I Still Dream

When I’m sure they are both asleep, I get back to work. I’m used to staying up for a few hours after them at this point. It helps that Paul’s got this sleep apnoea machine: a mask he sticks on his face that makes him sound like Darth Vader. No idea how Mum sleeps through it – I’m guessing she takes something to help her, she’s got enough bottles of tablets in their bathroom cabinet – but she does. I get the tiny screwdrivers I use on my computer and I take my modem apart. Should have done this before. Inside it, I find the little speaker that makes its sound. There’s a tiny wire, and I snip it, put the case back on, do it up. Plug it into the wall.

Next month, this is going to bite me in the arse. Next month, when that bill comes, Paul is going to go mental, because – I can hear it already – I’ve lied to them, gone behind their backs, let everybody down.

Mum’ll say: You promised us; and I won’t say: I did no such thing.

I watch the flashing red LEDs on the front of the modem, and I catch myself making the little noise – the scree, screeeech – under my breath.

‘You’ve got mail!’ the speakers basically scream at me, and I flap at them to find the power button. I sit, quiet as anything, listening to the house for a minute. To hear if that woke them. But there’s nothing, just the distant hiss and wheeze of Paul’s breathing passing through two closed doors and a load of hallway. Breathe in, breathe out. So controlled you could set your watch to it.

The email is nothing. Spam. Nothing from Shawn. I don’t know what I expected, really. Something. Just a, No worries, my parents are assholes as well, we’ll talk soon. Something like that. But there’s nothing.

Do I write him another one? Tell him I’m online now, maybe if he wants to reply we can chat a bit? Find a chatroom or something? I am actually angry at him right now. It’s not like it was my choice to have to be offline, and am I being punished? By getting no reply? His parents let him on whenever he wants, so I know he’s seen my email. If he told me he was shut off from the Internet after an argument, I know I’d be at least a little bit concerned. I’d at least ask if everything was okay. But then – breathe, Laura, breathe, think of Paul’s sleep-breathing, follow that – maybe he knew I wouldn’t be online, so he didn’t reply? It’s probably that. It’s probably that he’s going to send me more emails over the week, before – of course! – before I get back online at the weekend, when I said I would. He’s got four days to come up with a reply. I should send him a new email. Let him know he doesn’t need to wait. I start typing. I ask him how he is, first. Make it about him. It’s not all about me. Tell him that I managed to sneak some time when they’re asleep. Ask him what time it is there, even though I know – seven hours behind us, so he’s probably just getting back from school himself – and what his day was like. And I ask him for his address, because I want to send him something. I won’t tell him what, but he’ll be excited. I can picture his face, when he opens the tape, when he plays it. This perfect ninety-minute song arc.

I click send.

The little thing telling me I’ve got another email triggers straight away, popping up on the top of the screen. I think how quick he was to reply, and then tell myself that’s stupid. Can’t be him.

Bug Report. It’s from Organon; or, the Organon that’s installed on Mr Ryan’s computer. He must have just stopped using it. That’s what it does, after the session: it lets me know how its programming went. There’s a feeling in my throat, like something stuck, that’s made out of disappointment. I open the report and have a look. Everything’s fine: Organon asked him a lot of questions. I can tell which ones, but only by their log numbers. I can’t see his responses, and I don’t want to. That’s the point of it. It’s private. It’s yours, and yours alone. Mr Ryan was using Organon for four hours. That’s fine. Maybe it’ll be useful, like he said. Maybe he’ll help me learn something about it.

I work on Organon myself, then. I put more questions in. I tell it about my day. I tell it that I’m worried about Mr Ryan with the software, that it feels out my control; that I wish Shawn would reply to me, because that always helps me to feel better; that I wish my mum would calm down, let everything go a bit more, because I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine.

Organon asks all the right questions about what I tell it. I wonder if Mr Ryan will have found it useful at all, or if it’s really only geared to me; my questions, my answers, designed only ever to make me feel better.

When I’m lying in bed, I listen to Radiohead, and I hold my elbow, and I feel the scab pressing onto my palm; and I think about the email I sent, the words I wrote, the letters that made them up. I rearrange the sentences in my head, making them better, instantly filled with regrets about them; and I think about how I would do it all over again, if I had the chance.

WEDNESDAY

‘You’re so bloody boring at the moment,’ Nadine tells me. She thinks that her bluntness is her best trait. She thinks that’s how you know she’s a true friend, because she’s just so upfront. Honesty, always. I try to be honest with her, as well, but that would mean telling her how tiring I find that honesty sometimes. ‘Come out on Saturday. Darren and Gavin will be there.’

‘I hate Gavin,’ I say, which isn’t strictly true. I don’t hate–hate him, but I certainly don’t want to get off with him, which is what Nadine seems borderline obsessed with making happen. Nadine thinks she’s got a chance with Darren if Gavin’s distracted.

‘Well, it won’t just be them. Owen, probably. Maybe Sarah and Tommy. Maybe Martin.’

‘My mum’s being a bitch about me going out.’

‘She didn’t ground you. You’re not locked up.’ There’s this petulant look on her face, a pout that she thinks is pitched somewhere between sulky kid and sexy temptress. ‘Well, I’m going. Everybody’s meeting at Finnegan’s, and then we’re going to the park. If you don’t mind me being on my own, fine. God knows what could happen, though.’

‘We can’t get into Finnegan’s. I don’t have an ID.’

‘Gavin’s brother’s working the door this weekend. He says he’ll let us in.’

‘It just doesn’t sound very fun.’

‘You don’t sound very fun.’ Nadine and I have been friends since we were ten. Her father died in a car crash the summer before I met her. She was buddied up with me that September. I think they thought we could bond over losing a dad, even though hers was a totally different thing to mine. I might not have closure, but she watched her father die. Very different sides to very different coins. But it worked, kind of. And now, I don’t know if we’re only friends because we have been for years. She doesn’t totally get me, and I’m not sure that I totally get her, either. And yet. ‘Come on. Gavin keeps asking.’

‘He doesn’t even know me.’

‘He does. He says that he thinks you’re well fit. He told Darren.’

‘Fine,’ I say. Not because I’m agreeing to go, or because I believe that Gavin said that, but because wriggling out of it will be much easier closer to the time. When I get cramps on Saturday morning, or when Mum properly grounds me – whatever lie is easiest to sell to her – she’ll have to accept I’m not going. For now, she’s happy. She grins, leans over, and kisses me. She does that, like a little seal of approval she makes every time she’s happy with something. Not a real kiss; just her lips in an O, pressed against my cheek; a trace of the lipstick we’re not allowed to wear to school.

‘You’re a properly wicked friend,’ she says. ‘What are you doing after school? I thought I’d go to Our Price.’ Nobody shops in Our Price any more, but Nadine’s got a habit of stealing the tape boxes. They keep all the cassettes up behind the counter, and you take the empty box up and they pick them out for you. Nadine’s started nicking the inlay cards. That way, she’s got the lyrics and everything, and she can borrow it off somebody else, make a copy of it, and she’s got the inlay card all ready to go. Looks like the real thing, tastes like the real thing, sounds like the real thing.

‘Lab time,’ I say, and she rolls her eyes right back, does this huff that’s so exaggerated I know it doesn’t come from anywhere that’s even close to real.

‘Oh my God. Will Pryin’ Ryan be there?’

‘Don’t call him that.’

‘You can tell though. He’s such a fucking perv.’

‘Oh he is not,’ I say, but I feel a bit weird, defending him.

‘He’s never been married. He’s not got any kids. He’s a bit weird, and he’s old. And he talks really strange. He’s either a perv or a homo.’ Malice in her eyes. ‘Probably he’s both.’

‘He’s American.’

Another eye roll, and I can see the subject change in her mouth, opening it to start saying one thing, but changing her mind. ‘Have you got any new albums?’

‘I’ve got the new Björk,’ I say.

‘Lend it me?’ I can see her thinking about stealing the inlay card already.

‘I’ll just make you a copy,’ I tell her.

‘Love you,’ she says, and she gives me another of those stupid false kisses, then swoops off. She twitches her head like a little bird, glancing at the other tables as she passes them. She makes eye contact with some of the other students, just for a second; making sure they all get a tiny piece of her eye-attention. But for some of them she holds her gaze longer; really making sure that they notice.

Mr Ryan’s really pleased to see me. Excited, even. We’re the only people in the room, which means the door stays open. I don’t know if he’s a perv or not. I don’t know if you can even tell. He starts talking before I’ve put my rucksack down, though, he’s that excited.

‘I have to tell you, Laura, having spent a bit of time with her, Organon is quite the achievement. Really quite remarkable.’ He blinks, as if he should be wearing glasses and his eyes can’t quite focus. ‘It’s as if she knows exactly what to ask you. Almost spooky.’

‘It’s just a bit of code,’ I say.

‘Maybe so, but it doesn’t feel like it. Usually with software, you can see the cracks. But this is so far beyond anything I’ve seen like this. I get it, I understand it, how it works. It’s just … The cracks are plastered over. You know?’ He goes to a computer. Organon’s already running on it. ‘I’ve been playing with her some more, today.’ He must see my face react to that. I wonder how much I give away, moment to moment, and don’t even realise. ‘Don’t panic, nobody else was in here. This was just me. I wanted to look at the code, see if I could add in some of my own questions—’

‘You told me you wouldn’t do that,’ I say.

‘I didn’t cross any boundaries. I told you I wouldn’t. I wanted to see exactly where this came from. Where it could go.’ The air in the room turns stale so quickly. I can see him trying to work out how to defuse the situation, straining somewhere inside his head. ‘Look, Laura, I think I can be really helpful to you, here. I think you might have something.’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

‘Organon’s hugely impressive. She could have some amazing real-world use, you know. This is the sort of software that could be huge. I mean, you can’t sell her to consumers, but going into other companies’ product lines? You’ve built a really awesome interface, it works well, it’s smooth. There are a lot of companies looking for software like this that they can use. Make it their own, build upon it.’

‘You’ve told people about it, haven’t you?’ I know. I can tell. He’s not being vague. Those companies – and he used to work for some of them, he’s already told me that before – they already know about Organon.

He sighs. I know, from my mum, that a sigh pretty much always means a Yes. ‘It’s not as if she isn’t still yours, Laura. But you are going places. I’ve seen a lot of students in my time, and some of them are more skilled than others, and they fall by the wayside because they don’t have any way of focusing what it is that they’re actually doing. But I could help you get Organon into the right hands.’

‘Give it back to me,’ I say. I’ve never spoken to a teacher that way before. I don’t even know how he’ll react.

‘I’m not trying to—’

‘Then give it back.’ I sit down in front of the computer and I shut down Organon, and I delete the installation file. Get rid of it, clear the trash.

‘Laura, please don’t be so rash.’ His voice is stern, like a slap, or as close as he can get. Before this, he’s been as still as a lake. Now, ripples drag across his forehead.

‘Where’s the zip drive?’

‘It’s at home,’ he says.

I stand up. I go to the door, and I can hear voices down the corridor. I want to be near them, not him. ‘Bring Organon back to me tomorrow,’ I say, and I go, I leave. I don’t give him a chance to reply. It’s only when I’m outside the building, walking across the playground – people saying Hi to me, and I totally ignore them, and again I can tell what my face must look like, from their reflecting it in their own reactions – that I realise he must have been lying. He installed it here, so he must have had it with him. I run back, but the lab is empty, the door locked, the lights out.

Even if he gives it back to me, he could make a copy of it. Keep it installed on his computer at home. And that shouldn’t bother me, because I let him take it; but it hurts me so much, having no way of knowing if there’s another version of it still out in the world. If it’s no longer just mine.

Stub follows me as I run upstairs to my room. I take my matches out of the drawer and place them on the desk in front of the keyboard. One single match out, like always, lined up and ready for me. I flick through my tapes. Paul said, last birthday, that they’d get me a CD player, and I told them I didn’t want one. I kind of like that tapes are impermanent. Even the ones you buy from the shop you can still record over: stick a bit of tape over the security hole, and Bob’s your uncle. Can’t do that with CDs. I don’t even care if they sound better.

Plus, some of my tapes were my dad’s. When he went, he left everything. So they’re what I’ve got. ELO, The Beatles, Elton John. But my favourite is Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. Mum’s hair used to look just like hers on the cover; and I loved that the picture is all soft focus; like at first it’s just a woman with some dogs, and then you look at it more, closer and closer, and you can see stars in her hair, and this strange effect over the whole picture, as if there’s two of her, slightly blurred, slightly out of sync with each other.

The tape is a bit warped now, because it’s old. It’s been listened to a lot. I play it quietly, usually, because I don’t know that I want Mum reminded of it – of him – if she hears it. But I’m alone in the house right now, so I turn the volume up, so loud that the stereo speakers start to shake on my shelves, and everything around them shakes as well. The dust.

I sing along, every word, even though I don’t know what any of the songs are actually about. That’s partly why I like it. It makes sense, but it’s elusive. When she sings about Organon, I know it’s not my Organon, but still. I snap the matchhead against the grit-strip of the box, and hold it while I roll up the sleeve, just like always. The bits of the scab wilt under the heat, like candlewax. Wet underneath. I feel sad, overwhelmingly sad. Like clouds; like fog. I light the match, and the smell of the burning, and the light, in that moment.

I take my pain, and I bury it; and I forget.

Mum pokes the shepherd’s pie that Paul’s made with her fork, swirling the mash and mince and carroty gravy around until it’s one puddle of brown, lumpy mush in the middle of the plate. She hasn’t been eating much the past few days. Maybe she’s having a proper lunch, but I doubt it. There are lines on her face, around her mouth, where she’s thin; and the only other people I know with lines there are the girls from school who everybody always worries about. The telly’s on, some bit on Watchdog about holiday companies ripping people off. How to get your money back if you’ve been fleeced.

‘We should book a holiday,’ Paul says. He nudges his knife towards the TV. ‘I mean, terrible for them, it must be, to be done over like that. But we should book something, get it sorted for next summer.’ Neither Mum nor I reply. ‘They say that it’s good for you, to have another holiday sorted. Does something to the brainwaves.’

‘We’ve got enough to be dealing with,’ Mum says, but I don’t know what she means. There’s this weird quietness from her that I can’t work out. I reach over for the ketchup and bang my elbow against the side of the table. I forgot how bad I made it earlier. I swear, and they both look at me.

‘Sorry,’ I say, and we all go back to eating, until Mum stops, puts down her fork, and stares at me. I can feel the blood before I see it. A trickle of it down my arm, and the wetness of it soaking into my shirt.

‘What did you do?’ Mum asks. Alarm in her voice. She knows.

‘Scraped it in school. I’ll clean it up,’ I say, and I push back from the table and stand up, rush out of the kitchen, up the stairs, but she’s right behind me, right on my heels, and she reaches for me, to turn me around.

‘Let me see,’ she says.

‘No,’ I tell her, ‘it’s fine, I must have just—’

She grabs my wrist, and she forces the sleeve of my shirt up. It’s hard to see it in the darkness of the hall, but she can feel, I’m sure, the blood that’s run down to my wrist, to her fingers. Her grip tightens, so tight that she’s hurting me; I can feel her fingernails digging into my skin.

‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ she asks. She isn’t looking at me, but down at her hand. I wonder what she can see in the darkness here that I can’t; how much better her eyes are than mine. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ I say. I yank my arm from her grip and rush into the bathroom. She doesn’t follow, but I still slam the door. I want the whole house to feel it. To shake.

I look at my arm in the mirror. It’s worse than I thought. The elbow skin’s torn, more than where I burned it. A flap hanging off, and it’s really bloody, really red. I take my top off, and I hold my arm under the shower. Mum’ll hear it, but I don’t really care right now. The water hurts. The heat of it. It’s a different sort of pain when you’re in control of causing it. I can’t stand it hurting when I don’t want it to. When I’m not prepared.

I keep the shower going until the water runs clear, and then I open the cupboard and find a plaster, a big square one that’ll fit around the whole thing. I know it won’t stay fixed, so I unwind some medical tape and wrap it across the top and bottom of the plaster. Wrap it all the way around my arm. My shirt is ruined. Mum might be able to bleach the blood out, but that’ll mean giving it to her, and then she’ll start asking me about it all over again. What are you doing? Why are you doing it?

There’s a knocking on the door. ‘What?’ I say. Furious. That she could stand there, listening, waiting.

‘Are you all right?’ Paul, not Mum. ‘Your mother’s really upset, Laura. I said that I’d come and check on you, let you know. Maybe you want to come and talk to her.’

‘Not now,’ I say. He waits, for a second. I can hear him breathing, about to say something, but not quite managing it. Then he’s gone, his feet on the stairs, his hand on the bannister, skirting along.

I hold the sink with both hands, and I look at my face. I didn’t even realise I was crying so much.

When I hear them finally go to bed, I’ve got a bug report email waiting for me; or, rather, three of them. Mr Ryan’s turned it on and off three times since I was last online. Once this morning, before school, for only half an hour. Once this afternoon, from school, which I already know about. And then once in the evening. That final session lasted for five hours, which is insane. I can’t see what he’s doing. Just: he opened it, he typed. He used it.

And there’s an email from Shawn. It’s short, abrupt. Asks me to tell him more. Asks me if I’m feeling okay. Doesn’t mention anything about my email, and the fact that I’m very clearly not okay. Like he wasn’t really paying attention when he read mine. Like there’s something wrong, and I think: Well I could email him and tell him that, but not now. I don’t want to have any more fights. I need him on my side. And I’ve got things to do that are, suddenly, much more important. He can wait for my reply now. See how he likes it.

I go to one of the forums I found when I first started work on Organon. I started off by teaching myself to code from old books that used to be my dad’s, that he left. Really old things, with his own notes scrawled in the margins. Useful tips. It was reading those that first gave me the idea for Organon. He was creating something that could translate words, that spoke those translations back to the user. I wanted to create something that did more than just words. Did something deeper.

I ask the coders who live on these boards if they can help me with a problem, give me a way to disable a piece of software remotely. I post that, and then I open up Organon. My version. The real one.

I tell it everything. Just like every day, I tell it what’s happened to me. About Mr Ryan, about the version of itself he’s got at home with him, that he’s shown it to people, or that he planned to. Organon asks me all the right questions.

> How would you fix this?

I don’t have an answer.

THURSDAY

I’m outside the computer lab so early that the only other people in school are the cleaners. I sit in the hallway, on the weird old floor that’s got this strange zigzag of dark wood all along it, like paths leading you in every which direction. I wait there while other kids start to appear, walking past me, bags into lockers, talking about whatever. Ignoring me. The smell of sausage and bacon baps being sold in the dining hall drifts through the corridors. Then the bell rings, and I should be in maths, but I don’t move. Some kids come along, Year 8s, but there’s still no sign of Mr Ryan. Eventually, one of the trainee teachers comes along. I don’t know his name, but he looks like he’s barely out of sixth form himself. His suit doesn’t fit him, and his tie is yanked up so high and tight I can’t believe it’s not throttling him. He doesn’t even really look at any of us, just unlocks the door and stands to one side.

‘Take a seat,’ he says, and he opens the register.

‘Where’s Mr Ryan?’ I ask him. He’s got a little badge on, with his name written in impenetrable chicken-scratch.

‘He’s not here,’ he says. He tries not to look at me directly. You can tell he’s new, and still uncomfortable with this. Being around us all.

‘Is he sick?’

‘No. I don’t know. He’s gone,’ the trainee says. ‘That’s what they told me. Are you in this class?’ he asks, but I don’t reply. I just walk out, feeling like the world’s been tilted slightly to one side, set off its axis.

Waiting out the day is sick-making hard. Like when you’re on a boat and the sea kicks up, and your gut churns, and there’s a whine in your ears as everything goes quiet, muffled. As if the air itself is sludge. At lunchtime, I peel the plaster off my arm, and I dab at the wound. Some rando in the toilets sees it, and she tells me it’s disgusting, but I don’t care. It doesn’t disgust me to look at it; doesn’t actually make me feel anything. I can hear some other girls, I don’t know who, in front of the sinks, preening in the mirrors. They’re talking about the teachers. There’s one that they want to have sex with, or that they claim they do. They talk about him as if they could; as if that’s somewhere in their futures. I recognise their laughs, but I can’t put them to faces or names, so I wait until they’re gone. Then there’s Nadine, pouting in the mirror, exasperated expression when she sees me rolling down my sleeve, then telling me that she loves me, that I have to remember that, and that she hopes I’m ready for Saturday. There’s such a big one lined up, she says. And then she laughs: not like that!