23:55
Carolina scratched the silver foil off the corner of the card to reveal the PIN code beneath. She opened the Internet app and started to type an address which her phone already knew well and remembered for her instantly: www.timeismoney.com. After umm-ing and aah-ing about it for weeks, or maybe months, she had finally given in and — no, not given in — made the perfectly sensible self-care decision to buy herself some extra time. Literally.
That’s what Time Is Money did: they sold time in units starting from one minute and going up as far as your imagination or your budget could stretch. The website reminded visitors that the more minutes you bought, the lower the cost per minute became. But the single hour that Carolina had bought and was about to activate had cost her the equivalent of six weeks’ wages. It was all she could afford. It was more than she could afford.
She’d gone without a lot, worked even harder than usual and even longer than normal, in order to buy that one precious hour. The irony of that wasn’t lost on her. She’d been telling her psychotherapist and her spiritual adviser for as long as she could remember that the thing she wanted most was more time. No matter what she did, she never seemed to have enough hours in her day.
Her psychotherapist had told her that one logical short-term solution was to stop going to see him for an hour a week and she’d taken him at her word, but the two-and-a-half hours she ended up reclaiming by cancelling those sessions (with the there-and-back travel factored in) had just ended up being reabsorbed into work time, or shopping time, or household chores time, or boyfriend time, or any number of other frustrating, boring or profoundly unsatisfying duties.
It was Gill, her spiritual adviser in the Pyrenees, who had set her on the track of Time Is Money. Gill said she had several other clients who’d bought extra hours this way, and that they had all had overwhelmingly positive experiences. She had encouraged Carolina to buy herself an entire week, but to use the one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a series of one- or two-hour increments at first, building up to some six-hour breaks and finally leading to a completely uninterrupted twenty-four hours of me time.
Carolina had allowed Gill to believe she was wealthier than she actually was, but nodded and smiled affirmatively during their Skype conversation, and when she ended the call, Carolina spent the rest of the night working out what she could actually afford with one of Time Is Money’s deferred payment plans. To her great annoyance, she spent so long on these calculations that she failed to complete an urgent report for work, which got her into hot water with her line manager next day; or to get a load of laundry done, meaning she was not wearing clean underwear during this dressing-down; or to pay her credit card bill, which meant her contactless payment was declined on the morning train, making her already late for the meeting in which she was reminded, rather unhelpfully by her boss, that time is money.
24:00
But Carolina put all of that to the back of her mind now, as she typed the unique reference number and PIN code from the little card (which had arrived in the post earlier that week and which had practically burned a hole in her pocket ever since) into the online form. She smiled to herself as the screen changed to reveal a huge green-leaved tree with heavy rain falling upon it, and with the leaves bouncing and shimmering as each raindrop struck them. Over the tree, the message “60 Minutes Especially For You” faded up. The sound of the rain on the leaves intensified — and then stopped.
Carolina froze in horror. What was up with the screen? Was it broken? Had it broken her bloody phone? Had the transaction even gone through? How would she even know?
She looked at the clock on the wall. The clock was still going. But then she realised that something was different. Instead of the usual reading of 00:01, the digital display now said 24:01. The app had communicated with the clock, and this was the result. It had worked. It had worked!
Carolina looked back at the phone screen which now featured the message: “These sixty minutes are a precious gift — from yourself, to yourself. How will you use them? What difference would you like to make?”
She blushed with a sudden rush of shame and confusion, because she had spent so long looking forward to having this hour that she had not actually pre-planned what she would do with it. A flurry of possibilities surged around in her mind, but however hard she tried, she couldn’t see past the most desperately conventional ones, couldn’t conceive of anything truly ennobling or truly liberating which would befit this eye-wateringly expensive additional hour she was now adding to her life.
When she looked back at the clock, it was already at 24:07. There was no time to waste searching for something lofty to do with her hour. She needed to do something now, right now, which would help her to feel relaxed and refreshed. Something which would make a real difference.
24:59
Carolina sat in the almost empty bath with the merest swill of barely tepid water left in the bottom which had not yet drained away through the poorly fitting plug. On the bathroom floor beside her sat three largely uneaten portions of fortune chicken, crispy duck and Singapore noodles. Next to them on its side lay a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc which had barely a sip of wine left in it. Beside the sink sat a front door key on a fob in the shape of a Lego Batman figure.
She had stopped crying now and was starting to feel cold all of a sudden. Instead of getting up and getting out, she pulled the towel into the bath and covered herself over with it. The last fifty-two minutes were almost a blur. She hadn’t expected that. She thought that she’d savour every delicious minute of her extra hour. And now she would have much preferred to forget all about it, erase it, go back to the time before it had happened.
She remembered starting to run the bath, determined to fill it to the top for once and really luxuriate in the deep hot water. She remembered opening the wine and draining the first glass in one urgent gulp. Her cheeks flushed as the alcohol kicked in on an empty stomach. Snatching up her phone, she ordered a takeaway from her favourite local Cantonese restaurant. She hadn’t been able to afford to go there for months while she had saved and saved for this. There seemed no point in being cheap now. So she went for the most expensive set menu for one. Click. On its way.
By the time the food arrived, the bath was mostly full and the bottle was mostly empty. She tore open the containers and fetched her chopsticks from the kitchen — the ones which were joined together at the top with a spring, because she’d never managed to pick up the knack of using the normal ones. She attacked the three containers of food frenziedly, as if willing herself to adore every mouthful. But to her great disappointment, the noodles were cold and claggy, the duck was fatty and flabby, and the fortune chicken was distinctively down on its luck.
She chased the unpleasant mouth-feel away with a generous glug of wine from the bottle — the last generous glug the bottle had left — and she slipped into the bath. It was hot. Too hot to be comfortable, but she was in a bad mood now because the takeaway people had spoiled her precious hour of me time, and she was too irritated and too tipsy even to reach for the cold tap. So she sat there, gently poaching in the bathwater, and she simmered. After another gulp of wine, she reached for her phone with her one dry hand and went online to post a one-star review of the restaurant, illustrated with photos of the scarcely touched dishes in their silver containers which she took by craning awkwardly out of the bath, spilling some water over the sides in the process. Are you sure you want to submit a one star review?, the website pleaded with her. Yes. Send.
It was around now, she thought, that Harry must’ve let himself in with the key she had been reluctant to let him have. This was her flat, its rent and bills were being paid for through her hard work, the food and drinks and Netflix in it were all being bought with her hard-earned money. She had wanted to refuse his suggestion that they should swap keys to each other’s places, because he still lived in a flat which he shared with two laddish housemates and in which she had no interest at all in spending any time. She knew he was getting the better end of this deal, and she was sure he knew it, too, and that was why he had suggested it in the first place.
And the time he did spend here she had been growing to resent more and more. The empty cartons of milk put back in the fridge. The toilet roll put on the holder with the end of the paper facing against the wall, not facing out. The smell of running shoes left in the hall. The taste of beer on bedtime kisses, detectable even after he’d brushed his teeth. The sex, or at least, his constant requests for it and her constant refusals of it.
Calling out to her, repeatedly calling her name, he had looked for her around the flat. He sounded drunk. In fact, he was quite sober. He walked into the bathroom and she turned away from him, sending more water sloshing over the side and onto the floor. What he said next she did not entirely recall. She thought she would remember more of it when she had slept off the wine and the disappointments of this hour, but for now, all that stuck in her mind was a declaration of love — for someone else, a woman who was not in this room and not in this flat and therefore was not her — and that must be why he no longer had need of the key, which he now discarded. Pulled over by the weight of the key, little Lego Batman ended up lying on his side next to the sink. Carolina heard the sound of the front door closing.
Down on the floor, her phone flared awake and she heard the sound of raindrops falling on leaves once more. Even though she couldn’t see it, she could picture the image on the screen again: “60 Minutes Especially For You! These sixty minutes have been a precious gift — from yourself, to yourself. How did you use them? What difference did you make?”
What difference has it made, she thought to herself. What difference has it made?
Without a sound, the digital clock clicked over from 24:59 to 0:00.
Carolina closed her eyes and pulled the towel over her head.
04:26
The automatically generated letter prints itself out on the giant machine and rolls along the conveyor belt to the place where two pairs of robotic arms dextrously fold it into three with the name and address uppermost. A third pair of robotic hands then slips it into a windowed manila envelope and seals it with one swift movement. The letter charges through the franking machine and flies out into a huge hopper lined with a frayed canvas sack, ready for posting.
The letter, when it reaches Carolina, will tell her that her mortgage application for the flat she has been hoping to buy has been rejected. The letter indicates that, regretfully, she has not passed the lender’s stringent credit checks, but try as she might, she will not be able to find out exactly what the problem with her credit rating is.
Buried somewhere on Carolina’s electronic file is the symbol of a purple flag, which signifies a warning to the credit check computer. No living, thinking human being is involved in this process: it is the whispered telepathic conversation of one algorithm talking to another. The purple flag appears next to a transaction with the reference TIMEISMONEY (all one word, all in capitals) next to it.
This company is one of a long list of organisations whose trading operations mark its customers out to lenders as an unacceptable liability. In the past year alone, the algorithms have politely declined loan applications from 8,523 people in the United Kingdom, all of whom had made purchases of varying amounts from Time Is Money, and none of whom will ever know that this was the reason why.
07:17
The Imperial Palace is a very grand name for what is a modest restaurant nestled between a charity shop and a dry cleaner’s on a suburban high street. But it was the first restaurant of its kind in the area and has been in business for more than twenty years. It prides itself on its reputation and relies heavily on customer loyalty and positive word-of-mouth to keep people coming back.
But ever since review websites started to provide an outlet for customers to express their opinions with impunity, that reputation has been in steady decline. The restaurant closes earlier each evening than it used to, even on Saturdays which have traditionally been the busiest time, and they do not open at all now on Mondays.
An increase in two- and three-star reviews is steadily pushing their average rating down. And this morning, the owners’ daughter (who manages their online presence as best she can in between her veterinary science degree studies and her shifts in the restaurant) alerts them to a shocking development: their first ever one-star review, posted late the previous night.
They know exactly who the customer is, despite the pseudonym of LittleMissC which she has used. The description of the dishes is enough to identify her. But the restaurant was also so quiet last night that they had been on the verge of closing when the order came through, and the kitchen had as good as packed up for the night already.
A long argument ensues between the owners, a husband and wife, both of whom are tired out after working endless hours only to see their business falling apart around them; between the chefs, all of whom have families to support and their own pride and reputations to protect; between the owners and the chefs, each of whom wants to blame the other for this situation, even though nobody really believes anyone has done anything wrong.
So heated does the argument become that when a cleaver is brandished simply to emphasise the point that one of the chefs is making about the quality of his cooking skills, the owner-wife picks up a cast-iron wok from the cooker-top. And before she knows what she is doing, the heavy pan is swinging through the air towards the head of her most trusted chef, a man she has known and worked with for more than a decade. And on a reflex, he flails out with the cleaver, the blade slicing through the air towards the body of a woman he has secretly been in love with for years, and who he invited to be the godmother of his first-born son.
12:38 (GMT +6)
High in the Himalayas, in Sarpang province of southern Bhutan, Druk Tshering surveys his rice field with dismay. It has already been a difficult year, with unseasonably cold temperatures and a higher number of pests than usual adding to the existing challenges from the increasingly poor fertility of the soil.
Water supply has never been a major problem, until now. But today, when Druk Tshering tries to divert water around the terraces of his modest rice plot, there seems to be less of it than usual. He knows perfectly well that in other areas, glaciers are disappearing and floods are becoming more frequent. He also understands that these formidable mountains supply one quarter of the world’s entire population with water.
But today, all he is able to concern himself with are his own water needs. Somewhere along the great water cycle of the world, more water is being used in another place which means, today, there is much less water here, for him.
The rice is failing before his eyes. He must now seriously confront the fact that his whole crop is likely to die this season. But to do so will mean confronting some terrible outcomes. Nothing for his family to eat, let alone nothing for them to sell. The loss of the farm, the repossession of the land and their home, the need to follow others relocating to unfamiliar cities.
Druk Tshering sits down on the edge of the field and closes his eyes.
