Graft (14 page)

“Wake up.”

The big man stirs. Breathe too deep and his odour is overpowering. Plates of untouched food surround him.

“Do you sleep?”

Jeff shakes his head. “More like standby.” She hears something rattling.

“I think you understand now that you can't abuse our trust,” Mel says. “Never mind manhandling the girls. Or our bloody clients.”

Jeff tries to sit up. A joint pops with the movement. Mel notices he isn't wearing sunglasses; that his diamondoid eyes are dulled to pencil lead. “Girls'd rather you rot in here,” she tells him. “After what you did. And they don't know half of what I do.”

Jeff's eyes seem to glisten. He's listening intently.

“No more of this theatrical shite, either,” Mel says. “I know exactly what you are. And I'll happily leave you here full stop.”

Jeff shakes his head. He tries to rise again, but no good. He's hogtied; his legs are dead.

“Pull those faces all you want. You've got plenty to learn about bosses like me. In all honesty I don't know why I'm even giving you a chance.”

“A chance?”

“How long have I got left of this trial? Till Jason comes knocking?”

Jeff licks his lips. He clears his throat. “Melanie.” His voice is slow. “Just under two weeks.” His features don't move at all. “Please excuse me. I don't know what happened.”

Mel doesn't react. “You know enough. I don't employ animals. And I
really
don't like people who take advantage of my goodwill.”

“No,” he says. “No.”

“If I let you out, could you help me? Can I trust you to redeem yourself?”

“I follow orders, except where such orders conflict–”

“It's a simple frigging question, Jeff.”

Jeff doesn't react to his name. “How do I know you haven't recorded any of this?” she asks, angrier now. “That Jason doesn't already know?”

Jeff attempts a reassuring smile. “Recording and playback's an optional extra. I can talk you through the accessories if you like…”

“You'll do what I tell you.”

“I said so. It is my pleasure.”

“And say I sent you to check up on someone, you could? There isn't a… range… on you? You'd have to pose. Act a bit. Pretend to be a prospect, actually. To know about vehicles.”

“Why not? You don't seem to be getting many punters in to see me.”

“He's called Solomon.” Mel passes him a piece of paper, pointing to the topmost address on it. “He works here. A garage. Maybe try it first – he more or less lives there.” She points to a second address. “This is – well, he only sleeps here.”

“What would you like me to do?”

Mel's heart skips. She knows the next sentence comes from the margins. From a darker part of her usually restrained. And yet it doesn't stop her.

“I want to scare him,” she says.

“Happy to help,” Jeff says. So matter-of-factly. A sparkle back in his eyes. “What for?”

Mel shrugs – her own act, but hopefully convincing enough. She's boss here, and Jeff will do well to remember it. “I think he's paid for a new girlfriend,” she says. “I want to know who she is, and what he's playing at with her. And I want him to know it's not a good idea.”

A
fter they unloaded
Y from the half-track, and the troop escort signed her over, Y was ushered into a camp of three-sided concrete tents. For a time she stood alone, shivering in a muddy light that coloured the camp putrid brown. The whole site, she noticed, sat on a rim – its edges stopped abruptly and fell into an ocean of black mist. Back the way she came, she could make out the mansion. It appeared as a featureless lump on the hill, outlined by heavy spotlamps.

She felt disjointed, adrift. The farther she travelled from her cradle, the stronger her memories of her time there became.

Eventually a masked figure approached and led her into the camp. A small tracked robot followed at their heels taking photographs. “Proof of delivery,” someone commented. By the entrance to one of the bigger tents, the figure paused. Y looked at the tent's weathered outer skin. These structures had obviously been standing far longer than intended.

“Think your friend's waving.”

Y turned. The half-track was pulling away across the terrain, the young escort on his gun platform. “Good luck,” he mouthed. It struck her as strange that she was the only one unloaded here. What would happen to the others?

“Let's get you ready,” the figure said. Y suspected it was a man, but she couldn't be sure.

The tent was sparsely furnished, with roll mats and sleeping bags arranged top to tail down one wall. A matted floor, presumably to soak up moisture. Several more people in a circle played cards among themselves, all pockets and tabs and gleaming buckles.

“A fine harvest,” the figure said. The group considered Y. The figure gestured to her and said, “This is your trolley team. Respect them, and they'll keep you safe.” And with that, Y was left with five strangers playing cards by torchlight.

“Pay no notice,” the woman closest said, standing up. “I'm Fi, hey. And trust me – you can talk to us however you want.” She motioned to the others, and slowly they all rose to their feet.

Another woman piped up. “We've got a lot to get through. Have a seat first, eh?”

“Sit here,” Fi said, offering her a cushion. “Don't want a wet bum. Did they feed you OK?”

Y shrugged.

“Maybe some flatbread? We're not meant to. But the gels'll make you feel shitty if you're running on empty.”

Y sat down. Fi passed her a plate.

“Dig in,” she said.

A
fter their game
, the trolley team took Y through their descent plan. They moved her out to a pillbox where many more heavy-suited people milled around. Then they sized up Y's own transfer suit – complete with a visor and comms loop that sat uncomfortably in her ear canal. The woman called Fi said, “Whatever we do, you do too. You need a breather, you say. You need a wazz, then hey, we'll find you some time. Oh, and try to ignore the blokes. They mean well, but they aren't particularly sensitive.”

“Only for her protection, Fi,” one of the men whispered, chewing with his mouth wide open. “Yet to lose a diamond in the rough.”

Y adjusted her outfit while the trolley team went for one last briefing in an adjacent room. This was more of an extension than its own cabin, and its corrugated roof reported the changing weather. Through the window, the pink mountains were absent, and dark clouds rolled past, bringing heavy but fleeting showers whose rain was a corrosive yellow. Y couldn't hear much of the briefing – though she gathered the team were more interested in the benefits of moving her than the conditions outside.

That much was true. For all the danger and exertion and the risks of exposing themselves to cell-mutating dust, the team's rewards were incredible. The volume of their cargo – twice weekly per team, if they were any good – hardly mattered if they did it on time. Handling a Grade One subject, live and kicking, made the risks worthwhile.

For these teams, working the Slope was as addictive as it was lucrative. Every moment down there felt like overtaking a freighter on a blind corner – it was an exhilarating task to transport these rare assets down the face of it and cross them over to the other side.

Soon the six of them waited on hard standing, suited and booted, ready to go. They'd assembled their kit, slipped into gel casings and exo-layers. They'd decided who would take point and rear guard. The lookouts were already taking measurements. And Y, in her protective wrapping, stood between the rank and file, gawking at the insignia on their suits – a symbol of two circles interleaved that looked so much like an illustrated eclipse, or a Venn diagram – which was repeated in gold and pinned like a corsage to her chest plate. The plate pressed down on her sternum, and she vaguely hoped it might break the pendant.

When the dust cleared sufficiently to make the descent, they marched out to the Slope's access plain in single file. The team leader seemed to be arguing with someone – their paymasters clearly expecting their cargo soon. Y took it in: night here was simply a darker shade of mud, and there were no stars. They reached the rim and entered the mist – a miasma drawn from the frontiers of some god's terrible imagination.

Y could sense all of them were nervous and excited. Deep in the line, she went with care. The soil became the glassy powder the escort had told her about; formed a surface that wasn't as unforgiving as ice, but needed almost as much concentration to walk on. It didn't take long for Y's thigh muscles to start aching.

She soon found that whenever the wind picked up, the line hastily changed direction. The six of them crossed the plain like people zig-zagging under sniper fire, and the Slope opened out beneath them.

T
he woman's
stapled mouth makes for an awkward drive.

Sol glances at her when he can, eyes invariably drawn to the knotted shape of her doubled-up shoulder. He imagines what she might be called, his mouth dry, as the car bobbles over the road. He smiles, a tired attempt at comfort, but she doesn't register it.

There's a cavity, a gap in Sol, where the flies of dread are breeding. As they ghost along this road, headlights full beam, his mind incessantly cuts to Mel; shorts out to locked doors, coming home late from the workshop to find a meal cold on the side, covered in wilted kitchen roll. And he thinks, suddenly and ruefully, of the way watching porn made him feel whenever Mel left their house after an argument. That feeling was so much like this. He found he watched it to spite how good they once had it; to explore something anathema to her, to the warm, rusky smell she carried after sleep; her inexorable smartness and dark humour. He watched it while he made a mess of their life – even before their rainy city seemed to distort and collapse into itself; even before her skin changed and her bones started to jut. It was all so base – the figures on his screen were always so flat, fictional. And yet he did it anyway. To feel
something else
. To feel not good enough, and then, when he finally left her, to know it as fact – to remind himself he never was good enough, and that her addictions had borne this out, had replaced him. Every time, this unfeeling would swell and displace his organs.

“Manchester,” he says to the woman, gesturing towards the city. “We used to have a tower there.” He looks over her. Her muscles running like a map. He thinks:
She's somebody's daughter. Somebody's friend. “
But they brought it down. God, what a horrible day. It emptied our sky.”

Sol stops the car for a red. He looks at an empty wall where once an advertising board stood, and he feels he can remember the image of it – a sea of shimmering discs – and a sun, shiny-ribboned. Or was it? Suddenly he isn't sure if it was here or in another landscape from the past, now superimposed on this one.

“You hungry or what?” he asks her. “I'm starving – had nothing for tea, have we? Have to see what I've got in.”

Green light. The brightness of the city spreads across frosted tarmac, flooding the neglected road. From here to home is basically a two-mile run of churned blacktop, more potholes than viable surface.

“Can't believe it's nearly morning already,” adds Sol. He nods as if she replies. It's true enough: he'd seared through the darkest hours on adrenaline alone. In the mirror, his eyes are red and watery.

The woman puts a hand on the dash and another on the door, like she's minded to open the window and inspect the sights: holo-boards and greening concrete; burned-out industrial units; rotting substructures made eerie by the play of shadows; tattered Metrolink lines stripped for the cable inside.

“Wind it down if you want. It'll be cold, though.”

They cross another waypoint on Sol's internal map – a near-finished block of flats where the double glazing still wears its tape but the exposed iron pilings of the top floors reach up like the arms of corpses. As they pass, Sol notices something in one of the first floor window spaces. It's only a glint, a near-imperceptible movement, but it catches his eye. A squatter most probably. Maybe a few of them – gangs are common in these derelict new builds. Nonetheless, he slows the car to a crawl.

As he watches, the something becomes a figure, and the figure moves into focus. A mother trying to get her keening baby to sleep.

Sol stops the car. He cranes, can actually see the gummy gap between the baby's lips, the fat cheeks that frame it, the smile lines on its mother's face. The baby is giggling. Sol is desperate to share the moment, but his passenger is oblivious, looking the other way.

Sol smiles up at the woman, and she smiles back – recognition of the hour, but also, somehow, of their respective lives. In that alone there's enough to keep him going. He mouths, “Hello,” and thinks:
Good luck
.

Just as the mother and her child move into Sol's peripheral vision, the mother lifts the baby's arm to wave.

“See? It isn't all bad round here.” And maybe it stands to reason he loses himself in the moment and decides to nudge the woman – mostly because she's there as well. Because, just for a moment, the dread lifts away.

It's not a clever move.

The woman flattens herself against the door, all three hands covering her face and head. Confused, Sol misses a pothole. The car drops in on the right side and jolts into the oncoming lane, Sol's driving hand shaken off the wheel. The car bounces on its suspension for a moment, rear end minnowing. Sol wrestles the wheel into the drift before he straightens it up.

“I hardly tapped you!” he shouts.

The woman peers at him between fifteen fingers and thumbs. Her eyes are swimming.

“Wait! I didn't mean to…”

The woman closes her hands tighter around her face, pushes herself into the headrest.

Sol grows angry, first at her, and then with himself, and then with his lot: for Irish jacking the Lexus; for being in the wrong place, the wrong time. He actually wishes above all it wasn't him but someone else with this to bear. A better person might understand her reaction – but Sol's already felt his face change; seen in himself the venom-flash. Now the woman's eyes are set in a nest of interlacing fingers, and briefly their thoughts mesh. For him, a vision: the palms of a thousand hands raised. For her, a desperate man, lost in his circumstances.

How many times have you seen that face before?

Sol struggles for breath, like the car chassis has dropped away. She whimpers through her nose, mucus bubbling through her lips. “I'm sorry,” he says, and pulls in, kerbing the wheels. There at the pavement, he gently peels all three hands from her face, feeling her muscles bite, tense against him.

“But I'm not going anywhere,” he adds, slowly shaking his head. “I'm not going anywhere.” And in the city lights that cast her as a statue and the city road as a pier in an ocean of glass, he can only hope he means it.

F
oot over wet foot
.

Something about the rain, the sound of his footsteps, reminds Roy of the first day he killed someone.

That was 2019. A Tuesday six years ago. Back when he had rough hands and lean muscle, and the food never seemed to touch the sides. Before the Reverend.

Roy went on site early every day. Jobs were hard to come by, so you made the effort. The labourers were mostly young: new immigrants working for peanuts, or local lads swaying in their tracksuit pants. The foreman was Harry – an East End man whose job seemed to involve wearing a high-vis vest and stomping about in the mud. Harry had no respect for his boys, received none back. He called them “scrotes” – one of the few northernisms he'd picked up – and liked to rip into Roy for his army surplus cargos, his baldness, his technical fleece.

Harry also called Roy Noodles. “Noodles,” he'd say, “have a word with those trousers mate. Lose your skinny arse down a fackin pencil sharpener you would.”

Noodles was green on the cranes. He'd spent his twenties and thirties labouring, and now, tipped into his forties with bad tendons, he spent entire shifts up a tower crane next to a sweaty man with a girl's name. That man was Kerry, and that crane was a Titan – a rusty pillar caught in Manchester's throat.

Come rain or shine it was always hot in the Titan cab, and without fail it smelled of suncream and bad feet. Kerry's pits and Kerry's heart-attack food. Roy often wondered how he managed the ladders.

But Kerry was also charming: all monkey-swagger and
alright our kid?
and he looked after Roy like nobody else. His love for words fascinated Roy – Kerry said he was a poet on the side. He said, when he wasn't singing old Man City songs – “Got to remember them, haven't you!” – that he only did this work because it let him think.

Kerry made no effort to hide how much he loved the job. For him, life was all about hooks and cable, steel and load. Home for City reruns on DVD, then back next day to move bricks and mortar and roof for holes. He loved the vibrations singing through the joists. He loved the charts and loads and switches and codes. And he loved the perks. Because it turned out that come noon on every shift, Kerry ate his ham butties on the Titan's concrete counterweight. Dinner with a view, he called it. It put them two hundred feet into space, he told Roy. And on his big grey picnic table above the city, he insisted only the birds could see what you were up to. He'd say to anyone who listened: “You can never tell how shite it's all got when you're up there.”

It stayed with Roy, that. He still sees the glossy black letters – TITAN – running away from him down the crane arm. Everything in the glare of 20/20 hindsight. Because on that Tuesday of all the Tuesdays, Kerry took Roy out on the counterweight to have a look for himself.

Roy was shaky out on the structure. The steeplejacks he drank with called it disco leg. His eyes streamed in the wind, and he felt vulnerable until he crawled, got himself flat. Relaxed only when he felt certain he wouldn't be blown off the top.

“Look properly you fanny,” Kerry said. “Properly over the edge. Go on.”

So Roy shuffled and wormed. He reached the edge and saw the ground.

“Better. Now look out there. Go on lad, just look at it.”

Roy turned to him. Kerry stretched out, beaming, his City shirt showing through the gaping buttons of his overalls. He saw Roy's expression. “Football fans are like displaced tribes,” Kerry told him. He put a hand where the club badge would be. “We might not get to watch games anymore, but we've got the stuff that matters.” He patted his chest. “We keep it all in here.”

With that, Kerry checked his watch and stood up. He spread his arms, pretended to be a plane. And he didn't know why, but Roy did too. His legs braced, locking himself against the wind shear. Then Kerry drew out a banana and peeled it. Lobbed the skin, watched it flop away like a lost glove.

Standing on the counterweight again, Roy felt his throat tighten. He could just about see the lashed-up load dangling from the Titan's cables. He imagined the banana skin bouncing off a cabin roof.

“It's a perk, this,” Kerry said, in case Roy had already forgotten. “As long as you don't get caught.”

A gull floated past, eyeing them. Roy saw Kerry shake his head and take in the kingdom of Manchester and whisper to himself, reverent: “Fuck. Me.”

And then for ten minutes they didn't need to speak at all.

S
ol's flat
is a measly box teetering above a takeaway on the way to Gorton. Most of his row was torched when a neon sign shop on the corner was firebombed, and in the day you can still see the scorch marks, in wet spells smell the brick dust. But where the unsafe buildings were demolished there's now a kind of parking space round the back. A silver lining. And it's here, in the ribs of this terrace carcass, that he leaves the customer's car he's borrowed.

He tells the woman they're home like it's the end of a long journey. He'd hoped they wouldn't see any neighbours, and owing to the time, they don't. He bundles her up the stairs and through his front door.

With a guest, Sol is conscious the flat smells. It does smell; smells the way flats are wont to smell when their tenants are left too long by themselves. Microwave meal trays stacked and sticky by the sink. Bin bags tied with half-arsed knots. Foam boxes and stained paper from the takeaway downstairs. Bluebottles rattling about.

Sol turns on a light. A single bulb swaying from the hall ceiling. Behind them his bedroom, a pile of overalls growing mould by the wash basket. Before him the lounge, an old flat-screen TV, a tatty sofa. Beyond this the kitchenette, and round to the right, a bathroom cancered by damp.

He guides her into the lounge. Just by the window, there's evidence of a hidden talent: an easel and a canvas, on to which Sol has painted the view from his window: skeletal husks in the foreground, a hyper-real ribbon of purple behind. On a narrow shelf stands a framed monochrome picture of a black man in overalls standing next to a Bentley R-type Continental fastback, its coachwork a gleaming carapace.

For once, Sol turns on the heating. He throws loose change in the meter and drapes the cleanest towel he can find over the radiator.

“Get yourself comfy,” he says to the woman, pointing to the sofa. “Just got to sort some bits. You can have my bed, if you want.”

But when Sol turns again, he finds her taken in by his project wall.

In his younger years – before the rations, the curfew, the riots and the violence – Sol took thousands of pictures, Polaroid prints mostly, which he brought home and overlaid on a corkboard to make composites of bridges and towers and chimneys and overpasses. His super-city soon grew to cover a whole wall – and now, moved from their shared house to this flat, it's taken on the significance of evidence in an investigation room. A hobby that charts Sol's descent into middle age as well as the world that changed around him.

Sol watches, the woman rapt by it, and he by her. He feels strangely embarrassed when she begins to run her three hands across the roads the way a child might run a toy car, past interconnected black gates and mesh fencing, motorways and hidden scrapyards beneath. She strokes the occasional river, canal, even a stranger's head bobbing into shot as an oversized, out-of-focus blob. She finds pylons, substations, stacks. She traces overlapping superstructures, infrastructure splayed out. She explores the musculature of a lost civilization, its concrete cathedrals. She shares in his idea of the country as he'd prefer it: a fallow Britain in which the only thing you can do is
drive
.

He wonders if these structures represent some common language between them. If she's looking for a tower.