Sample fiction

The usual drill is Sommerled Hussein, papa’s lawyer, meets me in reception and carefully ignores me on the drive back home. Today papa was waiting for me on the white sofas. I loitered at the door for a moment, wondering why the fuck he was there. He was sat beside Magnus Weng, the tough-looking, muscular cop who headed up Ravnina District, and – as I walked in – Magnus said something and he roared with laughter.

Then they looked up and saw me, and the laughter got sucked down a drain somewhere. I reckoned I was in deep shit. Papa stood up, as I walked over, and looked me up and down.

“Heh, papa.” I grinned, half-heartedly.

He raised an eyebrow. “You look a fucking mess.”

Thanks, papa. I said, “I feel like a fucking mess.”

He turned his head and made a curt hand gesture. Out the corner of my eye, I saw my doctor, Ghede Espinoza, rise from a chair near the honeycomb windows. A field stretcher lay by his feet like a pet.

“Did they tell you what’s broken?” Papa glanced at Magnus, who was glaring at me.  Like he could have happily broken a couple of my bones himself. I stared back. He had a heavy, stern face with a lot of correctable scars. His skin was white, almost see-through, so you could see the red veins winding around his fat crooked nose. He looked every year of his age, which was about sixty. Despite all that, he had this hard-worn authority about him that I thought I liked. Hard, flinty eyes like papa and there was a lot of hard muscle under his jacket sleeves.

“What are you looking at?” he grunted.

“Your dental work,” I said.

He hauled himself off the sofa, giving me a dirty look. I reckoned I could piss him off consequence-free. He couldn’t do anything. He near-as-worked for the Company. He turned to papa and folded his arms.

“You know my opinion, Gath,” he said, in a low dangerous voice. “I think you’re playing for too-high stakes with this one.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I figured he was getting in the last word on some argument before I arrived. He turned back towards me and took a step forward. Frowned down at me and tried to look intimidating. My forehead was level with his chin. I couldn’t help thinking that was a good height for a guy.

“You’re a disrespectful, arrogant, unrepentantly psychopathic little scumbag,” he said. “If it was up to me, I’d lock you back up right now. And make damn sure you spent the rest of your short-arse criminal life drinking dust. As it is, your father’s got a better idea what to do with you.”

He stared at me. Waited for some response. I wobbled up onto tiptoes, looked right into his pale blue eyes, and grinned. He stared at me expectantly. I belched into his face.

“Fucking hell.”  He shook his head, disgusted.

‘Scuse me,’ I said, with relish, and patted my midriff.

He slapped his palms together hard, miming washing his hands of me, and shook his head again. “Fucking unbelievable.”

He stalked off towards the cells, still shaking his head. I thought, what’s his problem? Fuck knows. I knew he didn’t like me. I’d got into trouble twice in Parasol Copse and both times he’d treated me rubbish. Maybe ‘cos the first time we met, I’d been heckling mama’s performance poetry and I kicked out some of his teeth.

Something nudged my hip. The stretcher had trotted over and was hovering by my elbow. I pushed it away and took a couple of steps towards the door. Papa gave me a quizzical look.

“I’m alright,” I said. “Just a couple of broken bones, heh? I can walk.”

Papa turned towards the door and we all walked out onto the scrubby waste ground that doubled as a car park. There was a troop transport helicopter parked in the blinding sunlight. It still had sandy camouflage and I reckoned it had flown straight into the City from one of our frontier stations that bordered the Sahil. The side hatch was open and the ramp was down.

Inside the seats had been melted back into the wall. The stretcher came past me and stood in the space, filling it nice and neat. Good old papa. I swung my legs awkwardly onto the stretcher and rolled onto my side. I closed my eyes and yawned, and squirmed to get comfortable. I thought maybe I could exploit my injuries. Get a bit of recovery time. I fancied a few days relaxing at our villa in Kaiju Port.

A pair of fingers pinched my ear lobe. Ghede bent over me, holding a mediscanner. He signalled for me to shift my head. Held the little wand over the jewel stud pinned to my ear. I stayed still while he took a readout of my health diagnostics.

Heavy footsteps clattered up the ramp.  Papa.

“Get out. I need to speak to my daughter.”

Uh-huh.

He sat down beside the stretcher. We sat in silence for a while. He didn’t look at me. He looked away down the ramp. He was wearing a fitted charcoal jacket with wide lapels, the unofficial Heqet Party uniform. It looked odd on him. The jacket was unbuttoned, the shirt underneath had the top button undone. He looked like he’d spent the night sucking up to Heqet politicians. I had a bad feeling about that.

There was a low whirring and the passenger hold went dark as the ramp curled up. And then the daylights went on. We were alone in there. He took off the jacket and threw it over the back of his seat, which had flowed out from the wall. He rolled his sleeves up over his wrists. Meaning business.

He gave me a long hard look.

“So, tell me. Why did you crash the fancar?”

“What you mean, crash it?” He knew when I was lying, but I couldn’t resist giving a shot anyhow. I rearranged my facial expression into a look of shock. “It was an accident. The car malfunctioned, didn’t it?”

He sighed. “Don’t lie to me, Troya. I read the police report.”

Something squirmed low down in my stomach.

I made a mournful face and looked away. “I was pissed, wasn’t I?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“I know how it looks, but it wasn’t my fault this time, was it?” I summoned up some righteous anger. “It’s Askari’s people, isn’t it? They think it’s real funny getting his little sister blind drunk and hanging me out to dry, heh?”

For a moment he was silent. The howling thrum of the helicopter rotors drowned out every other sound. Abruptly, he snorted with laughter. “So Askari’s people tied you down and poured wine down your throat with a funnel?”

I ran my hand under the paper shirt, massaging my stomach. He didn’t say anything. I felt this cold spike of rage down my spine. I looked at him and I imagined winding my long flexible fingers around his thick bullish neck. Squeezing, squeezing and throttling the life out of him.

“I didn’t have any other way of getting home,” I spat.

“I don’t doubt that.”

“I had to borrow ‘Kari’s fancar, didn’t I?”

“Which you flew on manual?”

I thought about that. “We all fly the cars on manual, heh? The law’s an ass.”

“You told me you were drunk,” he said.

“I wasn’t sober.”

“So, tell me, why did you decide to fly the car after you’d drunk that much?”

‘Cos I fucked up.

“’Cos I wasn’t thinking straight.”

He sat and looked at me. I lay prone on the stretcher. The painkillers must’ve been damping down ‘cos everything hurt. My hip bridge ached. My ribs were sore and my breath still rattled a little. My left hindfoot was on fire. That had second-degree burns. Weeping flesh. Blisters everywhere. I shifted my back leg and it sent vicious little stabs up into my hip.

I shut my eyes.  “I fucked up, alright?”

Utter humiliation. You couldn’t feel lower than that, I reckoned. He owned me and we both knew it. Without him, I was dead in forty-two hours. And I thought, all over a fucking car. It wasn’t like ‘Kari couldn’t print another one.