Louder Than Words Page 17

  Josie bit her lip. ‘How was it different with Mum?’

  There’s something about the smile people get when they remember the dead – so happy and heart-shattered all at once that it hurts your soul to see it. But they’re the lucky ones – lucky to have known someone so wonderful that it still lights them up like a match has been struck within them and their memory-lamp burns with a bright flare.

  ‘When you meet someone like that, the one you know you’re meant to be with, you don’t wonder if you like them. You know. It’s in every tingle of your skin when you’re with them, in how your stomach wobbles when you know you’re about to see them, how they fill your thoughts every waking second, and your sleeping ones too.’

  ‘Can’t that be fake though?’ Josie asked with a shake in her voice. ‘Can’t you feel all that when it isn’t real?’

  He paused to think. ‘Yes, you can get a crush on someone. I guess it feels a lot like that when you do. And everyone gets a crush sometime or other, especially at your age. But the real thing, Josie, that’s different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s stronger, so much stronger. You might think you’re in love with a crush but the real thing blows that right out of the water. And the other thing with it is . . . it’s . . . well . . .’ His forehead creased with effort. ‘It’s nicer.’

  ‘Nicer?’ Josie’s face screwed up to match his.

  ‘Yeah, nicer.’ He grinned, pleased with himself. ‘That’s exactly it. You can relax with her, be yourself. It’s never hard work being around her.’

  Josie looked astonished. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. Even when you go through tough times together, your tough times are easier with her than they’d be with anyone else.’

  I’d never heard a grown man in real life talk about love before. If I had words, I’d have fallen silent with shock. He’d been drinking wine of course. Maybe he couldn’t have spoken that way if he was completely sober. Maybe that was why he said it in front of me.

  ‘And that’s how it was with Mum?’

  He gave that smile again. ‘That’s how it was.’

  ‘But what about Wuthering Heights?’

  ‘What?’ Josie’s father looked confused.

  ‘Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff and Cathy. Um, ultimate passion. You know, love being all-consuming and –’

  Josie’s dad let out a peal of laughter. He looked up at her and saw her serious, cross face and he burst out laughing again, slapping at the counter he laughed so hard.

  ‘What?’ she said angrily.

  ‘Oh precious, you don’t want to be loving like that. It might sound like the best way in a book, all that sad stuff, but who wants that in their life? It’s all just misery and tearing yourself up.’

  He took hold of her hand and became more serious. ‘Now you listen to me, girl, because this is important. There’s a kind of love which isn’t about all that tortured romance stuff women seem to like in books. It’s the love that means there’s a hot dinner waiting for you on the table when you’ve had a bad day at work. The love that means a wife never has to ask her husband to put the bins out. The kind that bursts a man’s heart when he sees how his wife takes care of her child. And if you ask me, that love’s worth so much more than the other kind that it’s not even worth bothering about what’s in those books.’

  He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. ‘You wait for a man who loves you like that.’ And then he winked at her. ‘To be honest, Baby D, if you bring home a man who doesn’t love you like that, he’s gonna have to get past me.’

  Josie burst out laughing then, but behind that I could see the cogs of her brain whirring furiously, as mine were, trying to process what he’d said.

  Because I thought I might just have heard the biggest truth ever for my collection.

  She took me to her Elfin grot,

  And there she wept, and sigh’d full sore,

  And there I shut her wild wild eyes

  With kisses four.

  (John Keats – ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’)

  CHAPTER 39

  Dear Dad,

  I’m still not entirely sure what had possessed me when I raised my hand and volunteered my services to Dillon. Perhaps I was swept away by the moment – Dillon is persuasive. Or it could have been all about showing Lara I can be useful too. Because, in this area, none of them could touch me.

  For a moment there in that room, she looked at me with admiration. She looked up at me, as they all turned to see what I had to say. I told Dillon I could do it, not bragging, just genuine. And she looked proud of me.

  I might have hacked into the Pentagon to see that.

  Which, I guess, is how I came to be sitting with Dillon and Tyler in an upstairs room while Tyler briefed me.

  ‘We want a big hit, something to get us noticed.’

  ‘Like who? The companies you went after on the demo?’

  Tyler shook his head. ‘It’d make sense to hit them, make them sit up and think about what they’re doing. But no, we’re going for maximum attention on this so we’re going after the government.’

  A shudder ran through him. It could have been fear or excitement or both. So this wasn’t some piddly little messing up of a store’s website then. They really were serious when they said they needed some brainpower behind it. Could I do it? Was I that good? It was a challenge. And not much challenged me so, hell, yes, I was doing this thing because the buzz if I managed it – that would be insane.

  ‘Full-scale Denial of Service attack. Can you do that?’ Dillon asked in his quiet voice.

  ‘On who?’

  ‘I want it as big as you can get it. I don’t know how good you are. Can you take down something like the Parliament site? The Home Office? The Ministry of Defence?’

  I shrugged. ‘Probably. Is that what you want hit – their public websites? Or do you want me to bring their networks down?’

  Dillon’s eyes sparked like I’d seen Lara’s eyes spark when she went into battle. ‘You can do that? Then I want you to hit the lot.’

  I leaned back in the chair. It was interesting how the balance of power had suddenly shifted here. A little bit of me liked that – Dillon, who everyone viewed with such adulation, looking at me like I was something special. It was a part of me I wasn’t proud of, but nevertheless there it was.

  I thought through it while Dillon and Tyler waited.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ I said eventually. ‘But I need to play around for a while.’

  ‘What’s the idea?’ Tyler asked.

  ‘Not yet. I’ll tell you when I know I can do it.’

  ‘Leave him in peace,’ Dillon said. ‘We’ll go downstairs. Let us know when you’re ready.’

  ‘Tell Lara I could be a while.’

  ‘She won’t mind. She’s chatting to Katrin.’

  I nodded and turned back to the computer, the cogs of my brain whirring already. And I began typing.

  It was much, much later when I finally went downstairs. My eyes were heavy from too long in front of the screen. I half expected Lara to have given up and gone, but she was still there, talking to Dillon now as Katrin appeared to have left. I could hear Tyler crashing about in the kitchen and he came through as he heard me arrive downstairs.

  ‘How’s it going? You need coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be good.’

  ‘Wait one minute. The kettle’s boiled and I don’t want to miss this.’ He shot off.

  I sank down on to a floor cushion.

  ‘You OK?’ Lara asked, moving to sit by me.

  ‘Yeah, I’m good. Just tired.’ And I was, but inside I felt like Lara in her battle mode.

  Tyler came back with the coffee. I like Tyler. There’s something simple and uncomplicated about the guy, even if he does appear to be jealous of me and Lara because he was looking at us in that strange way again. Or rather, not looking at us, as if he didn’t ever want to see us together in the same frame.

  ‘So tell us the plan,’
Tyler said eagerly, sitting down too.

  ‘Think of a house of cards,’ I replied. ‘You topple one card and then the rest fall one after the other, gathering momentum until the whole lot collapses.’

  Dillon shifted. ‘Yeah, so what’re you thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking first I take down the public websites, one by one, the unimportant ones first. And I replace what’s there with our own messages.’

  Our . . . it felt strange to say that.

  ‘And then the bigger ones get hit. Then their infrastructure – take down their networks. Total Denial of Service. I want them to see the small attacks and be running around trying to stop those, then the second-wave DoS hits and they don’t have a clue that was on its way.’

  ‘And how long are you thinking of spreading these out over?’

  ‘A couple of days.’

  Tyler choked on his coffee. ‘A couple of days? Man, I thought you were going to say months or something.’

  ‘No, that gives them the chance to respond and protect. It needs to be fast.’

  ‘Yeah, I get that! I just thought it’d take you months to do it.’

  ‘It needs setting up in advance so it can go quickly, in a wave, from one stage to another to another.’

  ‘How long for the set-up?’ Dillon asked.

  ‘I did some digging around tonight. I’ve got a week off from school soon for half term so I reckon in the next few weeks. Certainly this month.’

  All three of them looked awestruck. I felt like a god, I can’t deny it. This must be how Dillon feels when he has all those people hanging on his every word, believing in him like a messiah.

  I knew it was wrong. But I liked it.

  I left with Lara not long after that. We walked back through lamplit streets to the train station.

  ‘I’ll get off at your stop and walk you home,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not necessary. If I need help, I’ll ask for it.’

  ‘I didn’t say you needed help. Just . . . it’s not safe this late on your own. And before you start bristling up at me about that, I didn’t make the world this way, did I? But it’s my fault we’re so late and I don’t want anything happening to you.’

  ‘I can protect myself. You’ve seen that.’

  I sighed. The train was pulling into the station. ‘But if there are two of us then you’re less likely to need to. You can’t deny that.’

  ‘And what about you, walking home alone afterwards?’ There was a horrible sneer on her face as she said it and momentarily I was sick of her attitude.

  But I know, Dad, it would drive me crazy to be a girl and have to put up with restrictions like that so I sort of understood. I just wished she wouldn’t take it out on me.

  We got on the train and found a seat. She stared out of the window even though it was too dark to see a thing.

  ‘Is it because you don’t want me to see your flat?’

  ‘What?’ She didn’t turn and kept looking right out of that window.

  ‘Your flat. You told me your parents pay for it for you.’

  ‘Yeah, they do.’

  ‘And is that why you don’t want me to walk you home? You don’t want me at your flat.’ I had a sudden flash of inspiration. ‘I wasn’t going to try it on! I really was just going to walk you home and then get the next train.’

  She finally looked at me. ‘No, it’s not that. I’m quite capable of telling you to get lost if you get pushy –’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘I really don’t like this concept that I have to be looked after. I need to be free.’

  ‘OK.’ I gave up.

  We journeyed on a while longer in silence.

  ‘Lara?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What are we? Are we . . . together?’

  And there she was staring out of the window again. ‘I don’t want to be owned by anyone,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want to own you. I want to know what we are.’

  ‘This,’ she said, and she grabbed my face between her hands and pulled it to her. She kissed me, urgently, intensely, like it mattered more than breathing.

  And I didn’t care very much about breathing when she kissed me.

  ‘This is what we are,’ she said when she finally pulled away, leaving me dazed and drunk.

  When the train pulled in at her station, she got off alone.

  So what is this, Dad? Do you know? Because I sure as hell don’t.

  Love, Silas

  CHAPTER 40

  Josie somehow worked some magic on Silas. He had a face like a wet Monday morning when she appeared at our front door the next day. From the way he was snapping at everyone, I thought he’d probably had a bust-up with Lara, especially as he kept looking at his phone and I never once heard the message tone go off.

  But Josie whisked into our hall and ignored his grim face. ‘I want to speak to you,’ she announced and she grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him into the empty sitting room, closing the door firmly behind her.

  When he came out a few minutes later, he shrugged at me. ‘I’ll sort it with Mum then,’ he said in a bemused way as if he wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but it was easier to give in than argue.

  So at my next appointment, it was Josie sitting with me in the waiting room. Mum had apparently pre-warned Andrea, who said it was OK. She certainly showed no surprise when she called us in.

  Josie wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘Rafi said I could tell you about what happened when she stopped talking. That’s why I’ve come with her.’

  Now at that Andrea did show her shock. ‘And Rafi shared this with you?’

  ‘Yes, she wrote it down for me. She doesn’t want you to see because she isn’t happy about people reading what she’s written in general, although I think she’s a really good writer. But she said I could tell you.’

  ‘Her mother and brother aren’t aware of this, are they?’

  ‘Nope. She didn’t want them to know. It’ll be obvious why when I explain.’ And with that she launched into her edited version of my story.

  She did very well. She explained how it all came about and how I felt as it happened. I didn’t know if the tears that started to flow down my face when she got halfway through were from hearing it all spoken about, or because it was clear from her retelling that she understood so well how it had been for me.

  She paused when she realised I was crying, but Andrea said gently, ‘I think it might be better to carry on and get it over with,’ so she did.

  At the end, and it didn’t take long, Andrea sighed. ‘It’s a pity this didn’t come out at the start because a therapist could certainly have helped you deal with those feelings.’

  ‘How?’ Josie demanded.

  I couldn’t help smiling at that. Ever practical and moving forward, that was her.

  Andrea adopted a careful expression. ‘It depends how Rafi feels, but one way would be to bring the whole family together and discuss it –’

  I flew to my feet, shaking my head furiously. No, no, NO!

  ‘I thought you might feel like that,’ Andrea said. ‘It could be very effective, but only when you’re ready for it. I do want you to think about it though, for the future.’

  ‘If she doesn’t want that, what else can you do?’ Josie demanded.

  ‘We can obviously work on restoring her self-confidence and building up her self-esteem. And most importantly, making her feel worth listening to! The fear of being looked at when she speaks is very common. But there are some practical exercises we can try too, so that when she’s ready to speak, she finds it easier to begin. To use your voice after so many years is difficult.’

  ‘Not like riding a bike then?’ Josie asked.

  Andrea laughed and so did I, though my version was silent. ‘It is in a way. Once you get going it comes back to you, but getting started again can be hard . . . wobbly.’

  ‘How can I help?’

  Just with that question Josie helped more than she cou
ld possibly know. Just by wanting to.

  ‘You can give her someone to practise in front of. I was going to suggest she practise the first exercise alone at home, but she may find it easier to do it with you. See which she prefers and go with that in the first instance.’

  ‘What does she have to do?’

  ‘It’s a technique called shaping. What I want you to do, Rafi, is pick a sound, like a hum. And I want you to try to make that sound. To keep practising it until you feel comfortable with it. When you are, we try another sound. Eventually we attempt something that sounds more like speech, like the sound of a letter. But first we start with something non-threatening like a hum.’

  ‘OK,’ said Josie with enthusiasm. ‘I get it. Maybe she could move on to humming a little tune or something.’

  ‘That would be fantastic.’

  ‘We’ll work on it,’ Josie said, beaming. ‘By the next time she’s sees you, we’ll have it nailed!’

  O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has wither’d from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  (John Keats – ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’)

  CHAPTER 41

  Dear Dad,

  I wish I could say things had got less confusing, but I can’t. Why do girls have to be so complicated? I finally got Lara to text me back and agree to meet me after days of silence. We met in the coffee shop in town and I asked her why she wouldn’t answer my texts.