‘Where are you going?’
Rae shook her head and almost smiled. Her voice was low, controlled. ‘I’m not allowed to answer questions, Sandra. Not even yours.’
I stared at Rae’s neat fringe, grey wings of hair at the sides, immobile in their silver clasps, her skin the colour of an expensive envelope. It seemed that if I put out my hand to touch Rae’s arm or any part of her, the edges of the envelope would shrivel, browning into sepia.
I couldn’t believe she was giving up, not even putting up the semblance of a fight.
I said, ‘But surely you can—’
‘What? Leave before they kick me out? I gave Access Computing a grant. They deserved it. Their application was by far the best. I signed for the money. That’s all there was to it.’
‘I believe you.’
Rae bit her lip and turned away from me, and there was nothing I could do to stop her.
Bodies do lower their guards, I thought, after I’d watched her disappear down the stairs, wondering whether she’d make good her escape from the building before somebody else called her name, asked unwelcome questions.
People lower their guards, physically and psychologically. There is a kind of languor, a weary letting go, a lowering of our invisible barriers. And then disease laughingly trips across the broken wall. Keats knew about it. And Sylvia Plath.
People say it’s been a hard winter. They mean cold even for Canberra, frosts and bitter winds hanging on right through October, and the sun with barely strength enough to thaw a frozen bird.
And I say yes, it has been hard, because I remember those things too. But then I remember that day saying goodbye to Rae, and in the cafe with Ivan, and I mean something else. Senses can stay dormant, frozen, then thaw in the most unlikely ways.
. . .
That night I went to bed thinking about the word ‘hacker’. It didn’t have the aura that surrounds obvious criminal labels like ‘thief’ or ‘murderer’. Even ‘forger’ or ‘embezzler’. For those most familiar with the word, it still has the affectionate connotations of someone good at her, or his, job. And in the dictionary, you won’t find a hacker described as someone who breaks into computers. Everything but—in the Oxford, anyway.
‘To hack’ has many meanings, some of which surprised me. I found ‘to put to indiscriminate or promiscuous use; to make common by such treatment: a prostitute or bawd, 1730’. A hack in 1681 was a miner’s pick, so perhaps the first hacker wielded one. Later, ‘a common drudge, especially literary drudge; a poor writer, a mere scribbler, 1700’.
‘Hack into: to mangle by jagged cuts.’ I suppose that came closest.
The new meaning is still raw around the edges. It took me a long time to grasp the importance of something obvious, and that is the anonymity of the crime. The computer criminal can be absent, even thousands of kilometres away—and there’s no-one on the spot doing the dirty work, either. Everything appears perfectly normal, while millions of dollars are busy disappearing, and no-one’s fingerprints on anything.
Oh yes, and one more thing. Though the image the word ‘hacker’ brings to mind is of a long-haired, thin young man with glasses, the label itself is, for better or for worse, androgynous.
Block-it
Next morning I switched on my PC with some trepidation, even though Ivan had assured me that everything was fine. The huge hairy face of a gorilla appeared. His mouth opened wide and he said in an ingratiating voice, ‘Good morning, ladies. I’m squeaky clean! Virus-free, as you can see! Next time, don’t forGET. Use disINFECT!’
I knew, without turning round, that Ivan was hovering in my doorway with a look of shy expectancy, like that other time when he’d pinched my cyclamen.
‘Get rid of the ape, smart-arse,’ I said.
I glanced over my shoulder. Ivan was pouting, his thick lips pressed together like a hairy clam. ‘If you promise to do as the gentleman says.’
He walked over and lowered his hand on to my shoulder. He winked at me and said, ‘Computers can die of a virus, you know, Sandushka. Just like people.’
The wool of Ivan’s jumper sleeve brushed against my cheek. It felt alive.
I glanced up, but his eyes were on the screen.
My skin felt tingly, strange. Things Ivan had no trouble with, the physical and the disembodied all in one. He looked at me and smiled, the smile making a tiny wave under his beard.
I rubbed my cheek and said, ‘Thank you for the warning.’
. . .
I discovered that Ivan had stayed back after work the night before to draw his own comment on our office situation. A caricature of Rae on a big black horse bent over and pointed a long, schoolmasterish lance at an innocent-looking IT, who was staring up at the horse’s shining withers, vulnerable in his red jogging gear. Representatives of the press, our Minister and Secretary, and a blonde, ethereal figure that I took to be Angela Carlishaw made darting entries and exits in the background.
Ivan had a way of asking questions with his eyes and hands. He also, as I discovered that morning, had a way of taking on the demeanour of his latest creation. For a while after he’d shown me his cartoon of Rae and Felix as jousting medieval knights, Ivan wore a hard down-the-nose look that was exactly Rae’s. For a few minutes his own burly nose became straight and thin, high-ridged and superior. Then his hair seemed to grow curiously fairer, his nose to shorten and turn up at the tip. His whole aspect grew healthier, his skin glowed as if he was just back from a run, and for a few unnerving moments he was Felix Wenborn.
I invited Ivan home for tea, a sort of peace-making gesture, though I wasn’t sure why I needed one.
We stopped off at Video Ezy to rent a movie for Peter, something he’d been nagging me to do for weeks.
‘Someone has to start the viruses,’ I said to Ivan. ‘Some one person. Surely you could try and trace them? Here’s Milo and Otis.’ I held a cassette out to Peter, who was crouched beside me, laboriously reading the titles on the bottom shelf of the video library. I waved the picture of a dog and cat in front of him. ‘You’d like this one.’
‘Hey, Mum!’ Peter gave a low crow of pleasure. ‘Batman Second!’
‘No, you had a fighty one last time.’
‘Mum!’
‘Defence have turned all their PCs into fortresses,’ Ivan growled at my elbow. ‘They’ve used Block-it. Just what the name suggests. Nothing to do with sunscreen.’
‘I can see their point of view,’ I said. ‘Three months ago I wouldn’t have been able to, but now I can.’
While I scanned the rows of garish covers for a compromise with Peter, Ivan made a box out of videos, oblivious to the curious stares of other customers and the young attendant eyeing him warily from behind the counter.
‘Know what it costs, this Block-it?’ Ivan said too loudly. ‘About $400 per PC. Per PC. Know what it’s like running them? It’s like buying a Ferrari and signing a pledge that you’ll only ever drive it in first gear. Walls within walls.’ He gestured to the makeshift model with his foot, then knocked it over with a quick tap from the pointed toe of his black shoe. ‘A clever hacker can get through as easy as that.’
‘If I get Ilo and Motis, can I have a Crunchie for dessert?’ Peter asked.
Exhausted by the thought of further negotiating, I tried to will myself into good humour and failed, as I’d known I would. ‘Bloody hell!’ I said to Peter. ‘Oh, all right!’
‘Yes!’ Peter cried, making fists of both hands in front of his chest, while Ivan replaced the jumble of cassettes on the shelf and grumbled, ‘Why’s he watching any of this crap? Just buy him a computer.’
We called in at the supermarket. Though I’d planned to do my shopping the day before, somehow I hadn’t managed it.
I handed Ivan a loaf of white Tip-Top, and he chucked it up and down in one hand, the grasp of his broad fingers pronouncing the bread mushy, overpriced and lightweight. He scratched his armpit under parka, jumper, checked flannel shirt. A woman wearing leather fur-lined
gloves and pushing a full trolley turned to stare.
Peter scurried around the aisle with a tin of dog food. ‘Mum! If we get a dog!’
I told him to put it back. Ivan scowled at me and reached an arm around Peter’s narrow shoulders. ‘You know, little dude,’ he said, ‘a lot of things happen at supermarkets. For instance, you should never sneeze in a supermarket.’
‘Why not?’ Peter demanded.
‘Because, dude, you might knock a whole pile of tins over with the force of your sneeze!’
We braved Peter’s clamouring to have tea at McDonald’s.
‘Like a hungry young starling, you are!’ Ivan told him. ‘Parp, parp, parp, parp!’
Peter looked shocked for a moment, then laughed.
‘Who’s that? Listen!’
I looked to where Ivan was pointing. It was my favourite busker, singing for his supper.
I remembered how I’d felt the first night I heard the red-haired busker, how he’d made me believe I was sitting in a warm cafe and someone was stroking the inside of my arm and wrist with long, slow strokes.
I walked over and dropped a $2 coin into his guitar case, and we exchanged a private smile, the young man’s hair rough red, his blunt face red and white and chapped.
In the car, Peter sang the theme to Playschool with rude words. Normally it didn’t bother me.
‘There was this case in Melbourne,’ Ivan said. ‘Four college students. No-one could trace them. Caused hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage. Maybe you read about it?’
I shook my head. The gears grated as I tried to get out of reverse. Ivan winced, scrunched in the seat beside me with no leg room.
‘They all had their favourite signatures, buzzwords.’ Ivan leant forward and drew a hieroglyphic in the dashboard dust. ‘Kids’re like that. Be patient—in the end they’ll give themselves away.’
‘Felix told me he ran a secure ship,’ I said. ‘It was impossible to break in from outside.’ My eyes stuck on a square of grey road while the car complained with human irritability about moving into third.
‘Until someone did! In that lump in his chest that passes for a heart, Felix knows that total security’s impossible. And to be fair to him, people bring in dodgy software, pirate games for their kids, all the bloody time. He’s had more trouble than you can poke a stick at. And everyone treats it as his problem, not something they could’ve avoided.’
‘They were caught eventually,’ I asked, ‘those Melbourne kids?’
‘Shit!’ I’d pulled up too suddenly at the lights, throwing Ivan forward. ‘Remind me to walk next time. Caught, but not convicted.’
In the back seat, Peter improvised on the Playschool theme. He was tone deaf, like his father.
Crossing Northbourne Avenue, I looked up and saw the smoke from hundreds of fireplaces, a grey-white wall on Lyneham hill. Ahead were the trees I’d named my sentinels in the days when I’d walked towards them with Peter in his pram. There they were on their hill, looking down at us, clear outlines in the dusk, while the trees around them dissolved into one dark shape. It was as though they had some special reprieve from the night.
And I thought how knowledge is not fixed, so that once you’ve learnt something you’ll always know it. You can know and then forget, or half-forget then know again, and when you do, it’s like prodding an old bruise.
I thought of Peter learning to read, the way he conquers, retreats, one step forward and half-a-dozen back.
. . .
‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ I heard in a loud whisper from Peter’s bedroom while I was putting away groceries, cheating by pouring myself a glass of wine before I’d started on the dinner. ‘I never learnt to read till I was ten years old!’
‘Why?’ Peter’s voice was petulant, tired, not wanting to be humoured.
‘Well,’ I heard Ivan say, ‘I think it was because my parents didn’t settle in one place. My family first came to Australia when I was younger than you. My Dad worked for the government, you see. But Dad hated it here, so after a year or so we went back. But he hated it back in Russia. And Mum did even more. After a few more years, he got another posting to Australia. But he didn’t like that either. I went to good schools, but I kind of got mixed up.’
I tiptoed to the hall doorway so that I could eavesdrop more effectively.
‘Let’s take a squiz at this guy,’ Ivan said. ‘Hos-pit-al. You think of the syllables as legs. This dude’s got three. Can you sit on him? OK, if they’re big fat legs like this! If your Mum had a computer I could show you. Hey, how ’bout we talk her into it?’
In the kitchen a little while later, while Ivan was taking ten minutes to peel an onion, Peter came running in from the TV, yelling, ‘Hey, guys! I just had a great idea for a dog-proof garbage bin!’
He waved a large white sheet of paper at us, and Ivan staggered back, holding up his onion in defence. Peter took no notice. ‘This sort of clamp! D’y’see? D’y’get how it works, Ivan? A dog’s got no hands, so he can’t undo it, see? It’s the same basic garbage bin apart from that. I’ll have to build a model if I’m going to patent it, won’t I? Won’t I, Ivan?’
‘Sure dude,’ Ivan told him.
‘He wants a dog,’ I said, when Peter had run off again. ‘What can I do?’
‘Buy him one.’
‘And leave it shut up all day in this pissy little backyard? Take it for walks in the freezing dark?’
It occurred to me that Ivan hadn’t been wearing his beanie or his kingfisher jumper lately, though he still sported a lethal pair of shoes.
I watched him offering Peter a friendship that was easy and masculine, yet with an edge to it—the way his friendship with me had an edge.
It seemed that Ivan spoke in someone else’s voice when he talked about the old Soviet Union, a voice with an obvious accent.
‘Did you ever go back?’ I asked him later that night, after Peter was asleep and we were drinking hot chocolate in front of the combustion stove. ‘I mean, after you grew up?’
Each time they moved, Ivan told me, his father had been full of hope that life would be better now. But after a few months he became disillusioned again, and began renouncing the country he was in and all it stood for.
‘A traitor, you see, within the privacy of family. Of course, he couldn’t say what he really thought outside it.’
‘So you’re a diplomat’s son.’
Ivan winced. ‘Just bloody glad that when they went back the second time I was old enough to stay. Enrolled myself at Queensland Uni. Far enough away to stop them pestering me.’
‘And they did?’
‘Dad died of heart disease when he was forty-eight. That second time back was a death sentence, and my mother knew it.’
‘What happened to your mother?’
‘She died eighteen months later.’
So neither of us had a family. After a while I asked, ‘Will you go back? Now that things have changed?’
After the Soviet Union fell, Ivan said, he’d bought a plane ticket. ‘It was unreal. From the minute I walked into the travel centre, it was like I’d left reality on the other side of the door. I couldn’t renew my passport, couldn’t phone anybody to tell them I was coming. I just physically could not do those things. So I cashed it in, the ticket. Bought myself a new computer.’
‘You were frightened.’
‘Of course I was frightened.’
I finished my hot chocolate and debated with myself whether I felt greedy enough to be bothered making more. There was a Friday-night feeling of not having to clean up, not having to worry that I’d run out of Peter’s favourite breakfast cereal. I felt reassured by the house’s neutrality. As each week without Derek passed, I felt my house creaking and shifting, settling, getting used to holding two people not quite a family.
In fairness to Derek, I should say that at least he’d stopped complaining about my housekeeping. The time immediately before he left was peaceful. Derek seemed to stop caring about
how I always did the wrong thing. Or maybe he was just excited about going to America. Derek had had all kinds of plans for the house when we bought it, but they’d slipped sideways somehow—he’d lost interest, decided that the shape and aspect weren’t any good. But he couldn’t be bothered moving, either—or maybe it was that he couldn’t be bothered making the effort to persuade me.
I said, ‘Thanks for talking to Peter about his reading.’
I’d told Ivan the gist, the bald outlines of my son’s problem at school. At the time, Ivan had grunted a response and I’d concluded that he wasn’t interested.
‘That’s OK.’ Ivan tilted his head back, draining the last of the sweet liquid from the bottom of his mug.
‘It would be great if you could—’
‘Sure. It’s cool,’ Ivan cut me off. ‘I like him.’
I murmured thanks again, but I was feeling that I should not have asked, that I should have waited till I had a clearer idea of what Ivan might expect in return. Then I felt contrite for not trusting his generosity.
I’d won some sort of a reprieve from Peter’s teacher, Mrs Correa of the perfect flower arrangements and punitive ideas. If Peter made progress with his reading and writing, and didn’t try to copy from others at his table, she’d drop the plan to make him sit by himself.
Ivan was watching me, waiting for me to say the next thing. I stood up and began to collect mugs and empty plates on to a yellow plastic tray.
He followed me out to the kitchen.
There was no need to switch a light on in the short corridor between my living room and kitchen. I turned and looked at Ivan over my shoulder. The oblique light shining through the door caught his hair, his springy hair that seemed to be growing while I watched it. I wanted to reach out my hand, feel that movement and that growth. Almost too late I remembered I was carrying a tray. I recovered and kept walking.
I dumped the tray on the kitchen bench and blurted out, ‘What’s going to happen to Rae Evans?’
Ivan frowned.
‘You believe Rae had this coming to her, don’t you? Why? Why doesn’t anybody like her?’
The Trojan Dog Page 6
