The Machine (20 page)

Vic is still asleep when Beth wakes him. He’s curled up on his side of the bed, his body presents an implausibly small form; his breathing is constant and sharp. He doesn’t move as Beth does, and she makes it out of the bedroom and into the living room without disturbing him.

She turns on her computer and goes to her forums, and she searches for other people who have had issues with the Machine; or with the people that the Machine has built up. One woman reports that her husband has trouble sleeping, not just insomnia but something worse and more deep-seated, and he has to take pills to knock him out, but that’s a small price to pay to have him back; a man’s boyfriend has been slightly more aggressive, but nothing that can’t be handled, just shouting at other drivers; another man’s wife has completely lost her sex drive, total lack of interest, and she cries when he tries to instigate it with her. Beth starts a topic, staying casual, not giving anything away. She asks what other people think the memories which the Machine puts inside their loved ones really are. She refreshes the page, but there are no immediate replies.

She washes their clothes in the bath, making sure that the water runs scalding hot and then adds bleach. The blood spirals, whirlpools around the plughole, but it’s too thin to leave a ring around the bath itself. Too thin for that.

She checks her phone, and there are messages from Laura.

PLEASE TELL ME YOU’RE OK

I HOPE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. THE LORD FORGIVES.

They’re all written in capital letters, shouted at her with the same insistence that Laura had when knocking on the door. Beth wonders why she didn’t spot that insistence in everything: the way she drank, the way she fingered her cross. She wonders why she was friends with her in the first place: she doesn’t want to tell herself how lonely she actually was.

Go away, Beth says to the text messages. She stands by the window, thinking that they should leave: this is a definite full-stop to their time on the island, even if Vic protests. He’ll have no choice now. She imagines him more placid after this. Easily persuaded, in his guilt and shame.

And then out of the window she sees the crowd in the courtyard below: the policemen, knocking on doors, talking to residents. Across the way, two more stand on either side of the door to what must have been the boy’s flat. Flowers along the wall. This has all happened so quickly. Beth touches the side of her head: the cut is now scabbing, it still needs a clean and some proper attention. Not stitches, at least, it’s healed too fast for that. Her head throbs. She can hear the Machine. Vic’s breathing.

She opens the front door. From here she can see down to the street, and there’s a cordon and a group of people milling around outside the shops.

I’ll be back, she says to the flat, and she takes the keys and walks out. She heads down to the centre of the estate and the police stop and look at her. What happened? she asks one of the officers. She has no idea if she’s a good liar or not.

Are you a resident here?

Yes. What happened?

He ignores her question. What number, please? She tells him. He looks up her name on a sheet. We’ll be around in the next half an hour or so. We’ll let you know everything then.

Beth sets off down the path, and she almost runs to the crowd who are gathered around the steps down to the water’s edge. There’s an ambulance but the doors are shut, and the crowd aren’t saying anything. She sees the waiter from the restaurant, and he smiles at her, like they’re old friends.

All right, love. He rocks back onto the heels of his shoes, then to his toes, stretching up to see over the crowd.

What happened? she asks him. She wonders if she is just establishing an act or genuinely wants to know what they’ve found. As if maybe last night could have been a dream.

They got a body down there, he says. Washed up or something. Some kid from the estate. Apparently it was the little one, he says. You know the one I mean?

I don’t know, Beth says. She pictures him, and his glare and his scar. There were lots of kids there.

Right, right. Fucking hell, though. They found him because of the seagulls, that’s what I heard. Because they were all around this morning, pecking away. What a way to go.

Beth feels sick. She clings to herself to keep it in. The smell of the salt and the sea, and the breeze – such a slight breeze, but it’s there – coming from the front, and she’s glad she can’t see it or smell it. And then there’s a sudden commotion: and walking backwards up the stairs a paramedic, holding onto one part of a stretcher. Beth wonders, for a second, if the kid’s alive, but then she sees the thick black rubber of the body bag that lies on it, and she thinks of a maggot: the loose skin, and inside it something worse, soaked in filth, a developing fly, waiting to emerge and reproduce itself. The paramedics ask the crowd to step back, and wind their way to the ambulance, and they open the door and slide the body into the back.

Where are his parents? asks Beth.

Doesn’t have any, that’s what I heard. The waiter cranes his neck to see. Apparently lived on his own up there.

What?

Dad’s recently been banged up, that’s what somebody said. Mum’s gone, or dead. She isn’t around. Lives by himself. Always gave me all that shit, always having arguments with me, he was, and now he’s dead. There’s something conspiratorial about the way that he says it, as if what he really means is, Don’t tell the police that I argued with them, and I won’t tell them that you did. Fucking hell, he says, and he laughs. This’ll do wonders for the tourism, eh?

Beth gets back to her flat just as the policemen are talking to the fat neighbour. She’s out on her doorstep, mopping at her eyes – did everybody know the boy? – and the children are all around her, running up and down. She stares at Beth as she passes, and one of the policeman is nodding his head. Beth opens the door to the flat. Vic is awake: sitting on the end of the bed.

They think I live alone, she says. So stay here, stay quiet. Just let me talk to them.

Who’s they?

The police. They’re doing interviews. She doesn’t look at him. She drinks water and takes headache tablets, and then steps outside, pulling the door shut behind her. They’re still with the neighbour, so she heads to the railing and looks over it. She tries to make this feel as casual as possible. Nothing to it. To her this is a normal day, only one loaded with intrigue. She thinks she should ask questions. That’s probably what somebody who knows nothing would do.

They thank the neighbour – the one who did most of the talking puts his hand on her arm and tells her to call if she thinks of anything – and they turn to Beth. The consoler consults his sheet.

Mrs McAdams?

Beth, please. She holds out her hand to shake theirs: her palm hot, her whole body hot. They shake it, but don’t tell her their names.

Mind if we ask you some questions?

No, sure. Sure.

You know what’s happened?

I saw the crowd down there, and the flat opposite, obviously. They said that there was an accident?

One of the boys who lives on the estate has died. Did you know him? They bring out his picture and hold it up. Oliver Peacock, the officer says. Went by Olly. The picture has him smiling. It’s a few years old, taken when he was still at school. He’s so young. Grinning, because he’s a kid and he was told to, and it was school-photograph day. He’s in a uniform from her school, tie done up, shirt buttoned, not quite posing.

I teach at his school, Beth says.

You know him?

No. I mean, I’ve seen him around here. Not in school.

He was excluded earlier this year.

Oh.

But you’ve seen him on the estate.

A few times.

The other officer speaks finally. We’ve heard some reports about trouble he caused. Ever give you any? he asks.

Beth thinks about lying completely, but plays along. He shouted things sometimes, she says.

What sort of things?

Names. You can imagine, kids’ stuff.

Do you know where he used to hang around? The things he used to get up to?

By the shops. They hung around there a lot. And he used to jump off the point with his friends.

The point?

Suicide point. They would jump out and into the water. The police look at each other. They close their notebooks, and one pulls a card from his pocket.

You’ve been really helpful, he says. He hands her the card: his name, his telephone numbers. Anything else you think will help, give me a bell, okay?

And then they’re gone. Vic appears from the bathroom as Beth steps inside the flat again.

Is it okay? he asks.

It’s okay, she says. She checks her phone. Another message from Laura.

BETH PLEASE DON’T DO THIS ALONE YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT PEOPLE ARE CAPABLE OF WHEN THEY ARE GODLESS.

I don’t know what we do now, she says to Vic.

Laura’s next text arrives at almost exactly the same time as the banging on the door, and Beth reads the text as she opens the door, thinking that it might be the police. They left the estate the night before, taking the cordon away from his flat and getting the landlord – who owns so many of these flats – to lock the door, but Beth’s on edge, convinced that they’ll reappear and intrude and make guesses, and want to ask her more questions. So she opens the door without looking, clearing the text message – WE HAVE TO TALK, PLEASE – and it’s Laura herself.

I thought this was easier, Laura says. To just come around and see you, because then you would know I was serious, Beth.

Because your last visits didn’t give that impression? Beth asks. She sighs. Please go away, she says, and she shuts the door, but Laura puts her hand out, between the door and the frame. She braces but Beth stops it shutting. Don’t do this, Beth says.

You’ve messed with things that you don’t understand, Beth. Don’t you see that? Don’t you see that it’s not yours to play God?

I didn’t play God, Beth says.

He’s in there with you still, isn’t he. It isn’t a question.

I’m on my own. Laura pushes the door slightly and peers past Beth. He’s in the spare bedroom: waiting there until she gives the all-clear.

Where do you keep him?

I don’t keep him anywhere, Beth says.

He isn’t right, is he? I know about it, you know. Back when they used it on people with dementia, they weren’t right either. That’s why they stopped it: people left wrong and vacant, you know that.

You don’t know what you’re talking about, Beth says, but she can even hear it in herself: that there is something wrong. The Vic she loved would never have done what he did. And it’s true: the dementia cases remembered things wrongly sometimes. A hazard of the treatment, they said. Better than the alternative, they said.

Laura shuts her eyes. Lazarus rose from the dead, because he was touched by the son of God, she says. Jesus healed the sick and the lame: Jesus, not the physicians, not the doctors. He could heal mankind, body and soul, Beth. Don’t you see?

There’s something insistently pleading about this, Beth thinks. Histrionic as it is, her performance is almost convincing.

Can that thing heal the soul, Beth? Or does it replace it with something much weaker? Laura leans in towards the door. Oh Beth, we were friends, we were. I could feel it. You’re better than this.

I’m not, Beth says.

He’s in there, isn’t he?

Please, Laura, Beth says. Go away. Please just leave me alone.

I can tell. He’s in there. You’ve helped to make a monster, Beth. When he was lost in the first place, that was God’s will. People cry when their loved ones die, but there’s a plan, Beth. He was part of God’s plan. That insistent tone again, and she jams her shoe further inside the doorway, and puts her weight behind the door to keep it open. You should have left him well alone. She backs away from the door. Yours is not to meddle, she says. She makes a sign of the cross.

It was God’s will that he took a bullet? The dreams, the nightmares, the pain: that was all God’s will? Beth feels the bile in her throat: just as when she used to take him to the clinic and they would be there, protesting outside, their heads wrapped in cloths and their arms cradling crucifixes and signs that screamed THE SOUL IS SACRED, telling her to think about what she was doing. And she said, at the time, I am helping my husband: as she led him out after the sessions, drained and weak, ready to sleep it off, and they threw themselves on the ground and begged her to reconsider.

It certainly wasn’t God’s will that he would be rebuilt in an image other than that of our Lord. An image that was created by man. A false prophet. She backs away more. She’s completely different: her eyes crazed. Beth sees her here and doesn’t know how they ever became friends. She tells herself that you don’t know about a person until they show themselves fully. Here, Laura is exposed. Beth shuts the door. She shouts through the wood.

Leave me alone, Laura.

Laura doesn’t leave. She stays standing there, Beth sees, waiting by the railing. She’s sure that Laura is praying.

Beth goes into the bedroom. Vic is asleep on the bed: the Machine is powered up. The noise is still there.

What did you put inside him? she asks. What did you do? She touches the metal: the vibrations run all through her skin, and over her and through her. When you filled in the gaps, what did you fill them with? She sits down. Vic’s asleep, she can tell from the breathing. What did you make him from? She lowers her voice and touches the screen and looks for something that might be an answer. She asks a question, feeling stupid for even considering it: because this isn’t a story or a film or a joke or a song, or anything that isn’t her life. Her actual life. Did you put some of yourself in there? she asks.

The Machine seems to shudder in a way that Beth hates.

The text message wakes Beth up, but Vic sleeps through it. It nags three times to be read, so Beth does, if only to shut it up. She knows that it will be Laura – nobody else messages her, not these days – and she almost dismisses it without looking at it. But she doesn’t, and then she sits on the edge of the bed and reads it again, and again. And she goes to the living room and reads it again, aloud, as if that might, somehow, make it feel more real.

THE BOY WHO DIED. WE BOTH KNOW WHO DID IT.

Beth’s reading it again when another text comes through.

SO HOW CAN YOU LIVE WITH YOURSELF?

Beth sits on the sofa and puts the television on. They have to leave the island now, she knows. There isn’t much time left.