… back in 1991, drilling a hole in the skirting. Large enough to thread a length of two-wire cabling from the phone in the hall to a BT wall socket under his desk. Wire, socket and phonejack purchased that very afternoon. Nick knelt on the floorboards, feeling a deep satisfaction in knowing precisely what he was about: four screws to hold the socket in place, thread the cable through, stick in a phonejack, done. In his bedroom on the other side of the wall, his computer, an AMD 386DX-25, product of birthday and Christmas presents and months of washing dishes at the Dux — waited for connection, glowing in the dark.
The drill whirred in his hand. He peered intently at the bit as it drove into the skirting, lit by the narrow beam of his head torch. The wood was surprisingly tough and he was forced to apply some pressure to force it through when he became aware of a pair of bare feet.
‘What the hell are you up to?’ said his father, voice muted. ‘Do you know what time this is? I’ve got a big day tomorrow and Stephie has a job in Nelson. She’s got to be on a plane at 8.30.’
‘Just putting in some cable,’ he said. ‘Won’t be a sec.’
A couple of minutes to link it all up. Already he was planning what he’d post on their BBS to Dev and the others who were at this very instant seated in front of screens all over the world, his widespread tribe gathered around the glow of the campfire. Some like himself who had to work late at night, when there was no necessity to compete with everyone else in the household for a phone connection.
His father had no idea what he was up to. He used the computer as a kind of glorified typewriter, seemingly unaware of its limitless potential.
Nick did have an idea. He had understood its magic from the very start, back when he and a bunch of other kids had persisted in sneaking into the new computer lab over lunchtime, though the duty staff were always trying to throw them out, back into the jungle that was the quadrangle and grounds of the school. When forced out into the open air, they huddled unhappily by the door, merely waiting for the moment when the duty teachers retreated to the staffroom and they were free to return to the reverent hush of the lab, the row of PCs whirring, emanating their seductive, enticing power.
Mr Shaw understood. But then he was an outsider, too, the only teacher who turned up unkempt, in baggy shorts, socks and sandals when the male staff’s standard attire was trousers, shirt and, often, a tie. Hagley was unconventional in some ways, and that was why Nick had chosen to go there. No uniform. He was able to grow his hair, apply a whole bottle of Directions Acid Green, then comb and gel the result into a spiky mohawk. He looked like some ancient hybrid creature, part human, part lizard. But Hagley was still a school, with classes and desks and a syllabus he largely ignored. The only reason he attended at all was Mr Shaw and the computer lab.
Mr Shaw’s idol was some dude called Richard Stallman, who’d been at Harvard and MIT, which, according to Mr Shaw, was the centre of the universe.
‘That’s where I’d go if I had the chance,’ he said, looking round at the stupid daily notices pinned to the wall, the pile of dumb assignments waiting for assessment on his desk. ‘Too late for me.’
Mr Shaw was kind of gloomy. A lot of kids didn’t like him, laughed when he passed, or played stupid tricks, delivering a hail of spit balls the moment his back was turned or parading in and out to the toilets during class, but he didn’t give a fuck. That’s what Nick liked about him. He truly didn’t give a fuck. He also knew a lot about computers, and if he was on duty, he let them into the lab. Nick and a couple of silent boys from form 3 and a Chinese kid and a skinny Goth girl in dead-white pancake make-up and boots so huge it seemed impossible her sticklike legs could lift them.
This guy Stallman was a hacker at MIT (Nick savoured the word: ‘hacker’. You could be a ‘hacker’, a smart pirate, working on the fringes of the system.) He’d been a hacker who had modified the software on a Xerox laser printer in this building at MIT, so that it alerted everyone who was logged-in when it was jammed. Which was kind of useful, as it was on a different floor from most of the users.
But Xerox wouldn’t allow them to introduce this modification and blocked their access to the printer’s source code. So Stallman said, ‘To hell with that!’
‘These computers,’ Mr Shaw waved at the row of screens ‘are tools, whose power is infinite. And that power will soon be freely available, as it should be, to anyone who wishes to adapt this tool to their own use. Thanks to Stallman and people like him, your generation will have access to immense power.’
And as he said it, standing in Room 43, the computer lab, he looked, in his baggy shorts and wild hair, like a wizard, like Gandalf or Saruman, passing his wizardry into the hands of the initiates, to the mutes from form 3 and the Goth girl and the Chinese kid and Nick.
Nick repeated the words as he walked home from school, his green mohawk tremulous in a nor-wester. GNU, UNIX, source code, copyleft, rehearsing the language of the new world. He had tried to speak it with his father, to convey to him the power that lay at his fingertips, but his dad wasn’t really interested, though he was vaguely approving of his son’s prowess.
‘Good for you, mate,’ he said, patting him on the shoulder, then went off to carry on with his exhausting, demanding, deadening job.
One thing Nick had always been absolutely certain of was that he would never become a doctor. Not for a single second would he want to spend his life looking up someone’s bum, poking and prodding sick people in some dreary shabby stinking hospital. His father’s life seemed exhausting. He always had the air of being slightly harassed, even on holidays, never completely free, always checking back on someone or other. When Nick was small, someone had asked him if he was going to be a doctor like his daddy and Nick had said, though he has no memory of this, ‘No!’ And when they went on and asked him what he wanted to be instead, evidently he had replied, without missing a beat, ‘Rich!’ Everyone always laughed at this, as if it was a joke, like the way Emma always mispronounced ‘hostiple’. But Nick had been deadly serious. He still, deep down, wanted to be rich. Why not? It was as good an ambition as any.
So when his father stood over him that night as he drilled a hole for the cable, it was without comprehension. He had no idea how necessary it was to put in the cable, so Nick kept drilling, nearly there, and his father stood by fighting for calm, saying, ‘Nick, there are other people in this household, and you must have greater consideration for them. If you don’t want to do so, then you’re free to leave. You’re old enough. You’re perfectly entitled to choose for yourself. But right now, you must stop disturbing everybody. Now, give me the drill. You can finish this in the morning.’
And crouched by the skirting, Nick experienced a revelation. It was true. He could leave. He could walk away from this fucking flatlining city, he could go to Wellington. In Wellington, maybe he could do some course, teach himself Linux, become part of the future.
Which is how he came to be living in a flat off Cuba Street where a mobile of ancient pizzas dangled from the light shade and the walls were ornamented with the interlocking As and Es of Anarchy. And the curtains remained drawn at all times and the dark rooms resonated to Crass and Conflict and the Dead Kennedys and bands whose names began with ‘Dis’: Discharge, Disorder, Disfear, Disaffect, who were Scottish, fast and thrashy, and there was endless talk about the system, which was totally fucked, and endless beers, and he had an A and E tattooed on one shoulder, and a stud in his nostril and another in his lip where it clinked on the glass.
He got a job washing dishes in a kebab place on Willis Street where there was a girl called Kaz who had yellow hair tied in rows of tiny tight plaits who told the owner to get fucked when he tried to grope her behind the chiller and they both walked out and went straight back to his flat and his grimy bed and then she sort of moved in.
She gave him a jacket, black and heavily studded, that she’d got from a friend who lived in a flat where someone had OD’ed and they were recycling his clothes in his memory. The jacket lay upon his shoulders like armour. And he got another job, with computers this time, at GTech on The Terrace where he worked on a help desk, sorting out problems with UNIX users in the Ministry of Fisheries.
And one afternoon in 1994 he is helping Lorraine, who is unbelievably thick, and he’s beginning to wonder if he should just run down to her office and sort it out himself rather than laboriously try to explain, yes, that arrow. The black one, by the toolbar, that’s the bar at the top with all the little pictures, can you see it? And the rain falls horizontally, driven by a ferocious southerly, and the flat is growing mould and someone has nicked the dead man’s jacket, maybe Kaz who has kind of moved out, and Wellington has lost its glow.
And as he sits there, rain splattering the windows, he experiences another revelation: he hasn’t avoided his father’s life after all. He’s repeating it. He has become a doctor, not ministering to people but to sick computers, and it’s every bit as tedious, every bit as exhausting.
And he’ll never be rich.
And he’ll never realise his potential. He has taught himself C, submitted to the Linux kernel, rewritten a sound card driver.
But here he is, helping Lorraine locate the black arrow.
‘Fuck it,’ he thinks. And it is a repeat of the revelation by the skirting board. ‘I’m free. I can leave.’
And he hangs up the …