Graft (10 page)

A
few days
into the trial, Mel approaches Jeff from the reception cage. He's been sitting in the foyer since the morning, sunglasses on despite the drizzle.

“Quiet mouse aren't you?” she says.

Jeff shakes his weighty head. “Small talk's pointless,” he tells her. “You should measure my abilities by tips.”

Mel frowns. “So far it feels like I'm paying you to sit there in a corner and put people off. Jason know you're on a jolly does he?”

Jeff doesn't reply.

“Rude as well. Didn't they squeeze manners into that big head of yours, or what?”

Jeff leans, puts his mass to bear. “Would you prefer me to record your feedback and pass it to my supervisor?”

“You daft bugger. I'm not a grass, for starters. Just… just try and make yourself useful, right? Could try getting you on some outcalls if you like – save you sitting here all day. And think about taking them glasses off, will you? You seen it out there?”

The front door opens. Mel turns quickly, as if she's been caught doing something. A dark shape moves across the hallway's tinted glass, and a pale, lanky man blunders in through the second door. He looks about awkwardly, a bracing draught all about him.

“Salaam,” he says. A nasally voice. A thick plastercast round his right arm. His features are small and ratty, and untreated acne has cratered his chin.

Mel raises her eyebrows. “Hi,” she says.

The man's visibly trembling. Some punters do.

Mel smiles and fetches the menu, watches as the punter picks through its laminated sheets.

“You're actually a bit early,” Mel tells him. “If you want to wait, you're welcome, but I'd head back out for a wander if I were you.”

The punter smiles, shifts. Clearly doesn't know what to do with himself.

“A drink?”

“What you got?”

“Glass of water?”

The punter shrugs, takes a seat. “Safe, yeah.” He crosses his legs at the knee, more for the warmth than comfort. His jogging bottoms are soaked to the shins. “Heard decent things about this place.”

Mel doesn't respond. She pours filtered rainwater from a jug and watches the punter struggle with the menu; his one good hand just about dextrous enough to flip the pages. She hands him the glass.

“What you done to that arm then?”

The punter blanches. He swallows a mouthful of water so fast his throat squawks. “Got jumped.”

“Your wrist?”

“Elbow.” The punter holds up his glass, furrows his brow. “Shot me. One round, like. Doc reckons I'll be picking fragments out of my chest for months… Sorry love, sorry – this water's got bits in it.”

“Jesus,” Mel says, ignoring his complaint. “They get anything off you?”

The punter downs the rest of his water. He swallows noisily again. “Did they fuck.”

“And you reported it?”

The punter smiles and shakes his head. Puts his glass on the floor. “No.” Mel looks sidelong at Jeff. “But they say it'll never stop hurting. Like an ache, innit.”

“So what you thinking, then?” She nods at the menu.

“In here? Vanilla, to be fair.”

Mel points to a picture on the open page.

“Safe her, isn't she?”

“That our number four?”

“Yeah. Nice one. Looks mint, her.”

The punter notices Jeff staring now – goes to speak, decides against it. He opens his hands, somewhere towards a shrug.

“You heard?” he asks Mel. “Them nerds at the uni got the web destricted again.”

“Derestricted, you mean?”

“I'm just saying. Better than the council doing it, innit? Gets you on most sites now. Like the old days. Had a few tins at home last night and got on the old networks and everything. Didn't even need a proxy.”

“Haven't tried,” Mel says. “Not for ages.”

The punter nods emphatically. “You should. Honest. Your shop's on a site I found.”

“What kind of site?”

“Directory of parlours and that. Can't argue with it. And I goes to my missus, ‘No way man, they've been updating this while the rest of us had no bloody connection!' Know what I mean? The privileged few.”

“Council bunch get all the perks,” Mel tells him. “Still get a few in here on their tablets from time to time.”

The punter nods, gawky.

Mel shrugs. “Will you want to pay up front or afterwards? If it's afterwards, I'll need your keys.”

“He pays half up front,” Jeff says from the corner.

The punter glances at Jeff then up at Mel, expectant. She can feel Jeff's eyes on her. “Shut up,” she says, not looking over.

The punter doesn't know what to do. A strange silence settles. The walls flashing with skin.

“What are
you
here for, mate?” the punter asks Jeff.

The big man coughs. “I work here.”

The punter throws his good arm up. “Chill, man, chill. Was only asking.”

“Keeping an eye on scum like you,” Jeff adds.

Now Mel glares at him.

The punter points a thumb. He whispers to Mel: “Who's he with?”

“Ignore it,” Mel says. “Elephant in the room.”

Jeff chuckles, taps his nose. “Just saying. I've got my beady eyes on you.”

The punter stands up, and the brothel's air seems to shift, break. “How long you say I'm waiting again?”

“Not long,” Mel tells him. “Any minute, really.”

“Safe, safe.”

Mel isn't far wrong. Somewhere out the back a bolt slides, and a cold lock rattles.

“That's Cassie,” Jeff says.

Mel pouts. “You reckon?”

“You can smell her,” he says.

Mel isn't sure she's heard him right.

“Hiya!” shouts a woman.

“Jesus,” Mel says. She can't even look at Jeff. Then, with mock brightness, she shouts: “Through here, Cass!”

Cassie bounds in. “Oh, lots of you,” she says. She undoes her coat. An old band T-shirt, faded black with lurid green print. As she takes off her bag, the T-shirt's hem catches and rises, reveals the lower curl of a three tattooed on striated belly. She winks at Jeff, unfazed by the room's strange mood. “Who's first, then?”

The punter clears his throat. “You don't look nowt like four.”

“But three's your lucky number,” Cass says back. “Just have to let me get some slap on first.”

The pair of them disappear. There's a rattle of door beads. A slam.

“What the hell was all that about?” Mel asks Jeff, fuming. She snatches the menu off the bench and goes back to the counter.

Jeff comes over to the mesh, leans on it. “It's only vetting. I can help while you get me some work. I won't get in your way.”

“Vetting? This isn't a frigging job shop, Jeff. It's a business. My business. And that means I decide who's welcome and who's not.”

Jeff ignores her. He lowers his sunglasses. Hard-cut diamonds shine out. “Call it market research,” he says. “It's key. Tweak this, tweak that. It's how you make more money. And I want to fix up that missing letter and give the place a polish. You'd be a premium leisure destination. All tastes catered for.”

Mel clenches her jaw.

“Are they all like him?” Jeff asks. “The punters?”

“Who – that fucking no-mark in there? No. Not all. I mean you even get couples sometimes.”

Jeff nods down at Mel's arms. “We all have secrets, don't we?”

Mel tugs at her sleeves.
Does he know?
“I'm just saying it isn't my business who they are as long as they pay up.”

“I know,” Jeff says. “I get that. So I'm making it mine.”

O
n a good day
, Roy believes waiting is a fine art with few masters.

Now and then you hear about others – assassins working for wealthy foreigners, odd-jobbers with the kind of esoteric skills you don't learn by choice. Part-time handy types who do their bit for their neighbours when they have to. And through the Reverend, Roy knows personally a few others: Jan, a canal runner who's in with the Wilbers on the side. Ro – a bobby turned vigilante, who garrottes unsolved case suspects when she isn't making IEDs. Jane Doe, a spark on call – a drone engineer with a sideline in meter hacks and weed farm setups. And even Raj – a retired metalworker who'll convert your replica firearms for a modest fee…

All of these people are masters of waiting. All of them have conquered patience. Yet none of them do it quite like Roy. Lone wolf not because it's simpler, but because it suits him better. A man for whom waiting still means working hard.

Cut to interior. Night time. Roy sitting in the Rose with a woman. Not a date – a job to pass the time. Something to do while he relaxes.

The job was phoned in by the Reverend from a payphone on the bar corner – the fat man's breathing fraying over the line – not long after Roy returned from Sol's workshop. “Domestic client,” he tells Roy. “Easy money. Don't you dare fuck it up.”

The client gets a spot in the parking sprawl, finds Roy in the corner. As usual he's spotted her from way off, standing next to her dark car. At the bar she orders a straight gin. He guesses she's carrying the world on her shoulders. When she turns, he confirms the heavy look – someone at the end of their tether. It's a look his clients often have. It's the look he wears inside.

She sits. She says, “Are you the man I called?” Her voice is snippy, precise.

Roy smiles. “No. You spoke to my boss.”

“He was incredibly rude.”

Roy pretends to look shocked. “Surely not. How was your journey?”

She points up ambiguously. “Overseen.”

And from there it all blurs into one:

How much when how long will I have to wait will it work though will you get caught will I go to jail will you go to jail how can I trust you the best price on the table what he's done to us it needs to end I'm not scared he doesn't listen no one else no thanks can I buy you a drink though are you sure this is all you're drinking I understand do you have a partner kids a dog a place to call home…

And fifteen minutes later Roy finds himself behind the wheel and outside the first ring of Didsbury's defences. His client in the back seat, swallowing hard. Death sitting patiently alongside him, its heavy limbs around his shoulders.

Roy smiles. The compound's mesh fencing and sharpline fixings catch sweeping torches like dewy spiderwebs at first light. The car's facing toward the guard booth windows. Roy can see his breath. He thinks:
The world goes on like this because the world's always been like this
. He thinks:
It's better now people are more honest, more accepting of their nature.

He thinks of the Reverend, the cost of failure.

“I don't want him dead,” the client says. “You understand me, don't you? I'm not a murderer. That's not what this is about. I don't want you to be, either.”

Roy adjusts the mirror. “They'll riddle us if we move another yard forward,” he tells her. “You sure he doesn't leave?”

“Not often, no. I mean he works all the hours God–”

“You told me.”

“How do you get in?” she asks. “What about the drones?”

Roy turns round to her. “I'll suss all that, don't fret. My problem – not yours. And there's not much motorway here, anyway. They don't bother with A-roads.”

“I suppose not,” she says.

“You can get out here if you want.”

“I don't know. I don't know if I want to, you know…”

“Watch?”

The client nods. She wipes her eyes and blows her nose.

“I'd say you don't.”

“Then how will I know?”

“You'll just know.”

“But how?”

Roy unlocks the car doors. “You'll just know.”

D
ysentery once seemed
a distant ailment – a disease that only came in the aftermath of natural disasters; a partner to looting; a black-winged angel of aid camps; a scourge of refugees running borders.

No longer.

Manchester's learned about dysentery the hard way, with serious outbreaks usually spreading from the markets outwards. It's easily cured, at least in theory, but now it's more common than ever, and the right antibiotics so often aren't, it can have an edge.

One of Mel's employees is stricken with it. She hasn't left her plastic wetroom in two days, and couldn't if she wanted to.

So Mel raids the takings and heads into town for help – hoping she has enough to secure medicine from the charity bus that tours the northwest most weeks, and stops in the centre twice on its rounds.

Out there it's lonely and quiet and Mel loves it this way. She leaves Cassie in charge, Jeff on a stool by the inner door. She ponders him, his elusiveness, as she turns from Ancoats down Oldham Street and into the Northern Quarter: a patch of the city once forgotten, rejuvenated, and forgotten again. Its amorphous edges like a mole worth checking.

Right onto Church Street, left onto Tib Street. A yawning multistorey car park echoing her bootfall. Each street maintains its own smell: blocked grids, food stalls, hawkers' wares and composting rubbish left in piles where once civic lawns flourished. The pavements squelch with mulch as Mel skirts Affleck's Palace, smiling at the tilework sign that reads AND ON THE SIXTH DAY, GOD CREATED MANCHESTER. Back when life meant hot meals, salaries, unfiltered tap water, Mel got her ears pierced in there, up on the top floor, and an ill-fitting nose ring installed another time. She and her mates fancied the piercer, a dreadlocked guy with some wacky name – Diesel or Merlin or Rats – who was slightly too old for them and probably knew it. They came every weekend to see him, and he knew that too. What did her friends call her again?
Mosher
. She thumbs her nostril and remembers. Some scars you're proud to keep.