by Ben Jeapes
“Wikis,” said Ted.
“I beg your pardon?”
“They’re called wikis. Web pages that anyone can update. Well, anyone authorised, which can be just anyone, or anyone signed up to them.”
“So – if we had a–” Mr Jackson pulled a face. “Do I have to call them wikis?”
Ted grinned. “It’s what they’re called.”
“If we had a ‘wiki’” – this time there was no doubt about the inverted commas – “we could put our notes and thoughts up there, and make notes on each other’s notes–”
Ted wondered if Mr Jackson knew he was sounding like a promotion for a suite of office applications.
“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”
“Well, that does sound just what we need. So, do you think you could set up a ‘wiki’ and show us what to do?”
*
Come closing time, Ted’s equilibrium was mostly restored. Apart from the weird stuff in the mall it had been a good first day. His employees were decent. He could do the work. He was being paid. Now he would cycle up to see Robert, and report on his day, and then he could go home to an evening of as much TV and pizza as he wanted, without Mum or Barry to tell him otherwise.
He couldn’t pretend the weird stuff hadn’t happened, but it wasn’t like he was going mad or growing a brain tumour. Was it? He had run away from the weirdness and it had stayed behind. If it was inside his head then it would have followed him.
So there. He would be pleased with life. He looked forward to being able to tell Robert about it.
Mr Jackson and Zoe showed him how the burglar alarm worked. Zoe tapped the code in; Mr Jackson closed and locked the door on its electronic beeping. Ted unlocked his bike and they headed off in different directions with cheery ‘goodbyes’ and ‘see you tomorrows’.
Something was rubbing in his pocket as he coasted down the slope of the taxi rank in front of the shop. For a moment he thought it must be Barry’s condoms but then he remembered getting rid of them.
The fragile beauty of his good mood suddenly vanished like a soap bubble. He pulled over and dug into his pocket.
“Oh no–” he murmured. His hand slid into his pocket and pulled out the calculator that had been sitting beside the till in the shop. It was solar powered and had the four basic functions plus a memory: retail value about the same as a packet of chewing gum. He didn’t even remember taking it. Normally his conscience at least put up a struggle.
“Oh no!” Ted’s face screwed up. “No!” A couple of pedestrians looked at him oddly, and he glared back until they glanced at the pavement and hurried on their way.
“Christ Almighty, Ted. You are pathetic. You are the worst. You are ... gaah!” Self-loathing choked him off. The calculator seemed to lurk in his hand like a turd that he had accidentally picked up, and was about as welcome.
He sighed, and put it back in his pocket, and glanced back the way he had come. Mr Jackson and Zoe had disappeared; he had no way of getting back into the shop and returning it. Well, he would do that in the morning, hopefully before it was missed. He kicked away from the kerb. The ride to go and see Robert would take about twenty minutes: he spent the time glumly revising the account of the day that he would have to give to his brother.
*
“I have been really crap at staying out of trouble, and I thought I was getting there, but–”
Ted swore under his breath and quickly scanned the dayroom of St Osmund’s Hospice for Children. In one corner a cluster of bald kids jostled each other around the games console, blowing mutants to pieces with an infinite array of weaponry. A girl in a wheelchair was shooting pool with another girl whose face was half covered with horrible scarring. It was a normal evening at St Ossie’s, a red brick manor house down the Odstock road in secluded, tidy grounds. Once it had been the private home of some rich guy. Now, Ted thought darkly (and, he knew, a little unfairly) it was where the county of Wiltshire stuck its no-hope kids.
And there was Robert, unscarred and unharmed in any visible way. He sat in a wheelchair with a discreet strap around his chest holding him upright, while Ted lounged on a bean bag. Ted’s younger brother was a pleasant looking thirteen-year-old in t-shirt and shorts and trainers, all hand-me-downs from when Ted had been that age and size. He was still zit-free and the hair was the same blond-brown as Ted’s, though the style was pure dork – neatly trimmed, brushed and parted. It was what you got when adults made your style decisions and you weren’t able to communicate your own choices. Robert hadn’t communicated anything at all for four years.
“So anyway.” On an impulse, Ted got to his knees and pushed his brother’s hair into something more stylistically acceptable. If it had to be brushed over to one side, Ted thought he could go for something a bit more emo. “That’s why I took this bookshop job. Keep me out of trouble ... I can’t get into trouble in a bookshop, can I? They’re not even good books. I mean, old, boring stuff. Who’d want to nick that? So I thought, yeah, it won’t pay as well as working at a till somewhere but it should be safer and then I go and steal the arsing calculator. Oh crap, why am I telling you this?”
He sat back, angry with himself.
Sometimes, just sometimes, Ted thought he might have seen the first flicker of intelligence in Robert’s brown eyes. It made sense, didn’t it? Surely all the old memories were in there? And surely random connections of neurons must be forming, like with a baby. Intelligence would arise. Wouldn’t it?
But then it would be like some loose circuit in his head immediately earthed the spark so that no charge could ever accumulate. Ted longed to reach in and fix it, if only he knew how. Why couldn’t he write code for his brother’s head, just like he could for a computer?
Ted was resolved that when he became a software millionaire, Robert was going to live with him at home with a full-time carer. But that was a few years away. He looked around and his mouth twisted. This was Robert’s home for now. He would have so preferred it if Robert could live with the rest of his family at 34 Henderson Close, East Harnham, Salisbury, Wiltshire, but he could see why that wasn’t possible. And looking on the bright side ...
Most of these kids, to put it bluntly, were here because they were dying. If they weren’t dying then they were so ill that medicine couldn’t make them better. Time and their own bodies might do it but nothing else would. Robert at least was alive and well. There was no reason he shouldn’t live to a grand old age. With an empty mind. In his wheelchair.
Ted looked back into Robert’s face, carefully making eye contact, and he held up his phone so that Robert could see the screen.
“Got a text from Mum, see? Look, she says: ‘here safely, traffic terrible, weather okay, hotel nice. Sarah says hi.’ And so I’m going to tell her–” His thumb tapped at the screen with swift, practised movements. “‘Robs ... says ... hi ... too’. Because you would, wouldn’t you? If you could.” He tapped ‘send’. “And, while they’re away, I’ll come and see you every day, right?”
The phone buzzed suddenly with an incoming message, but it wasn’t a quick response from Rome.
compiling want 2 get pissed?
He grinned and sent back:
totally home in 30 mins.
*
“Condoms? He gave you condoms?”
Ted and Stephen sat companionably together at the top of Harnham Hill with their backs to a tree. The woods were behind them and Salisbury spread out in front. Stephen was a little shorter and wider than Ted, with hair that verged on ginger in the right light. He had been distinctly chubby as a child and had never quite grown out of it. Sometimes Ted envied him the chunkiness: he didn’t want to be overweight but he did wish it wasn’t quite so easy to count his ribs in the mirror.
“Uh-huh.” Ted grunted around the end of the cigarette in his mouth. He squinted down at the lighter, sheltering it with his hand as it sparked, and took a couple of draws to suck the smoke through the little tube. He felt it go into him, fill him, soothe him. He breat
hed out again and the smoke blew in billows and whirls into the clean evening air. Sunset was still an hour away and westering light spilled across the city. The cathedral looked like a toy church standing proud amongst Monopoly houses. Its perpendicular lines just drew the eye up to heaven, from the ground and up the tower and up the spire to the tiny cross at the very top, four hundred feet up. On a class visit back in Year 8, Ted had met one of the steeplejacks who had to climb the spire to maintain the aircraft warning lights and do maintenance. They climbed up inside until they reached a small hatch and then they climbed the last forty feet outside to the very top. And good luck to them, Ted thought. If God was real, Ted hoped he appreciated what some people went through on his behalf.
Stephen waved the smoke away.
“I thought you’d given that up.” They had both tried smoking back in Year 9. They had both decided it wasn’t worth it.
“Started again.”
“I can see that.”
“Want one?”
“No, thanks.” Instead Stephen took a swig from his can of lager. Ted’s own can sat open but otherwise untouched beside him. “So–” Stephen returned to the original conversation. “Condoms. You’ve got parental permission to get laid?”
“Apparently I do.” Ted took another pull. “Well, fifty percent parental permission. The other fifty percent would freak out.”
“Hmm.” Stephen frowned into the distance. “Isn’t that a bit unusual?”
“Well, I still have to find the girl. It’s not like Barry’s providing her too.”
Ted was aware of their shoulders touching. He could feel Stephen’s warmth through his t-shirt. He gave it a polite moment, then shifted half an inch away. Stephen took a sip from his can again.
“So, have you still got …?”
Ted shook his head, took another pull. “Threw ’em away.”
“Oh. Okay.” Stephen shrugged. “You know, you’re never going to have sex if you–”
“I don’t want to have sex!”
Now Stephen looked as puzzled as if Ted had announced that from now on he wanted to be called Janice.
“You don’t want to have sex?”
“Well ... I mean ... of course I ... but not ... Give me that beer!”
Of course Ted wanted to have sex, and he fully intended to, one day, sometime between now and the day he died. Another box to tick in the great list of life. But reaching the point where someone else might want to have sex with him was a scary thought. There would be no going back. Life would have changed, and he didn’t know what would happen next, and he hated unknowns. So, while he had no idea what would happen if a woman with the body of a supermodel, the brain of an astrophysicist and an obliging weakness for inexperienced spotty geeks decided she must have him there and then, until and unless that actually happened he intended to be picky.
Stephen passed him the can.
“I could have taken them off you, if didn’t want them–”
Ted laughed around the end of the cigarette, both at the words and at the absent look on his friend’s face as his eyes tracked the swirls and twirls of smoke. He could read Stephen far too easily. The mouth talked about condoms and their uses and maybe part of the brain was thinking about it too, but always the geek at the back of his mind was thinking: hmm, I could model that smoke virtually if I could just work out the right algorithms ...
“Oh, like you were so going to use them!”
“Hey, since you started working in an antique bookshop, all of a sudden I’m the one with the shiny social life, relatively speaking, so my chances must be higher.”
“You do know you don’t need a condom if the girl’s only on screen, right?” Ted was still grinning and Stephen gave him two fingers. “Anyway, there is this totally, and I mean, totally fit girl at work and I am so in.”
Ted felt a little guilty bringing Zoe into this, but honour demanded it. Anyway, when he and Stephen talked about girls there was always an implied small print warning: ‘Nothing contained in this conversation shall have any bearing on reality.’
Stephen cocked a sceptical eyebrow.
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah! She loved the t-shirt.”
The shirt had been a Christmas present from Stephen in the first place. He studied the ‘Geek and Proud’ design and his shoulders started to shake with laughter.
“Well, who wouldn’t? I mean, I’m this close to tearing it off you myself. She might not like boys who smell of smoke and are dying of lung cancer by slow degrees, though,” Stephen pointed out as Ted flicked the ash off his cigarette. Ted took an extra-deep lungful and blew it at Stephen.
“Bite me.”
Stephen squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the smoke to go past before opening them again.
“Mate, what’s wrong?”
Ted’s good mood deflated. Reading friends was a two-way process: he could do it to Stephen but unfortunately Stephen could do it back.
Oh, balls, where to start? He leaned back against the tree and once again saw the woman in the mall. Pre-calculator, he had thought he had everything under control. Then he had been forced to realise that actually he did not, and that meant he could no longer just dismiss her from his mind either. She had been real. She had been looking for him.
But that was all far too much to tell Stephen about, so he sighed and told his friend about the calculator instead.
“If I don’t smoke I steal,” he finished. “It satisfies the urge.” That was Ted’s theory, anyway. If nicking stuff fulfilled an urge and smoking fulfilled an urge then smoking could stop him nicking. It was within his capabilities and so it was worth trying.
“Bollocks. I’m sorry.” Stephen hesitated, then reached out and covered Ted’s hand with his own. Ted let him keep it there for a few seconds before moving his hand away. Then Stephen snickered.
“You know, there’s other ways of fulfilling urges.”
“Hur-hur. Funny. This I can do with you watching.”
Stephen checked his watch.
“Should be done by now. I made some tweaks to the texture generation module. Want to see?”
“Cool.” Ted pushed himself to his feet. “And then we can watch crap movies until our brains start to bleed.”
Stephen grinned. “Now you’re talking!”
TUESDAY
Chapter 3
When Ted pushed the shop door open for his second day at work, Mr Jackson was already there at the front desk. He looked up and seemed pleased to see Ted. Ted wasn’t particularly pleased to see him. There went his chance of returning the calculator to its proper place.
“Morning, Ted.”
“Morning–”
Ted sidled over to where his employer was working. Mr Jackson was entering data into a spreadsheet, painfully, cell by cell. Ted longed to point out how he could use copy and paste, or highlight a block of cells and copy the same formula to each one with a single keystroke.
He screwed up his courage and thrust the calculator in front of Mr Jackson’s eyes.
“Uh – this was – uh – over there.”
Ted stared down at him with wide eyed, nervous innocence, willing him to believe. Mr Jackson took the calculator and put it down beside him.
“Thank you. I hadn’t noticed.”
“You’re wel-–” Ted trailed off as he felt a sneeze coming on. “Welcome–”
He scrabbled at his pockets for a hankie, and that was when he remembered he had closed them up with safety pins. His face crumpled with the effort to keep it in. Just as he was about to sneeze into the back of his hand, Mr Jackson passed him a screen wipe.
“Thanks,” Ted mumbled, three sneezes later. “Sorry. Hayfever.”
Mr Jackson was looking at the safety pins.
“Is this a punk thing making a comeback?”
“Uh ... yeah ... it’s ... uh ... retro ... so, you’ve got the calculator?”
“Yes.” Mr Jackson held it up. “Apparently I have.”
“Uh ... great–�
�� Ted gave him a weak smile and fled into the back room. He was pretty sure he heard Mr Jackson murmur “Strange child–”
In the back room, Zoe’s hostile glare brought Ted up short.
“I needed to do some sums,” she said. “I was looking for that calculator everywhere.”
Ted’s face burned scarlet and sweat turned his clothes clammy. She smiled suddenly but she didn’t break eye contact.
“Only kidding. Only, it wasn’t ‘over there’. Was it?”
He shook his head, unable to speak until a minute shift in her gaze somehow broke the spell and words tumbled out of his mouth.
“I took it home I mean accidentally I really didn’t mean to but you’d all gone when I found out–”
She rolled her eyes.
“Jeez! He’s not going to sack you for that, is he? Have some faith!” She grinned and poked him. “I gather you’re working on the website again today. Malcolm said you weren’t one hundred per cent complimentary about it.”
Ted had to smile. When Barry brought him round to meet Mr Jackson, Mr Jackson had asked Ted’s opinion of the site and, always ready to oblige, Ted had given it. He had relished every indrawn breath and wince from his stepfather.
“I suppose I suggested ways I could improve it.”
She smiled back as if they were co-conspirators, and he enjoyed the feeling.
“So, what’s your story, anyway?” she asked as he sat at the computer and called up the browser. “What brings a man with a geek-and-proud t-shirt to work in an antiquarian book shop?”
Ted liked being called a man, though he had changed the shirt.
“Needed a job for the summer,” he said. “Here I am.”
“Ah-ha.” Her look and tone showed casual, friendly interest. She had opened a pile of parcels containing books, and was working through each one, comparing it with a list on a clipboard and not really looking at him as she spoke. “Any family?”