She had to find a way in to Hadfish, and at least she’d learnt that it had to be when the directors were there during the day. She put the bedside light on and switched on the small netbook she’d bought from the computer shop on Tottenham Court Road, connected to the Internet and brought up the Hadfish website using a dongle and a proxy connection that cloaked her IP address. Perhaps there was something on the site that she had missed that might suggest a new approach.
The arrow on the screen that mimicked her forefinger movements on the trackpad alighted on the office manager’s photo. An older black woman. An office manager, Mojgan thought, was simply a glorified way of describing a secretary, a position that seemed to be viewed with some disdain in the West. Typing documents in English was something Mojgan was more than capable of doing. A couple of years of transcribing the recorded conversations of visiting foreigners might at last pay off.
EIGHTEEN
A week after meeting Cassie, Sheila was waiting for her at an outside café on the King’s Road near the Saatchi Gallery. She felt contented, people-watching from behind sunglasses with the late-morning sun on her shoulders. She reflected on a tough week. Jules had become yet more withdrawn, staying late at the office (although she couldn’t get hold of him one evening) and saying only that he’d agreed, after all, to take on the Rami job that they’d been squabbling about. She’d catch him staring at her as if deciding something. She wanted to prompt him, get him to open up, but she was half-afraid of what he might say, her old fears of him confiding in someone else resurfacing.
She brought herself back to the here-and-now as a woman wearing oversized sunglasses and a fitted red dress approached, carrying a large designer-labelled shopping bag. She looked much like many of the women who shopped on the King’s Road and it took Sheila a second to recognize Cassie. She’d changed her hair; it looked longer, with contrasting highlights. Cassie put the bag down next to the table and whipped off her glasses.
‘Sheila!’ she exclaimed, as if they were old friends. Sheila took off her sunglasses too and stood up. Cassie embraced her, then unashamedly checked her out. ‘Lovely trousers,’ she said, pulling out a chair. ‘Linen?’
Sheila nodded, gesturing at the matching jacket on the back of her chair. She wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to meet with Cassie, who’d rung her out of the blue. ‘I got your number from Rami,’ she’d told Sheila on the phone, ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ How could she mind? Cassie’s cheerfulness had come at just the right time, and the fact that she was nothing like her friends was probably a factor in agreeing to meet. She needed something less demanding than yet another analysis of the latest film or book and the endless talk about children, which most of her circle were now encumbered by. At times she felt her whole social scene to be terribly narrow and suffocating. Also, truth be told, she was curious about Cassie, and what Rami saw in her beyond the obvious.
‘What have you been buying?’ Sheila asked, as Cassie flashed a smile at the waiter.
‘Shoes,’ she said. She ordered an iced coffee and leant forward to rummage in the bag. She took out a pair of high heels and put them on the table between them.
Strappy ‘fuck-me’ shoes was all Sheila could think. ‘Very nice,’ was what she said.
‘Three hundred and twenty-nine pounds of foot-deforming shoe,’ Cassie said, putting them away.
‘How was Moscow?’ Sheila asked, wondering whether this get-together was such a good idea after all.
‘A hoot, as always,’ Cassie said, ignoring the waiter as he set her drink down. ‘How’s Julian? Rami says he’s working on this new contract. You know, the one they were arguing about.’
‘Yes, although I don’t know what it is. Apparently it’s confidential.’
‘Rami says it’s for an arms company, but that’s all. Something to do with, what do you call them, UAVs. I can’t remember what that stands for. Unmanned something. Anyway, they call them drones. It’s something to do with drones and GPS, you know, like the thing you have in your car.’
‘That’s Julian’s thing, GPS. But an arms company?’ So that’s what Rami meant at dinner about Jules having principles, she thought. Also, it was a little galling that Rami told Cassie what the job is but Jules didn’t tell her. Yet another example of him withholding.
‘I take it he doesn’t want to work for an arms company?’ Cassie asked, running her fingers through her hair and flicking it off her bare shoulders. Something about Cassie appeared carefully managed, Sheila thought, but not overdone. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, something that didn’t ring true, other than the silicone enhancements. Perhaps it was all part of being in PR, creating an image.
‘He worked for British Aerospace for years and hated it. The macho culture, the weapons they made, the way they got round arms embargoes. He was relieved to leave.’
‘So why take this job?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t talk to him at the moment. It’s stressing him out but there’s not a lot I can do about it. He refuses to talk about it.’
Cassie leant forward and raised her lovely eyebrows, which to Sheila looked unpruned, unlike a lot of eyebrows you saw around here. ‘Everything all right in the bedroom department, is it?’
Sheila felt herself blush. ‘That’s usually not a problem, but when he’s stressed like this he loses interest. I think that’s pretty normal, though.’
Cassie turned down her mouth as if doubtful. ‘If he’s losing interest in you then he’s got problems. You don’t think he’s seeing someone else, do you?’
Sheila was so taken aback at the casual manner in which the question was asked that it was a moment before she realized she was sitting with her mouth open. ‘That’s a bit of a leap from—’
Cassie’s mobile, sitting by her plate, emitted a joyful tune – an instrumental version of a current pop song. She picked it up and examined the screen. ‘Sorry, I have to take this, it’s work.’
Sheila picked up her own phone to check for emails and pretend she wasn’t listening to Cassie’s call, but Cassie didn’t seem to care if she was overheard. In fact, she was looking at Sheila all the while she was talking.
‘Sure, that’s not a problem … When? No, that’s fine, honestly.’ She laughed. ‘Yes, that’s true … OK, bye.’ She put her phone away. ‘Sorry about that, what were we talking about?’
‘Do you like your job?’ Sheila asked, keen to change the subject.
‘Sometimes, depends on the clients. It takes me places I wouldn’t otherwise go. It pays really, really well, which means if I’m careful I can quit in a few years.’
‘Three hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of shoes isn’t being careful,’ Sheila said.
‘True, true. But you have to look the part in my business.’
Sheila wanted to ask whether she thought people didn’t take her seriously, dressing like that, but she lacked Cassie’s forward nature.
‘So you’re telling me it’s never crossed your mind, whether Julian is seeing someone else?’
‘Not really,’ Sheila lied. It had occurred to her plenty of times.
‘The thing is it’s easy enough to find out.’
‘What?’
Cassie placed a soft hand on Sheila’s. Her fingernails were immaculately French-manicured. ‘He wouldn’t be the first, would he? If they’re unhappy in one aspect of their lives they think the solution is found in another,’ she said, pointing to her lap with her free hand. It took Sheila a second to understand what she meant. Cassie patted the back of Sheila’s hand for emphasis. ‘Believe me, I know.’
Sheila shook her head. ‘I think he’s just absorbed with the job, that’s all. Struggling with it because he didn’t really want to do it.’ She slipped her hand from under Cassie’s and hid her uneven nails in her lap.
‘Rami tells me that you guys have been together for years, that you even got engaged at one point.’
Just how much else had Rami bloody told her? Sheila wondered. But looking at Cassie’s
light blue eyes she just saw ingenuous curiosity. ‘Yes, we did get engaged a couple of years after university. But we never got disengaged as such.’
‘Just didn’t follow through?’
Sheila laughed. ‘Exactly. We didn’t follow through.’
‘And no ring?’
‘I took it off a while ago, it felt a bit …’
Cassie sat up straight and the male waiter appeared magically by their table. Cassie’s enhancements, emphasized by the perfect fit of her dress, provided benefits that Sheila hadn’t appreciated. ‘Let’s go to lunch,’ Cassie said enthusiastically, and without waiting for an answer threw too much cash on the table and stood up.
A thirty-pound bottle of chilled Chablis and a Caesar salad later and Cassie was telling Sheila that Rami was too serious about their relationship for her liking.
‘The proverbial clock is ticking. I want to have a kid, sooner rather than later.’
‘But not with Rami?’
She snorted. ‘I know he’s a friend of yours but would you have a child with him?’
Sheila slowly shook her head.
‘That’s why I work all hours now, so I’ve got enough to quit work down the road. I’ll have enough put by to do it on my own, so who knows, I might visit a sperm bank.’
‘I knew you would.’
‘What, visit a sperm bank?’
‘No, I mean I knew you valued your financial indepen-dence.’
‘Of course.’ She drained her glass. ‘Men are too needy.’
‘More than women, you think?’
‘Oh, yes, or in a different way. They need … reassuring all the time. I suppose they’re a bit like children in that respect. Shall I order more wine?’
‘God, no, I’ve got work to do this afternoon,’ Sheila said, thinking that actually she could do with some reassurance herself.
‘Houses to sell?’
‘No, I volunteer at the hospital once a week, so I need coffee and chewing gum.’ She waved at a waiter.
‘I’m impressed. I could never do anything like that.’
‘Well, I didn’t think I could either until a few months ago.’
‘What made you do it?’
‘I’m not sure. I just felt my life was too … I don’t know, restricted, small, not fully lived, if that makes sense?’ she asked, embarrassed despite the inhibition-loosening effects of the wine.
Cassie made a sympathetic face but obviously had no clue what Sheila was talking about. ‘So kids weren’t an option for you two?’
Sheila was getting used to Cassie’s bluntness, and grateful that she wasn’t pretending kids could still be a real possibility at her age.
‘At some point they were, maybe. Maybe they would have filled a gap, maybe they would have completed things, but maybe that would’ve been the wrong reason to have any. There’s something more … I can’t really explain it, to be honest. Anyway,’ she added, aware she was repeating herself, ‘if a kid is really what you want, Cassie, then don’t leave it too late.’
Cassie took Sheila’s hands and leant forward. ‘The clock is ticking. You could come with me to the sperm bank and help me choose.’ They laughed and ordered coffee from the waiter while still holding hands, and the not unpleasant thought came to Sheila that the waiter, a woman, might think them a couple, with Cassie being Sheila’s younger trophy girlfriend. She felt giddy with the wine and the intimacy; she’d never discussed not having kids with her friends before, simply because no one had asked her, and yet here she was opening up to someone she hardly knew and had very little in common with.
She recovered her now clammy hands. ‘I wanted to ask you …’ she started saying.
‘You can ask me anything, darling,’ Cassie said, encouragingly.
‘You said earlier, that it would be easy to find out, you know, whether …’
‘Whether he’s seeing someone else?’
Sheila hardly nodded and Cassie said, businesslike, ‘It’ll take a weight off your mind and he’ll never know.’
‘I’m not sure I could do it. You know, the actual practicalities. It’s like a betrayal in itself.’
Cassie smiled and patted Sheila’s hand. ‘Just leave it to me, Sheila. We girls have to stick together.’
NINETEEN
Julian, rubbing his eyes and stroking his stubble, had become intrigued by some comments in the code on the circuit board. Mainly because he couldn’t read them. They were just empty squares or random symbols. The comments in a program were there to explain a section or line of code, both as a reminder to the programmer of what that piece of code did or, more importantly, an explanation to the next programmer taken on to make changes or updates. It was good practice to include these comments, and they were enclosed in special characters that made them invisible to the computer running the code but obvious to a human. Except the ones in the control unit routines were unreadable to Julian. He wondered if they were deliberately ciphered, given this was a military job, but he didn’t have time to worry about it, and in a sense it forced him to work through it blind rather than being falsely reassured by bad documentation. Instead he chunked the code down, concentrating on working through each routine by taking it through the debugging software then making a note when a different part of the program was called so he could check that later. It was tedious and complex work, since the routines were dependent on many variables being fed in by sensors on the aircraft. So he put on some Bach, which always seemed to enhance his concentration. Many coders listened to music as they worked, some of it dreadful heavy metal or techno stuff. Each to his own, and if he walked through the open-plan office at Hadfish he was treated to a cacophony of tinny sounds coming from the headphones (again in a variety of styles) of the coders, who could spend hours hunched over a screen without coming up for air. Julian, however, was at an age where he needed a regular break, and he pulled off his headphones to stretch his legs and use the toilet.
It was late again and most of the coders were gone. Nizar was there, shutting down his workstation and retying his long hair at the back. He hooked his laptop rucksack over one shoulder and turned to see Julian. He came over to the office as Julian opened his door.
‘How’s it going, boss?’ he asked. ‘You look busy.’
‘I like to keep my hand in. Can’t let you young guys have all the fun.’
‘What you working on?’
‘It’s a control board for a GPS tracking system,’ Julian said, keeping things general. ‘Why are you here so late?’
‘There’s a lot to pick up.’
‘Enjoying it?’
‘Of course. I love getting stuck in to new challenges. It’s all problem-solving, isn’t it, at the end of the day?’
‘Exactly, always using the most efficient lines of code, of course.’
They smiled and Julian realized he was missing basic human company. He wanted to get home to Sheila but, as Nizar turned to go, he remembered something. ‘I’ve got a little problem for you to solve,’ he said, ‘if you’re not in a hurry?’
Nizar removed his rucksack and put it down. ‘Lead me to it, boss.’
Julian reckoned there was little Nizar could glean from seeing a few lines of code, so he led him to his desk and swivelled his screen around. He pointed to some of the missing or garbled comments. ‘What do you think is going on there?’
Nizar peered at the screen. ‘Is this like a test?’
‘No, I’m genuinely asking for your help.’
He nodded and said, ‘OK. So that’s Linux. The rubbish looks like it should be the comments, right?’ He was tentative. ‘Not code. I mean, each line starts with a hash symbol.’
‘Yep.’
‘This is too easy, unless it’s a trick question?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I’ve come across this before, these squares. It’s because it’s written in a language you haven’t got installed on your laptop. I’ve worked on some programs written by Arab programmers and they sometimes put in a few com
ments in Arabic, you know, like a signature thing. I had to download the Arabic language file so I could read them.’
Julian slapped his forehead and laughed at his own stupidity.
‘Was I wrong?’ Nizar asked.
‘No, no, I’ve just been sitting in front of the screen too long,’ Julian said.
Nizar looked pleased with himself. ‘Shall we see what language it’s in?’ he asked, reaching for the keyboard.
Julian grabbed his arm. Nizar was thin and wiry. ‘No, you get off. I’ll sort it out. Well done, Nizar. It had been nagging me.’
‘Pleased to be of help, boss,’ he said, grinning and picking up his rucksack.
‘By the way, I keep meaning to ask you,’ Julian said as he went back to his chair. ‘I’ve noticed you and your mates, down at the café, hunched over your laptops every lunchtime. It’s none of my business what you get up to in your spare time, but I’m curious; you guys working on something?’
Nizar stood at the door, taking a moment to answer. ‘Well, just something to make the world a better place,’ he said, straight-faced.
Julian, bemused and intrigued, wanted to ask him more, but he’d already left in a bit of a hurry, as if regretting saying anything at all. He figured they were working on a game that they hoped would go viral and make them rich. He’d been there in his youth.
Back at his laptop, Julian established that the operating system had been stripped of all languages except English, possibly in a bid to save space. He quit the debugger, downloaded a multi-language pack from the web and installed it. Then he restarted the machine and fired up the debugger. The gaps were magically filled.
‘Nizar, you’re a fucking genius.’
He couldn’t understand a word that it said, but he knew Hebrew when he saw it. Now he understood why Boris was banging on about being Jewish: he was working for Israel.
TWENTY
Sheila hadn’t had a chance to tell Julian about her meeting with Gulnar because he just hadn’t been around, but she had followed it up with some productive action. Thus her impetuous decision to help set up this charity for amputee children had taken a further step towards reality. After several weeks of being a patient support volunteer, which involved visiting patients and acting as an advocate, she’d met a very young Afghani girl brought to the UK for surgery after her legs had been blown off below the knee by a cluster bomb. Her trip had been arranged by an enthusiastic young occupational therapist, Gulnar, who’d been working in Afghanistan. She’d shared with Sheila her vision of being able to fly therapists, equipped with prosthetics and know-how, over to war zones to ‘literally get people back on their feet’. Gulnar, who was of Afghani heritage on her mother’s side, was self-aware enough to know that she didn’t have the organizational know-how to pull it off. Sheila immediately recognized how her own skills might be useful. She may not have the idealism, or even the ideas, but she saw no shame in latching on to someone else’s, someone who was more altruistically minded than she, someone who knew how to engage with the world in a way she was struggling to discover. She could, of course, just have given Gulnar some money to help out, but that would have provided little satisfaction; she’d given enough of the stuff away every time some appeal came up on the TV, or when she was stopped in the street by a charity worker. But she realized that what she really wanted was to have that personal contact that Gulnar was talking about, even if it meant stepping out of her comfort zone, which is why she’d become a volunteer in the first place.
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