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This is like Tetris, the first man says. The younger man laughs. They back up and look at it when they’re done, and the wall is essentially filled by the wrapped packages. The light that came through the small window is totally blocked now, and the room is suddenly darker, thrown into the shade of the still-wrapped packages. You all right with this now? the older man asks. He hands Beth a sheet from his back pocket, and a pen. Sign this and we’re all good. They gulp their drinks back as she signs her name three times, and then leave the glasses on the side. They replace the window back in minutes. These things are all designed to be taken apart and put back together so quickly now, the first man says. Everything’s a bloody prefab, right? He smiles at Beth as if she doesn’t live here, as if she’ll be in on the slightly snobbish joke with him. To her surprise she laughs, to back him up.
I know, she says. Thanks for everything. I really mean that.
No problem. She waits until they’re back in their van – they stand at the rear of it for a few minutes examining what they’ve got left on their sheet of deliveries, and where they’re heading next, wiping their foreheads on their sleeves and on a towel, gasping for air – and then watches them drive away. Then it’s just her and the flat and the Machine.
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The paper pulls away from the Machine with relative ease. She’s surprised that it didn’t tear during the move. A few bits she has to attack with scissors but most of it rips away easily, and then she’s left with the Machine itself. She stands back, on the other side of the bed, against the far wall. She sizes it up. This one is bigger than she remembers.
The pitch-black casing is grotesque, she thinks. It seems so vast. She hasn’t joined it together yet, not where the clips and bolts require, but she can see it as if it was complete. On its side, a coiled power cable waits, like an umbilicus. The Crown has a dock above the screen, in the centre, and the whole thing seems unreal. She looks at it for too long, at how black it is. It almost fills the entire wall, and the shadow it casts is deep enough that she can’t see the wallpaper past it. This was the only place it could go, because of the shape of the room. She tries to move as far back as possible and take it all in, but it isn’t possible. It’s like a cinema screen when you sit near the front: never entirely encompassed by your vision.
She knows, to the day, how long it’s been since she last saw one of these. The last one was very different in some ways: it was smaller, she thinks, and the Crown wasn’t docked as it is in this one. It was wireless, where here there’s a thick cable that looks like it’s got sand stuffed inside it to keep it taut, and other lumps and bumps along the length of the pale-coloured rubber. The Crown itself is less flashy as well. This is definitely an older model, but she wasn’t looking for a new one. In the newer models, you couldn’t change anything. Firmware updates were automatic. The guides on the internet told her that she needed one she could change, and this was all she could find. Even then it was hidden away amongst useless husks and books and videos. She had to email the man directly to ask if he had any working Machines, and it took four emails (making her jump through hoops) before he trusted her enough to tell her his prices. This one was the oldest of the old. She still paid through the nose for it. But it was the only one she had found in six months of searching, and she hadn’t spent any money for the last few years beyond the essentials. This was a long-term plan, and she had saved accordingly. The email where he wrote the figure she would owe him made her cry: not from the enormity, but the relief.
She goes closer to the bulk of it. She remembers the one that Vic had during his treatments, and the way that it used to vibrate. They explained to her, once, about the power needed to run it. It’s one of the most powerful computers in the country, they said to her. (She supposes that, were they to be invented now, they would be put into a smaller package: something the size of a briefcase, maybe even as small as a telephone.) It used to vibrate right through the floors, and Vic would sit in the chair next to it and his teeth would chatter as he clenched them together, because he was bracing himself. The early sessions were the hardest. This Machine here isn’t even plugged in yet, and yet Beth puts her hand on it and would swear that she can feel the vibrations. The metal itself – that’s what it’s made of, some thick alloy that she couldn’t even name, that isn’t like anything she’s got in the house, not aluminium cans or the wrought-iron picture frame or the steel of that lampshade, but something else, like the material that the thing is made from was this shade of black to begin with – is coarse and cold, and she would swear carries some sort of residual shudder. She takes the plug from the side and uncoils it, and runs it to the base of the bed, where the room’s only sockets are. So much is wireless now and yet this needs hard-wiring. The ones that Vic used before were actually attached to the wall, part of the complex that they had to visit. They were monitored.
She goes to work on the bolts. They’re all hand-driven, none requiring custom tools, which is good. Some of them have connectors that need to be touching, but the deliverymen got them mostly lined up for her. All the insides are driven by conductive metal rather than wires, which makes them easy to assemble. Foolproof, even. The pieces sit perfectly flush when they’re connected and lined up, and it takes a bit of effort – heaving them a centimetre this way, a millimetre the other – but they satisfyingly click together. She can’t even see the lines between pieces when it’s done: it’s like a solid lump of black metal from the front, no seams, like something carved from the world itself. It looks, she thinks, almost natural. Like rock.
She drags the plug from the side and plugs it into the wall, and then strokes the screen. Doing this is like instinct. The screen flickers to life. There’s the familiar triple tone of the boot noise – ding-ding-ding, ascending and positive, full of optimism – and then the screen is awash with light. Beth hadn’t realized how covered in dust it was. She doesn’t know when this thing was last turned on, but the clock has reset. She pulls her sleeve down over her hand and wipes the screen off. She’ll do a better job later, but she wants to check that this all works before she gets her hopes up. The interface is exactly as she remembers, all big colourful buttons and words driven by positivity. Nothing negative. Even in the act of taking away they were reinforcing. PURGE, COMMIT, REPLENISH. She presses a button, through to sub-menus. There’s a button that offers her the chance to explore the hard drive, which she presses, but the drive is clear. That’s what she’d hoped for. She didn’t want somebody else’s memories lingering here. She heads out of the room and into the other bedroom, her bedroom. Compared to the Machine’s room, it’s chaos. Clothes everywhere, on the floor and bed, – she sleeps around them, making nooks in them where her body lies – and the walls stacked high with vacuum-packed bags full of clothes that she hasn’t worn in years, or that she kept of Vic’s. She keeps the hard drive under her bed, because that seemed like the safest place. If she got burgled, she didn’t want them to take it thinking that it would be worth anything. Pulling it out – it’s been in a box with remnants of who she was before, old library cards and birthday cards and childhood photographs – she walks into the room and sees the drive appear on the screen as she gets closer. It’s a first-generation capacitive wireless device, able to pick up on other wireless items in the vicinity and read their drives. A new option appears on the screen: a cartoonish image of a hard drive. She presses the button – her hands are shaking, because she’s worried that the drive might have wiped itself or corrupted over the past couple of years (ever since she backed up the contents from an older drive one New Year’s Day as she worried about it, worried about the life-span of these things) – and there it is: a folder named after her husband. She presses his name and waits as it loads.
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There are hundreds of files inside, all date-stamped, and all under an umbrella of his name. She presses the first one, which she can barely remember being recorded because it was so long ago, and waits as it loads. A bar appears on the screen and an icon of a play button. She presses it and the Machine starts thrumming. The file starts loading. The technology isn’t there with the size of these files: the pristine nature of exactly what they’ve recorded, and how long they are. The amount of data that they contained inside the packets of the audio files themselves … Everything important. The audio is essentially worthless. It’s wrapping paper. But the files are enormous, and streaming them all is impractical. It would take far too long; too much waiting for them to load. She should be using the hard drive of the Machine itself, but she wants to check it works first. That, and she wants to hear him. She’s too eager.
Then the first file is done queuing itself up, and it plays automatically, and she hears somebody clearing their throat in the background, the click of something. Somebody sitting down. She doesn’t know where the speakers are in the casement, but they’re somewhere, or it uses the metal itself as a speaker. Maybe that’s where the vibrations come from: internal sound channelled outwards. She saw that once, when she was a teenager: something you could plug your iPod into and it would turn any glass table or window into a speaker. She remembers being impressed by it: as the boys that she knew ran around her parents’ house plugging it into everything they could find, dancing in their room full of art pieces as the glass covering a statue that her father described as priceless vibrated with the sounds of trilling keyboards and squawked singing. They danced on the rugs, because of the novelty of not being able to hear their own footfalls.
The first voice she hears is that of a stranger. It must be one of the doctors who had worked with him.
We’re ready? Can you say your name for us? it asks.
Victor McAdams. His voice is suddenly full in the room. She can’t remember exactly how long it’s been since she heard his voice talking properly, saying sentences. Long enough that it’s become a memory, rather than something tangible. She’s forgotten how deep it was. How it cracks at the higher end. The trepidation as he says their surname, and the pause that hangs in the air afterwards. She can hear him breathing.
And could you state your rank and ID number, for the record?
Captain. Two-five-two-three-two-three-oh-two.
Great. Don’t be nervous, the voice says to him. You know why you’re here?
Yes sir.
Don’t call me sir. My name’s Robert. First-name terms here, Victor.
Vic.
Vic it is. Beth hears the smile. Shall we begin? Beth stops the recording. The voices hang in the air, like the dust. It works. The files are intact. Her first worry dealt with. She presses the screen and goes back a few stages, back to the central menu, and ticks the box to copy the contents of the drive to the Machine itself. The vibrations start as it accesses its drives. It’s older than her tiny hard drive by a couple of years, and she thinks about the information – about the recordings of Vic’s voice, pages and pages of entries where he sat in a room and spoke about the things that he didn’t want to remember any more – she thinks about it all expanding as it fills the drive of the Machine. It gives her a time-bar for the download, of hours rather than minutes. The slowest crawl. She goes to the main room of her flat and thinks about how she should tidy more. It’s become worse since she invested in this project, stealing both her time and her energy. The kids have suffered most: mountains of marking sit by the front door, and she knows that they need to have most of it done before the summer holidays. Her deadlines are theirs. She has six weeks coming up, and she’s planned how she’ll break it down by the day. She’s begun stockpiling food and provisions: the kitchen is brimming with canned foods, and the bathroom has toilet-roll packets stacked behind the door. The plan involves her not leaving the flat for the first week because Vic will most likely need her. He won’t be able to be left alone for more than a couple of hours, not for at least that time, and probably much longer. The schedule of how those six weeks will work is punishing, she knows, but needs must. She has printed them out, a week per sheet of A4 paper, and she’s put them on the fridge under a large magnet that Vic was given by his parents when he was a child, that he hung onto. She’s kept it as well, like a trophy. Proof that he was once real. She can tell that people don’t believe her, when she talks about him. It’s like he’s a ghost. She says, He used to be a soldier, and they smile, and they ask where he is now. She tells them that he’s away, serving still. They look at her – or, if she’s let them past that barrier, at her flat – and they know that it’s a lie. Nobody’s away serving any more. Everything where they were is rubble. So she has to tidy, and she has to make sure that she knows exactly how the Machine works. Two weeks before the end of term.
She has videos on the computer, kept on the desktop. They’re taken from a forum about these things, where she’s nothing more than a username that bears no relation to who she is. Numbers and letters chosen at random, on purpose. She doesn’t know if the forums are monitored – or who would be monitoring them – but just in case. She grabbed the videos over one long weekend, determined in case the site ever suddenly disappeared. She’s renamed the videos with numbers, so that she knows what order she’s learning them in, and she’s already watched them tens of times, but never with anything to practise on. It’s different when there’s a practical application. Plus, there’s a difference in the firmware in the Machines, and she needs to know exactly what she’s playing with. She thinks that she should check it, so she goes back to the bedroom. It’s the first time she’s been surprised: before, she pulled the paper off, and exposed it piece by piece. Now she sees how big it is for the first time, and the mass of blackness seems to make its own negative light, casting the rest of the room in a shadow of its own making. And it seems so tall to her. Impossibly tall. The ceilings are high, ten foot, and this wasn’t much taller than the first removal man, but it seems to fill almost every bit of the space. She tries to see on top of it but can’t, so she idles in front of it. The screen is still active but on standby, the colour and brightness dampened. She presses it and the whole Machine whirs into life. The noise – she hadn’t noticed it before, but it must have been there – is like gears, as if this were some nineteenth-century apparatus. Something almost industrial. She knows that this is a computer, and that what’s inside is fans and microchips and cables to carry processes from one part to another; and the hard drive, never forget the hard drive, which is both the brain and the heart of the Machine – but the noise is unlike any that she’s heard. She supposes that she’s forgotten: that things have changed since this was cutting edge. She thinks about the newer models of the Machine, the ones after this. How much one of them would have cost her, even if it could be hacked and updated like this one has been. That she would have been here in a decade still, forming her plan, slowly losing herself, alone for so long, with Vic’s body rotting more and more. Less her husband with each passing day, week, month, year.
The screen gets lighter, and she sees the button labelled ABOUT. She presses it, and there, a year and a firmware number. She reasons that this must have been one of the first commercial models, before even her mother started on the programme, and well before Vic was using one. She pulls the Crown down from the dock and the screen changes, updates. PURGE, it invokes, or REPLENISH. Like this is some sort of advertisement. She’s seen the language on both beauty products and bleaches. She doesn’t put the Crown on her head, because she dare not.
She’s thought about it, sometimes: as she’s tried to get to sleep, lying in bed, thinking about how easy it would be to wear a Crown, to press the buttons and to talk about Vic and herself, and their old life together. To talk her way through everything that she’s lost. To press the PURGE button and feel it all drift away. Vic used to say that it felt like when you take painkillers for a wound. He said that they gave him heavy stuff after the IED went off and put its shrapnel in his shoulder and his neck, and once he’d popped them there was a sense that it had once hurt, but that it was like an echo of the pain was all that was left, or the memory of the pain. Like it’s been rubbed hard and then left alone. That’s what the Machine did. He rarely spoke about it as time went on, but in the early days, before Beth was allowed anywhere near the process, when Vic still knew what he was doing and why he was doing it, he frequently used to describe it to Beth when he got home. They said it would be two weeks before he’d start to lose what it was he was running from, and it was, almost to the day. After that, Beth didn’t like to say anything more. He knew that it was time for his treatments and he didn’t question them. Beth looks at the bar for copying Vic’s files over, and it’s hardly gone down.
Come on, she says, though it’s not like she can do anything with it here and now. She lies on the bed next to the Machine, a bed that she’s never actually slept in because it felt wrong, somehow, ever since she decorated the room. She watches the bar and shuts her eyes, and thinks about Vic and what he could be.
When the company behind the Machine announced that they were working on a cure – they would put the word in inverted commas, because they were so cautious with how they went about presenting it to the world after the last time – they said that the technology side of things was flawless.
They said, We can take a person and make them whole again.
Beth – everybody – doubted it, but then they showed videos of a man and his progress. In the earliest videos he shuffled like a zombie and needed feeding and changing and his eyes lolled back in his head even as his loved ones poked and prodded him, asking him questions, trying to get a response. In later ones he fed himself and walked, and even responded to his name. They showed old video of him ignoring persistent, insistent calls – Shaun, Shaun! – over and over again. Then they invited him up onto the stage where they were making the announcement: and they did it solely by calling his name. Once. Shaun! He ran up, and he shook their hands. He looked at the cameras, and his gaze was a bit glassy-eyed but he was mostly there. He waved at the crowd, and then they asked his wife up there as well, and they embraced on stage to applause. Standing ovation: he is healed.
And this can only get better, the men from the company promised. Beth saw it in their eyes: the idea that this was somehow their redemption. The thing that might stop their houses being burned and people fighting with them in the streets and the headlines on the tabloid sites. They have destroyed thousands of lives and now they’re back, ready to save the day. They said, It takes years of therapy to bring them to this point. It uses our pioneering technologies. The process works best when we’ve got a full and frank medical history, and when you help us.
Shaun was back in another video. This time, his bedside in some hospice somewhere, where the bed was thin and metal-framed and the bed sheets that yellow colour. On his head was a Crown, or what passes for a Crown now: tiny multi-coloured pads designed by a famous South American designer, to make it appealing, placed on the temples and the forehead, tiny lights indicating that they’re all wirelessly connected. His wife talked Shaun through a shared experience from their past that, presumably, had been lost; she’s laughing and squeezing his hands.
We found it so funny, she said, and then you opened the presents, and you had another one, from Mark and the kids. A funny story, and when she laughed at the end, so too did Shaun, somehow simpatico to it all. On stage, Shaun watched the video and then spoke to the audience. Slow and measured, careful with his words.
I can hardly believe this is me, he said. Standing here in front of you. The audience whooped and clamoured.
Shaun represents hundreds of man-hours of work, the doctors said, and it’s not perfect. Shaun’s not perfect. But we’ll get there. By the end of this decade, they said, we hope to be able to offer this therapy to many of our ex-patients. Shaun waved again. The end of the decade made Beth’s heart sink, because that was eight years away. That was so far away that, by the time it arrived, she would have been apart from Vic for more time than they had been together. And that was two years ago. They were asked, over and over, how long it would be before the public could have access to the tech. We don’t want to rush things, they said. They – everybody – wanted to avoid a situation like the first time around: rushed to market, and then thousands damaged, seemingly irreparably. They were cautious, and their ‘end of the decade’ became the start of the next decade, in the post-Shaun interviews. They wanted to wait until it was right.
The internet didn’t want to wait, though. People who knew things, people who worked for the company and hated what they had done, people with vested interests: they all stepped forward under the internet’s veil of anonymity, and they told others how to do it. They leaked firmware, software, instructions; things that somehow they had got their hands on, that they shouldn’t have had. Cloak and dagger, they explained that the Machine could be used to create a new persona in the damaged. It could build them up again, as they were, based on who they were. It could be achieved through talk, through photographs and videos. It was better if you had the recordings of their original sessions. They got together in clandestine meetings, organized themselves to do work for this: on the technology, the software, the work itself. Eventually they had their own case study, their own version of Shaun: a lady called Marcela. She was from Eastern Europe, and Beth didn’t understand what she was saying but she got the gist. Marcela was herself again, in that she smiled and she waved at the camera and the person behind it, and they bent past the lens and leaned in to kiss her and she kissed his bearded face back, and he gave a thumbs-up to the camera.
We used the original recordings to help Marcela, the video said, and that sold it to Beth. Because she couldn’t wait. This was too important to her, and to Vic. When Beth opens her eyes, the on-screen bar is finished: only it says that the files have been moved, not copied. She looks at the hard drive and it’s empty, but it doesn’t matter. Vic’s memories are in the Machine now, and where they should be.
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The window of her bedroom opens onto a view of what used to be thought of as a field, but now it’s just scruff, cracked dry soil and scuffed-up anthills. They called them the Grasslands when they built this place. The area between the flats and the cliffs isn’t huge, because that was the only way that they could get planning permission, and the most-desired flats had been the ones with the eastern-aspect view: looking out onto all that grass. The residents would remark that they lived in the greyest building on the island, but it didn’t matter, because the view was what you saw every morning. You weren’t looking at the walls. It was meant to be for new overspill from Portsmouth, because the mainland couldn’t expand any more. That was the trick with it being so enclosed: there was no more land to build on. The developers moved across the water, assuming that people would want to live there, but they didn’t. Apart from Beth, that is. The Grasslands themselves were protected because they were so close to the new cliffs, far too fragile to build on. The local council had decided that those flats that had the spectacular views – out to the sea, to the mainland across the way, to freedom – would be put up for sale, and the rest could go to whoever needed them. Back then, when the first proposals for the construction of the site went through, the Grasslands were still green, and the trees dotted around the landscape were all green as well, their leaves almost constantly present. When Beth moved in she didn’t know the names of them, but it helped her, being able to see them so unfaltering: when she was at her lowest, they survived. The trees are still there, now bare or getting there, but the grass is almost entirely gone: it’s now a sickly yellowing orange, almost burnt. It looks the way that lawns used to look in the summertime after kids had played on them: hard, dry soil patches, like liver-spotted scalp peering through thinning hair.
Beth spends the day waiting for the files to copy, staring out of her window at the Grasslands, and by the time she’s remembered that she hasn’t eaten it’s dark outside. She looks at the tins piled in the kitchen and thinks about how many of them she’ll be eating in the weeks – months? – to come, baked beans and spaghetti hoops on toast, and she looks out of her living room window – past the rest of the estate, over towards the street of shops and takeaway restaurants that leads towards the main road – and decides to chance it. She opens the front door and looks around for people, but she can’t see anybody out this side. There’s noise (rustling and cackling) from behind the block, from the Grasslands, but that doesn’t worry her. The only creatures that she ever sees out on the Grasslands are cats, from all around the neighbourhood: a glaring of them masses, like a congregation. They’re not watching her or the flat or anything in particular. They just seem to mass. If there are kids out there – or worse – she can never see them. They’ve become excellent at staying in the dark. She locks the door behind her, and then checks it’s locked, shoving it with her shoulder. When it doesn’t budge she checks the window where the men took it out, pushing it as hard as she can to check it’s secure. Satisfied, she walks down the bridge path, towards the stairwell. The doorway’s open – some of the residents collectively decided to take the door off, because there were times that trouble had waited at the bottom of the stairs, and they wanted to make sure that they could hear it in future – and the lights are on, which buoys Beth. She runs down them, really pelts, and then out into the estate, past the bollards, to the street. She wants something hot. A curry, maybe, or spicy Chinese. She can smell the Indian Palace from the edge of the estate: the restaurant opens their back windows and doors, trying to entice people down. Some nights the whole estate can reek of food, and some nights that’s the last thing that Beth wants to think about. But tonight it’s enough.
Inside the restaurant they’re playing music that Beth recognizes, but in some water-chime musical form. Songs from when she was a child, that she still knows the words to: huge ballads, slow-dance pop songs that once soundtracked hit movies. The waiters all sit around a table at the back, all with half-pint glasses half-filled with lager. Two of the four stand up when Beth walks in.
All right love, one of them asks.
Hi, Beth says. I wanted a takeaway?
Sure, sure. What can I get you?
Chicken korma and a pilau rice, she says. The man nods. He leans back and peers through the door to the kitchen, then nods at the solitary chef Beth can see in there, who’s been leaning against the cookers.
It’ll be a few minutes, the waiter says to Beth. Want a drink?
I’m fine, she says.
She sits at a table by herself to wait, near the window, and she watches the few other people out for the evening, all of them going to get takeaways or hurrying forward by themselves, collars up and eyes down. A group of kids – heads shaven into a step around the back and sides, suddenly popular again, and ripped jeans with smart-looking cheap shirts – walk past: they see her peering out and they spit at the window. One of them undoes his fly and rushes up to her, and she flinches backwards, away from the window. One of them stands at the back and doesn’t do anything but stare, a fixed gaze that won’t break. They all laugh.
Ignore them, the waiter who took her order says.
Bunch of pricks, one of the others says. He doesn’t look up from his beer.
I know, Beth says. The waiter walks towards her table and leans over it. There are curtains that she hadn’t seen, only half-height ones, but he pulls them across, blocking her view of the street, and the kids’ view in.
Better when they can’t see the customers, he says. Beth sits and stares at the curtain for the next few minutes, because she can hear them still out there on the street. They’re laughing about something, down at the kebab house, and there are occasional bangs where they’re throwing something, or hitting something. She thinks about standing up to see what they’re doing, but knows that if they see her it will only antagonize them. She nearly asks the waiters how many times their front glass has been broken. It always looks new, she thinks.
When the waiter comes back with her food (which smells amazing, she thinks, cooked freshly because she’s the only customer they’ve had all evening) he loads it into a plastic bag and throws a few poppadoms in.
You going to be all right? he asks.
Yes, she says. I only live up the hill.
In the estate? He inhales and laughs with the other waiters. I’ll walk you.
Don’t be silly, Beth says.
What else am I doing?
I’m fine.
Look at all my customers, he says. He opens the door for her and stands back, letting her head onto the street first. The boys outside the kebab shop shut up slowly, one by one, falling into line. They’re all some ambiguous age that Beth can’t tell, past the hoods and caps, even in this heat. They’re looking over at them. Just ignore them, the waiter says. He walks next to Beth, briskly, their pace faster even than when she walked down here, and they don’t look behind them. The boys stay quiet, so they don’t know if they’re being followed. Beth pictures it: them dropping their kebabs and cans, leaving them on the side, and then walking behind them as one. Falling into a pack, a tight unit, rapidly advancing, a cloud of dust ready to swallow them whole. That one who stared suddenly at the front, leading the others.
They make it to the lights of the estate, and the bollards. Beth can see her flat from here. At a dash, it’s only thirty seconds away. The waiter stops. You all right from here? He looks back where they’ve come from. The boys are nowhere to be seen.
I’m fine. Thank you so much.
Pleasure. Want to walk me back to the restaurant now? He grins. Joking, joking, he says. Enjoy your dinner.
He heads back down the path towards the road. There’s a bit where there are no lights and he disappears, and Beth waits to see him reappear on the other side of it. When he does she goes into the stairwell, and then along to her flat. She fumbles for her keys, but there’s nobody anywhere near her, and no noise she can hear apart from the background murmur of neighbours’ televisions, and the occasional rustle of a cat. She locks the door behind her, then goes to the kitchen with the bag and unpacks it on the worktop. She peels the lids from the tubs, takes a plate and turns them both out onto it, then sits on the sofa with the plate on her knees, the greasy paper slip of poppadoms on the table. She puts the TV on and tries to concentrate on it. She flicks through channels with one hand, eating with the other. But there’s something else. She can hear it: a buzzing. She mutes the TV, cutting the weather report off midsentence – the symbols all sweating comical suns, not much chance of them saying anything to contradict that – and listens for it. It’s like a fridge, but hers is silent, or an old light bulb about to blow, but hers are all energy-saving modern ones. She puts the plate on the table in front of her and walks around the living room, looking for the source. She can’t find it in here, so she tries the spare bedroom and then remembers about the Machine. The screen is on – still – and the buzz coming from it. Not the screen: just, vaguely, the Machine itself. She can’t pinpoint it, but she’s sure of the source. She puts a hand on the casement and there’s something, a movement. The most subtle vibration.
I should switch you off, she says to it. She leans down to the plug and flicks the switch and the Machine’s screen goes dark. She can still hear the buzz, though, as she goes to leave the room: and as she lies in her bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how this is all going to go. And still, even with it this close to actually happening, how she has her doubts.
5 (#u5e222e83-e52f-5a8c-b77f-86de843d54d9)
She swims first thing in the morning. Only some mornings – not enough to call it a regime, but more than a habit. Some deep-seated feeling about being so close to – inside, even, beneath and through – something that caused so much destruction and yet is somehow blameless. She gets up before anybody else, when it’s still barely light, and she peels her clothes off and swims out against the waves into the water, and then back: and she stands on the beach and waits for the sun to dry her, which only takes minutes, and then she dresses herself. She doesn’t get her hair wet – she ties it up above her head, a style that she never used to wear, but that’s practical for her, here and now – and she puts her work clothes straight on and then sets off.
Her walk to work takes her along the path that runs adjacent to the coastline. She and Vic had always wanted to live by the sea: they had said that when he retired it was what they would do. (Without him here, she sometimes thinks, this feels almost like cheating on him, with this place instead of another man. She is sure that he would – will – forgive her.) The path is hard ground, old mud that’s faded and cracked underfoot. It falls just shy of the green grass; as she walks she keeps her eyes on that side. On the other side are the roughest blocks, the ones where the people always seem crammed in. These were the last ones built, designed to take the council housing overspill from Old Portsmouth after the flooding. The people there are bitter that they ended up here. They didn’t choose to move: it was their only option, if they wanted to live where they could still keep their jobs. Most of the children from the estate go to her school, and she teaches many of them, or tries to. The worst of her kids invariably come from the worst parts of the island, where their parents have sob stories about how they lost their jobs on the mainland, or their homes. There’s a joke around Portsmouth and Southampton, where they call the island Alcatraz and refer to the ferry that runs six times a day as the prison boat. They don’t try and hide it. Anybody with real money left the island a long time ago. Before this, Beth would have been one of those people: running before they sank along with the rest.
Beth passes some children who clearly have no intention of going to school today (out at this time already, racing around on their bikes, standing bolt upright on the pedals and clipping their wheels on curbs, trying to make the bikes jump off the ground for even a few inches of air), and thinks about persuading their parents to persuade them to go, or to force them. It’s not a cost thing, she knows, because they fought to keep all the schools free when the new Prime Minister took over: it’s an effort thing. They circle her as she walks, flitting between the road and the grass verge. Most mornings they ignore her. Today, one of them rides alongside her as his friends drop back, watching from a distance. She thinks she recognizes him; one of the youths from outside the takeaway house, maybe. Or just from the estate. They all blur into one after a while. Beth pulls her bag closer to her body. She remembers being in London when she was much younger, walking down roads where footsteps behind her might have meant an imminent mugging: she remembers how much that feeling holds you back, steps on your toes as it walks alongside you. She breathes and tries to stare past him, even as he nudges towards her, slightly ahead of her. His hair is clipped short on top, longer at the back and sides – looks like a home-job, clippers rather than scissors – and he is slightly boss-eyed, she notices, as he turns his head back towards her, peers at her from under his drooping eyelids. She wonders if he’s stoned. He’s very young to be getting stoned.
The fuck you looking at? he asks. His friends laugh behind them: she can hear the spokes of their cheap bikes clattering against wheel frames. You looking at me?
She doesn’t answer him. Instead, she stares past him – at the boat in the distance, moored up, ready to take people across the water – and carries on walking. He darts in front of her, swaying across her path, forcing her to keep pausing her steps. He’s only twelve or thirteen, she thinks, but his voice has broken into a full baritone, making him de facto ringleader.
I asked you a fucking question, he says, but Beth still ignores him. She would have taken him to task, in the old days: the Beth who walked along those streets in London and heard footsteps would have turned, stopped, done something surprising to scare them off. They’re all mouth and no trousers, she would tell herself. But here she keeps her head down, because this is how she knows it has to work. No trouble. Every day is exactly the same where this is concerned. Beth carries on walking, heading up some steps and away from the front, even though it’s slightly off-route for her, because she knows that they won’t follow. They stay at the bottom of the steps and stand on the pedals of their bikes, laughing as if they’ve won.
Over the hill she sees the school: the gate that needs a fob to get into the playground, and then the door that requires a swipe of her ID card to get inside the building; and the metal detectors, which used to be something that they threw at troubled schools in America and people the world over laughed at as something that they would never need themselves, because our kids just weren’t like that. Now, there’s two of the turnstiles and a room, to the left of where the security guard stands, which has handcuffs inside and a locked cupboard crammed with mace, tasers, truncheons and a bullet-proof vest, just in case. Because, the Head told them when the decree came to have them installed, you never know.
The classrooms of Beth’s school – which swallowed the other two nearest schools on this part of the island, a primary and a secondary, turning them into one giant institution spanning two campuses – don’t have any air conditioning. The school priced them up, worked out how much it would cost, but it was unfeasible. Even the discounted companies priced themselves out of the running, mainly because the school had one of the lowest budgets of any in the county. Instead, they made do with opened windows and cheap desk fans, often two or three in each classroom, blasting off from one wall, pushing the air away from the desks and ushering it towards the outside.
Beth’s Year Ten form has forty-one students: twenty-four girls and seventeen boys. The ratio makes the boys excitable. They rock against their chairs and jiggle their legs, their feet tapping furiously on the floors when some of the girls do salacious things: taking off their jumpers, wearing shirts that are paler than the rules allow, fanning their skirts when they stand up. One of the repercussions of the heat is that everything becomes sweat-laden, and the school has rules. Shirts must be of a certain thickness; no thin cotton, nothing that can become too transparent in the heat. The class sit on cheap plastic chairs; every day, no matter who is sitting down, there’s a sweat mark on the seat when they leave. Beth hardly sits down at all any more; she leans against the desk, or she paces.
Her class are always late, but it’s excused by all the teachers because of the heat-caused lethargy. Everybody’s late. The parents – those that care enough to attend the biannual meetings about their child’s progress – tell the Head that the kids can’t be expected to be excited.
It’s so fucking hot in there, one shrill woman said at the last parents’ evening. It’s so hot that they don’t want to be there. And if you don’t want to be somewhere, you don’t fucking go there, do you?
Beth sits and sweats and can, some days, barely concentrate herself, let alone expect the kids to. When the children do eventually arrive in her classroom it’s in a single gaggle, a tumble of horny adolescence through the doorway. They sit quietly, because they quite like Beth (even though she’s quiet: they think of her as particularly fair, for a teacher), and she takes the register.
Abrams, is the first name, and he says that he’s there, and she goes down the list one by one. They laugh when they reach Turner, because he’s the butt of all of their jokes, the only fat kid (so fat he’s actually clinically obese, with medical certificates brandished at every opportunity to excuse him from any chance of accidentally doing exercise) in a classroom of children rendered thin by profuse sweating. Beth tells them all to shut up and get on with it. They respect her for that. She doesn’t beat around the bush. And they respect her expectations of them: she only wants them to pass. Anything else is a miracle, a grade above the expected, frankly, because all the kids worth their salt – or perceived to be, at least – have long left the island for one of the boarding schools that sprang up in the wake of the new education reforms. If she can get her class to read a book of their own accord she’s happy to call it a win.
It’s a Thursday: they have Beth’s English class first thing after registration. She’s meant to spend fifteen minutes doing pastoral care, expected to ask them how they are, what’s going on in their lives, their hopes, wants and fears. She skips it. They’re reading Lord of the Flies as a class, taking it in turns to go passage by passage. The boys at the back of the class have the most problems with the language: they stumble and struggle over the words, clumsily piecing them together as if they’re a puzzle in and of themselves, breaking down the components into single syllables. At least they’re trying, Beth thinks. They ask her about conch shells, and one – a girl called Tamzin that Beth always butts heads with, who’s always tapping on her phone, doing something or other – says that her father, who is American, a soldier, calls them cock shells, and the rest of the class laugh. Beth hates moments like this: once they’re lost, they’re lost for the rest of the lesson. She leans back against her desk, her palms sweating onto the old wood, and she tells them to be quiet.
It’s not that funny, she says, but already she can hear it: the quiet ripple of jokes about her and a conch – cock – shell, what she might do with it in her spare time, why she might need it. Because they think that she’s single, even though she wears the ring on her fourth finger, as they’ve never once seen her with him. Five years and no sign of her husband. Come on, Beth says, we’re already behind. She assigns another reader, asking one of the girls at the front, one of the few who are desperate to listen, who sit there scowling every time the rest of the class manages to derail things, and the girl ploughs through the words like they’re going to evaporate. Ordinarily Beth would tell her to slow down, but most of the class just titter every time the word conch appears, so she’s happy to simply get through it.
She spends lunch by herself, in her classroom. Sometimes some of the girls will ask if they can sit in, but most of the time they’re outside, desperately searching for a breeze by getting to high points of the playground or skulking in whatever shade they can happen across. Despite the heat they still drape themselves over each other in primitive pre-sex ways. Beth watches them out of the windows and eats her sandwiches.
When she gets home – school ends early, like she’d heard it used to on the continent, because of the heat there – she opens the windows and sticks the fans on. She has four: two in the living room, one in the kitchenette and one in the bedroom. She’s never really used the spare room so that’s not got one, but she worries about the Machine. She takes the one from the kitchenette, thinking that she’ll angle one of the others later to cover it as well, and puts it on the chest of drawers in the spare room. The chest of drawers, like the rest of the furniture, came from their old house in London. This was the stuff that she brought with her when she moved. The flat was already furnished, and she left it piled up and unused in the spare bedroom for years. For a while, she couldn’t bear to look at it, so it was easier to leave it buried under vacuum-packed clothes and old curtains still with the rings through their hooks. She places it facing the Machine and turns it on, letting it rotate and swing around the room.
I hope that this weather isn’t making you too hot, she says. She walks to the Machine and puts her hand onto it, and it’s cold. So cold, she realizes: colder than it should be. She wonders how it keeps itself cool. No refrigeration component, and it’s been off. The fans can’t have been running. She assumes that this must be an effect of the metal that it’s made from. She moves her hand across the metal, almost sliding it so that her forearm is flat against the cold, and that makes her sigh. This part of the Machine could easily accommodate her entire body – the thing itself is big enough to fit three or four bodies inside, she thinks – and there’s no screen here, nothing but metal from floor to ceiling, and the span of her arms. She grabs the bottom of her shirt and peels it up, rolling it to below her breasts and then pressing her back against the Machine itself. It’s so cold that the relief is incredible. She peels herself off and looks at the print of her sweat on the metal, then presses her front, her arms spread, like an embrace. I should have a shower, she says. She stands back and pulls her shirt off, and then uses the shirt to wipe down the sweat, cleaning the metal. She undresses more as she walks to the bathroom, and then steps into the shower, throws the dial to the coldest it can be and stands there.
6 (#u5e222e83-e52f-5a8c-b77f-86de843d54d9)
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?
