Graft (22 page)

Sol rubs his eyes. “I can't hack that,” he says. “I can't. It knocks me sick.”

“Aye. And everyone round here moans about Wilbers.”

Sol closes his hands under the table.

Roy smiles thoughtfully. “At least with that lot it's finders, keepers. At least it stays local.”

“Then who's running this?”

Roy shrugs. “Deep pockets, though. Cars like that? Never mind the gear you'd need. It's specialized as fuck. A business.”

“And your rumours,” Sol says, leaning over the table. “You ever heard where they change them?”

Roy takes a breath. “Oh aye, plenty of names bandied about. A few places. But the one I always remember coming up is Sellafield – the power station. Used to knock about with some steeplejacks who took down the Windscale chimneys. They banged on and on about random concrete being poured all over the site. Weird for a decommissioning job – makes you wonder. There's so much money sunk into that place – billions, seriously – you wouldn't be surprised if they were reusing the infrastructure, hiding stuff in plain sight.”

“Sellafield,” Sol repeats. “Is that Yorkshire way?”

Roy shakes his head. “Cumbria – up the coast.”

Something clicks. The Lexus plates. Carlisle –

“Pretty brazen,” Roy adds.

“I don't get it, though,” Sol says, his voice shaky now. “How can people know but do nothing?”

“Well that's just humans, innit? For starters you wouldn't go near that shithole. Crawling with guns, barriers. Sharpline on every bloody surface. And that's before you mention the radioactivity. The lads I knew got swabbed, tested, every day they left there. Geigers and all that. It's fucking poisonous.”

“But…”

“Let me put it another way: there's gulls that sit by the nuclear waste ponds all day. You've got bloody all sorts in these ponds – fuel and cladding… all sorts. Through the miners' strikes they didn't even bother processing it – just lobbed it straight in. Like a stew. And they say if one of these birds shits on your car, your car's pretty much glowing. That's how nasty it is. The workers get a year's dose in a week sometimes. You had fit lads going off sick with lumps and never coming back.”

Sol shakes his head.

“Telling you. Fall in one of them, one of the ponds, and you best hope someone puts a boot on your head. That's what I know.”

“But that's what I'm on about,” Sol says. “If you know about it then the council does too. They'd have drones all over it.”

“Depends. You don't bite the hand that feeds you, do you? Production sector's picking up, things are improving elsewhere – with this fix you're getting more labour to clean up the shit no one wants to see. You're getting control back. Why smother that? They're onto a good thing, any way you cut it. They are. And who says they don't benefit as well? Who says they don't get their palms greased? Who says it isn't policy full stop? Not like we've never had sleaze before. Half these council bastards only wanna cling on to their jobs.”

Sol shrugs.

Roy points at the window, as if to indicate some imaginary mass of people. “And you don't pull off something like this without someone upstairs knowing,” he says. “Amount of nutters you've got running around in the countryside… aren't you better off sending drones out for them? Win back your popular base? Trust me, pal. They're happy leaving them to it.”

Sol tries to imagine the logistics. The oiliness of it – such a sludge of corruption and manipulation – makes him dizzy. Where usually he might turn a blind eye, just as you might turn a blind eye to a beggar and subdue that barb of sympathy, Y gives him no choice but to stare it in the face. Feel it, helpless, as the institutionalized horror of it repeats on him.

“Cruel world,” Roy says. “Cruel world.”

“Yeah.”

“There's weirder shit, mind. Remember that thing that blew up a few years back? Up on the moors? You will do. Big nationalist cell – some guy training paramilitaries for a civil war. He throws this convention, right, and supposedly out of it comes this mad equipment that lets you cross universes.” Roy leans in and chuckles. “Other dimensions.”

Sol frowns.

Roy shrugs. “Maybe it's all out there, Solomon. Ten, fifteen years ago, you'd never believe you could make someone invisible. Lev bikes. Never mind that someone could have an extra arm grafted on. But that's what I heard. What's the thing? A wormhole. And like all the decent kit you get – cloak-suits, plasma gear – it just ends up with the last people you want to have hold of it. Maybe up in Sellafield. Maybe not.” Roy stares into space for a moment. “That place in the hills got glassed by drones. You ever see the birds that came across the city afterwards?”

Sol doesn't reply. There's so much to internalize, sift through. Make sense of. He takes the note from under Roy's mug and reads it again.

“I did,” Roy says. “I saw them.”

Accessories to follow. Still in transit. Cash in glove box.

“
There's something in it for you,” Sol tells him. “If you help me.”

“Help you what? Mod the vehicle I ordered?”

Sol looks down at his hands. “Find out who she is.”

Roy's grin hardens when he realizes Sol isn't joking. He gestures at the note. Sol passes it back, watches Roy reread it. Does something shift in Roy's shoulders? He leans in. “And was there? Cash?”

Sol nods. “Six grand,” he lies.

“And you reckon you know where their drop is?”

“One of them, maybe. Old gent up there told us cars were turning up,” Sol says. “I mean, it's what we do–”

“We. You keep saying we.”

“Me and Irish – Pete.”

“And Pete knows as well?”

“No – he's in Liverpool.”

Roy blinks. “Mancs grafting in Liverpool? Christ. But someone knows you've got her – had her.”

“My ex, yeah. She works in the game. I guess she employed…” Sol's voice falters.

“The web you weave.” Roy takes a final swig of tea and points at Sol's mug. “Be going cold that.”

Sol pushes it away.

Roy cracks his knuckles and leans back. “And say the news about you hasn't got up the chain yet. Say that biker in your flat didn't dial it in, and the whole racket isn't on your case. Say they're still running drops. What do
I
do?”

“You must have connections.”

Roy shakes his head. “Honour among thieves.”

“They're already hunting me. The flat's gone, the workshop's a no-go. And we've got all this metal turning up for your job.”

Roy tilts his head. “Which is why I said I'm still here. It's manageable risk. It's in my interests to make sure you get a new delivery address sorted.”

Sol snorts. That doesn't feel like the only reason at all.

“Alright, listen. We scope your dropoff, and we cut a deal if there's another car. But if you're gonna grasp the nettle, you're doing it my way.”

Sol looks past Roy. Sloping shoulders, poor posture, a gamut of razored heads. The glint of equipment in the servery.

“I look after you,” Roy continues, “so long as you look after my back pocket.”

Sol scratches his head.

“Serious,” Roy says. “You know the Reverend, up in Stalybridge? Unpleasant, if you don't stay in the good books. You work for him so you don't have to cross him.”

“The armour's for him?”

Roy shakes his head. “Client down south. Rev's just the handler. But there's a week's grace before the guy's gonna expect photos – so I reckon you get your boy Irish on it soon.”

“No,” Sol says. “We can't involve him.”

“Solomon. You don't think he already is? He turns up at the workshop, he'll know about it.”

Sol hates how Roy uses his full name to patronize him. But he's right. “He's going home, not back to the workshop,” Sol says. “Maybe I can get in touch.”

“And then? There's still no way back. Not for you, not for him.”

“Not for you, either,” Sol says. “I'll find a way.”

“Have you listened to me? An outfit as slick as this, and you think you're gonna… what?”

“Y's missing from somewhere. There'll be lists. At the libraries maybe–”

“She's
forgotten
, man. They're strays for good reason. And libraries? Pull the other one. They've spent them on bombs.”

“I owe her,” Sol says. “And so do you.”

Roy straightens, and Sol wants to slap the act out of him. It went in, though. It touched something. Then Roy says, “Eighty-twenty,” with his hand held out. “You get your clues – your little treasure trail – and get yourself killed. Irish Pete works up my armour. And I get my spends.”

“You'd be taking the piss at sixty-forty,” Sol tells him. “Never mind the damage to my workshop.”

Roy sighs. “Look at it sensibly. Just for a second. There's no changing this. That's not how the world works. No bugger's answering the phone. No one's coming out to help. And don't even start me on the drones. You can't even move freely.”

“I'm going to do something,” Sol tells him. His concentration centres to a dot on Roy's front teeth, flashing between his lips as he talks. “Something.”

I'm going now,
he'd said to Mel that day.
But I'm not leaving her. I'm not walking away
–

“Be honest with yourself,” Roy says. “Why d'you think there's people like me?” He's pointing at his chest.

“People like you.”

“I sold what's in here. Six years ago and counting. And I'm still around, aren't I? That's being selfish for you. You'll learn the hard way, caring too much. I promise you'll learn the hard way. Now where the fuck did my chips get to?”

S
loshing with tea
, the men enter the multistorey behind Winnie's. It's vacant but for the Lexus, and Roy tuts. “Hold this,” he says, passing Sol his jacket. “And keep an eye out.”

Sol watches in quiet wonderment as Roy sets about the Lexus with a kind of precise ferocity. He pulls off the registration plates, kicks dents in the doors and bumpers. Then he bounces on the car's bonnet and roof until its profile is completely deformed. “Just in case,” Roy says, his lumpen features absurd, and gets in.

Window down for fresh air, Sol listens to the Lexus' tyres squealing on the poured concrete, air buffeting through the opening, the exhaust reverberating around them. “Need to drop in somewhere,” Roy tells him. “Before we get rid of this.”

Sol is queasy, frail. Beyond the car park he finds himself anticipating a sudden motorbike – every oncoming headlight a fresh twist in his stomach – while trying to ignore that Y's body is in the boot. It seems callous to imagine her as a body at all. That she could be something so inanimate. Was it comfortable in there? The suburbs ghost past – a near-continuous smear of terraces, hand car washes, bookies.

“Where now?” Sol asks.

Roy grins. “Bit of shopping.”

For a mile or so the road hugs a train line, itself running parallel with the rear side of a housing development. Sol sees the amassed possessions that, over the years, have been thrown over people's fences: jetsam half-hidden in the wild grasses of the bank: toys, balls, old prams, barbecues, compost, wheels, cassette tapes, oil bottles. It's a reminder that people like to put difficult things where they can't see them – where they might just disappear. Except Sol knows that forgotten things tend to rot, and fester, then get found again.

After Ashton's roundabouts, the vacuum of Stalybridge, they reach a fortified gate between bushes riddled with sharpline. “Stalybridge Celtic,” Sol says, pointing to the sign in the brambles. “They were Conference, once.”

Roy shrugs. “Wasn't that arsed by footy.”

“I think we passed that hospital on the way,” Sol says. “Signs for Tameside General.”

Roy opens his window and turns to him. “Shut up.”

A laser cuts down through cold air. Roy lets on to the approaching guard.

“Gents. Who you here for?”

“The right Reverend,” Roy tells him.

The guard's expression is fixed. “He expecting you?”

“Always.”

“In you go, then. And behave yourselves.”

The three gates open sequentially, and the car heads through.

“What is this place?” Sol asks, gawping at the sprawl. There's so much damp cardboard, plastic barrels strewn about. Some young kids throwing stones at a group of pigeons.

“Emerald City,” Roy says. “Basically the opposite of the Vatican.”

“It bloody stinks.”

Roy grins and wedges the car between two four-by-fours. He cranks the handbrake. “You alright with new people?”

“Fine,” Sol says. “But I think I'll stay here with her.”

Roy ignores him. “Actually, how are you with psychopaths?”

Sol doesn't know what to say. Instead he asks, “Why are you seeing the Reverend?”

“Because I lost my shooter playing hide and seek in your workshop,” Roy tells him. “Listen, if the smell's bothering you that much, breathe deep – it goes away sooner.”

Sol shakes his head.

Roy gets out of the Lexus and crouches beside it, hands on the driver's seat, eyes level. “Stop being a mard-arse,” he says. “It's networking if nothing else. The Rev seems to think your outfit's the bee's bloody knees. And you could do worse than seeing the place. Might even qualify for a home here, state you're in.”

“I don't get you.”

“They take runaways, is all.”

“Runaways? Like refugees?”

“If you say so. Owner's a shut-in. Wizard, they call him. Fucking lunatic rolls around in his wheelchair reeking of fish, or chills in a bath up in the old business suite. They say he cooks his hair and eats it. But each to their own – if you pay him your dues, keep your head down, you get to call this home. No questions asked.” Roy points to the reinforced power lines entering the stadium wall. “Amenities and everything.”