“You know you’ve got a brown stain on those trousers, don’t you? There. On the knee.”

I sighed. “You could find a whisper in a whirlwind, Kaleigh Nyx.”

“And you’ve another dot there on your cuff. Christ, you could have made an effort, Archie,” Kaleigh said, her words glazed in sugary sarcasm.

“Bit of a shoddy finger work with an espresso con panna just before I popped over,” I said.

“All that money you’re making doing that dull-sounding freelance consultancy work and you can’t even wear clean clothes to your niece’s birthday.”

I looked pointedly around the spacious kitchen. It was homely and tastefully decorated. It had kept the same rustic bones it must’ve had a three centuries before—naked hand-hewn beams and exposed brickwork—but had been fitted every modern contrivance; self-cleaning oven, a 3D crockery printer, a smart fridge that automatically detected when staple items were running low and ordered them from the local supermarket.

And it looked like a couple of concussion grenades had gone off in it. I was fairly certain that there was a smear of chocolate icing across the ceiling.

“Is that chocolate icing?” I asked.

“Where?”

I pointed.

My sister looked up. “God, I hope so,” she said.

“You know, the word ‘freelance’ actually comes from medieval times when the word was free lance, and denoted someone who was a mercenary,” said my sister’s hopelessly devoted husband, Len, in his dreamy, soft, Minnesota accent. “A lance for hire, as it were.”

I took a sip of tea. Rubbed ineffectually at the bloodstain on my cuff.

“And it’s Savage now, remember?” Kaleigh said, returning to the attack.

“Pardon?” I asked, derailed.

“Kaleigh Savage. Just because you couldn’t be arsed to make the wedding doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“I was working. I had a meeting in Bratislava,” I said, hopelessly.

“Would it have killed you to miss one of your stupid bloody meetings just once?”

I thought about what had happened in Bratislava. Who Bratislava had involved.

“Yes,” I said.

“Such a drama queen,” Kaleigh said, rolling her eyes.

“Keep rolling them,” I urged her. “You might find a brain back there.”

“I used that one on you last Christmas,” Kaleigh said, smiling.

I didn’t answer. She had too, the she-devil.

I looked at Len over the rim of my cup of Earl Grey. He looked like a man who’d passed through all nine levels of Hell only to realise that it was merely half-time and he was going to have to go back in after a team-talk and an orange segment. Dimly, from three floors above, the shrill shrieking cries of a party—or pack, drove, murder, or whatever it was you called them—of small girls permeated the floorboards of the four-story Peckham semi.

“Don’t feel sorry for Lenny, Archie,” my sister said, catching sight of the sympathetic glance I had aimed in Len’s direction. “He’s brought this down on himself. He told Molly and Rosie and their friends this morning that Cheerios were doughnuts seeds, so they went sprinkling them all around the back garden. Then, while I took the girls to that ceramics café down the road, Len went and hid bloody doughnuts all over the place; under some of the bushes and in the plant pots and what not.” Kaleigh gazed fondly at her husband and smiled. “Silly bastard. They’re running around up there like a bunch of tiny neuroflux addicts now.”

“They’ll calm down when Archie goes up there with his present for Molly,” Len said in his phlegmatic voice. In my opinion, he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “They love Uncle Arch.”

This was news to me—the venturing upstairs part, I mean, not the love bit. I was awfully fond of my nieces, and believed that they thought I wasn’t too much of an excrescence as well, but I’d already been involved in one attempted mugging that day and wasn’t up for another.

There was the sound of something very heavy thumping onto the floor followed by a chorus of delighted squeals.

“Sounds like they just tipped over the wardrobe in the guest room,” Len said resignedly. He was drinking his tea in minuscule increments. Sharp little sips. Willing it not to end. Len was a ghostwriter of fiction and an occasional investigative journalist. He was paid quite handsome sums of money to remain almost completely anonymous. I could see him trying to physically manifest some of that anonymity right now.

“So, no date, Archibald,” Kaleigh observed. “No Julia Roberts. Again.”

“No.”

Kaleigh leaned forward. Her eyes were the same grey colour as mine. They looked tired and happy. Her hands clutched her mug of tea. The gold band was slightly twisted on the third finger of her left hand, the diamond pointing north-west. The direction in which I’d just left five men lying in a road. The direction in which I’d just done a lot worse.

“Modern life, I’ve found,” Kaleigh said, “is very efficient at telling people what to think, but extremely poor at telling them how to think. Don’t let this go to your head, but I’ve always thought of you as being a not-totally-shit judge of character, Archie.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Why, then, are you still playing the bachelor. It’s not as cool as the media reels would have you think, you know. It’s actually a little bit sad. It’s nice for people to look at a man and see he’s got someone in tow. It reassures them because they know that at least someone likes the bastard.”

I chuckled and gave a little one shouldered shrug.

“I find all that sort of a thing a bit of a circus,” I said.

My sister looked at me as if I was daft. Perhaps I was. “Human beings are a circus of emotions and thoughts. What other species do you know of that is so intelligent and yet so bloody ridiculously stupid? That being said, you don’t go to the circus just to sit outside and stare at the tent, do you?”

I took another sip of my tea. Raised my eyebrows to show that I’d heard her.

“Take a bloody break from work, Archie,” Kaleigh said. “Get out and meet some people.”

“I meet people at work all the time,” I replied.

“Yes, but you know what I mean. Go out to dinner with someone that isn’t me or Len for once.”

“I like going out for dinner with you and Len.”

“Yes, but you can’t date us, can you?”

Len gave me a dry sort of look. “Arch doesn’t have any kids,” he mused quietly. “I’m almost tempted.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Kaleigh absent-mindedly flicked some tea at Lenny. “You’re a good man, Archie,” she said. “I know dad fucked with your head a bit—”

“Give that a rest, Kaleigh,” I said tiredly.

“—but you’re just as deserving of everything the world has to offer, you know. You did your time in the armed forces just like our father, the wanker, wanted. You don’t owe Dad anything. You never did.”

“I know that,” I said. “Bloody hell, I know that only the ridiculous and the insecure let the dead govern them.”

“Then why not let your hair down—you still have a lovely head of hair on you, unlike some people I know,” Kaleigh cast Len a narrow-eyed look. “Treat yourself to one of those hangovers that you feeling like the last scrapings of the inside of a parrot's cage in the morning.”

“You’ve marketed that very well and I’m tempted,” I said. “I just never seem to have the time or the… type of life that’s conducive to the dating game.”

“Well, you better sort your shit out and make it conducive,” Kaleigh told me, narrowing her eyes at me. “You’re thirty-six. That’s no spring chicken.”

“Hardly a summer chicken though, surely?” Len said.

“You know how they say that if you don’t make time for exercise then you should make time for illness? Well, the same’s true for your love life, Archibald,” Kaleigh said.

“Dreadfully easy for you to say,” I said, finishing my tea.

“How’s that?” my sister asked me.

“Because you and Len are made for one another. You both drive each other up the wall in just the right manner and in just the right amount. When either of you gets to the point of throwing something blunt and heavy at the other, the blunt heavy thing is stopped in mid-air by a similarly blunt and heavy object coming the other way. If you’re lucky you’ll have another fifty years to drive each other mad. A nice long time.”

“Not a long time,” Kaleigh said, ignoring me, “just a lifetime.”

I looked across the table at my sister. Then I looked over at Len in his faded plaid shirt. He shrugged.

“That’s my point,” Kaleigh said. “It’s just a lifetime. And who the bloody hell knows how long that is.”

None better than one in my line of business.

“It’s not as if I don’t see the merits of a relationship,” I said.

“How romantic,” Kaleigh said.

“I mean, I would like one. I’d like one very much. But, it’s just not practical. What with work…”

I had thought about it, of course. You can only spend so much time in a home gym, or walking through the High Weald with an obese basset hound, or working your way through every series that the extensive collection of umbrella companies owned by Amazon and Google have to offer before your mind starts to dwell on what it is that the heart really wants—or so Wordsworth or Shelley or one of those amorous gits would have you believe.

“Oh, come on, Archie, this,” and Kaleigh waggled a finger between herself and Len, “is never practical. That’s what makes it so bloody frustrating. What makes it so bloody rewarding. You keep your arms and your eyes open and quietly hope that something—someone—stumbles into your path. That’s it.”

“As much as it pains me to say it, she’s right, Archie,” Len said, managing to crowbar a few words in past my sister as she drew breath. “You keep going around making excuses why you can’t do something, eventually you’ll forget why you wanted it in the first place.”

“Don’t turn out like Dad, Arch,” Kaleigh said. “Don’t end up alone.”

“I’ve got Chubbs,” I said.

“That dog’s one dropped sausage away from a coronary,” Len said.

“That’s a bit tactless,” I said.

“But plausible.”

I made a face. “At least he’ll die happy, though.”

“Yeah. Well. Make sure you do the same,” Kaleigh said.

Len slid his empty teacup quietly into the centre of the table, cleared his throat and addressed my sister. “Come on now, sugar, it’s Molly’s birthday. No one relishes philosophising at a birthday party. Not sober at any rate.”

Kaleigh smiled. “Too true. So, why don’t you and Uncle Arch run along upstairs and give Molly Archie’s present. You can entertain the girls while you’re at it.”

“I think it’d be better—more effective, more significant, you know—if Uncle Arch was to go up alone,” Len said, slightly too ebulliently, I thought. “Rosie and Molly are so fond of him, you know, his coming is like lightning into their lives. And I wouldn’t want to steal his thunder.”

“Oh, darling,” Kaleigh said, bending down to kiss Len on one bearded cheek and knocking his spectacles askew, “you’re so good with your words. I’d love to see things from that imaginative writer’s point of view of yours, but I just don’t think I can fit my head that far up my arse.”

Len sighed resignedly.

“Good try,” I said.

Kaleigh flicked the kettle back on, as Len and I pushed back our chairs with the dignified air of two men being sent up the gallows steps to see if they could dance on air. We looked back at the door. Kaleigh pulled a chocolate biscuit from a packet that she’d retrieved from the top shelf of the larder, where it had been hidden alongside a bottle of Southern Comfort and an emergency pack of anatabine patches, and waved.

“Away with you, Thunder and Lightning!” she said, shooing us away. “Go and illuminate Molly’s afternoon.”

As Len and I made our way slowly upstairs, he nudged the present in my hand and asked, “What did you get her, by the way?”

I pulled a conciliatory face. The folly of my gift was only now starting to dawn on me.

“Replica police loudhailer,” I said.

“You son of a bitch,” Len said phlegmatically.

“With added siren sounds.”

“You dumb son of a bitch.”

Fifteen minutes later I found, if anything, Len’s aspersion of my intelligence and character to be on the magnanimous side.

The door to the landing shut behind us with a satisfyingly loud click. The tumult of the horde, urged on by Molly with her new cursed piece of plastic tat—as Len colourfully referred to it—faded into the upper recesses of the Victorian house. I could hear the piercing wail of the siren as the girls thundered up the stairs that led to the old maid’s quarters. Len had turned it into a playroom, but Molly had now designated it as ye olde gaol.

Len sat heavily on a step halfway down the stairs and leaned against the wall. I joined him, parking a shoulder against the banister.

“’Course, if you do find your Julia Roberts,” he said, carrying on the previous conversation in an attempt to blot out the last quarter of an hour, “you might always end up with children. You want to bear that in mind.”

I reached around the back of my shirt collar. Fished out the small wodge of doughnut that Rosie or Molly had inadvertently deposited there when they’d hugged me.

“Yours, I believe,” I said, handing it to Len, who pocketed it. “And I’d like to remind you that, as much as you gripe, you dote on the girls. Unequivocal love and all that.”

Len waved a hand at me. Scratched at his salt and pepper beard. “Oh, I know that. That’s how nature ensures you don’t throw them out the goddamn window on day one. I’m just saying, it’s worth bearing in mind. Once you’re up to your ass in the dating pool, of course.”

A burgeoning of heat on my wrist alerted me to a commtab message. A specific thermal modulation that informed me that I’d received a communique into my cypherbox account.

“Work,” I said.

“You’re a martyr to it,” Len said. He hauled himself up and stumped down the stairs. “I’ll fish out a bottle of strengthening spirits. No doubt your sister is already getting stuck in. See you down there.”

I brought up my cypherbox, activated the CyberGuard software, and read the message. Twice. I recognised the name of the person that I was to be meeting, and saw that the offer of remuneration for the appointment was more than adequate.

The file that had come with the missive was far more extensive than what I usually received from prospective clients. Very neat. Very organized. Very dispassionate. An address, a recommended time, and known associates that could be expected to be attending the meeting too. There was even a considerate little note informing me that, due to scheduled work on the cruiser charging point network in the Kensington and South Kensington areas, all hard-wired security cameras and systems from about the Design Museum to Exhibition Road would be down from 8 p.m until about 5 a.m.

There was a bureaucratic angle to that information that niggled at me slightly.

But, the money was very good. And if I really fancied taking a short break from work, well, every little penny helped.

I spoke quietly, dictating a curt reply, and the words appeared as if floating in the air in front of me:

CONFIRMED. AWAITING PAYMENT.

I always used cap-locks when replying to prospective punters. It was the typography I thought they’d expect from a freelancer. Commanding and forthright, sort of thing. There were expectations to this type of business now, an element of self-promotion—like my forum name, which was Mr. Mediator. Christ, a few decades earlier, before the government had outlawed them, and I would have had to have a social media page.

I sat on the stairs for ninety seconds before a different throbbing pulse on my wrist told me that I’d just received the agreed upon £175,000 via wire transfer. I checked it all the same, obviously. You can’t be too careful when it comes to these unsavoury types floating about the Shadow Net and engaging the services of operators such as myself. Trusting them would be laughable. The money was all there though, snug in my account.

I dictated another reply.

FEE RECEIVED. WILL NOTIFY THIS EVENING WHEN CONSULTATION HAS BEEN CONCLUDED.

And, with that, I got up, closed my commtab, and went back downstairs. It was a seventy mile, two-hour round trip back south to Hever, where Chubbs and a fresh suit awaited me at home. Before I hopped into the Helixen though, I nipped back downstairs for a cheeky snifter with my sister and Len.

“You’re staying for tea?” Kaleigh asked, as she poured me a dash of Southern Comfort into my mug.

“Can’t,” I said. “Impromptu meeting. A thousand pardons, mein Herr.”

Kaleigh shook her head. “That bloody job of yours will be the death of you, Archibald.”

I knocked back my drink, kissed Kaleigh on the cheek, shook Len’s hand, and took my leave.

“Not mine,” I said under my breath, as the bright red front door closed behind me. “Not mine.”