Kingdom: The Complete Series (12 page)

Glistening
machines stand at attention, lining the walls like soldiers huddled beneath the
weight of their polythene wrapping. Fluorescent lights illuminate the thin film
of dust coating everything. The air itself is suffocating, as though the room
had been holding in a single stale breath this entire time, and when it lets it
out they all reel at the stench of ammonia.

“
What's
that smell?”

“
Chemicals,
most likely,” Mark leads them in, waving the air away from his nose. “Ah hell,
they've been leaking.”

“
It
smells like the dentist's,” Chloe screws her nose up. “I hate dentists.”

Jamie nudges her.
“You've only been twice.”

She slaps his nudging
elbow away.“Well that's because I hate them, Jamie.”

“
So
why all the machines?” Jamie runs a hand over the plastic covering protecting
the chrome. “Is this a workshop, or...”

“
They're
used for a mixture of things,” Mark explains as they follow him down the long
hallway of machines and large, metallic baths and drums of chemicals.

“
Oh,”
Jamie stops in his tracks, grabbing Chloe's hand. “Oh, oh ok I get it. I know
what this is.”

Mark turns, his
innocent eyes narrowed.

“
You
do?”

“
Meth
lab. Or heroin. Something. You're making drugs.”

An uneasy silence hangs
like a condemned criminal between the two men, before Mark's laugh makes Jamie
flinch away.

“
No,
no, Jamie.” Mark waves a hand at him, turning to continue his stroll towards
the lights at the bottom of the hall. “Don't be ridiculous. Though you probably
could use some of the kit in here to make
something,
but no... this is
much fancier than drugs.”

Chloe squeezes his arm,
and gives him a look that says more than she's willing to say out loud.

It says:
I trust
him, so should you.

Mark guides them to the
bottom of the room, crates and boxes scattered beneath the white wall.

“
Ah
good,” he says to himself, “at least these are still in one piece.”

“
What
are they?” asks Chloe.

“
Boxes,”
he grins.

Jamie tries to clap
some of the sarcasm out of his hands, and Mark laughs.

“
Patience,
Jamie”

They watch him search
like a curious animal around the boxes, before he stops and looks into space.

“
Why
am I looking for a crowbar?” he asks nobody in particular.

Mark turns to the heavy
wooden crates, each half as tall as he is, and jams his fingers under the lid,
ripping it off with a faint grunt. It tears away with a dry rip, throwing dust,
splinters and bent nails into the air.

Jamie and Chloe flinch
back as the dust clears and the lid clatters to the floor.

“
Sorry
about that,” says Mark, leaning over and peering into the crates. He reaches in
and pulls out bulky yellow plastic bags, grabbing them in clusters.

Jamie catches one of
the bags as it is thrown to him, holding the spongy, dense package in his
hands.

“
What
am I holding?” he asks.

“
Military
ration packs,” says Mark, tossing another over which Chloe snatches out of the
air. “Open them, look inside.”

Jamie tears the packet
open and finds it filled with bars, liquid pouches and assorted chunks of
something that isn't quite food yet.

“
I
don't get it,” says Jamie.

“
I
do,” says Chloe, and tears open a protein bar.

“
Eat
up,”says Mark. “You guys must be starving. Sorry it's not something fancier,
but -”

“
No,
no, ration packs are fine.” Jamie rips open and chugs down a few gulps of
chemical-flavoured thin milkshake, wincing at the burning in his throat. “Why
do you have crates of them?”

Mark almost answers,
and then shrugs.

“
They
were cheap,” he says. “Now, the tour?”

“
Tour,”
mumbles Chloe, her cheeks stuffed like a hamster.

“
Tour
it is,” says Mark. “Bring your food, follow me.”

He leads them back out
towards the door.

“
I
thought you said you're a janitor,” says Jamie as he falls in behind Mark's
swaggering figure.

“
I
am,” Mark says without turning. “Was, rather.”

“
For
this place?”

“
No,
for a school. This was my project.” He holds the door to the stairwell open and
turns around to face them. “It still is.”

He leads them out into
the stairs and begins the ascent.

“
Glasgow,”
says Mark as they climb the stairs, “particularly in the poorer areas, was once
home to a strange phenomenon: voluntary incarceration. The hungry, the
homeless, the vulnerable: these people would smash a window and sit beside it,
waiting for the police to turn up.”

“
Yeah,”
says Jamie. “Because in prison you get a bed, clean water, a shower, three
meals a day, hell you even get an education if you want one.”

“
Exactly,”
says Mark. “It was a good way for the vulnerable to have their basic needs met.
Not how the system is supposed to work, but at least those people were
relatively safe.”

“
That
hasn't been an option for about six years,” says Chloe. “Trust us, we know.”

Mark reaches a door and
rattles it until it swings open – rather than enter, he turns and looks Chloe
and Jamie in the eyes.

“
That
sounds like the voice of experience,” he says.

“
It
is,” says Jamie, tearing a chunk out of his protein bar and motioning for Mark
to lead them into the next room.

“
Then
this won't be a surprise to you: the King ensured that it wasn't an option. I'm
assuming you guys know as much about him as I do,” says Mark, flicking the
lights on in a room full of workbenches and tool racks. “He got the police
force under his thumb; made his own laws. Nowadays, if you try to free-load in
a prison, the police will follow the King's orders and break your jaw before
they dump you in an alley somewhere to starve.”

Jamie gives him a slow
and measured nod, squeezing Chloe's hand as they step through the door.

“
So
what is this place?”

“
This
is the Gardens, Jamie,” says Mark. “This was my response to the King's
changes.”

“
You
built a prison?” asks Chloe, staring at the workbenches.

“
Not
a prison,” he says. “A commune. A safe haven – think of it like a monastery
without the monks. This was a place that people could come for the same safety
that voluntary prison stays granted them.”

“
But
without the prison part,” she whispers, and breaks into a smile. “Is that what
the workbenches are for?”

Mark nods and leads
them further into the room. With one finger he traces a line in the dust on one
bench, sighing.

“
For
training our residents in hands-on skills. You know: woodworking, joinery,
mechanics and so on.”

Mark crosses past the
workbenches to a shelf lined with amateur, lop-sided mug trees and small wooden
boats coated in clumpy varnish. He picks one up and stares at it for a long
time before turning back to them.

“
The
idea,” he said, “came from those start-up companies that use prison labour –
you know, pay them minimum wage and train them, and after a few years you have
a well trained and dedicated workforce who are ready to reintegrate into
society. They work sometimes,” he puts the boat down, “not all the time, but
sometimes. That was the idea behind the Gardens project.”

“
I
don't even need to ask what happened,” says Jamie, leaning back on one of the
benches and twirling the handle of a mounted vice. “I know the answer already.”

The two men look at
each other across the room, and simultaneously they say:

“
The
King.”

Mark nods.

“
When
he caught wind of it, things started going badly for me.” He pulls over a red
plastic chair, the kind you get in schools and community centres, and collapses
into it. “Surprise bills, extortionate utilities, vandalism and break-ins. All
of them worse than the last, until my residents didn't want to stay here any
longer. Some of them left, taking expensive equipment with them to sell on
elsewhere. I had poured all of my money into this: the King took it all and let
me piss it against a wall.”

In complete silence,
Mark picks up a wooden mallet from the tool rack by the bench and launches it
against the far wall. Chloe flinches and throws herself into Jamie. It cracks
and bounces off the concrete. The snap of the impact echoes around the room.

“
I
was just beginning to make a profit,” says Mark, shaking his head and leaning
back in the chair. “More importantly, I was making a difference; the King
couldn't stand that.”

“
You
had to shut it down?” asks Jamie, his voice laced with careful sympathy.

Mark smiles despite
himself.

“
No,”
he says. “I wound the project down to save money, but I never completely
stopped it. I minimised what costs I could and tried to find a job. Of course,
nobody would take me on: the King again, I suspect, black-balling me. I finally
settled for a life as a cleaner and funnelled most of my money into keeping
this place under my name until I could scrape the money together for a second
go.”

“
You
kept this all going on a cleaner's wage?”

“
My
mum helped me out a bit. I never told her how bad things had gotten: she thinks
I work in some accounting firm or something, and I use the little money she can
spare me to feed myself.” He stops staring into space and gets up, kicking the
chair away. “Come on, I'll show you the rest.”

“
You
don't have to if you don't want to,” says Chloe, standing up and scrunching her
ration-bag closed like a nervous schoolgirl. “If this is making you upset or
something, then - ?”

“
No,”
says Mark, opening the door and nodding for them to follow him. “I need to see
this. I need to remember what he did to me; why I'm doing this.”

“
Doing
what?”

“
Going
after the bastard.”

Neither of them reminds
him that they've lost their only lead. Neither of them has the heart.

Mark opens a door
further down and they find themselves in a room as musty as a tomb, motes of
dust dancing beneath a flickering bulb that illuminates the columns of book
cases.

“
A
library?” asks Chloe as she strolls through the door, her ration-bag clutched
to her chest.

“
The
books in here could technically put you through most entry-level college
courses. We've got plumbing, computing, business, languages, maths, history –
just about everything. I based it off of a high-school curriculum. There's some
decent fiction too.”

Jamie folds his arms
and stares around at the room, four desks with seats and cannibalised computers
in the middle like a religious plinth. The computers are missing keyboards, two
of them are without screens, and they are the pasty pale colours of a
nineteen-ninety-eight fax machine.

“
These
work?” asks Jamie, laying a hand on the only complete computer there.

“
Nah,”
says Mark. “I think people stole the important parts from the inside of the
cases. Motherboards, power supplies, so on. All gone. They weren't worth much,
anyway: they were donated by schools that were getting rid of them.”

“
That's
the streets for you, Mark,” says Jamie, crossing to the bookshelf and looking
at some of the titles. “When you spend every day thinking of where your next
meal is coming from, you learn to take advantage of any kindness.”

He looks across at
Chloe, who looks over her shoulder at him. They share a knowing look.

“
You
two went through this stuff first-hand, right?” asks Mark.

“
Two
years,” says Chloe, taking a hardback book about making wooden jewellery from
the shelves and flicking it open. She talks as though she is somewhere else,
lost in a memory and narrating it to them. “We spent two years on the streets
with nothing but the clothes on our backs and each other.”