Graft (9 page)

J
ase and Jeffrey
come round to the Cat Flap.

There are niceties. There are contracts. And there's a deal.

Jeff sits in one corner while Jase and Mel go over the fine print.

“Remember it's a trial,” Mel says. “And only Jeff. Only for now.”

“Course,” Jase says. She thinks he's trying not to smile. “Just see our Jeffrey as a little hired help. A way to attract a different clientele. He's been with us about six months now, and already proved quite adept. And if he's not busy, you know, at first, you could have him do your odd jobs. Give this place a clean for starters. He's more than a decent physique, despite the average face. There's strength in the head, too. Intelligence. And there's always the doors to think about. He'd make a fine minder.”

Mel looks at Jeff over in the corner.

“It's all no obligation,” Jase tells her. “And if you're not fully satisfied we'll simply take him back.”

“I can't promise anything,” Mel says. “Money comes and goes.”

“Course.” Those teeth again. “Nature of the beast. But you'll be surprised. Pleasantly surprised.”

“Are there instructions?”

Jase smirks. “No, no need for any of that. He's like us, you understand. But imagine a hip replacement, yes? Now extend that idea. Imagine you could sprint a hundred miles without a single sore ligament…”

Mel nods.

“All we ask is that you advertise. That you give him a good run. Outcalls, incalls, whatever makes sense.”

“And what's to stop him going berserk or something, hurting one of us? A place like this runs on trust, see. That's the game.”

“He won't do anything unless you want him to,” Jase says, and winks.

Mel's stomach flipflops. She tries to stop a thought blossoming: the violence of it; the root of Jase's assumptions. He's closing on her now. She knows he's
closing
on her.

“And how long we talking?” she asks. “For the trial?”

“Say a month tops, to give you an idea of how we train them. He's completely self-sufficient. And there's absolutely nothing to stop you, you know, trying yourself. A test drive, let's call it. You'll find everything's engineered for performance…”

Mel holds up a hand. “Don't push your luck. I'll need a full breakdown of the costs, too, with a couple of days' grace while he finds his feet. Girls'll stress about someone new hanging about all day. It's a big change, something like this… a change to their environment.”

She's annoying herself now, talking like this. It feels too much like sinking to his level. To bartering. She'd steadily got used to haggling for stuff on the markets – grains and dairy if the farm delivery hadn't been seized en route – but she's never felt entirely comfortable with it. Plus business now is never quite as simple as spitting in your hand and shaking on it.

In the corner, Jeff takes off his glasses. He's wearing what Mel can only guess are contact lenses. They turn his eyes into jewel-like orbs that shatter the light and send rainbow chips sprawling, vibrant, across the chipboard panelling. They're astonishing.

Jeff stares back at her. The effect is hypnotic.

She turns to Jase. She says: “A month.”

K
illing wasn't always so
easy. Roy had to learn. And when you learn, you make mistakes.

Roy had messed up one job in a big way. And sometimes, spellbound by insomnia, he replays the error on whichever ceiling hangs above him.

It was a dark and stormy night…

The client had turned up at last orders with a pre-agreed codeword. Roy remembers him being nervy, wan, rank with bad health.

“Grab a pew,” Roy said. “Make yourself cosy.”

The man sat and picked at his cuticles.

Roy pushed his peanuts across the table. “What's mine is yours. What can we do for you?”

Lover spurned. Love rival. Love rat.
It wasn't the point; he didn't remember this – the details didn't matter. “There's business to be had in the sorting of squabbles.” That's how the Reverend put it. Even then, even with his mind falling apart, and the Reverend applying pressure to a certain part of him, he agreed; saw that clear as day. The collapse was the opening. Its yawning tract was actually a foundation. And sitting there, even with so much lost, even with so much of what made them civil gone or going, Roy understood there was a living to scrape out from the cracks.

Naturally the client had concerns, for which Roy had stock answers:
No trace. Don't be daft, I'm in with the right people. Nah, the cars always go to the scrappers afterwards.

And then – only then – had the envelope been passed under the table.

“
Jesus, I feel like I'm in a film,” the client said.

A wink from Roy. “You could be,” he told him. “You could well be.”

A ringing bell broke the moment: “Last orders!” the barman sang.

The day after the meeting, Roy stole a large estate car and drove hard to Leicester. Over the Woodhead, windlashed, through the holes punched into England's twisted spine. Down through the M1 barricades, through gun checks, patdowns, all under drone watch. The odd rebel staging post, untouchable enclaves. He cruised past armoured convoys, citybound in the opposite lane.

People say it's bad now, but it was really bad back then.

Unusually, Roy didn't need to bribe anyone at the city's ringroad. The inner checkpoints were also clear. And then he was parked outside the mark's hotel, where the local operation ran a valet service which doubled as security. Nothing to do with courtesy: just practical; preferable to carjacking, the fastest-growing business of their time. Roy smiled, handed over the key. He wore leather gloves, a gift from the Reverend, and kept an eye on the car's rear lights as they illuminated a route towards another vehicle to steal.

Roy was tired after all the driving. It should've been the first warning. But he was also bolstered by how easily he smarmed the receptionist. He went in bleary, slower than usual, but still remembered to pulse the reception camera. Then, after deliberately catching a lift two floors too high and walking back down the stairs, heart beginning to clap, he shorted himself into the mark's hotel suite, found the bedroom, and got a surprise. A nasty scene:

Not the mark, but the mark's wife.

And their child.

Roy remembers all this through the details and the smells. She was in the shower, and she was singing. The little boy was on the bed, propped up on scrawny elbows with his feet dangling off the end. A lovely looking lad, he was, with superheroes on his pyjamas. The scent was sweet Sudocrem and shampoo. Steamed mirrors. A rose-patterned carpet and a golden chandelier. Leicester's interminable, siren-shot night. Curtains that looked so insubstantial in the breeze.

Roy ducked into the room. Roy remembers thinking, 
Just be brave, little man, and this'll be fine.
He supposed it was a scene from a life he might've had – a kind of reverse premonition.

Backed against a wall, Roy edged across, hands splayed, as though on a ledge. He went deeper into the shadows, grateful that the TV flooded the room with sound.

Then the woman opened the bathroom door.

Roy flattened himself then, just off the angle. He stayed down and hoped and hoped –

At last he looked – no danger – and used the long mirrors to watch them.

The woman was patting her hair with a small towel. Not a clue. Her lad rolled over, his pyjama shirt open and chest fully white.

“Oh!” the woman said. “You big sausage. Why've you got that all over you?”

The boy looked awkward. Sort of distant and sad. He put a hand in the pasty mess and started crying. “You told me Sudocrem fixes everything,” he said.

“Silly apeth,” she said, and pulled him into her.

“I want to go home,” the boy told her, muffled in her flesh. “Daddy's never here even when he brings us with him.”

Remarkably, this filled Roy's throat.

The woman held him then, and her towel came away as she sat on the bed.

Roy was too tensed, lost his balance, felt a joint crack.

The woman span.

Roy cleared his throat, got up to leave, whispered, for some reason he'll never understand: “Excuse me.”

The boy nearly hit the ceiling. But he didn't scream.

The woman baulked, wet hair across her face. She did.

Then the suite's front door opened. Timing or what.

The woman stared at Roy, hand on her mouth. Her eyes were glassy. Her scream echoed down the corridor –

The mark ran in, saw his family, then Roy. He went, “You?”

Almost like he knew him.

So Roy being Roy took out his revolver and shot all three.

T
he woman's
mask comes into Sol's hands with a sucking noise. Like papier-mâché off a balloon. The tubes come out with a gout of phlegm. She gags, but there's nothing to bring up.

Artificial light –

And so much to take in at once: Sol looks into her drawn eyes, bigger than average, and dead-glazed, each staring loosely back; an uncanny luminosity to them. Her nose is crooked. Her head's shaved bald. There's dry blood caked on her chin, a dotted square tattoo on her throat. And her mouth is stapled closed.

Sol simply shakes his head. Unreality. You can imagine horror, conceive horrific acts, but being confronted with it, and so intimately, dismantles the world around you – kicks you in the guts and leaves you swaying on the flimsiest of bases. A savage reminder that people are at their most inventive when they want to hurt each other.

From her face, he guesses the woman must be in her early twenties. Nameless, voiceless – caught now between some hidden ordeal and the cold walls of Sol's knock-off shop.

“Are you OK?” he asks, a hand on his face.

She peers into him, eyes sharpening. Working him out, maybe. Then she's looking past him, focusing on the far wall. He clocks that she's seen something – it's there in her expression, a twinge, a shift. Her eyes snap back to him, and she seems to hold her breath. And then it all changes again.

Just like that, just as fast, the woman's fugue evaporates. She lunges at him, collapses on to him. Only the sounds of nasal breathing, scuffling, as she claws at his head and face. Caught off guard, he's quickly overpowered. The blows come sharply, and while he parries what he can, she's too powerful – so scarily quiet and committed. Her hairless head remains still, neck strong, and she doesn't seem to blink at all.

“Stop,” he manages. “Stop!” Sol grabs a wrist, tries to drag it across him to decentre her weight. But the woman has him straddled, and each time he pulls, her third fist finds a gap.

“For God's sake, stop!”

The woman stops. She glares down at him.

“I swear I'm not,” he tells her.
Not what?
“Please! I swear it.”

She slits her eyes. She grabs him roughly by the jowls and pins his head back, rotates it. With her third hand, she points to a faded calendar on the wall.

He shakes his head as much as he can, looking between the calendar's naked model and the dashed tattoo on the woman's neck. “What? No – you've… It's nothing that, I swear – just… just a bit of fun.”

The woman shakes her head quickly, mocking his paralysis. She tightens her grip until he can't move his head at all.

“What is it?” His voice is strangled. “What? The calendar? That's nothing! It doesn't mean anything at all! I don't know what–”

The woman shudders. She flops away from him, claps her three hands on the barrel of his chest. She makes him look at her; pulls at her skin – her elastic neck, stomach, arms – until he is grimacing, wincing with imagined pain. She points at him, accusatory, goading him to watch. In some way she's flawless, but she's panting and clawing at herself, and her eyes strobe with ire. Sol watches her, mute and embarrassed. In the half-light of the workshop, this little room, with all the electrics humming, it's as if every inch of her is covered in scars.

T
his maker was called Chaplain
, and he worked in the production suite. His name was more of a misnomer – he didn't have much spirituality about him, but instead a kind of smokiness. He trailed a smell that made you wonder if he carried a hunk of something rotten in his pocket.

Chaplain wasn't gentle, Y found. And that morning he woke her with a giddy shake.

Y snapped from her grey dreams and expected the Manor Lord's face to be bearing down, expressionless and infinite, forcing into her the taste of bitty gruel. It took a beat to register Chaplain's features – the unmistakable implants that glittered in his face; the subtle rainbows that danced over his brow and into the folds and pits of his cheeks.

She suppressed her panic, as usual. She remembered nothing new, as usual. And just as she'd tried for hours the night before, she attempted to rip the tooth pendant from around her neck.

“Hey, that's permanent,” Chaplain told her, loud enough to wake three cradles each side of her. “Don't be such a disappointment.” He gazed over Y's glistening forehead, her greased head stubble, pausing to admire the nexus of her shoulders and collarbones, the sculpture of her stomach. “You're ready,” he told her. “All this work, and today we make you a hero.”

Y squirmed and stretched out. Wearing the chain and pendant was now a sentence of its own: it felt like a collar, a sign of someone's ownership, a ligature that only grew tighter as she fought it, and one that was cutting her invisibly at that. She spat in a funnel marked SPUTUM, and swore she'd get it off somehow.

Unlike the driller, Chaplain didn't pretend to look away while she pulled on her robe. He looked her up and down and handed her a large pill. “You'll have to let it dissolve as it is. No water yet – apparently one of the vaults needed a lot of cleaning…”

Y remembered the server.
To-mo-rrow
. She snatched the pill and kicked it back in one.

“Steady,” Chaplain said. He gestured to the cradle suite's exit. “We're in the bowels.”

Y followed Chaplain down there. Eventually they entered into a long, narrow rat run, lined with cheap wood and wiring. She'd heard of these studios – had sometimes heard Chaplain introduce their output between supper feeds and lights-out – but she hadn't expected them to be so basic.

Every few metres sat a turret-style camera rig with its lens disappeared through a slat in the walling. The red recording LEDs from each unit dotted these walls on both sides, and stretched well into the distance. They made the corridor look more like a runway at night. Y attuned to the rhythm of these blinking lights; intrigued as they fell into rows, blinking in harmony for two or three flashes before tumbling back to chaos. As Y moved through the hooped wires, around the powerpacks and tripod legs, the cameras conjured a strange image: the cannon of old ships on rough seas, their barrels pushed out through gunports.

Y bristled at this – the image was stark but fleeting. It seemed at arm's length, like her other memories, forever turning a corner just ahead of her. A reminder something had been taken from her that she couldn't retrieve. It made her ache, and it added to her confusion at what she'd managed to keep: this internal language, her ability to understand her makers, these truncated memories of before. How cruel that they'd left her with the stubbornness to know things hadn't always been this way. Because how could you be homesick for a home you couldn't remember?

The corridor only seemed to get longer, and Chaplain being ahead afforded Y a few stolen glimpses through the camera slats. The gaps were tight, so she couldn't see much – quick flashes of skin tone, exotic textile, the movement of lurid wigs. If she saw the Manor Lord now, would she react? Would a night of building rage finally combust?

Then Y tripped, and Chaplain heard it. “Y,” he said, pausing. His eyes, catching the red lights, were like cells of fairies.

Y slackened, relented. Chaplain's use of her name was warning enough.

Eventually they came to a door. Chaplain knocked, and a woman appeared.

“You're late,” she said. Y didn't catch a name – distracted instead by the trolley of clothes on the other side of the room. Its props and mirrors. Her guts were restive. She'd sat through screenings of these productions, but…

But nothing. The room was misting around her. A floral changing screen that covered silhouettes in the corner. Y knew there was something missing. Its absence rendered physical by a numbness that encroached from the corners. For the first time she noticed her vision was doubling and redoubling. Was it Chaplain's pill?

He guided Y with a hand on her back. The rainbows from his eyes travelled across the room's sterile-shiny surfaces. Over there, the woman tended to the clothes like they were plants, sliding hangers that dripped with strange garments from left to right. Centre stage was a seat fashioned from a stuffed animal's body. The animal had glossy brown fur and six legs, and its torso had one panel of ribs missing to accommodate a person sitting. Though the fur had clearly been restitched by a skilled crafter, the work was so faultless it looked like the creature was born and bred for comfort. Beyond where you'd naturally rest an arm, the fur and flesh beyond the neck was also missing – it revealed the top of the spine, ornately pinned with golden fixings, and the creature's long collarbones. The neck flowered into a death's head – a monumental skull angled down, as if the creature was grazing, or servile. Y stared at the skull's sockets: their distinct, odd shape, and at the four sharp horns curling out from its snout. It was a much larger version of the skull she'd seen on the Manor Lord's sceptre.

“A bursor,” Chaplain said. “Wandered over from the fringelands – from the plains we will not and cannot go.” He was still smiling. “Fascinating things. More or less vegetarian despite the fierce look. We're told the horns help it strip bark from trees, get at the sap. There's always bits of tree in their fur, you know? The synthesis is astonishing for its size – and a specimen of this size is almost as rare as you. One of our trolley teams brought it here with that chunk missing. We still don't know what could've taken such a bite…”

“Is she ready?” the other woman asked. She'd pulled a slick-looking mask over her nose and mouth.

“Sit down, please sit,” Chaplain told Y. “Try to relax.” He gestured to the woman by the rack. “Yes,” he said.

The woman came towards Y. She held a luxuriant shawl in her hands.

Y looked away. Set in the far wall of the room, a camera lens twisted. The bursor loomed monstrous on its convex glass. Was he there? Was he behind it?

He watched me. He kept watching.

Y slumped into the bursor's fur; found its seat so accommodating. She felt herself melting into it – the fur even softer than it looked, the rear panel of the seat a kind of endless yawn. She was sleepy, and the surfaces were coming unstuck. The encroaching edges had enlarged, risen up. They were curling in.

Sounds came from somewhere else now – Chaplain or the wardrobe woman, she couldn't tell.

She heard: “Systemic protection… designed not to… selective… amnesiac…”

Y croaked. A rising noise that hung, reverberating, above everything else in her head. A droning. She'd never wanted to say something more. Her heart rate was soaring now, but her eyelids were heavy and falling. She began to feel angry again –

Still the voices spoke. More people in the room now. Fleshy. Medical overalls? The camera lens tightened on her. The red dot blink stopped for nothing. “Exquisite specimen… and the price? Bargain, really. Sold to an anonymous bidder, hence the demo, and ready for shipment tomorrow if all goes well–”

Y felt a set of hands move across her head. Fingers picked at her shawl. Pushing, goading.

To-mor-row
–

Y collapsed into herself, supernova, a universe folding right up. The figures came towards her until everything became the red dot. The singularity. And in her bursor seat, the loving fur, Y accepted the fugue, the focusing lens, and crawled right in. The room's corners crashed over her.

Inside the folds, there was only rage.

Y felt herself expand, her muscles thrumming with blood. At last, beyond the point of bursting, she stood tall and exploded, a fresh impulse compelling her. The figures in the room recoiled, remonstrated, but she didn't care.

They would come apart in her hands.

Him. Them. All of them.