The Glass Field
an excerpt
Sov-Blok Supreme Judge Josef Bulgarin:
You have our terms: unconditional surrender – or the apocalypse!
– Judge Dredd, The Apocalypse War
January 2nd to July 26th, 1982
Question:
By 1988 the Soviets will deploy an anti-missile shield based on beam weapons and I am asking you what advice will you have for the United States when the Soviets act from behind their defensive shield to demand the unconditional surrender of the US and the rest of the free world.
Prime Minister:
But you are actually talking about strategic defence, are you not?
– Press question to Margaret Thatcher
Andrews Air Force Base, USA
December 22nd 1984
1
You wake suddenly.
Everything is dark.
There is a constant, deafening roaring sound. It seems to press down and crush you.
The air is thick with dust. You can’t breathe. You strain and tear your way through rubble until something gives way and you feel hot air on your face. The roaring is much louder, buffeting your eardrums, painful, incessant. You are hurt and damaged. You have no idea what has happened.
The roaring air tugs and staggers you. There is grit in your eyes and between your teeth. It’s hard to see anything. It’s hard to stand up.
You rub your eyes. Tears swim into a dull red glow.
You see: a cluster of mushroom clouds lifting above the burning city.
What do you want to do now?
Scott blinks. Time has slipped by without him noticing. It’s nearly nine o’clock and he has to be at the Centre at ten.
He pushes the chair back; stands up. Stretches. He’s been awake for maybe four hours. When he got up, dawn was just creeping over the pine trees. Now, the sky outside the attic window is a vast, cloudless blue and the air smells of resin and tarmac. It’s going to be hot again.
He gathers his clothes and gets dressed: jeans and a faded grey T-shirt that’s getting too small for him so he might as well use it for work. The jeans still have grass stains on the knees from yesterday, even though he’s washed them and hung them on a chair to dry overnight. What are you supposed to do about grass stains? He’s tried all the settings on the machine. There must be some kind of trick. His mum would have got them out.
He pads quietly downstairs, across the dark landing, down again. In the kitchen he makes orange squash and toast and butter and eats it at the table, with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress propped up in front of him. He has the back door open. Framed by the doorway, the garden is half dazzling sunlight, half dense slabs of shadow, and if he stares a while the shapes burn in so that when he looks back to the novel they float there, black and red, spanning the pages.
It’s not that the grass stains are a big deal. It’s just that he’d like to know. It feels like it’s important to know stuff like this. He’s fifteen after all.
When he’s finished breakfast, he washes the empty glass and the plate and puts them back in the cupboard. There’s a coffee mug in the sink – his dad is up, then – and he washes that too. He allows his own bedroom to be the same familiar clutter of books and comics and sketches, game disks, tubes of paint, as always; but everywhere else he tidies after himself as he goes, methodically, almost as if it’s a test of some kind. As if his mission is to leave no trace, no imprint, on the strangely resonant house.
He makes two sandwiches and wraps them in kitchen foil. His trainers are resting against the skirting behind the back door, under where the coats hang. Yesterday, Colin had him cutting the reeds at the edge of the swampy pond that’s something to do with the Centre’s water treatment system. The mud on the trainers is bone-dry and brittle now. Scott is about to take them outside when he falters; stops.
From along the hallway, from the door of his father’s study, he can hear the sound of music, quietly discernible in the stillness. The C major recorder concerto.
Scott stands motionless, listening. Except for Capital Radio on the little Aiwa in his bedroom, it’s the first music he’s heard in the house since December. Eight months ago.
It could be just an accident. His dad turning a switch without thinking.
Frowning slightly, he takes his trainers out onto the lawn and thumps them together until they’re clean; then sits on the step to pull them on.
Faintly, distantly, the steady, looping thread of the Telemann can still be heard, like the air itself is singing.
If this was a game, he thinks, you’d quit. Quit and start again. Start afresh.
It’s nearly half past now and he’s going to be late, but he can’t stop himself: he goes back into the house and along to his dad’s study, the old floorboards in the hall creaking a little under his feet. The door’s standing slightly open and Scott pushes it wider and the music swells up around him.
Dad? he says.
His father looks up from the papers on his desk. His narrow, serious, professorial face seems for a moment utterly disconcerted, as if he has no idea what this room is, who this boy is; and then the look is gone, his eyes seem to see Scott properly, and he smiles a little smile of greeting.
Good morning, he says. You’re up.
Yeah, Scott says. For a while now.
Would you like some breakfast? There are eggs, I think.
I’m okay. I had toast. I ought to be off now anyway.
Off?
The Centre, Scott says. The holiday job?
On a Saturday? his father says, sounding surprised. It’s Saturday today, isn’t it?
Scott shrugs. Yeah, he says. We do Saturdays too.
Goodness. Well, I hope they pay you overtime.
I don’t think so, Scott says. I just – I heard the music?
A faint, unsettled look crosses his father’s face. It’s not bothering you, is it? he says.
No, Scott says. No, not at all, it’s nice. I was just – it’s nice.
It’s Telemann. The recorder concerto.
Yeah, Scott says. I know.
I can turn it down, if you…
No, Dad, it’s fine, Scott says again. I was going anyway. I, uh. I hope the paper’s going okay.
His father blinks: nods. Yes indeed, he says. It’s coming along. Steady progress. Steady as she goes. I’m actually marking essays today, though.
Oh, right, Scott says. Okay. Well. I’ll see you later.
His father smiles again: a gentle, uncertain smile. His eyes drift towards the bookcase and then to his desk, the papers. Scott closes the study door softly behind him.
He walks briskly away from the house, his footsteps crunching on the driveway. The gravel has thick drifts of greyish-brown pine needles meandering across it, and is punctured by weeds, some of them standing as tall as Scott’s knees. The garden was always his mum’s thing.
Their house is right at the end of the dense tangle of unadopted roads that makes up the Heights. Out of the driveway, if you turn to your right, there’s a metal barrier blocking the way; and then just rough sandy track up through the pine woods until the trees thin out. After that it’s open heath and the Army training range: scrubland and heather and warning notices saying not to touch suspicious objects and to keep to the paths.
Scott turns left, heading away from the barrier and down through the houses. The land here is uneven and the gravel roads sometimes cut deeply, flanked by rising earth and yew hedges. Behind the hedges are big, serious houses, some of them Victorian like Scott’s house, others built in the 20s and 30s. You can get lost if you don’t know your way.
There are a lot of Army families: because Sandhurst is just down the road.
And, more recently, some people from the Centre.
Unadopted means rough gravel and improvised patches of tarmac, no street lamps, no pavements. Unadopted also means private. He remembers once his dad said something about the local community, and his mum said you mean enclave.
Right now the tarmac patches are shiny with the heat, and every fifty yards or so the thick resinous smell of pine sap gets shot through with swimming-pool chlorine. Scott keeps up his brisk pace, winding through the Heights, skirting the sticky patches of tar. Nothing is moving and the air seems to be thickening around him. He hears a splash, a girl’s voice shrieking, from far off. He can feel himself sweating now through the T-shirt.
He follows the road until it forks. One leg wanders down towards town, but he ignores that, keeping left, uphill again, deeper into the Heights; aiming for the narrow short-cut path that will loop him round to the rear gate of the Centre, near the groundsmen’s block.
The pine trees that cloak the stretch of land out beyond the houses are so densely packed that nothing else grows. The spongy carpet of their needles smothers the acidic sandy soil and their feathery branches cut the sun down to a gloomy twilight all year round. Nothing much lives in the pine woods except ants: big, heavy-bodied wood ants which gather the fallen pine needles and assemble huge nests out of them, three or four feet tall, thousands upon thousands of inhabitants. Whole towering cities like irregular brown pyramids, their surfaces crawlingly alive.
Scott walks faster still, his breath quick now in his throat, his arms swinging.
If this was a game.
At the rear gate, Scott presses the button, holds up the plastic card they gave him on his first day, and waits, looking steadily at the unwinking lens in the metal box. There’s a long pause; and then the lock buzzes loudly and clicks open. Scott opens the gate and steps through.
The main entrance to the Centre is down on the main road. But this is faster.
He walks the five yards across the stretch of no-man’s land to the second fence and the second gate, where he has to repeat the whole process. This part, when he’s trapped between two sets of chain-link and razor-wire, is always a little scary. The first time he did it he realised he could feel his heart thumping. Because what if they didn’t open the inner gate? What if they decided he wasn’t allowed after all, or there was a fault in the system, and the gates wouldn’t unlock? What if the dogs came?
Scary, but – be honest – also kind of cool.
The inner gate buzzes open, and Scott steps through onto the grass.
The groundsmen’s block is tucked into a low scoop of land, hunched down quite close to the fence-line. It’s a low rectangular structure with bays for the vehicles, partly screened off from the main buildings by a curling line of saplings. Colin is on the forecourt, sharpening the blade on the tractor mower.
What time do you call this, then? Colin says, giving him a narrow look.
Sorry, Scott says.
Well, at least you’re here now. You can make it up at the end. We need to get them banks done. Think you’re up to it?
Scott nods. Yeah, he says.
Up until Scott’s about ten or so, the Centre is just a pharmaceutical company’s headquarters: a cluster of low concrete buildings beside a car park, set in some grounds. The windows are deep-set in the concrete, with rounded corners and brown glass that sometimes gleams gold if the sun catches them. There’s a big corporate sign on the main road with the company’s name and logo in white on a blue background.
Then one day the pharmaceutical company leaves and bulldozers and work crews come in. New buildings get put up: again low, again concrete, matching in neatly with the originals except they have fewer windows. The grounds expand outward and become more carefully manicured. The first security fence goes up early on, while they’re doing the construction work; then, later, the second gets added, inside it. There are shifts of security staff in neat grey uniforms, patrolling in pairs. Some of them have dogs with them. In a couple of years it’s all done. Now there’s no big sign on the main road, just a small, bland plaque that says Visitors please report to gatehouse.
Even though they’ve put up more buildings, the car park is much smaller now, and far fewer people come and go. And the lights in the complex stay on all night long.
Ward becomes obsessed with the Centre: with finding out what goes on in there, what it’s for, what secrets it harbours. He and Scott spend free afternoons peering at the blank grey buildings through the chain-link. Ward is the nearest Scott has to a best friend, even though they don’t really get along very well.
It’s Army, right? Ward keeps saying. It has to be.
My dad says so, Scott says. He says it’s record-keeping and, you know, documents and all that stuff. For Sandhurst. He says they’re doing it all on computers now and that’s where they keep them.
Computers, Ward says in a tone of deep disgust. That’s such bollocks. Your dad must be fucking retarded to believe that.
Scott shrugs slightly. He feels lazy and content and he can’t be bothered to fight today. He says, It doesn’t look like Army. It looks like a hospital.
Exactly. Or a science laboratory. So why would the Army need a hospital science laboratory?
Genetic infantry maybe, Scott says. Like Rogue Trooper.
After a moment, Ward nods to himself. Could be, he says slowly. Could be. That’s it. It has to be. We should gather evidence.
But the evidence they gather never really amounts to anything. And now of course Ward has gone back to South Africa.
It would almost be worth getting in touch, just to tell him, Scott thinks as he carefully pours petrol into the Flymo. He can’t help grinning to himself.
Hey, Ward, guess where I’m working this summer?
Although in fact he still doesn’t know exactly what goes on inside the pale concrete buildings: only that if they let fifteen-year-old kids help out with the estate gardening, it probably isn’t augmented soldiers or anything actually cool. Probably it’s just what his dad told him: filing systems keeping track of where to send crates of uniform and who to bill for supplies of combat boots and stuff like that, and windowless rooms full of big computers.
Still. You can pretend.
He hefts the Flymo out of the shed into the sunshine.
The steep grass banks that buttress the Centre are tricky to do unless you know how. Colin has shown him. The thing is to tie the Flymo to a length of rope, and then walk along the top of the bank, swinging it like a pendulum and slowly hauling it in. Then move a little further, drop it back down, and do it again.
Since they built on to it, the building is no longer a simple rectangle; now it’s some kind of complicated interlocking series of boxy shapes and there are lots of corners and interior angles as well as longer straight stretches. Scott works his way round steadily. To start with he keeps missing little strips and segments. But slowly he finds the rhythm to it, learns how to swing the pendulum wide and let its own momentum take it where it needs to go. The Flymo buzzes back and forth, trailing fumes. By noon his hands are red and stinging from the rope and his back and shoulders are sore from the strain of hauling the heavy mower up and dropping it back down. He’s sweating hard, the sun full on his face and arms and the thick concrete walls behind him banging out heat like an oven. But he’s got it now. Neat arcs of mown grass follow, one overlapping the next, a sequence of pale green fans like radar traces. Then trail the mower along the bottom to finish it with a straight edge.
He’s working his way into an angle where the building is casting a narrow wedge of shade across the grass. He glances towards it and decides to stop here: he’s done plenty, and he can sit to eat lunch without the sun on him.
He reels the mower in, shuts off the frantically chattering engine, and leans it against the wall; blinks sweat out of his eyes; ducks to wipe his face on the arm of his T-shirt. For a moment he stares back critically along the bank he’s just finished, looking for mistakes. But it’s good; he’s done a good neat job; and he feels a little pleasant bloom of satisfaction, like he used to get when he was small and he did well colouring inside the lines.
He steps into the shade, into the small oasis of silence and suddenly cooler air. He’s right beside one of the strange smoothed-off windows. Recessed in the concrete, and in shadow, the smoked glass looks like a pool of dark water. His reflection wavers in it: a lanky boy with blondish hair, dirty jeans, his T-shirt patchy with sweat.
And then, with a start, he realises he’s being watched: that from within the room beyond the window a boy he doesn’t recognise is staring back at him. Short dark hair and a look of sceptical amusement on his sharp little face.
Scott blinks. He has the strong sense the kid has been watching him for a while; that the wry look – almost contemptuous – is at Scott’s expense. Still, reflexively, he raises a hand in greeting: hi.
The boy doesn’t wave back. Instead he tilts his head quizzically, as if to say, what the fuck? And right then Scott realises, with real surprise, that it’s not a boy at all: it’s Jodie Armitage. The Armitage girl.
The one everyone calls the freak.
The suspicion that he’s being laughed at – that he’s a source of amusement – hardens into certainty. He takes a faltering step closer. Her eyes don’t move from his. He says, What? What’s funny?
She doesn’t reply: doesn’t even move, except that her eyebrows go up a bit.
Scott can feel his throat tighten. He feels caught out somehow. He wonders how long she’s been there. He says, a little too loudly, Why are you watching me?
She doesn’t move.
Scott says, Come on. Say something.
She twists her face into a swift, imbecile grimace that clearly says moron. Gestures to the window between them. Scott realises it’s soundproof and she can’t hear what he’s saying.
He can feel himself flushing. He takes another step towards the glass but even as he does so, the girl gets up from where she’s been sitting; slips a pair of Walkman headphones over her ears; and wanders away into the room without looking back. The darkness of the window seems to swallow her and she’s gone.
Scott stands there blankly, staring at his reflection.
Jodie Armitage.
Everyone in the Heights knows she tried to kill herself or cut herself or something, razor blades in the bathtub Ward said, except her parents hushed it up.
And when Susan Lewis cornered her and asked what it felt like being a self-harming freakshow, she bit the soft part of Susan’s finger right through until her teeth met and said, Like that. And now she has to see a shrink.
At the time he kind of felt Susan Lewis deserved it; but now all he can feel is a confused, dull resentment turning and turning, low down inside him. Maybe because he had thought he was alone: concentrating on the work, his shoulders aching, his mind empty. Almost like being happy. And now that’s gone.
Well, she’s gone too.
What’s the Armitage kid doing inside the Centre anyway?
In his head, immediately, Ward’s voice: Bet they’re doing experiments on her.
Scott frowns. He feels fleetingly unsure of himself. Because something about the way she held herself – tense, twitchy almost – did make him think of an animal, a trapped animal, rather than a girl.
Still, he wishes he’d said something: something to show her he wasn’t embarrassed, that he was fine with being seen, fine with being almost happy.
Except of course she wouldn’t have heard him, because of the window.
Shaking his head slightly, he leaves the mower standing against the wall and goes to get his sandwiches from the shed.
By four o’clock he’s made his way around the whole Centre, but the easy rhythm he’d attained earlier in the day has slipped out of reach and he can’t get it back. The mower moves choppily and he has to go back over some parts twice or even three times.
He keeps glancing at the windows, checking them; and it throws him off his pace.
Still, in the end, it’s finished. He shuts off the engine for the last time and drags the mower behind him across a wide span of lawn towards the line of saplings. Little tan grasshoppers flit through the air ahead of his feet.
Back at the sheds he stows the machine. Colin looks over from the hedge trimmer he’s cleaning.
You got it all done, then?
Scott nods.
Good work. Bit slow, but then it’s fucking hot pardon my French. Your pay’s on the bench there. Wipe that mower down before you go.
Ten in the morning till four in the afternoon. Two pounds an hour. Twelve pounds cash in a little manila wallet. Scott says, Thanks.
See you Monday, then.
Yeah, see you.
When he comes out the back gate, the track is half in shadow: the sun’s starting to slip down towards the pine trees. Scott, sore and aching, lets the gate clang shut behind him and starts to trudge home. He can feel the back of his neck where the sun’s caught it. His arms too.
The air is very still. He can hear sounds of traffic from the main road, and somewhere far off some little kids shouting gleefully; and the gritty sounds of his own footsteps on the dry track; and his breathing. He reaches the junction.
Out of nowhere a voice says, So what was it?
Scott whips round. The Armitage girl is sitting right there on the ragged bank under the yew hedge, in a patch of sunlight. She’s staring at him: she has the same wry, sceptical look on her face as before.
Black jeans, black long-sleeved top despite the heat, short dark hair, a tatty canvas bag slung to one side, scuffing one foot in the dirt. Headphones slung round her neck.
He says, What was what?
Whatever you were trying to tell me. Whatever it was that was so important.
Scott shakes his head. Says, Nothing.
Must’ve been something. You were all –
She breaks off speaking and does a little mime, pretending to be Scott outside the window: looking pissed off, flailing her hands jerkily with mock rage.
Scott can feel his earlier irritation starting to come back again but he holds it down. He says, evenly, I was just asking why you were looking at me. Is that something you do? Watch people when they don’t know? Cos that’s kind of creepy actually.
She gives him a considering look and says, I know you.
Yeah? I know you, too.
Her face twitches once and her gaze dips away from his. She digs in the canvas bag by her side and takes out a Walkman; starts to fiddle with it. She says, I bet you do.
Scott says, What does that mean?
She ignores him; pulls the headphones over her ears. Scott hears the tinny pulse of the music start up. She squints her eyes against the sun for a moment, then looks away down the track towards town; like he’s not even there any more.
She must be his age but she looks about twelve. She has black makeup round her eyes, too much of it, like she’s trying to be a punk; black eyebrows. Everything about her is kind of scrawny. Sitting at the side of the track she’s just a nervous scrawl of black in the afternoon sunlight.
Just for a moment he can’t stop himself imagining it: the parting resistance, the sudden mouthful of blood. Susan Lewis screaming, presumably.
Then he turns away and heads home.
The house, when Scott gets there, is silent. There’s no music playing any more, and no sign of his father. The door to the study is closed.
Sometimes he’s working. Sometimes he goes in to the university for things, even though he’s on sabbatical.
Sometimes he’s just gone.
Scott’s hair is thick with sweat and dust and he has streaks of oil and grass stains up his arms from cleaning the mower. He puts his work clothes to wash, goes upstairs and has a shower, running the water dead cold and getting straight under: a gasping chill at first and then – as he becomes used to it – an increasingly luxurious sense of delight, of numb coolth, of the heat and weariness draining away; goosebumps on his arms, his balls shrinking up tight, as he forces himself to wait and get properly cold.
Then clean jeans and T-shirt and in the kitchen he finds bread, cheese, some sliced ham from the supermarket. He turns the little kitchen TV on and eats at the table, reading an old 2000 AD in bare feet.
The news comes on. Ronald Reagan at a podium, talking. Gorbachev. Something about increased tension. He stops looking.
The way she said I know you was weird. Like she meant something more than just I recognise you or I know your name. More like a judgement: I know about you.
But they’ve never even talked, so she doesn’t know anything: not really.
So the weirdness was probably just her. Just her weirdness.
If Ward had been there he would have pissed himself laughing. The freak speaks!
Jodie Armitage. She used to be more visible: you used to see her skulking around the Heights, never really part of anything, just hanging around on the edges. He remembers a barbecue at the Sutcliffes’ house that his parents made him go to when he was maybe eleven; groups of adults talking on the patio with plastic cups of white wine and the kids splashing about in the pool. Ward doing cannonballs, aiming for the girls. And Jodie Armitage, in the shadow of one of the big redwoods in the corner of the garden, watching them all. Just watching.
Scott seems to remember her being new that summer: that her family had just moved here or something. Sometimes when people move in to the area they make a big effort, go round and say hello, invite other kids the same age as their kids to come over to play; all of that stuff. But not always. And not the Armitages.
Still: she used to be around.
And then she just faded out.
I know you, she says, squinting at him.
Yeah, right.
What was she even doing there, at the junction?
Was she waiting for him?
Standing in his memory in the shadow of the redwood, she doesn’t look unhappy. Alone, perhaps, but more like she’s chosen not to join in than she’s been forced out; not like she might one day try to kill herself or hurt herself or whatever it is that comes later.
He goes back upstairs. The house is silent: his father is still nowhere to be seen.
In his room he switches on the Amstrad; waits for it to boot up; and loads Dispersal.
He clambers from the rubble; heads south. Finds the highway. This time, instead of following it towards the big cloverleaf in the distance, he crosses it, edging between the lines of stalled vehicles. He scrambles down the embankment and starts to trek determinedly south-west, away from the road, away from the blast site, into the desert.
He dies from dehydration before the radiation sickness can finish him. He quits the game. Starts again.
He clambers from the rubble.
Outside, the sun slowly falls out of the sky and the pine trees become dark. For the first time there’s a breath of a breeze through the windows.
I know you.
He dies four or five more times before he gives up and switches the computer off. It’s late and he ought to be exhausted but in fact he feels restless and edgy and messed up.
He takes his clothes off, brushes his teeth at the little sink in the corner of his room, and turns out the lights. The attic is dark and still. He lies on his bed, resting his eyes on the slope of the ceiling. There’s just enough light coming in to make a ghost-space around him: a faint grey echo of his room. After a while he starts to masturbate, without thinking of anything much; almost unconsciously. But once he’s come, he feels calmer; and in the end he does fall asleep.
He wakes.
The kitchen is dark. There’s a red glow from the numerals on the microwave and a faint backwash of sodium light from some low clouds outside. The house is totally silent.
He is naked, and holding the handle of the back door.
He stands for a long moment still gripping the handle until the sense of everything falling fades out and the world is solid again.
The house is still silent, the kitchen is still dark, he’s still standing here in bare feet.
Moving soundlessly, he climbs the stairs back to his room. With a heavy sense of futility he gets under the sheet; and lies, unable to sleep, with a muddle of thoughts tumbling around inside him, a confused incoherent static. Reagan and Gorbachev on the TV news. Which one will fire first. ICBMs ploughing lines across a clear sky and radioactive flame enfolding whole cities.
He thinks of dying. What it would feel like. If it would hurt. Whether you’d even know.
The doctor who talked to them at the hospital said it would have been over at once. That there was nothing anyone could have done.
But surely they say that to everyone. Even if she had been alive when they got there, alive and trapped in torn metal, and took time to die, they’d say it was over at once, wouldn’t they?
Everyone seems to take it for granted that dying is better if it’s fast. Better for the family because they don’t have to think of you suffering. Better for you, because you don’t have time to realise you’re dying, that you’re about to die, that this is it.
Like dying is a dirty secret that has to be kept hidden, even from the person doing it.
Like you wouldn’t want time to think; time to recognise what was happening. Like you wouldn’t want to know.
Perhaps it was true this time.
2
Every week at ten o’clock on a Monday morning, they test the Broadmoor siren. It has to be tested in case they need it for real: in case one of the mental patients escapes. For one minute there’s the two-tone alarm in the far distance, and then a pause, and then the all-clear wails up to pitch and hangs there steady.
She’s learned to stay indoors. If she’s out, someone will spot her, and she’ll hear them shrieking with delight: Hey bitch! They’re playing your soooong!
She gets her first computer when she’s eleven. It’s a reward and a consolation prize in one. The reward is for school: for being top of every maths test, every science test, every exam, all year; and for winning the Achievement Cup.
(She is exceptional; everybody says so.)
The Achievement Cup is a little silver cup on a black plastic base. It’s not hers to keep; you give it back at the end of the year for someone else to win. Her father says, I think we can do better than that, don’t you?
She knows it’s not just for being exceptional. It’s also because they’re moving house; moving school. Her dad has a new job now and Camwell Heights is going to be their new home and Jodie’s going to be leaving all her friends behind when they go.
(She doesn’t have friends. She is exceptional but people don’t like her. She has tried, but they just don’t. It’s strange to realise that her parents are unaware of this; that they think moving school will be difficult for her, will be something she’ll have to overcome, something that requires consolation.)
Anyway, so: computer.
Her father gets it through his work. It’s brand new. This is the most advanced home computer on the planet, he tells her in a serious voice.
When she switches it on, it’s like a door has opened.
The computer has an operating system called DOS and a programming language called BASIC. She reads the manual to learn how the language works. There are disks with programs already on them – a spreadsheet; a word processor; some games – but she ignores them. She is going to write her own.
Hours go by. On the softly-glowing screen, instructions unspool from her fingers and cautiously begin to take shape, to become connected to each other. The computer is like a small child, or a simple, willing alien; it will do what you want, but you have to talk to it clearly, in a way it will understand. If you want it to draw a circle, you can’t just say that. You need to start from scratch: teach it what a circle actually is.
She makes mistakes. But not many. And never twice. She’s good at this, just like she knew she would be.
There’s wetness between her legs. For a moment she’s baffled: has she been so lost in talking to the computer that she’s forgotten to pee, has wet herself? But then she realises her period has started.
It’s the first time, but she knows what to do. They had a talk in PE a year ago, and right afterwards she went to Boots in town and bought a box of pads which has been sitting in her dresser drawer ever since, ready. She changes her pants and settles the crisp white pad in place; and puts on new trousers; and goes back to programming.
The program starts to work.
Later on, when she thinks about this, it seems pretty symbolic that she got the computer and got her period on the same day. Or maybe not symbolic so much as just comical: a door has opened but also the floodgates of puberty. She can’t really decide. But it’s something, that’s for sure.
She remembers the boy from when they first moved here. There was a pool party at someone’s house. He was just a little kid then. Like her.
(Except not like her of course. Not exceptional. Not a freak either. Just a kid.)
She remembers him though. And more clearly than the others. It’s as if the other faces – laughing, screaming, eyes and mouths wide like wolves – have become part of the same smeared jeering mass; but his face stands out.
Framed in the window of her dad’s office, with the afternoon sun on him, seen through smoked glass, he is smooth and unaware and untroubled, working away in the sunlight. He looks happy.
A kind of desperation floods her.
Fuck you, she thinks as she looks at him. Fuck you.
She gets the modem three years later, for her fourteenth birthday. By this time the computer has changed (to a newer model with more memory and a better processor) and she has changed (from a good little scholar to whatever she is now; no-one knows; she doesn’t know). She wants the modem because she wants access to bulletin boards. She drops hints for a while but it’s tough. The therapist they have been making her see (ever since the incident) has said she should try to be less insular, more outward-facing; and this feels like a step in the opposite direction.
(Which it is.)
She concocts a carefully-reasoned, slightly emotional lie about this being a different way to connect: about feeling safe when there’s the screen as a mediator of interaction: of this being perhaps one of the baby-steps she needs, in order to make progress in the right direction. Inside, she’s cracking up because this is all bollocks and they’re buying it.
Then later, she’s not so sure. Maybe the lie is credible because it’s not entirely a lie. The thought makes her feel furious and slightly sick, like she’s been seen naked.
Like she’s let herself be seen.
But she gets the modem. So long as she only uses the phone line after nine in the evening she can go on bulletin boards and newsgroups.
There’s a newsgroup for everything. For programming; for academia; for Star Trek and Tolkien and Asimov; for recipes and short stories and phobias and politics and bonsai and metal detectors. For esoteric jokes that rely on a comprehensive understanding of particle physics, or Aristotelian philosophy, or obscure classic cars. For rude limericks. And of course there’s every computer game ever. You can download them, play them, share them around.
And in the crevices, strange stuff. People who like being hurt. People who want to fuck kids. Rape. Suicide. Death.
She reads everything. Avidly; relentlessly. Searching.
Somewhere out there is a girl-shaped, girl-sized hole in the world into which she would fit perfectly. Snug and neat. Click. If she can find it, things will start to make sense again.
She reads and reads. It is just around the corner; it has to be.
Some of the boards are local enough that the modem doesn’t even need an area code. Others are transatlantic, or in Europe somewhere. She’s not allowed to make long-distance calls but before long she has half a dozen ways around that. A man in Ohio uploads convoluted proofs of ancient Mayan prophecies. A guy in Germany transcribes and translates Eastern Bloc newspaper stories. Hackers trade information on backdoors and breaches to big computer systems in corporations, banks, research facilities. Teenage dorks make ASCII porn, the girls drawn using letters and numbers and punctuation marks.
Sometimes people reach out. The SysOp of a board in Swithenham wants to organise a meet, get everyone in the local dialling area together, who’s in, they can do costumes and vote on a theme for it.
But when that happens she drops silently off the board, erases her tracks, and vanishes.
Some of the newsgroups are about missing people. Their messages usually fall into the same desperate pattern: how the person looks, when and where they were last seen, what may perhaps have happened. Please look for. Please help. Sometimes it’s abduction; sometimes people run away; sometimes nobody knows what has happened – just that the person is gone now, leaving behind confusion and fear and pain and no answers at all.
Kellie-Ann went to the store to buy a paper banner for her little brother’s birthday party and never came home. Red hair, freckles; jeans and a sweatshirt with the name of a football team.
Paul was backpacking in Cambodia, supposed to meet up with friends, didn’t show though they waited a week. There’s a photo from an American high school yearbook. Glasses, curly hair, an awkward, friendly smile.
Stacey had an argument with her mother and stormed out of the house; said she wished her mother was dead. That was three years ago. Long dark hair, a jacket with badges, please help us find our daughter.
Jodie reads one after another, carefully, slowly. Sometimes for hours.