Dolores O'Shea’s marriage collapses when she discovers her husband’s AI sex doll in the garage. When she moves “Zoey” into the house, they become oddly bonded, opening the door to a lifetime of repressed feelings and memories. “Brilliant, provocative, and darkly funny, Sarah Crossan’s Hey, Zoey explores the impossibility of connection, and the things we hide from ourselves and the people we love.” (Sarah Dunn)
43-year-old Dolores O'Shea is logical, organized, and prepared to handle whatever comes her way. She keeps up with her job and housework, takes care of her mentally declining mother, and remains close with her old friends and her younger sister who's moved to New York. Though her marriage with David, an anesthesiologist, isn't what is used to be, nothing can quite prepare her for Zoey, the $8,000 AI sex doll that David has secretly purchased and stuffed away in the garage. At first, Zoey sparks an uncharacteristically strong violence in Dolores, whose entire life is suddenly cast in doubt. But then, Dolores and Zoey start to talk...and what surfaces runs deeper than Dolores could have ever expected, with consequences for all of the relationships in her life, especially her relationship to herself. Provocative, brilliant, and tender, Hey, Zoey is an electrifying new novel about the painful truths of modern-day connection and the complicated and unexpected forms that love can take in a lifetime.
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Print pages:
200
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If David had been sleeping with another woman, I’d have seen the signs: longer working hours, monosyllabic conversation, his phone face-down on the countertop.
But what signs could have led me to suspect Zoey?
I thought that not wanting to touch your wife was perfectly normal.
My parents’ generation have an alarming relationship with their televisions. My mother, born in 1950, turns off her TV along with the lights in the sitting room when she goes to bed, then turns it back on again as soon as she awakens.
It was always this way.
And in the houses of my friends growing up, it was the same: a persistent stream of chatter and advertising, the automated soundtrack to our working-class childhoods.
Once I had my own home, I replaced the thrum of the small screen with a silence so pure I could hear my bare feet sticking to the wooden floors, the gulp of water pausing in the pipes as it ran towards the radiators, my breath gauzy and quick.
When I married David, I asked him to watch the football upstairs so I wouldn’t have to hear the droning of the commentator. I found the repetitive rumble of our neighbour’s perennial hot tub so unbearable I complained in a gently worded text message.
Silence became the goal.
Until it was the problem.
Which it always had been anyway.
My life’s dream was to live in a detached house.
I met David at one of Leonard’s parties the summer I graduated. My limbs clenched as he came into the room, and I touched the ends of my hair, foolishly dyed red from a bottle that morning. I had immediately regretted it; the top of my forehead was stained pink. He was with an outrageously tall girl who was wearing a tight rainbow dress and my first thought was how odd they looked together. She had the physique of a brawny Viking while he was lean and somewhat inconspicuous in jeans and a navy shirt, a denim jacket held tightly in one fist.
I had found myself stuck with a particularly boring university acquaintance. She was disclosing her upcoming travel plans to Mallorca – ‘Leaving from Stansted because, God almighty, Heathrow is a curse’ – while I tried to tune into the more sinewy conversation David was having with a group across the room. Someone suggested that the issue of fox hunting was more complex than animal rights activists were claiming and jobs would be lost if the sport were banned. David asked what sorts of jobs, and his interlocutor replied by making a joke I couldn’t hear. David laughed politely then turned and we made eye contact. He took off his glasses, cleaned them on the hem of his shirt and put them back on again without taking his gaze from me. In that moment he seemed to be asking another question, and I wanted to disappear into the wallpaper behind me. He had lovely thick eyebrows.
I excused myself and found Leonard in the garden. He was flipping food on the barbecue. ‘Sorry you got stuck with Elaine,’ he said. His apron was smeared in ketchup. ‘I forget how dreary she is. But she’s nice.’ I told him she wasn’t that nice, that I had purposely lost touch with her.
Steadily Leonard placed a dozen vegetable skewers beneath the spitting row of burgers and sausages. He was thinner than usual on account of a devastating break-up with the boy he’d dated since he was at school. They’d been faithful throughout university, despite living apart and Leonard being regularly propositioned by lecturers and post-grads in the English department. While the rest of us stumbled legless around the student union on a Friday night, Leonard was on a bus heading for Leeds. At the time we envied his puzzling and stubborn commitment to love. But in light of the break-up, his fidelity seemed a waste of time.
‘Who’s the bloke inside with the wavy hair?’ I asked. ‘Denim jacket. Glasses.’
Leonard asked if I fancied him. I shrugged. Back then I desperately wanted Leonard to think I embodied a level of cool indifference to anything potentially interesting. I suppose what I really felt was mild embarrassment for being so tediously straight next to his enlightened homosexuality.
He said, ‘David’s a junior doctor. I met him through Jason.’ He began to explain who Jason was when David and the Viking stepped onto the patio. ‘He’s definitely in your league. But that hair is a mistake. It makes you look like you’re grappling for a personality. It’s the sort of thing Elaine would do.’
‘Oh, fuck off.’
David followed the scent of burnt food to where we were standing. He reached for a roll and broke it open with his hands, then held it out for a sausage. ‘How are you, Lenny?’ he asked.
The Viking had joined another group but was watching us. I sensed her examining me in particular.
Leonard looked at the sky. ‘It’s not pissing on my meat, so I’m alright. You?’
David nodded without answering and bit into the hot dog. His Viking was still peering at me.
‘I need the loo,’ I said, and went inside where I used Leonard’s hand towel to rub vigorously at my forehead.
When I came back out, David had disappeared. I sat in a corner of the garden and put on my shades. Before long Elaine was next to me rattling on about the Middle East and the failures of NATO. I closed my eyes hoping she wouldn’t notice through my sunglasses.
As I was leaving the party, sober because I’d driven, I finally spoke to David. He was sitting on the front step. ‘I’m off,’ I told him.
He looked at his watch. ‘It’s the weekend,’ he said. I explained that I had to work the next morning.
‘Shit. Me too.’ He threw the end of his cigarette into the road. His eyes were bloodshot. ‘You’re not walking home by yourself, are you?’
‘I’ve got my car with me.’
‘Oh. That’s very mature.’ He tilted his face towards me. ‘I almost broke up with my girlfriend this afternoon.’
‘Almost?’ I was delighted by the revelation and sat down next to him.
‘She concluded we needed to spend more time together.’
‘Maybe you should try telling her again,’ I suggested.
‘I did. About an hour ago. What she heard me say this time was that I wanted her to go to the off-licence. I’m already totally wankered.’
‘So write her a letter or send an email. You could turn your feelings into a rap.’
He smiled. ‘She’s alright. Uncomplicated. So maybe it’ll work out.’ He rooted in his pocket for more cigarettes and lit up. ‘I want a simple life. Do you know what I mean?’
I worked in Zara back then, folded clothes and attended a fitting room for a living. I’d only just applied to train as a secondary school teacher and do something with my degree. I wanted a salary that would pay for a room in a shared house, so I could stop living at home, so I could choose my own bread. I already had a simple life, and I thought that to others I might seem as dull as Elaine. What I actually wanted was a bigger life, though it felt out of reach.
David’s girlfriend appeared up the road. She was carrying a wine bottle in each hand. ‘I’ll get out of your way,’ I said.
‘You’re not in the way. I’m David.’
‘I know.’
‘You know?’
‘Yeah. Leonard told me. I’m Dolores.’ We shook hands. His grip was certain, gentle.
I admit I have been a bit smug. The biggest house on the street. Low-intervention wines delivered to our front door in sustainable packaging. Handmade closets in every room and an electric awning that stretched the width of the deck and kept the kitchen cool, even during globally warmed summers. The floors were made and laid by artisans. The abstracts on the walls were originals. I knew all the artists personally.
Only the brave or stupid lift the rug, take it into the garden and beat the living shit out of it. An incident forces conflict. And change. Zoey was that change, that conflict.
Zoey.
Hey.
Hey, Zoey.
Intuition is science. It is what happens when the brain sees two or more incongruous details and a narrative in the subconscious cannot be established. We pause before crossing a road and barely avoid getting killed by a motorcycle, or take the stairs rather than sharing a lift with a stranger who turns out to have murdered a nun. The story told afterwards is that a mystical force from the future sent a warning in the form of a feeling. Fear as foresight. We believe we are in tune with the transcendent. But this is bullshit. The only truth is that each sense is alive to narratives where pieces are missing, and we are very good at filling in the gaps.
So.
I know why I turned to examine the long nylon bag rather than chucking the laundry into the tumble dryer and leaving. But it was only after I touched the bag that I consciously spotted the Christmas tree in pieces by the garage door, its branches arranged at odd angles. My peripheral vision must have clocked the tree and sent a signal: something is out of place.
I unzipped the bag.
Everything was wrong.
Inside was a woman with long, smooth limbs. She was about my height but she was young, her hair disarranged, her lips fleshy, eyes open.
I could smell petrol and plastic.
I felt the air around me crisp.
But I was already late leaving for work. I had only dealt with the laundry to prevent it from sitting in the washing machine all day and stinking.
I zipped up the bag, covered the woman and kept her hidden.
Then I drove to school.
I tried calling Jacinta from the car. It rang and rang. Then I got through to Leonard and explained, but he couldn’t figure out what I was trying to say. ‘What do you mean?’ We got cut off as his train went through a tunnel, and I couldn’t connect to him again.
I fixated on the Christmas tree the rest of the way to work. I was the one responsible for its care: putting it together, taking it apart. It was a job I did on the same days each year, though I hated it. And now it was probably damaged because someone – because David – had a petrifying secret.
Tessa Winters was in my office for threatening another student. Tessa told the girl she would get her cousin to kidnap her and bury her alive.
‘Did you really say that?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. So what?’ She chewed gum, her legs spread, body slumped. The previous term Tessa had been suspended for smacking a tray across a former friend’s face and breaking the girl’s nose. The previous year she was arrested for trespassing in a maternity ward.
‘What exactly did Megan Dubanowski do to provoke you to say such a thing?’ I asked.
Tessa ripped tiny pieces from the corner of an exercise book with her fingernails. ‘She’s a bitch.’
‘Well, firstly, that isn’t a word I want to hear in school. And secondly, this appears to be completely unprovoked, Tessa. Her parents called and want you kicked out.’ She shrugged. Her knees were scratched. Her shirt was too short at the cuff. ‘Your head of year told me only last week how great you’ve been doing. She said you have a main part in Bugsy Malone.’
Tessa studied me. She knew the routine: a dressing down, a bit of approval, a punishment perhaps. But Tessa wasn’t someone I needed to delude with false praise. She was a good performer, loud and funny. Despite this, Tessa never had a parent attend a performance. Sometimes her aunt saw the shows. Occasionally a friend from another school.
‘We have an anti-bullying policy, and I can’t make any exceptions.’
‘It stinks in here.’
‘Of what?’
‘I dunno. Cornish pasty or something.’
‘Do you even have a cousin, Tessa?’
‘Yeah. His name’s Neil. He’s in prison.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘His girlfriend cheated on him, so he buried her alive near Pyecombe Golf Club.’
‘Is that a joke?’
‘No.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘She never died. He’d jammed her into this massive suitcase but forgot to take off her Apple Watch, so she called her mum. She only had a broken ankle.’
I rang Jacinta again, but it was still the middle of the night in New York. Then I tried Mum who answered immediately. She didn’t recognise my voice. I had to explain who I was. ‘Did you eat the casserole I left yesterday?’
She told me she didn’t like chicken and that she couldn’t get the television to work without a password. ‘I’ll need a code to get into the microwave next.’
‘Mum, please eat the casserole. And don’t mess with the TV.’
She shouted: ‘It has mushrooms in it.’
I put down the phone, and even though I’d probably be late for a meeting with the head teacher later that day, I drove to Mum’s house.
She lived a few minutes’ drive from my own home, in a bungalow purchased by David, as an investment, after Mum’s partner Pete died, leaving her penniless.
As I let myself in, Mum appeared from the downstairs toilet carrying a mug. ‘Did you wash your hands?’ I asked.
‘I was watering the plants in there, will you give over.’ Her hair was flat at the back and greasy at the front. She had what looked like egg yolk down one side of her pilled cardigan. ‘A storm’s coming tomorrow and is going to last into next month. They said so on the radio. Did you hear about the raw sewage in the sea? They pumped it in at Seaford and now there’s shite all along the coast from Hastings to Bognor Regis.’
I heated the casserole and we ate it together in the living room. While I was there, I filled a bag with bobbly clothes for the British Heart Foundation, and put it into the boot of my car. Mum said, ‘I can do that myself, you know. I’m not useless. Shouldn’t you be at work anyway? Have you lost your job?’
‘No, Mum.’
‘Does Jacinta have a job?’
‘Yes, Mum. She’s in America, remember? She paints.’
‘That isn’t a job.’
‘It is if she makes money from it.’
‘And does she?’
David called as I was pulling out of the driveway. He was breathless. ‘The mortgage runs out at the end of the month,’ he said. ‘Would you mind calling Halifax and asking what rate we can get on another two-year fixed?’
I said, ‘What?’
And he said, ‘We’ve had an emergency here. I can’t spend the day getting quotes. Do you mind?’
‘I have a meeting.’
‘OK. But can you call Halifax?’
I wanted to confront him about what I’d found, but I didn’t know what to say. And I didn’t know what I’d found. When I see him now, still when I see him, I hardly know what to say.
My father was what many people would call a nice guy: affable, entertaining and entirely lacking substance. He had a thin moustache and very bad teeth. I have seen photographs of him when he was younger. Always smiling because that is what you did for a picture in the seventies and eighties: you smiled the best version of yourself into the future and hoped to be remembered as charming. But all his relationships were transactional, so no one really liked him – my mother certainly didn’t, and wouldn’t even pretend to for the sake of his progeny’s psychological well-being. I never got to know my father, but his sabbaticals from our home were an unambiguous story: the beginning, middle and ending of all things were about him.
His name was Seamus O’Shea; he was the son of a wealthy dairy farmer from Donegal, though he opted for a career in day labouring at building sites around London. Seamus wore tracksuits and bought two-litre bottles of cider. You’d think from his confidence and my mother’s unwillingness to leave him that he was a catch, but he was a very average person. His accent, however, gave him the sexy whiff of a terrorist.
Seamus regularly took us to the Wimpy in Wood Green for dinner because he was friendly with the manager. After our burgers and chips, Jacinta and I were served whipped ice cream with chocolate sauce. My father gifted the manager tools and other building supplies in lieu of payment. My mother watched these exchanges without comment. She ordered tea and slices of toast with jam. She refused to enjoy any real dinner.
My parents argued a lot about food. I listened with my ear against the bedroom wall to their habitual shouting. They argued about traffic too. And other women.
Seamus liked Jacinta best. She knew many things and that made Dad laugh and Jacinta would give me looks that begged the question, Is he an idiot? I think he was a little bit of an idiot, especially compared to Jacinta.
I must have been eight or nine when Dad finally moved out for good, though apart from his dusty work boots missing from the mat in the hall, we hardly noticed. Also, Mum took a job. She hadn’t worked since she lived in Dublin where she’d sold tickets from a booth in Busáras. Then she met Seamus and got married. Mum had no qualifications, but through a friend found a nannying position with a rich family in Highgate. The father was a bestselling crime author and my mother was required to keep the two young children out of earshot so he could concentrate. On one occasion . . .
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