Graft (32 page)

Y
follows
the sound of Sol's voice along a first-floor corridor she doesn't recall being carried through, paralyzed as she'd been around the rebar running from nape to spinal base. With the throatpiece in place, she relishes a new sensitivity to the environment; calibrates herself to the frequency of passing traffic, animals calling, a rich cocktail of polymer fumes, carbon molecules. Compounds forming or breaking down. She reaches a staircase; takes the stairs in twos, attuned and silent. Perfect noise between her ears, a melody of precision, her head vibrant with sensory mass.

Y lingers in the doorway unnoticed and sees Melanie balled up, legs crossed, trying to occupy as little space as possible on the waiting room bench. Sol's stooped over a washing basket marked LOST PROPERTY.

“Alright to use the phone?” Sol asks Mel.

“Do I have a choice?”

Sol gives her the thumbs-up. He's got the phone to his ear when he finally notices Y in the doorway. “Oh,” he says, and lowers the handset to his chest.

Y steps out of the heels and enters the foyer self-consciously, finding it odd that the woman simply accepts her presence. She's seen that glassy stare before: perhaps the woman's been sedated in some way.

“Sit down then,” Mel says to her, patting the bench. “You'll make me feel uncomfortable.”

“Found you a fleece and a shell jacket,” Sol says, gesturing to a pile of clothing. “More than enough to be going on with anyway. Definitely good enough for a quick shower. And some boots. What size are those–”

Sol stops talking. Mel takes notice.

“What is it?” she says.

“Y?”

Y opens her mouth and emits a low crackle that rises with a shape, a timbre, through an unstable register. As she babbles, crackles, her tongue against her teeth, she finally lets out two definable words: “Good hello.”

Sol's mouth hangs open.

“Hel-lo,” Y says again. The paired syllables leave her throatbox with a sound of metal scraping metal. “Man Sol.”

Mel unwinds from the bench and plants her feet. She's glaring at Sol, willing him to respond.

Y shrugs. “It's me, man Solomon.”

The mundanity of the environment serves to amplify Y's voice, and Sol starts to sweat. He tries to say “What?” but it's stifled, trapped. To Y he looks visibly weakened – a loosening of his posture she takes to signal either relief or capitulation.

“Sol,” Mel says. “What's wrong?”

Y steps backwards.

Sol clears his throat. “Do it again,” he says. Clearer now. “Say it again.”

“Hello,” Y repeats, her mouth clicking. This time she looks embarrassed by it: the motorized translation of so many little ones and zeroes, compressed and squirted through the valve of her throat.

“You're talking, Y.”

“But Y is not the principal moniker,” she says.

It takes effort, Sol realizes. Does it hurt her? Does it chafe? “I don't–”

“There is sorry,” Y says.

“Sorry?”

She points at her third arm, more urgent. “There is… theirs are… there are apologies.”

“For what?”

“The abode of Sol, your ally – the man Roy.”

Sol clutches his forehead. The oddest sensation that gravity's failed. Again the powerful urge to hold her, to make this a celebration of them, and of providence. And yet he's breaking up inside. The noise of the throatpiece is as alien as it's frightening.

“Roy wasn't a friend, not a real friend,” Sol says. He holds his nose. “Sometimes you meet people and you try to turn your cheek. Even when they've got an arm round your neck.”

“He was our friend,” Y says. The throatpiece bobs on her neck. And then she begins to laugh, her whole body convulsing, and the module translates it as a hacking cough.

If it's not painful, it's tickling her, Sol thinks. “I found that thing,” he says, touching his Adam's apple. “The thing over your throat. In a car, with a biohazard suit. There was this crate, and a woman. Sandy–”

At the very mention of her name, Y scowls and begins to chirrup angrily. Sol grimaces and steps back – Y's module's shrill at the top end. How insensitive could he be? Of course she and Sandy had met. But does this confirm that the Audi's crate held Y's accessories? Or do more of them have her tattooed, expandable throat?

Y grunts. “Sandy is a betrayer,” she says.

“She's gone,” Sol tells her, picturing the abject spray on the interior of Sandy's windscreen, the gun barrel poking from her ribs. Y was sleeping then; couldn't have known. But what difference does it make? “I can't do this,” he says. And with that he severs the link; turns and crouches down to pick through more clothing. “Maybe these,” he mumbles, pushing away scarves and gloves. “All these warm things.”

“Sol,” Mel says.

“Can I use your phone again?” he asks.

Mel shakes her head. It's not his fault. Where others might consider it rude, even obnoxious, she recognizes the diversion. Sol's scared witless, and now he's disengaged to protect something of himself. That stubborn selfishness prevailing. Anything to avoid what really seems to be happening.

Sol produces a mid-length peacoat, navy, heavily bobbled, that he tries on for himself; pulls tight round his body. He turns and makes a satisfied face as if Y has left the room entirely, or never came in to start with. “Got taste, your forgetful johns,” he murmurs.

Y is locked. Patient. Is she being respectful of the situation? Or simply analyzing it? It jolts Mel to realize another woman might comprehend Sol, has invested the time necessary to. And by the way Y gawps at her, it's clear she's noticed the hollow eye socket, too. “
Sol
,” Mel whispers, rearranging her fringe to hide the cavity.

He ignores her.

“I think she needs you.”

“Who needs me?” Sol asks. “No one needs me. I can't.”

Y crosses the room. A broken stride, a distortion or imbalance on one side. She picks up and envelops herself in the fleece he's found. “Good base layer,” Mel says. “Sol, I think you should listen.”

“You don't understand,” Sol says under his breath. “You never understand.”

Behind him, Y puts two hands on Sol's shoulders. A third, tentatively, in the small of his back.

Mel inhales.

“A steeple,” Y says, letting go and pressing her three hands together into a pyramid. The module's attempts at restraint are lacking, and her words sound more sinister than soft.

Carefully, Sol straightens up. He drops the sweater in his hands. “A steeple?” He twists to her, takes her two hands in one of his.

Carefully she places her third hand on his chin. “No,” she says. “A tower.”

“A tower.”

“My tower,” Y says. “Where the circles convene.”

Sol blinks at her.

“I must revoke the father's ownership,” she says. This time the words are perfect – the module enunciating each one with unnerving precision.

“Your father?”

“Not mine.”

“But the person who sent you.”

A curt nod. Then, “He sent all. He watches.”

“From the tower.”

“Yes,” Y says.

“I think I know where it is,” he says. “Your tower.”

Mel exhales. While she doesn't get what they're talking about, he's come back from some edge, returned to them. Now she's witnessing their fears entangle. A perverse thought pops:
I already had my time with him.

“I'm sorry for what they've done,” Sol says. “I am.”

“Why?” Y asks. She taps the throatpiece. “I have a name. I found my name.”

“Then tell us,” Sol says.

I
n the waiting
room of the parlour in Mel's corner of the city, Y repeats the name in ratatat bursts – ejects it from her throat in triplets.

“Yasmin, Yasmin,
Yasmin
. Yasmin, Yasmin,
Yasmin
…”

Regardless of the mechanics – is the binary encoded from
thought
? She doesn't
think
in binary – it thrills and scares her to know she's carried a voice disguised even from her own ears for so long. In one way it completes the picture – nestles alongside her skills, attributes and personality traits as things to apprehend, to slowly tame and use. It also gives her a fresh perspective on who she might have been before the makers remade her, before the Manor Lord chose her, marked her. There are fresh assumptions she feels sure she could verify if time were more malleable: the sound and shape of her mother tongue, a genetic aptitude for physical tasks, a probably genetic tenacity. A familiarity with structures, a knowledge of the semiotics and symbology of these structures.
Towers
. And was there always potential for her to be so nimble, so physically powerful, so controlled? Was that why they selected her? In a strange way, her voice also trickled into the void of her parentage. Were they like her? Had they been contrarians, too?

She's now convinced she lived her first life in this sister-world.

Yasmin. Yasmin. Yasmin.

To hear it now feels no less significant than hearing Sandy say it in that grey car park, beneath those black, swinging bags. And though the throatpiece seems to interpret the binary and sometimes mangle it, it feels like something else she's recovered. A bridge between interior and exterior repaired.

With a voice, she is more human.

And so she repeats her name to Sol and Melanie like a mantra, and tries to think of a sentence, a phrase, some kind of grand statement, an answer to all of Sol's questions. This, though, is too hard. She and Sol like two old friends, reunited, who have so much to say, to fill in, they barely know where to start.

Thank you
?

Good luck
?

The Manor Lord is always watching, and now I must shut his eyes?

Perhaps the thing she most wants to say is
I'll take care of you
– knowing how she can. The thing is, it's too important, and she's frightened of how the throatpiece might translate it.

S
ol's made
his mind up. If they're going to do this – if he and Yasmin are going back to her tower together – he first needs to confirm something for himself.

“I need to get online,” he goes to Mel, the three of them inert, exhausted, in the Cat Flap's kitchen. Sitting like relatives waiting for the worst news. “Ten minutes at most.”

Mel isn't sure. “I wouldn't know where to start,” she tells him. “Though I heard it's being opened up to the public again.”

“How secure's your line?” Sol asks. He sips a mug of rainwater poured straight from the butt outside.

“The phone line?”

“Yeah.”

“It's just a phone.”

Sol purses his lips.

“Am I missing something?”

“I just need to ring someone.”

“Why?”

He doesn't want to explain that he doesn't know who's complicit in this, that he'd rather be safer than sorry. That they'll catch up with him eventually. “I just do.”

“And what about Yasmin?”

Her full name still sounds so novel. Sol hasn't said it enough to normalize it; to copy over the previous version. He likes it, certainly – loves what it means for the woman he's called Y for what seems so long now. But it isn't quite hers yet.

Yasmin bares her teeth at them.

“I want you to stay here,” he tells them, wavering on the last word. There's a firmness in his voice – a clear resolve. He kneads his hands in front of him. “And try and find Yasmin some decent boots.”

Neither woman responds. It's not difficult to feel like he's palming Yasmin off on Mel, or that she's unwelcome to go with him. Maybe that's the truth of it. He reflects on the ways Roy's influence might've taken root – if he's learned something other than how to fear the man's assertiveness. Thinking about Roy also makes him feel resentful: Roy would know exactly how to get online without any fuss. He'd know someone. Course he'd know someone.

“That OK?” he asks.

“Yes,” Yasmin says, and the tone's softer. With his engineering hat on, Sol guesses she's starting to understand the throatpiece's parameters; that she can temper, recalibrate the muscles that feed sound into it. Modified as she is, that seems plausible enough.

Beyond the basics, though, they still haven't found a way to maintain a conversation.

“Keep it all shut,” Sol says, as if that wasn't obvious.

“We'll make do,” Mel says. “But there's something else.”

“What?”

Yasmin places her three hands on the table in front of her. She cranes her neck, waiting for Mel to carry on.

“Nothing, actually,” she says, picturing Jase. “I'm just thinking out loud. You can go out the back way.”

Sol settles his mug. Mel with an expression dredged from a landfilled past. She's lying, and he can't dig in. “Then look after each other,” he says, and moves for the door.

“That's what we do,” Mel says behind him. “That's how it works here.”

B
eyond the Cat Flap
, Sol turns past the supermarket car park, where an enormous debris pile still burns, into a row of razed terraces. He's reminded what a sad bit of the city this is, heart pounding as he remembers Mel confirming what she planned to do with her half of the money. Telling him about the friends she'd made on the street. “We've got to make our own way now,” she'd told him gleefully, as if the Cat Flap's cheap ground rent was the only reason to put up with its adjoining decay. Strangely it made him ashamed – not of her, nor of her choices, but of himself. He wishes he'd told her once how proud he was of her recovery, of what she achieved. More than that, he wishes he had the consent to even have an opinion on her life.

Sol walks on. The destitution is astonishing: swathes of ruins; barren tree roots spidering from churned earth; a homogeneity to the housing foundations that evoke the battlements of a castle parapet nearly buried. Alien moonscape, monochromatic dream. And he's glad that all the discarded shoes he passes, many of them children's shoes, tied by the laces, remain inscrutable.

This lunar slew ends at a sort of inner-city border: a block of tall, still-standing buildings that leer down at his approach. At these bounds of inner Manchester – Ancoats the threshold – he finds a windowless phonebox with a rotten floor and a hot toilet smell. He wedges the door and throws in a few coins. Then he dials right into the order chain – his call bounced from link to link until a Swansea accent pipes through.

“Who's this?”

“It's me. Mr Manchester.”

Silence. Then, “You're not at home, are you?”

“No home to go to.”

Miss Wales chuckles. “You graft too hard, you do.”

Sol's more comforted by her voice than he wants to admit.

“Wanting updates on the shipment, are you?”

“No no, that all came.”

“Just checking. What is it, then?”

Sol sucks air through his teeth. When did he last clean them? “I need a favour.”

Another pause. “Favours? Haven't done favours in
years
.”

Sol doesn't say anything.

“Go on then…”

“I need to get online. Securely, though. I know it's easy enough if you ask the right people. But I can't have interference, monitoring, nothing. No one can know what I'm looking at. Not anyone. Not even the people I'm borrowing the connection from.”

“And what
are
you looking at?”

Sol settles his head on the phonebox frame. “Just… travel plans. I'm making travel plans. Serious, though – anything you can do…” Hearing a note of desperation creeping in, he cuts himself short.

Miss Wales' pen goes click click click. “You know,” she says, “I'm sure we've got a connector holed up near you.” Paper shuffling. “I'm sure we do. Let me just check my doo-dah.” Sol hears her half-covering the phone, muffled shouting to someone else. How many of them work there? A rustling, and she's back. “I'm always bloody right, aren't I? Brian he's called. Brian. Cute, that, isn't it? Brian. I think he does server hosting for us. Good, innit, this proxy business.”

“Brian,” Sol says.

“He's your best bet. Unless you feel like going cross-country. We do run our own stations further south – a few guys closer to us in Bristol, Merthyr. Obviously wouldn't recommend London unless you want ructions…”

“Brian,” Sol repeats. “Brian's fine.”

Miss Wales stops tapping the pen. “You know, if it's a quick fix, you should just knock on doors. Won't take too long to find someone handy – you'd be surprised how many'll get round it. All them little ones weened on code…”

“Maybe.”

“If you're really paranoid, though, it's tunnels or bust. Tunnels or bust.”

Sol closes his eyes. There's always a compromise. He looks ahead. In the distance, a patrol lev whines across the sky, engines crackling. It weaves its way through the crowded towers of the central block with a flock of pigeons keeping pace, attendant, like the pilot fish that nurse sharks. Every few seconds the bird cloud morphs, reimagines itself. Something about the movement makes him wonder how easy it'd be for him and Yasmin to hop the city entirely. The coast further north, maybe. A North Sea wind.

“I think I'll stick to who I trust,” he says.

Miss Wales laughs. “You're very flattering.”

“How soon can I see him?”

“Brian? Can get it teed up for tonight, if you like.”

Sol shakes his head. “Probably too soon. Need wheels first.”

“Tomorrow? Day after? Bear in mind he'll have you jumping through hoops. Nobody my end likes taking risks, so it'll be on my word he agrees to meet you.”

In the phonebox, the air stops moving, as if the massed particles around him have become a superconductor for some coming malignancy. “Tomorrow then,” Sol says, gambling on Irish. He wipes his forehead with the back of his arm. Knife slashes on the glass. It's started raining again.

H
ow do
you say goodbye to someone you've already left? Do you sneak out? Do you leave, casually, with a kind of breezy farewell that suggests you might see them again soon? Or do you repeat the whole sorry process – retreading the emotions of it, that rawness, looping up the present moment with a fixed point, a rupture of the past, in the way you might create wormholes by folding the universe itself?

Sol stands with Mel and Yasmin in the Cat Flap's waiting room, wondering how best to let go. Mel appears lost in herself, navigating her own labyrinth. Sol can see it in her single eye's movements – slowly down and up, briefly to either side, like an animal doublechecking its surroundings. A rueful glance at her watch, then back at Sol. Finally, a look of veneration for Yasmin, before she starts the sequence again.

It keeps occurring to Sol that an outsider – a punter – might peer through the boarded windows and mistake them for a family. Maybe they'd be preparing to go on holiday, waiting on their airport transfer. God, it'd been so long since a morning like that. You get calluses on those memories; the fixtures of their old normality rubbing up against the casual horrors of the new –

“When we are ready?” Yasmin asks, syntax just out. Sol smiles: it's like she understands how this scene would appear to a stranger, too. She's all layered up, the sports bag containing the cylinder by her feet. And she keeps stretching her legs – apparently to check they're still working as they did ten minutes ago.

“He won't be long now,” Sol tells her, hoping it isn't a lie. He's in the big peacoat, getting warm inside it. He imagines their next movements, and runs through Miss Wales' instructions for contacting Brian. And then he goes back to how he'll leave her this time.

Mel clears her throat. She hovers on something, then dismisses it. Another moment passes, and she speaks anyway. “Do you trust him?” she asks Yasmin, apropos of everything that's ever happened since they met on that frothy beach and poked dying fish as their parents ignored them on the dunes.

Yasmin doesn't answer directly. Instead she wraps a hand around her chin.

“Do
you
trust
me
?” Sol asks Mel.

Mel shrugs. “Would you?”

Sol shrugs back. In some small way, he knows this is the answer: that this is how they leave it. Not with a speech or an apology, not with tears or mumbled regrets, but with an exchange of indifferent, tired pleasantries, and the conviction that things never stopped changing.

A
t last a V8
purr pulls Sol out of the Cat Flap and into the road. Fresh air balms the cuts in his fingers, chills the sweat on his palms. “Stay in there,” he calls inside.

The Ferrari: a gothic wedge with comically flared arches. Its prancing horse on a yellow badge just ahead of its front alloys. Irish winds down the passenger window and leans across. “Travelling light, fat boy?”

Sol grins a full rack of teeth. “It's a frigging Mondial,” he says. “And it isn't red.”

Irish climbs out of the car and throws Sol the keys. “Mondial T
.
Different beast. And anyway – red's what the wankers go for.”

“Think I expected a 360,” Sol says, shaking his partner's cold hand. “Or maybe a Rossa. What you dream about when you're a nipper.”

The corners of Irish's mouth curl downwards. “Same chassis as your 360,” he replies, and starts listing on his fingers: “Power-assisted steering. Mid-engined, tasty whine at the top end, not too throaty. And look at it, Solomon, heavens be: just look at it. It's a fucken ninja. Steel body, box section space frame… moan all you want, but given your nasty timelines the welding was a dream. Even replaced your engine cover. Went with new springs and dampers, stronger sus-arms and a set of big old pots. Otherwise it'd go like a fucken blancmange round every corner.”