She doesn’t hear her alarm. Or she switches it off without realizing, one or the other. Her telephone rings and she answers it, confused, thinking it’s the middle of the night because it’s still so dark; and then she realizes that she’s not in her room. She’s on the spare bed. The blackness is coming from the Machine. It’s on, still; the screen dimmed, but still alight.
Hello? she asks.
It’s Laura, comes the voice on the other end. I’m in reception at work. Are you ill?
No, Beth says, but even as she says it she feels the sick in the back of her throat, rising. Her head pounds. What time is it?
Just gone eight, Laura says. I’ll let them know you’ll be late.
Beth gets out of bed and stands still, trying to hold down whatever’s threatening to work its way out of her. She gently strips, trying to move as little as possible, and then pulls on underwear and a skirt and a shirt. She walks to the fridge and grabs a little bottle of water, and then drinks it as she sits on the loo. Everything’s moving still: she sits there with her eyes shut, the coldness of the water so sharp on her throat it threatens to be her undoing. Eventually she stands up. She braces herself against the wall. She’s just doing too much too quickly, she knows.
She pulls her coat on, slips her feet into her shoes. Flats today, even if they don’t go with this outfit. She’s about to leave when she realizes that she doesn’t have her keys, so she scans the surfaces, panicked. She sees them on the floor, by the back wall, where she kicked them the night before, and when she bends to pick them up she sees the Machine through the spare room doorway. The screen isn’t dimmed any more; it’s lit brightly, and the Crown (which she now sees is up by her pillow) is lit around its rim, small yellow lights that indicate the stages of use. Like traffic lights: red is off, yellow is primed, green is go. When it’s green, the Crown must stay on the head. Those are the rules that they were told. (They were never told what would happen if they broke them, and they didn’t ask. It’s not been done, that Beth knows. Some rules seem serious enough to never be broken.)
She picks up the Crown and puts it back on the dock, and then looks at the screen. It hasn’t been used, she doesn’t think – there’s no way of telling directly, because such an indication hasn’t been needed – but she feels okay. She thinks about the damage that she could do to herself, given the chance. She knows that she has these thoughts, but she’s close, now. If she’d had the Machine for longer, just sitting there, then maybe …
Her telephone rings again. It will be somebody else from school, checking up on her. She ignores it, and she’s out of the front door in seconds, and down the stairwell, along the shops, along the front, through the shortcut of another housing estate and then at the gates. Laura is standing in her place, in her classroom, reading the register. She thanks her and takes over, and with every Here, Miss McAdams that the kids give her, her head throbs just that little bit more.