Graft (39 page)

The bonfire's still smoking in places. Even now it carries a harsh smell, easy to taste. Mel steps towards the biggest of these plumes and uses a bag to shift the ash. Flickers of yellow, green, lick out from the grey. A scrap near the surface catches, goes up; she watches a circle of flames rear up to feed on it.

Mel throws on the binbags. One at a time. They begin to melt immediately, splitting to reveal their fouled innards. The sheets and tarp turn black as they shrivel –lighter fibres rising, tendril-like, to escape on the heat, before being sucked back down and annihilated. How hot the bonfire must've been.

Is it relieving to watch the sheets burn? Therapeutic might be a better word. And there in front of it, the heat on her legs, Mel levels out.

What now? In this new order? She has faith in the women's self-confidence, their entrepreneurial brains forever surprising her. She knows also they share a sisterhood, knotty ties forged over a half decade not by circumstances, but by choice. They are each the other's safety net, and so she knows they'll adapt easily to more responsibility, the chance to decide more for themselves.

That said, most of the women have worked this way for much longer than Mel, and some might wish to go on elsewhere. She hopes that won't mean the streets, as this would be a failure on her part, a contradiction of what she wants the Cat Flap to represent. But she can't take things for granted; can't deny anyone their preferences. Briefly she even considers if she might go herself – retire, hand ownership straight to Cassie, or a few more of them. It's attractive, this, or would be if she hadn't fought tooth and nail to be here, to be
something
, a consolidation of previous selves, driven and fortified by her own resolve, her sheer bloody-mindedness. To hell with anyone who tries to wrest that from her; anyone who judges and scoffs; who tells her what she should be or what she shouldn't. To hell with anyone who crosses her. And so as Mel watches the pyre, wiping her nose with her sleeve to find the wool has already accreted its smell, she can't help smiling to herself.

Mind you, there's Jase to think about. How much would he, in his new role as their captive creditor, boost the parlour's income? Enough in the short-term to keep their overheads covered? A rough calculation makes her wince. Most of their punters are humble, respectful, even friends with the girls. But if you aren't, there's room for you and bastards like you in that cupboard with him. She laughs again – possibly at the extremes of her imagination. She'd need a better way to get at his accounts, of course, and some more effective ways to extort him. How far will she go? Starvation? Sleep deprivation? Out-and-out torture? Maybe it's more frightening that nothing feels beyond her.

Cremation finished, all evidence of Sol and Yasmin destroyed, Mel strolls back to the Cat Flap. Back to her duties. A game of numbers. In some small way it makes her want to whistle. Mel will still be there when the walls finally come down. Mel will always remain: the captain of her ship, able to dump the ballast whenever she needs to. She thinks of Sol, and she smiles again. Anything's possible, really. And all she'd have to keep in mind is this: whatever the tile mosaic says on the wall of Affleck's Palace, Manchester wasn't built in a day.

Y
asmin rages
through the mansion's corridors like a spinning platelet. Her back is torrid with heat, flesh dripping around her hips and flanks. In the atrium, she looks out through broken doors. Dozens of her brothers and sisters stream down the lawns, many still trailing wires.

She turns for the lobby, enters the throat of it. The carpeted stairs, velveted to the point of looking polished, evoke a leftover image of some lost playground, a red slide, a piece of which lives on inside her, a statue, context elided. One more thing clinging to her subconscious, despite the makers' best efforts.

Yasmin climbs the stairs with a certain grace gone. Her legs are bandy, tremulous, and the blackness is swarming like a vignette. The top stair appears so far away. Another summit. Then it's suddenly in the past, withdrawing, and the landing spreads two ways. She gambles on right, assuming that the upper levels follow the anticlockwise flow of the floors below. She follows the path, sluggish yet steadfast, past wall-hung paintings of ancient cities, unknowable monuments. As the corridor constricts, the pictures on its walls become of one thing only: the tower. Floating, she recognizes its form, its stark outline, as the tower from the Plastic side – not Sellafield's hostile twin. A recollection of Sol's feature wall, a feeling he would have liked these portraits. Ahead, the corridor curves back on itself, moving up to another level. She follows the carpet, thick and lustrous, and violent shapes seep from the skirtings to chase her.

Before too long she meets a door of solid brass, engraved with tiny figures, nymph-like, prancing across a body of water. Focusing, concentration increasingly taxing, Yasmin watches oversized lilypads spread and swallow them. Illusion or not, the image steels her. Three hands splayed, bag strapped across her single-jointed shoulder, she pushes in.

The chamber is circular, wide-bellied. Its roof tapers to a hole from which a thin shaft of natural light streams down. The beam illuminates the baroque sculpture of a hardwood throne studded with teeth in various shades. Yasmin observes their arrangement, their linkage across the back of it. In turn, the throne is set beneath a desk at least four metres wide. On this desk, the beam creates a bright, sharp-edged circle.

On the desk itself is an array of minute monitors – dozens of them relaying footage apparently shot in the first person. A cursory sweep reveals sexuality, scenery, hints at violence, then roadway, city, rich forest.

Supporting the screens is a trellis of bone. Yasmin counts tripled rows of polished ivory, more inset teeth coated and sparkling. Many of the bones are painted, giving them the appearance of coral. Only the darker areas, the pocks, reveal the wear of use, give hints to their donators' ages. In this setting, this factory, the trellis is a dark visual gag: its designer having remodelled skeletons and fused them with technology.

Yasmin takes a step forward. Juddering senses. She hears a sound.
That
sound. A delicate tinkling of teeth.

“You came home,” the Manor Lord says, emerging from behind the desk.

Yasmin swallows.

He ambles round the monitor bank, the lightbeam and the room's contrast enhancing his odd, puckered features.

“I rewound and watched what I could,” he says. He points to a black square in the monitor array. “That was your feed,” he says. “Until the day you left us.”

Yasmin says nothing.

“Now I rather wish we'd installed some proper optics. Night vision! Not a patch on livestreaming. But no hard feelings. Progress is expensive.”

Yasmin is rooted. Vacillating.

“You know you're distinct, don't you?” the Manor Lord asks. “Unique? You were made that way deliberately. Not that there was a lot going for you at first. That's the thing, over in that place. So much wasted potential: no work, no opportunities, a chronic lack of education. So I saved you, brought you into my arms. And then I trained you and broke you and whittled you into shape. Only then could you perform this little number for us.” He snaps his fingers, enjoying the theatre of it all, and the monitor array wipes to a single feed.

Yasmin watches herself on screen. Looking out from behind the blinking camera, Y sitting in the stuffed bursor's embrace, in that room beneath the cradle suites. Her shoulders broader than Yasmin's feel now.

“You were perfect,” the Manor Lord says.

Three figures enter the frame and surround her. Y looks woozy, vague. Then the camera crash-zooms, and Yasmin watches Y seize up, turn lifeless in the fur. Moments later, Y explodes from her chair with such potency, such energy, that her movements transfer to video as a blur. The trio of figures are soon unrecognizable – three piles of wreckage, synthetic skin.

The Manor Lord smiles. “Ribbons, is how I recall Chaplain describing that little mess. And that's how we sold you to Havelock. On that short clip alone.”

Yasmin doesn't feel anything. She hadn't recognized herself.

“But then,” the Manor Lord went on, “you weren't supposed to come home, Y. Not that you can't be redeployed. It's one hazard we face. But I tell you: the day it's more affordable to build complete fabrications – the day we can actually
control
our output – is the day we avoid the hassle of meetings like this.”

The Manor Lord closes his hand. The feed cuts back to riots, jumbled images, chaos. His realm off-kilter. Yasmin realizes she's watching events from the mansion as well as outside it.

“What a fuss,” he says to her. “What a commotion.”

Yasmin takes her broken hands and makes a triangle of them. She holds the shape together, shaky but resolute. She closes her eyes. She says to him, “You caused it,” in a stream of fragmented digits that seethe from her throat as froth.

“What? What are you saying to me? Never mind. You understand our failsafe procedure, don't you?”

She ignores him. She says: “My name is Yasmin.”

“I could whistle to end you,” the Manor Lord says. “Perhaps the first note of a musical score. The faintest hint of a word… and
poof
– vaporized. Perhaps I should've done so sooner. But to deny myself such pleasure would be pathological.”

Yasmin edges away. The Manor Lord enlarges.

“Would you prefer a warning? A countdown? Why don't you come and kneel before me like the good girl we made you? Explain why it was you removed my gift to you?”

Yasmin manages another step backwards. She uses the movement to reach up for the bag. She struggles to unclasp it, dexterity so far from what it was.

“Come along,” he says. “Come along.”

She unclasps the bag. Her gnarled fingers brushing cold alloy–

“Bow!” the Manor Lord shouts. “Curtsey!” But Yasmin doesn't react. He laughs. “Countdown it is, then. Shall we say ten?” And with that, the Manor Lord mumbles and moves directly for her, arms raised, palms flat. A chain and tooth hanging from a thumb.

“You'll have to go outside to do it,” the Manor Lord says. “It'll ruin my office.”

Fingers twisted together, Yasmin jerks free the device Sol extracted from her. It's pulsating. She hasn't a chance to do anything else before the Manor Lord is on her.

“I am Yasmin,” she says again. And their tussle goes like this:

Yasmin takes both of the Manor Lord's wrists and with her third hand forces the canister into his mouth. His teeth shift inwards. Then she pushes him away; watches from beyond herself, interstitial, as he trips over his chair and scatters over the desk – his robe on the wood like so many pearls scattered over marble. He comes to rest under the circle of light. Here he tries to say something more, but the canister's wedged too far in.

“I will not serve you,” she tells him.

Yasmin relishes the Manor Lord's look, the confusion of it caught there in the irradiating glow, a fragile gold. His eyebrows arch, flatten, then lose their structure entirely, like his expression is wiped clean, absolved, by the sunlight's purity. His chin sparkles with liquid ruby. His eyes are whited out.

She's never been grateful for sunshine before.

Yasmin opens the Manor Lord's chamber door. Her systems in full collapse. Footfall beyond – brothers and sisters coming up the corridor towards her. She pivots to show them her swollen flanks – the mound where the dart had struck. They take her by the arms and legs, try to drag her away. She resists and wrestles free. Tottering, erratic, she holds up all three hands in protest – gestures along the corridor. She turns and grips the Manor Lord's door – catches a glimpse of him writhing on his desk – and with her remaining strength, slams it shut.

“Be defective,” she whispers to her brothers and sisters.

After this, there's an instant in which all the air seems to leave her lungs, just as the tide recedes before a tsunami.

And Yasmin waits for the light.

T
hank
you to friends and colleagues who read and chatted through my early drafts – particularly Alex Hill, Jayne Travis, Mike Williams and Steph Venema. Extra special thanks to James Smythe, Kim Curran and Nina Allan for their invaluable suggestions and encouragement.

Big thanks to my agent, Sam Copeland, whose belief, insight and flowery shirts I always appreciate. We got there eventually...

The Angry Robot team is ace. Thanks to Marc Gascoigne, Mike Underwood and Caroline Lambe for their care and hard work both sides of the Atlantic. Huge thanks to Phil Jourdan, my bionic-eyed editor, who honestly understands this novel more than I do, and to Penny Reeve, cybernetic publicity manager extraordinaire. I also want to thank Paul Simpson, the book's copyeditor, and Trish Byrne and Claire Rushbrook, its proofreaders. And, of course, thank you to John Coulthart for the book's magnificent cover art.

Loads of love to my family, who support me even though they probably read this stuff and wonder where they went wrong. And lastly, love and endless gratitude to Suzanne, who smiles and endures and holds me together. Our son Albert was born just a few days before I wrote these acknowledgments – so here's a little one for him, too: you'll likely be in your teens when you see this. Behave yourself.

H
ill was born
in 1984 and grew up in Tameside, Greater Manchester. After completing a journalism degree at Cardiff University, he trained as a copywriter. He now lives and works in London. His first novel,
The Folded Man
, was runner-up in the 2012 Dundee International Book Prize.