by Sanjida Kay
‘Your mum told me about that horrid boy,’ said Vanessa. ‘You mustn’t take any notice. Bullies just want to see they have hurt you. If you don’t show how you feel and you laugh off the teasing, he’ll soon stop, believe me.’
‘I can’t,’ said Autumn in a small voice. Her face crumpled as if she was going to cry but she managed to stop herself.
‘That’s my girl, my big, brave girl,’ said Vanessa, stroking her hand.
‘The boy tore up all of Autumn’s paintings on the way home from school,’ said Laura.
Vanessa’s mouth tightened into a thin line.
Laura didn’t add that she’d grabbed hold of Levi and pushed him so hard he’d fallen in the mud and sliced open his cheek. Shame engulfed her. She closed her eyes.
How could I have done it? she thought.
‘Mum came and got me. From the boys,’ said Autumn.
She said it dully – not, thought Laura, as if she was grateful she’d been rescued.
‘You didn’t tell me that bit,’ said Vanessa, twisting around to look at her.
‘I didn’t have a chance,’ Laura said. ‘There was a gang of them, including Levi. Six or seven. They didn’t hurt you though, did they?’
Autumn shook her head but she still wouldn’t look at her. Laura held her breath. Was Autumn going to tell Vanessa what had really happened? How would Vanessa react if she did? She imagined Vanessa looking at her; she wouldn’t have to say a word, only stare at her, her pale-grey eyes bright and hard. Laura felt ashamed at even the thought of Vanessa finding out.
There was a horrible silence. For once she knew that Vanessa was thinking exactly the same thing as her: what if they had? What if Laura hadn’t got there in time? And if they had so much as touched Autumn, Laura knew that she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself. She might have done something even worse.
‘I think,’ said Vanessa, ‘it’s time for pizza.’
Autumn forced out a smile, without opening her mouth, and Laura was reminded how sensitive her daughter was about the gap between her front teeth.
Pizza was Autumn’s favourite food but Vanessa thought pizza was terribly bad for one – all that stodgy white bread and fatty cheese was a nutritional wasteland – so Laura knew that her mother must really want to help her granddaughter feel better.
She wondered if Autumn would tell Vanessa the whole story when she wasn’t there.
‘The computer man is coming round tonight,’ Laura reminded her mother.
Vanessa looked at her with annoyance because she was spoiling her plan, and then said decisively, ‘Then Autumn and I will go out together. On our own.’
Laura barely heard her. She knew she had crossed a line. What would happen when the boy told his parents? Would they try and track her down? Speak to the school? The worst part of it was that it would reflect badly on Autumn, deflecting attention away from the real issue, away from Levi and his bullying.
‘We’ll bring you some back,’ said Autumn.
Without them the house was unbearably quiet. Laura poured herself another large glass of wine and carried it upstairs to her tiny office. She turned on her laptop and fetched another chair.
She was just about to take a sip of her wine when the doorbell rung. She looked at her watch. Aaron Jablonski was exactly on time.
She ran downstairs and opened the door. ‘Come in. It’s so kind of you to fit me in at such short notice.’
He stepped in off the street, holding out his hand to her. ‘It’s no problem, Laura. It’s good to see you again.’ His grip was firm, warm.
He was taller and leaner than she remembered, filling the space in the narrow hall. She stepped back, flustered. ‘My office is this way, up the stairs.’
He shrugged off his coat, damp from the rain, and hung it up before following her, making her pause awkwardly on the stairs; she should have offered to take it from him. When they reached the office, he had to squeeze himself into the space, and as she sat down, she realized how close she was to him.
‘It’s the Internet,’ she said. ‘It keeps cutting out and my laptop is always crashing.’
He nodded but didn’t look at her or ask for any further explanation. He started to press buttons on the keyboard.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ She gestured at the wine glass. ‘Wine, beer, a soft drink?’
‘I know this is going to sound odd,’ he said, ‘but could I have a glass of red wine and a black coffee?’
‘Of course,’ said Laura, smiling.
In the kitchen she haphazardly measured out coffee into the cafetière and placed two cups on a tray, another wine glass, the wine bottle and a plate of biscuits. She hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and was suddenly ravenous. She ate a biscuit as she waited for the kettle to boil.
The only good thing about today was that the bullying would stop. Faced with an adult who knew what he’d been doing – the boy had practically admitted it – and who’d told him off, any normal child would be too frightened of the consequences to continue.
She carried the tray upstairs but there wasn’t even enough space to put it down in her office so she had to set it on the floor. There was something ridiculous – practically abstemious – about making this room into her study when the house was so large. It was almost too small to be called a room, but it had a high window and ceiling and faced out over the garden, which was why Laura had chosen it. There was just enough room for a desk, a chair and a set of shelves.
The house itself had a curious layout. The sitting room opened off the hall, which was where the front door was. On the next floor up there was a largish bathroom desperately in need of renovation and the spare room where Vanessa was sleeping and in between, directly opposite the staircase, the minute room Aaron was now in.
The floor above held Autumn’s room and another spare room, and in the attic, nestled into the eaves, was Laura’s bedroom. If money became really tight, Laura thought she could rent out one or both rooms – or, now she’d got Autumn into her choice of school, move to a smaller place. But she’d imagined being able to use them as offices for the new business.
The kitchen, dining room and a tiny bathroom were on the bottom floor, one level below the street and the sitting room. From the kitchen you stepped down to the garden. At some point, she planned to knock through to the small, dark dining room that had become a dumping ground for unsorted papers and piles of clean, unfolded laundry. It was also full of boxes from the house move that Laura hadn’t got around to unpacking and pictures that she hadn’t hung.
‘It’s certainly quirky,’ said her mother, when she’d arrived at Wolferton Place yesterday.
Laura had frowned. Vanessa meant quirky as a critical comment, not quirky as in: how quaint and adorably eccentric. Laura had fallen in love with the spectacular view over the south-east side of Bristol. Sometimes, early in the morning, she watched balloons drifting over the attic window. It was the garden that had really sold it to her though: long and narrow, south-facing with high brick walls and almost nothing in it but a strawberry tree and some shrubs, it held such potential. She imagined it being a showcase, a floral meeting space for new clients.
‘It’s spooky,’ Autumn had said.
They’d been standing in Laura’s room at the time and Autumn was holding her grandmother’s hand. Autumn didn’t like the house and Laura felt trapped, wanting to sympathize with her child yet not wanting to have to explain all the practicalities of buying as big a house as you could afford as an investment; of having to move to a neighbourhood with a good school; of having to be the only adult to make all the decisions from now on.
‘Why do you think it’s spooky?’ asked Vanessa. As a scientist, Vanessa didn’t have much patience for opinions about the supernatural.
Autumn shrugged. ‘It makes funny sounds – creaks and moans and sighs. And we’re all so far away from each ot
her.’
That was certainly true. The house was cold and draughty and needed a lot of work, which Laura could not afford.
To her surprise, her mother had laughed. ‘It’s an old house, Autumn. Of course the wood will creak. And, apart from me when I’m in the spare room, everyone is an awfully long way away from the loo.’
Laura poured Aaron a coffee and a glass of wine and placed them on the desk. She held up the biscuits but he didn’t look at her, so she put them down again.
Aaron’s fingers flew across the keyboard. He suddenly stopped and ran his hands through his hair. It was thick and dark, greying at the temples. He took a sip of the coffee and then the wine before turning to her.
‘You haven’t got a password on your Wi-Fi.’
‘No.’ She shrugged and eased herself into the chair next to his. Their knees almost touched. ‘Who’s going to sit outside our house and use our broadband?’
He had dark-blue eyes, almost navy, deeply set with crow’s feet around the edges and a fine, straight nose. He looked at her for a moment and shook his head. And then, with a start, she remembered somebody had been standing outside their front door at four that morning.
‘I’m going to put a password on. Someone could access your computer and hack into your bank accounts. I’ll try a few things to get your laptop running more smoothly. If they don’t work, I’ll have to take it to my office and wipe the hard drive and rebuild it.’
‘Oh,’ said Laura, thinking she really needed the computer to work – there was the essay she had to do for her course and Matt’s Skype call on Saturday.
‘I’ll do my best to fix it now,’ he said.
Laura craned forward to see what he was doing but it made no sense. He typed with great speed as he flicked through screens on the monitor, switching back and forth from computer code to the view that she normally saw. It was disorienting. She knew, of course, that binary was what made her laptop look the way it did, but actually seeing it was like glimpsing another reality; an Alice Through the Looking Glass world where appearances were superficial and ultimately treacherous.
Aaron barely spoke other than to ask her for the password to her email and Skype accounts and what she wanted her new password to be on the Wi-Fi.
‘Ode to Autumn,’ she said, without thinking.
Laura loved her daughter’s name. Autumn Wild. It had come to her when she was six months’ pregnant, feeling her daughter kick and stir as she walked through a field of barley, the sheaves soft as silk against her calves, the green of their stems turning a dry gold.
Autumn. It had seemed a perfect name for a child who would be born at the tail end of such a glorious season. Every time she said it to herself, Laura pictured vermillion Virginia creeper leaves, the smooth, sweet gleam of conkers cracking through their grenade-like casing, scarlet haws amid the downy tangle of old man’s beard. Although now, of course, Autumn’s beautiful name had been the first thing her daughter had been bullied about, she thought.
Aaron wrote oDetOauTumn21 on a piece of paper and passed it to her. ‘Safer,’ he said. ‘Harder for a hacker to crack.’
Aaron had rolled up his shirt sleeves as he worked and Laura noticed how muscular his arms were. She thought about standing opposite Levi, a boy, a child, and how weak she’d felt.
‘Do you work out?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. He didn’t seem surprised at her question. ‘I do martial arts. I have a black belt in Taekwondo.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She’d never heard of it.
He typed something and then turned the screen around so she could see. It was a YouTube clip of two men in white robes and trousers trimmed with black, wearing black belts. They bowed before circling one another, wary as tigers. One lashed out with a high kick; the other deflected the blow with ease.
‘It’s a two-thousand-year-old Korean martial art,’ said Aaron. ‘It means “the way of the foot and the fist”.’
‘Oh,’ said Laura again.
It looked deadly yet, at the same time, graceful. She could see that Aaron would be good at it; he appeared lithe yet strong and his focus seemed unshakable.
He didn’t ask her why she’d asked or if she was interested in trying Taekwondo, and Laura was grateful. He clicked the video off and returned to his examination of her laptop. She should really get fit, she thought. Jacob would smirk when she told him. He’d been telling her to exercise since they’d met when she first moved here. Easy for him to say, she thought, since he was an ex-marine and already incredibly athletic. She’d ask his advice when she saw him tomorrow.
Aaron stood up and stretched. ‘Mind if I have another glass of wine and a cup of coffee?’ he asked.
‘Oh, of course.’ Laura poured him one of each. ‘How are you getting on?’
‘Nearly there,’ he said. ‘Before I leave I’m going to install a remote device that will allow me to operate your laptop from my office. If you have any problems over the weekend or next week, I’ll be able to access the hard drive and sort it out for you. If you’re still having trouble, I’ll have to wipe it and start from scratch, but I think it’ll be fine.’
Laura was a little taken aback by his suggestion but Aaron didn’t seem perturbed by the intrusiveness of such a program.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, sitting back down and staring at the laptop. ‘Hopefully it’ll just be a temporary measure to check you’re not getting any glitches when I’m not here. I’ll be working this weekend so feel free to call me any time if you need to.’
It had grown dark. The only light in the room was the small desk lamp, which cast a bubble of radiance around them. Laura, warmed and relaxed from the wine, felt slightly less shaky. The threat that Levi posed and the terrible thing that she had done started to diminish a little in her mind. She resolved to talk to Mrs Sibson again and find out who Levi’s parents were. She would speak to them and apologize, but she’d make sure they understood how awful Levi’s behaviour had been. And she would get fit and become strong. Horrendous as it was, pushing Levi would put an end to his bullying. Bullies were fundamentally cowards and she had stood up to him.
‘You’re right by the nature reserve, aren’t you?’ said Aaron, interrupting her thoughts.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The allotments are over there’ – she waved in their general direction, now a black window into the night with a small, bright-white reflection in the corner from her desk lamp – ‘and the reserve is behind them. Why, are you interested in wildlife?’
Aaron shook his head. ‘It’s the highest peak for miles around. On a clear night I go and sit on the hill.’
She looked at him quizzically. She hadn’t thought that someone who was an expert in computer technology would have a romantic side to him.
‘It’s the best place to see the stars in the city,’ he explained.
‘Oh. You’re into astronomy,’ she said, smiling.
‘Correct. The pollution from street lights is minimized out there.’ Aaron tilted his head to one side. He was staring out of the window, now spotted with drops of rain. ‘At this time of year it’s easy to spot Jupiter.’ His voice was deep, resonant, quiet. She had to concentrate to hear every word. ‘I’m hoping to see The Great Red Spot – it’s a storm twice as wide as earth that’s been raging for three hundred years.’ He paused and smiled before saying, ‘Did you know Jupiter is made of what was left over after the sun was formed? It’s a giant ball of gas with the largest ocean in the solar system – a sea of liquid hydrogen. Can you even begin to imagine what that might look like?’ His eyes were shining. There was something beautiful about the cadence of his voice in this single, simple moment.
The front door opened and Vanessa and Autumn came in, accompanied by a blast of chill, fresh air and the sound of rainfall. Laura stood awkwardly and pushed her chair backwards. Autumn was staring up at her from the hall, but as soon as Laura s
miled at her, she looked away. Autumn and her grandmother walked up the stairs towards them.
‘This is Aaron, Autumn, Vanessa. Autumn is my daughter and Vanessa, my mother. Aaron’s fixing my computer,’ she said. She could feel her cheeks burning.
Aaron shook hands with them both. ‘Fixed,’ he said, and then turning to Laura, he added, ‘I’d prefer cash.’
‘Oh,’ said Laura, suddenly embarrassed.
The jolt, from listening to him telling her about Jupiter’s sea to asking for money, felt harsh. She realized she hadn’t thought about how she would pay him and she didn’t have any money in her wallet. Worse – since they were on such a tight budget and she’d never had to account for every pound so stringently before – she wasn’t even sure how she’d manage to pay Aaron this month.
‘I’ve got it,’ said Vanessa, touching her arm. She delved inside her handbag for her purse and Laura flushed as she realized her mother had noticed her agitation.
Autumn hasn’t told her, Laura thought, as she watched Vanessa. Thank God.
The child slid past them and disappeared up the stairs, switching on lights as she went. Laura wanted to rush after her, but she felt compelled to stay as her mother handed Aaron some notes. They both walked him down the stairs to the hall.
After he’d put his coat on, Aaron said, ‘Actually, I’d prefer to go out the back. I’d like to go home through the nature reserve. It looks as if the rain is beginning to clear up.’
‘Of course,’ said Laura, and led the way down to the kitchen. She opened the door and said, ‘I’ll come with you. There’s a key code on the gate. You need it to get out.’
‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ said Aaron. ‘You’ll get cold. And you haven’t got any shoes on.’
Laura hesitated and then said, ‘It’s 2003.’
Aaron said, ‘The year Autumn was born? You should change that to something more secure. I’ll make sure the gate’s closed properly.’