At Newport she left the bus and crossed dying grass, the sun fierce above.
Most shops were closed down, most cars sat on flats. Flyers plastered a phone box, the glass shattered.
The truth will set you free.
She pressed the buzzer outside the pawnbroker’s and watched the man inside look up, then release the lock and frown at the same time.
She pushed the caged door and stepped into rows of glass cabinets, people’s possessions displayed crudely. Electricals to jewellery to rare books and coins.
‘You again.’
She handed over the laptop and camera.
He scratched his beard and stared past her at the small television on the wall, Morales on the screen.
‘Nuclear,’ the man said. He wore glasses on a string, put them on briefly and studied the laptop. ‘A nuclear warhead will blow her out of the sky. Morales, he’ll get a prize or something, when this is done. Nobel Peace … for using a nuclear weapon. That’s poetic.’
He placed notes on the counter.
‘The laptop, it’s worth more.’
‘It’s stolen.’
‘It’s not.’
‘Try somewhere else.’
‘You’re the only place in a hundred miles.’
His laugh turned into a cough. He fished out a handkerchief and wiped a streak of blood from his mouth. ‘Cancer. I used to worry about going before my time, but then I see kids like you. You come in here with that look in your eyes. Is it easier, if you can’t remember before?’
She said nothing.
‘Why’d you need cash?’ He dabbed his mouth. ‘Drugs?’
‘So I can find a cure for cancer in the next month.’
Another smile, another laugh and cough. More blood. ‘Are you a leaver? You know there’s nowhere to go. Here is as good a place as any to die, kid.’
‘I’m not –’
‘Bring me gold if you want real money. It’ll hold its value. In the sky, underground.’ He pointed towards the window. ‘They’re building bunkers all over. They bring me their gold so they can pay for the work.’ He reached behind the counter and pulled out a thin gold necklace with a blue stone. ‘This is what I pay out for.’ He held it to the light and the stone shone. ‘I pay pennies on the pound. If they stop Selena I’ll be rich.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘Then I won’t care much about anything.’
Mae looked at the necklace, the shape of a half-moon. She reasoned she had a moral code, muddied but there. If it carried value beyond monetary, she left it. A laptop could be replaced, a memory couldn’t.
He turned back to the screen. ‘Morales. Maybe he’s not even real, maybe none of this is. I mean, what proof have we seen? CGI. Damn, they make new worlds on computer systems. They faked a moon landing.’
‘It is real and we will die.’
‘You want a buyback price?’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘No one ever does.’
She stopped in Pitmann Square and listened to a man who stood atop a wooden box and slurred about eternalism and gravity. A small crowd listened.
On another box a girl with a guitar played and sang about lighting candles in a daze and Mae peeled one of the notes from the meagre stack and placed it in her case.
The council offices occupied the old courthouse.
Mae took the steps slowly and found her way to the third floor.
Files stacked by the window blocked all but the thinnest slice of sun.
Colin Hayes frowned when he saw her, went to call security but she snatched the phone from his hand.
‘Every month,’ he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. A lanyard hung from a thin chain around his neck. In the photo he had hair and a smile, neither of which remained that afternoon.
She sat, clutched the phone and glared at him.
‘You know there’s nothing I can do.’ He dabbed at sweat with a paper napkin.
‘You all made promises. You voted for them.’
‘And they worked, until they didn’t. No one is paying taxes. Your grandmother isn’t the only one to lose out on her pension. There’s no benefits. I get women with three children, they can’t pay the rent. Or the landlord wants them out because he’s selling everything he owns and heading to Spain to die in the sun.’
‘How am I supposed to feed my sister?’
‘Ask for help. You must have friends.’
‘Charity,’ she said, the word hard in her mouth. ‘I can take care of my family. But we need what’s ours.’
‘In a month things will get better. People will have to go back to work.’
‘Or they’ll be dead.’
‘I want to help you, but I’m drowning here.’ He picked up a stack of papers. ‘Sixty-four thousand, three hundred and nineteen. That’s how many people have been released early over the past eighteen months. No one wants to be a prison guard, Miss Cassidy. Can you blame them? People want to be with their families, or on the beach. If you want to protect your sister, you’ll keep her away from …’ he pulled on his reading glasses, ‘Lewis Cranston. Oliver Sweeny. Malcolm Banbridge.’
‘Who are –’
‘These are people that shouldn’t be going home. These are the worst of our world, and because of extenuating circumstances they’ll be coming to a town near you very soon.’
She left the office and was about to head down the stairs when she saw him. He stood alone, eyes down and hands deep in his trouser pockets.
She took a step towards him, then stopped. She felt the crossroads, knew she should turn back because something about him seemed reckless. And she was measured, she had to be, for Stella. For the fragile ship they sailed through these last days on.
He looked up.
He didn’t smile, she didn’t either.
Behind him she saw a large room, a circle of chairs. A whiteboard. A man with a beard led a small group.
She looked at his shoes, his legs and arms and hair. Anywhere but into his eyes.
‘I don’t really feel anything any more.’
He was tall and she was small. She stood her ground but the ground was soft. Her heart beat so loud she imagined all the glass around her shattering. The letters on her wrist floated up and he looked down and noticed them.
‘The girl from the tape.’
It was hot, so airless she felt sweat on her top lip, beneath her arms, down her back.
Outside in the sun, on the stone steps, he stood with his back to her.
‘Sometimes I want her to come, so I won’t have to do it myself.’ She swallowed.
‘And other times?’
‘It’s the last thing I can control.’
He turned and looked down and in that light he dazzled her with a smile that changed his face. And then it was gone.
‘You ever miss being a kid?’ he said.
She said nothing.
He stepped up onto the low wall beside, his arms out wide. ‘When every wall was a tightrope. When you didn’t worry about shit you couldn’t change.’
She lit a cigarette, the smoke filling her lungs so totally.
He wobbled slightly. ‘I feel like I’ve lost that balance. But I don’t know if it’s me, or if the world is trying to throw me off.’
‘You work here?’
He nodded.
‘No way you need the money.’
His eyes were light, he spoke without humour. ‘I go where the judge deems fit, where I can work towards being a productive member of society and atone for past misdeeds.’
‘Probation?’
‘Haven’t you been to church? This life is probation.’
She looked out across the town. The faded awnings shaded boarded shops. The sun beat fiercely.
She fought the urge to stop him falling.
He stepped down and she breathed.
‘The idea of Selena. And death. Its existential importance. You ever think that each second, each instant is the most important moment in your life because it will never happen again? We plan and wait and hope and expect. But what if we miss it?’
‘What?’
He stared at her. ‘What breaks into our home.’
‘What drags us into the water at night.’
‘Survival is basal. Take away every luxury we’ve known –’
‘And I’ll bet you’ve known some.’
‘And that’s all we’re all doing. We’re fighting our endless numbered days. Where we are, there is no forward. There’s an immediate. And that’s a luxury in itself.’
Mae glanced at the betting shop across the square. The odds changed daily. Life or death.
Mae closed her eyes to the sun. ‘It’s all memories and regret. What you haven’t done or what you could’ve done differently.’
‘What haven’t you done?’
‘Too much to list.’
‘My mother says all you need is to tell someone you love them, and for them to say it back. Everything else is secondary. Distraction.’
‘Like I need some idiot boy giving me flowers, reciting poetry and thinking up some elaborate promposal. It’s … It’s not even what I haven’t done. It’s my sister. I want her to … I want her to see light.
‘Religion.’
‘Light, not the light. What we take for granted.’
He loosened his tie and opened three buttons. ‘Maybe you’re asking for too much.’
‘So what should I be asking for?
‘What’s a Forever?’
That look again, so deep like he could see every secret she’d ever kept.
She hated that her stomach flipped.
Hated it.
She saw her bus.
He took her wrist and traced the letters with his finger and she felt his touch too deep in her bones.
‘What’s your name?’ she said.
‘Jack Sail. You can just call me Sail. Everyone does.’
‘You saying that like I’m everyone, Jack?’