‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
They left the curving street and swung left past decayed low-rise housing and steel-shuttered frontages. The usual graffiti leered from the walls, incoherent tribal rage and abstract flashing that looked like stretched purple and white skulls. Carla stared ahead, tight-lipped. Chris felt his post-fight mellowness charring at the edges.
‘Hey, perhaps you’d rather he’d beaten her to death while we all sat there and listened to it. Good training for my future in the ombudsmen. Observe, take notes and never, never fucking intervene in anything.’
No response.
‘Your father lives next door to that every fucking day of his life, Carla. And he does nothing. Worse than nothing. He just shakes his fucking head and writes his agonised social commentary and he feeds it to people who’ll never know the realities of the situations he describes, and they all shake their heads and do nothing. And next door, a thug goes on beating his wife to pulp.’
‘My father’s a man in his sixties. Did you see the size of that piece of shit?’
‘Yeah. That’s why I shot him.’
‘That’s no solution!’
‘I don’t know - it seemed to slow him down.’
‘And what about when he recovers, Chris? When he’s back on his feet and twice as angry as he ever was.’
‘You’re saying I should have killed him?’
‘This isn’t fucking funny!’
Chris twisted round to face her. ‘No, you’re right Carla, it isn’t. It’s sick. You’re trying to get me, out of some twisted sense of moral outrage, to quit my job at Shorn and go work for men like Vasvik. And you saw how concerned he was back there. What a moral stand the fucking ombudsmen are prepared to take in the face of injustice.’
‘He wasn’t there for that, Chris.’
‘Neither was I, Carla. But I did something about it. Just like I’m going to do something in the NAME. Jesus, you think you can go through this life with your pristine ideals, taking notes and trusting some fuckwit UN judge to make everyone play nice. You think—‘
The Landrover leaned abruptly on its suspension. The road swung away in the high beams, replaced by the cross-hatching of an empty parking area. An abandoned supermarket loomed up ahead, facades smashed in and boarded up in about equal measures. There seemed to be a white tubular metal reindeer riveted to the roof, face turned blankly to greet the shoppers in their cars. Vague, tangled debris that had once presumably been a sleigh trailed from the animal’s rear and spilled down the roof as far as the sagging gutters. For one bizarre moment, the image reversed for Chris and he saw an amorphous tentacled creature dragging the reindeer down to its death.
Carla braked them to a halt in the middle of the car park.
For a moment, they both sat staring out at the mall front. Then she turned to look at him.
‘What’s happened to you, Chris?’ she whispered.
‘Oh, Christ, Carla—‘
‘I.’ She gestured convulsively. ‘I don’t. Recognise you any more. I don’t know who you are any more. Who the fuck are you, Chris?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘No, I mean it. You’re angry all the time, furious all the time, and now you carry that gun around with you. When you started at Shorn, you told me about the guns, and you laughed about it. Do you remember that? You made fun of it. You made fun of the whole place, just like you used to at HM. Now you barely laugh at anything. I don’t know how to talk to you any more, I’m scared you’re going to just snap and start yelling at me.’
‘Keep on like this,’ he said grimly, ‘and guess what, I’ll probably snap and start yelling at you. And no doubt it’ll be my fucking fault again.’
She flinched.
‘You want to know who I am, Carla?’ He was leaning across the Landrover towards her, in her face. ‘You really want to know? I’m your fucking meal ticket. Just like I always have been. Need new clothes? Need tickets to Norway? Need a handout for Daddy? Need to move out of the city and live somewhere nicer? Hey, that’s okay. Chris has got a good job, he’ll pay for it all. He doesn’t ask much, just keep the car clean and the odd blow job. It’s a fucking bargain, girl!’
The words seemed to do something coming out. He felt tearing, somewhere indefinable. He felt dizzy, suddenly weak in the numb quiet that swallowed up what he’d said. He propped himself back away from her and sat waiting, not sure what for.
The silence hummed.
‘Get out,’ she said.
She hadn’t raised her voice. She didn’t look at him. She hit the central locking console and his door cracked open.
‘You’d better be sure about—‘
‘I warned you before, Chris. You called me a whore once. You don’t get to do it twice. Get out.’
He looked out at the deserted parking area, the darkness beyond the Landrover’s lights. He smiled thinly.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not. Been coming to this for long enough.’
He shouldered the door fully open and jumped down. The night air was warm and comfortable, edged with a slight breeze. It was easy enough to forget where you were. He checked he still had the Nemex in its holster, his wallet in the jacket pocket, still thick with cash.
‘See you then, Carla.’
Her head jerked round suddenly. He met her eyes, saw what was in them and ignored it.
‘I’ll be at the office. Call me if the bills need paying, huh?’
‘Chris—‘
He slammed the door on it.
He strode away without looking back, aiming only to get beyond easy hailing distance. Behind him, he heard the Landrover put in gear and moving. He wondered briefly if she’d come after him at kerb-crawl speed across the car park, and what, in that ridiculous scenario, he would do. Then the high beams washed once over him and fled left, away across the white boxed acreage of the parking area. The engine lifted through the gears as she picked up speed.
He felt a single stab of worry, that she might not be safe getting home on her own. He grimaced and slammed a door on that as well.
Then she was gone. He turned, finally, to look, and was in time to catch the tail lights of the Landrover disappearing amidst the low-rise huddle of housing on the other side of the car park. A few moments later the engine noise faded into the vehicle-free stillness of night in the zones.
He stood for a while, trying to get his bearings, geographical and emotional, but it was all utterly unfamiliar. There was nothing recognisable on the skyline in any direction. The supermarket faced him with its wrecked frontages, and he felt a sudden insane desire to lever loose some of the boarding, use the butt of the Nemex to do it, and slip inside, looking for—
He shivered. The dream marched through his head in neon-lit pulses.
sudden warm rain of blood
falling
He shook his head, hard. Turned his back on the facade. Then he picked an angle across the car park at random and started walking.
Up on the roof, the tube metal reindeer watched him go through eyes empty of anything except the cool evening wind.
Saturday night, Sunday morning. The cordoned zones.
He’d expected trouble, had even, with some of the same twisted joy that had driven his actions at the Brundtland, been looking forward to it. The Nemex was a grab away beneath his jacket. His hands were Shotokan-toughened and itchy with the desire to do damage. Worst-case scenario, his mobile would get him a police escort out, should he really need it.
Rather coldly, he knew he’d have to be literally fighting for his life before he’d make that call.
Anything less, he’d never live it down.
He’d expected trouble, but there was nothing worthy of the name.
He walked for a while through anonymous, poorly-lit estates, emerging once or twice onto main thoroughfares to take his bearings from scarred and vandalised road signs and then plunging back in, heading what he estimated was east. TV light flickered and glowed in windows, game-show noise escaped through the cheap glazing. Occasionally figures moved within. Outside, he saw children perched on walls in the gloom, sharing cigarettes, two-litre plastic bottles and crudely homemade solvent pipes. The first set he ran across spotted the clothes and came jeering towards him. He drew the Nemex and met their eyes, and they backed off, muttering. He kept the gun where it could be seen after that, and the other groups just watched him pass with bleak calculation. Whispered invective slithered in his wake.