Maxwell's Retirement Read online

  Son. Wife. Hobby. All with that pointless number computers seemed to insist on.

  Maxwell reached for a piece of paper and a pen. ‘Which was it, in the end?’

  ‘gallant600.’

  He wrote it down. ‘Next question, Mrs B. How did you …?’

  ‘Easy, Mr Maxwell.’ She was being a little smug. ‘Most people use family names, sometimes they put a number in where it is the same as the letter or just add a one. So it could have been en, zero, one, ay, en, you see. Or jay, ay, sea, queue, you, one, ee. Do you get it?’

  Maxwell was working it out on his fingers. He smiled as the light dawned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do. But how did you come up with gallant600?’

  ‘Easy,’ she said. ‘You’ve been using that in an alphanumeric code for everything since you worked here.’

  ‘Mrs B,’ Maxwell said thoughtfully, ‘have you ever seen a film called Invasion of the Body Snatchers?’

  ‘Can’t say I have, Mr Maxwell. I don’t watch many films.’

  He looked down at her thoughtfully. He was looking, in a clandestine manner, at the back of her neck, to see if the telltale mark was there. Then he shook himself. Of course she wasn’t a doppelgänger. She was just a woman he had known for years, who had always pushed a hoover, dropped fag ash, gossiped and moaned about everything from chewing gum under the desks to the state of the nation, where it impinged on the price of cigarettes, tea and Windolene. And now, suddenly, while he wasn’t watching, she had become a computer whizz. She knew words like RAM. Well, he corrected himself, everyone knew words like RAM, but Mrs B seemed to understand it as well, in the sense of something other than a male sheep. In spite of himself, he bent his knees and looked again for the telltale mark.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘now I’m in, I’m going to send Miss Smartie and all her department an email from you to show how clever you are.’

  ‘Absolutely, Mrs B,’ he said, lost in admiration and thought in approximately equal measure.

  She tapped away for a while and then, with a final and decisive tap, sent the emails on their way. She did some more esoteric things on the keyboard and then reluctantly pushed herself away from the desk. ‘Well, Mr Maxwell. Must get on.’

  The pain of the chair leg pressed firmly on his toe brought Maxwell back to reality. ‘I hope you don’t think me rude, Mrs B,’ he said, ‘but I really have to ask. How did you become so good on a computer?’

  ‘Our Beryl’s eldest – I think I told you about him – lovely boy, got in with a bit of a bad crowd, stockbrokers or summat, anyway, our Colin, pronounced Coe-lin, like that general, anyway, him, he taught me.’

  ‘That was very sweet of him, Mrs B. The youngsters can’t always be bothered these days, can they?’ Maxwell knew that this was the kind of sentiment guaranteed to warm the cockles of her heart. It worked.

  ‘Too right, Mr Maxwell. He’s a good lad. He give me a bit of a crash course when he was with us a few months back. Well, the time hung heavy, with him not being able to go out.’

  ‘Oh,’ Maxwell’s voice dripped sympathy. ‘Was he unwell?’

  ‘No, not really. The CCTV picture was real clear, they’re usually a bit fuzzy, ain’t they? Well, he had to stop in for a bit, so he got me up to scratch on the computer. Well, I have to keep a bit of an eye on things, while he’s away.’

  Maxwell knew he shouldn’t ask, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘Away? Anywhere nice?’

  ‘Ford Open Prison. Five years for fraud. As I said, a lovely boy. Lovely manners.’

  Maxwell’s smile appeared pinned on as he backed away. ‘Well, that’s lovely. Fraud, eh? I’m off now then, Mrs B. See you tomorrow.’ And, brow furrowed beyond the help even of Pro-Retinol A, he made for the outside world, the familiar saddle of White Surrey, the newly blossomed leafiness of Columbine and sanity. Or at least, what passed for sanity. It never occurred to him to wonder what the email had said.

  Up high under the eaves, in the IT Department, among their coils of leads, furry mugs and piles of bubble wrap and brown paper, eBay packaging for the use of, the computer techies looked at their screens in wonder.

  From: maxwep

  To: IT Department

  Message: i done the practis and i can youse the computer alrite now. So dont cum down here cheking becuase im alrite. Yours Mr Maxwell.

  ‘Nicole,’ Mike, the least robotic of the geeks, called across the room. They’d named a musical after the slickness of his hair and he’d got a GNVQ in sitting around. ‘You weren’t supposed to take anything out of Maxwell’s head. You were supposed to just put stuff in.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s like Homer Simpson,’ she said, looking at her screen as though mesmerised. ‘Something fell out to make room.’

  ‘He’s having a laugh,’ Mike said, shutting down his screen.

  ‘I had him at school,’ said Ned, geek number two, in sepulchral tones, seemingly unaware that he was still sitting behind a desk in the same school. ‘He put me on detention for a term once because I used an apostrophe in the wrong place. I can’t see him using bad grammar. It’ll be the last thing to go when he finally goes nuts.’

  Nicole frowned at her screen and then looked up at her boys. ‘Gents,’ she announced. ‘We’ve got us a hacker.’

  Maxwell soared through the gates on the two-wheeled legend that was White Surrey, past the usual crowd of giggling girls. If they seemed less giggly than usual, he didn’t notice, such was his headlong flight from Nicole, computers and a strangely altered Mrs B. Today had been difficult, he acknowledged that. Usually, Maxwell didn’t countenance difficult: challenges were for rising to, problems were for solving, he’d never met a shenanig he didn’t want to go in. But the computer thing was different. He had been surfing ahead of that particular tsunami for some years now and it was a shock to find himself finally thrown up on the alien beach of technology. He could use a computer, of course he could. He could search on eBay and, should Jacquie be out, could even bid for things, but he had tried to avoid it ever since the heart-stopping day when he had bid £3,999 for a fifty-four millimetre plastic soldier kit because of a misplaced comma. He could find Wikipedia, and occasionally took notes from it (while advising Years Twelve and Thirteen never to do so), but he couldn’t get it to print out anything but the adverts and so still resorted to that much maligned standby, the pad and pencil. He could receive emails, because they just appeared when he clicked on what other people were pleased to call the icon. It looked nothing like a highly decorated Russian religious picture to him, but whatever made them happy. He couldn’t send emails, but he had either Helen at work or Jacquie at home for that, depending on his location at the time. Of course he could use a computer. Dinosaur? Peter Maxwell? The very idea.

  His musings took him all the way home, through the wild wind of the Flyover and the chill nip from the sea. He was oblivious to Surrey’s obvious shortcomings. The brakes squealed at that certain pitch guaranteed to make every hair on the body, no matter how tiny and no matter where located, stand up ready for flight. The front wheel wobbled and had a permanent tendency to lean to the left; the Leon Trotsky of the bicycling world. There had once been a bell, although with the noise from the brakes it had become redundant long before the top fell off. The saddlebag was a memory kept alive by two wizened leather straps. So many parts had been replaced that the conundrum was this – was this White Surrey still, as the only original bit was the left pedal? But it bowled along nicely, over the Flyover, down behind the shopping centre, along a few residential nonentities until it reached the haven that was home.

  Far behind him, the girls were still clustering around the gates of Leighford High at that fag-end of the day. Closer examination by Peter Maxwell would have shown him that some of his Own were deeply upset. The mobile phones banned from school but smuggled in, secreted in the bowels of backpacks and sports bags, were now out and beeping. One was being anxiously passed round. The girls, wide-eyed, huddled together to read the messages which poured in, each one arriving
as the previous one was still being read, each one more explicit than the last. They had looked with avid eyes as Maxwell pedalled past. Their watcher, their minder, their shoulder when everything got too much couldn’t have helped them with this. Everyone knew that Mad Max was crap at anything technical. He didn’t do PowerPoints. He didn’t do electronic retrieval for homework. He didn’t do anything much that didn’t rely on a pen and paper. For him a memory stick was something pink and sticky from long ago that would crack your teeth and had ‘Leighford’ written right through it. But if Maxwell couldn’t help them, who could?

  The question was unspoken, but one girl answered it anyway.

  ‘I can’t tell my mum or dad about this. They’ll think it’s my fault.’

  ‘Come on, Leah,’ another girl chimed in. ‘Why is it your fault?’

  ‘Yeah, come on. Your mum’s cool.’

  ‘Cool, is she?’ Leah turned a tear-streaked face to her friends. ‘If cool is going out clubbing and coming home with any bloke who buys her a Bacardi Breezer then, yes, she’s cool.’

  Her friends looked at their feet. Some had mums who stayed at home, baked cakes, had a nice hot meal on the table when their dad got home from the office. More had mums who worked all hours and came rushing in just in time to shove something instant in the microwave. Some had single parents; some had two; some, courtesy of second and subsequent marriages, had more parents than they could count on both hands. But none of them had a parent like Leah’s mum.

  Her best friend, Julie, known as Zhuzh, inevitably shortened to Zee, put her arm round the girl’s shoulders. ‘Come on, Lee,’ she said. ‘Tell your dad if your mum won’t understand.’

  Leah shook her off. ‘Yeah, right. I’ll do that, shall I? He’ll assume it’s one of mum’s lowlifes and take it out on me because I won’t go and live with him and his posh new wife in their posh new house with their posh new baby.’

  A girl from the back of the little crowd spoke for the majority. ‘Why don’t you go and live with him, Leah? His house looks great from outside. It’s got those gates and everything.’

  Leah dashed her tears away with the back of her hand. ‘Electric gates. They’re not to keep people out; they’re to keep people in. And anyway, who would look after my mum if I don’t do it? No,’ she squared her shoulders and raised her chin. ‘I’ll deal with it.’

  ‘Mad Max, Lee,’ Julie said quietly. ‘He’ll fix it.’

  There were quiet chuckles. ‘He doesn’t understand phones,’ someone said. ‘He calls them the Invention of Mr AG Bell and reminds us at every opportunity that even he refused to have one in his study after he had invented it.’

  ‘He’s got one, though,’ a little fair girl at the front said. ‘I’ve seen him with it.’

  Leah smiled weakly. ‘Yes, I’ve seen that as well. He looks down at it, kind of puzzled as if he doesn’t know how it got there. Then he kind of stabs at it until something happens. Usually, he finds he has switched it off. No,’ she picked up her bag and hefted it onto her shoulder. ‘I’ll have to do something myself. A new phone, maybe. New number.’

  ‘You could get one of those cool new ones, Lee,’ the fair girl said. ‘A Blackberry or one of those sort of email ones.’

  ‘Yeah, Alice. Leah’s mum can so afford a Blackberry.’ Julie was cutting.

  ‘There’s no need to be like that, Zee,’ Alice snipped back. ‘Her dad could buy her one.’ She turned to Leah. ‘Tell him you’ve lost the other. Tell him it was pinched. Tell him you need it for your school work. That always works with my dad.’ She looked wistful. Her dad worked in Dubai and sent her loads of stuff, but they hadn’t actually spoken in years. She found it hard to summon up his face these days.

  Leah looked thoughtful. ‘I don’t like to ask him, really, but you might have something there, Al.’ She looked more cheerful. ‘That’ll do it. He’ll go for that, I think.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Time I wasn’t here. I need to be home for Anneliese.’

  ‘Your mum’s not working just now, is she?’ Julie asked the question before she even thought to put her brain in gear.

  ‘No, but … well, you know.’ Leah and all the girls knew that her mum would be busy getting ready to go out. These days it took longer than it had a few months ago to repair the damage of the night before. Anneliese was a beautiful little girl, six years old, her parents’ attempt at gluing together a marriage that was beyond repair. She had blonde curls, big blue eyes and a temper like Gordon Ramsay, though fortunately as yet, not his vocabulary. It was easier to be there for her than pick up the pieces later.

  The group broke up, in all directions: to the town centre, The Dam, to their homes and in the case of just one, desperate girl, to 38 Columbine.

  Chapter Three

  Maxwell skidded to his usual stop at the kerb outside his town house in Columbine. The stop was rather more precipitous than usual, as Jacquie’s car was parked there as well. Maxwell’s heart did the little flip it always did when he knew he was about to see his wife. The word was still unfamiliar, but the woman wasn’t. She had been in and around his life for years, in various roles from irritatee to lover to mother of his son, and now, wife, but even so a little shock went through him every time he came home and found that she was there. He was smiling to himself as he walked up the path, deciding as he went whether he would knock, ring or use his key.

  A shrill voice cut him to the quick. ‘Well, Mr Maxwell. That smile is a bit of a surprise to me, I don’t mind telling you, what with one thing and another.’ Mrs Troubridge popped up on the other side of the hedge, giving shape to the disembodied voice. She looked like a prune with hair.

  A cold hand clutched Maxwell’s heart. To be fair, it always did when Mrs Troubridge was in the offing, but something told him that this time there was a really valid reason for it. He licked his dry lips. ‘One thing and another, Mrs Troubridge?’

  ‘Yes, well, the accident. Presumably that’s why you are home so early.’

  ‘I’m not early, Mrs Troubridge. I’m a teacher. We always get home early. And have long holidays. Our salaries are stupendous and we have total job satisfaction. We don’t really know we’re born. What accident?’ The last two words were issued in a distant scream, as though from someone underwater down a well many miles away. Faint, but piercing.

  The little woman visibly left the ground and clutched at where anyone else’s heart would be with a claw-like hand. In the empty recesses of her head she remembered that Maxwell’s first wife and child had died, long years ago for her, yesterday still to him and, in her selfish, addled way she was sorry for what she had said. ‘Mr Maxwell, I didn’t mean to alarm you. I’m sorry for what I said.’

  This was almost as big a shock as he had already had and he wasn’t sure how many more he could take. He drew a deep breath and tried to calm down. ‘What accident, Mrs Troubridge?’ He hadn’t slipped off his cycle-clips yet in case he had to be away again and mentally noted the distance to Surrey, still saddled at the kerb.

  ‘Nolan. Playground. Casualty. Not serious.’ She had resorted to telegraphic speech, a decision arrived at as less likely to spread alarm and despondency. Her aunt had been incarcerated in the war for just that reason and she had never quite forgotten it.

  But she was speaking to air. Maxwell had thrust his key into the lock after only the tenth attempt and was bounding up the stairs three at a time. He burst into the sitting room, to find Jacquie sitting in his favourite chair with Nolan asleep on her lap and Metternich the cat on the chair’s arm, glaring balefully at her. Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears and she was still wearing her coat. The smile she gave him was watery and the finger she raised to her lips was shaking.

  He was on his knees at her side in a heartbeat, hat and scarf flying in all directions. Metternich gave him a cuff round the head for the look of the thing, but he wasn’t giving it his full attention and it was a shadow of his usual offering. His slit eyes were fixed on the Boy. He was considering changing the help; he and the Boy ju
st weren’t getting the service they deserved. He had sent the little chap out in the morning, all neat and tidy, with a quick lick to finish him off, and they brought him back filthy, with a big white bandage and smelling of clean, which made the cat’s nose ache.

  ‘What happened?’ Maxwell whispered, stroking her hair and reaching out a tentative hand to touch his little boy’s cheek.

  ‘Well, you know Nole,’ she said quietly. ‘Never does anything by halves. He was on the climbing frame at the afternoon break and he climbed up the ladder. Unfortunately, when he got to the end, he just kept climbing. Pitched right over and landed on his chin.’ She pointed to the dressing. ‘Five stitches and a bruise the shape of Australia. And the size.’ She tried to smile, but failed and the quivering lip spilt over into crying. She stifled the sobs when the boy stirred and muttered in his sleep. A cloud went across his face as the pain stabbed briefly and then he was off again, twitching as he slept, like Metternich did. Maxwell hoped that this didn’t mean that Nolan was disembowelling rats in his dreams.

  ‘So,’ she continued, ‘Mrs Thomas scooped him up and took him to the nurse. It was bleeding everywhere.’ She moved her protecting arm and Maxwell saw the front of his son’s T-shirt, soaked in blood and his mother’s tears. ‘They waited until it stopped and then realised it would need stitches. They called me and I met them in A&E. He was so brave, Max. He didn’t cry at all. His chin was so small they couldn’t give him a local, so they just stitched it up. And he didn’t cry. Not once.’

  ‘You made up for it, I suppose,’ he said, looking as though he might join her.

  She compressed her lips and nodded. She took a deep breath through her nose and calmed down. ‘They said it was a really common injury. One of the nurses and both of the doctors said they had scars under their chin.’

  Maxwell lifted his head and pointed.