There was a smell of wet metal and stone.
Branner was not connected properly to himself. He could not step out of the moment with her in his dream just before the trees exploded.
It was a muntjac we were eating, that day, he thought. Before the charge went off. It’s probably a muntjac, this red dot.
As he went over the track, he paused to put his hand on the rail, his habit to touch the world to try to bring it back. But he could not fully focus.
He saw himself for a split second reflected in the rain collected on the solar sleeper. A black bird bursting into ash.
Dissipated into sky, as the rain broke his brief image.
Not too distantly a pheasant called, shuttered its wings, sensing the coming shudder in the air.
~
At the watch post, the blackbirds started to call and quickly their noise was thorough. The rain collector now trembled where it hung, and the post hummed with the bizarre accidental song that came into its iron stays.
‘Why isn’t he there?’ the sergeant asked. At least the green dot had gained pace. For a while it had seemed to falter, as if the dot itself had to cut its way through the dark backdrop of the monitor screen.
They saw Branner when he came into the cameras, as he went over the track.
‘Can you make this?’ the sergeant asked, bluntly into the comms.
They saw Branner, the rain somehow haloed around him, as if he moved in a bubble.
‘I can.’ But the voice was far off.
‘He’s leaving it late, Sarge.’
‘It’s Branner,’ said the sergeant. ‘He’ll shoot.’
The rain intensified again. A noise oncoming. The train transporting ten million gallons of water to the city at two hundred miles per hour.
Don’t go red, John, the sergeant thought. You’re not the type. You told us you were fine.
All he’d have to do is switch off his greenlighter and . . .
The digits fluttering, the rain collector swinging now.
‘Just leave it, Branner. Stay clear. It’ll be another dog.’
~
The rain hit with the rhythm of train wheels. Hit hood. Hit his hood. His brain was in a cave.
‘What is it?’ asked the sergeant.
‘I do not know.’
There was just the red dot, anonymous, a threat, superimposed on the undergrowth in the mid-scope of Branner’s rifle, moving sometimes minutely.
‘We cannot greenlight it without a visual, Branner. Take the shot,’ the sergeant ordered.
Branner could feel the train now in the ground. The shudder come, a growing shake, still the veil of dream, the image of the pine trees bursting. Explode. Explode with silence.
He thought desperately of his wife.
A shudder through the earth, his body.
The future now, a drop from a high building.
I do not want there to be time, to think of you in pain.
I could just switch off my greenlighter. That’s all it would take. The train guns wouldn’t recognise me. And they’d fire.
He imagined for a moment the thrashed material lifted in suspension in the air, a cloud of smashed greenery and blitzed stick, the thick earth orbiting through the pink miasma of his own obliterated cells. The sudden leap of everything, before settling down to ground.
He felt drips riddle down the body of the gun and well against his hands.
His soul was just there, curled up in the scope, as if he could witness it.
Hit. Hood. The rain. The train. The puddles gathered round him where he knelt vibrating, loosening. Ten million gallons of water, two hundred miles an hour.
‘Branner.’
There was urgency now in the sergeant’s voice, the rain, the air seeming to shatter ahead of the oncoming force.
Branner thought of the crossfire shatter clatter; the stub guns rippling like a millipede’s legs.
A great noise. Then I would be gone. I wouldn’t have to live with it. The doctor’s words.
He felt the rifle calculate for distance, calculate for force.
‘. . . seconds,’ lost in the thickening noise. The bullet’s path, a dream burst into flame and char, disintegrate to ash. The train some crashing wave.
It would happen with no more effort than it took to pick away a hangnail.
‘Clearing sector,’ Branner said.
It’s all you have now. Duty.
PAPER FLOWERS
The electric passenger trains hiss along the nearby tracks and it sounds like I remember wind does, moving through wide forests. A rhythm to it, a pulse almost, as if the city’s breathing.
There is only early morning light. Then the Water Train passes. Different. A weight of sound. The sound of a great waterfall crashing into a pool. It has the power church bells must used to have.
I have seen it pass above the houses on its lifted steel tracks and felt the shake it brings to the floor. Seen its hoses and pipes. The heavy protection.
It is meant to look magnificent, impregnable, but it looks uncertain, like a person others have decided to make into their hero.
It’s always about the image of a thing, in most minds.
It thunders by. And after it has passed, all the sounds seem to drop from the air for a moment. As if it leaves a vacuum.
I hear the soilmen then come for the soilets, clattering in the street below. Nita moves gently, next to me in the bed, the faint acidity of alcowash and the covering scent in her hair, and I am certain the noise they make will wake her.
There is something daring about the way they make such noise. As if to provoke you to complain, so they can say ‘Is this a job you’d like to do? Is this a job you’d like us not to do?’ The games we make of our jobs.
But she stays asleep.
Hillie though, her daughter, wakes. I hear her get up from her mattress and quietly play behind the sheet they modestly hang across the bedsit when I come here. ‘Happy in her own skin.’ A phrase I learnt from Nita when we met. Like an object she gave me to keep.
I hear the little one say ‘pooh’ and ‘yuk’, the stink now as they empty the chute bins out into the truck. Lie there, listening to the soilmen move along the buildings, the throb of the pipe sucking, chugging up the fibre and muck until they are too far down the street to hear; but the smell lingers. Treacly. Or perhaps just seems so, because my mouth is sticky and dry. The cement dust gets everywhere.
That first time I saw them, they were sitting together with their legs through the railings, looking out over the edge of the embankment, above the drained riverbed, pretending to be on a ship. They were pretending the city was a great old-fashioned ocean liner sailing through the sea.
The next day, after shift, I went to the same spot. To rest my eyes after the glare of the Dock. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the great ocean ship. Had lain awake. Travelling myself to the countries of the world. To home.
But this time there she was, crouched intently, trying – I thought at first – to fish a thorn out of her thumb.