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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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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.

‘It’s the police,’ she whispers, reading its side… She knows nothing much more about them than that their purpose is to protect. ‘Everything is all right.’

Simon is keeping quiet.

‘It is all right, isn’t it?’

I’m not sure. This is all completely new to them both. If he was really intended to be her guide, and not just an uninvited gatecrasher as she sometimes imagines, they should have made him better informed and less just opinionated.

Men in uniforms and helmets, hunched over rifles, emerge from the shrubbery onto the path and everything is now beginning to look not really all right at all.

The four-foot high mermaid, who until now has perched on a rock to provide the fountain, has been knocked over by the hova and is lying face down in the water.

* * *

Daniels lets the police into the kitchen through the outside door. He must have been asleep in his chair again – in the winter reluctant to relinquish the heat from the oven for the chill of his bed.

She listens from the music room doorway. The police think they are responding to a call but are strangely unable to say who made it. They want to speak to Matthew, but Daniels explains that he is poorly and asleep and reminds them tersely that it is not even dawn. He invites them to return in the morning. Despite their bold manner of arrival, he seems to have the better of them as if they know that their credentials are weak, but they will still not leave without a room-by-room check – ‘Just to make sure everything is all right’.

‘What are you checking for?’ Daniels asks. Even through the wall, she can hear his anxiety.

‘Intruders,’ the policeman replies flatly.

‘Intruders? What intruders? There aren’t any intruders.’

‘From the streets.’

‘From the streets? How could anyone have got in here from the streets? We’re thirty-five storeys up.’

‘They get in everywhere. How many live here?’

‘Just Mr Davenport, myself and… Evie.’ She picks up on his hesitancy to include her. Maybe for police purposes she doesn’t really count.

While they continue to speak, the kitchen door opens and a pair of the black jackets crowd their way down the hall. The elbow of one brushes right through the Tibetan vase, causing it to vanish and re-emerge upside down and flat, as if printed on the wall.

‘Who is Evie?’ The conversation in the kitchen continues.

‘She’s a relation of Mr Davenport.’

Evie slips away from the music room door and looks around urgently but there is nowhere here for her to hide.

The policeman enters. His rifle is wedged into his shoulder as if he may have to at any moment shoot.

On seeing her he comes to a stop. The gun barrel is tilted down at her and only inches from the daisy chain embroidery stitched across the chest of her nightdress.

What do I do? she asks Simon, petrified.

Act normal. If you can.

‘Miss?’ the policeman says, his voice, buried behind the chin of his helmet, amplified by a helmet speaker. He slants the gun away. ‘Everything all right here?’

Just – act – normal, Simon repeats, giving each word emphasis.

‘Yes,’ she murmurs, unable to look at him directly. Terrified like this, she is ironically at her most human.

He gazes down at her. The blue light from the cruiser parked in the garden strobes the tinted visor of his helmet, revealing for a second a pair of blood-shot eyes. A red dot pulses on the camera attached to his shoulder padding. The lens pans the room, whirring at speed past her, then sluggishly returning to settle on her face where it hovers without blinking, filming her staring eyes.

5

The police come again the following morning as promised. This time they arrive by the elevator and there are just the two of them. Evie has been told to stay out of sight, which is fine as she is still shaken by the night’s events. She listens through her door as they are admitted into the hall by Daniels and led to the library. She can hear the effort in his voice to be courteous.

‘What an amazing space,’ one of them says, a woman, on observing the garden through the window from the doorway. ‘I heard about it from the guys who came earlier, but without seeing it for yourself, you’d not believe that something like this could exist anywhere any more, let alone all the way up here. As she enters the room, she gasps again, taking in the double-height space with the ornate circular skylight. ‘It’s like a stately home in the sky.’

Evie hears Daniels take in a tray of coffee – she can smell also that he has made pastries, trying to win them over big-time. ‘Oh, no sign of austerity here I see,’ the woman says loudly. Evie can almost feel him wince every time the woman opens her mouth and he shuts the library door behind him with an irritated thump.


After another half hour, Daniels comes to her room. ‘Evie,’ he says, ‘they want to speak to you.’ He sounds apprehensive and immediately she becomes so herself. ‘They say they just want to ask you some questions about what you may have seen. If it comes up, you must answer that you are Mr Davenport’s niece.’

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