The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  I dawdled in Ivan’s office doorway after Wilcox had lectured and then dismissed us, putting off having to face the smirk on Dianne Trapani’s face, her birch-blonde hair a dry, upstanding accusation. Or Bambi breathing on the telephone, nestling in her thick blood-coloured cloak. They were pleased Rae was in trouble, and they wanted me to see it. Nor could I face writing the introduction to my report. I’d been looking forward to it, but that morning the words felt like shell-grit on my tongue.

  Guy Harmer and Claire Disraeli from the office next door were watching me, Claire with a small smile, Guy with an expression of distaste. Ivan fidgeted behind them, his thick lips clamped together. His cheeks were still a bit swollen, but he looked much better.

  I felt as though I was trapped in a small enclosed high space, a bubble with a fatally limited air supply. No-one was speaking up for Rae, not one of them, and it sickened me.

  . . .

  Felix Wenborn (alias IT) and I sat facing one another, both staring at a large booklet on his desk, with the single word SECURITY printed in large black letters on a grey cover. For one ridiculous moment, I thought Felix was going to ask me to place my right hand on the book and swear an oath. His eyes kept returning to it, and I wondered whether he’d hastily memorised the rules inside and was reminding himself of them. Felix was in charge of internal security, but until now it hadn’t been a big part of his role. I wished I could say ‘Go ahead and look something up if you want to,’ but I knew he’d take offence.

  Felix’s blond hair, long enough to curl against his collar, framed a smooth, round, dimpled face. At last he looked up at me and asked, ‘What did you say to that reporter?’

  ‘Which reporter?’

  ‘The one you were talking to on the phone.’

  How did he know about that? Bambi and Di had both been in the office when Gail Trembath rang me. I tried to recall whether or not I’d said her name; I was sure I hadn’t. But I’d referred to Rae by name on the phone, and it wouldn’t have been hard to work out what the call had been about.

  I folded my hands in front of me and said quietly, ‘I didn’t tell her anything. She’d had a tip-off from somewhere else, and I told her I didn’t believe it. What do you think Rae Evans has done?’

  Felix was younger than I was, though several grades above me in the hierarchy. That day, he was wearing a fawn button-up cardigan over a white shirt and dark-patterned tie. He dressed like a 1950s pater­familias, except when he went running. Then he dressed in a red T-shirt and red shorts, with a red sweatband holding his blond curls off his face.

  He curled his soft upper lip and said, ‘Access Computing was paid a million dollars, not a hundred thousand as they should have been. Perhaps you’d like to tell me where you think the money is?’

  Rae hadn’t been formally accused of anything, much less proved guilty. The story in the Canberra Times didn’t have to be true. Everyone was so antsy in the lead-up to a federal election that any bit of bad ­publicity was enough to send them off. And Rae was unpopular. I’d been in the department long enough to know that, if not to understand the reasons for it.

  Felix was waiting for an answer. I realised it would take very little, a whisper of breath on the wrong side of his face, for him to convince himself that I’d stolen the money myself, or else helped Rae to steal it.

  I said softly, ‘I have no idea.’

  I hadn’t known, until that moment, that it was actually missing.

  . . .

  Back in my office, I switched on my computer. Instead of the usual ­invitation to log in, coloured lines like worms wriggled energetically across my screen.

  I sat perfectly still, watching them. It was like suddenly finding myself in an aquarium. The worms travelled behind the glass, balling together rhythmically then separating.

  ‘Bambi?’ I said. ‘Can you come here a minute?’

  Bambi stared at my monitor and replied, ‘Wasn’t me, cherie.’

  ‘What are they?’ I asked.

  But Bambi had turned around, and I found myself speaking to her back.

  Ivan was on a job, and Di Trapani out interviewing. I switched my computer off, then on again, but all I got were rainbow-coloured worms.

  I pressed my nose flat against my monitor and it was for all the world like a large sheet of glass, the front of an aquarium. Behind the glass ran a mass of moving, treacherous water, hiding who knew what submerged ravines, what icebergs far from home.

  When Ivan got back, he made a sign saying QUARANTINE STATION and stuck it on my door.

  He hunched over my computer, his big back and hairy head offering a barricade I had no wish to pass.

  He and Felix worked on the worm virus together, while I fidgeted behind them, wishing I could disappear.

  ‘Found the string, but I can’t kill the bastard,’ Ivan said.

  ‘White Lady doesn’t believe in hexes. Unless they’re found in America.’ Felix nodded up from the screen towards Ivan. ‘Won’t believe in this one either.’

  ‘Looks simple enough,’ Ivan grunted, his fingers moving swiftly.

  They were silent for a few minutes, then Felix stood up. He gave me a level, cold blue stare and said, ‘Even in a small department such as ours, we seem to have more than our share of willing ostriches. They believe they’re smart as all get-out, but they don’t want to know about computers. You should have had more sense.’

  He stared at me with what seemed an unmovable dislike, the whites of his eyes luminous and somehow sickly-looking.

  I had no reply, because I didn’t know what I’d done wrong.

  I waited for Ivan to take a break, but it was halfway through the afternoon before he talked to me.

  ‘Viruses can hibernate until the part of the program that contains them is executed,’ he growled.

  ‘Speak English,’ I told him.

  ‘My guess, Sandy, is your little worms hid themselves in a part of a program that you haven’t been using.’

  ‘But how did they get there?’

  Ivan shrugged.

  ‘Will they spread to other computers?’

  ‘That’s why we’ve quarantined everyone you’ve been connected to.’ Ivan smiled like a Cheshire cat. ‘Relax, Sands, no-one’s putting you to bed without any supper.’

  It wasn’t the first time the computers in our section had been attacked by viruses. A couple of weeks before my phone call from Gail Trembath, I’d been in Rae Evans’s office, bringing her up to date on my progress with the report. Together we’d watched a low wall of grey stones build itself up, block by hewn block, until it covered Rae’s computer screen entirely. Across the top in loud black letters, a laughing rough voice cried, ‘STONE WALL HA HA YOU’RE STONED!’

  ‘Damn,’ Rae had said. With a kind of gathering grey annoyance, she’d reached for the phone, pushed IT’s extension and said, ‘Just send someone to fix it.’

  I’d forgotten that incident till now.

  I was in a kind of limbo. I couldn’t ignore the accusations against Rae, but I couldn’t think what to do about them either.

  Ivan’s beard looked thicker, as though the virus hunt had given it a growth spurt. I suspected that he thought the virus was my fault. And Felix definitely did.

  ‘A cup of coffee and a walk around the block,’ I said. ‘Come on. We both need a break.’

  Our corridor felt narrower, the grey bearing in more, as Ivan ­galloped along it to the lifts. The pale plywood office dividers seemed closer together, as though people had been secretly cribbing space on either side, leaving the walkway smaller.

  ‘Someone planted that virus, didn’t they?’ I felt my thigh muscles protest as I struggled to keep up. ‘They must have.’

  ‘Some nerd makes up a virus, it gets copied, passed along. If you can trace it back to its source you’re a bloody magician.’

  Maybe Ivan didn’t blame me. I began to feel a bit less of a pariah. I said, ‘It’s more than that. Something more is going on.’

  As Ivan leant forwar
d to press the button, the lift doors opened. Rae and Felix Wenborn emerged shoulder to shoulder, staring straight ahead.

  I don’t think Rae was aware of me as more than a blur of flesh and clothing. She was completely absorbed in the anger between herself and Felix, anger given form, as though there was another person darting between them.

  Ivan looked from Felix to Rae and back again, with an expression of delighted concentration, as if they were a couple of good stand-up comics, or Wimbledon tennis finalists.

  Safely in the lift, I said, ‘Poor Felix. Looks like he’s had to miss his run two days in a row.’

  ‘Don’t be catty.’

  ‘He hates Rae, doesn’t he? What is he, some sort of new-age ­misogynist?’

  Ivan threw back his head and laughed immoderately. He lost his footing as the lift bumped to a halt at the ground floor.

  ‘I know that what I say is usually hilarious,’ I told him.

  Ivan rubbed his head where he’d knocked it. Outside, he took the lead. He seemed to know where he was going.

  ‘Felix is sure Rae stole that money.’ I was thinking aloud. ‘It’s like he’s been waiting for something like this. For an excuse.’

  ‘Sand, I’m fresh from the wars, OK? I thought this was meant to be a break. Maybe Evans reminds him of his mother. Now that is a thought.’

  Cafe Moore looked as though it had been refurbished since I’d last been there with Rae. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was different. There was a sniff of fresh paint, though it was hard to be sure under the smells of coffee, chocolate, the ubiquitous muffins. The muffins looked like pouter pigeons after a meal of soda bicarb.

  The same Matthew Perceval prints of the Kimberleys were in the section by the windows where I’d sat with Rae, and they still matched the grey-blue of the walls and table tops. In a corner, a man spoke urgently into a mobile phone, rubbing his nose to emphasise a point.

  Patrons pulled their coats tight, lowered their necks into jumpers, made their hot drinks last, staring at the thick cold outside as though their eyes could melt it.

  Ivan leant back, stretching his arms and then his fingers. I thought of asking if they hurt. It would be like asking a bird if it got wing strain.

  He smiled. It crossed my mind that I ought to thank him and that ordinary thanks wasn’t what he wanted.

  ‘You know those digital images I do—like your cyclamen?’ he said suddenly. ‘I want them to be a window on the world. No-one here thinks of computers like that. Number-crunchers, brute data processors—how many people think of their potential for art?’

  Ivan made his eyes big, daring me to answer, ready for a joke against himself. But all the same it seemed to me that he was wrong, that not a week went by when there wasn’t some TV program on computer graphics, art or animation.

  ‘The perspective’s all this way.’ Ivan made an inverted V with his hands, fingers barely touching.

  For all his thick beard and long tangled hair, Ivan’s hands were surprisingly unhairy, as though whoever modelled him had had their fun by the time they’d made his head. I loved to watch Ivan’s hands move over his computer keyboard, like a professional musician’s. But I’d never watched a pianist close up, improvising, the way I watched Ivan. He had a gentle, precise touch. Mostly, it wasn’t sound he was ­producing, but pictures and words on a screen, and the relationship between his fingers and what they created was a hidden one. If I ever came to understand each keystroke as he executed it, would watching him lose its fascination?

  I reached for the sugar, and my hand brushed his.

  ‘I want to change all that,’ he said quietly, but with an underlying hardness I had come to recognise. ‘I want to teach people that ­computers can help them look out there. The opposite of what those guys’re after.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘What are they after?’

  ‘They want people to build walls around their computers so that they, the hackers, can bust them. Otherwise there’d be no challenge for them, you see.’

  ‘Who does?’ I insisted.

  Ivan took a huge bite of croissant. Jam and melted butter spurted out the end. ‘Some smart-aleck kid,’ he said. ‘Ten to one the viruses’ve ended up here by accident.’

  Outside our window was a smokers’ corner for Defence and the ANZ Centre, with blue slatted seats facing one another and white bins the size of horse troughs, where small bushes, geraniums and ferns ­survived shoulder-to-shoulder through the winter. Smokers stood around chatting to each other. Some wore gloves. I wondered if Dianne ever came over here. She never seemed to stray further than the travel centre.

  ‘Like a bloody reformed smoker,’ Ivan said.

  I started, wondering if he’d read my mind.

  ‘IT. Born-again security freak. He’d never be this bad if he wasn’t feeling guilty as hell.’

  ‘Guilty? What about?’

  ‘The buck stops with Felix. You screw up, he cops it. Evans screws up, the same.’

  ‘You mean Felix is taking the blame for the missing money? You think that’s what they’d been arguing about back there?’

  Our refills arrived. Ivan spooned the froth off his cappuccino and slurped it noisily.

  He seemed to have forgotten my question. ‘I want to use computers to expand human perception,’ he went on. ‘You never thought of what’s on a computer screen as a way of looking out, have you? I bet you haven’t. A way of connecting with what’s out there? I bet you never thought of that.’

  Ivan smiled complacently. I wished he would shut up. He didn’t give a damn what my answer was. His question was directed past me, maybe towards Felix, who was making life uncomfortable for everyone. But then I had a sudden optimistic vision of each of us packing away our defences, the way you’d pack away some cards you’d made a brittle house from. Sitting down together with good will. Presenting a united front. So I smiled and nodded and bit back the sarcasm waiting on my tongue.

  Emotions can fill up a scene so that after a while they’re all you’re conscious of, while normally solid objects lose their outlines.

  When I went to pay, I noticed that the white paint on the counter was still scratched. Lined brown wood showed through. Surely anybody giving the cafe a facelift would’ve repainted that?

  ‘Felix needs a girlfriend,’ I said, as we passed the church, a modern one with huge square blocks of glass. ‘What about Bambi?’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Ivan.

  ‘Why not? They both like wearing red.’

  The corner of the travel centre came into view. Ansett boasted four nights at Kuta for $967. Better than a Greyhound to Orange or Cooma, if you had escape in mind.

  I told Ivan I needed to buy stamps and we separated at the post office.

  Recalling Rae’s hot face as she came out of the lift, I was struck by a similarity between her appearance and Felix’s. Both were blue-eyed, roughly the same height. Felix had a boy’s round face and dimpled chin. Rae’s face was more angular. Her nose was higher and thinner and her cheekbones more pronounced. She could have been born into an upper-class English or Scots family, and when she was angry her air of looking down her nose at everyone was obvious.

  But reined-in anger had made Felix’s baby face older and stronger, while it had made Rae’s red and childish, in spite of her Julius Caesar haircut and patrician disdain.

  . . .

  Ivan relaxed for the rest of the afternoon by playing with some smart new software. When I went into his office for a brief chat before going home, there was a huge, hairy face filling his computer screen.

  A mouth opened in the middle of the face. There was a kind of cloud at the bottom of the screen, the faint suggestion of a mushroom cloud, a white top flecked with yellow. As the focus shifted and definition sharpened, the cloud became a meat pie with potato and cheese topping. The mouth opened wide to swallow mottled bits of meat and gravy.

  In a sequence that was at once grotesque and natural, the mouth attached itself to throat, stomach, intestin
es, each internal organ appearing on the screen as you might see your own insides in a nightmare.

  The sticky mouth opened one last time, letting out a giant burp.

  Ivan turned to me and winked, wordlessly handing me a brochure.

  ‘Relax, Sands, it’s just a demo. Compic strutting their stuff.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Local talent. It’s great! I like it.’ This was for Guy Harmer, who was standing behind Ivan watching the animation over his shoulder, cool as ever, but obviously enjoying himself.

  ‘BYOP. 256 colours.’ The information across the top of the screen seemed an optional extra, like tomato sauce.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Build your own pie.’

  More words appeared, this time rainbow-coloured, in a fancy script: ‘IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS COMPIC, AND THE WORLD OF COMPUTER ART WAS BORN.’

  ‘Who wrote this garbage?’ I complained. ‘It’s even blasphemous.’

  ‘What do you care?’ Ivan said. ‘You’re an atheist. It’s advertising.’

  ‘Did you model for it?’

  Ivan looked hurt.

  All I was producing was a humble report on clerical outwork. A coloured cover would stretch our project’s budget to the limit. If the department was planning on buying sexy new graphics software, it obviously wasn’t doing it to make my work more alluring.

  I mumbled something to this effect, and left Guy and Ivan chuckling like a pair of off-course punters who both had dreams of winning.

  . . .

  Heading out of the building, I looked up and saw Rae Evans at the other end of the corridor, walking towards the fire stairs. She was carrying what looked like a stuffed briefcase, and wearing her overcoat and scarf. I called out to her.

  Without replying, or glancing in my direction, Rae quickened her pace. She was opening the heavy fire doors when I caught up to her.

  ‘Rae!’

  She turned towards me, her eyes as grey and flat as the lake under fog.