Right Girl

by Ellie O'Neill

  ‘So are you sure Granddad is involved with the Luddites?’

  His mouth crinkled up slightly. ‘Yeah, I am.’

  There was a silence. I picked up my pint and raised it to him as a cheers. He mirrored my gesture and we both sipped quietly, contemplating life.

  ‘I stumbled across a meeting of sorts in the bookstore.’ His eyes were downcast and I could see that he was struggling to find the right words. ‘A few of his elderly friends, a little bit of an eccentric bunch. I had seen a lot of them in the bookstore before.’

  I thought of the nursery rhyme crew and assumed he was talking about them.

  ‘They were deep in discussion, but I wasn’t eavesdropping.’

  I nodded encouragingly. It would never even occur to me that he would eavesdrop, Patrick didn’t have that Wee Willie Winkie look about him.

  ‘It was like a town hall meeting kind of thing and Maurice was leading it, letting people know what was going on with the movement. It was relaxed but . . .’ He bit his bottom lip pensively. ‘I’m sorry, Freya, but he was very well informed.’

  ‘You were left in no doubt?’ I shook my head a little in disbelief.

  ‘I . . . he never saw me there, I was behind a bookshelf. I’m not proud to say it, but I hid. I didn’t want him to know that I knew. I didn’t want to jeopardise our friendship – I think a lot of Maurice. I hung around for a few minutes and ran at the first opportunity. He never saw me, none of them did.’

  I took a drink. I couldn’t say I was really surprised, nothing could shock me about Granddad after the last few days.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked at me quite seriously.

  I wondered if by asking the next question I would sound like a complete idiot, but somehow I didn’t think Patrick would judge me too much. ‘What are they doing, the Luddites, Granddad?’

  I was right, he didn’t flinch, he held my eye and started to talk. ‘When BBest launched, about what? Four years ago?’

  I hummed in agreement.

  ‘They had competitors and the marketplace was wide open, but very quickly nobody else could keep up. There’s big money behind them: private money and government money. BBest has unprecedented access to data, which in turn they share with the government – this used to be illegal, by the way – but isn’t anymore. BBest says that it’s empowering you to make the best decisions you can about everything – clothes food, friendships – but that ultimately they’re your decisions to make. Which isn’t true. BBest is now so ingrained into our society, it’s very, very difficult to make an independent choice.’ He took a drink. ‘With BBest we are all at the mercy of an algorithim, because the company believes even human unpredictability can be predicted. There’s no humanity in BBest. It isn’t factored in.’

  I swallowed nervously, and in a small voice said, ‘The thing is, I like BBest. It saves me time, it makes good decisions for me.’

  He grinned at me. ‘Of course, and the technology has a function in society, but not this blanket domination, and that’s what the Luddites want to bring to the table. Real choice, and real difference, and to bring humanity, individuality, back into the equation. The movement is not anti-technology, it’s not saying we need to throw away our phones.’

  ‘Phew.’ I gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘I am not giving up my phone for anyone.’

  He laughed, and inside I did a little jump. He thinks I’m funny.

  ‘It’s saying that one company has too much control, too much information on individuals, and that, as a society, this one company is eliminating our conscious freedom.’

  ‘You sound very well informed,’ I said suspiciously.

  He pursed his lips pensively. ‘I support them. I’ve attended some meetings in the past. I never met Maurice at one, I didn’t know he was involved until I stumbled across it. I agree with their cause. I’m not crazy active or anything, but they’re fighting a good fight. They need to be heard.’

  ‘Heavy stuff.’ I took a big gulp of Guinness.

  ‘The Luddites want conversations, but instead they’re seen as deviants and have been forced underground by the police. In a free society there is room for everyone, and the fact that there isn’t room for the Luddites’ arguments kind of proves their point: this isn’t a free society.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t have said deviants but I would have said weirdos.’

  He slapped the table, laughing. ‘That’s your granddad, by the way.’

  ‘You sound a lot like him.’

  ‘Hopefully not too like him, he’s a cranky old fella.’

  ‘Most of the time.’ I bent down to fumble in my handbag, looking for the Tolstoy book. I spotted my phone and that I had six missed calls. Mason. I threw it back in my bag, instantly feeling sick. I brought the book onto the table. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  He made a short noise. ‘Look, I know I’m supposed to be smart because I’m a PhD student but I don’t know everything. But I think there’s a chance that that is what used to be known as a book.’

  ‘Shut up!’ I cried a little too wildly, a little too excited. I was pretty sure we were flirting.

  He raised his hands into the air, elated. ‘I’m a bloody genius.’

  ‘Smart arse.’ I flicked through some pages and landed on the weird hieroglyphics. I showed them to him. ‘This.’

  There were small triangles, numbers, long, empty rectangular boxes, letters that I had thought made words but now I wasn’t so sure, and those stick men dancing and jumping at every turn. I supposed I would be looking for a pattern, some common theme. The triangle appeared as often as a motif with two stars. It was probably too literal to hope for a translation; the triangle might mean someone’s name or something like that. Or the triangle might mean nothing, it might be a decoy shape, a ruse, covering for the fact that the key was a sequence where every third triangle meant that the shape after it was a word. I had no idea what I was looking at. I peered up optimistically at Patrick, who, in spite of his jokes, had started to study the drawings intensely.

  ‘What is this stuff?’

  ‘Have a go.’

  He smiled, and those green eyes made me melt. ‘Do you have anything? Any starting point?’

  ‘Nothing, I have absolutely nothing. I thought maybe it was Spanish, but now I think I’m wrong.’

  ‘I think that’s an old Russian dialect, but God, I’m scratchy on that stuff.’

  ‘Man, I used to be fluent in old Russian dialects too,’ I teased him.

  He was quiet for a moment, studying the pages hard, tracing his fingertips up and down the lines. He flicked forward and back between them, tapping out a rhythmic beat. I could see that he was thinking about what to say next.

  ‘I don’t think you should have this book, Freya. It can get you into an awful lot of trouble.’ He fanned his hand out between us and squeezed his eyes shut. ‘I know something about what this is. What it really is. I’ve seen some of these types of messages before.’

  ‘Okay, you’ve gone all serious. Are you going to tell me what it says?’

  He turned the pages, reordering them. He smiled thinly at me, almost apologetically. ‘I know the Luddites use devices like this to send messages, nothing that leaves a digital fingerprint. When you think about it, it makes sense that your granddad might house it.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Freya, but he is involved.’

  ‘It’s okay, it’s not your fault.’ It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that Granddad’s arrest was not some terrible mistake. He had been up to something. My head felt a bit like an upturned laundry basket. I really hoped that the authorities didn’t know to what extent he was involved in the Luddites, because what I had heard so far made me nervous.

  ‘These are internal communications between members. The messages are about the movement, how to coordinate meetings, how the movement is progressing in other areas. I can’t get it all, or understand it all, but I think it’s nearly like a newsletter, or a messageboard, that gets u
pdated. They’re using ciphers. It might be a key referencing page numbers in the book, something like that. If the material gets captured it’s really difficult to decode. Look here.’ He smoothed out a page between us and slowly moved his hand across it, translating. ‘“Two arrested in New York.” “Operation–” I think that says “orange”, it’s a fruit anyway, “successful in Beijing”. And here, look at this.’ He moved excitedly through page after page. ‘“Device planted, Waist Watch production stalled.”’

  ‘Seriously?’ I stared at the pages in front of me. ‘You can get that from the triangle and that weird squiggle?’

  ‘I could be wrong.’

  My mouth formed a question but nothing came out.

  ‘There’s a meeting planned for tomorrow night in Blackrock, it’s in a gym, Joe’s, at eight.’ He folded the pages over and handed the book back to me. ‘This is really dangerous material to have, Freya. The guards probably don’t even know about that meeting. You could get into serious trouble just having this in your hands. I think you should get rid of it.’

  ‘Or maybe I should go to Joe’s Gym tomorrow and see if anyone there knows anything else about Granddad?’ I blurted without thinking.

  He closed the book. It made a loud slapping noise. ‘That is not a good idea, Freya.’

  ‘Why not?’ I shrugged, immediately feeling defiant and more than a little put out that he might try to tell me not to go.

  He lowered his voice. ‘Well, for starters the meeting is illegal, it’s dangerous, and these things get raided by guards all the time. And besides, Freya, we just met, I don’t want to be visiting you in jail any time soon.’

  He grinned almost shyly at me and I did a little jump and noticed my heart flutter, and for a nanosecond I imagined kissing his mouth and how that might feel. I was blushing and my temperature was rising, so I buried my head in my pint, embarrassed.

  ‘Please, promise me you won’t go.’ His soft green eyes were pleading with me.

  I nodded, took my index finger to my heart and traced an X across it, whispering, ‘Cross my heart.’ I hid my left hand behind my back and crossed my fingers. I would go, I knew I would go. I wanted to see what Granddad was up to. That defiant, independent streak was still in me, buried deep, deep down, bubbling away and getting ready to erupt.

  24

  I was just having a coffee, nothing more. I was sitting in the window of a café. It was a little austere: naked light bulbs in cages and hard wooden stools next to low metal tables. It was a black coffee and I was having a cinnamon doughnut too. The cinnamon had made me sneeze twice. It was eight in the evening and I was looking out the window across the street to Joe’s Gym. Blackrock was a well-to-do village on Dublin’s south side, and it smacked of middle-class lattes and private schools. It was definitely not where I would expect any kind of movement to meet, not that I knew what such a place might look like, but I would have thought shady, not SUVs and chiropractors. I would have put money on rebel movements meeting somewhere with graffiti on the walls and a stench of sewage in the air.

  I might still be right, nothing much was happening in Blackrock so far. The main street was quiet, with an occasional commuter hopping off a tram. The gym was in a basement, and there was a door that looked like it needed a lick of paint at the bottom of the stairs that led down to it. In the fifteen minutes I’d sat anxiously tapping my foot against the glass I hadn’t seen one person enter or leave the building. Maybe they were already there, plotting away, or maybe Patrick got the translation wrong. That was probably what had happened. And here I was, hosting my first ever stakeout, which really wasn’t a stakeout, it was just me going for a solo coffee.

  I was wearing all black. It had taken me an embarrassing amount of time to settle on an all-black outfit. I figured I should try to blend in and look inconspicuous, but everything I pulled out of the wardrobe seemed too bright. It was as if every T-shirt was emblazoned with a slogan: BABY’S FIRST LUDDITE MEETING. I genuinely wondered when the last time I picked an outfit without BBest’s help was. I couldn’t remember. Which probably explained why I looked a little like a mime artist: tight black polo neck, black jeans and black ballet flats that I could run in if I needed to. Not that I would have to run – would I? I had no idea.

  I didn’t really know what I was doing here. I didn’t know what I expected to see, so I told myself I was just coming for coffee, nothing more. I rarely visited this side of town and it was nice to explore. What would happen at a Luddite meeting anyway? Did they all just stand around and shake their fists and say, ‘Down with BBest’? If that was what they did, I could see how that would appeal to Granddad. Or did they plot things? Did they stand over a table with maps and toy soldiers and move the soldiers into battle with each other? I would probably never know, it didn’t look like there was much happening at Joe’s Gym.

  The stakeout did give me the time to think about Patrick and how I had lied to him. What was I doing? What was I really doing? I’d enjoyed last night so much; the conversation was so easy and fun. Patrick was a lot of fun. I felt like me but a better, more charming, me. I was on fire last night, full of witty comebacks and smart retorts. But Mason . . . Mason. I’d lied to him too. I’d made up a long-winded story about losing my phone and finding my phone and there was a cat and a rubbish tip. I was shattered afterwards. I didn’t want to be a player. I didn’t want to string men along and have a big collection of engagement rings and break-up and make-up presents. I wanted to be with that one person who would stop the rattle in me, just like Granddad said he would. And that person was Mason. He was my ninety-three per cent.

  Patrick was so dismayed at the thought of me coming to a meeting he’d actually gone pale and started talking to himself about how he should never have said anything to me. Regardless of his paleness and the fact that I did a full cross my heart and hope to die promise not to go to the meeting, I knew I would. I had decided that it was my only option. I was curious to know what was going on and what Granddad was involved in. And I had to admit that this little moment of rebellion had lit a fire in me. I didn’t ask BBest what to wear (I did have to ask for directions but only because I didn’t know this side of town very well) but the point was, I was beginning to see shades of the old me again, that independent, slightly rebellious, girl who marched to her own drum and wore pink and red together and didn’t give a hoot. It was nice. I’d missed her.

  I had the Tolstoy novel in my handbag at my feet. Yesterday it was just a book, but now I was carrying dangerous secrets that didn’t belong to me and yet somehow were linked to a person who did. I kept flicking my nails, a million thoughts racing through my head.

  There was a cool gust of air as the café door swung open. I looked up from my coffee. I could hardly believe my eyes when the woman from Granddad’s shop walked in; the fresh-faced floral-dress woman with messy hair and those eyes still moving uneasily. She didn’t look at me. She walked straight to the counter and ordered a coffee. She paid with cash, not her phone. It looked almost alien in the barista’s hand. He smiled down at it like it was a novelty, like he was a child playing shop. I saw him run it across his fingers, savouring the sensation.

  I was staring at her. My neck was stretched so tight it might pop. I could have tumbled off the stool at any moment. Was this a coincidence? She hadn’t looked towards me. If she had been looking for me, she would have found me – my tracker was enabled. I was paranoid. Why would she be looking for me? Why would she even know who I was?

  I watched her collect her coffee and thank the barista. She turned and walked in my direction but she didn’t look at me, her eyes were fixed on her coffee. She sat two tables over in front of the window. At no point had I peeled my stare away. I couldn’t. She placed the mug on the table and swung a satchel onto her lap. She unzipped it and buried her head deep inside, searching for something. I noticed her long forearms, her bitten fingernails, her slightly hooked nose. She took a book out, placed the satchel on the floor and hoisted the book to eye
level.

  I froze. I stopped breathing. My heart had fallen out of my chest and was flapping like a wet fish on the tiled floor.

  Tolstoy.

  I didn’t know what to do. I was shaking. I fixated on my doughnut, and then, terrified that she would leave if I didn’t look at her, I stared at her again. She didn’t return my gaze. Her eyes went from her book to her coffee. She sat for maybe ten minutes and that is what she did, took delicate sips of coffee and read her book. Then she closed the book, slid it back into the satchel and stood up. She looked at me, finally. Her eyes locked with mine and slowly moved to the window, across the street to Joe’s Gym. An invitation – that had to be a weird Luddite invitation. She turned around and walked to the door. I watched her cross the street and hop down the stairs to the basement.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I was following her.

  With every step, I was Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I was getting deeper and deeper into something I did not understand.

  ‘This way.’

  I followed a whisper and entered a doorway at the foot of the stairs that had a poster of Mohammad Ali on it, curling up at the edges.

  A hand appeared and greedily snapped open and closed. ‘Your phone? Hurry.’

  I rummaged through my bag and passed it over. I watched as Floral Dress placed it into a box. We were in a dark corridor and I couldn’t see very well. It was the first time in a long time my phone was out of my sight. If I was honest, it made me feel incredibly anxious.

  She looked at me, nodding, her lips pressed tightly together. ‘It’s lead, it blocks the signal.’

  ‘You know my granddad from the book store? Maurice Murphy? Does he come here?’ I whispered.

  She ignored my question, turned and beckoned me with her hand. ‘This way.’

  I followed her shadow down the hallway. This was weird. Had I even been invited to this place? Was I gatecrashing? Was this dangerous? It didn’t feel dangerous. There was a damp, musty smell in the air and the low sound of disco beats pumping from somewhere. What was I doing? What was I really doing here?