by M. T Hill
Martha doesn’t want to watch the operation, if it passes as one. She keeps picturing Rolly’s skinned roadkill, tendon and flesh unbonding. She helps to set up in Sharon’s shed, though; stands there agog as Rolly fashions an operating table from a pair of railway sleepers and four chairs. Soon they stretcher the injured man inside, and Martha recoils as he comes round briefly to scream. Then they’ve got the injured man on the table, illuminated by arcs dragged up from the lab, and Agnes has arranged on Sharon’s tatty sideboard her stainless instruments, a hacksaw with a fresh blade from the tool shed. The man’s drip bag dangles from a coat peg, fluid lines crocodile-clipped together. Outside, Rolly drags over one of the freshly charged solar units to serve as an auxiliary in case their stored power runs out.
Martha leaves before Agnes makes the first cut. Seized by habit, she heads for her shed – until she remembers with a lurch that it’s no longer a shed at all. Then, a curiosity greater than dread. The old man’s body is still in the remains of the car, and there’s no one to tell her not to look.
Ten feet away from the car she can’t deny a thrill, the sparkle at her fingertips. A faint high note in her ears. For some reason she expects the dead man to have shifted in his chair. Five feet, and she’s taking fairy-steps around the car, whose bonnet has stopped smoking. The wind whistles across the car’s open gull-wings.
Martha isn’t ready to look at his body again, she realises. Instead, she goes to the car boot. Peers through the rear windscreen, webbed with hairline cracks. She runs a finger over the glass, the texture of a mosaic. Inside are two duffel bags, half-zipped. A ball pein hammer with a blackened wood handle. A large torch. A thick coil of cable, jumplead attachments, one of which is hooked up to an array of batteries, themselves taped to a big lump of wood. A lifeless Gilper-branded navigation bug, its filigree wings singed and curled.
Martha clicks her jaw. There’s a story in here, even if she can’t pick up the thread. She blinks as if to simulate taking pictures with her eyes.
Martha comes back around the car. The injured man’s side. At his door she’s struck by the culture of the setup, the unconscious hierarchy: the dead man sits in what would be the passenger seat, were this a manual car, which meant the injured man had taken the ‘driving’ seat. Does that say something? Did the injured man have power over the dead old man? Or was the injured man a chauffeur?
Round the front now, with its frills and folds of metal and plastic and alloy. So much can happen in an instant. She passes the car’s indicator nubbin, the A-frame on the dead man’s side. And finally Martha is beside him. She stoops to be closer, at his level. She leans and cocks her head, trying to make sense of his remodelled face. Unreality expands around her; Martha inspects the old man as though he’s an exhibit. It’s the details, she decides, that make him less of a stranger – proof he’d lived and was not always this way. His chin has tucked into his neck like a sleeping drunk’s. The string of unbroken, bloody drool stretching from his lip to his belly, somehow impossible to accept as still being wet. Cheap amalgam fillings in his teeth, visible through the hole in his cheek. The thin, white hairs of his torn scalp. She leans closer. A hint of sour peach from the car’s air freshener. The man’s body itself still fresh enough to conceal its own smells, even if the skin has lost its colour. In this light, the old man is a green not unlike the limbs hanging in bunches across the field. It reminds her of a glow-in-the-dark toy she had as a child.
Martha looks along the rest of him. Hairy wrists, a cheap analogue watch. Beige sweater. A weathered leather belt, whose incrementally worn holes say he’s been gradually losing weight. He could be a grandfather – anyone’s grandfather. But something is different to her. A change, not in the dead man’s pose, his apparent indifference to death, the flap of head skin over his eyes. No – it’s the wider setting. A shift in the light, maybe. The rotation of the Earth. Or the framing of his being here at all. Her understanding of him.
How do they get rid of him? Who do they report him to?
Martha imagines a rectangle of loose topsoil, patted with a shovel. A local scrapper coming up for the car, taking it to pieces in situ, leaving nothing but the wood of her flattened shed, its paint tainted by mechanical fluids. Rolly burning the car’s onboard computer.
With a start, Martha realises what’s different.
What’s missing.
The pistol isn’t on the man’s knee.
Immediately she turns around, mouth open, expecting – what? Rolly to be standing there, grinning, revealing at last some clue to his past crimes, the things Sharon and Greenley chose to forgive, or had no choice but to ignore?
No. For all Rolly’s brooding, the odd clumsy comment, he has never struck her as violent. His shoulders seem too narrow, for starters, and his beard only accentuates his gauntness. It’s not like he’s wiry and strong despite his frame – she’s seen him trying to use an axe.
So who took it? Greenley? Maybe there’s an argument for Greenley ‘looking after it’. It’s not like the crypto-paternal-figure thing never extends to his taking responsibility for things beyond his sphere of control, in part as a way to extend his sphere of control. Except the idea of Greenley even knowing how to hold a gun is laughable. Greenley is the man who’ll scoop ants from hard standing to make sure no one treads on them.
Sharon, then? Martha can’t see that, either. Sharon is fierce to a point, certainly protective, but she wouldn’t see the opportunity. Give her a hand trowel and a good motive and she’d do the same damage.
Which doesn’t leave Martha many options. Except, of course, that the old man here isn’t dead at all. That this is all a ruse.
‘Who are you?’ she asks, goose-bumped now, the forest intensely black behind her. ‘Who took it?’ she whispers, increasing her distance. The man doesn’t tell her. The man can’t answer. The dead being those who see nothing, and hardly make for good counsel.
Then a glint – a little sliver of moonlight in the car’s footwell, between the dead man’s boots.
Martha swears at herself. The familiar having segued into the night, and with it her rationality. There, propped against the old man’s ankle, is the pistol.
She hesitates for long enough to consider the alternative. She ignores her best instincts. Martha reaches in and touches the gun. Takes it out, weighs it in her palm. Holds it to her chest as though she imagines keeping it.
She places the gun back on the dead man’s knee, balancing it carefully, and does her best to ignore the creeping sense she might come to regret it.
7
The injured man’s operation finishes before one in the morning. For the past few hours, Martha has been wrapped in a blanket watching the panel window of Sharon’s shed from the step of Greenley’s front door, and now her buttocks are part-numbed and itching from the welcome mat. The window in Sharon’s shed is a warm square of light, occasionally flashing as the trio move around inside. Through the night a warped shadow-figure played on the walls, whose arms made violent motions. At one point the saw’s shadow hung there like a portent.
This is the second full cup of tea to have cooled in Martha’s hands. The shed step damp and freezing to the touch. She listens to the chattering forest and the midtone murmurings of Agnes on the phone with the surgeon. Sharon’s been out twice in the last hour or so, her face sweaty. The first time to get something from the lab, stepping around Martha while tousling Martha’s hair; the second to visit the limb-trees, where she switched on her hand and had it harvest a ripe prosthesis for fitment.
At five past one, Agnes comes out of the shed wearing a lubricant-smeared plastic sheet. She looks to the sky, clear and starry, and casually lights a cigarette. Martha can’t get over the fact Agnes has done this here, just like that. Nor can she shake her sense that the man must’ve known, or at least hoped it would happen. No insurance and a catastrophic injury sustained in a crash at a limb-farm? It’s all too neat.
‘Why you still up?’ Agnes asks, noticing Martha. She star
ts over and Martha doesn’t stand because she doesn’t want to lose the warmth.
‘Hey,’ Agnes says again. ‘What you doing?’
Martha shrugs. ‘Wanted to check he’d made it.’ Then, with a frown, ‘He has, hasn’t he?’
Agnes exhales for a long time, nodding through the cloud. ‘He’s grand. Sedated for now – he’ll probably wake about midday tomorrow. Be a rough hangover, that…’
Martha scowls – can’t help it. The injured man is both a puzzle and a vague threat. If she’s honest, she wanted him to be awake, so she could go in there and ask who he is.
‘Will he be, you know – normal?’
‘It’s a brand new leg,’ Agnes says. ‘I’d call that a blessing. From the state of the scars on his face, I’m sure he’s no stranger to recovering… But sure, he’ll be in shock, some pain. Trauma does enough to the brain on the physical side – we’ve no idea what he’s been through. That, and body shock. Do you know the rejection rates of your prosthetics? Abbas always says you made good stuff here – but bodies don’t like things that aren’t made of bodies. Being a cyborg is nice till you’re honking of gangrene.’
Martha remembers the stream of people marching up the motorway. The desperation of it. She shakes her head.
‘Aye,’ Agnes says. ‘We’ve done all we can.’
‘And the dead guy? The old one?’
Agnes furrows her brow. She exhales. ‘Good question, young team. Did anyone call him in yet?’
Martha shrugs. ‘My phone’s been dead since Birmingham.’
Agnes dabs out her cigarette on her boot and holds up the butt. ‘I’ll try and get someone on the case, eh? Here – where d’you want this putting?’
Martha throws her cold tea on the grass and tilts the mug.
‘Nice one,’ Agnes says, throwing the cigarette butt inside. ‘I’ll call someone before I get off.’
* * *
Martha sleeps in Greenley’s bed for three hours tops. She dreams of finding a severed leg in her bed, and wakes before six with the taste of the car’s air freshener in her mouth.
Nobody else on the allotments is up. After Agnes left, Greenley and Sharon had bunked up in his old campervan down the hill, while Rolly had gone skulking about in the forest. On past form, they’d all be lying in.
Seven comes around, and blue sky gives way to swollen, leaden cloud. Martha stands at the open shed door, breathing it in, the damp and the earth. The fresh mud. Somewhere in the forest a cuckoo is calling. Away from the allotments, the slope down to the main road is textured like the sea. A low easterly current runs through the long grass, greens and yellows moving as languidly as waves. Martha boils the kettle for the washbasin, rinses her face and armpits, and dresses in yesterday’s clothes. Stands staring, for a time, at the space where her shed was. She wonders where she’ll sleep tonight. She steps outside and crosses the allotments, looping round the damaged car, her flattened shed, eerie in the grey light, like the remains of a nocturnal animal. The car’s been pushed off her shed. The dead man is gone. Had Greenley and Rolly moved him? She doesn’t remember any noises overnight. She kneels then at the shed boundary with a knot in her throat, recognising some of her belongings; hints of brightly coloured clothing and shattered trinkets. The structure, petalling outwards, is unrecognisable as something that might have stood at all. A dog barks in the distance, and the goats emerge from their shelter. Martha goes to feed them, absently humming old pop songs as they nuzzle her arm through the fencing. When the bag of alfalfa runs out, she tugs clumps of long grass from the bank beneath the pen and lets the goats lick her palms. When her knees begin to seize from squatting, she gives in to temptation.
The injured man is half-naked on the makeshift table, still lined in to the coat-peg drip. A blanket has been pulled up over his intact leg and groin. His replacement – smooth and steely, a markedly different shade to the skin of his knee and thigh – is exposed. Getting air to it is important.
Unable to reason herself out of it, Martha taps on the shed window. The injured man stirs slightly, rolls, but stays asleep. He’s facing her now – peaceable despite the sunken eyes and sallow complexion. Front on, the man’s scars are most apparent across his forehead, the receding hairline, and also in front of his ears. Another rough line through the well-defined crescent of his chin, just beneath the bottom lip. It makes Martha wonder if something has bitten off his face, then roughly reassembled it.
Martha taps again. No reaction. She curses him under her breath, knowing the chance for her own interrogation has all but gone. Back in Greenley’s shed, she fills the kettle, sets a fireblock going, and pulls four mugs from the cupboard. Balls to it. Greenley, Sharon and Rolly don’t deserve a lie-in.
* * *
Come eleven, a police officer arrives on an armoured bike whose motor sounds like a grasshopper. A large man, leathered up, here to get things done. He unclasps his chin guard and clears his throat. The visor lifts away to reveal dimmed sun-lenses and a legacy sinus-job. The officer’s jack-in ports sit on a strip running across his nose and under his eyebags, with a bundle of sensory fibre lined straight up his nostrils.
Martha has just finished wiping down her hand when the officer approaches. He turns off his sun-lenses in some attempt at humility, raises one hand against the sun. She squeezes out her chamois cloth and refits the control board.
Up close, she can tell he’s studying her.
‘Martha?’ the officer asks, pushing out his cheek with his tongue. She looks around, but the allotments are the closest they get to abandoned: Rolly out on a drop, Greenley up the road burning the injured man’s clothes, Sharon keeping vigil at the injured man’s side.
‘You are Martha, aren’t you?’
Martha tries not to look at the officer directly, aware of his mods, the running calculus. She resents her body for giving him data. It makes her bones feel cold.
‘Yeah,’ she goes.
‘PC Perrin,’ the officer says. ‘Or Geraint. Whichever.’
‘Hi,’ she says, rotating away.
‘Chill,’ the officer says, pointing to his eyes. ‘I’m not on duty. These aren’t even live – I messed up the last firmware update.’
Martha frowns. ‘They gave you my name.’
‘Proven to establish rapport,’ Perrin says, grinning.
‘Well, I’m not gonna throw myself off the viaduct, so you don’t have to worry about that.’
Perrin halves his grin. He re-engages his sun-lenses. The effect is subtle, but unsettling. ‘Is Mr Greenley on site, Martha?’
Martha hesitates, then shrugs. ‘He might be back,’ she says. She can smell Greenley’s wood burner, now she considers it. ‘If he’s in, he’ll be in the lab, I think. Is it about the old man’s body? I don’t know where they took it—’
‘It’s no bother.’ The officer smiles delicately. ‘We discussed it. If you wouldn’t mind showing me the way.’ He nods to Martha’s robot. ‘You okay leaving it?’
Martha tosses the chamois in the bucket and rolls her jacket sleeves, suddenly conscious of her heat. ‘This way,’ she says. And she leads the officer across the field to Greenley’s shed, past Greenley’s radio gear, and down the cement steps to the lab.
‘Sir?’ Perrin says, knocking on the main door. He goes in first.
Greenley’s there to one side with two handfuls of what looks like wet seaweed. Martha remembers Sharon moaning to Rolly about Greenley developing plants and ‘cultures’ for a new contract; Greenley had been spending too long perfecting the mix, and wasn’t going to bed.
‘Constable,’ Greenley says, removing his goggles and gloves. ‘We so appreciate you donating your time.’
Perrin shakes Greenley’s hand. The air reeks of hydroponics.
‘I owed her, to be fair,’ Perrin says, slightly askance. ‘Been a shocker, by the sounds of it.’
Greenley smiles. ‘Something like that,’ he says. Then to Martha, ‘Do you want to go and tell Sharon the cavalry’s arrived?’
‘The other guy being your injured man? The one Agnes operated on?’
‘Yes,’ Greenley says.
The constable smiles. ‘Talk about field medicine. We’ll get to him presently. For now, though, I’d like to see the dead one – if I could.’
‘Certainly,’ Greenley says. ‘Martha?’
Martha rubs her nose. ‘Yep?’
Greenley glances towards the lab door.
‘I was gonna stay put,’ Martha tells them. ‘In case you need a witness. Or corroboration, or whatever.’
Perrin’s eyes snap to her. Greenley’s face hardens. His thin smile makes for a poor disguise. ‘You sure?’ Greenley asks. ‘Don’t you have stuff to be getting on with?’
Martha shakes her head. ‘Cleaned my hand already. Fed the goats. I’m done for the day.’
Perrin clears his throat.
‘It’s fine,’ Greenley says, glaring at Martha over the officer’s shoulder. ‘Through this way, and mind your head.’ Then, almost guiltily, ‘We put him on ice.’
Martha follows the men into the back. Smug, to a point, that she might have embarrassed Greenley for infantilising her. It’s not like last night’s strange conference with the body hasn’t prepared her. Part of her wants to double-check he looks the same – that last night happened.
Greenley hovers by a chest freezer at the back of the walk-in, where much of their spring vegetable harvest is usually stored. He opens the chest. From her spot behind Perrin, Martha sees the fabric of a thick blanket, then a grey hand stuck to the wall of the freezer. Closer – all of them edging closer – the frosted tip of the old man’s nose, the loose scalp folded back to where it should be. The blanket is in effect a liner for the freezer. The old man’s relaxed position is oddly comforting.