'So tell me about this party.'

Mike leaned back on the tiled wall. 'Remember Troy?'

'From the Falkland. Sure.' They'd run into the Jamaican a couple more times in clubs on the other side of the wire, but in Chris's mind he was irrevocably linked with the events of that night.

'Well. Turns out his eldest son just got a scholarship to the Thatcher Inst.i.tute. Fast-track international finance and economics programme, guaranteed placement with a major consulting firm at the end of it. So he's throwing a party at his place. You are cordially invited.'

'So it is in the f.u.c.king zones.'

'What? Nah, Troy doesn't live in the zones. He moved out years ago, got a place on the edge of Dulwich.'

'Which edge?'

129'Look, it's a better area than Julie Pinion picked, alright. You don't want to come, I'll tell him you're working late. On a Friday.'

'He invited me?'

'Yeah, like I said. Cordially. Bring Faulkner, he said.'

'Nice of him.'

'Yeah, you got to come. Troy's parties are f.u.c.king cool. Lots of powders and potions, big sound systems. Really good mix of people too. Suits, media, DJs, dealers.' Bryant's face fell abruptly. 's.h.i.t, you know what. I bet f.u.c.king Liz'll be there.'

130SEVENTEEN.

'Look, I really don't think it's going to be your kind of thing.'

'Why not?' Carla folded her arms and leaned back against the door of the freezer. 'Too high-cla.s.s for me? Am I going to show you up?'

'That isn't fair. I've asked you to come to every Shorn function we've had this year.'

'Yes. Very dutiful of you.'

'And that's really not f.u.c.king fair. I wanted you there, every time.

Including all the times you said no, I wanted you to be there with me.'

Chris lowered his voice. 'I was proud of you. I wanted to show people that.'

'You mean you wanted to show off.'

'Ah,' Chris made a helpless gesture. 'f.u.c.k you, Carla. I put myself on the line for you every single--'

'If you're going to talk to me like that...' She was already moving, across the kitchen and away from him. 'I'm going to bed. Goodnight.'

'Fine. f.u.c.k off, then.'

He stood, fists knotted, surrounded by the twinned debris of another evening's separate dining, while she walked out on him. Again. Her voice drifted back down the stairs.

'I've got better things to do tomorrow night, anyway.'

'Fine, thenf.u.c.k off.' He bawled the last two words after her, dismayed at the sudden detonation of fury in his guts.

She didn't answer.

For a while, he crashed plates and cutlery about, loading the dishwasher with a lack of care or interest that he knew could sometimes drag her back into the kitchen to take over. He was kidding himself, and he knew it. This was a new level of hostility they'd reached.

He selected a clean tumbler and went to look for the whisky. Poured the gla.s.s half full while he stared into the dead blue glare of the TV.

The end t.i.tl.es of whatever mindless terrorists-threaten-civilisation flick they had just spun was already gone, already wiped off the screen as cleanly as the details of plot and action from his mind. Rage evaporating into remorse and a creeping sense of desolation.A vicious clarity caught up with him, just before he knocked back the drink.

131.

* iHe was glad of the row, he knew abruptly. Glad of the out it had given him.

He was relieved she wouldn't be coming with him.

Relieved, because-- He took the knowledge by the throat and drowned it.

Troy Morris's home might not have been in the cordoned zones, but Chris could see a zone checkpoint just down the street from his front door, and the quality of housefronts plunged rapidly on the way there.

The street was restored Victorian, Troy's place and the surrounding facades carefully painted, windows clean. After that it started to get rough - at the checkpoint end, paint was a flecked rumour on most frontages and window gla.s.s had become strictly optional. Plastic coverings flapped in a couple of places.

The last three houses on both sides of the street had been demolished to provide open ground on either side of the checkpoint. The rubble had been cleared, and defoliant kept the weeds down. A hundred metres beyond the barriers, the closest structures on the other side were riot fire blackened and crumbling. A shabby concrete block rose ten storeys high behind the sh.e.l.ls, dirty grey facades stained darker with leakage from substandard guttering. Chris spotted someone watching him from a window near the top.

It was a perfect summer evening, still fully light after eight o'clock and the day's heat was leaching slowly out of the air without the rain that had been threatening all afternoon. Junk salsa thumped out of Troy's opened sash windows and when Bryant rang the doorbell, the door seemed to blow open on a gust of ba.s.sline.

'Mike! Good to see you, man.' Troy was kitted out in a Jamaica Test '47 shirt with Moses McKenzie's grinning victorious face poking out behind a holoshot fast-bowled cricket ball that seemed to come right off the fabric at them. In contrast, Troy's face seemed unusually sombre.

'Hey, Faulkner. You came. That's good.'

Chris murmured something, but Troy had already gone back to Bryant.

'Mike, listen. Need to talk to you later, man.'

'Sure. What's the deal?'Troy shook his head. 'Later's better.'

'Whatever you need.' Bryant craned his neck to look down the hall.

'Any chance of a spliff?. '

'Yeah, somewhere I guess. That blonde TV face you like, she's here, she's rolling.'

'Right.'

They went down the hall, into the heart of the party.

132Chris had never been much of a fiesta machine. Growing up smart and strangely accented in a zone school had ensured he was routinely bullied nearly every day of his life and didn't get invited to many parties.

Later, he learned to fight. Later still he grew into looks that a lot of the cooler female kids liked. Life got easier, but the damage was already done. He remained withdrawn and watchful around other people, found it hard to relax and harder to have fun if he was surrounded. A reputation for moody cool, approved and codified by male peers and female fans alike, nailed the doors shut on him. By the time he hacked his way into the corporate world, he had exactly the demeanour required for long-term survival. The edgy, peer-thrown parties and corporate functions, rancid with rivalry and display politics, were a comfortable fit. He turned up because he had to, faked his way through the necessary rituals with polished skill, never let his guard down and hated every minute.

Just like the parties of his youth.

Accordingly, he was mildly shocked to discover, a couple of hours later, the extent to which he was enjoying himself at Troy Morris's gathering.

He'd ended up, as he often did at house parties, in the kitchen, mildly buzzed on a couple of tequila slammers and a single line of very good cocaine, arguing South American politics with Troy's son James and a glossy Spanish fashion model called Patricia, who they'd discovered - wow, you're kidding me - had appeared in the same issue of GQ as Chris, though wearing a lot fewer clothes. Not, Chris couldn't help noticing, that she was wearing a lot of clothes at the moment either. There were about a dozen of these exotic creatures sprinkled around the party like s.e.x-interest models at a motorshow. They drifted elegantly from room to room, drawn occasionally into the orbits of the expensively dressed men they appeared to have come with, spoke English in a variety of alluring non-English accents and, without exception danced superlatively well to the junk salsa blasting out of the speakers in the lounge.

To judge by Patricia and her end of the South America conversation, they had all been required to check their brains in at the door. Or had maybe just p.a.w.ned them for the wisps of designer clothing they were fractionally wrapped in.

'For me, all these bad things they say about Hernan Echevarria, I think they exaggerate. You know, I have met his son in Miami and he is a really quite nice guy. He really loves his father.'

James, perhaps thinking of his imminent entry into the Thatcher Inst.i.tute and the possible eavesdroppers on this conversation, said nothing. But he was young and unschooled as yet, and his face said it all.

'It isn't really a question of his son,' said Chris, making an effort.

'The point is that excessive use of force by a regime, any regime, can 133make investors nervous. If they think the government is stepping up repressive measures too much, they start to wonder how secure the regime is, and what'll happen to their money if it comes tumbling down.

It's like scaffolding around an apartment block - it's not the sort of thing that makes you keen to buy in that block, is it?'

Patricia blinked. 'Oh, I would never buy a flat in a block,' she a.s.sured him. 'No garden, and you would have to share the swimming pool. I couldn't stand that.'

Chris blinked as well. There was a short silence.

'Actually, the right kind of repression is usually a pretty good booster for investor confidence. I mean, look at Guatemala.'

It was the dealer of the high-quality powdered goods. He'd been leaning into the conversation on and off for the last hour, each time making remarkably astute observations about the political and economic salients of Latin America. Chris couldn't make up his mind if this was a result of close a.s.sociation on the dealer's part with some of his corporate clients or just exemplary background knowledge of his supply chain. He thought it'd be unwise to ask.

'Guatemala's a different game,' he said.

'How so?' asked the dealer. 'From what I hear their indices are pretty close to Echevarria's, pro rata. About the same balance of payments.

Same military budget. Same structural adjustment.'

'But not the same governance durability. The last twenty-five years, you've had over a dozen different regimes, a dozen regime shifts, most of them with violence. The US military has been in and out of there like it was a urinal. Violent change is the norm. The investors expect it there. That's why they get such a huge return. And, sure, violent repression is part of the picture, but it's successful violent repression.

You're right. Which does inspire investment.'

James cleared his throat. 'But not in the North Andean Monitored?'

'No, Echevarria's been in power a long time. Tight grip on the military, he's one of them himself. Investors expect stability, because that's what he's given them for decades. That's why shooting protesters on the steps of major universities isn't smart.'

'Oh, but they were marquistas,' broke in Patricia. 'He had to do that to protect the public.'

'Thirty-eight dead, over a hundred injured,' said Chris. 'Almost all of them students, and more than half from middle-cla.s.s families.

Even a couple of visiting scholars from j.a.pan. That's very bad for business.

'So are you handling the NAME account for Shorn these days?'It was Liz Linshaw, suddenly propped against the worktop opposite, a spliff c.o.c.ked in one upheld hand beside her face, spare arm folded 134across her body to support the other elbow. He looked across at her and felt her presence turn on a tiny tap in his guts.

He'd seen her a couple of times already, once in pa.s.sing on the stairs up to the bathroom, once across the cleared s.p.a.ce and dancers in the lounge where she was weaving back and forth alone to the junk salsa beat. She was decked out in cla.s.sic designer oil-stained Mao jeans, a deep red T-shirt and a black silk jacket. Her riotous blonde hair was gathered up and pinned at one side with an artful lack of care, left elsewhere to tumble down past her shoulder and partly mask that side of her face. There was a tigerish vitality in it all, he saw now, an animation that took the constructed charms of Patricia's kind and made them plastic and spray.

Now she tilted the hair away from her eyes and grinned at him.

He found himself grinning back. 'You know I can't answer that, Liz.'

'Just you sounded so informed.'

'I'm informed about a lot of things. Let's talk about Mars.'

It was that season's Dex and Seth ultra-cool quote, immortalised in a series of sketches featuring Seth's fawning, craven TV interviewer and Dex's high-powered American corporate shark. Whenever the interview steered into politically iffy waters, Dex started to make angry American noises that didn't actually contain any words and Seth's interviewer invariably reacted by cringing and suggesting let's talk about Mars.

With that line, you knew that across Europe, hundreds of thousands of watchers were reeling away from their illegally tuned screens, clutching their sides and weeping with laughter. Apart from being as far removed as you could humanly get from current affairs on Earth, news from Mars was famously dull. After nearly two decades of manned missions and exploration, the rotating teams of scientists were doing nothing anyone cared remotely about. Sure, people might be able to live out there in a century. Big f.u.c.king deal. Meanwhile, here are some more red rocks. More Red Rocks was another big Dex and Seth number, the two comedians done up in pressure suits and geeky masks, bouncing in faked low g and singing the lyrics to tunes ripped off from junk-salsa giants like Javi Reyes and Inez Zequina.

'Let's not talk about Mars,' said Liz Linshaw firmly, and everyone in the kitchen broke up with laughter. Amidst it, she leaned across the narrow s.p.a.ce between them, and offered the spliff to Chris.

Her eyes; he suddenly noticed, were grey-green.

The dealer sniffed the air with professional interest. 'That the new Moroccan stuff?.' he wanted to know. 'Hammersmith Hammer?'Liz spared him a glance. 'No. Thai direct.'

'Anyone I know?'

'I seriously doubt it.'

135Chris drew it down, coughed a little. Let it up again almost immediately.

He wasn't a big fan of the stuff. Aside from a couple of parties at Mel's place with Carla, he hadn't smoked in years.

Liz Linshaw was watching him.

'Very nice,' he wheezed, and tried to hand the spliff back. She pushed it away, and used the motion to lean in close. Close enough that tendrils of her hair brushed his face.

'I'd really like to talk to you somewhere,' she said.

'Fair enough.' He found a stupid grin crawling onto his mouth and twitched it away. 'Garden?'

'I'll meet you out there.' She withdrew, nodded casually at James and the powder man, and wandered out of the kitchen, leaving Chris hold- "

ing the spliff. Patricia watched her go with enough venom in her gaze to poison a city water supply.

'Who is that woman?' she asked.

'Friend,' said Chris, and drifted off in Liz Linshaw's wake.

Either Troy's garden was larger than he'd expected or the Thai gra.s.s was already beginning to kick in. It was full dark by now, but Troy had thoughtfully provided half a dozen garden torches, driven at intervals into the long tongue of well-kept lawn. The garden was bordered by a mix of trees and shrubs, amidst which the dwarf palms seemed to be doing the best, and at the far end a gnarled oak tree raised crooked limbs at the sky. From one lower branch someone had strung a simple wooden swing on blue plastic ropes that picked up the flickering light of the nearest torches and glowed. Liz Linshaw was seated there, one long leg drawn up to wedge her body back against one of the ropes, the other on the ground, idly stirring the swing in tiny arcs. There was a fresh spliff burning in her hand.

Chris hung from the moment, and felt something happen to him. It wasn't just the fact that he knew she was waiting for him. There was something in the air, something that caught in the luminous blue twistings of the swing ropes, in the casual elegance of the way she had folded her body like an origami sketch of s.e.xual appeal. The lawn was a carpet laid out under his feet, and the other people in the garden - he only registered them now - seemed to turn in unison and approve his pa.s.sage towards the tree.He grimaced and threw away the spliff. Made his way warily to her.

'Well,' she said.