Free The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam by Tom Fletcher

under hand, foot beneath foot, down the cool black marble.

6

Big Old Lash
     
    Alan took his boots off and splashed cold water from a bucket across his face, hoping to dispel the glue stink from his nostrils. He picked Snapper up off his bed and ran a finger over the fixed neck; he’d done the job himself at Loon’s workshop, where there were clamps and glues he could use. Loon herself had been busy at one of the cauldrons, intent upon her own work. She had grunted acquiescence when Alan asked to borrow a bench and buy some glue, but hadn’t spoken another word to him. She got like that when she was busy, and she was always busy.
    The join in Snapper’s neck was ugly, but the glue was dry and it would hold. He’d replaced those strings he had spares for, but that still left him down two. No mind. It would have to do.
    He went to the window of his room in the House of a Thousand Hollows. A gang of transients had accumulated around a bucket-fire on a flat rooftop down and across from him. He put his boots back on and went overthere with a bottle of Dog Moon in each of his deep coat pockets and Snapper once again on his back. Maybe some of them recognised him, maybe not. Their reactions to his arrival were all shanked by the half-cut toad sweat they were passing around, but they were welcoming enough, especially when they saw the whisky he was carrying. Mostly they just carried on their conversations with each other, a low murmur of voices interrupted occasionally by laughter. One man, all beard, offered Alan a fat snail on a stick to toast, which he accepted. There were snails in every crevice: between the flagstones, in cracks in the walls, creeping over the remaining tiles on the nearby rooftops. Not just on this rooftop: the whole of Gleam was crawling with snails and they were a staple foodstuff for the transients.
    Most of them there were topless in the Gleam heat, displaying scrawny and wasted bodies. They smeared the toad sweat into red gums with dirty, calloused fingers. Their skin was red-brown from the sun, and black in the creases. All but one were right gone on the sweat, but then, Alan judged, anyone living their lives under full Discard exposure should be forgiven for wanting to escape them, temporarily, now and again. He twisted the lids from the Moons and passed one off to the left, swigging from the other. The object was to get pissed, steaming, messed up. This wasn’t just drinking. This was drinking with intent, and it wasn’t as easy as he always made it look.
    Above them all, the deep blue sky was made distant by small, pink-limned clouds that floated against it. Striped Satis looked just like a child’s ball that had been booted up there and caught fast by the blue; it appeared closer than the white sliver of moon, though this was an illusion. The rooftop on which they all stood was surrounded by other rooftops, most peaked and tiled, but with tiles missing and ivy weaving in and out of the resultant holes. From one ancient window stuck a silver birch, which Alan had often looked at from his own window but still didn’t understand the provenance of. Like the clouds the tree too shone pink.
    This rooftop was one of several transient crossroads to be found in the environs of the House of a Thousand Hollows. Travellers met around the ever-burning bucket fires to find journey companions, exchange news, trade a little, imbibe a lot and hook up. They were welcome to use the facilities of the House itself if they could pay, but many couldn’t, living more of a hand-to-mouth life than House residents, and most of those who
could
pay wouldn’t, out of principle. ‘Might as well be the Pyramid,’ they said.
    The bottle of Dog Moon was passed to the one soberish member of the group, a woman with short dark hair and black diamonds tattooed around her nipples, and she addressed Alan as she took it.
    ‘You can use that thing?’
    ‘What thing?’
    ‘On your back.’
    ‘Oh!’ Alan lifted the guitar