The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

‘Good luck.’

  Bryant raised a hand and waved it sideways. ‘Ah, don’t worry about it. Piece of piss. Be out of here by three. See you tonight.’

  ‘He said what?’

  Carla paused in the act of fastening one earring and stared disbelievingly at Chris in the mirror. Chris looked back at her, confused.

  ‘He said it’d be a piece of piss and they’d—’

  ‘No, before that. That stuff about divorcing Suki.’

  ‘He said to remind him to get a divorce so he could shack up with a Swedish mechanic.’ Chris saw the look on her face and sighed, feeling the edge of the row they were teetering on. ‘He’s just trying to be friendly, Carla. It’s a kind of compliment, you know.’

  ‘It’s a load of sexist shit is what it is. Anyway,’ Carla finished with the earring and came away from the mirror, ‘that’s not the point.’

  ‘No? Then what is the point, Carla?’

  This time it was Carla who sighed. ‘The point,’ she said heavily, ‘is that I’m not some curiosity for you to show off. This is my wife, by the way she’s a mechanic. I’m sure it’s fun to say. The shock value. The looks you get. I know you get a kick out of taking me to these corporate functions, showing everyone what a rebel you are.’

  Chris stared at her.

  ‘No, it’s because I love you.’

  ‘I—’ She’d been about to raise her voice. Something broke in the effort. ‘Chris, I know that. I know. You just, you don’t have to prove it against overwhelming odds all the time. It’s not a - a battle or a quest. It’s just, living.’ She saw the pain flit across his face and went to him. Her hands, scrubbed clean with aromatic oil, cupped his downturned face. ‘I know you love me, but I’m not here just to be loved. You can’t use me as a statement of how strongly you feel about everything, how loyal you are.’

  He tried to turn his head away. She held it in place.

  ‘Look at me, Chris. This is me. I’m your wife. Mechanic is just a job, just a statement of financial disadvantage. I don’t let it define me, and I don’t want you doing it behind my back. We’re more than what we do.’

  ‘Now you sound like your father.’

  She paused for a moment, then nodded and let go of his head. ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ She touched her throat. ‘Should be fucking miked up, huh? And that reminds me, you said we’d go and see him this weekend. Whatever happened to that promise?’

  ‘I didn’t think we’d—’

  ‘Oh, forget it. I don’t really want to go anyway. I don’t feel up to the refereeing. Once you two get at each other’s throats . . .’ She sighed again. ‘Look, Chris, about this mechanic thing. How would you like it if I dragged you over to see Mel and Jess and said you’d just love to have a look at their tax returns.’

  Chris’s eyes widened with outrage. ‘I’m not a fucking accountant.’

  Carla grinned and dropped into a defensive boxing stance. ‘Want to bet? Want to fight about it?’

  The bravado ended in a shriek as Chris hurled himself at her and rugby-tackled her back onto the bed. The brief tussle ended with Chris straddling Carla’s body and struggling to hold her flailing arms at bay. He could feel the strength leaking out of his grip in giggle increments.

  ‘Sssh, sssh, stop it, stop it, behave yourself. We’re going out.’

  ‘Fucking let go of me, you piece of shit.’ She was laughing as well, breathlessly. ‘I’ll claw your fucking eyes out.’

  ‘Carla,’ Chris said patiently. ‘That’s not really an incentive. You’ve got to learn the art of negotiation. Now—’

  An incoherent squeal. Carla tumbled him. They grappled at each other across the bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Out, driving through Hawkspur Green in the waning light of evening, while Carla tried to do something with her dishevelled hair. The sex had taken half an hour, and it still lurked in the grins at the corners of their mouths.

  ‘We’re going to be late,’ said Chris severely.

  ‘Ah, bollocks.’ Carla gave up on her hair and settled for pinning it untidily up. ‘I don’t know why we’re doing this anyway. Going out to dinner with some guy you’re going to wreck in a couple of years’ time. It doesn’t really make sense, does it?’

  Chris glanced across at her, the implied confidence in the remark warming him inside. There was always an intimacy to the conversations they had while driving, maybe born out of the secure knowledge that the car was clean. Carla swept for bugs on a regular basis, and her knowledge of the Saab meant they were sure of their privacy in a way they never quite could be at home.

  ‘You know it might not come to that,’ Chris said, feeling his way through his own thoughts. ‘A wreck. We don’t have to run for the same promotions.’

  ‘No, but you will. Like at Hammett McColl. It always works out that way.’

  ‘I don’t know, Carla. It’s strange. It’s like he’s just decided he’s going to be my friend and that’s it. I mean, there’s a lot about him I don’t like. That stuff in the zones was pretty extreme—’

  ‘No shit. The man sounds like a fucking crackhead psycho to me, Chris. Whatever you say.’

  Without actually lying to his wife about anything specific, Chris had somehow managed to omit Bryant’s execution-style dispatch of Molly and her jacker colleagues. The way it came out, it really had been self defence against armed and violent attackers. In retrospect, Chris was almost starting to believe it himself. The gangwits had wrecking bars. Not much doubt they would have used them if Chris’s unloaded gun had given them the chance. Carla remained unimpressed.

  ‘He’s just like a lot of the guys at Shorn—’

  ‘Well, I certainly believe that.’

  Chris shot her an irritated glance. ‘He’s worked hard for what he’s got, Carla. He just got angry because someone was trying to take it away from him. That’s a natural reaction, isn’t it? How do you think Mel’d react if someone turned up and tried to trash the workshop.’

  ‘Mel doesn’t make his money the way you people do,’ Carla muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Forget it.’

  ‘Mel doesn’t make his money like me and Mike Bryant?’

  ‘I said, forget it, Chris.’

  ‘That’s right, he doesn’t, does he? Mel doesn’t do what we do. He just makes a living fixing our cars for us, so we can go out and do it again. Jesus fucking Christ, don’t you take the high moral ground with me, Carla, because—’

  ‘Alright.’ Her voice caught on the second syllable. ‘I said forget it. I’m sorry I said it, so just forget it.’

  The air between the two front seats frosted with silence. Finally, Chris reached across the chill and took Carla’s hand.

  ‘Look,’ he said wearily. ‘In the First World War fighter pilots used to toast each other with champagne before they went out and tried to shoot each other out of the sky. Did you know that? And the winners used to drop wreaths on their enemies’ airfields to commemorate the men they’d just killed. That make any sense to you? And we’re talking about less than a hundred and fifty years ago.’

  ‘That was war.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Chris made his voice stay calm. ‘A war for what? Lines drawn on a map. Can you honestly say that those men were fighting for anything that made any kind of sense? Anything that makes more sense than a competitive tender or a promotion duel?’

  ‘They had no choice, Chris. If they laid wreaths it was because they hated what they had to do. This is different.’

  He felt his anger twist and jump like a fish in a net: this time it was an effort to hold it down. It looked as if Carla was going to pull her favourite trick and they were going to arrive at the Bryants’ front door in the brittle silence of an interrupted row.

  ‘You think we have any more of a choice than they did? You think I like what I do for a living?’

  ‘I don’t think you dislike it as much as you say.’ Carla was digging in her bag for cigarettes, a bad sign on the row barometer. ‘And if you
do, there are other jobs. Other companies. Chris, you could go and work for the fucking ombudsmen with what you know. They’d take you. UNECT, or one of the others. The regulatory bodies are screaming for people with real commercial experience.’

  ‘Oh, great. You think I want to be a fucking bureaucrat. Playing at international social democracy with a fucking placard and a zone-level salary.’

  ‘Ombudsmen make a lot of money, Chris.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘My mother used to know some of the guys from UNECT in Oslo. Their field agents pull down near two hundred grand a year.’

  Chris snorted. ‘Not bad for fucking socialists.’

  ‘Alright, Chris.’ It was cold and even, a flip side of her anger he hated worse than the shouting. ‘Forget the fucking ombudsmen. You could get a job with any other investment firm in the city.’

  ‘Not any more.’ He hunched his shoulders as he said it. ‘Have you got any idea how much Shorn paid to get me out of Hammett McColl? Any idea what they’ll do to protect that investment?’

  ‘Break your legs, will they?’

  The sneer hurt, not least because it sounded like something Mel might have said in workshop banter. Jealousy flared. He hid it and worked at calm.

  ‘Not mine, no. But the word will be out there, Carla. Every executive search company in London will have been warned off me. Anyone who chooses to ignore it, they’ll find strung up under Blackfriars Bridge.’

  She exploded smoke across the car. ‘Come off it.’

  ‘No? You don’t remember Justin Gray, then?’

  ‘That was petrol-mafia stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, right. A recruitment consultant with a flat in Knights-bridge and a house in St Albans is really going to get mixed up with those clowns. Everybody believed that one.’

  ‘Wearing a suit doesn’t make you smart, Chris. It just makes you greedy.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it.’

  ‘Look. Two weeks before he died, Gray was instrumental in moving two senior cutting-edge technologies execs out of Shorn and into Calders UK. He told the police he’d been receiving death threats throughout the run-up to that deal. Conveniently enough, they failed to investigate.’

  ‘I think you’re talking wine-bar dramatics and a coincidence, Chris.’

  ‘Suit yourself. Gray’s not the only one. There was that guy they found floating in his swimming pool in Biarritz last year. Another one a couple of years before that in a car smash. Mistaken duel call-out, they said, like that happens all the time. Both chasing candidates at Shorn. Coincidence? I don’t think so, Carla. Over the last five years, there’ve been at least a dozen executive search personnel who’ve ended up dead or damaged while, coincidentally, they were trying to prise candidates away from Shorn.’

  ‘So why’d you go to work for them?’ she snapped.

  Chris shrugged. ‘It was a lot of money. Remember?’

  ‘We didn’t need it.’

  ‘We didn’t need it, right then. These days, that means nothing. You can’t ever be backed up too much. Besides, Shorn aren’t the only ones to play rough with the reckies.’ He found he was smiling faintly. ‘They’re just better at it than most. More prepared to go to the asphalt, quicker to floor it when they do. Just a harder crew, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, and that’s really it, isn’t it Chris.’ There was ice in her voice - she’d caught the smile. ‘It wasn’t the money, it was the rep. You couldn’t wait to get in the running with the hard crew, could you? Couldn’t wait to test yourself against them.’

  ‘All I’m saying is when you talk about choices, face the facts. Be realistic. Realistically, what choice do I have?’

  ‘You always have a choice, Chris. Everyone does.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Finally, his anger slipped its leash. ‘Have you listened to any fucking thing I’ve said, Carla? What fucking choice do I have?’

  ‘You could resign.’

  ‘Oh, good idea.’ This time there was a break in his voice that he couldn’t iron out. ‘And then we could go and live in the zones. And when your father gets threatened with eviction again, instead of paying off what he owes, we could just be poor and helpless, and maybe go and help him pick his possessions up off the street where they throw them. Maybe you’d like that better.’

  Carla flicked ash off her cigarette and stared out of the side window. ‘I’d like it better than waiting to see this car on fire on the six o’clock news.’

  ‘That isn’t going to happen.’ He said it reflexively.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Now he could hear the unshed tears in her throat. She drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Isn’t it? Why is that, Chris?’

  Silence. And the sound of the Saab engine.

  Mike grinned. Laughter erupted around the table.

  Two hours earlier, Chris would have been willing to bet that he wouldn’t hear Carla or himself laugh for the whole weekend. But here he was, seated in soft candlelight, watching across a food-laden, black wood table top as his wife broke up in peals of genuine hilarity. Against all the odds, the evening with the Bryants had taken off like a deregulation share issue.

  ‘No, really.’ Suki fought her own laughter down to a smirk. ‘He actually said that. Can you believe it? Would you have gone out with a man who said that to you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Carla was still laughing, but her answer was absolutely serious.

  ‘Oh,’ Suki reached across the table and took her husband’s hand. ‘I’m being horrible, aren’t I. Tell us how you met Chris, Carla.’

  Carla shrugged. ‘He came in to get his car fixed.’

  The laughter rekindled. Chris leaned forward.

  ‘No, it’s true. You know, she was standing there, in this. T-shirt.’ He made vague female body gestures with both hands. ‘With a spanner in her hand, grease on her nose. And she says, I can give you the best road holding in Europe. And that was it. I was gone. Falling.’

  Carla lost a little of her mirth. ‘Yeah, what he doesn’t tell you is, he was beaten up from some fucking stupid competitive tender. He was falling. He could barely stand. Torn suit, blood on his hands. Down his face. Trying all the time to make believe he wasn’t hurt.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Suki grinned. ‘Gorgeous.’

  Carla’s smile faded slightly. ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Oh come on, Carla. I bet that’s when you fell for him as well. Noble savage and all that caveman stuff. Just like that Tony Carpenter flick, you know, the one where he fights off all those motorcycle thugs. What’s it called, Michael? I can never remember the names of these things.’

  ‘Graduate Intake,’ said Mike Bryant, eyes intent on Carla’s face.

  Chris nodded. ‘Seen it. Great movie.’

  ‘That kind of macho shit doesn’t turn me on,’ Carla said flatly. ‘I see too much of the results, working salvage. See, they haven’t always finished pulling the bodies out by the time we get there.’

  ‘Carla’s boss spends a lot of time separating losers from their vehicles,’ said Chris, miming a pair of salvage shears. ‘Literally.’

  ‘Chris!’ Suki laughed again, then put one elegantly varnished set of fingernails over her mouth in mock mortification as if she’d just realised what she was laughing at. ‘Please.’

  ‘Okay, here’s a joke.’ Chris ignored the look Carla was giving him. ‘Who are the lowest-paid headhunters in the city?’

  ‘Oh, I know this one.’ Suki wagged a finger at them. ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. The guys at Costermans were telling this a couple of months ago. Ohhh, I can’t remember, Chris. Go on, then.’

  ‘Paramedic crews on the orbital after the New Year playoffs.’

  Suki’s brow creased in fake pain. ‘Oh, that’s awful.’ She sniggered, winding up to another full-blown laugh. ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘Isn’t it just?’ said Carla unsmilingly, staring across the table at her husband.

  Mike Bryant coughed. ‘Ah. Would you like to see tha
t Omega now, Carla? It’s just through the kitchen to the garage. Bring your glass if you like.’

  He got up and flashed a glance at Suki, who nodded on cue.

  ‘Yes, go on. I’ll clear these away.’

  ‘I’ll help you,’ said Chris, standing automatically.

  ‘No, it’s just loading the machine. You can help me make the coffee later. Go on, I don’t know the first thing about engines. Michael’s been dying to show it off to someone who understands what he’s talking about.’ Suki reached across and kissed Bryant. ‘Isn’t that right, darling?’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure—’ Chris broke off as Carla tugged at his sleeve, and the three of them trooped out after Bryant, leaving Suki at the table. They crossed the kitchen space and Bryant threw open a door that let in a wave of cold air and a view of a wide, concrete-floored garage. The BMW stood gleaming in the light from overhead neon tubes. They filed through the door and stood around the hood end of the vehicle while Mike Bryant reached in and popped the locks. Then he set aside his wineglass on a workbench and lifted up the hood. Service lights sprang up in the engine space and the Omega Injection was revealed in all its matt grey glory.

  ‘Ain’t that a beautiful sight?’ Bryant burlesqued, some mutilated sub-Simeon Sands idea of an American accent.

  ‘Very nice.’ Carla walked around the engine, peering down into the clearance on either side. She pressed down hard with one hand on the engine block and nodded to herself. She looked up at Bryant. ‘Cantilevered support?’

  ‘Got it in one.’

  ‘Looks like they’ve mounted the weight a long way back this time.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you probably remember the Gammas.’ Bryant came to lean into the engine beside her, leaving Chris feeling suddenly unreasonably isolated. ‘Never drove one myself, but that was the big complaint, wasn’t it? All that nose armour and the engine too.’

  Carla grunted agreement, still groping around down the side of the engine. ‘Yep. Handled like a pig. This one doesn’t, I imagine.’

  Bryant grinned. ‘You want to take it for a spin, Carla? Put her through it?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’ Carla was clearly taken aback. She was saved an answer by Suki, who appeared in the door with her hostess smile and a silver foil packet in one hand.