Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (18 page)

Whatever support he had received was enough for Max to persist.

'If you ask me, we should have given the IRA a few more bloody noses.'

'Yeah, because they really eased off after Gibraltar,' Parlabane responded. Max ignored this. 'No, instead we spend a hundred and fifty million pounds of British taxpayers' money on an inquiry into Bloody Sunday, putting on public trial the very service men and women who
defend
our country. What about an inquiry into Omagh, into Enniskillen, into the
thousands
of deaths dealt out by the IRA since?'

'Oh for Christ's sake, I've heard enough,' It was Vale who'd spoken, his intervention commanding the room with its severity in conjunction with surprise, given that he had up until that point listened to the debate politely but silently. Parlabane was more taken aback than any of them. He'd known the guy for more than a decade, and this was about the closest he'd heard him come to raising his voice. Vale was the kind of person who took pleasure in his own political inscrutability, amused by the assumptions and extrapolations of those foolish enough to attempt to get inside his head. It had been no surprise that he'd sat wordlessly throughout this bout of dead-horse flogging, or that he'd be wearing a wry smile while the intelligence services were being both lionised and burnt in effigy. He wasn't a man easily offended, and Parlabane had little idea what would do the trick, not being ever quite sure what Vale took seriously or what he held dear. Well, he knew now.

'First of all, we don't need an inquiry into what terrorists did because the whole point of terrorism is that it's unaccountable. Our security forces must be supremely accountable, because whatever they do, they do in the name of this country and it's a name some of us want to remain proud of.'

'Look, mate,' Max said, pitching at conciliatory but inevitably hitting patronising. 'Those are high ideals, and we ought to be proud of them, but it's easy for you to say, when you've spent all your working life in the civil service pushing pens. I was in the TA, I know a lot of soldiers, and it's not as easy as you think to practise what you're preaching. Those guys are the ones putting themselves in the firing line to defend us, so I think we should cut them some slack.'

'Yes, those servicemen are there, as you say, to defend our country, and
when
they are defending our country, they are defending a way of life in which 101

soldiers don't gun down civilians. You say we should cut our soldiers some slack. In my experience, people are happy to cut soldiers and policemen plenty of slack, see them dish out some "instant justice" - as long as it's people they disagree with on the receiving end.

'We've all got that nasty little streak inside us, that secret desire to just silence the person saying what we don't want to hear. And that nasty streak embraces force because when force is on your side, reason, logic and morality don't have to be. You're talking about fighting fire with fire. Well, who here hasn't fantasised about putting a bullet in the head of some scumbag the world could do without: Bin Laden, Le Pen, Nick Griffin?'

'Alan Titchmarsh,' suggested Rory.

'Quite,' Vale continued. 'You tell yourself the world would be a better place without them, but would it? Sure the world wouldn't miss another bloodthirsty extremist or racist hate monger, but the moment they were gone, the world would then be a place where we kill people because we don't like what they're thinking. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm proud of my country because my country isn't in that world, despite what those on the left might fear and those on the right might wish.'

Vale sat back in his chair and took up his malt, signalling the end of his contribution and, from the reaction, the end of the debate. There was silence, apart from the sound of other glasses being lifted to mouth or refilled from bottles. Suddenly everybody was thirsty and nobody had anything to say. It was like school dinners after the headmaster had just told everybody off.

'So,' Parlabane said, interrupting the awkward hush. 'Who's up for charades?'

102

Troubled Sleep

Rory was lying awake, despite the quantities of food and alcohol that would normally have seen off consciousness within moments of curling up in the customary coma position. Tonight, though, there was no getting comfortable, so he was on his back, trying to empty his head of its unwelcome and noisily rancorous guests. As always, the best way was to think about more pleasant, relaxing and appropriately nocturnal things, but it was like trying to watch a DVD while those same guests were still hanging round the living room. It was impossible to retreat into sexual fantasy because even his fantasies needed a minimum of plausibility to hang their titillation on, and right then it felt like there couldn't be a woman in the world who didn't despise him. When he was in his early teens, and his schoolmates were giving thanks to Sanyo for their Betamax pirate-hardcore delivery system, his VCR enthusiasm had been for capturing nude scenes from late-night movies - but only those featuring actresses he already knew from other roles. He remembered sitting up into the wee hours, through endless ad breaks and false promises, for the possible bounty of glimpsing hitherto unseen breasts beneath a well-ken't face. And when he found it, it was gold, with soft-focus footage of the erstwhile Bionic Woman or Lois Lane taking their tops off far more of a thrill than the full-on stuff his mates were whacking off to. To Rory, it was like the difference between seeing a stripper in a nightclub and seeing the girl next door take her bra off at the window. There had to be a relationship, if you like, a point of reference, otherwise it was just another pretty face (pretty tits, pretty bum, double penetration and multiple cum shots if that was your thang; the point was, no depth of depravity was a match for extant familiarity). Was it a fetish? Unquestionably, but that wasn't all it was. Was it perverse?

Only in accordance with the eternal rule that 'what turns
me
on is erotic but what turns
you
on is perverse'. Was it sad, pathetic and embarrassing? Well, so far he hadn't met any girls he imagined would be impressed if he told them all about it, so it was definitely well down the list of Interesting Things About Me to reel off over first date dinner. And was it on the wane? Hell, no. He'd once thought this voyeuristic streak, his 2-D love, as he came to think of it in his youth, would end or at least dissipate when he started getting some 103

first-hand experience. That maybe once you'd got your paws on your first pair of naked funbags, you'd be less inclined to strain the limits of your eyesight as you tried to detect the outline of aureoles through blouse and bra beneath that bank teller's namebadge.
Wrong!
That getting fully naked and doing everything you'd ever heard of, read about, imagined and fantasised would dim the allure of at least the next tight skirt or lycra-restrained embonpoint that bobbed into view the next morning.
Wrong!
In retrospect, he'd deduced that his na''ive theory had been comparable to thinking you'd never want to watch another football match just because you'd got a game for the local Sunday amateurs. It just didn't work that way.

At least Finlay had a viable excuse: he was a
bona fide
computer geek who didn't get out much and very seldom got laid. It was expected of him that he'd be thus retarded in the sexual area of his emotional development. Rory with his success, his money, his social sphere and his sex life, lacked any comparable mitigation, beyond the enduring personal philosophy that selfindulgent id-stroking was its own justification. And he knew what people would think, what assumptions they'd be likely to make, with the words 'sexist', 'misogynist' and 'wanker' featuring large and liberally; but they were dead wrong. Real life, real psychology didn't work like the flowchart on some right-on feminazi student pamphlet. He wasn't sexist in his dealings with women; he'd appointed more of them than he had men, and not because of any preference about what he'd rather be looking at from behind his desk. Jeez, you only had to get an eyeful of Theresa Graham of a Monday morning to nail that one. He wasn't some feminist's voodoo-doll fantasy boss who gave the job to the girl with the biggest tits or the shortest skirt; not unless she was also the candidate who could do the job best. He'd hired them in every instance because he recognised and required what they could bring to the table. Rory respected women in each and every way even the feminazis could wish for. He just couldn't help what the sight of them did to his brain.

He could be introduced to a Nobel-prize-winning female scientist who had eradicated an endemic disease in between senior government ministerial posts and publishing works of acclaimed poetry. He would cower before her intellect, be humbled by her achievements, be shamed by his comparative insignificance. But none of that would prevent him trying to picture what she looked like under her clothes, or cause him to avert his gaze if she turned just the right way to afford a glimpse between those second and third buttons. This didn't diminish her standing in his eyes, did not detract from his awe, and did not mean he was reducing her to a sexual object. It was just that he couldn't pretend she wasn't - as well as all those other things - a sexual object as identified somewhere deep and primal inside every straight male. 104

He knew some guys were better at filtering it out, numbing it or censoring it, but suspected also that he was more sensitive to this primal instinct than most. It was as though he was a kind of sexual empath, born with some carnal higher awareness, a more acute and sensitive means of tuning into the signals. If it was a crime, it was its own punishment, because there was no rest from it throughout the waking day. And truth be told, while it had at times threatened to drive him crazy, professionally it had served him well. Sex sells. Yeah. Everybody knew that. Everybody knew petrol was combustible, too, but that didn't mean anybody could design a Porsche. The Helen Lindstrom story had been bad enough, but that business after dinner. . . It had just been so ugly. What was that about? All that nonsense was over, long over. He didn't even vote any more, and if he did it wouldn't be for the Tories. But as soon as that Eighties vault was wedged open, the anger and hatred had come spilling out and it was like he was back there again; like they were
all
back there again, for there'd been no quarter given by the lefties either.

When he tried to picture women, he thought about Liz and her ambush; Emily and Kathy and their looks of disgust. It was hopeless. So, inevitably, something else started playing - once again - on the internal widescreen plasma. He was back once more to another Friday night: two weeks ago now but still vividly fresh and undiminished in its recurrence. He'd been driving home, towards the end of the rush hour, the traffic lightening but the roads still slow because of the rain. It was absolutely tanking down, that way where the drops seemed to be bouncing back up when they hit the pavement. It was dark, really dark, earlier than it was due, and not earlier as in hours, but months. This was December dark, headlights and streetlights swallowed by the rain like they may as well have been torch flames. He was grateful for the comfort of his BMW, but it was no pleasure to be driving. Pedestrians trotted alongside, more holding up newspapers and plastic bags than brollies, testament to the suddenness of the downpour. They were only visible for any length of time when he was stationary at red signals, otherwise they just appeared in blinks and flashes, picked out by another car's lights as it turned, or briefly silhouetted against windows. It felt uneasy that they should be so difficult to see, one of those moments when he became uncomfortably aware he was in control of a potential killing machine.

It was a great night to be inside, whether that was at home in front of the home cinema set-up or in a pub with a real fire going and a crowd of familiar faces determined to be there till the last. That was what he'd been deciding when he saw them. He pulled up, about ten or twelve cars back from the lights, little chance of getting through in just one change, which was why he put the machine in neutral and stuck on the handbrake. They were three 105

or four yards away on the pavement, in front of a garden gate: teenagers going by their dress, a guy and a girl, kissing under a hopelessly insufficient umbrella, which she was holding with one hand, her other locked around the guy's waist. The rain was running off the brolly on to one of his shoulders, water pouring off both their coats on to their shins, necessitating a jeansover-the-radiator scenario whenever they both got home. Well, one of them presumably was home, just about, but wasn't in a hurry to get inside, where parents and other complications dwelt.

They didn't care. Not about the rain, not about the cold, not about the hundred commuters passing by in their insulated metal boxes. If this was where that kiss was happening, then that was all that mattered about the location and the prevailing conditions.

His first thought had been, how miserable. Not the night and the weather, but the restrictions of being that age: not having the freedoms you needed, your own place, independence, privacy, the money that bought all of the above. It had been years since he'd been caught in the rain longer than it took to get from the car to the door, or in the worst instance to hail a passing Hackney. There was no need to be out there in the rain, never mind that being the only place he could kiss a girl.

Then, as the lights changed and he had to move on, he realised it had been even longer since there'd been a girl he wanted to kiss so much that he'd settle for doing it outside on a freezing night in the pouring rain in front of a hundred passing commuters. That's when he knew it wasn't miserable at all. That's when he knew they were happier than he was, because in that moment they had everything they wanted in the world.

Parlabane held his breath as he stood against the wall, balanced on the balls of his feet, watching his door very slowly swing open. A shaft of light fell across the foot of the double bed, picking out a tangle of sheets and the trousers he couldn't be arsed hanging up before he crashed out. The intruder stepped silently and delicately through the door, across the shaft and swiftly into shadow, approaching the head of the bed.