Graft (25 page)

Roy grins. “You sounded just like me then.”

Sol leans the door into place.

He stretches on the sparkling pavement, crushes a spray of weeds glistening from the cracks. Both the car and the truck wear a dust of frost, and a thread of web spans the road. He enters the ginnel, sun-soaked, and relieves himself a metre or so along it. His visible breath, bulbous around him, is split into iridescent bars by the light filtering through the mesh fencing.

As he turns back for the road, he thinks:
the sky hasn't been this clear in a long time
.

Then from the corner, he watches a wine-coloured Audi pull into the road.

Sol darts back along the ginnel. The Audi's brakes squeak. Had the driver seen him? Seen Roy through the Sierra's unfrosted windscreen, the panels of condensation on the glass inside?

Suddenly the Audi accelerates, red-lining past the ginnel, and clips an alloy on the corner before braking hard, scrabbling for grip, over-revving, over-steering, and bolting up the next left – a maroon flare that flickers through the fence.

Sol sprints back to find Roy crouching between the Sierra's rear bumper and the truck. Something gleaming in his hands that Sol follows out to the truck's wing mirror and then across the road.

“You pick your moments,” Roy says. He looks calm, but there's an excitement being restrained. He's on.

“They see you?

Roy shakes his head. “They see you?”

“I dunno,” Sol rasps. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Wait for it.”

“What?”

“
Wait
.”

Faintly, the sound of an exhaust note carries.

Roy grins. “And you call yourself a grafter. Duck down here.”

Sol doesn't understand.

“Down!”

Sol squats as the second exhaust note resolves to the scream of a motorbike. Roy leans, Luger revealed in his belt. Sol's chest is pounding.

“Bastard crossed the top of the road a few times.”

“You said there hadn't been a peep!”

“You'd only just woken – I didn't want you freaking out.”

Sol can hear the bike closing in. “What's that for?” he asks.

But the answer doesn't come from Roy's mouth. The bald man leaps to his feet and throws his weight against the Sierra's boot. Bewildered, Sol does the same. From there he can deconstruct the scene: Roy's hands pulled behind him, knuckles wrapped in what Sol now understands to be sharpline, pulled out from somewhere, who knows where; the line tautened around the truck's mirror and going up over the road; and the rider reacting too late, rearing back – racing leathers tensing symmetrically across the chest.

“Have it,” Roy says, so crisply it rings in Sol's ears.

The impact with the sharpline seems to elasticate the rider from his chest down, flicking him into the air with limbs flailing in insectile panic. The force shears off the truck's mirror and drags Roy skittering into the road, and the sharpline snaps with a crack. Sol watches the rider's head meet tarmac – his remaining momentum dragging him past, body ostensibly liquidized. With an agonizing grinding sound, the motorcycle skids up the pavement, engine gushing.

Only now does Sol realize what Roy's done.

Roy drops the sharpline, hands bloodied, and bears down on the biker with his Luger drawn. “Audi!” he screams back at Sol. “Deal with the Audi!”

Sol twists to the oncoming Audi – low sun creating a sharp enough silhouette to betray the woman driving it.

The Audi stops, uneasily slow, and indecision grips him. The woman gets out and edges towards the scene, mouth slack. He hears her feet turning on the gravel, the clip of her heels.

“Bloody
hell
,” Sol whispers, rooted. It's the pillion passenger he and Irish had seen from the old man's front door.

“It's a fucking accident!” Roy shouts, the Luger barrel now jammed under the biker's visor.

Sol's immobility wanes. He looks at the frayed edges of his T-shirt. The broken flies of his overalls. Oil spatter shining. His spindly knees and heavy boots.

“Stay there,” he says to the woman.

The woman looks surprised. Her features are indistinct, inappropriate somehow. “My friend,” Sol says, “is getting help.” He steps closer, touches her shoulder and flicks out his council ID. Now she looks at him, slowly, deliberately. “Sorry,” he says again. “I'm from the council. My truck's just over here–”

“What happened?” she asks. She looks undaunted. She moves her handbag to her front and unzips it. “What's the matter?”

Sol tries to smile. “An accident…” he starts, when from behind there's a pop.

He closes his eyes, relaxes his shoulders.

“You're done,” the woman says. There's a hardness in her eyes now – a fierce look that streamlines her face, sharpens her jaw.

The scales tip. Smoothly, practised, she slips free a flick-knife and rolls her arm back.

“Ah-ah-ah…”

Sol wheels to find Roy next to him, Luger raised. “Back it up,” he says to her. “And drop that.”

The woman's expression collapses.

“Do it. I'll count to three.”

The knife clatters.

“And the bag,” Roy tells her. “And the fucking
bag
! Good. Now, over there.” He uses the gun to direct her. “And don't think I won't do you as well.”

“Mate…” Sol says. “Go easy.”

“Zip it,” Roy snaps. “How often,” he says to the woman, “are you coming up here?”

“What?” she chokes, her armour cracked. “I don't know what you think you're doing here, but–”

“Shut your mouth,” Roy says. He looks at Sol. Back to her. “Open the Audi boot.”

“I
don't think
–”

“I said hush up. Now. Move.”

Roy marches the woman to the car. Everything slow, sticky-seeming. The woman glances up at a broken CCTV camera.

“Unlucky,” Roy says.

She blips the car. The boot catch releases. “Actually, you open it,” Roy tells Sol.

Sol does as he's told. The boot hydraulics hiss. The woman holds her breath.

Inside there's a heavy box, hermetically sealed. A pair of words stacked up on it:

OUT.

ORGANS.

Roy doesn't take his eyes off the woman. She's looking at Sol, and Sol's looking back at her. The air feels charged.

Roy glances over. “What is it?”

Sol says it slowly. “Organs.” The word meaningless, fly-away –

Or-gans.

“
What?”

“Accessories,” Sol whispers. And there's something else: a garment tucked in there, rubbery texture, drab green. “What's that?” he asks.

She shakes her head.

Sol pulls at the fabric. It unfurls weightily – a torso, sleeves, legs. Elasticated cuffs and collar. It's missing a headpiece, a visor perhaps, but it's obviously some sort of protective suit: there's a valve for breathing kit.

“Close the boot and get in the Sierra,” Roy tells Sol. “And you,” he motions to the woman, “back in the Audi. You're driving.”

The woman opens the driver's door.

“Wait,” Roy says, coming round the car, Luger level. He gestures to the lifeless rider on the road. “Any more of them?”

The woman smirks cruelly and murmurs something.

“Say what?”

“You'll get yours, little man.”

“I'll take that as a no, then.”

“Roy…” Sol says.

“Just follow us,” Roy tells Sol. “Whatever it takes.”

Sol can't believe how fast it's all unravelled. Before he draws breath again the Audi's doors are shut.

Sol reaches up for the car's boot lid, trying to blink away an image of the rider's oozing helmet. As he does, he notices another object – small – nested in a hoop of cable. He leans in, takes it. He closes the boot and turns this object in his hand. It's a square thing with bevelled edges, plastic, with an exposed metal circle at its centre. It reminds him of an old floppy disc. A serial number sits beneath a familiar two-circle motif, embossed. He pockets it and backs away – a million thoughts in orbit starting to fall into the gravity of a dense, lightless truth. If there's a filament that runs through it all – the note, the suit, the circles – it's brightening.

Sol opens the Sierra door to find Y's face impassive, like nothing's happened. Were those her spares in the Audi? Were they
her
accessories? He fumbles the ignition wires, re-shorts the starter. The Audi idles close by; Sol glances out to see the woman's portrait, the end of Roy's Luger wavering. Then the red car moves off towards the sun.

Sol follows, unsure of everything but the life of his precious cargo, her face jiggling in the mirror's image.

I
t feels
like the end of all things. Two cars powering up the M602 from Salford towards the M60 ring road, then east for the M56.

The stolen Sierra squawks through its ratios, often slipping into neutral and making the whole car jolt. To keep up with the Audi, Sol has to weave recklessly through sparse traffic – overladen shippers, lumbering half-tracks, the odd courier trike. He's reluctant to lean forward and look up – isn't sure his heart would tolerate the anxiety induced by a curious drone. Nor does he want to check his mirror, lest he find Y awake and judging.

Soon enough the road signs start counting down to Birmingham. THE SOUTH. Sol wipes his hands on his overalls and tries to remind himself why he's doing this; smothering the temptation to stop and imagine his mind isn't fragmenting; to deny that this has happened to the augmented woman on the back seat. There are no bikes, at least. Only flyovers and road markings and flickering mile counters. Hypnotised by the homogenous roadscape, a grey soup, Sol doubles inwards, imagines his feature wall overlaid like skin on the windscreen. It's so nearly real that Sol feels momentarily trapped in a vacuum between his tortured map and the barren territory. The broken lane lines form continuous boundaries, and his body absorbs the road surface through the footwell, the steering wheel.

Ahead, the Audi brakes sharply and indicates left. A handpainted warning sign is diverting drivers off the motorway through an old police layby. Both cars exit and see the reason: the black flags of militiamen waving from the carriageway further ahead. Sol exhales: they've narrowly avoided a funnel point.

The Samaritan's diversion takes them through what looks like unspoiled countryside to a village fenced away; a zone of life somehow kept how things used to be. While the flowerbeds are empty owing to early winter, and the trees are bare, Sol wonders briefly how easy it might be to make a life here and just pretend.

Back on the motorway proper, the cars pass signs for Knutsford Services. Here the Audi begins to move erratically, slowing and regaining pace, crossing all three lanes. Sol decides the driver is looking for an unmarked exit. He glances in his mirror before slowing off.

Sol blinks.

Is that…

A biker closing fast.

Delirious, Sol flashes his headlights at the Audi; sees Roy's distinctive ears rotate until he's sure he's looking backwards.

The bike draws level with the Sierra, its armoured passenger tapping a submachine gun on the fairings. With a whimper, Sol veers closer to the barrier; some bullied response; clinging to a hope the bike will pass. Airily, even politely, the pillion passenger gives him the thumbs in appreciation, before pointing the gun and firing at the Audi. Peripheral to Sol, the bike seems to flicker.

Sol can see Roy's Luger held to the woman's head – the block-stud of its barrel sight. Then the bike is directly in front of the Sierra, and Sol stares down at raging rubber.

Was Roy ready for this? Had he prepared?

Sol only knows that this is his territory; these roads his language.

He holds the Sierra in gear and plants his foot. With a terrible lurch, he connects with the bike's rear wheel – the shock of its passenger registers, the gun falls – and the bike sloughs right. He watches the wing mirror, anticipating an explosion of parts and bodies against the Armco.

But there's only road.

A single uninterrupted ribbon of barrier –

Dazed, Sol moves left again, convinced he can still hear the sound of munitions whistling, spent casings tinkling on the road. He checks again.
No
. He realizes with a second spasm of horror that the episode was wholly fictive, hallucinatory.

A lack of sleep. A loss of grounding.

You prick.

Cursing himself, Sol notices almost too late that the Audi's now over on the hard shoulder, hazards going. His flashing must've rattled Roy. Disquieted, he moves across.

On the hard shoulder there comes a vibration he knows to be glass under the tyres. Ahead, the Audi weaves in and out of the hatchings until it pulls decisively left into the sloping verge. Its passenger-side window is missing.

Sol stops the Sierra by a three-dashed marker for an exit close by. “Stay there,” he shouts to Y, as if she could escape, before legging it away from the car with its engine still running. The Audi's stalled. There's a ragged hole blown out of its passenger door.

“Roy!” A large HGV chunders past, disturbing the air. A moment to hope nobody else will stop to help. By the Audi, Sol skids in the gravel and finds two things at once: the woman slumped over the steering wheel, and Roy giggling to himself.

“Christ,” Sol says. “Christ!”

Roy flaps a hand out of the window. The movement reveals his other hand, bloodied, and the Luger pistol clutched against his jacket breast.

“What did you do?”

“She shot me.”

“Jesus, Roy.
Christ
. Shot you where?”

Roy holds up his hand. Sol can see straight through it.

“The face on you,” Roy laughs. “Only a scratch – chill your boots.” He coughs heavily, laughs again. “She's modded, pal. Look at it. Look at that.”