The Machine (11 page)

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.

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.

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.