Beth lies in bed and keeps her eyes shut. She can see Vic, and she tries to cling onto him. The image of him back as he was. He’s telling her about the treatments. What they entail. She’s got a glass of water, and he’s got coffee. Her arm is still bruised. She holds it close to her body.
They say that it’s natural, he tells her. They take away the bits that are broken and twisted and they leave the pure stuff.
What about the gaps? Beth asks him.
They fill it in. The computer has everything it needs to fill in the gaps. They give it a cover story – like, they might say that I was in a car crash – and the computer does the rest.
The computer lies to you?
No, it’s not … It’s more like the computer helps me lie to myself.
Beth thinks about the rules that they were given, a laminated handbook that was theirs to keep. The things that she should and shouldn’t ask Vic about once the treatments started. The things that might happen that seemed strange but that they had to roll with. She would be told the cover story completely, so that she could play along; but the brain often interpreted things its own way. She was to go along with everything.
Never contradict him if he’s sure of something, the handbook told her. And make sure he never finds this handbook. Once the treatments are underway, this should be kept secret, because one day he’ll come home and he won’t remember why he left the house in the first place.
Now, Beth keeps her eyes shut because she can see him as clear as if he was in the room with her. She thinks about how her alarm hasn’t gone off yet, and how there’s something else. An intrusion into her sleep, because even as she dreams of Vic talking to her – holding her arms, however sore they might be, and telling her that it will all be all right, that all of this will be over soon – she can hear something else. In the background. A grind; machinery, road works. An engine, like a train. The noise of tank tracks. And then she realizes: it’s the Machine.
She opens her eyes and she’s in the spare bedroom, on the bed. She’s still in the t-shirt she sleeps in (one of Vic’s, bearing some obscure reference to a film that he used to love) and she’s not under the covers. The Machine is on, and the Crown has been removed from the dock, and is lying next to her on the bed.
No, she says. She sits up but her head swims, and she has to steady herself. She gets to the edge of the bed and taps the screen. She wonders if she deleted something from herself: she’s certainly thought about it before. Everything that gets deleted gets recorded, and she wouldn’t remember doing it. That’s the point. Even as she presses the buttons to take her to the recordings, she realizes that this is the furthest she’s been in the process. She doesn’t know how you would do it to yourself. Whether you’d just talk yourself through something, after pressing the COMMIT button; and how that would feel, talking yourself through to forgetting.
But there’s nothing. In the recordings section, there’s nothing. It’s blank, Vic’s stuff having been moved to the main memory. She’s grateful: she knows that, after a treatment, there’s no way she could have deleted the recording, so she’s clean. She wonders why this happened: how she moved rooms, and if she did this in her sleep. What she was trying to achieve. The Machine’s growl sounds like the rumbling of her stomach: morning hunger. She switches it off and pulls the cable from the wall.
In the kitchen she takes ibuprofen, gulps them down with a full glass of water, and stands by the sink, shaking. She splashes water onto her face. It’s still so early, an hour before she’d usually wake up. Already it feels hotter than the day before.
She spends the hour back in her own bed, staring at the ceiling. She doesn’t want to fall asleep – she’s not sure that she even could, with this headache – so she tries to concentrate on Vic again. On what he might be like when he’s at home, back with her. When she can work on him.
The headache remains. She telephones the receptionist and tells her that she won’t be in, because her head hurts so much that she can’t even see properly.
Migraines are worse in this heat, aren’t they? Beth agrees with her, even though she’s never had migraines before. This must be what it is. She dresses herself and leaves the house. Sunglasses on to protect from the glare, she walks to Tesco and goes to the pharmacy counter, and she asks them for tablets for a migraine. They make her fill out a form: she notices how much the pen shakes; she can barely hold it steady to sign the paper.
Back in her flat she swallows the broad-bean-shaped tablet dry, and then she sits on the sofa with the fan pointed at her head. Sometime after that she falls asleep.
When she wakes up she’s moved herself again, to the spare bedroom. The Machine is still unplugged.