by James Smythe
I shouldn’t, Beth says, not even knowing what’s coming.
Not like the other night. I’ve got a bottle of wine in the guesthouse, that’s all. You can help persuade me that moving here is a terrible idea. Rob’ll thank you for it.
I shouldn’t, Beth says. I’ve got marking to do.
Ah, the perennial excuse. Laura lowers her eyes.
I’d love to, but the work. I have to get it done before we break.
I know, I know. It’s fine. We’ll do it the last day of term or something instead.
Sure, Beth says. She watches Laura walk away and put the remaining leaves of her salad in the bin, the plate on the side.
She remembers how she used to have friends. She used to be sociable. She and Vic went to socials for the army, the wives-and-partners things, and they would sit at the tables with people that they didn’t know and they would make friends, even transitory ones who only stayed their friends for the evening. The people you could talk to and make up details about your lives, or spill secrets to, knowing that you wouldn’t have to see them again. It didn’t matter who you were for that one night. All that mattered was that, the next day, you could start again: she could wake up with Vic and never think about the people they’d met. They were young, and that was how it was for them. You sit next to somebody you barely know; ten minutes later they’re your best friend; ten hours later you struggle to remember their name, past the wine and the dancing.
Beth catches up with Laura in her classroom just before the bell rings, signalling the end of lunch.
Friday, I promise, she says. I just need to get past this stuff.
It’s fine, Laura says.
Friday we’ll go out and have more drinks.
Will there be a social thing? All the staff, something like that?
Oh God no, Beth says. Nobody does that here. Just you and me, I’d think.
Lovely.
When Beth gets home she strips in the hallway and opens the fridge door and stands there in her underwear, pulling herself close to the brightly lit interior. She runs an ice cube over her head and puts more of them into a glass, gets herself wine from the cupboard – she doesn’t keep it refrigerated for some reason – and pours it, hardly gives it a chance to rattle the ice before drinking it almost in one. In the living room she puts the television on, opens the windows to get a draft through the flat, opens all the doors, and she stops and looks at the Machine for a second, thinking about how cold its metal is, and how refreshing and relieving it would be against her skin, but she tries to ignore it, knowing that it’s ready for Vic now – she doesn’t want to mess that up. She puts each of the fans on. On the television they’re all talking about it: on Blue Peter they’re discussing the multitudes of different ways to keep yourself cool when you’re sleeping. They show a young boy, twelve or thirteen, waking up and gasping, then wrapping himself in a cold towel that’s been kept in the freezer.
Quick showers really help to lower the body’s temperature, the presenter says. The boy shivers and grins, because this is preferable to sweating. Don’t run a bath then throw the water away; reuse the water, if you really want one. And more than anything, it’s important to drink lots, to keep your fluids up. Your health is more important than your cleanliness, at times like this, the presenter says earnestly. He’s got sweat on his hairline. Beth defies his advice, and takes herself to the bathroom. She runs both taps, the cold harder and faster than the hot, and when the bath is nearly full, not bothering to check the temperature, she steps in. It’s cold, but that’s okay: she slides back and under it, opens her mouth, lets the water cover every part of her. She doesn’t even think about the bill: since all household water went metered, she’s relied on short, sharp showers. When you live alone, it’s the sensible thing. This is the first bath that she’s had in forever. It feels incredible.
When she’s finished she doesn’t dress. She towels herself dry, dabbing at her body but leaving just enough water that it still feels cool, and she lays the slightly damp towel on the sofa before putting herself onto it. On the evening news they show footage of some coastal towns on the news – Eastend, Hastings, Canterbury – and of people bunking off work and school, the country brought to a halt by the heat. They dance in the water, the beaches crowded like she’s never seen, the sea a mass of hair and bathing suits. The reporter smiles and puts a brave face on it, but he’s dripping with sweat in his suit, desperate to join the throng behind.
This is officially the hottest start to a summer on record, he says, making it sound like that’s something that the audience at home should be happy with. You always used to moan about British summers: look what you’ve wrought. Beth checks her email as they cut to EastEnders, to the actors sweating, wearing cut-off shorts and open shirts, even hotter under the camera lights. This was filmed months before but feels strangely appropriate, seeing them struggle as much as the rest of the country.
Four days left. She calls up pictures of Vic and her on her screen and looks at them. Four days.
15
Beth lies in bed and keeps her eyes shut. She can see Vic, and she tries to cling onto him. The image of him back as he was. He’s telling her about the treatments. What they entail. She’s got a glass of water, and he’s got coffee. Her arm is still bruised. She holds it close to her body.
They say that it’s natural, he tells her. They take away the bits that are broken and twisted and they leave the pure stuff.
What about the gaps? Beth asks him.
They fill it in. The computer has everything it needs to fill in the gaps. They give it a cover story – like, they might say that I was in a car crash – and the computer does the rest.
The computer lies to you?
No, it’s not … It’s more like the computer helps me lie to myself.
Beth thinks about the rules that they were given, a laminated handbook that was theirs to keep. The things that she should and shouldn’t ask Vic about once the treatments started. The things that might happen that seemed strange but that they had to roll with. She would be told the cover story completely, so that she could play along; but the brain often interpreted things its own way. She was to go along with everything.
Never contradict him if he’s sure of something, the handbook told her. And make sure he never finds this handbook. Once the treatments are underway, this should be kept secret, because one day he’ll come home and he won’t remember why he left the house in the first place.
Now, Beth keeps her eyes shut because she can see him as clear as if he was in the room with her. She thinks about how her alarm hasn’t gone off yet, and how there’s something else. An intrusion into her sleep, because even as she dreams of Vic talking to her – holding her arms, however sore they might be, and telling her that it will all be all right, that all of this will be over soon – she can hear something else. In the background. A grind; machinery, road works. An engine, like a train. The noise of tank tracks. And then she realizes: it’s the Machine.
She opens her eyes and she’s in the spare bedroom, on the bed. She’s still in the t-shirt she sleeps in (one of Vic’s, bearing some obscure reference to a film that he used to love) and she’s not under the covers. The Machine is on, and the Crown has been removed from the dock, and is lying next to her on the bed.
No, she says. She sits up but her head swims, and she has to steady herself. She gets to the edge of the bed and taps the screen. She wonders if she deleted something from herself: she’s certainly thought about it before. Everything that gets deleted gets recorded, and she wouldn’t remember doing it. That’s the point. Even as she presses the buttons to take her to the recordings, she realizes that this is the furthest she’s been in the process. She doesn’t know how you would do it to yourself. Whether you’d just talk yourself through something, after pressing the COMMIT button; and how that would feel, talking yourself through to forgetting.
But there’s nothing. In the recordings section, there’s nothing. It’s blank, Vic�
��s stuff having been moved to the main memory. She’s grateful: she knows that, after a treatment, there’s no way she could have deleted the recording, so she’s clean. She wonders why this happened: how she moved rooms, and if she did this in her sleep. What she was trying to achieve. The Machine’s growl sounds like the rumbling of her stomach: morning hunger. She switches it off and pulls the cable from the wall.
In the kitchen she takes ibuprofen, gulps them down with a full glass of water, and stands by the sink, shaking. She splashes water onto her face. It’s still so early, an hour before she’d usually wake up. Already it feels hotter than the day before.
She spends the hour back in her own bed, staring at the ceiling. She doesn’t want to fall asleep – she’s not sure that she even could, with this headache – so she tries to concentrate on Vic again. On what he might be like when he’s at home, back with her. When she can work on him.
The headache remains. She telephones the receptionist and tells her that she won’t be in, because her head hurts so much that she can’t even see properly.
Migraines are worse in this heat, aren’t they? Beth agrees with her, even though she’s never had migraines before. This must be what it is. She dresses herself and leaves the house. Sunglasses on to protect from the glare, she walks to Tesco and goes to the pharmacy counter, and she asks them for tablets for a migraine. They make her fill out a form: she notices how much the pen shakes; she can barely hold it steady to sign the paper.
Back in her flat she swallows the broad-bean-shaped tablet dry, and then she sits on the sofa with the fan pointed at her head. Sometime after that she falls asleep.
When she wakes up she’s moved herself again, to the spare bedroom. The Machine is still unplugged.
16
She can’t call in sick again the following day, she knows, not this close to the end of term; so she leaves the house after making sure it’s all unplugged. She shuts the spare bedroom door behind her – the Machine’s room, she thinks, as she does it – and checks the locks on her front door twice. She doesn’t know why. The Machine’s not going anywhere.
The heat hits her like a wall. Lots of the kids have already ducked out of school early. They’re on the cliffs, just down from the bit that’s become famous for suicides. Only a few a year, but that’s all that’s needed for fame. More than one and you’re suddenly notorious. It’s only twenty feet lower, but it ducks inwards at the base. No rocks to land on, just water. And this is the part of the island where the water’s at its bluest, and for a second, when you look at it, you can see what the island used to be: the sun glinting off the breaks, the cold blue that runs to you-don’t-know-how-deep. She recognizes some of the kids, but there’s no point in chastising them, because they’ll just jump and hit the water, knowing she will never follow them. They stand on the edge of the rocks, risking falling by just being there, given how chalky and loose the ground is, and then they wind up like toys, before springing off the edge, their limbs splayed, cycling and pounding the air as they fly. There’s a smack as they hit the water one by one, before dragging themselves out and starting the climb up the scree slope next to the point, then the climb up the chalky sides, a long steep path back to the top. And then the process begins again, repeated ad infinitum. Beth watches them for a few minutes. She wonders what happens to them after this.
At school, the kids who have turned up are restless. They know what’s coming. No chance of getting through to them in the final two days, if anybody ever tries. It’s easier to let them do their own thing. Takes the pressure off the teachers, takes the pressure off the kids to learn. Everybody accepts that these are days of failure. Still, Beth knows that she probably won’t be back here, even if the kids don’t yet. Her plan, when Vic is well again, is to go somewhere that’s used to the heat. To take advantage of the low prices, to buy up something on an island somewhere else, where they’re built for the heat. Teach in a school there. She’s thinking of a particular place – it’s the sort of dream people had when she was a kid herself, to pack up and move out to the tropics – but she doesn’t want to over-think it. She’s barely researched it, in case it’s tainted. Tempting fate and all that.
And now there’s extra reason: the Machine. She thinks about it in her flat, like some growth. Mould. Cancer. Waiting in the room, and somehow alluring, persuasive, even. She wants to get away from it suddenly, because it’s a reminder. There’s more to it, maybe. But she doesn’t want to think about it. Back of her mind, until she gets home.
Laura approaches her in the corridor. Feeling better? she asks.
Barely, Beth says.
Those last few days are a killer, aren’t they? You always feel as if your body’s giving up early. She turns and walks with Beth, not breaking step. Are you like me, always getting ill at the end of term? It’s like everything in me says, Oh, now you can be ill. She reaches out and holds Beth’s arm, like a doctor comforting a patient’s loved one. You can be ill on Saturday, she says. You have my permission. She laughs. I can’t, Beth thinks. Saturday’s when I need to be at my best.
They pass some year-ten boys fighting, and they get in between them, pulling them apart. Used to be that they couldn’t physically intervene, but here the rules are different. They have to be. One of the children is clutching a ruler, holding it flat against his palm, using it as some sort of blade. A hard edge on it. The other has thick welts on his back, and his shirt’s torn and pulled up over his hips. Beth frogmarches them both down to the Head’s office, where there are already children waiting, all in similar states of disrepair. She sits them down in front of the receptionist.
Don’t give her any shit, Beth says. They both smirk at her swearing. And don’t smirk at me. I’m sick of you both. Beth can’t remember either of their names, as she doesn’t teach them, but she’s sure that they’re regular troublemakers. She’s seen them before, always sitting here. Waiting.
By the time she gets back to her classroom there’s a note on her desk. It’s from Laura.
It’s going to be a busy couple of days, it reads. See you outside the gates tomorrow at three?
It’s an invitation, not a question. Beth breathes in. She looks at a picture of Vic that she keeps in the drawer of her desk. Two days left.
17
She doesn’t know what time it is, because the flat’s in complete darkness. Outside, on the walkway, she knows, a light comes on at ten and goes off at four. She looks around to see what room she’s in, but it takes her some time to adjust to the light. Total darkness, utterly pitch black. That’s enough: she fumbles for the spare-bedroom door, opening it and letting light in, the faded orange-grey light from the living-room window. She moves again and feels a sudden tug on her head: and on it, the Crown. She puts her hands up and feels the pads, each on a pressure point. Two on her temples. One on the top of her head, the lid. Two smaller pads at the back, towards the neck, hidden away.
No, she says. Her own voice sounds strange to her: distant and vague. She suddenly becomes aware of the hum, sly and driven, in the back of the room. She can’t take the Crown off because she might have pressed something. It could be just the screen that’s asleep, because the Machine – it’s the only part of the room that the light doesn’t catch – is definitely plugged in. She wonders how she’s done this all in her sleep. What’s making her do it. She knows that she won’t have dreamt of anything else: the Machine is all that she’s dreamed of for months now, in one way or another.
She edges towards it. They said, If you take the Crown off and interrupt a procedure, you can cause irreparable damage. (She wonders if that damage is worse than the damage that Vic has already suffered; if they’re related, these two kinds of damage, or somehow the same thing.)
She presses the screen and it flicks on, onto the home page again. COMMIT. PURGE. REPLENISH. She looks at the options, almost invitations. No recordings have been made: she hasn’t used the Machine yet. COMMIT. PURGE. REPLENISH. She wonders if this is it: this is what her mind
has been setting herself up for. Telling her, somehow – and Vic’s situation has proven to her that the thing works in a way we can’t and will never understand – that she should press one of them.
Press COMMIT, and talk it through the plan. Press PURGE and remove that plan entirely, letting the Machine fill in the gaps for you. Like you never thought it in the first place.
Beth wonders if the plan – the whole thing, the Machine and Vic and the island and saving up and everything she’s dreamt up for after this stage – is something that she could get rid of in one go. Like pulling off a plaster, swift and sharp. It was always about the depth of the memory: how deep-set it was. With Vic, the hours and hours of interviews, before they even began taking memories from him, covered every aspect of his life. They took him back to his childhood, where he sat in the gardens of military-housing complexes, playing with his GI Joe, which he cast in scenarios with his friends: establishing zip lines with string, launch pads and aircraft carriers with cardboard boxes, theatres of conflict across perfectly mowed lawns. They asked him why he wanted to be a soldier and he said that he didn’t know. That it was just all he had ever wanted to be. So when they rooted for the memory, to pull every stem of it from Vic’s brain, that was where they had to go. Deep down, to childhood. Beth asked them what those earliest memories would be replaced with.
What does any childhood memory consist of in the first place? the doctor said. It’s all much of a muchness. Doesn’t impede his education or his learning. This is a different centre of the brain altogether.
So what does it get replaced with? Beth persisted.