It was certainly less convenient to go online via one hundred metres of cable, but it was a rush as well, to be faster and smarter than anyone, to be a trickster amongst governments and corporations run by complacent admins, with carelessly protected networks. These were anywhere you looked. From Peli’s HiAce Frederic could stroll unhindered into a massive computer known as Altos. Watch, watch, he said, and if Gaby did not know what she was seeing, Frederic told her. He was sweet and patient and excited too. He gave Altos the digital version of a masonic handshake. And Altos thought he was a fucking corporation.
Crammed inside that van with fuggy boys, Gaby was no longer the tangle-haired cherub dribbling a football across the green in Parkville. She was five kilograms heavier. Her breasts pushed in against Frederic’s back. Her cheek was against his cheek and she liked that he had stolen the modem. As his pretty fingers fluttered like moth wings across the keys, she wandered from world to world in a universe she had not known existed.
Now she understood how it had felt to him to lose his phone line. Being REALLY online was like Zork to the millionth power. From a dark street in sleepy Moonee Ponds, she was teleported into NASA. Frederic passed her the keyboard and she could write nothing better than FOO WAS HERE. How embarrassing, she said on tape, please don’t report that. No-one would believe it anyway.
17
GABY SAID, We had to deal with Dad aka the Thief aka Matty Matovic. He was snake-eyed, slim with a pool-hall hunch, always stalking around some imaginary table. He was drop-dead handsome until you saw his missing teeth. Also: he was bitter. He favoured white T-shirts and lamb’s-wool sweaters, even on a rainy night. Like when we were summoned, Gaby said, to his back corner of Toto’s with his unsold copies of Direct Action, grey and sodden, on the table. He looked more like a betting man, but he really was a fence, Gaby said: I thought, I have seen a gun. I have seen a fence. My life was turning out quite well.
Frederic’s father wouldn’t look at me, but I could not help looking at him, so creepy but also graceful, rolling a cigarette with his long yellow fingers. He felt me watching and he twisted his body sarcastically—which he could really do—and tossed the menu at his son.
Saw your mate Peli, he said to Frederic. We waited. His eyes were in that state we then called OWTH (offended-waiting-to-happen). Frederic hid behind his fringe, studying the menu.
Hey. Dad rapped the table.
I could have slapped his face.
Frederic said he would like lasagna and a can of Coke.
Hey.
Frederic flicked his hair back. What?
You, he said, having no clue he was addressing a genius.
Your mate, the Thief said. Peli. You never told me he worked for Telecom. He helped me shift some stuff to Melton Self Storage in his van.
I’m hungry, Frederic said.
I knew the Thief would never pay for me so I said I was on a diet.
He put his stained hand across his mouth, just like a girl whispering in class. You know what trashing is? he hissed. Of course we knew. Like trashing a hotel room? I suggested just to watch him curl his lip. No, sweetheart, like picking up the trash from Telecom.
I told him I didn’t think that would be his sort of thing. He looked at me. Up and down, as if he were astonished I could speak. He said, Girlie, you wouldn’t know “my thing” if it bit you on the bum.
I knew what Break and Enter was. I said that sounded like what he had in mind, but he wasn’t interested in me.
You’d only be taking waste paper from the bloody government, he told Frederic. If they wanted it they wouldn’t throw it out.
Frederic said he wasn’t sure.
What if I talked Mum into reinstating your phone line?
She won’t, Frederic said, but he looked my way, signalling: we wanted this.
Not interested, son?
Frederic licked his lips. I thought, oh shit, is this going where I think it is?
You and Peli. He’s got the wheels. And you’ll know what’s worth snaffling.
He tried and failed to tousle his son’s hair. Then he called the waitress and considered her body and ordered one lasagna and a glass of water.
He told us that his mate had told him that they had some interesting devices in those Telecom exchanges. He knew they were devices that should be studied. His mate could use the hardware, but he reckoned the waste paper was where the money was, thousands of Saudi credit card numbers, people who think nothing of putting a BMW on their Amex.
Dad, your mate’s a wanker.
But all Dad wanted, he said, was for Frederic and Peli to pick up the recycling. He didn’t need them to hang around reading it. They could pick it up and piss off home. Study it at their leisure there. If they found anything interesting, they could copy it down. They could have it. It was theirs. They could even share it with Miss Uptight here. Then Peli could bring the bag to him in Brunny.
You’ll get ripped off, Dad. You won’t know what you’re selling.
So you don’t want your own telephone line?
Apparently Gaby and Frederic wanted a telephone line more than anything that I, Felix Moore, could ever imagine. So when Frederic stood up, when it was clear he intended to walk away, when Gaby should have been relieved, she was, she admitted to me, disappointed.
Frederic said he didn’t want the lasagna. He would think about the offer.
Bullshit, said Matty Matovic. Is that fucking mascara running down your face?
Gaby had to rush to catch him at the door and then, in the spotlights of the cars turning right from Queensberry Street, he kissed her and she held him and he told her how he loved her and that was all that mattered in his life. He said he wanted to marry me, she said. I think I cried. We walked back to Park-o-tight together, and I was in love, and I do believe it was then, on that night, I learned that deep in the maze of Telecom the techs scrawled user names and passwords, restricted 800 numbers, “secure” information that they then threw in the bin, scraps of paper, cigarette packs, the backs of envelopes, on yellow dockets. There the honey massed, in thick black plastic bags, in dumpsters, a harvest worthy of a dungeon and a poison moat. Pick up key.
In the “twisty little passages” of the computer underground, Gaby said, there was a species dedicated to the collection of discarded information, furtive scholars, jesters, fools, hackers, phreakers, practitioners of the black art of recycling who picked the locks of Telecom exchanges and, like dung beetles busy with their ancient occupation, rolled their holy shit into the night. The passwords and user names would be useful in so many ways e.g. when you got an actual phone line you could go online free of charge, and clicky clacky there you would be: lying in bed with your BFF, jumping off the Hamburg springboard, shooting the shit, hanging out on the bridge where no-one knew the girl was a girl.
Dad was a thief, but for Fallen Angel and Undertoad (as they would be known) the highest value of this information was best appreciated in terms of the culture of the gift.