by M. T Hill
* * *
The doctor’s car takes them towards Manchester on a congested route, northward into the city, the stratified city, through fortified suburbs whose boundaries stand walled and gated and sentried, and then up and over the recently electrified Mancunian Way, a confused retrofuturist monument to the nineteen-sixties and the early twenties. They’re silent, both of them, their transaction having been made, their lives all set to diverge again. Silent and appreciating their mutual agreement. A few minutes of this, the doctor’s nasal whistle, before the car slips into a juice-and-drop spot fifty yards from the railway station. Owing to the charger points installed here, it’s now an unofficial red light zone, darkness afforded by railway arches of sooty brick. The diesel fumes have long since diffused, but in the right wind you can still smell the old trains.
‘Right then,’ the doctor says, as the car settles.
‘Ta again,’ Martha replies.
Abbas is reaching to pop Martha’s door when a shrill alarm sounds from somewhere deep in the car. They both startle, lock eyes. Frantic, one hand tearing out his hearing aid, Abbas slaps his pockets and produces a series of small devices. These he places on the dashboard, the fourth or fifth in his hand. ‘None of these,’ he says, baffled.
‘I think it’s the car,’ Martha says slowly, producing her own mobile and shaking her head. ‘I know that tone from somewhere.’
‘The car?’
‘I don’t… Hang on. I’m sure we did this in school. Ages ago.’
Abbas glares at her.
‘That’s it,’ she says. ‘Emergency broadcasting. I swear down that’s the tone.’
‘And there’s nothing on your phone?’
Martha rotates the screen to him. Back to her, for a second shock. The screen has filled with red exclamation marks – Sharon, Greenley, even Rolly, who she can never quite imagine using a phone.
All of them are asking where Martha is. All of them are saying to get back to the allotments ASAP. All of them asking if she’s all right, if she’s seen the news, if Rolly can come and fetch her on his bike—
‘Something’s going on,’ Martha says. And though Martha and Dr Abbas haven’t seen the news, the car hears ‘going on’, and serves it to them. A flashing windscreen HUD – URGENT.
Martha pushes the door open. The alarm isn’t in the car. It’s coming from the city.
‘Stream low,’ Abbas says, and the dash projects an image on the windscreen, fuzzed then sharpening as the unit compensates for the dark arches beyond.
Abbas gasps: it’s drone footage, that curious isometric. Night-time, and the craft obviously a long way up. Infrared mix. The camera is mounted in a fidgety gimbal, but the subject is strangely clear: they are looking down on a cityscape in negative. A large city in total darkness except for white-hot patches of things burning, encircled by a vast, unbroken line of streetlamps and car headlights. It’s as if some regretful god has draped a circle of black cloth upon the place, lest they accidentally look at it. Dead motorways and lightless high-rises, shadows only hinting at infrastructure. Everything shorn of civilising lines and angles.
A headline ticks along the bottom of the screen:
BIRMINGHAM ATTACK: FIRST PICTURES.
‘What the fuck,’ Martha says. Gutshot: that sparkling dread. ‘This is Birmingham?’
‘Look at the time stamp,’ Abbas says, voice quiet. ‘In the corner, see? My God. Look at the timestamp – this was taken in the early hours. How are we only just seeing it?’
Outside, something clips the open door, and Martha’s attention is drawn away. Clusters of people are sprinting past the car, ostensibly towards the city centre. No screaming, no panic, just a mass of silhouettes, the tattoo of feet.
‘My God,’ Abbas repeats.
‘What happened?’ Martha says. She stands up and leans over the door. ‘What’s going on?’ she yells at someone running past. A youngish lad turns and shouts, ‘An’t you seen? It’s kickin’ off big style, mate! Total fuckin’ wipeout!’
Martha turns to Abbas, whose eyes are very wide. She nods once, and before he can say otherwise, Martha is gone with the crowd. For the first few metres she can hear Abbas calling desperately after her, but she doesn’t flinch – extends an arm and waves over her shoulder without turning or glancing back. The surge is too intoxicating to resist: the sense of being in a movement, the sweeping and unknowable now, electric skin and a tumbling stomach.
The crowd is massing in Piccadilly Gardens, the heart of the city, most standing and facing the massive civic screens. Hundreds of people are packed on to the AstroTurf, some crying and shaking, almost all of them on phones. Martha gets in the thick of it, pushing through, nimble even with the big rucksack, until she breaks the line at one of the screens and comes before a new set of images.
Daylight, exterior: an enormous column of people walking up a motorway. A shifting mass of people covering all three lanes and the hard shoulder, pressed together so tightly you only see hair and shoulders. Beneath them a fresh headline:
PRIME MINISTER DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY.
‘What’s happened?’ Martha asks the woman to her right. The woman is middle-aged, well dressed, with a collection of expensive-looking shopping bags at her feet. Her phone is flat in her palm and projecting a bowl of light, inside which her family are gathered at the family dinner table, looking up and out into the city.
‘They’re saying it’s a kind of bomb,’ the woman tells Martha, not taking her eyes from the screen. ‘It shut down the city’s electrics. Lights. Roads. Cars. Hospitals. All of it. The whole thing. All the backups and bloody everything. The city just went out.’
Martha stares at the screen. The people marching.
‘Where are they going?’
The woman glances up at Martha and tuts softly. ‘They’re refugees, sweetheart. They’re going anywhere.’
Martha rubs her face. A pang of loss and fear, mixed with sadness. A numb thread of not understanding, and the wish she could. She has no family or friends in Birmingham, no real tether, so there’s a distance. But most pressing of all is the sense of enormity. As if she finally understands some of the things her mum told her about living through the noughts and tens. The day her mum sat at home, for instance, playing truant from college, and saw two planes collide with two towers; felt, in some immature, ungraspable way, her cossetted world judder and rock from its axis. How her mum described a revised world taking form, shaped by the pressures of its new orbit. A country in which innocence gave way to cynicism, and the fascia of civilisation was picked at, slowly elided. ‘Sometimes I cried my eyes out while I fed you to sleep,’ her mum once told her, ‘because you didn’t have a clue. I wanted to hide it all from you, at least for as long as I could. I thought, this way you can’t ever be angry with me.’
Martha has forgiven her mum that, though. Here, today, the world is still changing. The most perverse thing being that she doesn’t fear its horrors, but instead she finds them exhilarating. A modern city with its plug pulled – the idea is unbelievable. But it captures her, quickens her.
She stands there. Shocked into quiet, then, like the rest of the crowd, and marvelling at the way Manchester has paused, holding its breath, to watch the people of Birmingham march north.
3
When the police arrive to disperse the crowds, Martha returns to Dillock on a heaving train, grateful for the lightness of the rucksack, but otherwise distracted, weirdly homesick and thirsty, and none the wiser on Birmingham. Terrorism, they said on the screens. Definitely terrorism. And now there’s more terse chatter in the carriage, a vehicle-borne device being one possibility: a truck or bus or bin lorry or tanker, or something bigger. Maybe multiples, rigged up and synchronised for maximum effect. Maybe they used the old tunnels under the city. Before they left the screens, talking heads on the news were dismissing nuclear strikes but giving it all that about ‘severe broadband electrical disruption’ caused by something like an ‘electromagnetic pulse’, or ‘hy
perlocalised EMP’. Not that Martha can confirm anything now: her mobile has stopped working, owing to redirected satellites or stressed relay stations, or the networks being down altogether.
Martha closes her eyes, lost in her imagination. Without realising it, she’s trying to grasp the processes that even go into setting off a bomb. Is she naïve to question how someone could wake up and look at all of this – boring life, the fixings and faces, roadways and trees – and decide to reject it? Do they go out to jumble the order of it, or end it? Do they watch what they do? Do they live through the aftermath? Do they feel anything to hear children screaming for their parents? Does a bomb like this – whose damage is apparently confined to things – feel easier to trigger? What about afterwards, when the stillness, the debris, the absences, are all that remain?
The train reaches Dillock, inbound rain like nicks in the glass. Martha alights quickly, itching madly under the bag straps. Wind on wet fabric. A dampness, welcome on her neck and hairline, but not so much for the storm it’s likely dragging in.
She walks the long way back to the allotments. Fast feet, leaning in. Worlds away from Manchester, or Birmingham, or any city, come to that. Without really thinking, she collects a carton of fresh farmer’s milk from the town’s vending robot, a cutesy cylindrical thing whose face was painted by the local school’s competition winner, and more recently graffitied over by someone older and more profane. Then she crosses the farm’s wet fields, long grass dampening her toes and shins. She could sit in with Sharon, warm up by the wood burner. See what else has happened in Birmingham on Sharon’s little wind-up set. Hot wool and lemon verbena. A bit of sense talked into her – Sharon being good like that.
Over the last stile, Martha cuts down through the trees, the railway line an intrusion to one side. The smells of decay and blossom and musk, the signature of some unseen creature. Deeper in, the branches shivering. There comes an occasional slapping noise from ahead. Martha exits the treeline on to Greenley’s land, allotment city. The rain is getting heavy, and no one’s about. Spidersilk is strung in bowing lines between structures. Gardening tools are wedged in the biggest growing patch, and nearby is a barrow full of soily cauliflowers and legumes, tilting precariously, its handles capped with heavy-duty gloves. The sound of rain on shed roofs, glass and fabric awnings, on the tarp covering Rolly’s motorbike and the limb-trees, and on the corrugated plastic off-cuts and timber salvage. A gentle throb, in the low end, from the groundwater pumps. She goes between the sheds and under the wind turbine, whose blades cut silently. The solar arrays, mounted in trailers on the south-facing slope, are all facing due west; in the morning they will turn together to the east. In the growing lanes, the robotic hands are all turned off; they stand there in reduction, curled into themselves.
One of the sheets covering the limb-trees has come unfastened, and is lashing against the nearest hand’s working arm. Each slap sends a fine spray in the air. The loosened sheet has exposed the limbs of a bush that should not be exposed – a clump of partially formed arms, a battery of skinned legs – pointing accusingly at her. She swallows and stands in the drawing-down light. Now the shush of pre-dusk, the softened lines and blueing grass. A low mist developing on the slope above, a ghost wall descending the bank. For the first time a chill, though it isn’t particularly cold. The quiet here is so massive and contrary to the crowd she’d joined in Manchester. She goes to the hand, boots squeaking in the dew, and steadies herself with its cold wet steel. She grabs the loose flysheet, holds it taut. It’s rubbery, almost greasy. Nowhere near as heavy as she thinks it’s going to be. Up close, perhaps owing to the light, the artificial limbs are especially alien. With her other hand she touches one, just to see. A rain-glossed, half-grown arm, beige and hairless. Fingers without knuckles and form, but creased in preparation; same for the elbow. She uses one finger to slide droplets of rain from its surface. Finally, she pulls across the flysheet to secure them, zips it all closed. Maybe it’s the time of day, her frame of mind, but the limbs had started to make her think of blast injuries.
‘All right,’ she whispers. ‘Where are you all?’
As if in response, something snaps at the treeline. Martha’s neck prickles. A movement – too low to be human, too fast to make sense of. She crouches, inches herself against the closest shed wall. Not scared, she tells herself. Interested.
A slender head emerges from thick bramble. A fox, long ears twitching in the rain. Autumn bronze and black fur, a thick brush. It’s scavenging, probably. It’ll be out of luck: there’s no meat here except for a few vats of soggy synthetic. Then again, it could rifle the recycling bags, though Rolly will have seen to the compost already. As the fox sniffs the air, Martha holds her breath. She watches this creature, poised and long – and is suddenly rewarded when it springs forward and bounces around in the long grass, tail spraying fine droplets in great arcs. It’s chasing a bumblebee, the sight of which alone would be magic, were it not for the tiny yaps the fox lets out as well. Martha covers her mouth to hold in her grin. Presses herself into the wood, trying to remove herself from the equation. The minute expands. The ground around the fox seems to be shimmering. Then, just as quickly, the bee is gone, or the fox is sated, and the spell breaks. Martha steps away from the shed, tenser than she realised, and on towards the fox.
It notices her coming. A white glint in the eyes. It holds Martha’s gaze for long enough to blink twice, very clearly. Martha returns its blinks without thinking. A sort of conversation. The fox opens its mouth fractionally, black gum, a hint of yellowed teeth. A flash of plum tongue. Martha holds up one palm and waves tentatively. The fox dips its nose, then backs away. ‘Wait,’ Martha says. ‘Don’t.’ But the fox has turned, slinks into the thickness of the forest, towards the dry. Its bob, brilliant white, is the last she sees of it.
‘Huh,’ she goes. A daze. The allotments no longer so desolate, and the sleeping machines less eerie in their silence. The others must have gone to the pub, she’s telling herself. That, or they’re clustered around a screen somewhere, like everyone in Manchester was.
Martha unlocks her shed door. She sits on the coir mat and kicks off her boots, massages her wet toes and stretches out over the sheepskins she keeps on the floor. On the walls she keeps pictures of city landmarks and long-closed gig venues. From the ceiling hangs an upcycled wind chime tinkling on the breeze. Soothing notes, the warmth of wood on wood. Since she moved to the allotments, Martha has felt more present, much closer to the elements, more aware of the air changing from month to month. It’s one bonus of being up north, where they still have proper seasons: you notice the valley bloom, and later, as the ground frosts, everything die back again.
The shed has a small leak in the ceiling when it rains. Water drips from the central light fitting, down through a hardened silicon seal, and on to the sheepskins. Martha can scent it – mildew, a deeper smokiness. It smells of home. She pulls the blanket off her bed and stays there for a time, closing her eyes, listening to the restive chimes, thinking of the fox. The shed door creaks and taps against the frame. She remembers arriving at the allotments, bewildered and slight and anxious to meet the people who’d agreed to take her in. She thinks again of Birmingham, and all those people walking up the motorway. A word, helixing in her mind: refugees.
* * *
Right on the edge of sleep, Martha is roused by a voice on the wind. Greenley’s reedy tones, at once loud yet distant. Raised, too. She’s up, then, lest the others stumble on her lying down on the floor like this, cast their judgements. The paradox of being seventeen and hating that they see her as a teenager.
Looking out, however, there’s still no sign. She goes towards Greenley’s shed by way of the lab vent – a small outlet topped with a reclaimed red-clay chimney pot. Beside it, she realises what drew her this way. She squats and listens. They’re all down in the lab.
Galvanised, Martha steps around the guy wires supporting Greenley’s radio antenna and enters his shed. A new cable-knitte
d blanket on the bed he uses when he’s too busy to walk the fifteen yards to Sharon’s. Martha’s eyes shift to the stack of hardback books on the floor: reference and esoterica. A couple of garishly jacketed fantasy novels. On the shelves, succulents and trays of giant cress. The large planter he sometimes takes outside for rainwater, has named ‘Triffid’ for some reason. Copper pots, a camping stove. A pinned-up protest banner screaming ‘CO-OPS NOT CRISIS’. A set of mugs hanging on hooks – old trade union slogans, one featuring a crude impression of Margaret Thatcher with crossed-out eyes. A leather-topped mahogany desk for his elaborate ham radio rig, around which are pinned postcards from contacts all over the world.
Martha heads down the staircase. Damp concrete, no handrail. Tap-tap-tap. Her clothes still sodden. Then over the basement floor, where she’s shocked to find the lab door sealed. Staring around at utility lights, thick with spider webbing, little moths dallying. Does she knock? The lab isn’t usually closed, what with Greenley insisting there’s no hierarchy on the allotments – at least when it suits him. But Martha allows her hand to fall anyway, accepting she isn’t welcome for whatever reason. She puts her ear to the door.
‘Only a bloody kid herself!’ a voice insists. Lower register, that Lancashire bluddy. Rolly.
‘It’s a minor complaint,’ another voice responds – Sharon. Then, with some finality, Greenley himself: ‘You know we can’t risk aggravating long-standing clients. As an attitude, it’s not exactly disgraceful. I rather admire it, actually. But as an approach, it would be suicidal to allow it to happen again.’
Martha pinches the fleshy pad between her thumb and forefinger.
‘Can’t we just have a quiet word?’ Rolly asks. ‘She really flogs her tripe out for us—’
Crosstalk, then, and an angry response.
‘I won’t – I’ll not have that,’ Sharon goes, as if she’s repeating a point.
Then Greenley, even closer: ‘I think we’re done here, aren’t we? I’m going upstairs to try calling her again.’
