The Actuality Page 9

  ‘What has happened?’ Iz demands as he enters. The walls are so thin, it is as if he and his daughter are only just outside the door.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Evie hears the spark of Iz’s lighter and her breathe out. A chair creaks.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asks.

  ‘Where is who?’

  ‘Don’t play games with me.’ An ashtray scrapes across the coffee table. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I went back to the apartment—’

  ‘But you brought it here.’

  ‘Please Iz, don’t call her that.’

  ‘Like it has feelings! Like it’s not a machine!’ Evie can hear the tears in her voice.

  ‘That isn’t the point.’

  ‘I think the point is that you’ve always made it so obvious.’

  ‘What so obvious?’

  ‘How you valued her more than mum and me. How do you think that made us feel? Why do you think mum left you?’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Always so polite and accommodating. And do you know why that is?’

  The ghastly atmosphere is palpable even in the back room.

  ‘Because it’s a robot programmed to fuck and clean and the crazy thing is that you’re so completely and utterly taken in!’

  ‘She is being unfair,’ Evie says quietly, as much for her benefit as Simon’s. ‘She’s twisting things.’

  Iz starts to sob and she hears her father seat himself on the sofa beside her. ‘It was never like that,’ he says quietly. ‘Since your mother took you away, things have not been the way I wanted them. We’ve not spent the time together we should have.’

  ‘That fucking bitch,’ Iz’s tears are so strong, she can barely articulate.

  ‘Evie is not you. She is not a substitute. You are my daughter, you’re the only daughter I want. The only one I’ve ever wanted.’

  How long before I am charged? Evie asks. She is trying to stay calm, but her tone gives her away.

  You’ll be at fifteen percent in ten minutes but to get to full will be at least three hours.

  There won’t be time for that.

  She removes the connector and sits up.

  What do you think you are doing?

  I’m going to find some better shoes and then we’re getting out of here. She looks in the wardrobe but at the bottom is only a bag of clothes pegs and a jar of fishing bait.

  In the hall, Simon mutters.

  She opens the door quietly and, looking under the coats, picks out a pair of padded boots and from above, a red fleece-lined jacket with a furred hood. She likes neither, was more comfortable in what she had before, but these are practical choices. She returns to the back room where she finds socks in a drawer, pulling them on as the discussion in the front room intensifies.

  Iz draws breath and blows her nose. ‘So where is Troy?’

  ‘Who’s Troy? Is he your boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes, Troy is my “boyfriend”,’ she mutters. ‘Why are you here? Are you in this together to try and rob me of my share? I won’t allow it!’

  ‘There was a break-in, in the apartment last night,’ Daniels says. ‘Matthew was killed.’ Evie can hear the suffering in his voice and the sadness washes through her too.

  Iz catches her breath.

  ‘It happened while I was returning from here. When I got back he was . . . he’d been shot . . . he was dead. It was too dangerous to stay.’

  Daniels’s daughter draws noisily on her cigarette. ‘And what happened to . . . ?’ she asks.

  ‘To who? The intruder?’

  ‘Yes “the intruder”!’ she answers angrily.

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Died? How?’ Her voice is shaking. ‘No one just dies. It was the fucking android wasn’t it?’

  Daniels doesn’t answer.

  ‘That little cunt killed him, didn’t it?’

  ‘It was self-defence.’

  ‘Fuck self-defence,’ she shouts. ‘It’s a machine!’

  ‘Why do you care what happened to him?’

  ‘Because he was Troy, you imbecile!’

  There is silence for a few seconds.

  ‘But why?’ Daniels asks weakly. He is struggling to make sense of what she has just told him.

  ‘Because of her! What do you think? Jesus, how dense are you!’

  ‘You lured me here, while you sent your boyfriend – Troy – to—’

  ‘I didn’t lure you here,’ she snaps. ‘Don’t be so fucking melodramatic! I did you a kindness. I got you out of the way to save any heroics. But I underestimated what that little snatch was capable of. I warned Troy to be careful, I warned him that she’s not the docile little suck she pretends to be, but would he listen?’

  ‘Why?’ Daniels asks. ‘Why have you done this?’

  ‘Why?’ She sounds incredulous. ‘I’ll tell you why. Rumours of this clockwork freak were all over Troy’s station. They were all nosing around. It was only a matter of time before it was picked up. Me and Troy were just trying to – Oh fuck! What’s the time? Oh fuck, it’s gone eight! Oh Christ, they’re going to be here any minute.’

  ‘Who?’ he asks.

  ‘The people Troy found. The buyers.’

  Evie is standing in the doorway of the small back room, transfixed by the revelation of how nearly she was trapped.

  We’ve got to get out of here right now, Simon urges.

  ‘You were going to sell her!’ Daniels says.

  ‘Oh don’t look at me like that. Too right we were going to sell it. It was going to be enough to settle both our debts and give us a fresh start. Get away from this wretched country. We were going to America!’

  ‘You really hate her that much?’ Daniels asks.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she spits. ‘I fucking detest it, always have. Getting even with that mechanised little slut was the icing on all this.’

  Evie enters the front room. ‘We need to go,’ she says.

  Daniels is seated beside his daughter, staring forwards with a dazed expression. ‘Yes,’ he says, but he does not move.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Iz says, getting to her feet. She is looking at Daniels but the statement is for Evie.

  Evie crosses the room and takes Daniels by the arm, pulling him to his feet.

  Iz makes a grab for her but overbalances and falls against the wall. While she struggles upright, Evie pulls Daniels along the passage into the back room and shoves up the window with a bang.

  Footsteps echo in the stairwell beyond the front door. ‘They’re here,’ Evie says and bundles him out ahead of her onto the fire escape.

  In the courtyard behind the building floats a sleek hovacar eighteen inches above the ground, its doors retracted, the driver standing on the river bank, face to the sun, nodding along to the music in his earphones.

  Evie feels the warmth of the downdraft as they run through the melted snow. They climb in and the doors automatically close. Daniels, now recovered, glances over the instrumentation and touches the wheel. The motors accelerate and the vehicle bucks, the rear rapidly rising, tilting the front towards the ground, throwing them against the control panel.

  The driver, abruptly aware of the theft in progress, casts away his cigarette and rushes towards them.

  ‘Anchor?’ Daniels mutters frantically. He scans around himself, then lowers a lever by his seat and the front of the vehicle, freed from gravity, ascends sharply, levelling as the compass acquires control.

  Men appear at the window with handguns. Green and orange beams glance sizzling off the armoured bodywork.

  As the car accelerates upwards, the force pins Evie to her seat. The buildings rapidly shrink until her view of the ground is of the giddy prospect of the tops of the cylindrical gasometers and the dark waterway cutting an emerald wound through the white snow.

  12

  ‘You’re going to need a new name for when we meet people,’ says Daniels. ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Jane,’ Evie answe
rs, without hesitation. ‘I’d like to be Jane.’

  Simon huffs, poor little Jane. But he has been happier than normal for the last half an hour, feeding off her own distracted delight as they zoom over the snow-covered fields.

  She sits close to the door, with her forehead against the window, so she can see everything they pass over. The vehicle is like a flying carpet out of The Arabian Nights.

  After escaping from Daniels’s daughter’s and since leaving the suburbs of North London, they have descended to just a hundred feet and the tops of trees and pylons rush towards them as they skim the landscape.

  ‘We’re less visible down here than higher up,’ he says. ‘They’ll try to follow for sure – maybe are already – but they won’t catch us now. This thing is too darned fast.’

  Because of their speed, the snow freezes on the windscreen and is only kept clear by the rapid swipe of the wiper.

  Other hovas criss-cross around them, some extremely close and some scooting straight in front, and collision for a moment seems all but certain. It takes a while for her to relax and trust the navigation and as they get further from the city, the traffic is more sedate.

  They track for a while a road far broader than any she came across in London – up to a dozen lanes wide in places. Despite the driving snow, they are close enough to pick out a slow-moving caravan of hunched pedestrians, hand-, horse- and mule-drawn carts as well as wheeled cars and trucks of many varieties. But the traffic is thinly spaced and the road unnecessarily vast.

  ‘You’d think everyone would fly,’ she says, immersed in the joy of her vantage point.

  ‘The main reason they don’t is money. These things cost a fair bit to buy and run, plus all aerial vehicles require a licence and that boils down again to money. Some people have the wherewithal, but most haven’t and to be honest the majority don’t need to travel much or far.’

  He pushes a button and a bright hologram map – the vivid green and brown contours of hills and valleys seemingly tangible – fills the air around them.

  She recoils in her seat and Daniels, too, is taken by amused surprise at what he has activated. ‘The last time I drove was ten years ago and things have really come on. Back then it was a flip-up display.’

  She reaches out, extending her finger towards a swathe of forest, and in response the area swells up like under a magnifying glass, until the trees become individually identifiable. As she strokes the tops of the tallest, the upper branches part under her fingers like pond weed. She trails the tip of her nail between the trunks, spreading ripples through the leaves. It is like dragging her hand through the cool water in the garden pond, scattering the fish. She withdraws her finger and the individual trees shrink back.

  Daniels taps in the coordinates of the cottage onto a panel in the air and a virtual blue line threads its way across the landscape below them. ‘Like spilt ink,’ he says absent-mindedly, surprising her with a rare indulgence in fancifulness.

  She smiles back. ‘Or a reel of silk,’ she says, in an effort to be inventive too. ‘How far is it?’

  ‘Another half an hour – we’re already in Cambridgeshire. In fact, twenty-three-and-a-half minutes if this thing is accurate, which it probably is.’

  Evie watches the tops of the actual trees fly past. ‘I love it,’ she says, ‘I really do, I never imagined the world could be so beautiful. But right now, after everything that has happened, all I want to do is tuck myself away and hibernate somewhere safe.’ She sinks into her seat, as if this will help make her less exposed.

  He glances over. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’ His face grows slowly careworn and she has the intuition that he’s thinking about his daughter and what she has done. Evie does not know what to say.

  They land in a field behind a group of buildings. She watches from the car as he crosses to a gate and, clambering over, enters the yard beyond. He returns a few minutes later, the door of the vehicle retracting as he approaches.

  ‘It’s all clear,’ he says. He reaches in behind and takes their backpack from the rear seat. ‘Let’s get inside.’

  She follows him around the wall of a barn. As they pass, he peers between the slats. ‘That’s good, there’s room enough inside for the hova, we’ll hide her in there. Once I’ve disconnected the battery, she’ll be undetectable to even the most sophisticated divining technology.’

  The door to the cottage is already open, the snow blowing onto the stone flags of a narrow hall.

  ‘How did you unlock it?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, that was easy. The key was under the old milk churn, just where I last left it – this is the countryside, people trust one another.’

  Just a humble key, she thinks, revelling in their return to a world of reassuringly simple technology.

  They enter a small kitchen and he drags his finger along the worktop, holding it up to show her a curl of dust. ‘Looks like I’ll be needing to get the old marigolds out.’

  ‘Marigolds?’ Daniels grew them in the apartment’s greenhouse and she herself, quite the lady of the manor, would cut them for the vases in the library and music room.

  ‘You know, cleaning gloves – just something my old gran used to say.’

  He turns on the light switch in the corner and after an initial flicker, the strips around the cabinet doors glow steadily. ‘How about that then,’ he says, ‘the cells work even when covered with snow!’

  The only other rooms on the ground floor are a bathroom and a small sitting room with a set of partially enclosed stairs leading to the floor above. She follows him up. On the tiny landing is a single door. The frame is so low that Daniels has to bend to enter and even then his head only just scrapes through. ‘For small people,’ he grins. The bedroom has a single bed with a headboard covered in a flowered damask and a window overlooking the field. She goes over and looks out. The hovacar is already disappearing under a coating of snow, the scorch marks where the gunshots struck and scored the bodywork fading from view.

  ‘This is your room,’ he says. ‘What do you think?’

  She looks around her at the pale green woodwork. ‘My room?’ she says, supressing a tremor in her voice. ‘Where will you sleep?’

  ‘On the sofa.’

  ‘But I don’t need a bed. You should take it.’

  He shakes his head. ‘The room is for you. I insist.’

  She looks at him. She can see he is not going to budge. ‘Thank you,’ she says, letting her happiness begin to bubble up. ‘I love it.’

  She looks out of the window again at the field and the distant bare trees and the long grey hedge capped with snow, and then back at the snug interior.

  She turns. Daniels is only just inside the room; his head is nearly touching the ceiling and he is standing at the highest part. Stepping around the bed, she presses against him and, reaching up, kisses him on the cheek.

  ‘Heh!’ he says, blushing innocently. Thirty years ago, if she had done that, he might have taken it in a completely different way. Now it just feels natural.

  ‘I love it, I love it, I love it!’ she says, pulling away.

  ‘I guess you do then,’ he says, wiping his cheek. He glances at the steeply sloped ceiling. ‘Anyway it wouldn’t have suited me much, I’d have banged my head ten times a day.’

  You didn’t have to be so over the top, Simon mutters when they are alone, but Evie ignores him. She is wondering if any of her pleasure is because this place was chosen to please Evelyn’s tastes and it was just inevitable that it would please hers too. If only Matthew had wanted to bring her here. What would have been the risk in that?

  She sits on the bed and, resting her elbows on the windowsill, gazes out.

  Daniels emerges into the yard below. He has found the key for the barn and swings back the doors. He then tramps out into the field and slowly pilots the hova over the fence and, bringing it down to ankle-height, steers it through the opening into the barn, the downdraft throwing up a skirt of wet snow.

  She
lies back and gazes at the ceiling.

  I love it, I love it, she thinks to herself, unable to stop happiness from flooding her. Less than eight hours ago her husband died in her arms and she has fled for her life twice since, but now a blissful contentedness is washing through her. It feels for the first time in her life as if she has come home.

  Well, don’t get too happy, Simon intervenes. This is far from over. Very much far from over.

  ‘I know,’ she murmurs, ‘but—’ An odd association has popped into her head. She is thinking of what she once read about dovecotes in seventeenth century France. That they were built larger than most houses and had incorporated into the brickwork a projecting horizontal line called a rat ledge, its purpose to stop rats running up the brick. Safe as a dovecote the expression became. Safe as a dovecote, she repeats to herself dreamily. The loveliest conception. Safe as a dovecote.

  Indeed. But rather than congratulating yourself, this could be a good moment to complete the charging cycle from earlier. May I remind you that interrupted routines are detrimental to our cell’s longevity.

  Coming out of charge, Evie is aware of how the temperature in the cottage has risen.

  She continues to lie still, delighting in her surroundings. Daniels has been in the room while she slept – she knows it because a blanket has been laid over her. She sits up and looks out of the window. Outside it is dark. It is only four o’clock but there isn’t a light to be seen. It is so unlike London where there would be a glow from the tall buildings and the pinpricks of fires burning in the streets. Her reflection stares back from the glass, her small purposeful nose, so suggestive of intrigue, out of place as ever in her shy and unadventurous face.

  Cupboards are built into the eaves and one of the half-height doors hangs open. She sees that Daniels has unpacked and laid her few things inside. A small mirror is propped on one of the shelves and taking her hairbrush she works at her hair until it hangs smoothly, framing her pale skin. Taking a dark blue ribbon, she ties it behind her ears.

  Evie opens the bedroom door and smoke from below wafts through. The staircase is partially boxed around and it isn’t until she is halfway down that she has a full view of the room. Daniels is asleep in front of a wood fire. His shoes are drying on the hearth, his socked feet stretched out, soaking up the warmth.