Graft (31 page)

“But we've got–”

“Don't hang about. And if you see any others on their way in, tell them the same from me.”

Cassie's jaw sets. “It's him again, isn't it? You know I can call heads down here.”

“No. It's not him. Just get yourself home. And anyway – this lot round the corner'll be kicking off the second that fire's out. We'll have cordons both ends of the road.”

“You seen the size of it? Won't be going out any time soon – they're still chucking stuff on it.”

“No,” Mel says. A weary sigh. Then: “Please, love. I'll make it up to you when I can.”

Cass looks out the gate. The little square yard with its dented tin bins. “Fine,” she says.

Mel smiles sadly. “Everything's grand,” she says.

“You swear?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you take it easy.” And Cassie waves and heads back through the gate.

Mel sparks up another cig, resumes her vigil. Thick clumps of ash have started to fall in the yard. Again a temptation gnaws the insides of her arms, accompanied by a taste – bitter – that makes her salivate. There's already a pile of dimps at her feet, and her fake eye is sore, sticking.

Then it's dark. The early hours rolling around. And sooner still the inevitable arrives at the Cat Flap's front door. Mel was dreading this sound: bone on steel, the building ringing with it. She removes her blanket as the thumps come again; eases the back door shut and moves along the corridor towards a certain fate. Down here, at this time, you're so used to hearing laughter, pleasure, and the peace is unnerving. She pauses at the stairs: from Cassie's room comes the faintest report of clinking, dink-dink tinkering. A gentle interaction of precious metal that's almost xylophonic. Is it folly to guess? Silly to presume? She takes the stairs and wonders if she should go in, but a lifetime of distracted looks and bad moods has taught her not to interrupt Sol while he's working.

Knock knock knock. And a voice, stern and crisp: “Open up, Melanie.”

From the landing, black damp risen as if to a high tide mark, she looks down at Jase. Suited, booted, immaculate. He's alone, which surprises her. Maybe he doesn't know. Maybe –

Mel goes back downstairs and enters the little kitchen alcove; washes her hands. She stoops down to the washing machine and picks out a pair of sheer stockings.

As she goes to the reception cage, she carefully pushes one of the stockings into the other. Puts the paired stockings down, and opens the shutters remotely. Her little camera flickers on, slaved monitor hissing.

Jase looks into the camera.

“Wondered when you'd show up,” Mel says into the output. She puts the stockings in her pocket.

“You going to let me in?”

Mel comes across the waiting room. She unlocks the inner door, unbolts the outer. Deep breath. She opens the door a crack and talks to him through the shutters.

Jase peers through. “Melanie,” he says. “Sorry it's so late. Got a few?”

“Might do,” Mel says back. “What tripe you flogging now?”

He grins and puts a finger to his cheek. “You look knackered. Rough night?”

She slides the chain. Jase looks coiled, holding something back. She opens the door wide and almost reconsiders.

“I'm fine,” she tells him. “I'm fine.”

Jase steps into the building, taller than Mel remembers. “Didn't realize you shuttered the doors up here,” he says. There's not much between them in the hallway, and the tinted glass dims their skins to a sickly hue.

“Huge bonfire over on the supermarket. I thought there'd be trouble. Usually boots off.”

“The bins, is it? Saw a few things smouldering over my way too. But still – been a while since they did a collection.”

“Mmm,” Mel says.

“So. Let's cut to it. How's our little helper getting on?”

He does know.
Mel's sure of it.
He knows Jeff's gone and now he's blagging.
She swallows. “Good.” Swallow. “Really well, yeah. He gets on alright with the girls.”

“Great news,” Jase says. “I'm made up for you.”

Change the subject.
“You want a brew, something to eat? Come through, yeah – can't see you properly in here. I'll get the kettle on while we chat. Filtered, so it tastes pretty good.”

“Go on then.”

Jase walks ahead of her. Into the waiting room. She closes the inner door and clocks the outline of his wallet with a lump in her throat – this could be easier than she thought.

Now? Do it now?

“Where's the big man then?”

“Nipped out for us. Milk. A few other essentials…”

“What, like proper milk?”

Mel racks her brains. 
Was there any this week?
 It's a dance. It's like a dance. “Yes,” she says, a little too firmly.

Jase stops where he is. His eyebrows rise a touch. “You've got him doing long days then? Because I think you should–”

“Cold in here, isn't it?” Mel interrupts. “That bloody heater on the blink.”

“It's fine, Melanie,” Jase says. His voice is getting terser.

“Well–”

“Listen. You need to know when your next delivery's coming.”

Mel's heart sinks. She could crumble right there. How did she not see it coming?

She puts a brave face on it. “Our next what? Come through, come through, come on – this foyer's too nippy… Got a much cosier spot for the guests I know.”

Jase stops pretending altogether. He turns full on. “How long did you think we'd let you enjoy a free service?”

Mel's trembling. She knows she can't let on.
He knows
. “Come on,” she says. “We can talk about it.” She shocks herself by touching his arm, rotating him towards the corridor. It seems to take him by surprise, too, and he moves there without resistance, apparently diverted. With his back turned, she crosses over herself, and – there,
yes
– dips into his pocket; two fingers like slivers, pincer-poised. She manages to sneak his wallet straight out.

Breathe. Breathe.

Jase strolls down the corridor oblivious to her theft. Straight ahead. Head reacting to a bang, something dropped upstairs. “I just think we need to have a sit down and a good chat,” he says over his shoulder. “Wanted to ask a few things about your ex, too, actually. Head office interested for some reason.” He's calm again. The veneer quickly reapplied. “And bend your ear about payment terms, your expectations, whether or not you want to extend your trial, and when we can expect you to start retiring your current stock.” He smiles at her. There's a distilled cruelty in his face, but Mel nods and smiles sweetly back.
Play the game.

They draw level with the store cupboard door.

“It's just by there, Jase,” she says to him. “Yep, just round that way.”

Now Mel pulls the stocking from her jeans pocket and simultaneously plucks her fake eye from its socket, lower lid, upper lid, an uncomfortable feeling of suction as it comes out unlubricated.
Thwock
. She drops the ball into the combined stockings, weighs it, and halts on her front foot.

Jase hears her shoe squeak and gain traction. He turns to find her hand in rotation – a grey rotor blur at the end of her arm.

Mel doesn't falter. She swings for him; her eyeball glances off his shoulder, connects with his neck. More from astonishment than pain, Jase crashes against the partition wall.

“Bitch,” he says.

Mel makes a second attempt. This time the ball connects above his right ear with a deep crunch that resounds in the tightened space. Jase looks like he wants to say something else, something intangible, but Mel cuts him off with a third strike on his cheek. His face swells instantly.

“You can say that again,” Mel tells him, breathing heavy.

Jase whimpers, on his backside with a hand out to steady him, the other up and defending his face. Mel reaches across him and opens the storeroom door. The smell of it, of Jeff. Rotten food. She swings the makeshift cosh once more, into his knee this time, and the glass ball halves on impact. Jase screams in pain, clutches his leg, and Mel kicks his shoulder so that he collapses into the cupboard.

She raises her hand. The two halves of her eye jangle in the stocking. Perfect friction. Jase doesn't speak, but crabs backwards from her in retreat.

Mel grabs the door handle, pulls it to. She locks it and pockets the key.

“There,” she says to herself. “There's your fucking retirement.”

T
he waiting room is peaceful
. Mel sits in a wreath of blue smoke that hangs in the room like a rain cloud seen from a distance. She watches the smoke churn, impossible fluid, while absentmindedly tracking the conjunctiva of her empty socket with a finger. She listens to Jase pounding the cupboard door. He'd tire soon, wouldn't he? She's already turned out his wallet – a credit card, a clip of petty cash – on the floor. On top of the pile, a set of calling cards inscribed with two overlapping circles, wrapped in a list of local addresses. Who are these people? Who are their Jeffs? And who will turn up next?

S
ol sleeps
at the foot of Cassie's bed like a cat by the fire. In one hand, a multi-tool with attachments splayed. In the other, loosely, his collar, turned up into his chin. He's snoring.

Y stands up on the bed to begin with, angling pressure down through her feet. Her curious weightlessness has persisted. She articulates her knee and hip joints – carefully shifting weight from the ball and arch of one foot to the other.

Now she stretches upwards. All three arms, the stem of a flower in time-lapse, pushed up, hands and fingers straight, splayed, before they blossom into three petals and spread, a satisfying pop sounding off in her doubled shoulder. Each arm feels so new. Even the splits in her skin have resealed themselves.

From this bloomed stance she dives forward to touch her toes. Her back lengthens, and her stomach muscles engage. It's the best kind of stretch: relief bordering pain. Long lengths of pleasure.

She smiles, then: how liberated she feels to escape that locked-up body, her doppelgänger in the ceiling mirror. The afterimage of the reflection is now stark but dreamlike: her limbs open, Sol discovering the truths of her implants and biomechanics, untangling her pieces as if she were constructed from a series of interconnected lockets. The decorated face of this stranger on her chest, his half-head rolled and manipulated into new shapes depending on Sol's progress. But what strikes her most is the bliss she feels. A reconciliation with herself, almost. As if she accepts now she won't get her old self back – that her old identity is gone – yet recognizes that she alone has forged a new one, shaped it herself. Not under orders, but in spite of them. Not uncaring, but filled with a compassion; a will to resist that the makers could never scrape clean.

Y looks down at Sol. Is friendship right? Is this man a friend? Would she do the same for him? Objectively, she thinks there's an answer: despite the opportunity it presented, she'd responded instinctively to the unconscious Roy's ankle injury without even knowing who he was. The basics of wound treatment, triage, had flooded to her from some hidden reservoir. Whatever the makers had deleted, there'd been no empathy bypass. She felt for him, this man, this damp human, fatty and unmodified, just as she'd felt for the brothers and sisters who couldn't sleep in their cradles.

Oppositely, however, stands the partitioned memory of her response to Jeff's advances. The ferocity, the skin and mechanics of another Y – one who'd crushed Jeff's throat and pushed his glitzy eyes deep inside his head, her bulk against his assumed right to dominate her. Acceptance or not, induced or teased out: barbarity is also part of her, entwined with her. She knows she can mete out lethal force on her terms as well as the makers'. That with these three hands, it's easy enough to take as well as give.

So yes, she'd do the same for Sol.

Down from the bed, she crouches and touches his face – hot, sticky. His yellowy eyes open, adjust, and there her face glistens on the bowls of his irises.

“You're up,” he says.

Y nods.

Sol rubs his stubble. “Look at you.”

Y smooths down her arms. She demonstrates for him her fresh dexterity, hesitating briefly when his eyes brim over.

He sniffs it up and says, “You don't hurt? You aren't just saying?”

Y shakes her head.

He laughs through the tears. “Even without that thing in you?”

Y looks to the corner of the room. A sports bag with both handles fastened. She crackles.

“You need something warmer on,” he tells her. She observes him closely, his body language at variance with his words. He's either completely overawed or coping with an untenable guilt. “Have a good root in these drawers before you catch your death,” he adds. Then, looking away: “I'll… I'll just be downstairs with Melanie.”

What is Sol frightened by? Does his relationship with the woman complicate something? After he leaves, Y humours him and rummages for a while – finding a second pair of tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie. These she matches with long knitted socks and a pair of low heels that make her walk strangely. She doesn't like the way they stretch her calves.

Clomping out of the room, she stops by the dresser. A thousand other times she might not have; might not have even noticed the object Sol left on its corner, or recognized it as technology from the other side. Her other side. But the object, this little square, metallic circle at its core, is definitely a detail of the sister-world. And as she picks it up, she knows without question what it's for.

A knotty ball of certainty glowing inside, Y holds the square closer. Written down one edge, in glyphs she can read, are two words: BINARY DECODER. Y holds the device to her throat and feels the primordial pull of two opposing magnets desperate – or destined – to meet.