The next morning, the queue was small when I got to the Turner, maybe only forty people up ahead of us. I looked down at what I was wearing. Everyone else had their smartest clothes on.
‘It’s like they’re all going to a wedding,’ I said.
‘Well, it won’t be based on that.’ You looked at me. ‘You’re better, anyway. Taste of whisky.’
‘Lah-furra-gah bluhblah,’ I said. ‘Hey, Franky, call up the boss,’ I said as I walked away, ‘put in a good word.’
The doors to the Turner opened not long after, and they let about half the queue in in one go. I looked around. It wasn’t so different from the last times I’d been in. They’d swept up the syringes, at least. There were benches inside, made of the same cheap plastic as the ones outside all the pubs. Half the huge walls were made of glass, their edges a frame around the sea. On one of the non-sea-facing walls, there was a paper poster of a painting that had once been there. It was of our harbour. It looked like the sea was burning.
I took a seat on one of the rows. Soon, a woman in a shirt walked the row’s length, stopping at different intervals. When she got close enough, I heard what she was saying. Get your papers out. If you have papers, get them in order while you wait.
I looked around. Some of the people near me had passports in their hands or in see-through plastic pouches they kept smoothing down, but I had nothing. I’d never had a job where I’d had to show anything. I’d never even held a passport. I’d never left the country.
‘How did you get that?’ I said to the man next to me.
‘It’s an old one – red one – expired now but I had it for twenty years or summin’. Son’s wedding. Just the once.’
I nodded.
‘S’pose we just see what they can do,’ he said.
And so we waited. A halogen bulb was twitching on and off like an insect was trapped in it. As people got up, we moved along the bench. It made a squeaking sound.
Outside, the queue got longer and longer. It had to snake up the hill backwards, up towards Fort Crescent to avoid the tide. No shade. Some people came with cut-open cardboard boxes they held up to block the sun.
There was a form to fill in. There weren’t many questions. How long we’d been here, what our professions were. Whether we had family in the rest of the country.
The girl on the other side of me, a tiny bit older than me – I recognised her from old parties – put her pen between the wrong fingers. ‘Haven’t held one of these for ages,’ she said.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I read her the questions, she told me the answers and I wrote them down. Always, none, no one.
Eventually we all slid to the end of the bench. A woman asked me to go to one of the processing tables. And, I don’t know – I could say it all, but we both know what happened.
I sat down at the desk and said I wanted to apply for my mum and brother as well. I handed over my form, and the woman said they needed blood too. That the forms were just a formality.
I pushed my finger into a pin on her desk until a fat dot of red came out. I got given a number. And none of it – none of it at all – mattered.
I was sent to wait back at the same hard bench. Outside, some boys had brought buckets with ice and drinks to sell to the queue. A kid pressed his head up against the glass window, and the cloud of his breath made a perfect circle.
Inside, one by one, our numbers appeared on a screen. One by one, people got given a group. Priority, then group one, group two, group three.
‘Wait, what does the group number mean?’ I asked the girl I’d helped with the form.
‘The order they’re doing it in,’ she said. ‘The order we go.’
‘What order?’ I said. As the words came out, I felt my blood start to tick. ‘I didn’t know there was an order.’
A moment like that either sticks clean and perfect in your mind, or you make it disappear, you have to. Because when my number came up, there was no group next to it.
It never went green. It went red.
‘Deferred’, it said.
I found myself standing up. The girl turned to look at me. Other people turned to look too.
I went up to the desk. My legs felt empty, like my bones weren’t hard any more. ‘What does that mean?’ I said. I pointed.
‘Deferred?’ the woman said without looking up. ‘A later date. You’ll be processed at a later date.’
‘The fuck’s that mean? Later, when?’
‘Do I look like a magician with all the answers?’ she said. ‘Listen, it’s not me. It’s the system that works it out.’
‘Why, though? What does it say?’
‘I don’t have access to any of the specifics.’
‘Just tell me what it says on the screen then – it has to say something.’
‘Can you not hear me?’ she said.
I could hear the beginning of a high-pitched ringing fill my ears instead. I wanted to reach over the desk but there were guards around. ‘Well, I need to speak to someone then,’ I said. ‘There was a man I spoke to before. I went into the Sands before.’
‘You’ll have to make an appointment,’ she said.
‘Okay, make me an appointment.’
‘You’ll have to go through the official channels.’
‘What the fuck is this, if it’s not official? You all here for fun?’
‘You’ll have to make an appointment,’ she said again.
I looked at her. ‘What are you, fucking broken?’
‘Nothing we can do without an appointment,’ she said one last time.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ I said. I started walking to the door. I couldn’t take a breath that counted, could get deep enough – they all stopped before they made it past my throat. I tried to think of one moment where you hadn’t left things out, where you hadn’t made me walk into a situation like an idiot.
You were there, standing just outside, when I pushed the door open. I remember the sting of it, how bright your face was.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘We had all night. All fucking night.’
‘I don’t understand…’ There was a flower in your hand, purple, sweet, you’d picked it from the street.
‘Does it feel good?’ I said.
‘Does what feel good?’
‘You didn’t tell me they were doing it in groups. All these weird different priorities.’
‘I…’ You looked behind me, back into the Turner. ‘It’ll be to help. They can’t move a whole town at once. I don’t know. Priorities, how? I didn’t know about that.’
‘But what does deferred mean?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘What does deferred mean?’ I said again. I said it slowly. I said it clearly.
‘I don’t know.’ But your face. It didn’t look good.
‘The woman said it was the system,’ I said. ‘That the system works it all out. But works it all out based on what?’ I looked at you.
‘No,’ you said. ‘Definitely not. My work? No. They won’t be using it like that. They aren’t. They can’t. But I can fix it. I can go into the system and try to fix it. I’ll come to find you…’
It started to fill me. It should have been anger, but it was shame that came – a thick, dark clot of it. I felt ashamed more than anything. Whatever it was about me that wasn’t good, wasn’t good enough.
‘No more,’ I said. I couldn’t look at you. ‘No more. I’m done this time.’
I started to walk away.
‘I’ll find you, Chance,’ you called after me as I started to walk fast. Out of body. ‘I can fix it,’ you shouted, ‘all of it…’, but I think by then I was already running. How far did you follow me? Some other people shouted out at me from the queue but I didn’t listen. I just ran – left, right, right, left, turning corners at random – until I was on a street I hardly recognised.
I had a small square of kem in my pocket. I’d picked it up for Ma and it was meant to last her a week. All of the colour had been thumbed off the cardboard it was wrapped in. I didn’t have anything to smoke it with. I crushed a crystal with the back of my thumbnail. It looked like salt, or sugar. Darker than that. I pushed it into the roof of my mouth. Didn’t taste like either. It turned to heat, then burn. Fire. Felt like circles in my head. Too much. Took more.
I tried to find Davey before the world started to fade.