The Point (36 page)
They don’t say much on the way to the gallery or queuing up to get the food. Slow Food, thinks Elinor, who’d intended to go home and make a sandwich out of some rare roast lamb and pepper and thinly sliced red onion, and read the Iris Murdoch novel she is longing to get back to. Sitting at the table she makes the best of it. Words are her thing, after all, and she is especially keen on names.
Gwyneth, she says. Such a pretty name. And unusual these days.
Gwyneth glares at her and a dense red flush moves up her face, turning its blue hollows purple.
Elinor thinks, what now? She says, Gwynnie’s pretty too. I’m sure there’s a Gwynnie somewhere in literature.
Gwynnie
Gwynnie Gwynnie
… is it
Under Milk Wood
? The brain isn’t what it used to be. That would make it Welsh, wouldn’t it. Do you have Welsh connections? She frowns, trying to catch hold of the Dylan Thomas, she’s practically sure it is, she can hear the rhythms but the whole thing eludes her.
Gwyneth is still red, still not speaking. Elinor tries again. I don’t think I know your surname. Is that Welsh too?
No. The girl shakes her head, hard, the particoloured hair swinging. No.
Surnames have all sorts of odd things happening in them. Take mine – of course, I do have several, as people do. Women, I mean.
No. Gwyneth stands up. Elinor has picked up a handful of white paper napkins from the counter. Gwyneth’s trembling fingers open them, spread them out on the table, she puts quiche in one, salad in another, bread and butter in a third. Hastily she wraps them up and bundles them in her hands, the salad squishing through the flimsy paper.
I better go, she says, thanks for … She turns, putting her head down and hurrying away.
Elinor doesn’t follow. She doesn’t eat her lunch either. She sits and looks at it. She remembers the rhyme, some of it, it is from
Under Milk Wood
. But it’s not Gwynnie, it’s Gwennie, rhymes with penny. Something about boys giving her a penny so they can kiss her. She can hear the cadences in her head, though not quite the actual words, the high thin voices of children chanting in the music of Thomas’s prose, or verse it is here really.
Kiss Gwennie where she says
Or give her a penny
Go on, Gwennie
She looks it up when she gets home. So, the verse is in a slightly sinister way about giving Gwennie a penny if you don’t kiss her where she says. It doesn’t make her any more comfortable about Gwyneth.
I think I mentioned that I got into computers by way of Latin and bookkeeping. I say I think because not going back and rereading means that I may have intended to do a thing but not realise that I haven’t actually done it. Two very precise and elegant languages with severe rules and strict. Their grammar and syntax not supposed to be violated without destroying them. Unlike this English that I write, accurate enough in its way, if I choose, but also playful and susceptible to idiosyncrasy. Though Latin less necessarily correct than bookkeeping, allowing a certain fluidity. I am moderately fuddy-duddy, I like my English to keep to the rules, generally, though you’ll notice that occasionally I bend them, and I take great delight in the breakers and remakers, the poets who grow their own language out of their fertile breeding grounds. See, there, how I mix my metaphors, and I don’t care!
It seems odd to fall in love with Latin as a child, but I did, partly because I could do it, partly because it was a refuge from the harsher world of sport and boys’ games. I liked its dependability.
The shapes on the page governed by rules, and yet bringing an invisible crowd of meanings; so few words, so much significance.
But Latin and bookkeeping are stern taskmasters, and it was as such that I approached computing. In my palmy days, I mean, when the science was moderately young. They were heady times, when even the most basic functions let alone the vocabulary were unknown. I simply read, incomprehensible manuals and the magazines that in the early days told aficionados what the phenomenon might mean. Until by study and practice I could not only read the language of these exciting new machines, I could speak it too. I could speak it and be understood, its arcane terminology was at my fingerprints – literally. Isn’t that a pretty pun.
And no harm done by the fact that I have some skills in mathematics. I quite excelled in school, and in my Franciscan days studied some more, although this was not popular, being a bit pure and not evidently to the glory of God.
I never was a computer nerd, or freak, or whatever those names are that mark the young men whose lives are lived by computers. Like Clement, Novica and Jake, my litany of lads who know so much but not why or how. Who adore computers as a game they play with utter solemnity, and a sense of their own inclusiveness. My computer is a language, a means to an end, admirable and even delightful in itself, but only because the end is so significant. Another way of putting it might be to say that I am a purist where the language of computers is concerned, I mean that interior secret language where they do their work, but I do not care at all for the jargon which is simply a colourful vocabulary, a slang, a nerds’ cant. I used the words
nerds’ cant
to Novica one day, he is the best informed of my lads, to his complete bewilderment. By analogy with thieves’ cant, I said, their argot, their slang, for god’s sake, and had still to explain that. So much of the rich and multitudinous world is lost to the young these days. Their heads are bursting with facts off the Internet, but their brains lack any means to sort and order them. Webs and nets: sticky and encumbering and entrapping and finally more hindrance than help. So the metaphors suggest.
But I am explaining myself badly. I am trying to describe how my passion is different from that of my lads; I think that really all I can do is assert it. I do not want you to think that I know less than they, rather that I know it for different reasons. Enmiring stuff, this. I was going to say, not something they’d understand, but of course that is exactly what they did do, or rather, they did not understand but they perceived it. They knew I saw things differently from them.
Fuddy-duddy
wasn’t a word they’d have used, I am the one put in my pigeonhole by that. Are there even pigeonholes any more? They conjure up clerks in offices, who in turn had quite likely forgotten that once the beehive interiors of pigeon houses, or if you will dovecotes, had small slotting spaces for the birds to rest in. A dome studded with birds, all cooing.
Could my lads see my pen sliding across the paper with its firm black script following they would regard me with the same interest they’d show in a movie based say on a Dickens novel, where men grown old in the work of record keeping stand at lecterns and transcribe bills and invoices and flowery letters in copperplate script, begging to remain, on behalf of their masters, their correspondents’ most humble and obedient servants; they’d see us all as antique local colour, too cute for words. Though not perhaps in those words.
Outside the cockatoos wheel across the sky in great raucous shrieking swirls. So ugly the sound. The cry of the crow, its dreadful keening caw, has a melancholy dignity, invoking solitary deaths in desolate landscapes, but cockatoos are simply noisy, stupid and full of malice. I saw about fifty once, terrorising a possum that was caught up a telegraph pole, dive-bombing it in massed formations, all the time shrieking at it loudly enough to deafen us all. They tear the trees apart, chunks fall to the ground, a ripped up browning litter. We cannot afford our few trees here to be so decimated. Sometimes there are odd sounds of sense in their screaming, because a tame cocky has escaped to the herd and taught them shreds of the human language that’s only a form of squawk to them.
Pretty cocky
, mutilated far beyond a Chinese whisper,
come back, come back
, a plaintive wraith of sound,
cocky
want a biscuit
. Sometimes you see these cockatoos in old paintings, snowy-white, yellow-crested, fascinating exotic silent creatures, from a time before Australia was known to exist, they stare out at us with their sideways bright eyes, giving to believe they are wise and have seen much. But not honoured in their own country, where they bloom in dead trees like mutant magnolias. Or graze in the grass like hundreds of wisps of very clean washing, extra dazzle in their whiteness. Beautiful they are then, but their cries hurt your head.
I am writing about birds again. I think. I think I have already allowed myself one of these splendid set-pieces of the present. It’s a little self-indulgence, but also a kind of thinking space (I admire my self-knowledge) while my brain works out how to get on with the next bit.
Here it is, the next bit. I came into the study shortly before the lads and called up my emails. One of them had an attachment in the body of the email, not that I would have been wary of it in any form, so much of our business is done with attachments. But this one came up immediately I opened the message. I didn’t pay particular attention to the name of the sender, it didn’t mean anything to me and this was perfectly usual, our email address was in the public domain for anybody who wanted to get in touch. Clement had done us a quite spectacular website advertising our business, with all sorts of ingenious links embedded in it, so it got quite a lot of hits. Afterwards I thought the name might have been Kit something or other, but my memory is unreliable.
Anyway, there was the message, the words
See see where
Christ’s blood streams in the firmament
flashed up on the screen. They were in simulated neon, rather like those amazing advertising signs in Central Station when I was a boy, us hicks from the country used to get off our train and stare up at the Penfold’s grapes dropping their juice into a goblet until it was full of wine, when it drained and the drops filled it again. All the big city began in those red drops of wine. For me the email had some of the transporting recall of a Proustian madeleine; for a moment I was that youth again, and all life’s adventure awaited me.
This wasn’t wine; the letters dropped gouts of blood.
Novica had by this time come in and was busy at his box. I expect I exclaimed, because I was quite delighted by this effect, which I assumed had been sent to me by a friend who’d been at the play a couple of nights ago. Novica glanced across. That looks fun, he said. I was staring entranced at the red drops. Gradually they turned into a stream, no longer imitating a neon sign but becoming a wash of blood, and then quite quickly the whole screen was dissolved by this blood, there was no sign of the email program or its instruction box, the screen was simply a wash of blood that continued to flow down. Everything was obliterated, I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t exit, couldn’t go back, couldn’t call up anything else.
Then Novica exclaimed. Shit, he said, and looking across I saw that the same thing had happened to his screen.
Well, it was a virus, of course. A worm. After a while the blood coagulated and shrank into scabby patches, and then the screen went grey and that was it, nothing. The hard disk destroyed and everything along with it. The desktop gone. All the files, all the software. It was a particularly fiendish one. It shouldn’t have been able to get through our various viral screens, they were state of the art if anything was. Firewalls, you name it. But somehow we didn’t have a filter for this worm. I don’t need to say, I was very keen to find out how that had happened. It wasn’t an ordinary virus. A particularly clever piece of cracking had been involved. Some super blackhat at work.
It was not by any means the end of everything; we did not go down that easily. That wasn’t what destroyed us. You don’t run a business like mine without constant and quite separate back-up. Except for some stuff Jake had been doing for the Treasury file the night before and saved only on his computer. He got shouted at well and truly for that, I made him grovel and get the data sent again, and shouted at them that it was all very easy to get the material re-sent but what such things lost was a business’s good name which was not so easily retrieved, and in the long run our only asset. Not that any process of retrieval was quick, either, it took some days to get things back to normal, reinstall the software, reload the files. And of course the checks we could have used to find it, the logs, the pathways, all that it had destroyed past recall. It was a very expensive piece of destruction, and even more nightmarish in its implication. Because if it had got through all our virus filters once, there was nothing to stop it doing so again; the hacker could keep wiping us out and such was the nature of our systems, all interconnected by a central hub, that it was difficult to isolate any one of us. I did call in a virus expert, and set up various checks and safeguards, which I can’t be bothered describing. That’s all behind me now. How wearisome it seems. What I write down here is different from that endless painstaking so clever computer activity which is in the end so utterly fragile. I suppose I should see a metaphor for the human condition in that, but actually I think we are tougher. But certainly I never thought I would learn to appreciate the simple safety of pen and paper. Even Leonie’s dribblings hardly obliterate anything. Now that it hardly matters.