“How long were you waiting there?” Justin asked, but Guido’s only answer was a frown. Guido is a master of self-diagnosis, Tessa reminds him, much impressed by her recent visit to the sick kids’ hospital in Milan. If Guido’s ill he asks for the nurse. If he’s very ill he asks for the Sister. And if he thinks he may be dying he asks for the doctor. And there’s not one of them who doesn’t come running.
“I must be at the school gates at five to nine,” Guido told Justin stiffly.
“No problem.” They were speaking English for Guido’s pride.
“Too late, I arrive in class out of breath. Too early, I hang around and make myself conspicuous.”
“Understood,” said Justin and, glancing in the mirror, saw that Guido’s complexion was waxy white, the way it looked when he needed a blood transfusion. “And in case you were wondering, we’ll be working in the oil room, not the villa,” Justin added reassuringly.
Guido said nothing, but by the time they reached the coast road the colour had returned to his face. Sometimes I can’t stand her proximity either, thought Justin.
The chair was too low for Guido and the stool was too high, so Justin went alone to the villa and fetched two cushions. But when he came back Guido was already standing at the pine desk, nonchalantly fingering the components of her laptop—the telephone connections for her modem, transformers for her computer and printer, the adaptor and printer cables and finally her computer itself which he handled with reckless disrespect, first flipping open the lid, then jamming the power socket into the laptop, but not thank God or not yet, connecting it to the mains. With the same cavalier confidence Guido shoved aside the modem, the printer and whatever else he didn’t need and plonked himself onto the cushions on the chair.
“OK,” he announced.
“OK what?”
“Switch on,” said Guido in English, nodding at the wall socket at his feet. “Let’s go.” And he handed Justin the cable to plug in. His voice, to Justin’s oversensitive ear, had acquired an unpleasant mid-Atlantic twang.
“Can anything go wrong?” Justin asked nervously.
“Like what, for instance?”
“Can we wipe it clean or something, by mistake?”
“By switching it on? No way.”
“Why not?”
Guido grandly circumnavigated the screen with his scarecrow hand. “Everything that’s in there she saved. If she don’t save it, she don’t want it, so it’s not in there. Is that reasonable or is that reasonable?”
Justin felt a bar of hostility form at the front of his head, which was what happened to him when people talked computer goobledygook at him.
“Then all right. If you say so. I’ll switch on.” And crouching, gingerly poked the plug into the wall socket. “Yes?”
“Oh man.”
Reluctantly Justin dropped the switch and stood up in time to see absolutely nothing happen on the screen. His mouth went dry and he felt sick. I’m trespassing. I’m a clumsy idiot. I should have got an expert, not a child. I should have learned to work the bloody thing myself. Then the screen lit up and gave him a procession of smiling, waving African children lined up outside a tin-roofed health clinic, followed by an aerial view of coloured rectangles and ovals scattered over a blue-grey field.
“What’s that?”
“The desktop.”
Justin peered over Guido’s shoulder and read: My Briefcase . . . Network Neighborhood . . . Shortcut to Connect. “Now what?”
“You want to see files? I show you files. We go to files, you read.”
“I want to see what Tessa saw. Whatever she was working on. I want to follow her footsteps and read whatever’s in there. I thought I made that clear.”
In his anxiety he was resenting Guido’s presence here. He wanted Tessa for himself again, at the counting table. He wanted her laptop not to exist. Guido directed an arrow to a panel on the lower left side of Tessa’s screen.
“What’s that thing you’re tapping?”
“The mouse pad. These are the last nine files she worked on. You want I show you the others? I show you the others, no problem.”
A panel appeared, headed Open File, Tessa’s Documents. He tapped again.
“She’s got like twenty-five files in this category,” he said. “Do they have titles?”
Guido leaned to one side, inviting Justin to look for himself:
Pharma Plague Trials
pharma-general plague-history Russia
pharma-pollution plague-Kenya Poland
pharma-in-3rd plague-cures Kenya
world plague-new Mexico
pharma-watchdogs plague-old Germany
pharma-bribes plague-charlatans Known-mortalities
pharma-litigation Wanza
pharma-cash
pharma-protest
pharma-hypocrisy
pharma-trials
pharma-fakes
pharma-cover-ups
Guido was moving the arrow and tapping again. “Arnold. Who’s this Arnold suddenly?” he demanded.
“A friend of hers.”
“He’s got documents too. Jesus, has he got documents!”
“How many?”
“Twenty. More.” Another tap. “Bits and Bobs. That some kind of British idiom?”
“Yes, it’s English. Not American, perhaps, but certainly English,” Justin replied huffily. “What’s that? What are you doing now? You’re going too fast.”
“No, I’m not. I’m going slow for you. I’m looking in her briefcase, how many folders she got. Wow. She got a lot of folders. Folder one, folder two. Then more folders.” He pressed again. His phoney American was driving Justin mad. Where did he pick it up? He’s been seeing too many American films. I shall speak to the headmaster. “See this? This is her recycle bin. Here’s where she puts whatever she’s thinking of throwing out.
“But she didn’t, presumably. Throw them out.”
“What’s there, she don’t throw out. What’s not, she did.” Another tap.
“What’s AOL?” Justin asked.
“America Online. I.S.P. Internet Service Provider. Whatever she got from AOL and kept, she stored it in this programme, same as her old e-mails. New messages, you’ve got to go on-line to get them. You want to send messages, you’ve got to go on-line to send them. No on-line, no new messages in or out.”
“I know that. It’s obvious.”
“You want I go on-line?”
“Not yet. I want to see what’s in there already.
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve got like days of reading. Weeks, maybe. All you do, you point the mouse and you click. You want to sit where I’m sitting?”
“You’re absolutely sure nothing can go wrong?” Justin insisted, lowering himself into the chair while Guido stood himself behind him.
“What she saved is saved. It’s like I said. Why else would she save it for?”
“And I can’t lose it?”
“Holy smoke, man! Not unless you click on delete. Even if you click on delete, it’s going to ask you, Justin, are you sure you want to delete? If you’re not sure, you say no. You press no. Press no means, No. I’m not sure. Click. That’s all there is. Go for it.”
Justin is cautiously tapping his way through Tessa’s labyrinth while Guido the tutor stands patronisingly at his side, incanting commands in his mid-Atlantic cyber-voice. When a procedure is new to Justin or confuses him, he calls a break, takes a sheet of paper and writes out the moves to Guido’s imperious dictation. New landscapes of information are unfolding before his eyes. Go here, go there, now go back to here. It’s all too vast, you ranged too wide, I’ll never catch you up, he tells her. If I read for a year, how will I ever know I’ve found what you were looking for?
Handouts from the World Health Organization.
Records of obscure medical conferences held in Geneva, Amsterdam and Heidelberg under the aegis of yet another unheard-of outpost of the United Nations’ sp
rawling medical empire.
Company prospectuses extolling unpronounceable pharmaceutical products and their life-enhancing virtues.
Notes to herself. Memos, A shocking quotation from Time magazine, framed with exclamation marks, raised in bold capitals and visible across the room to those who have eyes and do not avert them. A terrifying generality to galvanise her search for the particular:
IN 93 CLINICAL TRIALS RESEARCHERS ENCOUNTERED 691 ADVERSE REACTIONS BUT REPORTED ONLY 39 TO THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH.
A whole folder devoted to PW. Who in God’s name is PW when she’s at home? Despair. Take me back to the paper I understand. But when he clicks on Bits and Bobs, there is PW again, staring him in the face. And after one more click, all is clear: PW is short for PharmaWatch, a self-styled cyber-underground notionally based in Kansas with “a mission to expose the excesses and malpractices of the pharmaceutical industry,” not to mention “the inhumanity of self-styled humanitarians who are ripping off the poorest nations.”
Reports of so-called Off-Broadway conferences among demonstrators planning to converge on Seattle or Washington DC to make their feelings known to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
High talk of “The Great American Corporate Hydra,” and the “Monster Capital.” A frivolous article from Heaven knows where entitled “Anarchism is Back in Style.”
He clicks again to find the word Humanity under attack. Humanity is Tessa’s H-word, he discovers. Whenever she hears it, she confides to Bluhm in a chatty e-mail, she reaches for her revolver.
Every time I hear a pharma justifying its actions on the grounds of Humanity, Altruism, Duty to Mankind, I want to vomit, and that’s not because I’m pregnant. It’s because I’m reading at the same time how the US pharma-giants are trying to extend the life of their patents so that they can preserve their monopoly and charge what they damn well like and use the State Dept. to frighten the Third World out of manufacturing their own generic products at a fraction of the price of the branded version. All right, they’ve made a cosmetic gesture on Aids drugs. But what about—
I know all that, he thinks, and clicks back to the desktop, thence to Arnold’s Documents.
“What’s this?” he asks sharply, lifting his hands from the keyboard as if to disclaim responsibility. For the first time in their relationship, Tessa is demanding a password of him before she will let him in. Her command is finite: PASSWORD, PASSWORD, like a brothel sign winking on and off.
“Shit,” says Guido.
“Did she have a password when she taught you how to work this thing?” Justin demands, ignoring this scatological outburst.
Guido puts one hand across his mouth, leans forward and with his other hand types five characters. “Me,” he says proudly.
Five asterisks appear, otherwise nothing.
“What are you doing?” Justin demands.
“Typing my name. Guido.”
“Why?”
“That was the password,” he says, dropping into voluble Italian in his nervousness. “The I isn’t an I. It’s a one. The O’s a nought. Tessa was crazy about that stuff. In a password, you had to have at least one numeral. She insisted.”
“Why am I looking at stars?”
“Because they don’t want you to see Guido! Otherwise you could look over my shoulder and read the password! It didn’t work! Guido is not her password!” He buries his face in his hands.
“So what we can do is guess,” Justin suggests, trying to calm him.
“Guess how? Guess what? How many guesses do they give you? Like three!”
“You mean, if we guess wrong we don’t get there,” Justin says, valiantly trying to make light of the problem. “Hey. You. Come out of there.”
“Damn right we don’t!”
“All right, then. Let’s think. What other numerals are made from letters?”
“Three could be E back to front. Five could be S. There’s half a dozen of them. More. It’s awful—” still from inside his hands.
“And what happens exactly when we run out of chances?”
“It locks up and won’t try any more. What do you think?”
“Ever?”
“Ever!”
Justin hears the lie in his voice and smiles.
“And you think three shots is all we get?”
“Look, I’m not a lexicon, OK? I’m not a handbook. What I don’t know, I don’t say. It could be three. It could be ten. I’ve got to go to school. Maybe you should call the helpline.”
“Think. After Guido, what’s her favourite thing?”
Guido’s face at last emerges from his hands. “You. Who do you think? Justin!”
“She wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s her kingdom, not mine.”
“You’re just guessing! You’re ridiculous. Try Justin. I’m right, I know I am!”
“Look. After Justin, what’s her next favourite thing?”
“I wasn’t married to her. OK? You were!”
Justin thinks Arnold, then Wanza. He tries Ghita, entering the I as a 1. Nothing happens. He emits a nervous scoffing sound that says this childish game is beneath him, but this is because his mind is stretching in all directions and he doesn’t know which to follow. He thinks of Garth her dead father, and Garth her dead son, and rules them both out on aesthetic and emotional grounds. He thinks of Tessa but she is not an egomaniac. He thinks ARNO1D and ARN0LD and ARN01D but Tessa would not be so crass as to block Arnold’s file with a password saying Arnold. He flirts with Maria, which was her mother’s name, then with Mustafa, then Hammond, but none presses itself upon him as a code name or password. He looks down into her grave and watches the yellow freesias on the lid of her coffin disappear under the red soil. He sees Mustafa standing in the Woodrows’ kitchen, clutching his basket. He sees himself in his straw hat tending them in the garden in Nairobi and again here in Elba. He enters the word freesia, typing the I as 1. Seven asterisks appear but nothing happens. He enters the same word again, typing the S as 5.
“Will it still have me?” he asks softly.
“I’m twelve years old, Justin! Twelve!” He relents a little. “You got maybe one more try. Then it’s curtains. I resign, OK? It’s her laptop. Yours. Leave me out of this.”
He enters freesia a third time, leaving the S as 5 but turning the 1 back to an I, and finds himself staring at an unfinished polemical essay. With the aid of his yellow freesias he has invaded the file called Arnold and met a tract on human rights. Guido is dancing round the room.
“We got it! I told you! We’re fantastic! She’s fantastic!”
Why Are Africa’s Gays Forced to Stay in the Closet?
Hear the comfortable words of that great arbiter of public decency, President Daniel Arap Moi:
”Words like lesbianism and homosexuality do not exist in African languages.”—Moi, 1995.
”Homosexuality is against African norms and religions and even in religion it is considered a great sin.”—Moi, 1998.
Unsurprisingly, Kenya’s Criminal Code obediently agrees with Moi one hundred per cent. Sections 162—165 lay down a term of FIVE TO FOURTEEN YEARS’ IMPRISONMENT for “Carnal Knowledge Against the Order of Nature.” The law goes further:
— Kenyan law defines any sexual relations between men as a CRIMINAL ACT.
— It hasn’t even heard of sexual relations between women.
What is the SOCIAL CONSEQUENCE of this antediluvian attitude?
— gay men marry or carry on affairs with women in order to conceal their sexuality.
— they live in misery and so do their wives.
— no sex education is offered to gay men, even in the midst of Kenya’s long-denied Aids epidemic.
— sections of Kenyan society are forced to live in a state of deceit.
Doctors, lawyers, businessmen, priests and even politicians go in terror of blackmail and arrest.
— a self-perpetuating cycle of corruption a
nd oppression is created, dragging our society still deeper into the mire.
Here the article stops. Why?
And why in Heaven’s name do you file an incomplete polemical piece about gay rights under Arnold and lock it away with a password?
Justin wakes to Guido’s presence at his shoulder. He has returned from his peregrinations and is leaning forward, peering at the screen in puzzlement.
“It’s time I drove you to school,” Justin says.
“We don’t need to go yet! We’ve got another ten minutes! Who’s Arnold? Is he gay? What do gay guys do? My mom goes crazy if I ask her.”
“We’re leaving now. We could get stuck behind a tractor.”
“Look. Let me open her mailbox. OK? Somebody could have written to her. Maybe Arnold did. Don’t you want to see in her mailbox? Maybe she sent you a message you haven’t read. So I open the mailbox? Yes?”
Justin gently puts his hand on Guido’s shoulder. “You’ll be fine. Nobody’s going to laugh at you. Everybody stays away from school now and then. That doesn’t make you an invalid. It makes you normal. We’ll look in her mailbox when you come back.”
The drive to Guido’s school and back took Justin a long hour, and in that time he permitted himself no flights of fancy or premature speculation. When he regained the oil room he headed not for the laptop but for the pile of papers given him by Lesley in the van outside the cinema. Moving with greater confidence than he had brought to the laptop, he sorted his way to a photocopy of a clumsily handwritten letter on lined paper that had caught his eye during one of his first skirmishing raids. It was undated. It had “come to notice,” according to the attached minute initialled by Rob, between the pages of a medical encyclopaedia that the two officers had found lying on the kitchen floor of Bluhm’s apartment, slung there by frustrated burglars. The writing paper faded and old. The envelope addressed to the PO Box of Bluhm’s NGO. Postmark the old Arab slaving island of Lamu.
My own dear darling Arni,
I don’t never forget our love or your embraices and goodness to me your dear friend. What a luck and bliss for me that you honeur our beautiful island for your holiday! I got to say thank you but it is to god I thank for your generos love and gifts and now the knoledge that will come to me in my studies thanks to you, plus motorbike. For you my darling man I work day and night, always glad in my heart to know that my darling is with me every step, holding and loving me.