You got a Tigger, she said.
That’s correct, a Tigger. He had a walnut face and all sorts of knocks and blemishes on his pate. He grinned and showed a bright gold tooth.
I’m here to see Miss Aisen, she said. (The snake’s head had been bashed.)
Did you meet him down the creek?
He was looking for a tête-à-tête. He asked, You know what that means?
Yes.
Of course you do.
He had comic eyebrows and bandy legs, sun-brown on both sides.
I got bitten by a taipan once, he said, opening the door for her.
I bet you did. (She had learned to talk like this by listening to her dad.)
Mervyn’s thongs slapped against the morning light. The girl could smell burned toast, fresh-cut grass, water sprinkling on hot soil.
I thought that would be a bit fatal, a taipan.
Old wives’ tail.
Did you use a tourniquet?
Beer and a Valium.
By the time she arrived in the kitchen she was smiling. It was a small room, painted a wild bright yellow, filled with sunshine, hanging herbs and garlic, high stacks of newspapers along the walls, a blackboard with rosters of names and dates, a laminex kitchen table with three odd chairs.
Mervyn continued out the back, through the flywire.
Your visitor is here.
The familiar computer was in front of her, the IIx that she knew from school.
Take it down the creek, Miss Aisen called, before it starts to pong.
Next to the computer was a modem, a bright red cradle. This was probably the only surviving coupler modem in Melbourne, but I didn’t have a clue. I understood that you took Miss Aisen’s normal everyday phone off the hook and placed it here, and I could, if I ever dared, if I ever got a sneaky chance, get onto Altos.
Miss Aisen wore short shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and gardening gloves. She had a shiny sweaty face.
So, she said, you want to learn to code.
All I wanted was to get online. But I insisted on the code. Not baby language, I said.
BASIC is a proper language. The fun bits get you to the hard bits.
So I could write a program in BASIC?
And what did you want your program to do?
Fool around, I said, yearning for that bright red cradle.
Do you know what that is there?
What?
What you’re staring at.
Is it a modem? I asked.
Have you seen a modem before?
Can you teach me?
Listening to the tapes, it was comical how Gaby highlighted her deceitfulness. She was her mother’s daughter after all.
I’ll teach you to program, Miss Aisen said. We can do that as a project, but we are not going to give up on BASIC.
I don’t think I want that, no.
If you want to be serious. BASIC is exactly that.
Maybe not.
Was Miss Aisen intrigued by this resistance? Surely, yes, she was a teacher, but then her father was demanding a jar to put his snake in. He had thirty-four bottled snakes which he planned to bequeath to the Melbourne museum. She dealt with this issue and then returned to her pupil.
Gaby, what is it you really want?
Yeah, right.
I beg your pardon?
You’ll get crabby.
I think we should trust each other a bit more than that.
When can I come back?
We haven’t even started.
Yes, when could I come back?
You don’t want a lesson now?
No.
Tomorrow morning if you like. But why?
I need to get something.
What do you need?
Can I really come back tomorrow morning?
Then Mervyn was demanding attention.
And so, of course, Miss Aisen went, as per usual because, as she told him, she was his doormat. And she gave up her bean jar and he coiled the snake inside it and poured the illegal formaldehyde and he finessed the coils with a piece of dowling. When he was finished she returned to her pupil but now with her father right behind her, polishing his horrible jar with his clean white tea towel.
What do you think of this, young lady?
The child became beautiful.
I brung a gift for you, he said.
The girl reached for the bottle and rubbed her index finger at the place where the snake’s crushed head lay against the glass.
It’s a beauty, she said.
I’ll get you a little Super Glue to keep it safe.
Miss Aisen watched her father glue the lid and saw how the girl was filled with light. She watched her leave, that summer car-park hop, as she carried the bottled snake, dancing across the gravel. Who would not want, with all their heart, to be a teacher?
22
OF COURSE the fugitive was on the Hawkesbury and never once laid eyes on the astringent little Aisen or inhaled her hallway, her kitchen floor polish, Stove Black, or 1950s plastics heating in the sun. Regardless, it was clear to him, inarguably so, that it was not merely an antique modem his subject had found, but surrogate grandparents who would, in their own ways, be prepared to love her unconditionally and thereby provide her with a history she had not even known she lacked.
Her first recollections of Darlington Grove are of soil, loamy, clay, dry, wet and are only interesting because they are so clearly disconnected from anything she could have experienced until that time.
All her language describing Mervyn Aisen (an “old shoe” for instance) indicates a comfort she could not have felt when first meeting him. Indeed, on entering their kitchen, her intention was to deceive them both, something she pointed out not once (fast forward) but many times. She fled from her first lesson in order to fetch her collection of passwords and access numbers. You can’t understand, she said. You can’t possibly understand what I felt. I did not have to die. I WAS GOING TO USE AISEN’S MODEM. It was as if Frederic had anticipated this very moment and had made a stash of everything I would need when he wasn’t by my side.
He already saw the shit ahead of us, and if our files were to be wiped or arrested we would store them where no-one would ever look. On paper. You’ve seen the Federal Police leaving those suburban houses with their cardboard boxes, floppy disks, hard drives, cables, modems. Did you ever see them with The Lord of the Rings?
Frederic stole two copies from Mark Rubbo in Lygon Street and we turned them into paper brains. We assigned numeric values to the ten most common letters a-e-i-o-u-h-n-r-s-t. (a=1 and t=10). Do you think the Australian computer crime squad would even open The Lord of the Rings? Would they see the pinpricks? Do they even know now, years later? A single volume held as many 800 numbers as there are blackberries growing beside the road to Eildon. In any case, the Altos twelve-digit NUA was in there: Book Three, Chapter Two, “The Riders of Rohan.”
Gaby returned to Darlington Grove on the Sunday but then lost her nerve. She begged another lesson, ten more guilty dollars, lost her nerve again. It was stinky hot, she said, summer holidays. My mother was cast in a movie and was filming at Mount Macedon. I waited three days in an empty house then came back to the Aisens’ so early in the morning that I was given the job of collecting the woodchips for their bath heater. My face was still bruised and yellow from the accident but they decided I was a good girl when I was actually a thief and burglar. I made lethal black tea the way they liked it, and two grilled cheese sandwiches. The old fellow went to see a man about a dog and I sat and waited, watching Miss Aisen swallow her dark brown tea. It got thundery. Then she went out to draw the shadecloth across the lettuce, almost enough time, not enough. Those early Macs took a long time to boot up.