‘No. But.’ Mike gestured helplessly. ‘How the fuck did you. I mean, Quain. Didn’t he see you coming, the day you joined HM? How did you even get into HM, come to that?’
‘I changed my name. My father wasn’t called Faulkner, it was my mother’s maiden name. She died of thorn fever, when I was seventeen. I took her name, sold everything else we owned and cut myself a new identity. Got a gangwit datarat in Plaistow to fix my records. Probably did a shit job, the money I gave him, but it was what I could afford. I doubt it would have stood up to close scrutiny, but when you’re from the zones who the fuck cares. You’re just cheap, faceless labour. And by the time I got to Hammett McColl, I had five years of new identity behind me. I’d made a lot of money for Ross Mobile and LS Euro, I could drive. That’s all the HM recruiters cared about.’
‘Sloppy. Was that their own people?’
‘No, contracted out. Some cut-rate two-room outfit off Ludgate Circus. They tendered for HM on straight cost. No duel requirement. Lowest offer wins.’
Mike shook his head. ‘Fucking amateurs.’
‘Yeah, but you know what. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Quain wouldn’t have recognised my father’s name. Some guy he ruined twenty years ago, one name out of hundreds he probably didn’t even know back when it happened, let alone two decades on. What are the chances?’
‘Yeah, figures.’ Mike puffed out his cheeks. ‘Jesus, what a story. Does Carla know all this?’
‘No. She knows I grew up in the zones, she knows my parents are dead, but we don’t talk about it. I met her after Quain. I’d already buried it all. She used to ask, back when we started seeing each other. Think it might even have been some of the attraction for her, the zone connection. I told her I wasn’t interested in looking back.’ He stared down the receding perspectives of the memory. ‘Snapped her head off whenever she asked. She stopped asking after a while.’
‘Yeah, it’s true. You never talk about it, do you.’
Chris shrugged. ‘Nor do you. Nor do any of us. We’re all too flat-out fucking busy trying to make it big right now to talk about the past. You’d think none of us had parents, the way we live.’
‘Hey, I’ve got parents. I see them pretty often.’
‘Good for you.’
Mike shook his head again, a little blearily this time. ‘Still can’t believe it, man. It’s like a fucking movie. All the way back from the zones to take down Edward Quain.’
Chris finished his drink. ‘Yeah, well. Some of us have got what it takes, some of us haven’t. Remember.’
‘Ah, shit, Chris, I didn’t mean you. I’m not saying everyone in the zones deserves to be there, you know that. If I’d known, you know, about your parents and stuff, I wouldn’t have said—‘
‘No? You must have known my background, Mike. You said yourself, that first day I met you in the washroom, Hewitt was batting my details about before I arrived. And it’s not a secret where I grew up. It’s on the resume.’
‘What?’ Mike squinted at him. ‘Well, yeah, but I assumed. I don’t know, accidental son of some slumming exec and a bargirl, a dancer or something.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Fuck, I don’t mean. I mean, it doesn’t mean anything, but I just assumed. It happens, you know. Seen it happen. Come close a couple of times, myself. I just figured, something like that, that’s how you got your break at Ross Mobile, maybe a leg up into LS as well.’
‘No.’ Chris smiled tightly. ‘I got Ross through an old friend of my father. Everything else I clawed down myself. Don’t worry about it, Mike. You were right. Some of us have got what it takes, and what it takes is hate. I had enough hate to paint a towerblock. I grew up hating. It was like fuel. Like food. You don’t need much of anything else when you’ve got hate.’
‘Look—‘
‘And then one morning I woke up and I’d killed Edward Quain, and the world was still here. I had a job, I had a life, well, a lifestyle anyway. Hammett McColl had just promoted me. I had money, a lot of money, for the first time in my life.’ He tipped his empty glass horizontal. Looked into it and laughed. ‘It seemed a little ungracious not to go on living.’
The two of them sat there in silence for a while. Finally, Mike shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat.
‘Chris.’ He hesitated. ‘You, uh, you want to stay at my place tonight?’
‘No. Thanks, no. I’ve got to be alone for a while, Mike. There’s stuff I need to sort out. I’ll get a hotel. But thanks. And.’ He waved vaguely. ‘Thanks for, you know, saving my life and everything.’
Bryant grinned.
‘Shit, I always owed you for Mitsue Jones. Just call it even.’
The hotel would not hold him.
He poured himself a whisky - another fucking whisky - and stared at the phone as if it were poisonous. His mobile was still switched off. No one outside of Mike knew where he was. He’d have to pick up and dial.
He picked up the TV remote instead, and zapped through the channels. Endless, mindless, brightly-coloured shit and an upbeat report just in from Cambodia. He recognised the editing.
He shut down the TV’s painted window and went out on the balcony. Warm night air gusted over his face. A well-lit Kensington street angled past seven floors below. A couple walked along it, arm in arm. Laughter floated up. A cab idled by in the opposite direction, cruising for custom.
He retreated to the bedroom. He lay face up on the bed and stared at the perfectly moulded plaster ceiling. Tension itched down his limbs.
He prowled the suite and gnawed a thumbnail down to the quick.
He lit the laptop and tried to carry out simple database tasks.
He hurled the whisky glass across the room.
He grabbed wallet, Nemex, jacket, and he left.
She was waiting for him.
She must have heard the cab in the street outside. The door opened as he pressed the bell. She stood in the clothes she’d worn at Break Point, black leggings and a loose grey running top, face scrubbed clean of make-up, hair gathered back. They stood looking at each other, an arm’s reach apart.
‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ he started, but she shook her head.
She reached for him as he crossed the threshold. It felt like falling. He was close enough to smell freshly drunk coffee on her breath, behind that the swirl of female scent mingled with orange blossom. The kiss was an open-mouthed collision that squeezed tears into his eyes, a mutual assault of tongues, of teeth tugging on lips and hands on clothing below. She was laughing excitedly into his open mouth as they clinched and his hands felt impossibly full of her body, unable to grasp the substance of it with enough force. He kicked the door shut and found a breast beneath the sports top, unsupported and surgically perfect - the porn segment sprang through his mind like sweat — hard under soft, a swath of stomach sprung with taut muscle, the hard length of one thigh and the lift of arse cheek above it. He could not settle on any of it.
Her leg thrust between his and ground upward against his prick. He was already hard. She bit him on the neck. Hands dragged him down the hall, past the kitchen and bathroom and left into an untidy bedroom. Cluttered bedside unit, a teetering pile of books and a glass of stale water. A pale blue quilt crumpled across an unmade bed. He drank it in and the new intimacy was a tiny itching in the pit of his stomach, an opening to an inner sanctum, built into his prior knowledge of the rest of the house. She let him go with a sudden motion as if he was hot, sank to the bed in front of him and peeled off her leggings in two single stripping motions. Fingers touched the mound beneath the white cotton thong she wore underneath, rubbing the groove up and down. She grinned up at him as she did it. Her free hand scrabbled across to the bedside table, ripped open a drawer and reached inside.