Dispossession (29 page)

I supposed dimly that that was praiseworthy. It didn’t seem
convincing, to me who knew myself too well, but it didn’t need to convince. No
story in which my mother played a leading role was ever going to be strong on
conviction, looked at in normal human quotidian terms.

But whatever the complexities of her situation and my
response to it, there was this one undeniable, irredeemable fact: that because
of my involvement I had ended up here today, watching a girl being beaten
senseless and listening to their plans for her future devastation. And I had
done nothing to help her, nor would I hereafter, and all the logical
persuasions I could muster couldn’t touch the shame in me, nor the humiliation,
nor the sense of something irretrievably lost.

o0o

Bright girl, Tina didn’t try to talk beyond a cheerful
hullo. One unresponsive grunt from me, and she let me stew in silence.

Not till we were well back within the city limits did I even
lift my eyes from my restless hands, dry-washing like Pilate, just as
uselessly. Gazing out of the window with a mortifying despair, I watched
familiar landmarks pass and still took a minute, two minutes to realise where
we were, and where we were going.

“Not this way, Tina.”

“Not? Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted home.”

I did, but not the one she knew, the one she’d always
brought me to before. Too heartsick to be bothered with explanations, I just
asked her to take me to Chinatown.

o0o

Paid her off outside the flat, making her take a tenner for
simplicity’s sake while she was still trying to work out sums on her fingers,
how much the meter was overcharging me for her unwitting detour; and climbed
the stairs like Christian, greatly burdened and utterly alone; and let myself
in with keys that still looked strange to my eyes and felt strange in my
fingers, and found wife and mother playing house together, not a game I could
play at all with either one of them.

Actually, they were making up the bed in the study for my
mother to sleep on. Suzie broke off briefly to hug me, of course, and to ask
how I was, how it had been, what had happened; and I lied, of course, I hugged
her back and told her it was fine, I was fine, we’d just had a talk and hardly
learned a thing from each other that was new. And my mother looked at me
sharply, many years more experienced in hearing my lies; and then she hailed
Suzie back to the bed-making. Clean sheets Suzie was insisting on, like a
dutiful daughter-in-law; and the duvet didn’t suit my mother, she liked the
weight of proper English blankets over her while she slept.
When she can’t have the weight of a man
, some
cynical or dispossessed adult male had muttered to me once, in an aside I was
barely old enough to understand. Blankets apparently were located on the top
shelf of the airing cupboard, which meant dragging a chair through to the
bathroom for standing on; but no thanks, they didn’t need my height for help,
they could manage fine between them.

So I left them to it, and never made a try to tell them
truly what I’d seen and done that day. I picked up the leather shoulder-bag
from its place beside the sideboard and carried it through to the bedroom;
pushed the door shut against the murmur and trill of female voices; unlatched
the bag and took out the neat black box that had been my favourite toy and my
favourite resource both, the last couple of years at work.

Cables, plug, find the nearest socket, switch on here,
switch on there. Lift the lid, watch it through all its internal checks and
balances; and I sat on the bed with my computer humming quietly on my lap, and
watched even this safest of havens do things I would never, never have asked it
to do in my original incarnation.

Me, I was a DOS man through and through; I hated the
mouse-and-icon mentality with a passion. Lowest-common-denominator computing I
thought it was, computing for the illiterate. I didn’t read picture-books any
more, and I didn’t see why I should be expected to drag a picture of a file
onto a picture of a waste-paper basket if I wanted to delete something.

My computer, my well-trained computer should have taken me
through DOS and straight into Lexis, favourite software of all solicitors. That’s
what I’d had it set up to do, and that was certainly what it had done last time
I used it.

Last time I remembered using it.

This time, it danced through DOS and into Windows, and left
me there with a little arrow to move around the screen and lots of pretty
pictures to point it at.

Took me a couple of minutes just to figure out how to get
out of that and back to DOS, I was that ignorant of Windows: deliberately
dinosaur, friends and colleagues had called me, and maybe they were right but
that was how I liked it.

Once comfortably on home territory, at the DOS prompt where
I liked to be, I started exploring the system to see what else had changed. It
only took ten seconds to find the big one.

Lexis was gone. Everyone used Lexis; I’d been using it in
one form or another since before I graduated; the company would have ground to
a halt without it. Already I felt totally stranded. All my cases, all my notes
were gone.

o0o

And rightly so. Took me a moment to remember, but I didn’t
work for Hesketh & Jones any more, I’d resigned. If for anyone, I worked
for Vernon Deverill, though I thought that maybe after today my resignation
would be heading in that direction also, if it wasn’t already inherent in my
walking out.

The computer had been a company machine. I was lucky that
they’d let me keep it, and they would certainly have been right to insist that
I deleted all client information before I left. Perhaps they’d done that
themselves, to be certain. That the program itself was gone seemed a little
above-and-beyond, though perfectly proper in a legal sense: it had been a copy
from their master disks, and clearly not my property. In any case, if I wasn’t
a solicitor any more, what need solicitous software?

Perhaps that explained the unwelcome presence of Windows,
that I was just trying to plug a hole, playing with other systems until finally
I found something I had a use for. A computer wasn’t a lot of use to me without
a job; I’d never been much of a one for games. And I’d have had time on my
hands, I guessed, if I’d been playing playboy. Even with a new marriage on my hands
also, I would probably have had time enough to try to break myself to an
unwelcome government, the philosophy that seemed set to rule computing for the
foreseeable future.

Or perhaps it was Suzie’s goading, her refusing to accept my
dinosaur tendencies in any part of my life, even those where she didn’t
noticeably have a role—

Or did she? I started scanning the directories for anything
unfamiliar, for evidence that she had infested this most private corner. She’d
said I wouldn’t let her near it, but that wouldn’t stop her proselytising. I
found plenty of software I didn’t recognise, all of it Windows-related: that
was fair, whichever way you looked at it. If I was experimenting of my own free
will, I’d do it properly; if this was Suzie’s influence, she’d dump the lot on
me all at once, and tell me to chew faster if I complained.

Before I found anything that could be called evidence,
though, anything that sang directly of Suzie, I found something more arresting,
something that froze me boneless.

I found a file called SUSI.DOC.

o0o

Sitting in a directory all alone, it was, announcing its own
importance; and the directory was called WORK, so it all stood out, it was very
much there to be found.
Poor security
, my
cautious mind scolded my absent personality,
what
the hell were you thinking of?
Two attempts at a burglary there had
been, hotel room and here; and if it hadn’t been worse than that, if it wasn’t
my blood they were after, they might very well have been after this.

With a .DOC suffix, it surely had to be an ordinary
word-processing file, though I was a .TXT man myself. I looked for my regular
writing package, WordPerfect, and found that gone also; looked for any other;
and in the end had to guess or remember or work out how to get back into
Windows before I could run the only one I could find, Word for Windows.

Spitting and cursing,
they call
this thing user-friendly?
, I felt my way into the program with a series
of ill-educated guesses, and asked it to open the file SUSI.DOC.

In return, it asked me for a password.

Enter Password for file
C:\WORK\SUSI.DOC
, it said; and of course I couldn’t, because I didn’t
have a clue what I’d used. Not such bad security after all, if it was secure
even from me.

I felt a slow and useless rage building in me, like when I’ve
gone a long way to visit a particular shop or gallery or whatever, and find it
closed in normal hours because it’s a half-day on Wednesday or the owner’s
daughter has her school concert that afternoon, or else it’s a bank holiday and
Sunday rules apply. It’s just frustration, at being even temporarily denied
access to something that I think ought to be open to me; but it manifests
itself as anger at whoever made the rules, whoever thinks that Wednesday
half-days or legislated Sunday hours make any kind of sense in the late
twentieth century, or whoever schedules school concerts in the middle of the
working day.

That day, of course, I could only be angry at myself. I’d
set the file up with a stupid password, after all. Almost certainly, I had. Not
my normal practice, but nothing about this was normal, and no doubt I’d have
felt it safer that way; and not, of course, expected or anticipated or in any
sense even considered the possibility of losing months of memory, and the
password a small but maybe crucial fraction of that loss.

Ignorance is not and never has been an excuse; ignorance of
the future is still ignorance. I was working up a fine if silent head of steam,
cursing myself and loathing myself, when Suzie demonstrated her innate sense of
appalling timing by walking unexpectedly in on me.

“Knock, will you?” I spat at her over my shoulder.

“Fucked if I will,” she replied equably. “This is my room
too.”

“Then I’ll go in the other room,” and I was childishly on my
feet already, closing the computer and stooping to unplug it.

“You can’t, your mum’s in there. Settling in for the
duration, by the look of her. Like hell she only came up for the day. You sit
down,” and her hands were on my shoulders, pressing obedience into my flesh,
and somehow I had no resistance to her, “and tell me what you’re in such a
grouch about?”

Almost, I told her; beautiful and anxious and demanding,
sitting beside me and smelling of musk and apples, she invited confession
without even knowing what she did. That lack of resistance in me was more than
physical; like a man on scopolamine I wanted to talk, I needed to talk. And
like a man on scopolamine all I could do was jerk my thoughts from one track to
another, not to control the flow of words but only to redirect it, to try and
do no harm.

“I didn’t tell you, did I? When I was, when I was working on
all this, you said I worked a lot in the other room and in private, you said I
wouldn’t talk to you about what I was doing but I’ve put a bloody password on
the file and of course I can’t remember it, so I was wondering maybe did I give
it to you? As a back-up, sort of thing?”

Actually I wasn’t wondering that at all: if I’d told her
nothing that must have been security also, on the principle that what she didn’t
know she couldn’t blab. I wouldn’t have breached that security by giving her
access to everything she didn’t know. But it was something to say, it was safe,
and I had to say something.

She shook her head. “No, you never told me. Can’t you crack
it?”

“I don’t know how.”

“Oh, come on, I thought you were such a whizz at computers?
Even kids can crack computer passwords, in the movies.”

“I’m not a kid in a movie,” but nor was I angry any more,
only drained and weary and stymied once again.

“Well, work it out, then,” she said.

“How? Have you got any idea how many combinations there
could be? Letters and numbers both, I don’t know the program but I bet you can
use numbers...”

“Yeah, but it’s a password, right? You’ll have used a word.
And, I mean, it was
you
, Jonty, know what I
mean? Even if you can’t remember it, you’ve still got the same mind that
thought of it, haven’t you? So you can think of it again. Take you a few tries,
maybe, but you should be able to work it out.”

For a second I only sat and looked at her, so close: narrow
pointed face, black almond eyes, chopped hair with an olive-black sheen, skin
of extraordinary hue. And then I kissed her, and her lips were soft and
surprised, then laughing under mine for the moment before she pushed me away.

“What?” she demanded, serious now, if serious meant cocking
her head to one side and squinting up at me with half a frown threatening
between her eyes.

“I don’t know if that was brilliant or stupid,” I said, “but
I’ll go with brilliant for now, until it fails. So thank you.”

She snorted. “Until you fail, you mean. Don’t go blaming me,
if you’re not smart enough to outguess yourself.”

o0o

She brought me a cup of coffee, and left me to it. I was
distantly aware of her voice and my mother’s rising suddenly into bursts of
laughter, loud enough to come at me through the wall, or else down the
passageway and through two closed doors between; but I wasn’t trying to listen,
barely even wondered what could possibly be funny on such a day, at such a
desperate time.

It wasn’t only the logic of the idea I had to thank Suzie
for, it was the engrossing nature of it, the obsessive focus it could lend me.
Staring at the computer screen, at the winking cursor that demanded a password
I didn’t know, I could cease to stare in my head at an abused and nameless stranger,
and at myself stood in a window watching, doing nothing but clinically or
cynically marking every blow, every added pain. Blinding myself to the world, I
could block out my ghosts, for a while.