Chapter 1: The Last Thing He Remembered

The last thing Elliot Marsh remembered about being alive was the ceiling of a Tesco Express in Bedminster.

It was not the exit he would have scripted. No mountaintop, no hospital bed, no loved ones murmuring kind lies. Just the buzz of aisle three, a floor that smelled of disinfectant and someone’s spilled Fanta, and a dawning awareness that his left arm had stopped doing what he asked of it about four seconds earlier.

Heart attack. Thirty-six years old. In the meal-deal section.

He had been reaching for the last BLT — the good one, with actual lettuce instead of the pale stuff that tasted of refrigeration — when something in his chest made a decision without consulting him. Then the floor was much closer than it had been, and then the ceiling was, and the BLT was still in his hand, because the body has its priorities and does not explain them.

He would like to have had profound final thoughts. He did not. He thought: I haven’t paid for the sandwich. Then he thought: Mum is going to be furious. Then a fluorescent tube directly above him flickered in a way that felt personal, and he thought nothing at all.

What came next he would spend a long time trying to describe, and never to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all his own.

There was grey. It went on in every direction with the patience of a waiting room. There may have been voices, speaking in the tone of announcements that have been made many thousands of times to people who were not listening, and he was not listening either, because something had begun to pull at him.

It started at the edges. His mother’s name. The layout of his flat. The password for the work VPN, which he had only just learned after the third reset. The feeling of standing in the shower on a Sunday morning with nowhere to be. Each one was lifted and tested, gently at first, and then with the insistence of a form that will not let you continue until every box is filled in.

He held on. He had no hands to hold with, so he held on with wanting — stubborn, frightened, entirely unreasonable wanting, the kind that belongs to a man who has already lost his body, his heartbeat and his sandwich, and does not intend to lose the memory of having had them.

The pulling stopped. He never found out whether it had given up or simply failed. The grey thickened, and there was a sense of falling, or of being posted through a letterbox a mile wide, and then—

Mesh under his cheek. Cold. Noise.

The noise came up through the mesh and into his teeth: a vast iron rolling, regular as a clock and far too big for one, the sound of something enormous that had been moving for a very long time and saw no reason to stop.

He opened his eyes. Six inches from his face, through a floor of gritted metal mesh, the ground was going past.

It went past fast — dark earth and scrub and grit, pulled into streaks by speed — and now and then something pale flicked by in it that might have been rock or might have been bone. He watched three of them go before it occurred to him that he was lying on his face, watching the ground from above, with nothing between himself and it but a sheet of mesh and a certain amount of disbelief.

He had a body. That seemed worth checking, so he checked it. Two hands, both shaking. Legs. A chest that went up and down, which in light of recent events was a surprise. He was wearing clothes he had never bought: coarse brown trousers, a shirt that was nearly cotton, boots that fitted better than anything he had ever ordered online.

He tried to sit up and hit his head.

The ceiling was four feet above the mesh, if that. It was the underside of something — planks and iron straps, a lattice of beams, and between them a run of pipework that knocked and dripped. Bulbs in little wire cages hung from a cable at intervals, swinging with the motion, so that the light went back and forth across everything like someone looking for their keys. A fine dust sifted down between the planks. It smelled of straw. Then it smelled, unmistakably and with great confidence, of pig.

He was underneath something, and the something was moving. He was, he worked out — and the thought arrived with a calm he would later recognise as shock in a sensible coat — under a train.

There was nowhere to stand, so he didn’t. He went on to his hands and knees, because that was the shape the space allowed. Behind him the crawl ended at a wall of riveted iron that shook with every beat of the wheels. Ahead it ran on into the dark, the caged bulbs shrinking along it, and about ten yards off a square of grey daylight lay on the mesh like a dropped handkerchief.

He crawled towards it. It took longer than ten yards should. The mesh bit his palms, and the ground went by under them in a smear, and the cold came up through his knees with the air of something that had been waiting for him in particular. His knees would remember the trip for a week.

Two iron rungs stood beneath the square of light. Above them was a hatch, propped an inch open on a wedge of straw. He pushed. It was heavy, and then it wasn’t, and straw fell on his face, and he put his head up into the light and found himself at eye level with a pig.

She was a sow, and she was the size of a sofa. She lay on her side in a pen a foot from the hatch and regarded him with one small, intelligent, unhurried eye. She did not get up. He had the impression she did not get up for very much.

“Sorry,” said Elliot. It was the first thing he said in his second life.

He climbed out into a long, low carriage of pens. The walls were planked to the waist and slatted above, and the daylight came through the slats in stripes, along with a steady wind from the forward end that smelled of grass and distance and, faintly, of somebody’s cooking a very long way off. Pigs lay in their straw with their backs to the wind, packed together on either side of a central walk. None of them got up either.

He went forward, because the wind came from that way and it seemed to know something.

The door at the end of the pig carriage opened on to a coupling — a draughty iron gap where the floor became two plates that slid against each other, and he could see the ground again through a crack the width of his hand. Then a hen carriage, tiered with nest boxes, full of birds with views. Then goats, who stood up when he came in and watched him down the length of their carriage with flat, oblong, unimpressed eyes, as if he were the third disappointing man that morning.

At the goat carriage’s forward end was a feed store — sacks stacked to the roof, each one stamped RECEIVED in violet ink, which was more than could be said for him. On a shelf of hay above it an old man lay asleep under a coat that had once been several coats. The old man opened one eye, considered Elliot, and closed it again. Whatever Elliot was, it was not apparently worth the effort.

He looked out through the slats. The country going by was dry upland — scrub in low grey cushions, strewn with flat pale stones — and above it the sky was wrong. Not dramatically. It was simply a shade off, a blue with slightly too much grey in it, like a colour someone had described over the phone and the person at the other end had done their best.

He put that to one side. The side was getting crowded.

After the goats the carriages turned green. Long troughs of something leafy ran the length of them under strings of lamps, and the smell changed from animal to wet earth, and pigeons shifted in the rafters overhead and declined to land on anything. Elliot walked to the end of the first crop carriage, assuming it was the last. It was not. Nor was the second. By the fourth he had given up assuming. He had grown up on a street of terraced houses in Bristol, and he had walked the length of it ten thousand times, and the farm alone was longer.

At the end of the last green carriage was a door. It was heavy, with a handle worn smooth and pale by years of hands, and from behind it came voices — a great many voices, all at once, the noise of people with things to do and opinions about doing them.

He opened it, and Carriage 74 opened out around him.

He had been expecting a carriage. It was the size of a sports hall. Bunks stood three high in long rows that ran across the floor and along it, block after block, with aisles between them wide enough for two people to argue in, and on every side people were doing exactly that. Laundry hung from lines strung between the top bunks. Smoke from a dozen stove plates drifted up and pooled under a high curved roof, and somewhere beyond the laundry and the smoke the carriage presumably ended, though he could not see where. Children ran between the rows. A woman mended something by an oil lamp. A brown dog of no fixed breed slept on somebody’s coat with the air of a creature that had stopped expecting things. One bunk was curtained with a shower curtain printed with faded fish.

He looked for the far wall, as he always did in an unfamiliar supermarket, so as to know where the milk would be. There wasn’t one. There was smoke, and laundry, and beyond those more of both.

Nobody looked at him. This was a mercy, because he had no idea what his face was doing.

“Oi. You.”

The voice came from his left and slightly below. A man sat on an upturned crate against the rear wall, peeling something that was almost an apple. Its skin was too thick and its red a degree too red, and it came off the knife in a single unbroken spiral, as if the man had peeled a great many of them and had views on how it should be done. He was compact and sharp-faced, with eyes that had already taken Elliot apart and were pricing the pieces.

“You look lost,” he said.

“I—” Elliot’s voice came out rough, as if it had been left in a drawer. “I think I might be.”

The man looked at him a moment longer, at his clothes and his boots and his hands, and at the way he was holding on to the door. Then his face cracked into a grin that was surprisingly warm, although the eyes above it went on doing their sums.

“Plum!” he called, without looking away. “Plum, come and see. We’ve got a fresh one.”

A curtain of hanging shirts parted and a very large man came through it — tall and broad and soft about the middle, with enormous hands and a face that looked as if it had been designed for the specific purpose of making people feel safe. He moved carefully, the way large men learn to when they have spent years discovering that their size alarms people. He looked at Elliot, and then at the man on the crate, and then back at Elliot, and his face settled into a gentle concern that Elliot found, to his own surprise, almost unbearable. It was the first kind look anyone had given him since the ceiling of the Tesco, and his throat did something inconvenient.

“Oh dear,” said the large man softly.

“I’m Mr Fixer,” said the man on the crate. “This is Mr Plum. And you are very obviously new, very obviously confused, and very obviously in need of a cup of tea. Plum, put the kettle on.”

“There’s no kettle,” said Mr Plum. “Jem borrowed it.”

“Then find Jem.”

“Jem’s in Seventy-one.”

“Then send Pip to find Jem. The man needs tea, Plum. Look at him. You can see the wall through him.”

Mr Plum looked at Elliot again and nodded slowly. “He does need tea,” he agreed, and went back through the shirts.

Mr Fixer hopped off the crate and offered it with a flourish that might have been courtesy or might have been mockery. Elliot sat. Someone’s child ran past his knees, laughing. Three bunks along, a man and a woman were arguing about whose turn it was on the stove plate, in the comfortable tones of an argument that happened every day and that neither of them had any intention of winning.

“So,” said Mr Fixer, leaning on the wall and resuming his peeling. “What’s your name, and how long have you been standing in that door looking like the world ended?”

Elliot almost laughed. It got as far as his chest and stopped there, wedged in with everything else.

“Elliot,” he said. “I’m not sure the world ended. Something did.”

The knife paused. Something quick went across Mr Fixer’s face and was gone, and the knife went on.

“Elliot,” he said, trying it. “Good. Short. Easy to shout across a crowded carriage. You’d be amazed how many turn up with four syllables. Nightmare for everyone.” He held out a slice of the not-quite-apple on the flat of the blade. “Eat. Whatever it is, it’ll make more sense with something in you.”

It tasted like an apple that had grown up somewhere else and formed its own ideas: sweeter, denser, with a faint note of flowers that had no business being in fruit. It was, against every expectation he had left, delicious.

“Ticket?” said Mr Fixer, quite casually, while Elliot was chewing.

Elliot patted his pockets. There was nothing in them at all, not even the lint of a previous owner, which seemed somehow worse.

Mr Plum came back through the shirts with two tin cups and nothing to put in them, and stopped.

“He’s got no ticket,” said Mr Fixer, the way you’d mention that a man had no pulse.

Mr Plum considered this. Then he set one of the cups down on the crate beside Elliot, carefully, so that it would be there when the tea was.

“Kettle’s coming,” he said.

Elliot Marsh, formerly of Bristol, formerly alive, sat on a crate at the back of Carriage 74 with an empty cup beside him, and waited for the tea.