James Smythe - The Machine

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.

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.