Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (41 page)

At some point she dropped some Reebok pills. She counted them to check how many but kept losing count. Then she realised she didn’t know how many had been in the baggie in the first place.

The bar room is dark and hot as Hades. A smell of burning plastic bubbles in from somewhere to devil up the air. Music like food that’s too hot to eat. Wild hormones sweat in her blood. She’s blissed up and on heat, and she couldn’t stop herself if she even wanted. She keeps the backpack strung across her shoulders, holding the contraband by her body.

Best is, they take plastic. When she found this out she bought a Cadbury’s Occasions of coloured drinks with Terry’s card – from Absolut Red Bulls to Zombies. She randoms drinks about the crowd as people slap her back and mouth
awright
and thumb her up across the hoo-hah.

She and this one guy with Victorian whiskers get gigantic giggles over a thing that happened. She doesn’t know what it was.

Mutton chops, they’re called. Mutton chops.

Oh and oh, she almost forgot: Sam is here! – somewhere. She doesn’t know why he would be but she’s lost track of why she’s even here herself. He’s beautiful in skinny skinny trousers and white pleated shirt, unbuttoned with chaotic genius. He’s fit as the devil’s cock.

Klaxon! She catches sight of him by the bar, talking talking talking, pale down showing through his open buttons.

The beat fades. Stage lights swell. Someone shouts into a mic. Dani makes a hoot as the band reappears. This isn’t the karaoke where dead-eye salarymen do Elvis in the corner of a piss-smelling pub. It’s live. The four musicians cram the tiny stage like polar bears on an ice floe. Dani was squeezed up on that rostrum with them just before. Surely that did happen. A miscreant thought tells her she’ll regret the karaoke in the morning. She downs a blue liquid shot to Shake-and-Vac the thought away.

The big bear guitarist in clown-face has changed from the Slipknot jumpsuit into a music-hall checkered suit. He jacks the amp with a sky-rocket
rhooomp!
The black-haired girl in slinky leopard-skin rears the neck of her bass before the crowd and rocks a loop –
dodackadodo, dodackadodo.
Dani loves her surly mischief.

But where’s Sam gone? Dani’s put the two of them down for
Don
’
t Go Breaking My Heart
. She better find him. She shouts ‘. . ., . . ., . . .!’ at the goth girl beside her, who nods and shouts back ‘. . .! . . ., . . .!’

Dani burrows into the mosh.

Other stuff happens.

At one point she’s shouting abuse at a size minus-six girl in a silver dress who has something spilled down her. Someone grips Dani’s arm.

Next she’s laughing and introducing a bunch of people she doesn’t know.

‘This is Sam.’

Oh, he’s here again. He smiles. She wants to explain him to these people but it’s hard to get the words.

She stumbles. He holds her up with a hand flat on her stomach. It’s warm. Drums beat inside her, or on the stage. The MC in the red suit does intros. She puts her hand over Sam’s. He says to her, ‘. . .’ and starts to lead her away. She’s telling him, no, when she hears the PA.

‘
Next up, can they put the
“
cheeky
”
into Elton and Kiki? Please welcome the lovely TERRY THE FISH AND SAMMY C!
’

She’s pulling and pulling him to the stage. People clap and whoop and pat her back. She stumbles and there’s a problem with the vodka.

Then she’s puking in the gutter with a calm hand rotating between her shoulder blades. It’s like coming home.

¶riotbaby

PIGWATCH: Ten armoured vans parked on the Embankment west of Hungerford Bridge. Avoid.

Fifteen

‘No, I won’t be,’ said Bethany. ‘Not tonight, babe.’

‘Poor you,’ said the voice on the line.

Peter was sounding oddly faint. She searched the buttons on the hotel phone for something resembling a volume control. Pressed the most likely candidate a few times. Her husband’s voice came back a little stronger.

‘Are you holding up OK?’ he said. ‘The boys are crazy with worry. Though Jake’s feeling a little better.’

Christ. She’d forgotten all about Jake. The vomit.

‘That’s good. But listen—’

‘I’m trying to keep them away from the news but their friends keep Snapchatting.’

‘Petey, hold up. I need to talk to you about—’

‘The look on your face as those kids invaded the stage. I wished I’d been there to just put my arms around you.’

Bethany rubbed her sore eyes.

‘That does sound nice but I’m honestly fine. I wasn’t—’

‘On the TV it looked like you were being shoved or—’

‘No, but Peter listen. I need to tell you—’

‘– and for a while they were saying you’d been kidnapped or something? And then you were fine again? What the hell happened there?’

‘Darling, we need to talk.’

Her BlackBerry buzzed on the hotel-room desk. She switched the receiver to her other ear and reached to turn off the intrusive device.

‘We are talking,’ he said. ‘Aren’t we?’

‘No, come on. You know what I mean. You must have seen. It’s everywhere.’

Some weird property of the phone line: when they both fell silent, it seemed to drop off altogether. A silence like deep space. Then, after aeons had passed, the line clicked back at the sound of Peter’s voice, like the world being taken off pause.

‘This isn’t the time,’ he said.

She bent forward under the weight of his dry, flat tone, elbows to the desk – pressed a fist into her forehead. This? Yes, of course, this: what the hell had she expected?

‘I know,’ she said. ‘IknowIknowIknow. And I will come home, as soon as I can get away from all this, and we will talk properly then. But I needed for us to, I don’t know – acknowledge this thing?’

The line clicked silent again.

‘Peter? Are you still there?’

‘OK then,’ he said at last. ‘Here we are, acknowledging this thing. I appreciate you not making any effort to deny it, by the way.’

‘I can’t begin to tell you—’

‘The funny thing is I realise I’ve known for at least a couple of weeks. With hindsight.’

Why, now, did her gut choose to twist? Not at what she’d done, but at the thought she might have been suspected?

‘How do you mean?’ she said.

‘I don’t need to tell you it’s been hard. Since you were elected.’

‘We’ve talked about this. You know how much I appreciate –’

She stopped herself short. She’d mouthed these thanks a million times. Today her
appreciation
rang more than a little hollow.

‘It’s been worse since your promotion, though,’ he said. ‘It’s like I’ve been married to this tracing-paper version of you. When I actually get to see you, you’re barely present. It’s sapped you, you know?’

‘I haven’t been much of a wife, I know. I know. I’m sorry.’

‘And then the other week, you came back from Cádiz with this – radiance about you.’

‘Darling, don’t.’

‘And I thought, hello. This is something new. You dumped your bags on the doormat with this smile, full of sun. I walked towards this woman – the same woman I first saw across the dinner table at Dan and Laura’s—’

‘Christ, Peter—’

‘– but when your eyes met mine, for this – just this fraction of a second – your face fell. You managed to put it back on again, of course. You gave me that
Hi how are you?
face. You know? That
Great to see you, thank you for your support
face.
The one you politicians are so good at? You didn’t realise I’d spotted the change. You sometimes forget how well I know you.’

She was full-on weeping now – at least her eyes were. She let out a little noise, half-word, half-choke.

‘That glow,’ he said. ‘I thought it was something you’d brought back with you – a souvenir of all that sun and optimism. I thought you’d brought it back for me. But no, it was
him.
Wasn’t it? You’d brought
him
home with you.’

The way he said that one word:
him.
Bethany wiped at the mess of tears and snot with the ball of her hand.

‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘You need to know that. I’ve been an idiot and he’s dropped me like a – used-up – thing. I deserve it.’

‘Leaving good old Peter to pick up the pieces.’

‘No I – darling—’

‘Well, like you say,’ he said, brisk now, ‘we’d better talk about it properly when you get home. Whenever that may be.’

‘Please don’t—’

‘So. Bye for now.’

‘Peter?’

This time, when the line clicked, it fell into a single dull tone that held up until she replaced the receiver. She hugged her arms around her legs and curled up on the upright desk chair. So tired now, so much at the end of everything. The sobs that took full hold of her were deep and forthright. Sobs she’d refused for so long burst like unexploded mines from a war lost years ago.

¶riotbaby

PIGWATCH: All on Panton Street: START RUNNING NORTH NOW.

Sixteen

The swipe works. Leo’s in. The concrete back-way smells of metal. Just like the building it penetrates, it gives off the message
host server unknown.
Leo takes the corridor ahead, hangs the first left and puts himself on silent running. Turn right, door, door, turn left, service lift – just like riotbaby said. Leo hits the button, steps into the lift and riffs on buttons.
Eeny, meeny, miney, thirty-two.
He leans back on the fascia and watches the LEDs go
one, two, three.
He hefts the ripped-metal equipment cases in each hand, checking the contents by weight.

Ten, eleven.

He knows it’s all there. He checked it a googolplex times this morning. Shit, this morning only! This has been the biggest day of Leo’s life. If only he could proffer. But he’s taken the battery out of his phone. You never know who those things’re talking to.

Twenty-one, twenty-two.

Then he has a panic over has he forgotten the hi-def jack, and spazzes a moment with the clip of the right-hand case. He gets it the wrong way up and the whole crap nearly spills on the floor.

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine.

No, all the kit’s in place, obv. Tucked into neat-cut compartments like an assassin’s rifle. He clips the box shut and breathes again.

Thirty-two.

Ping. Paydirt. The doors glide open smooth as destiny to reveal – another service corridor, this one narrow as the secret passage through a castle wall. One more swipe of the smartcard and he steps into a ballroom made of light. It’s the final scene of
2001.

This is the screen control room. The long high space is empty, like the Persona said it would be, but the conditioned air is filled with strobing colour. Leo holds his breath and gazes up, up, further up. His eyes are ‘does not compute’. Leering over him, flared by perspective, are two giants, taller than a house. The image is rendered for viewing city-blocks away. This close up, it takes several seconds to resolve the flash-lit figures of two slebs braving the red-carpet paps. A metre-high caption stripes their bellies.

This is mirror-world. He’s emerged behind one of 404 City’s mega-screens. He’s a tiny insect trapped in a living flatscreen twenty metres high.

Two screens, actually. The big one faces out across the unholy city sky. The other faces into the building’s central atrium. Nobody can hide from Mondan’s non-stop data vomit – not even its own wage-slaves. Leo’s on a floorplate suspended between the backs of these two screens. The outward-facing screen is cropped by the floor – Leo can only see the top part. In all, it’s twelve storeys high. This is the north-facing screen – the one he sees each morning from his top-floor window at the Flamingo. A flatscreen for a
Game of Thrones
giant.

The opposite screen, the one facing inwards, is nothing like as tall. It starts two metres above the floor and rises six metres max. It’s part of a mega news ticker wrapping around the inner walls. There are doors set into the wall below it.

Six metres overhead, a boxed-in area runs up between the screens like a periscope. This holds the video hub and the mass of cables feeding the vast displays. That’s where Leo’s going to hack the screens.

He puts his metal cases on the ground, shrugs off his backpack of tools and walks to the outer screen. He puts a palm against it. A patch of purple flares briefly under his hand then trickles to red. He thinks of the wasted girl he left back at the Flamingo, how the blood flames behind the birthmark on her jaw. The screen is warm. It’s made from a grid of liquid pixels the size of his hand. Each cell strobes though millions of possible colours twenty times a second, to the tune of the video hub.

Leo steps back from the hypnotic light and looks for the door to the video hub. In the opposite wall, under the inner screen, is a strip of wall with a choice of four doors. The doors are labelled in tiny utility typeface. He gets up close to read. The left door, near the south-east corner of the room, says
east.
The next,
video hub room.
The third, set at the end of a little alcove in the wall, is
top spot
–
private.
The fourth,
west.
It’s like an old-skool adventure game.
Go n, w, s or e?