Catriona

The heavy wooden door opened slowly, framing and revealing the room like a panning camera. Plain white walls, varnished pine floor. A wide bed with a cast iron frame topped with gleaming brass knobs. She knelt on it, naked, blindfolded, her face bowed between her chained, outstretched arms, half hidden in the tumble of her hair; her knees spread obscenely wide by their own fetters, stretching and parting her labia above her little tuft of soft pubic fur, revealing the darker pigment of her anus. Her beautiful skin gleaming in the soft evening light, marred and mottled with bruises. By the chain splaying her left leg, an unopened box of condoms.

-----

"Mark, can you spare a moment?"

I sat up, stretched, leaned back in my chair, and swivelled it round. David, my boss, and friend. Really. And with him, a very sleek guy. Sharp suit. Silk tie. Cuff-links, for heaven's sake! But big, well built, even slightly menacing.

"Mark, this is Tony. He's come to join us on European sales."

"Hi, Mark," said the suit, in a very upper class drawl, aggressively English, "I hear you're the wizard."

I'm the guy who writes your telephone bill. Or, at least, I'm the guy who writes the thing that writes your telephone bill. Or, at least, I used to be. Back in the day, when the company was just basically David and me and John the finance guy, I wrote the whole product. These days I'm called 'Senior Software Architect', and have a team of untergeeks who do all the boring stuff; and I mostly provide top level input and write the bit that interrogates the switch.

You really don't know how your telephone works, do you? There's this bit of string that goes from your phone to the exchange, and in the exchange, there's something mysterious that connects your call to the person you're calling. Of course, these days the piece of string is often virtual, but that really doesn't make any difference. Your call goes to somewhere, and from there it gets routed to where you want it to go. And that mysterious somewhere in the middle is the switch.

Now, switches are very good at routing calls, but apart from that they're mostly fairly dumb. They remember which line called, and where it was routed, and how long the line was up; and that's about all. So the telephone company need something to pull the data off the switch, and work out what the tariff for each call was, and which account it belongs to, and so on; and that something is my baby. I'm a geek, and geeks in our society are more or less invisible. Society needs the things geeks do in order to operate, but most of the time most people don't even realise that the things geeks do need doing. Their phone bills come through the post, and they (usually) pay them.

But I'm a geek, and I'm that geek; so next time you pay your phone bill, think of me.

The software industry is composed of two kinds of people. There's geeks. That's us: the people who can actually talk to the machines and persuade them to do things. We're very good with machines, but we're notoriously not very good with people. So we need the other kind: the suits. We don't, mostly, like them. We certainly don't trust them. And to hear us talk, you'd think the suits were a bunch of parasitic drones. Which they mostly are. They call themselves 'managers', which means they set impossible deadlines, provide inadequate resources, and then waste so much of your time with meetings and way-points and productivity metrics and other buffoonery that you can't get any work done. Or else they call themselves 'salesmen', which means they go out and sell customers something you haven't built yet with the promise that it will do something it was never designed to do.

Geeks have a word for that. It's 'vapourware'. Software that's been sold but doesn't exist, and which it may not even be possible to build. The one thing geeks hate above all else is suits who sell vapourware.

But here's the rub: geeks can't sell. It's something we're really, really not good at, and really, really don't like doing. And unless someone sells product to customers, there's no money to pay our wages. So there's an uneasy and uncomfortable symbiosis between geeks who can build product but not sell it, and suits who can sell product but not build it. We need each other. We don't like each other.

So Tony and I greeted one another with faux politesse, and after that I didn't see him for a couple of months. Until, one morning, David called me into the small conference room, and Tony was there. We exchanged greetings, sat down, shuffled papers.

"Look, Mark, what this is about, Tony's got us a deal in Ukraine which looks very good. It's the former national phone company and they've still got a very dominant position in the market there. They're upgrading their exchanges to Nokia switches over a five year programme..."

I saw what was coming. "But the sale depends on us supporting their old switches?"

"Exactly."

"What are they? Ryskas?"

There was silence round the table. David looked pointedly at Tony. Tony cleared his throat, fiddling with his cuff-links. "They're locally made. I gather they're based on a 1960s Ericsson design, but with some modifications."

I looked, slightly eye rolling, at David. We'd been here before. "OK," I said, "what language is the documentation in?" Again, David looked at Tony, and Tony looked still more uncomfortable. "They don't seem to have any. There's a couple of old guys..."

To cut a very long story short, Tony and I flew out to Kiev, and I spent a very enjoyable couple of days with the two old guys and an intelligent young translator, and came back with what I needed. It was really very simple; it was a very simple switch. Tony was hugely relieved. I realised that this was his first significant sale for us, and that David had given him a suitably hard time about vapourware. The plane, of course, was delayed, so when we got back on the ground at Glasgow it was already late and the weather was dreich, so I wasn't much looking forward to rattling home by two busses or a very expensive taxi.

"Come back to my flat", said Tony. "Cat'll whip something up; she's pretty good at that, and I'll drive you out to your place afterwards." I accepted, and Tony got out his phone. A moment later he asked me if there was anything I didn't eat, and I said no. His car was a dark blue Aston Martin; not new, but... certainly the most ostentatiously luxurious car I've ever sat in. His flat was in one of the big old sandstone blocks off the Great Western Road. We clattered up the tenement stair, and in through a heavy front door to a white space sparsely furnished with a judicious mix of antique and starkly modern furniture. And in it...

Tall, gracile, good cheekbones, wonderful eyes. Lovely hair, long, vigorous. Elegant posture.

"Mark," said Tony, "this is Cat. Cat, this is Mark, who saved my bacon in Kiev."

"Good to meet you, Mark," she said. "I'm Catriona Stevenson."

A soft voice, lilting gently. Northwards; I wouldn't be surprised if she had the Gaelic. But also, expensively educated.

"It's good to meet you, too. Have you been kidnapped?"

She giggled. "Not yet. And you should be very glad I'm not Gertrude."

The tiredness seemed to drop off me. I grinned. "I'm sure I'd find somewhere to hyde."

Tony looked at me for a moment, disconcerted, and then shrugged. "Park your bags, old man, and come through. What'll you drink? I've got some decent Chateauneuf du Pape, or there's a rather nice Saint-Émilion. Or there's pils, if you'd prefer."

At table, Catriona served us spaghetti bolognese; simple, but very well cooked and presented, with green salad and garlic bread. She apologised for it, saying she'd have done something better if she'd had more notice, but it was delicious, and I said so. The Chateauneuf du Pape was also very good.

"They have some surprisingly good wine in the Ukraine," said Tony. "Really quite acceptable."

"I thought you went out there to work," said Catriona, "not to drink?"

"Oh, Mark did the work," said Tony. "I just kept the money men happy."

"Businessmen, they drank his wine," I said, "but the servants, regrettably, were shod."

"And all the women came and went, no doubt?"

I grinned, sheepishly. "I wouldn't know about that."

"So," said Catriona, "which one are you?"

I looked at Catriona. I looked at Tony, who looked confused and uncomfortable. I looked back at Catriona. "Oh," I said, "I think I must be the Joker. Don't you?"

She laughed suddenly, a rich, warm laugh, her eyes dancing. "I think you must be."

Sometime later in the meal, I asked her, as one does, what she did. Tony answered quickly, cutting across her. "She's a waitress in a cafe. Part-time."

Catriona looked defiant and hurt.

"Not a cocktail bar?"

"No", she said, "that much is true. No, I'm trying to write a book, a novel."

"Dear sir or madam, will you read my book?" I asked.

She nodded, and her eyes danced again. "It's the dirty story of a dirty man."

"His clinging wife doesn't understand?"

"Well, in my book they aren't actually married, but... yes. More or less."

"And have you found a publisher?"

"No," she said, with a glance at Tony which seemed frightened, "not yet. I haven't tried yet."

"She won't," said Tony. "It's derivative tosh. But it keeps her happy, gives her something to do."

To change the subject I offered to wash up. Again the scared glance at Tony, who said nonsense, Cat would see to that. I said I should be getting home, and within a few minutes I was back in the leather passenger seat of the Aston Martin.

"Why don't you drive?" asked Tony, idly. "Lost your licence?"

"No," I said. "Don't have a car. Don't want one."

"You really cycle this every morning?"

I shrugged in the darkness. "It's not that far. And it gets my brain into gear. And if it's horrible, I take the train."

There was silence for a while. I said "Catriona seems a very nice woman. You're a lucky man."

"Oh, for heaven's sake don't call her that. It gives her airs. Just because her primitive barbarian forebears can't pronounce Catharine. But... yes, she looks the part, and she sounds the part. She's the sort of girlfriend you can be seen with in public, or show your parents. Never lets you down. Not very high powered in the brains department, but you can't have everything. What about you, girlfriend?"

"No," I said. "Not for years."

"Boyfriend?"

"No," I said, unoffended. "Not that either. I live alone. It suits me. If it were either it would be a girlfriend, but... the ones I fancy never fancy me."

"What about your little translator bird, Natasia, wasn't she? She seemed interested enough. What was she like in the sack?"

"Was she? I didn't notice. Yes, she seemed nice enough, but... it was just work. There wasn't time to get to know her."

"You don't need to know them," said Tony, "to shag them."

-----

"Uhmmm... Mark, old man, could you spare a minute?"

I swivelled my chair round. Tony, in another sleek suit, laptop in hand.

"What can I do for you?" I asked.

"Look, I'm awfully sorry, but I've got a presentation tomorrow morning, and my laptop seems to have a virus."

"Grab a seat," I said, sighing. "Show me."

He didn't look happy, but he opened up his laptop and logged in. Almost immediately pop-up windows started to appear, with drastically non-work-safe content, advertising porn sites.

"Right," I said. "You need this when?"

"Tonight," he said. "Before I leave tonight." I said OK, and called Elaine over. I handed her the laptop. "Wipe this and put a new copy of XP on it, would you?"

"No!" said Tony.

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"It's got my presentation on it."

I looked at him. "When did you write your presentation?"

"Well, it's mostly based on one I did for Euskaltel last month, but I updated it on Monday."

"In here?"

He nodded.

"When did you get this virus?"

"I first saw it yesterday."

"Is there anything else on it that you need tomorrow?"

"Well, nothing but standard contracts..."

"OK, Elaine. Wipe it. Standard XP install, then restore his home directory from Monday's nightly, then sweep for viruses. If you find any, wipe it and reinstall again, and then sort out which files he actually needs and clean them by hand if necessary."

"What's 'Monday's nightly'?" asked Tony, still looking worried.

"The backup."

"But I don't make backups," he said, urgently.

"No," I said, "I do. And if your laptop was connected to the office network on Monday, it was backed up. It's in our standard build."

"But I didn't plug it in..."

"The wireless," I said.

"Oh."

-----

"Mark, old man, I owe you one. Again."

I looked up at him. "All part of the service," I said. "Presentation went OK?"

"Yes, thanks. Flawlessly. All thanks to you. Cat and I were wondering..."

I looked at him, interrogatively. After a moment he went on.

"Would you like to come out for a meal with us tonight, maybe hit the town a bit? I've a friend I could drag along to make up a foursome."

Catriona. Hitting the town didn't appeal, particularly, but I would like to see Catriona. And realised it probably wasn't a good idea. No, definitely wasn't a good idea, but... I wanted to, anyway.

-----

A rather over-designer restaurant in the Merchant City. Chairs in imitation Charles Rennie Macintosh, better to look at than to sit on, rather too upright. Square white plates with rather too little food on them, rather too artfully arranged. Dramatis Personae: self, Tony, Catriona, Cecilia. Catriona, in a 'little black dress', simple, sleeveless, high at the neck in front but leaving much of her spine bare, sat on my left, feeling like a gravity well that it took all my strength for my eyes to resist. On my right, Cecilia, equally tall, with some mix of parentage which seemed to include both African and far eastern and made the most of both architectures; although marred in my eyes by a recent extension to the front elevation. She wore a rather insubstantial halter-neck top, in concert with a short leather skirt and tall boots.

The soup had arrived; the waiter had left.

"Tony says you live in a house up a farm track near Helensburgh," said Catriona, making it not quite a question.

"Yes," I said. "I like it there. It's quiet, and... the view's good."

"And no car?"

"I don't need one. Cars are quite expensive to run, and when I was younger getting the house seemed more important. It's all priorities, you know. My parents live in a tied house... if it kills I will surround myself with four stone walls."

"A little pride upon the shelf?"

"That too. I love Capercaillie. I love that in particular. Thon fair gars me greet..."

"Me too. That's my Scotland. I love it so much it hurts."

I nodded. "The beautiful wasteland, and the black tide."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Mark," said Tony, "not you as well. I can't bear all that schmaltzy Caledonian sentimentality. Scotland's dead. It's a backwater. And as long as you lot keep looking over your shoulders at some hazy romanticised Brigadoon past that was never real anyway, you never will amount to a hill of beans. Independent? This godforsaken place? Don't make me laugh. Your precious parliament couldn't manage a piss up in their own bloody building."

Catriona's eyes met mine, fierce and angry and hurt.

"There's nae gods," I said, "and there's precious few heroes." Catriona softened a touch, catching the reference with just a ghost of a grin. "Look, could we just put politics off the agenda for the evening? Cecilia, what do you do?"

"I'm a singer," Cecilia said, confidently. South-east England, with just a hint of Carribean. "I've got my own recording contract coming up, and I do mostly night clubs and functions and some modelling. And I've done some movies but... not speaking parts, yet. But I've done backing vocals for some pretty big bands."

"So how do you know Tony and Catriona?"

"Oh, I met Tony in a night club in Milan last year. I was singing, and he was over there on business... I hadn't met Cat. Before tonight, I mean."

I asked Cecilia about whether singing involved a lot of travel, and finding it did, moved the conversation onto places we'd been to. Cecilia and Tony both liked the States, particularly Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where they'd both been. We had all been to northern Italy, and liked it, but somehow the northern Italies we'd been to seemed different. Tony's northern Italy was about wine, fast cars and motor racing; it shared glamour with Cecilia's, which was almost exclusively about fashion and labels. Catriona had liked the clothes, too, but her northern Italy was a warlike, turbulent place of history, art, and architecture. It was architecture which formed the overlap between hers and mine. None of them had heard of the Stelvio or the San Pellegrino, although Catriona had been to La Thuile on a school skiing trip.

-----

The nightclub was dark and noisy, and I wasn't sure I wanted to stay. In a spotlight by the dance floor a nearly nude girl was gyrating around a pole. Out on the floor, Tony was saying something to Catriona, who was shaking her head, clearly unhappy. Tony said something again, more sharply. Catriona bent over, and another couple moved in front of her. When they passed, she was doing something with her feet. Where her dress had ridden up, there were blue shadows on her thighs. She scrumpled something tightly in her fist. They came back to the table, and I got up to let Catriona into her seat. As she moved past me I glanced down the back of her dress - I know, but one does - and there was the blue shadow again. Bruising. She found her handbag and stuffed her fist into it, coming out with her hand relaxed again.

"Aren't you and Cecilia dancing, Mark?"

"I'm not much of a dancer, I'm afraid."

"It isn't that hard, old chap. Look, I'll show you. Fair lady," he said to Cecilia, "would you honour me with the pleasure of this dance?"

"Yeah," said Cecilia. "OK."

It was, like most of the music, slow jazz, languid, sensual, They danced close. I turned to Catriona, wanting to take her eyes away from it.

"You're bruised."

She flushed, her eyes down. "I fell down the stair, at the flat."

"OK," I said, meaninglessly. "I have a friend - well, she's an ex girlfriend, really - who works in a domestic abuse refuge..."

She flushed darker, and her eyes came up to meet mine. "It isn't like that, Mark. Honestly it isn't."

"You didn't fall downstairs."

"No, but... consenting adults and all that, you know?"

"Rum, sodomy and the lash?"

"Well, no... Tony's more of a gin an tonic man..."

I grinned, startled and oddly proud for her that she could make a joke of it. "Don't be sad," I said, "two out of three ain't bad."

"Oh, not Meat Loaf," she said. "That's really below the belt."

I laughed. "Don't. That isn't fair. There are so many ways I could take that, and all of them are off limits."

There was a pause.

"Catriona, about your knickers..."

"Mark! That's below the belt."

"I know. He made you take them off, didn't he? Why?"

"Oh. That. Yes. I don't like, I don't like, I don't like..."

"Peruvian marching powder?"

"Yes. Tony and Cecilia have had some. I wouldn't. He said I was a boring little square. I said I wasn't. He said only boring little squares wore underwear to nightclubs. So I joined the commandos. I don't like anonymous white powder in nightclubs. I don't like coke. But I am so not boring."

"No," I agreed, "you're not."

-----

"Enjoy Friday night?"

"Oh, Hi, Tony. Yes, thank you, I did."

"If you'd had a car, I bet you could have taken Cecilia home."

I shrugged. "My bicycle isn't built for two."