The Trojan Dog (4 page)

‘You stupid child!' I'd screamed. Peter shook his head from side to side, faster and faster, his whole body a trembling pendulum, and I was scared to go to him, to touch, in case I hit.

John can run. Betty can jump. My first reader was pink, orange-pink. Who could fail to understand that run was run, and jump was jump, with Betty showing them, splay-legged over a puddle? So that ever afterwards these words had their places, and there was no clammy hole to fall into, no gap of forgetting, no need to claw my way back to that picture of Betty with her knickers showing that had first told me what the letters meant.

So what was the big mystery? Why was it impossible for my son to do as I had?

Letters for Peter were little sightless birds that might as well go up the page as down. Fly right to left, as badly or as well. Why hadn't I had someone to talk to back then? Who had there been but Derek, who'd blamed me for failing to teach Peter to read, who'd made our failure worse?

Peter and I were so anxious to get through the hated task that if a word looked like ‘there' or ‘three', or ‘they', what did it
matter
?

That night Peter had made his stab and missed, in a low, murmuring voice, hoping I wouldn't notice. But I had, and I'd shouted at him, and then he'd thrown the book, to break its spine, to kill it on the bedroom wall.

Framed Pictures on a Grey Screen

My office phone rang late one afternoon.

‘Sandy. Hi.' It was an old Melbourne University friend, Gail Trembath, now working at the
Canberra Times
.

‘Got something strange here,' Gail said in her rough contralto voice. ‘Hoping you can throw some light on it. This story turned up on my computer. Hour or so ago. About someone called Rae Evans.'

‘Yes?' I said. I hadn't seen Gail for years. How did she know where I was working?

‘It just appeared,' Gail said. ‘Actually, it's weird.'

She began to tell me the gist of the story, which was that Rae had been siphoning off DIR funds in the guise of a grant to a company called Access Computing. ‘Some dinky self-help women's outfit.'

Gail sounded as though she was quoting from her screen. ‘I should ask your department's accountant if he's missing nine hundred thousand bucks.'

‘Who sent you this?'

‘Didn't leave his calling card. Or hers. Any ideas?'

‘It's bullshit.'

‘Look, this thing I've got's quite long.' Gail said. ‘Three pages printed out. There's even a copy of the payment notification.'

‘How can a story just turn up?'

‘Like I said, it's weird.'

‘I'll get back to you. Rae Evans is out of town at a conference. Don't do anything till I call back.'

‘Normally I mistrust anonymous tips, you know? Like, we get them all the time.'

I remembered Gail's habit of simply not hearing questions she didn't want to answer. ‘Spooky,' she said. ‘The way it lit itself up on my screen. I almost expected it to talk.'

For a few years—studying, looking for our first jobs—Gail and I had been friends. We'd lost touch, met up again in Canberra. But Gail had been on the fast track for young female reporters, while I stayed at home with Peter, writing articles and research papers, struggling to keep my hand in.

When I went to see Rae, her personal assistant, Deirdre, said primly that she wasn't expected back that day. For a moment I thought my spur-of-the-moment lie to Gail about the conference might turn out to be correct.

Deirdre wouldn't tell me where Rae was.

She looked like Rae, in the way young women used to look like Princess Diana. Getting the resemblance almost right. In Deirdre's case she'd got Rae's straight grey hair, her tailored skirts and jackets, without the dignity, or the sudden warmth.

Deirdre was flushed. She hadn't had time to refresh her makeup.

The phone rang.

‘Excuse me,' she said, and turned to answer it.

I guessed it was Gail Trembath.

Gail wasn't answering her phone when I rang her back from my office. I shuffled papers into my briefcase, and made an excuse to Di and Bambi, who looked at me with identical expressions of sly mistrust.

I had Rae's home number, but before I picked up the phone I knew that there would be no answer. I had half a mind to go around there. But what good would I do sitting on her doorstep?

Every half-hour or so that night, between serving dinner and helping Peter with his homework, I tried Gail, and Ivan, who hadn't been at work that day, and Rae. I left messages on Gail's answering machine, but it was clear she had no intention of getting back to me.

Next morning's
Canberra Times
story carried Gail Trembath's by-line, and the news editor's as well.

SANITISED CORRUPTION

Fraud, or sleight of hand?

A spokeswoman for Access Computing, a computer group for women based in Brisbane, said, ‘Access Computing prides itself on having no directors.' Yet a Ms Angela Carlishaw is named as director of the company on an application for a grant from the Department of Industrial Relations. Access Computing was awarded a $100,000 grant, but information received by the
Canberra Times
suggest that they were instead paid $1 million. When asked to explain Ms Carlishaw's absence, the spokeswoman said she was currently on holiday in a remote part of Scotland. Who is Angela Carlishaw? And who is really behind Access Computing?

I said to Ivan, ‘There's got to be someone who can contact this place in Scotland. No phone, nothing—what sort of an outfit are they? How do they do business?'

‘Maybe by carrier pitheon.' Ivan's cheeks were swollen. His voice was oddly slurred, his pronunciation clumsy.

I stared at him and demanded, ‘Where were you yesterday?'

‘Denthisth's,' Ivan mumbled.

‘Till eleven at night? I tried to ring you.'

Ivan opened his big mouth wide. At the back of his lower jaw were two red clammy holes.

‘Took two Mogadon at eighth. Knocked me outh. Must've schlep right through the phone.'

I felt cross, as though Ivan had deliberately misled me. ‘What the hell are you doing at work then? I thought it took at least a week to get over having your wisdom teeth out.'

Ivan tried to smile. His bruised, hairy cheeks squished in and out. ‘I'm a'right,' he muttered through them, ‘s'long's I don't eath or laugh or swallow anything.'

I looked out the window. A man was walking along Northbourne Avenue with his head hunched forward, neck and shoulders bent. He wore a green felt hat, a baggy coat with long sagging pockets that came down past his knees. He looked like a caricature of an ageing crim, a man who'd had something to hide for so long it had become irrelevant.

I turned to Ivan and said, ‘For Christ's sake, why don't you just go home?'

Then I felt contrite. There was a lonely awkwardness in Ivan. That day I was feeling lonely myself, anxious about Rae and disappointed that she hadn't tried to contact me.

I put out my hand to Ivan, hesitating, conscious of a raw feeling, the lack of an adult person to go home to, an empty space ahead of and below me like a lift well yawning in a twenty-storey building.

‘Whatever it is Rae Evans is supposed to have done,' I said, ‘she didn't do it.'

. . .

Rae was expected on a mid-morning flight, but no, Deirdre said with the expression of a flustered princess, I wouldn't be able to see her.

If Rae did show up at work that day, she didn't come anywhere near me. I caught no sign of her, though I prowled the first floor and pestered Deirdre. I thought how, when you broke a thermometer, the mercury balled, rolled along the tilted surface of a table and dropped to the floor, a jewel in a bed of broken glass.

On that night's news, a representative of Access Computing—a woman with the romantic-sounding name of Isobel Merewether—repeated her assertion that her company had done nothing wrong. Isobel was a name that stuck in my throat along with Angela—Angela Carlishaw, Access Computing's putative director, whom the press had not been able to track down. The reporter tried to trip Isobel up, and clever cutting made her look deceitful as well as ignorant. Physically, she seemed a ruffled, slightly darker version of Claire Disraeli, the young woman who shared an office with Ivan and Guy Harmer—a little shorter than Claire maybe, a little less classically correct.

I changed channels. ‘So you don't believe this—Angela Carlishaw exists?' a smirking reporter asked the shadow Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations.

‘Whoever invented her should have invented a more plausible-sounding name,' the shadow Minister replied, trading pompous smirks with the interviewer.

‘What's up, Mum?' Peter asked.

‘It looks like a friend of mine's in trouble.'

‘Has he been stealing gold watches?'

I glanced across at Peter and smiled. ‘No way.'

‘Has he been arrested?'

‘She,' I said. ‘I hope it's not that bad.'

‘Mum? When Dad comes home we might get a dog.'

‘You know Dad doesn't like dogs.'

Peter nodded, unconvinced.

‘You see,' I said a few minutes later, ‘I don't believe my friend's done anything wrong.'

Peter frowned, wanting to change the subject—well, he'd tried doing that.

He started making what he called a thunderbird with his Lego, waiting for the news to finish, his hands moving now calmly, deliberately, now in a fidgety, impatient way.

I turned back to the television. Was it libellous to say of a person that you did not believe in them, that they were a figment of someone else's criminal imagination? Maybe when Angela Carlishaw appeared she'd sue the tits off that smart reporter. On the other hand, the coalition and the journalists were only making use of a goldplate opportunity.

I tried to comfort myself with the thought that there were a thousand ways of forcing a person to behave as though they were guilty, but ­relatively few ways of proving it. It was all so vague. No-one had ­produced a thing, apart from the
Times
's anonymous tipster. I didn't even know if a grant had been paid to Access Computing.

Rae was saying nothing, and neither was anybody else in the department. The whole thing would blow over in a few days. Reputations might be dented, but they could be repaired. Television viewers would recognise the coalition's tactics as at best opportunistic.

Without warning I was back there, in the spring of 1975. Men with big pasty jowly faces filled the TV screen. Tents of dark suits made their angry faces paler. My mother and I were watching the dismissal of the Prime Minister.

That night I'd been afraid that Mum would throw something at the screen, or throw the TV through the window. I think I might have moved a few heavy books out of her reach. We watched scene after scene of the drama, while my mother screamed abuse at Malcolm Fraser and the Governor-General.

Gough Whitlam's angry face had reminded me of a play my English class had been to, where all the characters had worn huge white face-masks half as tall as I was. My mother's face, her tears as she shouted, waved her fists, the sacked Labor ministers, the new, triumphant ­caretaker Prime Minister, had all seemed like those masks to me. I'd been mesmerised by the play while I watched it. The teacher had to lean over and shake my arm to make me move when the curtain fell for the last time.

I held the two of them together in my mind, my mother and Rae Evans, while Peter said, ‘Mum? Can I watch a video?'

‘Maybe,' I answered him. ‘When the news is over.'

The memory of my mother made me still inside. There was a flat, full space that had to be kept steady, or else it would overflow. I didn't want to face another night of grubby, flooding memories.

That was the thing about my mother. She was loyal. She simply assumed I would be too, in the way I realised, looking at Peter, parents assume some characteristics will just
automatically
be passed on, with the simplicity of drinking water, breathing air. I realised for the first time, and it seemed incredible that it had never occurred to me before, that my mother might not have liked the person I'd become.

Why does it so often happen that a physical memory, the stopping of the heart in place, is unpleasant, an itch, an indigestive twinge?

One of those nights I was itching to be out. I'd planned to meet my girlfriend Jess in Lygon Street. There was a bar with coloured lights. I was already dressed. That's where I wanted to be, walking through that rainbow doorway, the dark both outside and in, the inside dark rich with the smells of smoke and coffee, forbidden and compelling.

I'd stayed with Mum and watched the news and sulked.

The next night, I stuck a curt, uninformative note on the fridge and left the house before she got home from work. No phone number, nothing she could trace. I knew exactly how to hurt her most, exactly where, on that sleeping donkey of betrayal, to pin my daughter's tail.

I started to tell Peter what I was thinking, what I'd been reminded of, then stopped—not with the futility of it, or because it was too hard, but because of the framing, the picture I'd already made for my dead mother in her grandson's mind.

Winter Discontent

On a morning of minus eight degrees, I walked with Peter across a crackling oval to the primary school, then to the bus stop. My car battery had died in the night. Rubbish from the high school was frozen and frosted into weird shapes. A Raiders milk container, tossed aside while not yet empty, had grown frozen lips of brownish yellow. In the drain a boy was bashing iced-up leaves and plastic bottles with a long black stick.

There was a morning interview with the Opposition leader on 2CN. I borrowed the tea lady's radio and listened hunched over while he talked about public service wastage and corruption. After the first five minutes I'd had enough, but I couldn't bring myself to switch it off.

The
Age
had a piece on Access Computing that made them look as though they were a phoney organization, existing only on paper, a repository for stolen money.

Our Deputy Secretary made a brief appearance to tell us that all press inquiries were to be referred to him.

‘Wonderful facility for repetition,' commented Ivan with a grimace. ‘What does the fucker think we've been doing for the last twenty-four hours?'

Jim Wilcox, Rae Evans's division head, gathered all of his division into the large conference room on the first floor. It was like a school assembly when something unthinkable had been done, something ­meriting instant expulsion for the culprit, who was surely within an inch of being caught. In the mean time everyone, from the most senior student to the youngest, felt the tingle of unavoidable guilt by ­association, rats' feet up and down the spine.

I dawdled in Ivan's office doorway after Wilcox had lectured and then dismissed us, putting off having to face the smirk on Dianne Trapani's face, her birch-blonde hair a dry, upstanding accusation. Or Bambi breathing on the telephone, nestling in her thick blood-coloured cloak. They were pleased Rae was in trouble, and they wanted me to see it. Nor could I face writing the introduction to my report. I'd been looking forward to it, but that morning the words felt like shell-grit on my tongue.

Guy Harmer and Claire Disraeli from the office next door were watching me, Claire with a small smile, Guy with an expression of distaste. Ivan fidgeted behind them, his thick lips clamped together. His cheeks were still a bit swollen, but he looked much better.

I felt as though I was trapped in a small enclosed high space, a bubble with a fatally limited air supply. No-one was speaking up for Rae, not one of them, and it sickened me.

. . .

Felix Wenborn (alias IT) and I sat facing one another, both staring at a large booklet on his desk, with the single word SECURITY printed in large black letters on a grey cover. For one ridiculous moment, I thought Felix was going to ask me to place my right hand on the book and swear an oath. His eyes kept returning to it, and I wondered whether he'd hastily memorised the rules inside and was reminding himself of them. Felix was in charge of internal security, but until now it hadn't been a big part of his role. I wished I could say ‘Go ahead and look something up if you want to,' but I knew he'd take offence.

Felix's blond hair, long enough to curl against his collar, framed a smooth, round, dimpled face. At last he looked up at me and asked, ‘What did you say to that reporter?'

‘Which reporter?'

‘The one you were talking to on the phone.'

How did he know about
that
? Bambi and Di had both been in the office when Gail Trembath rang me. I tried to recall whether or not I'd said her name; I was sure I hadn't. But I'd referred to Rae by name on the phone, and it wouldn't have been hard to work out what the call had been about.

I folded my hands in front of me and said quietly, ‘I didn't tell her anything. She'd had a tip-off from somewhere else, and I told her I didn't believe it. What do you think Rae Evans has done?'

Felix was younger than I was, though several grades above me in the hierarchy. That day, he was wearing a fawn button-up cardigan over a white shirt and dark-patterned tie. He dressed like a 1950s pater­familias, except when he went running. Then he dressed in a red T-shirt and red shorts, with a red sweatband holding his blond curls off his face.

He curled his soft upper lip and said, ‘Access Computing was paid a million dollars, not a hundred thousand as they should have been. Perhaps you'd like to tell me where you think the money is?'

Rae hadn't been formally accused of anything, much less proved guilty. The story in the
Canberra Times
didn't have to be true. Everyone was so antsy in the lead-up to a federal election that any bit of bad ­publicity was enough to send them off. And Rae was unpopular. I'd been in the department long enough to know that, if not to understand the reasons for it.

Felix was waiting for an answer. I realised it would take very little, a whisper of breath on the wrong side of his face, for him to convince himself that I'd stolen the money myself, or else helped Rae to steal it.

I said softly, ‘I have no idea.'

I hadn't known, until that moment, that it was actually missing.

. . .

Back in my office, I switched on my computer. Instead of the usual ­invitation to log in, coloured lines like worms wriggled energetically across my screen.

I sat perfectly still, watching them. It was like suddenly finding myself in an aquarium. The worms travelled behind the glass, balling together rhythmically then separating.

‘Bambi?' I said. ‘Can you come here a minute?'

Bambi stared at my monitor and replied, ‘Wasn't me, cherie.'

‘What are they?' I asked.

But Bambi had turned around, and I found myself speaking to her back.

Ivan was on a job, and Di Trapani out interviewing. I switched my computer off, then on again, but all I got were rainbow-coloured worms.

I pressed my nose flat against my monitor and it was for all the world like a large sheet of glass, the front of an aquarium. Behind the glass ran a mass of moving, treacherous water, hiding who knew what submerged ravines, what icebergs far from home.

When Ivan got back, he made a sign saying QUARANTINE STATION and stuck it on my door.

He hunched over my computer, his big back and hairy head offering a barricade I had no wish to pass.

He and Felix worked on the worm virus together, while I fidgeted behind them, wishing I could disappear.

‘Found the string, but I can't kill the bastard,' Ivan said.

‘White Lady doesn't believe in hexes. Unless they're found in America.' Felix nodded up from the screen towards Ivan. ‘Won't believe in this one either.'

‘
Looks
simple enough,' Ivan grunted, his fingers moving swiftly.

They were silent for a few minutes, then Felix stood up. He gave me a level, cold blue stare and said, ‘Even in a small department such as ours, we seem to have more than our share of willing ostriches. They believe they're smart as all get-out, but they don't want to know about computers. You should have had more sense.'

He stared at me with what seemed an unmovable dislike, the whites of his eyes luminous and somehow sickly-looking.

I had no reply, because I didn't know what I'd done wrong.

I waited for Ivan to take a break, but it was halfway through the afternoon before he talked to me.

‘Viruses can hibernate until the part of the program that contains them is executed,' he growled.

‘Speak English,' I told him.

‘My guess, Sandy, is your little worms hid themselves in a part of a program that you haven't been using.'

‘But how did they get there?'

Ivan shrugged.

‘Will they spread to other computers?'

‘That's why we've quarantined everyone you've been connected to.' Ivan smiled like a Cheshire cat. ‘Relax, Sands, no-one's putting you to bed without any supper.'

It wasn't the first time the computers in our section had been attacked by viruses. A couple of weeks before my phone call from Gail Trembath, I'd been in Rae Evans's office, bringing her up to date on my progress with the report. Together we'd watched a low wall of grey stones build itself up, block by hewn block, until it covered Rae's computer screen entirely. Across the top in loud black letters, a laughing rough voice cried, ‘STONE WALL HA HA YOU'RE STONED!'

‘Damn,' Rae had said. With a kind of gathering grey annoyance, she'd reached for the phone, pushed IT's extension and said, ‘Just send someone to fix it.'

I'd forgotten that incident till now.

I was in a kind of limbo. I couldn't ignore the accusations against Rae, but I couldn't think what to do about them either.

Ivan's beard looked thicker, as though the virus hunt had given it a growth spurt. I suspected that he thought the virus was my fault. And Felix definitely did.

‘A cup of coffee and a walk around the block,' I said. ‘Come on. We both need a break.'

Our corridor felt narrower, the grey bearing in more, as Ivan ­galloped along it to the lifts. The pale plywood office dividers seemed closer together, as though people had been secretly cribbing space on either side, leaving the walkway smaller.

‘Someone planted that virus, didn't they?' I felt my thigh muscles protest as I struggled to keep up. ‘They must have.'

‘Some nerd makes up a virus, it gets copied, passed along. If you can trace it back to its source you're a bloody magician.'

Maybe Ivan didn't blame me. I began to feel a bit less of a pariah. I said, ‘It's more than that. Something more is going on.'

As Ivan leant forward to press the button, the lift doors opened. Rae and Felix Wenborn emerged shoulder to shoulder, staring straight ahead.

I don't think Rae was aware of me as more than a blur of flesh and clothing. She was completely absorbed in the anger between herself and Felix, anger given form, as though there was another person darting between them.

Ivan looked from Felix to Rae and back again, with an expression of delighted concentration, as if they were a couple of good stand-up comics, or Wimbledon tennis finalists.

Safely in the lift, I said, ‘Poor Felix. Looks like he's had to miss his run two days in a row.'

‘Don't be catty.'

‘He hates Rae, doesn't he? What is he, some sort of new-age ­misogynist?'

Ivan threw back his head and laughed immoderately. He lost his footing as the lift bumped to a halt at the ground floor.

‘I know that what I say is usually hilarious,' I told him.

Ivan rubbed his head where he'd knocked it. Outside, he took the lead. He seemed to know where he was going.

‘Felix is sure Rae stole that money.' I was thinking aloud. ‘It's like he's been waiting for something like this. For an excuse.'

‘Sand, I'm fresh from the wars, OK? I thought this was meant to be a break. Maybe Evans reminds him of his mother. Now that
is
a thought.'

Cafe Moore looked as though it had been refurbished since I'd last been there with Rae. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what was different. There was a sniff of fresh paint, though it was hard to be sure under the smells of coffee, chocolate, the ubiquitous muffins. The muffins looked like pouter pigeons after a meal of soda bicarb.

The same Matthew Perceval prints of the Kimberleys were in the section by the windows where I'd sat with Rae, and they still matched the grey-blue of the walls and table tops. In a corner, a man spoke urgently into a mobile phone, rubbing his nose to emphasise a point.

Patrons pulled their coats tight, lowered their necks into jumpers, made their hot drinks last, staring at the thick cold outside as though their eyes could melt it.

Ivan leant back, stretching his arms and then his fingers. I thought of asking if they hurt. It would be like asking a bird if it got wing strain.

He smiled. It crossed my mind that I ought to thank him and that ordinary thanks wasn't what he wanted.

‘You know those digital images I do—like your cyclamen?' he said suddenly. ‘I want them to be a window on the world. No-one here thinks of computers like that. Number-crunchers, brute data processors—how many people think of their potential for art?'

Ivan made his eyes big, daring me to answer, ready for a joke against himself. But all the same it seemed to me that he was wrong, that not a week went by when there wasn't some TV program on computer graphics, art or animation.

‘The perspective's all
this
way.' Ivan made an inverted V with his hands, fingers barely touching.

For all his thick beard and long tangled hair, Ivan's hands were surprisingly unhairy, as though whoever modelled him had had their fun by the time they'd made his head. I loved to watch Ivan's hands move over his computer keyboard, like a professional musician's. But I'd never watched a pianist close up, improvising, the way I watched Ivan. He had a gentle, precise touch. Mostly, it wasn't sound he was ­producing, but pictures and words on a screen, and the relationship between his fingers and what they created was a hidden one. If I ever came to understand each keystroke as he executed it, would watching him lose its fascination?

I reached for the sugar, and my hand brushed his.

‘I want to change all that,' he said quietly, but with an underlying hardness I had come to recognise. ‘I want to teach people that ­computers can help them look
out there
. The opposite of what those guys're after.'

‘Who?' I asked. ‘What are they after?'

‘They want people to build walls around their computers so that
they
, the hackers, can bust them. Otherwise there'd be no challenge for them, you see.'

‘
Who does?
' I insisted.

Ivan took a huge bite of croissant. Jam and melted butter spurted out the end. ‘Some smart-aleck kid,' he said. ‘Ten to one the viruses've ended up here by accident.'