‘Not half as much as we do,’ said Max.
Susan looked through the window, over the road to where the children were playing. She turned back to the table. ‘I saw Malthorpe about ten years ago. He’d come back to Manchester, full of plans. He wanted to involve me in those plans.’
‘Which were?’
‘He wouldn’t say, unless I agreed to join him. He had a new lover.’
‘Anyone we know?’ asked Jimmy.
Susan laughed. ‘I think you do. Miss Sayer.’
‘Miss Sayer?’ Jimmy couldn’t believe it. ‘But she’d be…’
‘Yes. She’d be old. I gave up on Paul’s desires long ago.’ Susan smiled at the two men, satisfied at having shocked them. She turned to leave. ‘I would appreciate no further contact. Thank you.’
Max and Jimmy sat in silence for a few moments, each deep in their own thoughts. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Jimmy, finally. ‘Miss Sayer would have been at least sixty-five. How could he?’
Max wasn’t listening, his eyes and mind following the still-attractive junior-school teacher across the road, back to school…
Play to lose
Beginnings, endings. As Max and Jimmy made their way back to Manchester, DJ Dopejack was visiting a friend in the medical department. It was his first visit to the university that week; the rest of the days spent in his room, tunnelling further and further through the defences of AnnoDomino. He was fired up, loaded with the DNA of his target, a hacker’s dream. Already he had peeled back layers, revealing hidden connections between the bones and the burgers and the cops and the town hall. All the connections uncovered, but no inroads to the real secrets: how to fucking win!
Dopejack had a hard-on for beating the odds; not just against the bones, but against Hackle and his dumbo crew and especially that Jazir Spicebreath Malik. DJ gone loco, lonely and wolf-like; yeah, this was the thrill.
To this end he was working on another tack, one too simple for the stupid, clever bastards that Hackle employed. You had to be simple to win this game, that was the insight. X-ray the bones, who had thought of that before now? One fresh domino, purchased only that morning, and a dead bone from last week; comparison test. Before and after playing the game.
It took an hour for the friend to come back with the various sheets. Fuzzy knowledge at best, but shapes discernible. Through X-ray eyes: before losing, a series of plates showing the domino magnified and darkly transparent, a small patch of deeper darkness inside, perhaps one inch long, that moved from plate to plate in a constricted dance. After losing: the same shape, the same constricted dance from plate to plate. Interesting; the numbers died, the insides didn’t. What did that mean? Studying these maps of bone, Dopejack felt a hard slap on his shoulder. Turning round…
‘What yer got there, snothead? Is that your brain?’
Nigel Zuze, with two of his cronies from the League of Zero. Sniggering in harmony, blue and cream. ‘He’s one of them that licked us,’ one of them said.
‘Aye,’ the other one said. ‘Fucking Paki-fucker.’
Nigel grabbed the X-rays off Dopejack. ‘Looks dead to me, your brain. Looks stuffed. I think you’re in need of some treatment. Boys…’
A beginning, an ending…
On Thursday also, the brethren buried one of their finest. Much love lost and found was mentioned, fights and curses forgiven. Eddie Irwell was laid out in his long-time hole on St Anne’s Square, the present owner having gracefully given up his rights. Many shoppers and passers-by stopped to ponder this strange, primitive ritual. Spade by spade the earth was replaced in the hole, covering the body. There would be no gravestone, no marker except for a small tree planted in this soil. This would grow over the next twenty-five years, carrying Eddie’s spirit into the next century.
Celia Hobart was not allowed to this ceremony She was forbidden to leave the safe house in West Didsbury. But later that day, long after darkness had fallen, two people did stop for a while at the grave in the city. One was perhaps nineteen years old, with ragged, short hair, a head full of numbers and pain; the other, a little girl of eight years, with long, straight, metallic- blond hair, in which a green-and-yellow bird’s feather was knotted. Perhaps she mumbled something kind, this child, something regretful; perhaps a curse against the bones and what they had stolen from her. Perhaps, one day, when enough of the homeless have died, the whole of the city will be covered with these trees of green spirit.
A blurbfly circling the grave, at play for once, but with a purpose.
Midnight. Jazir lying alone on his bed in Rusholme, awake but dreaming. Watching the scene at the gravehole far away, through the blurb’s eyes.