Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

Yes he is! What a rank betraying bastard that betraying bastard is! Indeed.

He pretends to be my friend. But he’s not! No, he’s not. He is merely a pathetic, evil, betraying bastard.

And yet, he took me flying. And yet, he cooked for me. And yet, he looks at me, in that way, so kind, and… and… sweetly sometimes. And yet, he… desires me. I feel it. And yet… None of this matters, because he is a betraying bastard.

Yes, you’re right. Of course. I know it. Of course he is! I mean, how could he treat me the way he did? Why did he let me be mauled and beaten? Well, since you pose the question: You did in fact pledge to read the ransom demand, without amendments. And instead, you…

You dog, you cur, don’t defend that mf c! Indeed, no.

He’s nothing but an mf cs f’ing c’ing piece of shit! And, also, let us not forget, a betraying bastard.

Yes!

It all goes according to plan. The Cheo sends his response; he will not pay the ransom. But he offers us a deal. Less money, fewer ships, no safe haven. It’s a good deal, we accept.

Alliea and Alby become enmeshed in the technicalities of the drop-off. We will leave Lena in neutral space, on a space station owned by the flame beasts. We will wire her up to a remote-controlled bomb and hurry to a nearby system to retrieve the money and the ships. Once we are satisfied, we will neutralise the bomb.

If the Cheo double-crosses us, we can kill Lena. If we double-cross the Cheo, the flame beasts are pledged to a blood feud against us. Since they can freely enter Debatable Space, we would therefore be doomed. The Cheo knows this. Legal agreements have also been drafted to secure the honour and integrity of the ransom deal. Everything is going according to plan.

The first stage of our dangerous game is complete.

Excerpts from the thought diary of Lena Smith, 2004

I have had three best friends in the course of my whole life.

I wish it had been more.

My first best friend was Carla. When I was seven years old we played together every day. We made up worlds and stories. I was Ebony, an African princess. She was Melissa, the Queen of our Queendom, the fabulous country of Alchemy.

Carla had beautiful blonde hair, a button nose, and a great stare. But I had all the ideas. I made up the stories, I made up the maps. I created costumes for us both. I painted my bedroom in black and gold to make it a suitable Queen’s Throne Room for Queen Melissa. And whatever I said or did, whatever brave or original idea I came up with, Carla always nodded, very seriously, and stared her formidable stare. So I would know that every idea I had was actually her idea, every thought was her thought. I was her willing slave.

When we were ten, we decided to hold a joint birthday party together, even though my birthday was in February and hers was in October. We wrote all the invitations, we used our pocket money to buy balloons, we made each other presents out of papier mache and brightly coloured paper. We made fairy cakes with our mums and stole as many as we could. Then, on the day of our party, we both locked ourselves in my room and played with our imaginary guests and handed out imaginary party bags. We gorged ourselves on cake, and that night I was sick in bed. When Carla’s parents came to take her home, she had a wicked little smile on her face. They knew she’d been up to something, but they never knew that she’d just had her “official” birthday.

We rarely quarrelled, and she only once really really lost her temper with me. It happened when I scored more baskets than her in basketball at playtime. I made two mistakes. First, I scored more baskets. And then I laughed, triumphantly. So Carla went very very quiet and didn’t speak to me for the whole rest of the week. We still met, and played together, but instead of speaking she would give messages to her blonde Bratz and ask the poor doll to pass them on. By the Friday of that week, I was devastated and I gave her all my pocket money to buy back her friendship.

Carla never bullied me though. She never bossed me either. She just always got her way. It was easier, we both always knew what to do – namely, what she wanted. For otherwise, I feared, in my state of youthful existential panic, I might have had to make my own mind up about things…

Then Carla’s parents decided to move abroad. Her dad had a job in Germany working on bridges or something. Her mum was part-German anyway. When Carla told me this news, I burst into tears. I begged her to stay, to join our family instead. Carla just stared at me, calmly, with that piecing stare. And she didn’t smile. Not once. Eventually, she calmly said, “Don’t make a fuss, Lena.” And I cried even more, for ages.

I explained it all to my mother, how I wouldn’t be able to cope without Carla and how life was no longer worth living. But my mum just said, “Never mind, you’ll soon make new friends,” and I cried my eyes out again.

I cried again on the day that Carla left. I was eleven by then. My mother was genuinely frightened at my behaviour. I was not just upset, I was hysterical.

I met Carla years later at a friend’s dinner party, when we were both in our early thirties. She didn’t actually remember me. She was still very nice, but by that time the stare had worn off and she was a frazzled but cheerful mother of four. And she didn’t remember Princess Ebony, or the Queendom of Alchemy, or me.

Some best friend.

My second best friend was also a woman. She was called Helen Clarke, and we both studied History at university in Edinburgh. Neither of us was Scottish, neither of us was quite sure why we’d chosen a university so far away from our families and friends back home. But it was a magical time. The city was dominated by a castle on a massive rock, looming and glowering over the Georgian and Victorian buildings of the city. We studied the history of the town, we read all the books which were set there like Jekyll and Hyde and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the novels of Ian Rankin. And whenever I read a book, Helen read it next; our fingerprints jointly stained score upon score of battered paperback novels.

I loved History. I read voraciously. I rarely forgot a fact. But Helen was the scholar. She came covered in clouds of glory – we all knew she had been offered a place at Oxford and had turned it down. Her mother was a Professor of History at Cambridge University, her father was a senior civil servant. I stayed with them once. All the curtains were chintz, there were knick-knacks in every room, not a trace of dust, and everyone spoke ironically and at length. I adored them. I compared them with my own suburban parents, with their boisterous enthusiasms and their silly holiday games. And I yearned for my own family to die painlessly and heroically in a freak asteroid strike. Then I could adopt Helen’s parents as my own de facto family.

At Finals, Helen got a decent 2.1. I received a glittering First, and was marked down by my tutors for great things to come. Strangely, after that, I saw very little of Helen. She moved back home without saying goodbye, and never turned up for any of our college reunions. Ten years later I was still sending her long, detailed letters (yes, I wrote letters, not emails in those days!) every Christmas, describing lyrically and entertainingly my intellectual trials and tribulations, my boyfriend troubles, my thoughts on life and everything. Helen never wrote back, we never met. We spoke on the phone a few times, but somehow an actual meeting always proved problematic.

Eventually I got the message. I stopped writing the letters, making the phone calls. Now, I can hardly remember Helen’s face. But I remember that sense of specialness. We were the terrible two. Yin and Yang, left and right, a bonded pair.