Digital Circumstances

by BRM Stewart

  We stood awkwardly around: Tom the accountant sat at his wee desk, Sam leaned over the counter, chin resting on her hand.

  Sandy had shaken our hands. He looked happy. ‘OK, Tom. Your show first.’ Ken Talbot stood back, his face impassive.

  Tom took off his glasses and looked at his notes. ‘The official turnover is very healthy indeed, and if we factored in the black cash income I’m sure we’d double that. Out of that comes what have been so far hidden payments: rent, heating, business rates, staff salaries, national insurance and various injections of cash for additional stock, but you’re still doing better that most small businesses at this point in time.’

  Sandy nodded, turning to Talbot to check he didn’t disagree. Charlie had gone over to stand beside Sam. As Tom spoke, Charlie leaned over to whisper something in her ear: I saw her blush – I’d never seen so much colour in her face – and then nod as he kept on speaking; I saw him lightly rest his hand low down on her back.

  ‘OK, Tom – listen up, Charlie – what’s the prognosis?’

  Charlie straightened after a conspiratorial nod to Sam. She gazed at him, her face like a hypnotised chicken.

  ‘Huge scope for growth. The purchase of hardware and software should be expanded and re-focused on small business users rather than hobbyists. This requires capitalisation. I think you could do with another engineer working here. Regular accounting checks, of course – it needs to be more rigorous, but still with scope for ‘exceptional’ cash flow in and out when appropriate. Your wee Goth lassie has done very well, but she needs a bit more training – I recommend a college course; you’d need a temp, some overlap first.’

  ‘Cut to the chase, Tom.’

  ‘Set it up on a proper footing, given all the checks and controls of course. It’s a runner.’

  He finished his coffee and stood up. He handed over two sheets of paper to Sandy. ‘I’ve drafted a contract and proposal. You can fill in the names and details and either change it and get me to check it, or just fire ahead. I’ll leave you to it.’ He nodded to me and Davey on the way past, and let himself out into the street. Sandy snibbed the door behind him, and he and Talbot started looking at the contracts.

  After a few minutes they put the papers on the table, looked at each other, and Talbot nodded. Sandy smiled at me and Davey.

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ he said.

  And there followed a blizzard of technical business talk in the original Klingon that just baffled me. The only things I really caught were: Davey and I were partners in the business, and between us we had forty-nine per cent of the shares; we had a salary of seven grand a year – a fortune that made me dizzy with the thought – and a pro rata share of the profits, dividends and bonuses; we would have day-to-day operational control over buying stock, and pricing; we could hire people to help, and determine their salary.

  ‘So,’ I said, shell-shocked as Davey looked at me with an amazed face, ‘we don’t have to pay out anything?’

  Sandy gave his smile. ‘Technically at this time you are in debt for your shares and for the stock and the premises – ‘ he pointed to a tiny line on the bottom of one of the sheets of paper – ‘but in actuality Mr Talbot will pay that all up front and you don’t have anything to worry about. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.’

  ‘How about the other fifty one per cent?’ I asked. ‘I assume Mr Talbot controls that?’ I found it odd talking about him in the third person when he was standing a few feet away.

  Sandy smiled again. ‘No. Mr Talbot has a number of business interests, so he is putting Charlie in charge of the company.’ He turned to Talbot, who was still just gazing impassively at me.

  At this point Charlie stepped forward from Sam’s side, beaming, sweeping his long blonde hair back from his forehead.

  Davey looked aghast and turned to me. ‘But Charlie knows fuck all about computers.’ I blurted out, voicing his thought.

  ‘True,’ Charlie said, not in the least offended. ‘And I know fuck all about running any kind of business, but this is my chance to learn.’ And he came over and put his arms round each of us. ‘We’ll do fine, boys. I’ll let you get on with things and make us all a lot of money. I won’t interfere, I promise. Now.’ He let us go. ‘Sandy will take the two of you to you to lunch to talk through some other details of this venture. I’m going to take Sam here off somewhere to further her education.’

  As he spoke, Sandy and Talbot slipped out of the door: I could see them, standing talking on the pavement.

  Charlie laughed at his own suggestive remark, Sam blushed but smiled, and I frowned. Charlie saw me and gave me a playful punch on the shoulder. ‘You’re not making any moves, Martin, so don’t concern yourself. Still pining over wee Fiona Andretti?’

  The implication of what he said hit me straight away, and he wasn’t far behind; his right eye flickered.

  ‘You said you’d tell me when you found out anything about her. You said you didn’t know her name.’

  ‘Sorry, mate. Yeah – found out just the other week when talking to a pal. Knew I’d get a chance to tell you soon enough.’

  ‘So, do you know where she lives?’

  ‘No.’ He saw the expression in my eyes and added: ‘But she’s working in the Kelvingrove Museum.’

  I had the urge to emulate The Graduate, and rush off to gather her in my arms, but it had been a few months now, and at that age a few months is a long time. So I drew breath – no rush: I’d think it through. After all, she hadn’t tried to track me down, so maybe she wasn’t that impressed. Maybe she’d found someone else. A memory of that night came back, and – after the self-satisfied glow passed – I thought with horror that maybe she was pregnant with my child. Christ. I wanted to see her, of course I did, but I was suddenly scared.

  I needed to think it through. But I’d definitely go down there. Soon.

  Sandy came back through the door on his own, and brandished a gold pen: ‘We need a couple of signatures, boys. And a name – for the company. Any thoughts?’

  Had to be something very computery – my first idea was absurd: Bytes and Digits – but Charlie leapt on it. ‘Brilliant. Write that down, Sandy.’

  And that was it. We were doomed to have students wandering in after a lunchtime beer asking if we did finger-food, each one believing he was the first to think of the joke.

  *

  The week after we signed the contract, we were in a place of our own: a tenement flat just up the road from the shop, owned by Ken Talbot but he allowed us to stay there rent-free. We scavenged some crappy furniture, and a two-bar electric fire that ended up costing us a fortune to heat the place that winter. And we now had to learn to cook and keep a place clean.

  But it was ours. Mum was sad; her boyfriend Alan couldn’t conceal his delight – though he still had a cautionary word for me: ‘Sure you know what you’re doing, Martin? Careful with that guy Talbot, and his kid.’ I told him I could take care of myself, and he gave a grim smile.

  And one morning I summoned up my courage and left the shop, heading along a frosty Argyle Street to the Victorian sandstone splendour of Kelvingrove Museum, and up the broad steps and into the main entrance that faced the park, and then the huge main hall, looking at every member of staff. Mid-week, this place was the haunt of pensioners and bleary-eyed students. There was a primary-school class too, a young teacher babbling away at them, excited, while they gazed, open-mouthed, at the huge space around them.

  I made my way upstairs to halls where there were art exhibitions, and the huge Dali painting – Christ of St John on the Cross – but I tore myself away from it. My heart was thumping and I was nervous as hell. I looked at everyone. There were loads of staff, but I couldn’t see Fiona – maybe she’d changed her appearance; could I remember what she looked like? It had been so dark at the party, and in the bedroom, and she’d been dark, wearing dark clothes; even her skin, when she was naked, had been dark.

  I wondered what to do if she was there – what to do if she w
asn’t there, half phrases in my mind. ‘Long time no see.’ ‘Fancy bumping into you here.’ ‘How are you doing – gosh, great to see you!’ ‘That was a great shag, by the way.’ Oh God.

  I went round the whole floor twice, then upstairs, then down to the basements. Loads of dinosaurs but no trace of Fiona. I went back to the art exhibition floor and stood looking down into the main hall, looking hard. Time was getting on – I had to get back to the shop soon.

  ‘Martin?’

  I turned, and stepped back.

  Of course I remembered her: her dark hair was now even shorter, but I did remember her face – her lips smiling, her brown eyes glinting, looking at me. She was wearing dark blue trousers and the uniform jacket, with her name on a badge.

  I wanted to… all the emotions went through me, and I didn’t know what to do, what to say. My voice squeaked and I coughed: ‘Hi, Fiona. It’s so good to see you again.’

  Her smile widened and she stepped forward, her hand reaching to hold my arm. ‘Are you here to see the exhibition? It’s very good – well, some of it.’

  I took a deep breath, and then my words came out in a rush: ‘I came to see you. I only just found out you worked here. I only just found out your second name.’

  She frowned at that. ‘I saw Charlie the week after the party, asked if he could get in touch with you, tell you where I lived – I gave him my mum’s phone number.’

  We took that in, and both simultaneously said: ‘What a bastard.’ And we laughed, and then I reached and held her tight. She felt so good, warm and soft.

  ‘You left the party – I looked for you.’

  She pulled her head back, a serious look on her face that even I, with such very limited experience of dealing with girls, knew wasn’t entirely serious. ‘I came back with a beer for you, saw you in with Charlie’s dad, playing with his computer. I said hi, but you didn’t hear me – you were so interested in your bloody computer. Charlie’s dad saw me, waved me away, shut the door on me.’

  Oh shit. I hadn’t noticed that at all.

  ‘I waited downstairs for a bit, then my pal Julie was getting a taxi home because she was so drunk, and I just went with her. I was a bit annoyed with you. But I saw Charlie a few days later and told him to give you my contact details. When you didn’t get in touch – well. You can guess what I thought.’

  I pulled her to me. ‘So sorry,’ I said. She liked me, she really liked me. It wasn’t a one-off that night. I was – maybe – about to have a relationship with somebody. Bloody hell. ‘I saw Charlie the day after the party, asked him to look out for you – I didn’t even know your surname, couldn’t look you up.’

  ‘You guessed it was Italian,’ she grinned.

  ‘Yeah, like looking for an Italian name in Glasgow would cut things down a bit.’

  And we held each other again, letting all of that just go, and getting ourselves emotionally and logically to what was really the day after we’d had sex. What now?

  ‘What are you doing these days?’

  ‘Davey and I set up this computer business – fixing them, installing software, sorting software problems, and we’re now expanding into selling hardware. Charlie’s dad financed it, and Charlie is nominally the boss – he’s such a tosser: all he’s bothered about is shagging our receptionist. So he doesn’t get in our way.’

  There was a slight frown on her face. ‘Is it all above board? I don’t like Charlie, and I’m not sure about his dad.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘The business is really taking off. Even if it all went pear-shaped with Charlie and his dad, Davey and I know enough now to be able to set up on our own. Anyway, how about you?’

  An older woman, in the museum staff uniform, was closing in on us: ‘Fiona!’ Her voice was a hiss.

  Fiona and I broke off our clinch, and she turned to the woman: ‘Sorry – this is an old friend I haven’t seen for ages. Can you give me a couple of minutes?’

  The woman frowned and moved on, but glared back at us, twice.

  I smiled and Fiona suppressed a laugh. ‘I’d better get back to work.’

  ‘When do you finish?’

  ‘Five o’clock. How about you?’

  ‘Could be any time. Fancy a drink tonight?’

  ‘I could come along to your shop after work – where is it?’ She was holding me tight again.

  I knew I’d have to work late. ‘How about something to eat – maybe around seven?’

  She smiled and nodded. ‘Fine. That’ll give me time to go home and change. Sure you can afford it?’

  I grinned. ‘Yeah, I can afford it. Where do you fancy?’

  ‘There’s a wee Italian just around the corner of Argyle Street, not far from here. Do you fancy a wee Italian?’

  My grin widened, and I pulled her very tight to me and kissed her mouth. ‘Oh yes, I fancy a wee Italian.’

  And it was like we’d never had that hiatus. I could even forgive Charlie for being such a bastard – he was a nasty piece of work: I would never fully trust him.

  Fiona and I slept together that night, and it was as good as the first time. And then again the night after, and over the following few weeks she moved more and more of her clothes over to our place, and mysterious toiletries and other things appeared in the bathroom. Davey didn’t seem to mind – the two of us still went for a pint after work on a Friday and Saturday, and he would come with us to the pictures with me and Fiona. He drew the line at art exhibitions or the theatre.

  As winter gave way to spring, I felt really good, happy. Just keep it like this, I thought: I’ve no other ambitions, this will do me just fine. Don’t change anything, not ever.

  Chapter 8

  Last winter - Glasgow

  Helen was away in London at a publishers’ conference, staying overnight. My ex-wife Elizabeth was going too, and I thought back to that Internet conference in London where I’d met her, and ended up in a doomed marriage.

  Something was going wrong with Helen and me: I couldn’t say what exactly, but where there had been harmony and trust between us, there was now a crack. We didn’t understand each other’s moods well any more, often disagreeing on whether to go out or stay in. We were suddenly, after Portugal, not entirely happy together. We made love less often, and it felt… less satisfactory somehow, like it was simply a need we had, nothing more.

  I went into the office in St Vincent Street every day, and worked on the code and watched the numbers, and checked all was OK. I marvelled at the way people would open up spammed links on their Facebook page and type in their login details, letting us into their personal information and that of their friends, allowing for wider phishing. I researched Internet fraud, keeping up to date with threats so that our clients could sleep soundly, unaware that their main protector was their worst enemy.

  I only briefly saw Sandy: he brushed off any conversation about the events in Portimao – ‘Just a wee job for a client of a friend, Martin. Nothing to worry about. That murder was absolutely nothing to do with what you did: trust me’ – and didn’t seem keen to swap holiday stories.

  I met Andrew Russell a few times after work, usually in Blackfriars in the Merchant City. It was a traditional pub, always busy and noisy, always with good guest ales on tap, though Andrew drank gin and tonic. It had become a tradition for us to meet there, away from the west end.

  ‘So, how is it going?’ I asked him, after we’d caught up with the day-to-day chat about the weather and the economy and the government.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ he said. ‘I’m making some progress. Slowly.’ He sipped at his gin and I swallowed some beer. Andrew had short hair these days, and dressed like he was back in the Thatcher era: clean-shaven, red braces, a Porsche Boxster S. He was an independent financial adviser. We’d never been close at school, but there seemed to be some kind of trust between us because we’d survived our beginnings in Drumchapel and become, on many measures, successful. We both had two marriages behind us, and he had told me he now thought he was gay.


  ‘I’d like to move things on a bit faster,’ I said.

  He frowned. ‘It’s bloody difficult, Martin. Talbot’s business concerns range far and wide: names change, ownership changes, and change again. You’re a director in some businesses, a shareholder in others – but sometimes there are gaps in the chain, and some companies just don’t physically exist. I’m finding it hard to map the whole network. I’m making some progress, and I’m managing to transfer your shares to your new dummy companies and bank accounts. But it’s bloody slow and difficult.’

  This had been our plan: we’d created new companies with different names – companies that existed but did nothing, though Andrew had some kind of back story – and my money was buying shares in them, capitalising them. From those companies in turn, Andrew would sell the shares to another of my companies, and move the money into various online bank accounts that I had, here and abroad, also in various names. At times it looked like a perpetual motion machine as the money went round and round. I wasn’t bothered about making a profit on the shares in Talbot’s companies, because I’d never actually bought them in the first place; I just needed capital, so I could get away from my entanglement with Talbot. Behind me would be left the debts and liabilities, but they would be isolated: it would be very, very hard for anyone to link the money that I would have squirreled away with the debts that existed. And while the money didn’t really belong to me, the debts didn’t either. It was a web that had been spun around me by Sandy Lomond and Ken Talbot.

  At least, that was the plan. There was no way of knowing whether it would really work, no way to test it. One day I’d cash in and run – then I’d find out.

  Andrew finished his drink and stood up: ‘Let’s have another. This is a three-gin problem, as Sherlock never said.’

  It was fully five minutes later before he spoke again. ‘I wonder if we could find out more about Talbot’s companies.’

  I started on my fresh pint. ‘Who would have that information?’