He reached forward and gently pressed her shoulder. ‘Elle? You should probably get out of the sun.’
Her eyes opened, widening as she uncurled, testing her neck as if she’d put a crick in it. Then she gave him a beautiful, brilliant, languorous smile, just as she used to when she was delighted to wake and find herself beside him.
The smile flew like a missile to his chest and burst inside his heart. He couldn’t look away. Couldn’t unlock his eyes from her mouth, which kept on smiling just for him.
For an instant he thought he was going to be physically unable to resist leaning forward and—
The smile faded. Elle’s expression flicked to one of confusion and she scrambled upright. ‘I’ve got stuff to do. Thanks for waking me.’ She yawned as she dropped her feet to the floor, face flushing as she lost a flip-flop and fumbled over retrieving it.
‘No problem,’ he said gruffly, watching her take three attempts to slide her high-arched foot between the straps and beads. With another smile – a small, wary one this time – she disappeared down the steps in the direction of the cockpit.
Lucas sat where he was until normal rhythm returned to his heart.
When Elle set off for the Nicolas Centre in the morning her step was light. After spending ten minutes learning some more Maltese phrases, she’d spent much of the previous evening on the cockpit seat with pad and pen, insects buzzing companionably around the light as she drew up plans for maximising the efficiency of the computer room at Nicolas Centre. It might not be everybody’s cup of tea because, well, not everyone found IT fun, but to her it didn’t even feel like a job. There might be no huge corporation’s work practices hinging on her actions, and she was used to controlling a budget of considerably more than a few euros, but she was beginning to find making something out of so little a challenge. Bringing order out of chaos was satisfying.
Arriving at the centre, she breezed across the courtyard and past the dry fountain. The door stood open and she was through it and into Joseph’s office in a few steps. ‘Can I talk to you—?’ she began. ‘Oh. Sorry.’
Two men were seated in Joseph’s office. Both rose, and she recognised them as her fellow volunteers from their pictures on the noticeboard in the lounge.
Oscar, the one with sandy hair, was possibly the tallest man Elle had ever met. He seemed entirely made up of gangle. Arms and legs straight, back long, he towered over her.
Dark-eyed Axel, probably of above-average height, looked short next to Oscar. His hair was brushed straight back, accentuating a tall forehead.
‘Well, hi.’ Oscar stuck out a large hand. ‘And you are our new lady, from England.’ He spoke English fluently, though with a breathy Dutch accent. ‘Please won’t you sit?’ He pulled up a chair.
Axel’s German accent was harder and more deliberate, as if he needed to check every word. ‘Welcome to Nicholas Centre.’
Oscar seemed a lot more interested in Elle than in continuing the meeting that had been in progress and led the conversation into a swapping of information about roles and nationalities. She felt uneasily conspicuous under his intent gaze.
In contrast, Axel was quiet. He frowned at Oscar from time to time, as if pained by the Dutchman’s heavy humour and blasts of laughter.
Joseph brought Oscar to a halt. ‘We are discussing the under-11s’ five-a-side football match on Saturday, Elle, but I could meet with you when we’ve finished?’
Elle jumped up. ‘Fine. I’ll go up and start.’
‘But you leave us too soon,’ protested Oscar, patting her chair as if to tempt her to take her seat again.
Ignoring this clumsy playfulness, Joseph fished the computer room keys from his desk. ‘I’ll follow you up in a few minutes.’
Elle ran up the stairs and it wasn’t long before she was engrossed in assessing the router, the speed of the broadband and the various operating systems on each machine, checking out the sizes of the hard drives and how full they were, shaking her head that the machines were automatically logged in and all users had administrative rights. Then, as Joseph hadn’t made an appearance, she signed into her e-mail and found a message from Simon.
From: Simon.Rose
To: Elle.Jamieson
Subject: Forgiven me for my meddling, yet?
Elle,
As I said on the phone, I’m deeply sorry. I see now that I did a completely stupid thing. If you want me to make Lucas quit the boat, I will do. Tell me if you need me to give him shit.
Apart from awkward living arrangements, how are you liking Malta? And how are Loz and Davie? I know you’ll love them.
Much love,
Simon. xxx *penitent face*
Elle replied.
To: Simon.Rose
From: Elle.Jamieson
Subject: Forgiven
Simon,
I think me and Lucas have more or less worked things out and we’re getting along, even if not as best friends. I can’t really feel angry any more as I have learned something from the situation – Lucas has moved on.
She paused, trying and failing to formulate some profound words about acceptance and rite of passage. Eventually, she settled on:
So I can move on, too! :-) Sometimes it takes the relationships that don’t last to teach us the lessons that will.
The centre is really interesting and I feel as if I’m doing something that matters a lot more than making money for a faceless corporation that dumped me when I didn’t fit with some precious new structure.
I LOVE Malta. Truly, madly, deeply love it.
Love and hugs,
Elle
She pressed ‘Send’ as Joseph arrived, puffing at the climb up the stairs.
Elle spun her chair around. ‘Is there any prospect of getting better broadband? This is slow enough to embarrass snails.’
Joseph dropped into a neighbouring chair. ‘I can try. Our provider gives us a discount, as a charity. It’s normal practice for me to contact all benefactors from time to time to see if I can encourage them to increase their assistance.’
‘Fantastic. Ask them if we can have at least double the current speed. And do you mind if I format all the machines and set up a limited-access user account for each? Then I can make downloading apps an admin-only privilege. These machines are grinding to a halt under the weight of stuff they don’t need.’
Joseph nodded. ‘All sounds good. Keep me in the loop and give me a note of all passwords. Can you keep some machines available while you make the changes?’
‘I’ll work on one at a time,’ she agreed. ‘Are people allowed to save data directly to the machines? The problem with that is nobody clears out outdated stuff.’
He lifted his hands, looking very Maltese. ‘They shouldn’t. They should bring a memory stick or burn to a disk. But …’
‘OK. There are a couple of external hard drives in the cupboard and some old towers, too. I could use their hard drives and add a server to the network. I’ll move any data I find to them, and it’ll provide a place for people to save their stuff if they don’t have a stick or a disk. That should prevent the machines from being clogged up.’
Joseph’s pocket began to ring and he nodded as he fished out his phone. ‘Anything else?’
‘How long will it take Carmelo to get here from his school?’
‘Ten minutes if he runs. Fifteen if he walks.’
‘Thanks.’
As Joseph left, speaking Maltese into his phone, Elle began on the first machine, moving data, formatting the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system.
As she worked, two boys and a girl of sixteen or seventeen came into the room. She smiled and introduced herself and they settled themselves at machines, casting their eyes around at the changes to the layout. They gave their names as Alice, Gordon and Antonio.
>
Once the machine she was working on was safely formatting, Elle scooted her chair closer to Alice. ‘Need any help with anything?’
The girl dimpled shyly and shook her head. ‘I’m just on Facebook.’
The boys were playing computer games. Elle was fine with that: computers were meant to be used and Alice, Gordon and Antonio were all interacting with technology and the cyber world in their preferred ways.
Because she didn’t want to take more than one machine out of commission at a time and neither Alice, Gordon nor Antonio seemed to have ambitions to conquer spreadsheets or lay out a CV, Elle turned to other tasks.
She cleared up the rest of her e-mail and then began poking around the machine on which she was working. It didn’t take her long to discover that the hard drive had been partitioned.
And one section used for storing pornographic images.
Oh-kay.
She blinked at the first few pictures, all eye-watering but, she was relieved to see, not illegal; then, disquieted by her discovery, protected the area with the caustic password NotCool and shut down the machine.
She went round making the installation of new apps an admin privilege on the machines that weren’t in use, giving the admin user account a new password, FirstSteps. She paused, wondering whether that had sprung into her mind in relation to her first steps in taking control of this chaotic computer room … or her first steps in her new life.
Probably the latter. Even though she’d been busy all morning, a part of her mind seemed constantly occupied with Lucas. It was as if sharing the boat had thrown the past four years in the bin. Occupying the same space. Talking together. Feeling his eyes travelling over her like a shiver. Dammit, she’d even woken up beside him yesterday evening.
Her fingers moved over yet another keyboard, but her mind kept floating back to their first meeting when, part of a drunken version of free running through the night-time streets of Northampton, Lucas had literally knocked her off her feet. Elle had been wandering disconsolately through Market Square towards the taxi rank after she and a date had agreed to end the evening early and suddenly men had flooded down the street. Pounding over walls, sliding over car bonnets, hurdling chained up cycles, twenty specimens of stag night manhood. Rat-arsed.
Lucas had lost his tie and two shirt buttons as other racers tried to haul him back. Gasping for breath and choking with laughter, he hurled himself over grey guardrails at the edge of the pavement. Then a competitor crossing his line forced Lucas to alter his trajectory over the top of a bin.
Elle, passing on the other side, found herself bowled over like a skittle, head bouncing on the pavement, legs and knickers flashing.
Lucas rolled to his feet as if landing a parachute jump, abandoning the run to fall to his knees beside her. ‘Are you hurt? Should I get an ambulance?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Crossly, Elle yanked her skirt to its proper position with one hand and rubbed her head with the other.
His friends returned, solicitous, crowding, offering her, with equal parts enthusiasm and drunken hilarity, piggybacks, fireman’s lifts or consoling cuddles.
‘All I want is a taxi.’ She struggled to her feet, brushing off a forest of helping hands.
Lucas despatched someone to the rank to secure a taxi and before she knew it Elle was crushed in the back seat with Lucas and a beaming bumbling red-faced reveller introduced as Lucas’s brother, Charlie. Sweet Charlie, so unlike Lucas.
‘We’re much nicer when we’re not drunk,’ Charlie confided. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Elle.’
Charlie began to laugh. ‘L for what? L for leather? L on wheels?’ He’d laughed so hard he couldn’t catch his breath.
But Lucas hadn’t laughed. ‘Elle est jolie, elle est chaude, elle est parfaite.’ His eyes had been fixed on Elle as he’d described her as pretty, hot and perfect. She’d found it hard to look away. In a taxi rocking out of the late-night streets of the town centre towards Upton, where she had a flat, Lucas breathed, ‘Elle, je veux.’ She, I want.
Lucas returned next day, sober, clutching a huge bunch of fragile pink peonies. He hadn’t forgotten her building, apparently, no matter how drunk he’d been, and had located her apartment by ringing each bell in turn until she answered.
Dark hair glossy, jaw shaved, T-shirt hugging his biceps, Lucas looked a hundred degrees of hot. He stood on no ceremony. ‘How about I take you to lunch?’
It wasn’t in Elle’s nature to be that attainable. ‘I have plans.’ But she gave him a small smile as she took the flowers. ‘Thank you.’
‘Dinner?’
‘Extensive plans.’
He looked exasperated. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘Plans …’ She let her smile widen to a grin.
‘When?’
She tilted her head, pretending to consider. And then, as his eyes narrowed, capitulated. ‘Tuesday evening could work.’
It had.
Elle completed her task and fished out the key for the cupboard where computers and peripherals went to die, intending to hook up a discarded tower to see if it could be salvaged. It seemed as if the computer room had been run without expertise or common sense, so it was possible that formatting a supposedly defunct hard drive might be all that was needed to make the machine once again a useful member of the IT team.
She tried to concentrate, to ignore the ache in her chest at how good it had been with Lucas before everything had begun to go horribly wrong.
Before the day when a scruffy man she’d taken to be homeless had shaken a cardboard cup in her face, its meagre handful of small change jangling.
And it had been Ricky.
At twelve-fifteen, out of breath, eyes full of anticipation, Carmelo catapulted into the computer room.
Elle had established that the tower from the cupboard was past resurrection and had moved on to stripping it of its hard drive. She smiled. ‘Hi, Carmelo! Have you enjoyed school today?’
‘No,’ he answered, frankly. ‘But I did go.’ His eyes dared her to query it.
Elle made a cheering motion with clasped hands. ‘I’m really pleased.’
She was rewarded with Carmelo’s smile as she returned the tower to the computer graveyard, in case she ever found its carcass useful. A quick glance at the progress of the machine that was formatting, and then she settled herself at what seemed to be the most recent equipment, and Carmelo pulled up a chair at her side.
‘Right. What shall we do?’
‘Wikipedia,’ Camelo returned, promptly.
‘OK, Wikipedia.’ Elle had expected him to want to play a game or chat on social media. She gave the computer mouse a little shove towards him. ‘Come on then. Show me Wikipedia.’
With alacrity, Carmelo began to click. Elle gazed at the site he opened – Wikipedija. ‘Ah. I can’t read Maltese.’
‘OK.’ Carmelo rapidly clicked through to the English-language version. ‘Now, I think of something I want to know.’ He paused before asking, courteously, ‘Maybe is there something you want to know?’
‘This is your computer time. You choose.’
He nodded. ‘I want to know about qarnita.’ He screwed up his forehead in concentration. ‘I forget how to say him in English.’
‘How about we open another browser tab and go to a translation site?’
Oscar, the giant Dutchman, wandered into the room. ‘We have our beautiful Englander again!’
Elle merely smiled politely and he went to use the machine that was being formatted.
‘I’m working on that one,’ Elle said, apologetically. ‘Can you use another?’
‘OK,’ he boomed, jovially, as if she’d made a joke.
Then she forgot him as she showed Carmelo how to discover that the English name for qarnita was ‘octopus’ and watched
as he put the word into the Wikipedia search engine with a quick cut and paste. Unsurprisingly, she found that he didn’t read English as well as he spoke it and she read much of the Wikipedia article to him, stumbling herself over phrases such as ‘cephalopod mollusc’.
The habits of the eight-tentacled habitué of the seas proved to be interesting, even to her. In fact, she learned, the octopus didn’t have eight tentacles, but four pairs of arms. ‘He has a beak,’ she marvelled.
‘A beak?’ Carmelo frowned.
‘Like a bird. If we open another tab we can look for pictures – click on images, that’s right. There.’
‘A beak, like a bird,’ Carmelo repeated. ‘I like to eat him, the octopus.’
Elle laughed. ‘I might, too, because I like his cousin, squid. In the Italian restaurants they call squid calamari.’
‘We call him klamari, the same.’ Carmelo tapped klamari into the translation window to prove that the English was given as ‘squid’.
She left Carmelo to his browsing while she installed the operating system on the machine she’d worked on; then password protected it before she shut it down. She didn’t want anyone messing with the machine until she had it how she liked it. She designated it number 01 and wrote a sticky label for the tower.
‘I’m going now,’ she said to Carmelo. ‘What about you?’
Carmelo’s shoulders slumped. ‘You go home?’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow morning, but I have to work somewhere else this afternoon.’ She watched a thoughtful look enter his eyes, and added, ‘Would you like to help me with some jobs on Saturday? You can if you go back to school tomorrow.’
‘Only if I go to school?’
She pulled an apologetic face. ‘Yes. Joseph needs you to go to school, so I have to know that you’re going. What if he wouldn’t let me work here any more?’ It seemed an unlikely result of her not taking a stand against truancy, but Carmelo heaved a martyred sigh.
‘OK.’
Oscar rose from his machine. ‘I’ll walk with you. Make sure you know your way.’ He smiled a smile large enough to fit with the rest of him.
The Wedding Proposal Page 7
