‘Thank you, but I’ve several hours’ work to do. It can wait.’
‘We’ll be through here by 5.00. If there’s no name down, it’s all yours.’ He jerked his head over at a sheet of paper pinned near the door.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I walked over to the sheet, and the lecture resumed.
‘Now, the early analogue machines had…’
I looked for today’s date. Beside the time of five o’clock there was a name, written in thick, untidy writing: E. Scrutch. I nodded my thanks to the lecturer and left the room. He didn’t notice; he was back in the days when computers were bigger than dinosaurs and a lot more ponderous; now they’re smaller than guns, and a damn sight more dangerous. The security man wasn’t there when I got downstairs; I ducked behind his desk and found a row of keys, all identical and tagged ‘Pass — must be signed for’. I pocketed one and left the building.
The name E. Scrutch stuck in my mind. Who was E. Scrutch? Who could possibly christen anyone E. Scrutch? It was one of the most singularly unattractive-sounding names I could remember encountering; I imagined him to be short, thin, with a jutting face, and stubble on both his chin and the top of his head.
I took my usual precaution of scanning the area as I walked away from the building; I didn’t feel there was much likelihood of my having a tail, but the scanning process had been so thoroughly drummed into me during my training six years ago, and during the yearly refresher courses, that it had become part of my normal movement. Within a second, and probably quite a bit less, and in one seemingly innocent action, I knew what was going on in the full 360 degrees of area around me, and to the casual observer would have appeared to have done no more than to have straightened some ruffled hairs on the back of my neck.
I carried on across the campus, towards downtown Boston and the hope of dry boots.
Half an hour later I was seated in sublime warmth in a cafe named Uncle Bunny’s Incredible Edibles, my feet having a good time inside a thick, dry pair of socks inside a thick, waterproof pair of boots. I had a mug of steaming coffee and a plate somewhere underneath one of Uncle Bunny’s smaller sandwiches. It wasn’t just the plate that had disappeared but most of the table as well, under a sprawling mountain of turkey, avocado, chips, wholemeal bread, bean sprouts and gherkins.
It was a student hangout cafe — everything this end of town was a student hangout — with orange tables and hard plastic chairs, advertisements in the window and a student staff. The cafe was quiet at the moment, the lunchtime rush hadn’t yet begun, and the few young hopes of America that were there sat, in the traditional arched back poise of students, staring mournfully into black holes, which, when they came out of their reveries, they remembered to be mugs of coffee, and they sipped.
In this great land of new awareness, of car-sharing, thought-sharing, experience-sharing, wife-sharing and God-knew-what-else-sharing, I sincerely hoped E. Scrutch would be into computer-sharing.
11
E. Scrutch came as a shock; the name which had haunted me through a long and slow day belonged to some 20 to 25 stone of very aggressive female. She was completely and utterly enormous, like something out of a comic cartoon book, except that she was real, standing there before my eyes in the computer room.
Her presence in the room diminished it, distorted the perspective like a scene from Alice in Wonderland. She had short dark hair, which served only to accentuate the size of her head, and this, whilst considerably larger than is normal for such an object, looked like an afterthought that had been plucked from the wrong-sized box, before being plonked, like a pimple, on the top of her bull neck.
She wore a badly cut full-length smock, which did nothing to disguise the total shapelessness of her body, and made it quite impossible to identify her breasts, stomach or even knees amid the enormous rolls of flesh that hung about her; were she horizontal, and a couple of hundred miles long, she would have been a geographer’s paradise. As she was, standing upright and about 64 inches tall, visions of paradise did not roll immediately into my mind.
She was staring at me with a pair of eyes that could have been glass, except they were bloodshot. ‘You want something?’ It wasn’t a question, it was a military command, barked out with all the softness and femininity of a sergeant major addressing the first parade of a platoon of new recruits.
‘No, don’t let me bother you.’
‘You are bothering me. I’ve got a lotta work to do and you’re the fourth schmuck to bother me in the last ten minutes. I’ve booked this room, so why doesn’t everybody fucking leave me alone?’ She stuck a finger in her ear, and twiddled it furiously; she then removed it, and started scraping a lump of wax from under her finger nail. Gaining access to this computer wasn’t going to be easy.
I tried the name-dropping trick once more. ‘Dr Yass is going to be upset — he’s asked me to get some work done for him by this evening.’
‘I don’t give a shit about that creep; got the worst-run campus in the country and the only way to get a fucking degree out of him is to be 5 foot 7, with blonde hair.’ She glared at me. ‘Either sex,’ she added.
Our heart-to-heart chat was interrupted by the emergence from the computer room of the operator. ‘I’ve fixed that tape drive — won’t give any more trouble now. I have to go home; my kid has to go to the hospital. I won’t be back for a couple of hours at least. Try not to break anything while I’m gone.’ He hurried off.
I felt that a new line of attack was required, since conventional and logical attempts to reason were likely to end in my physical ejection from the room. I didn’t say anything for some moments, and she stood blinking at me, like a toad eyeing a fly. I shrugged my shoulders and attempted to put on my ‘I’m actually a very nice guy’ expression.
‘You look like you need a good crap,’ she said.
They say that when a girl takes an interest in the condition of your clothes then she’s in the marriage stakes; I wondered if the same applied for an interest in the condition of one’s bowels. Her sheer size and physical ugliness weren’t my major worries; my eyelids were in good working order and in any emergency could be clamped shut. But I hadn’t learned how to shut my nostrils, and since I could smell her clearly from here, close up I reckoned she’d be pretty ghastly. But I steeled myself — somehow. ‘I like your dress,’ I said.
For a moment she looked like she’d been hit by a nuclear bomb. The moment passed and then she looked like she’d been hit by a passing car. That moment passed too, and she then looked like she’d been hit by a pillow-load of feathers. That moment passed too, and she looked like the back door of a Tiffany delivery truck had just burst open in passing her and showered her with one whole load of diamonds. ‘My dress?’
‘It’s very pretty.’ If ever, in its entire history, the British Secret Service had expected an agent to make the supreme sacrifice of all time, that moment, I felt, with not a little trepidation, might be about to come.
‘You like it?’ She was actually reeling in shock. It was probably the first compliment she had received in her 24-odd years on this planet and she was finding it difficult to handle.
‘I do. You look lovely when you’re angry. Don’t start being nice now.’
She just stood and looked at me. Then she put both her hands into her smock pocket and her eyes flooded with tears. I offered her a cigarette and she accepted; I lit it for her and put it in her mouth. Great crocodile tears came down. I waited until they’d subsided, and then laid it on further. ‘You look like you’ve had a rough time just recently.’