Graft (3 page)

R
oy heads
for Emerald City – a warren of box shanties in the Celtic Park, Stalybridge, east of town by ten miles as the crow flies. His destination is a local football team's sad legacy: two parts homeless shelter, two parts refugee camp. A stadium whose pitch has been clusterbombed with rickety prefab structures.

Roy turns in. The entrance a triple barrier topped with sharpline and flanked by watchtowers. He stops the car, cranks the window. The barrier guard seems polite enough – requests a name as he checks his sectors. No eye contact. From the towers, lasers rove across the gateline.

Roy wonders if they'll bother to recognize him some day.

The guard buzzes the first gate. The second won't open till the first is sealed. Same for the third. Roy knows the setup's strong enough to halt a suicide wagon doing eighty.

Inside the compound, the smell hits him full force. Sewage, plastic fires, incinerator chimneys. A sweet, rotting scent that sticks to your clothes, that clings to your nostril hairs.

He parks on the shale and steps out.

“Sexy! Sexy mister!”

Roy turns from the car. A woman scamping his way. She's isn't much more than skin and bone, whittled into spindles by addictions or worse. A metre off she bares stark ribs, top yanked up to the underwiring of a hollow bra. Roy fishes for spare change but finds only lint. “Nothing on me today, kid,” he tells her, and shakes his head.

“Not even a peck?”

Roy thinks he might recognize her, some wraith of alleyways past. “No,” he says. “I'm celibate today.”

With this, Roy turns quickly towards the stadium's main entrance, thick as a pressure hull, and doesn't break his stride. He hears the woman curse him gently; her heels travelling away. Acknowledges the film of sweat spreading across his back, a tension stringing him out. Then he pokes the buzzer and blanks his face for the scan.

An impassive voice comes through a speaker. “Irises are fine. Password?”

Roy sighs. “Bananarama?” He looks around sheepishly.

A cough. Then, “That were last week's.”

“For fuck's sakes–”

“Nope. One go left.”

Roy could punch the speaker unit. He grinds his fist into his leg.

“Well?”

Roy clears his throat. “Is it milk organ?”

“Bing,” the voice says flatly. The door pops to reveal a bank of flaking turnstiles.

Inside, Emerald City becomes a warren. Roy fingers a crumbling wall covered in markered names and arrows. Properties here change hands often – it'll be a good day when he remembers the way without directions, even if the old part of him, a callused centre, doesn't want to be there when he does.

The route takes him down and out through the old players' tunnel, a concrete corridor splashed with inert radio-graffiti. On each side are the children of Tameside: a mother slumped, feeding her infant from the breast; baleful dogs in the shadows, licking puddles and the carcasses of small birds; and a young man, wrapped in damp cardboard, picking scabs from marbled legs. The confined space seems to concentrate the smell – urea and sweet decay. It's a site of outstanding natural entropy.

Roy emerges onto the pitch. The apartments – mostly breeze-block and tarp, or some configuration of corrugated steel sheet – spread out before him. Beyond, the spectator stands thrum with market stalls, gambling tables, makeshift chemists and clinics.

Roy traverses the grid counting homes – twenty-one, twenty-five, twenty-nine – and stops at thirty-one. He blinks, hesitant, before knocking on the door.

The Reverend answers. He's a large figure – always bigger than Roy remembers – with cartoonish features that remind Roy of food: a face of corned beef, torn prunes for eyes.

“Hiya,” Roy says, and manages to hold the man's gaze.

The Reverend grins and beckons Roy inside. Roy enters without a word and watches the Reverend waddle back to his chair. As the man sits, his stomach spills from his shirt and settles in the crotch of his jogging bottoms. Apparently he's in a jovial mood, which counts for something. A pile of bountiful love –

“Welly-well-well,” the Reverend says. “Look what our Lord Almighty's dragged in. And what aberrations do you bring before Him today?”

Roy takes out his revolver and touches it against his stomach. “I think I took a man's elbow in vain.”

“Oh, that's fine,” the Reverend says. “Jesus still loves you – it's only me who thinks you're a cunt.”

Roy smirks uncertainly and looks at his feet.

“You may sit down,” the Reverend says, nodding at the tatty Winchester in the corner.

Roy takes a seat. He places his gun on the chair's arm.

The Reverend leans over for something. Fat bunching. Finger podge. He lifts up an ornate collection tray and tilts it towards Roy. It's covered with powder. “Snozzle?” he asks, the
ess
like a dentist's drill. “
Un petit peu?
”

“No ta,” Roy says. “Working today, aren't I.”

“I don't know,” the Reverend says. “Are you? You usually only bob in when you're high or dry…”

“It's quieter at the moment, yeah,” Roy says, nodding too much, too defensively. “So if there's stuff going I'm up for it.”

The Reverend suddenly heaves his bulk across his chair. “Darling?” he shouts down the hall, mock falsetto. It often manifests this way, his imitation of class. “Fetch our planner, will you?”

Roy hears a rustling sound in the far room.

The Reverend rolls back. “You found yourself a ladyfriend yet?”

Roy hesitates, then shakes his head.

“A male companion, perhaps?”

“No, Rev. Hard to even swing one way at the minute.”

The Reverend cocks his head. “You're missing out, dear boy. But you know I can always arrange a treat for you. A little bonus. And the night terrors?”

Roy shrugs. “Now and again.”

The Reverend snarls. “Liar. Don't fucking
lie
to me. What was it last time – drowning animals? Oh no, no – that's my other man. I know yours, Royston.
Clouds
laced with
visions
… the cry of that scumbag under those bootsoles of yours… Ha! Do you remember him? Do you? Do you remember what we said about the way we left his face? And let's not forget your
birds!
”

Roy lowers his head.

“And what of drinking? That sinner-man's crutch… that foul putrescence, those fibs you tell yourself about a better way, like the instructions might be lurking behind the label–”

“All things in moderation,” Roy cuts in. “It's just one of those things, Rev. One of those things. And what's that, anyway?” he adds, meaning the collection tray. “Blomp?”

The Reverend dismisses Roy with a wave. “Blomp? Have some respect, young man. Now, hold out a hand for me. Come on.”

Roy does as he's told, and the Reverend leans towards him.

“Oh, just regard these pianist fingers for a moment.
Ruined
by hard work. And yet the shakes have gone – there's hope yet! How far you've come – so
atypical
these days, Royston. Not that wreck we once knew. Now, I wonder about – no, I
marvel
at – your brain. Ought to test you, really. See if you're a psychotic yet, or whatever the trendy word is these days…”

Roy goes to speak but the Reverend's wife appears in the doorframe with what looks like an offcut of carpet in her hand. Roy realizes he doesn't recognize her – reminded that the Reverend's wives seem to come and go. “Win some, lose some,” as the Reverend will often say.

“Star,” the Reverend says, taking the item and stroking it. He opens it, revealing it to be a clothbound tablet, and starts tapping on its screen. Its keyboard sounds are still on.

Roy sniffs uneasily and fidgets in his chair. The Reverend glances up and winks as if to signal he's heard Roy's thoughts. Without looking he pats his waiting wife on the thigh. “Thank you,” he says to her quietly. Then to Roy: “Darling, darling – you sit and admire her all you like. She
is
a doll.”

Time passes as the Reverend writes on the tablet. At one point – Roy doesn't seem to notice – the Reverend's wife disappears into the back again, leaving Roy to listen to the key sounds clacking sharply in the stillness of the room, the Reverend's death-rattle breathing. Despite himself, he imagines the Reverend's fat cells strung together in phlegmatic strings, a yellowy gossamer stretched over the barrel of his throat.

Roy swallows deliberately, in part to check his own throat still opens.

The Reverend glances up. “Dealt with any garages recently?” he asks.

Roy tenses. “What kind? As in cars?”

The Reverend smiles and flips the tablet to show Roy a picture of a militarized half-track. “Of course not. As in pigs. Conversions.
Armour
.”

“Nah,” Roy says. He looks at the revolver. “Not really my bag.”

The Reverend ignores him. “I recently got wind of a chap in Old Trafford who handles the type of project I'm managing. Fine craftsmanship guaranteed, apparently. And we've a brand spanking new client willing to pay handsomely for the connection.”

“Same old, same old, then,” Roy says.

The Reverend closes his tablet and slaps his enormous thighs. “Look, why don't you come and sit on your Reverend's lap?”

Now Roy imagines the man's head coming off in gibs, the revolver stuffed down his neck. “Give over, Rev,” he says. “Just give it a rest for five bloody minutes.”

The Reverend's expression crashes into a hard glare, eyes dark and empty as space, and Roy clenches. Then the Reverend laughs. “More than enough of me to go around,” he roars. “Plenty, plenty.” He turns towards the back room, shouts again. “Isn't there darling?”

“Give me the address, and a price,” Roy says. “Can look over the rest on the bounce.”

The woman comes back in. She says something to the Reverend under her breath.

“Get this man some paper,” he replies. “
Pay
-per, yes.”

Roy looks at his hands and clenches until the joints go numb.

“She's learning all the time,” the Reverend says. “But anyway. You're right about business being quiet, Royston. Reminds me of those official recession days, much as I liked them. This environment picks off the weak, the chaff. Rewards the smartarses. And you're a smartarse, aren't you?”

Roy does his best to nod.

“You know what I've
always
said,” the Reverend adds. “One man's apocalypse is another man's opportunity. Now take down this name. You'll meet him at the Rose like normal. Don't involve me any more than you have to – I don't care for the dirty details on this one, just as I don't expect you to let me down. But satisfy him, please – I think he has rather a lot of money, and we could both do with a new account on the books. A southerner, no less. Are you ready?”

Roy's pen is hovering.

“Havelock,” the Reverend says. “Oh, Havelock, God bless his cotton socks.”

S
ol's headtorch
burns white through the workshop's inspection pit. He pulls a spanner from the Lexus' guts, taps a few welds and heads for the ramp. He's calmer about the vehicle's provenance now; fairly confident there's no tracker – no immediately traceable lines to the workshop, or to them – but he can't help being jittery about the implications for business. The hatchback would've been easy, a good job well done. Jacking the Lexus, a high-value car, was new territory for them – and he can't shake the feeling someone will be looking for it.

From here they'll need to quickly break the car into salvage for the parts library. There's lots in the engine bay to attract wealthier clients, and even the useless bits will earn plenty on the weighbridge. He's confirmed the tyres as run-flats, too – far too good for a yard fire.

Irish insists on calling this “agile business”, or “just-in-time”. They work this way because there's no other option – unless you're willing to go straight and take a council contract, you'll eventually lose the battle with time and a supply chain missing most of its links.

Sol and Irish aren't exactly ignorant, either. They know the workshop's reputation is long since down the pan. To survive, they steal what they can to keep their promises. Or they break their promises and lose custom. It's simple, and it's brutal, but in the new Manchester, you make your way or you die. Whereas once you were told to sell the sizzle and not the sausage, now you try to sell the frying pan as well.

Sol's out of the pit and cleaning up when Irish bulldozes in, a plastic bag swinging from his hand.

“That's fucken war booty,” Irish says, pointing first at the Lexus then across the workshop to a purple Transit hiked up on the MOT lane. “And that's our real work.”

Irish's real name is Pete. Wiry and strong, flame-haired in his youth but greying now. He and Sol are the oldest of friends, so familiar they often communicate with little but their eyebrows, especially when the radio's up loud. Love won't tear them apart.

Sol turns off his headtorch. His face is a picture – smudged lines, hooded eyes. And he realizes Irish is angrier than he sounded.

“Serious here Solomon,” Irish says. “Got to be first come, first served. Keep your boner for the nice motors, aye, but don't just pilfer the jobs you fancy.”

Sol puts his hand on the Lexus' bonnet. “Had to sweep it for trackers. You know that.”

“So what if it's tracked? Fuck all that. Anyone asks, it came in for a once-over before sale.
We
don't know where it came from.”

“And the truck?”

“What about the truck?”

“You think he didn't see it? The massive white truck we drive about in?”

“You'd parked there, Sol, Lord above. He'll only remember the ginner bastard that flew up his bonnet!”