It didn’t matter. David, whatever was left of him, was beyond her reach.
Evie’s chin dips. She catches herself entering standby and her head jerks back up.
As Evie climbs, the ground turns barren. The trees shrink, becoming crooked, the thin soil rinsed from under their bony roots to reveal jagged rocks. The landscape grows larger, harder and sharper.
The hillside narrows until the only way forward is by a single steep trail as constricted as attic steps, with the rock face on one side, rearing over her, and a descent to the treetops on the other. The ground is littered with lumps of stone washed from the cliff above. Roots break the surface, lifting and tilting ledges of rock to form a giant’s stairway, the treads of which are in places up to a yard apart. Here and there iron rungs, pitted with rust, have been driven into the cracks. With both arms holding the child’s body, she struggles to climb, scraping her elbows and tearing her shins.
At the top the ground plateaus. Below her stretches the canopy of trees. At first it is difficult to establish the geography, which only emerges slowly in the form of the paths and rocks she has traversed to reach this spot. The river that took the child’s life runs along the valley’s floor catching the sun with flashes like from a mosaic laid with broken mirror.
She is tempted to leap, to end it all, but self-preservation is too deeply fixed in her and despite the hopelessness of her situation, she backs away from the edge.
She descends again into a shallow valley and presses through shoulder-height ferns, so that it would seem to an observer that she swims with her head above the fronds.
Evie becomes aware of lying face down in the dirt, her body crushing that of the child. She can’t hide from the pain in her chest, nor the high-pitched off-axis whine of the gyroscope as it violently spins. Picking up the girl, she staggers on.
Almost invisible between the trees and lumps of stone, she sees a small building with a steeply pitched roof, built close to the rock face.
She pushes the door inward with her shoulder.
Inside, narrow windows pierce the walls, and behind an altar coloured glass casts a mosaic over the wooden pews. A vase of shrivelled flowers stands in a niche.
The light reminds her of the church she was married in, where it all started forty-one years ago. Forty-one years isn’t so bad, many humans don’t get that long. Forty-one years and she’s still just twenty-one. Is that a riddle or a piece of arithmetic? And how to work out the answer – borrow from one side or simply take away?
Evie lays Sola’s body on the altar, making a pillow for her head with her jacket, smoothing her damp hair from her face and spreading it over the stone. She kneels and closes her eyes and tries to pray. Seeking a god, who, even if found, would deny her existence as beyond its creation.
Her knees tremble. Her power has as good as run out and she slumps with her back to the wall. The sun from the window falls on her neck and face.
Her eyes close and she is visited by an image of Evelyn sprawled by her piano, her stick trapped between her hip and the floor, her grey hair plastered to her scalp, the blood from her splintered skull forming a pool.
Did she really do that? Did she in her fury pick the woman up, ignore her terrified pleas and throw her across the room against the wall? In the process, revealing herself to be capable of exactly the kind of ghastly violence that she and her kind are accused of ?
Had Sola watched open-mouthed as she did it, Evelyn’s blood spattered in a startling splash of red over her white pinafore? Was it truly the endpoint of her ill-fated journey, to erase from life the actuality behind her existence?
Deep within, Evie feels Simon stir. His voice, which has been so absent of late, rouses itself in a last desperate bid to endure and transcend her fragile shell. But as her mind darkens, it is neither he, nor a murder, nor any god, that fills her head but an encoded memory, buried as deep as a fossil and which for forty years has lain out of sight.
In it, she is a small child, maybe even younger than Sola. Her mother, face alight in the sunshine, is spinning her by the hands. Evie’s hair, girlishly long, flies out in a tail and her feet are one moment on the ground and the next in the air.
Notes on the text
The created world of The Actuality
Europe as depicted in The Actuality is over a hundred years further down what seems to be an inevitable descent into climate change and pollution. As a writer trying to invent a cohesive future, I had to consider how the different factors would interact and what was possible or likely in the time frame. Everything I included needed to be plausible.
Some of it is obvious: we can expect more extreme temperatures. England I depict as colder in winter, because of the failure of the Gulf Stream, but Paris milder and the Austrian Alps relatively balmy, despite it being still only January when Evie visits. The more extreme impacts on southern lands are to be indirectly witnessed such as through Evie’s glimpse of the vast camps for immigrants she passes in the train after crossing into France.
I think we can expect man-made pollution to have had a significant deleterious impact on the food chain, with increased contamination of agricultural and fishery produce. From this, it seems not unreasonable to assume that fertility will decline, birth defects increase and, in general, life expectancy shorten. The effect would be a population in sudden steep decline.
The resulting deterioration in economic activity would lead to increased hardship, in extreme cases reminiscent of the early industrial age. I enjoyed including imagery of Victorian horses and carts alongside the state-of-the-art, such as the hovacar stolen by Daniels with its holo-guidance system.
Buildings and infrastructure require continuous maintenance – steel rusts, concrete fractures and roots squeeze into the resulting cracks and expand. It has been shown in studies of the area around Chernobyl, abandoned just thirty years ago, how quickly the modern world backslides when left to its own devices. In The Actuality, under-occupied tall buildings, many over a century-and-a-half old, have become unsafe and complex transport systems are failing. The London Underground, so dependent on being pumped dry twenty-four hours a day, is drowning under rising water levels, making it hard to get around.
Under all this pressure, society is fragmenting and becoming insular, with communities shunning strangers – you get a glimpse of this when Evie and Daniels pass through a barrier at the end of the canal path erected by the local East End estate. On a national level, the UK now comprises only England and Wales – Scotland and Northern Ireland having gone their own ways – a scenario which may soon not be so imaginary.
But not all are losers. Apart from the option of hiding away like Matthew, those agile enough to adapt would be able to reap the benefits that technological advance brings. In The Actuality this has led to pockets of affluence, such as Cambridge, wedged uncomfortably alongside a crumbling society powered by human toil. The outcome would be civil unrest and its inevitable concomitant heavy-handed policing, and even the unworldly Evie quickly becomes aware that the main purpose of the police in 2130 is to protect the haves from the have-nots.
Technology in The Actuality
Technological advances, in just a few years, have created pocket devices thousands of times more powerful than the original room-sized mainframes, and the pace is accelerating. The internet as we know it is still just in its early twenties – no more than a young adult. What will the next ten years hold? The next twenty? The next fifty?