The Folded Man

by Matt Hill

  Haven’t got time to fanny about is what. I still have to grab the box you brought in here. And the pick-up window is only three minutes –

  What are you talking about?

  You’ll see.

  I can’t leave him. We can’t do that to him. I’ve never been more fucking sure about anything.

  Might have to, pal. Miss the pick-up, the world comes down on this building with us inside.

  Let it. Let the lot swallow me up.

  Get a grip. Air in your lungs yet.

  The boy mewls.

  I can’t stay here, Brian says. Oh God, Noah, what have you done? What’s happened to you?

  We have to leave him.

  Brian stares at the boy. Brian stares into the boy.

  The boy smiles, his wet chin and bruised neck. His dark-stained trousers and the sparse fluff across his top lip.

  Brian touches the plastiglass casing. He draws a heart with fingertip grease. He says, We’ll come back for you.

  And he wonders if the boy thinks he’s going for a slash. If he’ll wait with that same gormless grin on him; the same empty eyes; whether the spit on his chin will crust and yellow.

  It gets too much, thinking that way. Brian can feel his stomach rise, a panic, the shock of loss. It’s the guilt of apathy, striking sooner than later. The guilt of hindsight, projected back from some grimmer, greyer future.

  I promise, he says. I’ll come back for you.

  Sirens outside cut the town hall down the middle.

  Not got long, Noah says. He has the copper on reception by the hair, his other hand on the crotch. Brian watches from his dead-tree throne.

  Where’s the box?

  The copper doesn’t know. Came off curfew duty about the time this fancy dress horror show gripped his neck and weighed him in. New to consciousness, the copper has the glazed eyes of anyone who’ll do anything to escape a bad situation.

  You must have storage, Brian says.

  Noah looks over his shoulder. He says, Shurrup, lad. Enough good-cop from you.

  You can see the copper is twisting and writhing. He’s saying: I can’t – I can’t –

  So Noah strokes the man’s cheek and smiles. He says, Hush up, sweetheart.

  Noah exposes his own empty gums, the black pits where now-dead teeth lived. The gaps between the cord of his tattered cheek muscles.

  Copper here fumbles his keys, his hands trembling, his wrists gone slack. And Noah kisses the copper fully on the mouth. Forces the protestations back down his throat just as the flies fill the room.

  Tracking his eyes as they roll away, Brian sees the copper wilt.

  You really can, Noah says.

  Brian takes the box on his lap.

  You’re a monster, he tells his old buddy-old pal. Look at you. A beast.

  It’s dark out. It’s spitting too. Brian doesn’t know the time.

  With Noah, he watches the storm of flies rise into the black.

  There are new smells – burnt plastic and diesel fumes. The cobalt clouds have an orange fringe; the city burning up around them. Sirens glitching out on the hard wind. Running battles fought over long days. From here, the town hall roof, they can see some of the camps and barricades. Roadblocks and dead zones, bodies and walls turned to twaddle. Neon pictures and building wraps flicker wildly, others faltering to pale shapes and dull sheen. Some of the famous ones are plain dead altogether.

  Above them, a sentinel for their city, the town hall’s clock tower. Its clocks stopped at the moment those backpacks brought down the Beetham. Below, the statue of John Bright, spray-painted glowstick green.

  Brian wonders if his house is burning in the firestorm, too.

  The odd crack of a gun sounds out, half-arsed somehow. And then there’s a volley sent back in return – tracer rounds every few. It feels like capitulation. They’ve all got themselves in this mess, realised too late the effort needed to get back out. Everyone gunning scared. Hoping that if they miss, they won’t have to clean anything up.

  Brian chews his fingers, runs his hands across the flank of the box. Noah, whatever he is, looks out on the war.

  Noah says something Brian doesn’t catch.

  Say again?

  I said, You ever miss them straplines and slogans. Bit of wit on our walls. Because I do.

  Pack it in, Noah. The hell d’you mean?

  These pictures and fancy lights. When I were a lad. He stops, laughs at the cliché – or maybe at how old he’s caught himself. He tries again: When I started out climbing ladders, ropes, draping this stuff across our city, there were words. Don’t mean just big names like now – I mean messages. Slogans and that. All this, or how it was till the other day, it’s like we’ve regressed, isn’t it? They’re all bloody pictures and big-budget names. Like we’re kids who can’t understand owt more than a pair of baps waved in our faces. Used to be agencies and writers and concepts. Wit. That’s what I mean.

  I don’t really care, says Brian. Don’t notice any of it.

  You think that. But you’d reach for these brands. Burnt into your head, mate. Connect a picture, connect an idea, reinforce the idea with a picture – it’s clever, aye, but stone me it’s cynical.

  Can’t remember the last time I bought anything.

  You nearly bought it full stop in there.

  I’ve got bloody gills, Noah.

  Noah stretches out and tents up his wings – has to lean back against the wind so as to not topple off the roof. Slowly, purposefully, he pulls a strip of skin from his stomach – a ruler’s width, fully five inches – and balls it up between his hands. Then, he kicks it skyways.

  We win some, and we lose some, he says. You remember my story of the ponies on Ascension Island, don’t you? We’re just adapting pal. The two of us. We looked at the bottom of that box and saw something we liked. And look at you. You are glorious. You are a swan now.

  How long do we wait? asks Brian.

  Long as we need to, chum.

  Who’re we waiting for?

  Cavalry. Just like your old films.

  They look out on the city as it burns. Sirens and paper on the air.

  Maybe this’ll change things, Noah says. Like when they burn the heather up on the moors. Looks rotten now, like, but –

  Didn’t change owt last time, did it?

  Maybe last time the fire got to all the peat and seeds underneath.

  Hardly a moor-keeper to look out for that.

  Noah sighs.

  Well, give us a fag then.

  But an image, a new memory of smell, makes Brian retch.

  Turns out the cavalry is Tariq. Four floors down with a torch flashing up in morse code.

  How does he know we’re here? Brian asks, as close to the edge as he can manage.

  That one’s a complicated question, says Noah.

  Brian can’t work out why Noah keeps looking over the edge.

  Come on, Brian says, nodding back inside. Stairwell’s back here. I’ll go on my arse if you grab my chair. Noah? What’s the matter with you? Look like you’re going to jump.

  Noah laughs.

  Course I bloody am. And you’ll be in my arms, sunshine.

  Brian rolls up. Brian peers out on to the sheer face, the gothic protrusions. He feels gravity’s pull against the push of sense; thinks about the leap of faith they’d need to miss the whole lot on the way down. Brian gets an idea of impaling themselves – two fast bodies dashed over hard, old stone. Hitting the split pavement flags and splitting themselves. Slashed and separated out by the sharpline ringing the building.

  Where’s all this going to end? he asks.

  Noah puts a clawed hand to Brian’s shoulder.

  It’s in hand. All in hand.

  Heard that before, haven’t we?

  You’ll see.

  Noah scoops Brian from his chair and secures Colin’s box to a wrist. He steps, eyes shut, throwing his wings out and into battle formation. He touches a finger to ­Brian’s chest. A little left, centred on
the heart.

  He whispers, It beats climbing them. For all my years – all my sins climbing this city for Harry with some big cunt’s name rolled up in a tube on my back. This, this even beats what I did on the Beetham that day, Bri. Climbing the bastard with nowt but the balls between my legs.

  This.

  Noah dives off the building and Brian’s with him and Brian feels straighter than he has in years.

  Laughing and falling – fast.

  Superman, Brian breathes.

  Noah’s powdered wings are spread fully wide, the wind whistling across their edges like a child trying to play grass.

  The sides of all these buildings flaring electric blue.

  Brian, carried like a newly-wed in Noah’s flaking arms, has dead-heart dread. At three metres and closing, he can see how Tariq got the pig parked so close. Brian sees it through the sideglass – the lapels and collar. The shoulder stripes on him. The bloody riot helmet on the passenger seat.

  Brian half-gasps, a breath cut short as the half-track’s whopping engine fires up. The fat exhaust kicks up a plume of ash, the whole thing tipping, rocking on its axles. Noah carries Brian through a half-second of hesitance.

  And Tariq, Tariq winds down the window and screams: Get thee the fuck in, lads.

  With the door open, Noah more-or-less throws Brian onto the bench seat.

  Blues on, sirens on, the closed loop radio screaming gabbled static.

  Not you, goes Brian to Tariq. Tell me it’s a joke.

  You get your good eggs and your bad eggs, Tariq says. I would’ve told you sooner.

  A bloody plod. All this time –

  That’s how you got round the curfew.

  Did you fit me up for that? For them in there?

  Not sectioned to Manchester, brother. We –

  What you mean? Undercover?

  Sort of, aye. MET sent me. Anti-terrorism and that. I’m the wrong shade of white for owt else worth doing.

  Christ above. Those bastards are worse than ours. Government?

  It’s a contract. Can’t say owt else.

  Tariq’s looking in his mirror. Three days of stubble and he’s halfway to Ghandi.

  You told him what’s going on, Noah?

  Noah shakes his head. The flaps of his cheeks peel away and stick themselves back to mucus.

  Brian asks what’s going on. He says, You as well?

  Noah shakes his head again.

  Don’t fret on, will you? You’re always bloody fretting on. You think a serving officer’s going to get down here knowing what a murderous swine I’ve been all day, and then drop you back in it? Bigger fish, son.

  Well how else would you know I was there?

  Brian eyes Colin’s box. Noah’s tapping it with a single talon of bone – the flesh gone entirely from the forefinger.

  Nobody says anything.

  Get him warm, says Tariq. That grey face says he’s not long from shock.

  Noah remembers that part. Noah leans down and pulls out a blanket, a flask. He passes a pair of sugar cubes. He unscrews the flask lid and takes a sniff. A pearl of drool comes free from his chin.

  Milk and honey, our kid, he says. And here, he adds, passing him a pair of sugar cubes. Get these down you an’ all.

  Brian can’t get the wrapper off fast enough. The edges of the cubes hurt his gums; he sucks hard, chews, has trouble swallowing the paste.

  Noah nods approvingly. His ruined face half-masked by a wing. He pats the blanket on the seat between them.

  I can tuck you up. Hold you tight.

  Brian grabs it. He weakly flops about, cocooning himself in the blanket. Wouldn’t want to guess what’ll hatch out of this –

  And Brian swigs at the thermos. Takes the heat and the sweetness to heart.

  He closes his eyes.

  The half-track, the pig, bumbles on through the firestorm.

  19.

  They see one of these pigs with the doors hanging off its back. Rum buggers had got a pipebomb in there. They see a pram filled with bottles, virgin-white rags in their collars, yet to be lit.

  They see children bouncing on a holoboard they’ve pulled off a pawn shop. So many shutters ripped off their frames, bent out like the bristles of old toothbrushes. Tendrils of tear gas, the ghost of cotton smog. The war cries.

  And they all squirm when Tariq’s pig runs a barricade and comes away with a bloodied protestor on its nose. Through double-skin glass, he’s shouting all sorts. Tariq swings left but adrenaline makes the bloke too sticky. Dead keen, this one, someone says. So Tariq brakes till he’s gone under the front wing, and they hope the half-track’s ground clearance was enough because you sure as hell can’t see out the back owing to the ash and dust and muck on the windows.

  Nobody talks. Nobody says anything as they swing by a mob setting fires; scattering as the diesel engine sounds out. Bodies line the road, statue-hard, exactly as they’ve fallen. Near them, a woman crawls along the pavement, one side of her head pulped, her cheeks puffy. She’s calling a name – David, David, it sounds like. But they have to drive on because sticks and stones are clattering off the panels.

  One brick digs itself into the first pane of the windscreen. It has a red corner, a clump of hair. Something pink and fatty on it. Then a flash of something bright zaps across the bonnet – fumes alight, turning blue, and gone again. Masonry rolls off the buildings; endless bits of paper and insulation riding air as though caught in the fetch of a wave.

  Another corner, another scene. An old man sitting on the kerb with a young boy across his lap. His white shirt reddening against the boy’s belly. Desperate coppers at the top of the road, sprinting towards the half-track and waving for it to stop. Beyond them, a gang with burning road barriers legging it after them.

  The half-track doesn’t stop. Two people bounce off, ploughed to the sides. The gang are flanking the half-track, black, brown, white faces through the windows. A shotgun flares, a dull pop –

  The broken lines and broken helmets.

  We’ve lost the streets, says Tariq.

  No, says, Brian, still caught between his dreams and these nightmares. We’ve won them back.

  Further on, farther away, Brian asks how they found him. Mainly because Colin’s box already says enough about why they wanted to.

  Brian says, Fluke or chance or – pointing at Tariq – was it this bastard here, his pals back in there?

  Shifting his gaze to the mirror, Tariq coughs. Noah takes some kind of cue.

  Do you trust me?

  That was Noah.

  Don’t know any more, says Brian.

  Young lass, weren’t she Tariq? says Noah. Twenty or twenty-one. Dead bonny, too – you would, and you’d be rude not to. But she saunters up not too long back, can’t for life of me remember where, and says she knows me. She knows you an’ all. Knows about everything.

  Brian’s skin shifts on its frame.

  So I say, I say, What are you, some kind of witch? And she goes, No darling, I’m an empress.

  Juliet? says Brian. That her name?

  Noah shakes his head. She tells me she’s called Constance.

  Brian stares at him.

  Dark hair? You’re sure that were her name?

  Oh aye. You wouldn’t want to miss her. And she goes, Your friend Brian’s a very silly billy –

  Brian throws the flask, sends white globes spinning across the bench seat, the roof lining.

  But how? he screams. She’s a little girl!

  Once was, Noah says.

  Then she’s a frigging witch as well, whispers Brian.

  No, says Noah sadly.

  She’s definitely an empress.

  The pig rolls on. The pig rolls through the broken streets, the burning city. The slate tide washing blood to the grids.

  The twin-smell of diesel and sweat; the burning paper and the bodies.

  Brian, Noah says. His eyes seem so sad. It’s sorted, now.

  Brian nods. His red-rimmed eyes, his face the colour of
t-shirts you’ve washed too many times.

  Noah has a syringe. Noah has a firm grip and a vein worth aiming for.

  This won’t hurt –

  20.

  It didn’t hurt.

  But the sunshine does. The hangover.

  On first glance, there’s sunshine, a piercing view. Then green hills, glinting glass bodies of a city wrapped around itself in glee. The steaming towers of industry. Wind turbines, stretched across the hills like an upscaled Normandy cemetery, all spinning hard for the better good.

  Here’s a relic of something they all knew, only fresh and tall and proud and bright. Together they stand on its blunt tip, its box-flat roof. The snub-nose spire of an icon they lost. No fire, no guns –

  There’s a digital sign board running the top panel. It says, IT’S A BRIGHT OUTLOOK IN THE NORTH.

  All at once, in tides:

  He’s standing on the Beetham tower, but before the fall. Standing with hands under his armpits, his tail just touching the floor.

  Brian gets motion sickness, then. A kind of vertigo. He leans and spews, mainly at the realisation. It’s all fluid. It’s all black. A filthy by-product of a very real shock. Still black, still rotten –

  How? He says. How?

  But that’s the thing with rhetorical questions. Nobody needs to answer.

  Brian looks down and takes in the stainless steel piping that encases his pelvis. The stoppers, the rubber feet. Servo motors at knee-height, coils and springs and pneumatic rams.

  How-do, says a woman.

  In front of him, in deck chairs, Juliet and her daughter, Constance. To their side, a purple Transit van, side door open.

  Noah. Tariq. And Colin.

  Brian says, Am I dead? He must say it earnestly, too – they all pull a smile.

  No, says Juliet. Not dead.

  Asleep?

  No, not that either. But you can move. Try it.

  Brian, his throat burning, inches forward. The frame around him gives, hisses, takes his weight and interprets his intent. As it compensates, he bobs up, advancing slowly. He winces. He’s still very weak. Very unsteady. He can feel bruises in places you’ve never had a bruise.

  It’ll take you a bit of time to get used to it, Juliet says. But here, you have plenty of that.