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Paul Braddon: The Actuality

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Paul Braddon The Actuality

The Actuality: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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She belongs to me – property rights will prevail. Evie is a near-perfect bioengineered human. In a broken-down future England where her kind has been outlawed, her ‘husband’ Matthew keeps her safe but hidden. When her existence is revealed, she must take her chances on the dark and hostile streets where more than one predator is on the hunt. The Actuality

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The roof of a hovacar rises above the brickwork, the whine of its motors masked by the rain. The window of its cabin peers over like a swollen eye. There are people inside. Her vision is able to resolve the shadow detail and she identifies the ovoid form of their heads through the tinted nanospex. The car rises further, remaining just short of trespassing, staring down, its bonnet tilted towards her as it lingers in the air, headlights in her eyes.

Then, with a damp whoosh, it descends again from sight.

It’s the same one, Simon announces menacingly.

‘What do you mean?’

The car. It had a dent in the front wing in the same place as the one from two days ago and the same scrape down the side. We’ve seen it before. He remembers this sort of detail. The sort of detail she does not.

‘And?’ Her voice is distracted.

Evelyn, we’ve seen it before, he repeats, becoming exasperated as he so easily does.

‘So?’ She is staring at her hand, concerned about the damage she has managed to stupidly do. Bloody gel runs from her pricked fingertip, in which the thorn is deeply embedded, down the back of her hand and under her cuff where it blends and congeals into a sticky pink goo.

I think it is spying on us.

2

Spying!

Simon’s warning pulses around Evie’s head, as painful as the throb in her injured finger which she has covered with a handkerchief.

She hurries past the music room, the soaked skirt of her dress sticking to her thighs. It is dark inside and the piano that stands close to the full-height windows is almost one with the shadows behind.

Stepping over the puddle under the steps, she enters through the door at the end and, slipping off her wet shoes so she does not leave muddy prints on the tiles, joins the warmth of the kitchen.

Daniels is hunched over a chopping board. The room smells powerfully of garlic, onion, mushroom and coriander as he slices through vegetables and herbs from the garden, using one of the knives he keeps honed to a razor edge. In this regard they are self-sufficient, immune from supply chains constipated by energy shortages and the weather, and the wide-ranging restrictions imposed by on/off government rationing.

‘This’ll be ready in twenty,’ Daniels says. ‘He’s asked for you to take it to him.’ Daniels glances over his shoulder and sees that she is drenched, her hair hanging lankly around her face. He adds with a note of exasperation, ‘Leave those wet things out for me or they’ll be ruined.’

‘Thank you,’ she says, as she crosses behind him to the door to the hall; feeling guilty for not thinking about the work she has made.

‘Twenty minutes,’ he calls after her. ‘No longer, or it’ll spoil.’

He continues to mutter to himself, after she is gone, ‘What was it that she’s supposed to have – “elevated intelligence”, something like that they called it – although it’s leaving out of her head even as much as a dollop of common sense that I don’t get!’ The door is already closed but her auditory perception has deteriorated little over the last forty years and she hears him as clearly as if he’d been speaking directly into the channel of her ear.


You know why he wants us, Simon says.

She doesn’t answer, doesn’t want to talk about it with him. This conversation always ends the same way.

It’s her birthday.

‘It’s not her birthday,’ she snaps, ‘it’s the anniversary of her death. And don’t call him “he”, it’s rude. His name is Matthew.’

He’ll still want it.

She jolts her head in exasperation, vigorously enough so that he can feel it and know that she is cross with him.

She closes the door to her room and pulls the sodden cardigan over her head, dropping it on the rug – before guiltily picking it up and laying it flat on the chair.

So what are you going to do to stop him?

‘Nothing.’ She unwraps the handkerchief and examines her finger. The hole made by the thorn has already crusted over but it doesn’t stop it hurting.

Nothing what? She feels his indignation behind her brow, fanned by his powerlessness. Passenger not pilot. This is not what he is here for, to spoil her pleasures, but to keep her safe, spot threats that she might otherwise miss. Maybe the problem is that there’s never been enough for him to do and that is why he finds fault all day, stressing her about one thing after another until she can barely think straight.

‘Nothing,’ she affirms after a delay, taking a towel from the drawer and briskly drying her hair; tugging at her scalp, wringing the ends. All more roughly than she would normally.

You must…

‘He is my husband,’ she replies curtly, choosing from the wardrobe a dress decorated with summer flowers as if she is attending an afternoon tea party in a friend’s garden. An event where there would be trestle tables spread with paper cloths under the trees, plates of triangular sandwiches shorn of their crusts and pieces of chopped fruit floating in a bowl of punch. Not that she has ever been to such a thing. Not that she has any outside friends. Not that she would be allowed to go even if she had.

Listen to yourself! he comes back with. This is not the Dark Ages. We have rights.

Ignoring him, she lowers the dress over her head, shimmying it down over her clammy skin.

Turning again to the mirror she brushes her hair. Now that it is dry again, it has lost its dark flush and turned mousy. Surprising really that the colour should be so unexceptional when he could have had any shade. She ties it with a silver ribbon – a weakness for ribbons, whatever her mood, is something she can do nothing about, it is etched into her coding.

May I remind you what happened last time?

She huffs. Now he is twisting things. Nothing happened last time other than what a married couple rightly gets up to in private. She closes the wardrobe door sharply, rattling the full-length mirror, as if it might somehow shut him down.

Evelyn, you are not as young as you think.

What’s that got to do with anything? She bites down on her lip, trying to remain calm, staring at her reflection, refusing him a reply.


Evie returns to the kitchen. The tray is on the side with a bowl of soup and a crisp white napkin rolled in a silver ring. Daniels is reading his newsplastic, grinning to himself, his face lit by its shifting kaleidoscopic glow. He is sitting beside the warm oven, his legs crossed at the ankle, his heels propped on the handle of the stove door. He starts to laugh out loud.

‘What is it?’ she asks and tries to see over his shoulder. But he folds it closed and the radiance fades. Matthew has reprimanded him before for allowing her to see things that can make no sense unless one has experience of the world. Things such as forests being scythed to the ground by tractors taller than houses and terrified animals screaming as they flee from the cutters. Or lines of refugees crossing a bare landscape, casting shadows as thin as sticks, singed by a fiery sky. Such ideas only serve to leave her unsettled – confused and moody – and understandably he prefers an unruffled existence. As she should too, although a little natural curiosity was always part of her design.

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