The Actuality Read online

  ‘You shot him,’ Evie murmurs. She is struggling to absorb the rapid sequence of events. Her arms are so tense the knife wavers in the air, as if she is holding something heavy or her muscles are about to give out.

  ‘Put the blade down,’ he repeats. ‘No one wants to hurt you.’ He holds up his gun flat in his palm, making it clear to her he is turning it off, and the green beam splintering on the glass behind her is sucked back into the barrel. He drops it into the holster under his arm. ‘See. All safe. Now your turn.’

  She shakes her head and keeps the knife raised, the tip directed towards him.

  Shrugging, he takes slow steps towards her. In her white cotton nightdress she must look more defenceless even than she feels. Only the table and chairs are between them.

  ‘Stay back,’ she mutters. She takes a step towards the French windows. The freezing air, funnelled through the opening, blows her hair back around her face.

  ‘Lay the knife on the table,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ Or rather he does not want me to get broken, she thinks. She could as well be a porcelain figurine he has come to steal from the cabinet in the music room.

  He clambers up onto the seat she uses, his heavy boots leaving bloody marks on the silk cushion, and from there onto the table. His shadow looms over her and she cowers away.

  Evie backs another step nearer the open doors, the blade held up rigidly at arm’s length. Her sleeves slide back revealing the lack of anything like muscle in her slender forearms.

  He towers above her, gaping down, figuring his next move. Their eyes catch and she is gripped by his stare, almost hypnotised, before breaking his gaze and turning away and running out onto the terrace.

  She hears him bound to the kitchen floor and crash through the doors behind.

  Outside she should have an advantage. The garden is small but she knows every inch of it. She runs barefoot, feeling the familiar roughness of the paving slabs through the snow beneath her feet. The snow is at its deepest around the large pots of Nile ferns, their rims floating above the sparkling icy surface. She steers between them and descends down the brick steps to the sunken lawn, crossing it diagonally towards the fountain, covering the ground in seconds. Running is not something she normally engages in but for some reason being fast was a gift she was given: perhaps they overlooked to programme it out. The stiff grass concealed under the snow scrapes her toes. He is only a few yards behind her, navigating between the pots, but loses his footing and trips on the hidden steps and lands on his face.

  He curses, shouting a mouthful of bad words, before straightening his mask, brushing the snow from his eyes and clambering back up.

  She passes around the fountain and through the shrubbery. The hovacar is almost completely concealed by a powdering of new snow. As she approaches, the door, on a motion sensor, lifts up, cracking a skin of ice from the seal. An orange glimmer seeps from the inside, exposing a panel of instrumentation and hard shiny seats licked by the glow. It is like a mouth in the darkness. Open and hungry for her.

  He rounds the shrubbery, blocking the path behind her, breathing heavily.

  She turns to face him. He has his gun out again and the green beam strokes her cheek. He raises it to linger on her forehead, before sliding it down her nose. He is toying with her, would not want to shoot her, or at least not in the head. If he is forced to immobilise her, he would aim for somewhere less deadly.

  She glances around herself. She has allowed herself to be trapped by the trellising and the vehicle with its yawning maw. He couldn’t have done a better job in corralling her if he had planned to chase her into this dead end from the outset.

  Snow eddies between them. She wipes it from her lashes.

  He edges forward. ‘That’s right, get in the car, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘You’ll be safe in there. Nothing bad will happen to you if you do as I say. The sooner we can get this over with, the sooner help can be got for the old man.’ The flakes cling to his clothes and the reddish facial hair exposed by the opening in his mask, turning his bearded mouth into a dark hole.

  She looks fleetingly towards the hova. She doesn’t believe his promises. That he would help Matthew. What do I do? she murmurs to Simon. Can I drive it? Do we know how? He has access to the full inventory of her capabilities and has sometimes found surprising things like mixing cocktails and being able to waltz, that she had no idea she could do, and that have enabled her to astonish Matthew and Daniels, even after they thought they knew all there was to know about her.

  No, we don’t, he says, voice trembling. In the current situation, he has no more clue than she does. She senses him retreat inside, leaving her to face this alone.

  The man strides towards her, shoulders hunched, arms stretched the width of the path, gloved fingertips brushing the snow from the hedges.

  Evie withdraws until she is standing with her back to the open door. He comes in close, his breath all over her, boxing her in, and grips painfully her left arm through the thin sleeve of her nightdress just as she lifts the blade with her right and presses it into his side, forcing the sharp point through his clothing.

  If he had been expecting her to be incapable of holding the knife firmly enough to do anything much, or behavioural inhibitors to click in, he has allowed himself to be fooled. She has always been stronger than her appearance suggests and although she was programmed to act like a lady, she was given a powerful determination to survive.

  They stand locked together, his jaw pressing into her forehead as she slides the needle-sharp tip of Daniels’s knife beneath his protective clothing and drives it up between his ribs. His blood, surprising in its quantity and heat, streams over her wrist.

  The strength leaves his fingers. His hand falls from her arm and he slips down against her. His face slides open-mouthed past her cheek. For a moment an eye, gleaming through the hole in his mask, gazes glassily into her own.

  Evie detaches herself from him, leaving the blade buried in his side. He grips the hilt with gloved hands, attempting feebly to extract it, but collapses against the car, his head banging on the window, and slithers sideways into a heap in the snow.

  She kneels beside Matthew and takes his hand in hers. His breath is coming with difficulty. The tissue below her eyes swells – it is the closest she is able to come to shedding tears. With the infinite lengths her makers went to in providing her with the ability to simulate human emotion, including being able to realistically weep, it is a shortfall in her design that her ducts blocked in only her second year.

  ‘Evie,’ he says. His voice is noticeably fainter than a few minutes before. ‘I am so sorry.’

  She bites her lip, squeezing his fingers more tightly. She has known properly only two people in her life, her husband and Daniels, and now one of them is being snatched from her.

  ‘There is nothing to be sorry for,’ she murmurs.

  A tear leaks from his eye. She has never seen him cry and the shock of it sends a shot of pain through her neural gel.

  ‘I have been unfair to you,’ he says. ‘I brought you here to fill the place of a ghost but you deserved better.’

  His breath catches and a bout of coughing takes hold. As he regains control and lifts his chin to once again look into her face, a dribble of blood trickles from his lip.

  ‘Without you, I would not be me,’ she says in a whisper. ‘I would be another perhaps but not me. I exist because of you. You have been kind to me, provided me with a home, ensured I am safe. You have been my . . . husband.’

  Matthew flinches at the word and a fresh wave of blood flows over his lip. ‘Husband!’ he repeats weakly. ‘A wife is entitled to expect more than you ever had from me.’

  She wants to tell him that he has loved her, and that is enough, but she cannot be sure that he ever has. She was only intended to be a stand-in.

  His fingers lie powerless within hers. The only animation remaining is in his upper chest and face. She nestles his head in the curl of her arm and strokes h
is thin hair.

  ‘I am going somewhere,’ he says, ‘I can feel it drawing me. It is where maybe I will meet Evelyn again. But if I do, I fear her soul will be a stranger to mine.’ He is sinking fast but finds the strength to open his eyes a final time and look up into her face. ‘She will be a stranger because you made her so, because of all the ways you have not been her but have been you.’

  *

  Evie hears the front door open and Daniels stamping his boots on the mat. She imagines him crouching to untie the laces so that he can carry them to avoid making work for himself tomorrow, then stopping as he sees for the first time the signs of struggle in the corridor – the maritime painting hanging askew, the rifle fallen in the doorway. She calls out and hears him approach the bedroom door.

  As he steps around it, she looks up forlornly. She has not moved for the last hour. She has been dwelling on her husband’s final words, how she had not been good enough and how in her imperfect efforts she’d corrupted his precious memories of the actual Evelyn. She will never now be able to ask him for his forgiveness. He is gone and she has as much chance of joining him in heaven – if there is even such a thing – as passing through the eye of a needle.

  His body remains cradled in her arms. His blood has dried on her skin and clogs her nails; her hair hangs about her face, thickened and darkened with it. The cotton of her nightdress is stained from the ripped collar down to her knees.

  ‘He’s been shot,’ she says. How can she start to explain what has happened?

  Daniels stares. He is struggling to take in the scene. She looks like she has been through a slaughter.

  He reaches out to support himself on the door frame.

  ‘Who did this?’ He looks back out into the hall. ‘Where’re they now?’

  She shakes her head, she feels so helpless. ‘His body is in the garden.’ It was she who killed him but she doesn’t know how to put that into words. What do they do with creatures like her who kill humans?

  Daniels straightens and staggers into the corridor. She hears him reach the kitchen where he retches in the sink, before going outside through the French windows, letting them bang behind him. His boots crunch over the snow-covered lawn.

  After five minutes, he returns to her in the bedroom. ‘Tell me everything,’ he says, ‘from the beginning, and leave nothing out.’

  He looks at her in a way he never has before when she describes stabbing the man. She must have severed a major blood vessel because of the huge quantity of blood. When she has finished, he asks her, ‘Have you contacted anyone, like called an ambulance?’

  ‘I was waiting for you.’ She wonders if he will be angry with her for her lack of initiative and knowledge of what to do. An ambulance would have made no difference, she is certain, but Daniels is not to know that.

  ‘Good. Then maybe we have a little time. Now get yourself cleaned up, we must leave as soon as possible.’

  ‘Will you call the police?’

  He grunts. ‘That would be unwise I think.’ He holds up a constable’s warrant card in its black wallet. The card behind the plastic is soaked with blood. ‘I found this on that bastard you did for out there.’

  PART 2

  Terra Incognita

  9

  Daniels pulls the front door open for her but after crossing the mat, Evie pauses on the threshold. She looks out through the frame at the empty lobby and the gate for the lift. The prohibition against crossing is so deeply inscribed that even now she finds it difficult to break.

  There is also the fact that she is leaving behind everything she has known, with the sole exception of Daniels. While she waited with her husband’s body, she had contemplated the inevitability of this moment when she would be cast out, but she is still unprepared.

  Daniels stands behind her. She feels his anxiety. ‘Evie?’ he prompts, and putting his hand on her arm, guides her through ahead of him, across the lobby to the elevator door where he pushes the button on the wall.

  They listen to the whine of the lift’s motor as it ascends. It arrives and the gate squeaks back.

  She steps in and turns around to take a last look at her front door. It is a view of her home she has never had and the foreignness of what should be familiar is disorientating.

  Daniels inserts a key in the control panel and pushes a button. The door closes and the box jerks into motion, giving her the queasy sensation that the floor is dropping away, and she puts a hand out against the shiny wall.

  As they descend, Daniels stares forward, grim-faced. He is wearing the same clothes as earlier, with the addition of a large grey backpack in which he carries everything they are taking.

  There is a mirror on the rear wall and she views her reflection. She can barely recognise herself from the fragment of face exposed between hat and scarf – her eyes wide and nervous and her inquisitive nose poking out mouse-like – and this reinforces the sense of dangerous voyaging into the unknown. Her figure more resembles a small version of Daniels as she is outwardly dressed in his clothes, the most prominent item being a thick three-quarters length coat, its sleeves rolled back into bulky cuffs. On him, the coat reaches no further than his hips but on her it extends below the knees. Under this she wears her own cotton trousers and her only at-all-robust outdoor shoes: a pair of summer loafers with flat heels. On her head she wears one of Daniels’s cloth caps, the band oversized. Wrapped three times around her neck, concealing mouth and chin and hiding her long hair, is one of his old scarves.

  Evie resembles a boy and, bulked out by the male clothes, a broad-shouldered one. The impression is undermined only by the light shoes and her slim ankles protruding below the hem of her trousers, making her seem to totter cartoonishly.

  Back in the kitchen, Daniels had agonised over her footwear. The loafers, apart from being inappropriate for slush and snow and the long walk in the winter streets ahead, puncture the disguise. He made her try on a pair of his own size-twelve boots, padded with extra socks and with crumpled paper in the toes, but she could not walk without holding onto the counter. What with the coat and the cap she looked like Charlie Chaplin; all she needed was a moustache and a cane.

  She turns away from the lift’s mirror and faces the door.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Why’re you sorry?’ he asks.

  ‘Because I’m making you leave.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself for that. They’re the ones to blame. You didn’t ask for this any more than me.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she says. Her features tighten. Her husband is lying dead upstairs and the thought she cannot let go of is how he accused her with his last breath.

  She shudders it away. ‘How long will it take to get to your daughter’s?’

  ‘Most of the night. We’re going to have to go on foot. There’s nothing in the way of public transport at this hour and I’ll not risk a cab.’

  ‘Is it far? Bow?’

  ‘Five miles if not more and it’ll be hard going in these conditions.’

  The lift draws to a sudden halt and she braces her knees and puts her hand against the door. ‘Are we at the bottom already?’ The thirty-four levels have taken less than a minute.

  ‘Nearly. This is the first floor. We’ll take the stairs from here, it’ll give us a chance to see if there is anyone in reception before coming out. It’ll be best not to be observed.’

  The doors jerk back and they step out into a lobby very different to their own. It has three doors instead of one and a corridor leading off with more doors along that. It is illuminated by a single low-energy strip, blinking within a wire cage. The floor is not carpeted but covered with torn vinyl which in front of the lift is worn through to the concrete and between that and the apartment doors is tracked with muddy prints. The ceiling is stained with damp and where water has leaked down the wall, black mould has spread.

  Primitive drums thump from along the corridor. A sudden high-pitched skeletal shriek comes from the door behind, petrifying her, so th
at she recoils hard against the wall.

  It is as if they have emerged in quite a different building, even a different world, and the change is terrifying. Daniels had told her that it is unpleasant at street level but she has never really believed his stories, thinking they were his way to make her feel better about being confined.

  Even if she had believed him, this is worse than she’d have imagined and the degradation starts within their own building. Evie wants to shrink and disappear.

  Daniels is watching her confusion and attempts a smile of reassurance but it lacks power. He pushes open a door and gestures for her to precede him into a stairwell.

  As she descends, she avoids looking at the walls, which are sprayed with ugly writing and in one place what could be the crude drawing of giant sexual parts. The ripe sweet smell of decay is like from the kitchen waste bin waiting in the sun to be taken out for composting.

  She has never been down so many steps in one go and other than the ladder in the library, never steep ones like this. She holds on tightly, grateful for Daniels’s woollen mittens which, although turning her hands into great paws, mean she does not need to touch the sticky metal rail.

  The stairway reaches a half-landing and then switches back to continue its descent. Daniels’s boots bang hollowly.

  ‘When we get outside,’ Daniels says over his shoulder, ‘if we come across anyone, I’ll do the talking.’

  They reach the ground floor and before he opens the door, he stops and appraises her from head to toe, tugging her cap down her forehead, so that the peak hides her brows. She could be a boy-soldier being sent to the front. ‘We’re going to have to think of a story for you,’ he mutters, ‘something that we can tell people.’

  She gazes up at him. The answer is obvious but she is hesitant to propose it, in case it offends him, hoping he will come to it himself. When he remains silent, she murmurs, ‘I could pretend to be your daughter.’