Paul Braddon: The Actuality

Evie’s head is spinning. Finding out that she could be at risk from scientists wanting to pull her to pieces, or if not them, from police vacuuming out her mind, is a terrifying reward for her harmless eavesdropping.

Then there was what her husband said about her – that she is incapable of feeling. She knows he doesn’t really believe that – but then why did he say it?

Don’t claim I didn’t warn you , Simon interrupts with maximum superiority. What was it he called you? Oh yeah, ‘a rich man’s toy’.

He didn’t mean it like that.

I think he did!

She wants to run away but it won’t help her evade Simon’s vindictiveness, so she turns inwardly, replying in the very fiercest tone she can muster, Oh, why don’t you just leave me alone!

The day after the police visit, it begins to snow. The temperature overnight has dropped steeply and Evie watches from the library cupola as the first flakes fall on the shrubbery and drift against the glass. They cling briefly and slide down.

It is mid-morning. Daniels is outside, despite the turn in the weather, with a rope around the shoulders of the mermaid, attempting to straighten her. The tendons in his neck stand out as he tugs. The mermaid’s metal hips groan and whine, but she refuses to oblige. She is a small thing but surprisingly stubborn.

Evie watches them struggle. If only I was as resilient, she thinks. This morning, she’s not been able to concentrate on anything, half-expecting the police to return unannounced and take her away.

The library is the largest room in the apartment and the only one to have a second level. The glow from the domed skylight creates a wintery pool on the floor below, across which the shadows of snowflakes drift like feathers.

From her early years, she recalls milder seasons when it didn’t snow every winter and the summers were moist and changeable. Now the same stale heat hangs around from May to September, drying gulley-like cracks into the soil and turning the leaves a premature brown. It was all down to the failure of the Gulf Stream, the flow of which abruptly slowed over the course of her first decade – now thirty years ago.

Up here she keeps her precious copy of Jane Eyre , an early edition signed ‘yours faithfully, C. Brontë’. Matthew presented it to her bound with tinsel on her fifth Christmas, the silver wrapping winking under the lights on the fir tree Daniels had erected and shown her how to decorate. As she fingered through it, as clueless and gummy as an overgrown child, he told her it was not only rare but possibly the only one in existence. A nervous warning. Like her, she was being led to understand, it has a skin that needs to be looked after. If he really considers her a mere mechanical, insensitive to kindness, why would he have taken the trouble to source such a special gift? Maybe back then, he was wanting to let himself believe.

Between its pages, she keeps one of her few secrets – a letter found between the cushions of one of the library chairs. It is from Evelyn’s father to Matthew, describing his daughter’s health and how her treatment is touch-and-go. There are barely enough lines to cover a single side but still room for the underscored words ‘it is best if you do not come’ to appear in both opening and closing sentences.

Needing company to distract her, she descends the steep spiral steps, crossing the polished parquet in her stockings – one of the few pairs which Daniels hasn’t had to darn – and exits through the French windows.

Outside, she crosses the icy paving of the terrace, placing her feet with care. She has excellent balance – as good as any prima ballerina – but in conditions like this, anyone could have an upset.

Daniels is taking a break from his attempts to put right the poor mermaid and is sitting smoking on the wall of the pond; snow piling on the peak of his cloth cap.

‘How’s it you can always make me feel colder than I am already?’ he asks as she approaches. She hasn’t thought to put on any extra layers and now that he has drawn her attention to it, is aware of the prickle of the tiny flakes of snow on her bare shoulders. She has also forgotten shoes. Her stockings, her rare good ones, will be ruined like all the rest.

‘I’m fine,’ she replies, looking across to the corner of the garden, where the police hova skimmed the wall and brought down a wedge of brickwork, crushing the roses and brittle lavender.

‘Of course you are,’ he grunts, finishing his cigarette and grinding it under his toe. ‘Advantage of youth.’ Although of course he knows the real reason is that she is not restricted by the narrow temperature range a human can only tolerate. He gazes down at the bent statue. ‘Hardly what I’d call driving with due care and attention – hitting both the wall and our friend here. Anyone else do that and they’d be banged up.’

‘Do you think they’ll be back?’ she asks.

‘Hard to tell. They’ve only really got one purpose these days and that’s stopping the property of rich people getting into the hands of the poor ones. Not sure how bothering us helps.’ He prods the statue’s arm with his toe, as if after all his efforts, that is all that’ll be needed. ‘By rights we should be entitled to claim for the damage, but if it’ll mean we’ve seen the back of them, I think it’s best to let it pass.’

‘Are you going to be able to get her upright again?’

‘I’m not sure. It ain’t just her, it’s also the pipe which feeds the spout inside the shell for the water to flow out of – the lead’s bent. Unfortunately, unless your husband is prepared to get in help – and we’ve had quite enough in the way of strangers poking their noses around in the last twenty-four hours – she’s probably going to have to remain where she is for now.’

‘We need the king to bring all his horses and men,’ she says with a grin.

‘Yeah, sure.’ He looks at her as if she is being serious rather than whimsical. Although she does have form in this regard. Her lack of basic knowledge has always seemed to her ironic, given that Evelyn was an accomplished academic. Evie’s onboard cyclopedia was designed to access remote proprietary information banks, but these relied on an uninterrupted connection not maintained for the last twenty years, and anyway never lived up to their promise, even in the beginning.

Daniels has a TV in his room which even he doesn’t watch because of ‘the endless government propaganda’. Evie has had to acquire knowledge the old-fashioned way, through conversation and books. As a result, in the early days she made frequent basic errors, Matthew leading her along in her misconceptions for the sheer comedy of seeing her redden as her confusion and embarrassment mounted. In contrast, Daniels’s gentle correcting of her mistakes was how they had first bonded. Not that she was ever allowed to learn anything that really mattered.

‘Let me help,’ she says.

Daniels huffs, glancing at her thin shoulders. A little mound of snow has collected within the delicate sculpting of her clavicles which on a human would have instantly melted. He likes to believe the pretence that she is as puny as she appears.

‘He doesn’t like you to get involved in such things, and it’s not just his old-fashionedness – it may escape your attention,’ nodding at her fragile clothes, ‘that I’m the only laundry service in town.’

He’s right, we don’t need to get involved , Simon murmurs. Inside the apartment he had been quiet but it is as if the cold air has woken him. She misses him when he is absent but then invariably wishes him away when he is back. She really should start to learn.