by James Smythe
33
Beth watches Vic sleep. It’s dark outside now, and she’s put him through more than she planned: the pills were still having an effect, so she drove on for another hour, risking accidents and fits that didn’t happen. When he’s finished he wakes up for food. He doesn’t say anything until he’s at the table, until his meal is all but done.
What happened to me? he asks.
What do you mean? Beth replies.
I had an accident. I can’t remember things.
Like what? she asks him.
I don’t know. Victor McAdams. I’m a soldier. You’re my wife. Your name is Beth.
Yes.
And there was an accident, I remember that.
You were shot, Beth says.
Shot. I was a soldier.
Yes.
Shot. He raises his hand to his head and rubs the scar on the side, above the burned-in one from the Machine. I was in hospital. He starts to cry. I can’t remember some of this, and I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am.
Beth can see how close she is. She comforts him, holds him, and he says that he’s tired. She’s got two diazepam left, and they were meant to be for tomorrow, but he starts heaving tears and air, so she pops them from the blister pack and offers them to him.
This is medicine, she says. You should swallow them. She holds the water for him, and it’s a struggle but the tablets settle in and down, and he gulps the rest of the water. They’ll help you sleep, she tells him. She sits with him and they do nothing – no talking, no moving, just her holding him to her – and then she starts to feel his head nod forward. So she tells him that they should go to the bedroom, because he’ll sleep better there.
She gets him to his feet and leads him towards the Machine’s room, but something stops her. The noise: it’s deeper and more present, and something’s wrong in the room. Like the Machine knows that she’s prepared him for the next session, and resents it. Which is insane, she tells herself, because it’s a machine, a thing, and there’s nothing inside it but wires and microchips and hard drives and space for the fans and the dust. But still: the noise sounds worse. Desperate, almost. She tells him to wait for her, and he stands independent in the doorway, leaning against the frame. She unplugs the Machine from the wall. Still there in the background. No respite.
Not tonight, she says. She doesn’t know why she’s talking to it. Why it deserves that from her. She looks back at Vic and pulls the door shut. Not the spare room, she says, come and sleep with me in here.
In bed, he takes his side like it’s ingrained in him to do so, and he slumps into a mattress that has seemingly remembered his shape and his form and the way that he sleeps, and into the pillows that nest around his head. His eyes are shut instantly, and Beth pulls the door shut, leaving the room in darkness and silence. She closes the front door behind her and she’s suddenly out in the wild of the estate. It feels different to her now, as she sees her reflection in the mirrors of people’s windows on the way to the stairwell, and sees her hair unkempt and greasy – has she showered while she’s been making sure that Vic’s body is as clean as it can be? – and her clothes thrown on. This is how she looks, and how Vic will see her. She tells herself that she has to make more of an effort in the future, as he wakes up more. She takes the stairs two at a time, almost jumping downstairs. She hates the blind corner here. She hates that there’s no way of seeing what’s waiting for her at the bottom. And yet she’s never met anybody or been threatened there. It’s just the potential for harm, or surprise. Sometimes that’s more worrying than the harm itself.
The rest of the estate is quiet, so she’s out and onto the road before anybody sees or hears her, and down towards the strip. She has to walk past the takeaways – the smell of the curry place makes her hungry for something that isn’t eggs and tinned spaghetti and frozen slices of bread – and that means joining the crowd outside the kebab shop. She knows that the boy is there before she’s even close enough to make them out as individuals, past their white t-shirts and their football-kit-material shorts and their white trainers and their shaven heads, and she knows that he’ll be the one who comes over to her. She sees them turn as a mass and look at her, and this is when she’s outside the Indian restaurant, and she thinks about walking in and acting like this was her intention all along. But she needs more pills, because she’s so close, and Vic is so close. Another few days of keeping him down and she’ll have him.
The boy – now he’s there, an individual, not like the others, somehow, there’s something worse about him – steps forward and spits at his feet and his head lolls. Left to right, lolling and rolling. He doesn’t make eye contact with her: he fixes his gaze on her chin, or her neck, she can’t tell.
Fuck you looking at, he says. I seen you around, right? His voice is slurred. Again, she can’t work out how old he is. Somewhere between twelve and seventeen. Some vague age that can’t be pinned down.
Beth doesn’t say anything.
No, don’t fucking ignore me. He’s not pushy, physically, staying a few feet back from her. He walks as she does, matching her path, crossing his feet with an almost-grace. Don’t fucking do that, now, missus. His friends laugh. They pick at their teeth and watch her with their heads tilted forward, staring out from under their brows. They open their mouths and smack their lips and rub at their fresh tattoos. Don’t you be fucking doing that, now, because I am not to be ignored. I am not a man you just walk past, eh? You see that?
You’re not a man, Beth says. She regrets it as soon as it’s out there, but there’s something about how long this has been going on. She has to stand up for herself and stop this. He’s only a child, she tells herself.
The fuck you say? They all shift position, falling into a line and arcing around her. Cutting her off. You stand near me and fucking say that again, okay? Okay? Okay? Okay? He repeats the word over and over again, sounding more threatening with each spit of it. His friends smile each time. Beth looks at his hands, and he doesn’t have a weapon, and she hates herself for saying what she did. She thinks about running. She looks for an exit. Okay? he says again. They get closer. Still not looking at her face: instead he stares only at her neck, definitely her neck, she can see, now that he’s closer. She wonders what he’s looking at. If he can see her pulse through her skin, or her throat as she gulps back the warm air that she’s breathing in too quickly. There’s something more predatory about it.
Step the fuck back, all of you, comes a voice from behind. It’s the waiter from the restaurant. No trouble, just step back from her and get your kebabs or whatever, and I won’t have to call the police, will I. Beth sees that he’s holding a cricket bat out in front of him, waving it around. It’s heavier than he expected, clearly, and it’s loose in his grip. One of them could knock it away at any moment; but they don’t. They back up.
You’re looking to have your place busted up, one of the boys from the back says.
No, I’m not. I’m looking to stop you boys getting in trouble with the police. You know that, right? He looks at Beth. Go, he mouths. She turns and runs off, and none of them apart from the boy look at her go, because they’re fixated on the waistcoated restaurateur. She stops around the corner and thinks she’s going to be sick but she isn’t, and instead stands on the spot with her hands on her knees and coughs at the ground. She breathes these heaves, and then leans back and sniffs in the air, and tries to hold it in. She counts down from fifty. It’s not quite enough.
Tesco is bright and painful, and she walks to the pharmacy counter in a slight detour, down past the meat fridges and the cold front that occupies the air alongside them. It isn’t until she’s past them that she sees the railings up at the pharmacy, and the man behind them packing things away.
Please, she says, I didn’t know you were shut.
Nothing I can do, he says.
Please. I’m desperate. He shakes his head. I need to get some painkillers.
Diazepam lady, he says. I remember.
You gone through them already?
Yes, Beth says.
For an emergency, you said. To keep them in the cupboard in case of something, right? So there’s been a few emergencies the last week, yeah?
I’ve come out for this, she thinks, and she can feel herself shaking as she grips the counter. She doesn’t know if it’s shock, or nerves, or something residual from the Machine, because it definitely feels the same, vibrations rather than tremors, something inside rather than something muscular.
I know what you’re like, he says. Sort of person you are, I know you.
You don’t, Beth says.
Listen, right, we got a register, and you’re on it now. Because it’s people like you give us nothing but problems – in here, middle of the night, trying to buy this stuff. He glares at her through the railings. Go find a normal dealer, plenty round the estates.
Please, Beth begs.
Said we’re shut. The shutters darken and everything disappears: the background bottles of pills, the cough sweets, the man, everything. Beth’s nails dig into her palms. She turns and heads to the aisle where they sell these things without a prescription, and she finds the fastest-acting pain-relief tablets and scoops up a handful of boxes. At the front counters the security guard wanders along and keeps an eye on her, and the clerks all look at each other and smirk with their eyes. One of them looks down because she can’t stop laughing. It’s a quiet night, and this – probably telephoned through by the pharmacist, to tell them to watch out for her, because this one could be trouble – this is entertainment for them. Like a soap opera.
Twenty-six eighty, the cashier tells Beth. You want a bag? The adjacent cashier smiles and laughs into the hood of her top.
Yes please, Beth says. She can’t do anything, and the cashier flaps the thin bag on top of the piled painkillers. She pays by card and packs them up, and as she leaves, the security guard walks slowly behind her. She thinks that he’s looking for bulges in her pockets.
Outside, she breaks down. She walks around the side of the shop and it overwhelms her: the feeling that this – providing the diazepam – was one small thing that she could have done to help him. She’s carrying on, that’s not even a question. But the diazepam was to have been a gift to him: the ability to make it not hurt, and she’s failed. She sobs in the alley that intersects the supermarket’s delivery road, and she tries to keep it as quiet as possible. The wall is gravelled, pebble-dashed, and she smacks her hand against it. Only once, but it’s hard enough that each stone seems to break the skin, and when she looks at her palm she can see tiny red marks where it’s not quite bleeding. Her headache comes back and courses through her, and she opens one of the packets and takes two of the pills, dry swallowing them. They stick, and she can feel them sitting in her throat. She doesn’t know how to move them, until she gets water.
She walks back to the strip, hoping that the boy and his friends will have gone: but they’re still there, outside the kebab shop. They’re laughing harder than she’s ever heard them laugh. So instead she walks the other way, further down the strip, towards where it becomes the seafront. She finds the sole taxi rank servicing this part of the island. There’s a queue, and she joins it: behind the swaying man who clings to the woman with the smeared mascara. Beth waits, and they shuffle forward as cars drive up and take them away, and finally it’s her turn.
Where to? asks the woman behind the counter.
Beth tells her the address.
That’s no distance. You can walk that.
I’ll pay double, Beth says.
Your money, the woman says, and she shrugs, and she says the address into the radio and the man on the other end sighs. She’s paying double, the woman says.
The car pulls up two minutes later and Beth slumps down in the back seat. They drive back the way that she’s walked – past the pharmacist standing outside Tesco talking to his workmates as they drag on cigarettes, no doubt telling them about the addict who tried to scam him for tranquilizers – and then past the boy, and the youths all duck down to look into the cab but they can’t really see Beth because she turns away from them, so they look at the driver, make noises and shout abuse at him. The one boy isn’t looking where the rest are. His eyes are down, still, Beth’s sure, pointed right at her neck. They all laugh and one throws a half-empty bag of chips at the back of the car, and they laugh again, apart from, Beth is sure, the boy.
Fucking monsters, the driver says. Pardon my language.
No, it’s fine, Beth tells him.
Animals. Don’t know how we’re going to survive, if it’s them lot representing where we’re fucking heading. I’m trying to make a living, and now I probably got to clean chilli sauce off my car before I start tomorrow as well, and what the hell are they doing? Standing there, being wankers.
He pulls over and Beth gives him a ten, and he thanks her when she tells him to keep the change.
Have a safe night, he says. She walks through the estate and runs up the stairwell, and it isn’t until she’s on the tier outside her flat that she sees him: across the way, directly opposite.
The boy.
Is that where he lives? Has he always lived there? He isn’t looking at her. He isn’t looking at anything, she sees: his head slumped over, his eyes shut. He’s waiting for something. Beth fumbles with her keys and jams them into the door, and she can’t get inside and shut it fast enough.
Vic is still asleep. Beth sits by the side of his bed, taking the pills from their packets and crushing them up into a powder, and then trying to work out how much is too much.
34
Beth lies herself down next to him on his bed at some point and she turns her body towards him and tries to sleep. She knows that it will come eventually, but it’s the getting there. She watches his face, and she shuts her eyes when she gets sad from staring at it.
She wakes up with his hands on her: his fingers on her back, and his other hand at her crotch, pushing apart her legs. His fingers, once heavily calloused from the guns and the weights and the sand, are still slightly rough, and she remembers this perfectly: how it felt to have them in here. They cling to the inside of her thigh and knead it, and they brush up against her, and she’s ready almost instantly. She doesn’t know how much of this is Vic, but this must be because he’s nearly real. His finger slips across her. The same moves he always used to use, and she kisses him. She pushes: he used to like that, when she was the aggressor. He could start things, and she wouldn’t touch him, but she would push back with her mouth.
So she kisses him harder. She keeps her eyes closed, because she doesn’t want to know if he’ll be looking at her. He always used to look at her, his eyes open. He said that it made it feel better. More real. This feels real enough, Beth thinks. She pushes him back, his fingers still moving around her, and she slides on top of him. She manoeuvres, and then he’s inside her.
And the Machine is there all the time: that low-level noise that lets them know it’s still there, and that it’s still waiting to be used again. Beth pushes her whole body down to grind herself against him, and it doesn’t take long. She falls off him: in the heat, so sweaty so quickly. She thinks that she’ll have to change the sheets. She doesn’t say anything, and neither does he.
She lies next to him, trying to hear his breathing over the Machine; or maybe the Machine’s noise is his breathing, she can’t be sure. The heat becomes stronger somehow: as if it’s coming up through her body, and she’s making the heat herself, not the burning sun or the holes in the ozone layer that they warned them about for so long. She makes the heat. She feels her head with the back of her hand and can’t tell if it’s a temperature. So she gets out of bed and dresses herself lightly, her swimming costume and some shorts, that’s all. She walks back through the estate – it feels like days ago she was last here, not just earlier this evening – and she finds the beach opposite the stretch of shops where everything is dead and everybody else asleep, and she slides into the water. She swims out as
far as she can, until the island is hidden by the darkness: only the blip of lights run across the view. She looks at the water as she treads to stay still: and the ripples on the surface that tell her that the vibrations have followed her even here. She stops and bobs, then sinks. Down. She shuts her eyes. Down. Cold all around her, and she can’t feel the warmth of the outside air, not even slightly.
She thinks that she could stay under: but even as she is thinking it something kicks in and her body writhes and forces her upwards, and she gasps for air when the surface breaks. She’s drifted closer to shore: she can see the estate from here again.
She swims back.
35
As soon as he wakes up she gives him the powder, worrying about the amount, stirred into orange juice to mask the taste. It turns the juice cloudy and grainy, and he pulls a face as he drinks.
No, he says. Oh, no.
It’s only orange juice, Beth says. To reassure him.
Beth, that’s not orange juice. That’s like chalk. Yuck.
Beth sits and stares at him. Suddenly nearly himself. Everything: the way that his face moves, that his tongue spits the words, that his hands ball when he doesn’t like something. His shoulders. And that leads her to his face, which is looking cleaner and healthier, and his arms, which are definitely trimmer. More toned. She wonders if he could press what he could when he was still at war, because this – Captain Vic McAdams – is the man she’s getting back. Not the shell that came back from war, or the shell that she helped make with the Machine’s treatments.
And then he tries to stand. He moves to the edge of the bed and swings his legs down, and it’s like he never stopped being himself. Feet go onto the floor, and he pushes himself to standing, and then rocks backwards.
Woah, he says. Unsteady. I’m a bit dizzy.