The Perfectionist

The Perfectionist

by SJ Griffin

Copyright 2014 SJ Griffin

Smashwords edition

License Notes

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Words of advice for new readers

The Perfectionist is the third, and therefore final, part of The Vanguard Trilogy, the previous installments being The Vanguard and The Replacement. I didn’t recap any of The Vanguard in The Replacement and I still haven’t learnt my lesson. So, if you haven’t read The Replacement, or indeed The Vanguard, here is what you missed.

In The Vanguard Sorcha Blades and four friends are endowed with mysterious powers. Sorcha is telekinetic, Lola is telepathic, Minos is a pryomancer, Casino has the power of invisibility and Roach can speak every language ever spoken. It becomes clear that people expect Sorcha and her friends to save the world from some malevolent angels who have infiltrated the government. After about 100,000 more words it all ends up all right except Minos dies and then Sorcha dies and when she somehow brings them both back from the dead she has managed to move them out of their own world and into another. Like cosmic origami, apparently.

The Replacement sees Sorcha and the Vanguard living in a city that has been constructed by the Inquisitive, a space shuttle that crash-landed on a planet somewhere unspecified, at some unknown point in time.

The Inquisitive has evolved into a humanoid machine called Dante. He has built the world according to the artifacts from earth that were sent into space on the shuttle: a selection of music, films, art and books. There were two operating systems on the shuttle and once they had developed enough they began to conflict with each other.

As well as a lot of machines, the Vanguard meet two tribes of humans who were grown from bacteria as a virus to kill one branch of the machines. One is a group of feral barbarians with no redeeming features at all and the other, the Paramans, have established a communal society and adopt mechanical and technological enhancements to compensate for their physical limitations.

The Parahumans help the Vanguard escape from a machine who goes mad, a programming glitch that is infecting all the machines. In return they help them build a machine that will enable them to leap into another world, to a safer place.

Roach decides to leave with the Paraman search party and Dante takes his place as The Vanguard try to return to the world of the first book. But the attempt goes wrong and they end up somewhere else, a place where Sorcha already seems to exist.

Let’s read on. I hope you are sitting comfortably, I would hate for you to get pins and needles.

SJ Griffin, London, 2014

Chapter One

As the sun began to brighten the sky, I floated down from the low porch roof above our front door. I had sworn on the life of everyone I held dear that I would not, under any circumstances, be caught in flight or hovering in mid-air. On pain of death, too. It was a reasonable request, ordinary people could be funny about things like that. There were no security cameras anywhere, Dante had done a sweep of the area, so I was quite safe if I was paying attention. My hair was wet from the rain and water puddled around my footsteps as I walked across the sodden lawn to the front door. In the distance I could see the grey wall as it rose to meet the ashen sky. On the other side it was coated with a holographic projection of some city utopia but on the wrong side it was a blank space, mute yet reproachful.

‘I thought you were in bed.’ Dante was sitting in the living room checking the price of his stocks and shares on a tablet. He didn’t need to swipe or tap at it like the rest of us, he just plugged himself in if he was alone. He looked like he was meditating.

‘I was watching the sun come up.’

‘Did you sleep?’

‘A couple of hours. Plenty,’ I said. ‘I need to eat, do you want anything?’

‘I am fully charged,’ Dante smiled. ‘Casino just got in, he’s having a shower, but he’ll want something too.’

In the kitchen I opened and closed a series of cupboards to find something to eat. There was half a loaf of bread and various spreads. ‘He just walks round and round,’ I said. I could see Dante through the doorway. ‘It’s a wonder he doesn’t get dizzy.’

‘He says it’s very meditative,’ Dante said. ‘Everything looks the same.’ Dante looked strange dressed in the same clothes as the rest of us, he had discarded his suit in favour of something more casual so he could blend in. He looked like one of the dolls we made in the factory, as though he came in a shiny box with a window in the front so you could see him and his range of accessories. Although Dante looked like he was suffering from a rare and terminal illness. His eyes were too bright and his skin looked too thick. Minos said he needed to scuff himself up a bit. He had developed a self-conscious way of avoiding standing under harsh lights, like a vampire, in order to not draw attention to his difference.

‘How’s the empire coming along?’ I sat on the other end of the sofa with a plate of toast and a cup of tea floating in front of me. Minos had set fire to the coffee table by mistake.

‘We are far too rich to live here,’ he said. ‘In the last seven seconds I have made us millions.’

‘Investments can go down as well as up,’ I said.

The television unmuted itself to share the early morning news. It was quite forceful for an appliance, bursting into vivid animation at unexpected moments, like a drunk at a wedding. Dante paid no attention to it but I found its bright colours and cheerful sounds quite comforting. It was a strange kind of news, it felt very local and manageable. There was some item about a new bus that was more fuel efficient. The fleet of buses used by one of the large car manufacturers was being replaced with them. The management were very excited about this but it was playing havoc with the timetables and the workers were being asked to be ready half an hour earlier. This didn’t apply to me but it was interesting to see that so much thought had to go into things. That was nice. The next item was about the snow that was expected that winter. This would mean a shutdown in the Boundaries but we were reassured that food deliveries would be adjusted to cover the isolation. That was nice too. Thoughtful.

‘That thing is making my Bluetooth ache,’ Dante said.

‘I find it quite relaxing,’ I said.

‘Really?’ Dante looked up from his table.

‘Yes, this is community broadcasting at its finest.’

Dante looked sceptical and went back to his own fascinating endeavours. He would have found it interesting if he’d bothered to pay attention. He was into systems and schedules, after all. I finished my tea while the television ran through some advertisements for products that would be included in future deliveries. There was some new toothpaste and new recipes on the redesigned flour bags that would help people with low weight problems.

‘When is the next delivery?’ I said.

‘Tomorrow,’ Dante said without looking up.

‘That’s something to look forward to,’ I said.

He looked at me with an undecipherable expression on his face. He had taken to doing that a lot. I decided to let him off, of all of us he had the most to get used to. The television lapsed back into silence.

We’d found somewhere to live almost straight away. It was so fast I’d checked every room expecting to see Étienne sitting on a bed somewhere smiling that smile that knew everything but shared nothing. There was no sign of her, only the man who’d found us outside looking at the boarded-up house wondering if it could be squatted. Kowalski Poppins told us to go in before someone else did. It was odd but we were in need of a roof over our heads. The keys were on the kitchen table along with a card welcoming us to the neighbourhood in bright, cheerful tones that we thought might be over-compensating for some dark secret that we couldn’t work out. After a couple of days the anxiety subsided.

We’d slept rough for four nights as we made our way from the countryside to the city that loomed on the horizon like an optical illusion. It transpired that it was cloaked with a wall like the one that separated the Boundaries from the Suburbs, but the outer wall suffered more glitches than the inner one so as we ambled along the country roads with futile thumbs outstretched, ignored by the occasional cars, our destination disappeared and reappeared. We climbed through a crumbling hole, housing a defunct ventilator, and found ourselves in the mandala of the Boundaries. At first it felt like another optical illusion, the uniform boxes stretching as far as we could see, roads curving out of sight in neat rows of green and grey. We walked for almost a whole day, stopping only to steal a food box that was on someone’s doorstep, puzzling over the helpful notes and cheerful mottos slipped inside the bright food products and fresh fruit. Minos rubbed a mango all over his face like a kitten with catnip. People came and went but they didn’t approach us. Everyone seemed to stick to their own groups of four or five, scuttling into houses and slamming doors behind them. Then we’d come across an empty house. We could tell it was empty because it had a sash across the door that said ‘available’ on it. Kowalski appeared behind us and wondered why we were hanging around outside. At first it seemed strange that he was lingering, answering questions and explaining everything, but after a couple of days we got used to him. We realised that he was quite helpful. So much so that he could have been deployed by Étienne, but that was another concern I managed to put behind me. Lola wasn’t getting any incriminating information inside his head and the rest of us, outside his head, agreed that we shouldn’t ask too many questions otherwise we would raise suspicion. There were questions he avoided asking too, like what we’d done before we’d arrived and how we knew each other. It was the first day of the month and that was when the new arrivals came, so that might have explained it, but there were areas of discussion that seemed taboo.

The house was furnished with an inoffensive kind of taste. There was the television which Kowalski eyed as if it were going to leap off the wall and bite him. Something I would have liked to see. There was a large file on the table with some credit cards in and a manual. Kowalski said it was like a user guide for living in the Boundaries and that we should read it, it would make life easier. Dante memorized it and the rest of us ignored it for a couple of days. When I did pick it up I found that it was an interesting read, boiling down the most important actions for living in a very functional way and setting out the easiest methods for accomplishing them. The book went missing for a few days and Minos, who became quite agitated that it had vanished, found it in Dante’s room. He said he was analyzing it. The government, or the Boundaries Directorate, provided all the housing, water and power. They also delivered the food boxes to the doors in the middle of a Monday night. Kowalski said that the people who did this were part of a National Service Troop which everyone between the ages of sixteen and twenty two had to work for, unless they lived in the Boundaries. All in all we proved quite adaptable to our new life. We availed ourselves of all the amenities we needed and found life ran pretty much along the same lines as it had at home. We were just more peaceable. We were not home though, Étienne was right when she’d said we’d get it wrong. I hoped that was all she would be right about. She had turned out to be a glass half empty kind of a person.

There was a sound like luggage falling down the stairs and Casino arrived breathless with clothes twisted around him. ‘Am I late?’ he said.

‘No, the minibus won’t be here for another seven minutes,’ Dante said. ‘You have time for half a slice of toast and a cold drink.’

‘No one else has appeared yet,’ I said.

‘I’m here,’ Minos said, from the top of the stairs. ‘Ready to go.’

‘Do this toast for me,’ Casino said. ‘You’re quicker than the toaster.’ He grinned at Dante who shook his head in mock despair.

‘You will insist on cheating the system,’ Dante said as they went through to the kitchen where the furniture was more flame retardant.

‘How much have you made now?’ I sipped my tea as my empty plate made its own way back to the kitchen.

‘Millions,’ Dante said.

‘We should move,’ Casino said. ‘We needn’t slum it here.’

‘Don’t you start,’ I said.

‘Could you watch what you’re doing with that floating plate?’ Minos said. ‘You nearly had my eye out.’

The television turned itself on for its scheduled news update.

‘Lola,’ Casino shouted from the kitchen.

‘I’m coming,’ she thought. ‘There’s no need to shout.’

Dante rested the tablet on the arm of his chair and stood up. His trousers fell in neat creases around his shoes as he undid the top button of his shirt. ‘Are you going to work with wet hair?’

‘No, she’ll catch a cold,’ Minos said as a warm breeze dried my rain-damp hair.

‘Anyone else have any magic tracks they need to get out of their system before we go?’ Lola said. She was coming down the stairs with the house computer under her arm. She slipped it back into its cradle next to the television screen. She had been looking for Stark. ‘What’s the weather doing?’

‘A lot of water,’ Dante said.

No one complained about the weather, we’d missed it. We couldn’t wait for the snow that was forecast. A horn sounded. The bus was outside.

Casino put his half-finished toast down. ‘Let’s do this,’ he said. ‘Let’s contribute to society.’

‘Half a slice,’ Dante said. ‘Told you so.’

‘Has everyone got their chip on?’ Minos said rummaging around in his pockets.

I felt in my own pockets, there was a bullet, some strange fluff I didn’t remember seeing before and a crumpled meal voucher in one. My chip was in my back pocket. It was so I could make my journey to work without being detained for making an unauthorised entry into the city.

The horn sounded again.

‘All right, Artemis,’ Minos said. ‘You are exactly on time as usual, there’s no need to wake the neighbourhood.’

If Artemis Yarrow put any more weight on, he would need a bigger bus. He spilled out of his seat, threatening to nudge the gear stick into neutral every time he exhaled. If he sneezed we’d be halfway through a handbrake turn before we knew it. He had a tiny red cap crammed onto the top of his head with the factory logo on it and his too-small uniform jacket was abandoned on the back of his seat.

‘Minos, if we are late we will be stuck behind the coaches that go to the print works and which will make us half an hour late and that will never do.’

‘Twenty seven minutes late,’ Dante said as he sat next to me. We were the first stop so the other twenty or so seats were empty.

‘Twenty seven minutes, then,’ Artemis said.

‘Are you really bored?’ I said to Dante. ‘What’s with all the calculations?’

‘No, I’m trying to be helpful,’ he frowned. ‘It’s not helpful, is it? It’s weird.’

‘It’s unusual.’

‘It’s weird,’ he said.

‘We’re all weird,’ Casino said leaning over the top of the seat behind us. He was sitting next to Lola.

‘True,’ I said. ‘Some of us weirder than others.’

Dante leant around and activated his earnest chip. ‘You are acting strange, you know.’

‘Don’t start that again,’ Casino said.

‘You are not yourselves,’ Dante said.

‘You haven’t known us very long,’ Lola said. ‘We can be quite moody.’

‘Mercurial,’ I said.

‘Unpredictable,’ Minos chipped in.

Dante looked at Casino.

‘I’m too tired to play human thesaurus,’ he said. ‘I’ve not had a lot of sleep.’

‘Sit down,’ Artemis said. ‘There are rules.’

‘They’re weirder than us,’ Lola said.

‘They’re weird as well,’ Dante said. ‘But the natives are harder to assess.’

‘I don’t know what the matter with you lot is,’ Artemis said. ‘Anyone would think you were from a different planet.’

The journey to the factory took about forty minutes. I hadn’t got a precise figure from Dante. We picked up various people on the way, most of them worked in other parts of the factory to us so we didn’t really talk to them beyond the usual morning hello and evening goodbye. There was a quiet camaraderie on the bus but off it they melted away like shadows in a rain shower. Apart from Kit Limber. She lived near the wall and worked delivery with me so we let her hang around us. She also seemed to be good friends with Kowalski.

‘So, it’s like I was saying yesterday, Minos,’ Kit said, leaning over the man she was sitting next to so she could poke Minos’s arm. ‘When you’re as buff as me, I’ll arm wrestle you, till then, I really don’t want to embarrass you.’

The rest of the bus laughed.

‘Listen,’ Minos said. ‘I’ve been mates with Sorcha longer than I can remember and she is hard core. You think you’re buff, you take her on. She’ll rip your arm off.’

‘That skinny thing,’ Kit leant back and looked out of the window. ‘She couldn’t knock the skin off that new rice pudding they’re sending us.’

‘You want to see me in action?’ I said.

Everyone looked at the seat Kit was slumped in. I seemed to have got myself a reputation somehow, I suspected Minos had been talking me up, so everyone was taking a more serious interest all of a sudden.

‘You’re all right,’ Kit said. ‘I’m not feeling too energetic today. Maybe tomorrow.’

‘There’ll be no wrestling on this bus,’ Artemis said. ‘Not tomorrow, not any day.’

‘There’s a rule,’ Kit said. ‘I bet you there’s a rule.’

Artemis pulled over to the side of the road. ‘I thought we’d never get here,’ he said. ‘I thought I was going to have to listen to this nonsense all day.’ But he sounded as though he was sick of it but he was smiling, twisting his cap on his head like he was trying to unscrew it. He smiled at Kit like she was a favoured daughter.

Everyone liked Kit. She was small, a pocket-sized version of someone much larger, personality concentrated so it fitted her tiny frame. All her features, even her smile, seemed too big for her. She hurried Casino out of the bus as he lowered himself onto the ground with great care.

‘Feeling fragile?’ she shouted in his ear.

‘No, late night is all,’ he said. ‘I saw you out after midnight, what were you doing?’

‘I didn’t see you,’ she said. ‘I met up with my brother last night.’

‘How is he?’ Lola said. She was the only one of us with a family so she handled all the conversations about families and other related subjects in case one of us said something stupid.

‘He’s all right,’ Kit shrugged. I thought Kit liked the anticipation of the meeting more than the brother.

The rest of the bus emptied behind us and we waved the others off to their various work stations.

‘I’ve got to go and get a new time card,’ Minos said. ‘I’ll see you at lunchtime.’

He walked away, waving over his shoulder and was soon swallowed by the darkness inside the large entrance. The rest of us stood outside on the wide pavement as Artemis backed the bus away so the growing queue of other buses could drop off our fellow workers. The tower rose into the sky so high the top was lost in the grey mist of a rain cloud. The whole city was a mass of skyscrapers, they reminded me of the machine city and if he’d had such a programme I’m sure they would have made Dante homesick. His towers weren’t so tall though, these ones were huge. They had whole towns in them. There were residential floors, commercial floors and leisure and recreation floors. It was possible for someone to be born on the fiftieth floor and to never need to venture lower than the twentieth floor. People did though. There were special events organised to stop people from becoming too insular. The blocks were beautiful. Inside the hollow spaces were landscaped with exotic flowers and plants and outside they were all chrome and glass. They made the Riverside Sector back at home look like the Boundaries. They said the views were incredible. We weren’t going up though. We were going down. There was one city above the ground and another one underground. We walked through the entrance and across the courtyard in the centre of the building. I could see Minos through a smoky window arguing with a man behind a counter, who doubtless despaired of Minos’s inability to keep hold of his time card. It was the fourth one he’d lost. On the other side of another set of wide doors we entered the vast hall and fell into line to wait for the lifts that would take us down to our workplaces. There were thousands of people employed at the factory, all somehow involved in the manufacture and distribution of cute plastic items for the Happy Tortoise Toy Company. Shifts were staggered so we didn’t all have to fight our way into the lifts to start at the same time. We thought it was lucky that we’d all been given the same shift until it transpired that the job came with the house. Everything came with the house, it was the gift that kept on giving.

The lift stopped on the thirty fourth floor, having only stopped at the seventh which was unusual but not unheard of.

‘Have a good day,’ Casino said.

‘You too,’ I followed Kit out of the lift and waved as Dante, Lola and Casino disappeared behind the broad metal doors.

‘I hope we haven’t got loads on the slate right away,’ Kit said. ‘I like to ease into a day.’

There was a short tone as I crossed the time plate and the chip in my back pocket shared my employee number and the time of my arrival was recorded in some gigantic database somewhere. I got a bonus for never being late. Thanks to Artemis, I was never late. No one was ever late. We all got a bonus. It seemed fair.

‘Sorcha,’ a voice said from behind a long counter littered with small tablets and key cards. ‘You’re up, urgent delivery to Cherry Blossom Shard. It’s the child’s birthday and she’s opened her present and it’s faulty. It’s a complete disaster, as you can imagine.’ Carousel Mudge’s hand appeared over the edge of the counter with a small package in bright wrapping paper. He put it on the counter and pointed in the vague direction of my gear. There was no sign of the rest of him.

Sometimes I felt like Santa Claus.

‘What about me?’ Kit said.

‘You wait,’ Carousel stood up. ‘Or maybe you could get on the practice rollers and pedal and pedal until you’re as fast as she is.’

I was back on a bike, back on the road. One morning, we’d been in residence about a week, we got up to find a message on the television screen indicating that we should report for work. It was a mysterious development but the next morning as promised Artemis turned up with the Yarrow Mobile and we all boarded the bus. Everything was tumbling into some order as though by some divine hand. Divine and disembodied. We were interviewed, together, and all gave approximations of our actual work experience back home, without the illegal elements. I ended up in the delivery service where I was dispatched to deliver emergency and special delivery packages all over the city. Minos was in the technical department repairing manufacturing machines that broke down, Casino was in the textiles department designing dolls’ clothes — we found this hilarious — and Lola was in human resources due to her amazing ability to empathise with people and spot if they were lying. Dante was in the executive office crunching numbers. I had to explain to him that he should work at the same pace as everyone else so he didn’t stand out too much but he decided to be a little bit better than everyone else, rather than ordinary, so he’d been promoted to work with the director of the company. Dante had never laid eyes on him. We suspected he didn’t exist or that he was a real tortoise and therefore moved at such a slow pace he was still on his way to work.

The delivery department was a huge hall with a long counter along one side and racks and racks of bikes. The bikes were all identical, they had green frames with a brown tortoise shell pattern on the saddle and handle bars and I’m happy written in jolly yellow letters on the crossbar. Each bike had a pair of tortoises on the front, one was a horn and the other was a radio unit so a dispatcher could send you on another job or summon you back to the office. I pulled a courier bag out of a cubby hole under the counter and while Kit argued with Carousel about her perceived lack of pace I assembled my gear.

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said to her. ‘I cheat.’

I rolled out of the goods lift and passed the security gate thinking, as I did every time, that that would be where Roach would have worked if he’d come with us. I waved to the guard as though I was waving at Roach and he smiled as he lifted the barrier as I rode up the long winding ramp to street level. I lifted the bike in my mind so we were off the ground, only by a little bit so no one would notice, and I spun the pedals around. I’d done the same as Dante in that I’d decided to be just a little bit better than everyone else instead of just ordinary. The present in my bag was going to an address just on the city side of the Suburbs. When seen from above, the city’s towers rose like a bull’s eye in the centre of a target with the suburbs forming a red and green ring around them, the thin line of the wall and the brown hoop of the Boundaries on the outside. Beyond the Boundaries were green and yellow fields threaded with grey roads leading to other far off towns and cities. Kowalski said that this city was the capital though, the administrative centre he called it. Cherry Blossom Shard was a slim tower, the fine drizzle misted the glass frontage as I waited for the doorman to let me in. Doormen were the same the universe over, they didn’t have a rush in them. The Happy Tortoise Toy Company prided itself on manufacturing excellence so a trip with a replacement was a rare occurrence.

‘Leave the bike,’ the doorman said. ‘I’ll take it behind here. And sign in.’

I pushed my bike over, rolling it to him in my mind. He thought it a little odd but didn’t say anything as I signed the book. A thought fell into my head that didn’t seem to fit there. I felt strange signing my own name. Like I’d told someone something I shouldn’t have done. Maybe they thought I was the other me, the woman in the car with the children. Maybe I was about to be found out. I shook my head.

‘What?’ the doorman said.

‘You know when you have a thought that seems like it’s not really yours or it’s something you’ve dreamed rather than something that’s actually happened?’ I said. ‘But you know it has happened. It must have done.’

‘No.’

‘Lucky you.’

I went up to the seventy-ninth floor, a very proud sign in the lift indicated that it moved at twenty metres a second, so I was there in next to no time. The carpet in the hallway must have cost more than our whole house, it was all I could do to stop myself from taking my shoes and socks off and rubbing my bare soles all over it. When I knocked on the door I wanted the walnut door panels were so polished I could see my face in them.

‘Good morning,’ a child’s voice said.

I looked down. ‘Good morning. I have a delivery for Petulia Happengood.’

‘That’s me,’ the child said. ‘My name is Petulia Happengood.’

It would have been rude to offer my condolences so I just gave her the parcel.

‘Thank you very much. Would you like some water?’ Petulia said as she took it.

The children were all so polite it was terrifying. At first I’d assume there was something wrong with them and that they would be inviting me in because they were lonely or because their fathers were mass murderers.

‘I’m fine, thank you, Petulia,’ I said. ‘Can you sign for this?’

‘No, I’m only seven today,’ she said. ‘Next year I’ll be able to sign. I’ll be eight next year.’

‘Happy birthday,’ I said.

‘Please wait inside, while I get my mother.’

They all said mother or father like they were job titles though. It sounded odd. Petulia’s mother was also a lawyer, it said so on the door. Everyone had their name and their occupation on a nameplate next to their door in the towers. One said Petulia Happengood and gave her occupation as child. She had a brother called Hero. It was a good job they put that he was a child too or I would have assumed he was the dog.

‘Thank you so much,’ Petulia’s lawyer mother said. ‘Do you want the faulty one back?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said, politeness was contagious. ‘It’ll be checked thoroughly so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. Rest assured.’ I may have bowed a little. Perhaps I bobbed.

‘It’s so unusual for something to be faulty,’ Petulia said. ‘I’m sure it’s just a one off. I feel really quite lucky to have seen something like that.’

‘Why, what happened?’ I said as I took a small box from her mother. The box felt lighter than the one I’d given them and it rattled.

‘It exploded,’ Petulia said. ‘It was marvellous.’

There was something wrong with them, those kids. Of that I was certain.

I rode around the city picking up various envelopes for the finance department until lunchtime, taking a moment out to sweep past Kit on the main drag between Apple Jack Grove and the Stock Exchange as she chewed her handlebars trying to keep up with me, and then I went back to meet the others.

They were already sitting around a table in the refectory, half way through lunch boxes with Happy Tortoise logos on them. They provided us with food and juice so we didn’t have to bring it from home. We didn’t have the right currency for the city shops, even if our chips had allowed us to go into them.

‘This is for your lot,’ I handed a thick brown envelope to Dante. ‘Top brass.’

‘Thank you,’ he said and his apple appeared in my lunch box. Minos had his sandwich, Lola his crisps and Casino his drink. There was some chocolate somewhere. We had managed to hide the fact that Dante neither ate nor drank from everyone through the speed of his evasive functions and Casino’s invisibility.

‘That’s the figures for the pay rises,’ Lola said. ‘They’re making payroll adjustments tomorrow.’

‘That’s why everyone’s so cheerful,’ Minos said. ‘The boys said we were about to get a nice surprise.’

‘You know three of them are women?’ Lola said. ‘You do know that?’

‘They’re the boys,’ Minos said. ‘They were the boys on the docks, the boys at the Circus and they’ll be the boys here.’

‘There aren’t any docks,’ Lola thought. ‘Remember? Watch what you say.’