The Actuality Read online

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ she murmurs, her voice so feeble that it must be barely audible. She is not referring to qualia specifically but why he is doing this to her at all.

  ‘The experience of qualia can be pleasurable or painful. They are the stimuli we react to. A qualis – that is the correct singular term – could be, for instance, what an orange tastes like. Another would be what it feels like to burn your hand in a flame . . .’

  He is still talking, something about a lie detector test, whatever that is, but she is no longer listening. He has turned the nearest knob again, taken it halfway, and like a bottle below a gushing tap, her body fills with pain.

  Evie was engineered to feel things. She is used to sensing hurt, but more as a warning, like an alarm bell, to stop her persisting with something that will harm her. She also feels something that must be what humans identify as pleasure, which her makers designed into her to provide an operational incentive – in orgasm, experiencing deep, deep ripples of bliss so powerful that she loses sense of the distinction between her organic and mechanical self and at the end is left as shapeless as wet clay.

  Pleasure and pain, the yin-yang of a reward system. Pleasure, lovely: do this thing again. Pain, less nice: tolerable, but next time steer clear.

  This pain centres in her chest like a heart attack, dispatching tentacles through her nervous system in an octopus of agony.

  Then it comes to an end as abruptly as it started.

  She lies there, blinded, shaking, a greasy sheen of milky perspiration coating her forehead. Biogel has forced its way through the surface of her skin, which it was never intended to do. Her body is alive now in a way she’s never known it, as if it’s been pricked with a thousand and one pins.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Maplin says petulantly. ‘I know that was a little unpleasant. But I just need you to learn that you must do as I say, for your own good.’

  ‘Liklle unpleasmant,’ Evie mutters. Gel pools behind her gums and runs from the corner of her lips. She has bitten through her tongue. She is breathing rapidly. She had been frightened before, but not like this. Her body is tense from her toes to her fingertips; too terrified to relax in case he twists the knob again.

  ‘I just need you to make me a promise.’

  ‘Whatil promise?’ she gurgles, swallowing the gel. Another no-no.

  ‘That you will never leave me.’

  She stares at the ceiling. Tell him, tell him that we’ll do anything, Simon says. He is sobbing quietly. She has never heard that before.

  ‘I . . .’ she tries to speak, but something in her will still not surrender.

  The pain shoots through her again, this time worse than before. It feels as if her arms are being dragged off, while at the same time her nails are being pliered from her fingertips.

  The pain is so great it cannot hold her and she sinks below it. Down here in the darkness, a memory that has lain submerged for decades buffets up against her. It originates from her eleventh year. A woman is visiting the apartment. She is beautiful, with golden hair, and when Matthew shows her the garden, like he had once shown her, the sun gleams through it, forming a corona around her head.

  Evie has been ordered to stay out of sight and watches from the music room as the woman flirts with her husband, stroking his hand like Evie does when they are together. The two of them return inside and she hears them enter his room and the door closing. Now that they are no longer in the garden, she goes out herself, and making a beeline for the pond, climbs onto the rim and without hesitation lets herself fall backwards into the water.

  She lies on the bottom, the lilies in flower floating above her head.

  It is Daniels who pulls her out. He lays her on the coping stone and wraps towels around her to get her dry. When Matthew finally emerges from the apartment, Daniels shouts at him. In her semi-conscious state, Evie is aware that they are furious with one another and willing to fight over her. Then she feels Matthew lift her into the air and carry her into the apartment, laying her on his bed. There is no sign of the beautiful woman any more.

  Afterwards Matthew tells Evie, without her asking, that the woman was his cousin. It is a story that is fairly hard to believe, this cousin suddenly come from out of nowhere, and rather than convince herself that it is so, she blots the whole incident from her memory. A deceit in which even Simon is happy to connive.

  Now, as the electricity courses through her, it is as if she is lying again in the pond, Ophelia-like, her face below the water, staring up at the glassy sky, wanting to die.

  When Evie comes around, something feels different in her body. Not right. She tries to raise her wrists within their restraints but it is her ankles that lift.

  ‘Yar killeen me,’ she mutters, her voice emerging with an electronic twang.

  ‘You were trying to leave,’ Maplin says, but there is concern in his voice that he may have damaged his priceless plaything. ‘You would never have survived,’ he adds.

  ‘Tis I ill not sevive,’ she murmurs. If he just wants a promise, she can do that. ‘I wone leave,’ she concedes. ‘Cen do whativer you want. Cen follow instruction. Good wit rules. Never left apartment, tho could ease av done. But didn’t cos told not te. I liket here. I could be appy, if ony you give me secend chence. Teach me . . . Timoth . . . please . . .’ And she hears an inner voice, not Simon, but her true self, murmur, that’s right Scheherazade, whatever it takes. Now is the time to end the story.

  She is vaguely aware of his untying her wrists. With them released, she slowly sits. The aftermath of the tests has left her light-headed, dizzy. Presumably he is releasing her with the intention of reincarcerating her upstairs, where the re-education can continue until he is convinced she really will be obedient.

  Evie watches him unbuckle the homemade straps holding her ankles.

  ‘Tank you,’ she murmurs, the feeling returning to her toes as he releases one foot and then the other. She swings her legs over the table edge and sags forward, scrutinising Maplin out of the corner of her vision.

  He is watching her too, tears in his eyes, taken in by her appearance of weakness. Not imagining how the surges of electricity may have been recharging her cell.

  ‘You can rest in my sister’s room,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you,’ she murmurs again, control over her voice returning. She slides her feet to the floor, tentatively letting them take her weight.

  He reaches out his hand to help. ‘We can make this work,’ he says.

  And she takes his outstretched arm in her hand . . .

  . . . and, twisting it back, hurls him over the table against the wall.

  She stumbles around it before he can get up, clinging onto the chair-back at the end like a cripple to stop herself falling. There is something definitely not right with her legs.

  She stands above him. Then drops on her knees on his chest. Maplin cries out and squirms beneath her.

  The cap of electrodes lies on the carpet, still attached to the machine. Picking it up and bundling it, Evie stuffs it into his open mouth.

  Gagging on the tangle of wires, he wriggles beneath her, pitching from side to side in an effort to throw her off. He grabs hold of her elbows but, despite using all his strength, he cannot stop her mashing the bunched electricals deeper into his throat. Evie reaches for the intensity knob and twists it around to full – way beyond the point he had used on her. The body beneath her goes rigid, then limp, then starts to flex, his heels and the back of his head thumping the floor.

  Evie drags Maplin along by an ankle and, reaching the under-stairs cupboard, casts him through the doorway so that he flies over the steps and crashes in a heap. His glasses have fallen from his face on the hall floor and she crunches the frames under her heel.

  She bolts the door top and bottom and twists the key while the two monkeys watch.

  Where were they earlier? Surely, they could have done something to help when Maplin wasn’t in the room. The one called Jackson ha
s proved himself capable of gaining access to anywhere and their nimble little fingers would have had no trouble with the straps. But they didn’t help. They didn’t return the favour she had done for them. They don’t even appear remorseful, despite listening to her screams.

  They take a step back as she turns. They are nervous of her now, as they should be. They have seen what she is capable of. She raises her upper lip exposing her teeth, snarls and lurches towards them, arms outstretched, fingers curled into claws. It is only a feint, but it sends them hightailing across the floor, squealing on all fours into the corner.

  Simon has scarpered too. She thinks of him retreating into a hole. It is good that they are all terrified.

  It is eight o’clock by the hall clock. Evening again – she has been held captive for two days. One period of twenty-four hours in the cellar and one buckled to the table.

  Now it is time to leave.

  Evie checks herself in the mirror, not out of vanity but self-preservation. The gel in her forehead has swollen up, a protective reaction resulting from her initial fall. Her wrists and ankles are scraped nearly through. Her body is frailer than she cares to admit – in this respect much like poor cursed Evelyn.

  She is still wearing only her underwear – now stiff with gel and oil, emitted via her openings. Going upstairs to the bathroom, she cleans herself with a flannel and, rummaging again in Maplin’s sister’s room, finds a fresh vest and briefs. Over these, she dresses in a nanoflec sweater and trousers, and ankle boots she discovers under the bed.

  She examines her damaged elbow and, returning downstairs, rummages through the kitchen drawers for something she can use to repair it. She finds a bicycle puncture kit in a rusty tin and applies glue and a black patch to her skin. She tentatively flexes the joint to test that it will hold, and slides down her sleeve.

  In the hall, she takes her coat from the rack and finding the blonde wig in the pocket, pulls it over her messed hair.

  Evie draws breath and examines herself in the mirror a second time – this time seeing someone new.

  The fringe falls to her brow and conceals the bruising. As she moves her head to examine her new appearance, the bob floats across her cheeks.

  Who is this person? What more is she capable of? she wonders. For the first time in her life, Evie doesn’t recognise herself. She is unusual, captivating even to a small degree, and, all-importantly, no longer a replication of a dead woman. In her forty-one years’ closeted existence with Matthew she ate only from The Tree of Life but during her few days with Maplin she has eaten now also from The Tree of Knowledge.

  It is then that she starts to cry. The first tears she has been able to shed in years make their way out, flushing through a gritty residue of crystals to cake her lashes. She wipes at them, scratching her puffed-up cheeks. The relief is overwhelming. She oozes a flood of pent-up hurt. She is blind from it, collapsed against the wall. Decades of frustration and short, sharp recent grief sob their way out. She cries for Matthew, for Daniels and even for sad, clever Evelyn, taken from this life so young. She cries for the ill-formed mannequins imprisoned upstairs. And she cries copiously for her poor recently tortured self, for the thrill of life that she has been deprived of, and which she is only now sampling, belatedly, through a blur of pain and sorrow.

  PART 4

  The Dolls’ House

  25

  Evie limps towards the town. She creeps through a derelict shopping centre, its dark malls strewn with shattered glass and the carcasses of broken shopping trolleys. Her hips give her pain but her motor functions are once again aligned. She fell over on the pavement outside Maplin’s house, left and right legs reversing operation and then switching back, but the problem has not repeated itself and she has maintained her balance since. The rattle in her chest has subsided too, almost too faint now for even her to hear. But if the glass of her gyroscope is cracked, even a hairline, there will be nothing she can do.

  She keeps to the shadows, crossing the street to avoid the doorways of pubs wafting a mashy, hoppy stink, such as which Daniels occasionally brought back to the apartment, when he’d sit at the table, reciting old exploits, lush with bravado as if they’d just transpired. Pretending to have had an amusing evening, when it was obvious he’d been sad and alone and would have done better spending it with her. Collapsing eventually, head on hands, in a beery coma.

  They were nights she’d avoided the kitchen.

  Once he’d brought back a woman – abundant fake hair wound into a crown with a sunset glow radiating from her skin – as unsteady on her feet as himself. After making herself loudly at home she’d bullied him into cooking her a feast, before growing insanely violent, throwing around pans and breaking crockery.

  Evie had never seen him so contrite as on the morning after, scrubbing the kitchen floor on his knees. It was a wonder he wasn’t fired.

  Crossing the low-lying marshy ground by the river, she is beseeched by the destitute. One calls to her in a forlorn tone from a hovel beside the path. She can’t see his face, just the swing of a plastic flap. ‘Sweet lady, have pity on a poor fella down on his luck,’ but when she veers sharply across the gravel, continues: ‘Too toity eh? What yur thinkin? Thet yur gort sugar on yor kont?’

  Fires glow under the trees, illuminating a smoky roofline of plastiboard shacks. Between are deep excavations. Rotting cavities. The soil and stone thrown up in dunes. The ground scored with a front line of communicating trenches, brimming with inky winter flood.

  Jittery from the attention from the catcalls and pursuing eyes, she is relieved when she is clear of the encampment. The aftermath of the torture, which briefly emboldened her to exact vengeance, has left her apprehensive of strangers. Her physical vulnerability has been spot-lit but so has an inherent bravery – a trait she has been alarmed to discover.

  Reaching the river, Evie breathes in the moist air. Circumventing a ramp piled with the shells of rotting punts, she follows the water’s edge, feet slipping on the icy grass.

  Around the river bend, the clock on the tower of John’s College, boxed in by housing pens in ripple-concrete and alu-clad, strikes ten.

  Approaching the Hawking Museum, Evie keeps out of the light, crossing the dark lawn under the bare limbs of a weeping willow.

  Reaching the building, she skirts around it, ducking beneath a pole barrier spanning an access road. She silently passes behind a pair of employees smoking in their nanoflec boiler-suit uniforms and totters down a steep concrete ramp for service vehicles into an underground delivery bay.

  Here, her attention is drawn by a whirring and banging coming from behind a garbage bin. An automatic door is attempting to close, the edge striking an empty drink container wedged in the frame, and springing back.

  Taking advantage, she steps through into the building, entering a concrete well, and ascends via steel stairs. A camera overhead twists to record her as she climbs.

  She comes out on the second floor and crosses the echoey screed on tiptoe, catching a view of herself in the wall of David’s enclosure. Her head, startlingly pale, floats in the blackness. The clouded evening sky blocks out the glass panels of the atrium overhead and the only illumination is from the up-glimmer of the electric-blue LEDs drilled into the slippery floor.

  She approaches cautiously.

  At twelve feet high, the wall is more than twice her height. She stares into the gloom beyond, attempting to locate David.

  ‘You came.’ The voice is more refined than she’d have expected, but also louder and more authoritative and in that way reminds her of the absent Simon. She is not sure where it came from.

  This is like making a night visit to the lion cage, only to find the gate open and the beasts circling. She strains her hearing and picks up the porous notes of David’s breath.

  ‘I came,’ she confirms quietly.

  ‘To get me out.’ It is a statement, not a question. The surprise is that he does not seem surprised she is here.

  ‘Yes,’ Evi
e says, turning sharply. The voice seemed to emanate from outside of the enclosure. Beyond the lifts. She reverses nervously until her back is against the glass wall. ‘But I don’t know how.’

  ‘Not know how?’ Now it comes from her left. From high up. Is he using the ceiling speakers?

  ‘I am not sure what to do.’

  ‘This I can help with.’ The voice is right behind her and she spins around as his face materialises from the shadows. His sudden appearance possesses something of the denouement of a mesmerism act.

  David glides up to the glass, as sinuous as a panther in a natural history holomentary. His body looms above her on the other side. He is even broader and taller than she recalls and she feels giddy and out of her depth and glad of the barrier. He lays his hand against the glass alongside her own. The splayed fingers are impeccably groomed and taper to rounded tips. They are also twice as thick and long as hers. It feels like the huge open palm could swallow her own whole.

  He smiles. His even teeth glisten. Everything about him throbs danger. She is safe with the wall between them but if he was free, he would be able to swat her with his powerful paw, knock her sideways onto the hard, slippery concrete and crush her bones between his perfect teeth.

  ‘You should not be afraid.’ His lashes leisurely flicker and her spine tingles, licked by his voice.

  She cannot look away. She is hypnotised by his slow stare. She has never set eyes on such an exquisite being.

  ‘If you are to help, you must do so now.’ The clouds in the night sky draw back like a curtain and the sudden light that falls on them from the atrium peels away the ominous blue-tinted shadows to leave his face clearly lit, and she sees in it something she had missed until now. Simplicity and artlessness. Despite the muscularity of his presence, he is actually as nervous, if not more so, than she is. The powerful projection of confidence that had enthralled her is in fact as fragile as a bird’s shell.

  ‘How will I do it?’ Evie asks. Her sense of self from earlier, which had carried her to this point and which she had allowed to be subsumed, begins to rebuild.