by Peter Carey
The key is blue and glowing faintly.
>unlock
>unthread chain
You are inside a musty room where long-dead cats have passed their lives. Their ghosts swim in disinfectant. There is also an odour of mothballs. To the east are racks of clothing, fur coats and brides’ dresses from long ago. To the west is an unmade bed. To the north is a desk. On the desk is a computer.
>turn on computer
The screen reads: You are standing in an open parkland east of a row of old white terrace houses.
>take off gown
How can you be a girl when you have a penis? Before you is a cherub boy with strong legs and breasts. Her nipples turn out, L and R.
>go down
There is no down.
>go up
There is no up. This is one of the locations you are transported to randomly when you least expect it. The boy has breasts, the girl has a canna lily, a poisonous flower that will make you vomit if you swallow. Anything is possible in your life.
Fast forward. Play. Gaby was totally in love with his black lacquered fingernails, long hair, sibilant voice. I would do that for you, she said to him. I wouldn’t mind.
The voice on the microcassette was peeled of all protection. Was she alone? She said she had made the boy quiver and had smelled the Selsun in his hair. The fugitive lived on cheese and apples. He pictured Frederic, disconnected once again, pining for a modem, selling second-hand clothes at Flemington markets. He smelled the stink of tanneries, abattoirs and the heavy-metal mud, saw Footscray Park, the awful palm trees, unnatural in the poison yellow light.
Fast forward. Play. I didn’t mind anything stinky, Gaby said. I did his nails for him. And shaved his legs.
WHAT WAS SPOOKY about the house in Patterson Street had nothing to do with murders or the bad vibe left by the White Knights Motorcycle Club. Everything could be traced to sad parents coming and going with no explanation, one sleeping in his office in his socks and underwear, the other attempting to plant flowers, shouting shit, hurling her trowel against the garden fence. Fast forward. Gaby tried to stay away. Saturdays Frederic had to work with his mum at the Trash ’n’ Treasure. Fast forward. Gaby hung out with Troy. Troy always travelled via the lanes. He taught her how. In some parts the lanes had been colonised by the adjacent houses and they climbed the corrugated-iron fences, jumped across the beds of puntarelle, chased lizards within a hundred metres of Sydney Road.
Troy and Gaby smoked in the lanes but the true lanes existed only in Frederic’s Mac IIx.
On two Saturdays Gaby rode her bike to Solosolo’s house in Thomastown but then Solosolo said her mother was forcing her to tidy up for her palagi visitor, so forget it Gabes. But Peli was now a cable tech with Telecom and he had the perk of a Toyota HiAce van for use on public streets and highways all weekend.
Peli was six foot tall and over a hundred kilograms with his back tattooed “Fa’a Samoa” to show he had no fear of pain. Peli was strong. He liked strong weed, thank you Troy, who brought him over to Frederic’s place one rainy afternoon when the NES console had just arrived. Who else but stoned Troy would put those two together: Peli was like a refrigerator in board shorts; Frederic had satanic nail polish and eyeliner and careful floppy hair and a considered whispery voice. Peli was a big dog examining a whippet, sniffing, and pushing him with his paw.
But then they smoked and leapt to the Mac IIx, to Wizard’s Crown, with magic weapons named Frost, Flaming, Lightning, Storm. Frederic was polite. He used Plus-category weapons so the visitor would pass out (“The opponent lies unmoving”) but not die outright. The Samoans had no video games, but Peli was a duck to water. Dark, Doom, Soul, Demon and Death were his weapons of choice. If you are taken out by these weapons you are dead except with a resurrection spell.
Then Peli spied the Nintendo. It was his. He must play it now. Then he morphed into Small Mario, trotting left to right across the Mushroom Kingdom, collecting gold coins, dodging Bowser’s armies. Peli was addicted. Could he come back? Frederic thought that would be so, so cool.
Here, by accident, was an unlikely gang glued together, Gaby said, by not much more than dope and games, or so it seemed. Frederic, Gaby, rabbity Troy, Solosolo and red-eyed Peli took the HiAce cruising in the early morning, hooning through the S’s on The Boulevard, three passengers unsupported, rolling, bruising and cutting themselves amongst the racks and cables. The HiAce had the aerodynamics of a garden shed which was frustrating to its driver who was a “man of spirit.” It was Peli’s continually expressed desire to swap the Toyota engine for a Chevy V8. He lay on a beanbag in the sleepout and performed the television news report in a deep blissed-out voice: “A Toyota HiAce van marked with Telecom insignia drew away from a police car already travelling at a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour.”
Frederic loved Peli straight off. Peli was slow to get the hang of Frederic but he was there to be with Gaby. This was obvious to everyone but her. She was so dumb.
When they set off cruising in the HiAce, Gaby must sit beside the driver in the front.
Someone else should get a turn, she said.
Nah, you don’t get it.
What don’t I get?
Cappuccino, he said, meaning expensive white froth, black coffee. Drive the racists mad, he said.
Let Frederic sit here, Gaby said.
I don’t drink that brand, Peli said.
The boys played Wizard’s Crown and Mario Bros.
Frederic said no word about Peli’s job, but surely this was the first thing he thought about Peli, that God had sent him a Telecom van. Peli could deliver him all the free phone lines that he wanted. Within days of their first meeting Frederic had “located” a USRobotics Courier, way better than the modem he had lost. Gaby didn’t see that at the time.
Frederic did absolutely not social-engineer Peli. Gaby said this. Peli’s family would later say he had been conned by the palagi kids. This was so untrue. It was Peli who loaded the gear into the HiAce. It was Peli who drove so carefully along the shadowy streets. Fast forward. Play. Gaby was beside him, natch. It was her job to keep her eyes skinned for pods, those pieces of municipal furniture you never notice until you do, foot-high metal Mario mushrooms everywhere, parked in clear suburban sight, melancholy purple in the yellow streetlights so common in those Melbourne nights. The pods were packed with phone lines like spaghetti squash, waiting to connect with that new modem and catapult you into teenage worlds of wonder unimaginable in Patterson Street Coburg or almost anywhere on earth that year.
Later Gaby would be persuaded that perhaps Peli had a conflicting sense of loyalty. He did not hate Telecom like everybody else did. Telecom gave him a good job and a vehicle. It did not occur to anyone that the way they slagged off Telecom might have been offensive to him. In any case. For whatever reason. Peli wouldn’t touch the pods. Troy, on the other hand, got his beaky nose inside the pod. Troy hooked a line, stripped its wire, attached alligator clips and ran the hundred metres of cable, an umbilical cord, a garden hose, like a shadow along the front of those suburban fences, then around the corner to the van. Meanwhile the driver played Tetris, super-cool.
Then Gaby saw the delicious dark side of Frederic, the kid who had already spent two years flying online solo, messing with two different computers, learning to write programs, connecting with local BBSs and doing mischief on his own account. He was the sort of alienated boy who might have set fires down by the Merri Creek but it was way more fun to invade and incinerate a certain local BBS (Pacific Fire) which had banned him. Rewriting Zork was cool and retro, but by the time he got a replacement modem and Gaby caught her glimpse of the online universe, Zork seemed like Play School. Frederic had traded a set of passwords for the local dial-up number for Minerva, a system of three Prime mainframes in Sydney.
It was certainly less convenient to go online via one hundred metres of cable, but it was a rush as well, to be faster and smarter than anyone, to be a trickster amongst governments and corp
orations run by complacent admins, with carelessly protected networks. These were anywhere you looked. From Peli’s HiAce Frederic could stroll unhindered into a massive computer known as Altos. Watch, watch, he said, and if Gaby did not know what she was seeing, Frederic told her. He was sweet and patient and excited too. He gave Altos the digital version of a masonic handshake. And Altos thought he was a fucking corporation.
Crammed inside that van with fuggy boys, Gaby was no longer the tangle-haired cherub dribbling a football across the green in Parkville. She was five kilograms heavier. Her breasts pushed in against Frederic’s back. Her cheek was against his cheek and she liked that he had stolen the modem. As his pretty fingers fluttered like moth wings across the keys, she wandered from world to world in a universe she had not known existed.
Now she understood how it had felt to him to lose his phone line. Being REALLY online was like Zork to the millionth power. From a dark street in sleepy Moonee Ponds, she was teleported into NASA. Frederic passed her the keyboard and she could write nothing better than FOO WAS HERE. How embarrassing, she said on tape, please don’t report that. No-one would believe it anyway.
GABY SAID, We had to deal with Dad aka the Thief aka Matty Matovic. He was snake-eyed, slim with a pool-hall hunch, always stalking around some imaginary table. He was drop-dead handsome until you saw his missing teeth. Also: he was bitter. He favoured white T-shirts and lamb’s-wool sweaters, even on a rainy night. Like when we were summoned, Gaby said, to his back corner of Toto’s with his unsold copies of Direct Action, grey and sodden, on the table. He looked more like a betting man, but he really was a fence, Gaby said: I thought, I have seen a gun. I have seen a fence. My life was turning out quite well.
Frederic’s father wouldn’t look at me, but I could not help looking at him, so creepy but also graceful, rolling a cigarette with his long yellow fingers. He felt me watching and he twisted his body sarcastically—which he could really do—and tossed the menu at his son.
Saw your mate Peli, he said to Frederic. We waited. His eyes were in that state we then called OWTH (offended-waiting-to-happen). Frederic hid behind his fringe, studying the menu.
Hey. Dad rapped the table.
I could have slapped his face.
Frederic said he would like lasagna and a can of Coke.
Hey.
Frederic flicked his hair back. What?
You, he said, having no clue he was addressing a genius.
Your mate, the Thief said. Peli. You never told me he worked for Telecom. He helped me shift some stuff to Melton Self Storage in his van.
I’m hungry, Frederic said.
I knew the Thief would never pay for me so I said I was on a diet.
He put his stained hand across his mouth, just like a girl whispering in class. You know what trashing is? he hissed. Of course we knew. Like trashing a hotel room? I suggested just to watch him curl his lip. No, sweetheart, like picking up the trash from Telecom.
I told him I didn’t think that would be his sort of thing. He looked at me. Up and down, as if he were astonished I could speak. He said, Girlie, you wouldn’t know “my thing” if it bit you on the bum.
I knew what Break and Enter was. I said that sounded like what he had in mind, but he wasn’t interested in me.
You’d only be taking waste paper from the bloody government, he told Frederic. If they wanted it they wouldn’t throw it out.
Frederic said he wasn’t sure.
What if I talked Mum into reinstating your phone line?
She won’t, Frederic said, but he looked my way, signalling: we wanted this.
Not interested, son?
Frederic licked his lips. I thought, oh shit, is this going where I think it is?
You and Peli. He’s got the wheels. And you’ll know what’s worth snaffling.
He tried and failed to tousle his son’s hair. Then he called the waitress and considered her body and ordered one lasagna and a glass of water.
He told us that his mate had told him that they had some interesting devices in those Telecom exchanges. He knew they were devices that should be studied. His mate could use the hardware, but he reckoned the waste paper was where the money was, thousands of Saudi credit card numbers, people who think nothing of putting a BMW on their Amex.
Dad, your mate’s a wanker.
But all Dad wanted, he said, was for Frederic and Peli to pick up the recycling. He didn’t need them to hang around reading it. They could pick it up and piss off home. Study it at their leisure there. If they found anything interesting, they could copy it down. They could have it. It was theirs. They could even share it with Miss Uptight here. Then Peli could bring the bag to him in Brunny.
You’ll get ripped off, Dad. You won’t know what you’re selling.
So you don’t want your own telephone line?
Apparently Gaby and Frederic wanted a telephone line more than anything that I, Felix Moore, could ever imagine. So when Frederic stood up, when it was clear he intended to walk away, when Gaby should have been relieved, she was, she admitted to me, disappointed.
Frederic said he didn’t want the lasagna. He would think about the offer.
Bullshit, said Matty Matovic. Is that fucking mascara running down your face?
Gaby had to rush to catch him at the door and then, in the spotlights of the cars turning right from Queensberry Street, he kissed her and she held him and he told her how he loved her and that was all that mattered in his life. He said he wanted to marry me, she said. I think I cried. We walked back to Park-o-tight together, and I was in love, and I do believe it was then, on that night, I learned that deep in the maze of Telecom the techs scrawled user names and passwords, restricted 800 numbers, “secure” information that they then threw in the bin, scraps of paper, cigarette packs, the backs of envelopes, on yellow dockets. There the honey massed, in thick black plastic bags, in dumpsters, a harvest worthy of a dungeon and a poison moat. Pick up key.
In the “twisty little passages” of the computer underground, Gaby said, there was a species dedicated to the collection of discarded information, furtive scholars, jesters, fools, hackers, phreakers, practitioners of the black art of recycling who picked the locks of Telecom exchanges and, like dung beetles busy with their ancient occupation, rolled their holy shit into the night. The passwords and user names would be useful in so many ways e.g. when you got an actual phone line you could go online free of charge, and clicky clacky there you would be: lying in bed with your BFF, jumping off the Hamburg springboard, shooting the shit, hanging out on the bridge where no-one knew the girl was a girl.
Dad was a thief, but for Fallen Angel and Undertoad (as they would be known) the highest value of this information was best appreciated in terms of the culture of the gift.
If you were us, Gaby said on tape, above the noise of running water, you gave the info to other hackers in a BBS. One hard-to-get 800 number got us invited into a private BBS, then past the rope of a restricted BBS we never guessed existed. Fallen Angel and Undertoad were quickly cool. They talked to Justum. They met Quark. They got higher up the pecking order.
Peli was never a thief. No-one ever asked him to be one either. Even Frederic had never picked a lock before but when the first one popped, Gaby said, he was so completely hacktified. We were IN. Running, white bright neon light. Flinders Lane exchange, 3 a.m. Sunday morning, oh man, you cannot know, IN IN IN, black trash bags, bat wings, unimaginable, to ourselves I mean. We were so swift, so cool, and back outside before Peli got to the second level on Tetris. Who knew he had Tetris syndrome? Go, go, I screamed. Go, go, go. And he was stuck to the screen like a fly to flypaper, illuminated, and the bloody cops cruised past. But nothing happened, because nothing ever happened, and the only consequence was: Meg finally placed an order to reinstall a phone line. Then we would have everything we needed to fly around the world, like they say Satan does, all night. We would enter through the weak front doors of systems, build our own backdoors to guarantee return even
when the admin dopes got off their arses and fixed the hole. You’ve got no idea how easy it was back then, she told me. People would use their own names for passwords. We would wipe away our meece tracks, return through that back door to read pissed-off messages from admins who we roasted, toasted, flamed to fucking death. We abandoned Zork forever.
Undertoad and Fallen Angel both had school of course. There was Ritalin involved in consequence, and this was the giddy, high, overstimulated time, the night-before-Christmas sort of thing, when they were innocent but not at all, when they lay naked together and did things they thought they had invented and knew the possibilities of life were about to become wilder and weirder than anything their hippie parents dreamed. They were bound together, grown together, wrapped like strangler figs around each other’s trunk, inseparable, waiting for a dial tone.
FREDERIC’S MOTHER HAD her temperament upgraded with a huge TV, a VCR, a refrigerator, two air conditioners. Then everyone was perfectly sedated, playing Mario Bros. Suddenly Meg liked me, Gaby said. It was an unexpected side effect.
Stringy Meg Matovic folded her black balletic legs beneath her and snuggled up beside the Blondie child. She flicked ash onto the floor and begged the child to teach her Mario Bros. Technically, she was unteachable, the most awful player you ever saw, yelling, screaming, falling into blackness, hitting the invisible block, being killed by the Firebar, missing all the Bloobers, a giggling fool, happy to die at the hands of Goombas and Koopas and Buzzy Beetles, shouting like a soccer mum. Meg was possibly bipolar. She was certainly the first parent Gaby met who was a blatant stoner. She crashed her van on the Eastern Freeway. She stayed at home on school days, getting high, waiting for Telecom to show up.
Teleprofit, Telescum, Frederic called it, hissing and narrowing his kohl-lined mystery eyes. Hackers hated Telecom, he said. Telecom were morons who could not even use their own technology. The line noise was so bad you got logged off continually and the faster your modem the worse the problem was. Soon they’d have a modem with error correction, but not that year, not yet. Telecom were jackboots. They could raid your house, tap your phone line and seize your equipment any time they wished. Service? They could not even give you a phone line when you asked for one. Oh no, you must wait three fucking weeks.
