In the waiting room of the parlour in Mel’s corner of the city, Y repeats the name in ratatat bursts – ejects it from her throat in triplets.
“Yasmin, Yasmin, Yasmin. Yasmin, Yasmin, Yasmin…”
Regardless of the mechanics – is the binary encoded from thought? She doesn’t think in binary – it thrills and scares her to know she’s carried a voice disguised even from her own ears for so long. In one way it completes the picture – nestles alongside her skills, attributes and personality traits as things to apprehend, to slowly tame and use. It also gives her a fresh perspective on who she might have been before the makers remade her, before the Manor Lord chose her, marked her. There are fresh assumptions she feels sure she could verify if time were more malleable: the sound and shape of her mother tongue, a genetic aptitude for physical tasks, a probably genetic tenacity. A familiarity with structures, a knowledge of the semiotics and symbology of these structures. Towers. And was there always potential for her to be so nimble, so physically powerful, so controlled? Was that why they selected her? In a strange way, her voice also trickled into the void of her parentage. Were they like her? Had they been contrarians, too?
She’s now convinced she lived her first life in this sister-world.
Yasmin. Yasmin. Yasmin.
To hear it now feels no less significant than hearing Sandy say it in that grey car park, beneath those black, swinging bags. And though the throatpiece seems to interpret the binary and sometimes mangle it, it feels like something else she’s recovered. A bridge between interior and exterior repaired.
With a voice, she is more human.
And so she repeats her name to Sol and Melanie like a mantra, and tries to think of a sentence, a phrase, some kind of grand statement, an answer to all of Sol’s questions. This, though, is too hard. She and Sol like two old friends, reunited, who have so much to say, to fill in, they barely know where to start.
Thank you?
Good luck?
The Manor Lord is always watching, and now I must shut his eyes?
Perhaps the thing she most wants to say is I’ll take care of you – knowing how she can. The thing is, it’s too important, and she’s frightened of how the throatpiece might translate it.
Sol’s made his mind up. If they’re going to do this – if he and Yasmin are going back to her tower together – he first needs to confirm something for himself.
“I need to get online,” he goes to Mel, the three of them inert, exhausted, in the Cat Flap’s kitchen. Sitting like relatives waiting for the worst news. “Ten minutes at most.”
Mel isn’t sure. “I wouldn’t know where to start,” she tells him. “Though I heard it’s being opened up to the public again.”
“How secure’s your line?” Sol asks. He sips a mug of rainwater poured straight from the butt outside.
“The phone line?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just a phone.”
Sol purses his lips.
“Am I missing something?”
“I just need to ring someone.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t want to explain that he doesn’t know who’s complicit in this, that he’d rather be safer than sorry. That they’ll catch up with him eventually. “I just do.”
“And what about Yasmin?”
Her full name still sounds so novel. Sol hasn’t said it enough to normalize it; to copy over the previous version. He likes it, certainly – loves what it means for the woman he’s called Y for what seems so long now. But it isn’t quite hers yet.
Yasmin bares her teeth at them.
“I want you to stay here,” he tells them, wavering on the last word. There’s a firmness in his voice – a clear resolve. He kneads his hands in front of him. “And try and find Yasmin some decent boots.”
Neither woman responds. It’s not difficult to feel like he’s palming Yasmin off on Mel, or that she’s unwelcome to go with him. Maybe that’s the truth of it. He reflects on the ways Roy’s influence might’ve taken root – if he’s learned something other than how to fear the man’s assertiveness. Thinking about Roy also makes him feel resentful: Roy would know exactly how to get online without any fuss. He’d know someone. Course he’d know someone.
“That OK?” he asks.
“Yes,” Yasmin says, and the tone’s softer. With his engineering hat on, Sol guesses she’s starting to understand the throatpiece’s parameters; that she can temper, recalibrate the muscles that feed sound into it. Modified as she is, that seems plausible enough.
Beyond the basics, though, they still haven’t found a way to maintain a conversation.
“Keep it all shut,” Sol says, as if that wasn’t obvious.
“We’ll make do,” Mel says. “But there’s something else.”
“What?”
Yasmin places her three hands on the table in front of her. She cranes her neck, waiting for Mel to carry on.
“Nothing, actually,” she says, picturing Jase. “I’m just thinking out loud. You can go out the back way.”
Sol settles his mug. Mel with an expression dredged from a landfilled past. She’s lying, and he can’t dig in. “Then look after each other,” he says, and moves for the door.
“That’s what we do,” Mel says behind him. “That’s how it works here.”
Beyond the Cat Flap, Sol turns past the supermarket car park, where an enormous debris pile still burns, into a row of razed terraces. He’s reminded what a sad bit of the city this is, heart pounding as he remembers Mel confirming what she planned to do with her half of the money. Telling him about the friends she’d made on the street. “We’ve got to make our own way now,” she’d told him gleefully, as if the Cat Flap’s cheap ground rent was the only reason to put up with its adjoining decay. Strangely it made him ashamed – not of her, nor of her choices, but of himself. He wishes he’d told her once how proud he was of her recovery, of what she achieved. More than that, he wishes he had the consent to even have an opinion on her life.
Sol walks on. The destitution is astonishing: swathes of ruins; barren tree roots spidering from churned earth; a homogeneity to the housing foundations that evoke the battlements of a castle parapet nearly buried. Alien moonscape, monochromatic dream. And he’s glad that all the discarded shoes he passes, many of them children’s shoes, tied by the laces, remain inscrutable.
This lunar slew ends at a sort of inner-city border: a block of tall, still-standing buildings that leer down at his approach. At these bounds of inner Manchester – Ancoats the threshold – he finds a windowless phonebox with a rotten floor and a hot toilet smell. He wedges the door and throws in a few coins. Then he dials right into the order chain – his call bounced from link to link until a Swansea accent pipes through.
“Who’s this?”
“It’s me. Mr Manchester.”
Silence. Then, “You’re not at home, are you?”
“No home to go to.”
Miss Wales chuckles. “You graft too hard, you do.”
Sol’s more comforted by her voice than he wants to admit.
“Wanting updates on the shipment, are you?”
“No no, that all came.”
“Just checking. What is it, then?”
Sol sucks air through his teeth. When did he last clean them? “I need a favour.”
Another pause. “Favours? Haven’t done favours in years.”
Sol doesn’t say anything.
“Go on then…”
“I need to get online. Securely, though. I know it’s easy enough if you ask the right people. But I can’t have interference, monitoring, nothing. No one can know what I’m looking at. Not anyone. Not even the people I’m borrowing the connection from.”
“And what are you looking at?”
Sol settles his head on the phonebox frame. “Just… travel plans. I’m making travel plans. Serious, though – anything you can do…” Hearing a note of desperation creeping in, he cuts himself short.
Miss Wales’ pen goes click click click. “You know,” she says, “I’m sure we’ve got a connector holed up near you.” Paper shuffling. “I’m sure we do. Let me just check my doo-dah.” Sol hears her half-covering the phone, muffled shouting to someone else. How many of them work there? A rustling, and she’s back. “I’m always bloody right, aren’t I? Brian he’s called. Brian. Cute, that, isn’t it? Brian. I think he does server hosting for us. Good, innit, this proxy business.”
“Brian,” Sol says.
“He’s your best bet. Unless you feel like going cross-country. We do run our own stations further south – a few guys closer to us in Bristol, Merthyr. Obviously wouldn’t recommend London unless you want ructions…”
“Brian,” Sol repeats. “Brian’s fine.”
Miss Wales stops tapping the pen. “You know, if it’s a quick fix, you should just knock on doors. Won’t take too long to find someone handy – you’d be surprised how many’ll get round it. All them little ones weened on code…”
“Maybe.”
“If you’re really paranoid, though, it’s tunnels or bust. Tunnels or bust.”
Sol closes his eyes. There’s always a compromise. He looks ahead. In the distance, a patrol lev whines across the sky, engines crackling. It weaves its way through the crowded towers of the central block with a flock of pigeons keeping pace, attendant, like the pilot fish that nurse sharks. Every few seconds the bird cloud morphs, reimagines itself. Something about the movement makes him wonder how easy it’d be for him and Yasmin to hop the city entirely. The coast further north, maybe. A North Sea wind.
“I think I’ll stick to who I trust,” he says.
Miss Wales laughs. “You’re very flattering.”
“How soon can I see him?”
“Brian? Can get it teed up for tonight, if you like.”
Sol shakes his head. “Probably too soon. Need wheels first.”
“Tomorrow? Day after? Bear in mind he’ll have you jumping through hoops. Nobody my end likes taking risks, so it’ll be on my word he agrees to meet you.”
In the phonebox, the air stops moving, as if the massed particles around him have become a superconductor for some coming malignancy. “Tomorrow then,” Sol says, gambling on Irish. He wipes his forehead with the back of his arm. Knife slashes on the glass. It’s started raining again.
How do you say goodbye to someone you’ve already left? Do you sneak out? Do you leave, casually, with a kind of breezy farewell that suggests you might see them again soon? Or do you repeat the whole sorry process – retreading the emotions of it, that rawness, looping up the present moment with a fixed point, a rupture of the past, in the way you might create wormholes by folding the universe itself?
Sol stands with Mel and Yasmin in the Cat Flap’s waiting room, wondering how best to let go. Mel appears lost in herself, navigating her own labyrinth. Sol can see it in her single eye’s movements – slowly down and up, briefly to either side, like an animal doublechecking its surroundings. A rueful glance at her watch, then back at Sol. Finally, a look of veneration for Yasmin, before she starts the sequence again.
It keeps occurring to Sol that an outsider – a punter – might peer through the boarded windows and mistake them for a family. Maybe they’d be preparing to go on holiday, waiting on their airport transfer. God, it’d been so long since a morning like that. You get calluses on those memories; the fixtures of their old normality rubbing up against the casual horrors of the new –
“When we are ready?” Yasmin asks, syntax just out. Sol smiles: it’s like she understands how this scene would appear to a stranger, too. She’s all layered up, the sports bag containing the cylinder by her feet. And she keeps stretching her legs – apparently to check they’re still working as they did ten minutes ago.
“He won’t be long now,” Sol tells her, hoping it isn’t a lie. He’s in the big peacoat, getting warm inside it. He imagines their next movements, and runs through Miss Wales’ instructions for contacting Brian. And then he goes back to how he’ll leave her this time.
Mel clears her throat. She hovers on something, then dismisses it. Another moment passes, and she speaks anyway. “Do you trust him?” she asks Yasmin, apropos of everything that’s ever happened since they met on that frothy beach and poked dying fish as their parents ignored them on the dunes.
Yasmin doesn’t answer directly. Instead she wraps a hand around her chin.
“Do you trust me?” Sol asks Mel.
Mel shrugs. “Would you?”
Sol shrugs back. In some small way, he knows this is the answer: that this is how they leave it. Not with a speech or an apology, not with tears or mumbled regrets, but with an exchange of indifferent, tired pleasantries, and the conviction that things never stopped changing.
At last a V8 purr pulls Sol out of the Cat Flap and into the road. Fresh air balms the cuts in his fingers, chills the sweat on his palms. “Stay in there,” he calls inside.
The Ferrari: a gothic wedge with comically flared arches. Its prancing horse on a yellow badge just ahead of its front alloys. Irish winds down the passenger window and leans across. “Travelling light, fat boy?”
Sol grins a full rack of teeth. “It’s a frigging Mondial,” he says. “And it isn’t red.”
Irish climbs out of the car and throws Sol the keys. “Mondial T. Different beast. And anyway – red’s what the wankers go for.”
“Think I expected a 360,” Sol says, shaking his partner’s cold hand. “Or maybe a Rossa. What you dream about when you’re a nipper.”
The corners of Irish’s mouth curl downwards. “Same chassis as your 360,” he replies, and starts listing on his fingers: “Power-assisted steering. Mid-engined, tasty whine at the top end, not too throaty. And look at it, Solomon, heavens be: just look at it. It’s a fucken ninja. Steel body, box section space frame… moan all you want, but given your nasty timelines the welding was a dream. Even replaced your engine cover. Went with new springs and dampers, stronger sus-arms and a set of big old pots. Otherwise it’d go like a fucken blancmange round every corner.”
Irish circles the thing, clearly proud of his work. When he comes back, Sol can’t help but drape an arm round his shoulder.
“Been a week,” Sol says.
Irish wriggles away. “Get on with yourself. You drag me out here to this whorehouse and now you want a cuddle as well?”
“I mean I appreciate it, Pete. It’s…”
“Who’s Pete? You keep doing that! What’s with all the small talk?”
Sol laughs nervously. Perhaps their appreciation of the Ferrari is all that’s left to bind them – or distract them from a glaring rift. The pair of them stand there, stomachs unsettled, half admiring the car. No mistake: it looks battle-ready. Sol knows the average drone system wouldn’t tell it’s been modded, and it excites him to know its hidden features are designed with his whims in mind. A bloodlusty vision, then: the car colliding with Roy’s murderers –
“Is it heavy?” Sol asks, grasping.
Irish nods. “Course. More than a few horses got away, but it still goes like shit off a shovel. Inch-thick box for your legs. All the doors are lined. The chassis is dripping with it. Radiator’s drilled out and replaced. Blast film for all the windows. Steel-sheeted the rear. It’s a tank. It’ll drink a lot of juice, mind…”
Sol steps forward, runs a finger over the paintwork, then under the arches. He stands up and sniffs his fingers. “It’s rusty.”
Irish rolls his eyes. “It came out of a canal, Solomon. It’ll be damp as ballbags for a long while yet. But mechanically, it’s sound – and you wouldn’t wanna get in its way.”
Sol smiles.
“Well? You telling me what the bejesus you’re playing at?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“It’s not you and her, is it? You running away again?”
“No, not really.”
“Ach, your cryptic bollocks. How long’s it gonna be?”
“Not much longer.”
“And work?”
Sol suppresses a wince. Do the ends justify the means? He knows the workshop is unsafe, even without the bikers, or Jeff. Mel’s contact Jase, the card on the Reverend’s mat, the boxes and Leila’s mob at Knutsford Services – all these stack up to a bigger threat, something monstrous, larger than he can comprehend. But at the same time he knows Irish can’t stay away forever. He has little choice but to assume Irish’s absence gives him an alibi. A perverse sense it’s only him being hunted. “Do what you can,” he says, with the feeling of a cold finger stretching up his throat. Because Yasmin’s my priority. “Any cash is yours. Whatever comes in till I’m back – and I mean all of it, plus what we’re owed. Pay some bagheads to graft if you need to. That bastard Transit’s still up on the ramp…”
Irish gazes at him, mystified. It’s rare for Sol to see him this way: expectant, stricken by concern.
“You’ll find a note from me there,” Sol tells him. “Just ignore it. And if anyone comes asking for me – anyone at all, asking for my name, where I am, or about the project, you tell them they’re knocking on the wrong door. The handler didn’t cough up, so they should take their shit to him, this Reverend. Out in Stalybridge.”
“The Reverend? That guy in Emerald City?”
“You know him?”
“Half the fucken city knows him, Solomon. He’s an animal. How’ve you got us involved with him? Is this her as well?” He points to the front door. “I swear she’s bad news.”
Sol bites his lip. He wants to say, I think the Reverend buys trafficked women. Instead he follows the Ferrari’s lines to vanishing point; its paintwork catching the light in such unpredictable ways.
“I’ll get off then, should I?”
“I didn’t mean–”
“You’ve gone weird,” Irish says. “Cold. It’s fucken sketchy, all this.”
Sol turns and scoops his partner’s hand. He pulls it, pulls Irish into his peacoat. He says, breathy in the man’s ear, “Thank you, brother.”
Irish pulls back, confused. He shakes his head and steps away, angled as if to sprint off.
Sol doesn’t say anything else. He knows it’ll be the longest walk.
The departing Ferrari skates a near-lagoon of black standing water, appearing to carve out a bow wave from the tarmac itself. Mel watches the water resettle and the car’s circular sidelights defocus to cooling hob-rings, its outline bleeding into the night.
For some reason, caught alone there at this hour, she prays for an inversion: for Manchester to run hot, tropical – its fine rain turned to steam. In this humid republic, lampposts swinging with dead bulbs become verdant palm trees; pigeons become parrots; and the sharpline thickets and bird-spikes morph into exotic plants. And then from pothole puddles rise fresh mosquitoes like vapour, fluid under Mel’s command. These she’d send after Sol and Yasmin, away across old Albion’s leylines, the city’s hidden tracks and tunnels and channels, to surround their car and shield it from harm.
Mel shivers. In with a cigarette and out from the heart. The Ferrari indicates and dips off towards the motorway. Mel drops her cigarette, listens to its hissing death. She pulls away the strands of hair that have blown across her socket. She’d better find her spare.
Back inside, though, Mel is preoccupied by change. Her idea is simple: she sits in the reception cage, flattens the menu and scratches every price from it. She’ll make the Cat Flap a collective – let the girls decide their rates. She loads a new film tape into the monitor bank with a heavy gut. She switches on the front door cameras. Smiles at herself. Jase there in the cupboard can bang the doors and walls all he wants, because she’s got things to do.
She watches the camera feed for a time. Adjusts the focus. She’d made a mistake with Jeff, pushed into a decision that didn’t bear scrutiny, and put imagined profit before their safety. It was a misjudgment, and it wouldn’t happen again. She and the women would make this work – will make their living how they like, serving the punters they know, many they trust – because that’s their choice, and this their space. She’s come too far to compromise. The alternative – stolen people, Jase’s half-people, the girls going back on the streets – is intolerable. And why should she run from the only city she knows?
On the Princess Road, damp overalls hugged by the bucket seat, Sol tweaks the Ferrari’s throttle. The Mondial is undeterred, unscarred, by its near-drowning, even if filthy water still sloshes around in the instrument binnacles. The road’s poor surface is forgiving at least: normally you’d expect a harsher ride owing to low-profile tyres, especially with the weighted suspension, but Irish has even thought to mod the bushes so there’s a more generous wallow in the arches. Enough roll for decent feedback, if you don’t take the corners too fast. This he learns as they leave a roundabout: Yasmin tipping against him with all her shoulder mass.
More than straight, Princess Road is long – running all the way out to the M60. Their journey there is soundtracked by the sweetness of fourth gear, the hiss and whine of the engine bulk, rear-mid, right by their legs. A sense of velocity enhanced by their closeness to the ground, and the low slung seats that have them almost reclining.
Traffic lights. Bleak terraces ranged left. Naked football pitches right. Sol downshifts, the gearknob a cold ball in his fist. A chance to doublecheck Miss Wales’ directions scrawled on the back of it. From here they pass under the Hulme Arch, headlights picking out the cables fanning out from its bowed beams. Unseen debris rattles the undercarriage – all the road markings are missing here, and the potholes are more like craters.
Cabin-wise, the Mondial has subverted Sol’s expectations. He expected sharper edges, rough welds, but Irish has been fastidious, and the extra steel is perfectly applied. It looks like a Ferrari. It feels and sounds like a Ferrari. It just about drives like one.
Finally Sol speaks. “Was it out or in?” he asks. “I keep forgetting what he said. Roy – about the crates.”
Yasmin points out of the window. “Out?” She points at Sol. “No, in,” she says. She giggles gently.
“In,” Sol says.
Yasmin nods.
“You know your left and your right, don’t you?”
Yasmin holds up three hands to him. “Left, median, right,” she says, and laughs fully.
“We’re stopping for petrol in a minute,” he tells her. “And we’re going to meet someone.”
Yasmin stills.
“Fluids,” Yasmin says, then looks frustrated with herself. “No. Buy bottled water.”
The petrol station is more a bank of graffitied shutters, spilled oil, scarred with overuse. The attendant-cum-guard lets on – plainly can’t believe what he’s seeing. He lowers his shotgun as the Mondial pulls across the forecourt, and doesn’t say a word when Sol pays at the grate – forty pounds and a penny. An extra fiver as a warning: keep your mouth shut. A few pieces of shrapnel dropped in a charity pot for some unknown war, some other lost cause.
“You hiding from?” Sol asks Yasmin as he gets back in the Ferrari. She’s got a sleeve over her mouth, nibbling loose thread off it. After a few seconds, he realizes why – petrol fumes.
“Old cars,” he says. “I quite like it.” He rolls down his window, then leans across to do hers. “Let’s sling it over there, shall we. And here – shove these bottles in the bag.”
They park up. They wait. Just enough time to ponder what could’ve been if he and Irish had taken the cheap hatchback instead of the Lexus. Had he chosen to stay legit, honour his father’s work ethic.
A car pulls across the forecourt at almost exactly the time Miss Wales said it would. A nondescript saloon. Navy or purple, Sol can’t tell. It turns and reverses up to the Ferrari so both drivers’ windows sit adjacent.
Sol wipes his forehead. He says to Yasmin: “Keep your extras hidden.”
Committed now –
The saloon’s driver opens their window. An older man, late-fifties-ish, on first glance reminiscent to Sol of a stereotypical farmer: lank hair scraped over a balding pate, crusty with an obvious skin complaint. Ruddy nose, heavy brow, a weary expression. He’s wearing a tightly wound scarf that appears more practical than fashion conscious, and Sol can’t be sure it doesn’t stick damply to the man’s neck when he inhales.
“Brian?”
Beside him Yasmin has crushed herself into the seat.
“Don’t bloody say it out loud,” the man says. Sol can detect something on his breath – a marine scent, a seafront. It pervades the Ferrari. “They’re listening,” the man adds.
Sol might be in Roy’s world now, but there’s plenty left to learn.
“Right,” Sol says. “So do we follow you from here?”
“Follow? No. You got the stuff, have you?”
Sol tries to pass the bung through the window. The wad of cash from Sandy’s Audi.
Brian glares at him. “For God’s sakes,” he says. “Not here you numpty – put it away. Just answer. Have you. Got. The stuff?”
“Stuff? Cash? That’s… it’s all here.”
Brian doesn’t immediately react, and Sol notices the lingering smell has turned to rotten fish.
“We were raided this morning,” Brian tells him. “We’re waiting for the all-clear.”
Fear pools in Sol’s legs. Something nagging. “I’m lost. What do you mean?”
“I mean the council raided one of our tenants.”
“Tenants,” Sol says. “And what… what do you want me to do?”
“Wait. That’s what I’m saying. Just hold your bloody horses – I have to take care.”
“But–”
“Shh will you! You not clocked him over there?”
Sol hadn’t, no. A burly man leaning against the petrol pump, staring at the Ferrari in partial disbelief. Sol bows his head: again his lack of awareness has undermined the act.
“And they told me you were an old hand,” Brian snorts.
“I’m not used to–”
Brian puts a finger to his lips.
All paid up, the burly man gets back in his car, and no sooner than he’s navigated the off-ramp, Brian opens his door. The gap reveals to Sol a blanket covering both of Brian’s legs, which seem clumsily positioned, too close together, and a steering wheel adapted with driving aids. He’s taller than Sol assumed, with a tattoo of dappled scales running in spirals from his stringy bicep to the back of his hand. From the passenger seat he retrieves two walking sticks and manoeuvres himself to get out of the car. Sol watches, fascinated, as Brian extends like a tripod onto his sticks and bundled feet. Then he goes like this to the boot of his car.
“Take this,” Brian says, passing a carrier bag through Sol’s window. Sol recognizes what’s inside as a tablet of some sort – weighty, wrapped in a matt case. “It’s disposable,” Brian goes on, “so when you’re done, stick it under your front wheel. No hard drive, no signature, and the case is fingerprint-resistant. Crypto-keys are automatic, so you’ll connect by proxy the second you switch on. It’ll be slow, unfortunately.”
“Connect to what, though?”
“The frigging satellite,” Brian says, throwing his head back.
“Satellite?”
“An old Soviet weather sat. How can you not even… Never mind. It does the job. We bounce info up… the sat bounces info down. All runs off our remote servers.”
“OK,” Sol says. “Great.”
“Great? Great? Do I need to show you how to turn it on as well?”
“It’s fine.”
“Good,” Brian says, and snatches the bung from Sol’s resting hand. “You never met me, alright? Never seen me, spoke to me, nowt. And I’m talking about you and her in there. Bunch of fucking luddites.”
“Wait,” Sol says.
“What’s up with you now?”
“You’re from Emerald City.”
Brian’s face remains clear, but the smell of fish intensifies.
“Call you the Wizard, don’t they?”
Brian rubs his head. Grains of abraded skin float free.
“And there’s someone with you in there, in Emerald City. The Reverend.”
Brian switches off his engine. His mouth’s constricted. “What about him?”
“He buys people.” How unreal it sounds. “Wives. He buys wives.”
Brian goes to speak but falters. “People can be difficult,” he says. “It’s a big world. A big, cloudy world. You’ve got to live and let live.”
“Against their will,” Sol says. “And I think–”
Brian cuts him off with a groan, the façade fully gone. “You know something I bloody don’t, do you? You with the council?”
“What? Me?”
Brian exhales. Then, more angrily: “I knew she was nervy about you. I knew it. And you feigning indifference – the Reverend, that silly shit’s why we just had a whole bloody lev squadron blowing holes in our front door. Grassed on by one of his regular gophers, he was. Taken a few others down with him, and all – some bigwig from London. Havelake, Haveland… Havelock? False imprisonment, people smuggling.”
Sol reels. Brian’s words boom at him. Tipped off? Regular gopher? Roy? His vision falters. Roy grassed on the Reverend? And then a logical stride: Roy knew more about the Reverend than he ever let on. And Roy knew more about the Reverend’s client.
Sol’s nervous system goes haywire.
But when? Sol had been with him since…
In the car. With Sandy.
What else had Sandy told him?
That arrogant walk to the portable toilet. That thumbs-up. Roy knew. He knew.
Brian restarts his car. “This is why I stay behind the curtain,” he says. “Like a bloody soap opera.” Then he pulls away – the smell of seaside in his wake.
Sol looks at his hands. His veins. His coordination failing.
“Manners,” Yasmin says. She’s trying not to laugh at something, and in the Mondial’s cabin he sees how well her scabbed lips are improving. “He was incomplete,” she adds, nodding firmly. “The Wizard. A semi-man.”
Plenty happens on this backwards island we’ll never understand.
“Small world, though,” Sol says. “You might’ve been right about Roy.”
He opens the tablet lid. A message reads: LINK IN 52 SECONDS, and the timer ticks down. Together they watch the screen, its glow flooding the car with weld-spark blue.
They say your muscles can remember. Sol finds it amazing what aging lets you forget. After so long, typing on a touchscreen feels like experimenting with some exotic hobby – there’s a resignation that years of mastery lie ahead. For most people that’s probably part of the fun, but for Sol, pecking at the screen with a single wavering forefinger, it’s a perfect definition of frustrating. Without office experience, he was never great to begin with – preferring to write with that solid all-caps scrawl of the trader – but this precious time beneath the hijacked satellite make his efforts all the more desperate.
The tablet browser runs slowly, wheel chugging away in its centre. The connection is fleeting, in and out. He’s already searched for his own name and related keywords – fire, business, flat, warrant, council. No meaningful results: just random stitched-together stories from disparate paragraphs, and an archived picture of his father on an old business directory, standing in front of his Bentley.
He turns to Yasmin and asks: “What first?” as if he hasn’t already sat there looking for anything that might incriminate him.
“Tower,” she says. “The tower first.”
Sol grimaces.
“Go,” she says, more insistent.
So Sol types COOLING TOWER SEL then backspaces to COOLING TOWER alone. Search. The page loads, white, to grey, rendering frames of content. A gallery of over-familiar shapes streams in. Seeing them, Yasmin releases an almost orgasmic noise. “Our crossing,” she says. “He is there.”
“Right,” Sol says. Then he types SELLAFIELD.
The pictures load. Black and white, many of them – artistic shots, too. He’d be the last person to deny the anonymous allure of Sellafield, or of facilities like it. How was this tangle of process line and cables and scaffolding so crucial to the running of a country, yet so foreign, forbidding, to everyone but its workers? With its stark perimeter, barbed wire, sharpline fortifications, it carried an obvious foreboding: a concrete temple erected to commemorate man’s triumph over physics, then bulwarked against the world.
The thought of getting inside excites Sol in the same way the Ferrari does.
It also excites Yasmin. “The tower,” she says, pointing to the second in a run of four. Then to its base. “Entry here.”
Sol scrolls down. At least a dozen of the images would make – would’ve made – a fine addition to his Polaroid collage. A centrepiece, even. But while there are four cooling towers in most of the images, there are no cooling towers evident in any newer shots – even in photographs taken from comparable angles. In most of these, even the two fearsome Windscale piles reactors have gone. And when he sorts the results by date, it’s clear only the massive golf ball structure of the gas-cooled reactor still stands. Sol swears, confused, and refines his search to text on SELLAFIELD COOLING TOWERS. Fresh results strain through.
At random, he taps for a page whose description tag sounds relevant. Poorly formatted, almost illegible, the text loads up – describes the demolition of all four Calder Hall cooling towers in 2007.
His heart sinks.
“Yasmin,” he says. “There aren’t… They aren’t there anymore. Your tower can’t have been here.”
“No,” she urges. “I passaged.”
“But towers like the one you drew don’t exist at Sellafield, not anymore. They haven’t for years.” He’s devastated. He thinks of Roy, the rumours he shared at Winnie’s, and what happened at Knutsford Services. A hopelessness rises to engulf him.
“Go,” she says. “Continue.”
He flips the tablet. “There’s nothing there, Yasmin. They pulled them down. I’m sorry – they’re all gone. Says it plain as day: those towers were demolished nearly twenty years ago.”
“No!” Yasmin shrieks. “You have to keep!” Her breathing has quickened; sounds like an angry creature rattling around in her chest cavity. She grabs the tablet and thrusts it in his face. “I see this and I know inside.” She taps her breast. “You trust it. You trust me. He is still there. Watching.”
“Yasmin… we can’t just–”
She slaps the dashboard with all three hands. “Yes! We will!”
Sol bows his head and tabs back. Maybe another will dig something out, prove it wrong. With terms like what, though? His mind wheels. Sandy’s car? The Lexus’ registration number – RA, Carlisle. The boot and the organs crate.
Inspired, he tries SELLAFIELD ORGANS. Even the words together look outlandish. He feels Yasmin’s breath on his forearm, fast and gentle.
The buffering wheel spins and results begin to filter through. Not just any results, either. Dozens of articles and book extracts and opinion pieces, masted below the old names of long-deceased publishers and newspapers. Sol flicks and engages: gaping at the scraps in silence. The tablet in his hands reveals a jumble of missing body parts scandals, unlawful tests on workers, radiation experimentation, disaster reportage. All of these things at one site. All these things at Sellafield.
He reads what he can of the first articles, heart racing. And this is only the front page – only the surface. What he consumes joins a widening slurry: while there’s nothing that explicitly mentions the transportation of people, there’s plenty to suggest their exploitation. And it’s been an open secret for what must be years.
He drops the tablet between his legs.
“Yasmin.”
“Trust,” she says.
He picks up the tablet, reopens the browser. Some decisions can’t be unmade. And there, broiling in his peacoat, Sol taps out one final search term.
SELLAFIELD MAP.