Infinite Detail

by Tim Maughan

  CD’S

  TAPE’S

  SWAPS POSSIBLE, NO CREDIT

  THIEVES WILL BE SHOT

  It’s the first shop Anika’s seen that appears to have a purpose, to have something of real value for sale. It’s also the first shop she’s seen with an armed guard on the door: a bored-looking teenager propped up on a barstool blocks the way in, a farmer’s double-barreled shotgun resting lazily across his lap. He looks like he’d hardly cause her any real problem, but like the rest of the crowd watching through the chicken wire she decides against going in.

  She drops down another static escalator to the ground floor, straight into the thickest crowds, and into a wave of unexpected panic. She’s not been surrounded by so many people since that last night in Bristol, she realizes, and it’s unnerving in its similarity—the tension on faces, the stains on unwashed clothes, the stench of unbathed flesh.

  But there’s something else she can smell, and as she works her way to the outside of the crowd it grows stronger as everything starts to fall into place. She couldn’t see it from the balconies above, but the shops down here have had their windows removed and replaced with counters, the crowd snaking out from its central mass, tentacle-like, into huge queues at each one. She’s standing in the center of a circular food market, each counter identified in huge letters, in the Gill Sans font Anika recognizes all too well—VEGETABLES, FRUIT, DAIRY, ALCOHOL, and, in similar but smaller letters below, NO PURCHASES WITHOUT ADEQUATE RATION COUPONS.

  The smell now is intoxicating, that marketplace scent she’s not experienced for close to a decade: the musk of unrefrigerated meat mixing with the acrid twang of decaying vegetation. She can’t see much by just peering into the crowd, and her urge is to push through, to see it, to drink it all in, but something stops her.

  Between every couple of shops, towering above everyone’s heads on platforms built from scaffold and repurposed motorway signs, stands a Land Army trooper. Woodland camouflage jackets, SA-80 assault rifles, shaved heads turning slowly to survey the patiently queueing crowds.

  Hanging from the wall behind each trooper is the first true branding Anika has seen since stepping foot in Cabot Circus, the familiar Land Army poster—the instantly identifiable Coca-Cola white-on-red colors, the stylized crown, the same huge Gill Sans lettering:

  KEEP

  CALM

  AND

  CARRY

  ON

  LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT

  Anika feels the people around melt away, feels suddenly, horrifically exposed. She drops her eyes to the filth-strewn marble floor, pulls up the hood of her jacket, and heads for the exit.

  Outside in the open air for the first time, she relaxes, slows her pace, silently curses her own naïveté. She pulls back her hood, lets the warm sunlight stroke her face as she stares up at the sun bursting over the concrete canyon walls of Bond Street, imagines impossible cinematic lens flare. It’s quieter out here, just the lessening flow of passing bikes. She probably panicked back there; the chances of anyone recognizing her are much slimmer in Bristol. Still, it feels safer out here.

  She takes a deep breath.

  She should never have come back.

  She’s not going to find what she hoped for.

  Fuck it.

  Fuck it all.

  But.

  But.

  There’s only one way to be sure.

  * * *

  Anika stares at the sun again, squinting up through smashed hexagonal geodesic wireframes and bird-shit-smeared glass, watching seagulls trace invisible thermals as she tries to ignore the building in front of her, its huge mass mockingly goading her onward.

  She walked here, almost on autopilot, until she found herself at the Bearpit roundabout, a century-old futurist’s dream from a time when subterranean public plazas on the wrong side of town were a utopian urban planning solution rather than a crime scene waiting to happen. The entire center of the roundabout is sunk below ground level, and although open to the sky it was always a natural destination for those who wanted to conduct business unseen. Drunks, junkies, dealers, prostitutes, graffiti artists. There’d been the inevitable effort to gentrify it at the turn of the century, to bring in the obligatory performance spaces and organic hot dog stalls—they’d erected an angular, origamic sculpture of a twelve-foot bear, and then, as if blissfully drunk on nostalgic naïveté, they built a geodesic dome over the whole thing—but still the winos and the junkies found corners they believed were unseen.

  She makes to leave the Bearpit via the opposite underpass to the one she entered through, but she stops on the way out. It’s still there.

  She would see it every time she passed through here on the way home. Everyone would, who came this way. She’s surprised to see it, unsure why. Maybe she expected it to have been ripped down, smashed up. It’s damaged, certainly, pierced by two bullet holes, smeared with filth, uncleaned. But it’s still there, and Anika can’t decide whether it’s now defiant, ironic, or just in bad taste. Whichever way, it makes her pause, triggering emotions she’d not expected, can’t control.

  White stenciled text and a laurel wreath on a red board—the wood apparently spared from becoming fuel—the sign is unmissable, its message bold, even if the context is unclear.

  STOKES CROFT—RELENTLESS OPTIMISM

  6. AFTER

  Mary doesn’t often see anyone wearing a suit. Well, unless you count the tramps down in the Bearpit—some of them wear suits, but mismatched ones, jackets from here, trousers from there. The occasional tie. But all old, dirty, smeared in their own shit and piss. Plus Mary doesn’t go down to the Bearpit very often. Grids doesn’t let her.

  Grids doesn’t wear suits, she thinks, even though he’s important. And isn’t that the whole point of suits? To show that you’re important? That you’re different? That’s what someone told her, that lots more people used to wear them, when lots more people were important, or had important things to do. Special occasions. She peers past her customer and toward the front of the shop—Grids is standing there, anxiously trying to look like he’s not watching them, and even though this is an important thing for him, a special occasion, he’s still not wearing a suit. Just his regular outfit, dark blue jeans, black T-shirt. The thin silver chain that always hangs from his neck.

  The guy sitting in front of her now, though—now, he is very much wearing a suit. The kind of suit Mary has never seen before outside of old movies. Different shades of gray, varying textures—silk, wool. Mary wants to lean forward and touch it, to rub it between her fingers. But what transfixes her the most is his shirt—slashed down the middle by a streak of pink tie—and how white it is. Really white, clean white—not graying, grubby, but pure white. Mary’s not seen anything like it before, an item of clothing that white, that clean. That pure. It looks like it could almost be new.

  Not even Grids’s trainers ever look that white.

  The guy—Walker is his name—has picked a face from the wall. It was one of the really high-up ones—Tyrone had to stand tiptoe on a chair to get it down. Usually Grids would have used that as a chance to make some joke in front of his crew about how short Ty is, but he didn’t today. Grids is being all serious today, polite.

  It’s a girl, quite young. Serious-looking. Pink hair and thick-rimmed glasses, like so many in the pictures are wearing. The face has been up on the wall for months, and Mary barely remembers drawing it, even though she recognizes the paper it’s on—she had a few sheets of this gray, coarse stuff one of Grids’s boys had brought her. Said he’d found it somewhere, suspiciously. It was torn at the edges, but big enough that Mary could rip it into smaller bits. She really liked it. It was nice paper, took chalk and felt-tip pens really well, like it was made just to do that. Plus she liked the feel of it between her fingers, rough to the point that it felt almost furry, like it was made out of compressed hair.

  Mary feels the paper now, just one corner.

  “Do you know her?” she asks Walker.

 
; “This girl? No. I just picked her at random, from your many wonderful drawings. I liked her face.” Fake smile flash. “Does that matter? Does it affect … what you do?”

  His voice is authoritative, questioning. Mary recalls being back at the tip; the dismissive, patronizing tones of Land Army officers. She bristles defensively.

  “No. No, it doesn’t. Why should it?”

  Walker smiles. “Forgive me. I’m just trying to understand your … ability. Do you need to have a connection to the person you’re trying to trace? I mean … to be near someone that knows them, or knew them? Does that make sense?”

  “No. No, not at all. It doesn’t work that way.”

  He smiles again. “So tell me. How does it work?”

  Mary takes a breath, embarrassed. She tries to mentally prepare herself, to say the words yet again. This is always the hardest part. Harder even than showing them.

  “I ain’t completely sure how it works, to be truthful.” She fidgets nervously with one of her oversized hoop earrings. “Sometimes I see people, out in the street. Nobody else can see them. They’re not fully there … just … half there.”

  Walker tries to hide a skeptical smirk. “You’re saying you can see ghosts?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe. I guess that depends on what you believe a ghost is. All I know is that they were here that night, and they’re not always dead. I think you have to be dead to have a ghost.”

  He leans forward. “So perhaps, what you see … it’s maybe memories? Like people’s memories, from that night?”

  “Maybe. I guess so.”

  “And you can see these people, right? But only see them? You can’t … touch them, or feel them?”

  “I can hear them.” Defensively.

  “You can hear them when they speak?”

  “Yes.” She can hear them when they scream, too, Mary thinks. She can hear them when they call for help, when they beg for mercy. When they die.

  “And what do they say?”

  “‘They’? They don’t all say the same thing.” She resists the temptation to tell him about the screaming, the dying.

  “Of course.” The fake smile, but this time shot through with a trace of genuine humor and what might even be respect. “But what about her?” He leans forward, and stretching one well-tailored arm across the wall of junk he taps the picture of the girl with the tip of one finger, three times. “What does she say?”

  * * *

  Tyrone, bored, sits and takes it all in. Weighs shit up. Analyzes.

  This kid standing opposite him, cradling the assault rifle like a comfort blanket and looking nervously at the faces on the walls, is barely as old as Ty. Maybe fourteen or fifteen, his thrown-together uniform a mess of camouflage fabrics and drab, faded olive cotton. Land Army child soldier, here to protect this bigwig that’s come to see Mary. He’s got one of those little headsets, an earphone and a mic, fixed behind one ear. Makes him look almost futuristic, except that Tyrone can see the coiled wire snakes down to one of those ancient radio walkie-talkies on his belt, a massive brick of a thing, held together with curled, graying sticky tape and tightly tied string. Tyrone wonders if it works.

  Though he’s much more interested in the gun, if he’s honest.

  He nods at its squat bulk. “So, you use that much, then?”

  The guy takes his eyes off the faces on the wall, flicks them down at Ty. “This? Only when I have to.”

  “You ever shot anyone?”

  The guy smiles, somehow managing to look even younger. “Nah. Had to fire it above a crowd’s heads once, though.”

  “Serious?”

  “Yeah. All kicked off down at Cabot, in the food market. People fightin’ over bread.”

  “Bet that got their attention.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you could say that. They simmered down pretty quick.”

  Tyrone nods, sarcasm-tinged appreciation. “So what’s it like, then?”

  “What? Firing this?”

  “Nah, I mean the Land Army, the whole thing.”

  The guy shrugs, stares out the shop window. “It’s all right. I only been signed up about … about seven months now, I think? Yeah, it’s okay. Boring a lot of the time, to be honest.”

  “Yeah, guess you missed out on most of the fun, huh?”

  “Yeah. It’s pretty quiet now. Occasionally something kicks off, something the magistrates can’t handle on their own, and they call us in. Apart from that I’m usually just doing jobs like this.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yeah, VIP escorts. But even they don’t happen much these days. Spend a lot of time patrolling the downs, you know? Making sure nobody sneaks in and tries to steal crops.”

  “Seen. So, seven months. Why you sign up?”

  The guy glances at him, and before he returns his face to the window, Ty sees the color drain from it, his whole expression drop. “Didn’t have much choice, to be honest. Was in a kids’ home up in Kingswood. Hit fifteen and they don’t keep you on. Had a choice—sign up, go work on a farm, or get shipped out to one of the landfills.” He shrugs again. “Signed up.”

  “Right.” Tyrone tries to find the right words. “You got no family, then?”

  The guy’s eyes drop to the ground. “Nah. They didn’t make it. You?”

  “Same. Mum died just after. Lived with my aunt for a while, but she only lasted a few more years.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah.” Tyrone suddenly can’t match his gaze, feels the hair pricking up on his neck, his skin temperature drop like he’s been enveloped in a bubble of cold air. “Likewise.”

  Seconds pass like minutes, Tyrone trying to think of something to break the awkward silence. Luckily Grids wanders over from where he’s been agitatedly hovering, shifting weight from foot to foot, trying to eavesdrop. The atmosphere is suddenly very businesslike.

  “Right. They going out.” He leans in close to Ty, drops his voice low. “Keep an eye on them. Like I said, Mary doesn’t leave the Croft. She doesn’t pass the gates, under any circs. Get me?”

  “No problem, man. I’m on it.”

  “I fucking hope so.”

  * * *

  Anika didn’t know what those long-dead futurists were thinking when they built the 5102, but she suspects they just thought it would look cool to have a road flowing under a building, a Fritz Lang–shot world of tomorrow where cars appeared and disappeared into the very fabric of the city, like trains disappearing into Alpine tunnels. Maybe that’s all it was: just architects flexing their terraforming muscles by building urban mountains, not allowing their future city to be restrained by the limitations of such antique concepts as roads and streets.

  Of course, what they’d actually created was a wall. A huge, ten-story-high wall with the smallest of gateways at the bottom, just wide enough for a single road—the A38 Stokes Croft—to slip through. The cynic, the class warrior still hidden deep inside Anika, would always whisper that it was intentional—that they had actually glimpsed the future, and knew exactly what they were doing—building a barrier with a single, controllable gateway to the badlands of St. Paul’s and beyond. That they’d seen everything that would follow, from the race riots of the ’70s through to the cataclysmic rebellion of the new century, and had built a wall to try to keep it out, a preemptive strike on the geography of the city’s undesirables.

  She knew that wasn’t true. For a start, a true prophet would have seen how it would have been reversed, deflected back as defenses for the other side. A wall of protection, fortification—not exclusion.

  At least for a while, before the tides turned again and it became the wall of a prison, a tomb.

  It hadn’t been called the 5102 when they built it, it was Avon House—the main offices for now-long-defunct regional authorities. It had sat derelict for years before being reborn as city-center apartments, part of that first wave of turn-of-the-century artisan gentrification that swept along Stokes Croft like floodwater, staining the buildings with graffiti an
d coffee bars as it receded.

  And then, later, as Stokes Croft had grown beyond just being a street and had become a place, for Anika the 5102 had become not just a symbol, but home.

  She honestly hadn’t been sure, as she’d emerged from the shadows of the Bearpit, that it would even still be there. But here it is, the fortress wall, breached yet still standing. The star-shaped hole they punched in it reveals all Anika needs to know, as it exposes crumbling concrete floors and twisted metal entrails, the rotting honeycomb of an empty, abandoned hive. The building might still stand, but it looks like it’s been bled to death.

  Anika stands, stares up at it, unsure what to think. She remembers the last time she saw it, glancing back over her shoulder as she fled, smoke still seeping from broken windows and a handful of defiant residents still on the roof, waving their improvised red flags and raining tiles onto retreating, unseen aggressors. She remembers a shot ringing out, a sound like fractured air, and the mass of people around her ducking, flinching as one, a few standing out from the crowd as they remain immobile, numbed and unmoved, failing to hear it, failing to care, or just refusing to be shocked anymore.

  * * *

  Below the fractured wall she stares into the gloom of the underpass, the once-ever-busy road silent, the once-barricaded gateway clear. Well, temporarily, at least—someone has built a gate across it, two giant sliding doors welded together from scaffolding poles and chicken wire, mounted on what looks like a couple of dozen shopping cart wheels. Putting aside the fact it’s wide open, it hardly looks secure, like it couldn’t keep anything out—or in—just another symbolic barrier, a physical manifestation of a long-forgotten virtual boundary.

  As Anika steps across the line between July sun and the shadow of the 5102’s underpass she clocks the two guys—kids, really, less than half her age—standing just the other side of the darkness, both holding guns. Big guns, old AKs refurbished with printed parts, their dull metal color patchworked with sections of gray plastic. As gate guards they’re both pretty shit, she figures—they’ve got their backs to her for a start, staring inward. She looks past them, into the Croft, follows their line of sight to a small group walking slowly but steadily straight toward them.