by Peter Carey
I thought something like the following, more or less:
A dark staircase can be seen leading upward out of the drain. To the west is a small window which is open.
>go west
Inside is a white clean chamber. Frederic no longer wears his gown. His skin is like ivory. He is in a trance.
Celine came towards me and the light burned the edges of her silhouette and I didn’t know if it was a man or woman, big or small, young or old. I thought she was a man i.e. INTRUDER. The flashlight made a second halo of her harm.
I pressed myself against the wall, in the shadow of a pier, listening to splashing feet.
You are in the cavern of cockroaches.
When the light rushed at my face I screamed and tore it free. I was mad, not nice, screaming keep out, stay away from me. Then I woke up, sort of, and there was my mother, bleeding where I hurt her arm. She was shivering, quivering. I put my arm around her and we limped towards the light like sewer rats. Outside on Elm Grove, beside the primary school, we were both embarrassed by ourselves. At home I ran a bath for her and made her bread and butter and sugar and drenched it in warm milk. What did I want? I watched her eat her baby food and I told her I was not cutting and then she told me Frederic’s mother had taken him up to northern New South Wales. At least I knew he had not dumped me.
Celine asked would I be happier back at school in Carlton. I said I had to learn programming. This was maybe not a total lie, but what I really wanted was to hook up online. I imagined Frederic’s fingers flying like moth wings all night long. Even now, when I cried myself to sleep, I knew he must be messing with root, account passwords, building back doors. My parents had to get me a computer and a modem. Then I would find Frederic on Altos. We would build a s3kr4t back room i.e. with just two members where we could invent, imagine, talk soft and dirty to each other.
I told my mother I must learn to program I didn’t care how hard it was. I would be the biggest swot she ever met. I stared at her with such bright mad attention I knew I could draw her from the water like a yabby, put her in the pot and eat her up for dinner. I was a selfish little cow.
Celine made me take off all my clothes and checked I wasn’t cutting. If this was creepy, WTF. I stood on my bed and she shone a flashlight on my not quite virgin thighs. To compensate me for this humiliation she would pay for private computer lessons with Miss Aisen. I was guilty about the money, so I gave her something in return, not much—I showed her the bottle of brown ink the idiots had thought was blood. She swore she had not read the letters, which was a lie. She apologised for believing stupid social workers. I could have asked for my own computer then, but I had no clue of how easy it would be. Miss Aisen had already told my astonished parents that it would be a “crime” if I was hindered in my desire to learn.
GABY DELIVERED the first ten dollars to Miss Aisen. Thirty minutes later she was back home, sweaty, out of breath, holding a tiger snake in a jar against her little breasts. It would have freaked you, Celine said, to see the poisonous creature with its head squashed like a garlic clove. My daughter was glowing like she had just been kissed.
What about the lesson?
I have to get something.
You have to get something? What do you have to get?
The girl grinned and placed the viper on the shelf between the kidney beans and lentils.
What do you need for your lesson?
Don’t worry about it, Gaby said. She’ll make up the time tomorrow.
Pause.
Start.
A worker’s cottage in Darlington Grove, Gaby told me, a block over from Patterson Street, with a super-loamy vegie garden. Aisen had been born there, in her mum’s bed. It had been her mum who had improved the soil with chicken manure and lake weed. Her father had also been born in Coburg. He was Mervyn. He had grown up when it was all “rock and rabbit farms,” paddocks wild with boxthorn bushes and Cape broom. Some moron would always “drop a match” and burn everything from McMahons Road right through to the lake, millions of sparrows and starlings rising in the air, blocking out the sun.
Miss Aisen had been taught at St. Bernard’s and Bell Street High then studied to be a secretary, then to be a bookkeeper and worked with IBM accounting machines which were already dinosaurs. Then she taught bookkeeping at Bell Street. She never married. She was careful with her money. When the Mac IIx arrived she could afford to buy one and thus became “the oldest hacker in Melbourne.” Fast forward. Play. She was not a criminal. Stop. Fast forward. Play. She had seen Celine and Gaby emerge into the steamy drizzle from beneath the Pentridge Prison walls. That lovely actress, she had thought, all her talent, and there is her angry ugly daughter living in a drain. But that was what Miss Aisen was put on earth to fix. From each, to each etc. Fast forward. When Gaby arrived that first Saturday morning, she found her living in an island of white people. One neighbour was Mr. Howard who trained the apprentices at the Government Aircraft Factory. Alice and Bob McNaughton were on the other side. He was “with” a timber yard on Gaffney Street. He raced pigeons, you get used to them, according to Miss Aisen’s dad. Melbourne’s oldest hacker had once had a front garden but now it had a wheelbarrow, a rusty Subaru and a motor scooter with a fruit crate strapped onto the back.
Gaby arrived in shorts and bare feet. She edged sideways through a nest of bicycles and reached the front verandah where the boards were nice and cool. It was Miss Aisen’s dad who answered her knock. Mervyn was short and wiry, in a working man’s navy singlet, shorts and plastic thongs. He was what we might call “a bit of a character,” a pensioner yes, but also a frisky dog who wants to play. He carried a white tea towel across his brown shoulder and a dead tiger snake in his right hand.
Gaby had grown up with Labor Party “characters.” She was also on familiar terms with the snakes of Merri Creek: browns, tigers, red-bellied black snakes too. They swam with their heads held high around the car wreck where Gaby had smoked with Solosolo.
You got a Tigger, she said.
That’s correct, a Tigger. He had a walnut face and all sorts of knocks and blemishes on his pate. He grinned and showed a bright gold tooth.
I’m here to see Miss Aisen, she said. (The snake’s head had been bashed.)
Did you meet him down the creek?
He was looking for a tête-à-tête. He asked, You know what that means?
Yes.
Of course you do.
He had comic eyebrows and bandy legs, sun-brown on both sides.
I got bitten by a taipan once, he said, opening the door for her.
I bet you did. (She had learned to talk like this by listening to her dad.)
Mervyn’s thongs slapped against the morning light. The girl could smell burned toast, fresh-cut grass, water sprinkling on hot soil.
I thought that would be a bit fatal, a taipan.
Old wives’ tail.
Did you use a tourniquet?
Beer and a Valium.
By the time she arrived in the kitchen she was smiling. It was a small room, painted a wild bright yellow, filled with sunshine, hanging herbs and garlic, high stacks of newspapers along the walls, a blackboard with rosters of names and dates, a laminex kitchen table with three odd chairs.
Mervyn continued out the back, through the flywire.
Your visitor is here.
The familiar computer was in front of her, the IIx that she knew from school.
Take it down the creek, Miss Aisen called, before it starts to pong.
Next to the computer was a modem, a bright red cradle. This was probably the only surviving coupler modem in Melbourne, but I didn’t have a clue. I understood that you took Miss Aisen’s normal everyday phone off the hook and placed it here, and I could, if I ever dared, if I ever got a sneaky chance, get onto Altos.
Miss Aisen wore short shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and gardening gloves. She had a shiny sweaty face.
So, she said, you want to learn to code.
All I wanted was to get on
line. But I insisted on the code. Not baby language, I said.
BASIC is a proper language. The fun bits get you to the hard bits.
So I could write a program in BASIC?
And what did you want your program to do?
Fool around, I said, yearning for that bright red cradle.
Do you know what that is there?
What?
What you’re staring at.
Is it a modem? I asked.
Have you seen a modem before?
Can you teach me?
Listening to the tapes, it was comical how Gaby highlighted her deceitfulness. She was her mother’s daughter after all.
I’ll teach you to program, Miss Aisen said. We can do that as a project, but we are not going to give up on BASIC.
I don’t think I want that, no.
If you want to be serious. BASIC is exactly that.
Maybe not.
Was Miss Aisen intrigued by this resistance? Surely, yes, she was a teacher, but then her father was demanding a jar to put his snake in. He had thirty-four bottled snakes which he planned to bequeath to the Melbourne museum. She dealt with this issue and then returned to her pupil.
Gaby, what is it you really want?
Yeah, right.
I beg your pardon?
You’ll get crabby.
I think we should trust each other a bit more than that.
When can I come back?
We haven’t even started.
Yes, when could I come back?
You don’t want a lesson now?
No.
Tomorrow morning if you like. But why?
I need to get something.
What do you need?
Can I really come back tomorrow morning?
Then Mervyn was demanding attention.
And so, of course, Miss Aisen went, as per usual because, as she told him, she was his doormat. And she gave up her bean jar and he coiled the snake inside it and poured the illegal formaldehyde and he finessed the coils with a piece of dowling. When he was finished she returned to her pupil but now with her father right behind her, polishing his horrible jar with his clean white tea towel.
What do you think of this, young lady?
The child became beautiful.
I brung a gift for you, he said.
The girl reached for the bottle and rubbed her index finger at the place where the snake’s crushed head lay against the glass.
It’s a beauty, she said.
I’ll get you a little Super Glue to keep it safe.
Miss Aisen watched her father glue the lid and saw how the girl was filled with light. She watched her leave, that summer car-park hop, as she carried the bottled snake, dancing across the gravel. Who would not want, with all their heart, to be a teacher?
OF COURSE the fugitive was on the Hawkesbury and never once laid eyes on the astringent little Aisen or inhaled her hallway, her kitchen floor polish, Stove Black, or 1950s plastics heating in the sun. Regardless, it was clear to him, inarguably so, that it was not merely an antique modem his subject had found, but surrogate grandparents who would, in their own ways, be prepared to love her unconditionally and thereby provide her with a history she had not even known she lacked.
Her first recollections of Darlington Grove are of soil, loamy, clay, dry, wet and are only interesting because they are so clearly disconnected from anything she could have experienced until that time.
All her language describing Mervyn Aisen (an “old shoe” for instance) indicates a comfort she could not have felt when first meeting him. Indeed, on entering their kitchen, her intention was to deceive them both, something she pointed out not once (fast forward) but many times. She fled from her first lesson in order to fetch her collection of passwords and access numbers. You can’t understand, she said. You can’t possibly understand what I felt. I did not have to die. I WAS GOING TO USE AISEN’S MODEM. It was as if Frederic had anticipated this very moment and had made a stash of everything I would need when he wasn’t by my side.
He already saw the shit ahead of us, and if our files were to be wiped or arrested we would store them where no-one would ever look. On paper. You’ve seen the Federal Police leaving those suburban houses with their cardboard boxes, floppy disks, hard drives, cables, modems. Did you ever see them with The Lord of the Rings?
Frederic stole two copies from Mark Rubbo in Lygon Street and we turned them into paper brains. We assigned numeric values to the ten most common letters a-e-i-o-u-h-n-r-s-t. (a=1 and t=10). Do you think the Australian computer crime squad would even open The Lord of the Rings? Would they see the pinpricks? Do they even know now, years later? A single volume held as many 800 numbers as there are blackberries growing beside the road to Eildon. In any case, the Altos twelve-digit NUA was in there: Book Three, Chapter Two, “The Riders of Rohan.”
Gaby returned to Darlington Grove on the Sunday but then lost her nerve. She begged another lesson, ten more guilty dollars, lost her nerve again. It was stinky hot, she said, summer holidays. My mother was cast in a movie and was filming at Mount Macedon. I waited three days in an empty house then came back to the Aisens’ so early in the morning that I was given the job of collecting the woodchips for their bath heater. My face was still bruised and yellow from the accident but they decided I was a good girl when I was actually a thief and burglar. I made lethal black tea the way they liked it, and two grilled cheese sandwiches. The old fellow went to see a man about a dog and I sat and waited, watching Miss Aisen swallow her dark brown tea. It got thundery. Then she went out to draw the shadecloth across the lettuce, almost enough time, not enough. Those early Macs took a long time to boot up.
I had to endure one more lesson in writing BASIC about which I had only second-hand opinions i.e. BASIC had a fat arse and took up too much space. Aisen could not grasp how I could be at once so desperate and so bored.
She taught via games, she said. She compelled me to choose what my game would be.
Doctor Who on Mars, I said, because I was a show-off. She forced me to start dividing things up in classes. I came up with “World classes” and “Actor classes.” I was so impatient. Mars was a “world,” Doctor Who was an “actor.” I had to make Doctor Who move but not all actors would need to move so she got me to invent the subclass “Movers.” So on, forever. I was so so bored.
I tried to trick her into leaving me alone. I said I would work on this by myself and show her what I’d done.
She was, OK, continue. And would not leave my side.
Finally, it was “nature calls”: she was going to the “library” i.e. the dunny out the back. By the time the screen door slammed shut the thunder was overhead. Her phone was on the desk beside me. All I had to do was drop it on the modem which clasped it tight like sex. 800. Remember that old-time dial-up signal? Then I was like IN. Minerva. And I had the Altos NUA out of my pocket. Then IN again: that intro page at ALTOS I had first seen in my honey’s bedroom, now so sweet and familiar. I hoped he was waiting on the bridge.
WELCOME TO THE ALTOS HAMBURG CHAT SYSTEM!
What’s your nickname?
Fallen Angel
Where are you from?
Undertoad, where are you? Need 2 dialog
You’re a tricky little thing, Miss Aisen said.
And I was going, Ah, I don’t know. What is it?
But she saw exactly what I had done. She asked me how I got there, and I began to cry. I’ll pay. It’s a local call.
Local call to what?
Finally I told her it was called Minerva.
She had clamped my shoulders with her strong little hands, but when I said Minerva she released me. OK, log off. She watched, her arms folded across her chest, her head cocked.
Now, log on.
I thought she had no right. I thought Frederic would kill me. She watched me while I went through Minerva and introduced myself on Altos. I was almost at the limit of my skills.
Speedball: Welcome back Fallen Angel. Wassup? WTF with
Undertoad?
Aisen asked: Who is Undertoad?
I would not say.
This is the boy who was in trouble?
I glared at her and she touched my head like someone who never had a pet before. She said, Show me what else you can do?
Will you let me use the modem still?
If it’s a local call, yes.
She had a way of looking at you I can’t describe, as if there was an error in your genetic code and she was searching for it, line by line.
You’ll find him, she said. Her eyes were pale and brown, too clear to hide a thing.
How do you know?
You will.
She could not have known. Actually, he was with hippies in Nimbin and could not get online. But I believed her.
The lightning was raging but the line noise was OK and I tried to take my five-foot teacher travelling. I wanted to show her I could do it, but I didn’t want to give anything away.
Good heavens, she said. Look at you.
God knows what she was thinking. Then, jeez Louise, the bitch logged me off. I sort of shouted at her, not thinking where I was. She goes, Do you really want to go to jail?
It’s not illegal, what I did. I dialled a phone number. That’s not wrong.
And the password, did you steal it?
A baby could have guessed it.
But those same eyes were on me. She could be a scary old dame. You better go home to your mother now, she said. I will not help you to break the law.
You promised I could find my friend.
Yes, but now you should go home.
I understand now that she liked me, and that she was afraid of the police like everybody but at the time I was outraged, deceived, betrayed. Also, completely inept.
You’ll still teach me BASIC? I said. I have to know BASIC, which was a lie of course. But she was in love with teaching, so I faked it, never thinking my lie might one day become my life.
She said I won’t help you to break the law.
Well what am I going to do? I said, and I was really crying because I could not find Frederic without her. I have to learn BASIC I cried. I bawled and bawled to make her sorry for me, so she would let me back and I could have another chance.