by James Smythe
She puts the Crown back in the dock and rubs her scalp. It’s tighter than she imagined. She cleans the rest of the Machine’s bulk, using the duster to wipe down the metal, then taking the disinfectant wipes and running them all over the screen, into the corners. There’s black gunk where the metal meets the glass, which she tries to get with her nails but it won’t budge, so she brings a knife in from the kitchen and scrapes away at it, getting it into the vein between the surfaces and reaming the gunk out. Then she wipes it all down again, noticing as she rubs the screen that she’s inadvertently cycling through menus. She’s managed to end up on a page that’s inviting her to wipe the Machine’s internal memory. She presses the CANCEL button, suddenly relieved. She had been so close to losing it all. Everything she’s worked for, for so long. She turns the screen off, to stop it happening. Puts the thing on standby.
She drags a chair in from the kitchen and places it next to the Machine, and stands on top of it. There’s a gap just about big enough for her arm to fit between the Machine and the ceiling, so she runs the handheld vacuum into the gap, watching the dirt and grime that sat on top of it zoom into the transparent container.
She looks at the picture again, the frozen still on her laptop screen. She compares. They really do look incredibly similar. She wonders if it might not be the same Machine.
She unplugs it at the wall. It’s nearly light outside. She dresses for work and sits on the edge of the bed in her bedroom. Now, I could sleep, she thinks. Now, when I have to go to work.
9
At the weekend, one week closer to the end of term, she visits Vic. She packs a bag before she leaves the house, taking biscuits with her, and some of his clothes, pulled out of the vacuum-packed plastic bags where they’ve been lingering. The walk to the ferry terminal takes her along the coastline, because she goes out of her way to stick to it. It’s infuriatingly hot, even this early in the morning. She peels off her sweater and stuffs it into her bag. From the sea, there’s a wind, but it barely registers against the heat. She remembers when this was a rarity: when weather like this would have brought the tourists flooding here, and the beaches below where she was walking now would have been crammed. The promenade leading to the terminal is almost deserted. People walking their dogs on the beaches, letting them leap into the waves; some elderly couples sitting in chairs outside the coffee shop. Everybody else is still in bed.
The ferry ride itself is amazing. She calls it a ferry: it’s a catamaran, and she stands on the deck and, for a few minutes, it’s almost cold. The wind up there, caused by the speed, is biting. She doesn’t put her sweater back on, because she wants to feel it. She knows how fleeting it will be. Even as the boat starts to slow she goes inside and rubs a thin layer of suntan lotion onto the back of her neck. They say, on the news, that everybody will get used to the sun eventually. Children born now won’t burn nearly as easily. We’ll be like they used to be in the south of Europe: naturally tanned. Beth isn’t there yet. She rubs the lotion on and then pockets the bottle, in case she needs it later. The ferry docks into what’s left of Portsmouth harbour, and they all leave.
She remembers how Portsmouth used to be, back when the Navy was still here, before the collapse of the cliffs and before the flooding of Old Portsmouth. They dredged it, of course, once the waters rolled back a bit, but the damage was done. It’s something that people rarely appreciate until it happens: the sense of safety, of not needing to blockade. She thinks about how easily people now put up walls here, after they’ve been through it. The shops she passes have small steps to enter them and trenches dug along the roadside gutters. Everything seems to have been elevated a few feet. This part of the city, when it was constructed, floated on the water, and there are still the remnants of the parts that were lost when the flood came: the offices that were wrenched away from their moorings, somehow, and collapsed into the sea, toppling onto boats, the masts tearing through the windows and spilling out the guts of the desks and computers and people inside. Even now, that part of the city is bypassed and cordoned off, despite it being years since it happened. Still, in the water, you can see the computers and ruined chairs from the offices under the water, sitting far below the docks.
From here Beth enters the station, where her train is waiting, and she finds a seat and stares out of the window. She’s become accustomed to not doing anything on these journeys, because she finds herself too distracted. On the occasions she tried to read a book, she had forgotten about whole characters by the time she boarded her return train. It wasn’t worth it in the end.
After the train she fights through Victoria station, and to the underground. The tube is filled with stale air, recycled a seemingly infinite amount of times, pumped out in what is claimed to be cold air, but only tastes cold, somehow, and is still warm at its core. She can tell as she walks through the stations: how out of breath she gets just fighting her way to the escalators. Everybody around Beth sweats. By the time she reaches Richmond it’s a relief, even just to step out onto the high street. It’s busy already, but she turns away from the shops and towards where it looks more residential. Three turnings away and over the bridge and past the little shops and she’s there.
The sign in the front garden proclaims it to be a CENTRE, though Beth knows different. It’s a hospice, really. She would argue that the patients are all terminal, because they’re like this until they die. Any chance of them being treated by this new technique is slim to none; if they’re the right patient, and if the company decides that the technology is up to it, then maybe. Probably not, though. Saturdays are visiting days, and she has to sign in. She has to show ID and be scanned, so she places her bag on the table and stands where she’s meant to and lets them check she’s not dangerous. She has no idea why anybody would want to bring a weapon into this place. The school, that’s a risk. Once a year the news rings out with another story about somebody murdering their classmates. Nobody ever murders the handicapped and dying.
In the hospice itself, Beth knows the way to Vic’s room. There are coloured lines on the floor to lead visitors. Green to the gardens; black to the storeroom in the eaves, where they keep old Machines, in case they should ever need them; sandy yellow to the private rooms. Beth follows this last line up the stairs and to the left. She pays for a room of his own, where so many of them are in larger wards, four or six to a room, divided only by thin cotton curtains. There’s an argument among the families of those in here that private rooms are unfair, because not everybody can afford the subsidies. They’re all in the same boat, goes the argument; and besides, they don’t know any different. She pays the subsidy, despite the rising prices, because it gives them privacy.
When he’s back to being himself, Beth thinks, he’ll appreciate that I did it. What it gave him. That space to be alone, and to be himself.
Vic’s room is the same colour as the rest of the hospice. A thin grey paint, a white dado rail, a white skirting. The furniture is hospital standard, with a white wire-frame bed locked to the wall and a table that’s high enough to be wheeled over the bed – and over Vic – and a chair in the corner of the room, a soft thing that’s low to the ground, impractical to sit in. There’s a television (an old-style set, with the bulbous behind and curved screen) on a stand on the wall opposite the bed as well. It made Beth laugh, the first time she saw it. When they brought her into the room, to tell her that this would be where he was staying, and they pointed it out. She asked them if it would be part of his rehabilitation, watching EastEnders. They ignored her. She found out later that the building used to be an old people’s home, and they simply moved them out and moved the new patients in. In the corner are Vic’s personal accoutrements: his monitor, his spare colostomy bag, a collection of kidney-shaped metal trays stacked up like saucepans. There’s a bowl of fruit, but it’s token, and often the fruit is gone, well past its date. On the wall above the bed, looking directly down at Vic is a security camera, a tiny ball that affords somebody a 360-degree view of the ro
om. A direct line to see and hear whatever Vic is doing at any given point in the day.
Here, Vic is on the bed, shitting himself.
Here, Vic is writhing, managing to push himself onto the floor, his tongue lolling from his mouth.
Here, Vic is in the corner, because he walked of his own accord, which should be a near-miracle, and celebrated, but now he’s just standing there and gasping as he faces the walls, heaving his body up and down, his shoulders halfway to a convulsion. Over and over and over again.
Beth always worries what state she’ll find him in. She’s sometimes been here when there’s been an accident, and she’s seen it before the carers have had a chance to deal with it, but that’s a hazard of their jobs, she thinks. The carers and hers. Even with those paying guests, the clinic is understaffed and underserviced. She could complain, but they’ve got heading on for a hundred other patients here, and they’re all in similar boats. Some are better, admittedly: many of them have kept their day-to-day routine, and they can take themselves to the toilet and feed themselves. Some of them might as well be in a coma for all they’re worth. Lying there, calm as anything, barely cognitive when visitors come. Vic is special to the clinic. He’s a worst case: not just far less able than the man he once was, but totally out of control of the man he’s become. Beth’s never seen anybody worse, not in the flesh.
(On the internet she’s seen videos of patients who reacted to the initial Machine treatments in other ways entirely. She tells herself that it could have been worse: those patients who, in the early stages of treatment, killed themselves and their families: holding them at gunpoint until they ended it, casually, one by one; or slashing their throats while they slept, disbelieving of the stories told to them to fill in their gaps. Or, when they’re vacant – such a cruel word, so suggestive that somebody else will be along in a minute to take their place – they’ve managed to somehow end it all afterwards. Reduced to something so primal and vague that they’re barely even quantifiable as human any more, let alone the men and women that they once were. And they end it, by either just giving up and stopping being any more; or, in worse cases, finding ways to put themselves out of what must be an indefinable misery.)
Today Vic has his back to Beth. She can see the line of his spine, the weight of his skin on it. How it looks almost curved where it follows the too thin mattress, the weak bed frame. His back has spots on it that it never used to have. They never get past red smears, but still. She knows that he’s not being bathed enough. The only times she’s complained they’ve told her to be here more, to do it herself. They are understaffed. They aren’t, they tell her, paid enough.
They say, Why don’t you move closer? They just say it to her, as if they’ve known her all her life, and who are they to pass judgement?
Because of my job, Beth replies, weakly. She doesn’t tell them that it’s shame-based: that she doesn’t want her colleagues’ pity. She tells everybody that Vic’s away at war, and she has a photo of him in her classroom. To her classes and workmates, Beth wants Vic to be a hero. Still away and fighting the good fight, even after all this time, even after any war he could be fighting has long ended.
He doesn’t stir as she approaches. She has to say his name four times before he even flinches, and then it’s not recognition. It’s awareness. When this happened they didn’t know why, any more than they had when Beth had rushed him to the hospital, telling them that something had gone terribly wrong, Vic’s body on the back seat in constant convulsion. He was one of the first to fall apart, because he’d been one of the first to start the treatments, and erase what needed to be erased. He was to be a test case, proudly paraded in front of crowds. But when they let her see him finally without any sedation he was a void. Nothing inside him.
They said, We don’t know why this has happened. This is an anomaly, it can’t be right. They apologized to her straight away, so she knew. You don’t apologize if you haven’t done anything wrong, and they said sorry so many times.
Vic? Beth says again. He moans: low and timorous, from somewhere other than his throat. From below. It’s me, she says.
She puts her hand onto his back and rubs it. Sometimes she’s done this and he’s reacted to her touch as if she was fire. Throwing her off, writhing around, lashing out with his arms and legs. Today he’s more placid. Her hand placed against his shoulder blades, she listens to and feels him breathe.
Some of the other users of the Machine, the doctors said to her when they delivered their final diagnosis, forget the basics, even. They forget the stuff that’s innately written into us, deep within us. Breathing, eating. They forget how their bodies work. They told this to Beth as if this should have made her feel better: your husband isn’t on a respirator, and we don’t have to tell his heart how to work for him. You don’t have to make that hardest of decisions yet. He’s still alive. And Beth, through her guilt, was even grateful.
Will he ever get better? she asked them. They didn’t know. What they did know was that he was ruined.
Sit up, she says to Vic. She moves around to his front, where she can see his face. It’s hardly changed over the past few years. He’s still handsome, she thinks. He’s still an army man, even where he’s lost the definition in his muscles. Jowls more than muscle, there, around his face. His hair has grown out, but she can still see the bruises, burned into his skin. They remind her of being a schoolgirl: of Ash Wednesday. All the children lining up to have a cross drawn on their foreheads, big fingers leaving smears that they were all too scared to immediately rub off, even with the slight smell and the stigma of having to wear it. That’s what the pad-marks look like to her: ash.
Vic moans again, so she moves her arm underneath him and tries to heave him into a sitting position. Come on, she says.
He says something that sounds like No, but she knows it’s not that. He hasn’t said a word in years. It’s like when parents think that their child says its first word, something random, off the curve. Really, it’s just a collection of noises that approximates speech. It’s fantasy and hope. She links her arms together, under his armpits and around his back, and she strains to drag him up the bed. He doesn’t help her at all. He doesn’t fight against it, but there’s no compliance.
Come on, she says. When he’s nearly sitting – a slight angle to his whole body, like he’s on a boat, slanted against the waves – she stands back. Better, she says. She wipes his mouth and then the rest of his face, and she brushes his hair with her hands because his comb seems to be missing. It’s usually kept on the shelf at the side of the bed but there’s nothing on it today, which makes her think that the cleaners have had off with it. It wasn’t a cheap one: part of a set that she gave him for Christmas once. That set went through the war with him, and it was part of the stuff that they shipped back with him after his emergency surgery, that she had to sort through, that she had to choose to keep. The scar – the real scar, not the Machine’s burn scars – sits to the left of his forehead. When she stares at it she traces a line to the bullet’s exit point, and she wonders how close it really came to ending everything. A fraction of a millimetre, the doctors at the time said. Beth has always wondered if that was an exaggeration.
I don’t suppose you’ve managed to remember who I am, Beth says. She stands back and looks at his face, and tries to make eye contact. You’re Vic, she says. Do you remember that? She’s not expecting anything. This isn’t the point where she gives up: that happened a long time ago.
(She remembers the exact day, because it still sits there as a dream that she has when she’s drunk or lonely: Vic bucking as she held on to him, as she tried to console him, and she realized that he didn’t know who she was, and he didn’t care. She was the only one who cared, and she had the guilt on top of that, and she carried that with her every single day, every single time that she thought about him.)
She changes him. She can’t remember what it’s like to undress him normally, not like they used to. This is different, a shift in
their relationship. The act of pulling down his underwear and replacing it. Wiping him if he’s had an accident. The nurses here change him every few hours to prevent them, now. Rubber-lined underwear; rubber sheets on the bed. She pulls the underwear down his legs and past his ankles, and then she takes a bath-wipe and rubs it over him. She doesn’t know how often the nurses actually do it.
I hope you’re all right in here, she says to him. She sits on the edge of the bed after putting his new pants on, and she turns on the television. It doesn’t hold his attention – she isn’t sure that he’s even capable of paying attention any more – but she watches a daytime cookery show for a few minutes. Sitting next to him is reassuring. She thinks that it won’t be that long until she’ll have him back with her, back as he was. Sitting with him now makes that prospect feel somehow more real. She can feel his warmth, which hasn’t changed at all. His blood still pumps the same way. His skin still smells the same, after she’s cleaned him.
He can walk still, sometimes: when she catches him on the right day, when the muscle memory does more than his active brain. Today isn’t one of those days. She asks an orderly who passes the room to help her put Vic into a wheelchair. It goes quite smoothly until he’s actually in it. He makes himself stiff as a board, back arched, and the orderly straps him in. They forcibly bend him, making him sit.