Waterman’s hand hovered over the keypad mounted on the side of the door, hesitated and then dropped back down. He turned around to Caleb.
‘Look … before we … I just want to … I meant what I said … about Tara.’
He stood there, not moving, waiting for a response.
Caleb’s stomach twisted in knots. This was the last thing he wanted.
He didn’t talk about Tara. Not with other people. And certainly not with Waterman, here, stuck in a basement with no escape routes. The truth was that the only way he, someone with an almost limitless ability to empathize, made it from day to day was by placing Tara’s memory behind a high-walled enclosure he had painstakingly built. Behind those walls was so much grief he feared it would overpower him, tearing him apart and leaving nothing remaining. So he learned to ignore it, like the father and children who go about their daily routine while a mad mother paces in their attic.
He looked down at the ground, avoiding Waterman’s eyes and praying for the hiss of the retracting door. But Waterman’s hands remained by his sides, and Caleb realized he was waiting.
He looked up at last and, to his surprise, saw his old college friend looking back at him, encased in the adult man he had become. A sense of nostalgia stirred in Caleb, like walking into an overgrown estate and seeing traces of the manicured garden you used to play in as a child.
Doing his best to contain his internal agitation, Caleb gave him a grudging nod.
‘Thanks.’
‘What happened?’ asked Waterman.
Caleb took a deep breath. So this was it. It was all going to have to come out now. And to his enemy. The man who betrayed him. But even as Caleb rehearsed this well-worn narrative, it sounded false to him. Waterman didn’t have a malicious bone in his body, and Caleb knew that hating him had served its purpose, like a runner imagining he is being chased by a phantom gang in order to reach his top speed.
‘I don’t know,’ said Caleb, the words coming out before he had a chance to check them. ‘She hadn’t been well for some time.’
Why won’t anyone believe me!
High-pitched screams were floating now over the enclosure walls, piercing him to the core.
‘She always was rather …’ Waterman searched for the right word. ‘Highly strung.’
If Waterman noticed Caleb’s ratcheting discomfort, he wasn’t showing it.
They were hiding. In the crowds. I saw them.
In Caleb’s heart, the enclosure foundations were shaking, causing the ground to ripple and the tops of walls to teeter.
‘It got worse at the end …’ said Caleb, his eyes pricking with tears, surprising him. ‘She stopped taking her …’
‘I heard they found her …’ said Waterman, overlapping.
‘OK,’ said Caleb, louder than he expected, the word bursting out, ‘are we going to get started any time soon?’
You were never good with your own feelings, Caleb. It’s always been easier to read others.
Hairline fractures were running up the side of the walls he had worked so hard to fortify. Her voice was louder now, clearer, her Irish lilt lending a musicality to the words.
Waterman looked at him for a moment and then ran a hand through his beard in embarrassment.
‘Of course, sorry.’
He pressed the code on the keypad, and the door slid open.
Caleb watched Waterman enter over the threshold. The pain of repressing his emotions was physically manifesting now, like he’d swallowed a bag of broken glass that scratched against the inside of his chest with every breath. He inhaled slowly, squeezing his fists in silent admonition to himself to keep his shit together.
Once he crossed the threshold, it took Caleb a few seconds to process what he was looking at.
‘The largest server farm in Europe?’ asked Caleb, pulling his jacket tighter around him. He welcomed the distraction of new subject matter.
‘Comfortably,’ nodded Waterman.
They were in a cavernous underground hangar.
‘We keep it at ten degrees,’ continued the Yorkshireman. ‘That’s why it’s so cold.’
Caleb looked at the white stacks humming around him and, despite the anxiety that still jangled his nerves, felt the hairs begin to bristle on the back of his neck. The floor space looked to be the size of four football fields. Rows and rows of evenly spaced white server stacks spread out in front of them. If memory space were physical space, then housed in these plastic casings were galaxies, whose infinite reaches would take millions of years to explore, even travelling at light speed. Ever the hacker at heart, Caleb was transported by the cosmic nature of digital space in front of him, capable of housing the sum total of human knowledge multiple times over in some side pocket to its memory while it maintained its daily duties.
Computers are safe for you, aren’t they? You can programme them, they aren’t messy.
Waterman kept walking along the near wall.
‘We’re going in here,’ said Waterman.
He pointed to a door in the corner of the room, its outline barely visible as a micro-thin line in the otherwise gleaming wall. Caleb prised himself away from the sight of the servers and followed Waterman.