by James Smythe
In the car park of a pub. I told you that I was going back to war, and you said that I couldn’t, so I lost it with you.
You told me what? Beth stops and squints at him. That had never happened.
I told you that I was going back to Iran.
That didn’t happen.
Of course it did, he says. He looks terrified then, as if he knows it sounds shaky even as it comes out of his mouth.
Tell me more about it? (She has no idea what time it is, but there’s no noise from anywhere else, only the Machine stirring away, as always.)
What do you mean?
If you were going back, tell me more about it. Why?
They called me and said that I was important to them. And that I had to go back to Iran, to help with a mission.
You left the army.
They said that they were reinstating me. Look, he says, this is what happened. I can remember it! I can remember everything! Why the fuck don’t you believe me? He stands up and starts pacing in that little room, in the space between the bed and the dresser. The door is shut. Jesus fucking Christ, this is exactly the problem. This is why we argued before, and why we’re going to argue now.
I put your memories back inside you, she says, in her quietest voice. And I didn’t put some story about you going back to war in you. That’s from the Machine.
I told it to the doctor then. I told it to him, and that’s how it’s back.
You didn’t. I’ve heard every recording. I know who you are as well as you do.
Shut up.
I know you as well as you know yourself.
You don’t have a fucking clue what I know! he yells. He picks up the potpourri dish and throws it at her, one swift movement; the circular vessel spinning through the air like a clay pigeon, and it collides with her, on the side of her head. It scrapes across her hairline before bouncing away at her ear, and everything in the dark room flashes white suddenly – the light, the walls, the Machine itself, as impossible as that sounds – and she falls backwards. Not from the impact, but the shock. And then Vic’s body – which, from that angle, is hulking and malformed, like the twenty-year-old Vic, with his constant intake of vitamin drinks and bench-pressing – disappears into the living room and then out of the flat.
Beth lets it all go black. She lets the whiteness fade and the sleep – because that’s what it feels like – washes over her. She’s out of control, and alone; and there, on the pillow, the Crown is lying right next to her.
41
Somehow she sleeps most of the day, waking when it’s night and dark in the flat, and when she wakes it’s to sobbing and clattering from the living room. She sits up and sees that the pillow is damp, and the Crown has somehow been knocked to the floor. She sits up further but she’s woozy, and she has to brace herself and focus on the only light in the room – the Machine – to steady herself.
Vic, is that you? she asks. She sees the potpourri tray beside where her head had been. Vic? She stands up, using the chest of drawers to keep steady, and her knees shake, but she’s strong enough to move along the line of the furniture and to the doorway. She looks out into the dark flat, and she can hardly see him. His shape in the light from the window and the door.
Don’t, he says. I’m so ashamed.
It’s okay, she says. She thinks about how she’s going to blame herself, because that’s the path of least resistance: to just take the fall, and say that she pushed him. They’ll get past this. After all, she thinks, hasn’t she already decided that she’s going to live with him and his temper and – if they start again – the dreams? That’s going to be her lot. Listen, she says to him, things happen. I’m fine.
It’s not that, he says. She steps forward into the living room itself, and she can see the trail of darkness that runs around the collar of his t-shirt, and down his arms.
What happened? she asks. She touches him, and he’s wet and warm, but not the warmth of the outside, not that dry heat: a pulsing, damp warmth. The smell of cleaning products and something else, something rotten. Oh my God, she says, you’re hurt. His tracksuit is soaked through, but it’s drying off, mostly; and his hair is wet and the water droplets in it cling to the strands.
I’m fine, he says. He’s shaking, like he’s the Machine itself, and his flesh the channel for those vibrations.
I’ll get a towel, Beth says. She turns on the light in the bathroom and sees the blood that covers her hands, which is now on the light cord and the sides of the sink and the taps as she tries to wash it off, and she looks in the mirror and it’s also all over her head: but this isn’t the blood from Vic, it’s from the gash that runs nearly all the way from her eye to her ear, so sharp and deep it looks to have been made with a knife, not a seemingly harmless ornamental dish. She lifts water to her head and feels the sting, but it’s okay. Not as bad as it looks, she thinks. She takes a flannel and soaks it and wrings it out, and then rushes back to Vic, picking up a bucket from the kitchen on the way. She peels his t-shirt off and starts wiping at the blood, to see where it’s coming from; and she gets it off his arms and then his neck, or at least makes it more liquid so that it runs clear and down his body and starts to soak into the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms. He notices her blood when she’s cleaning him, leaning in close to him.
Your head, he says. Oh my God, Beth. What have I done?
It’s okay, she says. I’ve made my bed, I’ll lie in it, she thinks. She nearly says that as well, but stops the words. There are no cuts on Vic’s shoulders or neck. What happened? she asks him. She wrings the flannel into the bucket.
I saw that kid, he says.
Oh God, she says. She knows instantly what he’s done, because there’s no other way that this story can end. She doesn’t want to know any more, but she has to. She knows that.
He, uh. He said things.
He always says things.
You said that he threatened you, and he did it again. The things that he said.
Where is he?
On the beach, Vic says. I left him there.
Come on, Beth says. She grabs her keys and opens the door and tells him again to follow, but he’s shutting down. You have to show me where! she shouts, and that shouting makes him move. He slopes towards her, dragging every part of himself, and she’s sure that he’s making a noise – a moan, something from deep inside, and it’s a noise that she knows so well, a noise that’s been there for so long, sitting in that room and in every part of her flat and her life, and inside her head. She pulls the door shut behind them and rushes down the stairwell, and she almost forgets about the blind corner until she’s past it, and she has to tell Vic to keep up. He doesn’t seem to be listening: this is all happening at his own pace, Beth thinks. She can’t shout at him here, because the whole estate will twitch their curtains and peer out at them. So she whisper-shouts, her voice feeling hoarse in the warm still air. Where is he? she asks him, and Vic points: not to the sandy beach at the end, but to the area of scree before the pebbles begin. Beth rushes to the line of shops and then down the steps that she never goes down, because what’s down there, at the water’s edge, is rough and hard and unpleasant, and it’s never used. It’s where the seaweed and rubbish get caught up on the rocks, and that’s it, nothing more.
Only now, she sees, there’s the boy. His eyes are shut and his body is at such an angle that she just knows, before she’s even there, because he’s been placed there, rather than having chosen to lie like that; and there’s so much blood, and it seems to be coming from every part of his skin. As if every pore decided to bleed at the same time. His clothes are torn and his face is beaten and red and swollen, and Beth swears that she can see fist marks in his cheeks, but that could be swelling from being in the water. She squats next to him and thinks about touching him to check, but there’s no need. And there’s no doubt that it’s the same boy. He’s eleven, maybe, twelve, maybe older. She has an urge to check his body for evidence of his age. She tells herself how sick that is: as
if knowing might make this better or worse.
He must have ID, she says. She checks his pockets and pulls from one of them a thin white sleeve with a bus ticket and soggy bank notes and there, an ID card. It says his name and his address. And his date of birth. Beth puts her hand to her mouth, and watches it shake as she lifts it, and feels it tremble against her lips. She reads the rest as fast as she can. It says that he’s diabetic. It says that the contact number, in case of emergency, is his father’s. Should we call him? Let him know? Beth asks, but she knows that they won’t. Nobody’s seen this: them with the body. This part of the beach is so enclosed, so rarely visited, that nobody will have noticed.
I pushed him from the cliff, Vic says, suddenly. I hit him a couple of times and then I picked him up and held him above my head and threw him over.
Where they jump?
Yes. That spot. He said he was going to find you, and the things that he said he would do, I got so angry. I wanted to teach him a lesson. His face collapses. I think I didn’t throw him far enough.
What?
That’s how it happened, he hit something else. Rocks, so I dived in after him, and I swear Beth, I saw him as I was falling and I thought I could save him. So I brought him here, because I really thought that he might be all right.
Jesus Vic, she says. He looks like he wants to be held, but she can’t touch him yet, because she doesn’t know what this means. Which part of him did this: the part that was there before, the soldier and husband; or the part that remembers things that she doesn’t.
Can’t we leave him? Vic asks. His friends will find him, because I don’t know what will happen to me.
Oh Jesus.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Vic holds his arms out, a toddler wanting reassurance. Pick me up, it says.
We have to go, Beth tells him. She thinks about the blood on the rocks where he would have landed, and hopes that the water washes it off – it should – and that his friends will find the body and that will be that. They’ll assume he fell into the water from the cliff edge; or that he jumped and accidentally hit a rock; or that he did it deliberately, maybe. Suicide rates are high. He was troubled, and they surely all knew that. It’s not hard to recognize in him, and everybody will testify to it. If they realize it was no accident they’ll just assume it was one of the many other enemies that the boy’s no doubt accrued. They walk back up onto the street and she checks herself, that there’s no blood on her, and sees that she’s clean (apart from her head), and so she takes Vic’s arm – her hand wrapped around his forearm, not holding his hand – and she pulls him behind her. It’s still dark, and they stay quiet, neither saying a word as they walk through the estate – the quiet, damp squeak of Vic’s trainers, and the noise from inside him, his lungs or a moaning, Beth can’t tell, those being the only noises that accompany them – and then into the flat.
You need a shower, Beth tells Vic. He strips and stands in the bathtub and she turns the tap on, and then leaves him to do the rest. His body looks weaker than it did when he left the house: thinner, somehow. Like seeing the boy on the beach took a part of him. Maybe just in the way that he holds himself, in the slump of his shoulders. Scalded, knowing that what he did was wrong.
Beth waits for him in the Machine’s room. She looks at it, and she presses the screen. She thinks that she can wipe this: from Vic’s mind, from her mind, if need be. She’s read stories about criminals who have had things wiped from their memories to give them perfect deniability when taking lie-detector tests. But she won’t do that: because she doesn’t know what erasing something now might do to him. Might leave him vacant again, and she doesn’t think she’s got the strength to go through all of this again.
You fucking monster, she says to it. What did you put inside his head?
The Machine seems to start the fans in reply, and the screen gets somehow brighter, and then the thing hums and shakes even though it’s not switched on. And even as she blames the Machine, she thinks about her arm, and how troubled Vic has been. Is this better or worse?
In the bathroom, Vic starts singing, a song that Beth’s never heard before, that seems to have no tune and no melody, only words, and they make no sense to her.
42
Vic is still asleep when Beth wakes him. He’s curled up on his side of the bed, his body presents an implausibly small form; his breathing is constant and sharp. He doesn’t move as Beth does, and she makes it out of the bedroom and into the living room without disturbing him.
She turns on her computer and goes to her forums, and she searches for other people who have had issues with the Machine; or with the people that the Machine has built up. One woman reports that her husband has trouble sleeping, not just insomnia but something worse and more deep-seated, and he has to take pills to knock him out, but that’s a small price to pay to have him back; a man’s boyfriend has been slightly more aggressive, but nothing that can’t be handled, just shouting at other drivers; another man’s wife has completely lost her sex drive, total lack of interest, and she cries when he tries to instigate it with her. Beth starts a topic, staying casual, not giving anything away. She asks what other people think the memories which the Machine puts inside their loved ones really are. She refreshes the page, but there are no immediate replies.
She washes their clothes in the bath, making sure that the water runs scalding hot and then adds bleach. The blood spirals, whirlpools around the plughole, but it’s too thin to leave a ring around the bath itself. Too thin for that.
She checks her phone, and there are messages from Laura.
PLEASE TELL ME YOU’RE OK
I HOPE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. THE LORD FORGIVES.
They’re all written in capital letters, shouted at her with the same insistence that Laura had when knocking on the door. Beth wonders why she didn’t spot that insistence in everything: the way she drank, the way she fingered her cross. She wonders why she was friends with her in the first place: she doesn’t want to tell herself how lonely she actually was.
Go away, Beth says to the text messages. She stands by the window, thinking that they should leave: this is a definite full-stop to their time on the island, even if Vic protests. He’ll have no choice now. She imagines him more placid after this. Easily persuaded, in his guilt and shame.
And then out of the window she sees the crowd in the courtyard below: the policemen, knocking on doors, talking to residents. Across the way, two more stand on either side of the door to what must have been the boy’s flat. Flowers along the wall. This has all happened so quickly. Beth touches the side of her head: the cut is now scabbing, it still needs a clean and some proper attention. Not stitches, at least, it’s healed too fast for that. Her head throbs. She can hear the Machine. Vic’s breathing.
She opens the front door. From here she can see down to the street, and there’s a cordon and a group of people milling around outside the shops.
I’ll be back, she says to the flat, and she takes the keys and walks out. She heads down to the centre of the estate and the police stop and look at her. What happened? she asks one of the officers. She has no idea if she’s a good liar or not.
Are you a resident here?
Yes. What happened?
He ignores her question. What number, please? She tells him. He looks up her name on a sheet. We’ll be around in the next half an hour or so. We’ll let you know everything then.
Beth sets off down the path, and she almost runs to the crowd who are gathered around the steps down to the water’s edge. There’s an ambulance but the doors are shut, and the crowd aren’t saying anything. She sees the waiter from the restaurant, and he smiles at her, like they’re old friends.
All right, love. He rocks back onto the heels of his shoes, then to his toes, stretching up to see over the crowd.
What happened? she asks him. She wonders if she is just establishing an act or genuinely wants to know what they’ve found. As if maybe
last night could have been a dream.
They got a body down there, he says. Washed up or something. Some kid from the estate. Apparently it was the little one, he says. You know the one I mean?
I don’t know, Beth says. She pictures him, and his glare and his scar. There were lots of kids there.
Right, right. Fucking hell, though. They found him because of the seagulls, that’s what I heard. Because they were all around this morning, pecking away. What a way to go.
Beth feels sick. She clings to herself to keep it in. The smell of the salt and the sea, and the breeze – such a slight breeze, but it’s there – coming from the front, and she’s glad she can’t see it or smell it. And then there’s a sudden commotion: and walking backwards up the stairs a paramedic, holding onto one part of a stretcher. Beth wonders, for a second, if the kid’s alive, but then she sees the thick black rubber of the body bag that lies on it, and she thinks of a maggot: the loose skin, and inside it something worse, soaked in filth, a developing fly, waiting to emerge and reproduce itself. The paramedics ask the crowd to step back, and wind their way to the ambulance, and they open the door and slide the body into the back.
Where are his parents? asks Beth.
Doesn’t have any, that’s what I heard. The waiter cranes his neck to see. Apparently lived on his own up there.
What?
Dad’s recently been banged up, that’s what somebody said. Mum’s gone, or dead. She isn’t around. Lives by himself. Always gave me all that shit, always having arguments with me, he was, and now he’s dead. There’s something conspiratorial about the way that he says it, as if what he really means is, Don’t tell the police that I argued with them, and I won’t tell them that you did. Fucking hell, he says, and he laughs. This’ll do wonders for the tourism, eh?
Beth gets back to her flat just as the policemen are talking to the fat neighbour. She’s out on her doorstep, mopping at her eyes – did everybody know the boy? – and the children are all around her, running up and down. She stares at Beth as she passes, and one of the policeman is nodding his head. Beth opens the door to the flat. Vic is awake: sitting on the end of the bed.