The Machine

37

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

I’m still aching, he says.

But I told you? What he was like?

You told me. You used the c-word.

Well, he is.

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

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

He’s a kid. I’m not going to hit him.

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

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

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

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

We did. Together.

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

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

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

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

How long have I had them?

Years, Beth says.

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

Maybe.

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

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

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

How can you run in this heat? she asks.

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

I know, Beth says.

What can I eat?

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

Right, but I’m still hungry.

I’ll make you something in a minute.

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

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

38

Beth still doesn’t sleep, even as he does. She lies next to his body and watches the ebb of it. She tries to match his breathing: to draw her own breaths in as Vic takes his, so that there’s some synchronicity, and the noise – which is so alien, more alien even than the distant hum of the Machine from the adjacent room – might somehow fade into a background of her own creation. She counts his breaths, which are naturally slower than hers.

That’s the thing about sleep, she thinks: the body slows down. In sleep, it quietens to an energy-saving crawl. In danger, it becomes hyper-energetic, surging with adrenaline. She wonders what her own body is doing: lying in bed, constantly on the verge of consciousness. If the rest she’s getting is worth anything at all. She counts his breaths to five hundred, and then starts counting down. She makes it nearly halfway before stopping.

At 4 a.m., according to the clock, she gets up and paces the kitchen. She opens the fridge – such a simple pleasure, that burst of cold – and drinks water, then uses the toilet before putting the television on and watching the news. The shallow news cycle in the middle of the night, the same fifteen-minute segments repeated with tweaks, as the stories roll in, and the scrolling texts at the foot of the screen giving real-time updates, suggesting that the newsreaders aren’t even broadcasting live. Beth wonders if they’re asleep as well: tucked under the desks, waiting until a real emergency springs up. She tries sleeping on the sofa but she can’t even begin to shut her eyes. The alarm clocks are all off, because she reasons that Vic needs the sleep. He’s not used to this, she thinks, and that makes her laugh; because what exactly is he used to? He’s used to being nothing, she thinks. He’s used to being a void.

It’s a bad thought, and one that she banishes. She tells herself that she has to remember that he’s here now. She wanted her husband back and here he is. He’s mostly-formed and tweaked and as close to perfect as she can reasonably expect. And he’ll get better. That’s what they say on the forums:

Remember: this is just the start.

The news flicks to a story about the economy, and she realizes all of a sudden how out of touch she is: how little she knows about the state of everything. Outside her flat, everything is carrying on, motoring forward. Inside, it’s just her and Vic and the Machine.

She opens the spare-bedroom door. She’s told Vic that they don’t need it any more. She’s been honest about what happened; about why it’s here.

I bought it so that we could make you better, she said.

Okay, he told her. He didn’t ask anything more than that. He only said, a few hours later, I don’t like it here.

What? she asked.

The Machine. In that room.

Okay, she told him.

Don’t you trust that I’m better?

Of course, she said.

So why do you still have it?

I’ll sell it, she told him. I’ll put it on the forums and sell it. Somebody else will want it, you know. Easy sale. And we can use the money. She blabbered excuses to him, to make him feel better. Now she looks at it, growling at her. Or maybe like a purr. Such a fine line between the two.

I should thank you, she tells it. You gave him back to me. She calls up the screen with her touch, a single stroke of her fingers, and it lights up. She’s left the room light off, and the screen casts its own colours: blue on the far wall, green on the ceiling, white everywhere else. And some black: black light, which she didn’t even know was possible, making parts of the room – corners, nooks – darker than they were even without the screen on. She flicks to the recordings, selects one and presses play. She acts like it’s an accidental choice, but it isn’t. She knows which one.

I know how this goes, Vic’s voice 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. He sounds so nervous. Now, in the present day, she can hear the confidence in his voice. That’s what the Machine has embedded of itself: the confidence that this is right. That he is who he is.

Tell me some other things about yourself, Victor. Where do you live, for example?

London.

Oh, whereabouts?

Ealing. Beth remembers their house. Their beautiful house, and their brutal mortgage, and their struggling to keep it. Another life entirely.

Okay. Are you married?

Yeah, Beth. He sounds so happy when he says her name. As if she’s the thing getting him through this, she thinks. That’s what she would like it to be: that she’s what got him through the early days. He did this for her, and their marriage. They spoke about kids. About being old. Elizabeth, Beth, Vic repeats, like he’s trying the names on. The reassurance of repetition. At this point, he still remembered everything. He knew what the Machine was going to do. He repeated her name, Beth thinks, so that he could cling onto it. This is something he never wants to lose, because they were meant to be together.

Beth stops the recording. Maybe she could sleep here, she thinks. On this bed. She peels back the duvet and heaps it on the floor, and she lies down on the sheet that’s been washed countless times since Vic came home to her. Even now it smells of him, of his skin and his sweat. Something about the Machine’s noise is comforting to her. And that makes her uneasy, because it scares her – and she’s right to be scared, she tells herself, something so powerful and confusing right there, with the power that it has. It’s rumbling. Like those planes overhead, when she was a child, and the trains at the bottom of the garden. She shuts her eyes. The smell of the pillows is stale sweat, but again, that means something. In this heat, it’s a smell she’s used to. Nothing off-putting about it.

She shuts her eyes and the room moves with her. As her body turns over – always moving from her back onto one side, then onto the other, once before sleep – so too does the room, it seems. And then there is the noise of the Machine, which starts in one place only and then envelopes her. It’s in the walls and the floors, and the vibrations come up through the foam in the mattress and through the sheet, and through the pillow where it touches the wall. And she can hear the voices: Vic and the doctor talking in the background, in the far distance, so quiet they’re barely there. The pressure on her head, which she’s sure is the Crown, but it can’t be. Because the Crown is still on the dock when she opens her eyes, and the Machine is silent and sleeping, and the room is dark again. It’s getting light outside, which means she’s had barely any sleep: and from the living room she can hear the panting of Vic, press-ups in full flow. Trying to drag his body completely back to being what it used to be. His hair already looks longer, a few days of growth having a nearly transformative effect. Where the darkness of the scruff around his temples has grown, the blackened patches look almost like part of the hairline. As if they’re almost meant to be there.

Beth walks to the doorway and watches him. He turns and smiles at her.

Sleep well? he asks.

Yes, she says.

39

Vic tells her that he wants some fresh air, and that they should go for a walk, down to the sea.

We should do things together, he says. Beth’s scared of seeing Laura, because she’s had more answering-machine messages left for her: begging and pleading, and telling her that there are other ways to deal with this; having no idea that it’s too late, that Vic is already back. She suggests that they stay inside instead.

We can look for flats, she says.

I don’t even think we should move, Vic says. This place: it’s got a lot of potential.

The flat?

The island. I’ve seen it when I’ve been running. Used to be an amazing place. He doesn’t ask what happened to it, or why she’s there. No inquisition at all, she thinks. He takes everything at face value.

I want to go, Beth says. I’d like a new start.

Well, while we’re here then. He pulls his shoes on, sitting on the chair by the door. Come on. It won’t kill you.

Beth’s terrified that they’ll open the door to Laura, but there’s nobody around – it’s so early, Vic somehow operating on the rigid wake-times he got used to as a soldier – so she takes his hand and leads him through the estate, even though he’s run it a few times now and knows the way out. She takes him down the stairs. It makes a difference, having him with her. She’s not threatened by the blind corner.

As they walk down the path, the whole strip is empty. She’s grateful: the boy is probably still asleep, sleeping off whatever it was that he did last night. The restaurants and takeaway look like they’re dead rather than just closed; and the Tesco – Beth winces as they pass, because she can picture the pharmacist at the front, waving his fist at her as if they’re both in some cartoon, and saying, Get out of here, and don’t come back! – is quiet inside and out. The shutters are up, which means they’re open at least.

I fancy a pastry, Vic says.

Not here, Beth tells him. There’s a place along the front. We can sit down there.

They walk down to the bit of beach and tread along the pebbles. Vic picks up a few stones, the flatter ones, and he goes to the edge where the water is almost still and he winds his arm back. He takes on the stance of a professional, if such a thing exists: a posture that looks ideal, to Beth, somehow absolutely perfect, Adonis-like. He is a work of art, a creation carved from marble and memories. She wonders if the models for those ancient Greek statues would pose, without a break, for the duration of the sculpture’s creation, or if it was done in sessions. The seemingly unimportant parts – the flats of their backs, or the flattened plateau of an inner-thigh – carved out when the muse wasn’t there any more, when the artist was left to his own devices. Vic’s tight arm springs and his fingers splay and the stone fires out at such a flat angle that it’s almost imperceptible for a second, and then it hits the water. It bounces, and again, and then carries on, almost gliding.

Still got it, Vic says.

He throws another, and another, and then one followed so quickly by another that the stones almost dance together, the second ricocheting off the ripples that the first creates.

Jesus, he says. Still got it.

They walk further along the beach, picking their way over the most stable areas: the larger stones that aren’t likely to slip, avoiding the scree closest to the water. Beth threatens to slip on one rock, but Vic catches her. He rights her. They get to where the sand has been placed – hundreds of tonnes of the stuff, brought here by the council to entice people to the beaches when the tourism started to die, the inspiration for hundreds of costly promotional photographs that only helped to sink the island faster – and that lets them get closer to the water. Vic takes his shoes off – he’s not wearing socks – and he paddles.

Freezing.

Should be.

How can people swim in this?

I did. I do.

Really?

Most mornings. It’s always this cold.

But the air’s so hot.

Doesn’t make the water boil. It would be a worry if it did. The cafe is down the way, so Beth tells him she’s going.

No, he says. I’ll go. You stay here. Sun yourself.

Milky white.

Milky white?

That’s what they call a latte, she says.

Milky white it is. She watches him head up the embankment and onto the pavement, and then pulls a lounger – one of those old-style ones, with the different-coloured rubber bands making up the bulk of the bed – and makes sure that the legs are dug in. She sits on the end and watches the water, and she zones out – watching the waves – until she hears the footsteps behind her. Too many for Vic alone. She knows before she turns.

What the fuck is this, the voice of the boy says. She’s here looking at the fucking sea. It’s not going anywhere, love. Beth turns round to look at them. Four of the boys, and two girls with them this time. Bikini tops, shorts, hair cut so short they are almost bald, like the boys, but with length at the back, pulled into ponytails. They’re almost identical, but one is fatter. You going for a swim, love? the boy asks.

Please go away, Beth says.

Fuck’s sake, get her? He laughs. I’m being all fucking nice, and she tells me to go away!

Please, she says.

You can fucking beg for all I care.

My husband is only getting coffees.

They all laugh. So now she’s got a husband, has she? Never seen you with him before, love. What’s he look like?

Like a vibrating plastic cock, one of the girls says. They all laugh.

Yeah, that’s what he looks like. And you sent that to get a coffee did you? What’s he going to do, stir it with the tip? They laugh again: from the back of the pack, the laughing is almost incessant.

He’s a soldier, Beth says.

Coo! They all coo. Sounds like a threat. What’s he going to do? Have my eye out? Beth notices his hands: he’s got a stone in one of them, and his fingers are tight around it. His other hand flexes, in and out, as he breathes. Fist, open. Fist, open. Come on, he says. Tell me what he’s going to do to me.

Beth cries instead. Please, she says, please leave me alone.

They start to back up, because she’s making real noise, huffing breaths in, and spitting them out as sobs. They back up, ten feet, and they start to turn, apart from the boy, who stands firm. He’s not budging. He can smell weakness.

And then Vic shouts from the road. Beth looks up and sees him pelting towards them.

Get back, he shouts. They ignore him as he runs, and screams. What are you all doing? He gets to Beth and puts an arm around her, shielding her as she cries, and he looks at the boy. What the fuck did you say to her?

The boy ignores him. He looks at Beth, and he kisses his teeth, and spits onto the sand.

Another time, he says. As he walks away, Beth sees his fingers open and the stone falls to the sand, patting into it. One of the only stones on this part of the beach, a lump of solid black stone in amongst all the gold. As soon as they’re all out of earshot – on the street, all laughing, all grabbing at each other and heading back towards the estate – Beth starts crying harder, almost hyperventilating as she tries to breathe.

Oh my God Beth, don’t, Vic says. She can’t help it. He rubs her back. Shh, he says. He makes soothing noises and tells her that it will be okay. Come on, he says. Come on.

When she’s pulled herself together she tells him what happened. She can hardly get the words out, her breath still tight and hard to find.

And then I saw you coming, she says.

Yes.

You didn’t get the coffees.

I dropped them when I started running. I can get more.

No, she says. Don’t leave me. Let’s wait here. They sit on the sun lounger, and then Vic leans back.

Can’t even really see the sun under the clouds, and yet this is how hot it gets, he says. He’s making observations on phenomena that the rest of the world’s lived with for five years. It’s crazy.

What would you have done? Beth asks him.

With what?

With that boy.

I told him to get off you.

Would you have done more? Would you have hit him?

If I had to. How old is he?

He’s done this before.

What?

Lots of times. He’s made me so scared. Beth says the words, and thinks how weak she sounds to herself. That’s living here, and being alone, and being so nervous all the time. And, she briefly thinks, the Machine. Something about it.

How many times?

I don’t know. Five. Maybe.

Threatened you like this? He turns to face her fully, and he puts his hands on her arms. He actually threatened you? Why didn’t you tell me?

I thought we would leave, and I would never see him again.

You won’t. He does this again, I’ll beat the shit out of him.

I don’t even know how old he is.

If he’s old enough to scare you he’s old enough to be scared.

I don’t want you getting into trouble.

I won’t. I’ll just scare the little shit. There’s something about the way he says it that suggests he’s lying. He stands up. Come on, he says, let’s get home. Get you a cup of tea. He looks in the direction that the boy and his friends went. Come on. He helps Beth to her feet and they start to walk. He sets the pace, and they tread faster, and soon he’s pulling her along. He wants to see them again, but they don’t; and then they get onto the road, and the kids are nowhere.

As they pass the shops and the side roads he looks down all of them, and he almost snarls at strangers who might, from a distance, be the boy. They get past the Tesco – Do we need anything? Vic asks, desperate to go inside and see if the boy is lurking in the booze aisles, but Beth pulls him back and tells him that they’ve got everything they need – and the takeaways, and then they’re on the hill back to the estate when Beth hears the boy. She looks down to the point where they leap into the water, and they’re all there. All of them, four boys, two girls, all stripped down to their underwear.

Fucking jump, the boy yells.

That’s him, Vic says. That’s him, isn’t it?

Leave it, please, Beth says. She looks down and sees the boy looking at her.

Cunt, he shouts, and he leaps off the edge backwards, facing them. Cunt, he yells again mid-air, and the word trails down as he plunges, and his friends laugh before following him, one by one. Each one smacks into the water.

Please leave it, Beth says. Vic picks up a rock – two handed, bigger than his fist, something heavy – and he leans back and then hurls it into the water. What are you doing? Beth screams, but they hear it splash, and voices laughing. He missed. Vic breathes deeply, and his shoulders move up and down, regular with his breathing.

I’ll fucking kill him, Vic says. He kicks the ground with his trainered foot, and kicks it again and again. Rocks fly, and he starts smacking the wall with his open palm, over and over again, and Beth has to step in to stop him, putting her hands around his hand and holding it, but she’s not strong enough, so he crushes her hand into the wall. It doesn’t break any bones, but the pain is extraordinary, and she staggers backwards. Vic notices and stops everything, freezes, and it’s like his face changes: the rage gone, replaced by total concern. Oh Jesus, he says, oh my God are you all right?

I’m fine, she says.

Let’s get back. I’m so sorry. He goes first until the stairwell, and then stands back and almost ushers her up the stairs, and then he offers to open the door but she wants to prove that her hand is okay, so she struggles with the keys and unlocks their front door. He goes in first and stands by the sofa, guiding her to sit down. Ice, he says, and he goes to the fridge and then holds a bag of frozen peas onto her hand. He looks at her hand as if he knows what he’s looking for – Beth assumes he’s seen a lot of broken bones in war – and reassures her. It’ll be fine, he says. That’ll heal up nicely. He sits on the other sofa. I don’t know what happened, he says. I don’t know what came over me.

You got angry.

I got angry before, didn’t I? When I got back from war.

Yes, Beth says. Her head murders, the pain actually worse than the pain in her hand. Can you get me headache tablets? And some water?

Oh sure, he says. I hit you, he says as he opens the fridge. On the arm, right? And that’s why you threatened to leave me. He pops the tablets from their plastic-foil beds. I remember that.

Yes.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like it’s that bad, not like it was. I’m not the same person.

No. Beth wonders what the gaps were filled with. If they diluted the temper he had before, or maybe added to it. He hands her the tablets, which she throws into her mouth, and then the bottle, cap already unscrewed for her. Thank you, she says. And then she leans back, turns her whole body onto the sofa. I’m tired, she says.

Okay, he tells her. You rest.

Okay.

She shuts her eyes and listens as he walks around the flat. He opens cupboards and closes them, and then rifles through the clothes, taking the rest of his out of the vacuum-packed bags and putting them onto hangers, and then adding them to the rails in the bedroom wardrobe. He talks to her, even though he thinks that she isn’t listening.

I’m going to put the rest of the stuff into the spare bedroom, he says. He opens that door, and the noise of the Machine is back. As if it could be forgotten about. You said you’d sell this thing, he says, and even going into the room he sounds nervous. The Machine is the only thing that can do that to him. Maybe he’s worried that this can all be undone, Beth thinks. That I could turn around and wipe him, as easily as I made him. He moves the bags anyway.

Beth sleeps. She drifts off, worrying about what will happen. Because he hit her before, but never like that; not with that fury.

40

Beth wakes up to Vic’s voice. He’s talking about what he did before.

I hit you, he says. I didn’t even think about it when I did it, but that’s what happened. I used to only think about the stuff in the war, and thinking about it was a perfect way to get it all out. And then I came back and I didn’t… I had blind spots. That’s the only way of putting it. I had these blind spots where I can’t even remember what happened now, but I got really angry about little things. And then I hit you that Sunday.

Beth opens her eyes. She’s in the Machine’s room. Vic’s voice is playing over the speakers, and it’s like the Vic that’s lying next to her is speaking, but he’s not. The Crown lies between them on the pillows, an intruder in their bed, their lives, their memories. The voice continues.

We were out for lunch, and I can’t remember what you said, but I left and you chased after me and then I did it in the car park, near those woods. And you wanted to leave me, and I didn’t blame you. Because that was something I would never have done, not the real me. It was the war that did it to me, you get that, don’t you?

I do, her voice says, coming from the Machine’s speakers. (And where are those speakers, she wonders.) But you regret it?

Oh God yes. Totally. I’ve never regretted anything more. That’s not me, don’t you see that? You know that it’s not me. You know that, because you know me, Beth. You know me better than anybody else.

Beth remembers this recording: finding it when she was doing the cleaning-up sessions. He started crying when he was talking to her, and she probed deeper. He remembered this, and now it’s back in him, because that’s how this works. She sits up and presses the stop button, and the voices hang in the air.

Wake up, she says to Vic. She shakes him and he opens his eyes. Did you use the Machine?

No, he says. I wanted to sleep, so I lay down in here.

How did I get here?

You joined me, he says. Go back to sleep.

The Crown is here. The Machine’s been on. It was playing something.

What?

It was playing something.

We were asleep.

She stares at his eyes. This is the biggest change: eye contact. What happened the day you hit me? she asks.

What?

Why did you hit me?

I don’t know, he says. I didn’t even think about it. It was when I came back from Iran, and I had the – you remember – the blind spots. Couldn’t remember things properly. And the dreams. It was a rage, really. I took it out on you.

Where were we?

In the car park of a pub. I told you that I was going back to war, and you said that I couldn’t, so I lost it with you.

You told me what? Beth stops and squints at him. That had never happened.

I told you that I was going back to Iran.

That didn’t happen.

Of course it did, he says. He looks terrified then, as if he knows it sounds shaky even as it comes out of his mouth.

Tell me more about it? (She has no idea what time it is, but there’s no noise from anywhere else, only the Machine stirring away, as always.)

What do you mean?

If you were going back, tell me more about it. Why?

They called me and said that I was important to them. And that I had to go back to Iran, to help with a mission.

You left the army.

They said that they were reinstating me. Look, he says, this is what happened. I can remember it! I can remember everything! Why the fuck don’t you believe me? He stands up and starts pacing in that little room, in the space between the bed and the dresser. The door is shut. Jesus fucking Christ, this is exactly the problem. This is why we argued before, and why we’re going to argue now.

I put your memories back inside you, she says, in her quietest voice. And I didn’t put some story about you going back to war in you. That’s from the Machine.

I told it to the doctor then. I told it to him, and that’s how it’s back.

You didn’t. I’ve heard every recording. I know who you are as well as you do.

Shut up.

I know you as well as you know yourself.

You don’t have a fucking clue what I know! he yells. He picks up the potpourri dish and throws it at her, one swift movement; the circular vessel spinning through the air like a clay pigeon, and it collides with her, on the side of her head. It scrapes across her hairline before bouncing away at her ear, and everything in the dark room flashes white suddenly – the light, the walls, the Machine itself, as impossible as that sounds – and she falls backwards. Not from the impact, but the shock. And then Vic’s body – which, from that angle, is hulking and malformed, like the twenty-year-old Vic, with his constant intake of vitamin drinks and bench-pressing – disappears into the living room and then out of the flat.

Beth lets it all go black. She lets the whiteness fade and the sleep – because that’s what it feels like – washes over her. She’s out of control, and alone; and there, on the pillow, the Crown is lying right next to her.

41

Somehow she sleeps most of the day, waking when it’s night and dark in the flat, and when she wakes it’s to sobbing and clattering from the living room. She sits up and sees that the pillow is damp, and the Crown has somehow been knocked to the floor. She sits up further but she’s woozy, and she has to brace herself and focus on the only light in the room – the Machine – to steady herself.

Vic, is that you? she asks. She sees the potpourri tray beside where her head had been. Vic? She stands up, using the chest of drawers to keep steady, and her knees shake, but she’s strong enough to move along the line of the furniture and to the doorway. She looks out into the dark flat, and she can hardly see him. His shape in the light from the window and the door.

Don’t, he says. I’m so ashamed.

It’s okay, she says. She thinks about how she’s going to blame herself, because that’s the path of least resistance: to just take the fall, and say that she pushed him. They’ll get past this. After all, she thinks, hasn’t she already decided that she’s going to live with him and his temper and – if they start again – the dreams? That’s going to be her lot. Listen, she says to him, things happen. I’m fine.

It’s not that, he says. She steps forward into the living room itself, and she can see the trail of darkness that runs around the collar of his t-shirt, and down his arms.

What happened? she asks. She touches him, and he’s wet and warm, but not the warmth of the outside, not that dry heat: a pulsing, damp warmth. The smell of cleaning products and something else, something rotten. Oh my God, she says, you’re hurt. His tracksuit is soaked through, but it’s drying off, mostly; and his hair is wet and the water droplets in it cling to the strands.

I’m fine, he says. He’s shaking, like he’s the Machine itself, and his flesh the channel for those vibrations.

I’ll get a towel, Beth says. She turns on the light in the bathroom and sees the blood that covers her hands, which is now on the light cord and the sides of the sink and the taps as she tries to wash it off, and she looks in the mirror and it’s also all over her head: but this isn’t the blood from Vic, it’s from the gash that runs nearly all the way from her eye to her ear, so sharp and deep it looks to have been made with a knife, not a seemingly harmless ornamental dish. She lifts water to her head and feels the sting, but it’s okay. Not as bad as it looks, she thinks. She takes a flannel and soaks it and wrings it out, and then rushes back to Vic, picking up a bucket from the kitchen on the way. She peels his t-shirt off and starts wiping at the blood, to see where it’s coming from; and she gets it off his arms and then his neck, or at least makes it more liquid so that it runs clear and down his body and starts to soak into the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms. He notices her blood when she’s cleaning him, leaning in close to him.

Your head, he says. Oh my God, Beth. What have I done?

It’s okay, she says. I’ve made my bed, I’ll lie in it, she thinks. She nearly says that as well, but stops the words. There are no cuts on Vic’s shoulders or neck. What happened? she asks him. She wrings the flannel into the bucket.

I saw that kid, he says.

Oh God, she says. She knows instantly what he’s done, because there’s no other way that this story can end. She doesn’t want to know any more, but she has to. She knows that.

He, uh. He said things.

He always says things.

You said that he threatened you, and he did it again. The things that he said.

Where is he?

On the beach, Vic says. I left him there.

Come on, Beth says. She grabs her keys and opens the door and tells him again to follow, but he’s shutting down. You have to show me where! she shouts, and that shouting makes him move. He slopes towards her, dragging every part of himself, and she’s sure that he’s making a noise – a moan, something from deep inside, and it’s a noise that she knows so well, a noise that’s been there for so long, sitting in that room and in every part of her flat and her life, and inside her head. She pulls the door shut behind them and rushes down the stairwell, and she almost forgets about the blind corner until she’s past it, and she has to tell Vic to keep up. He doesn’t seem to be listening: this is all happening at his own pace, Beth thinks. She can’t shout at him here, because the whole estate will twitch their curtains and peer out at them. So she whisper-shouts, her voice feeling hoarse in the warm still air. Where is he? she asks him, and Vic points: not to the sandy beach at the end, but to the area of scree before the pebbles begin. Beth rushes to the line of shops and then down the steps that she never goes down, because what’s down there, at the water’s edge, is rough and hard and unpleasant, and it’s never used. It’s where the seaweed and rubbish get caught up on the rocks, and that’s it, nothing more.

Only now, she sees, there’s the boy. His eyes are shut and his body is at such an angle that she just knows, before she’s even there, because he’s been placed there, rather than having chosen to lie like that; and there’s so much blood, and it seems to be coming from every part of his skin. As if every pore decided to bleed at the same time. His clothes are torn and his face is beaten and red and swollen, and Beth swears that she can see fist marks in his cheeks, but that could be swelling from being in the water. She squats next to him and thinks about touching him to check, but there’s no need. And there’s no doubt that it’s the same boy. He’s eleven, maybe, twelve, maybe older. She has an urge to check his body for evidence of his age. She tells herself how sick that is: as if knowing might make this better or worse.

He must have ID, she says. She checks his pockets and pulls from one of them a thin white sleeve with a bus ticket and soggy bank notes and there, an ID card. It says his name and his address. And his date of birth. Beth puts her hand to her mouth, and watches it shake as she lifts it, and feels it tremble against her lips. She reads the rest as fast as she can. It says that he’s diabetic. It says that the contact number, in case of emergency, is his father’s. Should we call him? Let him know? Beth asks, but she knows that they won’t. Nobody’s seen this: them with the body. This part of the beach is so enclosed, so rarely visited, that nobody will have noticed.

I pushed him from the cliff, Vic says, suddenly. I hit him a couple of times and then I picked him up and held him above my head and threw him over.

Where they jump?

Yes. That spot. He said he was going to find you, and the things that he said he would do, I got so angry. I wanted to teach him a lesson. His face collapses. I think I didn’t throw him far enough.

What?

That’s how it happened, he hit something else. Rocks, so I dived in after him, and I swear Beth, I saw him as I was falling and I thought I could save him. So I brought him here, because I really thought that he might be all right.

Jesus Vic, she says. He looks like he wants to be held, but she can’t touch him yet, because she doesn’t know what this means. Which part of him did this: the part that was there before, the soldier and husband; or the part that remembers things that she doesn’t.

Can’t we leave him? Vic asks. His friends will find him, because I don’t know what will happen to me.

Oh Jesus.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Vic holds his arms out, a toddler wanting reassurance. Pick me up, it says.

We have to go, Beth tells him. She thinks about the blood on the rocks where he would have landed, and hopes that the water washes it off – it should – and that his friends will find the body and that will be that. They’ll assume he fell into the water from the cliff edge; or that he jumped and accidentally hit a rock; or that he did it deliberately, maybe. Suicide rates are high. He was troubled, and they surely all knew that. It’s not hard to recognize in him, and everybody will testify to it. If they realize it was no accident they’ll just assume it was one of the many other enemies that the boy’s no doubt accrued. They walk back up onto the street and she checks herself, that there’s no blood on her, and sees that she’s clean (apart from her head), and so she takes Vic’s arm – her hand wrapped around his forearm, not holding his hand – and she pulls him behind her. It’s still dark, and they stay quiet, neither saying a word as they walk through the estate – the quiet, damp squeak of Vic’s trainers, and the noise from inside him, his lungs or a moaning, Beth can’t tell, those being the only noises that accompany them – and then into the flat.

You need a shower, Beth tells Vic. He strips and stands in the bathtub and she turns the tap on, and then leaves him to do the rest. His body looks weaker than it did when he left the house: thinner, somehow. Like seeing the boy on the beach took a part of him. Maybe just in the way that he holds himself, in the slump of his shoulders. Scalded, knowing that what he did was wrong.

Beth waits for him in the Machine’s room. She looks at it, and she presses the screen. She thinks that she can wipe this: from Vic’s mind, from her mind, if need be. She’s read stories about criminals who have had things wiped from their memories to give them perfect deniability when taking lie-detector tests. But she won’t do that: because she doesn’t know what erasing something now might do to him. Might leave him vacant again, and she doesn’t think she’s got the strength to go through all of this again.

You fucking monster, she says to it. What did you put inside his head?

The Machine seems to start the fans in reply, and the screen gets somehow brighter, and then the thing hums and shakes even though it’s not switched on. And even as she blames the Machine, she thinks about her arm, and how troubled Vic has been. Is this better or worse?

In the bathroom, Vic starts singing, a song that Beth’s never heard before, that seems to have no tune and no melody, only words, and they make no sense to her.

42

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.

43

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.

44

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.

45

Vic wakes her. She thinks, first thing, that she seems to do nothing but sleep: that this has taken so much out of her that she can hardly stand it. She’s on the sofa, curled up, her whole length pressed tightly between the sofa arms, and her body aches and moans as it unfolds itself.

You’re asleep, he says.

I know. I slept here.

You need to clean your head still, he says. She reaches up and touches the scab, hard and thick, and her hair is caught in it, knotted. She can feel the skin underneath the scab healing, slightly tender. She needs a shower, and she needs to clean the wound, and the hair. We’ll have a scar in the same place, he says. He touches it. He knows exactly how to touch her still. I’m worried about you, he says.

Don’t, Beth says.

I am. I do. He sits on the end of the sofa newly vacated by her feet. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know. There’s something about him that doesn’t look sad, Beth thinks. As if he’d eaten something that he shouldn’t have, or fucked another woman: a crime that had a payoff. A result. Something done to appease a hunger. I think maybe the Machine could wipe that I did it, he says. Is that a good idea?

No, Beth says. Don’t even think that.

But it won’t do any good, knowing it. And you could wipe it as well. Get it taken away, like it never happened.

It did happen.

Yes. But.

We have to leave, Beth says. Laura knows.

Your friend.

She’s not my friend.

She knows?

Yes. She knows that you’re back. She’s… Beth’s about to say something about the Machine, about what Laura thinks of it, but she catches herself. She doesn’t want to make Vic angry. Or the Machine. But she thinks about that boy, and how Vic saw him as a threat. She doesn’t want the same for Laura. She’s just nosy, Beth says, and she’s insistent, and she won’t leave anything alone.

He smiles. You used to hate that in people.

I still do, Beth tells him. She smiles at him, but it takes effort. He dresses himself, and she watches his body putting itself into his clothes, and she wonders if she could remove his memories of the murder. She couldn’t do it again, no, no chance of her putting him back into the hands of the Machine, because she couldn’t bear to see his face contorted that way again; and that noise from his mouth; and she couldn’t stand the wrenching away, piece by piece – like a finished jigsaw being picked apart, fingernails pushed under the pieces to remove them, watching the picture fall apart.

So we leave, he says to her from the bedroom. Right?

As soon as we can.

How soon is that?

Today. Tomorrow at the latest. We pack what we need, that’s it. Landlord can throw the rest.

What about that, in the other room? He looks at the bedroom wall, as if he can see through it to the Machine. She knows he can hear it, even though she’s never asked him. She just knows.

We disassemble it.

Okay. Vic nods, but Beth’s sure there’s something else there: a twitch. A tic.

She fetches bags from the bedroom, from underneath the bed: two large holdalls, one that used to be his, in their previous life, and one that used to be hers, and she puts them onto the bed and peels them open. She starts with her casual clothes: the stuff she can wear day to day, regardless of where they end up. She had planned for the UK, but there’s a lot to be said for abroad. Heading to France, maybe, where their money might go a bit further; or Spain, if they can cope with the heat there. She thinks about how much she’s been sleeping, and laughs at how easily she could adjust to the siesta lifestyle. Maybe Spain, she tells herself. Get the ferry to France, buy a car, drive down. Get the ferry to Spain itself, if Vic’s up to it. He used to get seasick. She wonders if that – his seasickness – will have made the transition, because it wasn’t mentioned in any of the recordings. Is seasickness part of a person? Or something embedded in a memory?

Vic stands by the front door.

I want to go for a run, he says.

It’s best if you don’t.

Why?

Because of the police.

They won’t ask me who I am.

Just stay here, please, Beth says. She realizes that she sounds desperate: but she doesn’t know why he’s being so casual about this. He sits on the sofa and stares at the wall, as if that is all that he is: he runs, he argues, he occasionally comforts her and apologizes. Why don’t you watch TV? Beth says.

No, he tells her. There’s no petulance in the voice, just a declaration that he doesn’t want to.

Then help me pack this stuff.

None of it is even mine, he says, which is untrue, because all the male clothes are his, every single item, but how would he remember that? So Beth does it for him: folding his t-shirts and shorts and trousers, which all seem to be white or shades of white, and which take up twice the space of Beth’s own clothes. She puts in toiletries, but they’re all hers, and then she decides against it: he needs ownership, she thinks. So she puts them back in the bathroom and decides that he should buy his own when they get to wherever they’re going, buy real male-scented toiletries that he wants to use. But then she wonders if he’ll even know what he wants, or if he’ll stare at these things on their shelves in the shop, and she’ll ask him what scents he wants, what sort of products, and he’ll be blank and clueless because it doesn’t matter to him. Because he never cried to a doctor, or to Beth, about the shampoo he preferred, and so it was never logged, and so it was never put back in. She wonders if maybe the gaps that the Machine filled in, if maybe one of them will have taken care of that. She wonders what Vic can smell at this moment. She sits on the bed and wonders these things as time rockets past, and all she can think, as she reaches every empty conclusion, is that she’s made a terrible mistake.

She takes one of the painkillers she bought, that she didn’t crush up for Vic, and another straight afterwards, deciding that one isn’t enough. Two isn’t even enough. Vic is asleep again – both of them are constantly exhausted, but after what they’ve been through maybe that’s okay – so she opens her laptop, standing with it at the kitchen worktop. On her forum, she looks at the topic that she created, and the replies. There are a few standard responses, from users who assume that she’s having problems – We’re so sorry, they say, or It’ll get there, give it time – and then there’s one from somebody whose username she doesn’t recognize. This is their first and only post.

They write that they’ve been a long-time lurker on the boards, but that they never had the urge to write anything before. They write that their partner – their choice of word, keeping everything ambiguous – had treatments in the earliest days, to get over a terrible event in their life. When they came out the other side, their faculties were hanging by a thread, and one day that thread snapped. It was, the post says, the worst day of their lives. (Beth thinks about what the writer wouldn’t have given to have had the Vic she was presented with: rough and unfinished and crudely drawn, but stable; and how she had destroyed him because she wanted so much more than that.) The writer’s partner spent four years, nearly, in a home, and then they were pulled out – not by the writer, but by the company who made the Machines. They needed people to trial their cure on: the writer didn’t see how it could make things worse.

There were five trial cases, the post says, and nothing has been said of them in public. They signed non-disclosure agreements and waivers of responsibility, but it was a way to get their loved ones back, in some shape or form. A year, they spent being worked on. (Beth thinks about her time rebuilding Vic, such a condensed period.) And then they were handed back to their loved ones: complete, or so they were told. Beth reads all this with her hands gripping the laptop sides, and biting into the inside of her cheek, worrying the flesh there with her back teeth. But they weren’t complete: the author of the piece doesn’t go into specifics, but says that there was something wrong.

They had it all back, says the writer, but there was something missing, and it made me think that there was something wrong with the way the Machine glossed over the gaps. But what if that wasn’t the problem? What if the problems – my partner had a temper, and said things that they would never have said before, looked at me like I was nothing, dead, filth – what if the problems are something that’s part of us already?

What if they’re part of humans, and we paste over them; and the gaps that are left after this, what if they’re just holes that let the darkness out?

Beth stands back from the work surface. She doesn’t write her own reply to the post; not because she doesn’t have anything to say, or doesn’t think that she can contribute, but because she can’t stop shaking, and she clings to the fridge, which is behind her, and she can feel that shaking with her, and she thinks, How did the Machine do this to us?

46

They’re not finished packing, so Beth tells Vic that she’ll get them a takeaway. She asks him what he would like from the Indian, and he says that he doesn’t mind.

You must mind, she says.

I really don’t.

Spicy, creamy, what?

For fuck’s sake, Beth. Just whatever. Whatever I like. He makes fists and bangs them on the table and doesn’t look directly at her. You can go out and I can’t? he suddenly asks.

No. It’s not like that. But nobody knows you’re here, Vic.

What are you so scared of? he asks. Are you ashamed of me?

You killed that boy, she says, her smallest voice. He still doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t apologize, or explain, or even react. He’s just still.

She slams the door as she leaves, and she walks down the balcony and into the stairwell, and she forgets about the blind corner. She’s never met anybody here, even though it has always felt like a threat. And then now she turns it, and there’s somebody there, waiting, or just getting ready to climb the stairs. Laura. She staggers backwards, and then she smiles: out of pity, or pleasure, somewhere between the two.

I was coming to see you, she says. She reaches out and takes Beth’s arm before she’s even had a chance to react. I wanted to tell you that it will be okay: that you can tell the police, and I will support you. You had nothing to do with it: it was all that monster of a husband of yours.

Get off me, Beth says. She starts to walk: she has to carry on. Twelve hours and they’ll be on a boat to somewhere else entirely. Laura runs behind her, stepping double-fast to keep up.

Beth, she says, you have to listen to me.

I don’t.

This is creation, Beth. You don’t mess with creation, as it is the purview of our one God, Beth. Don’t you see that?

Beth stops and turns. I didn’t mess with creation, she says. I put back what had been taken out. Nothing more. This isn’t some bullshit that involves your fucking church, Laura: this is my husband, my life.

And what about that boy’s life?

Beth turns and walks on again, because she doesn’t want to react. Laura shouts after her, not bothering to match pace now, but still walking.

Did he deserve to die? Laura asks. Did he fall at the hands of the monster you call your husband, Beth? She shouts loudly enough that somebody listening could hear, which scares Beth slightly, so she walks even faster. Did you really think that he could get away with this?

Beth steps inside the restaurant and stands in the entryway, in front of the curtain that leads to the tabled area. There’s nobody at the bar. She breathes. She can’t hear Laura any more, not from in here. She shuts her eyes and counts down from fifty. She’s wondering if it will be enough, when the curtain rustles and the waiter appears.

Jesus, he says, you all right?

I’m fine.

Yeah, okay. You want a drink? She doesn’t answer, but hears the pouring of something anyway, then the clink of a glass on the side. Go on, he says, and she does, and it’s bitter and sharp, but exactly right: enough to wake her up a little, to shock her into remembering where she is and what she’s doing. You want food, or you just hiding from somebody?

It takes her a second to realize he’s referring to the trouble she had with the the boy, not Laura. She glances through the glass frontage, and can’t see her anywhere.

No, I want food, she says. She orders a korma and a makhani and some rice and a naan.

Two of you eating, eh? He says it with an implied nudge. He’s smiling.

Yes, she says. My husband.

Good for you, love, good for you. He disappears and she hears talking from the other end of the restaurant, then the slam of the kitchen door. Done, he says when he returns, five minutes at most. He stops and looks around. Quiet night, he says, as if it’s ever not. You want a seat?

No, she says. Can I wait here?

Course you can. You want me to leave you alone?

No, she says. It’s fine. They stand in silence, and then she glimpses herself in the mirror behind the bottles of alcohol that line the rear of the bar, and she sees what a state she looks. Like one of those women that they used to avoid on the train: her hair is pulled and lank and greasy, and around the scab it’s deep, thick red, almost black-red; her clothes are misshapen and malformed around her body, which has been losing weight. Has she been forgetting to eat? Her face is pale and wrongly hued. She looks older than she is, and that scab… She touches it with her fingertips. Inside her head she can hear the noise that her fingernails make, the tap-tap-tap on the hard shell.

What did you do? the waiter asks. If you don’t mind me asking. Oh my God that was rude of me. Sorry.

No, she says. It’s fine. I fell over. Scraped it.

Ouch. It looks well nasty. You been to the doctor? He knows that she hasn’t. He wants to drop the hint that she should. They both know it.

No, she says. I need to clean it more.

Scab like that, might need a stitch.

I think it’s healing, she says.

Okay, he replies. Okay.

She puts her head down and looks at the floor. At the carpet, which is red and gold, and meant to invoke something, along with the music: the sensation of being somewhere other than a small restaurant on the Isle of Wight, a small place of faded glory; as if, instead, you’re in the Taj Mahal, one of the great wonders of the world, a place of regal majesty. The carpet, the cold gold trim around the bar, the cutlery, the nearly erotic imagery on the walls, the piped-in sitar music. It’s all effect, nodding to a colonial memory. It never works, nobody is ever impressed by the facade, but it’s ingrained now. Part of the culture. She doesn’t say anything more, and neither does the waiter, not until the food is ready – the ringing of a bell, calling him to collect it – and then, as he hands it over, he puts one hand on hers.

If you need any help, come back in here, he says. You know what I’m saying. Okay?

Okay, she says. She doesn’t look at him, even when he holds the door open for her and she slides past him and into the warm night.

She’s past the shops – which are all quiet, the group of kids mourning and silent after the death of their friend, or put under some sort of curfew by their parents, maybe – and has reached the point where it happened, when she sees Laura, standing by the sign that implores people to rethink their decision and to call a number that might help them, because we’ve all been through feelings like that, and we’re all in this together. You and me, the sign says.

This is where he fell from, that’s what the paper says. Laura looks at the lip of the cliff edge, as if the ground itself is guilty.

Don’t, Beth says. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Is this where you did it?

You don’t know what you’re talking about. Beth tries to walk on, but Laura reaches out and grabs her arm, and she does it with enough force that Beth spins slightly, and she feels her ankle going, and she’s suddenly on the ground, and her hands are on the rocks and stones that surround the point. The bag with the curry splits and the cartons seem to bounce up and collide, and they spill, the thick sauces going everywhere: on the ground, on Beth’s knees, slapping onto her top. Laura stands back and looks at her, and she opens her mouth as if she’s about to say something but nothing comes out; just a gasp that might pass as an apology, over and over again, inhaling breath. She steps backwards, and Beth thinks, You could fall, and she hates herself for thinking it as soon as she has – those are the words that form in her mind, almost spoken, an invocation – and then Beth shuts her eyes. She holds them shut.

She hears him before she sees him: all heavy feet and thudding breaths, and he runs past her and to Laura. He’s got something in his hands – a rock? Something heavy, certainly – and it collides with Laura’s head.

Vic! Beth screams, and Laura crumples. Beth sees her fall to the grass: hitting the ground as if she came down from a much greater height, loose and free, like she’s floating. She lies on the floor and blood comes from her head, and Vic stands over her and gasps.

I had to help you, he says.

Beth doesn’t reply. She pushes herself to her feet – he holds out his hand to her but she flinches away from him – and then looks at what he’s done. There’s nobody else around, and everything is quiet. There’s a faint smell – pot, it smells like – on the air, coming from the estate. Laura isn’t moving: the wet blood on her head curiously mirroring the dried blood on Beth’s. It’s thicker, Beth thinks, and she would be more worried if Laura wasn’t still breathing, and if the blood didn’t seem to have stopped flowing from the wound.

Beth? he asks.

Don’t, she says. Go back to the flat.

I can help, he says, but she thinks she knows what he’ll suggest, because he’s done it before, and how could she forget that? How could she let that slide?

Just go. Quietly. Please, Vic.

He does. He backs up the road, watching her as she stands over her fallen friend, and he only turns when he reaches the top, when he needs to look where he’s going, and then he’s gone. Beth picks up the takeaway and bundles it into the bag, and she puts the bag into the bin across the way. It’s all ruined now, spilled out and wasted. And Laura: she moves slightly, her hand and her arm. Beth bends down.

I’m so sorry, she says. He didn’t mean it. You might be right, you should know that. You might be right that there’s something wrong with him, but I don’t know what to do about it. Laura flinches as Beth says it. I’m sorry. We don’t have long together, and we have to get out of here. You were my friend. Laura’s eyes open and she looks at Beth. She focuses on her, and one of her eyes has got a bleed in it, running in from the left, running down the veins and flooding the rest of the white. Laura opens her mouth to speak.

Monster, she says, and her eyes roll back.

Please don’t, Beth says. She thinks about leaving Laura there, but she knows; and now that is what will be solidified in her mind: that she was attacked because she knew too much. Beth wonders how this works now, because she doesn’t know. She knows TV shows and movies, but not real life. If the police will even take Laura seriously.

Then she hears it, and she feels it: this far down the hill, this close to the sea. She feels it through the ground: a tremor, and she looks around, thinking that it could be more of the land falling into the sea, just like the times with the floods; and then she hears it. A groan that comes from the estate, but she can pinpoint it exactly, because she knows what it is.

It says, You can make this better. You can take this away from her. And Beth doesn’t even stop to think about it. She bends down and puts her arm underneath Laura’s, and she pulls her to her feet. The walk back to the flat isn’t too far, and she feels stronger than she did before. The adrenaline that a father feels when his child is trapped under a car, and he tells the newspapers, afterwards, that somehow he found the strength to lift it, to bend his knees and do something superhuman. Laura’s limp body needs constant support, which she gets: and Beth practises what she learned with Vic when she brought him to the island. She walks Laura, one step at a time, to the estate and then up the stairwell, propping her body and getting her up the stairs that way – and she suddenly can’t remember how she did this with Vic the first time, this leg of the trip. It’s like he turned up on her doorstep and that was a new start for them.

She opens the front door, still clutching Laura’s body. She lowers her to the floor by the door, so that she’s sitting with her head resting against the wall. The lights inside are off, apart from that ghostly glaze coming from the Machine’s room; and Vic is sitting on the sofa. She can hear his breathing; and the breathing of the Machine, somehow synchronous.

Why is she here? he asks. He sounds only slightly scared. Everything else in him is passive.

We can take this away from her, Beth says. Vic turns his head to look at her, but it’s too dark to see him properly. She knows that it’s wrong: his shape; the way that he is; the things that he remembers. It’s all wrong. The things that she knows, says Beth. She doesn’t have to know them.

Somebody will be looking for her.

Nobody knows she’s here.

This seems so cruel, he says, and he sobs. This big man, so big that he seems almost supernatural, and what he’s actually made of, Beth doesn’t know, because her Vic would never have killed that boy and he would never have attacked Laura like that, and she has to tell herself that, because she knows that this is wrong: but it’s something that she worked for.

We have to put it right, she says.

She was going to hurt you.

She wasn’t. She grabbed me. It didn’t mean anything, she says. She wants to say, This isn’t an argument about how inhuman you are. It’s about how we deal with Laura.

People are capable of anything, he says. It’s inside all of us.

Where did you hear that? she asks. He doesn’t answer. She walks past him and to the Machine’s room, where the door is open and the light from the screen is casting itself across everything, and that’s impossible, unless he’s been in here. But she doesn’t question that, not now. She tells Vic to bring Laura through.

No, he says.

Don’t do this, Beth says. He doesn’t react: he sits on the sofa, and is how he is. So she goes back to Laura’s body and drags it through the flat and to the Machine’s room. She puts her on the bed – and Laura looks wrong there, because it should be Vic, Beth’s used to it being Vic – and she takes the Crown from the dock. She uses lubricant, because it’s kinder; and it slides onto the temples.

She waits for Laura to wake.

47

Laura’s eyes open as her hands go to the top of her head, and she feels her way around – patting them onto the Crown as her eyes realize what’s happening. She sucks in high-pitched air.

Where am I? she asks, even though she knows. Beth is sitting at her side.

Please, she says. You have to tell me what you think you know.

What have you done to me?

Nothing, Beth says. Not yet.

You’re a monster, Laura says.

No, Beth says.

What have you done to me?

Tell me what you think you know. Beth’s finger hovers over the COMMIT button, waiting for that moment.

You’ll go to hell for what you’ve done, Laura says. She spits it at Beth, suddenly more righteous and furious than she has been. No gentle persuasion. Vitriol.

Why were we even friends? Beth asks, and she leaves it there. Laura doesn’t answer for the longest time, and then:

Everybody gets lonely, she says.

I’m not lonely any more, Beth says.

No?

No. Tell me about what you think you know.

I will never let you take it from me, Laura says.

Okay, Beth tells her. Then I’ll press this anyway and take everything. She says it but doesn’t think that she means it. In those seconds she asks herself if she could do it: because it’s not Vic’s life she’s messing with, this time, but somebody else’s, somebody with a boyfriend and family; and when she thinks about how much she would be taking, all she can see is Vic killing that boy. And she can imagine it as clear as day: he finds the boy there, and he reaches out his huge hands to the boy, and he crushes him, and he lifts him and hurls him, and he waits for the crack of the boy’s body on the rocks. Only then does he think about what he’s done. Maybe, inside, he wonders where it came from.

Maybe the Machine knows.

Beth stops. She pulls the Crown from Laura’s head.

Go, she says. Laura stands, and she’s woozy still, and she’s got blood matting her hair, but she staggers through the flat, clutching the furniture. She doesn’t say anything about Vic: in the darkness, he is almost part of the flat itself. She reaches the front door, her movements silent-movie melodramatic, limbs flung and legs crossing, and she turns.

You’re a monster, she says, once more, but she’s looking at Beth. She ignores the other, with its breathing and its menace; she never looked at him once, Beth realizes. And then she’s gone.

Beth sits at the dining table and drinks water, and she reaches for the pills she’s got in her pocket. She takes three.

You let her go, Vic says.

What would you have done? Beth asks. This wasn’t her fault.

I don’t know, Vic says. She’ll come back now though, right? With the police. He lies back and shuts his eyes. The flat seems all the darker for it.

Beth goes to the Machine’s room and lies down. She sleeps. She doesn’t know for how long. When she wakes up, it’s because the Machine’s fans have started up again; it’s eager. She deprived it, letting Laura go.

She says, I’ve ignored so much of you. She stands and moves to the side of the Machine and pulls the plug from the wall. I need the screwdriver, she says. Vic, still sitting on the sofa, doesn’t move to help her, so she gets it from the drawer she left it in, and she lies on her back and she opens the Machine up again and peers inside it. It’s so dark. She gets a torch from the kitchen and shines it inside, and the light bounces around the whole thing, reflecting off every inside surface, and she can hardly see anything. But then her eyes settle in and she sees how big it is inside; and how small the cluster of wires that make its guts is. Like a ball inside it, little more than the size of a fist. Floating, suspended by wires.

She hears something so she ducks out and goes to look. It’s Vic. He’s brought the bags out of the bedroom and put them by the door. He’s standing in the streetlight from outside, and she can’t take it, because she feels like she doesn’t know him like this, so she switches the lights on in the flat. His face is as white as she’s ever seen it.

I don’t know, he says. We have to leave, right? So we should go. He pulls on his own fingers, cracking each at the knuckle. I’m so scared, he says.

We can’t go until morning, she says. The first boat isn’t until half past six.

Should we wait down there?

No, she replies. Get yourself ready, that’s the right thing to do. I have things to do here. She opens the cupboards, where there are more tins of spaghetti, and takes slices of frozen bread from the freezer, and she starts the process of making dinner. We should eat, she says. So they eat together, at the table, and Vic keeps one eye constantly on the door; and Beth keeps her eye on the Machine. She stands in the doorway after they’ve eaten, as Vic is washing up – she laughs at that, because they’re abandoning everything else in a halfway state, walking out and expecting the landlord to deal with it: the flat a diorama of the Marie Celeste, which somehow feels appropriate – and then watches the Machine doing nothing, but somehow, she thinks, doing everything.

I’m going to kill you, she says. That’s going to be my last act. She goes into the Machine’s room and sits close to it. There’s something wrong with me, to have done what I’ve done. Who does it make me? she asks it. She puts a hand on its cold, metal skin, and it shivers under her touch.

She remembers being a child: her dog, so sick. Her parents telling her that the car didn’t mean to hit it, and that it was getting old. This – loss, her mother’s word – is a part of life. Intrinsically linked, two little l-words entwined. They invited her to say goodbye, and she put her hand on its fur, on its chest (because she wanted to avoid the sodden red tea towel that covered the dog’s hind quarters) and she felt it breathing and, as it died, it shivered. That’s what happens. That flash-rush of coldness envelops.

I need a shower, she tells Vic. He’s standing by the door.

Okay, he says.

48

The water is hot, and Beth is worried about the scab, so she washes her body first. She thinks about how people wash themselves after committing a horrific act in a movie; all going back to Shakespeare, back to Lady Macbeth scrubbing her hands. Beth lathers and washes off, and she repeats, but she doesn’t seem to feel any different. Nothing changes.

So then her hair, and she holds the tips underneath the powerful flow of the tap before putting the rest of her head under. She covers the scab with her hand at first, and then, when she’s sure that it’s okay – as she watches the water whirl around her feet she can see chunks of thick dried blood, but nothing fresh, which was the worry, that soaking it would open it up again – she lets the whole area be washed. She knows then that the cut looked far worse than it was: it doesn’t hurt, and she can feel the dried blood flaking away. She lets it, letting the bigger chunks pick themselves apart. They sit by the plug and slowly dissolve. It doesn’t hurt when it’s just water, and it doesn’t hurt when she runs shampoo through it, but she can feel the skin there below her hair: tender and pink.

She dries herself in the bath and then stands in front of the mirror, and she rubs the towel over herself before pulling on underwear and cleaning her teeth. She looks at the pink skin on the front of her temple, so similar to Vic’s own scar. The same shape. (They always marvelled that his scar somehow had the shape of a bullet. They were just seeing what they wanted to see, but there, on her head: a bullet, side-on, clear as anything.) She thinks about what to do with her toothbrush. All of this stuff can be left, she thinks. France will have toothbrushes. Spain will have shampoo.

I want to do my hair, she tells Vic. I should do something else with it.

Okay, he says. His voice is quiet.

She looks at herself. She looks better, she thinks, much better. Human, suddenly. She wonders if Laura’s awake properly yet, and if the police are in her room asking her what happened. It might take them longer to get a picture of Vic, so Beth will be who they’re looking for, if Laura even has a clue. They don’t have long. Beth thinks about her hair, and how changing it could give them time, if they need it. Vic’s clippers sit in the drawer in the bedroom, and she doesn’t give it a second thought once she’s plugged them in. She picks a high grade and doesn’t balk as she runs it along her scalp, front to back, and watches the clusters of hair mound in the sink as they fly off. Vic doesn’t ask her what she’s doing, so she takes swathes out. She does the front first, and then the top and the back – though she might need Vic to tidy it for her, and she pictures him standing over her, clutching the clippers tightly in his fist – and then she moves the clippers to the side where the scab is. It’s mostly gone, so she gently starts picking at it with her fingernails, pulling off smaller lumps, dragging them along the remaining hairs until they’re free, and then drops them into the sink. She manages to get most of it, but there’s still some left. She can see the pink of the fresh skin closer to her temples, but here, under the hair, she can’t, because the scab is dark against her scalp. It is at its darkest, and she pulls her hair from side to side to try and see underneath it, but she can’t, and she can’t get a purchase on the scab.

She knows, but she tells herself that it’s still only a scab.

So she takes the clippers and puts them on the line of her temple and pushes them along, and watches the hair come away, almost strand by strand, that’s how focused she is. It doesn’t hurt. It shakes: she feels the slight tremor of the device in her hands and on her head, and she thinks that this is nothing she hasn’t felt before, right here, vibrating the skin on this exact spot. And then the hair is gone from there, and she can see right to the skin, to the roots of the hair: and the bruise that sits at the puckered points the hair grows out of. It runs in a perfect circle, the size of an old fifty-pence piece, and she touches it but the skin doesn’t change: it doesn’t go pink, and it doesn’t go white. She thinks about her headaches, and how tired she’s been.

She takes the clippers to the other side of her head and the hair there is gone even faster, stripped away without a pause. She can see the Crown’s pad-mark even clearer here, because there’s no cut to contend with. She finishes the rest of her hair and then stands back and looks at herself. Barely recognizable, at a glance. She thinks that this is somebody else. It’s somebody else who did this, who wore the Crown, and what? What did she want to forget?

She goes to the living room. Vic stares at her.

What did you do? he asks.

To stop them from recognizing me, she says, but even as she says it she’s unconvinced. As if something inside her willed her to do this, so that she would see. She points to her temples. Snap, she says.

What? He rushes towards her and looks, puts his hands onto her head – she can feel them, so strong and warm and large, and she imagines them squeezing, crushing her skull, some feat of terrifying strong-man prowess – and he parts her hair with his fingers and examines the marks. He knows what they are. He’s seen his own, even as his hair has grown over them. His hair has grown so quickly, abnormally quickly, that they’re almost covered, and he almost looks normal. What did you do? he asks.

I don’t know, Beth says. I don’t know.

When, though?

I don’t know. She had assumed it was recent, but it could have been long ago. How long’s it been since she looked at this part of her head? Nothing about her has changed: no hairstyle changes, no haircuts that she hasn’t done herself. Nothing that would make her look at that part of her head, behind the temple, hidden away. She wonders if they’ve been there for years, even. As long as Vic’s.

She tells him to go to the bedroom and get some clothes out for her – she tells him which ones – and she sits on the arm of the sofa and thinks about what could have made her do this. Desperation, she thinks: if Vic did something so bad that she couldn’t live with it. Or if she did, maybe. But Vic… She thinks about the boy, and about Laura, and how easy he found it to shrug both incidents off as just something he did. An action, like breathing or eating. Totally justifiable.

He is simply standing in the room, not doing anything, so she has to go and find the clothes herself. She stands in front of him and dresses, and she looks at herself in the mirror by the door when she’s done, from across the room. These are clothes that she hasn’t worn in years, younger than she should be wearing, by a margin. She can fit into them now, after the last few weeks; and where they used to pinch her body, now there’s a sag and a hang. In the mirror she looks like a different person.

Okay, she says. Not long to go now. Wait here.

She goes to the Machine. It still trembles, like it knows what’s coming, but she doesn’t end it yet. She flicks through the screens for the recordings, to find out more, to see if there are numbered files of her speaking on here, telling the Machine that she wants to forget whatever it was that she couldn’t live with any more. But the only recordings are Vic’s old ones. Vic in file form. Vic as a fake man. Vic by proxy.

Something. Something outside, coming from the rim of the estate, coming closer and closer, the sound of engines and sirens that starts below the noise of the Machine, getting louder and louder, and by the time she gets to the living room she can see them as well, in the red and blue that flashes around the darkness.

49

We have to go, Vic says.

We can’t, she tells him. She tells him to get into the Machine’s room and to wait there: to sit on the bed and not touch anything, and to trust her. He does, or says that he does. Beth flicks the lights off and peers through the curtain down at the bollards, as the policemen climb out of their cars; and there, with them, is Laura. She clutches a rag to her head, something large and bulbous, and she steadies herself on the car door as she climbs out, then waits there a while. It’s still dark: only just heading towards light. Nothing like as hot as it will be. Nothing even close yet.

Beth ducks down, hiding, because she thinks that the best way to ride this out will be to sit inside and wait until they leave. She doesn’t know how this works, not really – only what she’s learned from television – but they can’t enter her flat, she knows that, not this quickly. So they’ll wait, and when the police are gone they’ll make their move. They’ll get onto a ferry and get off the island. She worries then that the police will be waiting for them at the dock, but that’s a problem for later. Now: they’re here, down below, because Laura was assaulted, and because she’ll have told them that Vic killed that boy. Beth tries to remember his name – because she wants to give him that much, rather than thinking of him as something so vague – but she can’t. She can remember the way that he looked at her, certainly; and the menace in his loping, drawn-out walk; and the scar that he had, across his neck; and she wonders again what it was from, and then she remembers his dead mother – car crash? – and thinks that it must be a scar from that, a remnant. That makes her feel sorry for him: carrying it around like that. Reminded, every time he rubs it. Always there but never in view, and he can’t see it, but he can’t forget it either.

Beth watches them come into the estate proper, and then to the stairs, and then they’re out of view – at the blind corner, in the stairwell, and then filing along the balcony. She can hear the crackle of their radios, and she can hear them asking Laura if she’s all right. Beth crouches low and scuttles to the back room, to the Machine’s room, and she stands in the doorway with all the lights off, knowing that they won’t be able to see her.

Stay quiet, she says to Vic. He’s still sitting on the bed.

The police knock on the door, not touching the bell, just hammering straightaway: the base of a fist making the whole thing thud.

Mrs McAdams, they say. She hears it, muffled through the door, and she looks at Vic. She looks at the Machine.

Don’t make a noise, she says.

The thudding comes again, and she sees the shape of one of them at the window. It’s getting lighter outside: not quite dawn yet, but not far off. She sees him bend down, and she stays stock still, in that darkness. Feeling safe enough.

Mrs McAdams, the policeman says again.

Beth, Laura says. We know you’re in there.

Please go away, Beth whispers. Because she needs to get out of here, and she needs to take Vic somewhere else, and start this again: working with him, keeping whatever’s inside him under control.

The policeman hammers again, and then the letterbox flap lifts and eyes peer through.

Nothing, he says. No lights, no movement. They might have gone already.

She won’t have gone, Laura says. Where would she go?

We can’t get a warrant until later this morning, but we’ve got people watching all the ways off the island. They’ll find her. (Beth strokes her head: her new haircut might be enough, she hopes, when she reaches the docks.) The policemen start to walk away – Beth watches their silhouettes go past the window – but Laura isn’t with them.

I’m going to wait for her, Laura says.

You really should come with us, they tell her. Stern but humouring.

I’m not going anywhere, she says, and then the door is hammered again, but this time it’s Laura’s knock, Laura’s fist. Beth! she shouts. Beth, I know you’re in there! Her voice becomes clearer as she speaks: speaking through the pain that she must still be experiencing. This must matter to her. We only want to talk to you, Beth. Nothing more.

I don’t know what you think I want, Beth, but I so want to believe you about everything. I only want to help you, because you’re my friend. Even after all of this – after you hurt me, Beth, and threatened me with that thing, I still want to help you. Doesn’t that tell you how much this means to me? She knocks again: softly, this time, with her knuckles, not the flat of her fist. The police are nowhere to be seen. And I thought that we connected, didn’t we? And you told me all of your secrets, and I was there for you. I could have helped you, Beth: I could have guided you. Beth hears the turning of an engine: must be the police. They’re nearly alone with Laura. Vic’s body tenses, because he could finish this, she knows, but that would seal everything. That’s a decision that she could never allow. She could do so, as easily as she could wipe Vic’s past, but neither is going to happen. Laura taps the glass again. Please, Beth. I can help you. Let me?

We’re in this together, Vic says. Beth worries that he says it too loudly, but Laura doesn’t hear him.

I know, Beth whispers in reply. She walks into the near-light coming through the windows, and towards the front door. She gets as close as she dares – the sound of the engines now long gone – and she waits there. She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for, exactly. For something.

Beth, please. God can save you, Beth.

But I made him, she says. Laura shuffles, loud enough to be heard. You told me that it was a sin, Laura. And you want to be my friend?

Where is he, Beth?

Please, Laura. Just leave us alone. I’m sorry about your head, but—

Now we have matching wounds, she says.

Yes. Beth touches her bruised head. She has that scar, and so will Laura, and so does Vic. Vic had it first: everything else is mere imitation.

So much in common, I told you. Beth can hear Laura’s smile through the door. It’s not too late, Laura says.

Come on, Beth says. We both know that’s not true.

Where is he really?

You’ll tell the police, Laura. You brought them here.

And now they’ve gone, Laura says, but Beth instantly knows that she’s lying: her voice is too persuasive, almost patronizing. Don’t worry, it says: trust me. Please Beth! Laura begs. You’re all alone in there, don’t you see that? You’re sick. I’m only here to help you! The police are only here to help you! Beth backs away from the door. She speaks to Vic.

They’re outside, she says. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Vic walks up next to her and reaches out his arms, and he holds her; and she thinks that he could smother her and she might be happy for that to happen, somehow. What did I erase from myself? she asks him, and he smiles at her – she can see the corners of his mouth from where she is, wrapped up in his arms – and he replies, because he’s figured it out before she has.

Who says you erased anything? Who says that you didn’t put something else in?

She knows that there isn’t long, so she quickly bolts the door and drags the table over from the kitchen area to put against it, together with some chairs. She asks Vic to help her move the sofa. This flat is her bastion. Fitting, somehow: years of being stuck in it, and now she accepts that this will be where it ends for her.

What should I do? Vic asks.

I don’t know, she says. Make sure that they’re kept out. Tell me what you can see.

He nods. Yes ma’am, he says. His army voice. She loved – still loves – that voice. She takes the tools from the kitchen drawer and she lies them on the bed in front of the Machine.

I can’t let anybody else have this; have you, I mean, she says to Vic. You understand? The fans start. They start, as if she was powering it up for a treatment, but she’s not; and they keep accelerating, as if she’s been running it for an hour, which she hasn’t; and they keep going, until the noise is louder than a shout, and the vibrations through the floor make Beth almost lose her footing. She doesn’t know if this is real any more, or something else. She wishes that she could ask somebody else if they can feel this, but there’s only Vic, and he’s as much a part of this as the trembling casing of the Machine itself.

She presses the screen first, then flicks through the menus to the hard drive, and she goes through the sequence to erase everything. The screen’s vibration is so violent that it nearly hurts her finger as she presses it: running up it from the tip, making the joints shake. When she pulls her finger away it’s like she’s got pins and needles, but she’s pressed the button, and she’s confirmed that this is what she wants to do. The Machine may protest, but this is her choice. It’s not enough, she thinks. Hard drives can be recovered. Data – zeroes and ones – lives on past anything we do to it. Vic stands in the doorway and watches her.

Can I help you? he says, but he seems sad to be saying it.

You don’t want any part of this, Beth says.

Maybe not.

What happens after this?

I don’t know, he says. Are you taking it all away?

Just the memories, she says. Just what it’s got of you. She touches him: the vibrations inside her travel to him, and his skin seems to shake, sending him out of focus for a second. There, and yet not. You keep watching, she tells him.

She kneels on the floor and then moves onto her back, and she peers upwards into the opened insides of the Machine. She can see the wire cluster in the middle but can’t reach it, not from where she is; so she starts to stretch her arm, pushing her body up into an arch and pressing her shoulder against the edge of the opening. She reaches with her fingertips, flailing them as if that might make the ball come closer, but it doesn’t work. So she moves herself more, and then suddenly she’s closer; her head underneath the hole, and it’s large enough to squeeze inside, she thinks. So she does.

She starts with one shoulder and her head, and once they’re inside, the other shoulder, and she moves herself around, stretching and finding space inside the Machine’s enormity. It’s bigger inside than out, she thinks, and then she manages to bring the top half of her body up and into the Machine, and she reaches up until the ball of wires is in her hands, and she can start to unwind it. It’s tightly packed but there are no knots, no seals, and she manages to wind everything out until she sees the central nugget: the hard drive, a solid lump of silver metal, attached through a normal plug socket, almost: nothing complicated.

She touches it; it shivers. When she pulls the plug out, the shivering stops.

In the bedroom, Vic sits on the end of the bed and holds his head in his hands. He looks up when Beth reappears.

Is that me? he asks.

Yes, she says. She holds him out, and his metal glints in the darkness of the room.

What are you going to do with it?

I have to destroy it.

Okay, he says.

So. She puts the hard drive into her pocket. Outside the front door, more hammering: the forceful fists of the police again.

She’s in there, Beth hears Laura say, and then they hammer more. Laura shouts: She’s a murderer! She killed little Oliver! (Beth smiles when she hears his name. That was it. Oliver.) The police don’t try and quieten her. They keep hammering.

Mrs McAdams, they say, we know you’re in there. Please open the door, or we will enact forceful entry. Beth listens as other people’s voices appear: the fat neighbour and her daughters, asking what’s going on, their voices carrying through the walls and doors. She sees people massing outside, and hears Laura again.

She killed that boy, you know that? She’s a murderer, and she tried to kill me! She tried to erase me! Beth can see her through the crack in the curtain, even from here: standing by the railing, towel held to her head, preaching. When I confronted her, she tried to kill me! She blames it on her husband, but he’s been disabled by her. She thinks he’s in there with her, but he’s not! He’s not a murderer; she is! He’s in a home, a vegetable: a victim of what she has done!

I’m not, Vic says. What she says. I’m not.

No, Beth says. Of course you’re not.

The police hammer, and the door starts to move slightly in the frame. One of them shouts about going to get the ram, and Beth knows what happens then: this all comes apart around her in seconds. Everything needs to be forgotten about and abandoned. She can’t let them get this, all of this.

She stands, suddenly alone, with the Machine.

I started this, she says. Didn’t I.

50

Beth tries to force the bedroom window open more, but it strains at the hinges. Beneath them, not far below, is the Grasslands, and she knows she could make that drop. It’s not too bad. It would hurt, but she’d walk away.

Smash it, Vic says. So Beth takes the light from the bedside table and turns it around, and she rams the base at the window. It doesn’t smash – the glass is far too thick for that – but the thin struts of the window buckle slightly, widening the gap. Harder, Vic says. Really give it some welly. She stands aside and lets Vic take the lamp, and he rams it over and over again, until the window is wide enough for Beth to squeeze through. Outside there are railings along the edge of the window, and she puts her hands on them. If you lower yourself down first, the drop will be less, Vic says. So warm: the railings burn to touch, and her hands sweat as they touch them. She doesn’t have any other choice. She can hear the banging from the other side of the flat, and Laura’s voice carrying through.

She is messing with forces that she doesn’t comprehend, Laura says. Beth wonders what sort of audience she now has. How much the islanders are humouring her. They will break down the door and enter the flat, and they’ll charge through the rooms looking for them, or for signs of who they are – No, Beth thinks, who she is, that’s all – and they will tear her belongings apart. And will they stand in awe of the Machine? Will they stand in front of it, as hollowed and gutless as it now is, and will they know to search through it? Or will they look at its opened front and know that it’s dead: that it’s like Vic’s body, lying in that bed, with all that makes it what it is taken from it, stolen from the inside by Beth, and left ruined, alone and blinking and reaching for purpose? She gave it up so quickly.

She thinks back to the day that Vic all but died. She stood outside his room as they told her their diagnosis: how the Machine had taken him. She had spent hours holding his hand until that point, knowing – so sure, so absolutely utterly bloody-mindedly sure – that he would pull out of it, do some sort of right turn and there he’d be, complaining of a headache and sleeping all day and rubbing at those bruises on his head, but still her husband. He would go back to talking incessantly about things that they both remembered, key events, holidays and hotels and birthday parties and other things that mattered; and those things that the Machine made up for him the first time around, people and places that didn’t exist. They would come from nowhere, and he would say, I love you, and he would take her hand, and he would say, Do you remember that holiday in Hawaii? On Big Island? And Beth would smile and ask him to tell her about it. That’s how she’d phrase it: Tell me about it, she would say, and she would close her eyes and lie back and put her head in his lap, and sometimes he would stroke her face and her hair, but sometimes he would simply let it be, getting so carried away with the story and the words that were somewhere inside his head that he almost forgot that she was there. It didn’t matter, because this was him, and he was happy. Better fake memories, than memories that tore him apart and kept him awake at night. So when he lay there, frothing and howling, she told the doctors that she couldn’t see him. She asked them again if they really meant that it would be permanent and they put their hands on her shoulder.

Now, somehow, Vic stands below her, on the Grasslands.

You can jump now, he says. Drop, bend your knees. Take the fall, don’t let it take you.

Okay, Beth says. She lets go. This is a trust exercise, like they made them do in therapy. How much do you trust your partner? Will they catch you if you fall? Beth goes down on her ankle, on the hard lawn – nothing to take the pressure, nothing spongy underneath to make this easier – and she falls to her side. She lies there for a second: the echo of the ram – she assumes – against her front door, coming through the whole estate, bouncing off the walls.

You have to run, he says.

I know. Her ankle is sore but workable, and she gets going, along to the cliff edge, and from there to the outskirts of the estate. The greyness of the place is overwhelming from here: the hidden part: the stuff behind the cooker or underneath the fridge. Graffiti lines the walls of people’s flats – FUCK TENBEIGH, one says, about the Prime Minister, and WHO LIVES HERE IS A CUNT reads another, and TITS is a third, with breasts drawn below it; and Beth knows that this last one was made by the boy, and she wonders when, because it looks old and faded and somehow part of the concrete, so she wonders how young he was when he actually did it – and there’s rubbish, like manmade scree, piled up against the building, trainers and food packets and empty tins, all browned from the sun, all rotting and cooking under the heat. Then she sees the body of a cat: dead, partly eaten, flies swirling. She can’t smell it. It’s been here too long now, almost a fossil.

When she reaches the front of the estate, cutting along the cliff-side path towards the strip of shops, she sees it from the bottom of the hill. There’s a crowd of people outside her flat, and all along the balcony. All with their arms raised, all watching Laura, who shouts things that Beth can no longer hear. She doesn’t suppose that the words matter now: this is just to incite them, to get them baying for blood, and they’re all transposing something else onto this. Nobody cared about the boy, because if they did they wouldn’t have allowed him to become who he was, and yet they find it easy to make Beth a villain suddenly, and everything – the place, the heat, the sense that her life as she knows it is all ending so soon – can be blamed on her. She doesn’t know what they would do if they caught her, but their arms are raised in fists, and they shout things at each other. Beth watches as Laura seems to command them, and they go into the flat past the police, and they reappear within seconds in groups of three, dragging the Machine out.

We have to go, Vic says.

Wait a minute, Beth tells him. She watches them bring it out in its three pieces, somehow separated – she had forgotten that that was how it arrived, less than whole, and that she made it what it was, physically, if nothing else – and they bring each piece to the edge of the balcony. They know what it is and what it does, because they were everywhere: the lives that they destroyed. The tabloid campaigns to ban them: OUR SOLDIERS, RUINED FOR THEIR COUNTRIES, they howled. And when the dementia patients and the Alzheimer’s patients and the amnesia patients began to be affected, that was it. Everybody hates the Machine. They throw the pieces over the balcony and they shatter on the floor below, held together by bolts that aren’t meant to take impact, and the black metal sheets flay off as the structure comes apart. Piece two follows, colliding with piece one, and then the final piece, the centre, with the screen and the lack of guts. All three lie crumpled, and they watch them. The people on the balcony – policemen, locals, the boy’s gang, Laura – all see the figures at the end of the road. They roar.

Beth turns and runs to the edge of suicide point.

I can’t let them get you, she says to Vic.

Then run.

I will, she says, but first. She pulls the pebble of the hard drive from her pocket and gives it to him. Go on, she says. He pulls his pose, his Adonis pose, his body-builder weightlifter idealized pose that she never saw him pull in real life, and his arm curls backwards and then releases, spring-loaded. The hard drive flies out and through the air, towards the water. It doesn’t skim; it smacks into the gentlest wave and it’s gone. No glint as it sinks.

Now what? Vic asks. She strips her clothes off. Down to her underwear. You might not make it, he says. There are rocks, and then the swim.

I can do the swim, she says.

The rocks, then.

Maybe, she says. She doesn’t wait for him: she throws her arms upwards and bends her knees slightly, and then flings herself forward and out. She opens her eyes, because if she’s going to hit the rocks she wants to know: but all she can see is Vic already in the water; already, that body cutting through the waves, his arms making a wake of their own, and she knows as she hits the water and it shocks her and he’s suddenly gone, that she’ll be swimming behind him the entire way.

51

She rushes up the lawn, because she doesn’t know if they’re here. She doesn’t have a clue if they’ll be watching this place or not. It depends on where they think she is. They might not even know that she made it off the island; this might give it away. Doesn’t matter, she thinks. So little time to go. So she runs across the lawn, patting her clothes down, and she smiles at the lady at the front desk, who smiles back. She doesn’t know if she recognizes her, and that’s fine, or if she just notices the burn marks on her head, so visible now. Vic comes just behind her, and the woman doesn’t bat an eyelid at that, but Beth doesn’t expect her to. She’s used to this now.

She follows the sand-coloured line, even though she knows the way, but she’s always followed it, like a habit. She doesn’t wait in the doorway because she doesn’t know how long she’s got.

Hello, she says to Vic, lying on his bed. He doesn’t answer, because he can’t. She can’t remember what happened the last time she was here. She was going to come and get him, and something changed. She wishes that she could remember what that was. How far she got, even: if she stood here and helped him dress and then chickened out, because it would be too much. And would it even work? And did she want it to? She puts her hand on his leg, which is thin and weak and soft. I’ve come back for you, she says. The other Vic – the one that she’s brought with her, who is somehow a part of her and nothing else – doesn’t say anything. He stands by the door and watches her, and he looks at her from underneath his eyebrows, tilted forward.

Are you okay? she asks them both. Neither can answer her, so she carries on. I love you, she says. That’s why I did this. That’s the only answer, isn’t it? And would you want this? She sits on the edge of the bed.

They said to her, when it happened, that there was nothing left of him inside. This isn’t your husband, they told her. This is a body. And it’s alive, and it’s learning, but it’s nothing like him, and it’s nothing to do with him. You asked us why so many people find it easy to divorce their loved ones when this happens. That’s why. There’s nothing of him left any more.

So, she says to Vic, I don’t know where to go from here. But I have an idea. She squeezes the body’s hand. I really do love you, she says. She kisses him on the forehead, even as his head moves of its own accord, left to right, and her lips smear on it. Okay, she says. So I should go. I’ll see you soon.

She gets out of the room and doesn’t follow the sand-coloured line back to the entrance. Instead she follows the black line. It takes her up another flight of stairs, and down a corridor, and then to another flight behind a door, and she expects this to be locked but it isn’t, because who is going to break in to get to this? It gets warmer as she climbs: no air conditioning up here, and the warm air from below seeps up through the building’s floorboards, and by the time she’s at the top of the last staircase she’s almost broken into a sweat and she’s breathing heavily through both her mouth and nose.

There’s a door that she opens, and there’s nobody in here. There’s a cordon that she steps over, and there, at the back of the room, stands the Machine. The same model, which she knows is right. It would have to have been, really. She doesn’t know if it’s plugged in, and it doesn’t matter: because she steps to it and puts her hand onto the screen and it starts up. The screen lights up and the metal buzzes as the fans work. The dust and warmth in the room swirl around, so fast that she can see them moving, the fans behind the Machine churning them into something like a wind, and the vibrations of the metal – because this hasn’t been used in so long, and somehow it’s hungry, somehow – make the floorboards shake and the dust in the air shake. She knows it isn’t real. Vic, her Vic, the one inside her head, watches her. He doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing left for him to say. But he stands in the light coming through the windows and he watches.

She pulls the Crown down from the dock and adjusts it, moving the arms and the pads. There’s no lubricant here, no painkillers, nothing to make this easier. She thinks that’s about right. This should hurt. So she puts the pads onto her head with the Crown itself, and they sit in the same space as the bruises, as she knew they would. She moves a chair from the side of the Machine and then thinks better of it, taking just the cushion instead, and the cushion from another chair, and puts them on the floor. When she’s started she’ll sit on them, or maybe lie down. Whatever feels most comfortable. After a while it won’t be her choice anyway.

So then she flicks through the menus. PURGE. COMMIT. The vibrations through her fingers. One hand on the screen, the other on her chest, where her heart is. She can feel them both, pulsing together so quickly. She slumps down and starts to talk.

If they come in now, and they ask her what she is doing, she’ll tell them. And if they ask her why she’s trying to wrench Vic out, she’ll say, Who said anything about Vic. And she’ll plead with them to let her finish; and she’ll ask for a room here, and tell them about her savings, and say, That should be enough. Put me with him. Let us be whatever.

This is what I want, she will tell them. And she’ll pray that they let her keep on talking, lying there on the floor in agony, screaming the words out, thinking it all through, all about her and about Vic and about everything she can draw on from her entire life, and she’ll beg them to not put her back in, because even though they know how to, now, they would ruin this; and she’ll say, This is what I want.