The Search - Part 2

The air outside Hassan’s smelt clean after the musk of frying grease. Morgan could hear the looping drone of the traffic on the nearby main road. The sun turned the windows of the flats into golden slabs, and Morgan worried about who might be looking out under the cover of this new opacity. He lit his cigarette and sucked. A ripple of nervous delight spread through his body.

‘Excuse me.’

It was a hooded kid, a girl in her early twenties maybe. Her face was distorted by scars, so that she didn’t really look like a girl anymore. A sinister purple mark extended from her crowlike black fringe, skirted the length of her jaw and went up through her lip, which was fat and split. Another cut right down through her right eye, which was swollen shut. Her nose had been broken, Morgan could see a hairline scar across its bridge, and still, he could just about make out that she was smiling.

‘I’d really appreciate it if I could borrow one of those. I’m really craving one, sorry.’

He passed her a cigarette and lit it.

‘Thank you so much.’

They both stood quietly smoking for a while. Morgan eyed each passing bus with suspicion. He watched the corner the smartly dressed man had turned round, expecting him to return, perhaps with a police car or several.

‘Do you eat here often, then?’

Little licks of smoke left her lips when she said ‘often.’

‘Yeah. Often ‘nuff.’

‘Great. It looks nice... Anything you’d recommend?’

Morgan wasn’t sure about this sort of thing.

‘Well, depends what you want.’

‘I don’t know what I want!’

She laughed. A fresh wind buffeted them, and Morgan felt alert and awake for the first time that morning.

‘Well, what ‘bout the eggs, ‘ash browns and bacon?’

She laughed again. It was a nice sound.

‘Well, I suppose I know what I don’t want! I’ll just...wait and see if anything takes me. Thanks anyway. Oh, and thanks for the cigarette!’

‘S’alright.’

He made an effort to smile at her and look at her in her good eye. His appetite had gone. She didn’t leave, and Morgan could not quite handle the silent gap in between a finished conversation and a finished cigarette, so he decided to go for a walk around the block. He thought about the girl and her scars. She must have been lonely too, at least she looked it. The pain of her life was physically manifested in her face, and Morgan often felt as if the anguish of his life was detectable, visible and repellent to all those that he met. He took another deep drag on his cigarette, which was burning low. He knew it wasn’t the same thing, but when he saw his face in the morning he saw a face marked by memories. Memories of failures and regrets. Memories of Jenny.

He wanted these memories with someone new. There was the first time, when Jenny asked him to drive her and Hayden to the city park. He pushed Hayden on the swings while she watched, and could see Jenny’s face, eyes wrinkling, grinning wide. Hayden was laughing, and he saw her look at him, then the kid, then back to him. She was making a link. He was scared, then, that the kid might wriggle out of his seat and fall. There was a tentativeness then, as if the slightest mistake would break everything before it really started. He tried to strike a balance, pushing delicately but with enthusiasm, concentrating as the fat little boy swung in his giggling arc through space. Once Hayden had had enough, they walked. A chill was settling and he watched as Jenny put Hayden’s coat on for him next to the pond. The boy asked Jenny where the ducks stayed at night, and she deflected the question to Morgan. Morgan had no idea. He crouched down next to Hayden and told him that at night, when everyone had left the park, the ducks all put on scuba masks and dove down to their houses at the bottom of the pond, to huddle with their ducklings. Hayden would not stop asking questions. Did they watch TV? Cartoons? Course they did!

He looked back and saw Jenny, taking a photo.

There were other times. One night, in bed, Jenny asked Morgan where he would go if he could go anywhere in the world. He said he’d go to Egypt, to see the pyramids. When he asked her the same question, she said that she’d go to Marney Bay, which she used to visit when she was growing up. Morgan spent the next night doing eight hours of extra programming to pay for petrol money, and after they were able to drop Hayden off with Jenny’s mother, drove with Jenny to the coast. Morgan only told Jenny where they were going after he had been driving for an hour. When she found out, she didn’t scream or jump or laugh. She simply stroked his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. She wasn’t surprised. She knew the kindnesses of which he was capable.

It was windy on the beach, and the clouds were stretched thin across the sky, all the colours of the inside of a shell. Morgan and Jenny were walking on the rocks, trying not to slip. It felt like something from a movie to Morgan. Just him and Jenny, alone at the edge of the world. He turned to her.

‘Eh, imagine if the Vikin’s or somethin’ were comin’ over the ‘orizon, yeah? Jus loads of ships, and we were the first one’s they would see? What would they think?’

‘They’d stay the fuck away if they saw us.’

She let out a small catlike roar, and started laughing.

Morgan helped her across the rocks and back to the cement promenade, where they ate chips and drank coffee from polystyrene cups, watching the sky darken.

The next day, Jenny mentioned a restaurant in the West End that she had heard about from a friend. It was musical themed, and waiters sang show tunes in turns while serving you in extravagant costumes. Morgan didn’t know if he had ever seen a musical, but it made him happy to say yes to Jenny. A smile and a kiss would normally follow, and, until Jenny, he hadn’t seen either for over a year. They took the tube to town. She wore the faux fur coat Morgan had bought her. He didn’t wince when she ordered the filet mignon, or when the waiters missed the high notes. Jenny quickly got drunk and sang along, and while everyone frowned, Morgan laughed. They were together in their mischief, too clever and funny for the rest of the uptight clientele. They laughed all the way back on the tube. She swung on the handrails, and when she looked like she was about to fall, Morgan caught her.

Four or five weeks had passed, Morgan couldn’t remember, before he truly became part of the family. He had taken Jenny and her friend Maureen furniture shopping one morning, when Maureen spotted a red sports car shaped bed that she speculated would be perfect for Hayden. Jenny agreed, and Morgan knew how much Hayden meant to her. Later that day as he was setting it up and Hayden clapped his hands with excitement, he heard Maureen say to Jenny that she had ‘hooked a real keeper.’ He could just about make out Jenny’s voice over the boiling of the kettle, and Hayden’s chirping sounds.

‘Yeah. I don’t know what I’d do without him.’

She didn’t know what she’d do without him. Morgan had never felt like this before. He was no longer some appendix, some troublesome waste of space. He was relied upon, needed. From that point on Morgan carried the new responsibility around with him like an Olympic medal. He typed endless lines of code with a sense of purpose and wellbeing. He lived with momentum.

On the way to the interview he passed a jeweler’s window. A ring, he thought, and it was just a thought, might be the next step. A ring represented his future, and he knew that they could make it work. Just him, Jenny and Hayden.

When he arrived back outside Hassan’s the girl with the scars had disappeared. Inside, Jemima was behind the counter washing up while Hassan jotted some figures on a notepad. The two men in paint spattered jeans had returned to their newspapers. Morgan nodded at Hassan as he walked back in. He sat back down at his plate, wondering if it had gone cold. The radio was playing adverts again, a deep voice booming about a new blockbuster. Morgan inspected his half eaten hash browns, their fluffy, yellowish innards like mattress stuffing. He didn’t want them anymore.

An idea embraced him.

It was what the girl had said. He had to get to his computer. His fingers were practically twitching. There was code to be written. He would go to the corner shop and buy some energy drinks - this could take all night. He went to settle his bill with Jemima. She looked at him and spoke.

‘Feeling better, sir?’

He didn’t know how he felt just yet. Something was different in his life now, something was ahead of him, rather than behind. Last night was fading.

‘Think so, yeah.’

Outside, hooded kids were shifting on the climbing frames. The sun was at its highest. Morgan didn’t care who was watching him. When something like this took him, he was untouchable.

-

The sun began to sink on Julia G’s world. Sullivan had been calling her more and more often, and what had been news of opportunities were now impositions. Julia G could never refuse Lou anything, for when she did he would lose his temper, reminding her how much she owed him, how he had practically made her.

Julia was lonely. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her father, nor could she count a single friend. This loneliness led to a self-obsession, and she constantly checked her territories on the internet, hoping for contact. She grew numb, and the effervescence she reserved for talk shows became tiresome to affect. The subtle grace with which she learned she had received the TELE award for Best Newcomer was in fact a display of controlled apathy. She didn’t care.

At the ceremony after party Julia G got drunk. She started talking to a movie producer and laughed a little too hard at his jokes. Lou Sullivan grabbed her by the wrist and told her it was time to go home. She refused, telling Lou she was having too good a time. She would get a cab. Then Sullivan caught her with a skull ringing slap. Those who saw it knew he was too influential to be reported on, besides, they had secrets of their own to protect. Julia G apologized repeatedly through tears in the car all the way home. Later, in Lou’s apartment, she sat in the shower feeling her cheek. She got out and looked in the mirror. There was a bruise coming. Her hair was shockingly blond, almost white, and a small black beauty spot had been painted on her upper lip. Her lipstick, ‘candied chilli,’ was thickly applied. Julia G bit into her bottom lip, hard. She felt the pain, but the person in the mirror didn’t notice.

-

‘Well, I suppose I know what I don’t want!’

That was what the girl had said. She knew what she didn’t want. Morgan cracked open his next energy drink, this would be an all night job, the first of many. To know what you don’t want, wasn’t that the most that anyone could hope for? No one really knows what they want, they just think they know what they don’t want, and everything they do, all the pain they go through, is just searching without finding.

Morgan typed, characters filling the screen, white on black. He would start it all again. A new project. This time, he would be pitching NAGROM searcher, a system that examined your browsing habits, history and personal information to eliminate any search results you would not want, and allow you to search through the rest. This could be, would be, huge. Morgan could feel the sugary energy course through his wiring, the caffeine making him twitch. No longer would he leave a unique trace on the internet. NAGROM searcher would be everywhere. He would take on the world the way Julia G once threatened to.

Julia G. It occurred to Morgan that he would have to be quick, that people were looking for him, that soon the world would know what he had done. He swatted the idea away - they would never find him. Finding wasn’t in his vocabulary anymore. It wasn’t part of the pitch. It wouldn’t be on the poster. He thought about how he could make it up to Julia G. Maybe he’d use her songs in the TV adverts. Poor girl, she had it all wrong. In a moment of excitement, Morgan typed ‘I’m Coming’ into his now outmoded NAGROM finder, set the song to play, and twisted the volume dial on his speakers to maximum. The shimmering tones of ‘I’m Coming’ filled the room as he rocked in his chair and his hands fired off code. He was practically shivering with excitement as he bounced off the music. She had it all wrong, and he would fix it for her, even though she was dead. His typing sounded like a swarm of beetles. His teeth itched with sugar. Julia G’s voice entered the mix, the reverb on it making it sound more than merely human. Elemental.

I’m coming,

I’ll find you,

If it takes me all my days.

The determination in the words broke Morgan’s heart. I’ll find you. This was for Julia G. NAGROM search would teach everyone to care less about what they find, and to just enjoy the search. The sun was sinking through a golden band of cloud outside his window as Julia G’s words floated upwards towards the ceiling.

I’m coming.

They floated up past the plaster, past the wood chip, brick, and grey foam insulation.

I’ll find you.

They split the rubber casing of the cables through which burning currents sped with a brightness beyond recognition, they dissolved through dark, half-empty pipes with verdigris walls.

‘Cos I always find a way

They climbed up through the spearmint-coloured fronds of the carpet and floated around a room. The room was cold and had only bare walls, an unmade bed and a desk with a laptop. A girl was sat at the laptop, and the words reached her in a voice she knew well. They hung to her for a moment, then vanished, like rings of smoke.

I’m coming,

I’ll find you,

If it takes me all my days.

She knew the person singing those words never could find her. She knew that person was dead. The girl swept her hair off her swollen eye and winced as she accidentally scratched a scar with her nail. She typed ‘S.L.U.T’ into her search engine and started looking for the comment, the words that reminded her that no, she was not the person that walked into the waves the night before. No, that had never been her. Her finger rolled the ball of her mouse and leaned in close to the screen. She had hundreds of comments to get through.