The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘So how long did it last?’

  ‘Well,’ Bryant turned to face him, getting comfortable. ‘In the initial stages, about eight months. I’m telling you, Chris, she was hot. We both were. She was doing this in-depth study of Conflict Investment, for a series and then, you know, that book, New Asphalt Warriors. So we saw a lot of each other without anyone wondering. She used to do these interviews and then we’d get off camera and fuck like rabbits wherever there was a lockable door. I used to get hard-ons just talking to her on camera. Even after the series was wrapped, we were fucking two or three times a week in hotels around the city, or the car. She really liked that, the car. Then it sort of cooled off. Once a week, sometimes not even that. And Suki came back on line, so there was that as competition. I’d missed Suki, you know, and that whole pin-up buzz thing was fading anyway. There was about six months when Liz and I didn’t see each other at all.’ Another grin. ‘Then she made, like, this amazing comeback. She asked me out to the studio one night, after everyone had gone home. I wasn’t going to go at first, but I was curious, you know. Man, I’m glad I went.’ Bryant leaned closer, still grinning. ‘We fucked on the interview set and she filmed the whole thing with one of those big studio cameras. Then she mailed me the fucking disc at work. You believe that? I mean, I didn’t know at the time she was doing it, otherwise I’d never have agreed. Then suddenly there’s this Studio Ten disc on my desk with Souvenir written on it.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Bryant nodded. ‘I thought at first she was going to send it to Suki. Fact, I thought she already had when I got my copy. But when I rang her she just asked how I’d liked it and if I wanted a repeat performance. So the last six months we’ve been repeat-performing a couple of times a month and it’s still as hot as ever.’

  ‘And Suki?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. You know, the weird thing is, you’d think I’d go back to Suki too tired to perform but it’s not like that. I’m more buzzed when I get home from a session with Liz than I would be if I hadn’t had sex all week. It’s that fucking disc, man. It makes you feel like a fucking porn star.’

  ‘So what’s the problem now?’

  ‘Ah, nothing really. We had this big row the last time we met up to fuck.’ Bryant’s gaze floated off into the corners of the bar. The carnal shine faded from his face. He seemed disinclined to go on.

  ‘What about?’

  Bryant sighed. ‘Ah, shit. Chris, do you think I was right to shoot those gangwit motherfuckers that night at the Falkland?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Chris heard himself and stopped. ‘I mean—’

  ‘See that’s what I think.’

  ‘They were—’

  ‘Fucking going to trash us, right?’

  Chris gestured. ‘Uh, yeah.’

  ‘Right, that’s what I said. It’s what Suki says, it’s what the fucking corporate police enquiry says. So, what’s the big deal?’

  ‘She doesn’t buy it?’

  Bryant glanced at him. ‘What’s to buy? I told her the truth.’

  ‘What about the machetes?’

  ‘Machetes? Wrecking bars? What’s the fucking difference. I don’t even remember which thing I told her.’ Bryant swallowed more whisky and waved his glass laterally. ‘Didn’t matter. She said I was a fucking animal. Get that. I, I was an animal. Never mind the fuckers with the crowbars. I was a fucking animal. You understand that?’

  Chris crowded Carla’s voice out of his head with a pull at his own drink. ‘She wasn’t there, man.’

  ‘That’s right, she wasn’t.’ Bryant stared broodingly at the bottles behind the bar. ‘Fucking reporters.’

  Chris snapped his fingers and the liveried barman arrived as if on rails. Bryant didn’t look at him. Chris indicated their glasses.

  ‘Fill us up.’

  The liquor drizzled down, catching the light.

  ‘Got work to do tomorrow,’ said Bryant gloomily. ‘Makin’s right, you’ll see. They’ll want twenty-five fucking drafts of that contract before it’s put to bed. Bentick from the DTC, I know that motherfucker and he wants every ‘‘i’’ double-dotted, just in case his precious minister runs into embarrassing questions on civilian casualties or some such shit.’

  ‘Worry about it tomorrow.’ Chris raised his glass. ‘Here. Small wars.’

  ‘Yeah, small wars.’

  Crystal chimed between them. Bryant knocked back the whisky in one and signalled the barman again. He watched the glass fill up.

  ‘I’m an animal,’ he muttered with bitter disbelief. ‘I’m a fucking animal.’

  They kicked it in the head about an hour later, when it became clear that no amount of drinking was going to extract Bryant from his sudden puddle of gloom. Chris half-carried his friend to the lift and along the corridor to his room, where he propped him against the wall while he fumbled with keys. Once inside the room, he hauled Mike most of the way onto the pristine expanse of king-size bed and set about unlacing his shoes. Bryant began to snore. Chris took off the shoes and shovelled Mike’s unshod feet up onto the bed with the rest of him.

  As Chris bent over him to remove his tie, the other man stirred.

  ‘Liz?’ he queried blearily.

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Chris, loosening the knot on his tie.

  ‘Oh.’ Bryant heaved his head up and made an attempt to focus. ‘Chris. Don’t even think about it, man. Don’t even think about it.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Chris finished unknotting the tie and stripped it from around Bryant’s neck with a single hard tug.

  ‘That’s right.’ Bryant’s head fell back on the bed again and his eyes rolled sluggishly closed. ‘You’re a good guy, Chris. That’s you. You’re a. Fucking good guy.’

  He drifted off to sleep again. Chris left him there snoring and let himself quietly out of the room. He slipped into his own room like a thief and went to his hotel bed, where he lay awake a while, masturbating to the thought of Liz Linshaw’s tanned thighs and cleavage.

  It was very quiet inside the limo now. The torrential rain of the storm had died back to a persistent drizzle that smeared the windows but no longer drummed on the roof. The limo’s Rolls Royce engine made slightly less noise than the rush of its tyres on the wet asphalt outside. The loudest sound in the rear cabin was the chirrup of Louise Hewitt’s laptop as it processed data.

  Maps and graphs came and went, summoned and dismissed by the deft ripple of Hewitt’s hands across the deck. Projections for the Cambodian conflict, altered minutely as new potential elements were factored in. Crop failures, what if ? Typhoon impact, what if ? Hong Kong federation cuts diplomatic ties, what if ? Bryant’s preliminary work was an inspired piece of modelling, but Hewitt believed in tracking her subordinates and pushing for potential weaknesses until they emerged. It was an exercise in basic security. As with any alloy, you didn’t know the material well until you knew what would break it.

  The car mobile purred up at her from where it was curled on the seat like a red eyed cat. She killed the phone’s video option and picked up the handset, eyes still fixed on the Hong Kong federation variant.

  ‘Yes?’

  A familiar voice crackled in her ear. She smiled.

  ‘On my way to Edinburgh, why?’

  Crackle crackle.

  ‘No, I didn’t think there was any point. I’ve got breakfast with a client in the Howard at eight and contracts to go over before that.’

  Crackle crackle SNAP. Hewitt’s smile broadened.

  ‘Oh, is that what you thought? Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I wouldn’t have come all the way up here just for that. Good enough to eat though you looked.’

  The phone crackled some more. Hewitt sighed and hoisted her gaze to the roof. Her voice became soothing.

  ‘Yes, media exposure’s a powerful thing. But I was sitting there, remember. I really wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.’

  The voice in her ear grew agitated and Hewitt’s good-natured exasperation hardened. She sat forward.
<
br />   ‘Alright, listen. You just let me worry about Faulkner. You leave him alone.’ The crackling stopped on a sharp interrogation mark.

  ‘Yes, I know. I was there, remember. It’s no big surprise, to be honest. Look, it’s just an angle.’

  Snap, crackle. Incredulous.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Snap, question.

  ‘Because that’s what they pay me for. I don’t have the details worked out yet, but it shouldn’t take much leverage.’

  Crackle, crackle, crackle.

  ‘Mike Bryant will do as he’s told. That’s the difference between them, and you need to remember that. Now, we’ve talked about this enough. I’ll be back in London day after tomorrow, we can meet and discuss it then.’

  Sullen crackle. Silence.

  Hewitt cradled the phone and grinned to herself in the quiet gloom.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘Seen enough?’

  Erik Nyquist got up and held the cracked remote closer to the screen. The red active light winked feebly a couple of times and the programme credits continued to scroll down, superimposed over an aerial view of Nakamura wreckage. Finally, Erik gave up on the failing remote and snapped on the blue standby screen manually. In the glow it cast, he turned back to face his daughter. Carla sat, glass in hand, and stared at the place where the images had been.

  ‘The hero of the hour,’ Erik grunted. ‘Jesus, the irony of that. Butcher a couple of fellow human beings to maximise neo-colonial profiteering half the globe away and you’re a goddamn hero.’

  ‘Dad,’ Carla said tiredly.

  ‘You heard her. This is a great moment for you, Chris. And your beloved husband sitting there grinning like a Mormon. I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t like it, Liz. Christ!’

  ‘He had no choice. The woman on the left was his boss, and from what I hear she already doesn’t like him. What was he supposed to do? If he stepped out of line the way you want, he’d probably lose his job.’

  ‘I know that.’ Erik went to the table that served him as an open-plan drinks cabinet and began to mix himself another vodka and orange. ‘Been there, bought the T-shirt. But sometimes you have to stand by the odd principle, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Carla snapped, surprising herself. ‘And where did that get you in the end, standing by your much-vaunted principles?’

  ‘Well, let’s see.’ Erik grinned down into the glass he was pouring. Having provoked her, he was now cheerfully backing down again. It was one of his favourite drinking games. ‘I was arrested, held without trial under the Corporate Communications Act, shunned by my so-called friends and colleagues, blacklisted by every news editor in the country and refused a credit rating. I lost my job, my home and any hopes for the future. Nothing that a young man of Chris’s calibre couldn’t take in his stride. The trouble is, he just lacks the vision to make it happen.’

  Carla smiled, despite herself.

  ‘Liked that one, did you?’ Erik lifted his glass in her direction. ‘For once, it’s something I just made up. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’ She barely sipped at her own neat vodka. It had taken her the whole news report to get three fingers down the drink, and now it was warm.

  ‘Dad, why do you stay here? Why don’t you go back to Tromsö?’

  ‘And meet your mother in the high street every day? No thanks. I’m living with enough guilt as it is.’

  ‘She isn’t there most of the time and you know it.’

  ‘Okay, I’d just see her every time she comes back from some particularly successful book launch or lecture tour.’ Erik shook his head. ‘I don’t think my ego’s up to that. Besides, after all these years, who would I know?’

  ‘Alright, you could move to Oslo. Write a column back there.’

  ‘Carla, I already do.’ Erik gestured at the battered computer in the corner. ‘See that. It’s got a wire in the back that goes all the way to Norway. Marvellous what they can do with technology these days.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  ‘Carla.’ The mockery drained from his tone. ‘What am I going to change, moving back there now? It isn’t as if the costs are prohibitive here. Even with the zone tax on top, email is so cheap you can’t realistically cost it on the number of articles I mail out in a month. And even if you could, even if I was walking my work to the editors in Oslo to save money, I’d spend what I saved on winter socks.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, it’s not that cold.’

  ‘I think you’re forgetting.’

  ‘Dad.’ Her voice grew very gentle. ‘We were there in January.’

  ‘Oh.’ She heard, in that single gruff syllable, how much it hurt him. He made a point of looking her in the face. ‘Visiting your mother?’

  She shook her head. ‘There wasn’t time, and anyway, I think she was in New Zealand. Chris took me to the Winter Wheels show in Stockholm, and we went across to see Sognefjord on the way back. He’d never been there.’

  ‘And it wasn’t cold? Come on, Carla. I may not be able to afford flights on a whim, but it hasn’t been so long.’

  ‘Alright, it was cold. Yes, it was cold. But, Dad, it was so—’ She gave up and gestured around her. ‘Dad, look at this place.’

  ‘Yeah, I know I haven’t tidied up for a while, but—’

  ‘You know what I mean!’

  Erik looked at her in silence for a while. Then he went to the window and tugged back one of the ragged curtains. Outside, something had been set on fire and it painted leaping shadows on the ceiling above where he stood. Shouts came through the thin glass pane. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘I know what you mean. You mean this. Urban decay, as only the British know how to do it. And here I am, fifty-seven years old and stuck in the middle of it.’

  She avoided his eyes.

  ‘It’s just so civilised back there, Dad. There’s nobody sleeping on the streets—’

  ‘Just as well, they’d freeze to death.’

  She ignored him. ‘—nobody dying because they can’t afford medical attention, no old people too poor to afford heating and too scared to go out after dark. Dad, there are no gang zones, no armoured police trucks, there’s no exclusion like there is here.’

  ‘It sounds as if you should be talking to Chris, not me.’ Erik knocked back a large portion of his drink in one. It was an angry gesture, and his voice carried the ragged echo of the emotion. ‘Maybe you can persuade him to move up there if you like it so much. Though it’s hard to see what you’d both do for a living without anybody to kill on the roads.’

  She flinched.

  He saw it and reined himself in.

  ‘Carla—’

  She looked at her lap. Said nothing. He sighed.

  ‘Carla, I’m sorry. I. I didn’t mean to say that.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘No.’ He set down his drink and came to crouch in front of her. ‘No, I didn’t, Carla. I know you’re just doing what you have to get by. We all are. Even Chris. I know that. But can’t you see? Any argument for me going back to Norway is an equally valid argument for you. How do you think I feel, looking at you, stuck in the middle of this?’

  The thought stopped her like a slap. Her hands tightened on his. ‘Dad—’ She swallowed and started again. ‘Dad, that’s not it, is it? You’re not staying because of me?’

  He chuckled and lifted her chin with one hand.

  ‘Staying because of you? Staying to protect you, with all the money and influence I’ve amassed? Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘Then tell me why.’

  ‘Why.’ He stood up and for a moment she thought she was in for another lecture. Instead, he went to stand at the window again, staring out. The flames were stronger now and they stained his face with orange. ‘Do you remember Monica Hansen?’

  ‘Your photographer?’

  Erik smiled. ‘I’m not sure she’d like the possessive pronoun, but yes, Monica the photographer. She’s back in Oslo now, taking photos of furniture for some catalogue. S
he’s bored, Carla. The money’s okay, but she’s bored to screaming.’

  ‘Better bored than sleeping in the streets.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, Carla. I’m not sleeping in the streets. And, no, listen to me a moment, think about it. You said yourself there’s no exclusion there like there is here. So what would I write about. Back in the comfort and safety of my own Scandinavian social system? No, Carla. This is the front line - this is where I can make a difference.’

  ‘No one wants you to make a difference, Dad.’ She got up from the chair, suddenly angry again, and faced him. She jerked back the other curtain and glared angrily down at the fire below. ‘Look at that.’

  The source of the flames, she saw as she gestured, was an overturned armchair. Other items lay scattered around, unrecognisable in the darkness and as yet untorched. A shattered window directly above suggested an origin. Someone had been in one of the first-floor flats, throwing down what it contained. Now figures in baggy, hooded sportswear stood gathered around the fire, making Carla think of menacing negative-image Disney dwarves out of some nightmare where it all definitely did not end happily ever after.

  ‘Look at it,’ she hissed again. ‘You think those people care what you write? You think most of them can even read? You think people like that care about you making a difference?’

  ‘Don’t be so quick to judge, Carla. Like Benito says, don’t make 3D judgments of what you can only see on your TV screen.’

  ‘Oh, for—’ Her expletives evaporated in an exasperation too old and deep for words. She rapped hard on the glass. ‘This isn’t a TV, Dad. It’s a fucking window, and you live here. You tell me what we’re looking at, community night barbecue maybe?’

  Erik sighed. ‘No, it’s probably gang retribution for something. Someone they thought informed on them, someone who spoke out of turn. They did the same thing to Mrs McKenny last summer because she wouldn’t let her son run balloons for them. Of course, then he had to, just to buy some new furniture. You can’t fault the gangwits on psychology.’ He turned away from the window, and suddenly, in the motion, she saw how tired he had become. The vision only fanned the flames of her anger again. Up from the pit of her stomach, a licking, gusting sickness.