The Machine (17 page)

Beth lies herself down next to him on his bed at some point and she turns her body towards him and tries to sleep. She knows that it will come eventually, but it’s the getting there. She watches his face, and she shuts her eyes when she gets sad from staring at it.

She wakes up with his hands on her: his fingers on her back, and his other hand at her crotch, pushing apart her legs. His fingers, once heavily calloused from the guns and the weights and the sand, are still slightly rough, and she remembers this perfectly: how it felt to have them in here. They cling to the inside of her thigh and knead it, and they brush up against her, and she’s ready almost instantly. She doesn’t know how much of this is Vic, but this must be because he’s nearly real. His finger slips across her. The same moves he always used to use, and she kisses him. She pushes: he used to like that, when she was the aggressor. He could start things, and she wouldn’t touch him, but she would push back with her mouth.

So she kisses him harder. She keeps her eyes closed, because she doesn’t want to know if he’ll be looking at her. He always used to look at her, his eyes open. He said that it made it feel better. More real. This feels real enough, Beth thinks. She pushes him back, his fingers still moving around her, and she slides on top of him. She manoeuvres, and then he’s inside her.

And the Machine is there all the time: that low-level noise that lets them know it’s still there, and that it’s still waiting to be used again. Beth pushes her whole body down to grind herself against him, and it doesn’t take long. She falls off him: in the heat, so sweaty so quickly. She thinks that she’ll have to change the sheets. She doesn’t say anything, and neither does he.

She lies next to him, trying to hear his breathing over the Machine; or maybe the Machine’s noise is his breathing, she can’t be sure. The heat becomes stronger somehow: as if it’s coming up through her body, and she’s making the heat herself, not the burning sun or the holes in the ozone layer that they warned them about for so long. She makes the heat. She feels her head with the back of her hand and can’t tell if it’s a temperature. So she gets out of bed and dresses herself lightly, her swimming costume and some shorts, that’s all. She walks back through the estate – it feels like days ago she was last here, not just earlier this evening – and she finds the beach opposite the stretch of shops where everything is dead and everybody else asleep, and she slides into the water. She swims out as far as she can, until the island is hidden by the darkness: only the blip of lights run across the view. She looks at the water as she treads to stay still: and the ripples on the surface that tell her that the vibrations have followed her even here. She stops and bobs, then sinks. Down. She shuts her eyes. Down. Cold all around her, and she can’t feel the warmth of the outside air, not even slightly.

She thinks that she could stay under: but even as she is thinking it something kicks in and her body writhes and forces her upwards, and she gasps for air when the surface breaks. She’s drifted closer to shore: she can see the estate from here again.

She swims back.

As soon as he wakes up she gives him the powder, worrying about the amount, stirred into orange juice to mask the taste. It turns the juice cloudy and grainy, and he pulls a face as he drinks.

No, he says. Oh, no.

It’s only orange juice, Beth says. To reassure him.

Beth, that’s not orange juice. That’s like chalk. Yuck.

Beth sits and stares at him. Suddenly nearly himself. Everything: the way that his face moves, that his tongue spits the words, that his hands ball when he doesn’t like something. His shoulders. And that leads her to his face, which is looking cleaner and healthier, and his arms, which are definitely trimmer. More toned. She wonders if he could press what he could when he was still at war, because this – Captain Vic McAdams – is the man she’s getting back. Not the shell that came back from war, or the shell that she helped make with the Machine’s treatments.

And then he tries to stand. He moves to the edge of the bed and swings his legs down, and it’s like he never stopped being himself. Feet go onto the floor, and he pushes himself to standing, and then rocks backwards.

Woah, he says. Unsteady. I’m a bit dizzy.

How’s your head? Beth asks.

Swimmy. I need …

Lie down, Beth says. How many pills were in the orange juice, she wonders. Five? Ten? All six packets made a pile of dust that filled half a mug, and this was a few teaspoons siphoned off and stirred in. But he’s weak anyway, she knows that. It’s been a long time.

Where are we? he asks.

In my flat.

What about our house?

I can explain it, but—

He doubles over and clutches his temples.

Jesus, this headache, he says. Jesus.

Come and lie down, Beth says. She has to support him, but it’s still easier than it was. On the bed in the Machine’s room he lies down, and in the darkness she soothes his head. She rubs her fingernail over the skin where his hairline sits, and he falls asleep. She takes the Crown and slips it onto his head. She tightens the bracing straps. I’m sorry, she says.

She presses the Machine’s screen. The vibrations and the noise, seemingly more intense again. She feels sick, and she has to hold onto the Machine as it makes her rock. She queues up the file and presses play, and on the bed Vic screams and bucks.

Oh God, he says, through the cries. Oh please. Please. Beth turns and holds him. She presses him to the bed, to try and stop him moving. Oh fuck, he says. This hurts oh my God it hurts so much.

I’m sorry, Beth says.

Oh my God. He passes out suddenly, and there’s no movement, not even a twitch. It’s sudden enough to make Beth feel for his pulse.

Do you know what makes it feel worse? the Vic on the recordings asks, his voice suddenly filling the room.

No, the Beth on the recordings says. What makes it worse?

That I can’t remember how we first met, he says. I don’t know why. It’s just a mist.

We met at a dance, the recorded Beth says.

That’s right. Okay. I think I remember now.

Beth now moves her hand to her mouth, because she doesn’t want to make any other noise. This was the part she didn’t want to hear, that she tried to pretend didn’t happen. This was her taking over the treatments, and changing the schedule to fit her timetable, not Vic’s, because she wanted a husband who was at home and normal and didn’t have gaps and patches that needed filling. This was a Beth who did three treatments a day when she should have spaced them out: three a week, they told her; a Beth who watched the bruise-burns appear on his temples each day with more speed, and then stay there; a Beth who was convinced that this was the solution.

Who sat in the clinic with Vic, in a room where they couldn’t see the Machine, and plugged him in and let it run and run.

They trusted the patients to do this at their own pace – there’s no right or wrong, the doctors told them, and that was their failing right there, that’s when they sealed their fate and condemned all these people: in not locking it down – and Beth was well aware that she was abusing it. How many of these recordings are there? Of her gently leading Vic down corridors to find patches, and then letting the Machine make of those patches what it did? Trusting in it – behind a wall, not even just a curtain, but something that they couldn’t see but could definitely hear, the continual churning behind and above them – and letting it do what she should have done herself?

She wants to turn the volume down, but here they are: herself and the man that she first created, as they go through the process. As she hears herself pushing him.

I don’t know, the Vic on the recording says, by way of an answer to a question.

Yes you do, the Beth says. Try and remember. You do know.

Okay, he says. Jesus, my head hurts.

Don’t stop now, the Beth says.

On the bed, Vic starts his bucking again, awake, his mouth suddenly frothing. Beth pins him down as much as she can.

I’m sorry, Beth says.

On the forums, the person who built the Machine’s new firmware used a construction analogy.

Before, the post said, it was like you were building extra floors to a building, like a block of flats, when there wasn’t the structure for it. You weren’t supporting it with pillars and scaffolding, just putting it on the top and hoping for the best. And then, at the same time, you’re pulling out the bottom floors in big chunks. You’re taking out the basement and the lower levels, taking out the foundations, and you’re leaving the whole thing unbalanced. They – the doctors – didn’t think about that. So, what happened next? I apologize, because maybe the analogy is crude, but the whole thing collapsed, and the building that you were adding to was destroyed. Not just the new parts, but all the parts, the older parts as well. Might as well have been flattened. Now what you’re going to do is build something new on the ground. The building-up part, that’s not what made it collapse. It was the removing of the foundations. That’s why this is safe, perfectly safe, for them. No danger for them, and no danger for you.

Beth tells herself to remember that post as she clings to Vic, who she’s not given a break, because they’re into this now. Soon he’ll be strong enough to refuse the treatments, to maybe even run away – and that’s a real worry for Beth – so her window has grown smaller. She gave him chalky water this morning, far chalkier than the orange juice even, and not long after drinking it his eyes rolled, but he’s still awake, so she has to hold his arms to his side as much as she can. She can’t be sure but she thinks that he’s pissed himself, because he’s so damp, but his whole body is glistening with sweat, so it could just be that. And the Machine is making this so much worse: the noise is incredible, inside her head, intensifying her headache. Every part of them, every part of the room seems to shake, and when there’s respite – in the pause between audio files, and as the Machine rests briefly in between sending whatever it’s sending down the Crown’s umbilicus to Vic’s head – Beth feels sick, and clutches at her head, and even takes the tablet powder herself, poured into a bottle of water and necked back.

This is torture, she thinks to herself. She doesn’t know how long she can keep it up. The day moves by and the night comes, and she wants to sleep but that’s pointless now, because she’s so close. In his gasps of consciousness he begs, and he’s her Vic again.

Tell me how you feel? she asks on the recording.

I feel incomplete, he says.

How do you feel, she asks him now, as his eyes snap open, and he vomits and definitely pisses himself this time, so she forces more water into his mouth to wash the taste away and keep up his fluids. It might be chalky but that’s better than nothing.

He tries to answer her but nothing comes out. Still, she can see it in his eyes: who he really is now. How much of him is Vic again.

I love you, she hears him say, but then it’s gone, swallowed by the noise of the Machine and the noise of his thrashing as a new session is firmly underway, and she doesn’t know if that was the voice of him now, or from the recordings made long ago when she destroyed him.

I told you about that boy, didn’t I? Beth asks Vic as he sits down next to her at the table.

I’m still aching, he says.

But I told you? What he was like?

You told me. You used the c-word.

Well, he is.

I don’t know what you want me to do about it, he says.

I don’t either, she says. I’m just saying, before we go.

He’s a kid. I’m not going to hit him.

Okay. I don’t know how old he is. She pushes her fried breakfast around the plate. She isn’t really hungry. It’s been three days since she had him back, and she’s barely slept, and hardly eaten. She tries to act as if this is normal, because she’s sure that it will be. Any second now. Vic has eaten his. He used his fork only, and he cut the egg and sausage up with its edge, and scraped them along the plate as he did it: and then, when he was done, pushed the plate away from him. Only an inch, but.

The Machine sits switched off, but still that means nothing to it. The noise has dropped to low-level, admittedly, but it’s still there. Even though it’s unplugged, and declared on its screen in big bold letters, COMPLETE. On the forums it says that when that message appears, you’re to stop. After that you’re pushing your luck. Beth doesn’t want to do that again.

But now this is a fine line, because Vic remembers everything. He saw the Machine and opened his eyes and asked Beth if she had gone through with it, then.

We decided that I wasn’t well enough, he said.

We did. Together.

Beth watches him in the bedroom as he dresses. He poses in front of the mirrors in the way that he always used to. Putting underwear on first and then standing and breathing in, like it was the most natural thing in the world to constantly watch the way that your body rose and fell. He dresses and tells Beth that he wants to go for a run.

Too much energy in me, he says. I’ll be back soon. Everything about his body is taut and lean. His shoulders, through his t-shirt. And the clothes that he wore five, ten years ago, exactly as they were back then. The films and bands that he liked then, which of course he still likes now, because he knows nothing else. But then, Beth thinks, she’s not exactly experimented herself: here, trapped with her possessions and her life.

Vic stops at the mirror by the front door. Will these ever disappear? he asks, rubbing at the temple bruises.

I don’t know, Beth says. On some people they do.

How long have I had them?

Years, Beth says.

Then I should grow my hair. Cover them up. People will know if I don’t, won’t they.

Maybe.

I’ll grow my hair. He walks back over to her and bends down and kisses her on the lips, his lips parting, the dart of his tongue that way he used to, wetting her. A prelude. I forgive you, he says to her as he pulls back. For everything you’ve done. And then he turns and he’s out the door. Beth follows him slowly. She watches him: down the stairwell, through the courtyard, each of his steps the same size as maybe two of hers, almost bounding, and then he hits the road running and then he’s a flash in the distance. White and grey of his tracksuit. Beth draws her gaze back to the flats, and to the ones across the way. Where she had seen the boy. She doesn’t know which flat might be his, because she rarely sees anybody coming or going from them. And he belongs to parents, surely, because he can’t be old enough to be living alone.

She waits, in case he appears. Now that Vic’s back, he’s the perfect deterrent. See how large and imposing and army my husband is? And everything that you said to me, the threats, how scared you left me. Would you fuck with him? He doesn’t appear, but there’s a breeze which makes the waiting better. She shuts her eyes for a second. She still needs to catch up on her sleep, because it’s so hard to drift off with this new body next to her: all of his weight and warmth, and the sound that he makes as he sleeps. He’s so silent that you think he’s stopped breathing, and then there’ll be occasional gasps of air into his lungs, and his entire body seems to convulse with the action of taking it in. When she opens her eyes she expects the boy to be there – the villain of a horror movie, sneaking up on her while her eyes are shut, weapon in hand – but there’s nothing: only the cats below, wandering from the Grasslands at the back, mewling for Beth to drop them some food.

She takes a can of tuna and peels the lid back before emptying the contents down onto the courtyard. The cats smell the fish and pounce, all of them, and there’s two at the front, eating most of the tuna, before one of them just seems to know when to back off, and leaves the other to a feast. It stays there, long after the tuna is done: nearly out of view, close to the side of the building. Beth watches it standing there until Vic returns, dripping with sweat.

How can you run in this heat? she asks.

It’s good. I’ve run in hotter, he says. You know what it’s like, running in Iran, sack on your back, in full gear? Boots and everything? You get used to heat.

I know, Beth says.

What can I eat?

We’ve already had breakfast, Beth says. She thinks about the remains of hers lying in the bin. Maybe the cats would eat that?

Right, but I’m still hungry.

I’ll make you something in a minute.

I’m going to shower. Can you turn it on for me while I get undressed?

Beth flicks the switch and checks that the water is cold enough, and then stands back. Vic climbs into the bath, all rippling muscles and memory of youth, and then lets the shower wash over him as Beth watches the steam rise from his flesh.