I walked into Rye. I didn’t have any money for the bus (my purse was in Fairlight. In the bungalow. Or not in the bungalow). I didn’t have anything, in fact. Only the piece of old newspaper, a nagging hunch and that inane grin which was still plastered right across my face. But it wasn’t a happy grin. Or even a cruel grin. It was a kind of a … a safety valve. A necessary release. It was the only thing holding all this … all this stuff in. Holding me together (that crazy tension – each side of my mouth). I suppose if (like, say, Mr Huff), you were given to bouts of chronic over-self-dramatization you might even call it a ‘deadly’ grin.
Because when I saw that piece of old newspaper (how old was it – a week?), I suddenly realized that it had all happened – all of it, every, little bit of it, even the rabbit – for a reason. Everything was interconnected. We were all chosen. We. Us. You know – the dregs. The pointless. The flawed. The unconvinced. The least worthy in many respects. Just like Sorcha had said. We were all chosen. Because majesty shines most brightly through … through frailty, I suppose. Through failure. Through weakness.
But I still found it perplexing – almost perverse. To choose a group of the least good, least functional, least hopeful, least … least reverential individuals to fulfil a mission so … so unknowable, so … so …
So it had all happened for a reason. Hadn’t it? But even worse than that (far, far worse than that), I had finally realized (didn’t I always know? Yes? No? Didn’t I?) that I was stupidly, excruciatingly in love with Mr Franklin D. Huff. That awful man! That skinny, sneaky, arrogant, strange, slightly unstable and patently unreliable aspirant Lothario …
Or was it actually love? How to describe the feeling, exactly? Hard to pin it down … A kind of squint-eyed keenness. An infuriated interest. A passionate irritation. A midge-bite on my heart which I just longed to scratch and itch and pick away at until it finally got infected and then … then hurt. Stung. Most dreadfully.
If that is love. If that qualifies as love (and I’m hardly much of an expert in these matters) then yes, yes, I was in it, right up to my chin, and the one thing I was certain of (before I’d even got to grips with it, before I’d even … I don’t know … so much as teased away at it with an idle nail), the one thing I truly knew (a feeling of indescribably hollow dread deep down in my gut) was that I was going to be asked to give him up. To offer him up. To hand him over to Mrs Sage Meadows, no less. For Orla. For my sins.
‘Good heavens!’ Sage Meadows exclaimed, answering the door at Lamb House after my third extended ring on the bell. ‘I thought you were … Didn’t your bungalow just …?’
I handed her the piece of newspaper.
‘Would you mind explaining this to me, Mrs Meadows?’ I asked, pointing to the four digits. ‘In a little more detail, perhaps?’
‘I heard about it on the local news!’ She grabbed my arm (as if to check that I was real). ‘It was all the talk on the Wednesday market! Was it terrible? I could hardly believe it. I was all a-tingle! I kept thinking, But I was only with her a few hours ago …!’
‘I wasn’t home when it happened,’ I said. ‘I actually stayed in Pett Level overnight.’
‘With your father?’ she asked, sharply, quickly releasing her grip on my arm.
‘Uh … My father’s dog had died,’ I quickly sidestepped the issue.
‘Oh. Well that was lucky.’
She frowned. ‘I mean unfortunate, but, you know …’
‘Yes. He was very fat. Rogue. The dog. He slipped into a diabetic coma.’
‘Oh. I see. I’m very sorry to hear that.’
‘Yes.’ I nodded.
She continued to gaze at me, perplexed.
‘We had to dig him a very big … a very big hole,’ I aimlessly expanded.
‘What an eventful twenty-four hours you’ve had!’ she exclaimed, almost satisfied, inviting me inside, pouring me a glass of water and then leading me out into the garden where the air was redolent with the scent of … of …
‘Do you smell that?’ I asked, spooked.
‘It’s wintergreen’ – she nodded – ‘and thyme and eucalyptus. The gardener’s been burning them. Smoking them. He thought there might be early signs of a Varroa mite infestation in the hive.’
She pointed to a small, old, white WBC hive in the far corner of the garden.
Mrs Meadows (I noted, with a small twinge of irritation) currently looked quite lovely – a good ten years younger than she usually did, because she wasn’t yet (I quote her guilty admission) ‘in full make-up’.
We sat down on a bench and she inspected the piece of paper again, frowning.
The borders were charming. They were buzzing. And there was a little hole in Mrs Meadows’s tights over her big toe. A slightly chipped painted nail poked out through it – on her right foot – which was only visible when she slid it from her leather clog and employed it to scratch her opposite calf. She was wearing glasses, too: large, heavy, tortoiseshell glasses.
What a strange, pointlessly feminine and formal creature she was, I mused, but yet underneath it – the uptightness, the hairspray, the polished veneer – something half-formed and musky, something organic and interesting, quietly throbbing and pulsing, like a delicate little mollusc – a freshwater bivalve – tucked quietly away inside its shell.
Hmmn. Was there actually more to Mrs Meadows than I had initially reckoned on? Was this to be all about Mrs Meadows from here on in? Mrs Meadows? Who two days ago had seemed – well, insignificant? Excess to requirements. A mere frill?
‘4.0.0.4?’ I prompted, clearing my throat, irritated, at myself – by my changing perceptions, I suppose (was I starting to try and see my way towards … towards loving Mrs Meadows now, like Mr Huff eventually would?).
‘It’s a central processing unit chip,’ she explained, ‘or a microprocessor, which is part of a family of four chips called the MCS.4. The MCS.4 basically consists of the “four thousand four” – as it’s generally known – alongside a supporting read-only memory chip – which we call a ROM – for custom applications, a random access memory chip – which we call a RAM – for processing data, then finally a shift register chip for the IO port …’ Her eyes kept on scanning the borders, worriedly, as she spoke, then returning to the beehive a short distance off.
Of course I didn’t have the first clue what she was talking about.
‘A chip,’ I said.
‘Yes. Intel originally designed the four thousand four for the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation in the late sixties,’ she expanded, ‘they manufactured calculators, of course. But then they quickly realized – Intel, I mean – the chip’s amazing potential for universal applications, so they bought it back again and relaunched it in 1971, and that’s when it became the first general-purpose programmable processor on the market. A simple building block for engineers …’
‘But what does the 4.0.0.4 actually do?’ I wondered.
‘Well a memory chip is sort of like the computer’s brain. It’s very tiny – the size of your smallest fingernail – but incredibly powerful. You’ll find one at the heart of everything and anything digital: super-computers, data-centres, communications products …’
She suddenly smiled. ‘You know I was actually very … very struck by something that you said to me the other day, Miss Hahn.’
‘Something I said?’ I echoed, slightly bemused.
‘Yes. When I mentioned my half-finished Ph.D. in Undecidable Problems. And you said, “But why don’t you simply concentrate on the problems that you can make a decision about?”’
‘I said that?’
‘Yes. And at the time I just thought, What an idiot – she doesn’t even grasp what an Undecidable Problem is, but then later …’ – she grinned – ‘when I was under the misguided impression that you’d toppled into the sea, and I was dissecting the conversation we’d had previously in much greater detail – imbuing it with so much more significance on account of your being … you know … dead, I thought, She’s right. Why always focus on the things that can’t be decided? That’s always been my problem – my Achilles heel. Emotionally, intellectually. Focusing on the undecidable – love, chemistry, loss, attraction – when in fact there are all these … these eminently decidable problems out there. Problems that need solving. Questions that can and should be answered. By me.’
‘Well I’m delighted if the thought of my untimely death spurred you into …’ I shrugged.
‘Art is undecidable,’ she sighed, ‘and that’s why I’m a useless poet, Miss Hahn. I lack conviction. In fact that’s why all poetry is useless. Because there’s no certainty.’
‘All poetry?’ I echoed, slightly worried now.
‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’
She handed me back the piece of newspaper.
‘I hope I managed to clarify things for you.’ She smiled.
‘You did. Thank you.’ I nodded.
‘Why exactly are you so concerned about it?’ she wondered. ‘A twelve-year-old computer chip? On the day after your bungalow fell into the sea?’
‘Because Orla – Orla – Orla Nor Cleary the … you know …’
She nodded.
‘Orla was always scribbling those four digits down after praying, or muttering them in her sleep, or scratching them into the sand on the beach with a stick, or—’
‘4004 BC is when Ussher claimed the world was born,’ Mrs Meadows interrupted.
‘Ussher?’
‘He was the Archbishop of Ireland in the seventeenth century. Of course the date was biblically sourced. And nobody takes it seriously any more.’
‘The birth of the world,’ I mused, pushing my hair behind my ear.
‘And I suppose with the Intel 4004 another kind of world was born,’ Mrs Meadows expanded, ‘a new world. A digital world … Here. Hold on a second …’
She suddenly reached up to her hair, felt around blindly for a moment, withdrew a small, eminently tasteful, antiqued brass and pearl filigree hair-clip, leaned forward and deftly pinned my fringe back with it. She then paused for a moment to inspect her handiwork, grimaced, removed the clip and quickly readjusted the positioning slightly.
‘There!’ she exclaimed.
‘Thank you,’ I murmured, somewhat daunted.
‘I have an old college friend who was working for Apple a while ago,’ she idly volunteered, slipping her clog back on, getting up and going to tear off the bent and browning flowerhead of a white, scented phlox in a nearby flower bed.
‘The computer people?’
I stared down at the newspaper article.
‘Yes. She was the sister of my first serious boyfriend. The one who ran off with the Sudanese, remember? The one who broke my heart. She introduced us to each other, in fact. We were the only two girls taking engineering at our university. She was a couple of years older. We’ve stayed in touch over the years. She lives and works just south of San Francisco in a place they call Silicon Valley. Her husband helped to get ARPANET up and operational … Have you heard of ARPANET, Miss Hahn?’
I shook my head.
‘They were one of the world’s first packet-switching networks …’
I looked blank.
‘Packet-switching is the dominant basis for all modern data communications, worldwide. In fact I was just thinking about him earlier when you rang the bell. Watching the bees moving out from the hive, into the garden and then back again … Thinking about the mites – the re-infection … Her husband actually worked on the team that helped crack the so-called “Creeper” virus …’
She fell silent, still watching the bees.
‘Mr Huff is back from his pilgrimage,’ I said.
‘Really?’ Her focus rapidly shifted. ‘Have you seen him?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘And he seems to have sustained a small injury on his travels …’
‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘Nothing too serious, I hope?’
‘His … his …’ I felt a now all-too-familiar tightening at both corners of my mouth, ‘his buttocks sealed together.’
‘Really?’
She looked horrified.
‘Yes. I’m afraid so.’
I watched closely for any signs of levity on Mrs Meadows’s part. But there was nothing. Nothing. Not a trace. Not so much as even the tiniest, little glimmer of anything.