Ramble awoke on the sofa with no feeling in his left arm and a strange and intense couple staring at him, perched on dining chairs like eager church-goers. A male and a female, both with dark lank hair, both wearing black and white clothes which looked to have been picked up on sale in Matalan. They leaned forward when he stirred. The female sucked in a breath to speak.
‘Do you know Jesus?’ she said.
Oh bloody hell. Mormons.
‘Elaine!’ Ramble shouted, and the Mormon couple recoiled. ‘Elaine!’
‘Hold your horses,’ she called from further back in the house.
The male leaned forward and whispered, ‘I’m sure things will get better. Soon.’
He spoke with such sincerity, but Ramble found himself too distracted by the huge mole in the centre of the man’s forehead to really appreciate his words.
‘Everything’s fine just now,’ Ramble said. He pushed himself up to a sitting position and his neck replied by trying to break away from his shoulders. ‘I only fell asleep watching telly.’
‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘Oh, of course.’
Ramble tried to think past the lie to remember what had really happened. He’d been sitting in the armchair in the shed, attempting to reminisce and trick his brain into revealing the specifics of DDNPLFRR. He dozed off like that, and when he woke up and shuffled back into the house he found that Elaine had locked the bedroom door. He considered knocking to wake her up, but the last time he’d done that she answered the door with a forgiving smile before kneeing him in the crotch. He thought about it, and concluded the sofa was a much safer proposition.
Elaine strolled into the room, smiling like she’d just cleared a stubborn bowel obstruction. ‘Stan,’ she said. ‘Have you offered our visitors some tea? Does you still being here at this hour mean you’re not going to work today?’
This is how she was punishing him. She knew he hated Mormons, and Witnesses, and Baptists … anyone who came to the door uninvited really, postmen excepted.
He tried to check his watch, but his arm still wasn’t responding. It hung heavy and disturbingly alien at his side, and when he reached down to grab his left hand it didn’t feel like it was his own. He felt as though he was breaching some social barrier with the act, and he blushed at the thought of his right hand in such an intimate caress with his left. He got an overhand grip on his senseless fingers and lifted the arm to expose his wristwatch.
‘Bloody bugger,’ he said. It was five to ten. He had a call with the development team in five minutes. ‘Where’s my phone?’
‘Probably in your trouser pocket, where you usually keep it,’ Elaine said.
‘Here, you can use my phone,’ the male Mormon said, and placed an outdated Nokia brick in Ramble’s open hand — his numb, useless open hand. It fell to the floor with a plastic clatter. The Mormon glared at him.
Ramble felt the slim profile of his BlackBerry in his pocket — in his right pocket, thank the Mormon God — and fished it out as he stood. ‘My wife will see you out,’ Ramble said. ‘I need to make a call.’ With his left arm still dragging at his shoulder like the world’s most useless prosthetic, he let himself out the back door and made his way to the shed.
‘We’ll wait here for you,’ Elaine called out.
The cow. She was using the Mormons to make sure he left the house. He tried to remember why he’d married her, but like his knowledge of DDNPLFRR’s secrets, that information was lost to time.
Once inside, he scrounged around the drawers in the workbench for some paper and a pen, then scrolled through the infernal menu system on the phone until he found the conference call numbers and password he’d saved there. He wrote these down and started punching them in. As the call connected, he fell into the armchair and his left arm suddenly exploded in a firework burst of pins and needles.
‘Ahh, ahh, shit bloody crap!’
‘Hello Stan?’ came an Indian voice through the phone’s ear-piece.
‘Oh, ah, good morning, er … Benoit.’
‘It is night here Stan, but good morning to you. I’ve also got Olivier and Julien in the room with me.’
‘Good, ah, good evening Olivier, Julien.’
Fire spread up Ramble’s arm, but it was still trapped in a physical limbo, neither dead nor alive. Benoit, Olivier and Julien comprised Ramble’s development team in Bangalore. He could no longer remember their real names. The consultancy who employed them had mixed up the message that they were to be responsible for a system inherited from a Belgian bank; they thought they would be working for a Belgian bank, so they decided their developers should legally change their names to something Belgian-friendly. It suited Ramble, as he was never able to pronounce their real names in a hurry, and his preferred method of communicating with them was exactly that: in a hurry.
‘Stan, so, we are ready to start development on CR2107.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘Yes we are, we —’
‘You are not ready to start work on CR2107. Yeah? The business still have outstanding questions to answer on the requirements.’
‘But these are small questions, and we understand —’
‘There are no small questions, only stupid answers. We need to follow governance very tightly or it will be our arses. No development until the requirements are closed out.’
‘Did he say we need tight arses?’ one of the developers whispered.
‘Okay Stan,’ Benoit said. ‘No development yet on CR2107.’
‘Exactly, no development.’
‘So what should we do in the meantime? There aren’t many production issues, and we haven’t seen an new items come out of the pipe.’
No, that was because Ramble kept a tight grip on the pipe. If they saw everything in the book of work at once, the bloody fools would go and do it all!
‘You should start work on CR2107,’ Ramble said.
Silence. Eventually, Benoit began to mutter. ‘But … but …’
‘Look, it’s really quite simple. I don’t want you to start developing CR2107, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start working on it. Yeah?’
‘But … but …’
Ramble tried rolling his shoulder, and the resulting pain was exquisite. He bit the side of his tongue.
‘Do I need to spell it our for you Benoit? Surely you understand what’s required of you.’
‘Yes Stan, of course,’ Benoit said. ‘We will do the needful.’
‘Yes,’ Ramble said. ‘You will do the needful. Was there anything else we needed to discuss?’
Another pause, then Benoit said, ‘There is one other thing, Stan.’
‘Yes?’
‘We have been told to expect visitors tomorrow. Two of your colleagues from London are coming to visit. We wondered if you could tell us what they might be wanting to do.’
‘Visitors? What visitors?’
‘Two people, Ryan Sanderson and Kong Li.’
The pain in Ramble’s arm became the ghost of a forgotten notion. Blood fled his head and pooled in his guts. ‘Those two? In Bangalore? Why?’
‘We were hoping you could tell us that Stan.’
Ramble tried to think fast. There could only be one possible reason for those two being sent to speak to his development team: mutiny.
‘Don’t tell them anything,’ Ramble said. ‘Not one single word.’
Another pause. ‘Okay Stan.’
‘No, not just Okay Stan. I want you to say it, Say, we won’t say a word to them.’
‘We won’t say a word to them.’
‘Good. Now, I need to get going. Call me when they arrive. And don’t tell thm anything! Don’t even speak to them.’
‘Okay Stan. Have a good —’
Ramble hung up. Jesus Christ, this was an unhappy development. Radical measures were going to be required. He went back to the workbench drawer and opened the cigar box. The mushrooms still had a bit of moisture in them, but he needed to access some of that locked-away information in his head, and fast.
He needed to go back in time.
He popped one of the little angel caps into his mouth, chewed briefly and swallowed.
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