The Count of Eleven (3 page)

“Here we are with no distractions,” he said, his eagerness revealing itself as nervousness. “I’ve lost nothing, have I? Everything it says is there is there?”

“All the files that are listed are on the disc. I take it you haven’t been able to get into them.”

“I haven’t seen a word of them all morning, so I can’t have harmed them, can I?”

“Let’s hope not,” Julia said, and having typed the command to edit a file, moved her chair aside. “Go ahead, ask to see one.”

“But I don’t want to edit, I only want to look.”

“That’s the command you use anyway.”

He typed a client’s name and crouched forwards, resting his fingers on the keys, and Julia wanted to pull them away in case he panicked and typed something disastrous. When the columns of figures and dates and names of investments appeared he relaxed, but not for long. As soon as he’d scrolled to the end of the file he demanded “How do I get rid of this?”

“You don’t want to erase any of it, surely.”

“What are you getting he began, so fast it sounded like a single word, and controlled himself. “You know what I mean. How do I make it disappear?”

Abandon it.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk, dangerously near the keyboard. “That can’t be right. I want to keep it.”

“You will. If you didn’t want to you’d delete it.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

Of course she had, at his first lesson, even if not in those words. She watched as he closed the file and opened another, scrolled through it, abandoned it, opened the next file…. His delight at his competence reminded her of Laura unwrapping birthday presents, though Laura was never so self-absorbed. As he opened the third file he said without looking at her “Feel like a coffee?”

She felt more like a spare part. “How many sugars in yours?”

“One teaspoonful, as level as you can make it,” he said, and sent the names and numbers streaming upwards like smoke.

Julia looked on the floor by the spare electric socket and then behind the desks. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the kettle’s hiding, would you?”

“Sorry,” he said, fumbling for his keys. As soon as Julia had unlocked his room he said briskly “Thanks.”

The kettle was beside his desk, the top of which was covered with neat heaps of documents and with Luke’s memos to himself in handwriting that looked wilfully illegible, a telephone, a pocket tape-recorder, an executive toy with its steel balls dangling. It seemed as if he wanted to keep everything about his business under tight control, even the coffee and sugar and powdered milk, and she wondered if she would be able to hear working for him once he stopped regarding her as in some ways more knowledgeable than himself.

When she returned from the tap in the toilet Rankin’s shared with the accountants upstairs she found that Luke had brought out the coffee ingredients and locked his door. By the time the lid of the kettle started dancing he’d examined all the files on the disc. He sat back to sip from his mug. “How about opening new files? I think that’s where I went wrong.”

“Give it the command you’ve been using to edit.”

She was sitting at Lynne’s desk, but Luke’s snarl of disbelief made her twist around. “It’s doing the same bloody thing,” he cried. “It’s asking for the name of the file when the damned file hasn’t got a name.”

“It’s asking you to name it, Luke.”

Then why the devil wasn’t that made clear?”

Julia told herself that he was blaming the machine, not her. “Once you’ve named your file you can do what you like with it. Write it, edit it, copy it, rename it, anything.”

“It’s as simple as that?” he said with a laugh so mirthless it had to be directed at himself.

“Call it something, Luke. Whatever comes into your head.”

Luke typed HIDEY HO and stopped, fingers twitching above the keyboard. “So?”

Tress Return.”

He did so and immediately brought his fists down on either side of the keyboard, shaking the desk. “Now the bloody screen’s gone blank.”

“Because a new file’s empty until you write something in it.”

“Oh, I see.” Not before time, he sounded chastened. “What shall I write?”

“The screen is yours.”

Some time passed, presumably while he arranged his thoughts, before he started typing. Occasionally he asked her which key to strike to produce an effect, but when she made to go to him he waved her away: “I can’t work with people hovering.”

“Shall I leave you to it?”

“Can’t you stay? I need to learn while there’s time. While there’s nobody here to distract us, I mean.”

She took pity on him until he began to snarl and make mistakes. “Enough for today. Your memory’s overloading,” she said.

“How do I clear space on the disc without losing anything?”

“Copy some files onto another disc and then delete them from this one.”

“That’s what I thought,” Luke said. “Just show me that.”

When she had he switched off the computer, to her relief. “When do you want me to bring the records up to date?” she said. “There’s still about a year’s worth not on disc.”

“I may do that myself. They’re locked away safe. Don’t worry, there’ll be work for you. The girls need training.”

He let her out of the building and locked the door behind her. As she passed the window she heard the renewed chirruping of the computer and remembered her own feelings of compulsion as she’d learned how to use one, switching the machine on again to try just one more idea before bedtime, waking in the middle of the night convinced she’d worked out a solution. “Once I’m across the river I’m gone for the day,” she promised herself, making for the ferry terminal.

As the boat swung away from the landing stage the Liver Clock showed ten past three. As a toddler Laura used to say the clock looked like an egg laid by the Liver Bird above it. Children leaned over the stern of the ferry and pulled bread to pieces, seagulls flew up like whirling shards of the foam in the wake. A jet plane trailed its cloak of sound down to Speke Airport, beyond which, at the bend of the river, an oil flare stood like an indistinguishable match. On weekdays the rumble of Liverpool and of the peninsular motorway seemed to call to each other across the river, but now, as the ferry steamed towards the peninsula, the streets piled on the approaching bank were as quiet as the idle docks of Birkenhead.

She disembarked at Seacombe and walked along the promenade towards New Brighton. The tide was out, exposing flanks of sand and reddish rock pimply with winkles. A Doberman was dashing through the long slow waves, its lead in its mouth, while its owner, a woman in aged baggy trousers, searched the rock pools. A man with a cloth cap yanked low on his forehead cycled past Julia, wheeling a second bicycle. Boys on skateboards raced down the sloping streets between houses overlooking the river, and Julia had to grit her teeth so as not to interfere as the boys challenged one another to be last to jump off before the skateboards shot over the twenty-foot drop at the edge of the promenade. Past the war memorial, children wearing headphones were skating in Vale Park, between picnic tables and the pillared bandstand whose dome said Brahms, Mozart, Bach. Tiny bright figures with shrill voices scurried back and forth on screens in the Golden Goose amusement arcade near the mouth of the river, and Julia wasn’t sure if it was the screens or the hyperactive mites which reminded her of Luke. She climbed the slope of Victoria Road opposite the arcade and turned along her street. “Anybody home?” she called as she opened the front door.

Nobody answered. Jack would be at the video library for hours yet, and Laura had left a note in the kitchen. Now that Julia was alone in it the house no longer felt too small, but every meal-time the home computer had to be moved off the table in the cramped dining-room, and Laura liked to do her homework lying on her bed. Laura had been born in the front bedroom when there hadn’t been time to rush Julia to hospital at close to midnight, but since a prospective buyer’s surveyor had found damp and dry rot Julia had felt rather betrayed by the house. She knelt to rummage through the freezer compartment, and had just located the turkey pie she’d made after Christmas when the phone rang.

“If that’s you, Luke By the time she’d finished replacing foil trays in the freezer the phone had jangled twelve times and was still ringing. She ran into the hall and grabbed the receiver from its den among the coats on the hall-stand. “Orchards,” she said.

“Julia. You’re home, thank God. Can you come over quick as you can? Emergency.”

“I’m on my way,” she said, slapping coats aside and replacing the receiver, shoving her arms into the sleeves of her anorak, slinging the strap of her handbag over one shoulder and rushing out of the house. For a moment she’d been about to tell Luke to calm down, and then she’d recognised the voice despite its shrillness. It was Jack’s.

A woman returning a video tripped over the blow lamp on her way into the shop. Jack wedged the door open with a pound coin and dragged the tool out of the doorway. Now the edge of the door seemed perilously close to the nearest shelves. He was moving handfuls of video cases onto the floor, where they leaned like hollow dominoes, when a boy of about twelve loitered in the doorway, combing his oily hair. “Are you selling those, mister?”

“Depends how much you’ve got in the bank.”

The boy treated the leaning titles to a bored glance. “They might be worth using for blanks,” he said and strolled downhill, squeezing the sides of his scalp with the palms of his hands as though he was extracting oil.

“Nothing like unsolicited encouragement,” Jack said loudly, ‘and that was …” Stooping to the blow lamp he uncoiled the nozzle from the tank of calor gas. He turned on the gas and ignited it with his lighter. A metal fish-tail clipped to the nozzle spread the flame and rendered it practically noiseless. Jack aimed the fish-tail at the door, then snatched it back. The surface of the door had begun to writhe at once.

He had to peer at the unaffected door and finger it gingerly in order to convince himself that he had only been seeing a distortion produced by the wavering of the air. In fact the yellowish flame had little effect until the fish-tail was almost touching the door; then the paint started to smoulder and bubble and pop. Jack played the flame slowly over the door, using his free hand to wave smoke away from his itchy nostrils. He’d been crouching for several minutes when a sneeze overwhelmed him. The nozzle swung wildly, dislodging the fish-tail, which clanged against the charred paint and struck the floor amidst a shower of blackened flakes.

Was he supposed to be scraping the paint off the door? There was nothing in the shop he could use. Presumably he could scrape later. Now that the nozzle had been divested of its accessory, the flame was much louder and fiercer, though almost invisible. It blotted out any nearby sounds, and so he couldn’t tell how long he failed to notice that someone was standing behind him. “Go on in,” he said, shuffling aside on his knees.

When there was no response he lifted the nozzle away from the door and glanced back. An old man was leaning on the window, his hand surrounded by an aura of moisture on the glass. His face and sparse hair and blue eyes all looked faded with age. His raincoat was buttoned in the wrong holes, and a wattle of his neck overhung the left side of the collar. His lips were parted as if he’d been waiting for Jack to meet his eyes so that he could speak. “I know you,” he said.

“I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m here every day from eleven till eight.”

“Not here.”

“If it isn’t me then someone must be doing an impression.”

The man’s lips parted again as if he was trying to mouth the answer he required. “Was there anything you wanted?” Jack said.

The old man grimaced at the blow lamp “That isn’t what you do.”

“Jack of all trades, that’s me. If I can’t be of assistance you’ll excuse me if I carry on.”

Jack was aiming the nozzle at the door when the old man limped into the shop. He stared at the comedy shelves, and Jack assumed he’d recognised an old favourite until he spoke. “This isn’t right.”

“We’ve only been open a couple of years. It wasn’t anything for a while.”

The old man scowled at the top of the door, where the faintest trace of the house number could be distinguished when the sunlight caught it, which wasn’t now. He rubbed his eyes and turned back to the shelves as though he expected them to have vanished, then he confronted Jack. “You shouldn’t be here.”

It would be wisest to turn off the blow lamp and usher him out of the shop, and in a moment Jack would, but first he tried a pleasantry: “If you’re offering to change my life …”

The old man staggered to face the door. The skin beneath his eyes was twitching, and Jack had the disconcerting impression that he was trying to perform an inverted blink. His fascination with the spectacle was one reason why he didn’t react at once when his unwanted visitor lurched towards him; in any case, he couldn’t imagine that the old man intended anything other than to leave the shop.

He saw the old man grab the edge of the door and heave at it. He meant to look for a number on the inside, Jack thought in a paralysis of disbelief. It didn’t matter, the door was wedged open. Then the old man’s weight dragged it free of the pound coin, and the door swung towards Jack, who overbalanced backwards, taking the nozzle and its flame with him.

He managed not to sprawl on his back. His buttocks struck the floorboards. For an agonising moment his legs stayed folded in a kneeling position while his heels tried to gain some purchase on the floor, then his left foot shot out, propelled by a cramp. He could feel the heat of the bubbling paint through his sock.

Either the old man thought Jack intended to kick the door at him or he was trying to push himself away from the jet of flame, which Jack was holding vertical in front of his face, by using the door as a support. The blistered wood slammed against the side of Jack’s foot, scattering hot flakes over his sock. It felt as though a needle had been driven through his ankle into the bone, and he lost his grip on the nozzle of the blow lamp

In a moment he regained it almost. More than an inch of it had slipped through his grasp. As he grabbed the metal just short of the flame, pain blazed through his fingers. He was certain that his skin was about to adhere to the tube. “Mind out!” he shouted, his voice leaping more than an octave higher on the second word as though preparing to scream.