CHAPTER 8
It was unfortunate for Eldred but merciful for Mr and Mrs Jones, sitting at home with a gift-wrapped football, a birthday tea table, two aunts and a policewoman, that Charlie Austin was driving his girlfriend Mandy home at midnight and noticed a light on in the school.
As Charlie was the computer science teacher and there had been several recent break-ins at the school, his natural first thought was that local youths were after his precious computers. He slammed on the brakes and flung himself out of the car, shouting at Mandy to stay where she was, and ran to the phone box by the school gates to call the key-holding member of staff and the police.
Mandy, having been reared on solid feminist doctrine, ignored his command to stay out of the action, such as it was, and joined him. After a few token curses to establish his manhood, Charlie went back to lock the car and agreed to let Mandy stay with him while he pursued the dangerous course of standing at the gates, staring up at the lighted classroom window and speculating about who might be in there and how they had gained entry.
When she had said, ‘Probably some kids playing Terminal Terror Targets,’ three times, Mandy fell silent. Charlie advanced other theories, contradicted himself, then finally they both said at once, ‘Have to wait for the police,’ and laughed.
Two police officers and the school's deputy head arrived simultaneously. Charlie and Mandy followed them up the stairs. ‘Stand back and leave this to us,’ hissed the younger policeman as they neared the computer room. ‘Surprise is the essence.’ Scorning the key held out to him by the deputy head, he hurled himself against the door, surprising himself with a sore shoulder that became worse, not better, over the next few days. His second surprise was that the door did not give way. Silently, the deputy head pushed him aside and unlocked it.
The five of them stood looking at the small hunched figure of Eldred Jones, seated in lonely silence in front of a bright computer screen, typing furiously. He turned and squinted at them, blurryeyed from concentration, then reacted fast, punching the relevant keys to close the document, but Charlie moved faster still.
‘I'll have that,’ he said. ‘Confiscated.’ He whipped the disk out of the machine and pocketed it.
Eldred screamed like a wounded animal.
Mandy flinched. ‘Give it back to him, Charlie,’ she said.
‘It's school property,’ said Charlie.
‘Don't delete it!’ Eldred begged. ‘It's my program!’
‘You've no right to be in here,’ Charlie said, ‘making up computer games on school property. How did you get into the building?’
‘We'll do the questioning,’ said the younger policeman, rubbing his shoulder. ‘Come along with us now.’
‘Hold on,’ said his colleague. ‘Could this be the boy reported missing this afternoon?’
So it was that Eldred was returned to Flat 43, Cottrill Court, Aylmers Road, to end his ninth birthday in disgrace.
Edgar and Mildred were to remember the day chiefly for the hours between 6 p.m. and midnight when they sat, first expectantly then with mounting panic, in the open-plan living room at the table with its tuna sandwiches and iced birthday cake in the shape of a clown's face, staring at the present they had told Eldred he wanted.
In between phone calls to schoolfriends’ parents and the police, they took it in turns to say, ‘If anything's happened to him, I'll never forgive myself,’ and to reassure one another that neither had ever done anything to Eldred that needed forgiving. In the end, when their son was restored to them safe and sound, it was Eldred they couldn't forgive.
Eldred's chief impression of the day was of elation in writing the program, followed by despair and terror in the sleepless small hours of the morning alone at home in bed: a waking nightmare that Mr Austin might wipe the disk without first printing out the contents and that he, Eldred, would never again get access to a machine on which to reproduce the graphics so accurately, even if he remembered them.
In later years he was to recall few details of his parents’ reaction, but only that it was the occasion of a change of climate in family relationships, from cool to chilly and sometimes icy.
The elder police officer's memory of that day died as soon as his shift ended. A missing youngster had been found playing computer games in a local school and had been returned safely to his family. The event was logged in a couple of lines for the record and the officer saw no need to allow it to occupy space in his mind as well.
The younger officer remembered the incident, not with his mind but with his sore shoulder.
The high school's deputy head was to enter Eldred's name in her mental records as a troublesome child who got her out of a warm bed to open up the school doors late at night. Being a vindictive person, she began to plan complicated forms of revenge for the time when Eldred would be old enough to enter the sphere of her full time persecution, and was seriously disappointed when health problems caused by excess acid forced her to take early retirement before that date.
Mandy, Charlie Austin's girlfriend, was haunted for a few days by Eldred's scream and the anguish on his face when Charlie took the disk away from him. The vision soon faded but years later, married to a fast-food franchise holder, her children were to find her unusually considerate in giving them time to finish their activities before calling them for tea or bathtime or bed.
It was only Charlie Austin whose memories of Eldred's ninth birthday were entirely positive, for Charlie, staying behind in the computer room while the police escorted Eldred out, inserted the disk and began to scan its contents.
What he saw made him remove the disk again very quickly, allowing no one to see it, and return to school early the following morning. Slowly scrolling the text up the VDU screen, he read and re-read Eldred's project. When he reached the unfinished appendix and found pages of almost completed computer graphics, a beautifully detailed cross-section and accurately scaled diagrams of a timesaving design for a waste recycling plant, he pursed his lips and let out a stream of expletives.
‘Fucking Henry!’ he concluded. ‘We've only got a sodding genius in the school!’