Beth doesn’t care what they’re saying in the documentary, because she knows, and she knows that most of it was lies, or ended up being lies. Instead she wants to see him for the first time, wearing the Crown, hooked up. A mock of his first session, staged for the cameras, but she still wasn’t allowed to be there.
They told her, It can make things confusing for the patient. So she never went, not until the later stages, during what they termed cleaning up. There was no danger, then, of her messing anything up for him, apparently. So in the mock he’s there, in a chair, his face a mess of pixels, with a doctor asking him questions. She knows that the Machine isn’t on before they even show it, because there’s no noise in the room apart from the murmur it makes when it’s merely plugged in. The doctor is asking Vic about the war, and he’s answering, and the doctor is fake-pressing buttons. They show the Machine. They have trouble getting it all into shot, but once they’ve adjusted their field of view and pulled back, there it is. It’s the same model, exactly the same as the one in the spare bedroom. Beth’s sure of it.
She picks up the laptop and walks it into the spare room. She places it on the bed and changes the angle of the screen. So that she can see both it and the Machine. It’s exactly the same model. The same size (she guesses, from the height of it in both rooms); the same width (again); the metal the same pitch black; the screen with the same slightly glossier shine. She knows that it’s not the same Machine, not exactly. There were hundreds of them built. But there’s something heartening about the fact that it’s the model that started this all. The one that took everything away from Vic will play a part in giving him back. It’s almost poetic.
She takes the Crown down from the dock and examines it. The pads. She wonders if they got cleaned between patients – she remembers the sweat on Vic’s head around where the welts would be, before they turned black over a period of months, permanent bruises that would be hidden by his ever-growing hair – and decides that she needs to take care of that now. From the bathroom she gets disinfectant wipes, and from the kitchen a duster and the handheld vacuum cleaner. She starts with the Crown, wiping the pads down, and the frame that holds them together, and then she lifts it to her face to examine it closely. She brushes apart her hair, taking it back from her face; and then slides the Crown onto her skull. The pads slide into place, like they’re meant to be. The perfect size for her. They sit on her temples, where she’s got thin hair, like wisps. Vic used to call it her fur. He would sing this song to her – For my flesh has turned to fur, the lyrics went – and she would hit him on the shoulder, telling him to stop it. She looks at the screen. The REPLENISH button is there, on the front page. This is what they took away from future iterations, when they locked it down. Before they withdrew the Machines altogether. She could press it … She wonders what it would be like, with Vic’s memories in her head. If that is something that she could carry around.
She puts the Crown back in the dock and rubs her scalp. It’s tighter than she imagined. She cleans the rest of the Machine’s bulk, using the duster to wipe down the metal, then taking the disinfectant wipes and running them all over the screen, into the corners. There’s black gunk where the metal meets the glass, which she tries to get with her nails but it won’t budge, so she brings a knife in from the kitchen and scrapes away at it, getting it into the vein between the surfaces and reaming the gunk out. Then she wipes it all down again, noticing as she rubs the screen that she’s inadvertently cycling through menus. She’s managed to end up on a page that’s inviting her to wipe the Machine’s internal memory. She presses the CANCEL button, suddenly relieved. She had been so close to losing it all. Everything she’s worked for, for so long. She turns the screen off, to stop it happening. Puts the thing on standby.
She drags a chair in from the kitchen and places it next to the Machine, and stands on top of it. There’s a gap just about big enough for her arm to fit between the Machine and the ceiling, so she runs the handheld vacuum into the gap, watching the dirt and grime that sat on top of it zoom into the transparent container.
She looks at the picture again, the frozen still on her laptop screen. She compares. They really do look incredibly similar. She wonders if it might not be the same Machine.
She unplugs it at the wall. It’s nearly light outside. She dresses for work and sits on the edge of the bed in her bedroom. Now, I could sleep, she thinks. Now, when I have to go to work.
At the weekend, one week closer to the end of term, she visits Vic. She packs a bag before she leaves the house, taking biscuits with her, and some of his clothes, pulled out of the vacuum-packed plastic bags where they’ve been lingering. The walk to the ferry terminal takes her along the coastline, because she goes out of her way to stick to it. It’s infuriatingly hot, even this early in the morning. She peels off her sweater and stuffs it into her bag. From the sea, there’s a wind, but it barely registers against the heat. She remembers when this was a rarity: when weather like this would have brought the tourists flooding here, and the beaches below where she was walking now would have been crammed. The promenade leading to the terminal is almost deserted. People walking their dogs on the beaches, letting them leap into the waves; some elderly couples sitting in chairs outside the coffee shop. Everybody else is still in bed.
The ferry ride itself is amazing. She calls it a ferry: it’s a catamaran, and she stands on the deck and, for a few minutes, it’s almost cold. The wind up there, caused by the speed, is biting. She doesn’t put her sweater back on, because she wants to feel it. She knows how fleeting it will be. Even as the boat starts to slow she goes inside and rubs a thin layer of suntan lotion onto the back of her neck. They say, on the news, that everybody will get used to the sun eventually. Children born now won’t burn nearly as easily. We’ll be like they used to be in the south of Europe: naturally tanned. Beth isn’t there yet. She rubs the lotion on and then pockets the bottle, in case she needs it later. The ferry docks into what’s left of Portsmouth harbour, and they all leave.
She remembers how Portsmouth used to be, back when the Navy was still here, before the collapse of the cliffs and before the flooding of Old Portsmouth. They dredged it, of course, once the waters rolled back a bit, but the damage was done. It’s something that people rarely appreciate until it happens: the sense of safety, of not needing to blockade. She thinks about how easily people now put up walls here, after they’ve been through it. The shops she passes have small steps to enter them and trenches dug along the roadside gutters. Everything seems to have been elevated a few feet. This part of the city, when it was constructed, floated on the water, and there are still the remnants of the parts that were lost when the flood came: the offices that were wrenched away from their moorings, somehow, and collapsed into the sea, toppling onto boats, the masts tearing through the windows and spilling out the guts of the desks and computers and people inside. Even now, that part of the city is bypassed and cordoned off, despite it being years since it happened. Still, in the water, you can see the computers and ruined chairs from the offices under the water, sitting far below the docks.
From here Beth enters the station, where her train is waiting, and she finds a seat and stares out of the window. She’s become accustomed to not doing anything on these journeys, because she finds herself too distracted. On the occasions she tried to read a book, she had forgotten about whole characters by the time she boarded her return train. It wasn’t worth it in the end.
After the train she fights through Victoria station, and to the underground. The tube is filled with stale air, recycled a seemingly infinite amount of times, pumped out in what is claimed to be cold air, but only tastes cold, somehow, and is still warm at its core. She can tell as she walks through the stations: how out of breath she gets just fighting her way to the escalators. Everybody around Beth sweats. By the time she reaches Richmond it’s a relief, even just to step out onto the high street. It’s busy already, but she turns away from the shops and towards where it looks more