‘I see.’ Liz Linshaw leaned forward. ‘This is a great moment for you, isn’t it Chris. The hero of the hour. And coming so soon after your transfer. You must be over the moon.’
‘Uh, yes.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s my job.’
‘A job you enjoy?’
Mindful of Hewitt’s gaze, Chris manufactured a smile. ‘I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t like it, Liz.’
‘Of course.’ Linshaw seemed to have got what she wanted. She turned her attention to Hewitt. ‘Now, Louise, you made all this happen. How do you feel about the way your team performed?’
Chris switched off again as Hewitt began to mouth the viewer-consumable platitudes.
‘What was that all about?’
He asked Bryant the question later, as they sat in front of whisky tumblers in the hotel bar of the Tebbit Centre. Outside, wind-driven rain lashed impotently at big glass panels that gave a view out onto drenched and darkened hills. Makin had cried off early, pleading tomorrow’s crack-of-dawn start. It was pretty obvious he was choked about Chris’s guest spot on the Liz Linshaw evening special. Standard practice in post-tender reports was to interview only the team leader and the divisional head, but Bryant had been crowing about Chris’s performance from the moment they cut him out of the wreckage of his BMW. Makin had gone conspicuously unmentioned.
‘That?’ Bryant gave him a wry grin. ‘Well, let’s just say I’m not flavour of the month with Ms Linshaw at the moment.’
Chris frowned. His nerves were still a little shot from the duel and he found his mind tended to skitter when he tried to concentrate. At the same time, as if compensating for its poor performance in other areas, it spat chunks of memory at him with near total recall. Now, as if listening to it on tape, he heard the words Liz Linshaw had used over the radio that first morning as he drove in to the new job at Shorn: Still nothing on the no-name call out for Mike Bryant at Shorn Associates, don’t know where you’ve got to, Mike, but if you can hear me we’re anxious to hear from you. He strained to remember Bryant and Linshaw’s body language the evening of the quarterly review party, but his recall was too alcohol-damaged to trust.
‘Were you two, ah…?’
Bryant grinned and sank half his whisky. ‘If, by that delicate ah, you mean fucking, then yes. Yes, we were fucking.’
Chris sat still, remembering Suki.
As if reading his mind, Bryant said, ‘It was no big deal. Scratching an itch, you know. She gets off on drivers the way some guys do on Italian holoporn. It was back when Suki was, you know, off sex. Just after Ariana was born.’ He shrugged. ‘Like I said, no big deal.’
Chris tried to think of an appropriate question to fill the space. In the background, something insipid lilted from the bar’s sound system.
‘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.’