by Tim Maughan
He takes the knife, its handle bandaged with black tape, out of the box and chucks the jungle tape he’d been playing in there, just to be sure. Five snags, no breaks. Yet. Irreplaceable. More valuable than the two tenners he just dropped in there, to him at least. He locks the box and places it on a high shelf, pockets the key, tucks the knife into the back of his jeans. Turns around to check the shop, sees Janet standing there, still. Staring at the uncollected faces. The dead ones.
“Janet. Yo, Janet. C’mon girl. Gotta go. I’m locking up.”
Janet turns slowly, thousand-yard stare. “Sorry, Tyrone, I didn’t realize.” He holds the door open for her as she exits, flips the cardboard sign to CLOSED, and secures the locks and bolts.
“It’s a’ight, Janet. Is just a quick thing. We’ll be open again later.”
It’s bright outside, and he finds himself squinting against white sunshine. It’s pretty quiet out, still early. Airborne reggae vibes drift across the street from somewhere, pulses and tones, like the jungle tape stripped of its urgency. Sheltering his eyes, he can see Mary leading her two punters down the street, down the main drag of Stokes Croft itself, toward the open gates. He’d better catch up, she’s moving fast. Mary doesn’t like to hang around when she’s doing her thing.
“Is she gonna show ’em?” Janet asks him.
“Yeah. She is.”
Janet’s little face lights up. “Maybe she’ll show me Mark again, afterwards?”
Tyrone looks at her. “You got twenty quid, Janet?”
Janet stares at him, glances down at her impossibly full IKEA bag, and then back at him. “No.”
“Then she ain’t gonna show you nothing. Look, I gotta go with her, make sure she’s okay, all right? I’ll catch you later, yeah?”
Tyrone doesn’t wait for her to answer, just picks up the pace, closing the distance between him and Mary without looking like he’s hurrying. It’s been raining overnight and the pictures have washed off some of the walls as usual, running across the pavements and into the drains at the curb in crisscrossing tracks of dull translucent color, so it looks like the buildings themselves are bleeding out, melting. He half expects that if he traces the drying paint flows back he’ll find the empty, see-through wireframe of a building, drained of all pigment.
But he’s not got time. The last thing he needs would be Grids turning up when Mary looks like she’s wandering around the Croft on her own. He checks up ahead; she’s stopped now, about twenty feet short of the gates, the two punters still holding hands, their bemusement and discomfort openly betrayed by their body language even at this distance. When he’s about ten feet away from them he slows, stops. Best to give them some space, at least the illusion of privacy.
From out of the shadows of the buildings on the far side of the street he sees a hulking figure moving toward him, slowly. Ozone gives him a half nod and a fist bump as they meet in the middle of the road, his other hand resting on the dull metal and plastic of the counterfeit Kalashnikov rifle that dangles from his neck. Tyrone looks at the huge aging gun, thinks of the tape-wrapped kitchen knife stuck in the back of his jeans, and remembers exactly where he stands in the pecking order.
“Easy, Ty.”
“How’s things, O?”
Ozone shrugs. “Yeah, good. On gate duty, innit.”
“Anything exciting? You shot anyone this morning?”
Ozone laughs, rolls of fat under his neck rippling. “Nah. Nobody comes down here anymore, man, you know how it is. Not anyone wanting any trouble. Saw them two come through earlier, though.” He half nods at Mary’s punters. “Lord and Lady Marks and Spencer.”
Tyrone snorts. “Yeah, they come just to see Mary.” He slips into a sketchy, exaggerated posh accent. “All the way from Bath, don’t you know.”
“No shit. No wonder they looked fucking terrified when they saw me.”
“To be fair, fam, you a scary-looking fucker even without that thing.”
Ozone smiles, a blend of amusement and pride. “True.”
Sweat patches spread from Ozone’s armpits, turning the already grayed cotton of his once-white T-shirt even darker. Tyrone’s sure he can see them moving, growing, as he stands there.
“You all right, man? You look hot.”
“Yeah.” Ozone wipes sweat from his shaved head with his forearm. “This weather, man. Done with it.”
“Don’t say that. Gotta stay like this till after the weekend, man, at least. Carnival, innit.”
Ozone sucks his teeth. “Fuck that. Can rain all weekend, far as I care. Then maybe no one will turn up.”
“Fam!”
Ozone laughs, ripples his neck, gently taps the gun with two fingers. He glances over at Mary again. “How long she gonna be, man? You know she got big visitors today?”
“Oh yeah. Like Grids will let me forget.”
* * *
Three faces stare at Mary, the first two full of fear, embarrassment, awkward impatience.
The third, scrawled on the paper in her hand, is seemingly blank of emotion.
Mary stares at it, traces her own badly daubed lines until she has a full image of it in her mind. Focuses, blinks.
Above her the sky starts to darken, mid-morning sun settling into evening gloom. Buildings morph and shift, subtle changes to both their 3D architecture and 2D surfaces. She always tries to avoid looking at the buildings, the displacement is too disorienting, plus if she focuses on them too much they all go kinda weird, like they’re not really there, not really solid, like they’re made up of some patchwork collage of old photos, the lighting and coloring on them never quite fitting together, so much so that she finds herself questioning what’s real and what’s not even more than usual, and she’s trained herself to stop doing that. Best not to know.
The sky, the buildings. Only one place left to look. She holds her breath, looks down at the ground. She knows what’s waiting there.
The lines of paint running into the drains turn red, scarlet trickles of blood filling indents in tarmac, pooling, a spiderweb network of bloodstains that weaves around shattered glass and dislodged masonry to link the bodies, the remains, the limbs together. Then the sound comes in, sudden, fast—there’s always a delay, but it always surprises her, catches her unaware. At first it sounds muted, like she’s been deafened, that fuzziness you get the day after standing near the sound system rigs for far too long. And then it whooshes in, like air filling a vacuum, the mix packed so chaotically, so densely, that it almost knocks her off her feet. Alarms, screams, sobbing, yells—from above, the low drone of engines and the ever-present skittering roll of drums.
In front of her stand Diane and Alan, oblivious to it all, even the thick, black, acrid smoke that is pouring from the broken shell of the overturned police van that lies just a few feet to their left, oblivious as the smoke spirals around them, engulfs them. They seem only half there to Mary, like they’ve been badly cut out from one old newspaper photo and stuck, with a child’s blissful lack of care for perspective and lighting, onto another one, ripped from a story about a lost cat and pasted into a story about some terrible event in some savage, distant country, their pale faces lit by a sun she can’t see.
She gazes past them, back toward the freshly hollowed-out shell of the wall-like 5102 building as it leaks more smoke and spits flames at the darkening sky, lost figures stumbling about in the thick haze of dust and airborne debris.
And then, from near her feet, voices. Faint, distorted, panicked.
move her we’ve got to move her get her out of the road we
no no moving her is worst thing we can do jesus just hold this here no here hold that
here christ what was that we need an ambulance she needs a fucking ambulance
they won’t let any in they won’t let them in just don’t let go
they’ve got to they’ve got to got to fucking let them in now
get that fucking mask off her jesus
“He’s here,” Mary tells Diane and Alan, bar
ely more than a whisper.
“Where? Where is he?”
“Diane, calm down—”
Mary crouches in the street, brings her face almost eye to eye with the boy. It’s definitely him from the picture, she can be sure of it now, and she realizes his expression isn’t blank, it’s intense concentration. He’s on his knees, his arms disappearing into a mess of red that Mary can’t bring herself to look at directly, she’s just aware there’s a body there, motionless, a person, parts that should be there gone, face covered by a paint-spattered gas mask. Next to the boy kneels a girl, sobbing, her clothes soaked in crimson.
“He’s here,” Mary repeats, louder. “Right here. Kneeling on the ground.”
“I’ve had enough—”
“Shut up!” Diane drops to the ground, crouches next to Mary. Her hand lightly strokes the tarmac, feeling its way, as if she’s trying to read some message encoded in the compacted black gravel, but from Mary’s view it looks like she’s rooting around in the corpse’s abdomen. She feels sick.
She stands again, focuses. She pauses time.
Or, more accurately, she pauses one of the times. Then time. The time from that night. Smoke stops swirling, becomes sculpture, strangely flat, two-dimensional. Paper fragments, burnt and fluttering from the sky, suddenly hover in the air, still. Around her, the bodies that have somehow remained upright become statuesque, broken and disfigured.
Diane is still crouched in the road, unaware of how close she sits to her frozen son.
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s trying to help people. People are hurt, and he’s trying to help them. To deal with their wounds.” She feels sick again.
“Oh, c’mon now.” Alan has heard enough. “We already told you he was studying to be a doctor, you’re just using—”
“Shush!” Diane holds her palm up at her husband, silencing him. “Is he … is he alone?”
“There’s a girl with him. About his age. Blond hair, pretty.” She’s lying now, slightly. She can’t see the girl’s face; it’s blurred. They sometimes are. Give them what they want.
“It’s Sarah!” Diane is suddenly on her feet, clutching Alan’s arm. “It must be Sarah!”
“Di—”
“Can you … can you tell us anything else? Can you describe him? What … what’s he wearing?” The pleading eyes. Mary has seen them on every parent that’s passed through the shop.
She looks down at the three figures, flinches at the perfectly spherical blood drops suspended in the air around the boy’s bruised face, inspects his clothes—clearly unchanged for days, ripped and worn, splattered in blood and vomit and shit.
“He’s wearing a black coat, large hood with a fur collar. It’s nice. Looks warm.”
“Yes…”
“And he’s got a bag … a bag with him. It’s full of bandages, medical stuff. He’s using it now, to help someone.”
“What color is it?”
The bag is so soaked in blood she can’t make it out at first.
“Green … and brown. Patterned. Camouflage. Yeah, it’s camouflage-patterned.”
“Ian…” Teardrops roll slowly down Diane’s cheeks, and Mary finds herself surprised by how the fluid motion contrasts with the freeze-framed world around her. The man, however, isn’t moving at all, as though he’s become infected, become part of the then world, frozen.
“Alan … it’s him. That’s his bag. You bought it for him … he insisted on camouflage … you wanted to get him a leather one but…”
The man still doesn’t move, the blood drained from his already pale face.
Enough. Mary has had enough. Time to end this.
She unfreezes then time.
There’s a roar behind her, and she turns to look. Clouds of smoke roll toward them from the direction of the gates, but it’s white this time, not black, and it stings the eyes and faces of those running to escape from it. Some of them wear gas masks like the corpse on the floor, to protect them from just this, but still they run out of the smoke.
Mary knows what they run from—she can hear it: the shouts, the thunder of hoofs on concrete—she’s seen it before, too many times, she doesn’t need to see it again. She takes her glasses off.
“It happened here,” she says.
“What?” The man finally speaks. “What happened?”
* * *
Tyrone yawns, stretches his arms out to his sides.
“C’mon, girl, this is long. Wind it up.”
“What, she don’t usually take this long, then?” Ozone has never seen Mary do her thing before, Tyrone realizes.
“Nah, she usually like—oh, here we go. Done.”
From their respectable distance they watch the man crumble, fold in half. The woman tries to catch him, supports him for a painful second, but she can’t hold him, and he’s down on his hands and knees in the paint-stained road.
“Fuck, man. What she say to them?”
“Well, if you believe any of this shit,” Tyrone says, yawning, “then she just showed them where their son died.”
2. BEFORE
“This your first time?”
The guy’s eyes seem too close together.
“In America? Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
He nods, seemingly at the space itself. Pale fluorescent light falling through conditioned air. Government-issue beige walls.
“Ah. So definitely your first time in here, then.”
“Yeah.”
Pause.
“Not me.”
Rush sighs, hopefully to himself. He glances at the guy. Shaved head coming back through as blond stubble, orange tan sitting uncomfortably against the beige. Forehead stacked with lines from too much sun, time, or both. Eyes definitely too close together.
“No?”
“Nope.” No pause at all this time, almost comically fast. Impatient. “Not me. Not my first time at all.”
Rush notices his knee is bouncing. Feels his heel pounding against the floor. He makes it stop.
“In fact, happens every time I fly back into the country. And that’s a lot.”
“Really?” Rush’s interest perks up. “You on a list?”
“Nope.”
“Oh.” Interest gone. They took Rush’s spex and his watch, along with his carry-on bag. There are no clocks in here. How long has it been?
“No prints, that’s the thing.”
They took his passport, too. “Sorry?”
“No prints, see?” The guy waves his right hand at him, wiggles his fingers.
Rush recognizes the words, but right now they make no sense. How long has it been? “I—”
“No fingerprints.” The guy is unbuttoning the sleeve of his shirt, and gently but purposefully pulling it up, an act often and proudly repeated, it’s clear. Plastic is revealed, 3D-printed prosthetic pink, a municipal flesh tone that sits far more comfortably with the official beige than the present color of this guy’s real skin.
The guy flexes his arm and plastic carapaces shift against one another. The faint sound of motors whirring now that Rush knows to listen for them.
“Lost it in Nigeria, back in ’17.” The guy’s southern drawl is instantly more pronounced. “Was contracting for a Chinese mining company. Boko Haram. IED. Middle of nowhere. Sonofabitches hid it in a goat carcass by the side of the road. Roadkill. Middle of fucking nowhere.” He shakes his head.
Rush feels that familiar, sudden wave of embarrassment and guilty repulsion wash over him. “I didn’t realize, I’m sorry—”
“Oh, don’t be. Not your fault.” The guy starts to roll his shirt back down. “You weren’t there.”
Rush smiles, shakes his head, looks at the ground. His knee bounces again. He wonders how his skin looks against the beige.
* * *
He tries to summon moisture to his dry mouth, takes a breath, puts on his best British accent. That’s meant to be worth something here, right?
“Excuse me, I was just wondering—do you know how much
longer it will be?”
She looks up at him from across an expanse of IKEA farmed pine, his skin color and accent triggering a wave of cognitive dissonance to flicker across her face. Her skin pale against the beige. She stares into mid-space, focusing on text he can’t see.
“Rushdi Manaan?”
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t be too long. They’re just running some background checks. You’ll be out within a couple of hours.”
“Okay.” He tries to hide his shock at a couple of hours. How long has it been already? He ramps up the Englishness. “I was just wondering if it would be at all possible to send a message? It’s just my friend was meant to be meeting me, and he’ll have been waiting for quite some time now. It would be great if I could just let him know it won’t be long now?”
“Well—”
“Sorry—I know it’s an awful lot to ask. But I’m worried he might leave. I’ve already put him through an awful inconvenience asking him to come and meet me, the poor thing. You’d be doing me an awfully big favor if I could just text him, even.”
She smiles, unable to resist the accent, that use of “awfully.” Bingo. Americans, it’s like they’re hardwired for it. Instant backdoor access.
She leans forward, lowers her voice, sliding open a drawer full of spex. All brands, all designs, all looking at first glance like innocent pairs of glasses. She pulls out a pair of Amazon Basics.
“These yours?”
“Yes.” He’s surprised to see them just sitting there. He’d expected them to have been taken off and plugged into some DHS laptop somewhere, been torn down by forensic software. Not that they’d find anything. He knows better than to get on an international flight without wiping all his devices first.
“Okay, take them into the bathroom.” She motions over to the long window that runs the length of the room. “Go in the stall, so nobody sees you. No voice, no video. Text only. No pictures, okay?”