Graft (15 page)

Her staples.

You stupid, stupid prick.

“Hey, sit down,” he says. “Put your feet up. Need to see what we can do about your mouth.” He enters his tiny kitchenette and fills the kettle, before raiding what counts as his bathroom cabinet. He turns out a pair of wire pliers, inexplicably
 
stored here, and a set of nail scissors.

Back in the kitchenette, he takes a pot of salt and boils the kettle to make up a saline solution in a mug. Through the partition, a paper-thin divide between their two worlds colliding, he can see the woman kneeling at the TV, staring at her dull reflection.

“Won't be a minute,” Sol tells her.

When the scissor handles burn against the back of his hand – his fingertips too callused to gauge temperature accurately – he takes the mug through to her. He sits down and pats the sofa next to him; draws an exaggerated smile across his face.

The woman looks at the tools and touches her stitches. She eyes the scissors.

“That's it,” he says. “They're coming out. I can't get you to hospital tonight, because it's too far, and we'd be waiting forever. They have all these targets and…”

He can see it doesn't matter.

He points to the lamp behind her. Then he demonstrates how he needs her to arch her neck. “I'll be gentle,” he says.

The woman appears to understand. She arches her neck. Sol reaches up and clicks on the lamp. In the slanting light, ropes of muscle step out from her shoulders to her chin. Sol admires them as he might the columns of some ancient fascia. He follows the square of dashes tattooed on her throat, the scar above her Adam's apple. Taken together, these things give him the impression something is missing.

The woman clenches her teeth, and her jaw juts sharply beneath her ears.

Sol flicks excess water from the scissors and leans in to her. It's hard to work out the best angle to come in from – the top, bottom, from the side. Quickly he realizes he won't be able to do this without touching her face, which makes him uncomfortable. He says, “I'm going to have to…” and holds up a hand. The woman burrows into the sofa. “You've got to try and trust me,” he tells her. She nods, and with all three of her hands takes his own. She guides it to her face as though it might electrocute her: slowly, tentatively, eyes locked on his. Contact. Palpable shivers as his fingers settle around her chin. He holds her delicately.

“That's it,” Sol says, realizing he'd been holding his breath. “And you're in control. You can take it off any time you want.”

Sol dips the blades again. She watches the instrument leave the water and move towards her. She keeps one hand firmly against his hand on her chin – uses her others to guide Sol by the wrist of his working hand.

“OK?”

With the scissors just outside her mouth, she lets go of his working hand and returns her arms, slowly, as if underwater, to rest on the sofa.

“OK.”

He opens the blades. Twin points, hovering. “I don't know how it's going to feel,” he says, perhaps too honestly. Then he slides the blades around the first staple.

“Ready?”

The woman shakes her head. Sol pulls away. She releases the hand on her chin and moves it towards Sol's face. Sol draws a sharp breath before he realizes what she's doing. Gently, she takes his chin in the same way he holds hers, so that now they hold one another's faces in a peculiar embrace; a kind of speechless contract between them. The woman, seemingly satisfied with the arrangement, lets out a long sigh.

“OK.” He looks down at her hand. “OK.”

Sol closes the scissors again. There – the bite. Apply some pressure. He finds he has to put a lot of force through the scissor handles to even dent the metal. It makes him wince more than it does her. At last, sweat beading on his forehead, the first staple bows, splits, rends apart. It's so quiet in the room that Sol can actually hear the click as a section of her gummed lips parts.

He exhales. She squeezes his chin – a tender gesture he takes as gratitude.

The second staple comes easily, the third like a dream. Four done, and he starts working out the broken pieces with the pliers, teasing out the metal. These offcuts he drops on a saucer.

It astounds Sol that the woman never winces. That while sweat begins to emerge on her top lip and disappears into the holes as he pulls the staples through, she stays so still. By the time he gets to the middle of her lips, some of the holes are ragged, running with something sticky. But even this doesn't seem to bother her: the only sounds the shear and snip of the scissors, Sol's soft nasal whistle. And so he continues, her palm moist on his chin now, and more offcuts, yellow-crusted, meet the saucer. He's working so close to her face he can see the brilliant green strata that run through her eyes.

Another feeling, another response rooted in the terrible intimacy of the scenario, begins to affect him. The longer he works on her staples, the more it makes him twitch, until his hands start to shake. He can tell she knows. Her markedly slow breathing begins to accelerate. He decides to stop and pull back, hands off, and she looks hurt. Her ribs just there. Her pores and fine hairs, the muscle wall of her chest, the tension of the interlinking muscles between. It's all just there if he looks down and across the sheet.

The woman takes his hands. A strange sputtering sound comes from her throat.

“Sorry,” Sol says. “I don't know what's wrong with me.” He chides himself. He can smell his sweat. And then he tenses the muscles in his legs – his thighs, calves, buttocks – until they all start to cramp.

He wipes his brow and starts again.

“There,” he says. Quietly. “That's the last one out.”

She wipes her chin with the back of her hand. She looks at him. His eyes are stinging with concentration.

Then the woman bares a set of bright teeth in the frame of a smile, and touches a finger to each one, checking.

“Tell me something,” he says, passing her a mug of cold water. “Tell me anything you want.”

So she does.

But her language isn't any he recognizes.

T
his thing Roy remembers
: it visits him as a spectre, in bedsits and hotel rooms and rolled-down car seats. And tonight it continues to stalk him on the wet pavements of their city:

It was later on that Tuesday. Not long till clocking off – half an hour, if that. Roy was smoking on the crane's ladder deck while Kerry sat at the sticks, downing some rank energy drink. An eye on the load gauge, an eye on the time.

Below, through the cabin's acrylic glass, its elegant steel weave, the contract labourers were running rings round Harry the foreman. Ahead, the sun was half buried. A siege of dark clouds not far off.

Roy went back in the cabin. Over the radio, he heard the rigger challenge Kerry. “Get that next beam on straight first go,” he said, “and I'll send a lolly up with your cabin boy tomorrow.”

“Won't frigging see tomorrow at this rate pal,” Kerry said back, winking at Roy in the doorway. “But go on then. Let's have it.”

Kerry watched the rigger. Roy watched the load. The rigger's hand was palm up, opening and closing to guide the beams in.

“Harry wants our balls,” Kerry told Roy. It was a fair assessment, a site-wide concern: the build was long overdue. It's why Kerry and a few of the others were chewing X10s – diet pills that worked like speed – to pull the overtime.

“They'll run out of money at half mast anyway,” the rigger shouted. “We're building ghost houses.”

“And yet we're getting paid for it,” Kerry said.

Kerry nodded to Roy and rolled his eyes. Roy grunted.

“Get on with it, then,” the rigger said. “Bone-idle sods.”

Kerry grinned. He mouthed “watch this” and let out the line. Roy's stomach reeled as the load fell free. After what felt like too long, Kerry broke the line, and Roy saw the beams stop suddenly. The working arm shook, sending loud vibrations through the slewing unit behind the cabin. On the ground the rigger had dived into the mud.

“Dickhead!” the rigger shouted. “Prick! I'll have you!” Roy could hear everyone laughing over the radio.

“Sorry lad,” Kerry said. “Got put off – you'll wanna hide that cleavage next time.”

The rigger stood up.

“Budge then,” Kerry said, making a shooing gesture.

Roy smiled, more relieved than anything.

“His problem,” Kerry told Roy, meaning the rigger, “is that I've been riding these things forever – and I love 'em down to my gristle.”

Roy didn't respond. He watched Kerry land the first beam; lay the second bob-on. Nice and easy, smooth and level. He admired it all; the quiet coordination between Kerry, the rigger and the crew working the ropes. The set done, Kerry swivelled the Titan to the haulier dropoff.

Only there was nobody there to hook up the next load.

“Make it a Twister lolly, eh?” Kerry said into his radio. “And maybe another one for pudding.”

The rigger didn't respond. Roy couldn't tell why – he was still down there, still looking up at them.

“Oi!” Kerry shouted. “Gone damp, have you? Come on, nobhead, show us your tits–”

Another voice cut across. “Come down, gents.”

It was Harry.

“Boss?”

Through the cabin floor, Roy saw the group of workers growing.

Kerry made a face. Roy was stumped.

“What's up, chief?” Kerry asked. “Bit of rain never hurt anyone.”

“Just wind it up for today, and get Noodles off the rig with you.”

Kerry tilted his head. He gave Roy a second strange look. The foreman never spoke like this. “Got at least half-hour left in this light. Easy.”

“Fuck's sakes,” the foreman said, his apprehension now clear. “Just do it, Kerry, right? Look–”

“But…”

“But
nothing
son. Look! Bloody look over there…”

So Kerry and Roy looked. Looked out from their room with a view. From up in the gods. From the best view in the house.

In his mind, Roy still sees it like this now. In the present, he's trying to walk straight down a cold, wet street. But no mistake, he's there: the sight of it like a painting stitched into him. Not a single colour is missing; nothing is lost to the necrosis of time.

Jesus–

And Roy's world changed like this:

The ground seemed to yawn and fracture by the crane pad. Roy stood agog before he realized it wasn't really happening – that it was only shadows.

But then the birds came.

They looked like the tide. The birds cut a big black gash across everything – a wall of them, a dam against the light. It was a spectacle: the biggest formation of birds he'd ever seen. And they were coming full on.

Roy turned solid. It made no sense. It was unnatural, wrong. With it came a dissonance: imagine chewing a mouthful of food while looking into a spider's bursting nest.

The birds didn't deviate, didn't dissipate. They were a plague vision – an amorphous squirm of broken wings and squashed-flat bodies coming into the Manchester basin.

Roy said something, or tried to. It didn't matter much. By then the birds had arrived.

At the front of the bird wall, in looping waves, half-carcasses dropped away, tail-spinning to the ground. Roy watched feathers catch and plume. Birdshit came across the crane like whitewash. He saw pigeons and gulls and geese and swans. Blackbirds and herons and tits and finches. He saw them all, individually outlined in the blur; and even then, he knew it would be indelible. The cabin dimmed, left only the feathers and the noise and the gloom. The ringing in the men's ears intensified to a roar.

The crane started to groan on its basepad. Kerry, panicked but not beyond himself – deathly white but still standing – had the wherewithal to start tracking the hook back into the mast. It was way out on the jib, dragged almost horizontal by the density of creatures passing it, and the noises from the machinery arm were horrible. Roy could smell burning.

Kerry said, quite clearly, “Head down.” The bird cloud had thickened, and the sky had completely vanished. Then the first pops rang –
pap pap pap –
as the birds began to hit the windows around them.

Roy ducked and caught his head on the control panel, just as the window cracked and caved. Through his hands, the cabin's cold metal, he felt the whole mast shaking; ringing through his joints and tendons. Then a second cabin window cracked, caved, quickly went, and now there were only guts going sideways with the glass and the muck. Something raked sharply, deeply, across the top of Roy's head. He felt the blood spring up.

On the cabin floor, the radio squealed a tune on a different frequency. Animal sounds. Through the acrylic glass, Roy watched exploding birds seethe between the structure. He couldn't see the ground for feathers and viscera. He couldn't even see Kerry across the cabin, or the Titan's frame through the feathered pall.

A weight slopped onto Roy's head. It was a goose, shattered, its head crushed, eyes pushed together and facing forward. The bird stared up at Roy, he swears it did – and Roy found Kerry again, slumped in a high-vis jacket slicked with blood.

It quietened. Except for a few stragglers, the barrage had passed.

Kerry had his hands over his ears. His knees were pressed but knocking. Roy shouted, “I'll go down! I'll go down, Kerry! I'll get help!”

But it wasn't done yet. When Roy stood he realized the tower hadn't stopped vibrating. He looked out on the tower's face-side moorings thinking he could climb the arm and head down the scaffolding rig. It looked slippy, though. The bird mush was everywhere.

By now Kerry had collapsed into the corner. He looked a state.

Roy shifted. Wobbling. His knowledge of the crane's mechanics was basic, but he knew enough to know that if everything else was shot, the critical pieces were made of hardier stuff. As far as he could tell, even if this birdmeat coated everything, the crane still worked.