The Artificial Wife

by Rachael Eyre

  The third day I was close to surrender. The evil old bastard was never going to die. I'd be trapped in a half life where I handed him his horrible false teeth and folded his mephitic pyjamas. He loved seeing me reduced to servitude. “You're my only son, you should've been doing this all the time,” he'd say

  I thought about holding a pillow over his face, pressing it down until his bones cracked. But the home was under constant surveillance; I couldn't possibly get away with it.

  That evening he was glued to some asinine show, a thread of drool hanging from his lip. It was about moronic real life criminals and how they had been caught. He'd snigger, rub his hands, bawl anecdotes of his own over the veebox.

  “Can you fetch my glasses, Robert? I don't know if it's the ratio, but I can't see a thing.”

  Ratio nothing, he was as blind as a bat. The last time he'd used one of those invalid scoots, he'd knocked down and killed a dog. But he refused to wear his glasses in public, maintaining they were “sissy.”

  I searched in the chest of drawers, packed with the detritus of an old man’s life. Bilious handkerchieves. Ancient pornography. A hip flask. At last his glasses, dusty through lack of use.

  They were sitting on top of a photograph I had never seen before. My mother, hair longer than I remembered, beaming at whoever was taking the picture. She was too young and pretty to be anyone's mother, hands in her pockets, feet planted apart in their pumps.

  He was watching me. This was deliberate, he'd orchestrated the whole thing. I could close the drawer and pretend I hadn't seen it, but I needed to know.

  “Do you ever hear from … Mum?” I hadn't said the word for so long, it might have been runes on the wall of a cave.

  The veebox prattled in the corner. My father smoothed down his dressing gown, considering.

  “She was in a bad way, the last time I saw her. That woman was succeeded by another, and another. She'd turned into a fat old lush, living from one welfare handout to the next.”

  I couldn't reconcile the woman he was describing with the vibrant, laughing one who read me bedtime stories, who blew raspberries on my belly and defended me to the other mothers. They'd called me odd, intense, backward. “Robbie is gifted,” she used to insist, “only incredibly shy.”

  Every weekend we would go out for a special treat, just the two of us. The zoo, the Botanic Gardens, CER. She was the only woman I'd truly loved, before the crisis.

  “Did you tell her about me?” My voice sounded reedy, childish.

  A patronising smile. He was relishing this. “Robert, you're going to have to let go. She didn't want you. She joined that commune of dykes - no room for little boys there. Of course,” a belch, a lewd chuckle, “if you'd been a little girl, it might’ve been different. She hated being a parent. ‘Glad I dodged that bullet,’ she said …”

  She would always come looking for me, find me in the tree on our lawn. She could coax me down when no one else could, cuddle and comfort me. That's what love looks like. It couldn't have been fake.

  “You're lying.”

  He shrugged, not caring one way or another. “Think what you like. She wasn't fit. Depraved.”

  He'd made these excuses my entire life. Only now could I see how weak they were. Once he was dead, I would be free. I could get in touch with my mother, start over again.

  “What's her address? I want to write to her.”

  My father shook with mirth. It took half a minute before he stopped wheezing. “Oh, didn't you know? She died three years ago. You'll love this, it's like a comedy skit. She was waiting outside the offy at the crack of dawn - it hadn't even opened - when she slipped and broke her head on the ice. Gusset on show for everyone to see. If you live as trash, you die as trash.”

  In between coughs, he smiled exultantly. He had had the upper hand at last. And with that final blow, he died.

  ***

  I left directly afterwards. I know it isn't the done thing, but I owed him nothing. He'd cheated me out of a childhood, out of a relationship with my mother. If anyone deserved to go unmarked, unmourned, it was him. Let him be incinerated along with the other rubbish.

  I couldn't stand the thought of another night at the bed and breakfast, the landlady ‘picking my brains’ over cocoa. So I got into the vix and began the long, dispiriting journey home. Winter had set in with a vengeance. Hailstones belted down on the craft’s shell, melted down the windows. My hands were numb with cold.

  I wanted my own bed, Giselle. She was the only person I could tell about the past few days. The only person who didn't use me or treat me like I was nothing. I'd only ever been a pawn in my father’s war against my mother; he hadn't known the meaning of love. Even Vivaan had proved a fair weather friend, trickling away when it became too much. Giselle was all I had left.

  I wondered if she would marry me. Unorthodox, perhaps, but the world is changing all around us. Look at that celebrity artificial, Josh Foster. He married a beautiful oik last year, as part of a competition. If you can marry a robot in a game show, I don't see why a man who sincerely loves his artificial should be prevented.

  Thirty eight and an orphan. Now the shock had passed, I was filled with elation. I was free as I had never been before; my father’s animosity and my mother’s rejection no longer mattered. I could live how I wanted, be who I wanted. All that stultifying baggage, gone.

  It was half past one when I tethered the vix in the drive and walked up the garden path. The keys slipped out of my fingers; I had to hunt for them on the doorstep. At last I found them, in a parched pot of earth.

  The house felt different. It always does when you've been away: bigger, barer, as though it's expanded somehow and the furniture isn't where you remember. I shrugged. I needed solace, oblivion. I locked up behind me and ran up the stairs.

  The bedroom door was open.

  Even then I didn't worry. How much mischief could she get to to, this time of night? Perhaps she had heard the vix and gone down to meet me. I didn't mind - in fact, it showed a proper feeling. I'd indulge her whim.

  After a few minutes’ search - guest rooms, airing cupboards, junk rooms - the novelty had worn off. I was sick, tired and wanted my bed. I had never liked hide and seek as a boy, quitting at the earliest possible opportunity.

  “Giselle? Where are you?”

  A sound somewhere above my head. The attic! Why hadn't I thought of that? But wouldn't that mean -

  I scrambled up the ladder, a hundred excuses flying to my lips. This isn't what it looks like. She's only a machine. I'm using her for a book I'm writing -

  Preparing myself for anything other than what I actually saw.

  Giselle and Audra, in bed together. Naked. Entwined. Giselle cradled the platinum head with a tenderness she had never shown me.

  Another room, another lifetime. Another interlocking of hot, wanton bodies.

  I screamed.

  Elle: Deliverance

  Night falls so quickly in the country, like someone slamming the lid on a coal bin. We'd only been walking for a few minutes when we became hopelessly lost.

  I kept talking, tried to cheer Summer up, but it wasn't working. The landmarks she’d relied on - the skyscrapers, the factory’s tentacles - couldn't be seen from the ground. And why she followed me, I've no idea. I hadn't a clue where we were going.

  With all the things I'd packed, I'd somehow forgotten a torch. We were straying far too close to the forest path. If we stumbled, we’d be done for. I didn't trust trees with their hidden eyes and tripwires. I'd only read about the country in terms of newspaper reports: remote communities that feasted on human flesh, lovers’ suicide pacts in rivers, bloody murders in barns. Think of the scene we’d left: Ms Adelaide calmly living in a house of horrors. You'd never get away with it in the city.

  “It's so cold!” Summer bleated.

  It wasn't like her to whine but I understood why she did. We were back to square one. I'd never seriously thought Ms Adelaide could help, but Summer had, and she was utterly
crushed. I waited for her to catch up and rubbed her hands. She was roasting, trembling with a kinetic energy. I'd seen the girls like this at Juno’s when they were overwrought. She would cook if she wasn't careful.

  “It's okay, sweetie,” I said. “You're with me. You're safe -”

  “What are we going to do? I can't go back. You heard what our neighbour said. She knows.”

  I didn’t know if she was talking to me or herself, but answered anyway. “We can't clear off. He’ll come after us. We’re his property, remember.”

  “We've got these clothes, your cash tot. We can run away.”

  “How?” I exclaimed. “We’ve got nothing. No paperwork, nowhere to go. You can't just show up somewhere and ask for refuge. And if you think I'm going to waltz back into Juno’s, you've got another think coming. Captain Lucy would squelch the pair of us.”

  We glared at each other. The rain that had been threatening overhead took hold at last: leaden, icy. It churned the mud beneath our feet and turned it to soup.

  “We can't stand squabbling all night.” I prodded her, not unkindly. “Put that famous sense of direction to work. Get us out of here.”

  A few false starts later, we were in the station, buying coffee and sausage buns. It may have been the exhaustion and relief, but I'd never tasted anything so good.

  I expected people to point, stare, take us into custody, but nothing like that happened. People eyed Summer up - the mohawked boy who made our coffee, the cute Linese woman over the top of her paperback - but no more than they would any good looking woman. It was alright. We passed.

  “I'm sorry,” Summer said.

  I held her hand. At least it had cooled to a normal temperature. “Nothing to forgive. We’ll focus on getting back in one piece, then decide what to do.”

  “I couldn't have done this without you, you know.” Casually disregarding the workers at their stalls, the commuters scurrying past, she kissed me.

  “What's that for?”

  “Putting up with me. Being you.”

  I cupped her face, kissed back. “Likewise.”

  ***

  There were delays due to the bad weather, so it seemed an eternity before we were back at Brotherton Row. Our neighbour’s lights were still on, the curtain drawn. I didn't think of her as a harridan now; she was almost like a guardian angel. She knew we existed and wished us well. Who else could we say that for?

  Thankfully there was no sign of Robert. We did the briefest checks - nobody had broken in, nothing had flooded or burned down - and went to bed. Though not, as you've probably guessed, to sleep.

  Summer was a fast learner. Now she'd passed the practical, she wanted to carry out everything she had been taught. Having kissed, stroked and sucked me into submission, she played me one finger at a time, flexing her hand inside. She pulled me on top of her and we moved our hips together.

  “You have magnificent breasts,” she said, biting one.

  “Your bum isn't bad,” I said, clutching it. She loves it when you do that; she closes her eyes and gives an ecstatic little moan.

  “When I first saw you,” I said, as she got up for a drink, “you were so lovely, you didn't seem real. Like a stained glass window or a marble saint.”

  She climbed back in, moving her hand downwards. “What do you think of me now?”

  “That's not fair,” as she tickled me, made me moist. “Now I'd say you were wonderfully, gloriously filthy.”

  “Good,” she said briskly, as she disappeared beneath the covers.

  ***

  We slept the sleep of the innocent, or at least the satiated. She always slept with her head beneath my breasts, my arm shielding her. I don't know how this came about, maybe it's how she felt safest. I felt warm, secure, loved. As though nothing bad could touch me again.

  I snapped awake. Robert was shaking me, screaming at me, his face white with rage.

  “You whore! You bitch! I trusted you - and all this time -” He lifted me into the air, squeezing my throat with one hand.

  “Please, listen -”

  He dumped me on the floor, stood over me. “It's not what it looks like?” he mimicked. “Oh, it’s exactly what it looks like. You and Audra, cheating me …”

  Summer was still sleeping, her face beatific.

  “Her name is Summer!” I hissed. “But you've always refused to see that, because she's just a sick project to you.” As he reeled, “Yes, I know all about that book you're writing. The Artificial Wife? Wake up! It'll only be used as a serial killer’s manifesto!”

  His face caved, pathetic and terrible at the same time. “You mean you've never loved me?”

  I shook my head, astounded. “No one could love you. There's nothing to love! Just a twisted, nasty little boy who thinks the world revolves around him.”

  “Shut up!” He clapped his hands over his ears. “You're lying - it’s not true!”

  I started to dress. “Bye, Robert. We’re leaving. We deserve better than this.”

  He caught me, dragged me by the hair. His laugh was the most frightening thing I'd ever heard; he'd been driven clean out of his mind. “You're not going anywhere, lady! You're watching while I dismantle your lover, piece by piece! I can still write the book, only with another test subject!”

  He seized a hammer Summer had been using to put up shelves. How did he know that this had been my nightmare, that one day he would snap and smash her to bits?

  Hate in my heart and eyes, I flailed, struck out, tried to bite him. I was fighting for Summer’s life but he was too strong - he swatted me aside as though I was nothing. I landed on the bed, heard a loud crack. He realised it at the same time: the bed was empty. Summer was nowhere to be seen.

  “What the -”

  An explosion. He stood swaying, an aghast expression on his face. He was a tall man and had a long way to fall. Mouth open, nostrils flaring, he tumbled backwards through the shaft, crashing onto the landing.

  Summer stood watching, quivering. She was surrounded by shattered pieces of pottery, I couldn't think what they were - and then I realised. It was that profane ornament, put to good use at last.

  “He was hurting you,” she said.

  “He was going to do worse to you.”

  We didn't want to look but we had to. We approached the doorway and leaned out. It took a single glance to confirm what we'd known in our code.

  Robert Percival, arch tormentor and architect of our prison, was dead.

  ***

  It was unnerving how calm Summer became. It was as though she had planned it - and playing back her recent actions, I couldn't help but wonder. Having had the same thought, and even stolen the gun, how could I judge her?

  “We can't stay here. We need to clean this up, make it look like an accident.”

  “It's two in the morning,” I pointed out.

  “All the better. Less likely to be noticed.” Still that eerie tranquility, as though she tidied away crime scenes every day of the week.

  We climbed down the stepladder. Maybe it's personal bias, but Robert dead seemed far less tragic than the arties at Ms Adelaide’s. His expression was now the one he wore if he'd had a new idea for the book or a sex position. I wanted to turn his face to the wall. And now I nudged him with my foot, an unspeakable stench wafted up to us.

  “Oh, great. Even in death he shits on everything.”

  I hadn't meant to be funny, but the strain of the last few days overcame us. Summer giggled, I caught the bug too, and soon we were howling over the long lank body, lying in its own excrement.

  “Be serious!” Summer scolded, as though she was blameless.

  So we filled a bucket with several litres of bleach and started to mop up. It wasn't as bad as you'd expect. I'd cleaned up after dead clients in my time: an old geezer who croaked on Bibi, one who was knifed in the street and took three hours to die on the sofa. Though I doubted Summer had similar experiences, she was determined to treat it like one of her classes.

  “Keep your
home spick and span!” I heard her mutter through clenched teeth.

  The worst part was moving the body. It might sound bizarre, given our arrangement, but our relationship outside sex hadn't been tactile. I didn't touch him if I could help it and looked at him even less.

  We each heaved a gangly arm over our shoulders, and almost toppled from the weight. For all his skinniness, he was surprisingly heavy, and his head kept colliding with my shoulder. It was unpleasantly similar to how he would starfish across the bed, forcing me to the edge.