Also Starring

20

Also Starring

    Rosie’s got this silly grin on her face. “Hey, listen, Dot, I’ve had this brilliant—”

    “Drop it, Rosie. Whether or not it was just the easy option to fit in with what Bob had decided he wanted to do, he’s made up his mind he’s not gonna do it with D.M.—”

    “Not that! Though I must say, I never thought he’d have that much self-restraint.”

    Must you, just? Silly cow, why don’tcha just KEEP YA NOSE OUT— “Huh?”

    “Nothing to do with Euan! I’ve thought of something that’ll really drive D.D. out of his skull!” she says eagerly.

    Oh. Well, I might be up for that. “You, me and Gray in identical blue Sisters dresses at a fancy restaurant?”

    “Nothing with food in it,” she says repressively.

    “What? It wasn’t me that got bawled out for stuffing my face with soft cara—”

    “No, it was me,” she says pacifically.

    —amels. Yeah, it was. Added to which a half-chewed bit, don’t ask me how this happened, got stuck to the piles of blue nylon net and the stuff the misguided Kylie from Wardrobe used to get it off bleached out the blue and D.D. went ropeable. No, well, serves them right for letting Kylie do it, she’s only a helper and she done her best. Anyway, they just excised a large portion of the net and stitched in another bunch and it looks exactly the same. Given that no scene of the epic involves turning Rosie’s Sisters dress inside out and peering at the stitching round the waist. –Yes, of course he did, the man’s a maniac, hasn’t that dawned yet? Anyway, she’s pretty pissed off with him, not that she wasn’t from the word “Go”, really. Given that he’s been pestering her to do the film for the last umpteen years.

    “So it had better not have food in it,” she explains. “Anyway, I think he’d be pleased about that, rather than anything: he’s awfully pleased with the rushes of the Sisters close-ups. And with the sound-track.”

    “This is true. So?”

    “Molly!” she hisses gleefully.

    Huh?

    “Dot! Uncle George’s Molly!”

    “Yeah, I thought ya meant her, Rosie, there aren’t that many people called Molly in the 21st century.”

    “No, it’s coming back.” she says seriously. “Molly Ringwald, see? Me and Yvonne took Baby Bunting to Mum’s doctor for a check-up—there’s nothing wrong with him, he was just due for one. Of course he told us the Aussie food and our clean air was doing him good, but that was okay: I’d warned Yvonne they’ve all got closed minds and he was sure to say that. And not to bother to tell him how fresh and clean the sea air at the cottage is, but she did, anyway. Anyway, there were four other mums and babies in the waiting-room and one of the babies was a boy: Norman, after his granddad, it’s not a name you hear very often at all these days, is it?”—Might as well let her rattle on, there’s nothing else to do this arvo, the Great Director’s bullying Euan, Michael, Rupy and Darryn, plus what Rupy calls the chorus of attendant sailors, on a piece of cardboard battleship, and as a matter of fact I’ve discovered that, never mind the film-star crap and the sociology, she’s as unstoppable as any young mum when it comes to mums and babies, and, dare I say it? It’s quite a relief to find that out, actually.—“But the other three were girls, and guess what their names were?”

    “Mm?” Oh! Expecting me to actually speak, here. “Um, well, I suppose one was Molly?” Beams, nods, that must be right, looks at me expectantly. Jesus, Rosie, I dunno what the young mums are calling their kids these days! Not Russell, presumably, if the rest were all girls. Though given Wendalyn’s Taylor, anything is probably possible within the shores of Oz… “Ro—No, hang on: Lily Rose?” Laughs, nods, pulls awful face. Right, two down, one to go. Uh… “Not another Molly?” No, it’s not that popular. Well, I’m giving up! Don’t think the young mums are all that into Kylie Minogue, are they? Bit old hat, these days. Um, the Olympics are too long in the past, won’t be after any of them. Um, ’nother female pop star? Can’t think of one. Who’s that girl with the ring in her nose? (One of the many, yeah.) Um, can’t think of her name, um, hang on… “Casey? What I mean, maybe it’s K, fullstop, C, but—” Nope. Weakly I go: “Jennifer? Courteney? Phoebe?”

    “Ya don’t call ya kid after a wacky blonde with a name that ya can’t spell, Dot,” she goes kindly.

    Oh, don’tcha? Beg ya pardon. “Lisa, then? –Okay, I give up. What?”

    “Nicole, of course, they’re all feeling sorry for her since the—” Bust-up, right, right, goddit. So I just look at her limply: feel kinda drained, y’know?

    So she goes: “Well? Whaddaya think?”

    Uh… “Um, yeah, Molly’s a nice name, I guess. Better than Dorothea or Lily Rose.”

    “No! Honestly, Dot! Molly! –You, me and her!”

    Ye-ah… Oh, cripes! “Get her up here?” I croak.

    She’s nodding madly, eyes sparkling.

    “Yeah, but Rosie, D.D.’d love it: three Lily Roses? He’d be planning giant PR does and God knows what! Flaming Royal garden parties, probably!”

    “Right. Plus and, epics with the three of us in them, right? Am I right or am I very right?”

    Given that his latest inspiration is some epic set in the North of England based on The Pajama Game, only British not American, with Rosie and me doubling as twin Doris Days… “Ya prolly are very right, Rosie, yeah,” I croak. “Buh-but what if Molly goes for it?”

    “Our Molly? Ya godda be kidding!”

    Ye-ah… Well, maybe. Like, if she hasn’t changed since I last saw her—she’d of been about fifteen. And back then she was the hardest case in the world, yeah. Oh, ya thought me and Rosie were tied for first place, there? Well, ya wrong, see, we can’t neither of us hold a candle to Uncle George’s Molly. Or couldn’t back when her and me were fifteen and Rosie was mixed up with some totally unsuitable bloke, according to Aunty Allyson, Aunty Kate and Uncle George’s wife, known to her extended family as Aunty Buff. Don’t ask me why. No, it’s not short for Buffy. No, not a pet name for Barbara or anything like it, in fact her name’s Janet. No, not rude: the Grate Aussie Public might just recognise the expression “in the buff” if it thought about it, but the expression here is “in the nuddy”: the idea wouldn’t spring to mind, ya see.

    “I haven’t seen Molly since her and me were about fifteen. –Who was that bloke you were going round with? You know: ya brung him down to Melbourne.”

    “For the Chrissie holidays?”

    “Yeah! Of course! It was that time we all hadda stay at that caravan camp, because Aunty Allyson had told that sister-in-law of hers that it’d be okay for her daughter and her family to foist themselves on Uncle George and Aunty Buff that year. Aunty Buff fully agreed with Aunty Allyson’s previous intel that he was highly unsuitable.”

    “No, well, I seem to remember several… Was he highly unsuitable?”

    “And a half. Well, I was only fifteen, dunno that I ever had the whole story—but yeah. Me and Molly were fascinated by him, only he never done anything unsuitable that we could see.”

    “Caravan camp… Was that the year we went down with Aunty Allyson and her lot?”

    “Nah. She dragged them up to Townsville to Uncle Harry’s cousin Vinnie—you know, his wife’s called Harriet, she’s really nice—regardless of the fact that it was that New Year’s their Debbie was expecting her first. –Cora, dunno where it come from but it’s quite pretty, eh?”

    “Wouldn’t Coral have been more appropriate, given Towns— Townsville in summer?” she croaks.

    “You goddit. Think it was one unending thunderstorm, reading between the lines, only unfortunately they weren't flooded out: because if anyone was gonna stay in a caravan camp that summer it sure wasn’t gonna be Aunty Allyson!”

    “Yeah,” she agrees, smiling limply. “Um… Were we in a tent?”

    Cof. Ya sure were, because me and Molly useda crawl up to—Uh, yeah. “Mm.”

    “Bobby Tanzer!” she says with a laugh. “Sort of a merry version, if you can imagine it, of Bobby O’Donnell in that dumb lawyers thing!”

    Which of the many? Oh! Goddit. “Think ya mean Donnell, not O’Donnell: they were giving it a slight touch of yer Irish because it was s’posed to be Boston, only not going the whole hog because Bog Irish isn’t nayce. Weird to see nayce creeping into the Yank shows, isn’t it?”

    “It is to see overt nayce, yes, but actually mainstream Hollywood’s been relentlessly nayce ever since the Hayes Office,” she replies seriously.

    Come to think of it, she’s not wrong. “Ya not wrong. –Yeah, ya right: I knew that that Bobby Donnell guy reminded me of someone, only of course he never smiles.”

    “Exactly! He sent me a get-well card, you know!” she beams.

    Bobby Tanzer? Shit, was that one of the ones John vetted? So I go, real weak: “Did he? Has he settled down, then?”

    “Yonks ago. His eldest is eight: there was a lovely pic included with all their names on the back. No, well, think they hadda get married, but it seems to be working out.”

    Like, the Bobby Tanzer I knew, apart from the continual good-natured grin and the thick black curls, was chiefly characterised by the leather waistcoat covered in studs worn open over the chest, me and Molly thought it was a real rude chest, it was that good—with the muscly arms and their tatts well in evidence, you goddit. Plus and this humungous great brown leather watch holder on one wrist, and the other wrist strapped in black leather with tiny fringes dangling off it, and very wrinkled, very tight black denims worn either with huge black boots or grimy bare feet. Don’t think he owned a pair of bathers: the caravan camp was right on the beach and he used to just walk straight in in his denims. Which kinda sorta proved he never wore underdaks, if ya think about it. He did own a Harley, yeah, only he never brung it down because Uncle Jerry did his nut at the idea of Rosie coming down all the way to Melbourne on the back of a bike, so they just sat nicely in the back of the car—it was a Merc back then, too: big cream job. So pretty obviously he was a bit of a softie underneath the Look.

    “What’s he doing these days?” I croak.

    “Second-hand furniture. Dunno if you’d know it; you know that dump Old Man McKenzie’s put his old mum in?”

    “Darien’s Grandma? Yeah. Tarrytown Villas, wholly owned and operated by Rip-Off Nursing Home Joints Pty Ltd. Anything less like a villa: hutches, more like. She’s only got a room, though.”

    “Yeah, and lucky not to have to share it, at that! Well, it’s round that way. Big Bob’s Bargains.”

    “Oh! Yeah, I know that place, I got my dining table there!”

    “Yeah. The shop used to be a hardware place, only they got a Mitre 10 quite near, and then they built that big Bunning’s down near the motorway, so it folded. Didja see Bobby?”

    “Um, n—” Hang on: the guy that served me, he was a fat oldish joker in a faded orange tee-shirt with an Olympic logo on it, and grungy khaki shorts. Balding. Five o’clock shadow. Huge tatts on the forearms…

    “He’s put on weight,” she says mildly.

    Oh, my God. That was him? Bobby Tanzer, idol of my teenage years? And Number One Heartthrob for an entire summer of Molly Leach, Joanne Logan (friend of M.L.’s), Debra Sullivan (ditto) and even the glamorous Oksana Walsh herself? (Russian, I think, not something out of Star Trek The Next Gen.)

    So I croak: “Oksana Walsh was nuts on him that summer.”

    “Yeah? Don’t think I knew her, Dot,” she goes kindly.

    “Uh—no, ya wouldn’t. She was in the same year at school as Molly and Joanne and them, only far, far above them in every way.”

    “Right: she’d be married and living in an outer suburb with two kids, a 4WD and an imminent divorce, would she?”

    “I dunno, but I’d say you’re not wrong. Um, well, I can see that getting Molly up here would drive D.D. crazy, yes, but would she agree to— Hang on. If me and Molly were fifteen back then— Did you say Bobby’s kid’s eight?”

    “Mm. Oh—I suppose he did take up with Janine straight after we busted up, yeah.”

    On the rebound, is what she means. Got the poor moo up the spout on the rebound from flaming Dumped-Him-Heartlessly Lily Rose Marshall, married her and settled down to get fat and run Big Bob’s Bargains… Oh, well. Everybody’s gotta do something, don’t they? And it may not be exciting but at least he’s independent, he’s not a wage slave in a fucking big office like Dad.

    “What is it, Dot?”

    “Nothing. No, well, Dad’s been moaning about his job again and Mum’s been moaning about him moaning… The latest is, he wants to chuck it in and hive on up to the Blue Mountains or wherever with ruddy Bob Springer and run a B&B; only given the mortgage on the house and the amount they’re spending on the twins’ teeth and shoes, he won’t have any capital to put into it, to speak of. Well, he might have capital to put into it, but he sure wouldn’t have any to live off, not to mention feed the twins off, while they get the ruddy thing going— Forget it. Pipe-dreams of the middle class. No, well, I’m real glad Bobby Tanzer’s got his own business.”

    “Yes, ’course. So whaddaya think? Get Molly up here and drive D.D. out of his skull?”

    Er… “Would she wannoo? I mean, hasn’t she got a job?”

    “That so-called tutoring job, ya mean? Slaving all hours for peanuts while the actual lecturers that are paid the senior lecturers’ salaries manage to be utterly elsewhere for ninety-nine percent of the academic year? No, she chucked that in at the end of the semester. So it would be convenient for her.”

    “Ye-ah…” True, she’s given up the idea of the Ph.D.: looked round that ruddy department, realised what sex was slaving all hours of the day and night on junior lecturers’ salaries, and decided they could keep it. She only took on the tutoring because they got a new prof last year that she fancied dead rotten. “Um, yeah. Um, what about that new prof, though?”

    Rosie gives me this real dry look. “Guess.”

    Molly’s subject is—or was—marine biology. A total rort as far as most of its practitioners are concerned: gives you endless opportunities to swan off to tropic parts in the pursuit of your carefully chosen studies. Unfortunately for her, Molly made the mistake of taking it seriously. So I go: “Swanned off on a fellowship to Honolulu?”

    Sourly she goes: “Close—very, very close—but no actual cigar, Dot. Whacking big research grant. Greek islands.”

    “You gotta be joking!”

    “Nope. Octopodes, or so the story runs. Well, the way Aunty Allyson put it, octopussies and isn’t little Taylor adorable, but—yeah. They got lots of octopus round the Greek islands, Dot, in fact it was the Greeks discovered they were edible, according to Joslynne’s Mum’s mate Mrs Giorgopoulos.”

    “Yeah. Well, that’s the most brill’ rort I ever heard of. Why didn’t Molly pick octopuses instead of flaming jellyfish?”

    It was only a rhetorical question, but Rosie replies with a sigh: “Not a shrewdie. But take it for all in all, she’s real pissed off with marine biology. Well, she only started it because she was mixed up with that bloke Max—Uh, no: Ken Maxwell, that was it. ’Member him? Tall, strawberry blond, reddish skin, probably be bald as a coot by now.”

    “Eh? He wasn’t that much older than her!”

    “Work it out,” she suggests, looking smug.

    Er…Ulp. No, well, that’s pretty much the story of Molly’s life. Doesn’t know what she wants to do in spite of the brains, takes up with some dishy bloke and plunges herself into whatever he’s interes— Hang on, hang on, hang on! “Rosie, if you’re thinking that she’ll fall for Euan and plunge herself into the acting crap—”

    “No!” she cries indignantly.

    Ya know what? I’m not convinced. “It’d sure take Derry’s attention off you, if she did wanna go into the flaming ‘Business’.”

    “No! I never even thought of it!” Think she’s thinking of it now, though. “You’re right,” she says weakly.

    “Exactly. How could she not fall for him?”

    “Uh—no, I meant right about taking Derry’s attention off yours truly, actually.”

    “Oh.” Blush, blush.

    “And as a matter of fact I don’t think Euan’s her type.”

    Eh? Heretofore good looks and the figure to match seemed to be the only criterion and Euan’s got them, for sure. “He’s dishy, he’s under forty, and he’s hetero, Rosie!”

    “Yeah, but all her blokes have been athletic types. Well, at least sporty: I mean, Ken Maxwell was into that snorkelling crap on top of the surfing, why she imagined she was ever gonna get five minutes of his weekends I dunno. And Jamie Francis—you might not of met him, they came up to Sydney that Chrissie you were banished to Aunty Kate’s—he was mad keen on skiing. I mean, real skiing, always vanishing to Mount Hotham or wherever all winter, and all summer he was doing the water-skiing to keep in shape, she never got five minutes of any of his weekends winter or summer. And Shane McGovern, that was the type that dumped her just before the crush on the new prof, Aunty Allyson may have—Right, ’course she did—well, he was some sort of miniature motor-racing nut. No, well, I forget what they call it, but they do it all weekend, you betcha boots, plus and every minute of every evening they’re up-ended over the flaming car’s insides.”

    “Right… Oh, yeah, she broke both her arms, didn’t she?” –As opposed to the time she broke a leg and an arm on the slopes or the time she almost drowned when her flipper got stuck in a piece of the Barrier Reef, this is. Molly’s relationships haven’t been successes in any sense of the word.

    “Yeah, that’s right: Chrissie before last, it would of been. She sent me a real sympathetic letter when she heard about the accident.”

    “Uh—yeah. Well, I think she would of anyway, Rosie. No, well, you’re right, I guess they were all pretty sporty—hang on, what about Costas? Don’t tell me there’s a Greek guy on earth that’s into anything more energetic in his weekends than lying on his mum’s old couch while the womenfolk bring him relays of food and drink!”

    “Yeah,” she goes mildly. “Skateboarding.”

    “Uh—Rosie, she musta been nineteen and he was quite a few years older—”

    “Nevertheless. Well, incapable of growing up—yes. But so are most of the male half, Downunder, Dot, or haven’t you noticed?”

    “No, I mean, yeah, ’course I have. He was a dish, though.”

    “Oh, totally! Almost as handsome as Nicky.”

    Nicky Anastasiou, she means. Cringe, shudder, look round cautiously for signs of John… Phew! “What? Oh! Yeah, he was dishy, all right. So what did Molly break that time?”

    “Nothing broken, but some really badly skinned forearms and shins. Like, below where the— You goddit,” she recognises.

    “Right. Well, I s’pose that’s pretty sporty. Um,”—swallow—“what about Micky’s father?”

    Micky Leach, now aged eight, is Molly’s little accident. I couldn’t tell ya who his father was, she always refused point-blank to let on—this was after flaming Aunty Buff, who’s a bloody Catholic, refused to let her have an abortion at the age of sixteen. Well, yeah, she sent Molly back to school and looked after the kid real good, but who wants to be a mother at only just seventeen, for Christ’s sake? Molly upped stakes as soon as she’d finished Year 12 and was legally an adult, you betcha. No, well, like I say, she’s never let on to the rest of us who the father was, but I have an idea Rosie knows.

    So she goes smoothly: “Far’s I know he was only into indoor sports, Dot.”

    “Yeah, very funny. For my money, she’s still gonna fall for Euan, Rosie. I mean, all those sporty ones were at least two years back, weren’t they? And I wouldn’t say this prof was all that sporty, was he?”

    “Dunno. Aunty Allyson didn’t have that intel, unfortunately, Dot, so she couldn’t write it to me in a huge letter with the exact postage on it in multicoloured stamps covering three quarters of the envelope. As opposed to Aunty Kate’s exact postage in one stamp.”

    So I poke out my tongue at her and go: “Self-evident.”

    “Didn’t Molly tell you about him?”

    “She doesn’t write much. I got the impression he was a lot older than her, divorced, but with a collection of tall, slinky brunettes of the ex-model type.”

    So she goes: “That alone should of been enough to warn her he was never gonna fall for one of us.”

    “One of us? Oh! A short, busty blonde with unruly curls—ya right. Must of been mad.”

    “Hormones,” she says heavily.

    You’re not wrong there, Rosie. “Yeah.”

    “Doesn’t make him sporty, though, does it? Well, think he was the type that goes to the gym.”

    “Gee, she was mad, all right.”

    “Not gay, you nit!”

    “No, but Rosie: Molly in a gym?”

    She’s gulping, she’s got it. See, with her track record, Molly’d only have to go near one of those complicated exercise machines for it to leap up, break both her legs, and strangle her to death.

    So I go: “Yeah. Well, Euan does the aerobics stuff.”

    “Ye-ah… But I just have this very strong feeling that he’s not her type… Hang on, maybe it’s his looks! All her blokes have had kind of… sharp features? That’s not quite it. Chiselled features, Dot. Of the ones I met, anyway.”

    Um… Actually, she’s right. Well, no doubt all that lying around on his Mum’s old couch’d settle Costas’s features for him, in fact it probably already has, but yeah, for a spoilt Greek boy he was pretty chiselled, all right. Whereas Euan’s face is kind of lovely and blunt. Um, not the word. Well, definitely not chiselled.

    So she goes: “Whaddaya think?”

    “Um, well, he’s definitely not the chiselled type, no. Maybe Molly wouldn’t fall for him. Or not so bad as to make her think she could be D.D.’s next discovery. But how long are you envisaging this visit is gonna be for? I mean, what about Micky’s school?”

    “School?” she echoes blankly.

    “Yeah! Wake up, Rosie! He’s eight! And the mid-year break’s nearly over!”

    “Eight,” she says numbly.

    “Don’t tell me you haven’t been sending him birthday presents!”

    “Yuh—Um, shit. Yeah, I have, only it hadn’t sunk in. What I mean, the last couple of years it would of been John. See, Captain Efficiency got hold of my address book and put everything into the dreaded diary, it sits on his big desk at the cottage and accompanies us faithfully if we have to go up to town, and he’s appointed himself in charge of all birthdays and anniversaries and regardless of the fact that he was at fucking sea when his son turned six months,”—oh, God, here we go!—“is relentlessly, make that religiously, make that religiously and relentlessly, either reminding me or if my choice would be unsuitable, buying the things himself. Most of the time my choice would be unsuitable, natch.”

    So I go feebly: “For a little boy?”

    “Especially for a little boy, Dot,” she says heavily. “Remind me some time to tell you the saga of the unsuitable presents he wouldn’t let me buy in America for Joslynne’s two.”

    Eh? Davey and Rowan were thrilled with the things she sent from America!

    She’s reading my mind. “Exactly. He chose them,” she says heavily.

    Gee, and they weren’t even engaged at that stage! Well, I mean, he is gorgeous, and very, very nice, but heck, why did she marry him, she must of seen he’s the type to take you over lock, stock, and barrel!

    She’s reading my mind again. “Dot, you nit, he enjoys it,” she says heavily. “The ruddy Haworths haven’t got an extended family, let alone a network of very loosely connected kids that you have to buy prezzies for. And is it any skin off my nose? –No. And would I forget the birthdays and anniversaries if left to my own devices? –Very probably, yes.”

    So I go feebly: “I see.”

    “I hope you do,” she says drily. “Anyway, Micky could go to school here, so shall I ring Molly?”

    So at this point I really lose my cool and shout: “You don’t dump a little boy into a strange school for a week or two like a piece of LUGGAGE!”

    “No, you don’t,” agrees this very, very cool baritone Pommy voice and John comes walking round the piece of unwanted set that we were incautiously having this conversation behind. Oh, shit!

    So he goes: “Rosie, you cannot organise other people’s lives for them. I know Molly’s made a mess of a series of unsatisfactory relationships—yes, Dot, she has told me all about Molly, and I’m afraid this plot’s been festering for some time—but it is not up to you to sort her out, and, dare I repeat it? Bringing her up to Sydney will not solve her problems.”

    “All right, people take their baggage with them!” she snaps. “I know!”

    “Rosie, you don’t,” he says heavily. “Or at least, you refuse to recognise the fact. Getting Yvonne down to the cottage didn’t make her miraculously fall for Jack Powell, did it?”

    “I only thought it MIGHT!” she shouts, bright red.

    “Exactly. And involving young Katie Herlihy in the series—”

    “I NEVER wanted her to get together with Euan! I always thought she was too young for him!”

    “I know. Though I think you wanted it to work out once they were together, didn’t you? But I meant the acting, really. You meant it for the best, darling, but interfering in Katie’s life didn’t really do anyone any good, did it?”

    “I—No,” she admits, scowling. “All right, it didn’t. Though it did save Brian’s bacon over the show and help keep everybody in work for another year, you have to admit that, John!”

    “Yes, I do admit it. And I know you couldn’t have foreseen that Katie would fall for Euan,” he agrees quite mildly, phew! “But dragging Molly up here will be nothing but a disruption for her, Rosie.”

    “But heck, John, there’s lots of lovely blokes in the crew, and who knows?” she cries. “Molly’s really sick of Melbourne, she’d love to come up here!”

    “And Micky?”

    “Um, well, he knows Joslynne’s kids,” she mutters.

    “Darling, if she had a job to come to and the prospect of settling down permanently—”

    “Nothing is permanent, John!” she cries. “Didn’t you learn anything from 9/11?”

    “I—Yes. Rosie, my darling, we have to act as if it is, don’t you see that?”

    So I go hoarsely: “Yeah, he’s right. I mean, I think you’re both right, but heck, if we don’t act as if things are permanent, Rosie, doesn’t it kind of mean the bloody terrorists have won? Um, that’s what I think, anyway. Um, maybe I better—”

    “No, don’t go, Dot,” says John. “I’d value your input, actually.”

    Gulp. Mine? If you say so, John.

    Rosie’s trying to argue that acting as if things are going to be permanent doesn’t alter the fact that they aren’t; don’t think that’s going down particularly well. So I go: “No, um, well, leaving theory aside, in the present instance, if Molly had a job to come to, it would make a difference, Rosie; I mean, she’d be able to find somewhere to live and a school for Micky in the vicinity, see? Whereas if she comes up on spec and stays with Aunty May and Uncle Jerry, I know Micky could go to the local school for a bit but then he’d have to make another change, wouldn’t he?”

    “Yes,” he agrees, dunno that that was a judicious move at this moment.

    So she goes: “Couldn’t he just skip school for a couple of wee—”

    “No,” he says flatly.

    I gotta agree, there. “No, it’s against the law, Rosie. And don’t bother to give us the saga of Aunty Allyson pulling Little Taylor out of First Year as and when, because the woman’s a hen!”

    “Yes: no wonder the poor child started wetting the bed,” he agrees seriously, cripes, who told him that? And why the fuck did he bother to remember it?

    “No extended family of his own,” Rosie reminds me with a sigh.—Think she might be giving in.—“Added to which, the elephant never forgets. No, okay, you’re both right, ya pair of horribly sensible, psychologically anchored objects.”

    Gee, are we? No, well, he is, yeah, sticks out a mile. But am I? Never thought of meself in that way before and actually, is my emotional life all that much of a success?

    So he goes: “Thank you on behalf of both of us.” Those clear blue eyes are twinkling like mad. Baby Bunting’s got them, too, did I say? Definitely blue: they’ve lost that bluish baby-eye look. Pity you can’t ask a bloke before ya take up with him if he’s got blue eyes in his family, cos genetically, see, the both of you have to have had a blue-eyed parent in order to produce—

    “What? Sorry—what?”

    “I was saying, if we could find a job for Molly, would he agree to let me ask her if she’d like to come up,” she explains.

    “Mm,” he agrees drily. “And I was about to say yes to inviting her and no to any silly plots designed to annoy Dawlish.”

    “But you hate him, too, John!”

    “He’s not flavour of the month as far as I’m concerned, but hate’s going too far,” he replies calmly. “Rosie told you about that time he bearded us in the cottage and earbashed her for the best part of a day about doing the film, did she, Dot? –Mm. Not funny. Added to which he drank up my good brandy—definitely not funny! But dreaming up silly plots will only get you all hot and bothered, Rosie. Just be grateful for the fact that he’s wild that Dot can’t be talked into being a film star.” –Awards me the lovely smile.

    “Yeah,” I agree anxiously.

    “Ya don’t have to back up his every word, Dot!” she says crossly.

    “I’m not, I’m backing up the ones I agree with. They just happen to be every word so far.”

    Gee, I didn’t mean it to, but that went over real good; John’s collapsed in sniggers and has to out with the hanky and blow his nose hard.

    “Yeah, hah, hah,” she says weakly, but she’s grinning. “No, well, okay, I’ll drop the plotting. Actually I think just seeing the three of us together’d be enough to make him half choke to death,” she adds thoughtfully.

    “Exactly! Hey, I tell ya what—” I break off real quick.

    “Go on, Dot!” he says with a laugh.

    “Um, ’tisn’t really a plot. I only thought, what say we all put on the Sisters dresses—like, those are the ones there’s three of, John, ya see—and wait until he comes on set and Molly can stand with her back to him and he’ll think it’s Gray—and then she turns round!”

    They’ve both collapsed in wheezing fits and into the bargain Rosie’s trying to gasp: “He’ll explode!” So that’s okay.

    “Agreed,” he says weakly, blowing the nose again. “And don’t dare to do it without me!”

    “Good! It’s a promise!” she agrees, beaming at him. Boy, aren’t other people’s relationships funny? Well, theirs sure is. Not at all sure who gave in to who, here. Or why.

    “Eh? –Sorry. What did you say, John?”

    “I was wondering what sort of a job Molly could do, Dot, if she’s been tutoring in marine biology for several years.”

    “Since she finished her M.Sc. While she was studying she done all sorts of jobs, John.”

    “Waitressing—does Leila need anybody?” asks Rosie eagerly.

    “In mid-winter? Hell, no. If ya go in round twelve or one the place may look crammed, but they’re all office workers queuing to take away the hot soup and rolls, she hardly gets the sit-down trade at all, and that’s where she really makes her big bucks.”

    “Of course,” agrees John seriously. “It’s a hard life. What else has Molly done?”

    “Jobbing gardener—bit like your mate Greg Singh,” I remind Rosie. “She was working for the bloke that owned the franchise. He made her do all the work and took all the dough. She ended up making about three dollars an hour, don’t tell me that’s illegal, thanks. Then she did office cleaning, boy was that hard yacker. Only the thing was, being Molly, she took it seriously. Eventually she found out the others would just give the place the once-over and hardly ever bother to vacuum or wash the toilet floors and if the bogs looked okay they wouldn’t bother to clean them—that kind of thing. Mostly they just walked round emptying wastepaper baskets. They decided she was showing them up with the boss and ganged up to get rid of her. Um—lessee… Think she worked in a couple of shops.”

    “Yes,” agrees Rosie. “Aunty Kate wrote me a spiel about that, dunno who she got it off, but it must of struck a chord. Molly really liked the job at the stationer’s, but the lady there had a niece that needed a job, so she sacked her. Then they took her on at one of those places that recycle expensive clothes. –Yeah, that’s right, John, we got them in Britain, too, only out here they wouldn’t be Gucci labels or like that, but pretty expensive stuff. Only she wasn’t up-market enough for the lady that run it, added to which she kept telling the customers the truth, like if it had a mark on it somewhere or if it made their bums look fat, so she got the sack from there, too.”

    So he goes: “Surely that’s unfair dismissal?”

    “Yeah, it probably is, John, only an ordinary person doesn’t want to get involved in a law suit that drags on for at least two years just to get back a job they hated anyway with a horrible lady that victimised them!”

    “Um, yeah, she’s right,” I agree uncomfortably.

    “Quite: the system’s set up to keep the underdogs under,” he agrees, real grim. Cripes! And I thought he was as Establishment as Prince Charles—no, much more, he wouldn’t dream of cheating on his wife, however silly and unsuitable she was.

    So Rosie goes: “If you can ignore the accent, not to mention the syntax—and I concede it’s difficult—you do eventually realise, though only after you’ve fought your way past the Royal Navy shit, that’s he a red-hot radical at heart.”

    “If you weren’t in a wheelchair I’d tickle you to death for that, Rosie Haworth,” he replies smoothly.

    Cof. Maybe I oughta just slide quietly away?

    “No, well, I have to admit I am, Dot!” he adds with a laugh.

     Jump! Gasp! “Are ya, John? Well, good on ya!”

    “Didn’t Molly work in a factory, too?” she says suddenly.

    “Uh—yeah. Packing. Small cartons and boxes, like for cosmetics and soap, that kinda stuff. That was good, cos then when she went on that working holiday to, um, forget, some place they got one of the big fruit-packers—not Berri, don’t think—she got a job in the packing department there. Packing peaches.”

    “What did Micky do while she was packing?” asks John seriously.

    “Part of the time he was in the crèche, they had a real good one, like proper day-care, and part of the time their landlady looked after him: she was real keen, actually, her own grandkids were over in WA. Molly would of stayed on there, only of course all the jobs were seasonal.”

    “He’s just checking to see if she really is a responsible mother,” Rosie explains.

    “Yeah, I got that, Rosie. She is, John, she wouldn’t dream of waltzing off and leaving him. Aunty Buff wanted to keep him when Molly left school but she wouldn’t let her. Just as well: she’d of brought him up to be rigidly Catholic and he’d probably of turned out like Frankie.”

    “Yes?” he croaks.

    “Oh, haven’t ya heard that one? Gee, thought Rosie would of told ya that one!”

    “The topic of disastrous Catholic upbringings hasn’t come up,” she explains, poker-face. “He’s an atheist, former C. of E. Go on, you might as well tell him, since you’ve brought it up.”

    “Well, see, Uncle George isn’t a Catholic but he doesn’t much care, he’s always left the kids to her,” I explain. “Frankie’s their eldest, and he got the full treatment. Confirmation, altar boy, and an expensive Catholic secondary school. He wasn’t a rebel, quite the contrary: he was the perfect little budding saint all through his teens, and gladdened his Mum’s heart by deciding he was gonna be a priest. –Weird, huh? Why’d ya want your son to be celibate?”

    “I’ve always thought that,” he agrees, nodding. “Some sort of perverted desire to be the only woman in his life, perhaps? Underneath the religious thing, of course.”

    “Yuh—uh, yeah,” I croak.

    “I told you he was an atheist,” says Rose smugly. “Go on.”

    “Uh—yeah! Uncle George went ropeable, John, he’s not unnatural, but by then it was too bloody late. So Frankie goes to the seminary, tra-la-la, and he does it, all right. Takes the final vows, or whatever they call it when you’re a man. Aunty Buff’s over the moon and goes round skiting to all her Catholic friends. So things go real well for a bit and Frankie hasn’t yet got his own parish but he’s been priest at a prison, that must of opened his eyes a bit, I’d say, and then live-in priest, forget what they call it, at a Catholic boys’ school—”

    “Chaplain, I think, Dot,” he says mildly.

    “Is it? Like on MASH? Right, if you say so, John, one of those, and then—the Church must be mad—they send him as chaplain again to a ruddy Catholic girls’ school! A boarding school, way out in Outer Woop-Woop, no other distractions, geddit? Well! The S hits the fan with a roar! Like if he was gay it would of happened at the other place, only he isn’t. He falls with a thump for one of the senior girls, and being good little Frankie doesn’t just have it away in a secluded spot, thanks for the memory, darling, happy graduation and good luck at uni next year kind of thing—oh, no! He has to go and tell his bishop that he wants to break his vows! Well! Poor old Frankie’s gonna be a brand from the burning and the Catholic Church just about kills itself trying to salvage him. It’s retreats and whatnots till they come out yer ears, six months doing solitary with prayers with some brothers or something, and blah, blah—No dice. By this time the girl’s long since left school, of course, and gone to uni and I dare say had five dozen other boyfriends—who knows? I mean, if she was keen enough on sex to encourage the school chaplain? So the Church is ready to forgive all and welcome Frankie back into the fold and they put him in, not sure if it’d be as actual chaplain, think it was more a non-priest rôle, in a halfway house. Like for boys that have done time, getting them back into the community.”

    “As warden, Dot?” asks Rosie dubiously.

    “Um, think so. Or housemaster, was it? Like the uni hostels have. So Aunty Buff’s going round telling everybody that the Church is lining up a lovely parish for Frankie, it was just an aberration, and guess what? He takes up with one of the boys’ lady lawyers, dumps the Church and the job, and now he’s married and living in—well, I forget, but he’s a Carlton supporter, so fairly near there, think it is.”

    “Yes. Some of us think the cream of the story is that the lady lawyer—she’s really nice, mind you—is ten years older than him with a face like a camel—slightly whiskery, and a long upper lip,” notes Rosie dispassionately, “and even more serious-minded than he is. But there’s no doubt it was a love match.”

    “Yeah. They don’t go to church, but they both spend all their time doing good and they haven’t got any kids of their own but they’ve adopted two. Kids that no-one else would take. The boy’s Black and got a crippled leg, and the girl’s a Down’s Syndrome kid—most of the time she’s real good-natured but she has these unexpected temper tantrums, really frightening.”

    “Dot,” he says weakly, “if it was Rosie who had imparted that last morsel I’d say it must be apocryphal.”

    “Um, no, John. That’s the sort of people they ere.”

    “When you say the boy is Black,” he says weakly: “do you mean Aboriginal?”

    “No. Um, you usually would, out here. Um, no, his mum was a girl that went up to do guiding at the Olympics. The dad was one of the African athletes. The story is he strung her a line about marrying her and taking her back home to his chiefly way of life, only it was all a lie: he wasn’t a chief and he already had a wife and family. The girl was from a Maltese family but that didn’t mean they were keen to let her keep a Black baby. So the nuns got Frankie and Caitlin to agree to adopt him.”

    “I see. So they still do keep in touch with the Church?” he goes dazedly.

    “For charitable stuff—sure. Added to which the nuns knew a pair of soft touches when they found them. He is an awfully cute little boy. But the leg’s gonna cost megabucks by the time he’s had all the ops the docs reckon he needs, and there’s no guarantee they’ll fix it in the end.”

    “That make it clearer, Captain Exactitude?” she goes calmly.

    “Very clear,” he agrees, as mildly as anything. “Thanks, Dot. That certainly is an object-lesson in not bringing up one’s ewe-lamb to be a good Catholic boy.”

    Uh—yeah. I’d forgotten that that was the point of the story, actually. “Mm.”

    “Captain Stick-To-The-Point,” murmurs Rosie.

    “Yeah. Well, just as well someone can,” I admit.

    “She was much, much worse after Baby Bunting was born!” he says with a laugh. “Rambling, discursive, and vague with it! It was wholly delightful!”

    “The milk,” she goes, sticking her tongue out at him. “As well as the genes. Think we were deciding if I’m allowed to give Molly a bell or not, weren’t we, Captain Stick-To-The-Point?”

    “Yes, we were,” he agrees solemnly. “Only if we can find a job for her, darling.”

    “Um, Kenny’s dump might need more lab technicians,” she says dubiously. “Or what about Tim’s dump, Dot?”

    “I could ask him, but last time I heard, they were laying off, like all the government departments.”

    “Still? They were laying off when I left Oz!”

    “Yeah. Um… Well, Riana’s leaving work, I could ask Uncle Jerry, I s’pose.”

    So she goes: “I’ll ask him!” and he goes: “No.” Ya might expect her to lose her rag but she just pokes out her tongue at him again. So he asks whether I think Molly could do Riana’s job.

    Swallow. “Yeah, um, that isn’t exactly the point, John. Anyone could do Riana’s job. Like she's only got minimal keyboard skills, and no theoretical grasp at all of why she has to do what she does. Mind you, she can write a nice letter, they taught her the formatting for that at her word-processing course. Molly’d do it standing on her head and probably in half the time.”

    “That could be a problem,” he says seriously. “You wouldn't want her showing the other girls up.”

   “No. Added to which, see, there’s the boredom factor.”

    “Could it be more boring than packing, though?” asks Rosie.

    “No, but see, the end was in sight with those. This’ll be a”—blast, can’t think of any other word!—“like, a permanent job.”

    “Yeah,” she agrees. “I see. Though it might lead on to a better job in another office. She could do it for a year or two, surely?”

    John takes a deep breath so I say quickly: “Think that’s as good as it’s gonna get, John. The job isn’t that interesting, that’s true, but Molly’s real conscientious, she’d do it okay. I’ll talk to Uncle Jerry, see what he thinks. He might not want to appoint another niece at all, might put the girls’ backs up.”

    He agrees, so Rosie doesn’t object that Molly wouldn’t put anyone’s back up, what I could see she was about to. Just closes her mouth again and nods meekly. Gee, that’s a first.

    D.D.’s actually let me of the hook, so I can go into the office and see what messes Daniel’s been trying to hide since I last checked up on him, and talk to Uncle Jerry today.

    “Oh, there you are Dot,” goes the little pointy-headed nerd with a silly look on his face.

    “Yeah, back to reality, thank God,” I agree mildly, sitting down. “How’s it going?” I’ll give him ten min by me watch and then—

    Gee, he outs with it. They got a warning message, he run a diagnostic, but—

    “When was this?”

    Only yesterday arvo round closing time. Bad enough, but could be worse. At least it won’t affect the website. He doesn’t think it’s the software itself. Gee, no, Daniel, if it let ya run a diagnostic— Let’s see this warning message and when does it occur?

    Ouch, it occurs any time anyone opens the main accounts database!

    So I shoot out to the main office and go: “Anybody using the accounts database this morning?”

    Yep, Deirdre’s conscientiously started the billing process for the account customers. Like, first she has to check who owes us: ya don’t, and this did have to be laboriously explained several times, wanna send an account to people who don’t owe us nothing, they don’t like it. Did she get a warning message, like with a big red exclamation mark on it, when she started? Um… Right, she did, only the silly moo isn’t gonna admit it. So I exit, then reopen the database and pow! Up it pops.

    “Like, you never done anything wrong, Deirdre, something bad must of happened behind the scenes on the network late yesterday arvo. Like, maybe there was a power spike. This message means you can’t do any work— Yes, I know the database opened up okay—” And etcetera and etcetera and so forth. Don’t think it’s sunk in at all, my God! Wouldn’t you think that when anyone, even a stupid hen that dyes their hair that sort of auburn that has purple lights in it where the sun strikes it—not actual streaks, the dye does it by itself—would realise that when you get a ruddy great warning STOP! message in RED, ya stop? Nope. Possibly it has now sunk in that even if the command she put in seemed to work we can’t rely on it after a message like that and she’s gonna have to do it all again. Possibly. Well, now that I've seized the invoices she’s generated and ripped them to blazes I think it might of sunk in.

    “We need to check everything before you can use the database again, Deirdre. Sorry, but you’ll have to do something else this morning. Who else—”

    Riana’s checking the client list, making sure the ones that oughta be tagged for getting a Chrissie card from Grant & Marshall are so tagged. Ya right: Uncle Jerry was desperate for something to give her in her last week, she’s very, very preggy and almost totally out of it. Never mind, it’ll be good come Chrissie when we’re real busy. Crumbs, she’s going through each record— Oh, let her.

    “Yeah good, I think this database is okay, Riana, but I’ll just close—” Wail, find her place again! How did she get ’em all up in the first place? See, she used the globe button! Beam, beam. Right, well, she remembered, good on her. Didn’t remember to call it an icon let alone a global search but—yeah. Good on her. And if she was using this display to look at them, they won’t be in alphabetical order. Um, no, it did look a bit funny, she admits. Quite. (Often the result of selecting the wrong icon on your menu to go into a database, given that the menu is driving the selection of screens, a notion that none of them has been able to grasp at all.) So I take a note of the record she’s up to, she just looks on, not asking why I’m writing down the record ID or if that means they’re in ID order let alone if ID order is the default sort for the database— Forget it. They’re all like that. I don’t think this database will be affected, Riana, but I’ll check. Close. Reopen (using wrong menu icon again). Fine. Phew! Global search. Yeah, here they are again, Riana. Pity there isn’t a “Go to” command, huh? (Don’t say it. Make a mental note to check out the command language we haven’t needed to use and meditate ways and means of using the scripting the newest version has added to its facilities.) Do use the big black arrow buttons to skim through— Here. Ooh, thanks, Dot! Yeah. Any time, Riana.

    Deirdre’s been eavesdropping, can’t think of anything else to do because her appointed task of the morning’s been canned, so she goes: “But if she’s using it—”

    “No. It’s a different database, Deirdre. The client names and address are all in a different database.”

    “But I was getting the names and addresses okay!”

    Jesus! This has been explained one million times. One million. So I go, avoiding eye contact: “Nah, the wonky database was only looking at the names and address from the other database, it’s still good.” And slide off back to me office. Oh, dear, and it isn’t even nine o’clock yet! (The girls all start quite early, they like it, means they can get home in plenty of time to get the tea for the useless lumps they’re married to. –Yes, this is the 21st century. Nevertheless.)

    So Daniel warns me that Uncle Jerry’s slated for Randwick. Right, I’ll speak to him now. Gee, he doesn’t want to hear about the database crash, in fact he turns purple and roars: “WHAT?”

    “It’s okay, we’re on top of it. Lots of recovery procedures.”

    “The bloke promised us his fucking software was solid!” he shouts.

    “It is. The database files got corrupted: the program’s fine.”

    “It’s the database files we need to fucking USE!” he screams.

    “Yeah. We’re recovering them. Stop screaming.”

    He breathes heavily for a bit. “When did this happen?”

    “Late yesterday arvo. Think there might of been a power spike—was there a lot of thunder about?”

    “Thunder? No! There was another fucking unauthorised afternoon tea while I was at the races, though! What’s the betting this so-called power spike happened then?”

    Ouch. “Yeah. Anyway, we’re on top of it, but the girls can’t use the accounts database until we’ve fixed it. The other databases are fine. I actually wanted to ask you about Riana’s position.”

    “Look, I bought her a new chair, what else can I—”

    “No! Not that! –She loves the chair, mind you, and the girls are already fighting over who’s gonna get it when she’s gone, regardless of the fact that they’re all long past child-bearing age.”

    “In that case I’ll give it to little Shona,” he goes evilly.

    Will ya? Good on ya, Uncle Jerry! “Good. Um, no, I meant her job. I was wondering if Molly might do as her replacement. Uncle George’s Molly.”

    “With a degree in marine biology? What is it?” he goes heavily. “Another illegitimate offspring on the way?”

    “No! She has learned about birth control in the last nine years!”

    “Mm. If not learned how to say no, the way your bloody aunts tell it. Well, if you think she can do it, Dot, I’ll give her a try.”

    “I’m sure she can do it: she’s used to using computers and all sorts of databases, actually.”

    “Dot, if she shows the girls up, I frankly don’t care!” he says loudly.

    Ulp. Yeah. “Mm. Um, well, thanks. I’ll see if she’s interested.”

    “Mm. I won’t ask if she needs somewhere to stay,” he goes drily, “because I’m quite sure that between you, you and Rosie will have that well in hand. –That it?”

    “Mm.”

    “Is it safe to go to Randwick?”

    “Mm.”

    “Right, I’m going. And Dot, I want this fixed: never mind what I said about letting you go off to the fucking film studios, this job comes first.”

    “Yeah, ’course!”

    “Glad to hear it.” And he grabs up his coat and his field-glasses and goes, brushing off Deirdre’s bleating about shall she do this, that or the other like she was a fly. Well, yeah, good on him, but it would of been a lot better if he’d given her something to do, wouldn’t it?

    So I nip back into our office and close the door, real quick. IT manager, I’m up for. Fucking office manager, with that lot? No way.

    Daniel’s had a brill’ thort. Like, if we change the max number of users on the accounts database to one, only us can use it while we fix it! Uh—yeah, that is brill’, actually. Thing is, ya have to do it through the database itself, and that there abort message warned us we didn't ought to open— Shit, it’s better than having them waste a morning’s work. And have to repeat it all, thereby wasting an afternoon as well. So we do it. Gee, I feel a lot better and so, judging by the grin on his face, does he.

    So we run a diagnostic again. Ugh. How many errors?

    “I never got that!” he gasps.

    Er—no? Like, there are these check boxes that you gotta check before you run the diagnostic, Daniel. I don’t say it, I just say: “Think I better run it again, just to be sure.” So I go back and this time, read out the drop-down box’s instructions slowly and carefully to meself (cof) and the penny drops, because he gulps and goes: “Oh!”

    “Are you gonna print it out?” he goes sadly as we look at the beginning of the long, long error report.

    God. “Uh—better safe than sorry.” So we print it out but its messages aren’t any different: it’s still found umpteen corrupt nodes and it’s telling us to rebuild index this, that, and the other…

    “I think it wants us to rebuild all the field indexes,” he realises glumly.

    “Yeah. That isn’t gonna fix any of these corrupt nodes, though. ’Member that nice lady that helps with support for the supplier—not the high-powered one in the zoot-suit that done the so-called training, the one that came along the day the guy couldn’t make it and showed us the scripting?”

    “Oh! Her! Ye-ah…”

    “I asked her about error reports over afternoon tea and she admitted that while ya can rebuild any of the field indexes, if there’s a message about corrupt nodes you’ve had it.”

    “Oh.” He reaches for the manual. Okay, let him: at least he’s cottoned on to the fact that the manual is for using, not for leaving in its box in your bottom drawer. Alone of all pointy-headed IT nerds in the universe—yep.

    Gee, there’s nothing about that here. But maybe he could try the user group! Like, not our supplier’s, it’s the manufacturer’s, back in the US of A.. Their so-called help database is useless but their user group’s real good. So I let him try that, while I read up on rebuilding your database…

    Jump! “What? No, Joanne, that’s right, the system’s locking you off from the accounts database, it’s had an abort. I know Riana’s using the software, but she’s not using the accounts database, only the client one. Like, the client list—that’s right!”

    –Daniel’s muttering to himself, better not to know. I write out the instructions for rebuilding a database, step by step…

    Jump! “What? No, Betty, you can’t put in the payments, the accounts database is down. Dunno, think it was a power spike late yesterday arvo. Riana’s only working on the client list, that’s not in that database.”—Nothing.—“Like, ’member how we talked about it being like the clients’ records being in one filing cabinet and the accounts records being in another filing cabinet?” (No.) “Yeah.”

    So Daniel says, real grim: “I’ll deal with the next one, Dot.”

    Jeez, will ya, Daniel? Actually I won’t say no.

    So he goes: “Shona, Dot doesn’t want to be interrupted. Just take it that you can’t use the accounts database until further notice, okay?”

    And the poor kid squeaks: “No! Um, I only— Um, not that! I mean, I know it’s down. I just wondered if you and Dot might like a coffee. Like, they’ve all had their morning tea.”

    Weakly we let Shona bring us coffees. And the cake left over from yesterday arvo. Gee, it’s extra! Sponge with some sort of passionfruit cream. She’s watching us eat it with a hopeful expression on her face so I go: “Extra! Did this come from the shop where your mum works, Shona?” It did, and she’s real pleased and goes off looking all pink.

    After some thoughtful chewing on both sides I say slowly: “This afternoon tea yesterday… It wasn’t Riana’s leaving do, was it?”

    No, that’s coming up on Friday. Thought so, yeah. Glumly he admits it was Betty’s idea . It would of been, yeah. Hers or Deirdre’s. “And?” Um, well, see, Maureen’s little grandkiddy Sean has his birthday on the exact same day as Peta’s and her boyfriend’s one-year anniversary. What? Peta’s not one of the girls, she’s one of the newer staff hired to work on the incoming credit-card payments from the website. Like, every evening we get a great big file of website payments downloaded to us and the next day Peta, Margery and Tom (yes, a male, boy did that cause disruptions, though Daniel was bloody glad to see him) go through them, checking against the bank statements, and only when everything’s been verified, uploading the checked records to the master accounts database. The one that’s gone pflooey, yeah. “I thought Peta was sensible?” Yeah, but they got it out of her. –Oh, the misguided boyfriend rung her at work the day before about the restaurant he’d booked at, and left the message with Betty, that woulda done it, yeah. Peta was embarrassed, was she, Daniel? I just bet she was! Then they all brought their cakes—yeah, ’course. Why’s he gone so red? “It wasn’t your fault, even Uncle Jerry can’t stop—”

    No, gasp, he thinks that mighta been it! Cringe. But I let him tell me and get it over with. Turns out that in the great excitement of having a joint afternoon tea for Maureen’s grandkiddy’s birthday and Peta’s wedding anniversary, someone sat on a keyboard.

     What? Well, yeah, most of them are hopeless cretins, but honestly! All the same, by itself, that wouldn’t’ve—

    He thinks she mighta left the database open! Gulp, gasp, very red, looks at me desperately.

    “That woulda done it, yeah. Well, they all been told a million times to close the database when you’ve finished the immediate task— Never mind, lateral thinking. Uncle Jerry’s gonna have to bite on the bullet and take over that office space next door and set up a proper tea room with room for parties. Like a caff: tables and chairs. He can afford it—well, tax deductible, anyway. But the website’s doing so well he could afford a proper canteen with a canteen lady. Except they’d all start criticising whatever she cooked and bringing in their own that was better.”

     “And then we’d really be in the shit!” he says with a laugh, boy has he improved since we first took his tiny pointy-headed person on. Zoot-suits an’ all.

    “You goddit!”

    “But a proper tea room’s a real great idea, Dot!”

   “Yeah. Plus and a stern rule, pronounced by Uncle Jerry himself, about no more food in the office.”

    “Too right.”

    “Mm.” Is he gonna tell me who it was? Not that most of them wouldn’t be capable of it. Though with me Network-Administrator skills, I could probably deduce from the log reports for each workstation exactly whose—

    “Um, does Jerry have to know which one it was?” he goes miserably.

    “That depends. Was it a hopeless case?”

    “Um, yeah. Um, I think so.”

    “Then, no, he already knows they’re hopeless. Which one was it?”

    He starts to tell me that everybody was perching on the desks because they’d put the cakes on Deirdre’s big table that they use for sorting and enveloping, then thinks better of it. Betty. Well, my bet would of been her or Deirdre, yes.

    “Betty’s bum or her keyboard?” Both. Right. “Wonder the keyboard survived at all.”

    He goes into a relieved sniggering fit.

    Yeah. Well, I won’t let on to him, but of course i will tell Uncle Jerry the lot, he does need to know just how bad they’re getting. And it’ll certainly help persuade him to give them a tea room. True, the problem will then be how to got them out of it…

    Sufficient unto the day. We gotta get this database sorted out first. “You get any joy out of the user group?

    They don’t seem to think there’s anything to do about node problems except rebuild the database. No. Thought so.

    “What if we can’t extract the data?” he goes fearfully.

    That was my thought, too. Boy, I feel sick, wish I’d never eaten that passionfruit cream sponge!

    He thinks we might use the “copy database” command. I think, given the software’s pretty good but not actually magic, that that might result in copying the errors, too. Never mind, we’ll try— First we’ll turf everybody off the network, they can take early lunch-breaks, we don't want this to take forever. Gee, he leaps up and does it, think he's really pissed off with them.

    Peta comes in looking cautious. “Dot, does this mean we’re not going to be able to finish today?”

    “You’re not gonna be able to load the checked records until I get the accounts database up and running, no. But your clone of it that you use for checking your incoming files is okay.”

    “Yes,” she agrees in relief. “Um, Dot, I don’t know if Daniel mentioned it, but there was an accident with one of the keyboards yesterday.”

    “Yeah, it’s okay, Peta, he’s told me all about it, but thanks, anyway. And I know no-one in your section would do anything wrong. You might as well go to lunch: we wanna use the entire power of the network, get this over with soonest, okay?”

    “Yes, of course.” Smiling a relieved smile, she slides out.

    They’re all out. Daniel prudently does a tour of the workstations. Jesus flaming Christ, Maureen’s left the software up! Once the heavy breathing has subsided we run the “Copy Database” command. Shit. As I thought. No dice. Grimly I excise the copy’s files.

    “We can use the back-up,” he ventures.

    “Yeah. Not last night’s, though.”

    “Um—no,” he admits.

    We get the night before last’s back-up copy of the database up. It’s okay, phew.

    “Everybody was working on the accounts yesterday,” he notes glumly.

    “Exactly. We gotta try to get that data back.”

    “Yeah. Are you gonna try opening the database?”

    “I’ll do that first, yeah. See what I can get out of it.”

    Gee. Well, it’s written something to file. We get up Word and look at it—it’s only a formatted ASCII file. These are accounts records, all right. Thing is, how do we know if they’re all complete, even if it has given them the “end of record” symbol, or if we’ve got all of them?”

    Daniel thinks, very sensibly, that it wouldn’t of written the “end of record” symbol of it hadn't read the end of the record. No, right. But he admits we won’t know what we’ve lost.

    “No. Let’s hope it’s not Old Man Harbottle’s last bet. Um—well, match this against the back-up?”

    “Yeah! With the ‘update record’ and ‘add new record’ commands on!” he cries.

    Something like that.

    We do that. Well, it added something. Prudently we print out what it added. All right, Daniel, two copies, why not? All right, Daniel, we will use the “Copy Database” command and copy this lot just in case, why not?

    “Um, I think the manual said something about the data file,” he ventures.

    It sure did. What we gotta do, see, as a check on what we mighta missed, is extract the data from crashed database’s data file, then run it against what we got, and add anything extra.

    We do that. It’s added what it claims is one record but when we look at it there’s almost nothing in it.

    “This’ll be the point at which Betty’s bum landed on it,” I note.

    “Yeah. Only what about the stuff they added since then?”

    What, indeed? Ruddy morons! We’re gonna have to print the log file, though what use a log file of a ruddy aborted database is gonna be—

    Shona comes in with a plate of sandwiches and two mugs of coffee. Cos we missed lunch and the others are having their afternoon tea.

    Shit, that means it’s almost time for the big download from the website! I shoot out and remind Peta, Margery and Tom not to add anything to the accounts database but they know. Phew!

    “Why can’t he get rid of that lot and get in some more like Peta and them?” demands Daniel angrily as I close the door.

    “Because he’s running a human office, not a cyberspace one, and shut up,” I sigh.

    Gee, he just grins and says: “Yeah.”

    So by the end of the day when Uncle Jerry breezes in from Randwick smelling of whisky, we’ve got it up and running and poor little Shona has volunteered to stay on and do overtime, checking what oughta got put in yesterday, and the blasted “girls” are already packing up.

    So I march into his office. “Never mind what the favourite did or didn’t, get this!”

    At the end of it he just says mildly: “I knew they were getting worse. Sit down.” And he gets me a Johnnie.

    “This won’t help,” I warn, having downed it.

    “No—or only in the short term. I’d put in an office manager, only I know damn well that’d make matters worse. Suggestions?”

    So I make my point about a tea room.

    So he goes, not even pausing to take a breath: “How do we get them out of it?”

    “Can I venture to suggest that’s your problem, because they’re your employees?” I shout.

    “No need to shout, Dot. –Well, yeah, ’tis. Wish to God John’d come into the business.”

    Gulp. Eh?

    He raises his eyebrows at me. “Well, an idea for the future, mm?”

    Is it what? Gee, he’d only have to stroll into the tea room and they’d be shooting out like rockets!

    “I can see that the idea fills your mind with the same glorious golden glow it does mine,” he says with a sigh.

    “Too right. Um… I did have an idea, sort of lateral thinking, only… Well, what say we do a clone of the accounts database for the girls to input to—”

    “Or sit on,” he agrees drily.

    “Yeah. Then at the end of each day someone responsible loads their stuff to the master database.”

    “Ye-ah… Thing is, we want to generate our invoices from the master database, Dot: it wouldn’t really be efficient, would it?”

    “No. Sack Betty, seems to be the only other solution.”

    “Mm. Find other responsibilities for her?” he suggests without hope.

    “Ye-ah…” Golly. Me mouth sags open. “Tea room lady?” I croak.

    “By God!” he gulps.

    We just sit here staring at each other.

    “Where did that come from?” he croaks.

    “Dunno. Me brain just sort of done it.”

    “It’s ideal, Dot!”

    Yeah, ’tis, eh?

    “Daniel still here? Get him in here!” he says with a laugh. “This rates drinks all round!”

    “Yeah, um, him and Peta are still here, and so’s Shona, she volunteered to check all the stuff them other silly moos input after the abort come up.”

    “Get them in, too!”

    So they come in, looking nervous. And Uncle Jerry goes: “After consultation with Dot I’ve decided to take over the office next-door and put in a proper tea room. And—though you needn’t mention this just yet—Betty will be in charge of it.”

    There’s a stunned silence.

    “And off accounts?” asks Peta cautiously.

    He eyes her drily. “Precisely.”

    “Oh, good,” she says weakly. “I do think that’s a sensible solution, Jerry.”

    “Congratulate Dot, not me, it was her idea!” he says, pouring. “Come on, Shona, one won’t hurt you! Raise your glasses, everyone! To the new tea room!”

    So we all drink solemnly: “The new tea room!” Shona chokes on her belt of Johnnie, but never mind, she’s thrilled to be in on it.

    Next day. I’ve made it in to work again this morning, D.D. still doesn’t want me, he’s shooting close-ups and scenes with the sailors. Uncle Jerry’s here bright and early, think it threw a scare into him, between you and me and the gatepost. Calls Betty into his office. Don't ask me how he puts it but she comes out beaming and important. Approx. ten minutes later—after they’ve all had time to seethe with curiosity, right—she’s in a huddle with Deirdre and Deirdre then goes into a terrific sulk, probably slated to last until Christmas, but too flaming bad. It’s about as good as you can get in this universe, isn’t it?

    So Daniel goes kindly: “I can hold the fort, Dot, if you need to dash off to the studios.”

    Actually, I think he can. Only then he goes: “I’ll take him to lunch at The Old Lion, shall I?”

    “Huh?”

    “This bloke that’s coming out from England. I’ll take him to lunch at The—”

    “What bloke that’s coming out from England? What are you on about?”

    “I thought you knew. Wasn’t it you that told him about our system in the first place? Hey, just as well he didn’t come yesterday!” Hoarse laugh.

    “Daniel, what are you ON ABOUT?”

    The shouting penetrates the macho peer group he’s put himself into all on his ownsome, tiny zoot-suited twit. Lucas Roberts from Double Dee Productions Limited is the bloke in question. Yes, come out all the way from England to look at our system.

    “Daniel—will you shut up! He’s not just in the Accounts Department, he is their Accounts Department, he’s a fucking Executive Director of the company! It can’t be him in person!”

    “He said he’d talked to you on the phone. Something about your tax bracket?”

    “Yuh— Um, yeah, I spoke to him, he was the only one I could get any sense out of and yeah, he did say he’d like to see our accounts system, but— Look, just show me the documentation, will ya?”

    He can’t because it wasn’t by email. Figures. Jerry said he’ll take him to Randwick. For Pete’s sake, the man’d take Prince Charles or a wino off the street to flaming Randwick, what’s that got to do with it?

    “Look, I don't wanna pre-empt you, Daniel, but I am IT Manager, I think I’d better talk to him as well. Um, well, I dunno about lunch, though…” Very cunningly: “Um, well, think I better leave it up to you to choose where we all go. You reckon The Old Lion’d be the go, do you?”

    Oh, dear, he hasn’t seen through me at all. He’s tickled to death to be consulted like a big man and gives me the spiel on who Uncle Jerry last took there and why his cousin’s boss took his client there and—blah, blah. Yeah, really suitable for the hail-fellow-well-met breezy Aussie pub lunch of the semi-professional classes, Daniel, but will a guy with a real plutey Pommy accent that’s a director of an English company that makes multi-million dollar film productions— I’m not gonna say it: he thought it up all by himself and worked out why it would be suitable and even rung them up and checked that they do a vegetarian choice just in case.

    So I’m just checking through Shona’s check of the latest inputting—she’s done it beautifully, searched on the last two days’ records and worked backwards, marking everything off on her printout, why isn’t somebody in this dump fostering the kid’s potential?—when Deirdre sidles in and shuts our door behind her, looking mysterious.

    “Dot, there’s a visitor. I’ve put him in Jerry’s office.”

    “It’ll be Mr Roberts from Double Dee Productions, you can show him in h—”

    “No, the thing is, dear, he’s not an accountant!” she hisses.

    Very naturally Daniel is extremely pissed off with her, after all she is the senior person in that ruddy office, she should never have encouraged the afternoon tea thing, so he goes: “How can ya tell by looking?”

    “Yes, how?” goes Shona. Gee, didn’t think she had it in her!

    So Deirdre looks down that huge nose of hers. “Don’t be silly, dears.”—Like, between them they got something like fifteen times her brain-power.—“I had no idea, Dot: Jerry just said he was expecting an accountant from England!”

    “I’ll go and talk to him until you’re ready, Dot,” says Daniel grimly.

    So Deirdre stands in front of the door, completely blocking it. It and a piece of the wall next to it, to be accurate. “I really don’t think that would be at all suitable!”

    At this Daniel loses it and snarls: “All right, give him a flaming morning tea!”

    So I go, trying to sound like Uncle Jerry at his mildest: “He probably would like a coffee; you could ask him, Daniel. If he’s more than just an accountant I’d better talk to him in Uncle Jerry’s office, is that what you’re trying to say, Deirdre?”

    Good, that’s offended her. “Of course! It certainly wouldn’t do to show him in here.”

    So Daniel goes: “I wouldn’t of had to put my stuff on the floor if you’d of given up that table—”

    “Daniel, they need that big table for sorting and enveloping. Why don’t you go and tell him I’m coming, the poor man must be wondering what he’s struck, and ask him if he’d like a coffee.”

    “Or tea, Englishmen often prefer tea,” says Deirdre, looking down the nose again. Or still.

    “Or Milo,” adds Shona—not sure if she’s taking the Mick or not.

    So she goes, real tolerant and superior: “An Englishman won’t want Milo, dear.”

    “Adam McIntyre was drinking it at the film studio,” I note. Well, he was.

    So the cow goes, like lightning: “He’s a New Zealander, Dot, dear. I think I’d better speak to the gentleman, but by all means, Daniel, come if you think you can be of any use.”

    Shona’s gone very red. “He knows more about the system than you do, Deirdre!”

    “I’ll overlook that, dear, we all know what time of the month is it, don’t we?” And out she goes. My God!

    After quite some time during which we both just sit here scarlet-cheeked with our ears ringing—Daniel’s shot out, of course, red as a beet, poor boy—I manage to utter: “She’s never actually been that bad before, to my knowledge. I’m really sorry, Shona, shouldn’t have let you in for that. The thing is, she’s pissed off because Uncle Jerry’s offered Betty the position of Canteen Manager.” (The cunning bugger’s actually called it that.)

    “Yes,” she says weakly. “I know.”

    “It hasn’t dawned that there’s no reason to be jealous of Betty’s so-called promotion—quite the reverse.” Wink.

    She gives a startled giggle. “No!”

    “Right, now, let’s see… Well, that’s really excellent, Shona, I think you’ve done as much as is humanly possible.”

    She’s very red again. “Thanks, Dot! Um, only I might of missed something.”

    “Well, you’ve checked all the paperwork—so-called, in some of the on-course boys’ cases, but you’ve checked what we’ve got—and you’ve checked all the latest records from the database. No-one could do more. If Old Man Harbottle made a ruddy great bet and Uncle Jerry forgot to write it down, that’s his worry, okay?”

    “Yeah!” she admits with a relieved laugh.

    “Right. I’ve told him he has to pay you time and half for those two extra hours you did, so if anyone queries your payslip, that’s why.”

    She looks resentfully in the direction of the door. “She will.”

    Yep, it was a great mistake the day Uncle Jerry put Deirdre in charge of handing out payslips. See, she always used to do the pays, way back when they had a manual system, but even his first primitive computerised wages system was beyond her, so to placate her— Right.

    “Yes. There’s actually no need to have the amounts showing, so I’ll speak to Joanne and Kerri, get them to staple them so as they don’t show.”

    “Um, but our names need to show.”

    “Good point. If I can manage it this week I’ll redesign the payslips, okay? Otherwise in time for next week’s pay, for sure.”

    “Really? Can ya do that?”

    “Sure: all the forms that the database prints out can be changed. So if you spot anything else that you think’s not working too good let me know, and I’ll re-design it, okay?”

    She nods violently.

   “Good. You might as well grab an early lunch-hour, Shona. In fact, take an extra half-hour, ya done really good on this job, and if anyone queries it, I told you you could: oke?”

    It’s oke, and she goes out, beaming.

    Great flaming bloody Norah! Strychnine in the coffee is about the one thing that’ll ever stop bloody Deirdre, that’s for sure! Menopause or not, victimising a poor skinny little slip of a kid that’s less than a third of her age and a sixth of her fighting weight? Added to which, the woman must be pushing sixty, surely she must be over it by now?

    So I’ll just— No, better go to the bog first. So I do that. Then I trot along to Uncle Jerry's office and gee, guess who’s got this poor guy in a smooth grey suit pinned down under her great claw while her great beak’s going Yatter, yatter, yatter? Yeah. Poor old Daniel’s just sitting there like a spare part.

    So I go: “Thanks, Deirdre. Think you’d better get back to your invoices now, Uncle Jerry really needs them sent out soonest.”

    What can she say? No, he doesn’t? She does manage to say But she has to introduce me. So I let her do that. So this guy in the smooth grey suit—Jeez, now that I look closely I can see it’s light grey but with a pin-stripe, never seen one of those before—he gets up and shakes hands. Medium height, slim, late thirties, maybe forty, tops? Dunno why, but I thought he’d be older. He’s a bit like what you might imagine a captain in a very stiff old English regiment might be, only without a mo’. Like, the sort of officer that’s real smooth on the surface but underneath it he’s more than capable of grabbing up the sub-machine gun in his khakis and getting out there and slaughtering a few Afghans or Iraqis or terrorists—like that. Gee, his hand is warm but dry and doesn’t crush mine to death, in fact it’s a bit like shaking hands with John. Crikey, Rosie’s right, the upper echelons of Blighty don’t say “How do you do”, like, four words, they make this noise, “Howd’jadoow,” sort of. Thought she was exaggerating when she told me them horror stories of their very recent tour round the obscurer parts of England and Scotland dropping in on John’s assorted old mates and rellies in their flaming country houses.

    Now get this: the cow introduced me as Dot but him as “Mr Roberts.” So I go: “Good to meet you, Lucas. –’Tis Lucas, eh?” Cos no way am I gonna set myself up for the Little Dot shit!

    His reply you’d swear was John himself. “Of course. Lovely to meet you in person, Dot!” If you passed him in the street you probably wouldn’t give him a second glance. The eyes are just grey, well-shaped but not remarkable, his hair is light brown, and his features are just ordinary: his face is oval and the chin’s well rounded but you might call it a bit shallow—well, if you admire Kevin Costner you won’t object to it—and the nose is straight and biggish, but for a man, not too big. But the mouth! It’s quite wide, and not full, but not thin either, and the shape! Hold me up! Like, once you’ve noticed it you can’t think of him as just ordinary-looking at all. I wouldn’t call it bowed. But—no, can’t describe it. Perfectly-shaped, would put it best. His teeth are very white, the top ones very straight, not too long, can’t stand long horse-teeth, and the bottom ones just a bit crooked, only adds interest, if ya see what I mean. As for the shirt and tie—Phew. Not striking, no, Lucas Roberts would never wear anything striking. Totally appropriate and totally smooth. What’s that fancy London street? Rosie once tore a strip off Euan for buying something extravagant in it. Um… Bond Street? Yeah, think so. I’d take a hefty bet every stitch he’s got on came straight from there. Understated is the word, folks. Golly.

    “Uh—yeah, you, too!” –Is Deirdre gonna go or not? I’ll give her the chance. So I say: “I hope Daniel’s been looking after you?”

    “Yes; he’s been telling me something about your system and he was so kind as to get me a coffee,” he says. The mouth smiles. Think I’m gonna pass out. Of course it’s perfectly obvious that he must be married with a family, in fact the family’s probably not much younger than Daniel. Oh, well. A cat can look at a king. I’m just gonna say that’s good or something equally inane when he adds: “Thanks so much for looking after me, Mrs Henderson. But you mustn’t let me keep you from those invoices.” And gee, that finishes Deirdre off, and she tells him what a pleasure it was, and goes!

    So Daniel goes: “Um, all that that, that she said about the system, um, you better ignore it.” –Very red.

    “Yeah, in fact ignore every word she said to you about anything. If she claimed the world was still spinning it’d be Armageddon. Um—sorry, Lucas,” I croak, going bright red. “We’ve just had a real trying couple of days.”

    Daniel begins: “The system—” And thinks better of it.

    “Oh?” he says, cool smile. “A system failure?”

    “Not as such!” gasps Daniel, this is not making it better, tiny pointy-headed assistant.

    “You could call it that. One database went down. See, out there in the main office we’ve got a collection of ladies that’ve worked for Grant & Marshall ever since old Mr Grant’s days, and yesterday afternoon when there was no-one responsible in the office one of them left a database open and then sat on her keyboard. Um, sorry if that doesn’t sound likely,” I mutter.

    He grins. Gee, the mouth can do that! “It sounds all too likely, Dot! Double Dee Productions has got a roomful very like them: we started off in the outer London suburbs, you see, employing a number of local ladies”—don’t believe for a moment that usage is native to ya, but five gold stars for effort, Smoothly-Understated, Will-Never-be-Mine Lucas Roberts—“and although we’ve grown a lot since then, they’re still with us. Every so often there’s an almighty cock-up and Derry threatens to sack them all, but so far, he’s let loyalty to the old firm weigh in their favour.”

    Gee, I’m gonna ask this, Smoothly-Understated Lucas Roberts, cos since you’ll never be mine I don’t much care whatcha think of me, see? “Right. But if it was down to you, would you sack them?”

    He looks thoughtful. “I can’t say I wouldn’t be very tempted—and as a matter of fact I could persuade Derry that we’d be better off without them. Put it like this: if one worked in a plastic automated environment full of plastic automata—perhaps I should say silicon automata, in the 21st century—I wouldn't consider retaining their services for a moment. But at Double Dee, we hire people, not automata.”

    “Like, it’s not a cyberspace office,” puts in Daniel hoarsely.

    He blinks but makes a real quick recover. Smooth smile. “Exactly, Daniel!”

    Cof. “Yeah, um, the term come up in pretty much that context only yesterday,” I explain.

    “I can see it would, Dot! Oh, dear, I’m afraid if I don’t ask this, I may burst with frustration! Was that lady the one who did it?”

    “Nope. Another one very like her. There’s half a dozen of them, hanging on. Every so often Uncle Jerry counts up how many years they’ve got left till they get the super. Uh—sorry, Lucas, didn’t mean to be obscure. Um, see, Jerry Marshall’s my uncle.”

    “Of course,” he says, smiling nicely. “And the super?”

    Eh?

    “Superannuation,” says Daniel helpfully.

    “Oh! Of course! I’m so sorry! Like our pensions,” he says, sounding real weak, think it’s totally put on, don’t think anything on God’s earth, make that in the cosmos, could phase him.

    “Yeah, that’s the word. Sorry: I knew you called it something else in Britain.”

    “I didn’t,” admits Daniel with interest.

    “Yeah: ya read about the pension funds in the English papers.”

    I didn’t say it on purpose, but for the first time Lucas Roberts actually looks at me with a gleam of interest in his cool grey eyes. “Yes: they can have a big influence on the markets, back home.”

    “Yeah. Um, I dunno how much time you’ve got, Lucas, but we were thinking, take a quick look at the system, have lunch, and then come back and look at some of the nitty-gritty?”

    “That sounds lovely. I’m completely at your disposal, Dot.”—I wish!—“Unless I’m taking up too much of your time?”

    “No, the film people have given her a couple of days off, they’re doing close-ups,” explains Daniel.

    “Good, that works out well, then,” he says with a smile, my bet is he knew it all along. No, my bet is he’s seen D.D.’s actual shooting schedule and worked out exactly when— Oh, forget it: if there’s anything accidental in his life, it’ll be because, appearances to the contrary, he is not actually the manifestation of God on earth. Not meaning any insult to any believers. Well, apart from Aunty Buff, she can put it where it’ll do most good, though I must admit, now that Molly’s Micky’s here, so to speak, he is a dear little boy.

    So I explain that the software lets us design as many databases as we like—yes, he got that from our conversation on the phone. Did he, just? Well, his looks don’t belie him and he is sharp as Hell, cos I never spelled it out. It isn’t fully relational but in a many-to-one configuration we’ve managed to link everything together quite satisfactorily. Wages are managed in a separate database from main accounts but the link allows us to debit the wages to the main accounts database, and we link to clients and suppliers through accounts, and to personnel through both the wages database and the accounts database—right, the payee field in the latter, no flies on him. Yes, we could be managing wages in the main accounts database and in fact the suppliers suggested that, but for our purposes, with really heavy usage of the accounts database, we thought we’d take the pressure off it.

    Personnel contracts? Um, yeah. So far we’ve only had a few of those: mine (don’t tell him it was the trial run), Daniel’s, and the new staff who manage the website payments and credit checking, but yeah, our personnel database does allow us to generate the contracts automatically. Daniel’s really keen on the prompted text function so he eagerly explains that the contract docs have paragraphs with prompted text. Because his computer course did zilch on databases he’s never realised this isn’t a universal term, and it isn’t ringing any bells with Lucas. So I quickly say: “Show him, Daniel.” Daniel’s really keen to print out his contract for him, so heck, if he doesn’t mind Mr Lucas Roberts, Executive Director of Double Dee Productions, knowing what he earns— We print it out, Daniel explaining eagerly if redundantly that of course on the real one the first page would be on letterhead. This is good, and he likes the prompted text facility (being kind, yeah) but what if we had contract personnel hired on a recurring basis? Perhaps for a six months’ stint, then some time later we took them on for another limited contract, where the firm required tracking of all contracts.

    “It’s in the database, see,” Daniel explains helpfully.

    “Um, no, Daniel, he means they wouldn’t want to overwrite the contract. See, if your conditions change, we’d have to replace the existing ‘Conditions’ field. Or if your salary rate changed—I don’t mean the built-in increments, but say Uncle Jerry went mad and decided you were worth more—?”

    He gets it, though he asks why we’d still want to have the old contract in the computer.

    “Very largely tax regulations, Daniel,” says Lucas Roberts kindly. “I think they’d be similar here.”

    “Yeah. Gee, we don’t hire on that basis, Lucas…” I admit. “I see, it’d be very typical of the way you hire the actors, wouldn’t it?”

    “Yes but not only them. We don’t keep permanent crews, the way Rosie may have mentioned they do at Henny Penny Productions. At the moment we’re managing contracts, though that’s hardly the word, in word-processing, and it’s the Devil’s own job to track them. Especially when our damned IT gurus decide in their lordly way to change the names of the drives and sub-directories,” he adds with sigh.

    I look hard at Daniel. He gives a sheepish smile. So I go: “They will do it, Lucas, it’s in Network Management 101: make it as complicated as possible, it means your job’s secure.”

    “Mm,” he says drily. “In the case of our particular gurus it meant they were offered the option: do as they were told or get out. Well, IT staff are in pretty high demand in the UK, so they got out.”

    “But what didja do?” croaks Daniel.

    Lucas Roberts gives him this real dry look. “Re-read their contracts to make sure they were obliged to leave us all details of what they’d done to our network, plus all passwords, made sure I got everything they had before they actually departed, made sure they understood that I would sue them if it turned out they’d overlooked anything, and read a couple of books. Then I redrafted the IT contracts and hired new staff. We got over nine hundred applications from qualified persons,” he adds wryly.

    “Help,” I croak. Daniel just sits there with his mouth open.

    “Yes, well, it’s a popular field. I don’t know how many hundreds we got from unqualified persons—I didn’t ask. So we did an initial sift by requiring them to fill in a questionnaire by hand and post the result to us to arrive by a specified date and time. That narrowed it down some. An unbelievable number of them tried to email their replies.” He shrugs lightly. “Not realising that it was a test of their ability to follow a simple instruction.”

    Yikes. Is he a hard man or what! “Yeah. What next?”

    “The junior staff in the personnel department ran through the responses that arrived on time, discarding those without a covering letter. No, well, as I say, we hire people, not automata. Then they looked at the responses and chucked out everything that wasn’t hand-written. Next they discarded those who hadn’t filled in everything they were supposed to, or had put a tick instead of a cross, or, heinous crime, circled a box!” The cool grey eyes twinkle. “Ability to follow instructions again, not to say to conform to one’s employer’s standards. Then—I’m afraid we’re possibly the last employer in the English-speaking world to do this—they discarded everything with a spelling error in either the covering letter or the responses. Usually not having to go past the letter. After that they actually looked at whether the responses were right or wrong. How many do you think that left us with?”

    Gee, out of nine hundred? Me and Daniel look uneasily at each other. “Um, three hundred?” he croaks.

    Lucas raises his unremarkable but when you look hard—not that anyone’s doing that—perfectly shaped eyebrows at me. “Dot?”

    “Twenny?” I croak, thinking of the spelling in the applications we got for Daniel’s job.

    He laughs, gee, think he might be genuine, too. Boy, that Adam’s apple when he throws back his head— “Not quite that bad! Just under a hundred and fifty.”

    “Crikey, out of nine hundred?” croaks Daniel.

    “Mm.”

    “It worked good, then,” I note.

    “Quite!”

    “When I applied here, Mum said—” He breaks off. Not in time, tiny pointy-headed nerd.

    “Yes?” goes Lucas smoothly.

    “Um, she said she’d better check my spelling. Um, she reckons the spell-checker in the p.c. can’t spell,” he mutters.

    “It’s not that they’ve got it on American spelling,” I explain kindly.

    “I see,” he says nicely.

    Yes, I just bet he does! So I say quickly: “Well, your personnel contracts are food for thought, Lucas. What say we go to lunch now, and after some food inspiration may strike. Pretty sure you could run contracts in a separate database and link it in. –Daniel, why don’t you show him where the Gents’ is?”

    So they do that. He doesn’t say he doesn’t wanna go, God knows if that’s manners or not.

    So I totter out to me own office and just sit down limply instead of grabbing up my handbag. Crikey Dick. What’s he here for? In person? Why didn’t he just send a minion? I mean, high-powered is not the word, it’s like dealing with some beautifully engineered, superbly functioning piece of fine machinery. Finely machined machinery, that is. Uh—Rolls Royce engine, maybe? Like when ya go in the salesroom and the man in the zoot-suit ignores you and you go over to the one with the bonnet up—they always got one with the bonnet up—and just hang over it admiringly… It’s exactly the same feeling.

    Uh—yeah. Lunch. Handbag. Uh—on second thoughts, coat, the seasons haven’t changed with the advent of Lucas Smoothly-Understated Roberts, it just feels like they oughta done. And on third thoughts, go to the bog again, because it would be entirely humiliating to be caught short in the middle of lunch in front of him.