The pub is heaving with under-age drinkers, many of them sixth-formers from Beth’s classes.
We can go somewhere else, Laura says when she sees them.
It’ll all be like this, Beth says. She walks in and straight past the kids, towards the back of the room where the real locals have gathered. Some of them are smoking: nobody’s telling them to stop. She thinks that she can use the kids’ presence as an excuse to call it an early night. She thinks about what she has to do tomorrow.
Long day, Laura says. What are you drinking?
Whatever you are.
Pinot?
Fine, Beth says. She forms a plan: to drink a few glasses quickly, not too much, but enough for it to become an excuse. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just say that she wants to go home. Laura isn’t somebody whose feelings she has to worry about hurting. By the time Laura returns with the bottle, Beth’s decided to get this over with. They’re poured and hers is at her lips, cold against them, before Laura has even set the bottle down.
Okay, Laura says. You needed that, apparently.
Apparently so.
They’re not bad kids, you know.
I said that to you, I think.
I think you did.
They absorb the slight unease of not knowing each other, of being colleagues without the subject of work to discuss any more. Laura brings up the job offer, which is now firm and lettered. There’s a contract if she wants it.
Do you want it? Beth asks. She’s halfway through a glass. Another sip. Question, then drink through the answer.
I think so. It’ll be hard with Rob. Really long-distance all of a sudden.
Won’t he move?
We can’t live together until there’s a ring on this finger, and he’s too scared for that. No, that sounds terrible. But really. It would be good though, I think, being here. I don’t know how you live here, but there are worse places to work. She notices how quickly Beth’s drinking, and she tops her glass up when there’s still an inch left. You must have a really nice flat, that’s all I’m saying.
It’s okay.
Any word when … I’m sorry, I’ve totally forgotten his name. Your husband.
Beth doesn’t know if she told her his name in the first place. She’s so worried about somebody snooping, Googling him and seeing what actually happened to him. Still, she thinks: now it’s too late to affect anything. Vic, she says. Victor.
Vic! Gosh. Proper man’s-man of a name, Vic.
He is, Beth says. Goes with the soldier territory.
So when’s he home next?
Beth thinks about lying. But she can’t, because there are tears in her eyes, and hiding them from Laura – sitting this close – would be impossible without making a scene. Tomorrow, she says.
What?
Tomorrow. He’s back tomorrow.
How long for?
For good, Beth says.
She stands in the ladies and wipes her face with dry, flaky tissue paper, and then watches from behind the crowd at the bar, as Laura fills their glasses again – she’s one ahead of Laura, she thinks. She thinks about those holiday friends and wedding-guest confidantes. She thinks about the wine inside her. How she won’t see Laura again, not after today. She’s disposable and transitory, and so is anything that Beth tells her: details forgotten in the blur of the wine and the night and the rush. She orders another bottle at the bar and goes back to the table.
You all right? Laura asks.
Fine, Beth says. She takes her purse from her bag and pulls the photograph from it: Vic in full dress, hat and coat, medals pinned to his lapel. The only part of that life that she kept for herself, even though she was told to destroy it, for both their sakes. Every other photo is generic. No uniform: just a face with no telling details.
Forget who he ever was, they told her. Burn all the photographs, all the evidence. Sell him the story that he’s been told.
This is Vic, she says. She slides it over.
Very army, Laura says. He looks nice.
He’s sick.
Oh? Laura doesn’t realize. She thinks that Beth means the flu, or a stomach bug. Something not worth worrying about.
He’s not in Iran. He’s in a home. A care centre.
What? She looks at Beth as if this lie has been going on for years: burned, rather than just annoyed by somebody else’s secrecy What happened?
Not just now. For years. He’s been in one for years. He came back and he was having dreams, and he became violent. She says it in her flattest tone: able somehow to make it sound like something unimportant, this story that she told so many times when he was first taken away from her. When, almost overnight, the situation became intolerable for her, as everything about him collapsed and devolved.
So he had treatments for it, and …
She doesn’t have to finish the story, because everybody knows how it ends. A tiny percentage that still rolls into the thousands, men and women taken away from their families, set up in places where fixing them isn’t an option – and in return no more than an apology. No compensation, no legal recourse: they signed a document because they were so eager to be fixed in the first place, and they were told the risks. Spelled out to them in numbered bullet points spanning pages and pages, all with their signatures at the foot. So instead they paraded and marched in protest, husbands and wives and children standing next to their loved ones in their wheelchairs. But that got them nowhere, because of those thousands of signatures.
Laura drinks because she doesn’t know what to say. Beth fills her glass for her, and her own. She’s past her own limit, when she had been planning on making her escape. But it feels good, she thinks, to talk about this. Laura’s the first person she’s told since she left London. She came here for anonymity and a new start, and to stop people asking her how he was doing. When Laura speaks next, it’s the first time she’s heard the question in years. It almost sounds fresh from Laura’s mouth.
How is he? she asks. She doesn’t know how to phrase it. There’s no way to ask the question, not really, because the answer is always so clear-cut.
He’s destroyed. He’s hardly my husband any more, Beth says.
But he’s coming home?
Beth nods.
You’re taking him out of the hospital? Beth notices something: Laura’s hand up at her neckline, fiddling with the necklace underneath her collar. Are you sure that’s wise? Laura asks.
I think I can help him, Beth says. I think I might be able to start making him better.
Do you pray for him? Laura asks.
What?
Do you pray for him? Because it might help. It might … I don’t know, Beth. She’s nearly in tears, Beth notices. She drinks more as Laura sobs. Some of the kids are noticing, looking over from the bar where they’re dropping shot glasses filled with some liquid the same colour as the Machine into their pints, the mixtures mingling and coalescing. They laugh at the two teachers, and one of them raises his fingers in a V to his lips, pokes his tongue through. Laura wipes her face. How can you help him now? she asks. She seems almost desperate.
There are some people – on the internet – who think you can rebuild somebody. Recreate them, almost.
Oh, no, Laura says. No, no. That’s why you got into this trouble in the first place.
Trouble?
It’s not our place to meddle, Beth. There’s an earnest look in her eyes that Beth’s seen before: in the protestors who stood outside the clinics, telling them that it was their own fault when the patients began to collapse. The malice of their self-righteousness.
Look, I shouldn’t have told you this, Beth says. She tries to wheel the conversation backwards. Laura used to be logical and easy. Not any more, now that this is out. This is a burden. It’s mine, not yours.
No, Laura says. Almost shouts. I think this has happened for a reason. It’s good that you told me. You shouldn’t go through something like this alone.
I should go, Beth says. She stands up. She necks the wine left in the glass. It’s already gone to her head: she can feel it, swimming around.
Beth, I could pray for you both. I’ll show you how, Laura says. Beth sees the cross front and centre, suddenly brought forward to the front of the shirt, hanging down. Not a simple cross: a crucifix, a miniature figure hanging from his nails. A miniature crown of thorns on his head. That’s the best way to deal with this, you know.
Beth forces her way through the crowd of students, ignoring their comments, and out into the air. She expected it to be cool, for some reason, where the pub had been so hot: she’d forgotten. Instead it’s dense and cloying. She rushes off. Laura doesn’t follow her.
She passes the point where the children leap off into the sea, and they’re still there, or a different group of children are. Leaping from the outcrop of grass-tufted rock into the pitch blackness, only knowing that they’re jumping out far enough when they smack the water. And when their friends hear that smack they all laugh, as if each plunge is a belly-flop, and each dive a bomb. She stands back by the railing – set twenty feet away for safety, because the authorities didn’t know if or when more of the cliff might slump down further – and listens to them, trying to pick out anything other than shouts and giggles. They’re only teenagers, somewhere between thirteen and sixteen, she reckons, boys and girls, and she thinks she can see that they’re all naked. But there’s nothing really sexual about this: just the leap and the darkness.
Down the path, only thirty metres away, she ignores the sign that implores her to call the telephone number on it and discuss her situation with the friendly-looking man on the other end, the sign that tells her that it’s never as bad as she thinks it is. She stands on the lip of the cliff and she can feel the alcohol inside her, making her sway. A bottle of wine, that’s all it takes these days. She thinks about when she and Vic got together, and how they were. How they would go out and drink with their friends, and how that led to their wedding, where they flooded the guests with booze. A good party, that’s all they wanted.
She looks out at the darkness, and she thinks about the nothingness that replaced all of who Vic was, like a virus. Deleting cells, replicating itself. The Machine, filling in the gaps with things that didn’t stick, stories of its own creation to cover up the cracks. And what makes her think that it will be so different this time? Because the stories are Vic? From his own mouth, 100 per cent pure and unfiltered, every part of his life spilled onto digital tape? She doubts herself. She doubts the Machine.
This isn’t me, she says aloud, to reassure herself. The kids down the way somehow hear her – and she wonders if she shouted it, even a little, or if it was just the wind – and they stop being children and become animals all of a sudden.
Go on! one of them yells. His friends laugh. She’s sure that she recognizes the voice: the same cracked broken deepness of the bike boy who lives on her estate, who calls out to her, sexually threatening even for somebody so young. Go on, you cunt! Give the world a fucking break! He doesn’t know who she is. He can’t see her from here, and he wouldn’t recognize her voice – although, she recognized his, didn’t she? – and this is all for show. If she did it, he would never forgive himself, she thinks. That’s what she hopes. To teach him a lesson would be the worst reason.
She backs away from the edge. She can’t see the boy in the darkness, and they’ve all fallen silent. There are no lights here, only the moon. She waits, suddenly scared; and then the laughs start again, and she hears the boy jump. She hears his laugh arc through the air, and the splash, and a second – maybe two – where there’s no noise. She wonders if he made it.
His laugh cuts through the air from the water below. Beth turns and heads up the path. The estate is quiet. She unlocks the door to her flat. She can hear it, already.