Graft (20 page)

Nothing.

So Roy knots the man's sleeves across his stomach wound and pulls away the hand around the man's penis to free his wrists. With a little momentum the body slides easily over the wet flooring. It has a strange consistency, the blood – too dark, too shiny. Tacky already. And moving the body seems to have released a ghastly smell, so that now Roy has to gulp his breaths and hold them in.

Roy finds the bathroom light cord. Another bare bulb flickers, sticks, floods the space with desaturating blue. He plugs the bath. Getting the body over the lip proves difficult. Roy has to get right down under it, sprinter-set, and drive up power through the man's doughy chest. He feels the strain all the way down to his toes, wet things touching him, his injured ankle protesting. He pushes until his thighs are molten and the weight shifts. Something – a black placental mass – slops out onto the floor. Preoccupied, Roy doesn't notice it skate away across the tiles like a puck.

The man rattles the whole flat when he lands.

Now Roy hooks the man's legs over, pushes hard to unfold his stiffening figure. Once more those white socks unsettle him. He looks away and runs the taps, hoping to clean the worst; to make the body bleed out faster. He stands back from the spray.

The noise of the water on the man's face is mesmerising. How fragile it all seems. The rising steam carries the overwhelming stench. It reminds him of epoxy resin, a heavy industrial musk.

Another few seconds and the fumes start to intoxicate him – leave him short of breath. Before he's even thought to move for the door, he realizes he's lost perspective, panicking that he's somehow ingesting the man.

A crashing noise rings through the plasterboard. Even in this state, Roy knows it's the front door being kicked open – but he turns too fast and feels his leg flit outwards; the floor too wet with biology. His hands push hopelessly into billowing steam. His knee and hip crack over the tiles, and his head grazes the toilet cistern. From the floor he hears heavy footsteps, an appalling scream, then quiet.

Someone else is in there with them.

I
nside her tower
, the makers silently stripped Y of her armour and base layers and stood her before a giant incinerator whose mouth they fed with Fi's hat and the rest of her transfer suit. Wearing only the tooth pendant, she watched these things disintegrate; imagined the ashes pulled out through the elaborate ducting that ran into the black maw of the chimney; and understood that Karens had lied.

There was a special area for cleaning and scrubbing. And when they were done with her, these plastic-suited makers with soaped brushes, she watched pink water stream from her feet into scummy grates. By the exit they placed her under a wall-mounted ring to dry: a humming device that for an instant made her fear she was being boiled in her own skin.

In a smaller room – each was smaller than the last, like she was being telescoped into oblivion – they hosed Y with disinfectant and covered her in jelly. She let them paint it on, utterly numb to their rollers; surrounded on all sides by makers in full hazmat suits with buckets. When they were done, they led her beyond. The next room seemed more like a temporary storage facility – rows of lockers, boxes, trans-crates. The temperature drop was severe, left her holding herself.

When the slime had set hard, a young-eyed maker came in to shave her head. Y listened to the razor's scratch, paralysed by the casing around her. She wasn't sure she'd ever feel anything again. She thought they were stealing the last of her.

Another chamber, brighter than the last. Here, at least, she wasn't alone: there were many other figures – other shorn brothers and sisters, discernible as different only by the tone of their skin. Y stood with them among trans-crates marked OUT, and stared up at the patchwork of filthy masonry that formed the tower walls.

A hailer squawked. “Go,” it said. This signalled a conveyor belt, rudimentary and noisy, onto which they shuffled all stiff-legged. Above it hung two massive letters: a Q and an A. Every few metres a sign read: KEEP YOUR LEGS TOGETHER AND HANDS AGAINST YOUR SIDES – FAILURE TO COMPLY MAY RESULT IN LOSS OF LIMBS OR DEATH.

Owing to the casing around her, Y couldn't see how this would happen.

The belt system moved the brothers and sisters along the tower's edge in single file. A production line, to all intents and purposes. Y wanted so much to touch the body in front of her, to stroke its back, take its hand, know it was there; to know this experience was at least shared. She saw their modifications: grafted limbs, altered appendages, and their overworked, obscene muscle. And as the conveyor curved, she saw more severe mods ahead – things the makers had removed to order.

The faceless makers prodded and poked them as they passed.

At last, the conveyor shifted them through a plastic strip-curtain. Y took in the final room, surely the tower's innermost chamber. It was circular, dome-roofed. Y saw makeshift beds, fashioned from every scrap material imaginable. Anything, she realized, to avoid the freezing air sucked down from a hole in the room's roof.

There was only the sound of feet.

Above the masses, all of them stinking, was a platform. Several makers stood up there and directed workers to brothers and sisters in the crowd before them. Hauled on stage, each brother or sister was checked against a tablet screen and led away. Y couldn't see where.

When Y's turn came, she was so dehydrated she found it hard to see. She was pulled up, heard her name, her rank. Someone said, “Manchester,” distantly, a bored voice, and pushed the nozzle of a medical device against her wrist. A pop, and Y stumbled into a lucid dream – the chamber walls began to shimmer and glisten and roll.

Wonderfully alone, or so she thought, Y went towards an opening set in the tower's wall. Great tendrils sat around this hole, fat tentacles of plastic and metal, and while there was nothing to actually see through, the hole's murkiness also held a richness – a purer black than any she had known. She felt heavy, robust. And she felt hopelessly drawn to it.

At the hole's threshold, her apprehension lifted. The mansion, the camp, the Slope, the Manor Lord – these places and people were inconsequential.
I am the pure experience
, the hole might have murmured. Y thought of her golden corsage, pinned to her breastplate, and, with unmatched clarity, realized she was now standing in the almond space between its two overlapping circles.

Y stepped in, and slipped.

Inside she was atomized, became a nebula. For that instant, she was truly free between worlds.

W
reathed in steam
, Roy holds the sink and waits for the inevitable. Time stretches: in the bath, the man's body lolls side to side, stringy liquid coming in lines from the mouth. Water brims in the eye sockets, and pieces of reflective material sit in the surface tension – fragments of something isometric. The bath water's dirty grey, and Roy swears it should be pink.

He feels the draught of an open window, the awareness of a stranger sharing his space. He tongues the back of his teeth and tastes metal.

Heavy footfall.

Roy peeks round the doorframe. Down the hallway, the intruder faces away from him: full-face bike helmet, booted, leathers, a mobile flashing in his hand. Focusing, Roy hears the dead man's phone vibrating in the blood. He knows now that the woman is gone; that the bedroom's empty. Only the bedroom curtains move, tethered kites, and the flat's filled with a bitter wind – pale horses rolling in from the Pennines.

Roy steps out of the bathroom. “You the cavalry, then?”

The biker spins. They measure each other. Roy imagines a crack running between them.

The biker tilts his head at the phone in the blood and lifts his visor. His skin's too smooth, his eyes lilac, jeweller-cut. “Where is she?” he asks.

“I'm the wrong guy,” Roy tells him.

The biker points at the bathroom. “Jeff?”

Roy nods. “Wasn't me, though.”

The biker almost sighs. “Right,” he says.

An uneasy calm settles before the men share a mutual nod that says so much. It's recognition of the failures and faults that brought them here; of the roles they've chosen or been squeezed into; and a tacit agreement to the stakes. There's just enough time for a deep breath.

“Nothing personal,” the biker says.

Roy nods once. “It never is.”

And above the slippery floor of Sol's lounge, their bodies collide, merge, scatter.

Down in the dead man's blood, the men writhe in circles – immovable object and unstoppable force. Hand to hand, knee to knee, rib to rib, scrabbling and striking and spitting. Fraught and animalistic in their struggle.

The biker certainly has reach – lands several shots to Roy's head and neck. Roy has gristle; counters with low blows – kidneys, testes, stomach. They wrangle in the dead man's coagulate; coat themselves in that primal warpaint; stand against each other smeared with grime and fluids that smell so strongly of lubricating oil; and struggle for their balance.

On his feet the biker is taller, keener, more able. He kicks at Roy repeatedly, sends his opponent crashing against walls, through furniture.

But his lack of visibility exposes him, undermines his reach. And as he goes in for a body tackle, the helmet gives Roy an opportunity. He clamps the biker's head under his armpit, bicep in the neck-space, and runs backwards into Sol's feature wall. Here the biker crashes through an image of a bridge under construction, a scaffolding rig in partial collapse, and the plasterboard splits right down the middle.

Face down, dusted in white, the biker finds himself trapped with Roy on his back, sharp knees pinning his arms. Roy grabs the helmet and turns it one-eighty on the biker's head, pulling the mirrored visor down as he does. It reveals his own warped reflection, a beast's face smeared with carmine, the Reverend grinning off his shoulder. There's no honour in this. No clean endings. It's simply Roy at his most honest. His new character in essence. The Reverend's monster, made for Manchester.

Now the biker's face is pressed up against the back of his helmet, and Roy has both hands inside the helmet's front, gripping the chin guard and pulling upwards with such ferocity that he hears the biker's nose crushed against the liner, the tough foam beyond, and a gargling as liquid fills his mouth.

“Nnng,” the biker pleads.

Roy pulls harder. He slams the helmet into the floor, feels the biker's neck begin to slacken.

“Nnng–”

But Roy keeps slamming –

Keeps slamming –

No honour at all.

Until the biker stops pleading.

Sure then of the biker's mortality, delirious with relief – with survival – Roy rolls around Sol's flat making guttural noises. At last he enters the empty bedroom.

On the windowsill, diagonal-striped down the glass, he finds the woman's greasy fingerprints.

The prints where she pushed.

And there, down the bottom-most pane, a smear as she left.

He leans out of the window. For a moment there's confusion – he can see nothing, only concrete and scattered tiles and what the landlords try to pass off as grass. They were higher in the building than he realized: four storeys at least.

But when he squints, he can see her. Her three arms splayed like the hands of a stopped clock.

Roy slides away. The victory rush tapers. The water's still dripping in the bathroom. The grey steam moves across the flat ceiling in a knot of squid.

He looks down at his ankle. Swollen knuckles. Slick hands. Aching everything. And knowing – just knowing.

That Solomon's nasty little secret is out.

T
he rain's
been and gone. Heavy green clouds lumbering east. Sol hates what comes next – a grey mulch of newspaper and waste, puddles all over the cracked pavements. It leaves the city centre looking bombed.

Sol comes off the main road on autopilot. Just before his turn for the neon works, he sees a parked motorbike, one wheel bounced up the pavement, and feels his gullet rise. Flashing hazards say it's likely a drugs drop, a payoff, even a takeaway collection. But he can't place why it doesn't feel right.

Turning for his flat, he purposely ignores his mirrors – the same irrationality that stops you looking back down a dark staircase as you climb it. As the ribcage of the demolished buildings opens out, his thoughts fixate on Y, her three arms, and home. Where he should've been so long ago.

Parked in his space is a smart silver Lexus.

Sol stops the truck. He'd know the car even without seeing the Carlisle-marked plate –

He steps out, incredulous. He holds a hand to his brow. “Irish?” His voice echoes.

The Lexus' headlights snap on. Sol rabbits in the full beam. “Irish!” he shouts.

The Lexus roars out of the space and past him – his own dumbfounded face in the glass. Blinded by xenon glare, Sol chases it onto the street. But it's already gone.

Sol swears, loud, and sprints to his flat's ground access door. The cage is open. He staggers inside, bounces up the stairwell. Purple floaters dancing in his vision. A chemical smell hits him on the second floor, grows abject by the fourth. Then he's there at his flat and the door's off its hinges. “Y?” he shouts. “Y?”

No response. No sign. The flies mass in his stomach.

“No,” he whispers, and finds his flat upside-down. The strongest stench of blood and shit. Everything overturned, broken. He processes the devastation, each thought butted up against the next…

The unreality of a dead man in biker leathers, his head apparently twisted entirely round on his shoulders.

His feature wall split in two –

Water running, a dirty condensation crawling down the walls –

A strip of shining black that runs from the lounge, down the hall, and into the bathroom –

“Where are you?” he whispers.

He enters his bedroom; trips over a stranger's brogues; sees the window wide open, thin curtains billowing.

He crosses the lounge, stepping through broken glass and wrecked furniture. His upturned easel –

And he shouts her name:

“Y!”

The bathroom light flickers. Sol moves tentatively towards it, every hair on end. She's gone, and he's fighting every impulse to follow. His eyes wide and searching. And yet there's indignation as well as horror. He can't believe this is happening. That someone came here, did this –

That they found him. That they came for her, as he feared they would –

The bathroom door groans.

Sol pushes in –

And cries bloody murder –

At a fat, eyeless man.

Sitting up.

Turning to him.

Quivering in the bath.

Sol slams the door shut. Breathe.
Breathe
. He opens the door again, puppeteered, fleetingly, by some indecent part of him that needs to be sure.

The man in the bathtub shifts. Sol stares in almost total awe. The man's jaw has flopped open and his fingers are inside it, pulling at something sinewy. Sol holds his head, gasps when he realizes. A strange, stinking smoke is emanating from the tub. And between the man's fingers is a mass of wire and circuitry.

The man tries to say something through the gaps. It comes out as a soft electronic tone.

Sol stands there gawping. The flies nearly coming up his throat.

“Who are you?”

The man sniffs at the air.

“Where is she?”

The bloated man drops the wires in his mouth and lurches over the bath's edge. Water slops everywhere. His eyes are hollow but glittering from inside. Coloured wires dangle like slobber from his chin.

The man grips the bathside and pulls himself up. As he rises, Sol sees a wound in his abdomen; more wiring and metal panels showing beneath a layer of bright fat. Sol's caught between disbelief and the despair of knowing it's real.

The man speaks. Deeply, slowly. He says: “Sol-o-mon-n-n?”

Sol slams the door and bolts. He leaps over the dark liquid in his lounge, his nose filled with the tang of wet rust and faecal matter. The door bursts; he spills and slides down the stairwell; dry-retches the flies at the bottom.

Y –

Y –

Y
–

What had he just seen? Why had he seen it? There's a fluid guilt, a sense so weighted it makes him feel drunk, and through his pain comes Mel screaming three blunt words –
you stupid prick
. He breaks down in the hallway among the junk mail and the dust. Tears hot and chest burning. He's lost her. Lost Y.

He stands to and slides along the wall. Where to now? The car park. A one-way ticket to somewhere. Europe, maybe. Even one of those dinghies you hear people take to Ireland…

Grasping with this that he can never come back.

Outside the wind shocks him. His bones powdery beneath his skin. Run. Run.
Run.

Round the block. The car park is a remote, bounded rectangle. Steel bins, takeaway waste. A gate swinging in the breeze.

He pauses and rolls his head. The walls not quite matching up. He finds himself at the work truck, fumbles the door handle. He trips on the step and falls into the cab. He starts the engine but his leg's shaking so much he can't find the biting point, the pedals floppy under his boots.

That
smell
. Sol slaps the steering wheel, frustrated, impotent. When he closes his eyes the man is still waiting in his bath. A flash of Y's mouth with its holes, the staples coming out, twisting, and of their trusting hands on each other's chins. Her little breaths on his hand as he worked.

When he opens his eyes again, there's an orange glow in his mirror, and through the glass he's sure for a moment the bath-man is coming across the yard, his limbs reorganized and bent unnaturally.

Sol screams, a low sound edged with such desperation – for him, for her, the workshop, his home – and understands he'll never escape this smell on his skin, his fingers, bonded to the fibres of his overalls –

He casts out into Manchester's web. No particular direction. No particular way to go. At the nearest lights, he indicates to go left, then right, then left again. The green light comes and goes three times.
I'll find her
, he tells himself.

But how do you find something you never really had?

He sits there too long at the red light. Doesn't move. Daren't breathe –

So that when the Lexus pulls across the truck's nose, he barely reacts at all.

Y
ou'd hardly call
their coming together romantic, but there's a crushing inevitability to it – a surety pressed in by the weight of Manchester's starless sky.

Roy slides effortlessly from the Lexus, hefty and intent, and hobbles around it – a conspicuous space where he should feel his revolver.

Sol locks the truck cab, reaches down for something hard, anything hard, something to grip.

Roy edges the Lexus, locks on to his quarry.

Sol clocks the movement – the ripple of Roy's divoted head. It's enough. Their eyes meet. The men share a moment of recognition – parsing each other through the glass – before there's a flash of something else: a release, a climax, somewhere in the chaos of two lives crashing, melding, covalent-bonding.

Roy starts to chuckle. Bruised and swollen, he looks demented. “I bloody knew you were a dark horse!”

But Sol isn't laughing.

Roy comes to the window and taps it. “Get out, then.”

Sol flares. “That's my car, you robbing bastard–”

Roy roars with laughter. “And your missus up there. Optional extra, was she?”

The question sticks. Sol realizes Roy must've been in his flat.

That Roy must know.

Without thinking, Sol slams his door into Roy, bangs it shut again, throws the truck into reverse. The gears engage; at max revs he swings the wheel and the truck runs up the pavement. Roy yells, hops, rolls his way along the Lexus' flank.

Roy stands dead ahead. Sol jams the truck into first, dumps the clutch. The wheels spin from the torque smashed through them.

Roy stands his ground, and Sol bottles it. Metres out, he swerves into the high kerb. There's a bang and the truck seems to sag before it veers to one side. It just misses the Lexus and mounts the pavement again. The cab bounces back to the road, rumbling as the rear wheels follow.

Sol stops with Roy in his mirrors. He slams the truck into first gear, over-revs, then lets it out.