Wonder Women (25 page)

When Jo came in at noon so Mel could take her lunch break, she walked up to the sandwich shop. On the way, she rang Hamish, the IT expert. Hamish was a big, shy man, never married, who had been part of Mel's circle for as long as she could remember. He liked to sit in the corner at social events, sipping a beer and listening to the conversation. He
was a man of few words, but when he did offer comment it was often dry, witty or surprisingly insightful. He and Mel had never really socialised one on one, tending to see each other as part of a large group. But tonight, that would hopefully change. Hamish answered his phone after a few rings, sounding a little out of breath and slightly surprised. ‘Melster!' he said warmly. ‘Don't often see your name coming up on my phone. What can I do for you?'

‘Mr Hamish,' Mel said, ‘I wondered what you were up to this evening.'

‘Oh, you know, the usual: threesome with Beyoncé and Angelina, a little light skydiving and a lobster barbecue on the beach.'

‘So you're free?'

‘As a bird. What do you have in mind?'

‘I thought I'd win you over with my awe-inspiring spaghetti bolognaise and a bottle of Tesco's finest Vino de Special Offero, and then pick your brain on what my wayward daughter's been up to on her laptop.'

‘Throw in a Viennetta and I'm all yours,' said Hamish.

*

He arrived just before eight. He looked very large in Mel's small flat, a shambling, tall man who had worn the same Buddy Holly-style spectacles for as long as Mel had known him. He invariably wore rather baggy trousers and jumpers in shades of olive green and brown, and his shaggy hair looked as if he cut it himself.

Mel wasn't much of a cook, but she knew how to make a big bowl of pasta, and she could grate Parmesan with the best of them. She made a small salad, but didn't go to town
on it, guessing rightly that Hamish wasn't much of a lettuce man. They chatted easily over the meal. Hamish had been working as the IT manager for a charity for the last seven years so he didn't have much to report about work that was new, but he had recently bought himself a cottage down in Devon, near the area where they all gathered for Christmas. He'd got it for a song because it was practically a ruin, and he'd been going down there most weekends to work on it.

‘I'm lucky to have caught you in town then,' said Mel.

‘It is a bit unusual for me to be here, but they're putting in new windows this week and the house is basically a few walls surrounding some large gaping holes. Not really where you want to spend a January night.'

‘Not ideal. So what's the plan, ultimately? A holiday home? Let it out and earn an income?'

‘Well, the plan, if I can make it work, is to move down there permanently.'

‘Wow. And what about work?'

‘Chuck it in.'

‘And do what?'

Hamish blushed. He actually blushed. ‘Well … write.'

‘Write? I didn't know you wrote.'

‘I don't tell people, because they mainly take the piss, but I write fantasy.'

‘Fantasy?'

‘You know, like science fiction, but with goblins and elves and stuff. I've been doing it for years.'

‘And are you …?'

‘Published? Well, yes. I've had a series of books published by a specialist fantasy publisher.'

‘Since when?'

‘The first one was about ten years ago.'

‘Ten years? And you've never told us?'

‘You never asked. I tend not to talk about it. It's one of those things, like trainspotting, that if people know, they either think you're a hopeless anorak, or they ask lots of stupid questions.'

‘Like I'm doing now?'

‘Well, so far your questions haven't been too stupid.'

‘So, here's a stupid question: do you make a living doing it?'

‘Well, not really. I've been putting the money I've earned away since I started, and that was how I put the deposit on the place in Devon. But then last year my agent called me—'

‘You have an agent! Oh my God, you're famous and you have a secret life, don't you?'

‘And there's our first stupid question. No, I'm not famous. I'm mildly well known in one tiny circle of nerds. Anyway, my agent called, and told me they'd sold the series in America. So now I'll be pulling in the medium-sized bucks. Not an enormous amount, but enough to give up my job, which bores me to tears, and go and sit in my cottage in Devon and write.'

Mel sat back and took a sip of her wine. ‘Well, I never, Hamish. You're a dark horse, you are. I had no idea.'

‘Well, now you do, so can we drop it? No Gandalf jokes, okay? No Hobbit quips? And please, please don't ask me if I earn the same as that J.K. Rowling.'

‘I wouldn't dream of it.'

‘Now, talk to me about our Serena,' said Hamish, briskly changing the subject. ‘What's going on there?'

‘Well, remember the laptop Bruce gave her?'

‘Of course. I set all the permissions on it and got it going for her.'

‘Well, I have a feeling she's managed to bypass them.'

‘Is it here?'

‘No. She's gone to Bruce's for the weekend and taken it with her.'

‘Well, the first step is to have a look at the monitoring site. That way we can look at her web habits and see where we go from there.'

Mel stood up and pointed to her ancient PC in the corner, but Hamish actually snorted, reached into his bag and pulled out a sleek compact laptop. Within seconds he had booted it up and connected to Mel's Wi-Fi.

He went to the site and Mel told him her log-in details. He sat quietly staring at the screen for a minute or so.

‘According to this, the last time she logged on to the Internet was about four weeks ago.'

‘But she's been on loads since then. Of course she has.'

‘I'm sure she has. She's somehow found a way to switch off the parental controls entirely.'

‘How?'

‘Well, it's not that difficult. If she knew where to search, there'd be cheats and instructions on all sorts of sites. Or she could have got someone to do it for her.'

‘She must have known she'd be found out.'

‘She probably has a good idea about how computer phobic you are …'

‘I'm not computer-phobic!'

‘Okay, maybe not phobic, but you're not exactly Ms Techno-Literate though, are you?'

‘Well, maybe not.'

‘So she probably gambled on the fact that once you'd got me to set up the safeguards, you either wouldn't know how to check, or you wouldn't bother. At least for a while.'

‘Or maybe,' Mel said, her voice cracking a little, ‘she didn't care.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I think she just doesn't care what I think any more. Somehow, and I'm not sure how, I've become the enemy. We used to be so close, and now all her energy seems to be devoted to lying to me and trying to do stuff against my wishes. This is all going to end badly, whatever I say. I mean, I'm playing the whole scenario out in my head. I'll ask her why she bypassed the safe-surfing controls, and she'll yell at me and say all I do is restrict her freedom and ruin her life. Then I'll yell back, and I'll have to play the stern-mum card and take the laptop away, and then she'll hate me even more, speak to me even less and feel she's even more justified in lying to me and sneaking around behind my back.'

‘Oh dear,' said Hamish, and he looked very uncomfortable. This was clearly too much for him to handle. Whether he was uneasy with Mel's frankness, or with the insight into ugly mother–daughter stuff, or whether he thought Mel was just plain wrong, she had clearly dragged him way, way outside his comfort zone.

‘I'm sorry, Hamish. I'm just venting. This is so hard though. There's so much advice to tell you how to raise a baby, but
dealing with a teenager, well, these are uncharted waters. But I know they're my waters, and I'm sorry to have pulled you in, if you know what I mean.'

‘It's okay,' said Hamish, rallying. He was nothing if not brave and polite. ‘I'm sure you'll work it out. Listen, I must go. Last trains and all that. Thanks for dinner.' He gave her an awkward kiss on the cheek and was gone.

There were two alternatives, Mel thought. She could curl up in a ball on the floor and sob, then finish the bottle-and-a-half of wine left from dinner, then throw up and sob some more. Or she could wash the dishes. She went for option two. She had to be at work at eight the next morning and the tear-stained, red-wine-hangover look wouldn't go down at Jungletown.

Once she started, she couldn't stop. The cooker got a thorough clean, the floor was mopped and she was busy scrubbing the countertop viciously when the phone rang. She leapt to get it. It was just after midnight, and a call that late could only be bad news, but then she saw on the caller display that it was Hamish. She hesitated for a second and then answered it. Maybe he'd left something behind and would need her to send it to him. He started in without preamble.

‘It seems to me that this is Coventry.'

‘What?'

‘You. Serena. This is a Coventry situation. Sort of.'

‘Coventry? In the Midlands? What? Why?'

‘You must know the story of Churchill in the war,' Hamish said.

Mel was baffled. She had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Refresh my memory,' she said encouragingly.

‘The Allies had captured a German Enigma machine.'

‘Enigma machine? Sounds like some kind of science fiction—'

‘It was a highly complex machine to send and receive messages in code,' said Hamish impatiently. ‘Anyway, the Allies cracked the code—'

‘I don't see what this has to do with Serena's laptop—'

‘Let me finish! Anyway, because they were receiving and decoding the German messages, they knew that the Germans were planning to bomb Coventry. But if they told the people of Coventry and evacuated the town, then the Germans would know their coded communications were being read. So Churchill had to let them bomb Coventry, and loads of people died!' Hamish finished triumphantly. There was a long silence.

‘So, who's going to die?' asked Mel tentatively. ‘Am I Coventry? Or is Serena? This really doesn't help, Hamish.'

‘No!' said Hamish. ‘Serena's the Germans!'

‘She's a Nazi?'

‘You're not getting it. Maybe it isn't the best analogy I've ever come up with. But look at it this way: what if you could keep an eye on her online life without her knowing? Like you said, if she finds out you know she's doing stuff behind your back, then she'll find different ways to hide things from you. Let her bomb Coventry and think she's got away with it. And after that, you'll be watching her.'

‘How?'

‘Social media.'

‘What?'

‘Facebook, Twitter … you have heard of those, haven't
you? If she's getting involved with the wrong people, she'll be contacting them online. I don't think you'll find anything incriminating by looking at files on her laptop. And if she catches on that you're monitoring her computer access too closely, remember she can just as easily access social-media sites on her phone, if she has a Smartphone.'

‘She does,' said Mel. ‘I hadn't thought of that. Well, I don't know the first thing about Facebook and Twitter and stuff, but I'll can learn. And Hamish … thanks.'

‘Don't mention it.' He sounded embarrassed. ‘I've known Serena since she was a little speck. I want to do my bit to keep her safe.'

She had done nothing; made no decisions, not told anyone … she had been living in limbo for a week. Some of her things were piled on the floor of the flat in East Finchley, but most of them remained in the room at her mother's house in Ealing. She was still sleeping in Ealing, but she hadn't asked Bob to tear up her cheque, and he must have banked it by now. So through her own inertia, she was committed to the flat, but she couldn't see how she could move there.

With Judith's illness out in the open, it was amazing how quickly the house became a place of sickness. Now Judith had made her decision not to accept treatment, and people had found out about her diagnosis, she seemed suddenly to age. The consultant she had seen prescribed painkillers, which seemed to give her some relief, but made her sleepy and vague. There was a fairly constant stream of visitors – Judith's parish priest, friends from the church – and Holly had to manage them all. Judith wasn't always up to seeing people.

Whenever Miranda came to the house, she spent her time
wandering around in a red-eyed daze, touching things and moving them, starting tasks she didn't finish, and then suddenly bursting into tears, upsetting Judith and the children if they were there too. She was very much more a hindrance than a help, Holly thought, as she emptied yet another half-drunk cup of tea down the sink. Holly herself kept things together by staying fiendishly busy. If she wasn't working, she was busy getting Judith's life in order, making sure she had all her paperwork up to date and that all the medical professionals knew what was needed and when.

Holly stayed in the house pretty much all the time. She could do most of her work from there, either over the phone or via the Internet. She still hadn't told Jo what was going on, although she stayed in daily communication with her. She kept their conversations on a very brisk, businesslike level. She didn't have the strength to tell Jo yet. In fact she wasn't ready to tell anyone, because when she did it would become real. In the house, with Judith, with the mounting piles of medical paraphernalia and the sympathetic murmurings from visitors, it was very real, but contained. But if she told her friends and colleagues, then the cancer would take over all aspects of her life and she just wasn't ready for that.

After a full week had gone by, her mobile phone rang, and she saw from the caller ID that it was Bob. Time to face to the world.