‘Stan? Stan, is that you?’
Damn.
He twisted the key all the way around and opened the door and shouted, ‘Hello!’ If you can’t get away with sneaking, be as loud as possible. Anything in between is a sign of weakness.
Elaine stepped into the hallway and pulled shut the door to Reggie’s room. She referred to it as her gym now, but Ramble would always think of it as their son’s room, as Reggie’s room.
Reggie: useless little bugger.
‘Stan, what are you doing home so early?’ Elaine said, her voice cutting through Ramble’s head like a dentist drill. ‘Shouldn’t you still be at work?’ She was pulling at her yoga pants, trying to straighten them over her cold and shapeless hips.
‘There was a fire alarm,’ Ramble said. ‘By the time we were all ready to go back in again, it was hardly worth the effort.’
‘Stan, we’ve spoken about this. You need to make the effort. You’re only a contractor there, they could get rid of you like that.’ She snapped her fingers, and sweat pattered over the wooden floor.
She was slick with the stuff, and red with the strain of her workout. With any luck, Ramble thought, the wiry hag will drop dead of a coronary.
They can’t get rid of me, Ramble thought. They’d lose their own heads up their arses trying to find the right buttons to push.
‘I need to get back to my session,’ she said. ‘I’ve only got Antony for another fifteen minutes.’
Ramble grunted. Antony was the personal trainer. Almost certainly gay, the way he wore his shirts so tight, desperate to show off his poofy sculpted body to all his other poofy friends. ‘I’m going to the shed.’
Elaine returned to her gym session, closing the door behind her. As Ramble passed the door he heard the click of the lock being engaged, followed by the thumping of some very loud, very energetic pop music.
Gay pop music.
He stopped in the kitchen to grab some provisions. What’s in the cupboard, what’s in the cupboard ... Ah! Pringles, buried under a pile of Elaine’s rice cakes. There was half a loaf of white sliced sitting on top of the bread bin, so he grabbed that too and shuffled out the back door to his sanctuary, his fortress of solitude.
The shed.
Ramble’s shed was no cheap lap-panel crate from Homebase. It was timber-framed, insulated, and fully wired and plumbed. He even had a bog out there, and wi-fi! It wasn’t just a shed, it was a summer-house. It was a home away from home, though in his opinion not nearly far enough away.
He fumbled through his pockets for his keys and let himself in. The house was equipped with a standard issue Yale tumbler, but he’d spent a couple of hundred quid on the locks for his shed, the kind where the key couldn’t be copied without a secret password and a DNA sample. There were bars on the windows. He was giving serious thought to having an alarm system installed.
When he pulled the door closed behind him the latch engaged with an industrial thunk. It was the heavenly chime of the outside world being locked away. There were only two keys to the shed: the one on Ramble’s key-ring, and the other one on Ramble’s key-ring.
The boof-boof-boof of Elaine’s workout music pounded from the house, and the odd scream of exertion occasionally climbed above it. It was absurd, the things that woman did to her body, and at her age. He wondered, not for the first time, whether he should sound-proof the shed.
He rolled his head back and stretched his arms out, feeling for the floor lamp. His hand bumped the shade, and he reached beneath it to flick the switch.
‘Let there be light,’ he said to the room; and lo, there was light. The lamp was fitted with one of those energy-saving bulbs, so the small room wasn’t so much flooded with brightness as gently illuminated.
Screwdrivers and hammers and spanners and wrenches and a wide assortment of power tools covered the workbench which ran the length of one wall. Some tools still hung from their intended hooks on the wall, but only a few. Aside from the pedestal lamp, a lethargic old tartan-print armchair and a square mahogany-stain side table were the only items of furniture in the room. All three were rescued from oblivion when some new neighbours decided to update the entirety of the house they’d just bought from a deceased estate sale. Elaine had sworn at him like an army drill sergeant when she saw him dragging the things across the street. He was yet to figure out what a fucktarded shit-gibbon might be, but Elaine needn’t have worried, he never intended to leave them in the house. He had to take the door off the shed to get the chair inside, and while it took up a full third of the floorspace, it was there now, and it had become the centre of Ramble’s sanctuary.
He opened the small bar fridge under his work bench and fished out a can of Stella, sat it on the side table alongside a packet of Hamlets. The armchair half collapsed as he dropped into it, springs stretching and screeching like they were in genuine pain. When the first mouthful of lager his his belly, he was finally able to think clearly. He slipped the lighter out from inside the pack of Hamlets and touched the flame to one, sucking deeply. Elaine never let him smoke anywhere near house, but as far as he was concerned, the shed was his house.
‘However so humble,’ he muttered through the fog leaking out of his head.
He took another swallow of beer and wound the clock back in his head to the start of the day. What happened? There were the usual crises, failures and flaws in the system, crashes and subsequent squalls from the users, but that was all normal. He felt abnormally uneasy, because something had happened today to upset the balance — it was those two little upstarts from Group. He fished his Blackberry out of his pocket and scrolled through the emails, looking for the meeting invite, and he soon found it. Ryan Sanderson and Kong Li, assigned by Group to review DDNPLFRR as part of Project Harmony. What an appropriately weak project name: Harmony. It was bound to fail with a flimsy name like that. Projects should be called strong names, big uppercase names, like THUNDERBOLT, EAGLE, and TARDIS.
TARDIS. Now there’s a good name for a project. It’s the kind of project they’d need if they ever hoped to understand DDNPLFRR; they were never going to unpick it in its current state. Time travel was the only way they were going to learn what held it all together.
Still, all the questions they were asking, Ramble didn’t like it at all. How does this work? How does that work? Why are there so many issues? Is this normal? How long does it normally take to resolve an issue? He desperately wished they’d all just leave him alone to get on with things in his own time, in his own way — that’s how things got done in DDNPLFRR. Perhaps not things that anyone was expecting, but with the limited tools he had to work with, they should all be happy if they get anything at all.
He was going to have to keep an eye on these clowns from Group. It wouldn’t be the first time his authority had come under attack, but Ramble always came out on top, pushing ahead unperturbed, with scores of beaten business analysts and project managers bobbing uselessly in his wake. It was only a matter of time before Sevak cracked, and then he’d be just another notch on Ramble’s sword hilt.
He sucked on the Hamlet, drawing the heat down into his lungs and resisting the urge the hack it back up. Even smoking seemed to be getting harder, resisting his will, fighting him.
He sucked it again.
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