Graft (35 page)

T
he road north
isn't as quiet as Sol predicted – and the car's low height means other vehicles' dipped beams still dazzle. They skirt stark land. Sepulchral windfarms. Under bridges, up entrance ramps. Fortress towns flashing past. Cathedrals of concrete beneath motorway overpasses. Into the M61's funnelled mouth, and a night-time carriageway criss-crossed in light, a zoetrope flickering through the Armco supports. Whenever he can, Sol plants his foot and sends the Ferrari snarling to eighty, ninety – its sleek shadow repeatedly smashed against bright blue signs.

Eventually they join the M6 towards the Lake District proper, passing Preston, Lancaster, before a left onto the A590 trunk road, a wind-bitten dual carriageway with jungle verges. Neglected farmland sprawls either side, dark bodies of water spreading away to silhouetted hills tacked with pylons. What little the headlights show him is so overgrown that with some imagination you could imagine the Ferrari as a machete lunging through. A black line on bare canvas, cruising like a bird between the eternal moors of the place.

“Morecambe Bay's somewhere down there,” he tells Yasmin, pointing left. His voice hoarse because they haven't spoken much. He has the coat's collar up round his face; the window cracked and howling. “Have you ever seen the sea?”

“The sea,” Yasmin says. “I have.”

“Went down there all the time, my dad and me. He drove this great big Bentley – restored it himself. It was one of my father's favourite things in the world, driving that car with me sitting with him. I was too young for decent conversation, though. Whenever he took me out, I'd count the shadows of posts across the motorway, or pretend the car was flying between bridges. Wasn't anything else to do – he didn't believe in radio since it stopped him hearing the engine. One time, there was such amazing sunshine on the hills, and he turned to me and said, ‘Oh, my boy, just look at that,' and took my hand, like this.” Sol takes one of Yasmin's hands and squeezes. “He has it like this, right, and he goes, ‘It's like we're driving towards God, Solomon!' And I was so scared, shit-scared, because I didn't know if he meant we were going to crash into the lorry in front, or whether I'd been a good enough boy to get into heaven.”

B
y Greenodd
, on a smaller road, single carriageway, the clock is creeping towards dawn. Everything narrowing down as shadows slide in the darkness – trees and road signage stretched and sharpened as Sol and Yasmin pass woodland and dead villages.

“Don't you get nervous?” he asks her. The closer they get, the drier his mouth becomes. A twinge in his bladder. “No?”

Yasmin shakes her head. “No,” she says.

Sol takes this to mean something else. Maybe she misheard the question. Or maybe it's more like
not anymore.

At points the road seems impossibly narrow, forcing him to drop down; engine-brake to a crawl. The car feels heavier when it's slow – a cruiser coming in to port, carrying with it a grim inevitability, an extra bulk that's hard to quantify. And closer still, they thread through a series of roundabouts, pass torchlit cabins. A difference in atmospheric pressure.

“What do you remember?” Sol asks Yasmin through the V in his collar. “From before, I mean.” She looks over at him, gives him enough time to redden; enough time to wonder if it's too much, a question like this – like asking a soldier returning from war if they've ever shot someone.

Finally she shakes her head. Sol thinks of amnesia and brain damage and strokes.

“Not even your parents?” he adds. “Or where they took you from?”

“It is so empty,” she tells him. She pokes herself in the head. “A crack here where nothing grows.” She pauses. “Diminutive… memory-images. It's…”

There's a whirring sound. She crackles but the throatpiece doesn't find anything to translate. Sol's reminded that the device is only an accessory, an add-on, an optional extra. Would she have to wear it wherever Sandy's contact took her? Would she have to talk in it? Work in it?

“Barren,” Yasmin finishes.

Sol swallows heavily. Her translations seem to oscillate between nonsense and a kind of algorithmic poetry.

“It's hard for me to imagine,” he says. And it is hard, because how does a person close such a gap, or begin to confront the idea you must rebuild yourself from scratch? How do you accept that a version of you has vanished, and with it all your vested years – family bonds, friendships, lovers, tastes? He can't begin to imagine the trauma of it – being torn from somewhere, only to wake up and remember nothing. And yet, equally, he knows that people do have the capacity to rebuild, remould, rework themselves. Don't we do it all the time? Mel certainly has. And, in a sense, Sol has too. They all had to adapt when things collapsed.

When he looks at it this way, there's only admiration for this woman beside him.

“What's the first thing you remember as Y?”

“Wakefulness,” she says quickly, as though she'd predicted the question. “Masked creatures of the house,” she adds. “Alterations. Physical exertion. We were the children of the tower. They made me solitary. He made it so.”

Sol closes his window. “Did he hurt you?”

“Nothing to hurt,” she tells him, tapping her head again. “They took away the things that cause hurt. He made us all…” She flexes her body under the shell jacket. She puts a finger to her breastbone. “He made us like this.”

At last Sellafield comes into view on their left side. Rows of jutting things, cut from the navy sky in such a way as to seem materially absent. Clusters of simplistic buildings inside the perimeter have a strange density to them, like their stained walls have soaked up a nation's dread and somehow banked it. The golf ball-shaped reactor is far bigger than Sol imagined it would be. And set farther back from the road is another structure he didn't expect, but knows he must confront.

It's unambiguous. A singular, dark, hyperboloid mass. A cooling tower.

Sol goes from surprised to aghast. His throat full with it. From the pictures he'd seen, he knows –
knows
– that this is one of the Calder Hall quadruplets: towers erased from records since 2007 – but apparently living on.

“Trust,” Yasmin says. “You trust me.”

Shaking with adrenaline, Sol ignores the warning markings, the arrows, drives on with the lights turned off. They end up doing a full pass of the site, colossal in breadth, then turn the car to retrace their route; this time spotting what looks like a battery of anti-aircraft cannon – four-pronged systems on swivel mounts. He sees a fleet of HGVs. Sentries, armed, torches ranging. And the fencing – what must be miles and miles of it.

“It's impossible,” he says.

“Yes,” Yasmin says. Her eyes are lambent, almost as if someone is watching late-night TV inside her.

Sol stops the car. “Maybe we should wait. See if anything comes in or out.”

“In or out,” she says.

But the minutes slip by and nothing much changes.

“And you came through the tower itself?” he asks, like they hadn't stopped talking. His eyes are wide, scanning for possible entry points, weaknesses.

“Yes. Inside. In, out.”

Sol reaches behind his seat for the sports bag containing the water bottles, an extra pair of jeans to wear under his overalls, the cylinder he excised from her abdomen. At the bottom of it, shedding dust, there's a house brick.

“Can you run?”

Yasmin goes to open the door. “Run?”

“Hang on, wait,” Sol says. “Not here. They'll have heard us coming even if they didn't pay it any mind. We have to leave it a while. Camp out.”

Yasmin looks at him confusedly.

“Should've bought bloody cloak-suits. Done this properly–”

“False,” Yasmin interrupts. She straightens and lets the seatbelt roll across her. He wonders if he's made her angry. “No see-through qualities,” she adds. Then, “We cross the tower before the sun. You should have brought protection.”

Sol holds her gaze. Protection? What, a gun? He isn't Roy. But all the same, the comment rattles him. They'd definitely been hasty to act, and they were ill-prepared for this amount of security. Then he thinks:
This car's our protection
.

“You remember what I told you about the car? The armour?”

Yasmin nods.

“And you're warm enough?”

She pulls at the fleece collar under her shell jacket. “Thermal,” she says.

“You swear it? Because I'm bloody boiling in this coat, me.”

“Trust,” she says. “You must have strata.”

Sol frowns, then realizes what she means.

“
We'll need a bigger run-up,” he says. “Christ. I can't remember the last time I ran anywhere.”

Sol edges the modified Ferrari to a point closer to the tower, pointing its bonnet towards the fence. He takes in the tower's formwork, its supremacy in the skyline. How he wishes he'd brought his Polaroid camera. He visualizes how bulbous the tower would seem through the viewfinder. Yasmin, too, is rapt by it. It's getting easier and easier to comprehend the impression it's made on her psyche.

The longer you look, the more you see. In the tower's shadow, Sol scopes a pile of crates identical to those stacked by the trucks at Knutsford services. Many have IN stencilled on their sides – further confirmation of the tower's purpose, if it were needed. He swallows. Are they really doing this? He opens the car door with care, smelling grass, burnt ozone. He creeps out across the slippery verge, knowing that if he stops to think, it'll be over. If it isn't already. In truth the only thing he can rely on is the assumption that two people wouldn't dare to infiltrate what's fundamentally a military installation. Let alone somewhere with such a litany of disasters to its name.

“I know I said about them hearing us, but if we don't go now…” Staring into the breach, Sol can't admit to even considering second thoughts. He kneels by the car and sets to work in the footwell. With parcel tape and his teeth, he rigs the accelerator with the brick. It's crude, but his logic is sound: this is how he and Irish used to dispose of their stripped cars in the Bridgewater Canal.

Nearby, eyes on the perimeter, Yasmin lies flat on her belly.

Sol climbs into the back of the car and pulls out the length of hosepipe he instructed Irish to leave under the driving seat. Never an enjoyable task, but needs must. He feeds the tube into the fuel tank and sucks its end until the siphon takes. With the first surge he spits out the tube, gasping, and splashes fuel into the car, over the driver's seat, the back seats, its body. Then he turns the car's ignition, rams the Ferrari into second, and rolls away.

Sol winds himself on landing and lies wheezing as the Ferrari accelerates, straight and true, pulling, still pulling, through its modified torque band, engine piercing in the night-quiet. It's heading for a section of the fencing that runs close to a cluster of outbuildings, driver's door held back like a damaged wing.

Y crawls to him with the sports bag across her shoulder.

Sentry torches swing to the car. Bewilderment, before angry flowers burst into the night – metal on metal on metal – and the Mondial ploughs onwards.

A generator sound. An alarm. The perimeter floodlights surge. Gunfire tears paint from the car's body, but too late: the Mondial is inexorable, its trajectory guaranteed by speed and weight, simple physics. On the fringes, Sol and Yasmin perceive a rush of air and a
whump
as the petrol catches. It must be doing fifty when it punctures the fence. Another flash, a vicious crunch, and then the car is embedded and burning in a store building's side. The shockwave rattles trailer buckles even beyond the outbuildings.

In the glow of the fire, Sol and Yasmin see the tattered hole in the fence. Sentries scatter from their posts. A dull crump as something in the Ferrari explodes, and a liquid fire spurts up.

“Now,” Sol whispers. He'd intended for them to wait, for them to take advantage later. But the thick smoke pouring from the store building provides ideal cover.

In any case, Yasmin didn't need telling. As they flit across the road towards the fence, it's clear she's doing all the dragging.

R
educed
to visual prompts by the siren, Sol and Yasmin hug the buildings, lacing between each other as well as the brickwork – over low walls, shallow gullies, and into the tower's expansive shadow. Here they stop for breath between crates – Sol gesturing to a loading ramp attached to a storage bay; each acknowledging that the tower's entrance is locked down. Going first, Sol finds several rows of crates sitting on fork truck pallets. It's organized, scrupulous. And otherwise deserted.

Yasmin follows inside. Scattered voices and footsteps from somewhere indistinct – more sentries running to the crash scene with comms blazing.

Wordless, Sol and Yasmin move deeper and deeper into the unit.

“More crates,” Sol breathes.

So many crates.

Without warning, Yasmin goes at one, brute force applied to wrench its stapled lid half-off, her face straining until the whole piece creaks and gives. Sol goes over and looks inside to find a second box with an obsidian-like finish, a basic instrument panel. This flashes a temperature in crude red digits: -40c. Its metal feels impossibly smooth, like the finish of a vault. Y slaps it in frustration.

“Try another,” Sol urges, understanding now what she wants them to do. He alternates his focus between her and the gap where a sentry might appear. A static conveyor line behind them. “Just make sure it's enough for both of us.”

Y tries the next crate along. The same story under its stapled lid. Another. And another. The more crates she opens, the more Sol thinks this might be the worst idea in a whole series of them. He listens to the distorted shouting near the crash site. A mixture of panic and disbelief. This alone feels satisfying – but he can't help but expect the sentries' torches to swing back this way and pick out his face.