Paul Braddon: The Actuality

She stands over the statue. The mermaid is clothed in scales to the waist but above that her narrow waist and girlish chest are naked to sun, rain and snow. She lies face down in the dark water, as if diving, her tail flipped upwards in the frigid air.

‘I feel sorry for her to be just left like this,’ she says. ‘She’s been here longer than I have.’

Ridiculous , Simon replies, his ill humour again on display.

Evie reaches her hand into the water – it is close to freezing – and grips the mermaid under her chin. She lifts the metal face a couple of inches until her nose breaks the surface. The movement is accompanied by a complaining squeal.

She lets the mermaid drop back.

‘Well that’s more than I managed,’ Daniels says, returning his cigarettes to the pocket of his coat. ‘Must have loosened things up more than I realised.’

Evie examines the pit marks across the underside of her fingers. The rough surface of the corroded metal is a risk to her skin. If skin is what it can be called. She certainly thinks of it as skin. It looks like skin, moves like skin and feels like skin. Close up it is correct in every detail, the tiny pores and hair follicles arrayed with multifarious perfection. But actually, far from being natural, it comprises a fusion of 3D-printed genetically human cellular matter and extruded bio-material cultivated in a factory. She may find such details indelicate, but like anyone obliged to care for themselves, she needs to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of what she is made. It is just that the illusion is so brilliantly successful, it makes it easy to believe that she is something else. The real thing. She breathes, has lungs, has a heart that beats. Her body may be a hybrid of electronically activated and living tissue stretched over cutting-edge fibres, but her flesh is as soft to the touch as any young woman’s.

‘You think we’ve seen the last of them?’ she asks.

‘The last of who?’

‘The police people.’

‘Oh, them. Good reason to hope I’d say. I think the three of us put up quite a convincing show!’

His manner is casual and she glances over at him to make sure he is not hiding anything from her. After all, he hadn’t given such a relaxed impression after they left yesterday. Perhaps the intervening time has changed his opinion.

‘I’m going inside,’ he says. ‘I’ll have another shot in the spring. It was foolish to attempt anything today. Thought I might just be able to do something before the weather hardens.’

‘I’ll join you in a minute,’ she says, gazing down at the again-still water.

‘Yes, well, don’t be too long about it. If he spots you out here in this, dressed like that, I’ll be sent straight back out to haul you in, and once inside I’m intending on staying.’

‘He cares for me very much,’ she remarks quietly, saying it because she was programmed to believe it and because she really, really wants it to be true, still haunted by what she overheard yesterday. A rich man’s toy, he’d said. What sort of husband would describe their wife in that way?

Daniels is watching her carefully and she wonders whether her words could be construed as sarcastic. He seems to be about to comment but instead takes the shallow steps down to the kitchen, shedding snow on the bricks.

She gets her answer as he reaches the door: ‘She’s right of course,’ he mutters, ‘he does care, but it has to be in his own impossible way.’

She is ten yards distant but his whisper is perfectly audible. Maybe that is all it is, she thinks. Her husband doesn’t mean what he says, but then why does he have to be so confusing?

She wanders over to where the police hova smashed the wall. Daniels has nailed a pair of old planks across the breach but they hide little of the sky beyond. She clambers up onto the ramp of fallen bricks and peers over. A fresh view of the world opens up and she stares out across a city partially shrouded in the trailing smoke from thousands of puffing chimneys. Leaning over, she squints down at the narrow road nearly forty floors below. She’s never seen things from this angle and the grid of streets forms such a maze of odd interlocking shapes, it makes her dizzy and she abruptly steps back down to the path.

Evie makes her way past the greenhouse on her way back inside.

Skirting the lawn, she passes the pond and, distracted again by the mermaid’s plight, stops by the dark water. Bending over, she reaches for a second time under her cheek, this time with both hands, and wrenches sharply. With a twist and a pull, Evie lifts her clear in a single solid movement, raising her until she is creakily upright, once again balanced on the rigid curl of her tail.

She smiles inwardly. Even she sometimes forgets that below the supple membrane, nearly perfect in the brilliance of its imitation, underneath the layers and layers of code designed to ensure she behaves at all times as decorously as a debutante, she has a titanium and carbon-fibre spine.

The snow falls with increasing vigour as the day progresses. Outside Matthew’s window, buffeted by the rising current of warmer dirty air from the streets far below, it is blown hither and thither.

They are sitting close to the glass. Her husband’s Go board, an antique slab carved from Shin Kaya, is on the rug between them, the light flickering on the yellow wood.

He sits cross-legged in his bathrobe, studying her latest move. She has left an opening and he pounces with one of his black stones, capturing a line of her whites. He removes them, collecting them in his palm, and drips them clackety-clack through his fingers into her pot. They have been playing for an hour or more and the contest has been closely fought but is now in its end game and as the final positions are closed down, she is surrendering ground. It is the part of the process that Simon hates. He likes to win doesn’t he , he murmurs facetiously.

It makes it more fun , she replies, enjoying that she has managed to taunt him.

Yes, for him. We could win sometimes you know. It wouldn’t do any harm.

I’m not like that , she replies mildly. I don’t need to win. I like to give him the pleasure.

She lays her next stone with a crisp tap and then her husband his, and the final stages of play wash back and forth until there is no more that either can do. He counts up their respective territories and although close, his score narrowly beats her own. As she knew it would, having performed the calculation ten minutes before and adjusted her tactics accordingly. She is programmed to intuit his needs, while always being mindful to be covert. No one likes a clever clogs.

He leans back. ‘You’re getting better,’ he says, ‘I thought you had me on the run back then.’ He gazes into her face. She smiles back. The last hour has been warm and affectionate and he has touched her wrist on multiple occasions while confiding both common and intimate things. They have been like best friends. It has been like the early days.

He is also quite recovered from his recent illness. Maybe she just allowed herself to get things out of proportion. Allowed Simon to get under her skin.

Afterwards, she joins Daniels in the kitchen. He is sitting at the table rubbing polish into his boots. The collar of his shirt is neatly buttoned down and a thick cable-stitch sweater covers his chest. He has also slicked flat his unruly hair.

‘You look smart,’ she says. He looks a bit like historical pictures she has seen of rural gamekeepers or fishermen, proud of their profession, the image taken on a river bank or in a field.

‘Thank you,’ he murmurs absentmindedly, returning the lid to the polish. He holds the toecaps of his boots to the light, displaying their gleam. ‘Although I’m not sure why I’m taking so much trouble. Five minutes in this filth’n’wet and all my work will be undone.’