The Point (37 page)

In between getting the systems up and running again we had long colloquies about what to do. How to stop this happening again. We were agreed that it was the work of a hacker, targeting us specifically, not a generic attack, but how were we to find him, and stop him?

Of course you will call the police, said Flora, but I wasn’t keen to do that. Had we been a government department of course that would have been the first thing to do. But a business like mine, elegant, discreet, personal, you don’t want the police stamping through it if you can help it. Especially as I doubted they had a great record in catching computer criminals. I said I wanted to wait a while, see what we could come up with. In fact I was probably just hoping it wouldn’t happen again.

Oscar Luft is a hacker, said Clement.

Do you know him, asked Jake.

Everybody does, said Clement, he’s hugely famous.

He used to be, I said. A hacker. He’s given it up.

Huh, said Clement, in a snort of derision. Who says? He says? Who’d believe a hacker?

People change, I said, wanting to look after Laurel, not wanting to discover that Oscar had betrayed her and himself.

Hackers don’t, said Jake. It’s in their blood. I reckon they’re born with it.

I forbore to ask how, if it was in the blood, it used to manifest itself, hacking being such a recent phenomenon. Instead I said: Okay, for the sake of argument, Oscar Luft’s the hacker. What’s his motive?

Clement cast his eyes about. Fun? He said. Because it’s there? Like Mount Everest?

I cannot believe he would be so wicked as that. I would need a motive, before I could finger a person as guilty.

Maybe somebody paid him a huge amount of money to do it, said Jake.

Still, I insisted, we need a motive.

You mean, somebody with a reason for hating you. Doing you harm. Novica spoke solemnly.

There’s a start.

You’ll have to work that out, said Clement. I thought people liked you.

Well, maybe people do. Maybe a person doesn’t.

In truth, I could not come up with anybody who would dislike me sufficiently to attempt to destroy my business. There are always people one has crossed, not taken to, fallen out with, but any of them I could bring to mind I did not see having the skills to take this revenge. A competitor? A chilling thought, if they’d stoop so low. And anyway the technology is an expanding business, there’s plenty of room in it. Maybe it was a warning. But of what? Against what? It was hard thinking this, first of all conceiving that anybody could wish me such harm, then trying to imagine who that person might be.

Oscar was at that play, said Clement.

Half Canberra was at that play, I said. So were you.

I suppose we have to assume it was somebody at the play, said Jake.

The virus is a specific reference to it, said Clement.

Might be coincidence, said Jake. After all, it’s a well-known play.

Is it? said Clement.

Seems a bit too much of a coincidence, said Novica. What else would make anybody think of the connection?

Might be copied from something overseas. There’s a lot of copycatting, said Clement.

I remembered the pelican, ripping open its breast and its blood flowing, filling the screen. Had that been a warning? And was the blood simply a conceit, a clever idea for a virus, or was it maybe …

You don’t think it’s some kind of death threat, I asked.

Wowee, said Clement.

What about the meaning of the words, asked Jake, running his fingers through the bleached points of his hair and quite destroying the sculptural effect. It showed how worried he was, he normally never touched those careful peaks.

Good point, said Novica. They aren’t about destruction, they are about the promise of safety. Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament is offering salvation. It’s Faustus’s problem that he can’t take it.

I was silent, remembering my walk along the lake, when the crimson sunset seemed to be enacting those words. I remembered the sentence that came suddenly to me, and the terror in it that I refused to think of at the time.
What soul was it that I sold?
All right, I did at times remark that the computer allows us to embark on the last great Faustian temptation, that of containing all knowledge in its small space. But I had not made any pacts with the devil, my soul was my own, intact, unsold. I needed no salvation. That was for certain.

Quite often at work I thought of my namesake. Eusebius Hieronymus Sophonius. Geronimus in twelfth-century England. How he’d have loved using the computer. What a wonderful tool he’d have found it. But hearing Novica question the meaning of the virus it occurred to me that St Jerome would have had no doubt; he’d have seen it as a sure and certain sign from God. The offering of salvation in a context of destruction: it could only mean, desist. I have destroyed your handiwork; now, reach out and find your forgiveness in the blood of the lamb before it is too late and all is grey as ashes. You don’t query God’s signs, you simply take them to heart.

Except that I didn’t believe that God was some kind of heavenly hacker. I counted Him out. What worried me was the notion that somebody regarded me, or wanted me to suppose they did, as a latter-day Faust. I consoled myself that I knew the real thing when I saw it, I wasn’t to be fobbed off as he was with tomfoolery.

Despite my remonstrations Clement got hold of Oscar and questioned him. He pinched his little topiary beard – he was the image of the picture book Mephistophilis, I’d noticed that before but not seriously – and looked pained when I spoke to him about it. I had set him to find the culprit, hadn’t I? Tackling Oscar seemed a logical move. When I next saw Laurel at the restaurant she looked gaunt, her skin so pale it seemed her blood had stopped flowing. She looked at me reproachfully, and when I said that I did not believe it, that I knew Oscar was no hacker, I did not blame him in any way, her eyes went very large and her mouth twisted in a small smile. I’m afraid that it will ruin his exams, she said.

Clement acted without my permission, I insisted. Honestly, I told him I was quite certain Oscar was not involved. Please tell him I have no fears it was him, I said, hoping I sounded more sincere that I felt. Laurel’s face relaxed a little. Clement is a know–it-all, I said, if only he were half as clever as he thinks he is. Maybe I should sack him.

She laughed ruefully and gave me my coat, it was one of the small pleasures of the restaurant, being given your coat by Laurel, she held it while you put it on, and her elegant fingers almost without touching you seemed to settle it into place so it was immediately comfortable.

I kissed her on the cheek; I never had before. Tell Oscar I have faith in him, I said. And that I am giving Clement a piece of my mind.

When I heard, several days later, that Oscar had died of a heroin overdose, my first thought was, so he did do it after all, and committed suicide because he couldn’t live with himself so fallen from grace, again. You see, said Clement, it’s as I said. Hackers can’t stop. My heart was full of grief for the beautiful boy with the Daedalean smile, and I could not bear the thought of him betraying himself with his own foolishness as that golden lad had done. I thought of the old sculptor, old artificer, knowing what could happen, hoping that warning would be enough to prevent it.
Do
not fly too close to the sun or the wax holding your feathers to your
wings will melt and you will plummet from the sky.
The invention itself was successful – the father older and wiser flew to Crete and built the labyrinth for the minotaur – but his son lost. Pain doesn’t change, down the centuries. And neither do children, they still take no notice of their elders, and their elders are still left mourning. The young should not be cut off sooner than us old ones.

I have to confess, as well, to taking a certain comfort, ugly I know, and just for myself, that since Oscar was the hacker I had no more incursions to fear.

And then the notion of cutting off recalled to me the lines of the chorus at the end of Marlowe’s play. Well, partly recalled, I had to look them up.

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.

I copied them out, they were so apt, so full of loss and sadness, and wept over them. For quite certainly, hacking is the work of the devil, and whatever it is that a soul is these days, Oscar’s had been required of him.

34

The day that Oscar died was his twenty-first birthday. He hadn’t wanted any presents, not objects, just money. His mother would have liked to give him something substantial or significant which would always exist as a mark of that time, a watch perhaps, some cufflinks, even a silver paperknife, a tangible valuable thing which he could treasure all his life as a twenty-first birthday present. But Oscar said that was silly, just sentimental nonsense, he didn’t need any of those things. What he always needed was stuff for his pute, he was chronically short of money to keep that going as he liked. Laurel said what about him promising that when he got the CD burner he had everything he needed, but Oscar said that was then, things were always changing, he was falling way behind. Laurel thought, this is just what I don’t want, some transient soon obsolete thing. But gave him money. What about a party? Oscar didn’t want that either. Apparently it wasn’t cool to have a party. Twenty-one was no big deal. Eighteen was the thing, you got to vote. That was the one that mattered.

Oscar called in at the restaurant on the evening of his birthday. Laurel gave him some more money so he didn’t have to spend his gift money on entertainment. He leaned down and kissed her in that loving way he had, as though enclosing her for a moment in his radiance.

Jerome Glancy when he was leaving remarked on it. He gets more dazzling by the moment, that boy of yours, he said to Laurel.

Twenty-one today, said Laurel.

I bet he’s a real heartbreaker … Jerome interrupted himself. I mean the girls, of course.

Laurel smiled wryly. Well, I don’t know. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. There are girls, but it’s just a group, there isn’t any pairing.

Seems a waste, said Jerome. I wouldn’t mind being twenty-one again, with his looks and all these gorgeous girls around. Those lovely bare tummies they have.

I think it’s a good thing, not pairing, said Laurel. There’s plenty of time.

I suppose so. I suppose it’s my advanced years and strange history talking.

Laurel remembered her own twenty-first birthday. All the relations, as well as her friends. And the man she was in love with, whom she married, who was Oscar’s father, who saw him these days maybe twice a year. A tiny watch that looked silver but was actually white gold, her father said, with diamonds. A big wooden key that everybody signed. At twenty-one you were supposed to be old enough to have the key of your parents’ house, though Laurel had had one for years. The key to the door, they called it, with all sorts of symbolic implications. They had ham and chicken and salad, and her mother had made lemon meringue pies, and orange cake, date slice and coconut chew and trifle. If you’d asked the relations beforehand they could probably have recited this menu for you; looking back Laurel finds this comforting. One of the pleasures of visiting round the family was the familiarity of the special foods they served. Week after week on their baking days they cooked the same things. Not sponge cakes, too airy-fairy, two bites and they were gone, and all those eggs, so extravagant; they liked solid things, with fruit and nuts and oatmeal, good chewy mouthfuls. All the parties, birthdays, christenings, film nights, anniversaries, but not weddings which always had caterers, all the family get-togethers, and that included funerals too, out came the plates of familiar food. Auntie Madge’s date and walnut loaf, Auntie Val’s mini pizzas, flaky biscuits with slices of cheese and tomato, heated in the oven, Auntie Helen’s mock chicken sandwiches of scrambled egg with herbs, Grandma’s afghan cookies, cousin Margaret’s bachelors’ buttons. They could make them with their eyes closed. Now household cake tins hold bought biscuits, how these women would have scorned them, or none at all.

When Laurel got home from the restaurant Oscar wasn’t there. She wasn’t expecting him, he’d be out with his friends, clubbing on the money she’d given him, or maybe at somebody’s house endlessly at their computers. There was a package from his father, it was the size and shape of a watch. She decided to make a birthday cake on Sunday, Oscar could ask some friends around or just the two of them could celebrate, she’d make the flourless chocolate cake, he liked that, especially with classy couverture chocolate melted and poured over it to make a crisp coating.

It was half past two when there was knocking on the door. The first rap of the knocker woke her, though she didn’t know what it was, sitting up in bed with the terror of the lost sound echoing in her head, until it came again, and she knew what it meant. As though the hollow thud of the knocker against the door carried the news. It was the police. Her son, they said, with all the gentleness they could muster, was dead. An overdose. Heroin.