by Tom Fletcher
Marion backhanded him across the face, hard. ‘Of course you did something! You’re always doing something!’ Her voice was raw. ‘The fucking Arbitrators, Alan! They did this! They came here, they did this, they’ – she pointed to her face – ‘they did this. They made Billy watch. And they did it because of you. Because of something you’d done.’ She sat down on the floor and laid Billy down across her lap. Alan wanted to lift him up, enfold him. He kicked and shrieked. The noise was deafening. Marion pointed at him, at Alan. ‘You told me – you told me – that you’d stopped.’
Alan’s face burned. He didn’t say anything.
‘You told me.’ She crumpled as fresh sobs rose up.
‘Marion, I’m sorry. I have stopped. I’ve stopped now. But—’
She glanced up.
Seeing the look in her eyes, Alan’s words momentarily failed him. ‘Marion, it’s important,’ he said. He’d believed the words true until he spoke them.
‘What’s important?’ Her words were lizard bones.
‘That people know.’ Why did he continue trying to justify himself? His reasoning was hollow in the face of the hurt wrought on Marion.
‘So you have done something.’
‘Should I just have let this go?’ Alan pointed to his nose, all bent out of shape. ‘The imprisonment?’ He didn’t want to argue with her, but she had to know that he’d had reasons for doing what he’d done, and that he hadn’t anticipated this.
‘You provoke them! Alan, you fucking idiot, you’ve got a son now! Stop kicking the dog!’
‘My mum and dad?’ Alan realised that he too was shouting, and his own cheeks were wet. ‘My mum and dad? All those people? I provoked that, did I?’
‘Of course you didn’t. But you told me you’d stopped. You promised.’
Alan stepped over shards of glass and bent down to pick Billy up. ‘Hey, son,’ he said quietly. ‘Hey.’ But Billy kept on crying, and tried to wriggle free. ‘Talk to me,’ Alan said. ‘You’re a big boy now. You can use words.’ But Billy didn’t.
‘He’s upset,’ Marion said, taking the boy back.
‘I can see that.’
‘Alan, I’m sorry. You have to leave. You’ve put Billy and me at risk, and you living here is a danger to us both.’
Alan stared. But as sick as the notion made him, he knew she was right. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, I understand. I don’t want to, though. I love you. I love him. I love you both. I’ve stopped, I’ve stopped. I won’t do it any more.’
‘You’ve promised that before,’ Marion said. ‘Can’t you see? Billy comes first, Alan! Not you! Not your principles, not what you saw, not your grievances! Billy! Our son!’
‘It’s for him I do it all.’
‘So you do. You’re still at it.’
‘All I’ve done is meet with Eyes a couple of times on the terraces and—’
‘Stop.’ Marion rose up. ‘Alan, you lied to me. I know you have your reasons. I understand your reasons, too. But look at me. Look at us. Look what they’ve done to us, because of you.’
Alan took in the bruises on Marion’s face, Billy’s hysteria, the destruction that had been visited upon their home: the enormity of his mistakes made explicit for him. True guilt blossomed within him and it was a physical sickness. His head was pounding. He felt as if his flesh were fizzing. ‘Yes,’ he said, quietly. ‘To go is the last thing I want, but I know I must.’
‘It will be past curfew now, so you’ll have to head straight for the Discard. You can pack a bag.’
‘The Discard.’
‘Yes.’
‘Marion …’ Alan’s heart had wrenched itself free inside him and was sinking. He hurt all over. ‘I love you. I love Billy. I can’t lose you. I can’t.’
‘We love you too. But you staying here will hurt us. Even if you never put a foot wrong again, you are marked. We will be held in suspicion.’
Alan didn’t say anything.
‘For Billy,’ Marion said.
Alan knelt down and took his son in his arms again. His little body was hot. The boy’s crying had subsided, and he looked up at his father with big blue eyes. His flushed cheeks were covered with snot. His small mouth was closed and serious. ‘You’re thinking hard, hey?’ Alan said. He didn’t know why he said that. He brought Billy up to his chest and squeezed him. Billy put his arms around Alan’s neck and his chin on Alan’s shoulder.
‘Let me put him to bed,’ Alan said.
Marion nodded. ‘Okay.’
But Billy wouldn’t settle. He kept standing up in his cot. He thought everything was okay again, and wanted to play. ‘Good morn-ning!’ he kept saying, with a big grin. Alan sat on top of his Billy’s wooden toy-box and tried to conquer the trembling of his lips in order to smile back. When he was able, he’d whisper, ‘Lie down, son,’ or ‘Close your eyes.’ And he’d pick the child up and lay him back down. Billy would pretend to sleep for a moment – loud, whistling snores – and then ‘wake up’ once more, standing up with another grin and ‘Good morn-ning!’
Marion pushed aside the drapes that hung from the archway into Billy’s room, and came in holding a soft leather satchel. ‘Here,’ she said.
‘Where Daddy going?’ Billy asked.
‘Daddy’s got to go out,’ Marion replied.
‘Daddy going to tation,’ Billy said, which was what he said on those mornings when Alan had the Daily Stationing day shift.
‘Not this time,’ Alan said. He stroked Billy’s hair.
Billy looked up at Alan and Marion for a little while. ‘I’m tired now,’ he said. ‘I want a bobble, plee.’
‘I’ll get you a bottle,’ Marion said, leaving. ‘Say night-night to Daddy.’
‘Night-night, Daddy.’
‘Night, Billy,’ Alan said. He picked up his bag, took hold of Billy’s hand, smiled briefly, then pushed through the drapes.
Marion was standing by the shining bronze door. Alan walked over and she opened her arms to him. ‘Don’t let him forget that I love him,’ Alan said. ‘And don’t forget that I love you, too.’
‘I won’t,’ Marion said. She kissed him deeply. ‘I love you, Alan. Take care of yourself.’
‘I will see you again,’ Alan said. ‘I’ll find a way back.’
Marion gazed into his eyes. ‘But not if it hurts him. Not if it hurts him. Not at that cost.’
‘Not at that cost,’ Alan repeated.
‘Now go.’
Alan went to the door, then stopped. He moved over to the corner of the room and picked up his guitar: something Eyes had chanced upon out there in the Discard, and brought to Alan years ago, when he was still a child. A ten-bug piece of shit, but even so, these things were difficult to come by. Its name was Snapper. The meetings with Eyes had grown infrequent over the years; Eyes was less and less able, and the Arbitrators were less and less willing to turn their backs on such behaviour. So was Marion.
He put the guitar on his back and left, head down, not entirely friendless.
*
Curfew meant that if anybody saw him out, he’d be frogmarched to one of the Chutes and dumped. Discarded. But that didn’t matter; he had nowhere else to go anyway. In fact it would be best if the Arbitrators knew that he’d gone. He was stumbling, numb. The sense Marion had made was still percolating through him, frequently igniting into white-hot self-loathing. Look what I did.
He considered trying to ascend to the Upper Executive Offices and – what? Kill somebody? He’d fantasised about such a thing time and time again, but the truth was that he’d never even heard the names of any of the Executains, let alone worked out who was responsible for what. Maybe he could just kill them all.
But murder wasn’t in him, unfortunately.
And it would probably mean they’d slit his throat before Discarding him, and then he’d definitely never see Marion or Billy again.
He thought about going to Tromo, the Arb who’d saved him back in Modest Mills, but Tromo didn’t do anything unless there was som
ething in it for him, and right now Alan didn’t have anything to offer. As it had many times before, his mind skittered around the deal made with Tromo on his behalf back when Modest Mills was sacked, and its potential consequences. Besides, if Alan remembered correctly, Tromo was up patrolling the Astronomy and Engineering Compliance Executive Offices, and so not at all easy to reach.
He came to a window. The slope of the Pyramid meant that he could look straight up. By now the sun was down, but Satis was full, its ochre disc pocked and shadowed. Corval was half shadowed, but what could be seen of the smaller orb was more colourful – blue and green bands were still catching the sun’s light. And then there were the stars: scattered all over, but to the south was a bright, roundish cloud of them – stars gathered so thickly they looked as if they were swarming. Pyramidders referred to the star cloud as the Battle, but Alan remembered his mother calling it Green’s Eye, and it still looked like an eye to him. Various stars moved slowly around, blinking. His mother always told him they were dragons, great winged lizards that lived in space and spoke with light and flame, not words. He’d told Billy the same thing.
Billy. He had to go. If he was going to help Billy in any way, he had to escape straight away. He tore his gaze from the sky and looked out over the Discard, the expanse of mountainous ruins, the weird, twisted towers, the vast metal archways, monolithic and rusted. Huge square buildings buried beneath foliage and even forests. It was all indistinct in the dark, but here and there turrets and broken domes were silhouetted against the sky, and in places fires burned. When Alan stood alone on a balcony or a terrace, he could hear noises: the wind through leaves, metal grinding against metal. Very occasionally he’d heard what sounded like human voices raised in anger or fear. And sometimes sounds that could have been human, but could equally have been animal: strange barks and whistles. Once there’d been a long, cold howl.
He was from the Discard, almost. He shouldn’t be afraid of it. Though, really, Modest Mills had been something of a halfway house; even there he’d been warned not to venture off into the wilds. To watch for snakes, crocodiles, bandits and cannibals.
His head was splitting, and sickness had settled in his gut. His feet dragged. The bag felt very heavy. He came to the nearest Chute. An innocuous branch from the main corridor led him to a round chamber lit by one of the white globes. The walls were intricately decorated with rows of overlapping symbols in inlaid brass and bronze: triangles, eyes, discs, stick figures, fish, hands. The symbols repeated in various patterns, spiralling up around the chamber until they met with the ornate globe casing.
In the centre of the floor was a round hole. Alan looked down it. It was like one of the helter-skelter-style slides at the children’s pool he’d taken Billy to the previous weekend. Damn it. Sorry, Billy. The guilt he felt was poison.
He sat on the lip of the Chute and then waited for a patrol to happen across him.
2
Discard Nights
Twelve years after ingesting him, the Pyramid spat Alan back out, and Alan found that twelve years was long enough to have softened him. The Discard was not kind to newcomers, and nor did it recognise him as one of its own. And Alan did not recognise the Discard, either; he remembered only a tiny part of it – Modest Mills – which was gone. It had been a small town, the town of his birth, where he’d had parents and a home. But it had been reduced to the ash and dust that whispered softly around the base of the Pyramid and settled into deep drifts against its side. After crawling out of the Discard Chute and digging his way through these drifts, Alan was dizzy and parched. He lay amongst the ruins for a while, looking up at the sky, and the Pyramid that occupied so much of it.
Eventually he stumbled off in the direction that he’d seen Eyes go after their few clandestine meet-ups. He still felt weak after the Bleeding, and grew hungry as well as thirsty. He was torn between wanting to meet somebody in order to ask for help, and hoping against hope that he encountered nobody. He followed a wide path that descended between abandoned buildings. He started to worry that he was too exposed, but none of the alleyway mouths or the holes in the sides of the buildings looked particularly inviting. All around were night-sounds: small movements, doors banging in the slight breeze, architecture settling. The occasional call of a nocturnal bird. There were no birds in the Pyramid, but Alan had heard their voices from the terraces on occasion. Now they sounded far too close.
That night he passed out in a great hall that housed a vast machine comprised mostly of copper tubing which had long since turned green. He was awakened by a pair of emaciated hands pawing at his legs and kicked out. His foot connected with a face and something squealed.
‘I’m sorry,’ said his new friend. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you was dead. Just a little hungry is all. Just a little hungry. But seeing as you’re not dead I won’t bother you no more. A bit of meat’s such a rare thing! The rats and lizards are too fast for a skinny wretch such as myself. So sorry.’
By the light of the bright moons Alan could see the man scuffling backwards, away from him. He was almost skeletal. His bald head was grey and spotty. Alan’s skin crawled. Why would he be carrying meat? Then he woke up properly and jumped to his feet. He couldn’t see a weapon on the man’s person, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one, or couldn’t find one. But then why hadn’t he just tried to bludgeon Alan while he slept?
Perhaps he was just hungry; perhaps he genuinely didn’t want to kill anybody.
But Alan did not hang around to find out. He ran beneath the strange machine’s appendages and out of that ruined building, and he kept running.
*
The unpleasant night became an unpleasant day, and the unpleasant days and nights became hard, painful weeks. The Discard was teeming with animal and insect life, but all the creatures Alan encountered were faster than him and he had no aptitude for tracking, trapping or hunting. There was an abundance of greenery, but he did not know which plants were edible and which were poisonous. He frequently discovered colonies of mushrooms, but he was wary of consuming them for fear of making himself ill, however badly his hunger hurt him. It was an effort to resist, but resist he did, all the while fantasising about fat brown mushrooms sizzling on a metal plate over a campfire. Building campfires was something else that he was bad at. But he survived, thanks to the Discard’s apparently infinite population of snails. They couldn’t outrun him, and he was reasonably sure they weren’t poisonous: he remembered people in Modest Mills frying them with garlic and selling them at market stalls to passers-by. Alan ate them raw – shuddering at their gritty, rubbery flesh – until he got better at building fires. After that, he toasted them on sticks. They were still gritty and rubbery, but they were not as slimy.
Without intending to, he found himself in a network of buildings and couldn’t work out where the exit was. The ground he’d stood on upon first leaving the Pyramid was now lost to him. He wandered through vast, abandoned mills, clambered down rusty metal ladders, used thick twisted vines to climb up sloping chimneys, stalked quiet, dusty corridors of pale stone, crept up on nesting pigeons and sent them cooing and squawking up into the air. He stood at windows, looking for landmarks that would help him travel with more direction, but as soon as he left any particular window he became disorientated again. It felt like whichever window he stood at – however many storeys he ascended or descended – he gazed down at yet more red-tile rooftops, either blazing in the sunlight or gleaming coldly by the light of the moons. And he gazed up at yet more buildings soaring upwards, away from him, culminating in spires and spindles or messy knots of metal pipework. The architecture looked impossible.
In another attempt to take stock of his location he tried to get to the bottom of the building he was in, but the deeper he went, the darker the interiors grew, and he became unnerved. The less light made it through the windows, the more moss and mould dampened the floors, ceilings and walls. Large, dull beetles scuttled from his footsteps. But he kept on go
ing until, at the top of one stairwell, he heard a strange noise echoing up from the green, dripping depths; metal scraping metal, and something like laughter. He turned and fled.
He had expected to meet more people. Once he saw somebody several rooftops away, sitting on top of a chimney pot, wearing a large, outlandish hat, smoking, and sipping from a shiny hip-flask, as if there was nothing to be afraid of. Alan almost dived from the windowsill he was leaning over, shouting ‘Hello! Hello!’ but by the time he’d lowered himself down into a small paved courtyard and then climbed up a drainpipe onto the top of the building that the stranger had been sitting on, the stranger had disappeared.
As he continued on his aimless journey, though, he saw more and more people. Just never close up. The ones he wanted to speak to all avoided him, and he ran or hid from the ones who tried to approach him. They were all grimy and skinny and desperate. Who knew what they wanted, or what weapons they carried?
Alan’s diet of snails grew tedious and, despite his best efforts, he fell sick. He put it down to drinking bad water. The little food he managed to eat went right through him, and whenever he did manage to fall sleep he was woken in short order by the urge to vomit. He considered returning to the Pyramid – but no. He wasn’t going back until he could do something good for his family. Returning now would be bad for them. He wouldn’t fuck things up for them any more.
A week or two later, he was still unable to hold any food in his belly. He was dehydrated and his head felt like it was on fire. His skin was dry in some places, greasy in others, and he stank. He was encountering many more people now, but they kept well away. Traders selling dried meat and vegetables and whisky from backpacks went past but he didn’t have the bugs. He remembered bugs – a species of iridescent beetle, their bodies varnished – from Modest Mills, but he had no idea how to lay his hands on any now.
Had he been wrong about the Discard all this time? Maybe the Pyramidders were right. Maybe it was just a hellish labyrinth, offering nothing but a variety of ways to die. If you were born out here, well, then maybe you had a chance, but if you were a Pyramidder …