The Machine (10 page)

The pub is heaving with under-age drinkers, many of them sixth-formers from Beth’s classes.

We can go somewhere else, Laura says when she sees them.

It’ll all be like this, Beth says. She walks in and straight past the kids, towards the back of the room where the real locals have gathered. Some of them are smoking: nobody’s telling them to stop. She thinks that she can use the kids’ presence as an excuse to call it an early night. She thinks about what she has to do tomorrow.

Long day, Laura says. What are you drinking?

Whatever you are.

Pinot?

Fine, Beth says. She forms a plan: to drink a few glasses quickly, not too much, but enough for it to become an excuse. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just say that she wants to go home. Laura isn’t somebody whose feelings she has to worry about hurting. By the time Laura returns with the bottle, Beth’s decided to get this over with. They’re poured and hers is at her lips, cold against them, before Laura has even set the bottle down.

Okay, Laura says. You needed that, apparently.

Apparently so.

They’re not bad kids, you know.

I said that to you, I think.

I think you did.

They absorb the slight unease of not knowing each other, of being colleagues without the subject of work to discuss any more. Laura brings up the job offer, which is now firm and lettered. There’s a contract if she wants it.

Do you want it? Beth asks. She’s halfway through a glass. Another sip. Question, then drink through the answer.

I think so. It’ll be hard with Rob. Really long-distance all of a sudden.

Won’t he move?

We can’t live together until there’s a ring on this finger, and he’s too scared for that. No, that sounds terrible. But really. It would be good though, I think, being here. I don’t know how you live here, but there are worse places to work. She notices how quickly Beth’s drinking, and she tops her glass up when there’s still an inch left. You must have a really nice flat, that’s all I’m saying.

It’s okay.

Any word when … I’m sorry, I’ve totally forgotten his name. Your husband.

Beth doesn’t know if she told her his name in the first place. She’s so worried about somebody snooping, Googling him and seeing what actually happened to him. Still, she thinks: now it’s too late to affect anything. Vic, she says. Victor.

Vic! Gosh. Proper man’s-man of a name, Vic.

He is, Beth says. Goes with the soldier territory.

So when’s he home next?

Beth thinks about lying. But she can’t, because there are tears in her eyes, and hiding them from Laura – sitting this close – would be impossible without making a scene. Tomorrow, she says.

What?

Tomorrow. He’s back tomorrow.

How long for?

For good, Beth says.

She stands in the ladies and wipes her face with dry, flaky tissue paper, and then watches from behind the crowd at the bar, as Laura fills their glasses again – she’s one ahead of Laura, she thinks. She thinks about those holiday friends and wedding-guest confidantes. She thinks about the wine inside her. How she won’t see Laura again, not after today. She’s disposable and transitory, and so is anything that Beth tells her: details forgotten in the blur of the wine and the night and the rush. She orders another bottle at the bar and goes back to the table.

You all right? Laura asks.

Fine, Beth says. She takes her purse from her bag and pulls the photograph from it: Vic in full dress, hat and coat, medals pinned to his lapel. The only part of that life that she kept for herself, even though she was told to destroy it, for both their sakes. Every other photo is generic. No uniform: just a face with no telling details.

Forget who he ever was, they told her. Burn all the photographs, all the evidence. Sell him the story that he’s been told.

This is Vic, she says. She slides it over.

Very army, Laura says. He looks nice.

He’s sick.

Oh? Laura doesn’t realize. She thinks that Beth means the flu, or a stomach bug. Something not worth worrying about.

He’s not in Iran. He’s in a home. A care centre.

What? She looks at Beth as if this lie has been going on for years: burned, rather than just annoyed by somebody else’s secrecy What happened?

Not just now. For years. He’s been in one for years. He came back and he was having dreams, and he became violent. She says it in her flattest tone: able somehow to make it sound like something unimportant, this story that she told so many times when he was first taken away from her. When, almost overnight, the situation became intolerable for her, as everything about him collapsed and devolved.

So he had treatments for it, and …

She doesn’t have to finish the story, because everybody knows how it ends. A tiny percentage that still rolls into the thousands, men and women taken away from their families, set up in places where fixing them isn’t an option – and in return no more than an apology. No compensation, no legal recourse: they signed a document because they were so eager to be fixed in the first place, and they were told the risks. Spelled out to them in numbered bullet points spanning pages and pages, all with their signatures at the foot. So instead they paraded and marched in protest, husbands and wives and children standing next to their loved ones in their wheelchairs. But that got them nowhere, because of those thousands of signatures.

Laura drinks because she doesn’t know what to say. Beth fills her glass for her, and her own. She’s past her own limit, when she had been planning on making her escape. But it feels good, she thinks, to talk about this. Laura’s the first person she’s told since she left London. She came here for anonymity and a new start, and to stop people asking her how he was doing. When Laura speaks next, it’s the first time she’s heard the question in years. It almost sounds fresh from Laura’s mouth.

How is he? she asks. She doesn’t know how to phrase it. There’s no way to ask the question, not really, because the answer is always so clear-cut.

He’s destroyed. He’s hardly my husband any more, Beth says.

But he’s coming home?

Beth nods.

You’re taking him out of the hospital? Beth notices something: Laura’s hand up at her neckline, fiddling with the necklace underneath her collar. Are you sure that’s wise? Laura asks.

I think I can help him, Beth says. I think I might be able to start making him better.

Do you pray for him? Laura asks.

What?

Do you pray for him? Because it might help. It might … I don’t know, Beth. She’s nearly in tears, Beth notices. She drinks more as Laura sobs. Some of the kids are noticing, looking over from the bar where they’re dropping shot glasses filled with some liquid the same colour as the Machine into their pints, the mixtures mingling and coalescing. They laugh at the two teachers, and one of them raises his fingers in a V to his lips, pokes his tongue through. Laura wipes her face. How can you help him now? she asks. She seems almost desperate.

There are some people – on the internet – who think you can rebuild somebody. Recreate them, almost.

Oh, no, Laura says. No, no. That’s why you got into this trouble in the first place.

Trouble?

It’s not our place to meddle, Beth. There’s an earnest look in her eyes that Beth’s seen before: in the protestors who stood outside the clinics, telling them that it was their own fault when the patients began to collapse. The malice of their self-righteousness.

Look, I shouldn’t have told you this, Beth says. She tries to wheel the conversation backwards. Laura used to be logical and easy. Not any more, now that this is out. This is a burden. It’s mine, not yours.

No, Laura says. Almost shouts. I think this has happened for a reason. It’s good that you told me. You shouldn’t go through something like this alone.

I should go, Beth says. She stands up. She necks the wine left in the glass. It’s already gone to her head: she can feel it, swimming around.

Beth, I could pray for you both. I’ll show you how, Laura says. Beth sees the cross front and centre, suddenly brought forward to the front of the shirt, hanging down. Not a simple cross: a crucifix, a miniature figure hanging from his nails. A miniature crown of thorns on his head. That’s the best way to deal with this, you know.

Beth forces her way through the crowd of students, ignoring their comments, and out into the air. She expected it to be cool, for some reason, where the pub had been so hot: she’d forgotten. Instead it’s dense and cloying. She rushes off. Laura doesn’t follow her.

She passes the point where the children leap off into the sea, and they’re still there, or a different group of children are. Leaping from the outcrop of grass-tufted rock into the pitch blackness, only knowing that they’re jumping out far enough when they smack the water. And when their friends hear that smack they all laugh, as if each plunge is a belly-flop, and each dive a bomb. She stands back by the railing – set twenty feet away for safety, because the authorities didn’t know if or when more of the cliff might slump down further – and listens to them, trying to pick out anything other than shouts and giggles. They’re only teenagers, somewhere between thirteen and sixteen, she reckons, boys and girls, and she thinks she can see that they’re all naked. But there’s nothing really sexual about this: just the leap and the darkness.

Down the path, only thirty metres away, she ignores the sign that implores her to call the telephone number on it and discuss her situation with the friendly-looking man on the other end, the sign that tells her that it’s never as bad as she thinks it is. She stands on the lip of the cliff and she can feel the alcohol inside her, making her sway. A bottle of wine, that’s all it takes these days. She thinks about when she and Vic got together, and how they were. How they would go out and drink with their friends, and how that led to their wedding, where they flooded the guests with booze. A good party, that’s all they wanted.

She looks out at the darkness, and she thinks about the nothingness that replaced all of who Vic was, like a virus. Deleting cells, replicating itself. The Machine, filling in the gaps with things that didn’t stick, stories of its own creation to cover up the cracks. And what makes her think that it will be so different this time? Because the stories are Vic? From his own mouth, 100 per cent pure and unfiltered, every part of his life spilled onto digital tape? She doubts herself. She doubts the Machine.

This isn’t me, she says aloud, to reassure herself. The kids down the way somehow hear her – and she wonders if she shouted it, even a little, or if it was just the wind – and they stop being children and become animals all of a sudden.

Go on! one of them yells. His friends laugh. She’s sure that she recognizes the voice: the same cracked broken deepness of the bike boy who lives on her estate, who calls out to her, sexually threatening even for somebody so young. Go on, you cunt! Give the world a fucking break! He doesn’t know who she is. He can’t see her from here, and he wouldn’t recognize her voice – although, she recognized his, didn’t she? – and this is all for show. If she did it, he would never forgive himself, she thinks. That’s what she hopes. To teach him a lesson would be the worst reason.

She backs away from the edge. She can’t see the boy in the darkness, and they’ve all fallen silent. There are no lights here, only the moon. She waits, suddenly scared; and then the laughs start again, and she hears the boy jump. She hears his laugh arc through the air, and the splash, and a second – maybe two – where there’s no noise. She wonders if he made it.

His laugh cuts through the air from the water below. Beth turns and heads up the path. The estate is quiet. She unlocks the door to her flat. She can hear it, already.

Beth sits in the living room on the sofa. Her last night alone. She thinks about the night before her wedding, and the forced trip to the pub.

This is your last chance, her maid of honour told her. You should relish this. Your last night alone!

Last night alone! they all chanted at her in the pink minibus that passed for a limousine.

I hope you make a few decent mistakes, her maid of honour said. She barely drank what wasn’t forced into her hand, and when she got home – not quite blind-drunk, but blurred and slurring – she telephoned Vic. He answered her, asking how she was. She told him.

No mistakes, she said.

Okay, he told her. She knew that he could never sleep once he’d woken up, and there he was the next day, at the altar with aubergine eyes. He hadn’t slept, and she had.

She opens the bottle of whisky that she’s kept underneath the sink with the cleaning products, out of sight. Vic’s favourite, a Scottish one that he got a taste for. Not the best stuff, but certainly not the cheapest. She was saving it.

I need this more than you, she says. She pours a glass and it splashes as it hits, but she doesn’t care. The smell on the carpet means nothing. The vibrations through the flat, through the sofa and into her: they’re all that she can feel. She swallows it all in one go. This can’t be real, she says. You’re trying to scare me. She puts the television on, doesn’t matter what channel, and she turns on the fans and pours another glass. She can feel it going straight to her. And Laura betrayed her, she thinks: she suggested she was something, but she was something else. How dare she judge me? Beth asks.

She lies back on the sofa, to block out the noise of the turbine in the Machine’s room, and the vibrations, and the sudden pain in her head.

What would I like to forget? Vic asks. His voice fills the flat, loud and clear. Like he’s actually there, played back by the Machine on the highest volume it can muster. This is from later on in his treatments. When it started, it took forever: like it was massaging his memories to find the knot. One by one, they came. I’d like to forget what I did after I got back. How I treated Beth.

Didn’t they medicate you? the doctor asks.

They gave me opioids. Do you know what they do to a person? How much they rob of you? I couldn’t take them after the first few.

Maybe they could have helped.

No. No. I was responsible for what I did. His voice degrades into tears, and that’s the sound that comes over the Machine’s thrum: her husband sobbing. I want to tell her that I’m sorry, he says through the tears.

Beth stands up and walks to the doorway of the Machine’s room. She doesn’t go in: she stands against the connecting wall instead. She leans against it. She cradles a full glass of whisky, raising to her lips every so often and sipping. Letting it sting her lips where the heat of the days has made them crack very slightly.

So what would you like to forget? the doctor asks.

That. I’d forget that I hurt her. I’d forget that I did this, and that I was – that I am – the man I am now. I don’t recognize myself when I’m like that. I’d get rid of that.

Don’t, Beth says.

I would get rid of everything that made me that man.

Don’t.

Do you know what we’re doing here, Victor?

You’re helping to make me better. That’s what I know.

Why you’re wearing that Crown? Why we’re talking like this?

Something. He pauses, unsure of himself. Beth can hear it in his voice. She knows every nuance. You’re taking away memories, is that right?

That’s right, the doctor says. Beth can see him now, pressing the PURGE button on the Machine’s hulking screen: flushing everything that had been said before away. She rounds the corner and goes into the room, and there’s the Machine. She doesn’t know how it’s playing this for itself. (There was a part of her that expected to see Vic and the doctor, sitting here, playing this out for real: that’s how fake this all feels to her, like an accident or a lie, or a dream.)

How dare you? she asks. She puts her hands on the metal, which is so cold, and the shaking, which roars along her bones. Into every part of her. Come on, she says. The screen isn’t showing anything. That same painted blackness. Come on. She hits it, a punch with the flat of her fist. Play me more of him. Tell me more about what he felt.

It obliges.

What are we doing? Vic asks, another file starting. Must be the next one, chronologically. I’m so sorry, what are we doing?

Not the doctor’s voice, next. Beth’s. We’re trying something, she says.

It’s not time for a treatment, he tells her. I didn’t mean it, please don’t punish me.

I won’t. This isn’t punishment.

There are rules, Vic’s voice says. I remember that they told us.

No, Beth now says, listening to it. Not this one.

The Beth in the recording is persuasive. She sounds so strong and confident. The rules are for your safety, she says, and we won’t break them. But they told me to help you with your treatments, didn’t they?

Yes. He’s so docile.

Don’t play this, now-Beth pleads. She presses the Machine’s screen but she can’t get it to wake from its sleep. Please, she begs.

What happened earlier today? then-Beth asks. She’s wiping something. Erasing something beyond his normal treatments. Do you remember?

I didn’t mean to, Vic says.

I didn’t ask that. I asked what happened.

We had a fight, he says. Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.

That’s okay. You’re not yourself. I have to press this, then-Beth says. Now-Beth sees it happening: COMMIT depressed. Ready. Primed. What did we fight about? then-Beth asks.

I had a dream.

What about?

I was fighting. Some sort of fight. I had a gun. I was, uh. Something exploded. I was there, and then … I don’t know, I don’t know.

Shh. Tell me everything you can remember.

There was an explosion and my head was on fire, like burning, with the pain. And I had to shoot somebody or I would have been dead. I remember that.

Where were you?

Somewhere hot. Not here, though. Hot like the desert, somewhere like that. It was so hot. Went right through my helmet. I had a helmet on. Then I woke up, and you were there, and I didn’t mean it, but I was so confused.

What did you do then?

Now-Beth can hear it in then-Beth’s voice: the slight tweak of her jaw, which would soon start to swell, although she wasn’t even aware that it had been fractured. I don’t need to hear this again, now-Beth says. Turn it off. Vic’s voice speaks through her, above her. She hits the screen again, so hard that it should break, she thinks, but it doesn’t, and then she scrabbles to the floor and to the plug. She pulls it from the wall but the Machine continues to whirr. The turbines keep spinning. The voices are gone, but the screen is still on. Backup batteries, in case of power cut. The only way to shut it down now would be to destroy it, to open it up and cut its cords. She doesn’t.

She takes the Crown down from the dock and puts it onto her head. Perfect fit, always is.

Is this what you want? she asks it. Do you want more of me?

She doesn’t press the buttons. She lies down with the Crown on, and she thinks, as the room spins and she feels herself sleeping, so quickly, so exhausted and shocked and terrified, that it will do what it will to her. And it can’t do anything that will change her mind about this.

Tomorrow, she will get Vic from the clinic. Tomorrow she’ll bring Vic home.