Graft (18 page)

He remembers Mel buttered across a hospital bed.

He remembers the day he left her.

And then another thought, as if revealed only by those that gathered before. As if it were yesterday: Sol floating home unwashed from their first night as lovers, still smelling of them, him and her, Mel still in his hair, crescent nail marks like scars on his wrists. The strange electricity that came with finding one of her hairs trapped in the strap of his watch, and a series of rich images repeating –
clack, clack, clack
– all memory-stills, of the night before and the morning after and their skin in the moonlight through the mottling net curtains, her knickerline, the apex of lace and flesh, and all they did to stave off the grave new world outside. A flashbulb, memories of her eye; their open eyes, no blinking. Bonded lips and wrapped tongues and laughing. Just laughing. Hips and lips and curving spines. And now back to this. Just this. A dial-lit truck cabin, an A-road, and a dissolution of time.

Deeper still, then, into the black: their first time alone in a single bed, possibly her sister's, and while Sol knows he's alone in the truck the recollection is so intense he could be right there now. They can hardly move for the bed squeaking. Their faces so close her eyes have merged, cycloptic, so he can't tell if he's staring into her good eye or her bad eye or a fusion of the two. Her harsh fringe is clipped off her forehead, and she's breathing into his mouth and pulling his hand to her face, his dead fingertips to her dead eye. She's tracing a circle with his forefinger around it, and then she's pushing the pad of his finger onto it. She's making him roll it in the socket –

Gentle
, she's saying.

Now she's splaying two of his fingers into a pincer, applying pressure either side till her eye comes loose in his hand. He's tensing, tensing, and she's going,
It's alright
. She's reaching down and taking him and pulling him inside her. She's taking his forefinger, and she's edging it into her soft, leathery socket.

I don't want you frightened of it any more
.

He's trying to remove his finger. Trying to swallow.
Mel
–

She's saying,
I love you
, and it's making him come. She's giggling into his shoulder. And all the time, her glass eye is there on the sideboard in its cleaning fluid, and it's watching.

S
ol parks the truck
. Doublechecks his trader's curfew pass is visible on the windscreen.

He hammers the Cat Flap's door; presumes a camera's on him. That in every private room there's someone buried in selfish pleasure. That she's at the desk, gets up reluctantly, huffing –

Mel comes to the door in a dressing gown she can't be bothered tying thighs all marbled her chest white and blue with blotches her cig half ash and teetering –

The door swings. He forgets to exhale. She's in jeans, a thick woolly jumper.

“Sol?”

Sol reads her expression the way skippers read cloud ahead.

“Melanie…”

She backs off, unsure, hands out. She mumbles something, plainly shaken. She pushes her fringe away from her fake eye.

“Mel,” he says. “What's up with you?”

“Just… just wasn't expecting anyone.”

“You need to help me.”

Mel blinks at him.

“She isn't from here,” he tells her. “A man came to the workshop.”

Mel puts her hands over her face. “Please, Sol. Please.”

“Let me in,” he says, and steps into the hallway regardless. Mel backs up to the inner door and pushes it open. Dust and incense. The chipboard palace. “You've decorated.”

The video screens blare flesh. Sol with a dead-dog taste in his mouth. Mel closes the door behind them.

“You have to go home,” she tells him. “I knew it. I even said to the girls – he's bloody coming back. You know that? I knew. But you can't be here. If any of the girls–”

“If any of the girls what?”

“They respect me.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just go.”

“She doesn't speak a word of English. And she's got these holes, right–”

Mel puts her face in her hands.

“Mel!”

Another flash of the hospital bed. Life at low tide, draining through the mattress fibres. An old fear that returns as a revelation:
it was always my fault she ended up there.

“You've got to bloody help me,” he says. More desperate this time.

“I said
stop
.”

The screens pulsate with morphic shapes. It's like the wood panels are floating.

“I can't let it go,” Sol says. “Not this time.”

“You're getting yourself in trouble.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Where is she?”

“At mine.”

“Alone? Oh Jesus, no.”

“Why? Why? And who's Jeff?”

Mel stares at him. She goes to speak –

The front bell rings, cuts her off. Mel reels away. A group of young lads fall through the door – goggle-eyed, tripping.

Sol sits down, things spinning. Mel ignores him. She pulls down her mask; starts to take their orders, writing furiously with a pen.

He watches them all.
A beach. A fish. And the insides of her head.

Sol stands up, sickened.

She doesn't look.

So he leaves her again.

R
oy comes
round with the sense of being in an unfamiliar bed. Weak light filters through one eye. He's in a pit, concrete lined. Everything hurts. The kind of pain that turns the world purple, the space around you anechoic – so deathly silent the only sound is your rushing blood.

Most of the damage is in his foot. Bad news. He cringes as he massages the delicate jointing, swollen ligaments. A horror-vision of disfigurement – some irrational idea his injury might ossify there and then.

And then a secondary fear. Going undiscovered beneath the Transit van in the inspection pit. Lost or lapsed, like pocket change down a sofa.

When he tries to stand, he realizes he won't put weight down anytime soon. The shock of this fresh pain detaches him, tilt-shifts the view: his foot, still in its shoe, has turned almost sideways. He puts a hand to his face, his forehead dog-nose clammy. Is he concussed? He looks at his foot again. A foot, at any rate – not quite his. It might be dislocated – the tibia's pushing up against the skin to make a convex bowl in his sock. A new corner. He winces, imagines standing and his leg twisting round at the knee. And because he knows damaged biology like few others, he knows it's likely a break.

Now what
?

It's hard to know how long he's been out for. It's early morning at a guess, though he knows the sky can sometimes turns yellow regardless of the time. No watch, either – its body is shattered by his side, face burred cocaine-white.

He rifles his pockets, empty, and laughs for his offnet mobile. His revolver.

You could shout
, he thinks.
When they get in. They won't like what you've done to their generator, their lock, but at least they'll get you out.

Except Roy can't hear anything, like he's tuned himself out.

He tries to stand again. With both arms outstretched he can just about touch both walls, shuffle himself along. It's phobic-tight.

A bang. Roy drops. The roller door lifts, and in the gap he sees thick legs, boots. He hears someone swear. He can tell it isn't Sol. Maybe the other guy – Paul? No,
Pete
.

Roy slides upwards, weight on his good foot. He holds his breath. The man flicks on a rack of lights. More swearing. Then a second voice – quiet to the edge of pointless. Roy listens – hears the cadence of questions. Instinct telling him these two aren't colleagues.

The men move closer. Roy hears one of them say, “Not with a
G
. With a
J
.”

Then they go silent, as if they've spotted him. Spooked, Roy puts his weight on the wrong foot. It pulses, and the riptide drags him back under. He bites his tongue, slumps to his knees, finds himself too weak to try again. Why doesn't he say something? Why doesn't he shout?

Because these days people kill people for much less than trespassing.

The voices ebb past. “What time's Sol going to be in?” the second man asks.

“I don't know, mate. Anytime really,” the first says back, an Irish accent. “You want a brew or anything?”

It's all so tiresome. Just close your eyes and you can sleep, slide, slip –

The Rev'll find you if he really wants to.

T
he Slope bottomed
out like the end of a ski run. Here the dust and mist gave way to a pan of soft ground, clay-like, that was veiny with fissures.

Karens and the squad moved across the last yards, knees and hips aching, postures gone. Y was lost in marching rhythms; noticed only the action of her legs. She had muscle twinge, stomach cramps. She barely knew what carried her.

And still the divided man haunted her. The schism in the air and the tree it gave birth to.

“Stop,” Karens said, and they did, with only Fi lagging in response. Y saw a settlement, mirage-like, across the plain. It was a collection of flat, densely packed structures, fabric-sided, and covered with a gleaming material that had the appearance of a single enormous sheet. The sun, rising, gave it a pinkish sheen.

Karens unclipped a cantina, undid her faceplate. She rubbed her eyes and turned to Y. “It's fine – no storms down here,” she told her. She held out the drink. “Have a swig.”

Y unfastened her own mask. She pulled out her feeding tube and took the cantina. It wasn't water – something sweeter.

“Is that a smile?” the photographer asked, tilting the camera. The shutter snapped.

“Just leave her be,” Fi said. While they'd been standing, she'd managed to temporarily patch her damaged glove with insulation tape. She was pale, and her voice was weak.

Karens spoke into her mic from the corner of her mouth. Y couldn't hear this, so she turned and took in the view again – the liquid lustre of the settlement's shell.

“They call it Plastic, the locals,” the photographer said. “Kind of place you have to keep checking your pockets.”

“Animals,” Babar chipped in, “is what he's saying. But that's frontier towns for you.”

“They used to grow tomatoes,” the photographer said, “under all this. When they first came over, anyway.”

Y nodded. The photographer appeared even more imposing on the flat. His shadow was a solid stream of black running away across the pan.

“Then the settlers moved up in the world.” The photographer tilted his head back up the Slope. “Left this place a black market. You ever tried a tomato?”

Y shook her head.

“You don't have to say anything to him,” Fi said. “Nothing you don't want to.”

“Shut up,” the photographer told her, putting a finger to his lips. “There's nothing like that smell. Hot tomato plants under plastic–”

“You talk like it was fifty years ago,” Babar interrupted. “It's been a few years max.”

“I'm just telling her,” the photographer went on, “how we broke into another world to start farming.”

“Button it, the pair of you,” Karens said.

“We haven't even spoken for hours,” the photographer snapped. “She looks completely traumatized.”

“Then tell her something useful,” Babar said.

The photographer dead-eyed Y. “They speak Perune here,” he said. “Mangled Portuguese, basically. Good bartering language. Loads of the first crossers were Brazilian labourers – cheap and cheerful.”

“I won't tell you again,” Karens said. “Her pickup's waiting.”

The photographer snorted. “Another one to think about,” he whispered to Y. “Why didn't they didn't just build the mansion down here? Why hide it away?”

Y shook her head again.

“Bureaucracy,” the photographer said. “That's why. It isn't much good for industry.”

And Fi tutted.

Minutes later they reached the settlement proper – a market square. Crowds shuffled round bazaar-like stalls, people wearing either simple cloth or heavy security tech. They were indifferent to her, and she drank in the colour and odd-smelling foods and the sound of alien languages duelling. At the far end of the square was a column of tracked vehicles piled high with extruded profiles and neatly stacked crates. These were stencilled with the word OUT.

From there the squad passed into the capillary-like streets that ran between Plastic's squares. At one point another trolley squad came the other way. Y saw a masked person dressed as she was – twinned circles pinned to their front. She considered, briefly, if they could have been a brother or sister she'd once tried to help sleep.

Down more side streets, past heaving stalls, open sewers, all of it under the plastic canopy, the settlement's wrapper, this great synthetic sheet that trapped the reek and the sweat and the stickiness, most of which dripped back onto the uncaring crowds below.

Ahead, a heavy mass loomed through the material. Y thought she recognized its shape.

“We're here,” Karens said.

And they were. The canopy ended with a run of shanties, and the cramped passageway opened into limitless space.

Y was bewildered. She did recognize the shape. There before them stood the hyperboloid form of an industrial cooling tower, hundreds of feet tall. Dark bricks, patchy repairs, every concrete section of its curve speckled and lined with age.

She'd been here before. She knew this with terrible certainty. She knew it so intimately, so innately, that it couldn't be mere chance.

It was her tower. Faceless and enduring.

As they watched, a narrow-gauge locomotive emerged on a track from the tower's base. The train stopped at a platform, where a fleet of fork trucks began to unload crates from its flatbed cars. In the sidings, hi-vis-jacketed workers were dropping them onto skids much like those Y saw fitted to the ORGANS box up the Slope. The only difference being that these crates were stencilled IN.

Y tugged Fi's arm. Her eyes asked a thousand questions, but Fi shook her head sadly and said simply, “Trans-crates,” before pushing her onwards.

As they walked, Y stared up at the tower. Her tower.

“You get to walk in,” Karens said from behind. “That's something.”

Out of Y's earshot, Babar clapped. “She doesn't like this at all.”

Fi shot him a look. “Not her fault,” she whispered. “And if I were you I'd be grateful she made it here at all – it's the only reason you're getting fed later.”

“Are you smiling again, kid?” Shazad asked Y. “Babar, she thinks you're funny.”

But Y wasn't smiling consciously. She wasn't even listening. She was transfixed by the tower, its domination of the landscape. The exhumation of her memories, and its curious erasure, eclipsing, of something about teeth, a man robed in teeth, and a camera lens focusing.

Babar thumped Shazad on the arm. “Freaks me out how she never says anything.”

Shazad shrugged. “You didn't see the scar on her throat?”

“Guys,” Fi said. “I'm being serious now. A little compassion.”

“It's a surgical tattoo,” the photographer said, ignoring Fi. “She'll be a grafter, anyway,” he added. “Arms aside, look at her back. The size of it.”

“A little worker bee,” Babar said, scratching his heavy beard.

“Just imagine what she'll do with the extra digits,” the photographer said.

Fi was glowing. “Are you seriously doing this?” she asked. “You're really saying this in front of her?”

“Oh don't pretend servitude isn't servitude,” the photographer said. “You know what it's about. They cook, they clean, they assemble…”

Babar smiled. “They fu–”

“You're a cretin,” Fi snapped, cutting him off. “That what it's about. It's disgusting, behaving like this. You've no clue where they end up, what they have to do. Where they came from.”

“No,” the photographer said firmly, “it's business – and it's booming. If you've got a problem with what they end up doing, why are you even here?”

Fi narrowed her eyes. “You try getting a job when you've got a council sanction on your name. You forget there's two kids without their mum over there…”

The photographer shrugged. “Cry me a river, Fiona. It's not your only option. You made your choices, and you can renege on them whenever. You could get your own mods, even. Make yourself a pretty penny. Be just like her. You'd probably enjoy that, playing the victim.”

Fi shook her head. “Seriously.”

“Seriously what?” The photographer was grinning. “What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

“Fuck off,” Fi said, her eyes bulging. “What if she's none of those things? Ask her. Go on – ask her if she can fight. I'd put money on her kicking your fat head off, arsehole.”

“She's definitely pedigree,” Babar said, nodding. “Her skin's too clear.”

“Except s
he 
isn't a cut of meat,” Fi hissed. “You thick bastards.”

“Squad!” Karens shouted. “Some decorum, please. She crosses that line safely, and that's all we have to worry about. End of story.” The group fell quiet. “Shaz, get me a transit label, please. Basecamp want proof of delivery. And Fi, stand yourself down.”

Shazad nodded. “Sorry, K. Where for?”

“Manchester,” Karens said.

Shazad whistled. “Lucky girl…”

Alone now, away from the group by metres but separated by so much else, Y blinked away the view. The squad's casual attitude disturbed her. It felt impossible to reconcile their behaviour and what had happened on the Slope. How easily the halved man was dismissed, how routine it all was. It seemed as matter-of-fact, as day-to-day, as strapping on their tactical kit. They'd made the choice to walk away, no question.

And Y was frightened. Of the tower. Of the unknown. Enmeshed in confusion and loss and apprehension – for all that had been taken and all that didn't add up. Her back ached from tensing it so long – not because of the exertion, even, but to counter her near-constant anxiety. Here was the tower. Her tower. This should have been the end. So why did it feel like she was being wrenched away? What could she possibly miss about the mansion?

A hand brushed her hip.

“It's nearly time,” Fi said. “Oh, love. I know it's so tough.”

Y wished she could say, “No.” Because it wasn't tough. It wasn't even an escape. It was a withdrawal – and that was such a lonely journey to make.

At the tower's entrance was a concrete apron marked DROP OFF – the banal language of airports, taxi ranks and leisure centres repurposed to make what was happening seem mundane. A retrofitted stairway curved round the structure like a helter-skelter's slide. From there a guard greeted the squad in Perune, asked for ID. Karens went and met him on the gantry stepway.

The team checked out. As Karens came back, the guard nodded at Y and pulled something from his tactical vest pocket. Y recognized the object as the red fruit the escort ate during their brief journey from the mansion to the Slope's upper camp. She sniffed deeply, wanting to smell it again.

“You,” the guard said to her in his strange accent. He held up the fruit. “Want?”

Y shook her head.

“Yes,” the guard said. “Well behaved!”

Y shook her head again.

“Bye-bye,” he said.

Karens nudged Y's shoulder. “Ignore it.” She pointed down the path into the tower's base. It ran alongside the rail tracks, trans-crates stacked up in the sidings. “In here first, though.” Karens led Y into a booth where her image was captured by a halo of dazzling red. “And now over there.” Y stumbled towards the entrance port with laser-wash in her eyes. A reinforced door irised open to reveal the tower's dark guts.

Industrial gases, metals, must. It was cold, and the echo of their footsteps sounded like machinery. Y looked up through the squad's mingled breath: the tower's insides stretched away to the heavens. Purple light was just about breaking into the topmost quarter. The wiring of mysterious systems dangled from a steel net stretched across the volume.

Dead on, a panel flickered into life. Y's disembodied head rotated on the screen in fine definition; a similar aesthetic to the shapes she'd seen on her incubator's roof. It was strange to look at – Y hadn't seen herself like this before. And then a tone sounded, and to their left a new pathway was illuminated. A door to the right marked CRYO chunked closed and its controls pipped out.

The surface went from wiry carpet to steel mesh, and Y realized the men had stopped back at the screen. Babar, Shazad, the photographer. Karens jostled her arm and pulled her along. “They don't go further,” she told Y, and pointed to a partition ahead. “We're up here.” Y resisted and turned to them; stumbling, not fully understanding. Fi was at her other side, stony-faced.

“Y,” Karens said, her hair blowing around her face.

At the partition, Karens pulled up. “You know, don't you? This is us.”

Y looked over at Fi. The medic's eyes were bloodshot.

“You'll be well looked after,” Fi whispered. “Here.” She gave Y a woollen hat, pulled from a cargo pocket. “To say thanks – for what you did up there.” Y took it. “Manchester's cold,” Fi added. “Sometimes.” She hesitated, perhaps wanting to say more. But then she stalked off down the corridor.

Karens watched Y as Y watched Fi. Fi went slowly, unsurely.

“My turn now,” Karens said, putting a hand on Y's head, rubbing the stubble with her thumb. “It's been a trudge, this one… but you've made our job nice and easy. And you're going on to good things – I'm sure of it.”

Y croaked.

Karens gave Y a brief squeeze on the shoulder. “So. See you.”

Y looked around; saw Fi join the men, right back along the corridor. Y held up a hand. Shazad and Babar waved awkwardly. The photographer raised his camera one last time. Fi, however, did nothing. She stood offset, face averted, and couldn't seem to move.

Karens reached up and unzipped the partition flap.

“Always follow your guts,” she said.

And Y stepped through.