by Tim Maughan
And then he picks up his bag, turns away from the sea, and heads inland.
16. AFTER
Tyrone gives them masks to wear, tattered shells of scratched visor plastic and deteriorating, shredded rubber. Anika holds hers to her face as she walks, trying not to think about who else has had it to their mouth, what germs must lurk. It must be nearly twenty years old, pushed into service far longer than ever imagined by the Chinese factory worker who made it. It’s the same model, she thinks, as the one she used to use when she first moved to Bristol, when she first went out tagging on the Croft. Maybe it’s the same one. The smell of rubber triggers sense memories; the hiss of spray cans, the tackiness of dripping paint on exposed fingers, the splatter of color across clothes.
The women here are splattered with color, too. Anika turns her head to watch them as they walk past their tables, most of which look like they’ve been scavenged from one of the long-shut local schools. Appropriate, she thinks. Even with their faces hidden by their improvised masks—shreds of cloth wrapped tightly around faces, eyes barely protected by old swimming goggles, scavenged plastic sheeting, dead spex—she can tell that’s where most of the workers here should really be. Their childish frames should still be huddled over the same small desks, just in a classroom somewhere, not here. Their heads are down over bowls instead of books, their hands grasping pestles instead of pencils, the red chili dust rising from their tables as they work, pausing only to reach down to the baskets by their feet to refill their bowls with more peppers. The labor of machines transferred to children, Anika thinks. Her mind flashes to Wales, to Land Army camps, to the abattoirs, the blood-soaked overalls of children working in the meat-processing plants. The chili dust scorches her eyes through the useless plastic of the graffiti mask. She looks away, keeps walking.
They follow Tyrone through factory room after factory room, the only thing changing being the colors of the dust. Chili red moves through the spectrum to turmeric yellow, cumin brown. So many rooms, she starts to lose track of where the hell they must be; the buildings behind Stokes Croft have been cleared of their usual occupants and the walls smashed through to build Grids’s spice empire. It’s not until they emerge into one of the growing rooms that she manages to get her bearings.
This was one of Claire’s spaces, she realizes. Familiar but somehow mutated. It feels like the growing tubes have themselves grown, their white plastic bark expanded even higher toward the ceiling. More holes have erupted in their sides in order for more plants—spices, of course—to burst forth in green bloom. The white plastic—some of which was printed right here, most fabricated to Claire’s design in some distant, unseen Chinese manufacturing plant and shipped halfway across the world by now-lost infrastructure—is patched in places by mixed colors: landfill-scavenged material, ancient shopping bags, unidentifiable plastic sheeting. Anything to keep it together. The constant sound of running liquid nutrients, recycled from local sewage, she guesses, fills her ears. It’s gentle, calming, weirdly natural. A welcome break from the chaos of the processing rooms.
Grids is here, his back to them. She knows it is him without seeing his face. He’s studying the tubes, it seems, oblivious to their presence.
She removes the mask, the air largely free of spice dust here. The smell of rubber is replaced by humidity, fertilizer, that tinge of damp vegetation.
For long seconds, nothing happens. Grids doesn’t turn to face them. Tyrone says nothing. She glances at College, who just shrugs back. The silence is claustrophobic. Eventually she speaks, just to put an end to it.
“All right, Grids.”
He turns to face them. She’s startled by both how old and yet familiar he seems.
“Fucking hell,” he says, his head tilted slightly to one side. A look she genuinely can’t decode. “I don’t believe it. It’s actually you.”
“You remember me, then?” Instantly she’s no idea why she would say that.
“Yeah. Yeah.” He laughs. “Hardly going to forget you, am I? You know who this is, Ty? This is Anika. Threw herself in front of a tank with a—what was that thing you had strapped to you called again?”
“An EMP bomb.” She feels a damp chill sweep over her skin.
“An EMP bomb. E-M-P. You know what that is, Ty?”
Ty shrugs back at him, confusion muted by nonchalance.
“It stands for ‘electromagnetic pulse.’” Typical Grids, Anika thinks. He knew damn well what it was called. “Kinda bomb doesn’t blow you up, but fries all the electronics nearby. Kills them dead. Anika jumped out in front of that fucking tank in the middle of a firefight with one strapped to her and stopped it dead in its tracks. Literally. Craziest shit I’ve ever seen. She’s a fucking hero, Ty.”
“I wouldn’t say tha—”
“Then she left.” His tone snaps from nostalgic reverence to sarcastic annoyance. “Then she disappeared. Just like that. Why’d you leave so quickly, Anika?”
Ghosts flood the room, walls fold away. She’s out in the Croft again, a second after the recording stopped. Crowds climbing onto the tank, the crew being ripped from forced-open hatches. Limp, scared bodies, faces of children, being pulled to the ground, disappearing into the mob. She hears herself screaming for them to stop, her voice lost in the chaos.
“I didn’t like the way things were going.”
College speaks up, seeing where this is headed, wanting to break the tension. “Grids, I got the network running again.”
“What?”
He steps forward, grabs a school desk at the side of the room, and drags it in front of Grids. Pulls his backpack off and empties it on the desk, dozens of spex spilling out, dull LEDs on their arms blinking. He steps back, looks up at Grids, pride on his face, arms extended out at his sides.
“All these, bruv, I got them working again.”
“Really?” Grids looks at them, with what Anika reads as disgust. Like he might catch something from them.
“Really. I got ’em all working just off of Mary’s pair. The way the network works, it just needs one working pair and it’ll start reseeding the network again, reinstalling itself … I just needed a pair that had the client still installed, that hadn’t been wiped. A pair belonging to someone that left the Croft before the EMP went off. Mary’s pair—”
“He knows all this already,” Anika says.
Grids looks at her, across to College. He laughs. “Of course I do, I ain’t fucking stupid. What? You thought I really believed she had fucking magic powers? C’mon, man.”
“Yeah—but, y’know.” College shakes his head. “Every time I brought it up—”
“Every time you brought it up I wouldn’t talk to you. I told you to shut up.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, well. Because I couldn’t be fucking bothered. I didn’t want any of this.” He waves his hand dismissively at the pile of no-longer-dead technology on the table. “Look at this shit. Look at you two. I should have you both strung up.”
“Like that tank crew,” Anika says. Anger she can’t swallow back down. Things unsaid for too long.
“Oh.” He looks at her, eyes wide. Nodding. “Oh, okay. So you still pissed about that, then? That wasn’t just me, y’know.”
“You didn’t stop it.”
The mob suddenly breaking apart, falling back from the body on the ground, one of Grids’s men, scarf covering his face, standing above him with that pistol. Two hands on the grip, pointed at his head. Pleading and apologies and sobbing. Anika turning to Grids, yelling at him, telling him not like this, but him just standing there, watching.
The gunshot jarring, echoing through her head. The red mist, shattered eggshell skull. Blood and brains running into the drain like paint.
Silence.
Then a dull thud from the other side of Bristol, jarring everyone awake, sound rushing back like air into a vacuum. Everyone moving again. Another distant thud. A sense of scale, realization that this must be happening all over the city.
“
I didn’t—” Grids seems lost for words for once. He shakes his head, as if trying to shake the traces of guilt and regret, replace them with anger. “Fucking hell. I heard you’d been in Wales the last ten years.”
She can remember leaving now, trying to get away from the crowds, heading for the M32, bag on her back and eyes down so she couldn’t see the limp bodies hanging from the lampposts, seagulls tugging at gray flesh.
“Yeah?” Grids snorts, and Anika realizes her face must betray her surprise. “Yeah, I hear things, girl. Heard you been in Wales. I’m sure you seen a lot worse than what happened that day in Wales, yeah? Because I know I fucking have. And I just stayed right fucking here.”
He looks at them both, her and College. Glances around to look at Ty. Shakes his head again.
“What—what do you see when you look at me? Huh?” He pauses, waiting for an answer he knows won’t come. Silence except for the sound of running nutrients.
“What? Some savage? Some despotic fucking warlord? A gangster? I keep this place together, man. I keep this shit working.” He slams his chest with his fist. “I look after these people. Make sure there’s water and cow shit to keep these farms running. Make sure people eat. Make sure College here gets what he needs to keep the solar running. Make sure people got lights at night, don’t freeze to death in the winter. You know how I do that? Do you? It’s not by killing people. It’s not by being a fucking barbarian. It’s by hustling, by business. I do all that by fucking politicking. By bribes. The cops. The LA. The fucking city council. It takes money, all made by selling rich white people herbs. Spices. Fucking ganja. I’m not Scarface, I’m—” He pauses again, searching for words. “I’m like the fucking mayor.”
“This’ll help you with all that, G!” College points at the spex, the emptied bag. Anika is surprised to hear him this impassioned, to see it on his face. More memories, ghosts. “This’ll change everything. The network, it’ll give you an advantage, some leverage—”
“This? This is all bullshit.” Grids shakes his head at both of them, sucks teeth. “Nah. Fuck this. This is more hassle than it’s worth. It’s always been more hassle than it’s worth. Don’t you get that? Serious? Out of all this bullshit, the last ten years … have you really not worked out that this is always going to be more hassle than it’s worth?”
“But—”
“Nah. Nah, College.” Anika turns to him, face resigned. “He’s right. Probably. He’s probably spot-on. It’s more hassle than it’s worth. Plus we’ve all got things we’d rather stay buried.”
“…”
She looks Grids straight in the eyes, glimpses the sympathy she knows is there, the warmth that sheltered her body in that crumbling, bullet-shredded alley. “It’s just right now I ain’t got much choice, Grids. I got people to look after too. People that are dying. People that are being worked to death. Literally. And this, this is the only thing I can take back to them that might give them a chance, an advantage.”
She inhales, feels the cool tickle of a tear on her cheek. “So, what I’m saying is—you two, you can both sort your own problems out. What happens here, I don’t care. But I’m leaving here, and going back to Wales, with a bag of these. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” College sounds surprised.
“Yeah. Sorry. Tomorrow. And I wouldn’t try to stop me. Seriously.”
Pause. The sound of running liquid.
Grids shakes his head yet again. Laughs. “Shit, girl, you always was crazy. Fuck me. So you’re fighting the Land Army in Wales now, yeah? Bloc agent. You’re the big hero of the revolution.”
“Not exactly.”
“See, this is what I don’t get—I thought you’d be behind the LA? I thought that was your thing, you two? Socialism? Renationalizing the farms? Food for everyone?”
“Not exactly,” says College. “We weren’t Marxists. Not all of us.”
“Even if we were … there’s nothing socialist about the Land Army. It’s the fucking British Army, Grids. Just rebranded. It wasn’t a socialist uprising, it was a fucking military coup. It’s the same people that were in charge before the crash. Same generals, same politicians. Saying they’re doing it all for the good of the people, saying they’re doing it to feed everyone—it’s all lies. You seen what it’s like out there, outside of the cities? You seen what it’s like in the work camps? People being forced at gunpoint to work the land till they drop, literally. Their own land, land their families have owned for generations, that’s just been snatched from them. Living in fucking tents and shacks, starving to death, not seeing any of the food they’re growing because it’s all being sent to London, or to the war up in Scotland—”
“Well, what did you think was going to happen? After you broke everything? Really? What did you think? That everything would magically take care of itself? That this network of yours would somehow provide all the answers?”
“We didn’t pretend to have answers. Not for everything. That wasn’t what we were fighting for. We were fighting for people to be able to decide things for themselves, Grids. To start again. We were fighting for self-determination—”
“Well then, you got what you wanted. Self-determination? You’re looking at it.” He thumps his chest with his fist again. “I’m self-determination. The LA is self-determination. The city council is self-determination. That skinhead militia down in Knowle that’s lynching Muslims? That’s self-determination. That’s what it looks like. Lots of gangsters and warlords and fucking terrified people trying to look after themselves, trying to protect their own, and fuck everybody else. Me and all the other chancers and yardies that have carved this city up between us, trying to look after their own little bit of turf and their own people. Your self-determination is a fucking power vacuum, that’s all it is. Your revolution, with no idea of what would happen next, just created a massive hole full of people fucking each other over to stay alive.”
He suddenly looks, to Anika, exhausted. Like the fight has left him. She watches him exhale, his shoulders drop. He rubs his temples. “A’ight. Fine. You know what? You go. Do it. I ain’t going to stop you. In fact, I ain’t going to stop either of you. I can’t. You’re grown fucking adults. None of my business, I ain’t got the time. Soon as you get that shit running, the city is going to be down here tryin’ to shut it down, or getting their own shit reactivated—”
“That’s what I’m sayin’, we got to act fast. I got fucking hundreds of these, all from Mike’s shop. We get them all activated, then tomorrow at carnival we give ’em out. By the time anybody else knows what’s going down we’ll already have control of the network through pure numbers and—”
“Nah, College, nah. You didn’t hear me. None of my business.” He says it slowly, almost spelling it out. “I don’t care. I don’t want this. Twenty fucking years ago as a kid I didn’t want this, and I don’t want it now. Difference is now I got a fucking choice. Self-determination? I’m determining I don’t fucking want this.
“This is your bullshit, and it’s yours to sort out. It’s all on you, College. Just make sure it don’t blow up in your face, man. But even more, make sure it don’t blow up in mine. Make sure it don’t fuck with my shit. Because if it does, if at any point from now until I fucking die—if this bullshit starts fucking with my business I’ll see that you do swing from a lamppost. You get me?”
“Yeah.” College tries to suppress a smile. “Yeah, I get you, man.”
“Good. You fucking better. Now fuck off, both of you. I want you out my fucking sight. I got real shit to do. Take this shit with you.”
“Seriously, man, you’re making the ri—”
“Don’t want to hear it. Jesus.”
* * *
As Ty leads them out, Anika turns to College, speaks low.
“Well, you got passionate all of a sudden.”
“What you mean?”
“Listen to you in there. Few days ago you didn’t want anything to do with this when I brought it up. Now you’re arguing with th
e big man to let you start up the fucking network again.”
“Yeah, ha. I guess I got excited. Seeing the network up again, y’know? It works, A! It really works.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“That went easier than I thought. Jesus … he seemed to take it pretty well.”
“You think?”
“Yeah?” College shoots her a bewildered look. “No? You don’t think so?”
“I dunno. Sounded to me like he was going to have you hanged if your open-source, decentralized, basically unmanageable network ever fucks with his power structure.” She touches him gently on the shoulder. “Good luck with that.”
She pulls the ancient, battered mask back down over her face, and steps out into the pastel-shaded mists of spice.
* * *
Tyrone opens up the door of the shop, lets her in. Locks it behind her.
The girl—Mary, she must try to remember her name—is sitting at the back, hunched over her desk.
Anika steels herself, walks over to the girl. She sees she’s drawing—old chalk and felt-tip pens on scraps of paper. She looks up as Anika gets near.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” Anika smiles, trying to look as friendly as she can. “Look, Mary—I just wanted to say … Look. I’m really sorry. About what happened yesterday.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I was out of order. I should never have taken the spex from you like that. Put you through all that. Shown you what I did. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Really. I’m glad. You helped me find what I was looking for, for Grids.”
“You told him?”
“Yeah. He says he’s not going to look, says he doesn’t want anything to do with the network.”
“Yeah, he just said the same thing to me.”
“I don’t believe him.” Mary smiles. “He’ll look.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Anika tilts her head, looks at the drawing in front of the girl. Geometric shapes, explosions of color. “I like it.”
