James Smythe - The Machine

She opens the front door, still clutching Laura’s body. She lowers her to the floor by the door, so that she’s sitting with her head resting against the wall. The lights inside are off, apart from that ghostly glaze coming from the Machine’s room; and Vic is sitting on the sofa. She can hear his breathing; and the breathing of the Machine, somehow synchronous.

Why is she here? he asks. He sounds only slightly scared. Everything else in him is passive.

We can take this away from her, Beth says. Vic turns his head to look at her, but it’s too dark to see him properly. She knows that it’s wrong: his shape; the way that he is; the things that he remembers. It’s all wrong. The things that she knows, says Beth. She doesn’t have to know them.

Somebody will be looking for her.

Nobody knows she’s here.

This seems so cruel, he says, and he sobs. This big man, so big that he seems almost supernatural, and what he’s actually made of, Beth doesn’t know, because her Vic would never have killed that boy and he would never have attacked Laura like that, and she has to tell herself that, because she knows that this is wrong: but it’s something that she worked for.

We have to put it right, she says.

She was going to hurt you.

She wasn’t. She grabbed me. It didn’t mean anything, she says. She wants to say, This isn’t an argument about how inhuman you are. It’s about how we deal with Laura.

People are capable of anything, he says. It’s inside all of us.

Where did you hear that? she asks. He doesn’t answer. She walks past him and to the Machine’s room, where the door is open and the light from the screen is casting itself across everything, and that’s impossible, unless he’s been in here. But she doesn’t question that, not now. She tells Vic to bring Laura through.

No, he says.

Don’t do this, Beth says. He doesn’t react: he sits on the sofa, and is how he is. So she goes back to Laura’s body and drags it through the flat and to the Machine’s room. She puts her on the bed – and Laura looks wrong there, because it should be Vic, Beth’s used to it being Vic – and she takes the Crown from the dock. She uses lubricant, because it’s kinder; and it slides onto the temples.

She waits for Laura to wake.

Laura’s eyes open as her hands go to the top of her head, and she feels her way around – patting them onto the Crown as her eyes realize what’s happening. She sucks in high-pitched air.

Where am I? she asks, even though she knows. Beth is sitting at her side.

Please, she says. You have to tell me what you think you know.

What have you done to me?

Nothing, Beth says. Not yet.

You’re a monster, Laura says.

No, Beth says.

What have you done to me?

Tell me what you think you know. Beth’s finger hovers over the COMMIT button, waiting for that moment.

You’ll go to hell for what you’ve done, Laura says. She spits it at Beth, suddenly more righteous and furious than she has been. No gentle persuasion. Vitriol.

Why were we even friends? Beth asks, and she leaves it there. Laura doesn’t answer for the longest time, and then:

Everybody gets lonely, she says.

I’m not lonely any more, Beth says.

No?

No. Tell me about what you think you know.

I will never let you take it from me, Laura says.

Okay, Beth tells her. Then I’ll press this anyway and take everything. She says it but doesn’t think that she means it. In those seconds she asks herself if she could do it: because it’s not Vic’s life she’s messing with, this time, but somebody else’s, somebody with a boyfriend and family; and when she thinks about how much she would be taking, all she can see is Vic killing that boy. And she can imagine it as clear as day: he finds the boy there, and he reaches out his huge hands to the boy, and he crushes him, and he lifts him and hurls him, and he waits for the crack of the boy’s body on the rocks. Only then does he think about what he’s done. Maybe, inside, he wonders where it came from.

Maybe the Machine knows.

Beth stops. She pulls the Crown from Laura’s head.

Go, she says. Laura stands, and she’s woozy still, and she’s got blood matting her hair, but she staggers through the flat, clutching the furniture. She doesn’t say anything about Vic: in the darkness, he is almost part of the flat itself. She reaches the front door, her movements silent-movie melodramatic, limbs flung and legs crossing, and she turns.

You’re a monster, she says, once more, but she’s looking at Beth. She ignores the other, with its breathing and its menace; she never looked at him once, Beth realizes. And then she’s gone.

Beth sits at the dining table and drinks water, and she reaches for the pills she’s got in her pocket. She takes three.

You let her go, Vic says.

What would you have done? Beth asks. This wasn’t her fault.

I don’t know, Vic says. She’ll come back now though, right? With the police. He lies back and shuts his eyes. The flat seems all the darker for it.

Beth goes to the Machine’s room and lies down. She sleeps. She doesn’t know for how long. When she wakes up, it’s because the Machine’s fans have started up again; it’s eager. She deprived it, letting Laura go.

She says, I’ve ignored so much of you. She stands and moves to the side of the Machine and pulls the plug from the wall. I need the screwdriver, she says. Vic, still sitting on the sofa, doesn’t move to help her, so she gets it from the drawer she left it in, and she lies on her back and she opens the Machine up again and peers inside it. It’s so dark. She gets a torch from the kitchen and shines it inside, and the light bounces around the whole thing, reflecting off every inside surface, and she can hardly see anything. But then her eyes settle in and she sees how big it is inside; and how small the cluster of wires that make its guts is. Like a ball inside it, little more than the size of a fist. Floating, suspended by wires.

She hears something so she ducks out and goes to look. It’s Vic. He’s brought the bags out of the bedroom and put them by the door. He’s standing in the streetlight from outside, and she can’t take it, because she feels like she doesn’t know him like this, so she switches the lights on in the flat. His face is as white as she’s ever seen it.

I don’t know, he says. We have to leave, right? So we should go. He pulls on his own fingers, cracking each at the knuckle. I’m so scared, he says.

We can’t go until morning, she says. The first boat isn’t until half past six.

Should we wait down there?

No, she replies. Get yourself ready, that’s the right thing to do. I have things to do here. She opens the cupboards, where there are more tins of spaghetti, and takes slices of frozen bread from the freezer, and she starts the process of making dinner. We should eat, she says. So they eat together, at the table, and Vic keeps one eye constantly on the door; and Beth keeps her eye on the Machine. She stands in the doorway after they’ve eaten, as Vic is washing up – she laughs at that, because they’re abandoning everything else in a halfway state, walking out and expecting the landlord to deal with it: the flat a diorama of the Marie Celeste, which somehow feels appropriate – and then watches the Machine doing nothing, but somehow, she thinks, doing everything.

I’m going to kill you, she says. That’s going to be my last act. She goes into the Machine’s room and sits close to it. There’s something wrong with me, to have done what I’ve done. Who does it make me? she asks it. She puts a hand on its cold, metal skin, and it shivers under her touch.

She remembers being a child: her dog, so sick. Her parents telling her that the car didn’t mean to hit it, and that it was getting old. This – loss, her mother’s word – is a part of life. Intrinsically linked, two little l-words entwined. They invited her to say goodbye, and she put her hand on its fur, on its chest (because she wanted to avoid the sodden red tea towel that covered the dog’s hind quarters) and she felt it breathing and, as it died, it shivered. That’s what happens. That flash-rush of coldness envelops.