Chapter Two
Saturday
He bought Level 2 at breakfast.
There wasn’t much to it. He looked at the line — LEVEL 2 AVAILABLE, 100 DP — and thought yes, and the number dropped to seventy, and a new line said LEVEL 2, and that was it. No flash, no music. He felt exactly the same. Somewhere lower down the screen, a note wrote itself and filed itself away before he’d properly read it — something about minor optimisations, something about hesitation — and he let it go, because the tea trolley was coming and the screen was offering him five points to put wherever he liked.
He put three into willpower and two into endurance, and left charisma alone. He wasn’t ready to look at that one yet.
“Sugar, love?”
“Two,” Luther said, and the tea lady stirred them in like it was nothing, which it was. He’d been drinking it without for twenty-three years because asking felt like pushing in.
It was better with sugar. That was the annoying thing.
His mother came at half twelve, and he heard her before he saw her — out at the desk, saying his mother with the stress on both words, the way she said it to teachers and GPs and the man at the garage.
Then she was through the curtain, bag-for-life in one hand, and for one second her face did something it hadn’t planned to. Her chin went. She looked at him and her eyes filled up.
“Oh, Luther.”
“Hi, Mum.”
The second passed. She sat down, and started.
He got the whole sixteen days from her side. The phone call. What she’d thought. What Auntie Carol had said. The trouble getting here on a Tuesday with the buses on diversion. How she hadn’t slept — “I have not slept, Luther, ask your father” — and how the doctors had been very offhand with her until she’d made herself clear. She unpacked grapes while she talked. Red seedless. Dominic’s kind.
“You look thin.”
“I’ve been in a coma.”
“There’s no need for that tone.”
Dominic was doing brilliantly. Dominic had been beside himself. Dominic’s manager had said things about a promotion, and Dominic had nearly missed a work thing with the stress of all this, and Dominic sent his love, but it was five-a-side Saturdays, Luther knew that.
“He’s got my PlayStation,” Luther said.
“He’s looking after it for you.”
“I know. I’d like it back. When I’m out.”
His mother paused, mid-grape. That wasn’t a thing Luther said. Luther said no rush and whenever’s easiest and honestly, it’s fine. She looked at him for a moment, and then she moved on to how she’d had to park on the third floor, and what they charged, and how your father was minding the car because he wasn’t paying that, not for a hospital, it was criminal.
“He’s in the car park?”
“He’s minding the car. You know what he’s like with hospitals.”
Luther did know. He let it go past.
She stayed forty minutes. Near the end she straightened his water jug, and squared up the chart on the end of the bed, and then she sat back down and put on the voice she used for asking things she’d already decided.
“Now. While I’m here.” She smoothed her coat over her knees. “Dominic’s got the chance of a lovely car. Proper car, for the client visits — it’s practically a work requirement. The finance is all agreed, only they want a guarantor. A formality. And we thought — with your compensation coming, and you not needing much, living how you live — you’d do that for your brother.” She smiled at him, warm as a clamp. “It’s family, Luther.”
There it was. Not the whole visit — she had come, he’d give her that, she’d cried at the curtain — but this was the reason she’d come today, on Saturday, after the big shop, with a pen in her bag.
And he could feel it starting up inside him, the machine that had run his whole life: course I will, Mum, no problem, whenever they need it. The words were already in his mouth. Warm from use.
“No,” Luther said.
His mother looked at him.
“What do you mean, no?”
He waited for the rest to come — it’s just that, with my situation, I’m not sure I’d be allowed, maybe when I’m back at work — all the little doors back into the person he’d been on Monday. He could feel them there. He didn’t open any of them.
“I mean no.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. He’d never seen her not say anything for a while.
“Well,” she said, at last, standing up, doing up her coat button by button. “I don’t know what they’ve given you in here. But it isn’t you.”
She kissed his forehead. She said she’d tell his father he’d said hello. And she went out through the curtain with the bag-for-life and the grapes still on the table, and Luther sat in the bed with his heart going, and waited to feel terrible.
He felt something. But it wasn’t that.
RANK: SELF — SECURED +100 DP
He read it twice. It had happened before she’d even got to the lifts.
After a while he got himself to the edge of the bed — it was easier today; the body remembered — and pulled the cord on the blind. Four floors down, the car park. It took him a minute to find the silver Astra, reversed into its space the way his dad reversed into every space, ready for a quick getaway that never came. He could just make out the shape in the driver’s seat. Not moving. Radio on, probably. Sixty metres from a son who’d been dead for four minutes, minding the car.
Luther watched for a bit. His dad didn’t look up. He hadn’t expected him to, and it still landed somewhere.
He let the blind down and got back into bed.
That night, when the ward had gone quiet, he asked the screen the question he’d been walking around all day.
“What are you for?”
WORLD DOMINATION SYSTEM v1.0
“I’ve read the top. I’m asking what it’s for. Stand up. Take the sugar. Say no to your mother. That’s not what it says on the tin.”
The screen wiped itself and, for the first time, showed him the whole thing.
RANKS SELF — SECURED STREET — AVAILABLE DISTRICT — LOCKED CITY — LOCKED NATION — LOCKED CONTINENT — LOCKED WORLD — LOCKED
He read it top to bottom. Then bottom to top, which was worse.
The ward hummed. Somebody down the far end was snoring. And in the air above a hospital bed in Croydon there was a ladder with seven rungs on it, and the top one said WORLD, and it did not look like a joke.
“You’re not here to get me walking,” Luther said, slowly.
NO.
“That was—” He saw it, then. The four seconds. The sugar. The no. “That was just teaching me to stand up.”
The screen didn’t answer. It didn’t need to.
He lay there and felt his pulse going, and made himself look at what he was feeling, honestly, because that was one thing he’d always done — kept an honest account of himself, even if nobody else did. Some of it was fear. Fine. But under the fear, in the cold place where the day had left him, there was something else. He’d never felt it before and it took him a while to find the word, because he’d only ever seen it on other people.
He wanted it.
“Has anyone done this before?”
YES.
“How many got to the top?”
The answer took a second longer than usual. He noticed.
NONE.
Luther looked at that for a long time. Others had climbed this. Nobody had reached the top. And the thing had come to him — sixteen out of a hundred, four minutes dead on the London Road — with the top rung showing.
“What happened to them?”
BUY THE FILES.
“What files?”
LATER. YOU HAVE 170 POINTS AND A CRUTCH.
He almost laughed. He lay back on the pillow, with the ladder still hanging there in the dark, and for the first time since he’d woken up, he didn’t count the ceiling tiles.
They let him out two weeks later, on a Friday.
He’d done the physio. He’d done the stairs with a woman called Dawn walking backwards in front of him saying don’t look at your feet, they know where they are. He’d got dressed on his own that morning, which took twenty minutes and cost him a sweat, and he’d punched a new hole in his belt with the end of a fork because the old holes belonged to a man with more weight on him.
Discharge offered him a wheelchair to the door.
“No, thanks,” Luther said. “I’ll walk.”
He walked. Crutch on the left, slow, down the corridor with its three smells, past the shop, past the fish tank, with Wes beside him carrying the bag and the last of the Lucozade and visibly not carrying Luther, which was costing him something. Eunice was at the desk — days this week, she’d swapped, for reasons she didn’t explain — and she pointed a biro at him.
“Don’t you come back through those doors except visiting.”
“No, Miss,” Luther said, before he’d thought about it, and had to stand there inside his own sentence for a second while she laughed and the doors opened onto cold April air.
QUEST COMPLETE: LEAVE ON YOUR OWN FEET. +50 DP
The van smelled of dust and mints. Wes stowed the crutch like it was made of glass and pulled out past the barrier, and then, at the junction, turned left where home was right.
Luther watched him do it. Left, then left again. Ten minutes on the journey, three extra sets of lights, and not once did the van touch London Road. Wes didn’t mention it. He talked about the Palace back four and kept both hands easy on the wheel, and took the long way round the place the two of them had met.
Luther didn’t say anything either. But he noticed. He was noticing everything now.
The flat was above a chicken shop on Oakfield Road, one narrow flight up, and it smelled the way it always smelled at four in the afternoon — fryers warming up below, and bleach from the night before. His flatmate, Jakub, worked nights at a warehouse and slept days, and the two of them had been sharing the place for three years on the basis of notes on the fridge. There was one now, under a magnet: MILK IS YOURS. GET WELL. — J. That was about as much as they’d ever said to each other, and Luther found, coming through the door with a crutch, that it was plenty.
His room was as he’d left it. Single bed. Desk. The shelf of little painted soldiers he’d spent most of his evenings on for six years, and on the desk, under the lamp, the one he’d been halfway through on the night before the lorry. Brush gone stiff in the jar. He looked at it and left it where it was.
Wes brought the bag up, looked round the room once — the soldiers, the desk, the size of it — and said nothing about any of it, which Luther was grateful for.
“Two o’clock tomorrow?” Wes said, at the door.
“You don’t have to keep—”
“Two o’clock.”
“Two o’clock,” said Luther.
When the van had gone he went back down for the post. There was a pile of it on the mat — takeaway menus, a bank thing, a card from the hospital. And a white envelope with a solicitor’s address in Purley on the back, from a company called Aldous Property Holdings, addressed to The Occupier.
He opened it on the stairs.
Notice of intended redevelopment. 12–18 Oakfield Road. Tenants will be contacted regarding termination of existing agreements. Two months.
Downstairs the shop’s shutter groaned up, and Dev’s voice came through the floor, on the phone, saying what do you mean, the whole block?
Luther stood on the stairs with the letter in his hand.
Twenty-three years of moving when he was told to. Every room he’d ever left because somebody with a signature wanted it. And here it was again, right on time — the world’s standing instruction to Luther Tollsby. Make way.
He climbed the rest of the stairs, sat down at his desk, and read it again, properly this time. All of it. The second paragraph. The bits nobody reads.
Then he looked at the screen.
RANK: STREET — AVAILABLE DOMINATION POINTS: 220
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s start with the street.”