Paul Braddon: The Actuality

She smiles weakly. She wants to believe him but just can’t. Rather it feels like after four uneventful decades, she has only just realised that she’s been living the whole time on a cliff-edge.

In her bedroom, Evie sits in front of her dressing table and takes from the centre drawer, behind her hair brush, a hinged case. She unclasps it and selects a steel pincer with spring-loaded grip. Opening her mouth, she inserts the hook into her gum and, compressing the handle, lifts back the membrane. The skin of her gums has a tendency to recede, leaving gaps permeable to moisture, and needs to be periodically reset. She has the mirror in front of her, but operates by touch alone, repelled by the sight of her exposed jaw, which, with the roots of her teeth screwed into titanium glistening with gel, appears thrusting and robotic.

She replaces the pincer in its box and holds out her arms. She flexes her wrists, bending her hands back and forth, sensing the interaction of piston and lever in her narrow wrists.

Afterwards, going over to the bed, she takes from under her pillow an ankle-length nightdress. She was programmed to desire traditional things. What they called at the time her trousseau – the term hopelessly antiquated – has long since been worn to threads and she must now dress in what Daniels buys her in the shops below. He searches second-hand stalls for the fabrics she likes, pleasing himself as much as her when he comes back with something conservative and pretty. She is a lover of frocks, she can’t help it, and nowadays who else would even think of claiming that? Most of his choices are a success and it makes the task easier that her taste is consistent. When he spectacularly misfires – like last year when he brought her a bag of his own daughter’s castoffs, including a fluorescent self-healing nanoflec all-in-one – there is little she can do to compromise. Of course it would all be so much easier if she could accompany him on his expeditions, but that will never be allowed.

There are no curtains in her room to close, as she no longer has a window. The room she was given when she arrived was next to her husband’s with an adjoining door. That one had had a large window but she spent too many hours staring out of it and it was decided that it was preventing her from settling. Daniels did his best to make the alternative space cheerful, painting the walls a sunny pink (‘morning rose’ it said on the can) and the woodwork in cream. You’d never think it had been a storage room for luggage.

She climbs into bed and lies under the covers. She is aware that this is programmed behaviour to make her appear more human, but a cushioned surface minimises pressure points and reduces long term wear. Also, her charger is built into the mattress, making a direct connection unnecessary.

She lies without moving. Literally not stirring a muscle. She can even go without breathing in this state. The calm allows her to think, and she wonders, as she often does, about the building beneath her. Is there anyone there similar to her? She imagines meeting such a creature – the encounter like staring in a mirror, saying the same things when they speak. Although she really does not want any more Evelyns around, accentuating her shortcomings.

The silence in her head, which she had enjoyed earlier, grows oppressive. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs, but still Simon does not reply. How long will he keep up his cruel strop? However much they annoy each other, they are cohabitees of the same small capsule. Besides she wants to ask him again about the hova from earlier. Whether he really meant what he said that it was spying. Maybe he was just trying to ruffle her, although she knows what she saw. Despite the shaded windscreen, she could clearly make out three sets of eager eyes, the glow from the controls burning in the orbs.

Her mind wanders back to the very beginning, back to her wedding day, forty years before. She does not recollect arriving at the chilly country church. She only remembers standing at the back in a puff-sleeved dress, bodice sparkling with pearls in the limestone light, and gazing down at the bouquet in her hands, examining the novelty of her fingers as curious devices. Through her veil, the blurred backs of the small congregation are turned away. Unaware of her arrival, Matthew waits by the altar, quietly studying the window ahead and its depiction of the banishment of the first humans from the Garden of Eden. The small man and woman being chased from the exotic greens of one frame into the desert yellows of the next, by menacing figures with flaming swords.

It is the first time she has seen him and she has no reference point against which to compare his tall silhouette. She falls in love on the spot, just as she was programmed to, deep down at a binary level – the downward motion, so lovely, it is like flying… had they any idea of the sensation they gifted her? – but without which she would have plucked at her feathers like a caged bird or hanged herself like a handmaid. Thinking of it now, she gets the same light involuntary flutter, even though she worked out years ago that her memories of the event were composed and popped into her head like pills to keep her sane because as Evelyn, she’d require the legitimacy of such a ceremony.

With that final lonely thought, Evie switches her primary functions to standby and closes down.

A loud crash – a brief avalanche of sound from the garden – brings her to consciousness. The wind has built in strength. Because of their altitude, in winter, even despite the sheltering wall, it is capable of mischief and destruction. Maybe a trellis has blown down or a shrub been uprooted. Once one of the massive stone pots that stand at each of the four corners of the lawn was tipped onto its side and rolled like a giant medicine ball across the grass.

She lies still, continuing to listen, but apart from satisfying her curiosity, there is no reason to investigate. She is only partially recharged and her skin is in rejuvenation mode – the tingle lulling her. She will stay where she is.

Then there is another crash and a muffled curse.

Well?

Simon’s sudden return jolts her into full alertness. ‘You’re here!’ she says, trying to conceal her relief. She feels a pleasant warmth flush her chest. Followed fast by resentment that he chose to punish her for so long. That he gets away with bullying her.

You’re just going to ignore it?

She focuses on the distant sounds.

There are people out there. People in the garden.

‘It could be Daniels?’

Yeah, probably putting out the bins. It’s four in the morning! Putting out the bins is Daniels’s euphemism for going outside to smoke.

‘What should I do?’

Get out of bed, for one. When she still does not move, he adds in a voice that echoes around her head like a klaxon, Get up now!

Being away has not improved his attitude. She can tell he’s scared and is now making her so.

The corridor is quiet, but the sounds from outside are louder now that there is one less door to penetrate.

‘Where should I go?’ It is all probably nothing, but he has her so alarmed that she just wants to hide.

Go to the music room. We can see what’s what from there.

She runs down the hall to the door and reaches for the handle. Quietly , he says, open it quietly and slowly. The limit of his advice.

The air in the music room is still and cold. She stops in the doorway. In the darkness, the tall windows provide a panorama of the night garden. A hovacar sits on the lawn at an angle with one corner propped on the wall of the pond. Its doors are retracted and a light on its roof sends an icy beam scything through the shrubbery to cast a nightmarish web of shadows crawling over the ceiling.