The Teen, the Witch and the Thief Page 6

  No, of course not. She’s way older than you.

  But she said, seeing as you’re on your own ...

  No. Bet she’s got a boyfriend. Is she married? She hasn’t mentioned. Can’t remember if there’s a ring.

  But she said ...

  No. It didn’t happen in the real world, just the fantasy world he had been intending to dip into that evening. Man bumps into woman, oh, you’re on your own, and next thing they’re a lot better acquainted than they were five minutes earlier.

  Bloody hell, what do I do?

  It’s not real.

  It could be.

  Arse! How do I know?

  She could be in his room right now. It was above the kitchen. She could be just feet away. She could be taking her clothes off. She could be getting into his bed and wondering what was keeping him. She could–

  But she was coming down the stairs again, and a small voice of regret was drowned out by a gushing relief that life wasn’t about to become very complicated.

  “Hello?” she called. “Where– oh, here you are.”

  “Made your tea,” Ted croaked, and he pushed the cup towards her.

  The bell rang again as they were en route to the living room.

  “Popular guy tonight, aren’t you?”

  Ted grunted and went to the door. This time the visitor was Stephen with a big half-circle smile. He brandished his laptop.

  “Hi, mate. Got it working! Want to see?”

  Several responses ran through Ted’s mind and choosing one took so long that Stephen’s smile dimmed a little. In the end he just left the door open and turned away, beckoning with his head for Stephen to follow. Stephen stopped short in the living room when he saw Ted had a visitor – and not just any visitor but a female visitor, sitting on the sofa with Mr Furry on her lap, arms spread out on the back of the seat, legs crossed and a large, friendly smile on her face. Bloody hell, Ted thought – she took his breath away and he had been expecting to see her. How many times had he fantasised: fit girl ... on that sofa ... never mind.

  “Zoe, Stephen, Stephen, Zoe,” Ted muttered. “I work with Zoe, Stephen lives over the road.”

  “Uh. Hi.” Stephen sent Ted a telepathic glare that said how dare you have a real female in your home when I’m visiting? “So you, uh, work with Ted?”

  And Ted remembered telling his friend about this totally fit girl at work, and how he was so in ...

  “That’s what the man said,” Zoe said. “And apparently you live over the road.”

  “I’m, uh, not disturbing–”

  “Not at all.”

  After that conversation lingered for about a year and a thin layer of ice grew across everything in the room. Pressure grew inside Ted until he had to break it.

  “Uh. Stephen and me. We. Uh. Work. On this. Thing.”

  Stephen looked at the floor and shuffled his feet.

  “STOOPID,” he muttered. Zoe blinked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Stephen and Ted’s Object-Oriented Programming–” Ted began. He and Stephen glanced at each other, and the tension was relieved a little as they both giggled. “And we never could work out what the ‘I.D.’ stands for,” he added. “I like ‘Ideas Department’.”

  “Or ‘Intelligently Designed’,” Stephen mumbled. “Only that sounds religious.” He still wasn’t looking at Zoe and every particle of his being seemed to resent her presence.

  “‘Initiate Destruct’?” Zoe suggested. Stephen defrosted a little.

  “Yeah, maybe. If I decide it’s not working.”

  “So, you’ll be Geek and Proud too, then?”

  Stephen definitely smiled.

  “Damn right.”

  “So what does STOOPID do?”

  “It’s an object-oriented programming environment–” Ted began, and stopped short. If there was one thing he had learned it was that most people either don’t know what object-oriented programming is, or don’t want to. If a girl ever decided to go steady with him, object-oriented programming would play a very small role in her decision. But then he saw the look of interest on Zoe’s face, which seemed genuine and unfeigned. Suddenly he felt he had been put on Earth for the sole purpose of explaining object-oriented programming to her.

  But the first faint smells of cooking reached his nose. His dinner would be ready in a couple of minutes. He also realised that he and Stephen were standing in front of Zoe like two kids in front of the head teacher, so he gave Stephen a gentle shove.

  “I need to get the pizza. Why not show her?”

  Only good manners stopped Stephen from looking as shocked as he felt.

  “It’s not really ready for public release,” he reminded Ted out of the side of his mouth.

  “Zoe’s not public.”

  “No, I’m very private,” Zoe agreed. She patted the empty cushion next to her on the sofa. “I’d love to see it.”

  Stephen looked at the cushion as if it would simultaneously delete all his files and his virginity. Ted turned away quickly so that neither of them could see him laughing.

  By the time he came back from the kitchen, Stephen was actually demonstrating STOOPID on his laptop and Zoe was making all the right noises of interest. She was leaning over to see what he was doing, and if it had occurred to Stephen to tear his eyes from the screen and look a little to his right he would have been rewarded with a glimpse right down the front of her shirt.

  But it hadn’t occurred to him. He did however shoot Ted a look that said I provisionally approve of your friend.

  Ted perched on the sofa arm on Stephen’s other side so that he could see the screen too while he ate slices of pizza. Stephen was using the demo video, which showed Ted self-consciously walking across the road outside the house and waving at the camera.

  “... And see, I can break it all down–”

  Stephen’s fingers tapped at keys and Ted’s image froze. A grid of squares appeared down the side of the screen. Some squares just contained numbers, others shapes and colours. Stephen pointed at each in turn.

  “It’s analysed Ted and it’s stored his height, his speed, the colour of his hair, of his face, of his shirt, of his trousers and–” Stephen was starting to breathe heavily, which he did when he was excited about something techie and was kind of off-putting. He grinned up at Ted, looking very pleased with himself. “... as of today it’s even got the textures.”

  “Yay!” Ted and Stephen bumped knuckles out of respect.

  Zoe looked properly impressed and Ted didn’t think she was faking.

  “So why’s it called–” she started. “No, wait, I can guess. It’s called object-oriented because Ted on screen is built up out of all these objects?”

  They answered at the same time.

  “Yup–”

  “That’s right–”

  “But even the smaller objects are built up out of other objects–”

  “I can edit each one–”

  “–like light and sound and weight and speed–”

  “–and customise it–”

  “So, it’s just like real life, isn’t it?” Zoe said casually, and derailed them both in mid-sentence. The boys glanced at each other and Ted had a sudden premonition they were going to have another ‘wizard’ conversation.

  “How so?” Ted asked warily.

  “Well, when I look at you, my brain doesn’t run through all the options – hmm, deep voice, no boobs, must be a boy, questionable hair gel, must be Ted. I just immediately know that the sum of all those characteristics is you. Right? If I see you walk across the room, I don’t think, there goes Ted’s feet, there go his legs, there goes his waist, there goes his chest and arms and head ... I just see you. So, you’re an object.”

  “Uh–” The boys glanced at each other again and Stephen shrugged.

  “Yeah. I suppose so. Except that in STOOPID all that information is kept in a database. There’s no database in real life–”

  “Says who? Maybe the database is in the mind of
God–”

  Stephen was a proud atheist and Ted saw him start to bridle immediately the G-word was mentioned. But Zoe was still talking.

  “Or maybe there’s a field of information that defines the universe at some quantum level.”

  Yup, this was definitely turning into another ‘wizard’ conversation. But Stephen, who had drawn in a breath to say something about evolution or Richard Dawkins, let it out again.

  “Hey, yeah? That’s kind of cool. It’s like shadows of the platonic objects.”

  “Very similar,” she agreed.

  “Platonic?” Ted blurted. Didn’t that mean ‘not having sex’? What did that have to do with anything? They both looked at him with what looked like pity.

  “You know about platonic objects, right?” Stephen asked.

  Ted almost whimpered his ignorance. Who was this podperson? Where was his friend Stephen? The other two looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

  “After you.”

  “No, after you.”

  “The Greek philosopher Plato imagined that we’re all like people chained inside a cave, facing a blank wall,” Zoe explained. “The real world is behind us but all we see are its shadows cast on the wall. Our senses only pick up the tiniest notion of what the real world is.”

  “But the real world,” Stephen added, “has everything in it. This is a chair but it’s just a shadow. In the real world there is the ultimate, defining, big-C Chair.”

  “Right–” Chained inside a cave, huh? Maybe that was why they didn’t have sex.

  “So that’s STOOPID,” Stephen concluded.

  “Well, I think you’re both brilliant.”

  “But I just do the interface,” Ted added. He felt suddenly, strangely, immensely proud of his friend. “I make what the user sees on screen and I’m working on the manual for when we release it – ’cos I can, you know, spell and write in sentences …” Stephen stuck his tongue out. “… But Stephen’s the one who really gets into the guts of the thing.”

  Because, he thought with only a little envy, he’s the one who lives alone with his mum and doesn’t have any distractions like brothers or sisters or a job because his dad pays for everything ...

  “You’re Igor, he’s Frankenstein?” Zoe asked.

  “Yesh, mashter!” Ted’s head spun a little. She could listen to people talk about object-oriented programming, and understand it, and be interested, and she knew that Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, not the monster. She could also talk about wizards and platonic stuff but, hey, she was still cool.

  After that, they drifted away from STOOPID and onto games. Zoe joined in the on-screen destruction and gave Ted a good run for his money, even though he won in the end. Stephen sucked universally at anything requiring hand-eye coordination but he was always a gracious loser.

  Zoe stayed a bit longer, Stephen a bit longer after that. He always promised his mum he would be home by midnight, even if he did just live in the house opposite Ted’s.

  Ted watched him go, then closed the door. He leaned his head against the wall and felt it cool against his forehead. Then he smiled. At one point earlier that evening he had actually thought – hoped, dreaded – he might be about to have sex for the first time. But what had transpired had been so much better: just spending time with an old friend and making a new one, who was way too old/weird to be a girlfriend but could just be a really good friend in her own right. He had some cool friends, plural, for the first time in what felt like far too long. He hoped there would be plenty more evenings like this.

  He turned the lights off, locked the doors and headed upstairs. Halfway up he remembered that what he hadn’t done was his homework for Malcolm.

  “Arse,” he muttered but only half-heartedly.

  Chapter 6

  Stephen trudged up the stairs in the dark. His mum’s light was on, of course.

  “Home,” he grunted. The light went out.

  He clenched one fist and headed for his room, deliberately dragging his knuckles down the wall. He needed just a little pain, to focus.

  When he got to his room he closed the door and put the light on. He sat on the edge of the bed, eyes shut, hands folded in front of him, and breathed: deep, slow, calm.

  That had been close. He thought he had done pretty well.

  When he was sure he was fully under control again, he reached for the drawer of his bedside table and took out the picture. His mouth twisted in a one-sided smile as his eyes lingered on its beauty and caressed the subject the way his hands never would. And then he brought it to his face and gently pressed it against his lips. It wasn’t a kiss. He could honestly say he had never kissed Ted.

  “God, I could so freak you out–” he murmured.

  It had taken him completely by surprise, one day the previous summer. He had gone round to Ted’s and Ted’s mum had said his friend was in the garden. So Stephen had gone through to the living room, to the French windows. There, in the garden, Ted was. There was no way Stephen could have been prepared for it.

  Ted was watering the flowers with the hose. It was a hot day and he just wore a pair of brightly coloured, knee-length Bermuda shorts. In the picture, he was half turned towards the camera and you could see his laughing profile as he sprayed Sarah. She had been running around him in a swimsuit, shrieking and laughing too. It had been a scene of happy, innocent fun.

  It was like he saw his oldest friend for the first time.

  Ted’s shoulders were broad and his hips were slim. There was a ripple of muscle and shoulder blades beneath skin that shone in the sun, and all of him was poised beneath sparkling drops of water. There hadn’t been much time, just seconds, but that was all he needed to get his phone out and take a photo of that perfect scene.

  How could this happen?

  Stephen had grown up with Ted. He couldn’t remember the first time they had met. He had vague memories of two stark naked toddlers splashing about in a pool. They had got older and shared thoughts and speculations and compared sizes a couple of times in a strictly hands-off sort of way. They were basically the same age, Stephen a month older. The hormones had hit them pretty well at the same time. Suddenly, girls had a point.

  Except that for Stephen it had been a double whammy. Hormones, and the idea for STOOPID.

  He had got a book on programming for his thirteenth birthday, and as he read it, STOOPID just came to him. And it was accessible. Sometimes it was like he could see it, there, just ahead of his grasping fingertips, if only he could reach a little further … while girls, on the other hand, were just an impossibility.

  And so STOOPID was what he concentrated on.

  Sure, girls were nice, and one day he might meet one with a like mind and they would probably marry and have kids and all that. But it was a long way off and meanwhile STOOPID was unfolding and blossoming in his mind like a delicate, intricate flower. Girls, STOOPID: the less he had to do with one, the better he did with the other. It followed that if he made the decision of no girls, at all, then STOOPID would flourish. And it did. It helped that he and Ted both went to a boys-only school. If he played his cards right then his mum was about the only female he had anything to do with during the day.

  But, he soon realised, it went further than a philosophical acceptance that he wouldn’t have a girlfriend. He had a teenage body with teenage desires. If those desires couldn’t be satisfied with someone else – well, there were ways around that. Stephen understood that Ted got around that quite a lot.

  Stephen never had. At all. And was determined that, while he was working on STOOPID, he never would. All of him – body, mind, whatever – every scrap of his resources had to be directed at one goal. He began to understand how some people actually considered celibacy to be holy. Yes, there were the dreams, but he couldn’t do anything about them. When he was awake, even though his body often had very different ideas about how he could be using his time, his mind always won.

  And then this happened.

  What was
weird was that, if he imagined any kind of life with a long-term partner – someone you wake up with every morning, share your life with – then that partner had to be a woman. But if he imagined anything more strictly physical, then the recipient of those affections lived a short distance away the other side of the road.

  And so he didn’t imagine it.

  He hadn’t told Ted because … well, because. Of course, he still saw Ted every day, but with Ted firmly locked into the box marked ‘impossible’, even that became easier with time.

  And then – oh, bloody hell, and then. He came into what he thought was the safest sanctuary of all, after his own room – Ted’s house, when only Ted and the cat should have been there. And there was this woman. And Ted hadn’t been lying about her womanness.

  Self-control. Self-control. That was what was needed. He thumped the wall again, knuckles first, for the pain. He had let himself grow slack. Just avoiding temptation wasn’t self-control. The neural pathways in his head needed the challenge if they were to grow strong. He should be able to walk through a room of naked women and Teds, all begging to have sex with him, and not bat an eyelid.

  He had asked his mum once, trying to make it as theoretical as possible:

  “How do you know when you love someone?”

  And that of course had opened the floodgates. She wasn’t the kind to express a lot of joy and delight. She just became very practical, sitting him down and running through the checklist. Who was she, was there anything his mum should know, if you ever think that Something Might Happen then there’s machines in all the men’s toilets ... but eventually he had got something like a sensible answer, which was: “Well, I suppose it helps if you can imagine saying ‘I love you’ to them.”

  Unfortunately, Stephen could imagine saying that to his friend. So, he loved Ted. But Ted would never understand, or feel the same way back, and it would get in the way of Stephen’s ambitions just as much as a girlfriend would. And there was always the sad irony that in the impossible event of Ted actually returning his feelings, Ted would no longer be the boy he had fallen in love with. So, Stephen was quite comfortable with never letting Ted know or suspect. In fact, he had come to welcome it: double the self-discipline meant even more productivity.