by Gigi Fenster
Which has gone silent.
Wendy swears and pulls the car over.
She checks the phone, says they’ve missed a call from David, ignores Morris’s apology and stabs at numbers.
She gazes out of the window while she waits for David to answer, says, ‘Hi, okay, we’ll be there soon,’ and shuts the phone.
David’s spoken to the police.
A full search is being launched.
The weather’s turning.
‘Jesus Christ, Morris,’ she says.
Search and Rescue have put together an incident team. An incident co-ordinator has been appointed. Her name is Molly. She calls with questions: Does Rachel understand the dangers of flowing water? What do you know about her gear? How about navigation skills? Is she familiar with the terrain?
David and Morris hand the phone back and forth between them, trying to fill each other’s gaps.
Molly’s tone is firm but calm. It’s the sort of tone a doctor would use when talking to family members whose loved one is in surgery. There’s really nothing you can do. Go home and have a shower. She’s in excellent hands. It will be hours before she’s conscious and can see visitors.
She says ‘That’s good’ a lot, and finally she says, ‘Okay, that’s good. Can I speak to your son again?’
Morris hands the phone over and steps back. He is exhausted.
‘What did they want to know?’ Wendy asks. She doesn’t even bother to whisper.
David turns his back to Morris and Wendy. ‘On Wednesday,’ he says into the phone.
‘Morris, tell me everything. What did they ask?’
Morris is trying to focus on what David is saying, but David’s talking really quietly and Wendy is pulling, actually pulling, at Morris’s shirt. David walks away, still mumbling into the phone.
Behind all the questions, hiding in Molly’s that’s goods, there’s a question that hasn’t been asked. A gap in Molly’s interrogation. It’s in the room with them. Morris can feel the empty space of it. If he could just hear what David is saying.
‘Morris,’ says Wendy, ‘stop torturing me. What did they say?’
When Morris was thirteen and falling behind at school, his mother engaged an English teacher to come to the house and tutor him privately. Miss Robson smelled of laundry soap. Her hands had brown spots and her hair was so thin he thought he could count the strands. When she bent forwards over his book, the desk lamp caught her scalp and displayed little freckles where her hair was supposed to be.
‘Now, Morris, this is important. The first thing you do when you open a test. The first and most important thing …’
Some other boys had lessons with Miss Robson. One of them said she was nuts. He said she ought to wear a scarf to hide her bald head. He reckoned that his mother was going to buy her one at the end of the year. He said that her head was fuzzy and bumpy, that the freckles weren’t freckles but sunspots, probably cancer. You’d be able to feel them if you ran your hand along her head. If you could bear it. I dare you. I dare you to touch it.
Morris didn’t need to touch her head. He knew it was neither fuzzy nor bumpy. It was smooth and shiny. Uncomplicated. He hoped that the boy’s mother didn’t give her a scarf. He didn’t see why women wore scarves on their heads. Like they were hiding something dangerous.
At the end of Morris’s first lesson Miss Robson said, ‘You have a remarkable ability to concentrate. Do you know that?’
Maybe she was a bit nuts.
‘But you concentrate on the wrong things. We’re going to work on that. I’ve got a simple technique that will help you.’
Miss Robson’s simple technique did help. At the beginning of each lesson, or on starting a test, or on being given an assignment, Morris was to ask himself only one question: what must I focus on? When he had the answer he was to write it, in letters as large as possible, on a piece of paper as large as possible, and he was to put it in front of him where his eyes would see it.
Miss Robson used a huge piece of paper. She wrote When must I use an apostrophe? on it with a thick black marker.
‘Now Morris, during this class, while I’m talking and you’re concentrating on something entirely different, you will find that your eyes wander. You’ll gaze at different things—the lamp, that picture. The top of my head. But every now and then your eyes will stray towards this paper. When they do, you will remember—apostrophes. That’s what you’re to concentrate on. The paper will draw you back.’
Morris used Miss Robson’s technique through the rest of his schooling and at university, though he never used a black marker and was ashamed at the thought of a large piece of paper.
If Miss Robson were in David’s lounge now, she’d write Rachel on her paper in huge bold letters. Then she’d write the missing question. Then, when she was sure Morris knew what to concentrate on, she’d lean back so her shiny head didn’t distract him.
A policeman arrives. He’s plump and solicitous. He holds out his hand to everyone in turn and says, ‘I’m Tim.’ He smiles a lot and says, ‘Rest assured,’ and, ‘You can be confident that.’ He has come to offer support. And to give instructions: Search and Rescue prefer it if the family stays away from the incident site. Leave them to get on with their job. Stay near the telephone. They’ll keep you informed. You can be confident that we’re doing all we can, that the people in the incident team know the area like the backs of their hands, that they’ll keep on searching through the night.
There’s a lot to be confident about.
He asks to see Rachel’s typed notes and her list. When he takes the notebook in his fat fingers, Morris looks away.
‘Take your time,’ Miss Robson used to say, ‘in thinking about your question. Take the time to get your question right and everything else will follow.’
But they won’t give him time. They keep interrupting his thoughts with questions and instructions, pulling at his shirt and keep me company while I have a cigarette.
‘If smoking helps you get through it, don’t let me stand in your way,’ Tim says to Morris.
‘No, I … I don’t smoke.’
‘Come on, Morris, keep me company.’
‘You can rest assured I won’t pass judgment. If you need a cigarette, you have it.’
‘I don’t … I don’t.’
‘Go on, Dad. Keep her company.’
‘Rest assured I’ll still be here when you get back.’
Wendy looks directly at the policeman. ‘I’m going fucking insane here.’
The policeman stops smiling.
‘Dad,’ says David, ‘will you please go outside with Wendy.’
Wendy slams her cigarettes down on outside table. ‘Schmuck cop. Fat lot of good he’s doing sitting in our living room. Rest assured he’s waiting for us to feed him.’
Light your cigarette, thinks Morris. Smoke your cigarette and please, please keep quiet. There’s something I need to think about.
Wendy doesn’t speak but she’s not quiet. She clicks her lighter and rustles the cellophane on her cigarette pack. She sighs and coughs and shuffles about in her seat. Morris wonders whether anyone has ever hit her. Three minutes, he tells himself. That’s how long it takes to smoke a cigarette. In three minutes she will be done and then you can escape to a quiet place.
Wendy’s cigarette is down to its last thirty seconds when David comes outside.
‘Dad, won’t you sit with Tim for a few minutes, please. While I phone Debs and make some tea.’
Wendy snorts smoke through her nose.
‘I know,’ says David, ‘I know. But I can hardly shoo him out, can I? Anyway, rather this than if they didn’t take it seriously.’ He turns to Morris. ‘Come on, Dad. Don’t want to leave a cop alone in the living room, do we?’
‘Even if he is a schmuck,’ says Wendy.
Why do policemen always travel in pairs?
What?
Not what. Why. Do policemen always travel in pairs?
Why.
’Ca
use one can read and one can write.
But if—
For goodness sakes, Morris. It’s a joke.
The policeman settles into the sofa. ‘The waiting’s the worst part. Definitely the worst,’ he says, looking at Morris. ‘The waiting.’
Wendy’s right. The guy’s a schmuck. There are surely many worse things. Like if he never works out what his Miss Robson Question is. Or if he does work it out but then can’t find the answer. Like if it starts to rain. Or snow. If Rachel is alone in that.
She shouldn’t be alone. It shouldn’t be allowed.
He should have warned her about tramping alone. And about the Tararuas.
He should have gone somewhere quiet and thought about his Mrs Robson Question.
He should have asked David what he was discussing with Molly, why he walked away when he did.
He should have remembered not to sit on that low sofa.
The policeman starts drumming his fingers on his knees. Morris should have thought to drum. It seems the right thing to do. But now it’s too late. The policeman got there first.
Morris’s fingers tingle. What will the policeman think if he sits on his hands?
The house is silent, as if Wendy and David have run away, leaving Morris clasping his hands to stop them from tapping in unison with a policeman’s.
At last Tim speaks. ‘So, what work do you do?’
‘I’m retired.’
Morris Goldberg has just lied to a policeman.
Had Morris spent the previous minutes thinking about what might follow rather than focusing on tapping fingers, he would not have had to lie to the policeman. He would have prepared himself for that question.
He should have known it would come. Whenever there was a lull in the conversation or a silence to be filled, that question would float down to fill it. Someone would realise that Morris hadn’t spoken much and, in an effort to include him, say something like: ‘So, Morris, tell us, what work do you do?’
At David’s birthday party it had been the woman in the red dress, the long-suffering wife of the funny man. Her husband had finished his story. The last few laughs had died down, and in the smiling lull that followed she’d turned to Morris and said, ‘So, you’re David’s dad. I seem to remember you had an interesting job. Remind me what you do.’
‘Um, I’m in computers.’
The smiling faces looked to Morris.
‘What aspect of computers?’
‘It’s not very interesting. Really.’
‘Come on. Don’t be shy. Tell us.’
‘Um, I’m a metadata analyst.’
The faces around him were serious. Morris looked around for David. Couldn’t he wave his baton and restore the smiles? Couldn’t he explain? Like Sadie used to do.
Sadie had developed a standard response to the what-in-the-world-is-a-metadata-analyst question. Sadie’s response went: ‘It’s a fancy-sounding term for computer geek. The metadata analyst takes geekdom to new heights. Meet Morris, metadata analyst and ubergeek.’ Then she’d give Morris a little pat—on the arm or the back—and no matter where she patted him he always felt it as if it was on his head. And he’d smile and nod and hope that someone would take the conversation elsewhere.
Often someone did take the conversation away. Like that woman at the hospital who’d told a long story about her frustrating battle to get her computer settings right.
‘On Day Thirteen I went ballistic,’ she’d said. ‘I set the computer repair guy’s Asperger’s management programme back by about three years.’
That had got Sadie laughing, and then they’d moved on to talking about Asperger’s, which Sadie seemed to know a lot about, and Morris was able to sit back in his seat and pick up one of the hospital’s women’s magazines.
But the topic of Morris’s job did not always die such an easy death. Some people were demanding—like that engineer who’d invited Morris and Sadie for dinner and then spent half the evening telling his guests about how he’d put his foot down and said that he was not going back to Nigeria, no matter how many American dollars those oil gluttons throw at me, or the economist who travelled the world advising governments on how to stop spending money.
Some people demanded an explanation of the role served by Morris Goldberg. Or maybe they were not being demanding but were actually trying to be kind, wanting to draw Morris into the group, not wanting him to feel left out.
This would, Morris had noticed, usually be a woman. Someone soft spoken and sweet, or maybe one of those clever women who enjoy collecting information about people. Like the bejewelled wife of the engineer.
‘That’s really interesting,’ the bejewelled wife had said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a meta-whatsit before. So tell us more. What do you actually—?’
‘I don’t get it,’ her husband had interjected. ‘What exactly does a metadata analyst do when he’s at home?’
The travelling economist had encountered a metadata analyst before. ‘We had one of you guys at my work once. He spent three days interfering with all the computers, charged us a fortune and I’m still not sure what in hell’s name he was doing there.’
And Morris, poor Morris would try to explain.
‘Why don’t you read what the encyclopaedia says?’ Sadie asked him once. ‘Learn their Metadata 101 off by heart and rattle it off every time someone asks you that tiresome question.’
Morris, to his subsequent shame, had done just that. He’d gone to the encyclopaedia and learned that: Metadata is data about data. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple content items.
Morris knew, even as he was learning the words, that it was ridiculous to do so, and he didn’t tell Sadie he had followed her advice. He kept his definition close and secret and waiting. For the opportunity when it could spring from his mouth.
Why did Sadie have to be there when it did?
She’d driven him to the garage to fetch his car in for repairs. She could have dropped him and left. There was no need for the two of them to hang about, but Sadie, it seemed, wanted to hang about. She parked the car and went in with him.
‘What kind of a mechanic doesn’t have a calendar or a page three poster on his wall?’ she whispered to him after the mechanic left them in his tiny office while he went in search of his assistant.
‘What do you mean?’
But before Sadie could answer, the mechanic was back, squeezing through the space between Morris’s chair and the wall.
‘My assistant will be here with the keys in a minute. He’s giving the car a vacuum.’
That was when Morris should have insisted that Sadie leave. But he missed the opportunity and then it was too late. The mechanic tipped back in his chair and swivelled it to face Morris.
‘Nice car you’ve got there. Tell me what you do to deserve it.’
‘To deserve it?’
‘What job, I mean.’
It was definitely Sadie’s idea that Morris rote-learn the definition. Why then was there such dramatic surprise, such raising of eyebrows and rolling of eyes when he recited, in the mechanic’s little office, what metadata was?
Driving home from the garage, blessedly alone in the car, Morris wondered for the first time in his marriage whether he might just keep on driving. Sadie would be home already. She always drove faster than him. She’d be calling Wendy right now. Oh my God, Wends, you won’t believe what that husband of mine just did. And when he got home she’d tease him, call him something like her Walking Encyclopaedia and try to hug him as she laughed.
Morris, true to form, did not keep on driving and Sadie (could this possibly be true to her form?) never mentioned the incident in the mechanic’s office.
Perhaps she too had done some thinking on the drive home. And perhaps she’d realised that Morris’s shame at not being able to explain his own job was something real, not to be trifled with. For if a man can’t explain what he does for a living, how can others
know that he deserves a place in this world?
They never discussed what happened in the mechanic’s office, but from then on Sadie would, if the need arose, explain what Morris did for a living. He was so relieved the first time she did this he didn’t even correct her when she got it wrong. Well, not wrong exactly, but not quite right either.
She quickly developed a narrative—What Morris Does: The Palatable Version. And while this version was imprecise and vague, Morris recognised that it was entertaining. And that people understood it. And (this Morris pretended to himself was not important) that people seemed to consider his job, as described by Sadie, exciting. Sexy even. So if Sadie’s story exaggerated the thrill, well, it wasn’t Morris telling it, and everyone knew that Sadie exaggerated things.
‘It’s quite interesting actually,’ she would begin. ‘The best way of explaining it is by example.’
Already the listener would be leaning forward to listen. Morris would stand back a bit.
‘Say you’re writing a document in, say, MSWord.’
Sadie always said MSWord in full. Not, ‘You’re working in Word’. Morris liked this touch. It added gravitas to an otherwise slightly frivolous tone.
‘You start working on Monday. You work for an hour or two. Then stop. On Tuesday, you come back to it, delete some of what you’ve done and work for another few hours, and so on. Maybe you send it to someone else in between. They work on it and send it back to you, etcetera etcetera.’
The listener would often be nodding by now. This made sense. This they could understand. Sometimes they’d say something like, ‘Et cetera et cetera, story of my life.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Sadie would respond. ‘Okay, so the document you have produced with all this to-ing and fro-ing is your information. The data. But, there’s something more there, something—’ She always paused at this point, lowered her voice. ‘Something hidden.’
Even after Morris had heard Sadie’s story repeatedly and he knew that word was coming, he found it surprising. Something hidden. And he, Morris Goldberg, was the man to find it.