The Machine Read Online Free PDF Page A

with it this close to actually happening, how she has her doubts.

5
    She swims first thing in the morning. Only some mornings – not enough to call it a regime, but more than a habit. Some deep-seated feeling about being so close to – inside, even, beneath and through – something that caused so much destruction and yet is somehow blameless. She gets up before anybody else, when it’s still barely light, and she peels her clothes off and swims out against the waves into the water, and then back: and she stands on the beach and waits for the sun to dry her, which only takes minutes, and then she dresses herself. She doesn’t get her hair wet – she ties it up above her head, a style that she never used to wear, but that’s practical for her, here and now – and she puts her work clothes straight on and then sets off.
    Her walk to work takes her along the path that runs adjacent to the coastline. She and Vic had always wanted to live by the sea: they had said that when he retired it was what they would do. (Without him here, she sometimes thinks, this feels almost like cheating on him, with this place instead of another man. She is sure that he would – will – forgive her.) The path is hard ground, old mud that’s faded and cracked underfoot. It falls just shy of the green grass; as she walks she keeps her eyes on that side. On the other side are the roughest blocks, the ones where the people always seem crammed in. These were the last ones built, designed to take the council housing overspill from Old Portsmouth after the flooding. The people there are bitter that they ended up here. They didn’t choose to move: it was their only option, if they wanted to live where they could still keep their jobs. Most of the children from the estate go to her school, and she teaches many of them, or tries to. The worst of her kids invariably come from the worst parts of the island, where their parents have sob stories about how they lost their jobs on the mainland, or their homes. There’s a joke around Portsmouth and Southampton, where they call the island Alcatraz and refer to the ferry that runs six times a day as the prison boat. They don’t try and hide it. Anybody with real money left the island a long time ago. Before this, Beth would have been one of those people: running before they sank along with the rest.
    Beth passes some children who clearly have no intention of going to school today (out at this time already, racing around on their bikes, standing bolt upright on the pedals and clipping their wheels on curbs, trying to make the bikes jump off the ground for even a few inches of air), and thinks about persuading their parents to persuade them to go, or to force them. It’s not a cost thing, she knows, because they fought to keep all the schools free when the new Prime Minister took over: it’s an effort thing. They circle her as she walks, flitting between the road and the grass verge. Most mornings they ignore her. Today, one of them rides alongside her as his friends drop back, watching from a distance. She thinks she recognizes him; one of the youths from outside the takeaway house, maybe. Or just from the estate. They all blur into one after a while. Beth pulls her bag closer to her body. She remembers being in London when she was much younger, walking down roads where footsteps behind her might have meant an imminent mugging: she remembers how much that feeling holds you back, steps on your toes as it walks alongside you. She breathes and tries to stare past him, even as he nudges towards her, slightly ahead of her. His hair is clipped short on top, longer at the back and sides – looks like a home-job, clippers rather than scissors – and he is slightly boss-eyed, she notices, as he turns his head back towards her, peers at her from under his drooping eyelids. She wonders if he’s stoned. He’s very young to be getting stoned.
    The fuck you looking at? he asks. His friends laugh behind them: she can