James Smythe - The Machine

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.

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.