. While Cassandra mopped the floor and removed cobwebs from the corners of the studio, their handyman methodically measured, screwed in brackets, and mounted the unit on the wall. But there weren’t any other pieces in the carton.
‘There’s no keyboard,’ she said, scrabbling in the box and pulling out packing materials. ‘Where’s the keyboard?’
Harry shrugged and switched on the mains, then the unit itself. A red laser beam emerged from the bottom of the screen, projecting a virtual keyboard onto the work surface below.
‘Oh lord,' she exclaimed, worried. ‘Paul’s office doesn’t even have one of those.’
‘He’ll be wanting one now,’ muttered Harry. ‘Too sci-fi for my blood.’
Fat, clean tubes of Holbein paints arrived. A woman from British Cloud Computing came to drill a hole through the wall, pull a fibreoptic cable through, and attach a tiny disc to its end. The disc sat in a corner, glowing like a beacon.
Ticking off a goal she’d set with Eleanor, she messaged Jack to ask where he'd taken Darkroom to be scanned so that she could follow with the rest, even the paintings she’d done as a teenager. The Panopticon employees wore gloves as they lay each piece she brought in onto an ultra-resolution scanner. It was only to avoid any finger marks, they said, but it made Cassandra feel important.
When she arrived home, she would log in to find files of astonishing size beamed to her new high-capacity cloud account. On the mammoth screen her work appeared as real and detailed as it had on the wall of the gallery. Even 'The Swimmer' was impressive, improved rather than diminished by its digitisation.
She was unsure where to start, afraid to put her brush to canvas. But the pressure inside her threatened to burst her open at the seams. She forced herself to begin, simply, where students begin at art school. A single pomegranate, turning leathery now, poached from the mantelpiece at Olivia’s wake.
ChatGPT-generated image of a pomegranate painting
From that moment, when Paul was not there, she barely left the garden. In the middle of March, the magnolia tree outside the window bloomed, and Cassandra tracked its progress every day. Candy-coloured flowers of cream, pink, darker pink, unfurling and then withering away. Spiders lost their lease, had no opportunity to weave their webs in peace. Carried by the tide of an increasing strong creative flow, she forgot so many lunches that her cheekbones grew sharp. When natural light faded, if there were time before she had to go, she pulled together the text and images for her site, caught up on the art scene, and even reconnected with some of her Slade cohort. A few of them, as it turned out, weren’t as successful as she’d assumed.
‘This is coming along, all right,’ Paul said from the studio door, leaning against the frame and swilling an Old Fashioned in a rocks glass.
She jumped. ‘Oh god, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t even started dinner.’
‘I had a late lunch,’ he said, wandering in. ‘Many students today?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Just my Hong Kong one.’
‘Hm.’ He collapsed onto the loveseat, craning his neck to look around. ‘What have you been up to all day, then?’
‘Working on the website, mostly,’ she said. ‘Verity took a new picture.’
‘Let’s see it,’ he said.
She’d provisionally decided to use two photos on the site, one old, one new. One was the promotional photograph from her exhibit: frank stare and crossed arms, her work hung behind her along the great arc of the wall.
‘…her work hung behind her along the great arc of the wall…’ [I imagined Cassandra’s long-ago exhibit as being in the Tate St Ives in Cornwall. Photo @Rikard Österlund, https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-st-ives/display/modern-art-and-st-ives
It was not the face of some stranger, was almost the same as the one in the photo Verity had taken a week before, with her latest canvas and brushes, her palettes and fresh tubes of colour. Just like her younger self, she looked straight into the camera lens with a Mona Lisa smile. The two images could have been taken mere months apart.
She’d been surprised to see them side by side on the high-def screen, had spent some time zooming up to spot the differences. Maybe, not unlike Olivia, she could be the sort of woman that people envy, about whom people could say that she hadn’t aged a day. She’d gone to the mirror in the studio, run her knuckles up one cheekbone, up the other. She’d tilted her chin to touch and inspect the skin of her neck. She’d twitched aside the hair that partially covered her forehead, leaned forward, let the fringe fall back again.
Nothing had happened to her yet, nothing had happened at all, but still the smile in the second photograph could be the smile of a woman at the height of her powers, the expression of a woman with a secret. She blushed as she brought the images up to show Paul.
‘Huh. Very professional,’ mused Paul. ‘Funnily enough. But what’s the point of it all?’
He was in a funny mood. She wondered if this were his first Old Fashioned of the evening. She flushed deeper.
‘I don’t know if there’s a point, exactly,’ she said. ‘It’s practical. A place to collect pictures of my work. Eleanor thinks it will be good for my self-confidence. At Olivia’s, ah, Olivia’s thing, a couple people wondered if I still did portraits. But that’s just…eventually, maybe. Not definite.’
‘Huh. You never said that.’
‘I didn’t get the chance.’
It was risky to say, but he didn’t rise to it.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘as technologically impaired as you are, my love, I’ll be fascinated to see how this website ends up.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s easier than I thought,’ she said. ‘You just…describe.’ She shuffled around sheets of scratch paper on the worktop, found the notes she’d written to herself. ‘Natural Language Processing. “NLP-driven web design.” You sit there and say, “put such-and-such here” and “I need this to do such-such-such.” And it does it. Idiot-proof.’
‘That’s lucky, bless you.’ He drained the rest of his glass. ‘I’m going to get another,’ he announced. ‘Dinner?’
‘I’m coming in now,’ she said.
Only when she launched her website would she visit Liv's Memor-I-Am again. She would post her lovely tribute. She would return to the Us room, to the antechamber. Maybe she’d encounter Alex there again. When she did, she’d meet him this time as a person of greater substance. More successful. More…real.
But how could she cantilever success out of thin air? She’d had a CV once, when she applied for her master’s in fine arts and when she first proposed her solo exhibition, but it was lost long ago on some obsolescent laptop or misplaced USB stick. She had to start everything over.
She had so much nothing to show since then that it looked suspicious, like something had to have happened to her. Everyone would have understood if she'd disappeared off the map at those times when everyone was ill or had a tragedy or a sad story in their family. That would have been a good enough reason to have wandered from her path or paused her career. At certain moments in history, failure is so understandable that to sink into it, to embrace it, feels expected, almost noble. But she had failed well before then. What had she ever done?
She didn’t have a session with Eleanor for days yet, so she rang Verity.
'Okay, I'm going to stop you right there,’ said Verity. 'You're doing your "poor little me, I'm such a nobody" routine.'
'I don't have a routine,’ Cassandra said, propping her elbows on the table in front of her, muffling her voice with her hands. ‘I’ve let myself down.’
Verity sighed. 'If you start snivelling like that, I am going to hang up. Listen to me. This is not a problem with you. This is a societal problem. Did you read A Man's World? Or, wait, Why Women are Blamed for Everything? Oh, and Visibilising Women's Invisible Work? You'd better have read that, I gave that to you for Christmas, everyone should read that. I should have given it to Paul, come to think.'
'I read some,' Cassandra lied.
'If society gave you proper acknowledgement for everything you do - if society recognised the invisible work of all women - you would not be sitting here feeling fucking guilty and ashamed about what you think you haven't done.’ Verity was rattling like a machine gun now. 'This is bullshit. I can't believe we're having this conversation in this day and age. I am going to send you a link right now. Right, sent. Got it? Get on it. What is it?'
'You've sent me this before,' Cassandra said.
'And did you fucking fill it in? Clearly not, or else you've forgotten. Fill it in again. This calculates, monetarily, what all the invisible, uncredited, unacknowledged work you have done as a woman is worth. What you would have been paid, if women's work were validated and compensated. As for the website, well, let the art speak for itself, and that rockstar photo I took of you.’
'I'm still not sure what to say, though,’ Cassandra said.
'Honestly, you amaze me sometimes,' Verity snapped. 'Have you forgotten what inspired that exhibition in the first place? Or was that just a concept without conviction?'
'You’re not being fair. Without conviction?' Cassandra felt a surge of energy, more than enough to protest. 'You were there. First, I was Andrew's bloody handmaiden. He got all the space, all the priority. My getting through the first year of the MFA in the first place is a flipping miracle. And then Paul, I don’t know. He’s always been…sceptical.’
‘That’s an interesting word for it,’ Verity huffed.
‘So you know I get it. I have talked to you about how practically nothing had changed since Woolf gave those room-of-one's-own lectures in nineteen-twenty-whatever. I was as pissed off as you were about...'
'There you go. There she is. Now you're talking. Right, so whatever has happened to you, you haven't entirely forgotten. I can't tell you what to put...'
'Because you're only a journalist who makes her living through words?' Cassandra said.
'Because I don't need to tell you what to put,’ Verity said. ‘Who cares if I can, yes, I'm a writer but I’m not your spin doctor, babes, I can't hand it to you on a silver platter because it has to come from you. Connect with the person who was just telling me about Andrew and Paul. Fuck, I sound like my therapist. Do I sound like your therapist? What would she say?’
‘Ummm…she might have said that focusing on regrets about the past can block action in the present,’ she said.
'I like her,' Verity said. 'And here we are, in the present, and what do you want?'
'I want to get back out there.'
'Well okay, then. You'll be needing to get on. Good chat. I'm hanging up now.’
The website had been live for a week the first time she returned to Olivia’s Memor-I-Am. To buy herself some privacy, she told Paul that she had tutoring that day, university applicants in a time zone far from London, necessitating evening sessions in the studio. It was a lie she wouldn’t have dared had she still been working from the computer in the house, but she had her own space now. In any case, he had his early flight to Italy in the morning. Complete safety simply entailed waiting until his plane had left, but she felt deeply compelled to log in that evening. She couldn’t account for it, other than exhaustion at the wait, at the anticipation.
She expected that over the months since her death the stream of visitors to Olivia's memorial would have slowed to a trickle. But when she logged in, at least two dozen people had left messages on that day alone. A young, sexy man playing the guitar, singing an achingly sad song in Portuguese, had posted a tribute video. She couldn’t imagine what Jack must think when people put up things like these.
She squared up her paper next to the projected keyboard and readied herself to transcribe. Somehow, producing something perfect no longer mattered as much, but she had tried her best to be true to how she felt, not simply performative. We knew each other from the cradle, she wrote. We had our own language; one I’ll never get to speak again. I find you in unexpected places, looking straight at me, reminding me of who I am. The me that you helped make. Even now, maybe more than ever, you have the power to bring me back to myself. I only have to remember you.
As she hit ‘post’ a lingering weight passed from her. She watched with her chin in her hand for a few minutes, watching the heart symbol's irregular pulse as the approval beat in. Jack’s reply came swiftly.
You were there from the beginning of her, and from the beginning of us. You gave me my life, and I'll be grateful to you forever for helping me find her.
A more pedestrian comment from someone in Brussels, such a lovely tribute. Someone else in Brazil, sinto muito por sua perda, so sorry, with love from Salvador. Perhaps the man crooning the sad Portuguese song as he strummed his guitar. And then, another comment popped up.
Beautiful words from the artist of this extraordinary portrait of Olivia.
The commentator was anonymous, but 'extraordinary' had been the word he used, twice. Outside was darkness; their bedroom light, she could see, had gone out. And nine pm was the time he’d been online before.
She entered the ‘Us’ room to a babble of voices, but as before, Irina muted them and drew her aside for a brief tete-a-tete, a different stream of chat tailored for a second visit.
ChatGPT image of the Memor.I.Am antechamber
'Good evening. Welcome back,’ she said. ‘There are a lot of people in the room tonight. To review, I will be ambiently monitoring and available for any questions or concerns. Press the umbrella symbol to be connected with resources. Remember the fundamental rules of kindness, respect and tolerance. Please, spend as much time in this room as you would like. Do you have any questions that I can answer for you now?'
'No, no, return to room,' Cassandra said. For once, she forgot to say thank you.
'You will now be returned to the room and your microphone will be live,’ Irina said, and disappeared.
The conversation continued as she re-entered, the speakers too absorbed to acknowledge her arrival. She picked up that several people knew one another from their time at the Royal College of Art, had studied with Olivia. Perhaps they’d planned it, agreed to gather at this time. Her eyes tracked around the circumference of the circle, around again, and his initials were not there. But then a new circle started as a dot and expanded into existence, like a bubble blown from a wand.
Cassandra was aflutter. If she said ‘hi,’ the others might think she was speaking to them. She wanted to speak with him privately, didn’t know if she could, but he’d likely still be in his briefing with Irina.
The edge of his circle remained dark. Ten seconds, twenty, and the dark outline of AJ's bubble disappeared.
She shut her eyes in an agony of indecision, listening as Olivia's classmates gasped and giggled. Someone was telling a story about Olivia going skinny dipping in the Seine when she was supposed to be at the Louvre. Never trust Olivia around a body of water! So much laughter, peals and shrieks of laughter.
Ping.
A golden thread spanned AJ and CC’s circles, with a cartoon speech bubble attached. AJ has requested a private conversation. Accept?
She had not realised it was a feature. Running her hands through her hair, she tried to smooth a tangled flyaway and tucked it behind her ear, as though he’d be able to see her.
She tapped the screen, forgetting that her new unit could do everything by voice command. Accept.
'Hi there,’ he said. ‘It’s you.'
Cassandra blushed, relieved there was no video. Something about the addition of the ‘there’ made it feel so different than merely ‘hi.’
'It's me,’ she said. ‘And it’s you.'
‘It’s us,’ he said. 'Now it all makes sense.'
'What does?'
'The heading in the menu that got us to this room. Us. They don't tell you what you're in for, do they?'
She laughed. 'Nothing’s intuitive on here. I didn't know a private conversation was possible. How did you know?'
'I didn't,’ he said. ‘When I saw you, I touched you. And it worked.'
Whether it was by accident or design that everything from his lips sounded like a double entendre, she decided she should ignore it.
‘How did you manage this?’ she said. ‘Showing up at the same time as me again. Seems a coincidence, seeing as you were just stopping by before.’
'Does it?' he countered teasingly. ‘Not so much, actually. I get notifications about new comments on her Memor.I.Am. Don’t you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It would be too much.’
‘Ah okay. It’s a little different for me, I guess. So a notification popped up about your post. I hope this isn’t too weird, but I was hoping to speak to you again.’
Whether it was weird or not, Cassandra didn’t know, but a frisson of excitement tingled at her spine. ‘I haven't logged on since the last time we spoke,’ she said, pressing the cool back of her hand at the heat of her cheek. ‘Do you visit a lot?’
Embarrassed, she dropped her head into her hand.
He breezed past her come-here-often gaffe without needling her about it. ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘How are you?’
'Fine, I'm fine,’ she said. ‘Better than fine. In fact, a lot has happened in the last few weeks. I'm pleased to speak to you too. I need to thank you. You sort of put a fire under me.'
'Did I?’ he said. ‘I'm intrigued. What do you mean?'
'Well,' Cassandra said, back-pedalling, 'it might be a combination of things. A lot of things were different after...after Olivia. But our conversation was a catalyst. Yes.’
'Cassaaaandra,’ he drawled, spinning out the word, making a feast of the second vowel. Ahhhhhhhh. 'What have you done?'
So familiar, like something Verity would say, the tone she might take if she were chastising Cassandra on the surface but secretly proud of her. As her lifelong friend, Verity had license to be proud. The things she knew about Alex could be counted on one hand. Photographer. Lecturer. Didn’t know Olivia. Likes my work. American. Likes me. Sounds sexy.
Two hands.
‘What have I done? I’ve done a website,' she said.
‘You did!' he exclaimed.
'I did. To be honest, not having a site wasn't about being old fashioned, like I think I said the other week. I'm not, really.' She took a deep breath. 'I'd avoided it. For various reasons. I haven't done that much in recent years. Not as much as I should have done. As I wanted to.'
'You’re talking about existential guilt,' he said sagely.
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘I’m familiar with guilt, but I'm not sure that I have the existential variety. What do you mean?'
'Existential guilt. The feeling that you have failed to seek out or achieve your true potential. Followed, of course, by a paralysis of action and choice. You’re ashamed that you haven't done as much as you could’ve with what you were given, and that keeps you from doing anything.'
'You are a walking encyclopaedia.' She laughed. 'How do you do that? But that...that's uncanny. That is how I feel. Maybe existential guilt has stopped me.'
'I'll tell you a secret,' Alex said, dropping his voice. 'I think everybody feels like that. Even the people who look totally confident and successful. And life would be a whole lot easier if everyone told the truth about it.'
'Do you feel like that?' she asked.
'All the time,' he said. 'All. The. Time.'
His circle shimmered with every emphasised syllable. Cassandra closed her eyes to be alone with the sound, tried to picture what sort of man might be attached to such a voice, what sort of man might say these things, with this warmth and solicitude and connectedness. In that moment, she was more hopeful about her future than she had ever been, even after thousands of pounds' worth of therapy. She had never walked out of Eleanor's office with this feeling, though she thought she recalled Eleanor saying similar things. But they'd never hit. Not like this.
'So, let me guess,' he said, breaking into her reverie.
'Guess what?'
'Your website, of course,’ he said. ‘I’m going to guess the domain name. Ready?'
Cassandra burst out laughing. 'You're about to go on an adventure that I've been on myself. Quite recently.'
'Oh, I should buckle my seatbelt, should I? Okay,’ he said. ‘New window. Go to...Cassandra Parsons dot com. Ah. Oh my. Do you happen to have a secret life as an adult film artist in sunny California?'
'She's blonde, isn't she? I have curly brown hair,’ Cassandra said, blushing.
'Not answering the question, directly, interesting,’ he said. ‘Let's move on. Go to Cassandra Parsons dot co dot U.K. Hm....I'm guessing that in your spare time you don't manage the hair salon that won the Bradford's Best award two years running?'
He was flirting. He was a clearly a flirt. Perhaps not creepy, not icky, it didn’t feel like that. But a flirt.
‘Keep going,’ she said. ‘Just search my name. You’ll find me eventually.’
'That would take all the fun out of it!’ he said. ‘Wait, I know. Go to...' He paused dramatically. 'The Cassandra Parsons Project dot com.'
Cassandra froze. 'Oh. I...oh.’
'What? What's wrong?’ he asked. ‘The band? The Alan Parsons Project. They're English? Were English. But it was a long time ago...'
'I know the Alan Parsons Project,' Cassandra interrupted.
'Well, you're either older than I thought, or your parents liked them,’ he said. ‘Mine sure did. I am the eye in the sky, looking at you…I can read your mind. you know?’
'My father loved the Alan Parsons Project,’ she said slowly. ‘He's dead now.'
'Oh, I'm sorry. I've reminded you...'
'No, no. He died years ago. I can’t believe you said...it’s just…that was the song in the charts, the one that he used to sing.'
'The Eye in the Sky?' Alex asked.
'Yes, the Eye in the Sky. Yes,’ she said. ‘Stop, please, this is too spooky. I can't understand how you’re doing this. Anyway. I think the song was before I was born, or something. He had a joke, a bad dad joke that he used to tell when he'd introduce me to people. And this is my daughter, Cassandra Cecilia, otherwise known as The Martin Parsons Project.'
Alex made a little noise, a huh, an expression of surprise or empathy. 'That is uncanny,' he said finally.
‘This is the weirdest coincidence I've ever had,’ she said, quivering.
'I have to confess something that is not a coincidence, though,’ Alex said. ‘I did get a notification, that’s true. But I wasn’t on here entirely by chance when you came on tonight. I've have been coming back occasionally at about this time. Wondering if you'd be here.'
Her skin buzzed. She couldn’t feel her hands. What was going on? What was she doing? Her grandmother’s desk sideboard clock, which she’d brought to the studio to remind her of Eleanor’s consulting room and the resolve and comfort she found there, ticked louder and louder. That hadn’t happened since she was a child, when in stressed moments things became larger or smaller than they were, louder or softer. Later in life, she'd learned the name for it: Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
‘I should go,’ she said.
'Sorry. I'm sorry. I'll let you go,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Tell me first, though. What's your website?'
Was she Alice, or Cinderella? Cinderella ran off without telling the prince her name. But he already knew her name.
'I guess you'll have to search for it. I do have to go now,’ she said. ‘Bye, Alex.'
'Goodbye, Cassandra.' He sounded miserable. But he hadn’t logged off - the golden thread still connected their circles. She heard him still, thought she picked up the slightest sound of his presence, his breath? He was so present that it would be weird for her to say 'exit room' with him still sitting there, listening. She wasn't ordering her smart hoover back to its charging point, she was leaving a conversation with a man that was churning her up into that confusion of emotions. She didn't want him being aware of that. Not yet.
'Terminate conversation, exit room,' she said. The thread snapped, the room disappeared, and there was the image of Olivia again, training her lens on Cassandra, all knowing.
In the next episode, Cassandra bids farewell to Paul for a few days and becomes rather bolder in how she communicates with her new online friend. Next instalment drops on Tuesday, so don’t miss out! Click the button to subscribe, restack this post, and/or tell a fiction-loving friend about Still There. The more the merrier as the story unfolds.
About the Author
Elaine Kasket ventures into new territory with Still There, her first novel. Known for her nonfiction work, she's now exploring the boundaries between memory, technology, and human connection through fiction. This serialised novel is being released exclusively on Substack, with new installments dropping every Tuesday and Friday. Join the journey from the beginning, and subscribe to make sure you don't miss a single episode.
