The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  I never felt the excitement, the imperious confidence of an Alice, or the ability to step right through a mirror. I often thought about my mother, pretending I was telling her about Peter’s new tooth, two steps then five, my baby crossing a whole room upright on two stiff legs. And, as often as not, Peter would break into my make-believe, cry, wake up, smile.

  It was years since I’d seen that particular playground, those stands of trees, and if you’d asked me to describe them the day before I looked up Compic’s address in the phone book and realised where it was, I would not have been able to.

  Fred jumped on the roundabout and managed to make it move. Did dogs get dizzy? I called him to me, and began to walk towards the school buildings, for a few moments pretending that’s all I was, a lady in a floppy jacket, walking a brown dog for whom no amount of affection or reassurance was enough, who fell on each meal as though it was his last.

  Strolling, in what I hoped was a casual way, around what had been classrooms, I spotted an upstairs window with the Compic logo. I checked the directory at the front of the building. Compic, it told me, occupied suite 4, level 1. Suite, I thought, is pushing it. Walking back, I noticed what I hoped was a broken catch on one of Compic’s windows.

  . . .

  In the dark, I could feel that Compic hadn’t done anything to change the interior design of the classroom they’d taken over. I had a torch with me, but so far I hadn’t needed to use it. I was hoping that when I found the right machine, the light from its screen would be enough.

  My hunch about the broken catch had proved correct. Compic might have a well-protected computer inside, but their office had proved as easy to break into as any primary-school classroom.

  I’d gone up the fire-escape stairs to the first floor, then edged along a narrow slatted veranda roof to the window with the broken catch. I’d managed that part easily, surprisingly easily, and now I was inside.

  The part of the school that housed Compic’s office faced a small quadrangle of asphalt and grass. No-one could see me from the street. The quadrangle and the fire stairs were well lit, but I had to take my chance with that.

  The venetian blinds were drawn, and I’d slid underneath them with a small rattling sound. There was a faint lingering of the smells of dust and children, but no desks or chairs made to measure for small buttocks. I had a flash of Peter fidgeting in a room like this, Peter in America, waking up, eating breakfast with his father. There were lights in the corridors, but no lights on in any of the classrooms. I’d checked this carefully before beginning my climb.

  In that raw-boned classroom, dark with the half-forgotten smells of childhood, I felt I could have found my way blindfold. The darkness was my friend, my ability to work with it, and within it, a common sense I shared with all intruders.

  Compic’s office held four computers, their monitors pale grey ­ophthalmic rectangles of eyes. I quickly worked out that two of them were connected to each other, but not to modems. They did not appear to have any links outside the office. If the one-eyed man was right, these two were the in-house machines that programmers needed to come into the office to use. They were what I was after.

  I switched one on and it came to life with a small humming sound.

  I took a folded sheet of paper from my jacket pocket and, with shaking fingers, typed in a password. This password was my very own secret, one I’d told nobody about. I’d used the Trojan Horse again. The little program had done its job brilliantly. It had saved some ­passwords for me, and now I was about to try one out.

  The first thing I found was a list of Compic’s sales to government departments. It seemed they’d sold software packages to every single one.

  I set off a search for Access Computing and came up with dozens of references. There were amounts of money received by Compic from Access Computing, odd amounts, all for between ten and fifteen thousand dollars.

  I was concentrating so hard that I didn’t hear the noise until it was too late. And then I hardly registered it, a soft sound, but metallic. Somebody was opening the door.

  I swung round. A shadow passed through the doorway.

  I was at the window before I’d taken breath, slipping under the venetians. I threw myself through the window, landing on all fours on the veranda roof outside, scurrying along it like a mouse escaping from a cat. Whoever it was would run down the main stairs and cut me off before I was halfway across the quadrangle. My only hope was to get to the trees before the shadow figured out which way I’d gone. It flashed through my mind that there might be others, waiting under the windows, at the bottom of the stairs.

  I fell down the last few steps of the fire escape, grazing my hands and knees. With a desperate glance to my right and left, I ran down the long L side of the school, through an archway and across the oval, making for the pine trees on the side furthest from the driveway, where I’d parked my car.

  I thought I could hear running footsteps behind me, but I couldn’t tell if it was one person, or more than one.

  I’d driven my car to the edge of the trees bordering the playground, knowing it would be well hidden there. I prayed that I wouldn’t fall and make a noise, that my pursuers hadn’t seen my car and that I’d beat them to it. The footsteps seemed to stop. Were they circling round to cut me off? I got to my car, opened it, and jammed the key in the ignition.

  A figure reached the car just as I was lunging into first gear.

  I swung the wheel hard to the left. Something heavy hit the side of the car. I bumped and heaved along a gravel path, then found the road, crying with relief.

  . . .

  At home, I checked that all my doors and windows were securely fastened. My arms and legs felt as though all the hard bits had turned to mush, and I could no longer move them. I studied the grazes on my knees and hands. A Jack and the beanstalk headache had begun somewhere round my diaphragm, and was heading towards the ceiling. I picked up the phone and dialled Derek’s number. There was no answer.

  How could hacking be printless, voiceless, sexless, yet at the same time carry the belly of black emotions: malice, hate, revenge? My enemies multiplied inside my head, a double, triple vision.

  And Rae Evans? Rae was a woman to whom I owed a loyalty I could not explain and that she no longer wanted, if she ever had.

  . . .

  My eyes fixed on the black mandala of my steering wheel. It was eight-thirty in the morning and I was driving to work.

  At the corner of Wattle Street and Macarthur Avenue, I braked and nothing happened. I managed to steer around the corner, but the slope was downhill and the lights at the highway intersection coming fast. I jammed my foot on the brake as hard as I could. Nothing. It was as though the car didn’t have a brake at all. The stop lights at the corner of Northbourne and Macarthur were mad red eyes, my car refusing to obey though my foot, leg, whole right side pressed convulsively. I was conscious of needing to push the whole car, myself inside it, through the asphalt, to the safety buried on the other side. My car would not stop, though the weight of my body, my hands and contorted arms locking on the steering wheel, commanded it.

  I heard a voice screaming and knew, with a sensation that was part hysteria, part shame, that it was mine. Then the lights were red and white, a vaporising heat, the steering wheel a skeletal black flower, and my own hand holding it bent at such a funny angle that I laughed.

  . . .

  I lifted my arm a fraction, smelt damp gauze and cooling plaster.

  Ivan was leaning over me, his head refusing to be just one head. His beards made wavy patterns at the edges of my vision, brown waves with the sun behind them.

  At the sound of Ivan’s voice saying my name, I blinked and tried to speak. My voice cracked and would not obey me. Then I half-fell, half-propelled myself forward and vomited into a green plastic bowl the size and shape of a small swimming pool.

  ‘It’s OK, Sandy,’ Ivan said.

  His multiple lips pursed above brown kelp waves of beard.

&nbs
p; I tried to call the nurse, but all that came out of my throat was a rasp that an awkward, unhandy person might make with a chisel against a piece of metal.

  Slowly I looked up from the green bowl, hoping my eyes had learnt that there was only one of everything. I opened my mouth and whispered, ‘Tell the nurse I have to phone Derek. I have to speak to him.’

  From the way Ivan leant forward, his strained expression, I suspected that he could scarcely hear me. ‘I know the phone number,’ I said. ‘You dial it for me.’

  ‘You’ll soon be feeling better.’ Ivan’s falsely soothing voice seemed to come from as far away as Philadelphia.

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I managed to force out, before I flung myself over to be sick again.

  The nurse came in and spoke to Ivan. I hoped she was telling him to go away. I slept, and when I woke again, the sun was slanting through the ward in long secure rays, the kind that you walk on in children’s books. It was a six-bed ward. A patient was asleep in the corner opposite mine, over by the door. The bed directly opposite had the curtain pulled right round, and I heard low voices coming from inside. Ivan had gone. No-one else was there.

  I turned my head ten centimetres in one direction, then another. So far so good. My throat felt dry and sore. I decided that in a few moments, if the room stayed put, I’d reach for the glass beside my bed and drink some water.

  Making this small decision cheered me up a bit, but apart from that I felt too confused and sick to think. Someone had done something to my car. Who? The person who’d almost caught me at the primary-school?

  I reached my hand out for the water glass and grasped it firmly near its base. I lifted my head slowly and managed to hoist myself up on the pillows. The water was cool and soothing. The low voices went on behind the curtain, but no-one came to see how I was doing. I replaced my glass and coughed, and looked up through the window. A bloody sunset was throwing its red and purple cloak over Black Mountain.

  I woke during the night to feel Ivan’s beard surrounding me, ticklish and suffocating.

  The nurse came as the nightmare faded. She gave me a drink, and helped me use the toilet.

  Inconceivable that Ivan could have booby-trapped my car. I dozed again, still under the weight of painkillers and anaesthetic. This time, Ivan was in my car with me and we rode along, so jolly oh, two codgers out for a Sunday spin. Then the white light of the crash, the black spokes of the steering wheel. And Peter’s face above mine, Peter’s wry mouth smiling from another world, his dignity of a small boy saying goodbye to his mother. Pale face hanging over me from as far away as death.

  . . .

  The detective sergeant ran his hand loosely up and down his purple tie, and looked at me with something like embarrassment. I knew he was a detective sergeant because the nurse had told me; he wasn’t wearing a uniform. The early-morning sun filling the ward wasn’t kind to the policeman. His fingers were broad and stubby, his face pale, puffy, unhealthy-looking under a broad-brimmed Akubra hat. This hat was the most striking thing about him. It was grey, and much too big, and he wore it low on his forehead as though he’d jammed it there out of spite or irritation.

  ‘They’re letting you go home this afternoon,’ he said with a nod. He seemed to be confirming to himself that everything was as it should be.

  He glanced down at his fingernails as though checking them for dirt, then began to ask me questions about my car. I told him exactly what had happened, and repeated what I’d said to Ivan, that it hadn’t been an accident.

  ‘Where was your car the night before the accident, Mrs Mahoney?’

  ‘In my carport at home. Was anybody else hurt?’ I added, flushing with shame because I hadn’t thought of this before.

  ‘You hit a young chap. Bruises. Bit of whiplash. Apart from that, motorists managed to brake, or steer out of it. Lucky. That time of the morning, that intersection. Could’ve been a pile-up.’

  Unsmiling, offering no words of comfort, the detective sergeant went back to his questions. Where did I park my car during the day? Did anybody drive it besides me? No, but I did give people lifts. Had I given anyone a lift in the twenty-four hours before the crash? I shook my head.

  Had I seen any strangers in the vicinity of my car? There were people in the work carpark every day when I left it, and again when I went to pick it up. Normally I took no notice of them.

  ‘Is there a parking attendant there during the day?’

  It was an uncovered parking area, I explained, two blocks from DIR. You could buy all-day vouchers, and it was relatively cheap. Parking inspectors patrolled it, but I knew of no-one else. I reminded the detective that the brakes had failed on my way to work, early in the morning.

  Had I noticed anyone acting suspiciously, differently from how I might expect?

  ‘No,’ I said, after a long pause, ‘there was nobody acting suspiciously, there was nothing like that.’

  The detective sergeant had been writing as I spoke, slowly, as though it was an effort. I tried to read the expression in his shadowed face. He was one of those men whose age could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty. Something—late shifts, personal difficulties perhaps—had deepened the lines around his mouth and eyes, and given his skin a raw-dough quality.

  Finally he stopped writing, brushed invisible dust off his suit lapels, and said it would be twenty-four hours before he got the report on my car from the police garage at Weston. There was a backlog.

  Something happened then that jogged my memory, made it slip a cog. If it hadn’t been for the anaesthetic still making me feel woozy, I probably would have recognised the detective sergeant straight away. He took a few steps towards the door and stumbled, righting himself almost immediately with a shake of his shoulders suggesting intense irritation, and jamming his Akubra hat down hard with his left hand. A nurse, who’d been attending to the patient by the door, was instantly beside him, her arm around him, helping him upright, speaking softly to him, her voice calm and kind, not competent and clear as it had been when she’d talked to me.

  The detective sergeant shook her off, some colour coming back into his face. The nurse smiled to reassure him, and then bit her lip. He left the ward without another glance in my direction. It was then that I remembered seeing him in the corridor at DIR.

  He phoned me after lunch. I’d managed to eat a couple of sandwiches and keep them down. Detective Sergeant Brook. I mentally repeated the name to fix it in my mind.

  ‘Seems someone did monkey with your car, Mrs Mahoney.’

  ‘I thought you told me there was a queue.’

  ‘I jumped it,’ Detective Sergeant Brook said in a deadpan voice. ‘Looks as if they weakened one of the brake lines. Like to pop over to your place and ask you some more questions. Around sixish, if that’s OK with you.’

  I started giving him my address, but he interrupted to tell me he already had it. He hung up and I realised I’d been hunched over the phone, holding it awkwardly in my left hand, my broken right arm in its plaster heavy and useless and thick in front of me. My neck ached.

  When Ivan arrived at the hospital at three o’clock, I was drinking a cup of tea and nibbling an Anzac biscuit. The sight of Ivan’s bulk in the doorway caused a spasm in my bowels, and in my hurry to get to the toilet, I knocked over my tea. I rushed past Ivan, whose smile of greeting vanished into the wings of his beard.

  I dressed in my oily, bloody clothes because they were all I had. Ivan didn’t have a key to my house, so he hadn’t been able to fetch clean ones. During the hours I’d spent lying in the ward, it was one of my small comforts that I hadn’t given anyone a key.

  I signed the hospital discharge papers with my left hand and shoved a pack of Panadeine Forte into my bag, every action, every breath an act of will. Ivan stood to one side, a hairy mountain in the wrong landscape, his face blotched and frowning, while I returned the nurse’s curious glances with a fixed and narrowed glare.

  Ivan got into the back of the taxi with me, taking
no notice when I protested that I could manage perfectly well without him. As the taxi swung round the corner into Wakefield Street, it seemed as though the road and nature strip, the grass on either side, turned into a peculiar green-white-green striped lolly twirling into a greedy giant child’s mouth. Ivan was tense beside me, saying nothing, his shoulders falling away under his old brown jumper, his careful hands between his knees.

  I fumbled in my bag for money, and when the taxi pulled up in my driveway I shoved it at the driver, shouting, ‘Thanks! This man wants to go on into Civic! Thank you!’ I’d been nursing my bag tightly all the way, grateful that I didn’t have anything heavier to carry. I was out the taxi door and slamming it behind me.

  ‘Sandra, for God’s sake!’ Ivan called out, but that was all I heard.

  I had my key in my good left hand and it was working its magic on my front door, and I was falling through it, pushing it shut behind me.

  . . .

  Spring had come to my street overnight.

  Peter had been born in the spring. Derek had driven me to Royal Canberra Hospital with the prunus trees at the end of Goodwin Street still grey and brown, quiescent. The three of us returned to a corridor of brides and bridesmaids, white, pink, white, pink, white, pink, all the way to my front door.

  It had happened again. Until the pasty-faced policeman arrived, I was free to accustom myself to wedding trees dropping bits of bouquet over my back fence, to my sprout of a neglected lawn, unbearable soft new green of apple leaves. Back from the hospital with Peter, I’d walked haltingly around my back yard, wincing at stitches that I had not wanted. Now I watched magpies scrape for bits of string and wool, and made a mental note that tomorrow, if I was feeling up to it, I’d give Fred a good brush and leave the hair for them. Fred welcomed me as though he’d been left alone for at least a month. I’d phoned a neighbour from the hospital, so at least he’d been fed.