Graft (6 page)

T
he Transit job's
a time-sink. It's why Sol hardly notices the car pull in. The tall, easy-limbed man who steps out. And despite the car door slam, feet on gravel, the headlight glare, Sol only really reacts when the man's shadow spills across the workshop floor.

Sol downs tools and checks the van's bonnet catch. Looks once, thinks twice, and picks his spanner back up. Is this it? Is this the man in bike leathers?

The stranger seems to fill the whole gap under the roller doors. He's completely still.

“Alright in there pal? Pete about?”

Sol looks at his watch. Late evening. “Sorry,” he says. “You just missed him.”

The stranger shrugs. “It's Solomon, yeah?”

Sol squints into the diffuse. Raises a hand to shield his eyes. It's tricky to make out the man's features, odd to hear his full name from a stranger. He looks down, vision smeared purple. He unpockets a rag and wipes his face.

“You alright mate?”

Sol steps forward. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

The stranger takes note of Sol's awkward stance: feet inwardly turned, one hand concealed. He reads it as a sign, a vulnerability, and steps inside. “Hiya,” he says. The workshop lights pick out channels in his clean-shaven head. “What's a big lad like you doing being timid around me? Put it down, eh? We're all friends here.”

Sol's grip tightens around the spanner.

“Got a reputation, this place,” the stranger tells him.

Sol laughs nervously. “I dread to think.”

“Hard to find, mind. Wouldn't know you were here, all the holo-boards you've got plastered on the fence.”

“They pay the bills,” Sol says. “We rent out the ad space.”

The stranger smiles with a fraction of his mouth. “Can't pay you that much, though, can they? The LEDs are knackered on two of them.” He motions to a chunky powerpack in the corner. Its thick cable runs the whole length of the far wall, then disappears through it. A shoddy hack job if the stranger knows better. He smiles again. “If you pay your bills at all.”

Sol walks over and holds out a hand. “What you after?”

The stranger leaves Sol hanging. “We've got a vehicle swinging by for mods. Two or three days. Did my boss call ahead?”

Sol racks his brains, eyes rolled upwards as if to petition some god of memory. The problem is that Sol works with so many bosses, has met so many of these lackeys.

“Who's your boss?”

“Doesn't matter,” the stranger says. But something about his response nudges Sol's primal tripwires.

“No,” Sol says back. “I guess it doesn't.”

The stranger sits down on a pedestal of part-worn tyres. He picks at a pricing sticker near his crotch. “Work must be nice and steady for men of your talents.”

Sol wobbles his head. “Not too bad if you know where to look. Listen, though. Not being funny but I want to get off home soon. What's the project?”

The stranger doesn't skip a beat. “Security.”

Sol looks at his free palm, thoughtful. “Attack or defence?”

“Bit of both.”

“We don't build tanks, Mr–”

“No names!” the stranger snaps. “All you need to know is that my client's got a cross-country journey to finish in one piece. A to B on some less-than-pleasant roads.”

“Southerner, then? Isn't he better off flying?”

The stranger doesn't respond.

“Maybe you don't get it,” Sol tells him. “Ballistic glass isn't cheap – or even easy to come by. Pete's waited two months for secondhand stuff before now. Then there's sheet composite for linings… bespoke mouldings… Unless you've got an industrial printer and CNC you're gonna be at the mercy of your suppliers. And they're shipping most of this heavy gear overseas anyway.”

The stranger rubs his thumb and forefinger together. “All about this, though, innit? Wouldn't be right if we didn't put our boys first. But seriously, it's worth your while. And we've got some guys abroad who like dabbling in a bit of supply and demand – a nice networking opportunity for you.”

Sol looks outside. Sky the colour of a wet scab. He can feel himself wavering – a feeling deep-set in his shoulders. His mouth's dry. Then he grins. A sensation comes over him like the rush of relapse. It's not like he needs an excuse to stay at work, anyway – to avoid the lonely flat, his attempts at living a wholesome life there. “You want to come through, then? I'll stick a brew on–”

The stranger shakes his head. “Very kind, but I've got more errands to run.”

“Right,” Sol says.

The stranger reaches inside his jacket; produces a roll of dog-eared paper. “Just have a scan of this before I go.” He launches the bung like a javelin.

Sol makes the catch. “These blueprints? Bit retro, isn't it?”

“Plans, yes.”

Sol rolls off the elastic band. Opens the first page. His smile is gone.

“What?” the stranger asks.

Sol shakes his head, flicks through the sheets behind, accelerates to the last page. “We don't – can't – build
tanks
,” he says. “We don't work to this kind of spec. And if this is for a
car
… seriously. Chiller units? Backup power? These harnesses? What's he hoping to carry, your man? None of our equipment is…” He fumbles the words. “We'd never get the tolerances right.”

The stranger comes forward and passes Sol a card. “I've done my research. Seen some of the kit that rolls out of here – pig-rigs, armoured limos. Drone-proofing. That mad trike thing you did – the one with the turret.”

Sol nods slowly. “That was Pete's stuff.”

“So I know you're good for it,” the stranger says. “Get on and call me when the parts turn up. Boss is hands-off, but likes to hear about progress. Goes without saying he likes a nice result as well. The base vehicle gets here within the week. And me, I don't really give a toss how you get the gear. Just sort it fast and we're all happy bunnies.”

Sol scans the card – nameless, numbered. When he looks up again, the stranger's pointing at the Lexus. “And this little beauty over here,” he says. “On the market, that, or what? Quality, that – smart-looking.”

Sol turns to the Lexus. It's meant to be stripped down, sold on. And yet he finds himself nodding.
Opportunity knocks.
It might be in great shape, with plenty to salvage for resale straight off the shelf – but get rid now and they've made a few quid fast. Not to mention the fact he can't shake his jitters about having it here.

“Make me an offer I can't refuse.”

“Two?”

“Two ton? It's worth at least a grand. Run-flats alone'd get two… and there's hardly anything on the clock.”

The stranger chuckles. “Give it a good wash and I'll think about five.”

Sol mulls it, shakes his head. “Nah. And to be honest, I don't deal with people whose names I don't know.”

The man holds out his hand. “It's Roy,” he says. “Just Roy.”

“Roy,” Sol says, and takes Roy's hand. “You can have it for nine.”

A
n afternoon off
. Hands slanted into her coat pockets – one round a can of pepper spray – Mel goes south through the city. She threads between the ghosts of Deansgate before cutting down past Castlefield's reconstituted Roman fort, now a makeshift camp.

On foot, over time, she's created more and more of these shortcuts – delighting in her personal map as it grows more complex; as she links her old Manchester with its reshaped topography. With every walk, its new pathways are becoming shorter, its new structures more recognizable, its developing enclaves more delineated. The changed environment as she first found it, seen with fresh eyes, coloured with new smells, cavernous spaces where grand buildings once stood – is segueing to familiarity.

Despite the violence of previous years, it's still cobbled under the arches of the viaducts that pass over here, and the homeless in their sleeping bags cluster round the pillars as petals. Water drips from these structures almost constantly, and after dodging their streams Mel emerges into the canal basin proper: Catalan Square. Here the warehouses and bridges and quay markers create a unique space before her: an openness rarely found elsewhere in the city. She doesn't break pace.

On the water sit many barges, most owned by runners selling their paper-bagged goods to hazy figures who emerge as stereotypes from the shadows, from the doorways, only to slink away again. She smells food, infused cooking oils, woodburner smoke. What she can see of the canal water is widow-black and seemingly surfaceless, light sucked in and held in place. Mel passes a barge selling books, their wrinkled spines packed against its windows. “Classics!” the hawker shouts at her. She grunts at him, raises a hand. Now that work is everything, reading seems frivolous. Even daydreaming feels wasteful, conceited.

“Won't get anywhere without them!” shouts the hawker, fading fast. “The future's in these pages!”

And Mel walks on.

Down in Castlefield there's often a sense of being watched – because usually you are. Squatters live in these mills and warehouses – knocking through old conversions to create broken utopias – and the building entrances are well fortified. Look up, and you might glimpse a lens flash from a pair of binoculars, a camera, even a telescope.

Knowing this, Mel finds a bench this side of Merchants' Bridge – the bouncy bridge, as they call it – that's out of sight. Unfortunately it's tufted over and looks wet, so she moves across to another bench on Castle Street. This one overlooks Lock 92, where the Rochdale Canal narrows and drops into the basin. A place to think, scheme, or just recall. She sits and pulls out Jase's catalogue and a fresh packet of cigarettes and takes in the sounds of running water, the sparring of well-natured haggling, and the fires crackling on the barges behind. Dead ahead is the main span of Bridgewater Viaduct, with its distinctive off-white struts like the balusters of a parapet. Just left of that, the timeless-seeming hole where the Beetham Tower once stood.

For Mel, coming to Castlefield is an almost spiteful act – a deliberate effort to reclaim a territory as her own. When you separate from someone you love, your shared spaces so often become exclusion zones, force-fielded from your future self by painful memories. Break back into them, replant your flag, and you gain strength, put yourself back in control. Even if that means writing over something – double-exposing the film.

That said, there are spaces she's yet to reclaim – a spot on Winter Hill, above the city, beneath the old transmitter tower, where the Manchester conurbation smears out under its own haze. Here Sol had proposed to her after a McDonald's in her car. Not the romantic sort, was he, with the smell of barbecue sauce on his fingers; black oil forever like tattoos under his nails. And then Werneth Low on the other side of the basin, another fine view of the city, where they'd fumbled around until a man with a dog whistled and shone his torch through their steamed windows. A lot of embarrassment because her backside was right up in the air, and Sol in hysterics because Mel farted out of fright.

Mel shivers. Even now the memory of his laugh is infectious.

Still, none of it matters anymore. The past doesn't exist. So Mel crosses her legs and lights a cigarette and starts to read the catalogue.

The editor's note is written in English, but not with many words she knows. To her it almost has the feel of academic marginalia – words thrown in for words' sake. She flicks through to find close-up shots of different people, set against dark backgrounds. The images seem like old clippings, post-coital portraits, and they give Mel a strange thrill. It feels secret, fascinating, almost arousing, to study their perfect contours, however desensitized she might be to their function. But it's weird, too – there's something clinical about their presentation, and the captions are couched in jarringly familiar terms:
punter this
,
punter that
. They'd done their research, for sure.

Objectively, Mel isn't ashamed to concede that there's a kind of frontier here, expanding behind the scenes. It makes sense, given the march of things. Similarly, and despite Jase's heavy-handed sales pitch, she can also admit that looking ahead is no bad thing.
After all
, she thinks,
to save money can mean surviving
. And even from a human perspective – a
feeling
perspective – a warped moralization, bringing in extra revenue could mean feeding the women and their dependants for longer. And wasn't the point of all this to get by? She remembers Sol saying something similar to her once, channelling his father's politics to justify yet another late night at the workshop, and now his voice rings through her head again: “Ambition is the force behind everything,” he's saying.

Suddenly overwhelmed, she lights another cigarette and decides to walk the longest way home.

She thinks:
If it's only a trial.
She thinks:
You can be rewarded in the next life
.

I
n the workshop office
, Sol spreads Roy's plans and pins down the corners. It's too late, but now he's committed, he's excited by it – it's exactly the kind of job that keeps him away from his flat.

First up, the parts. Owing to dead mobile networks and a council-controlled, council-rationed, council-monitored internet connection, Sol's invested in an encrypted landline switch for making the workshop's orders. It means routing into a proxy hub and back out through several landline handlers, each more deeply buried in concrete than the last.

Sol's primary contact has a local voice. Buried beneath the city, the tunnels, or maybe even a bunker. From the cross-chat – ghostly voices that occasionally waft in and out of the call – Sol concludes that this handler also looks after some pot growers up on the moors.