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.”