Now the networks are gone, the technology silent, apart from the few hours every night when they hijack the infrastructure for themselves, taking over this weathered, twisted monument to beam out their own traffic.
He drops his backpack to the floor and reaches inside to pull out the small windup radio. He gives it a few cranks and turns it on, placing it next to his bag. The static of dead airwaves leaks out into the cold night sky.
He pretty much already knows what’s up. The cable carrying power from one of the solar batteries to the FM transmitter slung underneath the nest—a ramshackle old Tupperware box that College filled with scavenged cables and components—is always coming loose in the wind. He’s always promising to find some way of making it more weatherproof, but he’s always too tied up keeping the panels and the hydroponics down at the Croft running. For now it’s held together with some unlikely conception of string and decade-old sticky tape, and Ty fiddles with it incessantly until the radio behind him starts to splutter, the static breaking up to give way to the occasional snare and high hat.
Eventually what he’s doing holds, and cautiously he removes his hands and steps back, the music constant now, the jungle breaks rolling out of the radio’s tiny speakers. He bends down to grab it but pauses, stands back upright again. He lets the radio do its thing, lets it capture the invisible data from the aerial nest, lets it make it real. Making the inaudible audible, revealing the true contents of the air. This is what it’s all about.
Slowly, fighting vertigo, he edges toward the roof’s edge. Below him Bristol is laid out like a crumpled map in the night, dark architecture merging with more forgotten, useless infrastructure and long-abandoned roadways. The only signs of life are the interior lights from those neighborhoods that have been lucky enough to jury-rig electricity, and the flickering of outside fires from those that haven’t. There’s the occasional shout from the streets right below him, from the spaces between the towers, and he can hear his own radio waves being translated back to him. All at once he feels some pride rise in him, some all-too-rare wave of accomplishment.
His focus is broken by an unearthly sound behind him, and vertigo hits him as he stumbles back from the ledge, turning. Half hidden under the angle of one of the solar panels is a seagull, nestled with its young against the wind, watching him suspiciously with a piercing black-and-yellow eye. It squawks again, and Ty feels his pride and significance fade, replaced yet again by the constant sense of fragility. He realizes now that he’s the only person to come up here regularly, otherwise this gull and its family would be dead; plucked and jerk-seasoned and roasted over a fire. Gently he bends down, grabs the radio and his bag, and finds another route around the panels to the stairs back down into the tower, so as not to disturb the bird again. As he goes it never takes its eye off him, tracking his every move like the now-dead CCTV cameras that always watched him and the other kids from the towers whenever they went out to play, and all he can think of is his dead mother.
Back in Grids’s apartment he pushes into the kitchen, and is surprised to see the man himself standing there, eating curry from a bowl.
“You got it working, then?”
“Yeah. Loose connection.” Tyrone drops the keys back into the drawer. He instantly seizes up, finds himself checking his emotions and movements, some ingrained mixture of embarrassment and bravado.
Grids nods toward the rumble of the radio from another room. “Sounding good.”
“Cheers.”
He wipes rice from his lips and fixes Tyrone with slightly blunted eyes. “You ever find that beat I was looking for?”
“Melody’s beat?”
“Yeah.”
“Nah.”
“Yeah, well. Don’t think it ever made it to vinyl, innit. Just thought you might have heard it on a tape.” He laughs, shakes his head. “A tape. I didn’t know what a fucking tape was when me and Mel were your age. Dead technology, fam. Now we’re all excited about finding tapes.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so. Plus I never heard it, so I wouldn’t know.”
“Oh, you’d know it if you heard it.”
“What about her?” Tyrone nods toward the door.
“Mary? Nah. Says Mel was…” Grids pauses, looks at the floor. “Says she was gone before the time she can remember. Before she can see, y’know.”
“That’s how it works?”
“Apparently. Like there’s only a small time she can see. Like a few days, I think.” He shrugs. “I don’t fucking know.”
Tyrone wants to ask him how much he really believes in it all. Mary. Why he keeps her so close, now he knows she won’t find Melody. He thought that was the only point.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“What?”
“About Mary. You believe all that?” As soon as the words leave his mouth he regrets them, expects Grids to get upset, to think it’s a diss. That he’s questioning his authority.
Instead the old gangster just laughs, shakes his head. “I don’t know what to believe anymore, Ty, to be honest. Do I think she’s psychic? Probably not. But do I think she sees shit we don’t? Maybe. I do know she makes people happy. Gets through to ’em. Puts ’em at rest. Gives ’em closure. You’ve seen it. What she does, how it affects people. That’s gotta be important, right?”
“I guess,” Tyrone says.
“Besides. I gotta look after her. Whatever she is. I gotta keep her for us, for the Croft. Because if I don’t—” He pauses, and for a second Tyrone gets a sense that he knows more, knows something special about Mary that he’s keeping from him. From everyone. “I can’t let her get out of the Croft, man. Can’t let her get into the wrong hands. That’s why what you do, looking after her—that’s why that’s important. You get me?”
“Of course, man. Of course.”
“You want some food?” Grids sounds like he wants to change the subject.
“Ah no, I’m good.” His stomach rumbles. But something tells him no, that it’s not right. He’s not sure what.
“Really? You must be hungry. It’s good. Goat. Made it myself, man.”
“Nah, I’m good. Gotta get back to the radio, innit.”
“A’ight, if you’re sure.”
“Yeah. Cheers.” He heads for the door.
“Well played today, man, y’know.”
Ty turns around, startled. “Huh?”
“That shit with Mary, the guys from the Land Army. You handled it well.” He shovels another forkful of rice and meat into his mouth.
“Cheers,” says Tyrone, and walks out, head high, riding on significance.
9. AFTER
“I can’t believe you’re actually here.”
“I can’t believe I’m actually here.”
The bar is full of ghosts.
So many that their bodies seem to obscure the living, who sit hunched over their beer and cider, their clothes ragged and fading, patched at knees and elbows. They look tired and broken, older than their own ghosts somehow, who stand and laugh beside them, their clothes still ragged and faded, but in intentional, affected irony. Less crumpled, cleaner.
The ghosts have more life than the living, Anika thinks.
She rubs her eyes and sips warm, too-sour cider. The ghosts disappear.
“I can’t believe this place is still here.”
College smiles. “You’ll be surprised how little has changed.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Well, apart from everything.” They both laugh. “You know what I mean. This place—the Croft, I mean. It’s always going to be the same, man. You get me?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” She looks at him. “We got old, though.”
“Yeah. Well. It’s been a while.”
“Yeah. Yeah it has.”