The water is hot, and Beth is worried about the scab, so she washes her body first. She thinks about how people wash themselves after committing a horrific act in a movie; all going back to Shakespeare, back to Lady Macbeth scrubbing her hands. Beth lathers and washes off, and she repeats, but she doesn’t seem to feel any different. Nothing changes.
So then her hair, and she holds the tips underneath the powerful flow of the tap before putting the rest of her head under. She covers the scab with her hand at first, and then, when she’s sure that it’s okay – as she watches the water whirl around her feet she can see chunks of thick dried blood, but nothing fresh, which was the worry, that soaking it would open it up again – she lets the whole area be washed. She knows then that the cut looked far worse than it was: it doesn’t hurt, and she can feel the dried blood flaking away. She lets it, letting the bigger chunks pick themselves apart. They sit by the plug and slowly dissolve. It doesn’t hurt when it’s just water, and it doesn’t hurt when she runs shampoo through it, but she can feel the skin there below her hair: tender and pink.
She dries herself in the bath and then stands in front of the mirror, and she rubs the towel over herself before pulling on underwear and cleaning her teeth. She looks at the pink skin on the front of her temple, so similar to Vic’s own scar. The same shape. (They always marvelled that his scar somehow had the shape of a bullet. They were just seeing what they wanted to see, but there, on her head: a bullet, side-on, clear as anything.) She thinks about what to do with her toothbrush. All of this stuff can be left, she thinks. France will have toothbrushes. Spain will have shampoo.
I want to do my hair, she tells Vic. I should do something else with it.
Okay, he says. His voice is quiet.
She looks at herself. She looks better, she thinks, much better. Human, suddenly. She wonders if Laura’s awake properly yet, and if the police are in her room asking her what happened. It might take them longer to get a picture of Vic, so Beth will be who they’re looking for, if Laura even has a clue. They don’t have long. Beth thinks about her hair, and how changing it could give them time, if they need it. Vic’s clippers sit in the drawer in the bedroom, and she doesn’t give it a second thought once she’s plugged them in. She picks a high grade and doesn’t balk as she runs it along her scalp, front to back, and watches the clusters of hair mound in the sink as they fly off. Vic doesn’t ask her what she’s doing, so she takes swathes out. She does the front first, and then the top and the back – though she might need Vic to tidy it for her, and she pictures him standing over her, clutching the clippers tightly in his fist – and then she moves the clippers to the side where the scab is. It’s mostly gone, so she gently starts picking at it with her fingernails, pulling off smaller lumps, dragging them along the remaining hairs until they’re free, and then drops them into the sink. She manages to get most of it, but there’s still some left. She can see the pink of the fresh skin closer to her temples, but here, under the hair, she can’t, because the scab is dark against her scalp. It is at its darkest, and she pulls her hair from side to side to try and see underneath it, but she can’t, and she can’t get a purchase on the scab.
She knows, but she tells herself that it’s still only a scab.
So she takes the clippers and puts them on the line of her temple and pushes them along, and watches the hair come away, almost strand by strand, that’s how focused she is. It doesn’t hurt. It shakes: she feels the slight tremor of the device in her hands and on her head, and she thinks that this is nothing she hasn’t felt before, right here, vibrating the skin on this exact spot. And then the hair is gone from there, and she can see right to the skin, to the roots of the hair: and the bruise that sits at the puckered points the hair grows out of. It runs in a perfect circle, the size of an old fifty-pence piece, and she touches it but the skin doesn’t change: it doesn’t go pink, and it doesn’t go white. She thinks about her headaches, and how tired she’s been.
She takes the clippers to the other side of her head and the hair there is gone even faster, stripped away without a pause. She can see the Crown’s pad-mark even clearer here, because there’s no cut to contend with. She finishes the rest of her hair and then stands back and looks at herself. Barely recognizable, at a glance. She thinks that this is somebody else. It’s somebody else who did this, who wore the Crown, and what? What did she want to forget?
She goes to the living room. Vic stares at her.
What did you do? he asks.
To stop them from recognizing me, she says, but even as she says it she’s unconvinced. As if something inside her willed her to do this, so that she would see. She points to her temples. Snap, she says.
What? He rushes towards her and looks, puts his hands onto her head – she can feel them, so strong and warm and large, and she imagines them squeezing, crushing her skull, some feat of terrifying strong-man prowess – and he parts her hair with his fingers and examines the marks. He knows what they are. He’s seen his own, even as his hair has grown over them. His hair has grown so quickly, abnormally quickly, that they’re almost covered, and he almost looks normal. What did you do? he asks.
I don’t know, Beth says. I don’t know.
When, though?
I don’t know. She had assumed it was recent, but it could have been long ago. How long’s it been since she looked at this part of her head? Nothing about her has changed: no hairstyle changes, no haircuts that she hasn’t done herself. Nothing that would make her look at that part of her head, behind the temple, hidden away. She wonders if they’ve been there for years, even. As long as Vic’s.
She tells him to go to the bedroom and get some clothes out for her – she tells him which ones – and she sits on the arm of the sofa and thinks about what could have made her do this. Desperation, she thinks: if Vic did something so bad that she couldn’t live with it. Or if she did, maybe. But Vic … She thinks about the boy, and about Laura, and how easy he found it to shrug both incidents off as just something he did. An action, like breathing or eating. Totally justifiable.
He is simply standing in the room, not doing anything, so she has to go and find the clothes herself. She stands in front of him and dresses, and she looks at herself in the mirror by the door when she’s done, from across the room. These are clothes that she hasn’t worn in years, younger than she should be wearing, by a margin. She can fit into them now, after the last few weeks; and where they used to pinch her body, now there’s a sag and a hang. In the mirror she looks like a different person.
Okay, she says. Not long to go now. Wait here.
She goes to the Machine. It still trembles, like it knows what’s coming, but she doesn’t end it yet. She flicks through the screens for the recordings, to find out more, to see if there are numbered files of her speaking on here, telling the Machine that she wants to forget whatever it was that she couldn’t live with any more. But the only recordings are Vic’s old ones. Vic in file form. Vic as a fake man. Vic by proxy.
Something. Something outside, coming from the rim of the estate, coming closer and closer, the sound of engines and sirens that starts below the noise of the Machine, getting louder and louder, and by the time she gets to the living room she can see them as well, in the red and blue that flashes around the darkness.