The Machine

21

In through the front door he falls, because Beth can’t prop him up and work the key and keep herself steady, and when she feels herself going she drops him. Better that he take the soft landing than she fall with him, and she bear the brunt, break something. That would ruin everything. He’s taken worse in his time. And, she reminds herself, this him is just a form. A shell.

He lands softly, his skin making the only noise on the flooring. Nothing from his mouth. The lift was broken – the lift is always broken – so his wheelchair is still down at the bollards, waiting to be folded and lugged upstairs. She won’t need it. Vic’s not so gone that he can’t be coerced into walking when he needs to, or into supporting some weight on feet which almost seem to drag their toes along the floor with each step. Still, in case. Maybe, she thinks, the muscles will have atrophied a little, and maybe he couldn’t sustain this over any great distance. You read about that; it would drive him mad. She would hate to have him back and then have to do years of physiotherapy. Still, she reasons, that would be better than nothing. She pulls him inside the flat, manoeuvring him onto his back. She leaves him there while she runs to the stairs, down, to where she left the chair. It’s already gone. Some of the residents are like magpies. Finders keepers, if anything is left for more than a minute. She stands there and looks around, to see if any curtains twitch. She would go to the door and hammer on it and demand her property back, if she could work out where it had gone – but she’s completely alone. Not a peep.

Back in the flat Vic is exactly where she had left him. He’s gone limp now, all the use of his muscles seemingly gone. She can tell as soon as she looks at him, and it almost makes the getting him up here – how easily he responded to her – like a dream.

Come on, she says. She puts her hands under his armpits and she tries to heave him along the floor towards the section of the open-plan room designated as a living room. It’s easy on the laminate floorboards, but the sofas sit across a large rug. It’s no longer its original colour. She can’t remember what the colour was, or even if it’s hers. Maybe it was always here, a part of the flat. She leaves Vic where he lies and pulls the sofas away from the rug, and then moves the things from the coffee table and carries that to the edge of the room.

Only a second, she says to Vic. As if he cares. She rolls the rug up, not doing the best job of it. When it’s in a flabby cone she pushes it against the far wall, towards the kitchen door. She pushes the sofas and table back, and then resumes her dragging of Vic. She thinks, he’s heavier than he used to be, and then she laughs at this: because when did she ever drag him?

She thinks about the man in his regiment who saved him, who dragged him away from the IED. He was a hero, taking the brunt. Trying to save the rest of them. Managing to save most of them. He dragged Vic away, to get him to medical help. Beth thinks about contacting him: they could compare notes. She keeps laughing at the idea as she pulls Vic’s body along. At the sofa she tries to heave him up, but she can barely do it. She climbs up onto the sofa and pulls. It’s a strain, and the sofa threatens to tip onto its back, but she manages it: his shoulders first, then his back – his head lolling the whole time, as if it were unable to support itself – and then his hips. From the floor she picks up his legs and swings them around, and it takes effort, but then he’s lying prone on the length of the sofa.

That fucking wheelchair, she says. She stands over him and looks down at his face, which has nothing to it. No expression, not even enough to call it expressionless. It’s like he’s dead, but the blood still pumps. In coma patients it’s said that the eyes can still be seen moving under the lids, proof that they’re dreaming. Vic’s got nothing. What do I do with you now? she asks.

22

Beth lays out everything she’ll need for him on the floor nearest the sofas. She’s decided that she needs to impose some order. She’s going to try scheduled and strictly adhered-to toilet trips, to prevent accidents. Apparently his bowel and bladder have kept their muscle memory: they’re relatively stable.

(He can hold it a few hours, was how the people in the home sold it to her. A few hours, and most of the time he’ll make it through the night.)

Still, she’s got adult diapers in case she needs them – better that, than clean the sofas and the floors, and she intends to make him sleep in them – and baby wipes. She’s got a changing mat, which has blue ducks printed along it. Again, the ignominy will be better than the alternative. She’s got rubber gloves and bleach and cleaning products, and she’s got the materials for a bed bath, in case she can’t get him in and out of the real thing: sponges, bucket-deep troughs for water, flannels and a scrubbing brush that’s marked SKINKIND but looks more like something she would use on the floors. She’s got pamphlets and leaflets that they gave her at the clinic, containing advice that seems like common sense – preventing bed sores, fungal infections – and telephone numbers to call if she needs help. One of the pamphlets is called YOU, YOUR PARTNER AND THE MACHINE. She flicks through it, and it’s full of pictures of loving couples where she cannot tell which one of them is vacant and which one is just doting. She’s got most of the food out as well, cans of spaghetti and beans and keep-fresh bread, and bundles of snacks, crisps and nuts and dried fruit. When Vic has a bad day, she doesn’t want to starve herself, or him. She doesn’t even know what he’ll eat, so she’s got Ready Brek as well. It’s too hot for porridge, she knows – it’s winter food, traditionally – but she’s seen them feed it to people who otherwise have trouble with eating solids in the movies. Food and bottles of water – lots of small ones, that she can keep close. The fridge is full of them. She’s got changes of clothes for him, already out and sorted: underwear in one pile, tracksuit bottoms in another, t-shirts in a third. She assumes that she won’t need anything else: there’s no chance of it getting cold in here. It takes her the rest of the day to make sure everything is in its own pile and accessible, and that she’s got enough of everything. She doesn’t know how Vic will react when she starts the process, so now, while he’s not a danger to anybody, she’s taking the chance to prepare herself.

Tablets. She notices that she needs to buy tablets: painkillers. Nothing insane, just ibuprofen, something like that. In case she needs them, in case Vic needs them. She checks on him, and he looks like he’s asleep. She can see his chest rise and fall. She doesn’t want to touch him. He might wake up. She gathers her purse and her keys, tucks them into her pockets, and then pulls the front door shut quietly behind her. With any luck she can be gone and back without him noticing.

(There’s a second when she imagines him waking up and having some sort of fit. They do that, she’s been told. She’s only seen one once, and it was terrifying: flailing and howling. She wonders what the neighbours will think: fat woman with all the daughters, holding a glass to the wall to better hear what manner of howling, exactly, and how to define it so that she can whinge about it loudly.)

She goes down the stairs and along the front, almost running, past the restaurants to the little Tesco. She can see that there’s a queue for the pharmacy, but it isn’t until she gets closer that she realizes it’s the boy in front of her, talking to the pharmacist. She can see the back of his shaven head: in thick puckered pink skin is the line of a tattoo running right across. It covers the width of his head: and the hair doesn’t grow on it, not even slightly. Not even fluff. She’s never noticed it before. She’s never been behind him before. She can hear his conversation with the man behind the counter.

What the fuck? he asks. That’s fucking real. The man behind the counter has got an ID between his fingers, and he’s examining it closely, but he doesn’t have to. Even from behind them Beth can see that the plastic is peeling, that it’s been tampered with. He can’t be older than fourteen. Maybe younger.

Sorry, says the shop assistant. You know the rules, I need to see ID.

This is ID. What the fuck else would you call this? The boy rubs his hands over his head, and then turns around. He glances at Beth. He nods, like he knows her. She knows who I am, she’ll tell you I’m not a fucking addict.

Beth’s gut lurches. She doesn’t know what she’ll say.

It’s not about somebody vouching for you, the assistant says. It’s about the ID. I’m sorry, but please move aside. He lays the ID flat on the table: Beth can see that the picture’s grainy, not even a sanctioned photo. Shoehorned in. There are customers waiting.

Fuck right off, the boy says. He picks up the card and waves it in the assistant’s face. Fucking real, you cunt. Suddenly, he sweeps his arm across the counter, and the stand of cough sweets, the charity collection box, the contraception/STD leaflets, all go flying across the floor in front of them. I don’t need this shit, the boy says. He looks at Beth again, and he kisses his teeth at her. From the front, this close up, he’s younger still. Twelve, maybe. Maybe younger. His hair is blond and his eyes are an almost yellow shade of green, and his teeth are ragged enough to need braces, but his skin hasn’t yet met acne, and there’s not even a hint of stubble across his top lip. There’s a threat in the way that he looks at her, but she can’t take it seriously. He’s still a child.

He marches off towards the door, past the security guard – the boy turns, faces the guard, holds his arms outstretched as he walks past, all pomp that he’s seen in some television show about worse places than this – and then out of the shop. The assistant comes round to the front. He falls to his knees in the weariest, most protracted way, which says, I’ve done this too many times.

This place, he says. He doesn’t know Beth, or who she is. He’s assuming she’ll agree. She squats down and helps him with the leaflets. She scoops them up and puts them on the side.

I’ve seen him around, she says.

Yeah, he tries it every few weeks.

What’s he trying to buy?

Diazepam. He says it’s for his dad.

They don’t need a prescription for it?

Not since last year. Just ID. He tilts his head back and breathes in. Right. What can I get you?

Ibuprofen, Beth says. A few packets.

He takes the own-brand down from the shelf and lines them up. Three?

Yeah, that should do.

Anything else?

You say I can buy diazepam now?

He sighs. One pack per customer, and you have to have ID. It gets logged.

Okay, Beth says, pulling the ID card from her purse. It’s just in case.

Yeah, useful to keep them in the cupboard, he says. She isn’t sure if he’s joking or not. She waits as he runs it through, then pays for it with cash – she’s got a lot in her wallet, to pay for takeaways or whatever when she’s knee-deep in rebuilding Vic – and the assistant acts like she’s not there, suddenly. She’s not sure that she cares.

Back along the path, and she reads the instructions as she walks. Where most medicines are vague and loose, this is insistent. NO MORE THAN FOUR PER DAY. The instructions carry provisos and warnings that the makers of the product are not responsible, etc., etc. TAKE WITH WATER AND FOOD. Beth wonders how good Vic is at eating. She wonders if he’ll recognize his surroundings, and if that will have an effect. Maybe he’ll reject all this: the flat, Beth, the food and the Machine. Maybe he’ll rally against it. She stands at the top of the steps. She didn’t need the pills, not really. She looks at the door, her front door, and she puts her hands on the wall of the stairwell.

Come on, she says. The woman with all the children is looking at her from her window. Beth wonders if she saw Vic. She’s perpetually spying on everything. What would she think he was? She’d make assumptions. Have they ever even said a word to each other? Beth can’t remember. She stands and stares at the building: anything to keep her from having to go back into the flat straight away. When she’s in there she has to start, and once she’s started she can’t leave until this is done. However long it takes, marathon or sprint, she tells herself.

Come on. She walks to her front door – the curtains of the neighbour twitch back to their resting place – and she stands there, as if she’s forgotten her keys. She listens for any sound he might be making inside. There’s nothing. She puts her hands on the lock, turns the key, opens the door and goes in – just as warm as outside, even with the fans. She shuts the door. She locks it behind her. She might as well.

23

She sleeps the last night she’ll sleep before she starts working on him properly: the last night when the flat is quiet, when she’s not worried about the implications, or whether he’ll make noise or choke on his tongue. She’s read, on her forums, that this can be harrowing. She’s read reports from husbands, mainly, desperate to get their wives back. How demeaning this is to everybody, how degrading.

The things I’ve seen, one person wrote. I never thought I’d see them like this.

But it was worth it? another nameless forum-user asked.

Oh g yes. Absolutely. Smiley face.

Beth lies in bed and stares upwards. She can see the flaws in the ceiling, where the upstairs neighbours walk heavily. They have an achingly heavy old pram and they keep their baby in it all the time, pushing her around the flat. The creak of their wheels as they do it is maddening, but it keeps the baby quiet. She barely cries. Beth assumes it’s a she. The paint in the ceiling easily cracks, and Beth’s sure it’s got worse. She would repaint it, if it weren’t for Vic, and for the fact that she’ll soon be leaving the flat. When they’re gone she’ll sell the place. Then there’ll be no rush, and it won’t matter how long it actually takes.

She sits on the lip of the bed. It’s just past five, and it’s starting to get light outside. Beth remembers when you used to have to change the clocks, and when some mornings it would be dark. Dressing for school in the pitch black, and walking to the bus as the sky turned pink. Now it goes from blue to yellow in gradient shades. Her bedroom door is already open, so that she can hear Vic if he stirs, and to allow a breeze – the thought makes her laugh – to pass through the flat. She pulls on clothes. She stretches in the doorway. No point in dragging this out.

She makes herself a cup of coffee in the percolator, one of the stronger blends, and the noise wakes Vic’s body up. Its eyes peel apart.

We’re going to get on with this, Beth says. She doesn’t care if the body understands: people talk to pets and babies to stop themselves going mad. To reassure themselves that, in some little way or other, a level of understanding will be reached one day. Whether that’s returning a thrown ball, or a complex understanding of language. Something.

She has a terrifying thought as she pulls tracksuit bottoms from the pile to dress him in: what if she misses a step? What if there’s something intrinsic missing from the Machine? Say, language, or the ability to move. Those parts of the brain. What if she makes Vic again and he’s left without anything, trapped inside that shell. She stands and worries about it. The urge to prevaricate passes.

She pulls Vic’s hospital-issue trousers to his ankles. The smell hits her. She didn’t take him to the loo, her first rule. The one she wasn’t going to break. He’s been sitting here… The nappy he’s wearing is soiled yellow and brown, and his thighs – thick, dark hair, coiled up like springs – are slathered. She starts to cry, and she catches herself, raises her hand to her mouth. She goes to the kitchen for the wipes and the nappies, and then decides against them. It’s too big a job. Instead she stands at his head and puts both her arms under his, trying to heave him to his feet. He’s remarkably compliant today, his muscles helping her slightly on the way. He steps, it seems, or maybe just supports his weight a little, and together they stagger towards the bathroom. Beth doesn’t have the strength to help him in, so she coaxes him to sit on the edge of the bath, and then swings his legs over. From there she pushes him to kneeling. She gets a plastic bag and pulls the nappy away, and all the shit tumbles out and into the pink bathtub. She folds the nappy – the mess all over her hands, and the smell rank and stale in the small windowless room – and puts it in the bag, which then sits in the corner of the room. Beth pulls the showerhead down, covering it in the shit from her hands, and puts the taps on, and then she sprays the showerhead at the end of the bath where Vic isn’t, washing her own hands off, and the taps, and then cupping the water around the showerhead to clean it down. She imagines herself under it, trying to get herself clean.

She doesn’t know what temperature to use, so she finds a level where it’s hot but not scalding. She sprays it onto the nape of Vic’s back and his body doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t know if it even can. If there’s any sort of self-preservation instinct. She read once that we are human because we can’t drown ourselves in shallow bodies of water: because something kicks in. If our faces meet water, adrenaline courses through our bodies, making our bodies thrash out, trying to wake us up if we’re asleep or passed out. Beth pulls the showerhead around Vic’s body and sprays it once, just quickly, onto his face. There’s no movement there, and he doesn’t flinch. She brings it back to the face, and holds it there. She can’t even see him breathing through it. She imagines the water eking its way into his mouth and nose, flooding his lungs. And he wouldn’t even try to stop it.

Back to the mess, and she washes it as best she can. She doesn’t touch it, and she moves the showerhead underneath him as much as she can. She doesn’t want to touch the dirty water that’s flowing out, the bigger parts of debris getting worn down in the thick hot mire of the plughole, the smaller particles flushing upwards, creating a ring around the tub. She holds the showerhead right underneath him, pointing upwards. No movement from him still, even like this, even with the water splashing around him. Fighting against him, almost. Beth wants to stop this, but he’s not even close to clean. She moves the shower around to his thighs and sprays them down, but it’s in the hair, so she has to use her hand. The flat of her palm, the fingers lifted away from the leg. She rubs. And his penis: this shrivelled beetle of a thing, years of being used for nothing but pissing rending it sad and weak. She rubs it with her palm. There was time when that would have been enough, and this would have gone differently. There was a time, she reminds herself, when she wouldn’t be cleaning shit off it.

She moves the showerhead to his arse again, and between the fleshy cheeks, trying to get it all. She keeps having to shower down the bath. Clean then rinse. Repeat. Clean then rinse, and he’s finally done. She washes down the bath with him in it, to make sure she gets it all – all the dirty water that’s somehow found its way between his toes, and into the hair of his shins, and on his fingers. She cleans both the bath and Vic’s body, scrubbing away with a sponge that she knows she’s throwing away as soon as this is done. She looks at him as she puts the sponge into the same bag as the filthy nappy: he’s slumped, penitential on his knees.

From here she knows that she’s moving him to the spare bedroom, to the bed next to the Machine. She knows that the treatments will hurt at first. It’s a pain that he’ll get used to, like having a tooth drilled, once he’s got over the shock. She wonders how long it’ll take to see the first parts of Vic back inside him. How long before he’s recognizable again. She wonders if it will be harder or easier to cause pain to her husband when he’s nothing but a void. A shell, like the Machine itself.

She pulls back the duvet cover and smoothes the sheet down, and she moves anything from the bedside table that could cause a problem. That he could lash out at and accidentally connect with. She leans over and presses the Machine’s power button, but it’s still unplugged: the noise is just the low-level one, the power-saving noise. So she plugs it into the wall and presses the screen again. That initial snarl. The internal fans begin. She can almost see them. Flickering, spinning, covered in dust. The dust flying around inside the Machine. She wonders why so much of it is hollow: when they were designing it, what the space was for. Why they needed so much that had nothing in it.

She remembers something about the brain that she read once, or that she was told: that we only use 20 per cent, something like that. A fraction. So much is untapped. Maybe that’s a myth, she thinks. It seems obtuse to have so much waste, when evolution has pushed us to our limits everywhere else. Maybe, she thinks, it’s just that we don’t understand exactly how it is used. It’s vital, that 80 per cent. It has to be.

In the bathroom she tries to work out how to get Vic’s body out. He’s too slippery so she tries to dry him there and then, rubbing the towel over his back and chest. Then down to his thighs, to get them dry, and his feet, as much as she can. She pictures him slipping in the bath and hitting his head, and then blood everywhere. Imagine cleaning that up, she thinks. She tries to get him to his feet but she can’t get traction, so she ends up in the bath behind him, pulling him to his feet again, and then easing him over the edge to the floor, one leg at a time. Something in him wants to preserve himself: he tries to balance when he can. He hasn’t completely abandoned that. She gets both his feet to the bath mat and then sets about drying the rest of him. Soon she’s on her knees, in front of him, drying his shins. She hasn’t been this close to him in years.

She sits him on the toilet.

Go on, she says. Go now. Nothing comes out so she runs the tap. She knows that’s enough to set most people off. Go on, she says. Then it happens, a slim trickle of piss out of the end of the penis, just enough to say that he’s been. Nothing from the other end. She sets an alarm to go off every four hours, reminding her to take him. She doesn’t want any more accidents. The clock lets her know that the whole process took the best part of an hour. She can’t do that several times a day.

She dresses him, making him step into the pants and the tracksuit bottoms one leg at a time, then pulling them up for him. And a t-shirt, which is a hassle, getting him to hold his arms up as she slips it on. She thinks that a shirt would have been easier to get him into. Stupid, really, never even crossed her mind. A short-sleeved shirt, easy to get on and off, and to regulate heat. Just open it. She kicks herself. Next time, she thinks, and that makes her laugh. As if.

She walks him to the bedroom. The Machine is whirring, and the sound drowns anything else that might be there. It’s like a force field, when you walk through the door. Outside the door there’s nothing, the ambient noise of the cats on the Grasslands and the birds that they’re desperately hunting, and the crying of the fat woman’s daughters and the squeak of the pram wheels from above. In the spare bedroom, with the Machine running, none of that registers. Just that fan, or that power supply, or whatever it is. A buzz, a whirr, a hum. A grinding, almost, if you listen to it for too long; or like anything at all. You can make it into anything. She leads Vic’s body in, moving him foot by foot, and he stops in the doorway. He isn’t looking at the Machine, but his feet plant themselves. Beth has to bend down and shuffle them forward one by one. She’s sure that he’s resisting.

Come on, she says. It’s not that hard. He seems to be leaning backwards, not enough to fall, but enough to change the balance of his body. And there’s a noise, Beth’s sure, coming from his throat. She leans in close: a whine. It might have been there all along, she can’t be sure, but she can hear it now, now that he’s this close to the Machine. He’s reacting to it. Please, she says to Vic. She keeps moving him forward. Onto the bed, sitting first, then she gets behind him and pulls him up the bed. The easiest way to move him. Soon he’s lying down and in the right place. His body seems tense at first, and then she turns his head, so that he can’t see the Machine.

She looks at the clock. She angles it to face them. She’s broken this down into sessions in her mind, an hour at a time to start with. Pick a file, work through it chronologically to keep track of it all – they’re all about thirty minutes long, and the chronology is a structure she’ll need to remember what she’s done. Put it back in the order in which it was taken. She’ll let it talk him through whatever it says, and she’ll let it fill in the gaps. She doesn’t have a choice about that part.

It was always unnerving, wondering where the memories came from when they hadn’t existed before. She thinks about the first time that he remembered something that she didn’t: when he spoke about what he had done for his twenty-first birthday. In reality he had been training, at some camp or other. He had called her up, drunk, and told her how much he liked her. He was so drunk, he said, that he wouldn’t remember it. He slurred it to her down the phone, and she knew that he was lying. He wasn’t as drunk as he claimed. And then, that one day, deep into his treatments, he remembered something completely different. An invented scenario in which they had been on a weekend away together. He asked her if she remembered what they had for breakfast, because he did. Something complicated. So much detail, more than you would normally recall. And none of the connections. And she had to smile and agree, and play along, because those were the rules.

Do we have any photos of that weekend? he asked her, and she said no. She reported it to the company, and they sent her a doctored picture, computer generated.

To help establish the fiction, they said in the attached email. She showed the photograph to Vic and he smiled.

That’s the place, he had said. Yeah, wow.

Beth wondered if there was a bank of such material inside the Machine, to help establish these memories. Pictures of places that the creators had visited; or yanked from brochures, pages torn out to feed into the thing. And maybe whole stories, created by a team of writers. In some ways, she thought, this is the newest form of drama: the creation of something from nothing, a play that’s made to be performed by couples, where one of them is oblivious to the fact that the other is acting. She wonders how that stuff gets inside the patient’s head. If it’s just zeros and ones, binary burned in.

She tries not to think about it too much.

Beth pulls the Crown down from the dock. This won’t hurt, she says to Vic’s body, and she pulls the umbilicus towards him, making it uncoil from where it’s withdrawn inside the Machine. She manoeuvres herself to the other side of the Crown – nearer to the Machine’s control panel, because this is where she’ll need to be – and she leans down to put the Crown onto the head. The panels slide on; a perfect fit. She wonders what the chances are that she and Vic have the same size head. She wonders if she has a large head, or he has a small one. Must be her hair, makes her head seem bigger.

The pads sit exactly on the burned-in scars on his temples, like they’d never left. She’s got some lubricant at the side of the bed, because she’s read that it can make it easier, so she puts some onto her finger and lifts the pads one by one, smoothing the jelly down onto his skin.

Right, she says. I think we’re ready.

Beth presses the Machine’s screen and it lights up. She can see the options. REPLENISH had always been intended to help those with dementia. To prompt them back into life: a secondary effect of the Machine’s powers, and one that the company behind it saw as a lucrative revenue source. There was a huge untapped market there, and the tech was already available at every hospital around the country. Soon it would be in every home that needed it, that was the plan. Fool-proof tech, software, hardware, and those who had loved ones afflicted by too few memories, or too many, could take care of the situation themselves. That was the pitch they gave to shareholders. Beth watched the conference on the internet, back when she was helping Vic herself. She remembers the applause that the announcement got.

REPLENISH. The Machine’s fans kick in at double, maybe triple time, and the thing sounds like it’s growling. The whole screen vibrates beneath her fingers, and she’s barely able to keep her hand there. Each touch is like pins and needles. The file menu appears and she picks the first.

We’re ready? Can you say your name for us? The doctor’s voice fills the room. She wonders how the Machine knows to not take that information, to not turn Vic into the doctor. There’s a lot she doesn’t know. She knows that it works, that’s enough.

Victor McAdams.

And could you state your rank and ID number, for the record?

Captain. Two-five-two-three-two-three-oh-two.

Great. Don’t be nervous, the voice says to him. He laughs. You know why you’re here?

Yes sir.

Don’t call me sir. My name’s Robert. First name terms here, Victor.

Vic.

Vic.

She’s putting him back exactly as he once was. She reasons that this is going to be easier if there are no more lies: if he’s back to being Captain Vic McAdams, scarred in the war, leaving the army by choice. No manufactured photographs. She wants him to be exactly the man he was, and they can go through the process – the healing, the therapists, the PTSD counselling – together, as they should have done in the first place. Can’t pretend that something didn’t happen. Can’t just brush it under the carpet.

On the bed, Vic’s body moves ever so slightly, twitches left and right. His face spasms slightly, and his eyes – Beth didn’t see them close – dart around underneath his eyelids, as if he’s dreaming. There’s no sound from him, only the rustling of his arms on the sheet.

So, tell me why we’re here, Vic.

Because I’ve been having trouble sleeping. There was an explosion, an IED, when we were on a mission. Went off when we were doing a sweep on a hospital which looked abandoned, and we were sloppy. I took the brunt, here and here. Beth can picture Vic pointing. He always pointed the same way: to his skull and then to his arm, as if the hole in his head and the tear through his bicep were the same thing, the same level of damage. I returned home, Vic continues, and was sent to recuperate, and then given leave. I was rewarded for saving my squad, they said.

You’re a hero.

So they say.

And now you’re here?

Because I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I, ah, replay the event. Dreams and such, and lucid dreaming, you called it.

Don’t worry about what I called it.

Fine. Sometimes I’ll be sitting with Beth and—

Beth?

My wife. We’ll be sitting together watching TV or whatever and I’ll zone out, and I’ll be somewhere else. And I could swear it. If she tries to wake me up… She tried to wake me up a few weeks ago and I hit her. And I knew it was her, but still, I hit her. Not because it was her, but I couldn’t stop it. I was somewhere else.

By the end of the hour, Beth’s worse than Vic. She had pictured him convulsing, worst-case scenario, and yet Vic’s body is relatively still. She’s the one who’s been affected. Hearing him talk about her like this, and knowing that this is what she’s putting back into him. That, when he wakes up, he might be back as he was. Her memories of what happened are different from his, though: because she remembers being there, and how he screamed at night, and sweated, and would cling to her when he woke up; and how he worked out all the time, until his skin was glossy and the lines of his scars throbbed; and how he stood in the bathroom for hours, no exaggeration, and used his finger to trace the lines of the scars, up and down, not even realizing that he was doing it, rubbing the already puckered and tender flesh sore; and how she would serve dinner, putting it onto the table at the same time every day, one square meal a day, and he would pick at it, pushing it away, growing ever thinner, while the lines on his face deepened. It never went so far as to be something you could call a disorder, but it was serious enough that she knew there was something really wrong. And she remembered how they could never watch the television shows that they used to, the series about the anti-terrorist group sidelined in favour of cooking shows and renovation shows and soaps, which he used to hate, but which posed no danger of sparking an episode, as he called them. And how, that first year he came home, fireworks night made him like a scared cat, the first bangs prompting him to turn up the volume of the television, and the second round making him put in headphones, and then the way that he shook slightly on the sofa. And how, at his worst, he drank a lot, becoming a cliché, but he hid it from Beth because, he said – when she finally caught him – he was ashamed, and that he thought he had a problem, and when Beth said that it was because of the war, he shrugged and thought about the next drink. And how he said to Beth that they should try again for a child, and she said no, because this was no environment to bring a child into. And how he saw things and remembered things that never happened, long before the Machine got involved, when they argued or reminisced (which was all they ever seemed to do), and Beth would at first contradict him and tell him that he was insane, but then soon, because it was easier, began to placidly agree, and let him have his way. And how he didn’t hit her just once, lashing out in confusion about who she was, but how he hit her a few times. He didn’t do it like an abuser, though: no trying to avoid visible bruises. He got angry and he struck whatever was closest. Four times, before he hit her, it had been the walls of their house. His fists left indents and cracked thick paint. She had been next, the first time because she was close, and she was asking him to get help because of how little he’d been sleeping. The marks underneath his eyes were like bruises on his cheekbones, or warpaint in some action movie. The second and third times were when they were in bed, and he woke up, and then he swung his fists. The fourth time was when Beth gave him the leaflet that the doctor had left them about the Machine, and begged him to consider it seriously. After that, she told him that there wouldn’t be a fifth time.

You hurt me again and this is over, so you have to think about that. What’s most important to you? Pride, or whatever’s left of this?

Beth takes the Crown off his head and puts it back in the dock, and presses stop on the Machine. It winds down: the sound of an oven cooling, the clicks of an engine in the cold. New noises that she’s never heard before and can’t explain. Looking at Vic’s body, Beth sees that it needs water. She hadn’t seen the sweat during the process, but it’s suddenly there, seeping out underneath him, sinking into the mattress.

You need a towel as well, she says. She goes to the kitchen and gets a little bottle from the fridge and a towel from the pile she’s got there, all cheap, bought from the pound shop and designed to be thrown away if need be. Not made for washing; she suspects that they wouldn’t last a proper spin cycle. She uses the towel first, wiping down his chest and then pulling him up, her arm behind his shoulders, rubbing his back down. She props her body behind him and unfolds the towel, laying it flat on top of the sheet. Then she pushes him back down. Relax, she says. She catches herself, talking to it like it’s a sentient being. Like it’s a him, and can understand her. It can’t, not yet.

She stands in the kitchen and opens one bottle of water and drinks it straight down, gulping it. She gasps in between gulps. She wonders at what point he’ll be recognizable again: when Vic will start to seep back into his body. The Machine contains all that is left of who he once was. Already it’s processed his story, the speech-to-text system inside it turning his spoken, quivering memories into data and patching them. Filling in the cracks in his story. Somewhere, inside the Machine, are the exact constituents of what – who – Vic will be. Like a version of him, somewhere, only maybe not arranged in the proper order, and therefore not conscious, and not alive. The God-botherers argue that the soul is a solid thing, a distinct entity, and that when you tamper with it, you destroy it entirely. A soul that’s broken is no soul at all. By that logic, Vic’s soul is simply waiting to be reassembled. What is it, before it becomes whole? Before it works again?

With one bottle done and crushed in her hand, and thrown into the recycling bag, she opens another. She hadn’t noticed how hot she was. And listening to him, being in that room, has given her the start of a headache – are there fumes, from the Machine? Or is it just the heat of the fans, the hard drives, the memory inside the thing burning its way out? Not serious enough to pop the ibuprofen open – she worries that she won’t have enough. They weren’t even meant for her, but for Vic. For when it starts to hurt him. She eyes the diazepam and hopes that she won’t have to use them. Maybe this will go easier than she’s been fearing.

He still hasn’t moved when she gets back into the bedroom. She goes to the Crown, and feels that the pads are still wet with the lubricant, so she puts it straight back onto his head. She knows that listening to the playback of the voices aloud is an indulgence, totally unnecessary. It’s something to make it easier for her. What’s important is the code that’s being buzzed into him by the Machine. But it makes her happier, to hear his voice. To picture that this is how he’s being rebuilt, piece by piece, slotting together like Lego.

We’re ready, Beth says. She presses play.

Captain Victor McAdams.

Okay, Vic. Want to tell me about your last exercise? As many details as you can remember.

No. Not especially, Vic says. Beth can hear the smirk in his voice. He could be such a shit when he wanted to be. Fine, he says, breathing out. A huff, almost. We were somewhere I’m not allowed to say—

You’re allowed to say here.

I’m not.

This is between us.

So it can be between us and I won’t say the name of the place.

Do you think that this is all a trick?

You’re not army. Whatever you’re cleared for, I don’t know. So. You want the rest?

The doctor acquiesces. Please.

We were there, checking out a hospital, and there were only three days left before we moved to the next area. So it’s routine, place has been cleared out. Should be easy. And there’s a school that we checked, right next to this hospital. Hospital used to be a block of flats, but they converted it into whatever. School was empty, and we did it, routine. So we got slack. Beth hears him grit his jaw. His voice tightened when he did it: a level of audible stress. The recording continues: When we got to the hospital – and you have to remember, these things take like half a day to do a sweep, so it’s not something we breeze in and out – we were sloppy. No contact in a week. No shots fired in even longer, maybe three or four weeks. So that meant we were sloppy.

Okay.

On the bed, Vic’s body quivers and shakes. His hands pull themselves closed, making balled fists. His fingernails, which need cutting, dig into his palms. His toes curl over, the way they used to when he came during sex, his feet forming exaggerated arches, his legs twitching.

We went through and I was taking point, and I didn’t see it until too late. Something I triggered that was going to go off, and we were piling through the doorways because we were complacent. I suppose. So when I saw the flash – they do this little flash first, like the ignition on a boiler, the pilot light, you know – and I saw it and I thought, Well, fuck, this is my fault. I take this one.

That’s it?

Made sense. I was sloppy. I triggered it, so it was mine to take. And that means I got like this. There’s the noise of him moving, in the room. I got like this, and it blew shrapnel here and here.

Beth can see him, slightly re-enacting his movements in twitches and gestures. Remembering it exactly. He was so exact, such a creature of habit. Of repetition.

And that’s all I remember, until they dragged me off. I woke up in the helicopter but I don’t remember that part. Apparently I was awake, I don’t know. And then I was home. I remember seeing Beth when I got back, because she was waiting for me to wake up. That was about two weeks later, when I woke up properly. They’d operated already and everything. Taken the shrapnel out. And there was Beth, waiting for me.

Beth remembers it as well, but she can also remember those two weeks in the hospital, weeks that he has no recollection of, when she stood by this enormous incubator-like device that was keeping him alive, as they pulled the shrapnel from him over the course of two operations. They told her that he was lucky to be alive. She prayed that he would make it awake intact.

Vic’s voice tells the rest of the story to the doctor, and to Beth, and they both listen. Here, Beth finds herself sitting on the end of the bed, near to Vic’s feet. They twitch and curl up seemingly with every punctuation point of Vic’s speech. After a while, Beth puts her hand onto his right shin. She does it to steady them – to let him know that there’s somebody there, as if that might help – but she finds that she sort of likes it.

She imagines her husband trickling back into this body. She fantasizes that he is filling up, from the bottom of his body first, like water into a jug, and she’s touching the only part that might now be him.

24

Vic’s cough is what wakes her. She’s asleep in her bedroom, amongst the chaos of the vacuum-packed clothing bags that she’s pulled out of the Machine’s room to make it hospitable, and she’s dreaming of something that she can no longer remember when she wakes up, but it’s there, insistent, almost itching for her to find it. Then the cough, and it hacks through the mugginess of the flat. It’s the first noise that she’s heard Vic make since she brought him back, beyond the mild whimpers and whines that she thinks were involuntary; but here his body is responding to something. She gets out of bed. Half past four. She gets a bottle of water, even as the cough continues, and she swigs from it first. It isn’t until she gets into the Machine’s room that she notices the cough properly. She doesn’t know how much these things are or can be personal, but she recognizes it. It’s Vic’s cough: not just the hacking reaction of a dry throat in a random body.

She helps him sit up slightly more, and lifts the bottle to his mouth. He reaches for it, tongue out, desperate, and she pours it faster than she should, drizzling the water down his chest and into the sweat of his chest hair.

Come on, she says. That’s it. He drinks most of the bottle, gulping it down.

Thank you, he says.

What? Beth stands up. She stands back. What did you say? He doesn’t move, doesn’t look at her. His eyes are open, focused on the ceiling, on the veins in the paint. Say that again. Vic? Vic. She says his name repeatedly, as if one of the versions of it might make sense to him: one with a particular tone in her voice, or a particular lilt. She draws closer again, kneels on the bed and looks into his eyes. They don’t search around or try to avoid hers, but they’re not with her either. Somehow vague. She looks at his lips. Thank you, she says. Say thank you. But he doesn’t say anything.

Okay, she says. She stands again. She runs her hands over her head, and she looks at the Machine. It’s plugged in and switched on already, but she could swear that she unplugged it. It’s possible that she got it wrong, just as it’s possible that she didn’t hear Vic thanking her, in his voice, with his polite tone. Nothing casual there. She presses the screen. It’s as it was yesterday, as she left it. Five recordings down, one after the other, and then repeated. Blocks of five, at an hour each. Five-minute break between each, for toilet and drink, then an hour’s break for lunch, then the whole thing repeated. She doesn’t know if the information presented to Vic through the Crown is the same, though. She doesn’t understand the technology at all, even though she’s read everything she can about the Machine.

They started with slugs, she knows: removing the part of a slug’s memory that told it where food was. Slugs rely on experience to drive them towards whatever it is that they’re looking for. They remember. Scientists took that out and made them forget, and the slugs were lost. It wasn’t lobotomizing them: it was a targeted jolt. Proper science. An injection, and electricity, like a lightning bolt that only damaged the part you wanted it to. And after that they moved on to other animal trials, nothing cruel about it, because you’re making something forget the inane. Nothing important. Brain memory is different from muscle memory: even down to the actual filing system of how we remember. And then on to humans, and the introduction of the Machine, because the power needed to process it all was tremendous. In the earliest trials, the Machine occupied an aircraft hangar. There are pictures of it on the internet, this hulking thing that went back and back, filling the space like the first computers, a room full of wires and chipsets. They took memories away from people, and they discovered that they could also jolt those memories back: that the Machine burned bridges, but could also repair them, in a way. That’s what Beth understands: where it came from. They made the technology useable, put it out there before it should have been – when there were no limits to the havoc it could wreak – then tried to backtrack by imposing guidelines, dressing the Machines up as handy household appliances. But it was already over.

Beth worries that she’s pushing him too hard. That was how she got into this: rushing. She was in charge of his treatments in the latter days, because they wanted to remove the doctor from the equation. It was important that Vic ultimately forgot that he’d even had treatments in the first place. The last day of any patient’s experience was to have that part erased, wiping down the surfaces and locking the door on your way out. So Beth was in charge, and she was meant to take her time with the last few stages; ten stages, that was all. But she rushed it, and then… That’s been hanging over her for years: not knowing if Vic would have been left broken without her help, or if she was the catalyst. One treatment a week, she was told: and she condensed them into a fortnight.

Now, the instructions on the internet forums tell her that it doesn’t matter. That the pace at which memories are put back in is at the user’s discretion. She wonders who these people are, on the forums. What they actually know. The creators of the Machine are taking so long to work this through themselves, to reach an actual solution and make it public, only promising things in press conferences with their performing test cases. And the guerrilla underground has taken control instead. She laughs, to think of herself as that: part of a movement defying logic, and science, and time. At the forefront of something. She laughs because of how she got here.

It’s nearly morning, she says. You need to use the toilet. He’s made it through the second night dry, apart from the sweat. Tomorrow night she’ll give him a sheet instead of the duvet. She didn’t even think, because the duvet was what they had in their old house, and the decoration, the furniture. All of it imported to make this bedroom feel as much like their old room as possible, with the exception of the Machine, filling that wall, in case that helps to nudge his memory even slightly. She helps him up and leads him through. His walking seems better. More focused, somehow. She sits him on the toilet and stands outside the room.

The day I watch you take a shit is the day I know this marriage is over, Vic joked once. But it wasn’t really a joke, she didn’t think.

Back to the bedroom, she says, and she would swear that he leads slightly: that he’s the one who instigates that first assisted step, and that he knows the direction, that she doesn’t have to twist his body to meet it. He kneels onto the bed as well, she thinks, and when she goes to turn his body to lie down he doesn’t feel as heavy as he did the day before. Maybe just a night’s sleep, and Beth is less tired herself. She takes the Crown down and puts it on him, and the black marks are back, she notices. Not that they ever left, but they faded, like the way that bruises fade, only they never completely abandoned his scalp; and now they seem brighter. Which makes sense, because they’re always going to be tender, Beth supposes. She notices that the Crown has pushed up some of his hair into a tuft; she smoothes it down.

She presses the button and gets the next recording playing. REPLENISH, like a shampoo, like an energy drink. Vic’s voice is all she hears. She almost entirely blocks the doctor out now, as if he’s not important. She thinks that that must be what makes him good at his job: his ability to fade into the background. Vic talks about what made him want to get into the army, and how his father pushed him. Background experiences that made him who he was. Who he will be.

With the first shift over, Beth gives him food. This morning it’s soggy cereal, corn flakes left to melt in milk. Beth has to lift the spoon and open his mouth with her finger and slide the food off and onto his tongue, and then close his mouth, and he swallows of his own accord, an exaggerated motion in which he seems to tense every muscle in his jaw and neck in order to make it all go down. Then they repeat the process, so eating the bowl of cereal takes nearly half an hour. It’s the longest break he’ll get before lunch.

The second session begins, and the playback follows on from the last. Beth sits and listens and looks around the room, and suddenly the hour is gone. She finds herself staring at the photographs that she’s put in cheap frames on top of the chest of drawers; or at Vic’s body; or at the bowl of potpourri. She can’t remember how long ago she put it in the room, but it still smells. The sort of thing her mother would have done. She’s looking at the Crown on his head, listening to nothing, it seems, thinking about her own headache – how these sessions take it out of her as well, and that’s important, that the partner understands and feels it – when the doorbell interrupts.

Who’s that? Beth asks, a jerk reflex. Asking Vic that question. Something she hasn’t had the chance to do in years; he always used to be the one who opened the door to people. She would always tell him to go and do it, and assume he would know who it was before he even looked. As if he was always expecting somebody.

The bell rings again, and it’s followed by a knock. Three knocks, rapid and harsh. Beth stays where she is, staying quiet. Nobody ever comes to see her. Might be that it’s the neighbour with the girls. Another series of raps on the door, and Beth moves to the doorway of the bedroom to get a better look – to hopefully see a shape through the pebbled glass at the top, and somehow recognize the person from that vagueness.

The letterbox flaps. Beth? It’s me. Laura’s voice. I know you’re in there, Beth. Please answer the door, she says. You don’t have to do this alone.

Beth stands and holds her breath, and she completely forgets that Vic is behind her with the Crown still resting there on his head.

Beth, Laura says again, but she lets the letterbox snap back into place, and her shadow – just a shape – moves away, and down towards the window that looks into the living room. The curtains are closed so she can’t see anything, but her shape lingers as she tries to peer in.

Beth’s phone rings: the house line, because that’s the only one that Laura’s got.

Come on, she hears Laura saying through the window, which is cracked slightly open at the top to let the air in. Answer, answer. She paces and lets it ring, and Beth stands completely still and there’s no noise apart from the roar of the Machine, but that must be too quiet for Laura to hear, even though inside the bedroom it sounds like a gale, when you really focus on it.

The phone rings for a minute and then stops, and there’s a few seconds where Beth wonders if she’s gone – Laura’s silhouette is nowhere to be seen – before a note is pushed through the letterbox, and then she walks past the window.

Beth goes and picks up the note, which is a single folded piece of paper, but pre-written, prepared, as if this – her not answering or being out, one or the other – was an eventuality Laura had anticipated.

Beth, I came to offer you my shoulder and my advice. I can help you through this. You shouldn’t make these decisions on your own. Call me. Laura.

I’m not on my own, Beth says aloud.

25

Beth carries the note around with her as if it has a special meaning, but keeps it either in her hand (where it scrunches in on itself) or in the back pocket of her shorts (where it attempts to smooth itself out again). She thinks about it as she feeds Vic his lunch of apples and pineapple and tinned peaches, mixed down in the processor, like this is some fad diet, and when they resume their sessions in the afternoon she sits and reads it over as Vic listens to himself talking about his training. These sessions are the worst: the ones that have only to do with his army background, that she listens to because they’re there.

Am I being selfish? she asks him in their fourth session of the afternoon, pausing the playback for a second. Would you even want this, if it was offered to you?

The Machine’s noise is something that should be ruinous. It should destroy her, to hear it, because it’s so pervasive and so intense. There’s no escaping it when the Machine is working, or even when it’s idle. And she’s felt it shaking a few times before, but now, as she sits at the foot of the bed, she could swear that the vibrations from it are coming through the carpet. She climbs off as Vic talks about the speed with which he can strip and clean and rebuild a rifle, and she lies on the floor with her head on its side to see if the carpet is actually trembling, as she suspects. She feels it in her face: that slight tickle, like pins and needles.

When the fifth session is over she takes the Crown off and puts it back in the dock. She doesn’t unplug the Machine, because the hum when it’s on standby is almost comforting, she thinks. She wonders if Vic likes it. If it’s reassuring. She hauls him to the bathroom again, and makes him a dinner of spaghetti hoops on two slices of mushed-up bread, and puts him to bed, making sure that the bed is dry (which it is, as the heat pretty much ensures that anything left for half an hour bakes itself dry). She gives him water, but not too much.

Shower in the morning, she says. He shuts his eyes without her having to tell him to, but that might just always be the way he’s done it. When he’s tired, he knows.

She sits on the sofa with Laura’s note in her hand and pulls the laptop out and starts to flick through her usual forums. She searches to see if there’s anything about Machines vibrating, and if that’s a side effect of the custom firmware. She’s become an expert on these things, she thinks. Ten years ago, firmware wouldn’t have even been a word to her. When that search throws up nothing she searches for threads on The Positives, the name they use for those carers who’ve successfully brought people back from vacancy. There are six on her main forum, the one where she actually has a username and a login, and they were the only six people people she knew of who had managed to get hold of Machines. She was lucky number seven. The firmware was all programmed by the first one, and he shared the wealth. Swedish, lost his wife in the same war as Vic fought in, and he was desperate, because he didn’t have money. And their government banned the Machines; his chance of anything happening of its own accord was slim to none. She sends him a question.

How long did it take for your wife to become herself again? (Recognizably.)

Beth presses SEND and waits for a reply.

The users of the forum are dedicated and passionate, and they’re all willing to help. The users say that you don’t know what families of the vacant are going through until you go through it yourself; the only people who can help are those who feel your pain. It’s a motto of the forum-goers. Beth sits and rubs the sides of her head, where the headache has set in – like spending too much time near a photocopier, and so intense, concentrating on this, putting all the tension into her head and her jaw, making her bite down on nothing, making her tense her entire face over and over, every muscle in it – and she’s thinking about the ibuprofen when the reply comes.

Hi there! It was exactly two weeks after we started. We took it easy because I was sacred.

Beth thinks that he means scared, but she could be wrong.

I did not want to hurt her. So it was two weeks before she said something that was exactly her. But she made noise that she was getting better before that, and so I persevered. Are you going to be hopefully joining the club of the rest of us? Because we can give you any more help, if you need it. Just say the ask. Smiley face.

Beth doesn’t reply. She thinks about it – she types a reply, which she deletes twice – and then shuts the laptop. She still has the note, and she reads it again: Laura’s handwriting, which now looks over-rehearsed to her, as if she wrote this once on another sheet and copied it out, like writing letters to relatives when she was a child. And the words: suggesting that she needed help or advice. That she wasn’t entirely sure of what she was doing. It’s an intrusion by somebody on the outside, someone who was barging in where she wasn’t wanted. She hasn’t been through this pain, and she can’t understand it, so she can’t expect to help.

Beth puts the TV on and then mutes the sound and leans back. She shuts her eyes. That’s all it takes.

26

The sky crackles.

It wakes Beth up because it’s so noisy, like firecrackers snapping away. The television is halfway through a Japanese cartoon, but that doesn’t give her a time to use as reference. The clock says that it’s just gone midnight, which means she’s barely been asleep any time at all. It’s so dark in the flat, only the TV is giving off any light at all.

Snap, snap, snap.

She stands up and stretches, and her head feels clear enough, but the air in the flat is horrible. Hot, not just warm, and nearly wet. On the rare occasions that they have storms, they’re perfect for clearing out everything. Like a reset button, and they leave the ground smelling – what was it that Laura called it? Petrichor? Petrichlor? – and the sky clear. And everything’s cooler for a few days. Not long enough to get used to it, but in the same way that people used to celebrate the British summer. They get out and enjoy it while it lasts. It’s no longer something that everybody has to fight against.

Beth walks to the window and pulls back the curtain. The rain hasn’t started yet, and she knows what she expects to see, but it’s different. The sky isn’t just black: intermittently a filthy grey shade, lit by the lightning. There are other people outside, and in the distance she can see the sun buried underneath the clouds. It’s 11 a.m. The sky crackles again, and the lightning rushes across it, smacking into itself. It’s bad special effects from a science-fiction movie. It’s one of those gadgets where the electricity is attracted to somebody’s palm resting on the glass. It rolls through the clouds – like horses through waves, Beth thinks, which she remembers from somewhere, but she’s not sure where – and it seems to leap before it dissipates. She forgets about everything else: Vic, the Machine, her own life. She opens the front door and breathes it in, the damp, the sense that it’s about to happen. Everybody senses it.

And then it rains. It thuds in single drops first, thwap, down onto the concrete, and they’re almost big enough to make their own puddles. They’re as warm as everything else. Thwap, thwap. More of them. Each of the residents of the estate stays under cover, even her next-door neighbour, who hides indoors as her daughters run out, well past when they should be asleep. After the drops comes the flood, a gush of water coming down on them. Heavier than Beth’s ever seen before, she thinks. Nobody talks: down in the courtyard people stand huddled. It seems almost reverential. The rain pours and then the lightning comes, and all across the sky it can be seen, ripping down from the sky, smacking onto buildings. The lights are on in all the flats one minute, and the next they’re gone. The power tears out through the entire estate, and as far into the distance as Beth can see from the balcony: no lights down at the shops, no lights on the estate past that, or the houses that run around the edge of the island further down. Total blackness, apart from the lightning.

Snap.

Beth rushes back inside to Vic and the Machine, and she doesn’t know what she expected, but it’s still making that low-level hum, and it’s still going. It’s still plugged in and she doesn’t know what she expected, because that battery keeps on going, and now she wonders why everybody else doesn’t hear it: when the rest of the ambient noise is gone and all that’s left is the Machine and the light from it and that noise, which comes from somewhere at its back, in the dark, somewhere that she knows doesn’t have a speaker and shouldn’t be able to make noise. And what if Laura is right? With her protesting and her crying and her berating and praying to God? What if this is as unnatural as she’s suggesting? She reaches out slowly, tentatively, and she presses the screen – Vic doesn’t stir, completely knocked out by the day – and it lights up, and the light fills the room.

How are you still working? she asks it. That rumble, like the thunder itself. Roll of noise; pause; flash of light. She’s terrified, but this is what she wanted. She wanted Vic back. Somehow she’s getting him.

There’s time to do another, she thinks. She’s awake, and she’s got power. One more couldn’t hurt. She pulls the Crown down and rests it on Vic’s head. She wonders if it works when he’s asleep; if anybody’s ever tried it. She could be the first, a pioneer.

She presses play. Outside, the lightning fizzes.

27

He’s totally compliant when she takes him to the bathroom and he uses the toilet and then she puts him into the shower. Again, Beth thinks that he’s making this easier on her, although she can’t tell whether it’s an effect of the Machine and he’s becoming more himself, this quickly, this efficiently; or whether it’s just that the body is helping more, as if it’s getting to know her. But he works with her, and he lifts his feet more, and in the shower he isn’t as curled up. When she lifts his arms to wash underneath them, to soap up his armpits – the sweat has settled into his skin – he holds them aloft briefly. She finds the process much more appealing: this is nearly her husband again, and it’s nearly her husband’s body that she’s touching.

The flat is cooler than it was, because it’s happened: the sky has cleared. It’s instantly less muggy. Beth looks outside and it’s bright but clean. Something fresh in the air: that smell.

She puts a new sheet on the bed as Vic sits crouched in the bath. The breeze – there’s a breeze! – that comes through the flat is wonderful, even though it’s still warm. Beth leaves Vic almost naked as she lays him down on the bed, only underwear protecting his modesty. She pulls the Crown down and presses the screen, and it’s ready and waiting, exactly where she left off. The Machine’s start is like a yawn, a stretch, preparing itself for what it has to do. She lubes the pads and presses them onto his head, and she pushes the button. He flings himself upwards suddenly, arching his back. He swipes with his arms at his head.

No, Beth says. Don’t. Vic stops swiping at her and knocks the Crown off his head instead. He opens his mouth and noise comes out, a blast of something atonal, barely recognizable. It’s not something she’s heard before, and it doesn’t stop, even as his body bucks and his jaw moves between open and closed with a jarring sharpness, and his tongue pokes out, the muscle seeming to push itself to breaking point in an attempt to get out of his mouth. Please stop the noise, she says, and she rubs his head – the lubricant smearing under her touch on his temples – and that seems to calm him a little. Even then the convulsions (because that’s what Beth thinks that they are) continue, and she rubs more and makes a ‘Shush’ noise, over and over. He’s shaking, so she moves closer and puts her arms around him. She leans in. Please, she says. He resists but she gets close enough to properly hold him, hooking her arms behind him and closing her hands together to keep purchase.

She notices that the Crown is dangling down from the Machine, is tilting onto the floor. And then she notices that his voice, Vic’s voice, is playing.

You want to know what I wore at our wedding? he asks. Why does that matter?

Just tell me, the doctor says. You know how this works.

Fine. I wore full regimental dress. Everybody did, all the wedding party. My ushers all did, because they were all from my unit.

What are their names?

The ushers?

He reels them off. That part had to be taken. It devastated Beth at the time. The photographs that got doctored: of Vic in a normal suit, like any other wedding. Who is he, and what did he do? Nothing to indicate that, because he’s in a suit. No ushers, because they were all in uniform. People taken away from him, just like that. A click of a mouse. Beth wonders, as she clings to him, why they ever thought that it was a good idea, or that it was even fair.

That’s what this is like, the forum-user wrote. It’s like, we made a decision and it was a bad one, so now we’re putting things back the way that they were, through magic or whatever.

Beth thinks about that: about how she’s only undoing five years of hell, and innumerable hours of pain. She holds Vic and wonders if he’ll thank her for this: and if she’ll tell him the absolute truth about how he ended up here. That it was her decisions, not his, not theirs, and her eagerness to push him. Because she thought that he was so strong.

After a while the noise ends, and Vic’s body’s mouth closes.

Okay, Beth says. She stands and lets him lie down. When she lifts the Crown from the floor she’s sure that his body flinches, even though he’s not looking towards her and the Machine. I won’t, she says. We can have a break.

She goes to the living room and turns the television on, and puts the volume up. She finds it hard to hear what’s being said, people arguing, getting up from their chairs and threatening violence, waving their fists. She realizes that she’s left the Machine on. Vic is still speaking. How did she not notice? It’s so loud, and the noise of the Machine itself. She goes back to the Machine and is about to press stop when the recording ends. It’s been an hour since it started, and the time’s passed so quickly. All spent cradling him.

Beth runs the taps and wets her face, and then moves a kitchen chair into the widest path of the breeze. She leans back and lets it brush over her wet cheeks and lips. In the corner of her eye she sees the tablets stacked on the work surface: the ibuprofen first, but then the diazepam.

Not yet, she says. She’s shocked at how weary she sounds. How much this is taking out of her, as well as him. She doesn’t move. She sleeps.

When she wakes up she finds him waiting for her, where he was. The Crown slides straight on again. She tightens the straps, and fastens the jaw-strap, because she doesn’t want it being knocked off. The Machine leaps at her palm’s touch, and that vibration starts up again. She remembers the way that the ground shook during the flooding, and this is like that, after it finished: feeling uneasy on your feet, the trembling that runs through your legs and for a second you don’t know if it’s nerves or actually something physically happening to the ground, or if the two are even any different. She chooses the same passage as the morning’s attempt, and she doesn’t look at Vic’s body as she presses play. She gets close to the Machine, hands on either side of the screen. And she leans in, so that her head is almost resting on the black metal above the screen, propping her up, because the tremors run right through her. Everything in her body shakes, and she can, for a second, feel all of her bones: big and little, teetering against their connections, rattling in their sockets. She can’t hear anything past the noise of the Machine, and past the clatter that’s now inside her own head. As if this pain – because that’s what it’s heading towards, clinging to this thing – might be some sort of penance for pretending that, behind her, there isn’t her husband’s body, writhing and bucking on the bed, making a noise that sounds like something almost digital, unnatural and blunt. And this is just the tip of it: if it hurts now, it will only hurt her more as he becomes more himself. And especially as he becomes more able to vocalize. Will she have the strength to continue when he’s able to ask her to stop? When it’s his voice, his personality, half-formed?

She shuts her eyes, and that’s nearly enough to make this bearable: when all that she can hear is the Machine and that’s all that she can feel, even as her eyes vibrate behind her eyelids, this seems less real.

The first audio cycle ends, and the Machine quietens. Vic’s body doesn’t, so Beth presses play on the next file. No break; no time to reconsider.

28

She thinks that it could be a dream, but it’s so vague that she can’t tell. Vic says her name, over and over again. Muted and not quite right. The sounds are there but the mouth isn’t forming them quite properly. It wakes her and she rushes through, and there’s Vic, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Beth, Beth, Beth, he says. He rubs his face with his hands.

Oh my God, Beth says, and she puts her arms around him. She doesn’t know how much of him this will be, and she could pull away and that noise might start again. He says her name seven times and then stops, and starts crying. She tries to soothe him, and in a second he’s asleep. She lies him down and watches him. She lies next to him, in the nook made by the curve of his sleeping body, and she sleeps herself.

This could all be a dream, she thinks as she drifts off.

When she wakes up she’s in the room with him, but the Machine is on, and it’s playing; Vic’s speaking from another time entirely. Something from much later on in his treatments. She keeps her eyes shut, because she’s asleep, she tells herself. She doesn’t need to wake up yet. She doesn’t need to know what’s happening.

Word association, the doctor says.

Okay. Then they do it, a series of words that are connected and trite when Beth hears them back. All so obvious.

Morning, the doctor says.

Sun. The sun, Vic replies.

Bullet.

Pain.

Beth opens her eyes and sees the Machine’s screen lit up, playing back. It’s been activated: REPLENISH is illuminated. She’s on the bed. The Crown is on the pillow above her head; she looks up, peers up, and there it is, blinking. She sits up – Vic doesn’t seem to notice – and she pushes the pillow away.

I didn’t do this, she says. I didn’t take this down. She looks at Vic and grabs his arm and shakes him. Was this you? she asks. Did you get up? Did you do this? He doesn’t make a noise, but the Machine does.

It changes pitch. It shifts upwards, less industrial turbine, more washing machine or dishwasher, something normal and practical and household. Only louder. So much louder. Beth picks up the Crown, holding it between two fingers. The Crown itself shakes. She hadn’t realized that. Maybe that’s what hurts Vic: maybe it’s too tight on his head.

She slides it back onto the dock, and the voice persists.

Stop it, she says. She presses the screen but it keeps playing, so she doesn’t even fight it. She pulls the plug. It keeps playing. Fuck off, she says. She hits the screen.

Death.

Parents.

She shouts at the Machine, which wakes Vic up – his eyes peeling open, that’s it – and then hits the screen again.

I’ll fucking break you, she says. Stop playing that.

It stops. The screen goes black. Vic shuts his eyes.

Beth paces the flat in the darkness and then goes to her room. She shuts the door almost all the way, and then she lies on her bed. In the darkness she counts to fifty. Something that she learned from Vic, an army trick.

When stress descends, count back down, he had told her.

From ten? she had asked.

God no. If counting from ten solves it, it wasn’t proper stress in the first place. Fifty. A hundred. A thousand.

That’s what you do?

Yeah.

How long does it take?

If I make it to zero it means I’m going to sleep, he had said.

She counts. Somehow she sleeps.

29

When Beth wakes up, the mugginess is back. The storm did its job clearing everything up for a day, but it was just an aberration, and she’s got a headache that suggests tension in her jaw, grinding of her teeth, a bad night’s sleep. She stands up but the flat’s swimming, and she steadies herself on the dresser and then the doorway. The door is open; she only dreamed she closed it. That’s what it was. Unless he says her name, it was a dream.

In the Machine’s room, peering through the pain and the blurriness of being awake, she sees Vic on the bed, the Machine back on standby, its noise back to low-level ambient, like a normal computer left on overnight. The Crown is on the dock, and there’s no evidence she was ever even in here.

She wakes up Vic and helps him to his feet.

Say my name, she says, but he doesn’t. He looks at her, though: and he makes eye contact for a second. He turns his head away then and he flaps his jaw open and shut. He’s more animated than she’s seen him in the last five years. It feels like we’re getting somewhere, doesn’t it? she asks.

She takes him to the bathroom and pulls his trousers down before making him sit, only he’s got an erection. She hasn’t seen him like this in years, and she knows it’s nothing – blood and muscle, involuntary, nothing to do with her – but she doesn’t want to be faced with it now, and she doesn’t know how to make it go away.

We’ll have to wait, she says. She knows that if he pisses now it’ll go everywhere – he used to apologize for it when he would wake up like this before, saying that he couldn’t control it, that it wasn’t his fault, that she should blame whoever came up with such a shitty design in the first place – so they stand there as nature does its thing. Minutes, and she doesn’t look. He’s not Vic again yet. She waits.

Afterwards, she puts him onto the bed. The writhing starts before she’s even turned the Machine on: as soon as the Crown goes onto his head he kicks out his legs and struggles. She thinks about binding his arms. This needs to be easier. She takes the branded, boxed pestle and mortar from the cupboard – a wedding gift, never used until now, something that they never understood when herbs and spices were so easy to buy pre-ground – and she tips a couple of the diazepam tablets and a couple of ibuprofen into the mortar. She crushes them together, round and round. She’s left with a thin white dust, so thin that it could almost just spill into the air. Like talc. She takes a small bottle of water from the fridge and unscrews the lid and tips the contents of the mortar bowl into it, then puts the lid on and shakes it. She stands by the fridge, shaking it.

She hopes that she’s doing the right thing. Would he be happy with her for this? Vic didn’t like tablets. Didn’t like painkillers, or anything that dulled him.

I like knowing exactly what’s wrong with me, he would say. Then, after the war, he no longer had a choice. Would he thank her for this?

Beth holds the bottle to his lips and helps tilt his head back. He drinks in gulps, no finesse. She’s the one who stops it from dribbling down his face, manoeuvring the bottle to almost make a seal.

There, she says. She crushes the bottle and puts it into the recycling bin and then stands in the kitchen, to wait. She doesn’t want to wait in there, because the Machine is waiting as well. The power is all back on – must be back on across the whole estate – so she opens the fridge and smells the milk, to check it’s okay. It smells fine. She puts the coffee machine on and makes herself breakfast: yoghurt in a bowl, a few spoonfuls of sugary jam on top. It’s not exactly appealing, but her stomach growls in acceptance. She’s eating the last few mouthfuls, one eye on Vic’s body, which has slumped down again of its own accord, when there’s a knocking on the door.

Beth, comes Laura’s voice through the letterbox. Beth, I know you’re in there. I can hear you, and the lights are on. Beth, come on. Answer the door.

Beth stays completely still. She puts the spoon down as softly as she can manage, in the bowl of yoghurt rather than on the side, to minimize noise, and she shuts herself down: breathing as quietly as possible.

Beth. Come on. The only words that have been spoken to her in four days, by a woman on the other side of the door, and they are the same words that Beth has been saying to herself. Beth, come on. What are you doing? Have you got him in there with you?

Beth watches the shape of Laura moving from frame to frame, from the frosted glass of the door to the clarity of the curtained window, as if she’s nothing more than a shadow. She raps on the doorframe and the window. She flaps the letterbox and her eye peers through. She says the same things over and over again.

I’ll wait, she says. I’ve got all day. It’s my summer as well.

You have to go home, Beth thinks. You’re not even from the island.

I’ll sit here and wait for you to open the door, because you have to, sooner or later. She’s not joking. The sound of her slumping down against the door comes in, and the sound of her opening something, chocolate or something, and of her humming a song that Beth almost recognizes. Something that the kids in the school sing, or have as their ringtones. Laura sings along after a while. Don’t, she sings, cos here it comes, here it comes. When you keep them down, when they pressin’ you down, you better save your own blood, because here it comes: here comes the flood. Her singing voice is reedy and half-uttered, but the words are clear as day through the opened windows. Beth thinks about the diazepam, which is probably set into the body’s system now. She looks into the bedroom as much as she can without moving her chair, and Vic’s body is asleep. The eyes are shut at least. She thinks about how it can just wear off. She’s probably got, what, four hours? Five? Before he’s back to wide awake, not dulled by the painkillers. That’s a window of opportunity she’ll lose if Laura really doesn’t leave.

Go away, she says.

What? The scuffle of Laura standing up, leaning her head close to the opened window.

I said go away. Please go away. I’m fine.

You’re not fine. You’re going to do something that you shouldn’t.

Don’t tell me what I shouldn’t do. Go away.

I’m waiting here until you let me in.

You can’t come in.

Don’t do this, Laura says.

Beth goes to the window and shuts it, slamming it so quickly that Laura doesn’t have a say in the matter. Laura presses the doorbell, so Beth goes to the box and turns the volume off. Laura hammers on the door, so Beth hammers back.

I’m not coming out, and you’re not coming in, Beth shouts. Leave us alone.

Us? Laura’s voice cracks. You’ve got him in there with you?

Just go away, Beth says. She sounds defeated, on purpose: hoping that Laura hears the sadness in her voice. She walks to the Machine’s room and shuts the door behind her. Slams it. She doesn’t know if Laura leaves or stays, but here she is with Vic. She turns the volume on the playback down, which means it’s going to be hard to hear over the grind when the Machine gets going. But regardless, she doesn’t want Laura to hear this.

The diazepam has done its job, and he’s pliable. She slips the Crown onto his head and he hardly murmurs, and then she presses play on the first file she’s got lined up for the day. The Machine’s noise, she wonders where it’s gone. She can still hear it, but it’s like it’s hardly there, or it’s part of the background. She remembers being a child, when they – her whole family – moved to a house in west London that was next to the underground. The first few nights the trains kept her awake: bedtime meant the sound of the brakes and the engines as they came in and out of the station at the foot of her garden; and then there was the sound of the planes from overhead, the flight path directly intersecting with where she lived, coming and going at all times. They made more noise on the way up, she thought, as she watched the lights through the darkness. But she got used to it. Three nights of watching the planes, and waiting for the last train to pass through, and that was it. No more. As a child she told her parents that she had done it herself.

I wished that they would stop, she told them. So I wouldn’t be able to hear them any more.

Now, the Machine is there, but somehow it’s lower, inside her. Like the noise is synchronous with herself: with her headache, which throbs incessantly as she stands near the Machine, and the rumble in her gut, which she takes to be hunger but which edges towards nausea. But then she looks at Vic as the playback occurs and he seems more whole. He’s getting there, she tells herself; a construction site, with signs up and barricades, but he’s getting there.

He rolls slightly, from side to side, as if he’s lying on waves. Somehow suddenly tidal. He makes a noise, like before, but much quieter. A digital murmur, nothing more, really. The Crown blinks. Over the now-quiet speakers, Beth can make out words.

I always wanted to be a soldier, he says. I always wanted…

As the voice on the recording drops, she stops listening. Instead, she watches him: the muscles on his arms. Where they had dropped and sagged as he stayed in the clinic, and the flesh had taken back his army physique to nature’s settling point, all of a sudden it looks as if it’s becoming stronger. She touches his bicep and it’s firm. She squeezes it and it’s not what it once was – she pictures him as he was, taut, pinched flesh, a body destined to cause envy in his friends and hers, built from training rather than pride or conceit – but somehow it’s getting back to how he was. She tells herself to read about muscle memory: about whether this is something others have experienced, as a by-product. His body resetting itself to the way that it once was. She peels up the t-shirt he’s wearing, and there: the fainting trace lines of his stomach muscles. The iliac crest she used to stroke.

So they told me that if it was what I wanted…

She stands and looks at herself in the mirror on the dresser: at how she’s faded away over the past five years. Living by herself, and the toll. And the time. She’s sure that, as she looks at Vic, he hasn’t aged. What she thought was salt-and-pepper hair starting to creep in looks different in this light. She thinks about giving him a haircut, back to how it used to be, so short that it was barely there at all.

Like this never happened, she says.

She wonders what he’ll see when he’s awake and himself again: when he looks into the mirror; what he’ll expect. Will he want himself as he was, or will he know? She’s not getting rid of the last five years, because the lies are something that she needs to extinguish completely. So will he want them? Will he want to see himself and know what he’s been through? Will he want to see the time he’s lost in his eyes and on his face, and running through every vein in his body? And when he looks at Beth, what will he see? The woman who destroyed him, or the one who recreated him, returned him to what he was?

She opens the door to the bedroom as soon as the playback ends, before the next one starts. Laura’s still there: the shadow of her head, leaning back against the window. Beth goes to the fridge for water, and she drinks it herself though it is meant for Vic. With the window shut, the heat in the flat is nearly intolerable. She takes another bottle into the room and shuts the door behind her, and presses play.

30

Another day. She gives him the diazepam in his drink, without food inside him. It sets in faster and heavier without the food, and she’s wasting time. DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY. He drinks it without saying a word, the whole drink down in one, and then lies back.

Thank you, he says. I was so thirsty.

She sees herself as if in a film: where the actor has been told to stumble backwards, shocked. Display an extreme reaction to this. Emotionally push yourself. Imagine that it’s real.

What did you say? she asks. Her voice is so shaky, so barely there. She sounds as if she might be sick, as she listens to her words: the filter of it in her throat, the words catching on rising bile.

Thank you. He turns and looks at her, only not quite at her, his eyes off somewhere else. It’s so hot. He smacks his lips together. Can I have more? Still no real eye contact. Beth steps forward and lifts the bottle to his lips, and he sucks on it, almost, like a baby at a teat, and she tilts it more.

Go on, she says. Her voice: her head. The pain in it, because she’s so tired, and she’s been doing this for so long, and now this, so suddenly? He can’t be back, not yet. What do you remember? she asks him.

I, uh, he says. He searches. His eyes flit around the room. They look for reference points. They look for something to latch onto.

Do you remember my name? she asks.

He looks at her, but not at her eyes. The rest of her face, her body. Up and down.

Beth?

Beth. Do you remember your name?

I’m Victor McAdams, he says.

What else? Where are we? She sits on the edge of the bed. She’s not touching him. She worries that, if she touches him, he might disappear; like he might not be entirely real, not yet.

I don’t know, he says.

How did you get here?

No, he says.

What’s the last thing you remember?

No, he says. No, I can’t get this, I can’t. Oh my God, I don’t, ah, ah. He panics, and he moves more. He tries to push himself up to sitting, but the drugs that he’s been given are settling in, and it’s tough. He’s pushing against them. You have to let me up, he says.

I can’t, Beth tells him, not yet. Lie down. Shush. She rubs at his temples as he gives in, because the drugs are so much stronger than he is, and he lies back. This will hurt, she says. But I’ve never been so convinced that I’m doing the right thing. She pulls the Crown down and puts it on. No lubricant, because he doesn’t seem to need it any more, as if the Crown has grown, somehow, to fit around him more comfortably. He murmurs and rocks again, but she starts the Machine nonetheless. She knows her way around the screens without looking: she can sit with him and stroke his brow, fingers running all the way to the pads of the Crown as she presses play, and then his voice amidst the sound of the engine as it roars at both of them, and amidst the tingle from the pads and the screen. With one hand on his head, and the vibrations there, and the other on the screen, taking in the vibrations from the Machine, she feels like the central part of a circuit, the part that completes it. Vic is incomplete, and she will help.

No, he says now, as the Vic on the recording describes who he used to be.

Are you Vic now? she asks him as he lies there, the sweat dripping from his body. Like a fever.

At the end of the session she walks out of the room and makes breakfast for herself, and downs bottles of water at the sink. She pops ibuprofen from the packet and swallows them, three, then adds a fourth minutes later, even though she knows that they’re not an instant relief, that they take time to work. She stands in front of the fridge and lets the air from inside it steam up around her, and soon the flat is full of something like smoke but it’s only condensation. She loses track of how long she’s been standing there. She drinks another bottle. In the reflection of the oven door she looks at herself: her hair, her face. One of the first things that she’ll do when she’s fixed Vic and brought him back to her is sort this out. A haircut, a trip to a department store, if there’s one wherever it is that they end up. She makes a note on a Post-it stuck to the fridge to do more house research when Vic’s sleeping tonight, so that she’s prepared. Somehow this is all going faster than she dreamed. She gave herself six weeks, and yet now, after only one – not even one, not really – he’s showing signs.

She peers at the window. Laura’s gone. Beth wonders when she left. If she stayed until the night, or gave up long before. She knows that she’ll be back, because Laura has that sort of insistence. The sort that doesn’t just slip away.

31

She wakes him for lunch, the session complete, and an extra hour and a half of sleep for both of them, to get over it. He opens his eyes at her. She’s put her face close to his, so that he can’t avoid looking. Her eyes at his.

Come on, she says. It’s time for lunch. Are you hungry?

I think so. She smoothes his hair where the warmth of the Crown has made tufts, like horns.

Come on, she says. We should eat. I’ve made lunch. She helps him to a sitting position, and his head lolls, and he moans. I know it hurts, she says, but it’ll get better. She moves his feet out of the bed and tells him to stand up, and he shuffles forward. Then he puts his feet onto the floor itself, and tests his toes. I’ll help you, she says. She tries to take his weight, but he shifts so much of it back to himself, more than he has before during this process. He treads gently, toe to heel, like a series of pictures of somebody walking, rather than somebody actually doing it. He stumbles, and the weight on his ankles isn’t there. He shakes. Okay, Beth says.

Toilet, he says. So they go there first, and she helps him sit down. He pisses and shits, and then cries when she has to help him clean himself afterwards. He hardly speaks, not really, he doesn’t say that he’s ashamed that she’s doing this, but she can tell. It’s something ingrained and deep inside him. Shame and self-pity and self-hatred and a humiliating desire to do this himself. He knows that there’s something wrong. She wipes him and he rests his face on her arm, her chest, and shoulder, and he sobs. Beth doesn’t mention it afterwards, taking him to the table and sitting him down. There’s an omelette in front of him, softly fried, more scrambled egg than solid.

Can you manage it? Beth asks. He shakes his head, so she feeds him first. He opens his mouth and she slides the egg into it, onto his tongue. He swallows of his own accord. He cries as she feeds him, and tries to manage words.

My head, he says.

I know, she says. Finish lunch. You still remember who I am?

Beth, he tells her.

Okay, she says. You’ll be okay, I promise. Do you know what we’re doing here?

I don’t know, I don’t know. He still resists eye contact. She puts the egg into his mouth: the diazepam she’s crushed up buried somewhere in the butter and cheese that binds the thing together. He swallows and then refuses the next mouthful – turns his head – so Beth tells him that he has to have a drink to wash it all down. He takes it.

She helps him back to the bed before he starts to get drowsier. His increased responsiveness is certainly making this easier, and with each step he takes it feels like he’s taking more and more of his weight. He lies down of his own accord, and he shuts his eyes and smacks his lips.

Do you know what that noise is? Beth asks him. She’s referring to the Machine.

I don’t know, he says through the fug.

It’s okay. Don’t worry. She takes down the Crown and presses the screen.

32

Laura hammers on the door with the balls of her fists.

This is wrong, she shouts. Beth, you have to listen to me! The neighbours have come out of their flats to watch, because they assume it’s a domestic – and that’s one of the pleasures, for them, of this block’s forecourt, the sheer number of arguments that spill out of the flats and onto the concrete, complete with whatever’s thrown out after the offending party, and usually a crying brood, begging for whichever parent has the greater potential for violence to calm down. They stay standing as Laura continues her tirade. What you’re doing is wrong, Beth. What you’re doing is against everything that we are!

Beth sits on a chair at the dining table as Vic rests. She watches the shadows of Laura’s fists raise and fall on the glass.

Beth, answer the door. Answer the door.

Or what? Beth asks. She doesn’t shout it, but she knows that Laura will hear.

Or I’ll tell people what you’re doing.

It’s not illegal to stay inside your flat. This is a game in which neither of them is going to say it first: Laura in accusing Beth of something that’s barely common knowledge, something that barely exists as a possiblity; and Beth won’t admit any more than she already has. And Vic isn’t here against his will. He was checked out of the clinic, taken by his wife for the summer, a break from the monotony of his care, and he won’t be returned because he’s being changed.

You know what I’m saying, Beth. She hushes her voice to a spat whisper. Let me in and we can talk about this.

This isn’t your business, Beth says. She drinks water and rubs her head where it’s sore – she’s so tired still, and when she closes her eyes all she can see is the Machine, that wave of ever-deep black metal – and takes more ibuprofen. She counts her pills: half the diazepam gone, half the ibuprofen. She’s been using more of them than she anticipated. She’ll have to do another run: late at night, she thinks, when there won’t be people outside, when she can rely on Vic to stay asleep. He’s excellent at that. Sleeping through the night, never waking, never making a peep. That’s something he was good at before he went to war, being able to drop off anywhere, any time. Cars, trains, the hard benches of an airport: he could sleep on them.

You need help, Laura says.

I can handle him.

Beth, you need friends and you need help to see you through times like this.

I’m sorry, Laura.

I don’t know what you’re doing in there, Beth. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but it’s not your husband inside there—

Stop it.

—because he was destroyed, and he cannot now be reconstructed, not from nothing. That isn’t your right. She pauses. Genesis 2:7: the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and he breathed life into the man’s nostrils; and the man became alive.

You seemed so normal when we first met. Beth says it to hurt her, and there’s silence for a while, as the slump comes: Laura’s clothes dragging themselves down the door.

I’m not leaving, Laura says. I can help save you, don’t you see?

There’s nothing to save, Beth says. She shuts the door to the Machine’s room again and puts the Crown on Vic’s head. She presses play, and Vic’s voice emerges: so instantly reassuring.

I’m having trouble remembering things, he says.

That’s natural, the doctor says. You had a nasty accident.

Yes. That’s what I’m told.

You don’t remember?

No.

The recording is from after it was all settled: after the majority of the work had been done. From here, they told Beth, it was just cleaning up. From this point onwards, anybody could talk him through it.

And then shouting, coming through the flat.

What’s that voice? Beth, who’s in there with you? Laura beats the front door again, and Beth remembers that the playback is still at full volume, so that she could hear it over the Machine. She wonders why Laura hasn’t heard the Machine itself: supposes that she’s assumed it to be a normal household appliance. She wonders if the neighbours have noticed the vibrations coming through their floors or their ceilings. If the shudders carry through the foundations and supports and make their light fixtures rattle and their carpets hum. Beth, I can hear voices, who’s in there?

Beth opens the door. The voices fill out into the rest of the flat.

I remember being somewhere. The desert? Is that where I had the crash?

What crash is that?

The, ah, the car crash. That’s why I’m here. Speaking to you.

Who are those voices, Beth? Laura sounds desperate. And then Beth unlocks the front door and opens it. The sunlight from outside is brighter than she thought: it’s been a few days – how many? – since she left the flat. Laura’s there, fingering her necklace. Oh my Lord, you’re seeing sense. You’re seeing sense. Beth looks around. Fat neighbour is there, pretending to be hanging out washing across the balcony rail (which they’re banned from doing). The kids stare. Across the way, some of the other families stand on their balconies and watch, because Laura’s voice is shrill and loose and echoes across the courtyard. Below them, a group of youths in the courtyard, standing on the benches and the flower-beds, look up at Beth and Laura. The boy is there: the one with the scar and the bike and the naked leaps into water that he can’t judge the depth of; and he spits onto the floor and stares, and doesn’t stop staring at Beth as she scans the complex.

Go away, Laura. I won’t ask you again.

You need me, Beth. You need comfort and advice.

Just go away. She picks up Laura’s bag from the floor, which is open, spilling with her wallet, a bottle of water, a bag of crisps and a book, and Beth knows what the book is without even having to look. She hurls the bag over the railing towards the youths, who laugh and act like it’s a bomb. Apart from the one with the scar, who doesn’t move.

What? Laura asks, and she turns and starts to run to the stairs as the gang look at the bag’s spilled guts.

Beth slams the door shut behind her. She walks into the bedroom and the recording is still playing, but she speaks over it. She talks to Vic about Laura, and how irritating she is. How she won’t leave them alone. How she – Beth – needs to get out of this place, because it’s all becoming too much. She wonders if he’s becoming more receptive. If, somehow, he can hear her through all the other noise.

33

Beth watches Vic sleep. It’s dark outside now, and she’s put him through more than she planned: the pills were still having an effect, so she drove on for another hour, risking accidents and fits that didn’t happen. When he’s finished he wakes up for food. He doesn’t say anything until he’s at the table, until his meal is all but done.

What happened to me? he asks.

What do you mean? Beth replies.

I had an accident. I can’t remember things.

Like what? she asks him.

I don’t know. Victor McAdams. I’m a soldier. You’re my wife. Your name is Beth.

Yes.

And there was an accident, I remember that.

You were shot, Beth says.

Shot. I was a soldier.

Yes.

Shot. He raises his hand to his head and rubs the scar on the side, above the burned-in one from the Machine. I was in hospital. He starts to cry. I can’t remember some of this, and I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am.

Beth can see how close she is. She comforts him, holds him, and he says that he’s tired. She’s got two diazepam left, and they were meant to be for tomorrow, but he starts heaving tears and air, so she pops them from the blister pack and offers them to him.

This is medicine, she says. You should swallow them. She holds the water for him, and it’s a struggle but the tablets settle in and down, and he gulps the rest of the water. They’ll help you sleep, she tells him. She sits with him and they do nothing – no talking, no moving, just her holding him to her – and then she starts to feel his head nod forward. So she tells him that they should go to the bedroom, because he’ll sleep better there.

She gets him to his feet and leads him towards the Machine’s room, but something stops her. The noise: it’s deeper and more present, and something’s wrong in the room. Like the Machine knows that she’s prepared him for the next session, and resents it. Which is insane, she tells herself, because it’s a machine, a thing, and there’s nothing inside it but wires and microchips and hard drives and space for the fans and the dust. But still: the noise sounds worse. Desperate, almost. She tells him to wait for her, and he stands independent in the doorway, leaning against the frame. She unplugs the Machine from the wall. Still there in the background. No respite.

Not tonight, she says. She doesn’t know why she’s talking to it. Why it deserves that from her. She looks back at Vic and pulls the door shut. Not the spare room, she says, come and sleep with me in here.

In bed, he takes his side like it’s ingrained in him to do so, and he slumps into a mattress that has seemingly remembered his shape and his form and the way that he sleeps, and into the pillows that nest around his head. His eyes are shut instantly, and Beth pulls the door shut, leaving the room in darkness and silence. She closes the front door behind her and she’s suddenly out in the wild of the estate. It feels different to her now, as she sees her reflection in the mirrors of people’s windows on the way to the stairwell, and sees her hair unkempt and greasy – has she showered while she’s been making sure that Vic’s body is as clean as it can be? – and her clothes thrown on. This is how she looks, and how Vic will see her. She tells herself that she has to make more of an effort in the future, as he wakes up more. She takes the stairs two at a time, almost jumping downstairs. She hates the blind corner here. She hates that there’s no way of seeing what’s waiting for her at the bottom. And yet she’s never met anybody or been threatened there. It’s just the potential for harm, or surprise. Sometimes that’s more worrying than the harm itself.

The rest of the estate is quiet, so she’s out and onto the road before anybody sees or hears her, and down towards the strip. She has to walk past the takeaways – the smell of the curry place makes her hungry for something that isn’t eggs and tinned spaghetti and frozen slices of bread – and that means joining the crowd outside the kebab shop. She knows that the boy is there before she’s even close enough to make them out as individuals, past their white t-shirts and their football-kit-material shorts and their white trainers and their shaven heads, and she knows that he’ll be the one who comes over to her. She sees them turn as a mass and look at her, and this is when she’s outside the Indian restaurant, and she thinks about walking in and acting like this was her intention all along. But she needs more pills, because she’s so close, and Vic is so close. Another few days of keeping him down and she’ll have him.

The boy – now he’s there, an individual, not like the others, somehow, there’s something worse about him – steps forward and spits at his feet and his head lolls. Left to right, lolling and rolling. He doesn’t make eye contact with her: he fixes his gaze on her chin, or her neck, she can’t tell.

Fuck you looking at, he says. I seen you around, right? His voice is slurred. Again, she can’t work out how old he is. Somewhere between twelve and seventeen. Some vague age that can’t be pinned down.

Beth doesn’t say anything.

No, don’t fucking ignore me. He’s not pushy, physically, staying a few feet back from her. He walks as she does, matching her path, crossing his feet with an almost-grace. Don’t fucking do that, now, missus. His friends laugh. They pick at their teeth and watch her with their heads tilted forward, staring out from under their brows. They open their mouths and smack their lips and rub at their fresh tattoos. Don’t you be fucking doing that, now, because I am not to be ignored. I am not a man you just walk past, eh? You see that?

You’re not a man, Beth says. She regrets it as soon as it’s out there, but there’s something about how long this has been going on. She has to stand up for herself and stop this. He’s only a child, she tells herself.

The fuck you say? They all shift position, falling into a line and arcing around her. Cutting her off. You stand near me and fucking say that again, okay? Okay? Okay? Okay? He repeats the word over and over again, sounding more threatening with each spit of it. His friends smile each time. Beth looks at his hands, and he doesn’t have a weapon, and she hates herself for saying what she did. She thinks about running. She looks for an exit. Okay? he says again. They get closer. Still not looking at her face: instead he stares only at her neck, definitely her neck, she can see, now that he’s closer. She wonders what he’s looking at. If he can see her pulse through her skin, or her throat as she gulps back the warm air that she’s breathing in too quickly. There’s something more predatory about it.

Step the fuck back, all of you, comes a voice from behind. It’s the waiter from the restaurant. No trouble, just step back from her and get your kebabs or whatever, and I won’t have to call the police, will I. Beth sees that he’s holding a cricket bat out in front of him, waving it around. It’s heavier than he expected, clearly, and it’s loose in his grip. One of them could knock it away at any moment; but they don’t. They back up.

You’re looking to have your place busted up, one of the boys from the back says.

No, I’m not. I’m looking to stop you boys getting in trouble with the police. You know that, right? He looks at Beth. Go, he mouths. She turns and runs off, and none of them apart from the boy look at her go, because they’re fixated on the waistcoated restaurateur. She stops around the corner and thinks she’s going to be sick but she isn’t, and instead stands on the spot with her hands on her knees and coughs at the ground. She breathes these heaves, and then leans back and sniffs in the air, and tries to hold it in. She counts down from fifty. It’s not quite enough.

Tesco is bright and painful, and she walks to the pharmacy counter in a slight detour, down past the meat fridges and the cold front that occupies the air alongside them. It isn’t until she’s past them that she sees the railings up at the pharmacy, and the man behind them packing things away.

Please, she says, I didn’t know you were shut.

Nothing I can do, he says.

Please. I’m desperate. He shakes his head. I need to get some painkillers.

Diazepam lady, he says. I remember. You gone through them already?

Yes, Beth says.

For an emergency, you said. To keep them in the cupboard in case of something, right? So there’s been a few emergencies the last week, yeah?

I’ve come out for this, she thinks, and she can feel herself shaking as she grips the counter. She doesn’t know if it’s shock, or nerves, or something residual from the Machine, because it definitely feels the same, vibrations rather than tremors, something inside rather than something muscular.

I know what you’re like, he says. Sort of person you are, I know you.

You don’t, Beth says.

Listen, right, we got a register, and you’re on it now. Because it’s people like you give us nothing but problems – in here, middle of the night, trying to buy this stuff. He glares at her through the railings. Go find a normal dealer, plenty round the estates.

Please, Beth begs.

Said we’re shut. The shutters darken and everything disappears: the background bottles of pills, the cough sweets, the man, everything. Beth’s nails dig into her palms. She turns and heads to the aisle where they sell these things without a prescription, and she finds the fastest-acting pain-relief tablets and scoops up a handful of boxes. At the front counters the security guard wanders along and keeps an eye on her, and the clerks all look at each other and smirk with their eyes. One of them looks down because she can’t stop laughing. It’s a quiet night, and this – probably telephoned through by the pharmacist, to tell them to watch out for her, because this one could be trouble – this is entertainment for them. Like a soap opera.

Twenty-six eighty, the cashier tells Beth. You want a bag? The adjacent cashier smiles and laughs into the hood of her top.

Yes please, Beth says. She can’t do anything, and the cashier flaps the thin bag on top of the piled painkillers. She pays by card and packs them up, and as she leaves, the security guard walks slowly behind her. She thinks that he’s looking for bulges in her pockets.

Outside, she breaks down. She walks around the side of the shop and it overwhelms her: the feeling that this – providing the diazepam – was one small thing that she could have done to help him. She’s carrying on, that’s not even a question. But the diazepam was to have been a gift to him: the ability to make it not hurt, and she’s failed. She sobs in the alley that intersects the supermarket’s delivery road, and she tries to keep it as quiet as possible. The wall is gravelled, pebble-dashed, and she smacks her hand against it. Only once, but it’s hard enough that each stone seems to break the skin, and when she looks at her palm she can see tiny red marks where it’s not quite bleeding. Her headache comes back and courses through her, and she opens one of the packets and takes two of the pills, dry swallowing them. They stick, and she can feel them sitting in her throat. She doesn’t know how to move them, until she gets water.

She walks back to the strip, hoping that the boy and his friends will have gone: but they’re still there, outside the kebab shop. They’re laughing harder than she’s ever heard them laugh. So instead she walks the other way, further down the strip, towards where it becomes the seafront. She finds the sole taxi rank servicing this part of the island. There’s a queue, and she joins it: behind the swaying man who clings to the woman with the smeared mascara. Beth waits, and they shuffle forward as cars drive up and take them away, and finally it’s her turn.

Where to? asks the woman behind the counter.

Beth tells her the address.

That’s no distance. You can walk that.

I’ll pay double, Beth says.

Your money, the woman says, and she shrugs, and she says the address into the radio and the man on the other end sighs. She’s paying double, the woman says.

The car pulls up two minutes later and Beth slumps down in the back seat. They drive back the way that she’s walked – past the pharmacist standing outside Tesco talking to his workmates as they drag on cigarettes, no doubt telling them about the addict who tried to scam him for tranquilizers – and then past the boy, and the youths all duck down to look into the cab but they can’t really see Beth because she turns away from them, so they look at the driver, make noises and shout abuse at him. The one boy isn’t looking where the rest are. His eyes are down, still, Beth’s sure, pointed right at her neck. They all laugh and one throws a half-empty bag of chips at the back of the car, and they laugh again, apart from, Beth is sure, the boy.

Fucking monsters, the driver says. Pardon my language.

No, it’s fine, Beth tells him.

Animals. Don’t know how we’re going to survive, if it’s them lot representing where we’re fucking heading. I’m trying to make a living, and now I probably got to clean chilli sauce off my car before I start tomorrow as well, and what the hell are they doing? Standing there, being wankers.

He pulls over and Beth gives him a ten, and he thanks her when she tells him to keep the change.

Have a safe night, he says. She walks through the estate and runs up the stairwell, and it isn’t until she’s on the tier outside her flat that she sees him: across the way, directly opposite.

The boy.

Is that where he lives? Has he always lived there? He isn’t looking at her. He isn’t looking at anything, she sees: his head slumped over, his eyes shut. He’s waiting for something. Beth fumbles with her keys and jams them into the door, and she can’t get inside and shut it fast enough.

Vic is still asleep. Beth sits by the side of his bed, taking the pills from their packets and crushing them up into a powder, and then trying to work out how much is too much.

34

Beth lies herself down next to him on his bed at some point and she turns her body towards him and tries to sleep. She knows that it will come eventually, but it’s the getting there. She watches his face, and she shuts her eyes when she gets sad from staring at it.

She wakes up with his hands on her: his fingers on her back, and his other hand at her crotch, pushing apart her legs. His fingers, once heavily calloused from the guns and the weights and the sand, are still slightly rough, and she remembers this perfectly: how it felt to have them in here. They cling to the inside of her thigh and knead it, and they brush up against her, and she’s ready almost instantly. She doesn’t know how much of this is Vic, but this must be because he’s nearly real. His finger slips across her. The same moves he always used to use, and she kisses him. She pushes: he used to like that, when she was the aggressor. He could start things, and she wouldn’t touch him, but she would push back with her mouth.

So she kisses him harder. She keeps her eyes closed, because she doesn’t want to know if he’ll be looking at her. He always used to look at her, his eyes open. He said that it made it feel better. More real. This feels real enough, Beth thinks. She pushes him back, his fingers still moving around her, and she slides on top of him. She manoeuvres, and then he’s inside her.

And the Machine is there all the time: that low-level noise that lets them know it’s still there, and that it’s still waiting to be used again. Beth pushes her whole body down to grind herself against him, and it doesn’t take long. She falls off him: in the heat, so sweaty so quickly. She thinks that she’ll have to change the sheets. She doesn’t say anything, and neither does he.

She lies next to him, trying to hear his breathing over the Machine; or maybe the Machine’s noise is his breathing, she can’t be sure. The heat becomes stronger somehow: as if it’s coming up through her body, and she’s making the heat herself, not the burning sun or the holes in the ozone layer that they warned them about for so long. She makes the heat. She feels her head with the back of her hand and can’t tell if it’s a temperature. So she gets out of bed and dresses herself lightly, her swimming costume and some shorts, that’s all. She walks back through the estate – it feels like days ago she was last here, not just earlier this evening – and she finds the beach opposite the stretch of shops where everything is dead and everybody else asleep, and she slides into the water. She swims out as far as she can, until the island is hidden by the darkness: only the blip of lights run across the view. She looks at the water as she treads to stay still: and the ripples on the surface that tell her that the vibrations have followed her even here. She stops and bobs, then sinks. Down. She shuts her eyes. Down. Cold all around her, and she can’t feel the warmth of the outside air, not even slightly.

She thinks that she could stay under: but even as she is thinking it something kicks in and her body writhes and forces her upwards, and she gasps for air when the surface breaks. She’s drifted closer to shore: she can see the estate from here again.

She swims back.

35

As soon as he wakes up she gives him the powder, worrying about the amount, stirred into orange juice to mask the taste. It turns the juice cloudy and grainy, and he pulls a face as he drinks.

No, he says. Oh, no.

It’s only orange juice, Beth says. To reassure him.

Beth, that’s not orange juice. That’s like chalk. Yuck.

Beth sits and stares at him. Suddenly nearly himself. Everything: the way that his face moves, that his tongue spits the words, that his hands ball when he doesn’t like something. His shoulders. And that leads her to his face, which is looking cleaner and healthier, and his arms, which are definitely trimmer. More toned. She wonders if he could press what he could when he was still at war, because this – Captain Vic McAdams – is the man she’s getting back. Not the shell that came back from war, or the shell that she helped make with the Machine’s treatments.

And then he tries to stand. He moves to the edge of the bed and swings his legs down, and it’s like he never stopped being himself. Feet go onto the floor, and he pushes himself to standing, and then rocks backwards.

Woah, he says. Unsteady. I’m a bit dizzy.

How’s your head? Beth asks.

Swimmy. I need…

Lie down, Beth says. How many pills were in the orange juice, she wonders. Five? Ten? All six packets made a pile of dust that filled half a mug, and this was a few teaspoons siphoned off and stirred in. But he’s weak anyway, she knows that. It’s been a long time.

Where are we? he asks.

In my flat.

What about our house?

I can explain it, but—

He doubles over and clutches his temples.

Jesus, this headache, he says. Jesus.

Come and lie down, Beth says. She has to support him, but it’s still easier than it was. On the bed in the Machine’s room he lies down, and in the darkness she soothes his head. She rubs her fingernail over the skin where his hairline sits, and he falls asleep. She takes the Crown and slips it onto his head. She tightens the bracing straps. I’m sorry, she says.

She presses the Machine’s screen. The vibrations and the noise, seemingly more intense again. She feels sick, and she has to hold onto the Machine as it makes her rock. She queues up the file and presses play, and on the bed Vic screams and bucks.

Oh God, he says, through the cries. Oh please. Please. Beth turns and holds him. She presses him to the bed, to try and stop him moving. Oh fuck, he says. This hurts oh my God it hurts so much.

I’m sorry, Beth says.

Oh my God. He passes out suddenly, and there’s no movement, not even a twitch. It’s sudden enough to make Beth feel for his pulse.

Do you know what makes it feel worse? the Vic on the recordings asks, his voice suddenly filling the room.

No, the Beth on the recordings says. What makes it worse?

That I can’t remember how we first met, he says. I don’t know why. It’s just a mist.

We met at a dance, the recorded Beth says.

That’s right. Okay. I think I remember now.

Beth now moves her hand to her mouth, because she doesn’t want to make any other noise. This was the part she didn’t want to hear, that she tried to pretend didn’t happen. This was her taking over the treatments, and changing the schedule to fit her timetable, not Vic’s, because she wanted a husband who was at home and normal and didn’t have gaps and patches that needed filling. This was a Beth who did three treatments a day when she should have spaced them out: three a week, they told her; a Beth who watched the bruise-burns appear on his temples each day with more speed, and then stay there; a Beth who was convinced that this was the solution.

Who sat in the clinic with Vic, in a room where they couldn’t see the Machine, and plugged him in and let it run and run.

They trusted the patients to do this at their own pace – there’s no right or wrong, the doctors told them, and that was their failing right there, that’s when they sealed their fate and condemned all these people: in not locking it down – and Beth was well aware that she was abusing it. How many of these recordings are there? Of her gently leading Vic down corridors to find patches, and then letting the Machine make of those patches what it did? Trusting in it – behind a wall, not even just a curtain, but something that they couldn’t see but could definitely hear, the continual churning behind and above them – and letting it do what she should have done herself?

She wants to turn the volume down, but here they are: herself and the man that she first created, as they go through the process. As she hears herself pushing him.

I don’t know, the Vic on the recording says, by way of an answer to a question.

Yes you do, the Beth says. Try and remember. You do know.

Okay, he says. Jesus, my head hurts.

Don’t stop now, the Beth says.

On the bed, Vic starts his bucking again, awake, his mouth suddenly frothing. Beth pins him down as much as she can.

I’m sorry, Beth says.

36

On the forums, the person who built the Machine’s new firmware used a construction analogy.

Before, the post said, it was like you were building extra floors to a building, like a block of flats, when there wasn’t the structure for it. You weren’t supporting it with pillars and scaffolding, just putting it on the top and hoping for the best. And then, at the same time, you’re pulling out the bottom floors in big chunks. You’re taking out the basement and the lower levels, taking out the foundations, and you’re leaving the whole thing unbalanced. They – the doctors – didn’t think about that. So, what happened next? I apologize, because maybe the analogy is crude, but the whole thing collapsed, and the building that you were adding to was destroyed. Not just the new parts, but all the parts, the older parts as well. Might as well have been flattened. Now what you’re going to do is build something new on the ground. The building-up part, that’s not what made it collapse. It was the removing of the foundations. That’s why this is safe, perfectly safe, for them. No danger for them, and no danger for you.

Beth tells herself to remember that post as she clings to Vic, who she’s not given a break, because they’re into this now. Soon he’ll be strong enough to refuse the treatments, to maybe even run away – and that’s a real worry for Beth – so her window has grown smaller. She gave him chalky water this morning, far chalkier than the orange juice even, and not long after drinking it his eyes rolled, but he’s still awake, so she has to hold his arms to his side as much as she can. She can’t be sure but she thinks that he’s pissed himself, because he’s so damp, but his whole body is glistening with sweat, so it could just be that. And the Machine is making this so much worse: the noise is incredible, inside her head, intensifying her headache. Every part of them, every part of the room seems to shake, and when there’s respite – in the pause between audio files, and as the Machine rests briefly in between sending whatever it’s sending down the Crown’s umbilicus to Vic’s head – Beth feels sick, and clutches at her head, and even takes the tablet powder herself, poured into a bottle of water and necked back.

This is torture, she thinks to herself. She doesn’t know how long she can keep it up. The day moves by and the night comes, and she wants to sleep but that’s pointless now, because she’s so close. In his gasps of consciousness he begs, and he’s her Vic again.

Tell me how you feel? she asks on the recording.

I feel incomplete, he says.

How do you feel, she asks him now, as his eyes snap open, and he vomits and definitely pisses himself this time, so she forces more water into his mouth to wash the taste away and keep up his fluids. It might be chalky but that’s better than nothing.

He tries to answer her but nothing comes out. Still, she can see it in his eyes: who he really is now. How much of him is Vic again.

I love you, she hears him say, but then it’s gone, swallowed by the noise of the Machine and the noise of his thrashing as a new session is firmly underway, and she doesn’t know if that was the voice of him now, or from the recordings made long ago when she destroyed him.