by Lia Weston
The door swings open to admit another customer. Alex looks over his shoulder, pulls his coat a little tighter, and leans forward to whisper, ‘Really?’
‘Unfortunately.’
Earl Grey tea is presented in a plain white cup and saucer, the teabag still in. The owner’s gaze skims Alex, a quick triangle of assessment – face, hands, jacket – before he heads back to the kitchen.
‘Alex, you’re not in trouble. I know it’s not you.’
‘Sure. Sure, sure. Okay.’ His fingers steeple in his lap. He waits, eyes darting, accessing different memory points, wondering what he’s missed, how it could have happened.
‘Is it possible,’ I say, choosing my words very carefully, ‘that someone could access IF from the outside? Get into a client’s file, for example?’
Alex is shaking his head before I’ve even finished the sentence. ‘No way. IF’s system is like Alcatraz, man.’
I decide against pointing out that Alcatraz wasn’t completely watertight. ‘So there’s no way that anyone could break into our server, pick out images, that kind of thing?’
‘Nope. I mean,’ he scratches his forehead, ‘if we’re talking hugely sophisticated, like beyond government-level sophisticated, which isn’t that hard really, I mean, if you’ve seen the NBN stuff it’s really embarrassing, I mean our network speeds are already –’
‘Alex, come back to me.’
‘Oh yeah, right, sorry.’ His fingers quickly resume their tapping as he regains his train of thought. ‘We’re talking theoretically, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Theoretically, man, anyone can get into anything. It’s much easier for someone on the inside to get stuff out, though, of course.’
This is something I hadn’t considered. ‘So if I wanted to know who accessed a particular file or image, how it got out of the company, how could I do it?’
Alex chews his fingernail. ‘It’s kinda complicated. Like, you’d think it’d be easy, but it’s not.’
‘You can’t trace file pathways or something?’
‘That’s, uh, that’s not what that means.’
‘See? This is why I need your help.’
He nods, clearly chuffed but trying to hide it. He’s like a walking LCD screen, Alex: everything happens very quickly on the surface. ‘You need people who can do like computer forensics. It’s pretty big-time stuff, full-on investigations, you know? That’s way beyond what I do.’
‘Right.’ I had thought it would be such a simple solution – look at the system, find the leak, bash whoever’s head in, done. I should have realised it wouldn’t be. I tap at the handle of my coffee cup with my fingernail, flicking through any other possible avenues.
Alex pauses in the act of adding three spoons of sugar to his tea. ‘There’s like another thing. But, you know, it – it . . .’ He scans the room again, as if we are surrounded by spies. ‘It’s not super-ethical.’
I wait.
‘I can, like, go through everyone’s email.’ He holds his hands up, as if he’s already reconsidering it. ‘I don’t know if it’ll work. I mean, I might come up with nothing, but you know, I might not. Have nothing. I mean, find something. You know. You know what I mean, right?’
‘Yeah.’
A girl comes out of the kitchen and sits down next to us, casting a quick glance at our table. A blue bandana divides the copper of her hair. There’s a tiny patch of blonde behind her right ear where she missed with the dye; she’s left-handed. Alex side-eyes her back, as if she’s a plant from the enemy side.
‘The emails,’ I say. ‘Do it. Tell me what you find.’
He nods, already mentally rolling through the procedures.
My phone pings. Gen. So borrrrd. She’s been sending a lot of these lately, tiny SMS smoke signals. I stand and leave some money for the drinks. ‘I appreciate your help.’
‘Anything else you need, anything at all, I’m here.’ He starts to get up. ‘We could, you know, there’s, uh, have you been to Mung Bean? They have four dollar pints on Thursdays. Kain’s been, I think. But maybe you, maybe you and Rohan, we could, you know.’ He’s trying to look nonchalant but it’s not working.
I shake his hand. ‘Sure thing.’ His grip is slightly clammy.
I leave him working out the best way to electronically invade everyone’s privacy. What’s the bet he finds Ro’s Tinder profile?
On the wind, like a car alarm, comes the sound of a teenage girl expressing herself. Wheezer, who’s supposed to be an inside-only cat, lies like a furry rug next to my parents’ front door. He yawns as I come up the steps. I’d pick him up, but he’d shred my arms.
The door opens.
‘Hello, darling.’ Amity slings her bag over her shoulder. ‘Lucky you caught me.’
‘Gen home?’
‘Well, she does live here,’ says Amity. Her smile dissolves as she catches sight of my black eye. ‘Oh honey.’ When she puts her hand up to my face, I only dodge a few millimetres, but it’s enough to make her pause in confusion. Does she touch Dad this way?
‘Can we go now?’ Gen stomps past, backpack clutched to her chest.
‘Wheezer’s not supposed to be outside,’ I say to Amity, and follow Gen. My ankle burns, but I refuse to limp until we’re out of Amity’s sight. It stabs me in retaliation.
Gen finds shopping for paint as interesting as watching it dry. She detours instead to her favourite comic-book store. It’s on the second floor of the shopping arcade, its windows of figurines in stark contrast to the surrounding empty shopfronts. I head west to the industrial displays of wooden boxes and metal bodies, the army-neat ranks of black and silver cans. Their symmetry makes me calmer, the familiar smell of propellant and markers. The shop assistant barely bothers to acknowledge me, but he’s like that with everyone. I quickly find what I need, aware of Gen a floor away and alone in an environment dominated by teenage boys and guys in their twenties who still live with their parents.
I go up the stairs, past the dismembered heads in the window of Marina’s Wigs (open 11.30 – 2.45 Monday to Wednesday, Saturday 10.45 – 1.00) and wonder what Marina does when she’s not at work, which is apparently most of the time.
Gen is sitting at the feet of the Predator statue, glued to her phone. Two guys wisely move away at my approach.
‘Got your stuff?’
She jumps, looks up, shoves her phone into her pocket, scrambles for her bag. ‘They didn’t have it.’ There’s a new tension in her neck, her nostrils slightly flared.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing.’
We walk in silence for a few minutes. I wait to see if she’ll spill, but know there’s no point in pressing it right now. At the end of the mall, I turn left instead of our usual right. Gen takes a moment to catch up.
‘Where are we going?’ She skips next to me.
‘Want to show you something.’
I have to give her a boost onto the dumpster and then up to the fire escape. We climb three sets of freezing metal stairs, then over the locked gate to the rooftop.
Sophia is untouched by tags or the council’s paint roller army. She still dances up the wall, hand outstretched to the sky. She’s hard to miss if you’re standing in the right spot. Something will happen to her eventually.
‘Wow,’ says Gen. She puts her hands on her hips, a tiny version of Mum, and walks back and forth to view Sophia from different angles. ‘Can I?’ She waves her phone at me.
‘Sure.’
She pings around the space, her bad mood temporarily forgotten, taking shots from every vantage point she can get, including lying on the ground at Sophia’s feet.
We sit down by the wall opposite, trying to get some heat from the sun-soaked bricks into our backs.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on with you?’ I say.
Gen tilts her head to examine the ends of her shoelaces. ‘Nothing’s going on.’
‘Don’t give me that shit.’
She flattens her legs out
and bounces her knees up and down for a few moments before folding them in again. ‘Can you make me an album?’
‘What kind?’
‘Different family.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘Parents, I mean. Not you.’ She elbows me. ‘You’re kind of okay.’
‘Why do you want an album?’
Gen shrugs. ‘Sick of fighting with Mum. It’s like all the time. I get home and she’s all “Why aren’t you doing this?” and “You shouldn’t be doing that.” And I’m not doing anything.’
‘An album’s not going to fix that.’
‘It’d help,’ she says, ‘a bit.’
‘I can’t just erase reality, Gen.’
‘Yes, you can,’ says Gen, and looks at Sophia for a long moment. ‘That’s what you do.’
That night I strap my ankle and run. To my surprise, the fox shows up. It stays ahead but keeps me in sight, waiting for me on corners but never coming close. I hobble along at a reduced rate. At one point, it sits down while I catch up. I’m pretty sure I hear it sigh.
At the parklands, the fox detours into the mist to get some dinner. I consider hanging around to see if it will come back, but by that time I’ll be frozen and my ankle stiff as a board, so instead I lurch back home like some weird, sweaty, fox-friended Quasimodo.
I know I’ll pay for the run tomorrow.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I have been summoned to Kain’s office. I only go to avoid him visiting the basement. Mica’s wearing a zip-up top; he wouldn’t be able to resist making a comment about easy access, and I don’t feel like washing blood off the walls.
I open the door without knocking. Kain’s chair is turned towards the window, his foot tapping a staccato beat.
‘Please,’ he is saying, ‘it’s been weeks.’ The tapping slows, then stops. He lapses into a resigned silence. ‘Yes, but you can’t . . . Well, what about this weekend?’
I’m not used to hearing Kain sound defeated. Just as I start backing out, he swings around and spots me. His eyes are bloodshot, his nose glowing. His head is now completely red.
‘Okay,’ he says into the phone, eyeing me as if I’m about to spring over the desk and bite him, which, to be fair, I have considered in the past. ‘Love to the boys,’ he says, and hangs up. Just for a moment, his entire body sags like wet cement.
‘Everything okay?’ I hate myself.
He considers telling me – Jesus, things must be really bad – then shakes off the urge. ‘We’ve had a complaint,’ he says brusquely.
Mr Pyne. Shit. ‘Ro said he was taking care of it.’
‘What? I haven’t told Rohan about it yet.’ He squints at me. ‘What are you referring to?’
‘Nothing. Continue.’
Against his better judgement, he does. ‘You refused a brief. Gentleman called Riggs.’
Oh, that. ‘We don’t have to do every book we’re asked to do.’
‘Could have fooled me, some of the stuff we’ve been seeing lately.’
At first I think he’s picked up on the fact that there seem to be more of the growing-up books than before, more clients with that obsessive look in their eyes, as if we’ve suddenly tapped into an underground market that should have stayed underground, but this is Kain; he’s just not great with gender issues.
‘Too bad none of the brides in our lady marriage books look like Felicity,’ he says, almost sadly.
‘Anyway,’ I say, steering the conversation away from that particular dumpster fire, ‘the Riggs one was too freaky, even for us.’
‘Do you know what happens if we suddenly start turning down every person who doesn’t fit our particular moral profile? We go out of business.’
Note to self: actually try to find out some information on IF’s financial records, attempt to seem like competent co-owner. ‘We do have the right to pick what work we do. It’s our company.’
‘Yes, “ours”. Not “yours”. You agreed to leave the financial side to me, and the business development to Rohan, including client acquisition, remember? You’re the artist. So if I bring someone in who needs work done, the work has to get done.’ Kain exhales and brushes something imaginary off his shirt. ‘I’m sure it can’t have been that bad.’
Instead of saying what it was, I grab a piece of paper, write the brief down, and slide it across his desk.
Kain looks at the paper. His face goes a lovely mottled pink. ‘Right.’
‘Told you.’
He rips the piece of paper in half and bins it. ‘That’s all. Go back to work.’
I go out to lunch instead, and put a reminder in my list to go through IF’s bank records.
The balcony is so cold tonight I could snap my breath off and stab someone with it. I grab a scarf and wrap it around my face, tucking it into the neck of my jumper. Below me, the alleyway is free of foxes. I shield my match against the sliding door to light my joint – I don’t do it very often, I promise – and then make a phone call.
‘Any luck?’
‘Not yet, not yet, but making progress. So many emails, I mean, it’s to be expected, it’s a business, got a lot of paperwork, but more than I expected, man, seriously.’
Someone’s hung a row of Nepalese prayer flags in the rooftop garden across the alley, the flags surging against the wind that coils and climbs the face of the building. In a window opposite, a woman keeps leaving her flat but continually coming back for things she’s forgotten. First her jacket. Then her phone. Then a bottle of wine. Then a shovel, and now I’m really interested in where she’s going.
‘So there’s nothing you can tell me?’ I say.
‘Unless you want all the deets on whether Rohan’s training the pull or push muscles at the moment, not really. Did you know he can bench seventy kilos? I don’t think I could even do twenty. I mean, I’m not weak, but –’
‘There’s definitely no way someone else is using an IF computer as a conduit, is there?’
‘From the outside? Nah, man. I mean, it’s a thing they make look easy in movies, but to turn someone’s PC on remotely is actually super-hard.’
The streetlight across the road flickers and goes out.
There’s something in the background of his voice. ‘What else, Alex?’
There’s a short silence, and the click of a thumbnail against teeth. ‘Well, it’s not like completely relevant, but . . . I mean, it might not be . . .’
‘Just tell me.’
He takes a breath. ‘I found an email from Mica to Tarik saying she’s worried about you because you like don’t seem to do anything except work and run I mean not that I’ve noticed but I guess she sees you more than I do.’ Alex says it rapid-fire, as if that will help soften the blow. ‘And Dan apparently sent her a text or something the other week when you didn’t show up for beers or something and it’s happened a few times and she thinks you’re becoming like Greta Garba.’
‘Garbo.’
‘Still don’t know who that is.’
‘Don’t worry about it. But thanks.’
‘No problemo, dude.’ He sounds relieved to be getting off the call. ‘I’ll be on the 411.’
‘Sounds great.’ I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.
I can’t help taking a detour back to Sophia. I haven’t seen her at night yet, and there’s a moon, and, really, it would be weird not to, right?
Despite the ankle strapping and post-run bags of ice – yes, I’m stupid for even attempting it, I know, I know – I’m still not walking properly, though the joint takes the edge off the pain. The dumpster lid clangs as I clumsily push off it onto the fire escape.
Sophia dances in the moonlight, her colours muted, melting into the wall. I would dance with her, but I can’t. Up on the eighth floor, her window is dark. Maybe she’s out. Maybe she’s nearby. I scan the street below. A couple emerges from a side alley, leaning on each other, heads close, blonde and dark. He leads her to a car and opens the door. High beams from a passing taxi flood them, and t
he edge of the wall turns to ice in my hands.
It’s Rohan.
And Mum.
In the dark of the rooftop, my phone lights up.
Where are you?
When I look back down to the street, they’re driving off together.
*
There is a gig tonight at the Grace, and it’s brought strange people into our pub. At the bar, three girls dressed like pin-up dolls are trying to squeeze into a one-person-sized spot. Next to them is Dan, a human anchor in a polo shirt. Even his back looks annoyed.
I slot on Dan’s other side and signal for two beers.
‘Just one,’ Dan tells the bartender.
‘Are you pregnant?’ I say.
‘You’re high. And late.’
‘Only a bit.’
Dan shakes his head, but there’s none of the usual good-humoured exasperation today.
‘What’s up?’
‘I can’t stay for long.’
‘I thought we were going to make a night of it.’ I swap money for beer with the bartender.
‘Looks like you got a head start,’ says Dan.
I take a drink and nudge his elbow. ‘I’m sorry about last week. And the other couple of times. Work’s been really –’
As soon as I say the word ‘work’ his jaw shifts. I switch subjects. ‘Mica says hi.’
He nods, the side of his mouth softening just a little.
Further down the bar, a guy with a fifty is trying to get a drink, but one of the pin-up dolls is interrogating the bartender on the Grace’s cider range, so the guy may die thirsty.
‘Hey, do you know what Rosie wants for Christmas?’
Bad move. Wrong turn.
Dan looks to the side, behind us. ‘Maybe we should find a quiet spot.’
‘Just wait for the band to start.’ I point at the poster – the Avast-Mateys. ‘They’ll clear the bar one way or another.’
‘I don’t want to do this here.’
‘Do what?’
But he doesn’t answer. I take a drink, watching Dan’s need for privacy wrestle with his need to blurt out whatever he has to say. The image of Mum getting into Rohan’s car slides into my mind. I shake it off. Not now.
