The Dying Fall

Chapter 5: Small Link in the Chain

Song for this chapter:

Chapter 5: Small Link in the Chain

Carrie leant against the arm of the sofa, resting her mug on her bent knee as she watched Molly enacting the ritual of counting off the items in her handbag. There were fifteen items: from her housekeys, purse, and hand-mirror, to a lunch-box of crackers, raw vegetables and homemade hummus, with various assorted bits and bobs between, each one placed carefully into its correct place or pocket as it was counted off her mental list. Carrie watched Molly’s lips silently mouth the fifteenth item as she slid her bus pass into the inside pocket of her navy-blue work jacket and zipped up the bag.

“Right,” Molly said as she scooped up her coat from the back of the rocking chair, “I’ll be back by six. You’re okay to get dinner ready?”

Carrie nodded.

“And don’t forget to clean the bathroom.”

“I won’t.”

Molly slung her bag over her shoulder, patted her coat pockets, as if to check nothing unexpected was hiding in them, and stared vacantly at the clock. For a second, Carrie felt her mother’s weariness as she steeled herself for the sacrifice of her Saturday to an extra shift at work. She’d already worked overtime every day this week and signed up for several more weekend shifts to make up some of the shortfall the fine had left in their budget. Carrie had applied for overtime too, but since overtime shifts were always in high demand at the Plant, she hadn’t been able to get on the rota until next Thursday and Friday. At least the shed had passed the inspection yesterday.

“Right,” Molly said again, giving Carrie a nod. “I’ll see you later.”

“See you later.”

Molly headed into the hall and Carrie heard the front door open and shut and then saw her mother’s straight-backed form stride past the window.

Carrie finished her tea and then went to the kitchen to put on her boots and jacket. She pulled the green cloth bag from the back of her waistband and emptied the contents on the kitchen table. Yesterday, things had picked up on the line when an old desktop computer had come her way. Carrie had managed to smuggle another length of copper wire, a couple of gold connectors and a memory card into her overalls before she’d decided that was all she was prepared to risk in one go. Along with the copper wire she’d garnered earlier in the week, she had included a couple of dud buds in her collection. In some ways, the buds were more valuable than any of the other items, and it wrenched her heart a little to give them up. Because she hadn’t been able to settle on which buds she could live without, she’d used an ‘unlucky dip’ approach. All she knew, from the purple and blue dot on the back of each bud, was that she was giving up one compilation of SYNTH and one compilation of CLASSIC.

Carrie leant on the table and tapped an uneasy rhythm on the wood as she stared at the collection for a moment. Exhaling slowly, she swept the items into the cloth bag and stuffed it into her jacket pocket. Then she grabbed her keys, strode to the front door and let herself out onto the street.

Pale grey clouds herded overhead as Carrie walked towards the town centre. The early shoppers were already up and starting to fill the square as she passed through it. Turning down an alley, she was soon amongst the stalls of the market and winding her way to the railway bridge.

Nano was leaning against the foot of the bridge, eating a breakfast bap and checking messages on an old phone when Carrie slipped past the oatmeal van. He slid the phone, which Carrie was prepared to bet was unregistered, into his back pocket when he saw her, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Carrie stopped a comfortable distance from him with her hands in her pockets, one fist squeezing the green bag tightly.

“So, what did your friend say?” she asked.

“Not a friend,” Nano replied casually, “And good morning to you too.”

He pushed away from the bridge and closed the gap between them by a foot. Carrie resisted the urge to step back.

“You’ve got a deal,” Nano said. He fished a folded piece of paper from his jacket and held it out to her.

Carrie stepped forward until she could snatch it from him at arm’s length, opened it and read it with a frown. It was a list of desirable scraps, with weights, market values and the cut she’d get as a supplier. Some of the items, she noticed, were asterisked.

“Seven percent?” she said, giving Nano an unimpressed look. “Make it fifteen and then we’ve got a deal.”

“I can’t go any higher than eight.”

“Rubbish,” Carrie replied without hesitation. “I’m the one taking the biggest risk and I’m not taking it for a measly eight percent.”

“You’re the small link in the chain, Carrie,” Nano said dismissively. “There are bigger links who have to take the bigger risk and cost of fencing the goods.”

“I’m the supplier,” Carrie responded. “There is no chain without me.”

“There are plenty of other people working at the Plant with the same flexible scruples as you and the same need for a bit of extra cash.”

“But how many of them work on the electronics line?”

Nano gave her a wry look. “Nine percent.”

“Let’s round it up one more percent to make the maths a little easier,” Carrie suggested.

Nano didn’t reply, but took a bite from his bap and held out his hand for the paper. Carrie returned it, wondering for a moment if he was going to withdraw the deal completely. But instead he took out a pen and scribbled on the bottom of the list whilst he chewed and swallowed.

“Deal,” he said as he handed the list back. “The asterisked items are the ones to prioritise. You make a drop to me every Wednesday and Saturday, and I’ll bring payment once a week. So, if you’ve brought something today and you bring something on Wednesday, you’ll get payment for both drops next Saturday.”

“Okay.”

“We can’t meet here though,” Nano continued. “I don’t want this getting mixed up with my other business. Do you know the woodlands on Reddick Hill?”

Carrie nodded.

“Where the public path ends, there’s a track, over the fence, running past an old tree trunk that looks like a face—”

“The screaming tree?”

“Yeah. A little way beyond that is a clearing—”

“I know,” Carrie cut him off again. “Loads of kids at school used to hang out there at the end of the day—until that year someone snitched and no one could go near it for six months because there were two Patrol officers stationed at the top of the path from three-thirty every day.”

Nano’s face relaxed a little as he snorted at the memory. “And Miss Whickery gave the longest assembly on the consequences of trespassing on Protected Land,” he added.

Carrie shrugged, trying to shake off the sudden recollection of half-turning in her seat to glance back several rows to where she could just make out Savannah staring dutifully ahead of her, but with a glassy dreaminess that betrayed her mind was far from the heavy stillness of the hall and Mrs Whickery’s droning voice.

“What time do you want me to meet you?” she asked.

“What time do you finish work?”

“I could get to Reddick sometime after four—four fifteen-ish?”

“Works for me. But it would have to be earlier at the weekend. Say one o’clock? Got anything with you now?” Nano popped the last of his bap in his mouth, wiped his hands on his jeans and beckoned Carrie to come closer.

Carrie took a couple of steps forward and pulled out her cloth bag. She took out the cuts of wire, connectors and memory card, and placed them in Nano’s hand. He turned them over carefully, slipped them into his jeans pocket and took a little homemade pocketbook from the inside of his jacket.

“Two lengths of copper, two gold connectors and one memory card,” he recited as he noted each item in the book. He held it up to show Carrie. “Agreed?”

Carrie nodded and glanced down at the cloth bag, feeling the weightlessness of the two buds in the bottom. Nano seemed to sense her hesitation and cocked an eyebrow at her.

“I want to redeem these,” Carrie said, pushing down a flutter of irritation as she took out the buds and held them out.

“For cash?” Nano asked.

“Yes,” Carrie responded with more bluntness than she had intended.

Nano’s other eyebrow twitched but he took the buds without making a comment. “I’ll give you thirty for each.”

Carrie sucked the inside of her bottom lip for a second and then shrugged a shoulder. “Fine.”

She had paid twice that for them, but she’d known at the time she wasn’t exactly making a financially savvy investment. Nano needed a profit and she needed the money.

She shifted impatiently as Nano counted out the cash and then handed it to her, along with a receipt and a look that said he was curious about why she suddenly needed the money so badly but knew better now than to ask those sorts of questions. Carrie put the cash in her cloth bag and shoved it into her pocket.

“See you Wednesday,” she said, turning and walking back towards the oatmeal van.

“Seeya,” she heard Nano mutter behind her.

The market was busier now, and when she stepped out into the town square there was a group of about twenty people standing outside the public announcement screen in the window of the theatre. Carrie shuffled along the pavement at the back of the crowd until she could see the rolling banner on the screen.

Winter Light Savings begins tomorrow: 10 p.m.—5.30 a.m.

“I thought WiLS wasn’t for another fortnight,” someone grumbled.

Carrie squeezed back out of the crowd and crossed the square under the cobnut tree. Winter Light Savings signalled the downward spiral of the year into the long winter months. Carrie didn’t mind getting up and going to work in the dark every morning—she had to get the bus at 6.30 a.m. so she got up in the dark for half the year anyway—but WilS added a certain urgency to the day: a need to rush through business before the light curfew began. Carrie knew that when her mother returned from work this evening, she’d insist on checking their candle stock and drawing up a candle log; so the first thing she did when she got home was locate the candle box in the cupboard under the stairs and take out five candles to stuff under her mattress.

Having done that, Carrie stuck her MIX bud in her ear and the controller in her pocket, and started on scrubbing the bathroom suite to the rhythms that filled her head. She took her time over the job, eking out the tracks one by one and letting the melodies shift and shape her thoughts until, a number of times, she found herself paused with the sponge in her hand, staring at the limescale around the bathplug, or gazing vacantly at her smeared reflection in the cabinet mirror.

When she had finished, Carrie stood in the middle of the tiled floor, the controller in one hand as she let run one track end… and then another… and then a third…

Half of the fourth track had passed before her reason took control and cut the music dead in her ear. As the emptiness of the house collected thickly about her, Carrie’s memory clung to the songs it had hosted, summoning and chasing their ghosts along the strain-haunted corridors of her mind. As she plucked the bud from her ear and ran a bowl of water in the sink to wash her hair, her inner ear inevitably found the half-formed refrain that had been pestering her earlier in the week, throbbing with life still in the womb of her mind.

The refrain continued to throb and throw new tendrils after Carrie had drifted downstairs, her hair dripping onto her shoulders and soaking her sweater. It throbbed and swelled as she stood mechanically peeling potatoes at the cooker, until it had bloomed into layers of crescendo-ing harmony. A number of times, Carrie tried to abandon it and focus on what she was doing: preparing dinner, clearing up, trying to commit Nano’s list of electrical scraps to memory as she sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. But her will was weakened by her solitude, and so she indulged the new creation until she was startled out of her gratification by the sound of her own voice echoing around the kitchen. She jolted upright, nearly spilling her tea as her knee knocked against the table leg.

How long had she been humming aloud?

Automatically, Carrie glanced around the darkening kitchen to check she was alone. She had been so lost in her own world, she probably wouldn’t have noticed if her mother had come home early. The shadows were stretching long on the floor as the early evening light fell through the dirty windows, where a moth was fluttering against a pane. Her hair had dried in wavy straggles leaving her shoulders feeling cold and damp.

How long had she been sitting here, adrift from the real world?

Carrie shifted her stiff limbs and got to her feet, feeling unsteady and unsettled. This could not become a habit. She usually kept her daydreaming for when she was lying alone in bed. She had to be careful: once she allowed that part of her life to spill over into her daytime activities, it wouldn’t be long before she was caught humming on the bus, at the disassembly line, or in the street. And then she’d be just one step away from becoming like her father or her sister.

Stuffing the scrap list into her pocket, Carrie went upstairs to brush her hair and then came back down again to start cooking dinner. Molly came in half an hour later, and, as Carrie expected, went straight to the cupboard under the stairs. Bringing back the candle box, she began sorting the candles, mumbling all the time about the earliness of WiLS and the depletion of their supplies. Carrie said nothing as she tended to dinner, offering only the occasional “Mmm…” to indicate she was listening.

“Of course,” Molly said finally, as she pushed the candle box to one side and Carrie plated up their meal, “Things would be a bit more comfortable if we had two decent incomes between us.”

“I’ve got overtime booked for next week,” Carrie replied coolly.

“You’d get more money without having to do overtime if you had a job in an Eco Office.”

“I’d have to move to Carsle and you’d lose this tenancy.”

“It’s only a fifty-minute bus journey to Carsle.” Molly paused. “I’d have thought you’d want the extra cash to spend on… whatever you spend your savings on.”

Carrie shook her head, keeping her eyes on her plate as she focused on finishing her food as quickly as possible. “Not really.” She really didn’t want to have this conversation again. Not now. Not ever. “I left enough hot water for a bath,” she added.

“Thank you.”

Molly sighed but Carrie still dared not make eye contact and they finished their meal in silence.

Later in the evening, when she could hear gentle splashing coming from the bathroom, Carrie changed for bed, found a box of matches in the kitchen and paused on the landing outside her room.

“Night!” she called tentatively.

“Hmm?” came Molly’s voice back at her through the bathroom door.

“I’m going to bed,”  Carrie called again. “Goodnight!”

She ducked into her room and shut the door before her mother’s reply could reach her. Stuffing her winter coat up against the base of the door, Carrie retrieved a candle from under her mattress, balanced it in a damaged eggcup she’d rescued from the recycling bin a few years ago, and lit the wick. Then she turned off the light, crept into bed and took out Savannah’s journal. She stared at it in the flickering candlelight for a moment, resisting the urge to glance at the bed to her left. It would be empty—as it had been for eighteen months.

The day they had gone to the mortuary to identify her sister’s body, her mother had come home, stripped the sheets from Savannah’s bed and taken them to the laundrette with the rest of the washing. When she’d returned, she’d remade the bed with the clean linen, as if that night the long-limbed and soft-skinned body of her daughter would be crawling between those sheets and curling them around her to fall into the arms of a youthfully deep slumber. The bed and everything around it and in Savannah’s side table had remained untouched since that day, just as Savannah had left it. Only the DEW inspection team had ever laid a finger on Savannah’s belongings but they prided themselves on always leaving a place just as they’d found it.

Sometimes, Carrie wanted to scoop it all up and throw it into the street. And sometimes she dare not go near it in case she profaned the last remnant of her sister’s existence.

The truth was that this sacred half of the room wasn’t a shrine to Savannah’s life, but to her death. The empty bed just reminded Carrie that her sister’s body was gone: burnt to dust and scattered on the Ash Grounds. It was never coming home. She was never coming home. Savannah’s essence couldn’t be captured or remembered through material objects; she’d never been someone entirely present in the physical world, her mind often lost elsewhere, out of reach. And material things never lasted anyway; Carrie’s job at the Plant had hammered that home years ago. Savannah needed something more to be remembered: something that couldn’t be broken; something that was tangible and personal, down to the marrow; something that could be felt in the soul.

Carrie flipped open the journal and ran her hand over the curves of her sister’s writing, over the shape of her thoughts, her feelings, her person. These writings were her sister—this was where she could be found again, known and remembered. There was only one possible way to remember Savannah, and that was through her own words, her own lyrics—her own song.

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Next weekend: Chapter 6—Familiar Face

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Author’s Notes:

I had to look up how to spell ‘wavy’… it just looks so weird I was convinced it was wrong.

Chapter 6: Familiar Face, coming next weekend.

PJ