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.
Erik appeared not to sense it coming. He was freshening his drink again, working on an ironic grin to match it. ‘Of course, it could just be kids having fun. Random stuff. A lot of those first-floor flats have been empty for longer than I’ve been here. They just break in and—‘
He shrugged and drank.
‘And throw the stuff out the window!’ Suddenly she was yelling at him, really yelling. ‘And set fire to it! For fun! Jesus fucking Christ, Dad, will you listen to yourself. You think this is normal? Are you fucked in the head?’
The flashback caught like magnesium ribbon behind her eyes. Eleven years old again, and screaming at her father as he tried to explain what he had done and why she had to choose. It burned out as fast, afterimage inked onto her retina and the returning dimness of the room. She looked up quickly, caught the expression on Erik’s face, and knew he was remembering too.
‘Dad, I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
Too late.
He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to. Silence was settling around them in little black shreds, like scorched down from a pillow shot through at close range.
‘Dad—‘
She had thought for a moment he might yell back, but he didn’t. He only moved slightly, the way she sometimes saw Chris move when some piece of driving-induced injury caught him awkwardly. He moved and nodded to himself, as if her scream had been a swallow of rough but interesting whisky. She saw the way he was composing himself, and knew what was coming.
‘Normal?’ He said the word with careful pedantry that almost hid the returning gruffness in his voice. ‘Well I think, in the context of the slaughter we’ve just seen committed by the man you share your bed with—‘
‘Dad, please—‘
His voice trampled hers down. ‘I’d call it normal, yes. In fact I’d call it comparatively healthy. Burnt furniture you can always replace. Burnt flesh is a little harder.’
She breathed deliberately, loosening the tightness in her chest. ‘Listen, Dad, I’m not going to—‘
‘Of course, there is always the double standard to consider. As Mazeau would have put it, crime is a matter of degrees and the degree that really matters in society’s eyes is the extent to which the criminal has asserted himself beyond his designated social class and status—‘
‘Oh, bullshit, Dad!’
But the anger had deserted her, and all she could feel now was the edge of tears. She held onto her drink with clumsy, eleven-year-old hands, and watched as her father retreated, swathing himself in the gauze bandage of political rhetoric to hide the hurt.
‘The sons and daughters of the powerful buy and sell drugs amongst themselves with impunity, because all they have done is overstep slightly the licence their class entitles them to, misunderstood the lip service to legality that must be paid if the common herd are to continue grazing quietly. But let one child from the Brundtland enter their fairy kingdom and do the same, and watch the full bloody weight of the law fall on him, because he has presumed to behave as he is not entitled, presumed to not know his place. And that we cannot allow.’
‘Dad,’ she tried one more time, voice pitched low and urgent. ‘Please, Dad, look down there again. Never mind whose fault it is. Never mind the politics of it. Do you think anyone down there gives a flying fuck what you write? Do you think they give a fuck about anything any more?’
‘And my son-in-law does?’ He did not turn to the window, but his eyes were bright with the reflected fireglow. ‘Chris gives a flying fuck for the bodies he left on the motorway today? Or the bodies that they’ll be stacking in the streets of Phnom Penh a year from now? You know what I wish, Carla? I wish you’d married one of those edge dealers down there instead of that suited piece of shit you sleep with. The dealer, at least, I could make excuses for.’
‘That’s great, Dad.’ Finally, with the insult to Chris, she had the anger back. The strength to hurt. Her voice came out flat and cold. ‘You finally had the guts to say it to my face. The man who paid your rent and bought you a new kitchen last Christmas is a piece of shit. And I guess it’s clear what that makes me.’
She set down the drink on the coffee table and made for the door. She saw how he lifted one arm involuntarily towards her as she passed him, but she shut it out.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to pack my bag, Dad. And then, if I don’t get mugged and raped on the way out by one of your oppressed proletarians, I’m going home.’
‘I thought you didn’t want to be on your own in the house.’
He said it sulkily, but there was an undertone of fear and regret in his voice now. Dismayed, she realised that it was exactly what she wanted to hear. She could feel the relish bubbling up on hearing it.
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But I’d rather be alone, somewhere safe and sane, than with you in this shithole.’
She didn’t turn to see his face as she said it.
She didn’t need to.
Some damage, Chris had once told her, you don’t need to see. You know what you’ve done on impact. You can feel it. All you have to do after that is disengage.
She went to pack.
File #2: Account Adjustment
Chapter Fifteen
It finally hit Chris while he was waiting at the counter in Louie Louie’s for a double-spike cappuccino.
He’d sat up late the previous evening, going over the possibilities, and by the time he finally came to bed, Carla was already asleep. More and more, that was becoming the pattern. Work on the Cambodia contract was keeping him later and later at Shorn. He was forced to relegate his self-defence classes and gun practice to lunch-time, which stretched the day even longer. Carla was getting home anything from two to five hours ahead of him during the week and they had given up any pretence of dining together. He ate the remains of what she had cooked for herself earlier and talked desultorily to her about his day. Loading the dishwasher was usually the only shared activity of the evening; after that, one of them would retire upstairs to read, leaving the other marooned down in the living room with the entertainment deck.
There was an air of detached politeness to their lives now. They had sex at increasingly irregular intervals and argued less than they ever had before, because they rarely had the time or energy to talk about anything of significance. They kept meaning to take a long weekend together somewhere like New York or Madrid and use the time to recharge, but somehow it never came together. Either Carla forgot to book the Saturday off with Mel, or Chris was suddenly needed for a weekend meeting with the Cambodia team. Summer came on, pleasantly mellow, but the layer of superficiality continued to thicken over their day-to-day life and Chris found himself enjoying the new weather only in moments of isolation that he was later curiously unwilling to share with Carla.
He lay awake beside her, turning the game over in his mind until he finally fell asleep.
On the drive in that morning he’d tried again, but he’d been too sleepy from the night before. In the last few weeks his habitual driver’s caution had grown lax to a point that under other circumstances might have been called recklessness. As it was, the attitude made perfect sense. Following the Nakamura challenge, word had got out about the dangerous new player at the Shorn table and no one among the young no-name challengers was keen to go up against Chris Faulkner’s clearly identifiable Saab Custom. The vehicle’s spaced armouring and Mitsue Jones’s demise at its owner’s hands were equally thoroughly mythologised among the driving fraternity - detail upon invented detail until it was impossible even for Chris to separate the true facts from the thicket of embellishments that had sprung up around them. In the end, he gave up trying and started to live with the legend. In this, he was probably the last person on board. Amidst all the hype, one thing had been universally accepted in the City of London weeks ago - there had to be easier ways to carve a name for yourself than go up against Chris Faulkner.