A Gathering of Twine Page 19

  So, have a drink – just a small one to relax.

  And that was how it started.

  A glass of wine with dinner and a wee dram before bed. Except that he never had a good night’s sleep with the alcohol still in his system. But he still needed to unwind, right?

  Ok, so maybe a dram or two in the afternoon, and then a glass of claret with dinner.

  Of course, when Anna came home she could smell it on him. She never said anything. Not about the drinking. But the chores not being done? She had something to say about that. And what was his defence? He did not have one. He knew that. He felt that voice rise up inside of him. It had been quiet for years, like a sleeping black dog, but always there.

  Of course, you don’t have a defence. You’re weak and pathetic and your wife is carrying the family.

  How long had it been since they had made love? Two months? Three?

  Five and you know it! Why would she even touch something as disgusting as you? Look at yourself. Everything about you is a failure. Everything everything everything!

  And so he had started going to bed later and later. Limiting the time around her. He only upset her anyway. For the first time, silence had entered their relationship. And it was not that comfortable easy silence that comes at four in the morning after the exuberance of youth has put the world to rights. No, this was the silence that said I have nothing to say to you.

  As their relationship had become quieter, so the voice in his head had become louder and more persistent.

  Everything about you is a failure. Everything everything everything!

  And so he had drunk more to blot out that voice. It worked for a while. But then in the morning, or whenever it was that he got up, it was always there. Laughing. And he was always so much more fragile when he woke up.

  So he would have a little drink. Just to get the motor running.

  But the little drink in the morning had been growing. It had grown big, and the black dog in his head had grown with it.

  Anna took the child out of the bedroom. Ryan heard her walking down stairs, and the kettle came on in the kitchen.

  Tea. Yes, a cup of tea. That is what he needed. He tried to sit up on his elbows and half slipped. He was still drunk.

  Everything about you is a failure. Everything everything everything!

  He lay back down, closing his eyes, praying that the room would stop swimming. A car honked its horn outside. That was Jane from next door. Her boy was just a month older than Chris, and she was taking them both to the nursery.

  It was half seven already. He had fallen asleep again.

  Unconscious! Who are you kidding?!

  The front door slammed.

  Anna had left. He had not even heard her say goodbye.

  She didn’t. Why would she speak to something like you?

  *

  Anna waved to the retreating Espace, turned, and made her way up Norfolk Road. The line of bare London Plane trees seemed to almost blend with the leaden sky. A few leaves hung stubbornly on to the branches, refusing to succumb to the inevitable.

  The walk to Southbury Station was cold. Despite the mild November, winter had ridden in on the coat-tails of December and was now biting, making up for lost time.

  Although the platform was busy, the train itself was not so full that everyone could not take a seat. Many of the city workers had moved out to Cheshunt in the boom, and it appeared that more and more were choosing to work from home during these straitened times.

  Anna looked out at the darkening sky. Snow was coming.

  Seven Sisters was even busier than she expected. She supposed it was the build up to Christmas - people taking a day off to get presents. But even so, she had to fight harder than usual to get off the train. Why did people on the platform always stand in front of the carriage doors when they know people are trying to get off?

  She was in the office by half-eight and had just finished making her first cup of coffee when Steve Sloman came into the staff kitchen.

  “Morning,” he said, starting to make his own cup of tea. Steve was one of the regional directors and was well regarded, not just amongst the staff but also with the clients. He had that quality that just made everyone think, it’s all going to be ok. “How are things?”

  “Yeah. Fine. You?”

  “Pretty good. We’ve got a couple of big pitches next week. Hopefully, see if we can land at least one. See if we can’t replace USS.” The loss of the Universities Superannuation Service had been a blow. Little work, and high return. “What’s your load like at the moment?”

  “A bit full to be honest with you. A few of the banks had backup centres in Fiji, and what with the coup, all the lines have been cut. We’re trying to retrieve what we can from the European backup sites, but it looks like they’ll have a lost a week’s worth of data.”

  “What are we talking? Transactions?”

  “No. Mundane stuff mostly. Email correspondence. Net traffic stats. Nothing that will cause a ripple out there.” She nodded towards the window. Out in the real world.

  Companies lost data all the time. Sometimes it could be retrieved, sometimes not. But what mattered was how sensitive it was. The more sensitive, the more they could charge.

  “Any chance you could fit a job in for me?”

  “Depends on what it is.” she said, sipping her coffee.

  “It’s for The Met. Digital camcorder got fried.”

  “I didn’t know we had the contract.”

  “We don’t. Their usual contractor is backed up, and can’t touch it for a week. We’re the first reserve on their contractor list. Might be a good opportunity for us to try and raise our profile.”

  “Hmmm. How much data?”

  “Hard to say. Somewhere between and an hour and ninety minutes of footage.”

  “Do you know the resolution?”

  “No. But it’ll be high. It was a Beeb job.”

  “I thought you said it was a camcorder?”

  “It is. You know, one of those on the shoulder things.”

  “Steve!”

  “What? What would you call it?”

  “A film camera.”

  Steve shrugged. “Ok. A film camera.”

  Anna rolled her eyes. That was the problem with reps. They always promised the client the earth and then handed it off to the grunts with no thought as to if it could ever be delivered.

  “What’s the spec?”

  “Not sure. Probably twenty-five frames-per-second.”

  “How much of it has been lost?”

  “Looks like a hundred percent.”

  “Steve! Come on. I’m good, but I’m not a miracle worker.”

  “Anna. Please. We could really do with a win.”

  Anna paused for a moment. “Ok. I’m too soft for my own good, aren’t I?”

  “Thank you. Really appreciated.”

  “I’m not promising anything. I’ll have a look at it. If there’s nothing that I can do, or it’s going to take more than a couple of days then that is just tough.”

  *

  Anna was examining the broken camera casing when Ben came in at ten to nine. She did not even have to look up to know it was him. The tinny tsh-tsh-tsh coming from his earphones was so familiar to her that she often wondered how he did not permanently damage his hearing.

  She remembered when she was discovering her own taste in music, in the grunge and Seattle sound of the early nineties. But what Ben listened to – well it all just sounded the same. She wished she was cooler. That she could get it. But she did not.

  What was it this week? Slipknot? He had tried, bless him. He had played her some of the quieter tracks, and they were ok, albeit not her thing. But then he had tried the one about pushing fingers into her eyes. Or was it his eyes.

  She had remembered what it felt like to feel that angry. To want to rise, resist and rebel. Killing In The Name still made her feel sixteen again. Now that was proper metal. But the truth was that she just was not that angry any
more. Not even at her feckless husband.

  She just had to look at her little boy and she felt content. And when she was not feeling content she felt tired. God, when had she got this old?

  “Hi,” said Ben, in his typical borderline non-committal grunt.

  Anna had sized him up when she first met him. At twenty-two, he was a recent IT graduate and still dressed as if he was studying. He made an effort, in so far that he wore a shirt and his shoes had been polished, but if he had ever been shown how to iron, he had long forgotten. It was not that he was not talented. Anna wished that she had been able to grasp concepts the way that Ben did. He made it look easy and was able to extrapolate protocols from one process to another, often in a myriad of combinations that would never have occurred to her.

  It was his lethargy that bothered her. He was never excited. Never down. Never frustrated. He did his nine to five-thirty without complaint and then went off with his droogy mates on a Friday night. He had invited her along once, to some club. Slimelight. What sort of name was that for a club?

  Anna knew this was unfair. Perhaps she was resenting Ryan for taking those years from her. She could have been free and single, and tearing London a new one every weekend. But it was much more sensible to save a deposit for flat, and then a house. She had chosen him and he her. And they had just sort of drifted along ever since.

  “New Lost Prophets album,” Ben said, offering her an earphone. It was caked in wax.

  “You’re ok thanks,” she said, turning back to the camera. Ben looked disappointed, but then he always did. “They weren’t the same after Chiplin left,” she finished.

  Ben looked stunned, and Anna felt proud that she had forced him to emote. I’m still cool, she thought.

  “I’ve got the new Pearl Jam album on order if you want a copy,” he said. Perhaps he had finally found a crack in Anna’s seemingly impenetrable exterior. She knew about Lost Prophets! Finally some common ground!

  “You’re alright thanks. Ten was their peak. Come and have a look at this.”

  “Pretty banged up. What is it?”

  “Blue Job.”

  “Wha...” At twenty-two, Ben still only thought about one thing other than music.

  “I said blue,” said Anna, half smiling. God, she had almost seen those unreasonably tight trousers twitch. She remembered when Ryan had been like that. All fire and raw passion. In those early weeks, they had both been little more than animals. They had missed so many lectures, just to stay in bed, exploring each other’s bodies with an almost casual roughness, each pushing the other towards some unknown limit. After that first weekend, she had walked like John Wayne for a week. That memory gave her a warm glow.

  And then of course real life had dared to intrude. Exams had to be taken and then careers started. What did that leave? A snatched dinner before crashing in front of the television in order to numb once sharp minds and then to bed where they were too tired to do anything other than grinding up against each other quickly once a week. In time that had become once a fortnight. And then less frequent.

  Of course, it was not always mundane. Sometimes the weekends were better when they managed to get out and have some fresh air. But invariably it was a downward spiral, and she knew it. Christopher had come along nearly twelve months ago, and whilst she had no frame of reference, the pregnancy and delivery had been easier than most. But with all her attention on the little man, the distance between her and Ryan seemed to grow. And the child was not even demanding. He was a happy little boy. Maybe she used that relationship to hide from Ryan.

  But it was his fault as well. What was once a fire was now little more than embers and he did little to stoke it back up. There was no suggestion of leaving him. He was her husband. The father of her child. But another forty or fifty years of gradually increasing indifference?

  So what? An affair? Add a bit of spice back into her life? But where would she find the time? And with whom? There was not anyone at work that she would touch with a barge-pole, and she did not socialise anymore, or at least not like she used to. There was the Christmas get together with the girls, and then the works summer party. Hardly a social butterfly.

  She suspected that Ben had a crush on her, but boys of his age had a crush on anything with a pulse.

  “Oh, the Law. Right.” Ben’s comments brought her back from her brief daydream.

  “Yeah. One of Steve’s clients.”

  “So what happened?”

  “You know better than that,” she said, removing the screws that barely held the remains of the casing together. “We recover. We don’t question. Here, hold this.” She handed him the screwdriver and removed the case. “Have a look and tell me what you think,” she continued.

  Learn by doing, her eyes said.

  Ben took his coat off, put his earphones on his workstation, and pulled over a large magnifying glass.

  “The main circuit looks fried. There is impact damage on the sides. But I can’t see any burns. Probably not an electrical short. Maybe mags?” Magnets were always a likely source of data loss, and Anna was secretly proud at how Ben applied deductive reasoning.

  “Possibly. Look again.”

  Ben returned to his examination of the circuit. “Is that a bit of melting? There on the solder?”

  “What would that suggest?”

  “Someone microwaved it?”

  “Some sort of microwave radiation, yes. So what would the next steps be?”

  “Err... scan the hard drive. Copy it if we can. Find the longest piece of continuous data and try and see if anything can be recovered from there?”

  “Good. Off you go.”

  *

  It was about an hour later when Anna returned to Ben’s workbench. “What have you got?”

  “Not much,” said Ben, sitting up and stretching. “Sector zero is intact, and I’ve got file sizes and locations. But the actual files themselves... well most of them are toast. The audio has completely gone.”

  “Ok. Have you got the File Allocation Table?”

  “Yup.”

  “Good. So where is the longest set of unbroken data?”

  “Looks like it is about the twenty-three-minute mark. But it’s not a lot. Maybe a megabyte or two. Three at the most.”

  “Let’s have a look at it.” Anna leaned over Ben and called the file up. At best it was maybe a couple of frames. Probably less. “Ok. Create a separate directory. Now before you start processing, get familiar with it. You’ll need to be able to tell the difference between a raw and part recovered file.”

  The file appeared in the window of the recovery application. White snow.

  “See?” said Ben.

  Anna smiled. It never ceased to amaze her what the untrained eye could miss. She took a sheet of paper and drew an outline on it.

  “What’s that?”

  “That is what will appear on the first pass. Go on. Run it.”

  Ben set the recovery programme to run a single pass, and a few minutes later, the file reloaded into the window. White snow.

  Ben looked at her, confused that his mentor could have got it wrong.

  Anna smiled. “Do you see it?” She put the paper side-by-side with the monitor.

  “No.”

  “There.” Anna traced the outline for him on the screen. Ben looked from the monitor to Anna’s drawing and back again. He saw the faintest outline on the screen, and it matched Anna’s crude drawing.

  “How?” he asked, bewildered.

  “Just practice. Don’t worry. You’ll get there. Right set that for say another twenty passes, and then come and give me a hand with Fiji.”

  *

  It was after lunch when they returned to Ben’s station. They had both brought sandwiches from home, but Ben had chosen to sit with Fiona in the staff room. Anna had decided that that Fiona was odd.

  It was not that she was the only other woman in a company of nearly a hundred borderline autistic socially inept men, but it was her evasiveness. She never
answered a question, and she had never met Anna’s eye. Not once.

  Fiona had started at the same time as Ben, but she had a more natural flair for the discipline. Anna knew that she would pass her accreditation exams the first time. Ben, on the other hand, was a fifty-fifty. She was a few years older than Ben, possibly mid-twenties, but she had never confirmed her age to anyone. Her pale skin and shoulder length black hair had set all the trousers twitching. Not that any of the men would actually know what to say to her, let alone do to her, assuming she even let them within ten yards.

  She was smart, efficient, and in every way a model employee, and possibly a role model for every other woman in the industry. And she only had eyes for Ben. Anna knew that Ben thought it was sexual - that there was at least a chance he could get into her knickers. Anna had to have the chat with him very early on, about what was and was not acceptable material to email. He had looked suitably chagrined.

  Anna did not dare to think when was the last time Ben had got any. Certainly not since he had started with her. Poor boy must be rubbing his palm raw. But Anna also knew that, for Fiona, the last thing on her mind was sex. It was not just that she was out of Ben’s league, although it was like comparing the Premiership with the Nationwide Conference. It was that she was playing with him.

  Anna had watched Fiona flirting by numbers. Flicking the hair. Tilting the head to expose her neck. The kitten laugh. It was the smile that gave it away though. The smile that was far from innocent and said let me in or I’ll huff and puff.

  A predator’s smile.

  She suspected that Fiona was building up for a sexual harassment case, and she had already put Steve and HR on notice. Of course, there was not much that they could do other than monitor the situation. The Christmas Party was only a few weeks away, and it would not be the first time there had been a sticky ending to that event.

  When Anna had first started with the company, there had been another Anna who started at the same time. They were known as Big Anna and Little Anna, and she did not like being Big Anna. At the Christmas Party that year, Little Anna was not seen much after nine, and the next morning an embarrassed-looking director was seen leaving her hotel room.