Graft (2 page)

“Nothing.”

“What's up with you?”

“Doesn't matter. Let's crack on.”

Irish chuckles. “Don't like what you can't plan for, do you?”

Back in the road, Sol loads the chocks under the hatchback's tyres, making a mallet of his fist to wedge them in. Irish, still chuckling, stretches out on the trolley before disappearing under the car to shear its handbrake cable.

“Give us a hand then,” Irish says, wiggling his feet.

Sol takes his partner by the hems of his overalls and pulls. The trolley slides cleanly, and Irish comes out beaming.

“I'll grab the winch,” Sol says, stepping away. But as he's walking off, he hears Irish freeze.

“Sol.”

Sol looks over. “What's up?”

“Check it out.”

Sol follows his gaze. “What?”

“
Look
.”

Down the road, a bright silver saloon is pulling out of a parking space. A Lexus, probably a 2012 or 2013 model. A little too early for a conversion, which means it'll cost a fortune to run, but still blessed with smooth, clean lines. Tinted windows. Non-standard alloys. From the looks of things it's even fitted with run-flat tyres.

It's a rare sight, a car this nice. And judging by its registration plates, which start RA, it's not local either.
RA
. Sol jogs his memory.
Carlisle
?

Irish nods at Sol as if to agree with something essential. “Piece of piss,” he says.

And Sol can read his partner's mind. He shakes his head. “Don't even think about it.”

“Call it community service,” Irish says. He pulls his cap visor low. “Care in the community.”

“Not with someone in it. We're not jacking–”

“Opportunity knocks,” Irish tells him. He points at the Korean hatchback. “More guts in that Lexus than fifty of these fucken sheds.”

“Irish…”

The Lexus is being driven unsurely, tentative. The men can sense it's unfamiliar to the driver.

Then it begins to accelerate towards them, and Irish has broken away, gone, sprinting up the pavement.

“Get in the truck!” he shouts back to Sol. But before Sol has time to react – to appreciate the lines Irish is crossing, to fear the mistake his partner's making – he watches Irish salmon-dive off the pavement and up the saloon's bonnet. A sickening crump, and the Lexus skids, stalls. Irish rolls off it.

“What the
fuck!”
The driver's out already, a stocky build, dark leathers. Sol unconsciously connects the motorbike to the car for an instant, then hears his partner yelling madly. He opens the truck cab's door; watches heart in mouth as Irish springs up and shoves the driver. The driver falls gracelessly, shocked by the speed of it all.

Sol takes his hands off his face and climbs into the truck, head buzzing:
We jacked it. We jacked it. We jacked it.

The Lexus screams past, and Sol follows. He can see Irish's silhouette through the car's rear window, his shoulders jerking up and down with laughter. Just as they turn, Sol glances behind – sees in his mirror the driver staggering up the road.

Two streets over, Sol's skin liquid, he spots one of their fly-posters flapping on a lamppost:

WE BUY OLD BANGERS FOR SCRAP.

M
el's
the only person shopping in the supermarket. The cameras follow her mercilessly down each aisle – their controller a sweaty security guard wrapped in fitted mesh.

Behind a till, also watching Mel, is a teenaged girl wearing a filigreed salwar kameez and circus-bright makeup. Mel's noticed this look more recently: neon fairyland by way of raver chic. It seems hollow as far as counterculture goes – childish revolt, permitted if only because it'd be so easy to crush – but it makes her feel oddly grateful: at least someone's burning bright in the gloom.

As customers go, the security guard doesn't have much to watch. He thinks he's got Mel down pat: a slight but cunning woman, a stray with a limp – like a past operation only did so much. The lights don't do much for her complexion, either. Regardless, he amuses himself with crass scores –
hips and lips and arse
– for something to do when he's not enforcing his own brand of corporal law.

Mel is oblivious to the guard's rotten gaze. She's here for the essentials: wet wipes, baby oil, tea bags, cotton pads. Desperate for the cash, she'd slipped a twenty from last night's takings.

That said, Mel doesn't intend on paying for much. She's already squirrelled a few items up her sleeve, shrewdly putting cheaper items in the basket as cover.

“Looking for anything, miss?” the checkout girl calls between the aisles. Mel knows it's the girl's job to sound suspicious, but it rankles.

“Vegetables,” Mel calls back. “Broccoli?”

They share a sad little laugh.

“There's powdered stuff,” the girls says, pointing. “Round there.”

“Not proper though, is it?” Mel asks. She actually tastes broccoli for a second. Salted, buttered. The texture of a stem crushed between her back teeth.

The girl frowns. “Heard of it, but I never ate it.”

Mel goes towards her. “How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven?”

“Yeah, why?”

Mel smiles. “I'm being daft,” she says. “Eyes aren't up to much… But look at you. You're beautiful, aren't you – nothing to worry about there. Can't believe you haven't tried broccoli, though. It's only been missing a few years…”

The girl shrugs. “That powder smells rank anyway.”

The thought of being so young again makes Mel touch a hand to her belly. A dull pain there, radiating. Some failure of empathy. When she refocuses on the girl's features it's like she's seeing the composited faces of every woman employed by the Cat Flap. That this girl's eleven but appears sixteen says something – and the closer Mel looks, the more she sees a worldweariness etched in her expression. Suddenly, Mel remembers herself lying with him –
him
– in their old bed, morning sun turning the windows into luminous squares, and vocalizing that trite old question:
But what kind of world would we bring them into?

Mel blinks. Mel remembers needles sliding home. A series of bad decisions entwining, a blackened spaghetti of mistakes–

She shakes her head. The shelves around her are empty, their backlights fuzzing.

What if my girls have lied about their ages?

She stumbles.

“Miss?” the checkout girl says. “Miss?”

Mel snaps back. Striplights waning. “I'm alright, love,” she says, and turns away. More empty spaces. A basket of used meat cartridges, donated, beneath a handwritten sign reading FREE MEAT JUICE.

Mel snakes round to the supplements. She stacks her basket and pushes more boxes up her sleeves, their edges catching on old scars. Each item justified with a hypnotic refrain:
this is my way of looking after things
. In the next aisle she does the same for toiletries, rolling packets around her thin arms to disguise their shape.

Satisfied then, she moves for the till. It's all rehearsed, this – pulled off at so many other shops before. She unloads the basket and tuts loudly, then makes a show of patting down her pockets. A song and dance about tipping out her bag. A pained face to the checkout girl. Lastly she says: “Gone and forgot my bleeding purse, haven't I? What. A.
Pudding
.”

The girl looks stupefied. Copper bolts through her hair. “That's OK,” she says. “You can… you can leave it here if you want. I'll keep an eye on it.”

Mel smiles slowly. She touches the girl's arm. “Would you?”

The girl nods, reveals a cautious smile of her own.

Mel checks her watch, mindful of the boxes piled up behind it. “See. Knew you were a gem. I'll nip back in a bit, yeah?”

The girl nods.

Mel taps the girl's hand and goes to leave. Just before the sliding doors, though, she hears a whistle.

“In a rush?”

Mel clocks the security guard in his mesh wrapper, grinning yellow teeth. He points up and she looks into his camera. He whistles again.

“Come over here.”

Mel goes to him, hands in her pockets. “I'm not a dog,” she spits, mindful of the checkout girl. “You whistle at a fucking
dog
.”

The guard steps out of his cage and motions to her sleeves. “What you got up here, then?”

Mel scowls. “My bloody arms.”

He's a big guy, the guard, and before she even realizes he's locked off her wrist, twisted it up and back. He pulls her into him, and she smells his mouth, sour and livid. She wrestles to look back, but the checkout assistant can't see them. There's a tattoo on the inside of his forearm – a bird, feathers pluming, falling, with crosses for eyes.

“Clever little tealeaf, aren't you?” the guard says. “We lopped off hands for less in Afghan. Had this kid once, right – rooting through all our stuff he were…”

“I'll scream,” Mel tells him. “And then I'll make sure you never piss standing up again.”

The guard shows her a black tongue. “Screamed out there an' all. Specially when your first cut didn't go right the way through…”

She squirms against him. “Let go.”

But the guard simply shrugs, unfazed. “Only doing my job,” he says. “Doesn't have to be like this.”

“You're not wrong,” she whispers.

The guard pretends to look hurt. “Don't recognize me, do you? Were only after a discount – a freebie if you're being nice. I do you a favour… you do me a favour.”

Mel stops struggling. She looks at him levelly.

“Course I know who you are,” he says. “Everyone does. Should probably pay more attention to your regular johns, though – not the best customer service otherwise, is it?”

Mel nods. Wary now. The guard's grip slackens and she yanks free, rubs her wristbone. A punter? The stolen goods have travelled up her arms and started scratching the furrowed skin of her elbows. Irritating more scars. “You're right,” she says.

Yet the facts feel wrong. And the main fact is this: in her house you respect the punters as they respect you – but it's hard to spot the worst of them.

“Now hop it,” the guard says. “And warm up a spot. I'll be round to see you all soon.”

Y
emerged
from induced coma into the cruellest light: a space so bright she had to shut her eyes and scream to offset the burn. Her heart jumped at the shift in reality, and she remembered to inhale – stole a breath like it was her first.

Her senses cycled. She tuned in; knew she'd been absent, knew she was flat on a sterile-smelling surface, and that it was uncomfortable and cold. Oddly she couldn't remember the word for this surface – nothing came to mind, or quite matched the experience. With this dissonance came a throbbing pain in one shoulder, and the sense she couldn't lift her arm. She felt hollow. She took another breath and weighed her unease. It was relief, too, she decided. Finally –
finally
– she'd escaped her recursive dreams, the vast emptiness of them. Finally she'd escaped the grey box that'd encased her for so long. The looming black tower had gone, and with it a mass of dread.

But soon she realized her new box was much worse –

While Y recognized her skin, its familiar texture, it was tight and hairless, and the forms sliding beneath were alien. There was a solidity to her muscles that somehow told her everything was different. And when she reached to massage her sore shoulder, she found she couldn't understand the joint of it – couldn't fathom her own body – and felt the lurch of freefall. She didn't know who she was. Her name was absent. Her past and all the ideas she had hadfor a future. She'd dissipated – gone. And as she ran her hands over her head, she found raw skin there, too.

In fact, Y was sure of nothing but the certainty she'd lost herself. That before there was a named woman in this goosebumped skin, and that now she inhabited a stranger.

She held her breath, an instinctive way to slow the whole world down for long enough to find another moment of clarity. And that was this: she lay alone on a plinth in a plastic case.

Her panic was absolute.

Y tore herself up and clawed at her bonds. Adjusting to the white-out, she saw they were bunched cables and lines filled with a black, viscous liquid that moved into her veins. There were drip-bags, bloodied rags, swaddling. It revolted her. And she screamed and fought and bit and clawed in vain, and the sounds she made were the stranger's, came from another body, and the fear they inspired only made the terrible light brighter. Here she was, trapped in some kind of incubator, a nightmare folded within a nightmare, and her interior world was returning as a vapour, not dream-vague but livid and real, and all around her were the grey walls again, their images double-exposed on the incubator's reflective surfaces, and above, projected onto the ceiling, the black tower had returned. It was waiting.

Y spiralled into herself. She took in brushed metal surfaces and the seamless machinery that attended her – the clamps on her ankles. She observed her body numbly, the tightly wound bandages around her swollen arm. She caressed the incubator walls – suedey to the touch, heated by a network of visible filaments inside. A crushing limbo persisted: she was imprisoned in a body between the wakeful and the dead, and nothing that came from her mouth matched her thoughts.

She wanted to be sick.

“Stop struggling.”

It was a woman's voice. Stout and clear but not unkind.

Y locked up, a startled animal.

The ceiling flickered, and on it a grey square appeared. Y watched as the square jerked into rectangles. Now separated, the shapes began to circle each other and duplicate, tessellating as they went.

Y said something, but her throat garbled it.

“You'll learn,” the woman said.

The shapes began to lose their order. They re-merged and spat fractals. Then a fierce geometric form came together from all the disparate pieces and detached from the ceiling; dripped down to meet her. Y winced and closed her eyes, but even there she saw its pattern, a vivid tableau imprinted on the reverse of her lids. The shape vibrated, had its own resonance.

“You're cooked,” the woman said. “Ready. Done. Dinged.”

Y was sweating, panting. The shapes grew more volatile. Next came a hissing sound. Y tried to push open the unit. Nothing budged. She could've been entombed in concrete. And then the woman said: “We've worked hard on this. You're something of a triumph.”

Y didn't reply. She couldn't. Her throat simply burbled and popped.

“Do you like pain?”

Rising horror. The concept seemed to mean something.

“Pain…”

Something twinged in Y's feet. She felt warmth, saw a bright corona, and watched a knot of snake-like machines descend from the incubator ceiling.

“Not pain?” the woman whispered. Y screamed in her way, roiling in her own meat. The metal snakes began to constrict her legs, dislocated their geared jaws as if they meant to swallow her feet. Y tried to kick out, but the ankle clamps held fast.

“Or do we try pleasure?”

With this, the incubator became oily. The snakes disintegrated and a tropical dampness closed around Y's skin. It was filmy – a liquid fleece that shifted over her. “You must never forget who controls what,” the woman said. “Who controls
you
.”

Static hissed. Hermetic seals broke. The world grew noisy. “Welcome to Cradle Suite Three,” the woman said. “It's about time you met your brothers and sisters.”

Now the incubator chamber rose away, smoothly pulled from seals around the cradle. Y sat up as best she could, drawing wretched, ragged breaths. At the foot of her cradle was a masked woman in a tight bodysuit. And all around, in rows that ran forwards and backwards from her own, Y saw hundreds more cradles, identical cases hanging above each and every one.

“Your training begins tomorrow,” the woman told her. “Out on the lawns.” Y was faint from sitting, and her back was weak. She felt herself trying to nod, and, despite resisting, found it wasn't a reaction she controlled. The woman's ears moved upwards, and her eyes creased above her mask. She was offering something, Y realized.

The woman came to her side. She pressed an object into Y's hand. Through layers of swirling colour, pulled far into the distance, Y saw it was a pendant – a pearl fragment, so tiny and glossy, that hung on a slender chain. If she recognized it, the connection was faint. It had a hint of something deliberately forgotten, or severed.

“Wear it unselfconsciously for him,” the woman said. And then she glided away.