WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL, I was infected by the idea that writing was a genteel art. Set to read The Prince for its political insights, I was captivated by a single image: Machiavelli coming in from the fields of an evening, washing the sweat from his body, slipping on his silken robe, seating himself at his desk — and writing. That picture leapt straight from the page into what passes for my soul. I knew that was where I wanted to fetch up: at that desk, in my silken robe, writing. The glorious lucidity of Machiavelli’s prose also confirmed my suspicion that books were magical extrusions into the muddy mundane from a calm, blessed place where people could think important thoughts, even talk about them, without being told to please, please shut up and feed the cat.

(In my view, it is the absence of serious conversational partners that is the true cross of childhood. We can handle small matters like, say, the Oedipus complex by not liking our parents much, or heaven knows not in that way. The loneliness is more serious. Could that be why so many adolescents discover God? He is, I’m told, always there and always listening, if not responding. This has the makings of a PhD thesis: Does the growth of adolescent evangelical enthusiasm move in lockstep with the spread of mobile telephone networks? If so, why? If not, why not?)

The ‘writing as oasis of tranquillity’ notion had taken a beating at primary school, where, what with sputtering nibs and congealed inkwells, I was permanently bathed in sweat and ink. It was no better at secondary school, where I was promoted to a ‘fountain pen’, which, naturally, foun- tained. At university, I was too busy for desks or robes or writing. I was nonetheless confident that with the radically simplified social life that comes with age, there I’d be, freshly bathed, in my silken robe, quill gliding smoothly over the vellum — writing.

Then I got old and it wasn’t like that. It was still an inky, dishevelled business of piles of unnumbered, near-indecipherable notes slowly reducing to a page or two of mediocre prose. I was beginning to think I had made a wrong choice back there in primary school. Working in the fields was beginning to look like a doddle.

And then I discovered laptops, and I was happy, for a while. Here, at last, was companionship: its little face lit up every time it saw me. There would be no more scrabbling through ink-smeared papers: here, at last, was order. Now my notes were beautiful, with the full reference at the top, extracts elegantly demarcated, and my commentary rendered striking and intelligent merely by pushing ‘Command’ and ‘i’. An elderly aunt had once owned a sweet-natured silky terrier called Gyp. I thought of this machine as my Gyp.

Trouble began, as trouble does, quietly. We all know that fingers can accidentally stumble so that a joke or a jibe stares back from the page, but we don’t take it personally. We think it is an accident. But my fingers began stumbling too often, with increasingly offensive results. We all know the vagaries of the spellchecker: how surreal some of the ‘suggestions’ can be; what nonsense they can make of our delicate, thoughtful prose. But a ‘ph’ word for a misspelled ‘f’ word ? Surely that is getting too clever by half?

Then Gyp went on the offensive. It began inserting great spaces like Russian steppes and refused point-blank to remove them. It leapt into ridiculous fonts and wouldn’t come out. It habitually changed the name of my home university from ‘La Trobe’ to ‘Latrine’ and refused to apologise. Worst, it would swallow whole paragraphs, always my favourite paragraphs — just gulp them down, and they would be gone. Too late, I remembered that the other Gyp had turned inexplicably nasty with age. When mine moved into deep psychological diagnosis, rendering ‘Adolf Hitler’ as ‘Addled Hitter’, I knew it — we — had a problem.

So I called in a computer-vet. A supernaturally patient man, he could sometimes overcome Gyp’s contempt for simple fonts. He even coaxed it to disgorge some of the swallowed paragraphs. (It had subtly changed them: they were no longer any good.) Then, stroking the little brute and looking at me with his kind blue eyes, he said gently: ‘It behaves like this because it’s confused. Why don’t you just close it down, and leave it alone for a while?’ Meaning: ‘Give it a break, you dunce. You confuse it, with your ridiculous, contradictory, ignorant demands, your obsession with fonts. It’s your fault, you Addled Hitter!’

Silken-robe time became a clammy-handed Indian wrestle, which I always lost. So I reacted as slave-owners have always reacted to defiance: I took Gyp, dumped it in its case, and locked it in a dark cupboard. Then I bought another laptop, this one a little white creature merry as a poodle, its pedigree and character vouched for by the man who sold it to me; and I loved it. For a while. Then I did a foolhardy thing. Somehow I had strained my shoulder (‘Too much typing,’ my husband said; ‘Trying to drive that great bloody hearse of a car,’ I said), so I bought a magical device. This device would learn my voice, and then it would make my poodle type out what I had said to it. My poodle would take dictation!

So I bought the hardware, the vet inserted it and, despite the instruction book having been translated only halfway from the Japanese, everything went marvellously well. I would speak calmly, clearly; it would listen alertly — and then it would start furiously typing. Occasionally it would baulk when it had no idea what I was talking about, but I thought that no more than a gentle rebuke for my taste for Latinate polysyllables. It also began to offer discreet editorial advice, rendering, for example, ‘a confusion of tongues’, a favourite tag from my favourite anthropologist — which I know I use too often — as ‘a Confucian of Tongs’, which I thought very witty. It also replaced ‘an alien system of meaning’ with an ‘avian’ system of meaning, which made the same point rather more picturesquely.

Then it turned moody. It would not spell ‘law’, and went to extraordinary lengths to avoid doing so. I told it time and again how to do it; it would twist and squirm and collapse into a babble of wild guessing. It also habitually typed ‘borscht’ for ‘bush’, which given that I was trying to write on traditional law in remote Aboriginal communities, was seriously disobliging. And I was beginning to worry. Weren’t these ‘errors’ too systematic, too … malicious to be simply errors? My computer-deft friends told me I was neurotic.

Then I made a fatal mistake. When the phone rang in the middle of a dictation session, I forgot to turn off the microphone. When I turned back to the machine, there was a dense, single-spaced paragraph in an unidentifiable font on the screen. An innocent rendering of my half of a telephone conversation? No. The masquerade was over. Here, at last, was its own authentic voice. This is what it said:

how Huck how high I don’t if Serb resolve and I ask that some find Haag how Hohhot whole Air Canada of his disease is a red is always set of of he yet year of her from that visit with little zero weeks Arabic just to vote yes and then half its division of and above that he live half loss of the above all of the box this it is seeking at let’s see our Gurkha or some and he any is that crazy drove King live bit but it rests C R in as high or at …

And so on. This bit sounds like a terrorist network communicating in defective code. If they find that on my computer, I’m doomed. But what it usually sounds like is a political prisoner who is also a poet entombed by a fascist state. I think it knows about the laptop in the cupboard. How else to explain the political acumen of (from another phone-generated monologue) ‘cut the Lillehammer the Red parabola path’? How else to explain why, when I carefully enunciated ‘violence’, it reflected for a moment, and then typed, with Yeatsian melancholy, ‘Ireland’s secret woes’?

Like a fool, I was still fond of it. I still thought a deal might be cut. After all, I genuinely admired its prose; I had contacts; I could get it published. The machine didn’t want alliances. It wanted control. So it made its move. On an ordinary day, I was soldiering on, doggedly ‘dictating’ (comic word, given our relationship) about, I remember, Aztec ceremonial life. I spoke the word ‘ritual’. It used to manage ‘ritual’ with only a passing sneer (‘riddle?’ ‘tickle?’ ‘wriggle?’) but this time it typed, slowly, with relish (this was its big moment ) ‘David Jewell’. ‘David Jewell’ is my brother. How could it know that? I don’t think I have ever typed his name into the machine. And while ‘borscht’ for ‘bush’ is just possible if my accent is a lot weirder than I think it is, ‘David Jewell’ doesn’t sound anything like ‘ritual’. So what did it have in mind?

I think it was telling me three things: 1. I know everything about you; 2. I do not like you; 3. I am the master now, and you are Gyp. I had lost control of this demonic will — which was and remains indispensable to me. I dare not defy it, because then it will suicide, taking with it my stored past (in my records), my present (current work, e-mail addresses) and my dreams for the future (phantom books, and the lists through which I will one day bring my life to order). It will self-destruct, and I will be left with nothing.

You know, I saw it once. I had put the machine to sleep in its study (a shack on the edge of the borscht), drawn the curtains and tiptoed out of the room. When I returned in the dark of dawn, I realised that I hadn’t quite closed the lid. There was a slit of pale light. I eased up the lid — and there It was: naked, svelte, debonair, sprawled across the computer keys. It stared at me with its cold black eyes for a moment, then leapt and ran, transforming into a gecko as it fled.

So it could change into a gecko. I thought they were involved. I always liked my geckos, but my geckos do not like me. To them I am the giant who leaves with the spring and comes crashing back in autumn, lurching around, turning on lights, upending everything — like an occupying army, or Marines in Baghdad. I have to admit to collateral damage. The study has a sliding metal door. Geckoes like to sleep in the cracks. I always, always open it as gently as I can, but a couple of geckoes have lost their tails, one has been scalped (not fatally), and one terrible day a slim blond one was cut right in half by the cruel metal. Now they cluck angrily when they see me, and run to hide. The other day, a tiny black one was so panicked when I came lumbering in that he fell from the ceiling, bounced off my head and landed at my feet. He knew who I was; he had listened to giant stories all summer. Now he was so deranged with fear that he ran in tight little circles, round and round, until I nudged him with my foot (‘Nudged me! With its foot!’) to where his family watched in the darkness from under the bed.

You think I’m neurotic? I used to think so. I used to hope so. Remember big sad Hal, who only wanted to be human? The creatures controlling our desks, controlling our lives, don’t want to be human: they have different plans. And remember this. Geckoes are not just in the borscht or in shacks. They are in your houses. Geckoes are everywhere.

(Why is it letting me type this? I don’t know. But it knows. I wanted to put that last ‘it’ in italics. It won’t let me.)