The Folded Man (21 page)

19.

They see one of these pigs with the doors hanging off its back. Rum buggers had got a pipebomb in there. They see a pram filled with bottles, virgin-white rags in their collars, yet to be lit.

They see children bouncing on a holoboard they've pulled off a pawn shop. So many shutters ripped off their frames, bent out like the bristles of old toothbrushes. Tendrils of tear gas, the ghost of cotton smog. The war cries.

And they all squirm when Tariq's pig runs a barricade and comes away with a bloodied protestor on its nose. Through double-skin glass, he's shouting all sorts. Tariq swings left but adrenaline makes the bloke too sticky. Dead keen, this one, someone says. So Tariq brakes till he's gone under the front wing, and they hope the half-track's ground clearance was enough because you sure as hell can't see out the back owing to the ash and dust and muck on the windows.

Nobody talks. Nobody says anything as they swing by a mob setting fires; scattering as the diesel engine sounds out. Bodies line the road, statue-hard, exactly as they've fallen. Near them, a woman crawls along the pavement, one side of her head pulped, her cheeks puffy. She's calling a name – David, David, it sounds like. But they have to drive on because sticks and stones are clattering off the panels.

One brick digs itself into the first pane of the windscreen. It has a red corner, a clump of hair. Something pink and fatty on it. Then a flash of something bright zaps across the bonnet – fumes alight, turning blue, and gone again. Masonry rolls off the buildings; endless bits of paper and insulation riding air as though caught in the fetch of a wave.

Another corner, another scene. An old man sitting on the kerb with a young boy across his lap. His white shirt reddening against the boy's belly. Desperate coppers at the top of the road, sprinting towards the half-track and waving for it to stop. Beyond them, a gang with burning road barriers legging it after them.

The half-track doesn't stop. Two people bounce off, ploughed to the sides. The gang are flanking the half-track, black, brown, white faces through the windows. A shotgun flares, a dull pop –

The broken lines and broken helmets.

We've lost the streets, says Tariq.

No, says, Brian, still caught between his dreams and these nightmares. We've won them back.

 

Further on, farther away, Brian asks how they found him. Mainly because Colin's box already says enough about why they wanted to.

Brian says, Fluke or chance or – pointing at Tariq – was it this bastard here, his pals back in there?

Shifting his gaze to the mirror, Tariq coughs. Noah takes some kind of cue.

Do you trust me?

That was Noah.

Don't know any more, says Brian.

Young lass, weren't she Tariq? says Noah. Twenty or twenty-one. Dead bonny, too – you would, and you'd be rude not to. But she saunters up not too long back, can't for life of me remember where, and says she knows me. She knows you an' all. Knows about everything.

Brian's skin shifts on its frame.

So I say, I say, What are you, some kind of witch? And she goes, No darling, I'm an empress.

Juliet? says Brian. That her name?

Noah shakes his head. She tells me she's called Constance.

Brian stares at him.

Dark hair? You're sure that were her name?

Oh aye. You wouldn't want to miss her. And she goes, Your friend Brian's a very silly billy –

Brian throws the flask, sends white globes spinning across the bench seat, the roof lining.

But how? he screams. She's a little girl!

Once was, Noah says.

Then she's a frigging witch as well, whispers Brian.

No, says Noah sadly.

She's definitely an empress.

 

The pig rolls on. The pig rolls through the broken streets, the burning city. The slate tide washing blood to the grids.

The twin-smell of diesel and sweat; the burning paper and the bodies.

Brian, Noah says. His eyes seem so sad. It's sorted, now.

Brian nods. His red-rimmed eyes, his face the colour of t-shirts you've washed too many times.

Noah has a syringe. Noah has a firm grip and a vein worth aiming for.

This won't hurt –

20.

It didn't hurt.

But the sunshine does. The hangover.

On first glance, there's sunshine, a piercing view. Then green hills, glinting glass bodies of a city wrapped around itself in glee. The steaming towers of industry. Wind turbines, stretched across the hills like an upscaled Normandy cemetery, all spinning hard for the better good.

Here's a relic of something they all knew, only fresh and tall and proud and bright. Together they stand on its blunt tip, its box-flat roof. The snub-nose spire of an icon they lost. No fire, no guns –

There's a digital sign board running the top panel. It says, IT'S A BRIGHT OUTLOOK IN THE NORTH.

All at once, in tides:

He's standing on the Beetham tower, but before the fall. Standing with hands under his armpits, his tail just touching the floor.

Brian gets motion sickness, then. A kind of vertigo. He leans and spews, mainly at the realisation. It's all fluid. It's all black. A filthy by-product of a very real shock. Still black, still rotten –

How? He says. How?

But that's the thing with rhetorical questions. Nobody needs to answer.

Brian looks down and takes in the stainless steel piping that encases his pelvis. The stoppers, the rubber feet. Servo motors at knee-height, coils and springs and pneumatic rams.

How-do, says a woman.

In front of him, in deck chairs, Juliet and her daughter, Constance. To their side, a purple Transit van, side door open.

Noah. Tariq. And Colin.

Brian says, Am I dead? He must say it earnestly, too – they all pull a smile.

No, says Juliet. Not dead.

Asleep?

No, not that either. But you can move. Try it.

Brian, his throat burning, inches forward. The frame around him gives, hisses, takes his weight and interprets his intent. As it compensates, he bobs up, advancing slowly. He winces. He's still very weak. Very unsteady. He can feel bruises in places you've never had a bruise.

It'll take you a bit of time to get used to it, Juliet says. But here, you have plenty of that.

Where am I?

Manchester.

How is this Manchester?

Another Manchester. We brought you here.

We? How?

Me, Colin, Constance. In the van.

Colin's not –

No, not this one.

Where's my box?

Juliet smiles. She points to the van.

Come on, now. It's not yours.

Brian, dazed, simply nods.

And he – Colin – isn't dead?

Not this version of him, no.

You mean you keep copies?

Sort of. Anything else?

Are you from space?

No. But another place. You're our neighbours by five. This, this Manchester, this is the middle-point between yours and ours.

So how do you get around?

Juliet points to the van again.

Brian puts his face in his hands.

It's okay, says Juliet. You aren't expected to take it all in.

But my box –

The box was a trap. Bait. Whatever you want to call it. And not for you, either. Ian's supposed to open it at his event, isn't he. In that quiet room afterwards. You saw it, didn't you?

I was there.

We were intervening. The why doesn't bear mentioning.

But you'd approached me before then. The house. The shoe-shop.

Juliet nods. Well, I once asked if you believed in fate, she says.

Aye.

Well how d'you think we had this frame ready for you?

I don't follow.

With some degree of variance, you were going to end up here.

You can see the future?

Enough as needs seeing. The past as well. When we realised you got involved it had to be checked out.

Then you are a witch.

No more than you're a monster, she tells him.

You let me suffer. You let this box affect me –

Said this before as well, haven't I. It's not all about you.

But the box. The box and the riots. The police station –

I'm not sorry, says Juliet. You had plenty of opportunity. Would've been fine if you pair hadn't stuck your noses so far in. And look – what's in that box is part of something wider we still don't fully understand. A by-product of slipping between worlds. Used properly, it seems to make its own distortions there and then. Used improperly . . . well of course we have to clean up the mess.

I don't follow. If you knew I'd take the box, you knew what would happen. You didn't have to let it.

Brian. We can't just change things without serious consideration and planning. One small thing can be so enormous a day, a week, a decade later. So we planned on-the-fly – a way to get the box that wouldn't mean altering too much, too suddenly. I can't account for your will, your weakness. Nor Noah's. Nobody can. Plus time is so flexible when you know how.

People are dead. Diane –

I know. And it's . . . she . . . that was regrettable.

You don't know anything. You're saying you could've stopped that. You could've stepped in sooner. You let me think Noah was too.

I've had to grow a hard heart, Brian. We tried. We tried before Ian got to you. Before Noah could change. We watched to understand you – but first we had to find you. The right you – not a you from one slip, two slips across. Not a you on another path; some other string. So when I came to your house, I'd got the right person. But by the time you'd got the box, I'd been thrown off by a you who made a different decision altogether. Do you see?

Then why Ian at all?

We're investigating him. His future interests. On the course he was taking, he'd become a big problem for a lot of people. Don't mince my words, Brian. With that man, genocide wouldn't be far off.

Brian looks away.

We can't be too careful about what's changed and what isn't, Juliet says. The box was intended to help Ian . . . undo himself.

I see, says Brian. But all this and you don't even say who you work for.

That's because we work for everybody. You, me and everybody.

The Wilbers say that and all, says Brian. Ian's lot – the nationalists, skin-heads – they all say that. The council minders and the rich beggars in their towers. Everybody works for everybody. And everybody works for themselves.

And you then. Who do you work for? What have you done for somebody, anybody?

I left a boy to rot.

You got Constance working for it, too, have you? He gestures at Tariq and Noah. Because she came for them two, didn't she?

What's that got to do with anything? A distant her, yes. But like I say, it gets complicated. Logistics get tight. You make do. You have to fill in the holes any way you can. As and when they happen. Constance – the older Constance – had favours to pay off. It was necessary –

Is this terminal? What I'm turning into? This cancer you've put through my bones?

Brian looks over at Noah. The audience is rapt. His condition the way it is. He already knows it's terminal. The vomit was sludge, inky. Its foul taste didn't suggest something that might improve.

Probably, yes.

Then – and he pauses – I'd like to take our box back to Ian myself. It'll be my trident. See what he finds in the bottom of himself.

 

They're pretending like it's happy families on the roof. On top of this ghost that in Brian's world turns to a pillar of light by night.

Brian
walks circles in his new frame, his servo-powered zimmer
. How convenient all that other crap was – the chairs he
lost during earlier nights. Seems a hollow victory – not least
when you consider how Brian's thoughts are tangled around
revenge and redemption. His old buddy, his old pal, Noah
, sitting there with hunched wings, obscene, playing rock paper scissors
with a giddy little Constance. Colin, bearded skinny Colin, who
died in another world and didn't in this one
. Tariq, the copper, an arrow-straight, upstanding copper. Juliet. This
witch in a vest. Constance. The empress on her forty
-seven-storey throne. And Brian, standing, walking, all on his
own.

Yet in some ways, Brian does not want for anything. Not weed, not beer, not cigarettes nor coke. Maybe a bath. A salt-water soak. But mostly, Ian's head on a platter; hands tight round his throat.

Now, Colin asks Brian for a quiet word. He motions to the van. A small favour, he says. To help us understand what's going on.

Across the roof, Colin can tell Brian is anxious about the van. So Colin gives him the facts. It has jets. Some kind of fission device to power it. Gravity manipulators and other fancy words. He says, Don't look so upset. Where I'm from, we all use these.

Brian listens. They walk on a little more. Or Brian does his best to.

Brian asks, Did you know the you on that stage?

Colin smiles.

He came over from fifteen across, I think. Truthfully, I don't tend to deal with myselves. Freaks you out. Juliet manages HR.

So you've got all these versions of you selling ideas across the gaps?

Colin nods. Smiles.

The ones we could convince, I suppose. It's a war, where we're from, he says. Have to fund these things, don't you?

Brian squeezes his nose.

And there are more? Doing what you're doing?

A fair few in the group now, aye. Some drift – lapse. Kind of hard to keep track when there are so many versions of everyone. Plus a few found better lives through the slip, and didn't bother coming back. Hard to blame them really. So much to see, isn't there. The little differences between one world and the very next. But likewise you can go on forever, till one day something makes you pause –

Not much worth finding in ours, then, says Brian.

Colin unzips a holdall. Inside there's a flask, some kind of autoclave.

The politics are
interesting, he says, looking at Brian's tail. And the
box . . . the biology is absolutely fascinating –

Brian grunts.

The politics.

Sure the politics. Everyone seems to want the old world, the old way, but can't agree on the right road back there. And the more you look at that problem, the more you can't see any way round it. I don't understand who's protesting for what in that country of yours. It's like it's just something for people to do.

And what if it is? says Brian. Nowt else, is there.

Probably best it burns. Here, let me just clean up –

Colin squirts the air from a syringe. He swabs Brian's forearm. He says, Really appreciate this. It'll help us understand.

The needle slides home. The syringe body fills with a navy blue. Colin's eyes go wide. He taps the plastic; holds it against the light.

Well look at that, goes Colin. You're royalty.

 

If the box posed a question about what he was for, Brian knows the answer now. Because the enormity of all this doesn't really wash. The dizzying image of clean Manchester; Salford, there again; the low clouds putting a hat on the Pennines. Because it's hollow. The kind of dream a full bladder will pull you away from.

There's a bloating woman hanging over his staircase. There's a toothless boy in the town hall –

On the roof, the highest point in this warped, fairytale version of Manchester, Juliet clears her throat. She asks something –

The breeze catches an edge of the Beetham and drags out a note. Brian remembers the songs of this tower. In strong winds, the whole city could hear it hum.

Juliet repeats the question. She says, And it's safer here. This walker frame is yours to keep. You'll have the support you want, the care you need –

Brian says, No.

Brian says, You have to take me back.

And with that, his heart stops cracking.

Because
you love your country in spite of your country.

 

Brian and Noah look out to Werneth Low from a tower that never fell. That was never bombed. Between them – between the point of the hill and the building's base on Deansgate – lie ten miles of buildings and roads and parks and homes. Railways and bus routes. Corner shops and pub dinners –

Like the olden days, says Brian. Pretty plain without your adverts and logos, mind. Hardly a tube of neon, is there.

Not my cup of tea, says Noah. Wouldn't be, though. Didn't decorate any of it, did I?

Brian shakes his head.

So it's a fresh palette. It's a canvas for my best yet. An outrageous bloody playground for me to colour in. Starting with a pair of tits and a grin –

Brian laughs. The walking suit shivers around him.

And they aren't a bad bunch, you know, says Noah. Juliet got me out of a hole, too.

Well, I can't thank any of you, says Brian.

That's all right, son. I don't want that.

Aye, but I want to. But your promises. Your lies –

Well if you're really leaving, I'll at least come for the ride.

I want that kid out of the town hall. You can come as far as there. It'll be one last thing. Bring him here. Make sure he's looked after. Besides, them things on your back make for a better Superman.

Noah smiles.

OK, he says, hand on heart. One last thing.