Zero Bomb Read online

  Martha’s eyes widen. She darts into the recess behind the door, just as it swings open. Through the crack between the door and jamb, she can make out the lab’s stainless units, the rubber safety flooring. Cobwebs in her hair. A smell comes through: it reminds Martha of some crusty socks she once found on the floor of her foster brother’s bedroom – dank and human. And right there, right on the other side of this door, is Greenley’s sleeve, and the side of his face, head angled down.

  ‘Oh,’ he says flatly. And with a lurch, Martha realises her wet boot prints are all over the floor.

  She covers her mouth.

  ‘Sharon?’ Greenley says. ‘She’s back already. Make sure she’s in warm clothes. She’ll be soaked through. We’ll pick this up again tomorrow.’

  The gap in the door darkens. Greenley is looking directly towards her. If he can see her through the gap, he’s pretending he can’t. If he has something to say to her, he’s decided it’ll wait. Then he turns and goes back inside. A moment later Sharon and Rolly exit the lab together, clomping up the stairs. Martha slips off her boots and tiptoes up behind them, her socks drawing up cold water.

  ‘Shit,’ Martha says.

  Sharon’s sitting on the edge of Greenley’s bed. Martha has time only to drop her boots before Sharon launches Greenley’s new blanket towards her. Martha catches it clumsily, brings it up to her chest. ‘Sorry,’ she says.

  Sharon grins. ‘For what? Not having the sense to wipe your feet?’

  ‘I couldn’t find anyone,’ Martha tells her. ‘I – I wasn’t sneaking about.’

  ‘Course not,’ Sharon says, and winks. ‘Hard to be stealthy now we got rid of the diesel gennies, eh? You’ll catch your death with your hair so wet, mind. Go and get it dry. I’m doing a cheese and onion pie – I’ll bring some over.’

  ‘Am I grounded?’

  ‘Grounded?’ Sharon’s grin widens. ‘Earwigging as well, were you? No, love, you’re not grounded. You just decided to be an arsehole today.’

  * * *

  Sharon knocks on Martha’s shed door before she opens it, a grace note of respect where perhaps the men would afford none. Sharon can be matronly or motherly, yet mostly she seems to want Martha on side, uncynically, as a friend or confidante, a sister-in-arms. A good foil for Greenley at his most impulsive, come to that. For these reasons she speaks to Martha with care and thoughtfulness, and in times of need will fix Martha with kind eyes while allowing her brows to do the talking. With those things she can sympathise or empathise, smile or frown. Martha, meanwhile, is wary of the age gap, if not the gulf in their experiences. She compensates by listening harder, tempering her most stubborn responses. This is why she annoys herself when she catches herself laughing a bit too hard at one of Sharon’s jokes, usually at Greenley’s expense, but sometimes Rolly’s too. Then again, a sharp tongue will endear Martha to many. And Sharon had quickly worked that out.

  ‘Slice of this’ll fix you,’ Sharon says, tilting her baking tray. The pie is massive, a thick emulsion of cheese on its lid.

  ‘Smells ace,’ Martha says.

  Sharon settles it on Martha’s bed and slaps a midge that had settled dead centre on her forehead. ‘Wait till you’ve had a bite,’ she says, grinning. She sits down next to the pie and licks a finger to touch away the crumbs on Martha’s blanket. She clears her throat. ‘Look, this news today. Birmingham, I mean. Did you want to talk about it? Ask anything?’

  Martha shrugs. ‘It’s not really… What is there to say?’ Sharon glances out of the window, then down at the pie.

  She stretches for a trowel in Martha’s tool rack on the door, cuts a deep slice from the pie, and hands Martha the whole thing. ‘Probably about fifty cheeses in there,’ Sharon says. ‘God knows you’ll dream tonight.’

  Martha tears off a chunk of crust and dips it in the filling. It’s sharp yet buttery, and even better than it smells. ‘Really good,’ she says, nodding.

  ‘So yeah,’ Sharon says. ‘About today. I suppose I wanted to tell you a story – not because you got home late, but ’cause I know you’ll be feeling unsettled.’

  Martha takes another bite.

  ‘Going back a fair few years,’ Sharon says, ‘my brother was a roadie, right? Toured with metal bands, all over Europe and Canada. One afternoon he calls me from work, though not really out of the blue ’cause we constantly shared GIFs, memes, all that old-fashioned stuff. And I answer and I realise pretty quickly he’s in tears. Absolutely in bits. So I’m all, Andy, what’s up? And he’s sobbing, the lad. Can’t speak, just this stifled crying at me. So I ask him again, what’s going on? Do I need to come get you? Do I need to call someone? I’m sitting there with my heart in my mouth, wondering what’s happened. If something’s happened to my niece. But no. He’s been sorting through a vanload of hire equipment that’s back in from London. Drums, amplifiers, guitars and all that. My brother and his colleague took the delivery and started opening the hard cases to do inventory checks. Make sure everything’s there. But after the first couple of boxes, they’re getting confused. Some of the equipment is caked in dust. Some of it has this weird sticky stuff on it. They notice holes and scuffs, and now they’re panicking because they’ve signed off the return and will have to cover all the repairs. And then they realise where this stuff has come from. What’s actually going on. The two of them in that cold warehouse, oh God, leaning on each other I bet. The silence. Because there are bits of people in the flight cases, Martha. Clumps of bloody hair.’

  Martha stops chewing and puts down the trowel.

  ‘I know,’ Sharon says. ‘I know.’ She continues: ‘There’d been a militant attack at a festival that week. God, Martha, to say you were so little. And I say an attack – I mean this was another attack. There were lots of attacks around then, almost enough to lose track. During the clean-up, some of the cases got missed, I don’t know, a tragic bloody mix-up. Next news, the cases have turned up at my brother’s warehouse, and he’s got to deal with police and hospitals and find an incinerator for all this horrible stuff he’s suddenly responsible for. He said to me, “It’s poisoned me, Shaz. Never seen anything like it.” And he wasn’t wrong. None of us had seen anything like it, and imagining it was enough.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Martha says.

  ‘There was a cruelty about those years that you won’t remember. There has always been cruelty on this little island. Ask Greenley about the IRA when he was studying in London – had a run-in himself. Nail bomb. But this was personal. It was my little brother; that day it came home for him and for me, and we weren’t even directly affected. It was all you could do to stay clear of the news, and then this happens. And you know what? Why I’m telling you all this? Because even when you were afraid, even when it turned up on your doorstep and rubbed your face in it, you had to believe it wouldn’t be you. Had to. Selfishly, you had to believe it would be someone else. Or if it wasn’t, that you’d fight. That you’d make it out.’

  ‘I wasn’t scared,’ Martha tells her. ‘Today. I wasn’t afraid. I’m not scared.’

  Sharon cocks her head. ‘No?’

  Martha shakes her head.

  ‘Well, that’s good. But you better know you can talk to me if you are. It’s a slow burn, this kind of thing. Greenley calls it furtive, this anxiety about the world. You ask him – he gets so animated. People so easily stop trusting each other. Assume the worst… it goes on. And that’s partly why he set up this place. Why we’re helping people in the town. He came here and said, okay, things are really shitty, so what can we do for our community? Because at the height of the attacks there were reprisals every other day as well. People talked about civil war like it wasn’t just nutters on each side. All these lost kids were getting into it – they were kids to me, anyway. Your age. Younger, actually. It completely gutted me.’

  Martha knows all about lost kids; she swallows her first response. ‘And this doesn’t feel different to you?’ she asks. ‘Birmingham?’

  ‘No. It feels big, sure, bu
t no. Keep watching and we’ll learn their names and faces and motives – that always helps. Seeing that humans did it… that helps you get your head around it. Maybe that’s silly.

  ‘Whoever it is, though, they’re idiots. Black out the media and how d’you hope to tell the world what you’re up to? Poundshop terrorists. Imagination, that’s about it – I’ll give ’em that. But that’s it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Martha says.

  ‘Besides – we’re in the sticks. Nothing’d ever happen out here. Nothing much.’ She slaps her arm. ‘Except these bastard midges.’

  Martha picks up her pie again. Takes a bite.

  Sharon smiles tightly. ‘You eat that slow, pet. Save you on heartburn. And do me a favour, eh? Don’t go bloody renegade on us again. Greenley’s old ticker can’t hack it.’

  4

  Martha sleeps fitfully in her wools. She dreams of explosions in the valley, a military jet on manoeuvres, burning hares running across the allotments. At first light she boils a kettle – half for the washbasin, half for her flask – and tries to revive her phone on the wind-up generator, without any luck. She remembers she keeps an old SIM card and phone in a drawer, the same way one of her foster mothers used to keep a single cigarette somewhere close. A control test: there if she needs it, that access to her past life, and sometimes it tempts her. But today she resists, because to use it would be to re-enter her old life without preparation, an old life with a different set of rules. And in any case, she tells herself, it probably won’t work.

  She’s half into yesterday’s still-wet jeans when Greenley walks past on his early rounds. She’s fully dressed and stirring nettles in her flask when he returns to knock on the shed door.

  ‘Hi,’ she says.

  Greenley looks gaunt and edgy. The bags under his eyes are especially pronounced. ‘Wood store,’ he says. ‘In ten.’

  ‘Morning to you as well,’ Martha replies. ‘Any more from Birmingham?’

  Greenley shakes his head unsurely, then stalks off towards Rolly’s shed.

  Martha closes the door and pins up her hair. Pulls on her coat and wellies. The rain stopped in the early hours, but the ground is lustrous. She slops up towards the wood store, the flask a comfort beneath her coat, surprised to see a number of oily bubbles drifting lazily between the sheds, most popping on the solar arrays. When she looks across, there’s a rotating device on Greenley’s shed roof. Another of his little experiments, or distractions.

  Martha is last in at the wood store, and while Sharon winks at her, neither Greenley nor Rolly give her the time of day. The men make a point, in fact, of not looking at her. Martha laughs weakly to herself and leans on the rear wall, the sole of a boot pressed against it.

  To one side of her is a small table, an anaemic cake sitting on top. Four paper plates, a fork, spoon and a fan of paper serviettes decorated with nativity scenes. Martha considers eating it in one. She’d do it to spite them, had Sharon not made the effort to talk last night. She turns to the front, where Greenley is pacing.

  ‘I wanted—’ he says, then sneezes. He sits down on a broken pallet and begins to pick curls of damp grass from his boots. ‘I stayed up late,’ he starts again. ‘You know how ideas can seize you. Well, my idea is that we really ought to pass on this month’s profits to the Birmingham crisis appeal.’

  It clicks for Martha. Greenley’s eyes, his vagueness – he’s been taking speed again. She watches for Sharon’s and Rolly’s reactions. They say nothing, though they do share a glance.

  ‘Silence really is consent, you know,’ Greenley adds.

  Still no reply from the room. Rolly coughs into his fist, catches Martha glaring at him. He glares back from beneath his fisherman’s hat. His hair and beard are more unruly than usual, and there are porridge oats in his moustache.

  ‘In which case, let me spell it out,’ Greenley goes on. ‘We took some big private orders this week, on top of Martha’s drop yesterday, which – thanks to her polite reminder, no doubt – has been paid for in full, with arrears, this morning. We’ve broken even on labour this month, and we’ve already covered Saturday’s community meal at the church. We don’t have any more health derms to pay for, either, since no babies have been born in the last fortnight. So, I’d sooner the hands’ earnings go to the wider reaches. At least, this is what feels just to me.’

  ‘So we don’t keep the cash by for a rainy day?’ Rolly asks. ‘Order parts for another hand? Or finally upgrade the alloy printer? Buy a delivery drone—’

  ‘Yesterday was a rainy day,’ Greenley snaps. ‘Besides, we don’t need another hand. We don’t. Growing profits for the sake of growing profits is an old way to think, remember? That, and we can’t get near our production moulds at the minute. Our contractor was raided by the council last month – one of their other clients was caught printing a load of bloody machine guns.’

  ‘Reinvestment, then,’ Rolly says. ‘Reinvest in the business—’

  ‘That’s the same as enterprise,’ Greenley snaps. ‘So no, for the reasons above. And stop calling this a business, will you?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘I’m fine with doling out the cash,’ Sharon says. She nods at Rolly. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nowt,’ Rolly says. ‘Nowt is.’

  ‘They’re people,’ Sharon says. ‘Isn’t that right? They’re struggling. Don’t pretend you’ve had some kind of empathy bypass.’

  Rolly looks genuinely hurt by this. Martha finds it hard to work out his friendship with Sharon at the best of times, but something about the exchange seems a little too petty.

  Greenley nods at Sharon. ‘They are struggling. So I’ll contact the institute and we’ll do our bit.’ Finally, he turns to Martha. The others follow his gaze. ‘Anything you want to add, over there?’

  Martha mumbles a no.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  Martha keeps her mouth closed.

  Greenley claps once. ‘Then let’s crack on with our day, shall we? Rolly, can you get the hands warmed up, please? Sharon, we’ve a new ankle design I’d like you to test on the impact deck – I’ll explain the ligament system shortly. Between us, we also need to dig some potatoes. Lest we forget, we’re still only six inches of topsoil away from total dystopia. Martha, I want you to re-sort the recycling baskets, please. There’s far too much in the landfill bag, last I saw. But first, please stay here for a moment.’

  Sharon and Rolly file out. Sharon watches her feet. Rolly holds eye contact with Martha all the way.

  Martha comes away from the wall. Listens to Sharon and Rolly in the wet outside.

  Greenley stands up and closes some of the gap between them. Sometimes she forgets how tall he is. ‘Adventure, was it?’ he asks her, calm enough.

  ‘I stayed in Manchester to see what was going on,’ Martha tells him. No point trying for wriggle-room – Greenley has a certain way of seeing things. ‘When the Birmingham alert came up,’ she continues, ‘my phone packed in.’

  Greenley nods. ‘Mine’s been playing up, too.’ He buttons his patch jacket and removes his glasses to rub his eyes, pinch the bridge of his nose. ‘You realise, of course, that you were with a client. He knew you were underage, which already puts him in a certain position, particularly as a caregiver, and especially under our current… circumstances. What was he meant to do when you ran off with no means to contact us? When him contacting me directly poses such a risk to his work? How am I meant to trust that you won’t go AWOL the next time we ask you to do a drop?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Martha says. ‘The drop was done.’

  A loud crash rings across the allotments, rattling the walls of the store. Rolly dropping something, or one of the hands shorting out. Their biggest solar array has been temperamental for weeks now – maybe it’s finally given up. Greenley shakes his head wearily.

  ‘You didn’t think we’d worry?’

  ‘I’m a big girl.’

  ‘You’re also an ambassador for us.’

>   Martha rolls her eyes. ‘Yeah, and not a drone.’ She pinches the fabric on one shoulder. ‘I don’t have strings coming off me.’

  Greenley shakes his head again. ‘I’m not saying you do, never mind should. And of course I realise yesterday was distressing – you might’ve lost track of things, you might have much been less inclined to… I don’t know. But this isn’t about putting reins on you.’

  Martha’s heckles are up. The store’s lights are too bright. ‘I knew what I was doing,’ she tells him. ‘I looked after myself.’

  ‘Oh, Martha. You’re getting the wrong end of the stick. We’d almost certainly be lost without your diligence. We simply need to talk about how to behave—’

  ‘Behave?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘How I behave? Come off it. You want me to stay here twenty-four-seven like some pet Cinderella? You want me sticking around so your pet ex-con’s got someone to gawp at, have a wank over? I can do this job with my eyes closed. I can piss it.’

  Greenley’s mouth is a tight O. There’s sweat beading on his brow. ‘Let’s not be so aggressive,’ he stammers. ‘Rolly’s a changed man. He isn’t like that and you know it—’

  ‘He’s exactly like that,’ she spits. ‘You’re all the fucking same.’

  ‘Martha!’

  She turns to go. She doesn’t care where, or how, only that she’s gone. But now there’s someone charging back through the door – Sharon. Sharon with the brightness of the day behind her, and her breath short, and her eyes running. Sharon on top of Martha, and very nearly straight over her.

  ‘Where is he?’ Sharon pants. ‘Where?’

  Martha points confusedly back inside the wood store, as if he could be anywhere else, and Sharon barges past. Martha holds the door frame.

  ‘You’d better get out here,’ Sharon says to Greenley, in the kind of tone that only couples share. Except it’s not a statement, or an order. It’s a plea.

  5

  The air is cool outside. Under the close and silvered sky, two things strike Martha as wrong. The first is that Martha’s hand is stripping itself down, which means Rolly has set it to self-maintenance without her say-so. The second is harder to define – a sort of rupture in expectations. Because when Martha scans the allotments, the outbuildings and greenhouses and stores – the objects she’s familiar with and reassured by – there’s something missing.