Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

‘Have you finished now?’ Lucy suddenly asked me, when I was really sated and was settling down contentedly for my night’s rest.

‘Yes, I’m going to sleep.’

‘Sleep. Sleep is…’

I sat up. ‘Is there a problem Lucy? You seem to worry about this every night!’

‘Sleep. Sleep is… What is it?’

I laughed.

‘I bet I know what your problem is. I bet you were supposed to wake the men up if they went to sleep back in the ASPU House. Isn’t that right? You had to wake them up and tell them their time was up. Is that right? Well, you don’t have to now. We just have to lie down and sleep.’

She lay rigid beside me.

‘But what is sleep?’

‘Sleep? It’s when we lose consciousness for a bit. Rest. Download. Don’t you have to download at night back at the ASPU House?’

Actually every night that we were in Epiros she did still download, broadcasting all the day’s input in digital ultrasound to a House Control that could no longer hear her, a little like an Outlander dutifully praying at night to a nonexistent God. But it was an operation that she could complete in a few seconds.

Lucy said nothing, so I settled myself once more and was wandering away in my mind through the streets of a labyrinthine city, partly Illyria, partly Ioannina, when she suddenly spoke again.

‘I will read,’ she said flatly.

‘You what?’

‘I will read,’ she repeated, getting out of bed and going to sit on a chair in the corner of the room.

I had brought her some stuff to read – elementary science books, things like that – and she had been looking at one earlier. She picked it up and began methodically working through the pages. She didn’t need a light. Her eyes were different from ours.

Well why not? I thought. She doesn’t need to sleep. So why not use the night-time for reading?

I settled down again, down into the strange yet familiar city, down into the deepest of sleeps.

Some hours later I woke up with a full bladder. The bed beside me was still empty. From across the room, in the darkness, came the sound of a turning page.

There was something eerie about it.

But I was still half asleep. My uneasiness was transient. I pissed in a chamberpot, climbed back into bed and slid back down again into sleep.

Next morning, when we were sitting at breakfast, the landlord rushed in, beaming, with a large, blonde, fiftyish woman hurrying excitedly in his wake. I was drinking coffee. Lucy was drinking a lemon drink mixed to my instructions. There was no one else in the small dining room, except a middle-aged salesman reading a paper.

(‘HOLY CONSTANTINOPLE IS OURS!’ I remember was the headline. A rather empty sentiment I thought at the time, when Greece was fragmented into little pieces that were to all intents and purposes independent states, while Istanbul stood at the centre of a mighty Islamic empire.)

‘Here they are!’ cried the little hotelier. ‘Here they are!’

‘ Hello !’ gushed the big blonde woman in English, ‘Takis said you were here and I just had to come and see you before you left. It’s such a long time since I met anyone from England – or anyone who spoke English at all!’

I stiffly greeted her, but it wasn’t me that she wanted to talk to.

‘Lucy isn’t it?’ she said, beaming, as she settled down into the spare chair at our table. ‘My name’s Stacey. Came over to Corfu on holiday thirty years ago and fell in love with a handsome waiter. What a cliché, eh? Of course Spiro’s a fat old peasant now. And no one goes to Corfu on holiday any more. Not since, you know, not since people got more religious here… and then back home too, though of course it’s a different religion there… It does get a bit lonely at times.’

She sighed.

‘Spiro and I went back over to Corfu a few years ago. All the resorts are like ghost towns, now. Ruins. All those silly English pub names: the Pig and Whistle, the Dog and Duck. All crumbling away. Like the real pubs back in England probably.’

The Englishwoman pulled herself together.

‘Never mind, eh? I suppose you live in the Poli , with your husband here,’ she went on (without thinking, she used the Greek word for City when she spoke of Illyria), ‘and perhaps you see a different side of things. I’ve never been there myself. I tell Spiro sometimes we ought to go up there and have a look. I’d like to hear people speaking English again, though it wouldn’t be the same as going home. But anyway, he won’t have it. He won’t even discuss it. People round here don’t approve you know, because of the Poli being against religion and all that. Live and let live I’ve always said, but that’s not exactly fashionable now, is it? No, they don’t hold with going to the Poli at all, not unless you go there to make money…’

She was so full of things she needed to say that for a long time it was simply impossible for her to pause, but I knew that sooner or later the moment would come:

‘Oh dear,’ said Stacey, after ten minutes or so, ‘don’t I go on? Tell me about yourself, Lucy. Where do you come from?’

What could I do? It wasn’t like with Manolis. I couldn’t give Lucy prompts in English. I just had to hope she wouldn’t make a serious blunder.

Lucy hesitated. Stacey beamed at her. Stacey’s Greek brother-in-law beamed just as broadly from behind her, in chorus, in solidarity, though he hadn’t understood a word. Even the salesman across the room was smiling benignly over his lowered newspaper.

HOLY CONSTANTINOPLE IS…

Lucy smiled, meltingly.

‘I come from Wiltshire,’ she said, in that sweet sexy rustic English voice of hers. (Well done, Lucy, I thought, well done.) ‘Our dad was village postmaster,’ she went on, ‘and I had three sisters. We were very naughty girls. We liked to wind up the boys. Sometimes when we went to school, we used to leave off our…’

But luckily Stacey wasn’t listening any more.

‘Wiltshire!’ she exclaimed, ‘Well, well! My granny lived in Wilton. And we only lived in Dorset. So whereabouts in Wiltshire was it that you grew up, Lucy?’

Lucy stared at her, long enough for Stacey’s determined smile to become less certain. Then, having no answer to the question, Lucy responded to the smile. A smile was encouragement. A smile meant she was doing something right.

‘Sometimes when we went to school we used to…’

‘It was Faraday, wasn’t it, Lucy?’ I broke in. ‘Your village was Faraday.’

‘Faraday?’ said the lonely Englishwoman. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of that. Where is that near to then?’

I am an American-Illyrian. I had no idea whether Wiltshire was north, south, east or west, or even what kind of geographical entity this Wiltshire was.

‘Quite near Liverpool,’ I hazarded. It was one of only four or five British cities that I could name.

Stacey looked troubled. Even standing behind her, the hotelier Takis could sense this, and his face too became more uneasy and less friendly. The salesman had ceased to smile. He was just staring, his paper in his hands.

HOLY CON…

Lucy saw that Stacey had lost enthusiasm. Something else was needed to cheer her up again.

‘Would you like me to undress?’ she sweetly asked.

‘So let’s try it again, Lucy. Someone asks you where you come from, what do you say?’

We were crossing a wide plain of yellow sunflowers and white windmills.

‘Wiltshire,’ Lucy said.

‘Yes, and what don’t you ever talk about?’

‘My father the postmaster.’

‘Or the gym mistress, or the riding school owner who…’

‘…who used to pull down our tight trousers and smack our bare bottoms when we were naughty…’