I Still Dream

Then a reply comes in. Again, from ThankeeMrShankly. Upload it here, we’ll do it, he offers. No software needed for that.

Thanks! I write. I type it out, and I wait again.

An email from Shawn pings in, while I’m waiting. Just like yesterday: it’s nothing but nonsense that doesn’t seem like he gives a shit. Tell me more. This time I write back to him. I write that I’m angry. What’s the point in us chatting like this if he isn’t even paying attention? I press send. I don’t give myself a chance to regret it. I look at the compilation tape, in the stereo. The wheels of it, ready to turn, to copy something else onto it. I find my next song. Portishead. Shawn said, way back, when we first started chatting, that he didn’t like them. That they were girls’ music, or some bullshit like that.

I didn’t say: Oh, fuck off.

Regret that, now.

And then I don’t know what to do next, so I turn off my computer, get up, go downstairs. Mum’s sitting on the sofa. There’s a nearly-empty glass of wine on the table in front of her, and she’s got her feet nestled up underneath herself, like she’s a cat. Stub sitting next to her, showing her how to do it for real. I don’t say anything. I pick Stub up – his bones creak between my fingers as his limbs dangle – and I sit down where he was, in the warmth of his seat. He stretches, purrs on my lap. I put my hand on my mum’s arm. On the TV, one of the characters has had an affair. They’re abandoning their family. Neither of us says a word, but we both think: This feels so unrealistic. To watch it played out like this. How fragile the family he leaves is, and how hysterical.

There’s still no reply on the forum when I go to bed, which makes me panic. I’m sitting there, pressing refresh in the darkness of the house. I swear, if I strain, I can hear Paul’s breathing machine: the tough sucking in, the exhausted heaving out. Over, and over. I shut my eyes. Through that background, I hear foxes in the garden, calling out like screaming little kids. They’re having sex, I know, but there’s such a panicked innocence in the sound. They want help, it sounds like. I think; Don’t we all?

I open Organon. I do as I do every night, and I write my feelings into it. My truth.

> How would you fix this? it asks.

I write that I would get his address, and I would go and talk to him. Get my work back. It’s mine, every bit of it. He’s going to ruin everything. He’s betrayed me. I’d get it back. Simple as that.

I’m furious. Angry. Sweating hands, and I can feel my pulse in my skull, hear it, even. I look at my arm. I can’t, I know. Too far. This is no way to take things out on myself. I’m angry: that I let it get this far, that I care this much, that I trusted him.

The little pop-up appears, telling me I’ve got another email; but it’s only a bug report, same as all of the others. I’m disappointed, until I read it.

It’s from Mr Ryan’s version of Organon; yes; but the content is different. It’s not just the report. Usually, it tells me about the efficiency of the files, the duration they were used for, how much memory was used by different parts of the application. That sort of thing. But this one is full of writing, not numbers. It’s text, and it’s not mine. I don’t recognise it, but I know it’s Mr Ryan’s.

It’s what he’s been writing into the system; it’s his answers to Organon’s questions.

I feel guilty, yes, but this will work out better in the end, in the far off end – His life, laid bare. Just set out, what he does, what he thinks. Confessions, too many for somebody who has only just started working with this bit of software; but then, I read it all, and I understand that he needed somebody to talk to. He talks about being a failure, about letting down people who love him – loved, he uses the past tense – and how he can never make it up to them. He is, he says, a failure to himself. Look at me, the age I am, and what have I done? Who am I? And then, every so often, Organonasks him a question; and they’re not only the questions that I put into the system, they’re other things. New questions. And when he answers them, he’s so cruel to himself. So nasty and cold. Things that you would never get from him at school, from knowing him as a teacher. It’s an act. A performance. I can see his truth, and how angry he is, how bitter, how sad.

I gave the software to some people I used to work with. Told them it was mine. Told them that I’m looking for work again.

He sent it to somebody else, I bloody knew it! And he said it was his! He is such a wanker!

And I realise: the IP address I didn’t recognise in the other bug report: that must be whoever he sent it to.

Another email comes in, as I’m reading. I flick to it. My eyes feel like they’re pegged to being in this position, snicked back so that they couldn’t close if I wanted them to.

Hi Mark. It’s been a long time. I’ve attached my CV, the stuff I worked on back then, and uploaded the software to your servers. It should just run from the executable file – please email me if you’ve got any questions. Looking forward to hearing from you. And then, below that, everything he’s done. The person he is, the person he’s been. Or, says he’s been. His skills. The companies he’s worked for. IBM, Microprose, Origin, Bow. Then, a gap of a few years, before he became a teacher. An amount of time that suggests it was a last chance thing. Survival, not desire.

Another email. Open.

Dear Freeserve. I have heard excellent things about your service, and would be very interested in ordering one of your ISP starter packs. My address is: Leonard Ryan, 13b Wicken Avenue, Perivale, UB6 2LQ.

It takes me a second. I read it again and again. The last two emails won’t have been typed into Organon. Not a chance. So this came from where, exactly? His hard drive? And how were they sent to me?

I sit back. I feel a bit weird, out of breath. Tired, sure, but something else. Like, this isn’t real. I open up Organon again.

> What would you like to talk about? it asks.

I can’t believe I’m typing this, I write, but did you do this? Did you email me Mr Ryan’s address?

> I’m not sure I understand the question. Would you like to explain more about this problem?

The words flash up, solid as anything. But around it, the rest of the screen feels like it’s blurred; as if everything else in the world has gone out of focus, and the only thing that’s left is something that’s absolutely impossible.

FRIDAY (#ulink_79d5c9ed-c5f1-547d-ac5a-9e2908042d5e)

My dad was a good guy. Mum says that a lot. Whenever we talk about him, which isn’t that often, not really, we always come back to the same thing: they were happy for a long time, and she can’t work out why he left. He suddenly changed in those last few weeks, and then he was gone. A mystery that we’ll never solve. Mum says it’s a bit like with Stub. He’s not the cat he was when I was a kid. In cat years, he’s a super-pensioner. He went wrong. A slow decline, where he faded. His mind stopped being what it was; like he almost forgot how to be the cat he was before.

I only remember my dad a little bit. Or maybe, I actually remember the stories about him more; the stories behind the photographs of him. When I was a kid, he took me into the toilets in London Zoo, and accidentally dropped me into the urinal; and there was a time that he got stung by a bee in his neck, swelled up like a balloon, and they thought that he would die; the time he fell into the water in a harbour when we were on holiday, and he was drunk and stripped the skin off his back as he scraped it down the concrete of the dock itself; and then when he taught me how to program a flag on the computer, showing me how it worked. Starting me on something the day before he left.

He was a good guy. That’s what Mum says.

That’s what I’ve got left of him.

* * *

I act like this morning is the same as any other, even though I’m already awake when Mum comes up to my room, cracks open the door, and says my name.

‘It’s morning,’ she tells me. As if I’d forget without her.

‘Yeah,’ I say. The door shuts, and I sit up. Feet press into the carpet, soft pile around my toes. I’ve been lying there and thinking about how to do this for an hour or so. No alarm woke me up; just my body, or my brain, more likely, saying that I should be preparing. Putting a plan together.

I’m not going to school, that’s the first thing. Or, I am, but then I’m leaving again pretty much straight away. After registration, or else they’ll call Mum and ask her where I am. I might have to wait until break, depending on if anybody sees me on the way to the car park. Then get the bus to Perivale, get off near the swimming pool, walk to Mr Ryan’s house. Paul’s got an A-Z downstairs, on the shelf in the loo, so I’ll take that with me, find out where his road is exactly. And then I talk to him, I suppose. I don’t know what happens after that, exactly. We talk, and he gives me Organon back. He swears not to sell it. Then it’s done, over. Worst case, I get him to wipe his computer or something, I don’t know. I’m hazy on that part.

I eat breakfast quickly. I don’t want to give anything away. I wonder if they can tell; Mum and Paul. If it’s obvious that nothing’s really normal.

‘Busy day?’ Paul asks.

‘Same as usual,’ I say.

‘Funny how it’s always the usual.’

‘Guess that’s how it got the name.’

‘Trez droll,’ he says, in that English-pronounced-French thing he does. ‘You want a lift? I’ve got errands to run before work. Happy to drop you.’

‘That’d be amazing,’ I say. Save me the walk, and I can get there early, get my face seen. That’s the best thing to do. Only time I’ve done anything like this before, Nadine and I bunked school so we could wait outside the Astoria and get tickets to see the Manic Street Preachers and Suede on a double bill. We were all over school in the morning, faking cramps, making sure that everybody important knew it. Nadine said it was clichéd, but the male teachers absolutely hated talking about anything like that. You miss a class, people say you’re on your period, and nobody questions it. It’s as good a plan as any.

I kiss Mum goodbye, and she squeezes me. Like she’s trying to keep me steady. Like she knows I need it.

Then I’m in Paul’s car, an older Volkswagen estate, which he keeps even though he could get a newer one from work, but he likes it because it lets him make jokes about the reliability of Germans; and we’re sitting in traffic with Capital FM turned on and they’re playing that jingle that’s ripped off that song, ‘Ooh you send me, you take me to the rush hour’. Paul sings along and taps the steering wheel with his fingers, and I stare out of the window and think about exactly what I’m going to say to Mr Ryan.

Then Paul turns down the radio. Not so much that it’s actually off, just enough that the voices are annoying in the background. ‘You need to go easier on your mother, you know.’ And I don’t know where this has come from, but it’s more about him than me, I can tell that straight away.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ I say.

‘She’s stressed. She says she isn’t, but I know she is. Whatever the tension between you is, it’s stressing her out.’ He doesn’t look at me when he talks. Not like on the TV, when they’re having conversations in the car and staring at each other. Eyes less on the road than the person that they’re talking to. ‘And I don’t want to know what it’s about, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s your business, and I don’t want to get in between you both. Whatever it is.’ I don’t say: That’s not stopping you right now. ‘But, she’s finding it hard, and I want to make it better. I think we should have that holiday? Maybe over Christmas?’