Peter Hamilton - Misspent Youth

“It doesn’t get much worse, though it wasn’t just her.”

“I know. I’d just die if my dad ever hit on one of my friends, never mind the pair of them actually going to bed. Urrgh! That is so much the worst thing in the world.”

Tim grinned, amazed at how easy it was to talk about what had happened—he never could with Alison. One hand trailed lightly in the water, a tiny push for the inflatable chair, moving the two of them closer. “I’m really glad you asked me here. It feels good to be away from Dad. He’s so desperate to try to make up. Every day I have to listen to him going on about regrets and how being young again makes things difficult for him, that he hasn’t got a perspective back on his life and who he should be. It almost makes me feel guilty for getting pissed off with him for what he did.”

“So how do you feel about that?”

“Now? Not much, I suppose. It was a real bastard when it happened. I hated them so bad I could have killed them. And I still resent the hell out of the pair of them for screwing up my life like this. But…everyone was right—which I really hate, too. If Annabelle could do that to me, then she wasn’t worth getting worked up over in the first place.”

“Sounds like you’ve got perfectly healthy reactions if you ask me.”

“I’ve just calmed down, I guess. Time always quiets emotions. That doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven him, though. And I’m still angry he got to meet Sir Mitch. I so much wanted to do that.”

“Will you ever forgive him?”

“I don’t know. It would be kind of weird. Besides, that would be like admitting they were in the right to do it. I can never do that.”

“Then why are you talking to him?”

Tim shrugged, which just produced a squeaking sound between his skin and the plastic chair. “I don’t know. He’s my dad. Can you ever really hate your parents?”

Her chair touched his. She smiled and put a hand out across his backrest, holding them together. “Any other good reasons for coming here?”

“Maybe a few.” He leaned over. She giggled as the chairs started to dip down in unison. Then they were kissing, and the angle was increasing rapidly. They fell into the pool together, both of them laughing as they surfaced. He put his arms around her for a more insistent kiss. Vanessa clung to him, he felt one leg curling around the small of his back as she climbed up against him. Thankfully they were in the shallow end, so he could keep his feet on the bottom.

“Vanessa!”

They broke apart to see Margret, her youngest sister, shouting at them from the edge of the pool. “Vanessa, there’s a fight in London, a big one. It’s on all the news streams.”

“A fight?”

“One of the marches. People are throwing things and everything. It’s horrible.”

They made their way back to the house and occupied the big old leather chesterfield sofa in the lounge. The screen on the wall was showing one of the preprotest marches. Over two thousand people were moving along Whitehall with the intention of handing in a petition to Downing Street calling for the Euro Socio-Industrial summit to be canceled. But the police weren’t letting anyone near the solid metal security gates sealing off the prime minister’s residence. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, cans and plastic cartons were landing on the police. Several fistfights had broken out.

“That was stupid of the cops,” Tim said. “If they’d just let them hand in the petition there wouldn’t have been any trouble.”

“What are they all doing?” Margret asked.

“They don’t like the summit,” Tim explained gently. “A lot of people believe it’s an attempt by Brussels at social engineering. They want to either stop it or have their say.”

“Why?”

“They feel excluded. It’s like at school when the teacher just tells you what to do for no good reason you can see.”

“But fighting’s silly,” the young girl exclaimed. “We don’t do that at school.”

“I’m glad to hear it. But there are so many people protesting that you’re bound to get some silly ones in there.”

Vanessa frowned, searching the faces of the crowd. The news stream was showing images from cameras within the main body of the march. There was a great deal of anger and frustration building up. “I’m not so sure. They look like they’re out for trouble no matter what.”

“You still want to go down on Monday?”

“Yes. Brussels won’t listen to us otherwise, we have to show them just how strongly we feel about them. This is our only option.”

They carried on watching the news all afternoon, seeing the police block off Parliament Square with big metal and concrete barricades. The marchers began to spill back into Trafalgar Square. Shop windows were broken. Police vehicles raced in from side streets.

IN THE EVENING, Vanessa put some frozen pizzas in the microwave. They sat around on the old chesterfield, eating slices and swigging beer straight from the bottle as the news continued relentlessly. Sometime after ten o’clock an overturned police Land Rover was burning furiously outside the National Gallery. Vanessa had curled up against Tim, with his arms holding her protectively. She stirred, finally repelled by the images on the screen, and turned to kiss him. They made their way upstairs.

In bed, together, it was more for comfort’s sake than for passion, a physical action whose excitement and pleasure managed to obscure the grim outside world with all its pain and tragedy. For a while, at least.

JEFF RECALLED THE BLITHE COMMENT about personal safety he’d made to Sue as soon as he arrived in London. With all private cars banned from passing through the security cordon around the summit, he had to take the train down to Kings Cross. As soon as they stepped off the train car they were greeted with a raucous barrage of sound. Protestors were thronging the end of the platform, letting off horns and pressure whistles. More protestors arriving on the train greeted the welcome with cheers and began chanting obscenities at the line of uniformed riot police, who were struggling to keep the station concourse open for ordinary passengers.

Lieutenant Krober took one look at the situation and hurried Jeff and Annabelle out a side exit onto York Way. He called ahead for their car on his secure encrypted link. The big black sedan drew up beside them as they emerged from the gloomy Victorian brick edifice and into the bright sunlight. There were dozens of shops along the other side of the road from the station, groovy franchises that Jeff had never heard of, all boarded up and closed to avoid looting by the protestors. A dozen police vans were parked along the curb. Apart from the pigeons, nothing moved along the length of the canyonlike street. Lucy Duke glanced down toward the front of the station, where the protestors were contained behind a high wire mesh. “I didn’t realize there would be so many of them,” she muttered nervously.

The summit was being held in a massive ten-year-old convention complex, the Marshall Centre, that had been built on the site of the old London City Airport. It occupied the entire wharf between the Albert and King George docks, a collection of auditoriums, conference theaters, restaurants, cafés, bars, and hotels enclosed by a single structure, with a fifty-story octagonal tower soaring up out of the center. Protestors had swamped the University of East London, whose modern eco-sympathy buildings ran along the northern side of the Albert Dock in the broad sweeping curves of concrete that belonged to the kind of future that the 1930s believed in. The university campus ran parallel to the conference complex, allowing the protestors to gaze across the grubby waters of the ancient dock at the sheer façade of black carbon girders and gold mirror glass.