Rhona. pt 2
Millie Garrens, former British spy, Vape Enthusiast. A short story - Part 2.
(Part 1 here)
‘Tell me now Arif, or so help me.’ Millie demanded as a motorbike roared past outside.
‘I’m sick obviously,’ her husband said.
‘What do you mean “sick”, and “obviously”?’
‘I’ve kept it quiet, on purpose. And if I’m being totally honest, I’ve been spending a lot of time at, well, I can’t say.’
‘That’s your total honesty Arif?’
‘Kettering. There’s a medical biographer who cured himself using alternative therapies.’ With that he dropped his eyeline to the floor.
‘Cured what Arif?’
‘That’s as specific as I’d like to be right now please.’
Millie decided to not fall for the trap. One which would have rendered her a sceptic and entrench him deeper into his holistic bunker. Unable to chastise him for lying to her, she said nothing and walked out of the bedroom dabbing away the tears she had failed to hold back.
‘Oi, out. Now.’ Millie said to the Grandson who was staring at his feet as customary. In the hallway Millie chucked him one of Benji’s coats and stormed to the street giving her a chance to quell her anger.
It had been two weeks since Millie’s former boss Rhona had asked her to babysit Lord Agnew’s illegitimate and mute Grandson. The man-child who arrived in a blue Londsdale tracksuit and nothing else, not even a name.
‘You look like an extra from an ITV drama. Agree?’
He was unmoved but she knew she had not offended him on account of having said much worse over the last fortnight in trying to get him to speak.
‘You need new clothes. Agree?’ Millie continued, to which he made eye contact with her immediately. A gesture Millie imbibed as ‘yes’, proved by her cycling through options for dinner and him always looking up at ‘pizza’. She set off in the direction of the station and he eventually followed.
With her feet throbbing, they took a moment to rest in the Costa Coffee behind Oxford Circus station. The sound bounced around, drowning out the specifics of any nearby conversation, which was as close as it came to peace and quiet for weary shoppers in the West End.
‘Fuck, I need to go Apple Store.’ Millie remembered, noticing a couple of churlish girls no older than thirteen staring at The Grandson and the ten brown paper bags from Primark in his lap he refused to put down.
‘Come on, you’re not drinking that anyway.’
Millie was immediately accosted inside the Apple Store by an unlikely trio of geniuses who made no sense as a work clique. She considered that perhaps cliques had become a thing of the past before she remembered the judgemental brats in Costa.
‘How many languages do you speak?’ the one genius said (out of absolutely nowhere) pulling up Millie’s purchase history on the iPad hanging around their neck. Before Millie could answer the genius was already distracted by a passing colleague gloating about being done for the day and able to break fast before them.
Millie reiterated that despite her ample experience and expertise with computers her iCloud account was still confusing her old email address as the host and preventing her from fully recovering her Red Dwarf and Adam Curtis digital boxsets.
‘Which is the old email on the profile’ the second genius asked, peering over her colleague’s iPad like some sort of Detective character from CSI, called in for a second opinion.
‘Douglas-Adams-Fan-underscore-N-O-0-0-01@btinernet.co.uk. My daughter picked it during a particular phase.’
‘No-no, always pack a towel’ the final genius said as they got to work.
Leaving knowing that she could finally rewatch her and Jen’s favourite shows, Millie thanked the geniuses enough to ensure she wasn’t being rude but not enough to preclude the possibility of her eventually figuring it out herself.
‘I thought it was something like that, thank you.’
Now faced with having to return home to Arif, she looked around the store hoping The Grandson had wandered off to Urban Outfitters or beyond as she envisioned another pained silence on the eleven minute walk home from the station. As the crowds parted to reveal him, Millie was astounded to see him full of life, his back straight, fingers dancing over the keyboard of a display MacBook Pro.
Now looking over his shoulder, Millie saw his glazed eyes tracking the cursor as the screen showed the grisly code laden face of computers only hackers or people who hit an accidental shortcut in Chrome saw. Her jaw continued to drop as she recognised the Cyrillic alphabet endlessly populating the screen - a rare feature for computer programme writing. Looking up at his entranced face, Millie felt as though she was about to wake a sleepwalker swaying at the top step. She glanced around to check she herself was not dreaming as he hurtled through a series of portals requiring 2-factor authentication, six digit numbers he typed from memory. Millie darted her hand out and slammed the laptop shut and he froze, thankfully returning him to the dead expressionless gawking.
‘Out’ she said. Now it was a case of escaping Central London as quickly as possible, which would be difficult late on a Thursday approaching December.
Millie texted her family chat as she led The Grandson by his hand into a packed Oxford Circus Station, where they tailgated a family ambling through the wide gated barrier to avoid using her own card to tap in,
‘You don’t have time to pack a bag’ she typed as a final sign off before turning her phone off to remove the SIM card, dropping it at the bottom of the escalator for it to be crunched through its bottom teeth.