Graft (19 page)

F
rail and hungry
, Roy drags himself to the inspection pit's shallow end – the van's rear axle inches from his head. The concrete wet with oil, dank under his hands, and blood pounding in his twisted ankle. Laboriously, he crawls into the unlit workshop. There's no sign of the partners, and a deepening sky cuts abstract shadows from the workshop fittings.

As he's brushing grit from his hands, Roy hears movement behind him. He kneels and waits there a moment, swiping blindly towards the darker corners. The noise abates. “What a shambles,” he says to himself, then counts down from ten before he tries to get up.

Wobbling but relieved, he stands on his decent foot. The Lexus' driver-side door is open and close to hand. Roy hops towards it, almost laughing at the scenario, at the fruits of his perseverance.

But as he stoops to get in, the roller doors start to rattle open.

Roy swings. He waits for Sol's surprised voice – prepares himself for the confrontation by reaching for his revolver. It's not there, and its absence throws him.

He squints. No feet planted there in the widening crack…

A sharp sound rings out in the side of his head. Part of him. Internalized. He acknowledges the way it travels through him, like vibrations along a tuning fork.

The workshop tilts.

Roy angles for the Lexus, both hands on the roof sill. A vapour descends. The muscles in his forehead knotting in confusion. He falls against the frame of it – a sudden, hurtling vertigo. Savage pain as he puts down his bad foot.

He registers a large man to his left. The man is breathing heavily, with almost neon-bright discs sitting behind the lenses of his sunglasses. A flash of something again, a plunging edge –

“Solomon,” the man says.

“No,” Roy manages. A second noise explodes behind his ear. Heavier, more sincere. Roy feels it through his teeth. He holds up his hand, recognizes that it's still empty, but levels it like he's holding the revolver anyway.

“Are you Solomon?” the man asks.

Roy can only shake his head.

“You've taken something,” the man tells him, “that isn't yours.” The third strike closes everything down. Roy topples on demolished legs. As he does, he remembers a kitchen so vivid he can't believe he isn't there now:

“
How did he look?” Kerry's wife asked. “In the end, I mean. When they got him out.”

“Peaceful,” Roy told her – a lie. In the corner of his vision was a fat man he'd only just met, his sweaty face pressed against the window. “Here,” Roy said, and held out Kerry's wedding ring. “They found it when they cleared the site.”

Kerry's wife slapped him, flicked the ring on to the lino.

The fat man outside was laughing.

“You didn't deserve to know him,” Kerry's wife said.

That was life in those little houses, all stacked up like dominos.

R
oy's woken
in a few bad places over the years. A few bad states. But he knows this isn't good – he can smell it's wrong before his eyes open and a naked bulb sears in; before he can clear his throat; before his internal compass can calibrate itself.

The

facts

tumble

single

file:

Lying in an unzipped suitbag

Crust heavy in his eyebrow

Pins and needles down one arm

A radiating pain in his head

A kitchen knife in his hand –

Amazed, Roy creases and sits up. Drops the knife and rubs his eyes. Unconsciously he feels for his revolver; only realizes he's searching when he can't find it anywhere.

It's a stranger's place – faint smells of takeaway and brick dust mixed with something metallic. On the nearest wall there's a high contrast collage of roads and buildings, below it a sofa that's seen better days. And then, partially obscured, a kitchenette – elements of beige laminate with chipped edges. In the other direction, a pile of socks, tracksuit bottoms, faded boxers – and a towel drying over a twisted maiden by the window. An easel, tipped over, and a torn canvas. A pile of filthy blue overalls by the door. A framed photo of an old black man standing by what looks like a classic car.

Roy blinks. Nothing adds up. In front of him are his bare feet, the hair of his legs matted. One trouser leg rolled up, and his ankle wrapped with a bag of slush.

Who the–

Roy puts his hand down to pivot, to get a bearing. What does he remember? The workshop. His ankle. The big man with laser eyes. A
pain –

Roy's hand is wet. He recoils, palm up. The substance is sticky. Light diffuses through it. The floor next him is covered in the stuff, a thick emulsion slowly widening. It looks like setting lava. It looks like blood.

Is it him? Is he cut?

He rolls over.

By the wall is the answer. The man is there, quite still and dead, shirt torn collar to crotch, trousers peeled down, his bread and butter spilling from a ragged hole in his stomach. On one hand the man's fingers are bent too far backwards. His other is down by his crotch, vised around what looks like a thin grey slug. Roy swallows thickly and stares. Apart from the man's cheap white sports socks, which are bizarrely spotless, the man is completely soaked in his own fluids. He looks varnished.

Roy doesn't remember any of this –

Something starts vibrating on the floor by the wall. Roy crawls to it, out of the bag and away from the body. It's a phone – a fully functioning on-net mobile. On its screen, a string of code runs horizontally.

Roy whispers, “What the fuck?”

And, hearing a creak –

Turns and locks eyes with a woman entering the room.

He jumps, and she freezes in the door jamb – throws her hands up in surprise.

Three of them –

Three hands –

The light intensifying –

“You,” he says. “Did this?” His voice sounds garbled to him, distant.

The woman seems fixed in time, ribcage high at full inflation, her bones visible through an oversized workshirt. Jogging pants sagging from her hips. She makes a sound like a cat purring.

Roy struggles to his knees, gestures behind. “Did you?”

His mind reels. The garage scene spooling backwards: a cold pit, a man and a spanner. Someone calling him Solomon.

Roy stands up. His ankle joint is sore, but the pain's eased. He points at her and then to the body. “He brought me here?”

She stares at him, expression unreadable. Then, seemingly unable to help herself, she glances down at the bread knife on the floor. Roy understands at once; gleans so much from this smallest of tells. “You wanted it to look like I did it?” He studies the man's body. From this angle he can see livid bruising on the neck – what looks like compression marks at three separate points. The man's eyes have been pushed deep inside his head.

“You did him,” Roy says.

The woman edges back into the hall, hiding most of her face with the jamb.

Roy goes towards her. She reacts instantly, flinching at his movement, and wraps herself in her arms. In a flash of self-consciousness, Roy appreciates his own size; realizes his appearance – bald, scarred, bloody – is threatening. She could be half his height.

Roy rubs his forehead, his scabbed eyebrow. “Fuck,” he rasps. “I've heard about people like you. But I never saw the handiwork.”

He crosses the laminate, bridging infinite space.

“How long?” he asks. “How long have I been like that?”

The woman's backed against the front door now, silent.

Roy pauses, points back in at the body. He looks into the visible triangle of the room beyond – a bedroom. “Hang on,” he says. On the floor of the bedroom there's a pair of men's shoes. Not kicked off, but deliberately placed there. Expensive-looking things – polished brogues – that jar in a flat like this.

“Did he? This bastard over here – did he try something? And did you–”

Roy moves closer. No real sense of what to do when he meets her.

Another step. The woman seems to hunker down, using the door to steady herself. She makes an animalistic sound that makes Roy hang half-step.

“Wait,” Roy says, but by then the woman has already launched off the door– goes from standing to full speed in barely a metre. He takes her weight fully into his chest. His sweaty hands around gnarled arms as they fall into the partition, twist, and into the lounge. Her tendons are like tree trunks, winter-stripped. Through her shirt's heavy cotton, he can feel the hardness of her blue-vein branches. They tussle on the floor; her so much stronger, weightier than she looked; her with the advantage. “Hang on!” Roy shouts, but she's pinned him anyway. She squeezes his wrists until he slackens, until his forearms are locked up. She keeps her third hand fixed solidly around his jaw. “Whatever he tried,” Roy says, his voice with a note of mortal fear, “whatever he did…”

The woman bounces Roy's head off the floor and steps away. She tries to speak but it comes out an angry bark. Then, by the maiden of drying clothes, breathing deeply, she gestures at the door.

“He doesn't live here, does he?” Roy asks, meaning the body. It's rhetorical, really – he knows the answer.

The woman's nostrils flare.

Roy kneels and nods towards the framed picture of the old man with his classic car. Looks at workboots by her feet. The grubby overalls. “Solomon,” he says. “It's Solomon's place, isn't it?”

The woman doesn't respond.

“You know who I mean, don't you?”

The woman doesn't respond.

“So who's this?”

The woman rolls up the sleeve on her single arm, her third arm swinging free through a hole torn at the opposite shoulder. Roy can see marks there – heavy welts.

“A pimp?”

The woman doesn't respond.

“But you knew him.”

She hisses.

“English?”

She holds a hand over her mouth.

“Jesus,” he says. “He came for Solomon and found you.”

Nothing.

“Or… no. He came for
you
and liked what he found.”

What had the man said in the workshop?
You've taken something.
What had Sol done?

Again the signals betray her. He changes tack.

“Alright then, how's this? Solomon keeps you here… and this one came for you. And after, after you'd done him, did you sort me out? Did you ice my foot?” He holds it out. “Did that stop you feeling bad about trying to bloody frame me?” Pallid daylight reveals burst capillaries in her eye, as if the sclera's been coloured in. And there, when she blinks – he swears there are flecks of luminous green.

“D-d-d,” she says, between her clicking. “D-d-d!”

And her lips, her lips are covered in scabs –

Roy surveys the front room. The body's oozing – makes wet sounds and tiny clicks as all the slippery stuff congeals. “Sometimes,” he says to the woman, “your luck just runs out.”

She patters back into the bedroom. He hears the bedsprings loaded with weight.

Roy eases into the sofa, wheezing, the bag round his foot dripping. It's a new one, this – and not like him to hang around after the fact. He sits there for five minutes trying to process it. It's not the death, or even the implied violence of the man's wounds, but the domesticity of the scene that makes it so unusual. Blur your eyes and here's a man asleep in a lounge. It's only when you look closely that you see the bruise prints each side of his trachea, eyes against the meninges. His accusatory expression.

It wouldn't take much detective work, either way. Breaking and entering, self-defence. For what it's worth, though – and there's something in this – the woman can't look at what she's done. It's othered behaviour to her – evidence of a savagery she can't face down. That's why Roy knows she probably won't move from the bedroom. That she'll sit on the bed's edge wrapped in sheets and slathered in mess, shaking and making alien noises.

He thinks:
It's time to go.

But something counters the impulse – supersedes his honed response to countless acts of paid-for violence. After all, he's innocent.

It's not about the body anyway, he realizes. It's her.

He shakes his head. He's heard of them, of course, these modded people, these built-on bodies. You can't run in the circles he does and not hear about the extremes, the excesses. He knows about the trade, a hidden industry. He knows you can get anything you like, if you've got the money. God knows he's seen all that.

He just didn't expect to find it like this. And he certainly didn't expect such a person to tend his injuries.

Roy analyzes his foot. Maybe it wasn't a dislocation after all – it can't have been. And yet he remembers the angle. Its
corner
. He limps back towards the bedroom. The walls getting closer the longer he's in here. He says to her, “No names, right? I'm gonna try and tidy up. Return the favour. Then we can go. Then we'll have to go. You understand that? Your man Solomon's in a world of shit.”

Her jaw twinges.

“Aye,” he says. “And you hear him coming in, you better make some noise.”

P
riority one is all
the blood. It's soaked the laminate. It's all over the walls, up the curtains. It's flecked over everything. And it's still spreading.

The second job is the body. Where to put him?

He canvasses the flat. The bath will have to do. It'll take a while yet for people to notice the smell, and by then they'd be long gone. And her – he could take her to a hostel, leave her at a clinic entrance. Call it in. Even the Reverend might lend a hand – though these are the kind of details his boss likes to rise above, and it feels like the worst-best option.

“You wanna help me lift him?” he asks. “Bit of a wide load, isn't he.”