o0o
That was clever, it was nasty, it was life-destroying; but it was better I thought than what I’d been most afraid of, better than the girl being beaten to death. Slightly, very slightly easier to live with, though I guessed I wouldn’t be sweet on myself for a long time after this. Running out I was indeed, on her rather than on them; and Dean knew without asking, no need to warn or to threaten, I wasn’t running to the police any more than I had run to her rescue. They knew where to find me also, they knew where to find my wife.
No, I’d been wrong, Dean hadn’t been looking for or anticipating any trouble when he’d come lightly down the stairs to intercept me. He knew I’d make none. This, I thought, was only a reminder. They had their eyes on me, I was on the payroll and I couldn’t even sneak away without their knowing it, even when their gaze was seemingly turned entirely the other way.
He said goodbye, nice and friendly, my buddy Dean. I muttered something and got into Tina’s taxi feeling craven and disgusting, wondering how much more they’d do to that poor girl before she was persuaded to speak nicely to Vernon Deverill.
They’d not had to do much to me, seemingly, to achieve the same effect. Not had to do anything at all: I’d gone to him of my own free will, to ruin my life under his aegis. To lay my hard-won reputation in his untender hands, deliberately to see it damaged or destroyed; and all for some unlikely undercover plot, to rescue my mother from the deadly consequences of her own folly.
I supposed dimly that that was praiseworthy. It didn’t seem convincing, to me who knew myself too well, but it didn’t need to convince. No story in which my mother played a leading role was ever going to be strong on conviction, looked at in normal human quotidian terms.
But whatever the complexities of her situation and my response to it, there was this one undeniable, irredeemable fact: that because of my involvement I had ended up here today, watching a girl being beaten senseless and listening to their plans for her future devastation. And I had done nothing to help her, nor would I hereafter, and all the logical persuasions I could muster couldn’t touch the shame in me, nor the humiliation, nor the sense of something irretrievably lost.
o0o
Bright girl, Tina didn’t try to talk beyond a cheerful hullo. One unresponsive grunt from me, and she let me stew in silence.
Not till we were well back within the city limits did I even lift my eyes from my restless hands, dry-washing like Pilate, just as uselessly. Gazing out of the window with a mortifying despair, I watched familiar landmarks pass and still took a minute, two minutes to realise where we were, and where we were going.
“Not this way, Tina.”
“Not? Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted home.”
I did, but not the one she knew, the one she’d always brought me to before. Too heartsick to be bothered with explanations, I just asked her to take me to Chinatown.
o0o
Paid her off outside the flat, making her take a tenner for simplicity’s sake while she was still trying to work out sums on her fingers, how much the meter was overcharging me for her unwitting detour; and climbed the stairs like Christian, greatly burdened and utterly alone; and let myself in with keys that still looked strange to my eyes and felt strange in my fingers, and found wife and mother playing house together, not a game I could play at all with either one of them.
Actually, they were making up the bed in the study for my mother to sleep on. Suzie broke off briefly to hug me, of course, and to ask how I was, how it had been, what had happened; and I lied, of course, I hugged her back and told her it was fine, I was fine, we’d just had a talk and hardly learned a thing from each other that was new. And my mother looked at me sharply, many years more experienced in hearing my lies; and then she hailed Suzie back to the bed-making. Clean sheets Suzie was insisting on, like a dutiful daughter-in-law; and the duvet didn’t suit my mother, she liked the weight of proper English blankets over her while she slept. When she can’t have the weight of a man, some cynical or dispossessed adult male had muttered to me once, in an aside I was barely old enough to understand. Blankets apparently were located on the top shelf of the airing cupboard, which meant dragging a chair through to the bathroom for standing on; but no thanks, they didn’t need my height for help, they could manage fine between them.
So I left them to it, and never made a try to tell them truly what I’d seen and done that day. I picked up the leather shoulder-bag from its place beside the sideboard and carried it through to the bedroom; pushed the door shut against the murmur and trill of female voices; unlatched the bag and took out the neat black box that had been my favourite toy and my favourite resource both, the last couple of years at work.
Cables, plug, find the nearest socket, switch on here, switch on there. Lift the lid, watch it through all its internal checks and balances; and I sat on the bed with my computer humming quietly on my lap, and watched even this safest of havens do things I would never, never have asked it to do in my original incarnation.
Me, I was a DOS man through and through; I hated the mouse-and-icon mentality with a passion. Lowest-common-denominator computing I thought it was, computing for the illiterate. I didn’t read picture-books any more, and I didn’t see why I should be expected to drag a picture of a file onto a picture of a waste-paper basket if I wanted to delete something.
My computer, my well-trained computer should have taken me through DOS and straight into Lexis, favourite software of all solicitors. That’s what I’d had it set up to do, and that was certainly what it had done last time I used it.
Last time I remembered using it.
This time, it danced through DOS and into Windows, and left me there with a little arrow to move around the screen and lots of pretty pictures to point it at.
Took me a couple of minutes just to figure out how to get out of that and back to DOS, I was that ignorant of Windows: deliberately dinosaur, friends and colleagues had called me, and maybe they were right but that was how I liked it.
Once comfortably on home territory, at the DOS prompt where I liked to be, I started exploring the system to see what else had changed. It only took ten seconds to find the big one.
Lexis was gone. Everyone used Lexis; I’d been using it in one form or another since before I graduated; the company would have ground to a halt without it. Already I felt totally stranded. All my cases, all my notes were gone.
o0o
And rightly so. Took me a moment to remember, but I didn’t work for Hesketh & Jones any more, I’d resigned. If for anyone, I worked for Vernon Deverill, though I thought that maybe after today my resignation would be heading in that direction also, if it wasn’t already inherent in my walking out.
The computer had been a company machine. I was lucky that they’d let me keep it, and they would certainly have been right to insist that I deleted all client information before I left. Perhaps they’d done that themselves, to be certain. That the program itself was gone seemed a little above-and-beyond, though perfectly proper in a legal sense: it had been a copy from their master disks, and clearly not my property. In any case, if I wasn’t a solicitor any more, what need solicitous software?
Perhaps that explained the unwelcome presence of Windows, that I was just trying to plug a hole, playing with other systems until finally I found something I had a use for. A computer wasn’t a lot of use to me without a job; I’d never been much of a one for games. And I’d have had time on my hands, I guessed, if I’d been playing playboy. Even with a new marriage on my hands also, I would probably have had time enough to try to break myself to an unwelcome government, the philosophy that seemed set to rule computing for the foreseeable future.
Or perhaps it was Suzie’s goading, her refusing to accept my dinosaur tendencies in any part of my life, even those where she didn’t noticeably have a role—
Or did she? I started scanning the directories for anything unfamiliar, for evidence that she had infested this most private corner. She’d said I wouldn’t
let her near it, but that wouldn’t stop her proselytising. I found plenty of software I didn’t recognise, all of it Windows-related: that was fair, whichever way you looked at it. If I was experimenting of my own free will, I’d do it properly; if this was Suzie’s influence, she’d dump the lot on me all at once, and tell me to chew faster if I complained.
Before I found anything that could be called evidence, though, anything that sang directly of Suzie, I found something more arresting, something that froze me boneless.
I found a file called SUSI.DOC.
o0o
Sitting in a directory all alone, it was, announcing its own importance; and the directory was called WORK, so it all stood out, it was very much there to be found. Poor security, my cautious mind scolded my absent personality, what the hell were you thinking of? Two attempts at a burglary there had been, hotel room and here; and if it hadn’t been worse than that, if it wasn’t my blood they were after, they might very well have been after this.
With a .DOC suffix, it surely had to be an ordinary word-processing file, though I was a .TXT man myself. I looked for my regular writing package, WordPerfect, and found that gone also; looked for any other; and in the end had to guess or remember or work out how to get back into Windows before I could run the only one I could find, Word for Windows.
Spitting and cursing, they call this thing user-friendly?, I felt my way into the program with a series of ill-educated guesses, and asked it to open the file SUSI.DOC.
In return, it asked me for a password.
Enter Password for file C:WORKSUSI.DOC, it said; and of course I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a clue what I’d used. Not such bad security after all, if it was secure even from me.
I felt a slow and useless rage building in me, like when I’ve gone a long way to visit a particular shop or gallery or whatever, and find it closed in normal hours because it’s a half-day on Wednesday or the owner’s daughter has her school concert that afternoon, or else it’s a bank holiday and Sunday rules apply. It’s just frustration, at being even temporarily denied access to something that I think ought to be open to me; but it manifests itself as anger at whoever made the rules, whoever thinks that Wednesday half-days or legislated Sunday hours make any kind of sense in the late twentieth century, or whoever schedules school concerts in the middle of the working day.
That day, of course, I could only be angry at myself. I’d set the file up with a stupid password, after all. Almost certainly, I had. Not my normal practice, but nothing about this was normal, and no doubt I’d have felt it safer that way; and not, of course, expected or anticipated or in any sense even considered the possibility of losing months of memory, and the password a small but maybe crucial fraction of that loss.
Ignorance is not and never has been an excuse; ignorance of the future is still ignorance. I was working up a fine if silent head of steam, cursing myself and loathing myself, when Suzie demonstrated her innate sense of appalling timing by walking unexpectedly in on me.
“Knock, will you?” I spat at her over my shoulder.
“Fucked if I will,” she replied equably. “This is my room too.”
“Then I’ll go in the other room,” and I was childishly on my feet already, closing the computer and stooping to unplug it.
“You can’t, your mum’s in there. Settling in for the duration, by the look of her. Like hell she only came up for the day. You sit down,” and her hands were on my shoulders, pressing obedience into my flesh, and somehow I had no resistance to her, “and tell me what you’re in such a grouch about?”
Almost, I told her; beautiful and anxious and demanding, sitting beside me and smelling of musk and apples, she invited confession without even knowing what she did. That lack of resistance in me was more than physical; like a man on scopolamine I wanted to talk, I needed to talk. And like a man on scopolamine all I could do was jerk my thoughts from one track to another, not to control the flow of words but only to redirect it, to try and do no harm.
“I didn’t tell you, did I? When I was, when I was working on all this, you said I worked a lot in the other room and in private, you said I wouldn’t talk to you about what I was doing but I’ve put a bloody password on the file and of course I can’t remember it, so I was wondering maybe did I give it to you? As a back-up, sort of thing?”
Actually I wasn’t wondering that at all: if I’d told her nothing that must have been security also, on the principle that what she didn’t know she couldn’t blab. I wouldn’t have breached that security by giving her access to everything she didn’t know. But it was something to say, it was safe, and I had to say something.
She shook her head. “No, you never told me. Can’t you crack it?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Oh, come on, I thought you were such a whizz at computers? Even kids can crack computer passwords, in the movies.”
“I’m not a kid in a movie,” but nor was I angry any more, only drained and weary and stymied once again.
“Well, work it out, then,” she said.
“How? Have you got any idea how many combinations there could be? Letters and numbers both, I don’t know the program but I bet you can use numbers...”
“Yeah, but it’s a password, right? You’ll have used a word. And, I mean, it was you, Jonty, know what I mean? Even if you can’t remember it, you’ve still got the same mind that thought of it, haven’t you? So you can think of it again. Take you a few tries, maybe, but you should be able to work it out.”
For a second I only sat and looked at her, so close: narrow pointed face, black almond eyes, chopped hair with an olive-black sheen, skin of extraordinary hue. And then I kissed her, and her lips were soft and surprised, then laughing under mine for the moment before she pushed me away.
“What?” she demanded, serious now, if serious meant cocking her head to one side and squinting up at me with half a frown threatening between her eyes.
“I don’t know if that was brilliant or stupid,” I said, “but I’ll go with brilliant for now, until it fails. So thank you.”
She snorted. “Until you fail, you mean. Don’t go blaming me, if you’re not smart enough to outguess yourself.”
o0o
She brought me a cup of coffee, and left me to it. I was distantly aware of her voice and my mother’s rising suddenly into bursts of laughter, loud enough to come at me through the wall, or else down the passageway and through two closed doors between; but I wasn’t trying to listen, barely even wondered what could possibly be funny on such a day, at such a desperate time.
It wasn’t only the logic of the idea I had to thank Suzie for, it was the engrossing nature of it, the obsessive focus it could lend me. Staring at the computer screen, at the winking cursor that demanded a password I didn’t know, I could cease to stare in my head at an abused and nameless stranger, and at myself stood in a window watching, doing nothing but clinically or cynically marking every blow, every added pain. Blinding myself to the world, I could block out my ghosts, for a while.
o0o
So. Classic password mentality, for young men with no experience of using passwords: this much at least I knew, I had read about. Men like me, we tended to use names, as being easier to remember. More than that, they tended to be names that meant something to us. Parents, siblings, first or current lovers; heroes from real life or fiction, Kevin Keegan or Judge Dredd; erotic masturbatory dream-partners, Demi Moore or Michelle Pfeiffer or Antonio Banderas.
Carol I typed, and Carol Carter, just to get them out of the way, out of my mind, as I had apparently put Carol herself out of my mind or else simply out of the way. Then, a little more seriously, Elspeth and Elspeth Marks, and Ellie of that ilk: it was my mother’s story, after all, far more than it was mine. All the machine told me each time was that the password was incorrect, and it could not open the document.
More seriously still, really buckling down to it now, I tried Suzie and all the variants I could think of, Suzie Chu, Suzie Marks
, Suzie Chu Marks; and then remembered that I hadn’t called her that, that I’d refused to for reasons that seemed pretty good to me now, and ran the gamut again with Sue to replace Suzie.
Still nothing, only the flat denial; and my fingers were getting quite fast at this and my mind was sniffing around it like an eager dog, loving the challenge. I tried faces from the past, early girlfriends, my closest teenage mates. I tried my birthday, my mother’s, Carol’s. I yelled for Suzie, asked when was hers, tried that. No soap, but she lingered, so I asked for the date when we’d met. Sentimental as a kitten, she didn’t need to check in her diary, even; but it had no result, any way that I could think to write it. Nor did the date of our first kiss, though Suzie prompted me to try it.
“Well, it wouldn’t, would it?” I murmured, stretching, giving my fingers a rest. “This is my mind we’re trying to second-guess here, not yours. Practical, not slushy. Ow! Jesus, mind the machine...!”
I’d only said it to get a rise out of her, and I’d got that and more. There was a genuine point, though, that I noticed and accepted once I’d fought her off and sent her flouncing back to Ellie. There really wasn’t any point tracking the events or moments that she remembered or valued, even if they’d been shared; what would have resonated with me was all that counted, and I’d never been much susceptible to dates or anniversaries. Or any form of numbers, come to that. I was a words man, always had been.
Heroes, who were my heroes? I didn’t have any, not in that sense. Not whose names I would alight on, looking for an excuse-the-expression unforgettable mnemonic. Men I admired, sure, and women too; but no idols, no mascots, no obsessions. Except of course for Luke: but it would have been lèse-majesté to use his name in such a context, he would have hated it and so I would never have done that. I tried it anyway, I typed Luke just to be sure, and received no reward beyond the confirmation that I was right, that I hadn’t changed so very much after all. I still knew what was proper, what was owed to angels.
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