by James Smythe
Nothing, the doctor said. It’s one of the few times from a patient’s life that can be removed without replacement, because they remember so little of it anyway. She remembers worrying about that: that the Machine would be putting its own nothingness inside him. A computer-created void. Not just nothing, but like the screen, emulating black, to approximate a state of sleep. A created depiction of nothing. She tried to think about her own childhood: what she could call up was colours of things, and toys; an outfit, maybe, something that she wore regularly; a story told to her so many times about a trip to the zoo – about her father dropping her in a urinal, such a funny story, and she remembered it happening; but did she? Or did she actually only remember the story itself, recounted at opportune moments for embarrassment? And when she was older she remembered birthday parties and holidays and single events, but nothing that she could say was defining.
(That was a long-standing argument of the anti-Machine protestors: who were the creators of the Machine to dictate life and death? To dictate creation? When they protested with their placards, they decided to bring God into it, with the capital letter. They fought for the right to say that the creator defined the soul. That we were made in his image. This is the next stage, after clones and gene therapy: we are changing what that image is. Picking and choosing what we keep for ourselves. Only this time it’s not something physical, something transitory and visible. It’s something that defines who we are, as people. As children of God. They argued that the memory was tied to the soul. And if we could tamper with memory, how long before we could tamper with the soul?)
Beth looks at the buttons. Her finger raises, and hovers. If she could do it, what would she say? This stage, the recitation, always took it out of Vic, and he was so strong. She had to pick him up from the sessions. She had to cradle his body, helping him from the car to the living-room sofa after the worst of them. When they took the deepest parts.
She hears her bedroom alarm in the other room. She pulls her finger away from the screen.
I could do it, she tells the Machine. Like she’s warning it. Like, if she did, it would somehow cease to exist.
18
It’s the last day of term. Before the day has even begun Beth is tired: as she dragged herself to the beach and swam through the cold, every stroke felt harsh and wearing. She drags her feet during the walk to work, to the playground where the big coaches wait to haul them across the water, hundreds of children all desperate to be set loose for the next six weeks. All along the walk she dreams of this going well – of her and Vic, hand in hand, talking like before, everything like before – and she imagines not having to be here any more. Not here, specifically. More the feeling. The sensation of the last few years. The heat is impossible, and worse when she steps onto the coach she will travel in, cheaply reliant on its miniature above-seat fans rather than air conditioning. The children swagger and groan as they take their seats, pre-arranged to avoid chaos. All along the motorway the children sing filthy songs, variations on classics. Replacing the word Love with Fuck. The teachers can’t control them, and there’s no point. If they do, they become the focus of the songs. Easier to let them be 14 and 15 year olds.
London has become a very different city from the one Beth grew up in. The Barrage wall casts much of the Thames into shadow, certainly at the bankside. Time was, sun like this would have rendered the walk alongside the river heaving with people, queuing for the London Eye or sitting on the grass at the front of Tate Modern. Now the South Bank’s nearly empty. The stark concrete of the Barrage doesn’t help matters.
Ugly fucking mound, that, says one of the boys in Beth’s group.
Pubic mound, more like, another says. They all laugh. The first boy isn’t wrong. It looms over them like a dyke of thick mottled cream, tarnished in the last few years from things that have been thrown at it. There are parts where it’s been patched, in case; but the biggest issue is what it does to the view.
Used to be that you’d be able to see the ships, one of the male teachers says, as if the boys will be interested in that, young enough to be fascinated by boats and trains and fire engines still. Ships and boats, up and down. The bridge – he indicates Tower Bridge in the distance – would open and close to let them in and out.
Now it stays up, to accommodate the Barrage’s height. They didn’t expect to have to build the Barrage in the first place, let alone as fast as they did. Beth remembers plans for how beautiful it was going to be, how it was going to complement – their word – the rest of the South Bank, all the way down to Docklands. It was going to be the most practical kind of tourist attraction, that had been the plan. Then they had to rush it or risk losing more of the coast, and that wasn’t an option.
The teachers – seven of them, practically the entire English department – take the children to the Barrage Exhibition Centre, built in what used to be an art museum above a McDonald’s. The children cackle about wanting Big Macs, but they’re corralled through to the different stages of the exhibition. The teachers work efficiently, and soon the kids are watching videos of waves crashing across houses: starting with the hurricanes in New Orleans, in Japan, showing the destruction that they caused. They all go silent when they see these, and when they see the films of the east coast of England, of New York.
In one room, the children line up and stare at a wall of video screens, a wall that curves around them to the sides and above them, across the ceiling. The room falls into blackness and hardly any of the children snigger; and then the sound of water, of screaming. The video begins slowly, blinking in, as if the people in the room are actually standing at the scene, as if this is their eyes; and then they’re suddenly standing on a rooftop, looking down across London as it could be, water troughing the streets. People are screaming through the speakers, begging to be saved; babies are crying, women howling that they cannot reach, a man sobbing that he’s hurt, that he’s trapped. The camera doesn’t move; it just looks around, watching as water starts to fill the city, as a wave brings cars down the streets, hammering through porches, smashing through windows and dredging out belongings. The camera swings around to see the Shard falling in the far distance, the glass smashing, the iron buckling. It looks impossible, and it probably is, but the kids almost uniformly gasp. This is so vivid, Beth thinks. The camera swings back once more, towards the first shot, where the screaming people are now silenced, the streets now empty. There, in the distance, comes a swell of water towards the camera, and the audio starts swelling as well, becoming a cacophony as the water crashes down on the crowd in the room. As it hits, as the camera eye falls backwards, real water, actual water, sprays from some hidden place, and all the teenage girls scream, absolutely caught in the moment. The lights come up, the door opens, and they all laugh and gasp and filter out.
Outside, in the sun, it almost feels like a lie. They all sit on the lawn outside the art museum there and eat the packed lunches that they were given on the coaches, now-warm sandwiches and miniature bags of slightly molten Maltesers. They pose in front of the Barrage wall, all of them, for a photograph which some of the nicer girls print out on their sticker-printers and give to Beth, placing it delicately onto her bag. They run around, playing bulldog on the lawn, boys and girls alike, tearing each other down, tackling each other to the floor. When they’re all finished – and a group of boys who had snuck off and bought burgers instead have been rounded up – they walk down the river towards the Globe theatre. They file inside and are immediately less interested, lost by the presentation that they’re given by the actor who plays Caliban, even though he’s got his makeup on and looks suitably hideous. There’s no air conditioning in the theatre, and the ground seems to be giving off just as much heat as the sun. They sweat and swat gnats as Caliban talks to them.
Sit still and hear the last of our sea-sorrow! he starts. Who feels separated and alone, like they’re not actually a part of society? he asks, skewing his questions for the teenage audience. Some of their hands slowl
y creep up. Right, he says, and you should. And that’s because we all do, no matter how old we are, or what we do.
Bloody right we do, Laura says.
It’s a natural feeling, a human feeling. It’s hard, this life thing, the actor says, and we all get through it in any way we can. Caliban – you’ve all read the play, right? Murmurs. Caliban spent his life there on the island, alone and scared. And in many ways, that’s a lot like our lives, isn’t it? We spend this chunk of our life alone – or, just feeling alone – and then this ship comes along and our lives are turned upside down. Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell?
I’m going to need that drink tonight, Laura whispers again. Tell me we’re still on.
Beth had almost forgotten. She nods. The kids traipse over the set, which is only really boxes fastened together to represent a shipwreck, and some more of the cast appear, still wiping their lunches from their mouths, and act out a scene for the kids. Afterwards, they’re shepherded through the exhibit on Shakespeare and then back out onto the street, which is cooler and has something resembling a breeze running across it. They gasp for the air.
Stay together, the teachers all say, over and over again, because they know that this is the time the boys are most likely to disappear and try to find shops or trouble. They get to the coaches and file them on alphabetically, class by class, checking them off and making sure that they’re all on board, and when they are the doors are shut. On Beth’s coach, some of them say that they need the loo.
You can hold it, Beth says, until we get to the services. She sits by herself at the front, the kids putting a few rows between her and them so that she can’t hear them talking about their day, or frantically making out on the back rows. She can hear, of course: the slurping, the laughter. They stop at Chichester and let the kids out, and when they’re back on the bus the driver puts the radio on and they sing along to songs that Beth doesn’t even come close to recognizing. At school, their parents are waiting to pick them up; the ones whose parents aren’t there, Beth and Laura offer to wait with (Beth offering first, Laura stubbornly refusing to let her new friend out of her sight). There’s six of them, and after an hour – that the kids spend protesting that there’s no way their parents will turn up, because they never do, and they know it all too well – Beth lets them go.
Go straight home, and have a good summer, she says. When they’re gone, Laura gives an exaggerated sigh.
Thank God, she says. She walks to the gate. Come on.
19
The pub is heaving with under-age drinkers, many of them sixth-formers from Beth’s classes.
We can go somewhere else, Laura says when she sees them.
It’ll all be like this, Beth says. She walks in and straight past the kids, towards the back of the room where the real locals have gathered. Some of them are smoking: nobody’s telling them to stop. She thinks that she can use the kids’ presence as an excuse to call it an early night. She thinks about what she has to do tomorrow.
Long day, Laura says. What are you drinking?
Whatever you are.
Pinot?
Fine, Beth says. She forms a plan: to drink a few glasses quickly, not too much, but enough for it to become an excuse. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just say that she wants to go home. Laura isn’t somebody whose feelings she has to worry about hurting. By the time Laura returns with the bottle, Beth’s decided to get this over with. They’re poured and hers is at her lips, cold against them, before Laura has even set the bottle down.
Okay, Laura says. You needed that, apparently.
Apparently so.
They’re not bad kids, you know.
I said that to you, I think.
I think you did.
They absorb the slight unease of not knowing each other, of being colleagues without the subject of work to discuss any more. Laura brings up the job offer, which is now firm and lettered. There’s a contract if she wants it.
Do you want it? Beth asks. She’s halfway through a glass. Another sip. Question, then drink through the answer.
I think so. It’ll be hard with Rob. Really long-distance all of a sudden.
Won’t he move?
We can’t live together until there’s a ring on this finger, and he’s too scared for that. No, that sounds terrible. But really. It would be good though, I think, being here. I don’t know how you live here, but there are worse places to work. She notices how quickly Beth’s drinking, and she tops her glass up when there’s still an inch left. You must have a really nice flat, that’s all I’m saying.
It’s okay.
Any word when … I’m sorry, I’ve totally forgotten his name. Your husband.
Beth doesn’t know if she told her his name in the first place. She’s so worried about somebody snooping, Googling him and seeing what actually happened to him. Still, she thinks: now it’s too late to affect anything. Vic, she says. Victor.
Vic! Gosh. Proper man’s-man of a name, Vic.
He is, Beth says. Goes with the soldier territory.
So when’s he home next?
Beth thinks about lying. But she can’t, because there are tears in her eyes, and hiding them from Laura – sitting this close – would be impossible without making a scene. Tomorrow, she says.
What?
Tomorrow. He’s back tomorrow.
How long for?
For good, Beth says.
She stands in the ladies and wipes her face with dry, flaky tissue paper, and then watches from behind the crowd at the bar, as Laura fills their glasses again – she’s one ahead of Laura, she thinks. She thinks about those holiday friends and wedding-guest confidantes. She thinks about the wine inside her. How she won’t see Laura again, not after today. She’s disposable and transitory, and so is anything that Beth tells her: details forgotten in the blur of the wine and the night and the rush. She orders another bottle at the bar and goes back to the table.
You all right? Laura asks.
Fine, Beth says. She takes her purse from her bag and pulls the photograph from it: Vic in full dress, hat and coat, medals pinned to his lapel. The only part of that life that she kept for herself, even though she was told to destroy it, for both their sakes. Every other photo is generic. No uniform: just a face with no telling details.
Forget who he ever was, they told her. Burn all the photographs, all the evidence. Sell him the story that he’s been told.
This is Vic, she says. She slides it over.
Very army, Laura says. He looks nice.
He’s sick.
Oh? Laura doesn’t realize. She thinks that Beth means the flu, or a stomach bug. Something not worth worrying about.
He’s not in Iran. He’s in a home. A care centre.
What? She looks at Beth as if this lie has been going on for years: burned, rather than just annoyed by somebody else’s secrecy What happened?
Not just now. For years. He’s been in one for years. He came back and he was having dreams, and he became violent. She says it in her flattest tone: able somehow to make it sound like something unimportant, this story that she told so many times when he was first taken away from her. When, almost overnight, the situation became intolerable for her, as everything about him collapsed and devolved.
So he had treatments for it, and …
She doesn’t have to finish the story, because everybody knows how it ends. A tiny percentage that still rolls into the thousands, men and women taken away from their families, set up in places where fixing them isn’t an option – and in return no more than an apology. No compensation, no legal recourse: they signed a document because they were so eager to be fixed in the first place, and they were told the risks. Spelled out to them in numbered bullet points spanning pages and pages, all with their signatures at the foot. So instead they paraded and marched in protest, husbands and wives and children standing next to their loved ones in their wheelchairs. But that got them nowhere, because of those thousands of signatures.
Laura drinks because she doesn’t know what to say. Beth fills her glass for her, and her own. She’s past her own limit, when she had been planning on making her escape. But it feels good, she thinks, to talk about this. Laura’s the first person she’s told since she left London. She came here for anonymity and a new start, and to stop people asking her how he was doing. When Laura speaks next, it’s the first time she’s heard the question in years. It almost sounds fresh from Laura’s mouth.
How is he? she asks. She doesn’t know how to phrase it. There’s no way to ask the question, not really, because the answer is always so clear-cut.
He’s destroyed. He’s hardly my husband any more, Beth says.
But he’s coming home?
Beth nods.
You’re taking him out of the hospital? Beth notices something: Laura’s hand up at her neckline, fiddling with the necklace underneath her collar. Are you sure that’s wise? Laura asks.
I think I can help him, Beth says. I think I might be able to start making him better.
Do you pray for him? Laura asks.
What?
Do you pray for him? Because it might help. It might … I don’t know, Beth. She’s nearly in tears, Beth notices. She drinks more as Laura sobs. Some of the kids are noticing, looking over from the bar where they’re dropping shot glasses filled with some liquid the same colour as the Machine into their pints, the mixtures mingling and coalescing. They laugh at the two teachers, and one of them raises his fingers in a V to his lips, pokes his tongue through. Laura wipes her face. How can you help him now? she asks. She seems almost desperate.
There are some people – on the internet – who think you can rebuild somebody. Recreate them, almost.
Oh, no, Laura says. No, no. That’s why you got into this trouble in the first place.
Trouble?
It’s not our place to meddle, Beth. There’s an earnest look in her eyes that Beth’s seen before: in the protestors who stood outside the clinics, telling them that it was their own fault when the patients began to collapse. The malice of their self-righteousness.