Graft (11 page)

Tib Street soon intersects Market Street, a bank of rainbow panels to the right, a huddle of bent bollards ahead. It opens out, here, at Market Street's top end: the bleeding stump of the commercial row. The council had given this section to independent traders to try and revive the high street, but now, almost predictably, it's abandoned.

As she reaches the junction, several pigeons blast out from an alley between a red-bricked building and a concrete garage. Mel jumps; watches them tangle and crash through a lap of the square before settling again. The city's birds seem to have a shorter range on them, and they're getting skinnier all the time.

The drugs bus is parked the other side of Market Street's tram platform, its armour relaxed. Two gutted coffee shops stand behind the crowd here, soot marks still rising up their walls. A bank next door offers unboarded apertures, eviscerated systems; its cash machines having been liberated by a mini-digger whose drag marks spread upwards from the holes.

Mel boulders the tram stop and skips down the platform towards the servery, where masked aid workers pass down bags into grasping hands. She elbows into the crowd, the cold replaced with stickiness, damp sleeves. So much coughing and spluttering. And over their heads, twin laser-dots roam: sentries on the top deck looking down for trouble. Mel doesn't like crowds – feels like something's always about to happen, unseen and unknown, just a half-turn away. When she glances right, she isn't reassured: everyone seems to be in profile, their hoods up and noses pointing forward.

Still, the crowd is subdued, voiceless, if not jostling, and Mel overhears some of the medics' care instructions. Their faces may be masked, but there's sympathy in their eyes.

The wind picks up, brings sleet. Mel flips her collar and buries her chin; watches gathering water stream down the bus's armour panels, bracketing bullet holes and blemishes. These liquid shapes hold her gaze as she shuffles slowly forward, each new position, each gap, carefully negotiated with her elbows and weight.

Someone prods her from behind – an older woman, unsmiling, with a gnarled finger pointing to the man leaning out from the bus.

“You're next,” the medic says. Mel refocuses.

“Me?”

He nods. “I'm Daryl – I'm with MSF. What are you after, madam?”

The word “madam” takes Mel by surprise. “Was hoping you'll tell me,” she says back.

“I'll try. Give me your symptoms – let's see if we can work it out between us.”

“It's not me,” Mel tells him. “It's my daughter. Pretty sure it's dysentery. Cramping, nausea, bad diarrhoea. She says there's blood in it.”

He frowns. “OK, OK, that doesn't sound too good. Let's go from the top. Has your daughter travelled recently?”

“Abroad?”

“Anywhere.”

“Not that I know of.”

“What about the camps? Has she spent any time in them?”

“Camps?”

“Immigration centres. I don't want you to think I'm being funny here, but our dear leaders don't provide too well for visitors. If things get grotty in there, poor sanitary care for instance, you've got a nice nesting ground for bad stuff. And contamination isn't rare, regrettably.”

Mel shakes her head. “She's been at home. Just at home.”

“Well that's something,” Daryl says, “because it cuts the risk of amoebiasis. Usually we'd want to do some tests on a sample, but our next visit's actually a fortnight away – we've got to get the bus rearmoured. And I'm guessing you haven't brought a little tub with you.” He smiles again. “Clean water's the most important thing for her, to be honest. And again, not to be funny, but do you have access to good stuff?”

Mel nods. “We boil what we can't buy – there's a rainwater butt in the yard.”

“Great. Because she needs to stay hydrated. She'll be losing a lot of fluid. That means making her drink more than she's comfortable with, just to be sure. If she's too dehydrated you'll run into bigger problems. Otherwise…” Daryl darts under the counter, reappears with a box, “you'll need to try these.” He shakes the box. “This is your garden-variety co-trimoxazole. Should nuke it.”

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome. Instructions are all inside, OK? Read them twice, please. And tell her to keep washing her hands thoroughly.”

“How much do I owe you?”

Daryl scans the box.

“It's fifty, I'm afraid.”

Mel pulls a slip of paper from her coat pocket. She scribbles something on it and hands it to him. “Call it a voucher in lieu of payment.”

Daryl reads the chit. It takes a moment to click. When it does, he withdraws into the bus. “Not interested,” he says.

Mel goes up on her tip toes. “How come? Easy stressbuster.”

“Maybe I'm not explaining myself properly,” he says. “It's fifty pounds or I can't serve you.”

“What if you give that to someone else, then? Like a gift?”

“Seriously?” He points behind her. “Who's next, please?”

“Fine,” Mel snaps. She pulls a wad of notes from the opposite pocket and slaps them on the counter.

Daryl takes the money and looks away. “Let's hope your
daughter
finds a way out of your house.”

Mel barges into the faceless crowd. Out through the squirm, in the clear, she breaks into a run, her chest tight and throat sore. She bolts over the platform and down the other side, across the rusting tram tracks.

Daryl's judgment reverberates all the way to the shop. Every step carrying it along with her, while her eyes water and his antibiotics rattle in her pocket like shackles. She knows his verdict will carry a terrible sentence: a certainty that will haunt her, slide through her system for days, weeks, even months. And however fast she moves, the wind still bites holes through the damp wool on her back.

F
leeing Didsbury
, killing in his veins, Roy finds an open pub and pulls into its car park. The pub's lounge windows are half shuttered, red curtained, and he doesn't catch its name; too distracted by palpitations and torn muscles. The mark's stolen car stinking of body odour and hot guns.

Roy parks and scopes his surroundings; counts automatically, instinctively: five other vehicles, at least twenty-five witnesses, plus the bar staff. He decides to repark the car in a shadow beneath a naked oak. 
Concentrate, Roy
.

Roy breathes in, gets out.
Fuck.
Distracted. That's it. He feels distracted. It's not guilt. It's not remorse. It's simple, refined distraction. He locks the door and pockets his gloves. Away from the smells of murder, he can better control himself. Some relief as a kind of dissociation begins to wash over him.

“Sociopathy,” he recalls the Reverend saying, “has a steep learning curve.”

Is it folly to be here, so close to Didsbury's control gates? Probably. But after a swift half, a settler, he can steal another car and get moving.

Roy goes inside; pays for his beer with pocket change that rattles a rain song in his hand.

The things you do for love –

The things you do for money.

“Shit,” he whispers into his glass. At least a concession the job was messy. That it went more wrong than most. He never liked strugglers, fighters, survivor types. They made him operate right at his limits.

Here's what happened:

The mark saw Roy coming, grabbed Roy's revolver and threw his shot. The mark rallied first, and took Roy hard. In the mark's home there was a mini-bar, gold edged, the trappings of wealth, of ostriches with buried heads, and Roy and the mark fell across it. Tooth and nail, clawing to be on top. So much glass shattered. Cuts in strange places. Curiously a photo flopped from its frame nearby: a picture of the mark in medical overalls against a bullet-pocked wall.

The mark was vicious, running on fear. Roy didn't fight hard enough, ended up on the bottom, head filled with the animal musk of the mark's body. His revolver skittled, bounced, spat a single shot. The wall puffed plaster, revealed a gash. Imagine the scene: iron-brown water frothing out onto a shagpile carpet.

Roy wriggled, absorbed several blows, somehow forced his way free. His face felt lumpen, and something vital was leaking.

The mark still had hold of Roy's leg when Roy reached his revolver. Roy angled, fired, a foot or two away, the noise of his makeshift silencer breaking, and the shot took the man in the side of his neck. It carved out a flap of ham.

The mark tried to scream. He put a hand to his throat. Blood came in hell's rainbows between his fingers –

He looked at Roy, no words, all eyes. There was so much hurt in that look, with one side of his face sopping red and the other turning white. Roy turned away and fired again: shot the mark in the mouth in such a way that the round went in and out of his cheek via the lower jawbone, and the bottom of his face exploded.

Now the mark's screaming was glottal-stopped, bubbled air escaping through pockets of meat. He had no definable lips, just a half-jaw dangling from the hinge on one side, and connective tissue daubing his collar.

In the pub, Roy closes his eyes. Locked back in that moment, his memory-image grows iteratively worse. Sometimes it's hard to kill another human; sometimes so much harder than you think.

So Roy being Roy he shot again. And again. A fifth time, then, so that the mark sagged back on himself, only the strength of his spine to hold him; so that he wobbled there, suspended in the amber of lamplight, rocking over his knees on the thick shagpile, with his face dripping like a hung paintbrush, and the noise from his throat phlegmatic.

Roy threw up in the mark's front room. All over the leatherette sofa. He scrambled backwards like some damaged crab and watched the vomit roll down the fabric in clumps. He distinctly remembers thinking that the nice carpet wasn't all that nice now. He thought that's what the Reverend might say.

The violence was finished. The job was done. And Roy sat and watched his victim, senses glowing with a prehistoric thrill.

His next decisions, he knew, were critical. He knew he had to stage this. Make it look amateur. Make it look opportunistic – a Didsbury burglary gone wrong. He showered, wiped down, bagged his clothes and trashed the place, before setting a small fire in the kitchen bin. Finally, he pocketed a black key from a hook by the door, and drove off in the mark's car.

Roy sips his drink. The next thing was perhaps the most surreal of all:

The gates of Didsbury had opened automatically. The guards actually waved him out.

I
t's
all kicking off when Mel gets back.

Outside the Cat Flap, Cassie and two other women are standing in their nighties screaming at an unkempt man – also half dressed – about something he's paid or not paid.

“You're a bunch of cheeky robbing bastards,” the man keeps shouting. He has painful-looking clutch marks on his arms, and both hands outstretched. Mel doesn't recognize him.

Cass is doing her best to separate them all, and locals are starting to come out on the street.

Mel starts with the man. “I'm the owner here,” she tells him. “The owner – will you listen to me? Tell me what's going on.” She turns to Cass. “Get them inside.
Inside
. And get Jeff out here.” 
Where the hell
is
Jeff?

“Get these slags to tell you,” he spits. “I want my money back!”

Mel turns him softly, redirecting his rage. “Listen,” she says, “we won't get anywhere with you talking about people like that. You can sling it now, or get your kecks on and talk me through what happened. It'll save you your dignity. But believe me, I won't give you the option again.”

The man sniggers, indignant. “Take a lot to sort this lot – especially that gorilla you've got in there.”

“Jeff?”

“Jeff, Jim-bob, Jeremiah – need to put a leash on him, I'm telling you.”

Mel pinches her nose. A pressure mounting behind her false eye. The man's skin is flushed and bumpy. His nose is crusted off-black where someone's bopped him. “Go on,” she says.

“You tell me! I was enjoying the service I frigging
paid for
when he stomps in and starts knocking us about–”

She squeezes his shoulder. “He went for you?”

“Not just me, no – them two as well. Nearly put one of them through the bloody window he did. He's off his head!”

“And you were alone with them.”

“Yeah.” He looks at the parlour window and growls in frustration. “Filthy fucking–”

Mel squeezes his shoulder. “Less of it. I told you: I don't like that tone.”

“Well it's bullshit,” he says. “You're lucky I haven't called the council. Worked my arse off for that money!”

Mel holds his stare. He doesn't know which of her eyes to look in. “What next?”

“We all got him down – someone leathered him with a shoe. Threw him in that manky cupboard – the door was right there, right next to the room, and we locked him in.”

“And this was out of the blue? No misbehaving?”

“Nothing I hadn't paid for.”

Mel looks away and tears a strip off her fingernail. It pulls skin right from the nailbed. “I think it's time to go,” she tells him. “How much did you pay?”

“Eighty.”

“Well here's twenty of it.” Mel throws her last pair of tenners on the road.

The man swears at her and reaches for his tenners on the wet ground. “It's snide as fuck, this. I swear it. What happened to ‘the customer's always right'?” He closes his belt, angles to move away. “The customer's always right!” he shouts again.

“Course he is,” Mel says back. “Course he is.”

Inside, the waiting room's a state – one screen off the wall, scattered. Chipboard stripped from the damp wall it covered. Even some of the window blinds are bent.