James Smythe - The Machine

Go away, Laura. I won’t ask you again.

You need me, Beth. You need comfort and advice.

Just go away. She picks up Laura’s bag from the floor, which is open, spilling with her wallet, a bottle of water, a bag of crisps and a book, and Beth knows what the book is without even having to look. She hurls the bag over the railing towards the youths, who laugh and act like it’s a bomb. Apart from the one with the scar, who doesn’t move.

What? Laura asks, and she turns and starts to run to the stairs as the gang look at the bag’s spilled guts.

Beth slams the door shut behind her. She walks into the bedroom and the recording is still playing, but she speaks over it. She talks to Vic about Laura, and how irritating she is. How she won’t leave them alone. How she – Beth – needs to get out of this place, because it’s all becoming too much. She wonders if he’s becoming more receptive. If, somehow, he can hear her through all the other noise.

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.