Chris grinned. 'Well, he'd know about same-s.e.x friendships, I sup pose. From a real in-depth point of view.'

'Don't be a w.a.n.ker, Chris.'

'Hey, come on. It was a joke.' Chris hung onto his smile, but there was a tiny feeling of slippage somewhere inside him. There had been a time, he was sure, when Carla could read him better than this. 'You know I've got nothing against Mel or Jess. A whole stack of the people I worked with at HM were gay. Jesus Carla, before I met you I was sharing a flat with two gay guys.'

'Yeah, and you used to make jokes about them.'

'I--' But the oozing sense of unfairness was already setting in, like cold mud, chilling his mood and tugging his smile away. 'Carla, they used to make jokes about me too. They called me the household het, for f.u.c.k's sake. It was all part of the banter. I'm not h.o.m.ophobic. You know that.'Carla looked at her food, then up at him.

'Yeah, I know.' She mustered a small smile. 'I'm sorry. I'm just tired.'

'Who f.u.c.king isn't?' Chris took an overly large pull at his margarita and said nothing more for a while.

Fajitas are not a dish to be eaten in resentful silence, and neither of them did much more than pick at the food. W-hen the waiter stopped by 67he sensed the mood radiating out from the little table and took the cooling dishes away without comment.

'Any dessert?' he asked carefully when he returned.

Carla shook her head, mute. Chris drew a deep breath.

'No thanks.' He made a sudden decision. 'But you can bring me another margarita. In fact, make it another pitcher.'

'I don't want any more, Chris,' said Carla sharply.

He looked at her with a blank expression he knew would hurt her.

'Who asked you? Pitcher's for me.' He nodded at the waiter, who withdrew with obvious relief. Carla put on her disdainful face.

'You're going to get drunk?'

'Well, looking at the logistics, I would think so. Yes.'

'I didn't come here to get drunk.'

'I didn't ask you to.'

'Chris . . .'

He waited, going nowhere near the opening the forlorn fade in her voice had left him. Her shoulders slumped.

'I'm going home,' she said.

'Okay. Want them to call you a cab?'

'I'll walk,' she said coldly. 'It isn't far.'

'Fine.' He buried himself in the margarita gla.s.s as she got up. She hesitated towards him for just a second, barely leaning, and then something stiffened in her carriage and she walked away from the table.

Chris very carefully did not look round to watch her leave and when she stalked past the window of the restaurant, he busied himself with his drink again. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she did not look in at him.

He worried for a while about her walking home alone, but then stopped himself, recognising the feeling for guilt over the fight. Hawk spur Green was a hamlet, made ludicrously prosperous by the influx of driver-cla.s.s professionals and their families. It had crime levels appropriate to a playgroup, nothing beyond occasional vandalism and even that mostly graffiti tagging. Plus Carla could look after herself and the house was barely fifteen minutes away. He was just manufac turing excuses to go after her.f.u.c.k that.

The pitcher came.

He drank it.

68TEN.

South-west zone. The Brundtland.

The decaying concrete bones of the estate squatted mostly in darkness.

A handful of unsmashed lights cast sporadic stains of sodium orange on walkways and stairstacks. Isolated lit windows stamped the darkened bulk of buildings in black and yellow code. Child-sized shadows scurried away from Carla's headlights as she parked the Landrover.

Once outside the protection of the vehicle, it was worse. She could feel professional eyes watching her set the anti-theft systems, professional ears listening to the quick, escalating whine of the contact stunner charging from the battery. She walked as rapidly as she could without showing fear, away from the vehicle and into the lobby.

Miraculously, the lifts appeared to be working.

She had stabbed at the b.u.t.ton more to vent frustration than anything else, and was almost alarmed when the lights above the battered metal doors blinked and the downward arrow illuminated. She blinked a little herself, wiped angrily at a tear that had leaked out from under one eyelid, and waited for the lift to arrive. Her right hand was wrapped tightly around the stungun Chris had bought for her and there was a can of Mace in her left. The lobby at her back was coldly lit by grating protected halogen bulbs and starkly empty, but the wired gla.s.s portals she'd come through were cracked and pushed in at a height suggesting kicks, and the damage looked recent.

f.u.c.k YOU ZEK-TIV c.u.n.tS said a wall to her left in daubed red lettering. Pointless rage; no self-respecting executive was going to be seen dead in the Brundtland.

The lift arrived, but when the doors opened the stench of urine was so thick she gagged. She deliberated for a moment, then compressed her lips and headed for the dimly-lit stairwell to her right. Holding the Mace, hand extended, and keeping the stungun hidden behind her back, she climbed the five double flights of stairs and marched down the corridor with steps intended to convey to anyone who might hear her that she was at home in this stinking pit.

She stopped at number fifty-seven and hammered on the door with the bottom of the Mace can. There was the sound of slow, slurred movement inside and a light sprang up under the door.

69"Who's there?'

'Dad, it's Carla.' She tried to keep her voice even, partly out of pride, but more out of a desire not to alarm. Only a year ago, her father had told her, one of the local edge gangs on the estate had forced an elderly woman to open her door by holding a gun to her daughter's head on the doorstep. Once in, they'd ransacked the flat, raped the daughter while her aged mother was forced to watch and then beaten both women into unconsciousness. Apparently, they hadn't bothered to kill either of their victims. They knew there was no need. The police att.i.tude to the zones was containment, not law enforcement. Raids were infrequent and unrelated to actual crimes committed. The estate was gangwit-run.

Rape andburglary were not considered transgressions of gang law.

'Carla?' There was the snap of the lock being unfastened, the solid thunk as the security-bolt system she and Chris had paid to have installed was disengaged, and then the door was thrown wide. Her father stood in the doorway, a pool cue hefted in his right hand.

'Carla, what are you doing here at this time of night?' He switched to Norwegian. 'And where's Chris? You didn't come up here alone, did you? For Christ's sake, Carla.'

'h.e.l.lo, Dad,' she managed.

He ushered her inside, slammed the door shut and engaged the bolt system again. Only then did he relinquish his grip on the cue, dropping the makeshift weapon into an umbrella stand by the door and opening his arms to hug her.

'It's good to see you, Carla. Even if it is half past midnight. What the f.u.c.k happened? Oh, don't tell me.' He nodded as the repressed tears began to leak out and she trembled against him. 'Not another fight? Is he downstairs?'

She shook her head against his shoulder.

'Good. I won't have to be diplomatic then.' Erik Nyquist stepped back from his daughter a little and took hold of her chin. 'Why don't you come and have a whisky coffee with me and we can b.i.t.c.h about him in his absence.'

She choked a laugh. He echoed her with a gentle smile.

'That's better,' he said.

So they sat in front of an antique electric fire in the threadbare living room with mugs of cheap coffee and cheaper whisky steaming in their fists and Erik stared into the reddish glow of the heating element whilehis daughter talked. The tears were under control now, and Carla's voice was firm, an a.n.a.lytical tool sifting through the settled sediment, first of the last few hours, then of the last few weeks, finally of the last few years.

TO'It's just,' she said. 'I'm sure we didn't always used to fight this much.

Did we? You must remember.'

'Well, you never drove across the cordoned zones in the middle of the night alone because you'd been fighting,' Erik admitted. 'That's a first, at least. But if I'm honest? I think you've been having rows with Chris about as long as you've known him to any appreciable depth.

Certainly as long as you've been married. I couldn't say if you have more now than you used to, but that's not really the point.'

Carla looked up, surprised. 'It isn't?'

'No, it isn't. Carla, marriage is an artificial state. Invented by the patriarchy to ensure that fathers know who their children are. It's been going on for thousands of years but that doesn't make it right. Human beings were never designed to live like that.'

'I think I've read this somewhere before, Dad.'

'The fact that it was written by your mother,' said Erik severely, 'does not invalidate the argument. We are tribal, not matrimonial.'

'Yeah, yeah. Let's see if I remember how it went. The basic human social unit would have been a matriarchal tribe; a female, child-rearing and knowledge-keeping centre with a protective outer sh.e.l.l of warrior males. Uh, how does it go, children held in common by the tribe, reproduction only understood by the females and--'

'The point is, Carla, exclusive pairing is unnatural. Two people were never meant to be so exclusively much to each other.'

'That's a pretty f.u.c.king poor excuse,' she said, then bit her lip.

Erik gave her a reproachful look. 'That isn't what I meant. Look, even in the recent past you had extended families to soak up some of the strain. Now we live in isolated couples or nuclear families, and either both partners are working so hard they never see each other, or they're not working and the stress of living on the poverty line tears them apart.'

'That's a simplification, Dad.'

'Is it?' Erik cradled his mug in both hands and looked back into the red glow from the bar fire. 'Look at where you live, Carla. A village neither of you knew the name of three years ago. No friends living close, no family, not even a workplace social life unless you're prepared to drive for an hour and a half at the end of the evening. M1 these things put a huge strain on you both, and rows are the result. The natural result. It wouldn't be natural not to fight with someone you share your whole sleeping and waking life with. It's healthy, it provides .release, andif you don't hold grudges it shouldn't damage the relationship.'

Carla shivered despite the fire.

'This is damaging us,' she said.

Erik sighed.

71.

,L----'You know what your mother said to me before she went back to r .. ,.

I romso?

'f.u.c.k you and that English b.i.t.c.h?' She regretted it as soon as the words left her mouth, surprised that the anger was still there on tap nearly two decades later. But Erik only smiled wryly and if there was pain behind that, it didn't show. She reached across to him with one hand. 'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be.' The smile flickered but held. 'You're right, she did say that. More than once. But she also said that it was high time, that she wasn't really surprised because we didn't have fun together any more.

She said that. We have no fun any more, Erik.'

'Oh, come on!'

'No, she was right, Carla.' He looked across at her and this time there was pain in his face. 'Your mother was usually right about these things. I was always too busy being political and angry to spot the emotional truths. She hit the nail on the head. We didn't have fun any more. We hadn't had any real fun for years. That's why I ended up with Karen in the first place. She was fun, and that was something your mother and I'd stopped trying to do years ago.'

'Chris and I still have fun,' Carla said quickly.

Erik Nyquist looked at his daughter and sighed again. 'Then you hold onto him,' he said. 'Because if that's true, if it's really true, then what you've got is worth any amount of fights.'

Carla shot him a surprised glance, caught by the sudden gust of emotion in his voice.

'I thought you didn't like Chris.'

Erik chuckled. 'I don't,' he said. 'What's that got to do with it? I'm not sleeping with him.'

She smiled wanly and went back to watching the fire.

'I don't know, Dad. It's just.'

He waited while she a.s.sembled her feelings into a coherent shape.

'Just since he went to work at Shorn.' She shook her head wearily. 'It doesn't make any sense, Dad. He's making more money than he ever has, the hours aren't so different to what he used to clock at HammettMcColl. f.u.c.k it, we ought to be happy. We've got all the props for it.

Why are we falling out more now?'

'Shorn a.s.sociates. And is he still in Emerging Markets?'

She shook her head. 'Conflict Investment.'

'Conflict Investment.' Erik smacked his lips, then got up and went to the bookcase set against the wall opposite the fire. He dragged a finger across the tightly packed spines of the books on a lower shelf, found what he was looking for and tugged the volume out. Flicking through the pages, he came back to the fire and handed it to her.

72'Read that,' he said. 'That page.

She looked at the book, turned it to see the t.i.tle. 'The Sociali'rt Legacy. Miguel Benito. Dad, I'm not in the mood. This isn't about politics.'

'Everything is about politics, Carla. Politics is everything. Everything in human society anyway. Just read the pa.s.sage in highlighter.'

She sighed and set down her coffee mug at her feet. Clearing her throat, she picked up the line with one finger and read aloud. '"Revol utionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware"?'

'Yes. That one.'

'"Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware that in order to bring about a convulsive political change".'

'Actually, I meant, read it to yourself.'

She ignored him, ploughing on with the edge of singsong emerging in her voice. '"In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensit the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of cla.s.s conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. In populist recog " Dad is there a point somewhere in all this bulls.h.i.t?'