Graft (30 page)

S
ol wakes up threshing
, sopping wet. Half-light greets him, brings a splinter of moon. Slowly, he wades from the hinterlands of brittle sleep to recognize the room.

We're in the Cat Flap. We're on the run.

For a time, he sits naked on the bed until the dead air leaves him shivering – worried, in some way, that he might otherwise return to the same dreams. Should he check on Y? Probably it's better she rests for now. So instead he turns on the TV to an unlikely-looking threesome. He watches, loosely fascinated, but finds after a few minutes that the video's making him feel ill. It's not because of its content, per se, but the fleshy colour it turns the walls. What signals have been absorbed by all this peeling plaster? It's easy to imagine a substance like asbestos, leeching in.

Sol flicks on from porno to porno to porno, until he finds what appears to be a compilation of headcam war footage. A smoking compound, tracer rounds in the night, harrowed land. The dark sheets around him stripy with salt. Boom – another soldier. Rattle – another. And then the newslines that mass in from the margins:
For the king he/she gave. Next of kin have been informed.
Cut-and-paste headlines on government troops, loyalist militias, terrorists, extremists – words that seem to mingle, melt, and mean increasingly little. Atrocities so common as to be glazed over, now, and relayed with such dilute reasoning. Reporters only ever dipping their toes – or straight up conniving. He thinks:
How come nobody ever asks why?

Sol looks at the ceiling and regards his body, his face, in the mirror. It's like the rings slake out from his eyes in real time; his torso covered with baggy flesh in liquefaction. “Prick,” he tells himself, and swings off the bed. He enters the room's small ensuite – a plastic shower pod – and showers in water so cold it pushes all the air from him.

Tomorrow.
Tomorrow
. Sol keeps thinking about tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes, does it? And he knows he won't sleep again now. Better to crack on, surely. Get things rolling. He goes on wrestling the quandary as he dresses; as he pads down the stairs to the waiting room. No sign of anyone, but there's a lingering odour of damp fires. It's not the Sierra, either – he'd left that too far away. No, this is closer. He goes in Mel's reception cage and picks up the phone.

The dialler clicks. The tone carries.

“Hello?”

“Irish.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Sol? What time is it?”

“Has it turned up?”

“Has what turned up? What's this number you're on?”

“Irish,” Sol says. “Is the car there? The gear?”

“Solomon… you seen the clock, man?”

“I'm asking you.”

Irish sighs. “Jesus, yes, it's all here. Came in a bin lorry, the clever bastards.”

“That's good,” Sol says. “They're early. And if I tell you there's a change of plan–”

Irish coughs, asthmatic. “This better be worth my angelic slumber. The heartburn you're causing me.”

“I know,” Sol says. “I know.”

“Well what's going on?”

“Honestly?”

Sol considers telling Irish just enough – that people came looking for the Lexus after all. Nothing more than necessary. Nothing more than believable. Which by extension means nothing of Y, of Roy, or of the things he's seen and done. Assuming the two dead bikers were the same bikers present the morning Irish jacked the Lexus, and that Sandy was the only other person linked to the scene, everyone directly connected is now out of the equation. Only the unseen structures persist. And in any case, Sol's overriding selfishness will force the issue. He might tell himself it's for the better good, but the truth is simpler, more reckless than that: Y is all that matters.

“Honestly,” Irish says.

“It's fine,” Sol tells him. “There's not enough time.”

“Then what's this changed plan?”

“You got a pen?”

“I've always got a pen. Spit it out.”

So Sol gives Irish his instructions – poring his way across a mental image to relay its nuances. When he's done, he closes his eyes, holds them shut. A long exhalation through his nose. “You get all that?”

“I got all that. God knows I wish I didn't. But I've got it.”

Sol nods, wired now. “You're my favourite,” he says.

Irish coughs again. “And you're deeply fucken tapped.”

T
ools over his shoulder
, Sol waits at Y's door. He aches with anticipation, muscles constricting his joints. Is it too early? Would more sleep be worthwhile? Would he do a better job?

He enters Room Three regardless. Inside, Y's awake too – eyes pinned to the mirror above her. Her arms are crossed, pharaonic. The sheets still drawn to Bowie's chin.

“Hiya,” he says, sitting at the foot of the bed.

Y blinks.

Sol wants to add some nicety, some attempt at reassurance. The room still as he unfolds a length of tarpaulin from his bag and lays it in the space between the bed and the partition wall. “Sterile,” he says to her.

In the wet room, Sol dilutes a quantity of bleach in a mop bucket and leaves several tools in there to soak. Then he splashes his hands and forearms with the dregs of Mel's tiger-striped bottle, and uses one of Cassie's exfoliator brushes to scrub them down.

“Never had to blame my tools,” he tells her, kneeling at her side, before giving her a promise he can't be sure to keep.

Sol pulls away her sheet, rolls it deftly into an extra cushion for her head. He cuts off a length of string and divides the tarp into eight – weighting down the string's ends with old spanners.

He smiles a little. “We'll start with your left knee,” he says. “The craggy one.” Wiring and substructure here spills through a long fissure, a rupture. The wound has exposed visible seams in the skin layer, which he peels away from the kneecap. Beyond this, he's able to access the muscle wall – a second peelable membrane that sits above the motor unit site. There's very little blood.

It's a strange and beautiful thing, the way they've done it, and this alone distracts him from the surrealism of the whole. So many pieces, sealed against translucent pods and beads of biology. Black-edged joins where the connectors meet Y's organic matter. Pure engineering, pure maths: a spotless jigsaw constructed with precision-machined pieces, whittled spindles and micro-cogs. Power drives and strengthened tendons. Pluses and negatives and motor controls.

He thumbs alloys, follows wires. He unscrews the knee unit delicately, carefully. Mapping Y, never less than staggered by her intricacies.

Down on the tarp, Sol starts his first exploded diagram in earnest. After the knee, he removes the artificial sections of Y's fibia and tibia, which are sealed off from her real bone by what appears to be a series of delicate valves and coverings. He extracts wiring looms and support structures, along with a set of clever-looking muscle modules, until Y's left leg resembles a hollow assembly above a blizzard of parts on the tarp.

Sol makes a note of bent fixtures and panels behind the knee. He takes the pencil from his mouth and marks the joins.

Then he starts on her second leg, applying what he's learned from the first. The knee system isn't as badly damaged, but the case is loose around her moving parts, as though violently shaken for too long.

By her ankle, the tight coil of a spring-loaded Achilles tendon, Sol takes a break. He looks up and feels he should ask her for something. Forgiveness, at least. In the mirror, Y watches with an expression impossible to describe – not pain, not fear. Not thankful, nor thankless. Curiosity, compulsion. Wouldn't that be something, to imagine her willing him on?

Sol continues, meticulous and entranced. Time soon ceases to matter or even to be; the whole universe shrunk down, condensed and confined to these four walls and the replications of them above; sensations only the pins and needles of his hands and feet, cut off under his weight; and the only sounds the clink and chink of his tools. His hardened hands maintain their steadiness, and the deconstructed pieces of Y become as gems, pearls from the ocean bed. Her soul counted out in little treasures.

Sol's distantly aware of pain from his own limbs, but he doesn't stop. His tools – only a few proving much use – have become a part of him. As his fingers move around, the calluses burning, he starts to feel a pure form of relief. As if, in doing this, he's reaffirmed to himself that Y isn't an object, not a subject, not a thing. And never – never – a toy. Watching her eyes watch him, he understands that pieces alone can't form a person. And that whether he was created divinely, or was delivered by evolution, his own meat was not entirely pointless – he could have a purpose after all.

Soon he completes her single arm. The elbow structure seems intact, but the wiring, an elegant yarn, is desoldered; the mother unit drifting towards Y's soft tissue like an unmoored craft.

Next he starts on her double-jointed shoulder. The most fiddly section, to his mind, as well as the most sophisticated – even despite the appearance of several cheap fixings. Progressively he unravels a labyrinthine configuration that starts on the opposite side of Y's neck: a series of panels which reveal a missing section of trachea and larynx beneath the tattooed square – though he wouldn't know these names – and in their stead some sort of chip and speaker, wired carefully into the encased biology of her throat. His tools seem magnetized to this setup, and here more than elsewhere he needs to pause to appreciate the marriage of the pieces they left and the parts they added. It's both terrifying and sublime. Then he works outwards towards the doubled joint, removing delicate modules and breaking them down separately, displaying them on the tarp in their own orbits. He reaches the servos of her new shoulder next to the wrapped-up ball of her own, the clavicle apparently strengthened to bear extra weight, and the ligaments replaced with struts of tensile material.

Twinned joint fully derigged, Y's third arm at last comes away in one whole piece, synthetic skin and all. With the city pulsing through the walls, he breaks it down into its major components.

This done, he stands up. His legs are close to buckling.

“Does it hurt?”

Y doesn't blink.

“Promise?”

Y blinks.

“Have I missed anything?”

Y blinks downwards.

Sol motions to her chest. “Here?”

Nothing.

Her stomach?

A murmur from her naked throat.

Sol kneels again. He rolls up her T-shirt and looks across Y's hairless belly until the seams catch the light. From her navel to her lowest rib is a panel. He pushes at the skin. It gives, and he goes inwards, past subdermal screws and plates, until a tiny compartment opens out, and a cylinder, seven or eight inches long, slides free. This he can't break down further. Sense tells him no organ would sit here; that it's not a replacement but an addition. He rolls it over in his hands and finds a faint warning triangle etched into it. He thinks of Jeff and thinks of Sandy and goes cold.

He puts the cylinder to one side. Y's still watching him. “Is it what I think it is?”

Y blinks.

Tight breaths. Tight little breaths.

“And you know how to use it?”

Nothing.

Bastards
.

“There's one last bit,” Sol tells her. He taps his head and gently rolls her over. Then, using needle-nose pliers and a damp cloth, he removes the accumulated grit and gunge from her nape, her hairline.

What had the young privateer pressed? Sure enough there's another subdermal panel under the lowermost plate of her skull. Here Sol finds a bank of rudimentary I/O switches, each jacked into the boss of her spinal cord. He unscrews the switches carefully, lays them out with the rest. So that now Y is almost completely incomplete; a whole galaxy of parts. Colonies of disparate components, enamelled by indefinite light. Each square of tarp its own distinctive lab culture.

Sol closes his eyes to the fragrance of sweat and oil. Burning there in the darkness, his father's voice:
If it don't work, take it all apart and put it back together again.

He doesn't take another break before he starts unbending and cleaning and reassembling the pieces of Y. In fact, he only hesitates when he goes to reattach her third arm. She blinks rapidly at him until he grasps why he must continue. For better or worse, it's part of her. Keeping this in pieces implies Y's modified body is something she should be ashamed of – gives her one less thing to reclaim.

W
ith Sol
and the woman upstairs, Mel locks and bolts the front door. She can't remember the last time the Cat Flap closed like this, or what might have closed them. She's found a packet of cigarettes, though, which she takes to be a sign, a portent.

Inner door barred, Mel turns off the foyer screens and fans. She tuts at the puddlewater Sol's toolbag has trailed in.

A time check. The girls will start arriving for their shifts any minute. So at the back door, Mel unfolds a plastic chair and sparks up – her feet wedging open the door, and the cold, damp air bringing in the smell of burning rubbish. It's all Mel feels she can do to keep a nightwatch like this, with the clouds lit red above and a paroxysm of jagged thought threatening to burst in her. A haze of smoke expands across her view of abandoned terraces, denuded trees, analogue aerials, chimney pots. Not for the first time tonight, an old habit feels more tangible than the ghosts that usually haunt her from negative space.

Cassie arrives first, as Cassie always does.

“Hi sweet,” Mel says, hoping not to scare her.

“M? You doing out here?”

“We're closed tonight.”

“How come?”

“Just head home, Cass. I'll pay you all double tomorrow.”