The Machine (4 page)

Beth sees the weather report, and it’s a relief – even in the voice of the weatherman, and the person that they’ve got out on the streets, waiting to report on the rain as soon as it happens – but it just makes Beth hesitant for a second. When it rains, most of the South Coast gets caught up in celebrating. It still rains a little more in Scotland, but the closer you get to London it almost entirely ceases. It’s not a drought any more, though so many people still call it that. The hosepipe ban started and never ended. When it rains, if the kids are in the classrooms, they get more restless than at the end of term. They can’t be kept, and sometimes one or two of them have just stood up in the middle of Beth’s class and walked out, choosing instead to dance around on the torn AstroTurf outside.

When the rain finally starts, as she’s halfway through a lesson about verbs, Beth shuts the curtains. It’s a move designed to curb the distraction, but it can only ever fail.

I know it’s a big deal, she says, raising her voice over the din, but it’ll still be there when you get out at the end of the day. Nowadays they get two or three days of full-on monsoon rain every few months, heavier than she can ever remember it being when she was a child. It doesn’t soak into the ground because the soil is so broken and hard to begin with. Instead, it floods everything, coursing down the streets, turning them into run-off sewers. In the classroom, they can hear it: like a river, doubled by the insistent sound of the rain smacking into the windows that line the one external wall of the classroom. It’s a completely different sound to the sea. Funny, Beth thinks, that water can do so many things.

When the lesson is done, Beth takes herself to the staff room. She sits at a table by herself, gets a coffee from the machine. She stares out of the window: the grass of the playground is nearly entirely gone, worn down by the kids playing football. There’s a cough: she looks up, and a woman is staring at her.

May I? she asks, meaning the vacant seat opposite, and Beth nods. The woman sits. She’s only Beth’s age, maybe even a couple of years younger, and she reads through sheets of photocopied paper, notes about classes in a nearly illegible scrawl. She looks familiar in that way that friendly people do: smiling with her eyes, not stern, mouth in a half-tilt upwards. She keeps looking at Beth, glancing; nervously fingers something on a necklace that hangs just below her shirt. Eventually, she speaks again. My name’s Laura, she says. I’m a sub, only here for a few days. In for … She looks at her sheet. Arnold Westlake. Any tips? The woman smiles. It’s something she’s used to: having to make introductions, having to do this anew every week. It shows, because it’s glossy and confident in a way that makes Beth immediately envious. Apart from, you know: don’t let them eat you alive. Beth laughs gently.

No, they like change. No chance of you being eaten, not yet. They’re good kids, mostly. Some pains.

Any in particular I should watch out for?

Which classes have you got?

Laura looks at her notes. Nine-C first, then 10-B, 12-C. She thrusts the registers over towards Beth, who scans the names.

Two C-tracks? Lucky. She smiles at Laura sympathetically. They’ve all been there. Well, Jared Holmes, Beth says. She points to his name on the register. He’s got a reputation. I’ve never taught him, but I’ve seen Arnie – that’s Arnold – going mad over him. Amy Lancer – Amy Chancer, some of the teachers call her. And these. Both the Decker boys are nightmares. Laura nods with each name, mentally filing them away. Where have you come from?

Horsham. Take the work where you find it and all that.

You’re commuting?

Staying in a guest house over in Ryde. Apparently I could be here until the end of term, which is why I took it. Couldn’t come this far for a day. Do you know what happened to Mr Westlake?

Not a clue. I didn’t even know he was off.

Well, I hope he’s all right. There’s a silence as they both sit; then Laura quickly stands up, grabs her things. I should get my classroom ready. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name?

Beth. They shake hands.

Beth spends the rest of her lunch walking the Black Pitch. It’s what the school unofficially calls the main playground: a patchwork of tarmacs, laid at different times to cover holes and cracks that could prove near-fatal, then covered with a thick coat of gravel from end to end. The noise of the children’s shoes on the gravel is ever present: a scraping, thin and frantic. The pitch needs to be watched at all times. It’s a rare lunch hour that one of the kids doesn’t fall and hurt themselves. Beth walks around it by herself, because when it rains like this, the pitch is empty: none of the kids want to brave it. They hang around the grassy fields or the slick tarmac at the back of the art block, under whatever cover and overhangs they can find. She can’t hear anything over the sound of the rain on her umbrella. It’s quite peaceful, she thinks, watching the water hit the gravel as it does, almost nudging it around to make immediate puddles. It’s relaxing. As the break comes to a close she stands in the central doorway to the Black Pitch and waves the children in. They’re all drenched, which is a hazard. The school used to trap them inside when it rained, to stop any chance of them getting sick. The kids used to be more trouble than that was worth. Now they get drenched, and they ride through the final two lessons of the day in damp clothes. They’re always too exhausted to cause any trouble at least, those afternoons.

When they’re all inside Beth still stands there, in the door frame. She loves the smell.

Petrichor, says Laura from behind her. That’s what you call the smell of rain on hot ground.

Thanks, Beth says. Good word.

No problem.

Did they go all right? Beth asks, catching her just as she’s off to her next class.

The bell rings over her reply, which she repeats. They went fine, yeah. Better bunch of kids than in many places.

Beth thinks that might be a compliment. Her class, a year-seven one, doesn’t listen to her telling them about some semi-tragic novel where an Inuit child befriends a husky that saves its life and, tragically, inevitably, dies.

Beth can’t sleep because of the rain. It’s so heavy that it sounds unholy: the windows shaking, the beating of it against the ground outside. Looking down from her bedroom window to the Grasslands she can see that they’ve become a slop, as the run-off from the hard ground has caused the water to accumulate there. It’s puddled around the base of the building – she can lean down and see it, like a trench, and there are things floating in it but she can’t see what they are from here, bobbing like dark rotting buoys – because the ground is too hard to take it in. It’s easier to watch it than to sleep, so Beth slides open her window and leans out. It’s coming straight down, no wind pushing it in any direction. She can lean on the sill and not get even slightly wet, which she does: sitting on the edge of the bed and watching it fall. The cats are conspicuous by their absence. She wonders where they go when it rains like this. If they’re young enough to not remember when it rained with any real regularity, and if they don’t know what it is, it must terrify them. She remembers being a child and having a small dog, and the first winter it snowed since they got it. Taking the dog out into it and trudging through the foot of whiteness that covered their streets that first morning, and watching the dog licking at it, then jumping through it: trying to make it over the mounds but failing, and ending up leaving pits where its entire body landed over and over again. How it pissed into it, and the cave that the hot urine made, and how that cave made the overlying snow crumble. How she notices that cause and effect, dragging the dog to piles of snow against walls to get it to wee, to make the snow collapse.

When she’s done with the window she leaves it open and walks around the flat. She sits in the living room in front of the television, nervous. She checks her bank accounts, which have been all but cleared out by her purchasing the Machine. She’s got an email from the French seller. He’s ambiguous in the language he uses, but he wants to make sure that it got there in one piece, and that it works. She doesn’t know why he cares: probably because he’d likely get in more trouble for selling it than she would for buying it, and if it was broken she would be liable to kick up a fuss. She replies: Everything seems to be fine, and the equipment seems to function. I’m very grateful for all your help. She presses send, and she’s barely had time to think before a reply comes.

No problem, it says. It offers her help if she needs it, tells her to email that address. She doesn’t reply to this one. She assumes that that’s it, the last contact that she’ll have with him. She Googles Vic’s name, just to see if there’s anything new, but there’s nothing immediate. There’s a lot of articles that mention him as part of some group litigation, and a few people who have studied him, covered him as part of a thesis. Occasionally an article will mention Beth as well: it will say that he was only recently married when he went to war, and that the treatment robbed a wife of her husband, left her practically bereaved only a couple of years past their beautiful union. Purple prose to describe something that was far more simple and crude than it appeared. When it had actually been a lump of shrapnel from an improvised, home-made bomb that robbed her. When she heard that he had been injured – a telephone call from a man whose name she didn’t even remember, frantic and desperate where she had assumed that army calls came through measured and calm – she prayed for him to survive. She said, through her atheism, that she wanted nothing more than for him to survive.

Whatever happens, that’s all that I want, she said, out loud, to the darkness of her bedroom as she tried to sleep that night. Now, she remembers that night, because – quite deliberately – she never prays. This has been done by her, not some cruel deity. It was an unfair trade-off, to give him his life and then curse him with the dreams that it did, only to rob his life from him again, in all essence. Beth shuts the laptop and walks to the fridge. She takes milk out and drinks from the bottle, standing with the door open, letting the chill run over her body. She can’t stop thinking about Vic, so she goes to the spare bedroom. This, in here now, contains a part of him.

You’re still here then, she says. She turns the Machine on and presses her hand, all of it, palm fully spread, onto the screen. The whirr, the hum. The familiar warmth of the screen as she leaves her hand there, and the print that’s left when she peels it away. The start-up tones ring out and she sees the menu there. She chooses to play back a recording. There’s a list of them all, each with a date stamp and time count next to it. At the bottom of the list is a total of everything. Just shy of 270 hours of recordings. It’s implausible, she thinks, until she remembers that they took it out of him in hour-long chunks, broken down into only a few sessions a week. She can’t remember how long it took, not really. How long they lived with Vic having his episodes, and with Beth pretending that it was all right.

She picks one, at random. Vic’s voice is first.

I know how this goes, he says. He sounds sick, Beth thinks: like there’s a scratch in his throat. He says, What do you want me to talk about, Robert?

I’d like you to tell me your name, like always, the doctor says.

Victor McAdams.

Tell me some other things about yourself, Victor, the doctor says. There’s a pause, then he speaks again. Where do you live, for example?

London.

Oh, whereabouts?

Ealing.

Okay. Are you married?

Yeah, Beth. Elizabeth, Beth, he says. Beth presses pause on the screen. Him saying her name, so loud and so clear through the room. She presses the timeline to hear it again. Yeah, Beth. Elizabeth, Beth. Elizabeth, Beth.

Any kids?

No.

Why are you here? Do you know?

Because I have dreams, and because … of what I did to Beth.

Good. Do you mind if I start the process?

No, Vic says. On the recording, behind their voices, comes the sudden rumble of the Machine, like a turbine. Beth thinks of sitting on planes and hearing the engines kick in. That lurch of noise. I’m ready, Vic says.

What do you dream about? the doctor asks.

Vic sighs. Mostly about blackness, he says. Darkness. It’s like nothing, with noise over the top. It’s hard to explain.

What are the noises?

Bangs. Sounds like gunfire, he says. There’s a rustling on the recording which takes Beth a few minutes to place, and then she gets it: it’s his hair. They decided that he should grow it out, to establish less of a connection with his army persona. And to cover the scar from the bullet. It itched, the scar, and he always ran his hands through the freshly grown hair when he was stressed.

And can you tell why you’re hearing them? Why you’re hearing gunfire?

No, Vic says. He sounds trepidatious. I don’t know.

Beth stops the recording. She wonders if the Machine is like the ones that they used in the labs. Vic was so early on in the run of treatments that he must have had experience with the older Machines. She presses the screen, going to the place she found the firmware number. She writes it down again, on the palm of her hand, along with the Machine’s serial number. At her laptop she types them in, but there’s nothing. She doesn’t know what she expected. Maybe that it would have a list of recalled Machines, and where they originated. Then she remembers the documentary.

It’s been at least a couple of years since she last watched it, because it was so painful for her to see Vic the way he appears in it. She finds the disc in the drawer, along with everything else she put aside about the Machine, just in case. It’s a shop-bought copy, her second. The first she lost after a fight with Vic, during the later days of his treatments, when she pulled it out to show him, to say, This is you.

Fuck you, Vic. This is you.

She puts it into the computer and lets it start up. She still remembers the exact minute and second when he appears, because there was a period that she watched this repeatedly, like a child fixated, so she skips to the first one. It’s an introduction of him, only ambiguous, no details offered. They’ve blurred his face and down-tuned his voice, like he’s a criminal or a snitch; only it was so that he himself would never see it by accident, post-treatment, and start to ask questions. They show a blurred-faced Beth walking him into the hospital, where a psychiatrist spoke to them. They made an assessment and offered Vic the Machine.

Beth doesn’t care what they’re saying in the documentary, because she knows, and she knows that most of it was lies, or ended up being lies. Instead she wants to see him for the first time, wearing the Crown, hooked up. A mock of his first session, staged for the cameras, but she still wasn’t allowed to be there.

They told her, It can make things confusing for the patient. So she never went, not until the later stages, during what they termed cleaning up. There was no danger, then, of her messing anything up for him, apparently. So in the mock he’s there, in a chair, his face a mess of pixels, with a doctor asking him questions. She knows that the Machine isn’t on before they even show it, because there’s no noise in the room apart from the murmur it makes when it’s merely plugged in. The doctor is asking Vic about the war, and he’s answering, and the doctor is fake-pressing buttons. They show the Machine. They have trouble getting it all into shot, but once they’ve adjusted their field of view and pulled back, there it is. It’s the same model, exactly the same as the one in the spare bedroom. Beth’s sure of it.

She picks up the laptop and walks it into the spare room. She places it on the bed and changes the angle of the screen. So that she can see both it and the Machine. It’s exactly the same model. The same size (she guesses, from the height of it in both rooms); the same width (again); the metal the same pitch black; the screen with the same slightly glossier shine. She knows that it’s not the same Machine, not exactly. There were hundreds of them built. But there’s something heartening about the fact that it’s the model that started this all. The one that took everything away from Vic will play a part in giving him back. It’s almost poetic.

She takes the Crown down from the dock and examines it. The pads. She wonders if they got cleaned between patients – she remembers the sweat on Vic’s head around where the welts would be, before they turned black over a period of months, permanent bruises that would be hidden by his ever-growing hair – and decides that she needs to take care of that now. From the bathroom she gets disinfectant wipes, and from the kitchen a duster and the handheld vacuum cleaner. She starts with the Crown, wiping the pads down, and the frame that holds them together, and then she lifts it to her face to examine it closely. She brushes apart her hair, taking it back from her face; and then slides the Crown onto her skull. The pads slide into place, like they’re meant to be. The perfect size for her. They sit on her temples, where she’s got thin hair, like wisps. Vic used to call it her fur. He would sing this song to her – For my flesh has turned to fur, the lyrics went – and she would hit him on the shoulder, telling him to stop it. She looks at the screen. The REPLENISH button is there, on the front page. This is what they took away from future iterations, when they locked it down. Before they withdrew the Machines altogether. She could press it … She wonders what it would be like, with Vic’s memories in her head. If that is something that she could carry around.

She puts the Crown back in the dock and rubs her scalp. It’s tighter than she imagined. She cleans the rest of the Machine’s bulk, using the duster to wipe down the metal, then taking the disinfectant wipes and running them all over the screen, into the corners. There’s black gunk where the metal meets the glass, which she tries to get with her nails but it won’t budge, so she brings a knife in from the kitchen and scrapes away at it, getting it into the vein between the surfaces and reaming the gunk out. Then she wipes it all down again, noticing as she rubs the screen that she’s inadvertently cycling through menus. She’s managed to end up on a page that’s inviting her to wipe the Machine’s internal memory. She presses the CANCEL button, suddenly relieved. She had been so close to losing it all. Everything she’s worked for, for so long. She turns the screen off, to stop it happening. Puts the thing on standby.

She drags a chair in from the kitchen and places it next to the Machine, and stands on top of it. There’s a gap just about big enough for her arm to fit between the Machine and the ceiling, so she runs the handheld vacuum into the gap, watching the dirt and grime that sat on top of it zoom into the transparent container.

She looks at the picture again, the frozen still on her laptop screen. She compares. They really do look incredibly similar. She wonders if it might not be the same Machine.

She unplugs it at the wall. It’s nearly light outside. She dresses for work and sits on the edge of the bed in her bedroom. Now, I could sleep, she thinks. Now, when I have to go to work.