Graft

W
ith a voice
, she was too human. So that's what they took away first.

One maker plucked something gristly from her throat. A second stood by, thumbing the catch of a surgical gun. A third maker, holding her chin, nodded. The second leaned close and marked a dotted square on her neck.

With a name, she was still a person. So when they'd sent her under, had her feeding off the machines, a harridan came by her cradle and scrubbed it out. In its place went a Y, suffixed with a screed of glyphs. When their work was complete, the makers would wake her, tell her. Call her Y for short.

With memories, Y was tethered to a life before. So when her time came in the queue, the makers vandalized her hippocampus. Scraped away her sense of self. Cleaned out her mind almost whole.

And with her standard muscles, Y was too cumbersome, too slow. So when she'd had her modifications, her augmentations, her transplants and transfusions, the makers started her on a regime of hard hormones. They pumped in bags and bags to make sure she grew.

Finally, the makers came for Y's hair. Because with a bald head, she'd be unmarked, easier to sell. So when her muscles and ligaments had been repaired, and the makers were certain the immunosuppressives had taken hold, they sheared her clean. Laser-treated the fast-growth areas. Matched her face type and shade to a suite of wigs. And documented it all.

Then, with such things done, Y was ready for training. So that later they could take her, demonstrate her potential, and send her on.

A
sk Roy
what he believes in. Ask if he's going to hell, or if there's just a blank space after all this, and he'll say what he always says. He'll say: “Jesus is a friend of a friend.”

That way suits Roy. That way he doesn't have to worry about forgiveness. But sometimes – while he's on the job, sitting in stolen cars, lurking in empty car parks, suspended between unkept bushes and rust-fused trolleys – he wishes there were someone, something, to deliver him. Because the waiting gets boring. And after so long dealing with people, or waiting to deal with people, it's boredom that does his head in most.

Hiding here in twilight, Roy wishes he were already at the Rose. His comfy chair at the back. Half a shandy, two bags of peanuts. He yawns, keeps yawning, keeps wanting to pack it all in and go straight over there. How much was tonight's job even worth, anyway? He coughs, startles himself. There's no doubt he used to enjoy all this sneaking about – the window-watching, the note-taking. It's just that now it feels so glamourless.

One eye on the target. One eye on the time
–

But what else can he do?

So Roy sips from a flask of tepid coffee, smokes a pair of prison rollies back to back. He flicks through an offnet mobile rammed with porn. Checks his mirrors. Tries to rub away the comedy circles around his eyes. He rolls three more cigarettes in as many minutes. He scratches his groin. And then he tries to focus. He takes out his revolver – an import from the former Yugoslavia, an officer's gun – and chambers a pair of cartridges.

All as he watches and waits and watches and listens. Then waits some more.

He thinks:
All this time on your own can't be good for the soul
. He thinks:
What soul?
Maybe, despite the cash his handler stumps up, glamour's the wrong word anyway. Not for Roy: a fixer, tinkerer. Your man-down-the-pub.

And yet Roy's become so
skilled
at waiting. These days he breathes for this concrete – these car parks, the levelled terrain behind disused bingo halls, demolished shops, abandoned malls. He lives to wait. Because suddenly it's worth it – all the patience, all the rituals:

When his mark steps out of the squat, a woman in tow.

Roy opens the car door. Unfurls, stretches. He turns to his mark and tilts his head; watches the couple as they move across the tarmac.

Walking just ahead of the mark, the woman strikes a match for a cigarette. She seems to exhale her first drag for a long time. Her hair's updoed, beehived. She smokes with teen surl.

The mark looks concave, harried – feeble light betraying a run of misspent years. He catches up with her again and they walk in step, half-committed somehow, not quite hand-in-hand.

Roy approaches them, the revolver stuffed in his coat pocket.

“Evening,” he says. He's far enough away that the wind might easily carry it off, yet close enough for the tone to register. The two of them pause and double-take.

“Evening,” he says again, and cracks a smile.

The couple squint. They take in the man before them: shining bald, a heavy winter coat, with something like claw marks running across his scalp.

The mark speaks first. “We know you?”

Roy keeps coming. “Me? No. Not yet.”

The woman turns to the mark. Roy's seen it all before. He knows her heart will be going – that her throat's catching when she swallows. From her stance he'd say her legs have seized as well.

Roy scans left, scans right. Nobody else, only the husks of burned-out cars
.
A road sign spitting error messages.

The mark pushes a shoulder in front of the woman and puffs himself up.

So Roy counters – quickens his pace. “Keep still for me,” he says.

The mark edges forward to eclipse the woman. Possibly still wondering if Roy means him. “You what?”

Roy reaches for his revolver. He imagines a crack running from his feet to theirs. He knows at this range, them standing this way, he'd likely tag them both with one shot. He can almost feel the revolver's kick – the violence of it running through his forearm, absorbed in the elbow, triceps. A warm feeling, rare but addictive.

The woman murmurs something. Her dry lips catch and roll up on her teeth.

“Elbows or knees?” Roy asks.

The mark raises a hand. Can't work this out.

Roy shakes his head. “I don't do fingers.”

The mark looks upset. “What's up with you, pal?”

The woman drops her cigarette and darts.

“That your missus, that?” Roy asks, tilting his head towards her.

“N-nah,” the mark says. “Just some bird–”

Roy nods slowly, watching her go. Then he says, “Are we going elbows or knees?”

“I don't get you,” the mark says.

So Roy raises his revolver and fires once into the air. The crack splits the night, sets distant dogs barking.

Now the mark gets it. It spreads over him like glue. He falls to his knees and goes rigid. Roy finds it oddly brave – this acceptance the mark's past has come to find him. That his past has teeth.

Roy looks beyond his mark to the woman. She's out as far as the car park boundary, the scrub that fringes a denuded petrol station. “Fast her, isn't she?” he says. She vanishes, and Roy shrugs. “Anyway. You know why I'm here.”

The mark nods without looking up.

“And you know who sent me?”

The mark nods again. “Think so. Yeah.”

Roy frowns – all he can do to look sympathetic. “Alright,” he says. “Doesn't make it easier, though. Just means I say less.”

The mark deflates. “It was self-defence,” he says. “I swear down. We were off our heads. He comes up through the window and we get jumpy, so I pull my cannon and–”

“Listen,” Roy cuts in. “I'm not judging. I don't care what happened.”

The mark quietens. He rocks forward, a confessor baring his neck.

“Alright,” Roy says again. “Let's get on with it. You left or right-handed?”

“L-left,” the mark tells him.

Roy shakes his head. “Cack-handed as well? Christ, man. How's about we do your right? That way you can still write our friend a sorry letter.”

The mark wilts. He gazes up at Roy with his elbows in the gravel, his hands twisted together.

Roy kneels by him, scans once more for trouble. The car park's still desolate. The mark is silent, slack. A trolley train creaks. No life in the squat. Lost carrier bags skiffle across the concrete. Roy, knowing now that deliverance won't come today, puts a fatherly hand on the mark's head and his pistol in the crook of the mark's right arm, and says to him: “Sometimes we've got to learn the hard way.”

The mark mewls.

“Let's count to three, yeah? You and me together.”

And the mark nods, nods, nods along –

“Good lad. Ready?”

Roy and his mark say it slow:

“
One
–”

But Roy being Roy he fires on two.

T
he North Wales
coast under boundless sky. Two children, a boy and a girl, poke at dying fish with twigs, the ocean swell leaving grey foam between their toes. The fish are bland, silver-flanked. The boy's organized his in a line. Nudged by the foam, a few of them still twitch in the sand.

The girl – Melanie – has scored the head off one of hers, and it stares up dumbly. She decides it looks miserable like that, so she flicks the head away.

The boy feels weird in his stomach. Melanie keeps threatening to remove her own glass eye, mainly because she can.

“Don't you want to see?” she keeps asking him. “Don't you, don't you?”

The children have just met. Their parents are somewhere nearby – one of the group laughing deeply, taking pictures with a loud camera, a big camera. His father, most likely. The boy is itching. Melanie's pasted with cream. The parents don't see. Once more she threatens him. Once more he squeals and looks away.

Finally Melanie puts her fingers to her face.

“Look,” she tells him. “It's not scary.”

The boy pleads and smells the salted air.

Melanie laughs. She's done it anyway. Her fake eye has popped out, is cradled in her hand.

The boy looks at her socket. He can see the insides of her head.

I
n the new Manchester
, 2025, you have to find new ways to make ends meet. It's why Sol and his partner Irish drive about in a recovery truck looking for donors to steal.

Their little scheme goes like this: you see a driver, you scan their car, you agree to tag it. You go out early on your first run – early when commuters are preoccupied with getting in safely; getting in without getting jacked. And because it's bitter in the city – autumn on the turn – the weather helps too: wipers smear in the misty rain, and damp interiors easily steam up the windows.

Of course, nine times out of ten your commuter will park somewhere safe, somewhere sensible. Maybe the city's underground car vaults, or the caged walk-to-work pens.

But Sol and Irish are patient men. They know the odds. And they'll do their worst on that tenth.

This morning they lap a route not far from their workshop in Old Trafford, barely a mile outside the city centre. You'd think they're shitting on their own doorstep, but their unmarked recovery truck barely raises an eyebrow – it's as battered as everything else.

After a good few laps, they see a woman parking an anonymous Korean hatchback at the end of a row. Lady Luck's feeling kind – the driver's even left enough of a gap for their truck in front. Sol noses them past; laughs uneasily as Irish rolls down his window, leans to pip the horn, shouts something crass.

They lap the block twice again, just to make sure the woman has gone.

“We having it?” Irish asks.

Sol nods. There was a time he might have felt sad or sorry for what they do – but as Irish often says, “Guilt doesn't pay the rent.” You can practise indifference, he's found, and now practice has made perfect.

The men park and pull on their caps. Roll out their hi-vis vests and bail. Out of the truck, they each signal to make sure the other has spotted a nearby CCTV rig whose lens case is dangling off its mount. Sol pauses there, the broken camera like some stranger's flowers – withered, browned – strapped to the railings at the scene of an accident.

Irish kneels, unracks the trolley. Sol pulls their wooden chocks from the passenger seat footwell.

“Excuse me,” comes a voice.

Sol swivels. A man in the door of a terraced house opposite.

“What's all this?”

Off to the side, Sol hears Irish swear under his breath. He feels instantly hot; starts patting his pockets.

“
Sir…” Sol starts.

The man leans off his step on a beige crutch. Older, white hair. Straining to see through jamjar glasses. For some reason he strikes Sol as being only half-loaded, scrambled, so that now on his plain skin you can see his raw code poking through.

“I asked what's going on,” the old man says, pointing at the truck. “Bloody jobsworths – you best have a good reason for all this.”

Sol finds what he needs. He drops the chocks and crosses the road, a thin wallet in his hand. He straightens his cap and flicks the wallet open. Mounted inside is a passport photo with a fake name and some bumf about licensing. A decent approximation of the council's logo. “We're cleaning up,” Sol tells him. He holds it out, trying to steady his hand. “The car's wanted.”

The old man resettles his glasses and pulls Sol's ID into his face. He whispers as he reads, moving Sol's hand back and forth through his focal length. Sol can smell his breath.

After ten seconds, the old man clears his throat. “I better apologize. It's just that–”

“No need,” Sol tells him. “Honest. It's nice to see a bit of community spirit.”

The old man blinks. Vacant expression. “They just come and go as they please…”

Irish bounces over, cap off, forehead glistening. He winks at Sol, acknowledgment his partner isn't blessed with a natural blagging nature, and says to the old man: “Ever see any nice motors out here?”

The old man shifts his weight. “Oh, every so often. No one local, mind. Must be earning a fortune up some tower to drive the daft bloody things they do.”

Irish frowns. “Not the safest place to park, though, is it?”

As if on cue there's a rumble behind them, increasingly loud, before a ferocious-looking motorbike burbles past. Riding pillion behind a rider in racing leathers, a smartly dressed woman pulls on an open-faced helmet. Sol watches her, fully absorbed: she's so still and composed, looking dead ahead. Then he winces as the bike tears away. Only aftermarket parts could make a machine so noisy.

“No, no,” the old man says distractedly. Sol doesn't even remember the question. The old man's eyes follow the bike, its passenger. Then he looks back as if someone's behind him in the house. “Are they
gangsters
?” he whispers. “These ones you're after?”

Sol and Irish share a look. “Something like that,” Sol tells him, shrugging with one shoulder. Then another pause as they hear the motorbike downshifting some distance away.

“Oh dear,” the old man says. “It's really gone to the dogs, hasn't it?” Sol smiles, and the old man continues: “Listen, I don't suppose you gents fancy a cuppa at all. Kettle's not long gone. The granddaughters bought me some of those filter efforts.”

“We're good, cheers,” Irish says. “Places to go, people to see.”

The old man nods. “Then I'll leave you to it.”

Irish salutes him casually. “Appreciated. You take good care now.”

The old man holds up a bronchial hand and turns to go inside.

Sol shoots Irish a look.

“What?” Irish says.