by James Smythe
Inside the restaurant they’re playing music that Beth recognizes, but in some water-chime musical form. Songs from when she was a child, that she still knows the words to: huge ballads, slow-dance pop songs that once soundtracked hit movies. The waiters all sit around a table at the back, all with half-pint glasses half-filled with lager. Two of the four stand up when Beth walks in.
All right love, one of them asks.
Hi, Beth says. I wanted a takeaway?
Sure, sure. What can I get you?
Chicken korma and a pilau rice, she says. The man nods. He leans back and peers through the door to the kitchen, then nods at the solitary chef Beth can see in there, who’s been leaning against the cookers.
It’ll be a few minutes, the waiter says to Beth. Want a drink?
I’m fine, she says.
She sits at a table by herself to wait, near the window, and she watches the few other people out for the evening, all of them going to get takeaways or hurrying forward by themselves, collars up and eyes down. A group of kids – heads shaven into a step around the back and sides, suddenly popular again, and ripped jeans with smart-looking cheap shirts – walk past: they see her peering out and they spit at the window. One of them undoes his fly and rushes up to her, and she flinches backwards, away from the window. One of them stands at the back and doesn’t do anything but stare, a fixed gaze that won’t break. They all laugh.
Ignore them, the waiter who took her order says.
Bunch of pricks, one of the others says. He doesn’t look up from his beer.
I know, Beth says. The waiter walks towards her table and leans over it. There are curtains that she hadn’t seen, only half-height ones, but he pulls them across, blocking her view of the street, and the kids’ view in.
Better when they can’t see the customers, he says. Beth sits and stares at the curtain for the next few minutes, because she can hear them still out there on the street. They’re laughing about something, down at the kebab house, and there are occasional bangs where they’re throwing something, or hitting something. She thinks about standing up to see what they’re doing, but knows that if they see her it will only antagonize them. She nearly asks the waiters how many times their front glass has been broken. It always looks new, she thinks.
When the waiter comes back with her food (which smells amazing, she thinks, cooked freshly because she’s the only customer they’ve had all evening) he loads it into a plastic bag and throws a few poppadoms in.
You going to be all right? he asks.
Yes, she says. I only live up the hill.
In the estate? He inhales and laughs with the other waiters. I’ll walk you.
Don’t be silly, Beth says.
What else am I doing?
I’m fine.
Look at all my customers, he says. He opens the door for her and stands back, letting her head onto the street first. The boys outside the kebab shop shut up slowly, one by one, falling into line. They’re all some ambiguous age that Beth can’t tell, past the hoods and caps, even in this heat. They’re looking over at them. Just ignore them, the waiter says. He walks next to Beth, briskly, their pace faster even than when she walked down here, and they don’t look behind them. The boys stay quiet, so they don’t know if they’re being followed. Beth pictures it: them dropping their kebabs and cans, leaving them on the side, and then walking behind them as one. Falling into a pack, a tight unit, rapidly advancing, a cloud of dust ready to swallow them whole. That one who stared suddenly at the front, leading the others.
They make it to the lights of the estate, and the bollards. Beth can see her flat from here. At a dash, it’s only thirty seconds away. The waiter stops. You all right from here? He looks back where they’ve come from. The boys are nowhere to be seen.
I’m fine. Thank you so much.
Pleasure. Want to walk me back to the restaurant now? He grins. Joking, joking, he says. Enjoy your dinner.
He heads back down the path towards the road. There’s a bit where there are no lights and he disappears, and Beth waits to see him reappear on the other side of it. When he does she goes into the stairwell, and then along to her flat. She fumbles for her keys, but there’s nobody anywhere near her, and no noise she can hear apart from the background murmur of neighbours’ televisions, and the occasional rustle of a cat. She locks the door behind her, then goes to the kitchen with the bag and unpacks it on the worktop. She peels the lids from the tubs, takes a plate and turns them both out onto it, then sits on the sofa with the plate on her knees, the greasy paper slip of poppadoms on the table. She puts the TV on and tries to concentrate on it. She flicks through channels with one hand, eating with the other. But there’s something else. She can hear it: a buzzing. She mutes the TV, cutting the weather report off midsentence – the symbols all sweating comical suns, not much chance of them saying anything to contradict that – and listens for it. It’s like a fridge, but hers is silent, or an old light bulb about to blow, but hers are all energy-saving modern ones. She puts the plate on the table in front of her and walks around the living room, looking for the source. She can’t find it in here, so she tries the spare bedroom and then remembers about the Machine. The screen is on – still – and the buzz coming from it. Not the screen: just, vaguely, the Machine itself. She can’t pinpoint it, but she’s sure of the source. She puts a hand on the casement and there’s something, a movement. The most subtle vibration.
I should switch you off, she says to it. She leans down to the plug and flicks the switch and the Machine’s screen goes dark. She can still hear the buzz, though, as she goes to leave the room: and as she lies in her bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how this is all going to go. And still, even with it this close to actually happening, how she has her doubts.
5
She swims first thing in the morning. Only some mornings – not enough to call it a regime, but more than a habit. Some deep-seated feeling about being so close to – inside, even, beneath and through – something that caused so much destruction and yet is somehow blameless. She gets up before anybody else, when it’s still barely light, and she peels her clothes off and swims out against the waves into the water, and then back: and she stands on the beach and waits for the sun to dry her, which only takes minutes, and then she dresses herself. She doesn’t get her hair wet – she ties it up above her head, a style that she never used to wear, but that’s practical for her, here and now – and she puts her work clothes straight on and then sets off.
Her walk to work takes her along the path that runs adjacent to the coastline. She and Vic had always wanted to live by the sea: they had said that when he retired it was what they would do. (Without him here, she sometimes thinks, this feels almost like cheating on him, with this place instead of another man. She is sure that he would – will – forgive her.) The path is hard ground, old mud that’s faded and cracked underfoot. It falls just shy of the green grass; as she walks she keeps her eyes on that side. On the other side are the roughest blocks, the ones where the people always seem crammed in. These were the last ones built, designed to take the council housing overspill from Old Portsmouth after the flooding. The people there are bitter that they ended up here. They didn’t choose to move: it was their only option, if they wanted to live where they could still keep their jobs. Most of the children from the estate go to her school, and she teaches many of them, or tries to. The worst of her kids invariably come from the worst parts of the island, where their parents have sob stories about how they lost their jobs on the mainland, or their homes. There’s a joke around Portsmouth and Southampton, where they call the island Alcatraz and refer to the ferry that runs six times a day as the prison boat. They don’t try and hide it. Anybody with real money left the island a long time ago. Before this, Beth would have been one of those people: running before they sank along with the rest.
Beth passes some children who clearly have no intention of going to school today (out at this time already, racing around on their
bikes, standing bolt upright on the pedals and clipping their wheels on curbs, trying to make the bikes jump off the ground for even a few inches of air), and thinks about persuading their parents to persuade them to go, or to force them. It’s not a cost thing, she knows, because they fought to keep all the schools free when the new Prime Minister took over: it’s an effort thing. They circle her as she walks, flitting between the road and the grass verge. Most mornings they ignore her. Today, one of them rides alongside her as his friends drop back, watching from a distance. She thinks she recognizes him; one of the youths from outside the takeaway house, maybe. Or just from the estate. They all blur into one after a while. Beth pulls her bag closer to her body. She remembers being in London when she was much younger, walking down roads where footsteps behind her might have meant an imminent mugging: she remembers how much that feeling holds you back, steps on your toes as it walks alongside you. She breathes and tries to stare past him, even as he nudges towards her, slightly ahead of her. His hair is clipped short on top, longer at the back and sides – looks like a home-job, clippers rather than scissors – and he is slightly boss-eyed, she notices, as he turns his head back towards her, peers at her from under his drooping eyelids. She wonders if he’s stoned. He’s very young to be getting stoned.
The fuck you looking at? he asks. His friends laugh behind them: she can hear the spokes of their cheap bikes clattering against wheel frames. You looking at me?
She doesn’t answer him. Instead, she stares past him – at the boat in the distance, moored up, ready to take people across the water – and carries on walking. He darts in front of her, swaying across her path, forcing her to keep pausing her steps. He’s only twelve or thirteen, she thinks, but his voice has broken into a full baritone, making him de facto ringleader.
I asked you a fucking question, he says, but Beth still ignores him. She would have taken him to task, in the old days: the Beth who walked along those streets in London and heard footsteps would have turned, stopped, done something surprising to scare them off. They’re all mouth and no trousers, she would tell herself. But here she keeps her head down, because this is how she knows it has to work. No trouble. Every day is exactly the same where this is concerned. Beth carries on walking, heading up some steps and away from the front, even though it’s slightly off-route for her, because she knows that they won’t follow. They stay at the bottom of the steps and stand on the pedals of their bikes, laughing as if they’ve won.
Over the hill she sees the school: the gate that needs a fob to get into the playground, and then the door that requires a swipe of her ID card to get inside the building; and the metal detectors, which used to be something that they threw at troubled schools in America and people the world over laughed at as something that they would never need themselves, because our kids just weren’t like that. Now, there’s two of the turnstiles and a room, to the left of where the security guard stands, which has handcuffs inside and a locked cupboard crammed with mace, tasers, truncheons and a bullet-proof vest, just in case. Because, the Head told them when the decree came to have them installed, you never know.
The classrooms of Beth’s school – which swallowed the other two nearest schools on this part of the island, a primary and a secondary, turning them into one giant institution spanning two campuses – don’t have any air conditioning. The school priced them up, worked out how much it would cost, but it was unfeasible. Even the discounted companies priced themselves out of the running, mainly because the school had one of the lowest budgets of any in the county. Instead, they made do with opened windows and cheap desk fans, often two or three in each classroom, blasting off from one wall, pushing the air away from the desks and ushering it towards the outside.
Beth’s Year Ten form has forty-one students: twenty-four girls and seventeen boys. The ratio makes the boys excitable. They rock against their chairs and jiggle their legs, their feet tapping furiously on the floors when some of the girls do salacious things: taking off their jumpers, wearing shirts that are paler than the rules allow, fanning their skirts when they stand up. One of the repercussions of the heat is that everything becomes sweat-laden, and the school has rules. Shirts must be of a certain thickness; no thin cotton, nothing that can become too transparent in the heat. The class sit on cheap plastic chairs; every day, no matter who is sitting down, there’s a sweat mark on the seat when they leave. Beth hardly sits down at all any more; she leans against the desk, or she paces.
Her class are always late, but it’s excused by all the teachers because of the heat-caused lethargy. Everybody’s late. The parents – those that care enough to attend the biannual meetings about their child’s progress – tell the Head that the kids can’t be expected to be excited.
It’s so fucking hot in there, one shrill woman said at the last parents’ evening. It’s so hot that they don’t want to be there. And if you don’t want to be somewhere, you don’t fucking go there, do you?
Beth sits and sweats and can, some days, barely concentrate herself, let alone expect the kids to. When the children do eventually arrive in her classroom it’s in a single gaggle, a tumble of horny adolescence through the doorway. They sit quietly, because they quite like Beth (even though she’s quiet: they think of her as particularly fair, for a teacher), and she takes the register.
Abrams, is the first name, and he says that he’s there, and she goes down the list one by one. They laugh when they reach Turner, because he’s the butt of all of their jokes, the only fat kid (so fat he’s actually clinically obese, with medical certificates brandished at every opportunity to excuse him from any chance of accidentally doing exercise) in a classroom of children rendered thin by profuse sweating. Beth tells them all to shut up and get on with it. They respect her for that. She doesn’t beat around the bush. And they respect her expectations of them: she only wants them to pass. Anything else is a miracle, a grade above the expected, frankly, because all the kids worth their salt – or perceived to be, at least – have long left the island for one of the boarding schools that sprang up in the wake of the new education reforms. If she can get her class to read a book of their own accord she’s happy to call it a win.
It’s a Thursday: they have Beth’s English class first thing after registration. She’s meant to spend fifteen minutes doing pastoral care, expected to ask them how they are, what’s going on in their lives, their hopes, wants and fears. She skips it. They’re reading Lord of the Flies as a class, taking it in turns to go passage by passage. The boys at the back of the class have the most problems with the language: they stumble and struggle over the words, clumsily piecing them together as if they’re a puzzle in and of themselves, breaking down the components into single syllables. At least they’re trying, Beth thinks. They ask her about conch shells, and one – a girl called Tamzin that Beth always butts heads with, who’s always tapping on her phone, doing something or other – says that her father, who is American, a soldier, calls them cock shells, and the rest of the class laugh. Beth hates moments like this: once they’re lost, they’re lost for the rest of the lesson. She leans back against her desk, her palms sweating onto the old wood, and she tells them to be quiet.
It’s not that funny, she says, but already she can hear it: the quiet ripple of jokes about her and a conch – cock – shell, what she might do with it in her spare time, why she might need it. Because they think that she’s single, even though she wears the ring on her fourth finger, as they’ve never once seen her with him. Five years and no sign of her husband. Come on, Beth says, we’re already behind. She assigns another reader, asking one of the girls at the front, one of the few who are desperate to listen, who sit there scowling every time the rest of the class manages to derail things, and the girl ploughs through the words like they’re going to evaporate. Ordinarily Beth would tell her to slow down, but most of the class just titter every time the word conch appears, so she’s happy to simply get through it.
She spends lunch by herself, in her classro
om. Sometimes some of the girls will ask if they can sit in, but most of the time they’re outside, desperately searching for a breeze by getting to high points of the playground or skulking in whatever shade they can happen across. Despite the heat they still drape themselves over each other in primitive pre-sex ways. Beth watches them out of the windows and eats her sandwiches.
When she gets home – school ends early, like she’d heard it used to on the continent, because of the heat there – she opens the windows and sticks the fans on. She has four: two in the living room, one in the kitchenette and one in the bedroom. She’s never really used the spare room so that’s not got one, but she worries about the Machine. She takes the one from the kitchenette, thinking that she’ll angle one of the others later to cover it as well, and puts it on the chest of drawers in the spare room. The chest of drawers, like the rest of the furniture, came from their old house in London. This was the stuff that she brought with her when she moved. The flat was already furnished, and she left it piled up and unused in the spare bedroom for years. For a while, she couldn’t bear to look at it, so it was easier to leave it buried under vacuum-packed clothes and old curtains still with the rings through their hooks. She places it facing the Machine and turns it on, letting it rotate and swing around the room.