The gate was opened at a nod, and Theo followed the older man inside.
“You take tea, right?”
“Please.”
“Milly! One cup of proper tea for our guest here, and I’ll have that herbal shit—it’s past my bedtime you see, if I have even a sniff of caffeine after 3 p.m. I can’t get to sleep and it’s my bowels too—you wouldn’t understand but when you’re my age you’ll see. Sit down, sit down.”
“Thank you I’m…”
“Someone do you over?”
“In Shawford.”
“Ragers?”
“Yes.”
“Town went to piss. After Budgetfood pulled out, place with such a fine tradition of smuggling too but they couldn’t hold it together, it’s all gone downhill, it’s nice to have a place to call your own though isn’t it, this place—biscuit?”
“Thank you.”
“Digestive?”
“I’ll eat anything.”
“Hungry? Milly! Our guest is hungry! Knock something up, will you?”
“You knock something up!” came the reply from the kitchen, down the end of a low-ceilinged, wood-timbered hall.
Jacob Pritchard chuckled, eased back into his padded chair with a creak of spine and sinew, smiled brightly at Theo.
Flames in an old iron fireplace; soot in the chimney. Various prizes for darts on the mantelpiece, getting old now, a few newer trophies for bowls. The stuffed head of a gorilla above a rocking chair, its face wrinkled in disapproval. The face seemed old, wise; it was not angry that it had been killed, severed from its body, stuffed, pickled and suspended on a living-room wall in Kent. It was merely exasperated that there was a species out there that thought this was the acceptable way of things.
A single fat-bodied fly crawled weakly at the edge of a windowpane, too exhausted from days of endeavour to find its way to the open crack at the top.
Jacob Pritchard, king of diesel, prince of cheap booze, sitting in a padded brown armchair, had grown old. His once-dark hair was tied in a thin ponytail, the peeling-back strands revealing the bright pink scalp underneath. His great hands shrank into his chicken-skin arms; most of his teeth were fake, and he kept them in a clear green jar by his bed at night.
His mind would be the last to go, and he knew it. Always assumed he’d go mad like his old mum had, but no, he’d be awake until the end, as his body failed one bone at a time, so it went, so it goes, you can’t beat time, not even him, not even Jacob Pritchard.
“So,” he mused, studying the bruised figure in the chair opposite his. “Little Mike’s boy, all grown up.”
Theo shrugged, and it hurt.
“All strapping man, all bringing down the Company, yes? All heroic causes and towns full of ragers and knocking on my door in the middle of the night. Yes indeed grown up, but maybe not the way your old man would’ve wanted. So how’d it work out for you, being Theo Miller? Did he have a good life?”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly—mostly—a joker—mostly he says and I say to you mostly is not what brings you to my door, sonny, it’s not the truth of matters as they now stand. It’s not why we’re here so why are we here, Theo Miller? Why would you come knocking, and what trouble do you bring?”
“I have proof.”
“What kind of proof?”
“All of it. Everything. Company Police shooting runaways, gunning down screamers and ragers, clearing whole enclaves out to send in the patties to remove the scrap metal, the bricks, the pipes—everything. I’ve got the maps of the mass graves behind the prisons, the records of how many people died cos the hospital wouldn’t let them in, the starvation figures for Wales, the murder rates for Newcastle, the…”
Jacob Pritchard rolled his lower lip in, puckered his cheeks, stared up at the ceiling, then shrugged. Where’s his tea? Pritchard called for tea and tea hasn’t come. In his more tempestuous days this would have been cause for some remark.
“If you can’t work on the patty line, you’re a burden on the state,” Theo mused. “You have to be fed, be given clothes, you have to be… but there are jobs, dangerous jobs, sometimes it’s easier, cheaper… at New Roade they process radioactive waste. The oldest patties, the ones who aren’t any use, are sent into the rooms with the spent fuel rods. They’re given these overalls, but real kit costs, so they just let them work until… then they break the bodies down and put them in these heaps and wait a few years and…
At King’s Badby they process jet fuel. There’s these conditions you get, these tumours, but the Company contracts don’t say they have to provide medical help. It got left out of the deal. The government deliberately left it out of the deal, Philip Arnslade and Simon Fardell, they were at university together. They’re best friends. One for the Company, one for the government, but the Company pays for them both.
And when they run out of labour, they send Company Police into the enclaves, and they grab anyone who looks at them funny. Where’d you think the beggars went from the city? Where’d you think the drunks, the kids who throw eggs are? Why’d you think there aren’t more people in the ghost towns that the Company left behind? Where’d you think they all went?”
On the canal, Neila said, “Tea? We’re down to camomile, which I don’t even like, but it’s all that is…”
In the prison, in the past, the man who was Theo’s father reached down into the bowels of the machine and realised, too late, that something was still moving, felt the cog, felt the lock, the first brush of metal and then the squeeze it burst through his hand like a bullet through a melon and he screamed and screamed and knew that he could pull his arm free and didn’t dare because if he did he would have to look at the place where his hand had been and he…
In Dorchester the woman who was Theo Miller’s mother helped pull up Mrs. King’s trousers, sweeping thin faeces off the inside of her thigh with a Wet Wipe and popping the fouled tissue into the bin, and said, “Mushy banana for supper lovely mushy banana you like banana don’t you you like it?”
But Mrs. King didn’t answer. She never did talk, really, except for when she wasn’t allowed her cigarettes.
By the fire, Jacob Pritchard said, “So?”
Outside the churchyard, the unnamed grave of the real Theo Miller is cold and overgrown. The first winter snow has fallen, the grass is stiff and cracked with frost there and the body is just bone in the thin coffin.
Jacob Pritchard shifts in his seat, wiggling an old ache in his lower back, and says again, “So? So what? Everyone knows this shit. This shit has been happening for years. This ain’t nothing new. So you got some shit. Funny—it’s funny, I like that, very funny—dead people, enclaves cleared, slaves locked up on the patty line, yeah, that’s a thing but what about it? I’m comfortable. I’m peachy. Most people are. Few thousands die… well shit. Most people are scared of the ones who aren’t like them anyway.”
Silence on the canal.
Silence in the firelight.
And of course, there it is. There is the truth, the one that has been waiting for Theo, and the ghost of Dani Cumali, their whole lives.
Everyone knew.
So what?
Then Theo murmured, “You’re right. Of course. Everyone knows. I’ve known. I send people to die, and I knew it. I’ve always known. No one ever says it. We stop before the hard things. We never finish saying anything that might matter at all. And you’re right. That’s how it happens. That’s how it always happened.”
Looked up. Met Jacob’s eyes. Smiled.
“My friend left me a message—save the mother. I thought she meant her, I thought I had to save her, but she was already dead. Dani went to a place called Danesmoor. There’s a woman there called Helen, she’s Philip Arnslade’s mother. Help the mother, Dani said. And sure, Dani stole stuff from the Ministry, but she’d been pinching things for weeks before she got herself sent to Danesmoor. That changed everything. Something there scared the Company enough to kill Dani. Kill my friend.”