Sarah Turner


People Who Can Love

 

I’d heard about the surgery even before Cathy reminded me of it. They’d discussed it on the radio one morning, and I’d half listened as I was making coffee, but it seemed experimental – outlandish, even – and I assumed the idea would flicker, smoke, and then go out, like the time they talked about finding volunteers to go to space forever. I forgot about it, anyway, and it didn’t come up again for over a year.
.
I was feeling dissatisfied by then. Nostalgic and bleak. My brother had died, and my grief was complicated by a hard, brutal anger, but it wasn’t just that. Sometimes, I thought the country was in decline. Other times, I thought it must just be me. I was more anxious, more downbeat than usual.
.
A few days before I saw Cathy, I went for a drink with my old friend Liam. We’d been close since college. We’d studied together, working late into the night at a shared library table. We’d sat outside pubs on summer evenings and talked about everything from books and friendship to equality and the environment, only ever disagreeing on minor details, but we were talking about the latest political scandal now and he glanced towards the long, rain-streaked windows, smiled, and said that he could understand why the government had made the arrangements they had. It was just unfortunate that they’d been caught.
.
He saw something in my face that made him glance away. He seemed to remember about my brother and the expression in his eyes wavered towards softness for a moment, but hardened again quickly. He spoke faster. I tried to interrupt, but his reasoning was convoluted, and it felt impossible to pinpoint the sentence where he’d veered away from logic. I tried anyway, but he talked over me, more insistently than before.
.
‘How can you think that?’ I asked, but we were both talking at once; he didn’t hear. I was furious and frustrated, and then unexpectedly emotional. When he paused, I tried to speak calmly.
.
‘I get that you feel this strongly. You think there needs to be some protection of important individuals so that the functions of state can continue. But come on. They don’t need that protection. And if government ministers award free power tariffs to themselves while other people die of hypothermia and struggle to feed their children, it’s obvious that it’ll destroy trust. And democracy with it.’
.
‘That’s just so emotive. The minute you say “feed their children”, you’re manipulating fact. The media are whipping this up. They’re –’
.
‘No, that’s what’s actually happening. That is a fact. And it isn’t just the media. Look at that family in Bethnal Green. How can it be right for those three children to have died of hypothermia while government ministers were getting power for free?’
.
‘They had asthma. They’d probably have died anyway.’
.
‘Of course they wouldn’t. That’s a ridiculous thing to say.’
.
He shook his head. ‘If you’d just –’
.
‘No. I don’t want to listen. I don’t agree that it can be justified. Our winters are much colder than they were in 2023. The cost of power is far higher. That’s happened in five years, and this government needs to take some responsibility for sorting it out, not cushion themselves.’
.
‘If you won’t even –’
.
‘Even they don’t even think it can be justified. If they did, why would they have lied?’
.
He began to talk again, and so did I, but we were both just spilling out words. Before long, I said I had to leave.
.
For the next few days, I thought about it constantly. He was only saying what a lot of people said, but what really upset me was that he’d understood what I was saying. I’d seen his eyes soften, but he’d hardened himself against his own emotions, as though it was weak to allow them to influence him. In the past, he would have empathized easily, naturally, with families like mine, who’d lost relatives to heart disease or hypothermia because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes over the last, brutal winter. It would have shaped his thinking. I was sure of that. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t let it now.
.
The way people thought had changed. It had started slowly, but was everywhere now. If someone died in tragic circumstances, a large number of people attacked them. They were too rich, too poor, too old, too young, too frail. I heard it at work, on buses, in cafes. Social media was full of it, and I knew it was just a way for people to control their own fear – to find reasons why it couldn’t have been them – but to me, it felt like a general decline, not dissimilar to the overflowing rubbish bins, the graffiti on the wall of the community centre, or the crowded platforms and cancelled trains I saw on my morning commute. And perhaps I thought it more the day I saw Cathy because the meeting with my daughter’s headmaster had left me so upset.
.
I’d made an appointment to see him because Leila was being bullied. She wasn’t sleeping, she was desperate not to go to school, and although both she and I had talked to her teacher, it wasn’t being taken seriously. I’d assumed the head would help – he wouldn’t want the school’s reputation to suffer; they’d have clear policies – and I saw his brow crease in concern as I described the problem, but when I’d finished, he sat back in his chair, and looked past me, at the window.
.
‘I think it would be best if Leila sorts this out herself.’
.
‘Herself?’
.
He smiled and gave a quick series of little nods. ‘She’s obviously getting far too emotional about these girls. If she could just be more detached –’
.
‘Are you seriously blaming her?’ I maintained eye contact until he looked away.
.
‘These girls are eight and nine. There’s always going to be a certain amount of horseplay between young children.’
.
‘It isn’t horseplay. Yesterday, she had a cut on her forehead, where she’d been kicked.’
.
‘Kicked?’ He raised a sceptical eyebrow.
.
‘Yes, after they pushed her to the ground.’ There was a silence where I thought he’d react. When he didn’t, I said, ‘That isn’t normal. You can’t allow that to happen in a school.’
.
He clasped his hands in front of him. ‘As I said, I think the very best solution would be for her to ignore it.’
.
‘Perhaps you don’t realise how serious this was.’ I had a photo on my phone. I showed it to him.  He glanced at it, then quickly away. ‘She could have been seriously hurt,’ I said.
.
‘But she obviously wasn’t.’ I looked at him with disbelief. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Did she go to the hospital?’
.
‘I took, her, yes.’
.
‘And she was all right?’
.
‘Well, sort of. They were worried about concussion.’
.
‘And was she concussed?’ He was smiling past me again – that faint smile, with his fingers pressed close together in a pyramid close to his face.
.
I walked to the window, glanced out, turned round to face him. ‘Do you have any idea how much damage bullying can do?’
.
‘All the more reason for her to get this sorted out.’
.
‘Can’t you talk to the girls involved?’
.
‘I could, but taking the long view, the likelihood is that they’ll resent it, their parents will be upset, and it’ll draw attention to Leila as a victim and I just can’t see what that would achieve.’
.
We went on like that for another ten minutes, him insisting that the situation was not problematic, and me repeatedly trying to explain the effect it was having on her.
.
‘I don’t understand why you’re trying to protect them,’ I said.
.
‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’
.
I felt a strange slipping sensation while we were talking, as though the ground had been tipped and all the assumptions and values that I’d thought were commonly held were sliding slowly but certainly away. I folded my arms, to steady myself.
.
‘Can I see your bullying policy?’
.
He paused for a long moment. I looked into his eyes and thought of the fish at the supermarket, with their empty, endless stares.
.
‘If you enquire at the office, my secretary will direct you to it.’ He stood up. ‘But since you’re so concerned about this, then OK, I’ll talk to the girls.’
.
‘Thank you.’
.
He nodded, very slightly.
.
I left the building, furious. The anger surged in me all afternoon, slipping between muscle-tensed, fury to a vulnerable, churning sadness. I told Rob about the conversation later, but he didn’t understand. He was working a lot. I was the one who went to Leila when she woke crying from nightmares. I coaxed her to school each morning, cleaned her cuts in the afternoons, and sewed up the tears in her clothes.
.
.
.
After the evening with Liam, I was guarded with my friends. Several of them seemed different now, and Cathy was one of the few people I thought would understand about Leila. We were meeting for a walk on a hill above the city, and she texted to say she’d be late, so I waited in the car, growing steadily more furious about the driver in the layby behind me, who was stationary, but still running his engine. I could hear it rattling and ticking behind me, and I kept thinking he’d switch it off, but he just sat there, with his music playing and a haze of pollution shuddering out from his exhaust. I got out of the car in the end and walked over to his window, but the glass was up and he was on his phone. He stared at me blankly, then looked away and I was already so upset about the meeting with the head that I gave up and turned away.
.
When Cathy turned up, she was furious too.
.
‘That man,’ she said. ‘I mean, he can’t not know. It’s an SUV, too. Why is it always the massive cars that do that? Why doesn’t anyone stop them?’
.
We talked about politics for a while, then, and I said I thought the problem was lack of empathy. No one in government had had the imagination to foresee how angry people would be when the power-tariff story broke. They seemed delusional, sheltered by a haze of drugs or alcohol, or whatever it was that had made it impossible for them to understand how that would feel to people whose relatives had died that winter. And then other people admired their brazenness. Standards slowly shifted. I told her about Liam and the headmaster.
.
‘It isn’t lack of empathy,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s stranger than that. They’re feeling it, but they don’t let it sway them. They’ve stopped responding to their consciences.’ Something seemed to change in her face. ‘Oh God, maybe it’s that operation. Maybe it actually is.’
.
‘What operation?’ I asked. Then I remembered and stopped abruptly. ‘Seriously?’
.
‘I mean, it would explain a lot. They’re all so ambitious. They’re rich. Why wouldn’t they do it, if it could make them more money?’
.
I hadn’t moved. My eyes were still on hers. The sun was still warm on my face. The sheep were still grazing in the next field and a tractor was progressing slowly along the road behind us, but my heart clenched itself tight for a second, then rushed to catch up.
.
‘What exactly is it?’
.
‘Have you not heard? It’s just minor brain surgery. They sever some of the connections. And it’s keyhole, so they can do it without opening anything major up. I mean, I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that’s all it is. Then you can get on with your job without being impeded by morals or conscience. You’re more streamlined. More certain.’
.
‘Surely they can’t just –.’
.
‘I mean, they haven’t finished the ethical review but they’re quietly waving it through for people who they think might boost the economy.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s very good for business, apparently.  They’re calling them superhumans – they can make razor-sharp decisions without having to worry about ethics.’
.
‘Superhuman?’
.
She smiled bitterly. ‘They don’t get weighed down by emotion. They’ll find it harder to have relationships. But seriously, that headmaster. I bet he’s had it done.’
.
‘Do you think he has?’ I trailed off, seeing that we’d be asking this question a lot from now on, evaluating people, listening to them closely, scanning for anything left in them – anything at all – that we might possibly connect to.’
.
‘Well, you did say he seemed empty.’
.
‘He did. Drained. There’s nothing in his eyes. But people are more like that anyway at the moment. It’s like there’s a pandemic of emotional illiteracy.’
.
‘Yes, but if they’ve had this done, there’s no hope at all, except for their careers.’
.
‘He has actually just been promoted.’
.
She took hold of my arm and laughed, and I laughed too. It felt empty and endless.
.
After a while, I stopped. Something heavy was weighing on my throat. ‘I can’t keep sending Leila to that school.’
.
‘I’m not saying he’s definitely had it done.’
.
‘But he’s like it anyway, whether he’s had it done or not.’
.
She stopped and hugged me, and I saw in her eyes that she was worried too. ‘They’re going to trash the environment as well,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine? Making decisions like that with your conscience subdued? With no capacity to love? Think how easy it’d be to decide that your children’s future didn’t matter.’
.
‘It’s terrifying.’
.
‘But Leila’s so thoughtful. She’s got such a strong moral compass. She’ll be OK.’
.
‘Isn’t that exactly the kind of person who won’t be OK?’
.
We were at the top of the hill, at the point where the view over the city was clearest. I looked down at the buildings and I could see the roof of the school where I knew my daughter was, and I thought about how heavily the black clouds of this new development would gather over us, and how easily people like Cathy or my daughter would be swept aside, like greenfly struggling in a storm.
.
‘I want someone to love Leila,’ I said. ‘I want her to be able to love.’
.
‘She will,’ Cathy said. ‘Most people won’t have it done. It’s expensive. And you’d have to be a bit like that anyway, to sacrifice such an important part of yourself just for your career.’
.
‘What if they make her do it to get a job?’
.
‘She wouldn’t have to say yes.’ She put her arm through mine as we sat there. ‘There’ll always be people who can love,’ she said, and I looked at her for a long time, hoping she was right.
.
.
.
Sarah Turner‘s short stories have been published by (or are due to be published by) The London Magazine online, Fictive Dream, Welter, Toasted Cheese, J Journal, Litro, and After Dinner Conversation. She studied English at the University of Oxford and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.


To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.

Dearest reader! Our newsletter!

Sign up to our newsletter for the latest content, freebies, news and competition updates, right to your inbox. From the oldest literary periodical in the UK.

You can unsubscribe any time by clicking the link in the footer of any email you receive from us, or directly on info@thelondonmagazine.org. Find our privacy policies and terms of use at the bottom of our website.
SUBSCRIBE