The Actuality Read online

  ‘I’ll join you in a minute,’ she says, gazing down at the again-still water.

  ‘Yes, well, don’t be too long about it. If he spots you out here in this, dressed like that, I’ll be sent straight back out to haul you in, and once inside I’m intending on staying.’

  ‘He cares for me very much,’ she remarks quietly, saying it because she was programmed to believe it and because she really, really wants it to be true, still haunted by what she overheard yesterday. A rich man’s toy, he’d said. What sort of husband would describe their wife in that way?

  Daniels is watching her carefully and she wonders whether her words could be construed as sarcastic. He seems to be about to comment but instead takes the shallow steps down to the kitchen, shedding snow on the bricks.

  She gets her answer as he reaches the door: ‘She’s right of course,’ he mutters, ‘he does care, but it has to be in his own impossible way.’

  She is ten yards distant but his whisper is perfectly audible. Maybe that is all it is, she thinks. Her husband doesn’t mean what he says, but then why does he have to be so confusing?

  She wanders over to where the police hova smashed the wall. Daniels has nailed a pair of old planks across the breach but they hide little of the sky beyond. She clambers up onto the ramp of fallen bricks and peers over. A fresh view of the world opens up and she stares out across a city partially shrouded in the trailing smoke from thousands of puffing chimneys. Leaning over, she squints down at the narrow road nearly forty floors below. She’s never seen things from this angle and the grid of streets forms such a maze of odd interlocking shapes, it makes her dizzy and she abruptly steps back down to the path.

  Evie makes her way past the greenhouse on her way back inside.

  Skirting the lawn, she passes the pond and, distracted again by the mermaid’s plight, stops by the dark water. Bending over, she reaches for a second time under her cheek, this time with both hands, and wrenches sharply. With a twist and a pull, Evie lifts her clear in a single solid movement, raising her until she is creakily upright, once again balanced on the rigid curl of her tail.

  She smiles inwardly. Even she sometimes forgets that below the supple membrane, nearly perfect in the brilliance of its imitation, underneath the layers and layers of code designed to ensure she behaves at all times as decorously as a debutante, she has a titanium and carbon-fibre spine.

  7

  The snow falls with increasing vigour as the day progresses. Outside Matthew’s window, buffeted by the rising current of warmer dirty air from the streets far below, it is blown hither and thither.

  They are sitting close to the glass. Her husband’s Go board, an antique slab carved from Shin Kaya, is on the rug between them, the light flickering on the yellow wood.

  He sits cross-legged in his bathrobe, studying her latest move. She has left an opening and he pounces with one of his black stones, capturing a line of her whites. He removes them, collecting them in his palm, and drips them clackety-clack through his fingers into her pot. They have been playing for an hour or more and the contest has been closely fought but is now in its end game and as the final positions are closed down, she is surrendering ground. It is the part of the process that Simon hates. He likes to win doesn’t he, he murmurs facetiously.

  It makes it more fun, she replies, enjoying that she has managed to taunt him.

  Yes, for him. We could win sometimes you know. It wouldn’t do any harm.

  I’m not like that, she replies mildly. I don’t need to win. I like to give him the pleasure.

  She lays her next stone with a crisp tap and then her husband his, and the final stages of play wash back and forth until there is no more that either can do. He counts up their respective territories and although close, his score narrowly beats her own. As she knew it would, having performed the calculation ten minutes before and adjusted her tactics accordingly. She is programmed to intuit his needs, while always being mindful to be covert. No one likes a clever clogs.

  He leans back. ‘You’re getting better,’ he says, ‘I thought you had me on the run back then.’ He gazes into her face. She smiles back. The last hour has been warm and affectionate and he has touched her wrist on multiple occasions while confiding both common and intimate things. They have been like best friends. It has been like the early days.

  He is also quite recovered from his recent illness. Maybe she just allowed herself to get things out of proportion. Allowed Simon to get under her skin.

  Afterwards, she joins Daniels in the kitchen. He is sitting at the table rubbing polish into his boots. The collar of his shirt is neatly buttoned down and a thick cable-stitch sweater covers his chest. He has also slicked flat his unruly hair.

  ‘You look smart,’ she says. He looks a bit like historical pictures she has seen of rural gamekeepers or fishermen, proud of their profession, the image taken on a river bank or in a field.

  ‘Thank you,’ he murmurs absentmindedly, returning the lid to the polish. He holds the toecaps of his boots to the light, displaying their gleam. ‘Although I’m not sure why I’m taking so much trouble. Five minutes in this filth’n’wet and all my work will be undone.’

  The snow is piling up in the garden. The mermaid sits with perfect poise on her rock, crowned with a fresh white bonnet.

  ‘I think it makes everything pretty,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe to you, kiddo.’ He takes out a soft cloth and strops it one last time across the two boots together. ‘But you’re not the one having to go out in it.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m seeing my daughter,’ he says. ‘After six months, she’s finally been in touch and told me where she’s living.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Oh, don’t think I’m fooled. She’ll be wanting something from her old man – money most likely.’

  ‘I remember when she was born,’ Evie says. ‘It was in my fifth year and you brought her to the apartment. I had never seen a baby before.’

  He pauses. ‘Good God yeah, I remember. You couldn’t stop touching her little hands. It made Mr Davenport hoot to see you coo over her.’

  It was true. The experience had triggered a confused longing that at the time left her wondering whether she was malfunctioning.

  ‘Well, she made thirty-five last year, has properly caught you up and overtaken.’

  Life moves so slowly in the apartment, each day a replica of the one before, that when the passage of time does reveal itself, it does so with a showy leap and bound.

  ‘Well, I’m all done,’ he says. ‘I’ll not be back till late, got to make it all the way over to Bow.’

  ‘How will you get there?’ Bow sounds pretty, very distant and from the way he said it, not without danger.

  ‘Well, with the winter flooding closing the tube, it’ll be a riverboat from Westminster and then shank’s pony along the canal.’ He drops his boots on the floor and inserting his large feet in their thick socks, laces each in turn.

  ‘Is it really safe to go all that way at night?’

  He stamps around on the tiles, testing the comfort, and takes his greatcoat from the back of the door. ‘Don’t you worry about me, young lady.’

  He gets out his wallet and leafs through the notes, calculating maybe what he can afford to spare his daughter, arranging the sought-after dollars to the front and the less readily accepted pounds to the back.

  His reflection in the glass looms over her. He ties a scarf around his neck and tucks it in.

  ‘Just promise you won’t take any risks and make sure you avoid drunken sailors.’ She is aware that she is just talking to delay his departure. But now that he is finally ready, he also seems reluctant to make a move.

  They are both expecting something more.

  ‘Give me a hug,’ she says, helping the matter along. She gets up from her seat and stands in close. In response he puts an arm around her, holding her awkwardly against his chest. The familiar tincture of smoke, soil and cooking oi
l wraps her around. Daniels kisses the top of her head, in the centre of her parting, before gruffly letting her go.

  8

  You make me laugh, Simon says, as she sits back down at the table after Daniels has gone, already worrying about him.

  ‘Why?’

  Because you’re like a cat.

  Evie doesn’t respond and instead stares out into the falling snow. The hedges are already bent over by its weight and the distant corner gazebo, with its tiered roof, has become a ghostly mausoleum. Her sense of wellbeing is eroding fast.

  ‘Why am I like a cat?’ she asks irritably, unable to resist the bait any longer.

  Programmed to purr when someone strokes you. She feels his satisfaction at making her ask – winning the battle of wills. She should have seen him coming.

  ‘It isn’t like that.’

  So that thing you do for him, the soft obedient thing, what exactly is the purpose?

  ‘He misses his daughter. How she used to be.’

  And there’s no exquisite teeny little hit in it for you?

  She gazes out through the glass, trying to exclude Simon’s voice. He is twisting things as normal. She forces herself to think of something different. Tomorrow, Daniels will use the snow shovel to clear the paths and while he works his way around, he will be watched by the smart little robin that lives in the vine under the pergola. If it is mild, she may even be able to persuade her husband to put down his books for a half hour and stroll with her along the freshly exposed gravel.

  *

  At eleven p.m., Evie returns along the corridor to her room. She glances to the end but there is no sign of a light under Matthew’s door, although he could still be reading. She wonders whether she should go to him, whether she can build on the success of their game earlier. She feels lonely and it is tempting but then, thinking of the inevitable fight with Simon, she decides against it. Besides, her power is running low.

  Instead she changes for bed in her room and lies down under the covers, speculating as to whether Daniels is safely on his way home yet from Bow and how late the riverboats run. The woman should have come to visit him here, not selfishly made him go all the way out to her at his age. The thought makes her feel something like anger – before she softens again, recalling the little baby with its tiny hands that Daniels carried in to meet them in its crib, thirty-five years previously.

  What sort of mother would Evie have made? An indulgent one, she suspects, but such speculations leave her hollow and can’t be allowed.

  The apartment itself is totally quiet, as if in her friend’s absence something vital is missing. The night feels polarised between the wind scraping outside and the stillness within, and the resulting tension leaves her more nervous for her future than ever she can recall. Unsettled, she is reluctant to put herself into standby, wanting to hold on until Daniels returns. Needing to know that he is back and all is well.

  Simon won’t have it. Your levels are scraping zero, he announces in the darkness. You can’t hold a charge to save your life these days. I’m sorry, I know you don’t like to hear it but it needs to be said . . . and if you don’t put yourself down right this minute, I’ll initiate the override.

  I can last another hour . . . she thinks back fiercely, and is about to add that he has no right to talk to her in this way, when he flicks the switch and a void closes in.

  *

  Wake up, he says, and then, because she does not respond, sends a ball of current arcing through her cranium. It is equivalent to all the lights in the apartment being flashed on in one go – what a migraine must be like – and her body is thrust upright, chest pumping.

  She is doubly disorientated because he has dragged her from a nightmare, one she has time and again. In it she lies on her back on a silver worktop with wires protruding from the soles of her feet to the top of her head, while people in white coats with masks stand around gazing down. But this time the view was different: she was one of the observers and a male figure – possibly the AAB that Daniels told Matthew was kept in a museum – was in her place, naked, face in pain, restrained at the wrists, ankles and neck, cables snaking from his scalp and torso to the panels of instrumentation.

  It is the middle of the night. Evie stares about herself. ‘What is it?’ She is panicked by her dream and exhausted from being interrupted mid-charge.

  There’s someone in the apartment.

  ‘Daniels?’

  No, not Daniels. His tone is confused and worried – keeping her safe is what he is programmed to do but he has no more experience of dealing with real-world threats than her.

  ‘Who?’

  I don’t know. But keep your voice down.

  They listen together. Now that her systems are coming back up, her yo-yoing power level stabilises and the paralysing fear induced by her nightmare passes, allowing her perspicacity to rapidly improve. She hears footsteps in the kitchen. She imagines the intruder navigating between the counter and table in the post-midnight darkness with just the gleam off the snow from outside to guide him. A glass breaks, tinkle-crash, taken down by a clumsy elbow, the sound both chunky and ephemeral, and she is certain it is her husband’s whisky tumbler with its solid base which he leaves on the side at night for Daniels to wash in the morning.

  We can’t stay here, Simon says.

  She swings her legs over the side of the mattress onto the floor and pads to the door.

  We must hide, Simon says.

  She huffs. Hiding is what she indeed feels like doing but she is surprising herself by unearthing more courage than that. ‘I need to tell Matthew,’ she murmurs, ‘he’ll know what to do.’

  Her husband’s curtains are open. The light outside reveals a swirl of snow blurring the distant outline of the high-rise buildings. The river is obscured by a greenish fog.

  She leans over his bed and speaks softly, touching his arm with her fingertips. She gently rocks his shoulder.

  There’s no time for niceties, Simon says, just get him up.

  ‘Matthew,’ she says, more loudly.

  His eyes open slowly and he twists his head on the pillow to look up at her. ‘Evie,’ he murmurs, ‘it’s you.’ He lifts a corner of the blankets. ‘Get in, out of the cold.’ Then, seeing her expression, ‘Darling what is it?’

  ‘There’s someone in the apartment, they’ve broken in.’ She tries to keep her voice steady, hold the fear at bay.

  ‘Are you sure about this? Where are they?’

  ‘In the kitchen.’

  ‘How on earth . . . why did the alarm not trigger? Where’s Daniels?’

  ‘He went out hours ago.’

  ‘He went out? Why would he do that?’

  They hear the kitchen door open and footsteps at the far end of the hall, then the squeak of the dining room door being pushed back. After that the door of the laundry cupboard.

  They’re searching the rooms in turn, Simon says, but she’s already figured that out.

  Her husband pushes off the covers and stiffly crossing the floor lifts his dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door. He takes what looks like a last-century army rifle from behind the ledge at the top of the wardrobe and slams into it a metal cylinder. ‘Evie, remain here.’

  She nods, quite terrified. Glad as a child to be relieved of further responsibility.

  He conceals the gun with his right arm against his side and slowly turns the door handle. He then opens the door carefully to avoid it squeaking and steps into the hall.

  Coming to a stop immediately. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he demands. ‘Stay right where you are . . . the police are on their way . . . Heh, I said stay where you are.’

  Apart from the belted back of his dressing gown, her husband is concealed from her by the door but she sees a green beam flicker over the grey varnished waves of the seascape on the wall behind him.

  ‘Stand aside old man, you don’t need to get hurt.’ The voice is gruff, alien, and out of place in their elevated world.
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  Matthew is breathing loudly, the mucus in his lungs from his recent illness rattling in his throat.

  ‘Last chance old fella. You know what I’m here for. Just hand it over and I’ll be gone. Heh what you got there? Put the peashooter on the ground. I said put the pop gun down . . . oh what the fuck!’

  The green laser surges, garishly illuminating the hall. Her husband grunts and staggers back through the doorway, dropping the rifle and knocking her over as he falls to the floor.

  The intruder’s boots bang down the corridor towards them.

  Blood oozes from under Matthew’s gown. He holds his stomach with both hands, staring down at himself, pressing her to the floor. She feels the wet flow onto her skin, smells his scorched flesh.

  While desperately struggling to wriggle out from underneath him.

  The shooter reaches the door and peers down at her husband. ‘Sorry old man, I did warn yer. It didn’t have to be this way.’

  Then he glances in Evie’s direction as she scrambles to her feet and draws herself upright in the shadow cast by the chest of drawers. ‘Oh, do we have here what I think we have?’

  He reaches for her but Evie is too quick, already elbowing past and through the door before he can grab her. She sprints down the dark corridor towards the kitchen, leaving a trail of bloody prints on the polished wood.

  ‘Stop,’ he shouts, and pounds after her.

  She shoves open the kitchen door, crashing it against the dresser. The windows are open wide and the normally cosy room is as cold as the inside of a fridge. Snow, blown in from the garden, lies across the tiles.

  He bursts in behind her, almost taking the door off its hinges.

  She takes a carving knife from Daniels’s drawer and swivels around. He is dressed in black from head to toe, with just slits for his eyes and mouth cut into a mask. The kitchen table stands to her left and she moves behind it to put something between them, while holding the blade out in front in both hands.

  ‘No need for that, sweetheart,’ he mutters, suppressing a chuckle. ‘I don’t intend you no harm, quite the opposite. Now put it down on the table.’