The Actuality Read online

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she murmurs.

  ‘What’re they doing?’

  ‘They’re trying to see in through the windows.’ They would, however, observe little other than a soft radiance through the curtains from where Daniels left the bulb of a table lamp on in the sitting room.

  A dog yelps. She can’t see it, nor its owner, but is now certain that the snooper is the old woman from the church.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she says, relaxing a little. Not quite true, but she doesn’t want to create worry where none needs to exist.

  They continue through the trees, reaching the bare crest of the hill. From its round top the view opens up. Daniels is out of breath, his chest heaving, and Evie is conscious of her own energy levels. She was fully charged before she set out for Cambridge but she has been through a lot since. In the rush to leave the cottage it was expedient to ignore the faint inner voice expressing concern – not Simon this time but a new, friendlier presence of which she is only just becoming aware: a mirror, perhaps, of her own self.

  ‘How far is it?’ she asks.

  ‘See the lights?’ Daniels says. ‘That’s an all-night garage. Attached to it is a car dealership.’ He points out a straight strip of road cutting through the snow. Perhaps something left by the Romans, as featured in one of her Ladybird books, of which Matthew had a collection ready for when she arrived covering subjects from hovercraft to the Holy Land.

  ‘We’re going to buy a car?’ she asks.

  ‘Not exactly buy, I was thinking more like borrow.’

  Evie gazes at the light pooling around the garage buildings. It appears to be about a mile distant. She can do a mile – if they take it slowly – although possibly not much more. Tight but doable and now that she has seen what is required of her, she relaxes a little and thinks about what lies beyond. ‘How far is Scotland?’ She still grapples with distances, used to only measuring her world in feet and inches.

  ‘A long, long way and the roads get more and more mangled the further north you get. We’ll reach the wall by tomorrow evening with a bit of luck, if not the day after, and cross via one of the smuggling tunnels.’

  The wall he is referring to is Hadrian’s Wall which was also in the books provided to her. In addition to the Ladybirds, she was given a near-full set (missing only E – F) of an illustrated young people’s encyclopaedia with coloured plates. Did Matthew imagine he was acquiring an adult or a child? How would Evelyn have reacted? She probably would have thrown them at him.

  ‘Scotland,’ Evie says. ‘Robert the Brave, Bonny Prince Charlie’s Gal, The Gallant Fastlane Mutineer, The Bloody Siege of Inverness . . .’ reciting the titles of ballads from a piano songbook back in the apartment, which apart from the Waverley novels and the children’s books, provide nearly the only facts about the country she knows. ‘What’s Scotland like?’ she asks wistfully, imagining mists drifting through mountain glens, fierce but handsome brigands in kilts and funny long-necked monsters swimming in lochs.

  ‘Unfortunately, not as romantic as you fondly imagine. It’s grown pretty lawless since the schism and there’s understandably no love lost with the English after what was done, but it’ll count in our favour that we’re fugitives. Oh, and the weather’s f’ing terrible!’

  She gazes down the hill towards the cottage, and draws breath sharply.

  ‘Cheer up, girl,’ he says, squeezing her arm, misunderstanding her reaction, ‘we’re only going to be staying long enough to sort our passage to Canada.’

  ‘There’re people in the yard outside the barn,’ she says.

  He looks around. ‘You sure?’

  She hears the tinkle of breaking glass. Shortly after, electric torch beams move about inside the cottage. ‘Oh,’ he says: even he can see this.

  ‘They’ve found us,’ she says. The lights move upstairs and enter the room that she so loved. It feels like a violation. The trembling she is experiencing is just a wobble in her central control system but it serves to magnify her fear and the resulting tension is an additional power drain.

  The barn doors swing back, pushed open from the inside, and a handler emerges with a pair of dogs.

  The dogs cross the yard and, picking up a scent from the cottage steps, squeeze under the lowest bar of the gate and dash into the lane where they mill excitedly.

  ‘We need to get moving,’ he says. ‘This is bad.’

  They descend into the darkness the other side of the hill and are soon again among trees. The going is difficult and without the light of the moon, they crash through the undergrowth, their feet sinking in the drifts. Daniels breathes noisily as he snaps back the brittle branches but for her it is worse, her legs are shorter and her motion less efficient. Energy consumption is at peak.

  She stops and leans against the trunk of a tree. ‘They’re following our tracks up the hill,’ she mutters, ‘I can hear the dogs.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he says. ‘We need to keep going.’ When she doesn’t respond, he adds, ‘Evie, it’s not much further. Don’t give up now.’

  She struggles upright and stumbles after him, too ashamed to reveal her predicament.

  Daniels waits for her and takes her arm as she comes alongside. ‘You should have said. I’m not expected to be a mind-reader. How bad is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can make it,’ she murmurs, dropping her head. Her power has just drained away in a fashion that even she, who knows her limitations, could not have foreseen.

  ‘You will,’ he says. ‘We both will.’

  The barking of the dogs reaches the top of the hill and Daniels stiffens.

  ‘Once we get to the bottom, it will be easier,’ he says. ‘Once we reach the road . . .’ He doesn’t finish the thought. Half-carrying her like this, he is panting hard, the breath steaming around his face. But she can finish the sentence for him. Once they reach the road, they will be exposed by the garage lights, and burdened with her, and in the open, they’ll be even easier to catch.

  They reach the valley floor and, pushing through a hedge onto a track, follow it until it takes them through a gate leading to farm buildings.

  They enter a shed. On one side it is piled with mouldy bales and the other is parked up with rusting rotovators and sprinklers.

  Daniels takes a ladder from the wall and lays it against the stacked hay. ‘Climb up.’

  ‘But the dogs,’ she says. ‘They will find us.’

  ‘They’re following my scent,’ he says, ‘not yours. I’ll lead them away from here and come back.’

  Evie climbs to the top of the bales and lies down. She is twenty feet up, close to the roof, and from here through the gap between the edge of the corrugated iron and the top of the wall, she has a view over the fields.

  She is so exhausted, she is barely aware of him placing the pack by her head. He climbs down and removes the ladder. ‘Don’t move,’ he calls up in a low voice, ‘I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.’

  She listens to his feet clatter across the concrete and then silence closes in.

  Shortly afterwards, she hears the barking of the dogs again, from the distant woods.

  Then, fifteen minutes later, gunshots.

  Half an hour on, with her head on its side, too weak to turn away, Evie watches four people come down the track towards the shed in which she is hiding, Daniels’s body slung between them.

  PART 3

  Elektra

  16

  Evie’s desolation is complete.

  Simon is quiet too. He may have had no love for Daniels, but even he is aware of the severity of the situation.

  The hunters bring Daniels’s body to the farm and swing it onto the rear of a truck, like a grain sack. She overhears enough of the exchange of blame to grasp that he is regrettable collateral. But none of them seems overly worried.

  The search for her, meanwhile, continues. They have light throwing nets woven from nycra and a hova in the air over the woods with a searchlight stroking the ground.
Activity is orchestrated from a command post set up below her in the shed, with maps laid over the engine housing of a wheel-less tractor. She hears herself referred to as ‘the freak’, ‘the monster’ and ‘the thing’. For their safety, no one is to approach her without support.

  She rolls onto her side so she doesn’t have to see Daniels lying below. Her body trembles but it is not from fear; the danger of discovery no longer troubles her as both hope and reason to continue are gone. When her charge is this low, processes judder inefficiently like Daniels’s lawnmower when low on fuel, or the flicker of his newsplastic in the apartment on nights when the clouds cling to the windows and the signal struggles to penetrate. Thoughts repeat themselves, looping again and again, each time seeming for a second to be fresh and hopeful before being replaced with a blank screen.

  Lying there, without even being sure she’ll have enough energy to bring herself back up, she puts her systems into standby.

  *

  When Evie revives, all of them are gone, including the truck with Daniels’s body.

  Daylight grows and, as the sun rises, falls across her. She wriggles the hood of her coat from her face and manoeuvres her cheek into the light, soaking up the energy from its rays.

  She lies there throughout the morning, slowly charging. As the sun grows in potency, she finds enough strength to move and stay within its reach. The biogel beneath her skin acts as a heat exchanger – albeit an inefficient one – and gradually the electrical flow in reverse raises her main energy cell out of critical.

  She has time to mull over events and face the fact that she is completely alone and in need of a new plan. It is clear that the idea of Scotland is now hopeless – the point of it was to get to Canada and she’d never manage to cross the Atlantic without Daniels’s assistance.

  In her helplessness, Evie’s thoughts chase their own tails in dizzy confusion, and a memory they gave her of Evelyn with her father slips unnoticed into her head. As it plays out, it bathes her in nostalgia and raises in her something bittersweet and akin to homesickness.

  In it, they are out riding in the early morning along a lane overhung by branches, which they duck beneath to avoid knocking their heads. They come to a halt in the dappled light, both out of breath. The horses’ fetlocks are slick with dew from the long meadow grass. The mountain air is just warming, stirring the blood of her father’s large roan for more, and he stamps and snorts, eager again to be galloping. Her darling Florizel, in contrast, is relaxed and patient, head down, happy to do whatever she bids.

  The moment is tinged with melancholy as they must shortly part for Evelyn to return home. She has a literature test at school that morning, over which, despite the distractions of the ride, she is nervous. Her father reaches across to place his hand on hers, smiles reassuringly and tells her how smart she is and how she and Goethe will get along just fine.

  It is one of Evie’s favourite memories, not only because of the affection in that look but also because Evelyn, with her momentary exhibition of nerves, for once feels attainable.

  Soothed by the reminiscence, Evie finds that she can think clearly, and in the resulting calm, the solution she needs comes to her, astounding her with how obvious it is but that neither she nor Daniels had considered it.

  She does not know if Evelyn’s father knows that she exists. She cannot even be sure that he is still alive. Even if he is and she manages to make it to Austria and find him, there is nothing to stop him throwing her out as an abomination of Evelyn’s memory, or worse still, trapping and betraying her. But he is perhaps the only person left who may be willing to protect her.

  By the late afternoon, Evie is able to descend the ladder, and as the shadows lengthen over the fields she follows the unploughed strip beside the hedge to the road, and from there limps the few hundred yards to the service station Daniels had been aiming for.

  She passes a cluster of buildings beside a wired enclosure jammed with old cars with prices scribbled on their screens, and crosses the forecourt between the fuel pumps, keeping to the shadows.

  A massive multi-articulated truck emerges from the darkness and bears down, blaring its horn. The noise from everywhere and nowhere at once is enough to blow her sideways. Running first into its path and then realising her error as the racks of headlights skewer her, Evie scampers to the side, pressing herself against the pumps as a tide of treacly slush thrown from under the dozens of wheels splatters her legs and coat, leaving her heart racing as fast as a rabbit’s.

  Creeping out from between the pumps, she enters a twenty-four-hour shop. Inside the entrance is a public phone under a plastic hood and, pushing in a half-dozen quarters, she calls the number on the card given to her by the man in Cambridge. She has never used such a device but has seen how to work one from old movies. She and Matthew watched films together in bed, the projector flickering like a magic lantern, the image filling the end wall – sometimes stutteringly black and white, other times vividly holographic, the performers strutting around the rug. She’d lie tucked tightly into his side with her cheek on his chest. And now and again, ignoring the three-dimensional presences just beyond the footboard, they made love.

  The bittersweetness of the memory brings her to a temporary standstill, holding the receiver in front of her face and staring into the distance.

  17

  Timothy Maplin arrives half an hour later in a rusty yellow car. It is not much larger than a refuse container on wheels, its roof just wide enough to incorporate a photocell.

  After making sure that he is alone, Evie leaves the cover of the trees and, circling around to avoid the dim cone of his headlights, which give the vehicle a cross-eyed gaze, approaches from behind. Maplin looks over his shoulder nervously as she taps on the window but then quickly invites her in. She takes the other of the two seats. He tries to hide it from her but from the glow of the dashboard, she can see he can’t stop himself insanely grinning.

  ‘Drive,’ she says in a low voice, relieved he is here, obviously, but goaded by his elation. She is painfully aware that she has lost control of events and is relying completely on the help of a man she knows nothing about and instinctively dislikes.

  Maplin’s house is in the suburbs to the south-west of Cambridge, an unexceptional Edwardian red-brick semi about a mile from the centre.

  He parks on the road, squinting into the bent wing-mirror as he manoeuvres into the kerb, still scraping the wheels despite his efforts.

  Grass grows thick between the slabs in the narrow path to the front door. ‘You’ll be safe here,’ he purrs, opening it for her, grinning fawningly, his eyes bulbous behind their thick rectangular frames.

  Evie does not feel reassured. She has been told that she will be safe too many times recently and that was by someone she had learned to trust.

  They walk down a hall lined with boxes of what appear to be junk electricals. Her head rolls weakly. She is nearly overwhelmed by exhaustion. ‘I need to recharge,’ she says, taking hold of the wall to prevent herself toppling.

  ‘No problem, we can do that.’ He opens the door to the kitchen and a monkey bursts through, trampling over her feet in its rush to get past. Evie turns to stare as it makes its way to the stairs using the handrail to climb. The back of its skull is missing, exposing a tangle of wires and blobs of solder.

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s just a toy,’ Maplin says. ‘An animatronic. I’m repairing him but whatever I do to keep him in one place, he insists on wandering about!’ He pulls the plug of the kettle from the socket, sliding out of the way a box overflowing with blackened circuit boards giving off a singed smell. ‘You can charge yourself here.’

  ‘I’d rather go somewhere private.’ This modesty has been programmed into her, partly for her self-protection and partly because at all times she is expected to maintain the illusion of being human, of being Evelyn.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you to the study.’

  He swings back the door with his foot. The roo
m is dim and dusty and as cluttered as the kitchen and corridor. Shelves reach to the ceiling, piled higgledy-piggledy with files and books. The presence of books are a fresh reminder of home and how, in just a few days, both of the people who have been everything to her have been lost.

  There is a brass key in the back of the door: she turns it and, feeling secure enough to power down, scoops an armchair clear of curling papers and collapses into it. Lifting her jumper above her ribs, she peels back her skin with unsteady fingers and connects herself.

  *

  Evie comes to sprawled on her back, half over the arm and half on the floor. Blinking, she stares around at the high shelves. For a moment she is lost, wondering if she has been dozing in the library at home, before remembering with a jolt all that has happened. It is the morning after she arrived here. She has been out of it for twelve hours.

  The door is open, Simon says. It is the first time he has spoken since she can barely remember when. When her energy is low, his presence retreats, but it is more than that, his voice is no longer the near-constant companion it was. She used to miss him like a twin, but now she is getting familiar with figuring things out for herself; his company, when he chooses to pop up, merely makes her head seem crowded.

  I locked it.

  That’s why I’m saying.

  The point is a good one, but she would have come to it herself. And she resents his tone.

  She straightens her clothes and walks stiffly into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, you’re awake,’ Maplin says, cheerfully. ‘I wasn’t sure how long you needed.’ He is applying a lumpy yellow spread to a square of bread with the edge of a sliver of silicon, using the only spare space on the worktop. In daylight it is more apparent than ever just how filthy everything is. The cupboard doors are streaked with grease and the floor sticks to her shoes at each step. She is wary of touching anything. Daniels had kept the apartment spotless.