Graft (28 page)

Sol lowers his window. “Roy, don't.”

But Roy struts over, Luger visible in his waistband. An obvious discomfort when he lands his right foot.

Sol enters manual breathing, acutely aware of the surroundings. Despite the rain, it's stuffy in the car, and the window has steamed where his shoulder meets it. He rolls it all the way down.

Leila stands before Roy like an opposing captain waiting for the toss. As Roy reaches her she holds up the tablet, all smiles. On the tablet is a clear image of a vehicle. Sol would recognize it from a mile off; could translate the vehicle's lines into scale from sight alone. This is the man who could, at least before Far-Eastern manufacturers dominated the market, relay the name and make of every vehicle out there. He'd tell you the
year
of a model from as little as its headlight cluster. And that's why he knows this: on the tablet screen is a picture of the Lexus that he and Irish jacked.

Y's Lexus.

Roy acts bemused.
News spreads fast
. And now he's got his hands up, remonstrative, and hasn't noticed the circle closing around him. Heavy hearts are made of this – Sol knows there'll be too many gaps in his story; that a lie's only good enough if you believe it too.

A bad situation is growing worse. This is the time for Sol to go, but something like misplaced loyalty stays his decision. “Y,” he whispers. “Can you run?”

Then the circle around Roy loses its cohesion, or at least its intent. Has he smarmed them? Even Leila's determined appearance has relaxed.

The tablet vanishes. Leila and Roy shake hands. She's still smiling. Not a big smile, exactly, but enough to shift her scalp, open out her face.

A certain weight leaves Sol. He pivots to Y and says, “I think we'll be alright.” But Y's gazing beyond him. Sol follows her eyeline to the dangling black sacks. “Don't,” he says. “Don't look at that.” And the numbness returns. Roy, too, is pointing at something behind the crowd. The row of portable toilets.

“Don't,” Sol whispers. “Don't.”

Roy sets out. Despite his limp, his gait seems more confident – shoulders held back, chin into the rain. A contented, knowing look Sol's never seen on him before. Something like relief in Roy's motion, as if he's been shorn of some burden.

As he reaches the toilet, Roy stops and holds up a thumb towards the Sierra. Then he mouths something and opens the toilet door.

The crowd watches Roy close the door. But only Sol sees Leila's smile drop. She claps and points, businesslike, and Sol's arms prickle
.
Instinctively, he twists the dangling ignition wires part way together. Eases the Sierra into first gear.

Two privateers run to Roy's toilet with a heavy-looking bag, one strap each. They wrap the structure with a length of flat-sided cable, effectively locking Roy inside. Sol can see the twined sections of it – the braided cable.

Sol gets out of the Sierra.

By now Roy has realized something's wrong. He's trying to open the door from the inside, but the cable won't budge. He thumps on the toilet's thin polymer walls, bounces off it, rocks it, kicks hard. Stress-lines form in the plastic – lighter sections where the plastic expands. Hearing Roy's desperate shouts, Sol falls back into the Sierra where Y is blinking madly.

The privateers at the toilet remove a lump of arcane-looking equipment from the bag. It looks to Sol like a typewriter. This they separate and clamp to opposite sides of the toilet's shell with a foul sucking noise. Then the privateers sprint away.

Sol can still hear Roy shouting for him – shouting his name, now – and the distress is audible. In response, Sol closes the car door. What else can he do? Powerless, cowardly, he twists his head. The alternative is unbearable.

Roy starts firing his Luger through the plastic, scattering the crowd. Then there's this single, searing flash. The toilet twists on its base, as if in seizure. A sound of rending plastic, crackling, before a final, wrenching cry – a note that rises sharply, impossibly, then cuts out. The shooting stops, the cable disappears, and the top half of the toilet implodes. Sol sits agape. In place of the toilet's top half hangs a cube of reversed matter; a white blizzard inside, so brilliant and real it renders its frame as false. Sol regards the cube in total awe – its edges slurred by the bleak wind contained within it. As he watches, a patch of something else becomes clearer, something like land, another land inside the cube, which is blown with white granules and pitched steeply. Into the cube, onto that ramp, fragments from the toilet rise up with a liquid freedom. And then a glimmer, another flash, and the suspended cube vanishes to reveal empty space. The top half of the toilet is now gone, missing in totality. Sucked in, sucked
through
. It's simply disappeared, winked out – like a magician's box dropped through a stage trapdoor.

“Roy!” Sol screams. “Roy!”

In his mirror, Y's eyes are dead-set, unyielding.

“Did you see it? Did you see?”

Her face says she did.

“Oh my God. What was it? Like a window! And that storm inside it–”

Y blinks serenely.

“And it just
disappeared.”

Y blinks and blinks and blinks.

What's left of the toilet door hinges open. Two thick ropes – Roy's legs, Sol realizes – with trousers loosened and falling away from his cauterized waist, tumble to the tarmac.

Sol retches in his lap, emits a stringy bile, elastic, that leaves him gasping for air – sucking it down, throat seared.

To the crowd, Roy's legs are a signal. Leila points towards the Sierra with a single finger and the privateers' rifles level. Sol drops his head just in time – a flicker and the side window shatters. There's no pain, only noise and the sensation of sweat cascading from every pore.

Sol scrobbles the starter wires together. Pumps the old Sierra's accelerator till it's growling and lifts his left foot. Bangs, bumps, lumpiness. The engine screams right up to its first rev band. Bullets rattle, closer and closer, and when the windscreen comes in there's something heavy on the other side of it. Sol keeps his face buried in the passenger seat, one hand somehow holding the wheel in line. The weight increases, the steering drags left, and he kicks down on the brake pedal. The weight dissipates.

Sol rises briefly, glass raining from his head and neck and clothes, and finds a man on the bonnet clinging to a protrusion of the Sierra's hybrid kit. Spotting Sol upright, the privateers fire again. Light pours through fresh holes; chunks of plastic debris and chair foam and upholstery pluming. Rain curling in. He must be hit. Somewhere in this squall of deconstructed materials must be his own blood, flesh. The man on the bonnet wriggles – the impact of each round carrying the sound of slapped meat.

The Sierra careens across the car park behind the pavilion, and the firing ceases. Cover. Sol pulls and pushes the car into second, third. Smoke pours through the windscreen frame, and the electric unit whinnies. He can tell the front left tyre's shredded by the way the car dips off its centre line. He needs to over-correct it, holding the steering almost full lock to the right. The man on the bonnet slides straight off, taking a lump of machinery with him.

“Y!” Sol shouts over his shoulder. “Are you hit?”

Nothing.

“Are you hit? Where are you hit?”

They won't make it at this rate. Not with the car limping like this. And as they descend to the sliproad, he imagines the privateers as scrapyard dogs, tearing across the car park.

Sol hits the brakes before the sliproad bend. There's a worrying knocking through his foot, and the car's body rolls up onto its right wheels alone. Some hose, some fitting, cut away. He pumps the brake pedal, and still nothing. He swears, and over the onrushing wind and rain the volume of his voice surprises him. The chevrons narrow as the sliproad merges with the motorway.

Sol knows what's next. A cavalcade in tow. A death-convoy. As they pull away, back towards the city, smoke billowing in against Y and what's left of the rear window, Sol scans the sliproad they escaped down, and the windows of the green bridge that spans the lanes – expecting muzzle-flash to burst from the windows, a volley of shots to ring from every aperture. The lonely road stretches out. The black tarmac expands. The sky yawns wide. And even as the Sierra snakes and shimmies through a long tapering corner and the sliproad and bridge slide from his view, he can't relax – imagines the privateers no longer as dogs but fighters from a carrier, enveloped in noise: one bike, two bikes, three bikes – each emerging to chase after them for eternity.

They pass a column of heavy smoke rising from a ditch on the other side of the road. The penny drops: the Audi. Sol keeps accelerating, keeps going –

Until a searing clarity burns through:

They can self-destruct.

And the realization seals around him:

Jeff self-destructed in his bath, his flat –

Now in the mirror Y's eyes are welded to his – a look of naive fear edged with such bright hope he could navigate by it for all the nights to come. Does she share his thoughts? This nexus of fresh connections? Does she know?

Sol wipes his face on his sleeve. “Just you and me now,” he says, only now noticing the torrent of sparks flaring up the car's side. While their gathering speed has stabilized the Sierra's jitters, he assumes the front wheel only has so much left in it; that its steel rim will eventually warp, bend, and crack entirely, perhaps set alight. Or that the stresses on the drivetrain will prove too much, and the axle will seize, and the car will careen off or stop and flip under its own momentum.

You could imagine a hundred different deaths in these open lanes –

But the road stays empty and the sky stays heavy but droneless and all he can process is the stench of the smoke and the cold air and rain blasting through the car.

Manchester's cityscape expands. The Sierra piles in – mile after mile away from Roy; Roy who held up a thumb like he knew what was coming; Roy who was halved; Roy whose death scream has already morphed in Sol's recollection – become more than a blend of fear and surprise. Roy whose disembodied legs are imprinted on his interior space, dancing there on puppet strings held by the grotesque man he called the Reverend…

What kind of autopilot had got them out, got them to here? And Y – untouched, scrutinizing him, adorned with engine smoke – how was she alive?

Inside the walls of his mind, stalking and pushing against his senses, pulling the black curtains aside, Sol feels something stir: in a woodchip waiting room, somewhere in the city, is a one-eyed woman holding up a headless fish, keening like a fox.
Melanie
.

“That's where you need to go,” he says. “Isn't it? Your tower. The teeth.”

Y blinks at him.

“I've got my tools,” he tells her. “But first we need to hide.”

M
el's
out of fags and fingernails left to chew. It's early afternoon already, though she couldn't say what day. She's wrapped up in a man's coat – a heavy, grossly oversized thing from the Cat Flap's lost property box. She's been in and out here since morning, withering in the cold and wet and hoping for something to draw back the nerves. False eye itching as the city swims around her. Wondering about Jeff, Sol's dreamlike visit, the woman in his flat. And all the while plenty's been happening on her doorstep: dozens of locals slogging past with bags of rubbish for a protest bonfire on disused land round the corner.

Back when, she'd have complained about her neighbours' noise, their mess. No longer. Now she's actually tempted to join them, join in by adding to the pyre; to bag up and burn the detritus she pulls from her employees' rooms after a shift.

How many years has it been now? All this?

How long have things been going this way?

Mel thumbs a thick scar on her wrist and locks the front door. She thinks:
They can knock tonight
. It's actually tempting to simply close up and pay off the girls with hot meals and what's left in the till – shut up shop for the rest of the day, and then tonight attend the fire; watch it burning till morning or longer, rain or not. She smiles: of all the services you once took for granted but now accepted as gone – the rule of law, medical care, road maintenance, the postal service – it was only really rubbish collections that'd prevailed. This demonstration – an organized protest that if channelled differently, had its emphasis shifted, could do so much to unsettle the council – is happening simply because the rubbish hasn't been collected for a month. How many of her neighbours knew it wasn't the council running collections now but the Wilbers?

It's come to something when you're protesting because the Wilbers aren't doing their jobs properly.

A banging makes her jump. Somebody knocking on the front door.

She checks the time. Possibly one of the regulars, though it's too early for most. She pulls her fringe over her false eye and pads uncertainly to the door.

“Mel!”

She freezes.

“Mel!”

She flattens herself against the hallway wall, watching the front door as if it might reveal some indescribable horror.

“Please, Mel. We need you.”

Mel races upstairs, clumsy footsteps betraying her. She can still hear banging on the door, wants to escape its echo. In the farthest room, Mel hops over the bed, unmade, and catches her hip on the open drawer of a subsided dresser. The damp's bad in here. The net curtains are moth-eaten. And a scent: babywipes and antiseptic; latex and dried lubricant. The faintest note of semen. She stands shaking by the window with the net curtain's veil-like shadow masking her face. Looking up, she gets the sense the sun has been scuttled behind the cloud, and that Manchester's ready to swallow it.

“Mel!”

She pushes back the curtain. Streaking wet. So many dead flies on the sill.