Free Graft by Matt Hill Page B

should do in hospital. Behaviours you’ve learned from old TV, or from other visitors and relatives. And there are things you think you shouldn’t: nod at other families; pay too much attention to the monitors.
    There were also things Sol could say to Mel that he never imagined saying to anybody. He told her he thought death was close for her. And he would pick out details – comment on the fact she still had her earrings in. Small things like this reminded him so powerfully of their past selves; of two people cohabiting and setting out their boundaries. He knew that after a late shift at the garage, after he’d collected some milk on the way home and they’d eaten food together, they’d go to bed and she’d take out her earrings and false eye and reach over his chest to put them on the side.
    Time had done such things to them. Their relationship was being stubbed out. Scratched out. And increasingly, obsessively, Sol came to believe that the best thing about eyes – whether you had one, like Mel did, or two, like he did – was how they gave you the option to look away.
    One morning he couldn’t bear the kind way the nurses looked at him. They’d been nothing but sympathetic and diligent, and yet he felt embarrassed to be seen there with Mel. They were endeared to his vigil, he knew, but this didn’t shift an uncomfortable feeling they judged him; that they thought he lacked the will to prevent this happening in the first place. That wasn’t him, he told himself. It wasn’t the man he thought he was. Sol spent his life fixing things, and here lay something wretched – no, some one wretched – he lacked the capacity to fix. She had pushed him to see the outer limits of his personality; confronted his flaws, his pure weakness. He hated how it made him feel. And so, in an act of arch selfishness – shrinking from the opportunity to make himself a better partner – he leaned in to Mel with a fattening tear hanging from his nose. It’d been too long, he told himself, already dismissing his self-analysis. Too much had changed, and too much was still changing.
    Something frayed had finally snapped.
    â€œMel,” he said to her, and watched the tear fall and splash from her chin into the channel of her neck. “I love the bones of you. But I’m going now.”
    And that was how he left her.
----
    R oy’s life is full of codas. So while the names, objectives and cover stories change, he considers repeatedly the unspoken rules of engagement in his transactions – in the debiting and crediting of life and limb.
    One of the critical rules is this: don’t expect the truth. When Roy takes contracts from the Reverend, he can expect just enough to run with, just enough to let his imagination fill the gaps, or paper over his reservations. It’s why, as he leaves Sol in the workshop to return to the Rose, it’s confusing that Havelock told him so much, and so earnestly. It said lots about the things Havelock wasn’t saying.
    Roy lights a cigarette, opens the window. Takes in Manchester air, its scent and taste. The smog and ceaseless drizzle. The ratty bars and risky streetfood.
    What’s that bastard up to?
    Roy has to be careful: he knows you can seriously overthink this stuff. Drive yourself barmy. And does he really care as long as the fee clears? As long as there’s food in his guts by the end of it? These are the pressing questions, most of the time – albeit two questions the Reverend would punish him for asking.
    Ahead, the sky’s shod in black-blue bruise. In his mirrors sits the lone headlight of a motorbike. Beyond, the dark jags on the horizon where the moors and gritstone tors run stitches between counties. Closer, he sees the silhouetted, attenuated servants of Manchester: her cranes and towers, her surviving chimneys and masts, all wanting to drag Roy back into the past. To a single dark day up a crane