Over the first cider he gets her up to speed. About how it was tough for years, but they held it together. How Grids kept a firm grip on the Croft but was reasonable, mainly. How they held it all together with string and solar panels. How they kept Claire’s farms open and running enough so that most people had a few fresh vegetables and a little ganja, plus enough spices to trade with the Mullahs in Easton and the pharma labs in Brislington. All to the annoyance of the Land Army and the city council. He glosses over the details: the pain and the deaths and the suffering. That’s all taken as read.
“Claire still here?” she asks him.
“Nah, she’s back up at the uni now. Doing research up there.”
“Research?”
“More farm stuff. Hydroponics and aquaponics. So they can build more. It’s hard, though, getting the shit she needs. Everything she built down here—well, it was all from stuff she bought online. Stuff she had shipped from China, or that she printed herself. The LA wants her to just copy what she built here, but she’s gotta start from scratch. Like, really from scratch. She’s gotta work out how to make stuff that was never made here.”
“She’s working for the LA?”
“Nah. Well, yes. Kind of. They pay for some of her research, I think.”
“Right.”
“Ah, c’mon, Anika.” He shakes his head. “Don’t be like that. You know how she is. She’s just doing what she thinks is right. Just doing what she always did. She just wants to feed people.”
“I guess.” Anika looks down, into the sickly orange soup of her pint.
“What about Rush? You ever see him again?”
College shakes his head, can’t meet her eyes. “Nah. Last time I saw him, he was with you.”
“Right.”
“I gotta assume he’s—I dunno. He’s either on the other side of the world or they caught him.”
“Or he’s dead.”
“Well, yeah. I guess. Claire is convinced he got out of the country. Went to try and find that Internet boyfriend of his. Steve?”
“Scott.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. She reckons he went to the U.S. to see if he was okay. Says he was completely obsessed with him, in love.”
“But how? It was hardly like he could just get on a plane. I mean, all the airports were fucked, I thought?”
College shrugs. “Something about a ship. That academic friend of his that bought a container ship, you remember that?”
“Strickland.”
“Sounds about right.” He finally makes eye contact with her. “Is that why you came back? Wanting to find him?”
She blushes. Memories of her lost mentor, of abandonment and betrayal. “No. Of course not.”
Over the second cider she gets him up to speed. About Wales, and the civil war. About how she spent two years on a farming commune before the Land Army turned up and seized it, and forced them all to work the land. About how she escaped, went on the run, ended up with the insurgency. About the Bloc training camps. About being in Cardiff when it fell. She glosses over the details; the pain and the deaths and the suffering. Again, that’s all taken as read.
“It’s not going well, then?” he asks her.
“It could be better, yeah.”
“I’m sorry. We don’t get much news from outside the city, y’know? We don’t even know what’s happening in London.”
“It’s pretty bad. Wales, I mean.” She has to look away, can’t keep eye contact with him. The bar fills with ghosts again, ones that don’t belong here. Ghosts wrapped in bandages, clothed in camouflage. The ghosts of crying children, of their wounded and broken parents sobbing on the floor. “The LA controls most of the countryside now, right up through Cheshire. All the cities and towns are theirs now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I mean—” She stops herself, hearing the tremble in her voice. Breathes. Hard words for her to say. “I understand, I get it. I know why they’re doing it. They need to feed everyone, keep the cities alive. They need the land and they need the workers. I get that. It’s just—they’re so fucking brutal. The number of people they’ve moved. The refugee camps. The way they treat people. What they’ve done to people, to children, to families—”
“Yeah. I’ve heard. I’m sorry. I know what—”
“No.” Her head snaps back to face him, her voice raised. “No, you don’t know. You don’t fucking know.”
Glances from the living in the bar. The ghosts have gone again.
He reaches out, touches her hand. “I’m sorry. Really. I am.”
She sighs, takes a deep breath. “No. It’s okay. I’m sorry. I just… y’know. I’m fine.”
College takes his hand back, downs the last of his cider, winces at the acid burn. “Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here. Get some food. You can crash at mine tonight. Oh, and fuck, yeah. I nearly forgot.”
“What?”
“There’s something you should see.”
“Fucking hell.”
College laughs. “Yeah. Mad, innit.”
“Is it…?”
“Yep. It’s yours.”
The tank sits in a pile of rubble, a vacated space where architecture once stood. She glances up and down the street, trying to work out what it once was. She can’t get her bearings. The Croft doesn’t look that different, but enough buildings have fallen, enough shop fronts vanished, that she’s lost for a second.
“What used to be here?”
“Really? You can’t work it out?”
“Nah.”
“Tesco.”
“Oh.” She laughs. They both laugh. “Oh, shit. That’s kind of perfect.” Tesco supermarket. An eternal emblem of the struggle of Stokes Croft, going back nearly three decades now. The scene of protests, riots, battles. A corporate infringement into the anticapitalist hipster dream, but one that meant the real locals could afford to buy bread and cider.
“Right? I thought you’d like that. Part of the reason I put it here.”
“You put it here?”
College shakes his head. “Don’t ask. Long story.”
At first glance the tank looks like it’s covered in psychedelic camouflage, pink and red and blue scatter markings, as though it were trying to stage a sneak attack on a sweetshop. That makes it hard to make out the tank’s form, but as her eyes become accustomed to the patterns she realizes what it is: every part of its surface—its armor, its turret, its tracks, even its canon—is covered with graffiti. Paint and stickers, words and colors. Tags. Splatters. Wild-style lettering. Doodles and characters. Slogans. The names of the dead.
She steps up onto the rubble, runs a hand across the tank’s flank, just above its busted, spray-painted tracks. It feels rough, the texture of layer upon layer of forgotten art. She has a sudden flashback to a forgotten time. Amsterdam.
“Damn.”
Sprouting out of the top of the turret is a sprayed-out cobweb of cables, dozens of wires silhouetted black against the dusk sky. Like the tendrils of some mutated banyan tree they explode out of the tank, shooting up to the walls of the neighboring buildings and across the street, fastening themselves to broken brick surfaces and slithering onto rooftops.
“Does it work?” she asks College.
“God, no.” He fishes inside his olive combat trousers, pulls out a crumpled joint, stretches it out. He produces a lighter from his bomber jacket. “Well, it doesn’t move, if that’s what you mean. The control systems are all fried, they died with everything else. But the battery still works.”
“The battery?”
He lights the joint, takes a drag. “Yeah. It’s got a huge fucking industrial-level battery inside it. Took me fucking ages to figure out how, but I got it to work. I tried taking it out, but it was a pain in the arse, so I just left it in there. Now it’s wired up to most of the panels down this end of the Croft. Stores electricity, means we get some juice at night.”