The Dying Fall

Chapter 14: Graffiti

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Song for this chapter:

Chapter 14: Graffiti

Meg wanted Carrie to stay for breakfast but Carrie turned her down, using the excuse that her mother was expecting her home. There was no way she could tell Meg that she was actually heading straight to Nano’s or that she couldn’t eat because last night’s events had left her feeling sick and uneasy. Her thoughts were still jumbled and she didn’t have the words to explain to someone else what she was feeling. The walk to Nano’s in the crisp morning air cleared Carrie’s head a little and she arrived on his doorstep feeling like she had gained some control of her emotions. She was half an hour early, but didn’t fancy loitering on the street outside or walking aimlessly around the block, so she knocked on the door anyway. It was only after she had knocked that she wondered if Dryce was home. What if he answered the door?

To Carrie’s surprise, Nano opened the door almost instantly, pulling on a jumper, his hair damp from a shower.

“You’re early,” he said.

“I got woken up at seven by three small children shrieking the house down,” Carrie replied, following him into the hall.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs beyond the open basement door and then Rox appeared in the hallway.

“Hey, Carrie!” she said casually as she balanced one foot against the wall to tie her shoelace. “Hope you’re not wasting your Sunday on this loser.” She crinkled her nose at Nano as he gave her the finger. “What are you up to anyway?”

“That’s none of your business, Rox,” Nano replied.

Rox gave one of her throaty laughs and slapped Nano playfully on the arm as she passed him. “I’ll get out of your hair then. Thanks for letting me crash here.”

“Any time.”

Rox gave Carrie a wink before she closed the front door behind her.

“Patrols,” Nano said, gesturing at the closed door. “She couldn’t get past them last night.”

Carrie followed Nano into the basement, set her overnight bag on the arm of the sofa and took out Savannah’s journal.

“Do you want a drink?” Nano asked.

Carrie declined and then watched Nano walk to the tables where the production equipment was set up. She took the opportunity, whilst his back was turned, to slip the photograph of her father out of the journal and into her back pocket, before then joining Nano at the far end of the basement. The table was a little tidier and the laptop was hooked up to a couple of small speakers.

“Where did you get those?” Carrie asked, indicating the latter.

“From the refurb shop. Morris picked them up for me.”

“Doesn’t he have to account for those?”

“Yeah—that’s why they’re just borrowed.”

“How long can you borrow them for?”

“Hopefully for as long as it takes us to make this track,” Nano replied, booting up the laptop.

Carrie placed Savannah’s journal on the table and flipped it open to the back pages. “Where would you get speakers you could keep?”

“Do you get many on the line at work?” Nano asked, giving her a side glance.

“Sure,” Carrie replied. “But I think someone is going to notice if I try hiding a pair inside my overalls. I thought you had other contacts?”

“I do, but things like speakers are expensive and someone’s going to ask what I want them for.”

“You don’t want anyone to know you’re producing music?”

Nano gave her a dry look. “You do realise that what we’re doing is highly illegal. I’m talking neurosensory-corrosion-and-fifteen-years-of-your-life-in-prison illegal?”

“I know,” Carrie replied. “It’s pretty much the same sentence you’d get for dealing—but you don’t seem to mind everyone knowing about that.”

“ ‘Everyone’ being addicts who can’t accuse me without implicating themselves,” Nano said confidently. He pulled up a chair in front of the laptop and kept his eyes fixed on the screen as he began running the production programme. “I don’t want Dryce to know about this,” he confessed with a grimace.

Carrie folded her arms as she leant against the table and looked down at him. “Doesn’t Dryce know anyway that you’ve got all this stuff down here?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” There was a pause and then Nano swivelled slowly on his chair to face Carrie. “Everything is business to Dryce,” he said reluctantly, as if making this admission was an embarrassment to him. “Everything is an opportunity to make money, and this…” He gestured at the laptop and journal. “This isn’t about money; it isn’t business.” He shrugged. “Although…” He took a piece of paper from his back pocket and handed it to Carrie. “This is—Dryce has a new list of scraps he wants.”

Carrie read through the list, a frown creasing her brow. Most of it was the usual stuff, but with more specific requirements: certain lengths of wire, certain types of memory cards and processors. But there were also new items on the list that could hardly be labelled scraps.

“Micro-cameras? EPROM chips? External hard drives and data bracelets?” Carrie read aloud.

The list made her nervous. Stealing was stealing, whether it was scraps or entire devices, but Carrie had a feeling the law would differentiate between a few coils of copper and whole, potentially workable micro-cameras and external hard drives. Considering what she had witnessed outside the undersound last night, Carrie had to wonder who she was indirectly supplying with the goods she took from the line. For now, however, the prices scratched next to these new items gave her a good enough reason to ignore her reservations. She tucked the list into the front of the journal.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

“Are you sure?” Nano asked, as Carrie pulled up a chair next to him.

“Yes.”

Nano shrugged. “As long as you understand that Dryce doesn’t drop anyone from his payroll as long as they are useful to him—whether they want to be or not.”

“You mean… if I wanted to get out of the arrangement…?”

“I’d recommend looking for another role at a less useful business,” Nano said.

“Thanks for the timely warning.”

Nano’s lip curled in a smirk and he turned back to the laptop. “Let’s get started on this track.”

Carrie rested her elbows on the table as Nano again talked her through how the programme worked, how to build the song in layers and how to mix those layers in different ways to produce the effect they wanted. They decided to try inputting the melody first, using a classic piano as their initial sound. Nano shuffled up to let Carrie use the keyboard and it didn’t take long for her to familiarise herself with the keystrokes that would get her the notes and values she wanted. As she worked, Carrie felt a rising thrill at the sound coming out of the speakers and the musical notations appearing in a box on the right of the screen. Nano explained that the programme would save each version of the composition they created, enabling them to later cut and edit parts as they wished.

Once the founding melody was inputted, they played around with the different instruments and sounds that were stored on the programme. Nano then showed Carrie how they could record their own sounds to add to the database, by filling a bottle with fizzy water and shaking it up over the mic as an example. This prompted a few hours of messing about with objects in Nano’s flat to create different sounds and experiment with their effect in the programme.

Eventually, Nano mentioned lunch and went to the fridge to check its contents. Carrie was surprised that she still didn’t feel hungry, but now for an entirely different reason that wasn’t unpleasant. She’d been so absorbed in testing out the production equipment it was as if she had disconnect from the weariness of her body.

“Unless you fancy margarine spread on a raw tomato,” Nano called from the kitchen, “We’re going to have to go out to get something to eat.”

Carrie grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair and strolled to the staircase where Nano was pulling on his jacket and checking his pockets. He chucked a bag of buds and his pocketbook on the sofa and took his keys from one of the hooks on the wall. Carrie thought about his earlier comment as she watched him: this wasn’t business. He was right: Dryce ran his empire for the money and power it gave him; she and Nano went to undersounds and spent hours in a basement dreaming up a single track because they just couldn’t help it. One was business; one was obsession. And that was why Dryce was the successful businessman exploiting addicts, and Carrie and Nano were the addicts willing to be exploited. In a perverse way, they needed each other.

“Chips?” Nano suggested, as they headed to the front door.

“Sure.”

Once they’d picked up their chips, Carrie and Nano headed into the town square, eating and talking and not really paying any attention to the streets around them. For the first time in a long time, Carrie found it easy to relax. Neither she nor Nano were carrying anything illegal and they weren’t breaking the curfew. A hundred Patrol officers could stop them and it wouldn’t matter.

But as they approached the narrow side road between the theatre and the health centre, Carrie recognised a figure emerging from it, moving with a purposeful stride, their eyes typically alert to their surroundings as they negotiated the other pedestrians. Carrie immediately grasped Nano by his jacket, turned him about and dragged him across the square in the opposite direction. She didn’t stop to look behind her until they had tucked themselves into another side road. Leaning against the side of a shop, Carrie peered over Nano’s shoulder to check whether they’d been seen.

“Who is it we’re avoiding?” Nano asked.

“My mother,” Carrie replied, watching her mother cross the square towards the bus stop.

Nano swivelled around as far as he could with Carrie still firmly holding the front of his jacket to glance into the square. “Should I go and introduce myself?” he asked, clearly amused.

“Hilarious,” Carrie returned, her gaze transfixed on her mother until she had turned out of the square.

“I’m not sure how I feel about being someone’s dirty little secret,” Nano said mildly.

“Really?” Carrie raised her eyebrows and let go of his jacket. “Aren’t you already the dirty little secret of hundreds of people?”

Nano grinned. “Are you worried your mum will see us and think ‘there’s my daughter with her dealer’?”

“Knowing my mother, that’s exactly what she’d think. She’s always suspicious of me.”

“She’s got good instincts then,” Nano said, plucking a chip from the bag Carrie was holding and popping it in his mouth.

Carrie manoeuvred her chips out of his reach and wrinkled her nose. She wasn’t going to argue. Her mother’s instincts were her biggest problem. Carrie often wondered if her mother was naturally suspicious or if it was the result of experience. If her father hadn’t been identified as an addict, would her mother still assume the worst of her? An unexpected flash of anger towards her father burst inside Carrie and brought the image of the man in the woollen hat to the forefront of her mind.

“Come on,” she said to Nano, “Let’s go.”

They walked on down the side road and Carrie only looked back once as they reached the end, unsure if she was expecting to see either her mother or father behind them and wondering whether she was becoming paranoid when she thought she saw a figure dart surreptitiously into a doorway. She tried to focus on the present moment, feeling the crisp air on her face and watching the shifting light on the streets as tufts of clouds glided intermittently across the pale autumn sun.

After following the twisting backstreets for some distance, Carrie and Nano came to a Dedicated Recreation Ground—or DReG—and let themselves in through the gate. The place was virtually empty: five teenagers loitered noisily on one of the fitness stations and a man was walking his dog along one of the paths.

“Did you ever hang out here as a kid?” Nano asked.

Carrie threw her empty chip bag into the paper bin as they passed it. “My mother used to bring Savannah and I here during the summer holidays. When we got a bit older, we used to come down on our own to meet up with friends. I haven’t been here for years though.”

“This is where I listened to my first bud,” Nano said as they ignored the paths and crossed directly over the green to the far side of the DReG.

“You deal here, don’t you?” Carrie said.

“Occasionally,” Nano replied. “But it’s actually someone else’s territory.”

“Another of Dryce’s dealers?”

“Of course.”

The furthest boundary of the DReG was defined by a high brick wall, twisted along the top with barbed wire. Tasteful planting in front of it was supposed to divert attention away from the ugly security measure and in one spot a bench had been placed so visitors could sit with their backs to the wall and ignore it completely. When Nano reached this bench, he stepped onto it, first on the seat and then onto the back, which brought him level enough with the top of the wall to lean his elbows on it. He beckoned Carrie to come up next to him and she was soon balanced on top of the bench too, looking out past the wire at the view beyond.

Immediately below them, on the other side of the wall, was a narrow stream, trickling through an overgrown ditch. On the opposite bank was an electric fence and more barbed wire, and beyond that the lumpy contours of a heathland, coloured with the prickly green of gorse and the rust-red of bracken. Looking at this landscape, Carrie felt both love and hate for it. She loved it for the expanse of colour and texture that seamlessly touched the blue horizon. But she hated it because, however inviting and warm a picture it presented, it was pointlessly beyond her reach and made her feel all the more like she was trapped. That was the trouble with living in a Border Town: she was surrounded by Protected Sites she could see but not touch. The heathland, Reddick Woods, Brock Meadows and the hill country beyond were all out of bounds to human feet, except those of the Rangers. And although Carrie had repeatedly been taught why it had to be this way, she still felt as if something essential had been stolen from her. At least those who lived in the Central Towns benefitted from the adage ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

“So,” Nano said, shifting to face Carrie better. “What’s wrong?”

Carrie frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“Something’s wrong,” Nano said matter-of-factly. “You don’t give away much, Carrie—usually just derision and suspicion—but last night you were spooked by something at the undersound and you’re still edgy now. So, what’s wrong?”

Several plausible lies slipped through Carrie’s mind, but, contrary to her instinct, she dismissed them and reached for the photograph in her back pocket. She handed it to Nano.

“I think I saw my father last night.”

Nano looked at the picture and then up at Carrie. “On the street outside the undersound?”

“The man talking to Dryce,” Carrie confirmed. “I thought I saw him on a News bulletin a few weeks ago too—just in the background. It was about the raid on an insurgent base.”

“Didn’t your dad leave when you were little?” Nano asked.

Carrie wasn’t surprised Nano knew this. She had always suspected she and Savannah were known as the sisters whose father was a fugitive. It was the sort of thing you just knew about classmates—like the fact Meg was raised by her sister after her mother’s death; or that Krev Angelo’s dad had left his mother to be with his long-term mistress; or that Happy and Verity Chicago’s mum had been awarded a medal for bringing down a ring of illegal-fuel smugglers.

“He was wanted for breaking the Degen-Rec Drug Laws,” Carrie explained. “I haven’t seen him since I was six years old.”

“And you think he was there last night?” Nano said. “Are you sure? Would you even recognise him now?”

“I don’t know,” Carrie admitted. “The face I saw on the news was just like that—” she pointed at the photograph. “A little older and greyer, but essentially identical. And the man talking to Dryce on the street last night looked so similar.” She took the photograph and turned it over to show Nano the scrawl on the back. “That date is a few weeks before Savannah died—she had this photo in her journal. I think my dad gave it to her.”

Nano shifted uncomfortably. “Three weeks before she died?” he repeated, and then swore softly.

Carrie gave him a curious look. “What is it?”

Nano hesitated and looked a little sheepish. “It’s just something Savannah said to me around that time—a few weeks before they shot her—” he paused for a second, as if interrupted by the memory.

“What did she say?” Carrie prompted.

“She threatened me,” Nano said, the corner of his mouth twitching with a fondness that made Carrie’s heart cry out for her sister. “She said that if she wasn’t able to look out for you anymore, I’d better do it or she’d come back to make my life hell. I had no idea what she was talking about—she was always nagging me about something: buds being too expensive or not having enough tracks on them. She was always threatening me about you too.”

“Me?” Carrie asked in surprise.

“Yeah,” Nano scoffed. “I wasn’t to rip you off when you came to buy buds.”

“I didn’t buy buds from you until after Savannah died.”

“I guess she knew you’d come for them eventually.”

Carrie hmm-ed cynically. “Didn’t do much good, did it? You’re always ripping me off.”

Nano half-smiled and didn’t deny it.

“Why did Savannah want you to look out for me?” Carrie asked.

“No idea,” Nano replied. “But I don’t think introducing you to undersounds and track production was what she had in mind.”

“She’d hardly be surprised.”

“It just struck me now,” Nano continued, “That she said she’d ‘come back’ to make my life hell.  Do you think she was planning on going away?”

Carrie shrugged. “Maybe. If my dad did get in touch with her then perhaps they made plans.” She swallowed as a lump rose in her throat. Why would Savannah make plans without her? “Who were those men Dryce was with last night?” she asked to divert the topic slightly.

“I don’t know,” Nano answered, honestly enough. He traced his finger over the strange E-shaped symbol on the back of the photograph. “I’m guessing you don’t know what this is?”

Carrie shook her head. “Do you?”

“I’ll show you,” Nano said, pushing away from the wall and jumping off the bench.

Carrie followed him to the ground and then further along the wall until they came to a planting of mature Rhododendrons that stretched for about twenty yards across the front of the wall. Nano ducked through a gap in the thick, structural branches and Carrie scrambled after him, climbing and bobbing between sprawling limbs until they reached a space close to the wall. There they found an old, dirt and water stained version of the graffiti from the undersound.

“Here,” Nano said, taking the photo from Carrie and holding it up as he traced the symbol on the back of it in the air with his finger. As he did, Carrie realised he was also tracing a line along the edge of the graffiti, from the top of the head of the last stick figure, down its middle and along the righthand strokes of its arm and leg.

Carrie stared at the graffiti for a moment, then took back the photo from Nano and stepped towards the wall until her fingertips touched the rough brickwork. She followed the lines of paint that Nano’s finger had traced in the air and then turned over the photo to look at the smiling faces on the other side.

“They’re called Dextinction,” Nano said behind her. “They’re an insurgent group Dryce has connections with—that’s all I know.”

“What do they want?” Carrie asked.

“To change things?” Nano guessed disinterestedly.

Carrie turned to face him. “Like what?”

“Dunno. Everything?” Nano shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. “If they could change the Drug Laws that would be fine by me.”

“You’d be out of a job,” Carrie smirked.

“We’d be in business,” Nano replied. “Think of all the highs we could produce and sell.”

“I thought it wasn’t business,” Carrie said slyly, pushing past him through the Rhododendron branches.

“It won’t be anything,” Nano responded with a snigger as he slipped out of the bushes behind her, “If we don’t crack on with it.”

Carrie gave him a half-smile as she put the photograph back in her pocket, grateful that Nano had smoothly avoided the question of whether or not her father was an insurgent. The Dextinction symbol on the back of the photograph made it more plausible that the man in the woollen hat, doing business with Dryce outside the undersound, was her father. But if it had been him, then that raised questions Carrie didn’t want to consider right now. The idea of her father as an insurgent was alien to her: he’d always been just a man whose obsession had caught up with him—a low-level criminal who flouted the system; not a rebel who wanted to change it. That persona didn’t fit with the father Carrie had known nor the memory she’d cherished over the years.

Crossing the DReG, Carrie instinctively glanced behind her, in case someone had noticed them sneaking out of the Rhododendron bushes. She couldn’t quite shake the feeling of being watched, perhaps because of the close call with her mother; but there was no one behind them as they crossed the green, except the man with the dog and lone figure in a hooded coat sitting on the bench they had left earlier.

On the way back to Nano’s, they stopped off at a corner shop so Nano could pick up a couple of cartons of soup, a packet of pitta bread, a sharing bag of parsnip crisps, and some apples. By the time it started to get dark, Carrie had munched her way through an apple and more than half the bag of crisps as they worked on the track. She realised it was going to take longer than either of them had anticipated to pull together all the layers needed to bring Savannah’s song to life, which meant spending a few more weekends in the basement. Carrie knew a fight with her mother was on the cards if she disappeared for too many more weekends in a row; she was dreading going home this evening.

Before she left, Carrie copied out the notes they had made in the back of Savannah’s journal on to some paper Nano provided. It was too risky to keep carrying the journal between her place and the basement, especially now Patrol presence on the street had increased. Carrie was in two minds about taking the journal home with her at all: she was more likely to be stopped and searched carrying an overnight back at this hour, but she couldn’t bear to be without her notes for a week.

Carrie had to stop and wait at the top of the basement steps with Nano as they heard the front door open and close and a heavy tread cross the hall. Another door opened, the footsteps disappeared, and then, after a couple of breathless minutes, they returned to the hall and ascended the main stairs. They listened to the creak of boards above their heads for another minute.

“I’ll ask Rox if she’ll do the vocals for us,” Nano said, keeping his voice low, even though it was impossible for Dryce to hear him. “She might be able to come over next weekend.”

“Okay,” Carrie agreed.

“See you at Reddick on Wednesday?”

“Yes.”

Nano went first out of the door to check the coast was clear and then Carrie slipped out behind him and out of the front door as quickly and as quietly as she could. She looked back at the narrow brick house as she crossed the road, aware that she could be seen from the top windows. The fact that Dryce ran a black market racket was of no concern to Carrie—she’d done her deals with Nano knowing full well who was behind the supply—but if he was in alliance with an illegal political group, that was different. Perhaps it was just another business opportunity for him, another customer to bring in the money. Carrie had a nagging feeling though that if that were the case, Dryce wouldn’t have allowed the Dextinction graffiti at his undersound. The new scrap list was still in the front of Savannah’s journal and Carrie suspected some of the items on it were intended for boxes that would be loaded into the back of another van in the middle of the night. But her indirect involvement in suppling a rebellion didn’t bother Carrie as much as the fact that it seemed increasingly likely her father was not only alive and well but in the same town. His possible association with Dextinction, or the fact he’d made arrangements with Savannah a year and a half ago wasn’t the most pressing issue anymore. Carrie’s only burning questions now were, firstly, if that really had been her father yesterday night, how long had he been in town? And, secondly, why hadn’t he yet tried to make contact with her?

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Next weekend: Chapter 15—Caught

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Author’s Notes:

Margarine spread on a raw tomato. Yum.

Chapter 15: Caught, coming next weekend.

PJ