Home for six hours’ sleep. Why the fuck did we move this far out?

But he knew the answer to that.

This place is no different to HM. Live at work, sleep at home, forget you ever had a relationship. Same shit, different logo.

Well, that’s where all the money comes from.

He let himself into the house as quietly as he could and found Carla in the lounge, watching a TV screen tuned to the soft blue light of an empty channel. Ice clicked in her glass as she lifted it to her lips.

‘You’re awake,’ he said, and then saw how far down the bottle she was. ‘You’re drunk.’

‘Isn’t that meant to be my line?’

‘Not tonight, it isn’t. I was wired to the fucking datadown until quarter to ten.’ He bent to kiss her. ‘Rough day?’

‘Not really. Same old shit.’

‘Yeah, done some of that myself.’ He sank into the chair beside her. She handed him the whisky glass just a fraction of a second before he reached out for it. ‘What you watching?’

‘Dex and Seth, ‘til the jamming got it.’

He grinned. ‘You’re going to get us arrested.’

‘Not in this postcode.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He glanced across at the phone deck. ‘Did we get any this morning?’

‘Any what?’

‘Any mail?’

‘Bills. Mortgage repayment went through.’

‘Already? They just took it.’

‘No, that was last month. We’re over the line on a couple of cards as well.’

Chris drank some of the peat-flavoured Islay whisky, tutting learnedly over the sacrilege of ice in a glass of single malt. Carla gave him a murderous look. He handed her back the glass and frowned at the TV screen. ‘How’d we manage that?

‘We spent the money, Chris.’

‘Well.’ He stretched his suited legs out in front of him and yawned again. ‘That’s what we earn it for, I guess. So what same old shit did you do today?’

‘Salvage. Some arms supply company just moved into premises out on the northern verge lost a dozen of their brand new Mercedes Ramjets to vandals. Whole lot written off.’

Chris sat up. ‘A dozen? What did they do, park them in the open?’

‘No. Someone dropped a couple of homemade shrapnel bombs through a vent into their executive garages. Boom! Corrosives and fast-moving metal in all directions. Mel got a contract to assess the damage and haul every write-off away gratis. Paid to clear it, and he gets to keep whatever salvage we can strip out of the wrecks. And here’s the good bit. Some of these Mercs are barely scratched. Mel’s still out celebrating. Says if the corporates are going to insist on this urban regeneration shit, we could have a lot more work like that. He must have put a good metre of NAME powder up his nose tonight.’

‘Shrapnel bombs, huh?’

‘Yeah, ingenious what kids can wire together out of scrap these days. I don’t know, maybe Mel even set them up to do it. Connections he’s got in the zones. Jackers, drugs. Gangwit stuff.’

‘Fuckers,’ said Chris vaguely.

‘Yeah, well.’ An edge crept into Carla’s voice. ‘Amazing what you’ll get up to when you’ve got nothing to lose. Nothing to do but stand at the razor wire and watch the wealth roll by.’

Chris sighed. ‘Carla, could we have this argument some other time, please? Because I haven’t rehearsed in a while.’

‘You got something else you want to do?’

‘Well, we could fuck by the light of the TV screen.’

‘We could,’ she agreed seriously. ‘Except that I always end up on top and I’ve still got carpet burns on my knees from the last time you had that bright idea. You want to fuck, you take me to a bed.’

‘Deal.’

After, as they lay like spoons in the disordered bed, Carla curled around his back and murmured into his ear.

‘By the way, I’m in love.’

‘Me too.’ He leaned back and rubbed the back of his head against her breasts. She shuddered at the touch of the close cropped hair and reached instinctively for his shrunken prick. He grinned and slapped her hand away.

‘Hoy, that’s your lot. Go to sleep, nympho.’

‘So! You just want to fuck me and leave me. Is that it?’

‘I’m,’ said Chris, already sliding headlong into sleep. ‘Not going anywhere.’

‘Just use me, and then when you’ve used me you go to sleep. Talk to me, you bastard.’

A grunt.

‘You haven’t even told me how it went today.’

Breathing. Carla propped herself up on one arm and prodded at the springy muscle in Chris’s stomach. ‘I’m serious. What’s Conflict Investment like?’

Chris took her arm, folded the offending finger around his own and tugged Carla back into the spoon configuration.

‘Conflict Investment is the way forward at a global level,’ he said.

‘Is that right?’

‘It’s what the Shorn datadown says.’

‘Oh, it must be true then.’

He smiled reflexively at the scorn in her voice and began to drift away again. Just before he slept, Carla thought she heard him speak again. She lifted her head.

‘What?’

He didn’t respond, and she realised he was muttering in his sleep. Carla leaned over him, straining to catch something. She gave up after a couple of minutes. The only sense she succeeded in straining out of the soup of mumbling was a single, repeated word.

Checkout

It took a long time to find sleep for herself.

‘Conflict Investment is the way forward!’

Applause rose, and clattered at the glass roofing like the wings of pigeons startled into flight. Around the lecture theatre, men and women came to their feet, hands pumping together. The entire CI contingent of Shorn Associates were gathered in the room. The youngest, Chris noticed, were the most fervent. Faces gashed open with enthusiasm, teeth and eyes gleaming in the late afternoon sun from roof and picture window. They looked ready to go on applauding ‘til their hands bled. Sown in amongst this crop of pure conviction, older colleagues clapped to a slower, more measured rhythm and nodded approval, leaning their heads together to make comments under the din of the applause. Louise Hewitt paused and leaned on the lectern, waiting for the noise to ebb.

Behind his hand, Chris yawned cavernously.

‘Yes, yes,’ Hewitt made damping motions. The room settled. ‘We’ve heard it called risky, we’ve heard it called impractical and we’ve heard it called immoral. In short, we’ve heard the same carping voices that free-market economics has had to drag with it like a ball and chain from its very inception. But we have learnt to ignore those voices. We have learnt, and we have gone on learning, piling lesson upon lesson, vision upon vision, success upon success. And what every success has taught us, and continues to teach us, again and again, is a very simple truth. Who has the finance.’ A dramatic pause, one slim black clad arm holding a clenched fist aloft. ‘Has the power.’

Chris stifled another yawn.

‘Human beings have been fighting wars as long as history recalls. It is in our nature, it is in our genes. In the last half of the last century the peacemakers, the governments of this world, did not end war. They simply managed it, and they managed it badly. They poured money, without thought of return, into conflicts and guerrilla armies abroad, and then into tortuous peace processes that more often than not left the situation no better. They were partisan, dogmatic and inefficient. Billions wasted in poorly assessed wars that no sane investor would have looked at twice. Huge, unwieldy national armies and clumsy international alliances; in short a huge public-sector drain on our economic systems. Hundreds of thousands of young men killed in parts of the world they could not even pronounce properly. Decisions based on political dogma and doctrine alone. Well, this model is no more.’

Hewitt paused again. This time there was a charged quiet that carried with it the foretaste of applause, the same way a thick heat carries with it the knowledge of the storm to come. In the closing moments of the address, Hewitt’s voice had sunk close to normal conversational tones. Her delivery slowed and grew almost musing.