Graft (21 page)

The truck shudders and stalls.

Before Sol can turn the ignition key, Roy is there at the window. “Serious, man,” he says. “You think you've had a bad night. Your neighbours nosey?”

Sol thumps the steering wheel, inadvertently sounding the horn. “Piss off!”

Roy grins. “Been a busy boy though, haven't you? Council's gonna be on you like flies on shit if you don't shift your arse. Never mind who else is on your case. Must want her badly, I'll tell you that. They are some heavy-duty bastards…”

Sol is rabid. “Where is she? Where?”

“Your bird?” Roy points loosely at the flats. “Well, she was up there. Shit, I knew it was your gaff…”

“
Where
?”

“And next news she was down here,” Roy says. “But I only did the biker, right? He turns up and she's straight out the window. Makes you wonder. These eyes he had… But your man in the bath? She did for him. Honest to God, I just put him in there for safekeeping. I reckon he tried it on, right, and then she throttled him–”

“Where is she now?”

Roy thumbs at the Lexus over his shoulder. “Back seat.”

“Is she hurt?”

Roy shrugs. “I dunno what she is, pal.”

Sol pushes open the door; pushes Roy aside. He staggers towards the Lexus, incredulous, ears buzzing.

“Hang on,” Roy says.

Sol stops in the road and leans on his knees, gasping.

Roy shakes his head. “She jumped. She jumped out. And all that time she could've just sailed out the front door.”

“She was waiting for me,” Sol says. “I told her. I said I'd be home.”

Roy watches as Sol squats down in the road, head shuddering.

“I had to be sure it was you,” Roy tells him. “I had to wait, too.” He's frowning in concentration, working it through. “You get why you're a vested interest, don't you? My livelihood depends on delivering the goods. On my subcontractors. But all this complicates stuff. Because they're on to you.”

Sol sniffs. A good ten seconds of quiet. “Screw your goods,” he says. “We're taking her to hospital.” He stands up and nods effusively. “We're taking her to hospital. Now.”

“You insured?”

“No.”

“Then you don't go down this road. I know about these people – all their extras and that. Expensive shit. And if your biker man called it in, hospital's the first place they're gonna look for someone with fall injuries.”

Sol glares at him.

“How much you pay for her?” Roy asks. “You've paid, right? Or is this about debt?”

Sol doesn't reply.

“I'm not judging. My cupboards rattle they're that full of bones. But she's gonna need serious work, man. Something big done. If it isn't too late already.”

“Is she breathing?”

“Not really, no.”

Sol shakes his head. “I found her,” he says, blinking. “In the boot.”

“Boot?”

Sol points at the Lexus but averts his gaze. Something repellent, unearthly, about the way the segments of its bodywork convene so perfectly. In turn, Sol knows now that he doesn't want to see Y. He just wants to run. He always wants to run. To keep running –

“Sol?”

“The Lexus.”

Roy holds the expanse of his chest. “That explains why they thought I was you, then. Why I got brained in your bloody workshop.”

Sol's eyes snap to him. “My workshop?”

“And that fat lad knew what he were doing – he said your name–”

“
You
broke in?”

“I swear to God,” Roy says, hands up. “I only wanted what we'd shook on. The car. And your man in the bath…
Shit!
I was pissed – went base over apex down your inspection pit. I must've been sparked out, crawled free after hours, and then that fat bastard did me over. He was asking after her – someone sent him asking after you. Because whoever that bird is, your woman with three fucking
arms
, you shouldn't know her.”

Sol closes his eyes.
But only one person knew apart from you.

Mel? The woman he'd shared a life with was involved in people-running?

Sol can't even begin to believe it. And yet there it is. It doesn't even seem so far a leap from the parlour their settlement money helped to set up.

“Christ,” Sol says. “Oh Christ.”

“I was out of order going in there,” Roy says. “I know that. But I didn't bring the Lexus back here – that must've been your man indoors as well. My guess, he came to your flat, found her, went back out for you. And got me. Must've brought me here in the boot – I was out for the count.” Roy pauses. “Don't look at me like that – like you're gonna start crying again.”

“I can't go there,” Sol tells him. “I can't go to the workshop. If they know who I am…”

Roy tips his head and shows Sol the fresh marks on his head. The welts and swellings on his face. “Oh, they know,” he says. “But like I told you – I'm invested. We're in it together now, you and me. Plus she sorted my foot. I don't forget favours like that, like it or lump it. Call it a pride thing.”

“We're taking her to hospital,” Sol says.

Roy shows a cracked tooth in the corner of his mouth. “You need sugar first. Time to get it straight – get your head straight. Shock's a killer. Can't let you wander off like this, can I? My head's clanging – isn't yours?”

“There'll be somewhere.”

“Not before you eat–”

A low rumble interrupts them. Sol and Roy register it, realize in unison that it's coming from the row of flats they left a hundred yards down the road.

Sol looks at his truck, half-mounted on the pavement, and back at Roy, the bulk of him; a man in high contrast. The Lexus dazzling behind. He goes to ask, “What was that?” when the answer comes: the walls and windows of his own flat – now a stranger's, it feels like – open outwards in a storm of black and grey. Brickwork rains down onto the pavement below; the heavy sky a riot of glass and debris. A shockwave blows past, forces on them an uncanny pressure. Then the sign on the takeaway fizzles and winks out.

Roy turns to him. “Here comes trouble.”

I
n the passenger seat
, Sol can't bring himself to look round at the woman lying across the bench seat. It's a mixture of things. Even miles down the road, with the burning flat now ten or fifteen minutes behind, he can't seem to order the passage of events; the consequences of his decision to go to work; or the realization that his old life had faltered the moment Irish carjacked the Lexus.

And to look at her, he decides, would be to admit his complicity.

The car is smooth and Roy's quiet, giving Sol space to contemplate the oiliness of the gas that rose from his bathtub, the mechanics of the eyeless man pitching out from it. Along with fire and brick dust, he can still smell Jeff's rustiness. The stench mixed with car seat leather, what's on his hands, what clings to his clothing. What's in the recycled air.

What made the flat go up like that?

Y makes no breathing sounds, no clicking. She's gone. Absent. And that's his fault – his responsibility. It renders him cold and disconnected. His focus rests on a point between the windscreen and the world beyond.

“She isn't gonna bloody bite you,” Roy says.

The calmness is menacing. Sol doesn't reply; finds it difficult to deal with Roy's pernicious mateyness. A critical component missing from the man's personality.

“I can't look at her,” Sol tells him.

“Talk to me then. Do you no good, playing silent.”

But Sol stares outside. They pass a pub, and in its garden Sol sees the indistinct shapes of downed parasols, off-white in colour. A distant glimpse of Mel smoking on her wedding morning, a contemplative cigarette before their day.

“Solomon, don't be a pussy.”

“She couldn't speak,” Sol says. “Nothing came out right.”

“Nah,” Roy says. “She couldn't.”

“She's called Y,” Sol tells him. “I know that.”

“Y,” mimics Roy. “Like the letter?”

“Yeah.”

“Y,” says Roy, trying it out. “Y not…”

“What are we going to do?”

“Well, I'm gasping for a brew.”

“There's a mobile clinic at Ordsall. We could take her there.”

Roy slaps the wheel. “You need to eat. I won't say it again. Blood sugar. You've had a shock. There's a trucker caff near Hyde – we hide this car, park our arses. Tameside General isn't exactly far after that if you're dead set on it, but I still reckon it's shock talking.”

Sol holds Roy's gaze.

“Winnie's,” Roy tells him. “You must've heard of it.” Roy addresses Y on the back seat. “Good, isn't he?” Then back to Sol: “A bloody keeper if you ask me.”

Sol holds in a breath until his lungs burn. He knows about Winnie's: famous because the owner upended a McDonald's sign and stuck it to her terrace. She serves full English breakfasts with ill-gotten meats in her front room at all hours, and you often see whole columns of council pig-rigs, levs and support vehicles parked outside.

“How about it?”

Sol feels restrained, compromised, by Roy's charisma.

“What's that? Say it loud for me.”

“
OK
,” Sol says. “OK.”

“Good lad. Do you right, honest. And we'll sort her after – bury her or whatever. I know a place. It's just shock, just shock… I swear a good brew will see you right.”

Bury her.

At last, Sol turns to look at Y.

For a second he stays detached, views her as a stranger once more. She lies there a life apart, once removed. Figurative, even. And as the seconds pass and the road rumbles beneath the car, he's less and less sure of their peculiar closeness. The way she'd held his chin, smiled when the last staple was out, took the pen and shaded in the contours of a black tower in the workshop's waiting room. Drew that grinning mouth. These memories feel implanted, like things that happened to another Sol.

But reality soon follows. A gut shot –

“That face for?” Roy asks, glancing at him.

“Stop the car,” Sol says. “Stop the car!”

Roy stops the car.

Sol falls onto the road, freezing tarmac under his palms. He vomits on the kerb, threads of bright acid. He leans his head against the Lexus door, eyes streaming, slime across his top lip, and looks up into the cloud canopy, the abyss of tomorrow. They're somewhere in Manchester. Nowhere in Manchester.

He peers back into the car.

“I'm sorry about Y,” Roy says. “I am.”

Sol wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

“Honestly.”

“She was gentle,” Sol says. “I mean that.” Looking at her this time he can see where things have gone wrong. Unknown but essential elements jutting through the blanket. Angles where there should be straight lines. Her face half-turned into the leather of the bench seat, and the back of her head a muddle of wires and gunge. Protrusions, labelled things, structures that resemble antennae.

Perhaps the worst thing is that Sol almost expected biomachinery. Y's extra arm had always been a primer.

Roy can tell Sol is trying to say something else. And for all the horror Roy has witnessed, never mind wrought, he looks into Sol's eyes like he's never seen fear like it. Except, perhaps, in his own.

“Come on, sunshine,” he says. “Let's get a pint of tea down you.”

W
innie's looks
like it sounds. On the inside, net curtains sticking to wet glass. Outside, the remodelled
M
dim on its frame.

Roy tells Sol to hop out.

“Aren't you coming?”

Roy frowns. “Can't leave the motor on show. There's a multistorey round the corner – give me five minutes. And if they ask, I like mine milky with one. Vintage brew, that.”

Sol nods because he can't ask what he needs to ask:
What about her?

“Go on,” Roy says. Sol's hands are trembling, and he can smell Sol's body odour – the cortisol spike. “Don't pay either – just get them on tick.”

“Tick?”

“Set up a tab.”

Sol climbs out and closes the door; pretends he doesn't catch a final glimpse of the hybridized woman across the back seat. He puts a hand against the terrace-row wall and glances up the road. Internally, he mashes the view with Mel's body and Y's wires, her stitches and burns. Futility, then: a sureness that whatever happens, all of this will be dust someday, and in time they'll be oil.

As the Lexus drives away, Sol considers running. As if his basest compulsions, denied for a day, have reasserted themselves. He'd do it, too, if his legs didn't feel so heavy, or if he had a clue where to go other than the workshop –

There's Irish's house, maybe, up in the hills. Or down south, to some unchanged village – live a nomad's life on the marshlands.

Sol goes inside. A bell clangs obnoxiously and the patrons stop eating to register him. He apologizes silently and scans for a table.

“Born in a barn, were you?” A woman's standing opposite, hands on hips. Sol realizes he's letting a draught in.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and pulls the door to.

“Don't have to be sorry,” the woman says, smiling warmly. “Just more sensitive to the needs of others.”

On her striped pinny, embroidered over her heart, it says
Winnie
.

“We'd love to heat half of Manchester,” she goes on, “but it's hard enough to keep the kettles going with these sods in charge. Now you look like you're on death's door. Let's get you something warm and wet, eh?”

Winnie's caught Sol off guard. For some reason he thought the name was convenient – a business built around the gimmick, the repurposed arches, a trophy of the end times. He finds himself nodding. Her jolly straightforwardness is refreshing, though as he crosses the café it only serves to make him sadder – here's a woman who managed to adjust without losing her humanity.

Winnie touches Sol's shoulder. He jumps, reflexes hair-triggered, and she pulls out a chair. “Tea for one?”

“For two, actually. My –” he hesitates “– my friend's just parking up.”

The front door bell goes on cue. Roy saunters in and ducks the mechanism, looking round for Sol. Cast against the depth of the room, a backdrop of striped curtains, he looks totemic.

Sol leans, raises a hand. Roy weaves over and sits down without comment. He picks up a serviette – crappy two-ply paper that smells of dry storage – and dabs at the corners of his mouth where a creamy substance comes and goes.

“Two, then?” Winnie asks. She smiles broadly. Again her determined lack of cynicism. Roy and Sol nod. “And a chips and gravy, ta,” Roy adds. He motions to Sol. “Owt or nowt?”

Sol shakes his head. Couldn't eat if he tried.

“No
thank you
,” Winnie says, and goes to the kitchen hatch.

On the next table, someone coughs loudly. A brawny man in a tatty police blazer. Roy eyeballs him – he's making a whining sound.

“You want a heart-to-heart?” Roy asks. Sol watches him inspect the salt and pepper shakers, then snaffle a lump of sugar. “Nan gave us these for pudding,” he says, splitting the lump between his front teeth. He doesn't close his mouth while he chews, making a sound like wet sand. “She was the greatest woman.”

Suddenly the whining man moves his chair. Sol jumps. The man gawps back.

Sol doesn't know where to look. Around them, the clatter of cutlery becomes a dirge of industrial feeding. Y's wires creep over the surfaces, her three arms extending outwards from each corner of the room, broken and reset in new directions. Food on plates becomes Y's muscles, her fibrous joints, and a smell of frying mingles with the sickly warmth of a heater haphazardly drilled into the wall –

Winnie approaches with a rattling tray. “Two teas,” she says. “For two handsome boys. Your chips are just coming, sweet.”

“Cheers,” Roy says, and she puts down their steaming mugs.

“No bother. And listen you,” she says to Sol, “pay no mind to old Bert here.”

“What's up with him?” Roy asks bluntly.

“Oh, says he were kissed by a giant moth or something.”

Roy stares at her. Sol doesn't think he heard it right, either.

“Like a mothman,” she adds, and rolls her eyes. “I know. So the story goes. But I don't flipping mind, do I? We just make his tea. Oh heck, sorry love – let me get you one of them stirrer things.”

Roy puts his tongue in his cheek. Bert carries on whining.

“Mad house,” Roy says. “The whole city's gone frigging barmy.”

“Where's the Lexus?” Sol asks.

Roy puts a finger to his lips. “Not here.”

“Then how did you leave her?”

Roy looks both ways. “Seriously, Solomon. Pack it in.”

“Where, though?”

“Back in the boot for now.”

Sol starts at this; bangs his knee under the table. Bert stops whining momentarily. “No,” Sol says. “No. It's not right–”

“She's gone,” Roy whispers. “She doesn't know.”

Sol puts his head in his hands.

“Mate…” Roy picks up his mug. “It's shite, but it's happened. Think about your flat – your work. You've gotta look after number one now.”

“But–”

“She was just passing through. I mean they're not even real, are they?”

“Roy, that's–”

“That's the march of technology, is what it is. How you can even order girls like that is crazy enough…”

Sol slams the table and stands up, tipping his chair. Everyone turns. “Roy!”

Calmly, Roy settles his mug. The only noise now comes from Bert.

“Don't make a tit of yourself,” Roy says. “You're being oversensitive.”

“No,” Sol says.

Roy's face changes. “Sit down,” he hisses. “I won't tell you again.”

Winnie's over there with her arms crossed over her pinny. Eyebrows up, smile sliding.

Sol picks up his chair and sits down, cheeks hot. After a moment, the noise swells again.

Roy leans in, speaks slowly: “You've got to understand. She's
gone.
And when we're finished in here, we'll grab a shovel and drive out somewhere nice and quiet and do the decent thing.”

But Sol can't handle the thought of it. The chunk of a spade going into northern soil. “No,” he says.

“What's your bright idea, then?”

“Hospital.”

“Fuck's sakes, man. You think it's legal? That they're regulated or something?” Roy snaps his fingers. “They'll have you in for murder like that. And me.”

Sol pulls out Y's delivery note and slides it across the table. “Read it,” he says.

Roy flips it over reluctantly, frowning at the circles motif before opening it out. “What's all this about?” he asks. “Accessories to follow? Still in transit?”

“It came with her,” Sol tells him. “And I think they bring more like her.”

“And Knutsford?”

Sol shrugs.

Roy looks away and refolds the note. His expression's softened. “OK,” he says, “I'm gonna just tell you this. You know I said I'd heard of them?”

“Yeah.”

“Well when I started out, you heard rumours. Certain investors, on the margins. More cash in people than guns and drugs put together. Throw in customization, and you're laughing. I mean it's no excuse, but you see shit on that side of the fence – the worst of us. You get immune eventually – you learn to keep your nose out.” He pauses, looks at Sol as if he doesn't quite believe what he's saying. “But maybe I've met one before.”

“Who told you?”

Roy sips his tea. “I dunno. It's only ever been snatches – someone knows someone… But the story's standard enough. They're taken off the streets, the tunnels, orphanages, ring estates, even abroad. Ship the poor buggers away and tell them they owe money for the trouble. The rest you can fill in yourself. Take bits out or jam stuff in – train them up, sell them back.”