After a quick breakfast snatched in the kitchen, Eva reluctantly descended the stairs to her bedroom. The hot weather of the last few days had left it stuffy and close, despite her best efforts to air it. Dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, she was already too warm, even though it was early in the morning. Yet she pulled on a smart blazer over the t-shirt. Bad enough to be seen in her bedroom, without feeling like she’d been caught just out of bed. She carefully placed her laptop on a chair, then settled herself on the bed opposite. Having no desk – and no space for one in her small room – this was the only setup that worked. Balefully she eyed the camera slider, then slid it open. She loathed the camera, despised spending entire meetings watching her own face, seeing every stray hair, every spot, every drop of sweat or strange twist of her lips. Worst of all was knowing everyone else could see them too. It was entirely different to meetings in person, where you could be fairly sure most people were watching the person speaking at that moment, and a quick scratch of the nose or a yawn would go unnoticed. Now you were constantly on display, like a stuffed animal in a shooting gallery. She had experimented for a while with keeping the camera off, but so many people had made negative comments about it that she had felt pressured into switching it back on. With a sigh, she logged into the meeting.
Eva had to admit that online meetings were handy for this sort of international project. It was fascinating to think that her colleagues in Japan and Australia were nearing the end of their day, while she was just starting. Only a shame that everyone was indoors, so you couldn’t see anything of the country where they lived. It reminded her of the days of conferences abroad, where you were in an exotic location yet all you saw was the anonymous colour-coordinated interior of an air-conditioned conference centre. Even so, she enjoyed listening as the project manager broke the ice by asking each team member where they were. Melbourne, Kanazawa, Accra, Sarajevo, Valencia, Cork. When it was her turn, she felt quite dull answering, ‘Amsterdam’. ‘It looks very dark’, commented one of the participants. ‘Is it night there? No – that can’t be right?’. ‘No’, she answered. ‘I live on a houseboat, my room is down in the hold’. ‘Wow!’, said another, ‘Really? A real houseboat?’. ‘Well’, she said, ‘you can’t sail round on it. But it is a real boat, moored by the quay’. ‘It’s in a lovely spot’, said Remko, one of her immediate colleagues, ‘She has great views out of the windows’. He squinted at the screen. ‘Or you did before…’. ‘That was the living room’, she explained hastily. ‘That’s up above decks. But I live with two housemates, and there’s been a bit of a policy change about having online meetings in the communal areas’.
She was relieved when the project manager moved on to the next person. She heartily disliked having her home open to scrutiny and discussion. It had been bad enough when she sat in the living room, having to explain her living situation every time a housemate passed behind her, knowing that people were speculating about whether her living with housemates meant she was still single, and why, or if she were perhaps romantically involved with one of them. But having people seeing inside her bedroom was the limit. She had tried over and over again to use a virtual background instead, but her laptop stubbornly refused, and when she finally did get it going, it capriciously failed in the middle of meetings. Eventually she decided it was better to try and make her real background as neutral and tidy as possible, than to think she was safe only to have the pyjamas lying in an untidy heap on her bed suddenly pop into view. It was an incredible invasion of privacy, and she thought bitterly back to the series of arguments between her housemates that had preceded the ‘policy change’. Strangers until they moved in together on the houseboat, they had got on fine when they only saw each other fleetingly, leaving for work in the morning, grabbing a quick bite before going out in the evening. That superficial goodwill had proven too weak to withstand the strain of sharing the same small space twenty-four-seven, for months on end.
At the end of the day, she slid the camera slider shut with a triumphant click. Feeling free for the first time in hours, she pulled off her now thoroughly sweaty blazer and wrinkled her nose at it. Thank God that smell couldn’t be transmitted over the internet, she thought. At least one small aspect of her life was still private. She hung it up to air, then climbed up to the kitchen for some welcome fresh air and to cook her evening meal. Her housemates were, for once, each cloistered in their own rooms, and the solitude was soothing. Feeling fresher in body and spirit, she descended back to her room. Glancing over at the laptop, she was surprised to see the camera slider open, the lens glinting like a small, round eye. I’m sure I closed it, she thought, but perhaps I forgot. She slid it shut, then after a short read, climbed into bed.
In her dream, she was sitting in the living room. It was nighttime, and each of the many large windows was a sheet of darkness. Then, slowly, each one glimmered into life. On each window appeared a face, as if it were a computer screen. She was surprised, and quite impressed that technology had progressed so far. It gave her a feeling of power, sitting there in what would have been the bridge of the ship, surrounded by people waiting for her command. Then she noticed that all the faces looked faintly odd. Some had a greenish hue, others a tint of blue. In some, the eyes gleamed redly, in others, they were pits of blackness. With a sudden chill, she realized that the windows weren’t screens at all. The faces were really there outside, pressed up against the windows, watching her every move. Waiting to find a way in…
Eva woke up sweating. She snapped on the bedside light, and reflexively glanced over at the laptop. The camera slider was closed, just as she had left it. Switching off the light, she tried to slow her pounding heart and drift off again, but sleep was a long time coming.
The next day, it was even hotter. Worse, Eva had a workshop the entire day long. Presentations, breakout sessions, brainstorms. The need to constantly concentrate and, at all times, appear alert and interested, wore at her nerves. Sweat streamed down her back, and soaked the band of her bra under her breasts. When the lunch break arrived, she was greatly relieved to be able to close the camera slider and go upstairs to get a sandwich. Coming back down with it on a plate, she decided she would be more comfortable if she took off her bra. Discarding her blazer, she started to pull her t-shirt over her head when a sudden sound came from her laptop. ‘Ahem, Eva, you’re on camera…’. Horrified, she looked over to see the camera slider open, and the few faces of those who were still behind their computers looking away in embarrassment. Tears pricking at the backs of her eyes, she dived out of view. Going to the bathroom, she sobbed for a few moments in earnest. Then she scrubbed her tearstained face, tried to restore her composure, and returned to the workshop. She didn’t know whether to apologise for the incident or just leave it be, and struggling with her indecision meant she paid very little attention to the rest of the proceedings.
At the end of the day, she sat there, trying to reconstruct what had happened. Had she really closed the slider? Thinking back, she was positive that she had done so. She could even remember seeing her own camera view go black on screen. Then what could have happened? A suspicion started to creep into her mind, and she went upstairs to the kitchen.
There, Slava was busy making preparations for his evening meal, surrounded by kitchen utensils, spices and vegetables like a television chef. He took cooking very seriously, and always made every dish from fresh ingredients. He was carefully oiling his wok, with an occasional glare at Mateo, who was horizontal on the sofa, deep in some parallel universe online involving zombies and gothic castles. Eva wasn’t sure if the glare was down to the grudge he still held against Mateo for having ruined his previous wok with a greasy fry-up, or because Slava felt Mateo was taking over the living room again, or was prompted by some other perceived injury. Since lockdown, it seemed the two of them took issue with practically everything the other did in the communal areas, even down to whether the curtains were drawn (so Mateo could see the screen better while playing games), or open (so that Slava could admire the view of the museum across the water). She wasn’t sure if it was some power struggle for territory or just displacement of their lockdown tensions. Either way, she did her best to just stay out of the way – which mostly meant staying down in her own room.
‘Uhm, Slava…Mateo?’. They each briefly glanced up and then carried on with what they were doing. She decided to assume they were listening. ‘Did either of you go into my room today?’. Mateo shrugged his shoulders in what could have been a no. Slava looked at her, his eyes narrowed. ‘Go into your room?’, he said, in the same tone he might have used if she had asked him if he had taken a bath with toads. ‘Why would I do that?’. ‘W-well…’, she stammered, ‘on my laptop, my camera slider was open, when I had definitely shut it, and…’. They were both looking at her now, with expressions that could have been either pity or contempt. Slava cut in, his tone deceptively mild. ‘So you think perhaps one of us, we came into your room and thought, hey, let’s open the camera slider?’. It sounded utterly ridiculous when he said it. Mateo stifled what could have been either a cough or a laugh. Feeling increasingly ridiculous, Eva mumbled something conciliatory, then grabbed some leftovers from the fridge and fled back downstairs, blocking out the suddenly louder, guffawing exchange between Slava and Mateo, so that she wouldn’t hear if it was about her.
Back in the room, she mechanically ate the contents of the Tupperware container with her fingers, having neglected to pick up a fork and not wanting to go back to fetch one. Could it have been Slava or Mateo? If it were a practical joke, then it was odd that they would miss the opportunity to laugh at her about it openly. Could they have been switching on her camera surreptitiously to try and film her? When she had moved in with two men, some of her friends had warned her to be on her guard. But having studied Physics, she had become used to being one of very few women in a room full of men. She had never felt threatened by the male students. Quite the opposite. It had been a relaxed time, not having to worry about brushing her hair or applying make-up before early-morning lectures. She had always felt sheltered and safe going out with the boys in the evenings, knowing she could call in their help if she ever got into trouble. With Slava and Mateo she had also felt comfortable, although differences in interests and the little time they spent together had prevented them really becoming friends.
Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. You heard of all sorts of things happening, of girls being humiliated when their supposedly loving boyfriends actually turned out to be the sort of dick who shared their naked photos on the internet. And it wasn’t as if she even knew her housemates so well… Giving herself a shake, she told herself to stop being silly. If someone did want to record titillating footage of her, then the middle of the working day was not a particularly smart time to do it. Suppressing a sudden smile at the improbable thought of there being a subgenre of porn devoted to office meetings, she finished her food. It was Friday evening, and she longed to go out. Especially now that the weather was so hot. She thought back wistfully to the previous summer, when she had only been living on the houseboat for a few months, and had discovered what a drawback a bedroom in the hold could be in hot weather. She had solved the problem by spending as much time away from it as possible, working late in her air-conditioned office, sitting on café terraces, hanging out in the park with friends, attending an open-air film festival. When she did come back to the boat, she stayed out on the deck until it was time to sleep. But if she went up on deck now Mateo and Slava would be there, and if they weren’t fighting then they would be smoking, filling the evening air with a cloud of tobacco. In the end, she watched two long films on her laptop, hoping her room would cool off a bit by the time she went to bed. It didn’t.
Hesitating for a moment, Eva finally gave in to her remaining nagging doubts, and locked her door, also pushing her chest of drawers in front of it for good measure. Then she stripped off all her clothes and lay down on her bed under the sheet, then threw it back again to try and get cooler. The heat was oppressive, and she wished it were possible to sleep without having to touch the bed, as sweat seeped down underneath her body, making her stick to the bottom sheet. After tossing and turning for a long time, she finally dropped off.
She woke in the night to an unlikely chill. It seemed as though an icy wind was playing through her room, twitching the curtains in front of the miniscule window, plucking at her bedsheets. She pulled the sheet back up over herself, clutching it tightly, shivering. The wind seemed to grow stronger, tugging harder and harder at the sheet, until it was suddenly ripped from her grasp. Now the wind moved caressingly over her body, seeming to solidify, so that it felt as if unpleasantly moist fingers were probing her, thrusting themselves into every crevice. Opening her eyes, she gasped in shock as the ceiling above her seemed to waver in the darkness, then open out in a ragged whorl. In the middle of it was an enormous lens, fixing her with its implacable gaze. She could do nothing, just lie there exposed to view as her body was used –
Eva woke up properly, to a pitch black, suffocatingly hot room. She was drenched in sweat, as if she lay not in a bed but in a hot tub. Despite the heat, she shuddered uncontrollably, still possessed by the feelings of utter vulnerability and violation that the nightmare had left in its wake. Cramps shot through her body. Turning her head to see what time it was, the muscles in her neck protested in a spasm. Then her blood froze as she saw a small red light and the glint of a glassy eye. Scrambling up out of bed, she banged her head hard on the low ceiling, but still staggered over to the chair and first pushed the camera slider closed, then slammed the whole laptop shut. She couldn’t bear to leave it there on the chair, crouching like some loathsome reptile, while she lay sleeping next to it, defenceless. After a moment’s indecision, she gingerly picked it up and carried it into her tiny bathroom, pushing it into one corner. For good measure, she dumped an armful of towels on top. Then she returned to her bed, but sleep was impossible. She lay there, the events going round and round in her head in a confusing whirl. Had she dreamt it all? The first part had definitely been a nightmare. But she had really seen the laptop camera, hadn’t she? While she had double- and triple-checked that it was closed the night before, both when she started watching the films and at the end. One thing was for sure – she glanced briefly at the door, still barricaded – no one had come in to do it. But if that was the case, then what could be going on?
When the morning sun filtered through her blinds, a measure of calm returned to Eva. She was utterly exhausted, but sleep still eluded her. Eventually, she gave it up as a bad job and got out of bed. Her head ached dully, her mouth was dry, and she felt sticky and soiled. Perhaps a shower would help. She went into the bathroom, attached the shower hose to the taps, and climbed into the bath. The water was tepid but still wonderfully refreshing, and as she rinsed away the sweat and stink with her favourite berry bath gel, she began to feel more cheerful. Humming to herself, she squinted her eyes shut as she rubbed shampoo into her scalp. Directing the stream of water over her head, she listened to the soothing sound of the water beating its rhythmic tattoo and cascading down over her ears.
She had no idea what made her open her eyes. She couldn’t possibly have heard anything over the noise of the running water. All she knew was that suddenly her eyes were blinking away drops of water, as she stared in disbelief at the corner of the room. The towels were slipping away from the laptop, as its lid slowly rose. Then the slider slid back, like an eye drifting open as a slumbering beast awakened. With a violent crack, the slider fell off completely. Exposed, the camera lens glistened. Then, on the dark screen, something shadowy seemed to stir. Staring at it as if hypnotized, Eva’s hand found the tap and turned it off. In the silence left when the water stopped dripping, it seemed to her that there was a faint sound coming from the laptop. Breathing? Sighing? The sound seemed hoarse and animalistic. Suddenly, something snapped in Eva. Slipping and sliding as she forced herself to her feet and out of the bath, she grabbed a towel and threw it over the laptop, clamping it shut. Then she was stumbling across the bathroom, across her bedroom, shoving violently at the chest of drawers to get it out of the way, twisting the key in the lock and wrenching the door open.
Her feet left wet marks as she pounded up the stairs. She slipped and fell, banging her face painfully on the edge of the step, but kept hold of the laptop. Emerging, blinking, into the bright light of the living room, she looked wildly around her. The doors to the deck were open, sunlight streaming in like a beacon. Acting on instinct, she rushed through them out onto the deck, past her astonished housemates smoking their morning cigarettes at the railing, right to the prow. There she took a deep breath, and flung her burden down into the water. The laptop hit the water with a splash and sank like a stone. In the murky water it quickly vanished from sight, gone without trace. Only the towel was left, floating on the surface. Falling to her knees, she hung onto the railing, gasping to catch her breath. Behind her she heard Slava and Mateo’s incredulous voices. ‘…hell she thinks she’s doing? Totally starkers! Everyone can see!’. ‘Was that her laptop she just threw in?! Is she drunk? Or stoned?’. ‘Maybe she’s cracked up. Cabin fever, isn’t that what they call it?’. Slava chuckled, a note of hysteria behind the laughter, ‘Don’t you mean cabin virus?’.
Eva didn’t care what they were saying. After the intolerable closeness of her room, the comparatively cool morning air felt delicious moving over her skin. She took a few deep, steadying breaths. She lifted her eyes from the water to take in the broad view, houses, boats, people in the distance walking along the harbour wall. Somehow, she had forgotten how beautiful it was outside. Further along the water’s edge, a heron took flight, its ungainly body jerking as its wings flapped awkwardly for the first few beats, until it caught the air currents and sailed off into the freedom of the wide blue sky.