Graft (24 page)

N
ot far from
the original Lexus drop, not far from the old man's house, Sol and Roy wait in a freshly stolen car. The rain has long since turned to squall; the drains blocked and burbling with urban mucus.

For Sol, the reality of a stakeout is becoming clearer. Waiting time is thinking time, and all he thinks about is time elapsed:

After the Reverend's, in the ruined Lexus, Roy had eventually talked Sol out of the hospital. “Better to act now,” he'd said as a closer. “And right now we need a getaway.”

But as they'd prowled for options, Sol had other things on his mind.

“Why does he scare you?” he asked Roy.

“Who?” Roy said.

“Back there. I saw it in you. Like a black hole. Could more or less see the strings coming off his fingers.”

“Nobody scares me,” Roy said.

“Do you worship him?” Sol said. “Is that it?”

Roy laughed flatly. “You best button your mouth.”

“You went all meek. What's he got over you?”

Roy shook his head as he drove. “Don't push me, Solomon.”

“I'm only asking why you run for him.”

“I don't run for him. I work for myself.”

Sol sniggered.

Roy stopped the car, clutched Sol's ear. “He sorted me out,” he snarled. “There. Alright? That enough? He sorted me out. There was an investigation, a tribunal, and he got me off. He gave me work when no one else would.”

Sol grimaced through the pain. But he kept pressing. “How? How did he get you off?”

Roy let go and fell back. Sol rubbed his ear.

“Violence?”

Roy closed his eyes.

“Was it?

“You can't stop him when he gets going.”

“But why help you in the first place?”

Roy looked at his hands. “Self-interest? Charity? He doesn't give anything away. I just ran deliveries.”

“Until he gave you a gun. Triggerman Roy.”

Roy shrugged. “It changed. The market. My opportunities.”

“But you never felt the shift.”

“No.”

“And now here you are. Too far in. Too deep.”

He nodded. “Here I am. Are you happy now? Are you done?”

After that, Roy shut off the car and pointed to an '88 Ford Sierra a few cars along, then stole it while Sol watched. Sol found the theft ruthless; winced with each piece of trim Roy tore out. It wasn't just crass – it was feral. And he could've, should've, done it himself –

The Sierra was a shed. Somewhere along the way it'd had a hybrid conversion kit retrofitted, but nothing worked as it should, and the charge console, limp on the dash, reeled a list of critical faults. Sol drove it as hard as he could, lagging behind the Lexus as Roy led him from dead end to dead end, the engine either burning too much fuel, smoking heavily, or stuttering and choking like it was full of rocks. Frankly, Roy's choice of car didn't make sense to Sol – you hardly saw Sierras driving on the road in the early 2000s, never mind 2025, halfway through another thalidomide decade. It spoke of deflection; the need to end a difficult conversation. “Wouldn't you want something more reliable?” Sol asked, as Roy smashed off the ignition barrel. “It's hardly a getaway.”

“No,” Roy told him. “It's a
blendaway
.”

Down a gloomy cul de sac, Roy pulled up and bailed. “Get her out,” he said to Sol, and started preparing a bottle and rag he'd magicked from somewhere.

When he opened the boot, Sol caught himself sniffing Y's body. It was automatic, instinctive, and the urge appalled him. His self-loathing soon met relief, however: the liner only smelled of dust and oil, and he understood that he no longer cared that her suspended state made no sense. Though she was injured – damaged – and displayed no sign of life, there was nothing to suggest decomposition either. She looked at rest, asleep, as if she'd simply grown tired of it all. Sol thought:
How could Roy imagine burying her?
To him Y existed in limbo – and it seemed enough to satisfy his internal logic. At last, he'd successfully reordered and reframed the world to accommodate her.

Sol wrapped Y in some dog blankets they found in the Sierra's boot and laid her across its bench seat, securing her legs and waist with two seatbelts. Squeamishly, he tried to push in the spilled wires of her third arm, wet string threaded with metal fibre. It made his nose itch, touching her this way. Her innards. But her expression was tranquil.

Sol thought:
Who was she before?

As the Lexus burned, Roy said to him: “I never get bored of that noise.
Whoomph!
The sound of not guilty.”

Sol tried to see it as an offering. The accursed car dying before him.

Next they went for the recovery truck, found it exactly where they'd left it: humping a pavement near Sol's ruined flat. Incredulous, Sol looked over it; checking, with justified paranoia, for any evidence of tampering – taps, trackers, even explosives – while Roy waited with Y. Sol couldn't believe the truck hadn't been seized, parked as it was so close to the property, and registered in his name. Half-satisfied, he hopped in and powered out of there; found he couldn't look along the road to his flat without his chest tightening.

After this, the men agreed to one last stop.

The workshop.

Luger on show, Roy covered the entrance as Sol went inside. It had the atmosphere of a quickly abandoned village – as if its inhabitants had vanished overnight. Nothing looked abnormal, nothing was disturbed. Sol dashed around, grabbed his address book, notes, the armour project plans. Then, sweating from the pressure, he placed a call through half the world's telephone exchanges to reach Miss Wales, and asked her about the metal drop. “Just to be safe,” he told her, “we need a change of address.” Then he gave her one – Chinley, Irish's moorside home.

“The hassle you give us,” she said to him. “One of these days we'll have to treat you to a 3D printer.”

And everything else was in flux –

Sol turned off the electrics. Cut the landline. He emptied the safe. Gathered his favourite tools into a canvas bag. And before he left the workshop, he wrote a note for Irish – a single line in capital scrawl. It read:

P. DON'T COME IN. GO HOME & STAY PUT. I'LL CALL.

As he left the yard, the strobe light dead, he felt a kind of respite. The idea, perhaps, that they were still a foot in front.

But when he saw the perimeter wall, his relief spoiled, became a rancid taste in his mouth. Because there, sprayed in gold, massive on the bricks, were two overlapping circles.

Sol stumbled. Could've choked on his heart.

“I'm sorry, pal,” Roy said from the shadows. “Looks like you're in deep, too.”

F
or a time they sit separately
: Sol and Y in the Sierra, Roy in the truck.

Sol has the chair reclined, his feet up, his mirrors adjusted so he can see her lying there; a constant pointer to his neglectful nature. He's drawn the twin circle motif on the fogged window a few times now – perhaps some attempt to interrogate its symbolism, or otherwise purge it from his psyche. Looking at it, he's increasingly convinced it's meant to represent two worlds meeting. Lost in the fuzziness of its edges, its shape slowly warping as lines of water run through it, he jumps when Roy opens the passenger door. “I'm sitting with you two,” Roy tells him. “Bloody freezing in there.”

Seconds out. Minutes down. Hours gone.

“Should've brought sandwiches,” Roy says. The comment washes over Sol, who's still obsessing over the things he could've changed. “Even that fake ham shite they make with mushrooms,” Roy adds. “Or cartridge drippings. Or a game of Connect fucking Four. Remember that? Always played that on the way to the caravan before our kid went inside.”

Sol stirs in his seat. It's late, and getting colder. Dread occupies him, growing fetid.

“You like stories about me, don't you?” Roy asks. “You wanna know why he got banged up? My brother?”

Sol shakes his head.

“Built like a bay bloody window Dean was. Older than me by what, six years? So he must've gone down when I was twelve or thirteen. I said, are you listening, pal?”

Sol grunts.

“Then I'll tell you anyway. Dean liked his birds and loved his knives, right? Mam always said he collected both, though far as I knew he only hung the knives on his wall.”

“Roy,” Sol says. “Can we just sit here–”

“His birds all had that same look: big hair and panda eyes, always fagging it and all. You'd get in from school and hear them at it, and afterwards Dean would kick my door open and make me smell his fingers. Filthy bastard he was – he'd come out with the worst things and the girls just thought it was piss-funny.

“Then there was Mand. Dean said Mand had been sent to save him. I liked Mand, I really did – she spoke to me like a friend, not a kid, and when she leaned over in a baggy top you could see right down to her bellybutton piercing… you still with me?”

Sol lets condensation roll down his cheek, there but not there at all. He looks at Roy sidelong and dips his head.

“One time,” Roy says, “I come home and find them absolutely peppered in the kitchen, tobacco all over the floor. It stunk of weed and I said hi but knew they'd gone west. Then I saw Dean's bow and arrow in his hands. Listen now–”

“I am,” Sol tells him.

“So Dean's aiming out the back door at the neighbour's cat on the fence, minding its own. I shout
stop!
and Dean jumps. The arrow bolts and the cat flies off the fence with the arrow straight through its leg.” Roy flicks his finger, claps loudly. “
Bang
.
Fffft.
Just like that, poor little sod. Then Dean gets me to say I did it and I say I will, because it was more or less my fault. I told Mum I'd robbed his bow and arrow off the wall and shot that cat myself.

“But that isn't why Dean went down, Solomon. Thing was, Mandy karked it a week later after a big coke session, on her own in the bath round her old man's place. Coroner calls it bad coke, cut bad, and Dean said the man who sold it to her was a fucker for it – and he knew, since Dean usually scored for them. Not this time, though. This time he wasn't there to check it over.”

Sol's staring at Roy.

“Dean wasn't Dean after that, and fair enough to the lad. Would you be? He was on it. And I mean all the time. Pulled double shifts, never spoke, never really ate, nothing – just vanished into the bogs with his keys and a baggie in the top pocket. And then one night he wakes me up, standing there in full camo, balaclava and everything. I go, You nobhead, you scared the shit out of me.

“And Dean just sits down with his head in his hands and says he's sorry. I said, For what? and he looks at me and his eyes are sore and he goes,
She's gone,
again and again. Howling it. And then he took his bow and arrow and went out into the night and found her dealer. He took him up on the moors and shot the guy through both legs, just like that cat. Left him there, crawling about. And that's why he went down.”

Sol clears his throat. “I'm sorry.”

“Doesn't matter,” Roy says. “Lad hung himself a year in. They said he couldn't hack prison. But I knew he couldn't hack missing Mand.”

Silence, then. Beneath the covered moon and the hidden stars.

“Your turn,” Roy says.

“My turn?”

“Yeah. This ex. Tell me about her.”

Sol squirms. “You're alright.”

Roy smirks. “OK, the work. You reckon you've ever robbed a car with a girl in it before?”

Sol squints away. Everywhere but the shadow of the car, the ground flickers in greens, oranges. Manchester's night-waves, a fluoro tide. Sol pictures for a moment the Lexus in a scrapyard crusher, the squeal of compressed metal, technical fluids running. The cube spat out at the end –

“I never knew if we did,” Sol tells him. “Been lucky. Just have to keep your head down, don't you?”

Roy chuckles. “Course you do. But then…”

Sol looks at Roy. His bald head, the battlescars. His swollen nose, the new scratches and bruises. He speaks before he can think twice. “How come you ended up floating round on the bottom, anyway?”

“Me?” Roy chuckles. “Oh, that's easy-peasy. I just killed a friend.”

S
ol wakes
to coppery frost and a sore neck. Cold air, bright in the fresh sun. It takes a second to reacclimatize to their stakeout at the arse end of town. The car stinks of cigarette smoke, and his lips are papery. His backside's completely numb.

“Morning, soldier,” Roy says, knees pulled high either side of the steering wheel.

Sol checks on Y. Still the same peaceable expression. Still asleep.

His dread catches up.

“You slept?”

“Have I fuck,” Roy says. He coughs something heavy and spits it out of the car. “Told you. I'm a sniper, me.”

Sol croaks. His teeth are furry. “Any luck?”

“Not a peep.”

Sol yawns. “I need a slash.”

“Bottle down there,” Roy tells him. “Or the ginnel behind us. And while I remember – your old missus ever mention you snore like a dog?”

Sol opens his door. “Once upon a time.”

“Well, go on then. No one's coming this way any time soon.”

Sol picks up Roy's rolling tobacco from the dashboard and flaps the packet in Roy's face. “Habits,” he says. “Die hard.”

“Just saying. We could be looking elsewhere.”

Sol shakes his head. “Can't underestimate convenience. Like you said in Winnie's – you build that many layers into a simple dropoff for a reason: it stops communication with the next crew along. They won't just break the chain like that. And you'd be surprised. When we started robbing, we had six vans out of a courier's yard before they even cottoned on. Even when they did, we managed two more. If it's business, they won't stop for much.”