Containers with stuff still in them. Tyrone snorts to himself, sucks his teeth. He went up to Avonmouth once, years back, with a crew from his old ends. All kids, hungry but dumb, believing the hype. Nearly killed himself scaling a twelve-foot chain-link fence for nothing. Nothing. Not a thing. Nothing in those containers but tramps and criminals sheltering from the winds that rolled in from the Bristol Channel. And they’d looked for hours, for a whole day, man—fuck, it’s big up there. They’d got lost more than once in there, in the endless maze of streets and alleyways formed by the spaces between the containers—padding around aimlessly, staring at cliff walls that towered into the sky and blocked the sun, smothering them in cold shadow, walls built from uniformly sized giant bricks—all twenty feet long, ten feet high—but every color of the spectrum, symbols and logos sprayed on their faces. Not like down here, where all the walls are painted with constantly shifting color, cartoon energies, and explosions of love and anger—no, Tyrone was used to that, knew that, recognized it. Down here it’s background noise: the desperate, frustrated, barely controlled outpourings of people, of humans, splattered onto walls in paint born from crushed plants and rocks. But it was different up there in the container streets, it was like everything meant something. Of course, Tyrone knows the shit on the walls down here is meant to mean something too—pause too long on the Croft or down in Bemmie and invariably one of the old heads will snag you, running a hand through their geriatric beards or scratching at the flabby skin under their threadbare Adidas while they point at the walls and tell you the stories of the artists, the stories of rebellion and passion, of protest and rivalry, of riots and turf war. Human meanings; unreliable, fragile, and malleable.
But not on the containers. Tyrone couldn’t tell what the symbols meant. There were words—hell, there were individual letters—he didn’t understand, didn’t even recognize, but he knew that they all meant something. Something solid, something firm. He knew they meant order, organization—something official, important. Something planned. Not mad outpourings, not passionate human splatter, but something with a sense of purpose, something with a system. Rational sequences of letters in hard, bold white fonts that always looked the same, reliable. Stars—always stars, some lone, some clustered—white stars on blue squares. Globes, maps, rectangles of white banded with colors and filled with shapes that he knew, from some fading school memory of stained, broken-spine books, were flags. As he walked past the walls he held his hand out, dragging it across the surface, enjoying the thrill of touching something alien, something that had allegedly traveled so far it seemed like a lie. Occasionally as he did so his fingernails would snag at the neat edge of a giant letter or precision-painted white star, and to his slight distress it would flake away; little sharp shards of metallic paint sticking to his clammy hands and spiraling to the ground, lost. It distressed him because he had assumed they were permanent, immovable—he’d assumed that unlike the berry-painted murals of Bristol, they didn’t wash away in the rain, let alone when a kid just touched them—but they’d been here for years, he realized; decades, even, in all sorts of weather, and had survived. Even so, he withdrew his hand just in case, not wanting to inflict more damage, out of respect for the machines that had painted them. He couldn’t be completely sure machines had put that paint there, of course, but in his heart he knew they had, because it spoke to him. And it’s only ever the art the machines make that speaks to Tyrone.
But anyway, yeah, it’s fucking big up there, man. Walking round there was long. They got lost more than once, and the last time they were so disoriented that they climbed up four stories of container wall to see where they were. It was pretty impressive up there; the city grid of the container maze stretching out in front of them all the way to the sea, and beyond that, touching the horizon, the huge, slowly looping tri-bladed propellers of the offshore wind farm disappearing into the mist. The rest of his crew got excited when they saw all that—for some it was the first time they’d seen the sea—and they wouldn’t stop joking about going to the beach, swimming, diving off cliffs; bragging about which girls from the ’hood they were going to take down there to show off their bikinis. Kids’ stuff. Not Tyrone, though, right then he knew they were wasting their time: as soon as he saw those windmills out at sea he knew all the stories of security and patrols up here were—well, they weren’t bullshit exactly, but if there were feds or army up here it wasn’t to protect these empty crates, it was to make sure nobody stopped those giant arms from spinning, or messed with the little stream of electricity trickling down into the city. Apart from that, this place was dead. He should have guessed that when they first broke in, and the only things watching them were forgotten, guano-spattered CCTV cameras, webs of broken-lens cataracts filling their dead eyes. Nobody protected anywhere unless there was something valuable inside, which was why you could just walk up to all those huge stores in Eastville, just walk straight in with nobody stopping you, the Tescos and the IKEA up there—some of them bigger than the whole Croft inside—you could just walk in there and see nothing but bare walls, empty shelves, everything stripped of anything that could be eaten or digested or burned or worn, anything that could keep you warm. Empty shop floors with just the useless metal and plastic left behind, the ground submerged under a couple of feet of water in the places where you could look up and see the sky because the roof tiles had been taken. Nobody protected that shit anymore.
Not up in Clifton, though—that’s why he’d sneaked in those three times, even though each time he’d got his ass kicked back out again pretty much straightaway. In fact, with each beating he took from a Clifton magistrate or some pissed-up LA grunt it made him more convinced there was good stuff in there. Had to be, it was Clifton, for fuck’s sake. But each covert incursion got him no closer to some new shoes, just a fresh shower of bruises, more chipped teeth, another mouthful of blood. Eventually he packed it in and looked elsewhere, and then of course he stumbled across these kicks—the Nikes—in the back bedroom of some terrace house he and Ozone had jacked in Lawrence Hill, his old ends. Right around the corner from home. Sod’s law, as College would say. They were two sizes too big for him, so they rubbed like fuck until he padded them out with some old bits of foam cut out of a car seat, but they were fucking Nikes, barely worn. They looked like they were less than a decade old when he first found them, swear down.
Not now, though, that had been two years ago this summer, and now they looked old and fucked. Proper fucked. Split to all shit. One of Mary’s believers had brought in some glue for her as a gift; transparent, hard-core stringy gloop in a little tube—a rare and valuable find indeed. She’d let him use some of it, and he’d managed to fix them up a bit—but that was a few months ago now, and he hadn’t seen that tube around for a while. Most likely Mary had given it to College—he’d come into the store every so often and root around in the piles of donated crap, seeing if there was anything he needed to help keep the important stuff running—the tank, the panels, the stuff that kept the Croft running. And of course Mary gave it to him, anything he needed, no questions asked. Presumably Grids told her she had to, and Grids rarely told her to do anything she didn’t want to, but she seemed more than happy to give College whatever he wanted. She seemed, to Tyrone at least, like she couldn’t get rid of all that shit quickly enough.