Graft (5 page)

“Will you just sod off, please?”

Jeff starts to laugh. Hearing it, Jase turns to him, shoes squeaking on their heels. “We like to say our products sell themselves,” he tells Mel. “Don't we, Jeff? And we know Melanie's long-range plan isn't going to hold up.”

“God's sakes,” Mel says, picking up the brochure. “If I hold on to this, will you leave me alone?”

“You won't regret it,” Jase replies, clearly in his element. Mel could swear he winks. “Have a quick flick through and we'll be in touch. Let's say… how's later this week?”

“Whatever.” Mel shelves the brochure below the counter and clasps her hands.

“And remember,” Jase adds. “We're talking significant savings over ten, fifteen, even twenty years… Not to mention room for growth on your new venture, if and when you take it.”

“Twenty years?” Now it's Mel's turn to smirk. “Sweetheart, listen. I'll be long dead and buried by then.”

T
he Rose sits
in a hernia of the M60 – Manchester's orbital motorway. It used to be a sandwich trailer called Mega Baps but grew so popular the owner added a roof and four walls, and finally a bar. Together these things made it a rarity before the troubles. Now it's almost unique: a roadside pub that sells a half-decent homebrew. Its relative distance from the city means it's stayed more or less the same, with a brisk trade round the clock. But instead of benches outside, there are dozens of armoured haulage vehicles, half-tracks and courier bikes in disarray – their engines and bonnets steaming from harsh trips up the country. There's even the odd luxury marque with statement wheels – a blunt signifier of gangsters on safari. To Roy it's always seemed like the perfect illustration of things. Caught in dusk, seen from beneath the pub's awning, the car park resembles an aftermath.

All this makes the Rose a preferred spot for Roy, who, while anonymous here, has his corner, is left well alone.

A few windows were broken earlier this evening, and the chill is noticeable. At the bar, glass fragments winking from the carpet, the regulars tell Roy that a dozen lads turned up on motorbikes and tried to raid the place. Has he heard the rumour, they ask, that a gang of orphans living in the old city tunnels have turned bandit? Roy smiles at such a romantic idea; he knows the real marauder gangs make their cash out in the fortress suburbs – Didsbury, Hale – or the even smaller towns deeper into Cheshire, as well as farther north. The best have got out of Manchester entirely – left the reins of the city's underbelly to the Wilbers: a local slaver-gang, which, with its well-paid privateers and brutal reputation, has all but monopolized the local labour market, and benefits from most of the petty crime too.

Roy sips his half, ruminating. In the olden days, journalists would've had a field day with a story like that. Like they did in South Yorkshire after the drone raid in the hills. But then, he knows better than most that there's no arguing with what people will do if they're desperate. How fast those blacks and whites can smudge to grey.

In this Manchester, you do what you can to get by.

Roy watches headlights scanning the bar top – traffic coming and going. He only glances elsewhere when the doorbell goes, and a man wearing tweed strolls in.

Roy knows it's the client immediately. He can tell the man's unacquainted with the pub layout; that there's southern money, import power, in the fabric of his coat. Beneath his hat, behind the horn specs, his eyes are flighty.

Roy lifts a little finger, signal enough, and follows the man's silhouette as he takes off his hat and scarf and orders a bourbon – another symptom of a foreign body.
Nob
. It's so obvious the barman cocks an eyebrow in Roy's direction as he hands over the change.

Finally the man approaches. “Cold out,” he says.

“Not wrong,” Roy agrees, nodding at the broken windows. “Cleans out the pipes, though. Decent journey?”

The man sits down and speaks quickly: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

Roy smiles. Not an icebreaker so much as a quirk – make the client feel silly and they'll know who's boss. The Reverend taught him that. He pushes his nuts across the table. “Protein?”

The man looks offended. “I've no time for games.”

Roy stops smiling. “I wasn't even playing yet.”

The man pushes Roy's peanuts back to him. “It's Havelock.”

“Pleasure,” Roy says, ignoring Havelock's hand. “Our mutual friend reckons I can help.”

“That rather depends.”

“On?”

“How good a middleman you are.”

Roy grins again. “I fix what can't be cleaned.”

“So we hear,” Havelock says, “which is why we're sitting in your squalid little world and not mine. For your sake, let's hope I'm not picking glass out of my brogues tomorrow.”

“Listen,” Roy tells him. “I'm not here to take the piss. You want something sorted, I'll get it sorted. Otherwise you can do one back to your floods. I don't need your money.”

Havelock rocks back. “No?”

“Nah. Hobby, this. What we do for fun round here. So don't be coming out with the big-man shite, saying what's what. You lot have your own muck to roll around in.”

Havelock smiles. “Yes, we do. But given the state of the union, I'd wager there being more on tap in the capital for someone as capable as you.”

“I'm not thinking about relocation,” Roy tells him. “Hate wearing wellies, for starters. Now let's not cause a scene, Mr Havelock.”

Havelock hunches forward, smirks. “No scenes. Though it's worth knowing that if you
were
to try anything…” Havelock nods to the space on Roy's right, and Roy feels something grip his thigh. His stomach turns over.

He's sitting next to someone in a cloak-suit.

Havelock laughs. “Never trust a Mancunian, they told me. Even your boss said to keep that in mind. You're all bluster, aren't you?”

Roy sits back, tries to hold his nerve. “And you reckon your gimp here's the only one with a shooter? Turn round. Get an eyeful. You've got most of Manchester's roughnecks sitting up at that bar.”

Havelock turns, takes them in. Turns back. “Pond scum,” he says.

Roy looks sidelong as if he can actually see Havelock's bodyguard. He puts out a hand, probing, till he finds the slick, damp fabric of the cloak-suit, moulded over the bodyguard's skin like wax. “New model, this, or what?” he asks. “Nice feel, innit. None of that ribbing you normally get. Must make yourself some enemies to need it.” Roy shifts his gaze to where he guesses the bodyguard's head must be. “Hope you don't need a slash tonight, kid.”

The bodyguard makes a pleased sound. “I'll make sure it goes down your leg if I do,” she says.

Roy looks back at Havelock.

Havelock simply smiles.

“Fair dos,” Roy says, his hands up. “Fair dos.”

Havelock clears his throat. “Do these unconscious biases often land you in trouble, Roy? Your handler said you were precocious.”

“He doesn't know me at all,” Roy hisses.

Havelock grins. “Well, business, then. You may already know I need an adapted vehicle. We're up here on a recruitment drive, and hope to return to London safely with our new employees. For this reason the vehicle must fit my specification precisely, and be produced quickly. I need high standards – not something one can afford south of Birmingham at the moment, I'm afraid to say.”

“And you tried the chop-shops in Calais?”

“I prefer to support local industry,” Havelock says.

“But you can't go direct.”

“Busy man, Roy. Busy man.”

The cloaked woman to Roy's right nudges him. A paper-thin tablet has appeared on the seat between them.

“Go on,” Havelock says. There's an urgency in his voice now.

Roy puts the tablet on the table. He dims its brightness then prods the only icon on the screen. An app explodes into numbers.

Roy reads facts and figures. Thinking, he looks up at the Rose's artexed ceiling. Then back at Havelock. “What kind of people are you transporting,” he says, “in boxes? And is that a bloody fridge in there?”

“It doesn't matter,” Havelock says. “What matters is my assets travelling securely.”

Assets
. Roy shakes his head. “I'll have to do some digging,” he says. “But let's sort the most important thing now: how much cash are we talking?”

Y
was locked
in the diurnal cycle: a daily sequence of panicked waking and furious panting as predictable as her view of the pink mountains at the edge of the world; the thick mist that rolled over the mansion lawns, blue in the morning's amethyst light; and the rising sun that burned it all away.

By now, though, days themselves didn't matter. At first she had measured time by chewing her fingernails until they bled – counted the units of her sentence through the stages of her body healing: the stinging heat of the first day, the scab of the second, the abscesses that sometimes bloomed on the third, the lancing by makers on the fourth. But soon it was impossible to keep up. Instead, she followed more seasonal shifts in her behaviour. She knew, for example, that she'd resisted the makers more at the beginning – in part to test her new capabilities: the extra load bearing, her new power and grace. They had laughed and mocked, told her she must've “been a handful” in whatever had passed as her preceding life. But even they didn't bother her so much any more. She was growing more confident in her sharpness, her new agility, and it almost embarrassed her to think of how she'd once fought them off, running on instinct, thrashing about. Back then, she'd regularly injured herself out of raw animal frustration – not understanding the changes they'd made to her body. This, too, was rarer now.

There were dark spells, however, in which Y wished the makers had gone further. Regardless of her progress, every morning still felt like the first morning she woke, and she often felt bitter they hadn't taken more of her away. Her remnant mind – it must have been that – had undeniable power, and she lamented that they hadn't severed more of the connections; wondered if it was a deliberate policy. On these occasions she envied the brothers and sisters who never left the suite; whose open mouths leaked black fluid; whose every need was catered to by their cradle's arms. And she still sought a way to escape the black tower from her dreams, just as she struggled to apprehend the meaning of the pendant she found around her neck each morning.

In her brighter moods, though, she was simply grateful to know there'd once been more of her. It gave her the power to imagine something beyond the mansion – and with this surged a hope that she could eventually rediscover her previous self, wake up one morning and remember it all, every last bit, and undo this project, their training, all of it. Sometimes, when she was still and clear-minded, certain images came and went – ghosts of a life before. She just had to remember more – find an easier way to enter that state. She just had to repel their last tweaks and adjustments, their deep moulding of her. She wouldn't let herself love them. She wouldn't…

Explanations for the physical training were scarce, and for the most part she was isolated. Unlike the people either side of her, forwards and backwards of her, in their rows of life-sustaining cradles, Y had no designated vocation but exercise. And when her brothers and sisters were taken off to the kitchens, workshops, classrooms, boudoirs and laboratories to put their modifications to good use, to train and develop their extras, to have their hands roughened in special machines with sandbelts, to prepare for the new lives the makers promised them, Y was usually kept in her cradle for hours.

It often felt like the makers kept Y separate to punish her, to mark her out. None of the brothers and sisters she met wore a pendant like hers, and none adhered to anything like the regime imposed on her. It meant that now and then she might catch a brother or sister giving her an odd look – a mixture of pity and fear, mainly – and then occasionally something else. Something closer to awe.

Regardless – or perhaps because of this isolation – she soon assigned a secret duty to herself: to comfort her youngest brothers and sisters as they sobbed in their sleep. It had begun to suffocate her, the urge to help them. It made her hot inside, fraught and restless, and so she acted when she could listen no longer, or when no one else came to silence them. Carefully, she'd remove her lines and tie off the drip bags to preserve their nutrient levels, careful not to knock over the additives measured out for muscle maintenance or repair. And then she'd swing out of her cradle and prowl across the suite, edging through the darkness her eyes had been mysteriously tweaked for, received images grainy and green-tinged, and stroke the brother or sister's face until they slept again.

In their daytime whispers, their tight-knitted circles, Y became the cradle suite's night-comforter whose name they dared not mention, but who in the morning they always remembered.

On one particular night, it was a girl three rows forward and nine cradles down. Y went to her, fluid through the wire nests, the gridded cradles and cabling; a dancer
en pointe
. She felt certain the cameras hadn't followed her.

The girl was bruised, bewildered. Y didn't know if the girl could see her, or if Y was simply a blank shape against the background, her shadow dulling the cradle's arms and attachments.

Y offered a hand, which the girl squeezed against her chest. Through the gloom, Y could make out the girl's face: shining cheeks, a black-matted but glued gash in her hairline, and a seam of puffiness along her jaw. The girl was shivering, so Y pulled up her cover and tucked it under her chin. She couldn't see any obvious modifications; wondered what they might be making her.

“He watched me,” the girl whispered to Y from cracked sleep, sniffling quietly and apparently delirious. “He watched me.”

Y stroked the girl's hair, the girl's cheek, and absently squeezed her pendant. The girl's words made little sense, even as they unsettled her.

“He kept watching,” the girl said. “He said he was my father.”

At the foot of the cradle, which had been set to curve upwards, there was a pile of clothing. Y made out a shattered square pattern – didn't recognize it as digital camouflage – and boots spattered in mud. On top lay a crumpled beret. With greater awareness, Y would have recognized the smell as the residue of heavy weapons. But knowing exertion more than anything else, Y could only identify the girl's sour sweat.

There was something else in the pile. A rolled piece of fabric, tied closed. And when the girl dozed off again, her chest less frenetic, Y moved to the foot of the cradle for a closer look. She rolled off the tie and unfurled the sheet. She could see it was the outlined torso and head of a person, boxes in ever-decreasing sizes, with the smallest a single square over the figure's forehead. There were little holes burned into it, which Y didn't understand, and there were stains on the fabric, still damp, and Y didn't understand these either.

She dropped the fabric, unexpectedly scared, and snuck back to her cradle past the suite's central hub – a mass of electronics and monitoring equipment.

Back in her cradle, she discovered the sticky dampness was still on her fingers, so she wiped them on her cradlewear, lined herself back in, and tried her best to sleep.

In the morning she found a deep maroon smear down her front. An hour later, it would earn her a thousand extra pressups.