by Tim Maughan
“Huh?”
“Your work. I like it.”
Mary blushes. “Oh, thanks.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure. Nothing, really. Just not a dead fucking face.”
Anika laughs. “Fair enough. It’s really nice. I used to be an artist myself, once. Long ago.”
“Really? Not anymore?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Anika shrugs. “People change.”
And with that Anika feels her knees almost buckle, her stomach turn, and she holds back the urge to scream, to hurl up the pain and the regret and the tears and—
“I should be going,” she says. “And again, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’ll see you around?”
“Maybe,” Anika lies. She turns and heads for the door.
“Wait! One last thing?”
“Yeah?”
“Now they’re all working—I mean, now College says he’ll give everyone a pair … does that mean I’m not special anymore?”
Anika stops in her tracks, turns back. Not knowing what to say.
“I mean, I’m not a freak anymore? Am I?”
“No.” Anika smiles. “No. You’re not a freak. You never were.”
Mary smiles back, puts her head down, picks up the chalk again. “Good. Thanks.”
* * *
Tyrone unlocks the door to let her out, holds it open as she leaves. Stone-faced attitude. She pauses in the doorway, looks back at him.
“Hey, look, man. It’s all right. Don’t beat yourself up. You did okay trying to stop me yesterday. Main thing was you made sure the girl didn’t get hurt.”
“Whatever.” Ah, the delicacy of the bruised male ego.
She smiles and steps out, but as she does, he surprises her by speaking. Sheepishly.
“So. These things, yeah?” He’s holding a pair of spex that College must have given him. “There any way of making music with them?”
“Yeah. Yeah, should be. Look under ‘creativity.’ Might be what you’re looking for. You want me to show you?”
“Nah. Nah. It’s all right. I’ll work it out.”
She smiles back at him. “Yeah. You will.”
17. AFTER
The black monoliths of the Shaka sound system tower into the dull sky, ancient hardboard cases bound together with tape and fraying elasticated rope. The old Rastas busy themselves with checking cables and connections, as some unidentified Trinidadian dub pulses through the stack. It’s just a warm-up, a system test for tomorrow. Tyrone watches them, knowing they’ll spend an hour or two tweaking and perfecting, messing with balances and levels, before they throw a tarp over the top of the whole thing and pay a couple of kids in ganja to stand watch all night. He knows this because just a couple of years ago he was one of those kids, standing out here with Bags on the corner of Ashley and the Croft, bullshitting to try to keep each other awake, to try not to nod off.
He wasn’t in it for the free weed, even back then, though it was a bonus. It was part of his education, an apprenticeship. What he learned about sound and acoustics from running chores for Shaka and his crew—standing guard, carrying boxes and records, climbing up the stack to reconnect loose cables—you couldn’t find it in any books down at St. Paul’s library. Tyrone doubted you’d even find it on the Internet, if that was still an option. It was an unending, unrecordable mishmash of technical knowledge and folklore, engineering skills and oral history, acoustic science and superstition.
The system sounds fierce tonight, the sub-bass going straight through Tyrone, effortlessly penetrating bones and flesh to reverberate in his stomach and bowels, to shake the contents of his rib cage, to move the air in his lungs. He blinks into his periphery and pulls down menus from the spex, still feeling his way through the unfamiliar software, and records a two-bar loop of slow-motion bass. He makes sure to capture it all—not just the pure, unfettered low-frequency sine waves, but everything they touch and move, the buzzing of loose connections, the distortion of speaker cones pushed too far, the groaning of cabinet cases. By the end of the night Shaka and his technicians will have ironed out most of these bugs, but Tyrone wants it all, every glitch and imperfection.
He takes the loop, the waveform floating in a translucent window in front of his face, and slices it into individual notes. More blinks and hand swipes—he feels self-conscious waving his hands around in the street, but he’ll get over it—and he drops them into a step sequencer, each note becoming a vertical bar representing pitch and velocity, pulsing as they play. With a few more blinks he’s shuffled them around, changed their order, tweaked their levels. Made something new, something his own.
* * *
After a few minutes walking up the Croft he pauses again, to watch a couple of graffiti writers working on a new mural on the permanently shuttered front of some long-abandoned shop. Berry paint stains the sleeves of their threadbare Adidas as they work aging airbrushes retrofitted to run off solar, their faces so close to their intricate lines that their foreheads nearly scrape against the colorful metal and brickwork. The hissing of compressed air punctures the near silence and he captures it, slicing it up again, carving high hat and snare patterns from the distorted white noise, bathing it in reverb to fill out the high end above his thunderous bass.
* * *
Back at the shop, he lets Mary out, smiles at her as she leaves. He glances around, wondering what will become of it now, the dead faces staring back at him. Supposedly they’re all up for grabs now, to anyone with a pair of College’s special glasses, anyone that wants to come venture down the Croft to wake the dead. He wonders what that means for Mary. Girl’s had a busy couple of days. She seems happier now, though, lighter. Like she’s had a load taken off her shoulders.
If she’s not looking for dead people anymore, then the shop closes, and he’s out of a job. No worries. Grids will find him something else. Maybe running spices, maybe helping him out with security. Maybe he’ll let him do the radio station full-time like he’d always wanted, maybe even pay him for it. Tyrone knows Grids thinks it’s important; he once told him that after the spices and the weed it’s the most important thing the Croft produces. A sense of community, a sense of purpose, a statement to the rest of the city. Well, at least it was, right up until today. He thinks of the spex on his face. Maybe that’s all about to change.
As he closes the door behind Mary the bell chimes again, that pathetic sound he’s heard a dozen times a day for the last year. Somehow, tonight, in the empty shop it sounds different, the high-frequency metallic sound waves splashing back from bare walls, creating instant rhythms and subliminal harmonics. He opens and closes it again, captures the bell’s double ring, and drops it into the sequencer, this time triggering the sound across nine sixteenth notes, so the pattern goes in and out of sync with the rest of the track. A light touch of reverb and compression, a heavy dose of urgency and discord.
He flicks off the lights, closes the door, and leaves, shutting the faces of the dead away in the dark.
* * *
Up on the roof of the tower he checks the transmitter. One hour until broadcast, and for once everything seems in order. It’s a big one, the pre-carnival warm-up show. He’s got a bunch of guests in tonight—a couple of MCs from Barton Hill and Easton, some DJs from Bedminster and Brislington. Even some posh kid from up in Clifton is coming down to drop some tunes. Well out of his safe zone. All crew, all ends. Can’t have any transmitter fuckups tonight, no dropouts, no dead air, no static.
He steps back from the bird-shit-stained cluster of aerials, wondering again how this all changes, wondering if College will be up here soon, breathing life back into the dead infrastructure. Behind him there’s a familiar yet disconnected squawk, and he turns to see the gull again, sheltering under the solar panels, hiding its young from him while bawling him out, watching him with one wide, terrified eye. Still here, still surviving, still dodging jerk spices and oil-drum smokers.
He crouches, moves crablike toward it. Slowly. The bird reacts, squawking increasing, one wing unfurling toward him as if to hold him back. Tyrone freezes, not wanting to distress the gull more. Instead he just captures everything, the gull’s cries mixed into the static rush of the circling winds. Again he cuts it up, shifting it into a three-note pattern of almost acidic stabs, drenching them in dub-siren levels of echo before layering them over the rest of the track.
He rises, stepping away from the bird, giving it some space and peace. The city unfolds in front of him, the sky visibly darkening, fields of flickering lights rolling out toward Somerset’s distant hills. It’s near silent up here, Bristol’s constant drone battered away by high-rise winds, but Tyrone can’t hear it anyway, his skull reverberating to the spex’s conduction speakers, his head lost in his own music, his mind staring out across unexplored possibilities.
18. AFTER
When she wakes, on the broken mattress in the corner of College’s room, he’s nowhere to be seen. She’s alone, no company apart from the throb of bass through cracked windows, with the morning coffee craving that never leaves, even after all these years.
She sits for a few minutes, watching dust motes swirl like pixels in suspended sunlight. Self-doubt and regret. She could just stay, forget everything else. Make a life here, again. Start something new.
It sounds easy. But the ghosts will always be here, in the corners of the room. Out in the hallway. On the street, just beyond the window. They’re dancing now, sunny carnival vibes, and she knows from there it’s only a short time until the screaming and bleeding starts.
She pulls herself off the mattress, packs her bag quickly. Grabs the backpack College stuffed with spex for her last night, and heads out the door.
College is at the end of the street, on the corner of Ashley Road and the Croft, surrounded by kids. He’s handing out spex to anyone that passes. And there’s no shortage of anyones, a steady, thick stream of party people flooding in through the gates. She tries not to gaze too long into the crowds, knowing ghosts lurk.
He smiles as she approaches. “Ah. It lives.”
“You should have woken me.”
“Eh, you looked like you needed the sleep.”
“Yeah. I did. So, how’s your adoption rate?”
He laughs. “Pretty good. Gonna run out soon. Time to start scouring shops for more. Trying to get people to go home and look in their drawers, innit.”
“People are into it?”
“Yeah. Yeah, appears so. Taking a bit of explaining. People think I’m bullshitting, some crazy man. Until I make them put on a pair. Those old enough to remember seem a bit freaked out. The kids, though … the kids fucking love it.”
“So I see.”
College sighs heavily, shakes his head. “He was right, though, wasn’t he?”
She looks at him quizzically.
“Grids. He was right. About us not knowing what came next. That’s why all this failed. We didn’t have any vision, did we? Just some beliefs and some ideals. But no way of, y’know, making something solid out of them. No organizing, no planning. Instead we ended up just scrabbling around, trying to fix things, trying to keep them patched up.” He looks out at the crowd streaming past. “It’s no different to what it was like before, really.”
“I guess not. But hey, you got another chance now. A whole new network.”
“Yeah.” He laughs. “I guess. Maybe. Just make sure we don’t make the same mistakes as last time, huh?”
“Ah, we probably will.”
“Yeah, probably. I just wonder if actually this is all just bullshit, y’know? Like maybe our brains just ain’t designed to deal with networks. They’re not going to evolve to interface with millions of other people. They’re just not designed for that. And trying to force it just makes us angry and actually more alienated.”
“I dunno. Didn’t they say the same about television?”
“Yeah. Well.” He laughs. “Television fucked things up pretty bad. You remember advertising? Politics?”
“Yeah. Good point.”
They look at each other for a second.
“So what now?” he asks her.
“Me? I’m going back. Wales.” She taps the shoulder strap of her bag. “Gotta get these back. People need them.”
“For what? I mean … what’s the plan?”
“I dunno.” She looks off into the distance, down the street at the gathering crowds. “We’re getting our asses kicked out there. Lots of little cells spread through the valleys, insiders working in farm camps. Trying to disrupt stuff as much as possible. The hope is we can set up a network, get everyone working together. Get everyone watching each other’s backs. Coordinate. Give us a bit of an advantage over the army. The upper hand, for once.”
College laughs. “So, despite everything, you’ve not given up, then? Right now you sound more positive than me.”
“What d’you mean?”
He taps his spex. “This. You sound more positive about all this. I woke up this morning kinda defeated, worried we’re just going to keep repeating mistakes, distractions. But you’re all fired up again. You sound like the old days.”
“Ha. I guess I do.”
“You sound like you think you can make a difference.”
“Yeah. I guess I do. I have to. People are dying.” Awkwardness hangs in the air between them. She puts her hand on his shoulder, squeezes gently. “Look, don’t let it get you down. Maybe Grids is right, maybe this is all a fucking waste of time. A huge distraction, and we’re all going to make the same mistakes again. Thing is, College, at least you’re trying. You want it to not fuck up? Then don’t let it. Take some ownership of it. Shape things. Talk to people. Organize. That’s where we fucked up last time, we just burned everything down, didn’t plan for afterwards. Grids was right about that.”
“I guess.”
“Look, I got faith in you. You know this place, you know these people. Help them. Give them what they need. Take the lead if they need you to. Don’t be scared of power. That’s the other way we fucked up before, we were always scared of power, of taking the lead. We just thought everything would sort itself out somehow. It won’t. It’s not enough to just take power away from those in charge. If we don’t use it ourselves, they just take it back.”
She pauses again. “Look. I’ve got faith in you. You’ll do what’s right. You’ve got this. And if you ever feel like you ain’t, come find me in Wales, and I’ll give you another patronizing pep talk.”
College laughs. “Seriously, though. Thanks. I needed that. I feel better.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.” He sighs, low and deep. “So this is it, huh?”
“Yeah. This is it. Gotta catch my ride before he heads back.”
“No convincing you to stay?”
“No. No, College.”
“Then I won’t try.” Instead he smiles that big goofy smile of his, and hugs her. They hold each other tight, and when she speaks, it’s into the warm, musky comfort of his chest.
“Thank you.”
“Just fucking take care of yourself, yeah?”
“I will.”
“You fucking promise me?”
“I fucking promise you,” she says, holding back sobs. “Maybe I’ll be back.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
When they separate she holds his cheek for a second, then turns and leaves, walking against the tides of the crowd, not looking back.
* * *
The crowd flows around Grids like a stream around a rock, splitting itself naturally and re-forming behind him, keeping a respectable distance. They know who he is. At best they smile or nod, say a couple of words, but most drop their heads slightly, avoiding eye contact. Too hammered by a decade of chaos, uncertainty, of scraping around for shelter and existence in the shattered shell of the city, they know when to step aside, to stay quiet. So they make way, walk around. Flowing like air over a wing, effortlessly passing across the
frictionless field of significance he projects around him.
But for the first time in a while he can feel that significance ebbing away. Too many motherfuckers in this crowd with College’s damn spex on their faces. Walking past him, flowing past as part of some semiautonomous crowd dynamic, but not actually seeing him. Distracted.
He shakes his head. Can’t deny them the distraction, he understands that. Damn, it’s carnival day, distraction is what it’s all about. Come down and get distracted. Smoke some bud, shake your ass. Escape. Forget the relentless fucking daily battle to stay alive that this city has become.
But he knows this is different. He’s seen this before. Escape to him was getting away from this. Sure, he tore College and Anika off a strip for their idealism, for not having some plan for the aftermath—but really, to him it felt like the chains had come off when it all got ripped down. That world—the one behind those glasses, the one that beamed itself directly into your fucking retinas—he was pleased to see it fall, to see it burn. To see it stripped of its value, its systems, its endless fake fucking battles. Its baked-in hierarchies and structures. He didn’t build it, it wasn’t built for him—it was built by some cunts in some other country, built by some rich white motherfuckers that just wanted to get richer. That wanted to make money off him, by occupying his headspace, by taking his credit, by turning him into spectacle and entertainment, content for their advertising vectors.
He shakes his head again and remembers the crazy shit they did as kids. Cars on fire, shoe shops looking like a bulldozer had been through them, carpets compacted hard with crushed plastic and glass. The sound it made beneath his feet. Was fun back then, before he understood who it was for. Who he was really doing it for, who was really benefiting. Who was turning him and his postcode’s dramas and daily struggles into prime-time entertainment. Trending topics on the timelines. Algorithmically curated. The filler between the ad breaks.