Splinter From Stone: Part 1
Introducing Hobalt, Greves and The Green Belt
New places always smelled different, and the town of Greves was no exception.
There was no difference in the composition of such smells, no unique features, just an everchanging ratio of piss, industry and dank concrete. By slow indoctrination, the ratio would fade into the white noise of cars and electric generators until one day you woke up, completely attuned.
By Hobalt’s reckoning he was probably 4 or 5 days away from this moment, so when he stepped out of his flat building he remembered to breath it in, sit in its shape and take stock. He didn’t like when things disappeared on him, and as such you couldn’t put smells in photographs, to be enjoyed later on with a lot less context. The miasma filtered through cropped greying hair and the technical-issue dark jumpsuit that his body called home. It was almost welcoming.
The morning air gripped his form, its frigid claws pressing on his ribs and stinging the back of his throat, less than gentle reminders that he was alive as he so often required. Too much of life was spent avoiding these feelings; convincing oneself of the superiority of comfort and convenience while your being shrinks into the far corners of your body, no longer enough volume to take up the necessary space. Hobalt often thought such avoidance resulted in a compelling lack of substance. He imagined that the bookends of life were to be found in these discomforts, inconvenient walls revealing what exactly was you and what was not, a necessary piece of your overall schema.
The morning was grey in both aesthetic and disposition. It almost felt to him like it was trying to hide itself, camouflaged in amongst the vacuous car parks and rundown buildings that slumbered behind the demarcations of the town. Hobalt wished he was partaking for an interesting reason, but today the to-do list had one task; the delivery of the weekly report to the company headquarters in Loose, a town situated on the opposite side of The Green Belt.
His job was simple, to monitor the quality of the water coming into Greves from the 3 tributaries that lazily wound through the beaten-up town. They were pretty things, slivers of flow and light sewn into the fabric of the town that rose around them, indivisible and yet almost completely forgotten, a concept Hobalt felt uncomfortably familiar with his own life. After all, the Bureaucracy had sent him south of The Green Belt, hadn’t they? It’s not as if his life had been anything to care about before this but now, everybody he knew and gave a slight damn about was behind that invincible, engulfing biomass.
Eyeless and inert but always aware.
The Green Belt represented in its quietude a raging spring river replete with potential, rippling and bristling at invisible banks that kept the green of the forest in and the leftover urban sprawl out. In the back of his mind, Hobalt knew why he had been selected to take over such a shitty position; Gladstone was a matter of public record now. The punishment of being transferred here had created a black knot in his gut that would never be reconciled, constant in its presence like the clicking of his shoes on the inky tarmac below. Chinese water torture, that’s what it said in those old history books he’d absorbed as a child, but as the page flashed through his mind a bend in the pavement revealed his intended destination; a bus station birthed from Brutalism and bad British values.
Thought-flow fragmented and sputtered out when he stepped inside, replaced quickly with polite niceties and pressured social instincts. From the outside, Bus Station North looked like an unassuming mottled cat sleeping by the side of the road. The name suggested there were others like it, maybe even just one, but the only transport link in Greves was Bus Station North and it had one destination: across The Green Belt to Loose. Closer inspection showed this cat slept in full armour; reinforced door frames, bulletproof windows and enough men with oversized coats and etched suspicions to match. The aura of the building was positively bristling. Hobalt could feel its dominance bear down on his very essence as he cut across the pockmarked floor of the lobby. Every pinch and crease of its interior was designed to mimic crude oil and penguin feathers, seeping and soaking until fully melded.
People were changed by energies of this intensity, and the intended result was respect and base fear for the government that controlled it. It was as much a tool of suppression as a vital lifeline and Greves, according to the Bureaucracy, was accountable for the debt of both. Hobalt had never seen the terroristic activities that warranted such a horrible wayplace; he was sure in fact that there was some other purpose for the fortified felid.
This was neither the time nor the place for such musings, and he stiffened his resolve as the kiosk and its occupant oozed into his eyeline. A gunmetal shutter extended down from the top of the booth window, leaving a gap a quarter of the original size, just enough for a demanding arm to reach out as he approached, hand outstretched and waiting for its food.
“Present your pass-coin for preboarding inspection”, the arm spoke, disembodied voice joining disembodied limb. The voice cracked like old paint and a less than faint smell of stale smoke leaked from the opening.
Hobalt reached into his jumpsuit pocket, fiddling through change and paper scraps until he found the 7-sided metal token. The coin dropped into awaiting hand and it snapped shut, arm slinking back the way it came with not so much as a thank you. Not that Hobalt expected one. Two weeks ago when he first came through this place, nervousness had manifested in the form of a joke to the arm, but it may as well have been told to a loaf of bread for the silence left in its wake.
“You may proceed. Stand by the onboarding attendant as we ready the vehicle.”
The disembodied limb had returned, pass-coin clutched between thumb and first finger. Taking it, he noticed the presence of a deep but waning heat, just like the last two times. He wondered again what checks they subjected the little metal token to. In his mind the “terrorists” were making counterfeits that would only be revealed by a lower melting point than whatever the Bureaucracy used in their coins, but that theory was still contradicted by Hobalt lacking tangible evidence of any terrorists at all. A queue had formed on one side of the room by a beefy security gate, accompanied by a matching guard. His gaze flicked from person to person like a man fiddling with a deck of cards, but otherwise he was as still as the gate he stood watch over. Hobalt joined the fold, coming to a halt behind a man that smelled like ladies’ perfume and dank newspaper. A round red dome stuck out the side of the gate, light pulsing in anticipation for the switch. The change was made real, baleful heat fading into calm ocean blue, and the queue lurched forward in unison. Precisely 18 seconds passed between lurchings, and in minutes he found himself alone in the presence of the guard. This close his convincing impression of a living statue staggered and Hobalt took note of the lines of anxiety worn into the creases of his eyes.
“On you go,” the guard affirmed, moving nothing to make the sound. But there was something in his voice that hadn’t been there last week, something that slipped through his person suit. Doubt was laced through his authoritative cadence, an almost imperceptible song haunting the eaves of long forgotten theatres. Something unique had happened, that was plain to Hobalt, and his heart rate rose at the prospect, whatever it was.
“On you go, sir.”
The guard had turned to face him, impassive stone once again entombing his personage. His gaze fell to the floor as he fumbled out an apology and hurried through the security gate, fear replacing curiosity with the speed of a volatile chemical reaction. The space beyond opened into a metallic-framed interior flanked on both sides with black artificial leather seats. Hobalts feet made contact with rubber nonslip floor tiling the hue of aging tan and he stumbled to a free spot, opposite the entrance way. Windows made of darkened plexiglass wrapped around the back of the bus, splitting the top half from the bottom to give The Green Belt a panoramic framing.
The bus was economical to a fault, every rivet and screw and scrap of artifabric calculated and recalculated, the bean counters wet dream. Slumping into his welcome perch, he dumped the small case he was carrying onto the floor and began to right himself. The gate door slid closed, conspicuous thunks of heavy locks ringing out through the frame of the vehicle. A gentle g-force was the only indicator that they had started moving, but Hobalt felt it at once, the comforting squeeze reigniting his humanity. At once his brain came alive with confusing voices layered on top of each other and he allowed himself to process what he saw in the face of the guard, the strain of unmentioned happenings written into his expression. The Green Belt swallowed him and his ride whole, but one charged fact rang out:
Something new had happened.
Thanks for reading, I really hoped you enjoyed it as much as I loved writing it. I’m not sure when the second part will be ready, but please have patience with me and I promise you’ll be rewarded!