A Brother's Secret

by Andy Graham

  He nodded.

  “You feature in the files as well, David. Heavily.”

  “A pyrrhic victory is still a victory.”

  The president rubbed the mole on the tip of her nose, watching him. “I will think on what you have said.”

  “A common cause.” He forced his lips into a smile.

  She smiled back, just enough warmth in the gesture to take the sting out of her eyes.

  David Prothero left the coziness of the bar for the cool autumn air. There was the scent of falling leaves in the night despite the nearest real tree being miles away. He needed to walk and clear his head. Opening the files wasn’t a threat he’d wanted to use. Why had he chosen tonight?

  He stared down the street and shivered. Pulling his coat tight around himself, he left the nervous buzz emanating from the Kickshaw behind him. As he went, he felt in his leather satchel for the food parcels he’d filched from his office.

  8

  Tattoos

  Ray pocketed his swipe card with a tolerant smile. It did nothing to stem the flow of polite abuse from his companion. The woman had finally let him buy at least some of the rounds and added something about doing her bit in keeping the old gender clichés where they deserved to be. Stamping them out was one thing the president had got right, apparently. Ray had protested that his gallantry and good manners extended to everyone, but she’d turned her nose up at that, too. She then reminded him the other reason he wasn’t allowed to buy any drinks was so she dictated the pace of the evening. The generous measures Lynn and the bar staff were pouring meant she was losing that battle.

  Ray’s companion nudged his glass with hers. Their conversation drifted away from her protests that she was being prudent rather than a control freak, and skittered around various minor topics while they probed each other, trying to fathom out commonalities and boundaries. Eventually, they settled on one which she appeared to have very strong views about, a trait he was beginning to think was going to be a recurring theme for the evening.

  “Tattoos?” she said. “Like I already told you, it’s none of your business. And even if I had any, I wouldn’t show you.”

  “So you do have some?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she replied, lips half-hidden by the wine glass. She had a little make-up on, not as copiously or precisely applied as some of the women, and even the occasional man, in the bar, but enough to hide the shadows around her eyes.

  “I have,” Ray said.

  “Why am I not surprised?” She toyed with her glass. Ducked a number of his questions. Fielded a few from the bar staff and finally asked, “How many?”

  Ray spread his hands in front of him. “I’m not sure you’d believe me anyway, or trust me to get it right.” He smiled at her. “Why don’t you count them?”

  “Nice try, Mr Military, very good effort. No.”

  “How did you know I’m in the legions?”

  “Oh please, don’t insult me.”

  Martinez joined them, oozing charm. His new joke was ready to roll. The woman swivelled on the stool to face the ex-legionnaire. Ray guessed she was a similar age to him, a woman rather than a girl just out of her teens playing at adulthood. She’d passed the age advertisers said everyone was supposed to be, the age men and women struggled to reach and then clung to as if they were already on their way to the meat shredder. She was also more broad-shouldered than the petite, busty figures that Nascimento, like many muscular men, went for.

  It had been on these bar stools, Ray remembered, that Brooke and Orr had almost come to blows for the first time. After turning up to the bar with a succession of carbon-copy women, Brooke had asked Nascimento about his taste in females. His explanation had centred around his belief that both men and women should have big chests – a natural expression of masculinity and fertility. He had added some convoluted qualifications about there being an ideal hip-to-shoulder ratio for both sexes. Nasc claimed to have done extensive field testing on his theory that the individual ratios balanced each other out when a couple were together to create harmony. His eloquent speech had been cut off by an upended pitcher of ice-cold beer in his crotch. Brooke had then slapped the leering Orr for his brutal reasons when choosing his partners.

  A flash of movement caught his eye. A man in a crumpled brown suit was working his way from the secluded table at the back of the room to the exit. He exchanged a brief word with the bodyguard, and headed out into the gathering night. What was Prothero doing here? Ray thought. More importantly, who were those goons protecting? Ray’s companion finished laughing at Martinez’s latest joke and the ex-legionnaire limped away. Ray pushed Prothero out of his mind and returned her smile.

  “It was smoothly done, by the way,” she said, pushing a fresh glass over. “No mess, no blood, just enough pressure on the arm to let that besuited idiot know enough was enough. My dad served,” she added, answering the unspoken question. “I saw him dealing with a few jerks in his time, before he got sent to the Second Great Trade Conflict.”

  “I was there, too.”

  “Apparently, you younger boys called it the Let’s Get Laid Conflict.”

  Ray spluttered a mouthful of beer across the bar. “He told you that?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? I hear some of you boys indulged in fantasies with foreigners that you would kill foreigners for even thinking of doing to your own women.”

  “Some did. Some didn’t. We all got the blame, though.”

  Her smile melted into a scowl and then into sadness. “Dad never lied. Not deliberately, nor by omission. He refused to sugarcoat the world for his daughters. Taught us to think for ourselves and about others. He taught me the arm lock you used on that guy, too. I just can’t get my head to accept that I can do that to someone, snap a joint like that.”

  “Sounds like a good man.” Ray stared into his glass. Somehow, it was full again.

  “The best. And yes, we were close.” Despite the sadness, she held herself with a self-assured poise and confidence, the kind of person you noticed in a room without the need for fuss or fancy clothes. “My father was an old man when he was sent into war, yet he was still deemed young enough to die in a tank. Crematoria on caterpillar tracks. I hate them. My granddad was one of the last to die in the First GTC. My dad was one of the first to die in the Second. I’m hoping that family tradition died with them.” She dropped her glass on the floor. “Those that went before us.”

  Ray stood, not quite as easily as he would have liked, and dropped his drink onto hers. “Will keep the watchfires burning.” The glass splinters swam away from them, grinding under his feet as he sat back down.

  His companion shot him a puzzled look, seemed on the verge of asking something, then changed her mind. Around them a few people raised their drinks, glancing furtively at the bodyguards and the cameras in the ceiling as they did so. Ray slid his swipe across the bar to pay for the breakages, only to have it pushed straight back.

  They sat in silence, letting the music and memories wash over them. As the jukebox kicked out another government-approved song that Ray had heard untold times, he nudged his companion. “What’s your problem with tattoos, anyway?”

  “I didn’t say I had a problem with them, and I’m still not going to tell you if I’ve got one or not. Neither am I going to count yours.” She waved an admonishing finger in his face. “There are just some things that are wrong. That guy you booted out was a very long list of don’ts and very few dos.”

  “Should I be intrigued or worried?” he asked.

  “Neither, you have more dos going for you than don’ts.” Her coy smile was lost in a frown. “He was not cool, probably never had been and never will be.”

  “That’s kind of cool.”

  “How can it be? More is more, less is less, less is not more! It’s left-handed logic, as my ex used to say, and he worked in a place that specialised in left-handers, believe it or not. It’s a little bit like cooking or cocktails, or even relationships. On their own the ingredient
s may be fine, but you combine them the wrong way and it all goes—”

  “Skovsky,” Ray said, nodding.

  “What-sky?

  “Military term.”

  “A hint, at least?”

  “A dead guy. Another friend.” He flinched; it shouldn’t be that easy to say, especially so soon after Hamid’s death. How soon before he was saying this about Nascimento or Brooke?

  “How drunk are you?”

  “Not enough. We adopted Skovsky’s name to mean anything wrong or weird,” said Ray. “Kind of worrying how versatile language can be when you put your mind to it.”

  “To the dead guy. Your friend Whatsky,” she said, raising her glass as they recited the Salute to the Fallen again.

  “Now,” said Ray, slamming his glass down, “before I got all Skovsky on you, you were about to tell me about a list of things you didn’t like.”

  She grinned, a smile that warmed him from the inside out. “Pineapple on pizza, milk in coffee, margarine on anything, lettuce with anything, and don’t get me started on anchovies or cucumbers.”

  “They’re not all bad combinations. I quite like—”

  She put one finger to her lips. “They are. You’re wrong. This isn’t just an opinion. It’s a fact. Because I want it to be.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ray said, hiding a smile.

  “Back to our case study. I’ll skip the minor stuff, but the first big don’t is skinny legs and beards. Skinny legs are bad enough on anyone, male or female, young or old, though the old have more of an excuse than the rest of us. A decent beard is a heart-warming thing. But,” she took a long drink from her glass and waved it at Ray’s face, “skinny legs and a beard? No.” She shushed Ray’s protests. “And then there’s the suit.”

  “‘Trust half of what you hear from someone in uniform and nothing of what you hear from anyone in a suit’,” Ray said. “I had it drilled into me as a kid.”

  “And you ended up in a uniformed profession? Who did this ‘drilling’?”

  He waved the question away.

  “OK then, Mr Enigmatic. The suits. Suits are fine – that wasn’t the problem with the guy. It was the hackneyed tattoo and suit combo.”

  Ray choked on his drink. Half of it went up his nose.

  “I love a good suit and decent tattoo. But the pantomime of flashing just enough of your exotic design, which probably doesn’t mean what you think it does, from under your suit is one of the biggest turnoffs I know.”

  Ray’s jaw was beginning to ache from trying to hold in the laughter. The look of self-righteous indignation on her face was making it harder.

  “Decide who you are and stop trying to be everything to everyone, including yourself. Otherwise you start believing your own mythology and become a caricatured cliché. That man, for example,” she put her glass down a little clumsily and started ticking points off on her fingers, “had skinny legs, skinny trousers, a full beard, some spiky looking ink sticking out from his shirt sleeves, and a suit. It was a very nice suit, despite being a fake, I’ll give him that. Otherwise, he was just one massive walking don’t. I should’ve thrown him out myself”.

  She finally lost her self-control and the pair of them burst out laughing. Out of the corner of his eye, Ray noted one of the bodyguards watching them.

  After several just-one-mores, they found themselves standing in the puddles of light outside the Kickshaw’s windows. Muted conversations filtered out from behind the glass.

  “I’m never sure if holding a door open for a woman is chivalry or chauvinism,” she said.

  “Take it as a sign of respect. In my job the first through the door is often the first to get the flak.”

  She buttoned up the collar on her coat and pulled a hat on. “So, you give up? That last clue was as obvious as the moons.”

  Ray stared up at the cloudless sky. She was right. It was beautiful. Other than using the stars for navigation, he’d never paid the sky much attention before. It was more than just a monochrome blanket. Hues of deep blues and greens shifted in the blackness, illuminated by the moons hanging pale in the night. One was scarred but happy, the other fresh-faced but mournful.

  Under the yawning moons, the constellations of lights from the planes, drones and satellites shifted. There were even a few aerial energy units still working up there, the sun-fans his mother’s dad had designed - Rick Franklin, the heroic grandfather Ray had never met. Most of the sun-fans had been decommissioned; the digital deficit had affected them in unpredictable ways. Some just stopped working. Others plummeted to the ground like a hail of metallic comets.

  Ray and his companion had spent the rest of the evening playing a guessing game. She had refused to give him her name and his increasingly wild shots had brought tears to her eyes. ‘If dream jobs were names and names were dream jobs, you’d be Bullet Franklin,’ she’d said. He had pointed out that bullets were being phased out, so she had changed it to Pedant Franklin. A slow smile spread across his face.

  “Stella.”

  “Very good, Crockpot. I never got to do astronomy,” she said, staring upwards. “It wasn’t on the career list the year I left school.”

  Ray took a step closer, cupping her waist in his hands. “So is there a prize?” he asked.

  The clouds of their breath mingled in the cold air. Stella pecked him on the cheek opposite to the one that Brooke had kissed him on earlier.

  “You get to go home.” She pulled a wedding band out of her pocket and slipped it onto the ring finger of her left hand. “Alone.”

  Muffled laugher spilled out from the Kickshaw. A man at the table closest to their window was holding court, his over-the-top gestures both demanding the attention of, and delighting, the people in front of him.

  “Thank you for holding the door open for me. It was a lovely way to end a wonderful evening.”

  She ran to the waiting tram and the low, crimson shape glided away, leaving him alone on the pavement. The deep, nagging ache was haunting his back again. His cheeks burned in the cold night air.

  9

  X517

  The untidy echoes of stamping feet faded in the early morning light. The noise bounced off the drab buildings surrounding the parade ground. Ray’s hand rested on the door handle. Behind him, the drill sergeant bawled out a name.

  The hurried scrape of metal and plastic on concrete stopped. Through the fuzziness of a mild hangover, Ray could almost feel the sergeant’s nose pressed into his, smell the spittle-laden breath flaying his ears for not keeping up with the conflicting instructions. He shuddered. Part of him felt sympathy. Most of him was perversely pleased that some traditions were running to form. He swiped into the building and hurried down the stark white corridors, arriving at the reception desk ten minutes before his consult was due to start.

  “Here to see Dr Neufeld, ma’am,” he said to the medi-sec behind the desk.

  She didn’t look up. “You’re late. And don’t you mean Clinical Lead Therapist Surgeon Colonel Dr Neufeld, PhD, BAMF?”

  “I guess so, ma’am.”

  “He’s sick.” She gave Ray an uninterested look and looped a strand of black hair over the bun it had escaped from. Placing her hand over the microphone embedded into her desk, she whispered to him, “Your doctor’s sick. He’s always sick. Maybe that’s why he’s a doctor, so he can work out why he’s always sick. Except he can’t do that, ’cos he’s always sick.” She waved her hand dismissively. “They’re all useless, no matter how many fancy titles and random letters after their names they give themselves; associate of this, fellow of that, blah blah blah, standing around preening themselves and comparing the size of their post-nominals.” She uncovered the microphone and popped a sweet into her mouth, sucking on it noisily.

  “Didn’t make the cut for med school did you, ma’am?”

  “I turned them down. Can’t be doing with malingerers like you wasting my time.”

  Ray kept his gaze fixed on the poster-screen behind her as she looked him up and
down. The androgynous uniform she wore failed to hide the shapely figure underneath it. Her twinkling stud earrings and make-up were more obvious than the regs allowed for and the tunic looked as if it had been taken in.

  Her eyes lingered on his name badge. Sighing, she turned to the bank of monitors in the desk, working them with ease. “It’s people like me that keep places like this running. No point having systems if you can’t use them. Just wish my sis would remember where the real power lies and listen to our mum, not her dad. That man gives me the creeps, no matter what he’s done for us all.” She carried on talking, seemingly unaware that he was still there. “My sister’s always been clever, not half as clever as she wanted me to think she was, though. Not like those mobile cerebrums she works with—” She snapped her mouth shut and wrinkled her nose as if remembering something.

  “If Dr Neufeld’s sick, I’ll go.”

  “Room six.” She tapped a button on one of the screens. “Thought I’d forgotten you, didn’t you, Corporal Franklin? We have a civilian doc in on rotation, some big researcher, Dr Swann, a neuro-immunologist it says here. I hope he doesn’t get sick as often as Neufeld – he’s always sick.”

  Making a mental note to tell Nascimento he was overdue an injury, Ray hurried off.

  The door swished shut.

  “Corporal Franklin, sir.”

  Looking out of the window at the recruits now duck-walking around the parade ground was a woman, hair pinned back. Ray went rigid. “Stella?”

  Her hazel eyes fixed on his.

  “There must be a mistake,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m here to see Dr Swann.”

  “I am Dr Swann. Guess the medi-sec assumed the new doctor was a man.” Stella followed his gaze down to the ring on her left hand and hid it behind her back. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lead you on last night. I just wanted—”