Danny Craig lived for the future. His was a world of new technology, where television screens became ever bigger and where bandwidth expanded exponentially with the phases of the moon. When not at work patching network cables into routers and hubs for a local newspaper, Danny shared his home with his aged father and his demure, unassuming sister, Annie.
He shared his home but not his time, preferring, when not down at the pub watching Manchester City flatter to deceive in wide screen glory, to lock himself away in his room with his computers and his cable links to a very private world of digital opportunities. Danny found virtual reality far more rewarding than the unnecessary and irksome chores that comprised all manual forms of familial communication. Such things were, he told himself, outmoded. Unfortunately Danny and Annie were thrust unceremoniously into the analogue Dickensiana of real life when their father keeled over with a massive heart attack one Saturday evening while watching the family’s favourite football team being trounced by Hereford United.
In the days that followed their father’s untimely passing, brother and sister lived in a world of frayed tempers, compassionate overload and weary resignation. Death certificates were signed and lodged with the appropriate authorities, funeral arrangements planned and paid for, paperwork sorted and solicitors engaged to deal with the minutiae of closing down a life. Danny was sure that he could design a much more efficient way of dealing with the arcane world of paper and people, and regularly assailed his sister with critiques of off-line morbidity. If only they could deal with the stiff by clicking a button and filing its life away in some Interweb repository. When it came to the reading of their father’s will, however, Danny found, in a rather brooding sort of way, that the world of flesh and bone took on a sudden fascination.
Danny stood outside the crematorium after a sparsely attended service making little attempt to disguise his impatience as he bade their one solitary guest goodbye. Annie, who’s mortal soul was grounded in a much richer vein of sensitivity, couldn’t help feeling that if this was all a life was worth come the final reckoning, then there was something infinitely sad about the infinite plan they were all a part of. Their mother had walked out on the three of them some ten years previously and a combination of family arguments and mortalities had reduced them to this paltry dynastic circumstance.
“Thought he’d never go”, said Danny, turning to his sister as their father’s ex boss hurried back to his car and the comfort of paperwork. Rubbing his hands together as he blew on them Danny continued, “Ready for the grand unveiling? Shall we trot down to the solicitors?”
Annie sighed, stuck her hands in her coat pockets and followed her brother along Barlow Moor Road towards the offices of Dawson, Dawson & Dawson, chosen by their father in happier times because he could always be sure of remembering the name of his solicitor when exceptional circumstances required the expertise of a legal beagle. The other advantage of the partners Dawson was that, unlike the new super-practices located at the heart of Manchester’s business district, their fees reflected their clientele’s ability to pay, which in the case of the now deceased Mr. Craig had never been very much.
Over a plateful of slightly stale tractor-wheel biscuits and weak tea in chipped china cups, Danny and Annie found out that there were no savings, no insurance policies and no investments. The only inheritance was the small terraced house that they had grown up in and a few personal possessions. Much to Annie’s horror, the elder Mr. Dawson spelled out the terms of the will in very short order.
“So, there you have it, I’m afraid”, he concluded. “Miss Craig receives her mother’s engagement ring and the… erm… Ming vase, while young Mr. Craig gets everything else, namely the house, which is paid for, and the furniture etcetera. I must say it seems a little one sided, but mine is not to reason…”
“Yeah, thanks”, interrupted Danny, “I’ll make sure Annie’s looked after. Nice to have met you, Mr. Dawson.”
Annie followed her brother out of the solicitor’s office and back onto the street, where the weak light of a chill winter afternoon had given way to the dark pit of night like a coffin being lowered into the ground on a rain soaked headland. Car headlights flashed in her eyes, momentarily dazzling her, as if a stray flash of lightning had reflected brilliantly on a brass handle just before the lid of the box disappeared from sight. Her tears, held back until now by the bleak austerity of the day, began to flow.
Danny didn’t wait for her. He ploughed through the streets followed at some distance by his sister until, with the front door of their modest terraced home shut firmly on the outside world, Danny disappeared into his bedroom to play electronic games. Annie sat at the kitchen table and looked at her inheritance. She was the proud owner of some books, a few records, a wardrobe full of clothes and a bank account with approximately two hundred pounds in it, all of which was now enriched by one ancient diamond ring and a crudely painted blue and white vase. She spent the rest of the evening dabbing her eyes with used tissues and asking herself what other wonders life might have in store for her.
Despite his apparently uncaring treatment of her the previous day, Annie still firmly believed that her brother loved her and that he would, in time, learn to engage with the world in a more constructive way now that he was the effective head of the household. Breakfast that morning had been the usual hurried, monosyllabic affair, and when she returned home from work Annie was determined that she would sit her brother down and that they would have a thorough chat about the future.
“After all”, she reminded herself on the bus that evening, “he did tell the solicitor he’d look after me”.
Cold comfort awaited Annie as she stepped through the front door. Her brother had taken a couple of hours off work that afternoon and used the time to strip her bedroom, bundling her clothes, books and music into black bin liners. He had also packed her toiletries, cosmetics and personal knick-knacks into an old rucksack and together with the Chinese style vase all of Annie’s worldly possessions were stacked in a small, untidy pile in the hallway. The poor young woman stood in the hallway in dumb silence as Danny explained the facts of her new life to her.
“Sorry about this, but it’s mine now and I’ve got plans, none of which include you. You can’t have order in a house full of women…”
“But it’s not full of women, Danny, there’s only me”.
“Today, granted, but what about tomorrow? I’m a man of property now. There’s bound to be something turns up. I’ve been chatting to a nice Russian girl on the Interweb and you never know. Anyway, as I was saying, you’ll be leaving tonight. Can I have your key?”
“But where…where will I go, what will I do?” Annie whispered, feeling as though she were being sucked down into a whirlpool.
Her sad and lonely inner child wandered the dark corridors of a huge adult world, while at the same time she could feel the steam head pressure of outrage building in the magma chambers that brooded darkly in the spaces between her quiet outward persona and her molten core.
“Not my problem”, answered Danny and he turned away, heading towards the kitchen where Annie could smell beans or spaghetti hoops cooking and toast burning.
She followed him into the kitchen. The table was laid for one person, with Danny’s laptop already hooked up via means of temporary network and telephone cables in the place where she usually sat. The history of eruptions, being by its very nature violent, would have been proud to record the effects of Annie’s full explosive force as it hit her brother’s online world with maximum venom.
“Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” she screamed over and over again as she emptied the pan of baked beans onto the keyboard and then turned her attention to the boy himself. By the time that she had whacked him with the frying pan six or seven times, kicked his shins repeatedly and doused him in an entire litre of Vimto, Danny’s other worldly cool had been completely shattered.
As volcano Annie subsided into a state of uncongenial dormancy, she and her brother came to a bruised and battered arrangement whereby she could stay on in the family house for a few days until she could find somewhere else to live. Given her brother’s obvious lack of filial concern for his sister and given Annie’s disgust at his behaviour, there seemed little alternative but that she should vacate the premises.
Armed with her father’s old address book, and after many disappointing telephone calls to old friends and distant relations, Annie eventually tracked down an ancient great-aunt who owned a crumbling Victorian villa that had been converted into bedsits. At first the telephone conversation with the old woman went very badly, with her great-aunt being extremely hostile to the memory of her nephew’s long forgotten children, but, as Annie described her predicament and as the old woman remembered that it had always been the men in the Craig family who had been the cause of the greatest unhappiness, she eventually found it in her heart to offer the young woman one of her flats at a very competitive rent. Arrangements were made, the bed sitting room was cleaned and a week later Annie moved her bin liners and her rucksack into her new home. By now she had grown accustomed to the weight of her mother’s old engagement ring on her finger and the Chinese style vase stood proudly in its new position on the fireplace mantelpiece.
The villa had seen better days, having matured over more than a century of irregular neglect into its current state of generally poor repair. Where once a stout Edwardian family had warmed themselves by the great living room fire and eaten roast meats on Sundays in the capacious dining room, there now existed within these walls a selection of small private worlds inhabited by transparent people who warmed themselves next to two-bar electric fires, who shared bathrooms and cooked tinned meals on single ring electric cookers.
Fortunately for Annie, she was still in such a state of shock that few if any of the shortcomings in her new home had yet registered in her consciousness. She was also blessed with the good fortune to have moved into one of the two ground floor bedsits, which boasted high ceilings, large sash windows and more than enough room to swing a cat. The two-bar was not effective in heating such a large space, but Annie’s great-aunt assured her that the rooms were lovely and cool in the summer, which would be a blessing worth waiting for.
Over the course of her first week in residence Annie, who was naturally quiet even in happy times, impressed her great-aunt with her obvious inner sorrow, which the old dear thought only fitting for a woman of the Craig line, and the next Saturday afternoon Annie received her first invitation to call on her relative in her own apartment.
Annie knocked on the door to her great-aunt’s apartment with some trepidation. In public the old girl bristled with an imperious air of confidence and hard-nosed, old-world defiance, but Annie was convinced that her private inner sanctum would be a shambling mess of decrepitude and cat infestations, full of strange smells and unfamiliar utility furniture that dated from the middle of the previous century. She steeled herself before entering the living room.
Annie was amazed to find herself in a most elegantly appointed salon, stuffed full of finely embroidered soft furnishings and antiques of obvious quality and refinement. In the middle of the room on an elegantly proportioned drop leaf table her great-aunt had set a Royal Worcester tea service, with one of those lacy three tiered cake stands at the centre of the display. Drifting languidly from the speakers of a restrained but nonetheless modern stereo system Annie was sure that she could hear the dulcet tones of Leonard Cohen. Annie greeted her great-aunt softly and settled herself into the voluminous folds of one of the armchairs.
Great-aunt Edith poured the tea, keeping one eye on the cups and watching her great-niece with the other. As she handed Annie her drink, she went straight to the nub of matter. “So, you’ve experienced the true reality of life as a Craig at last, my girl. Not pleasant is it!”
“No”, replied Annie quietly, “at least not recently. It wasn’t too bad when Dad was alive. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a life of luxury and he could be a bit moody at times, but I’m sure he did his best. After Mum left his heart wasn’t really in it anymore, but he did what he could. As for Danny, I thought it was a phase, you know, something he’d grow out of”.
“And here you are”, said her great-aunt, “without a penny to your name, without anything that anyone would want to steal”.
“It’s true”, said Annie sadly. “But then I’ve got nothing to fear either have I? I mean, who’s going to bother with someone like me? All I’ve got is my mother’s old ring and grandma’s pot”.
“You’ve got a heart, dear. What would you do if someone stole that or worse...if someone broke it?”
Annie sat in silence for a moment or two pondering the question of a broken heart. There had never been much in the way of demonstrable love in her father’s house and she’d already cried enough over his death. As far as her brother was concerned she couldn’t really remember the last time she’d really thought of him in affectionate terms. At best she felt a cold numbness in her heart, which she supposed was better than feeling nothing at all. Sitting here in this lovely room with a real fire in the grate and with Suzanne drifting out of the stereo’s speakers, Annie felt that, even in her poverty stricken state, life was still better lived than made into an excuse for not trying.
Her great-aunt watched over her throughout the afternoon, revealing snippets of family history, and sketching pictures from her own life story, all of which seemed to consist of too many broken hearts and broken heads, until, with the football results due in and Leonard Cohen starting to become a little bit overbearing, she turned to her young relative and asked, “Do you want to stay for dinner? There’s a DVD I want to watch and we could phone out for a curry”.
By the end of the evening, which great-aunt Edith thoroughly enjoyed because of the company, two bottles of Lambrusco and because they watched quite possibly the best werewolf film ever made, the two women had become the best of friends. The old girl eventually retired, wobbling slightly as she went, and Annie returned to her own thinly proportioned bed on a promise to call round the next morning for coffee. She was to bring her mother’s ring and the old blue and white vase.
In the days following Annie’s departure from the family home and while she settled into her new bed sitting room, Danny Craig made changes. He no longer felt the need to confine his online activities to his bedroom and had spent many a happy evening hour running cables around the house and setting up a new wireless router. His main file server now sat in the living room, together with various and sundry stereo and television appliances. By virtue of the addition of a new hub, borrowed from his place of work, Danny could attach his laptop to his domestic network in any one of the bedrooms, in the kitchen and even in the downstairs lavatory. In the living room he installed a fifty-six inch television monitor and was able to interact with online services in super-sized mode, which he found particularly useful when inspecting the assets and attributes of various potential brides from far flung lands such as the Czech Republic, the Ukraine and the Philippines.
Annie, knowing her brother from years of quiet observation, correctly suggested to her great-aunt that he would dedicate his new found personal freedom and financial independence to the pursuit of private digital excess, and it was this that great-aunt Edith was thinking about as she lay in bed after a very pleasant Saturday in the company of her poor, disappointed relative.
Over coffee the next morning great-aunt Edith inspected first the ring and then the Chinese style pot. She consulted an antiques guide book and after much humming and page thumbing, she turned to Annie and said, “Your father never was very bright, my dear. I don’t think he meant to leave you in the shit, you know, I really don’t. Unfortunately he believed what he saw on television and I’m rather afraid that he watched a little too much of the Antiques Roadshow. The vase is quite nice, and certainly Victorian, but not worth more than a couple of hundred. It looks like Ming but it doesn’t taste like it, if you know what I mean. It’s a reproduction. As for the ring, well, I remember the thing being passed down through various members of the family. It’s even been pawned on occasion, our diamond engagement ring, but its only glass and nine carat gold. Your father thought, no doubt, that a Ming vase and a vintage diamond ring would be worth quite a lot and that you would appreciate them better than your soulless brother. As it stands, however, they’re baubles and in no way do they compensate you for your father’s sad loss”.
Great-aunt Edith paused for a moment to let Annie take in what she was saying, pouring herself another cup of thick black coffee from the cafetiere. Annie simply stared into the steam that spiralled up from her own cup into the lazy Sunday morning air.
“The baubles may not have much monetary worth, my dear, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Let me tell you a story”.
Annie looked into her great-aunt’s eyes and saw there a sparkle and an edge that quite disturbed her. She had always thought of centenarians as being small and spindly creatures with bent backs and osteoporosis, as dull animals with rheumy eyes and limited vocabulary, but her aunt’s eyes shone with a strange mixture of passion, venom and audacity.
“I remember”, began great-aunt Edith quietly, “when I first saw those baubles. Once upon a time I too had maiden aunts and one Sunday, just around the time of the first Great War when I was seven or eight years old, my mother took me to visit her sisters in a house they shared near Macclesfield.”
“I don’t remember much about the rest of the day, but I do remember high tea. The four of us were sitting in the front parlour and I was especially looking forward to a slice of Aunt Cecilia’s fruit cake. After tea was served my aunts opened a cupboard in their welsh dresser and fetched out a little green box and a blue and white vase, which they put on the table. My aunts and my mother seemed to drift off into a little world all of their own before, with a huge sigh, they put the items back into the dresser. Nothing more was said.”
“On the way home I asked my mother about the vase and the ring, but she refused to say anything to me about them then or at any other time. It was only after the war, when I was about thirteen and my mother was sickening, that she told me about the precious things I had seen that afternoon.”
Annie sensed that she was about to be initiated into a new world of family revelations and scandals. She sat up in her chair and gave her great-aunt the full weight of her attention.
“They were gifts, you see. Gifts from older, single gentlemen given to my aunts when they were teenage girls themselves. In those days, when the world was very different to this one, bachelor gentlemen of a certain class and attitude were often to be found in the company of young girls and boys. The camera was still a relatively new thing and artistic shots of fairies and such like were not uncommon. Of course, the constraints of time, place and social custom precluded, for the most part, any of the more common occurrences, and indeed very many great men undertook such friendships. I mean, where would Alice be without the Reverend Dodgson or Peter Pan without dear old Mister Barrie?”
“Unfortunately for my aunts, the gentlemen photographers in question were not of a literary bent, far from it, in fact, and paid the girls in cash or in kind for making artistic photographic plates in a room above a fishmonger’s shop in Salford. Not one of the Craig family’s better known secrets. Your great, great aunts Cecilia and Florence were Boer War glamour models...”
Annie let out a small shriek made up in equal parts of horror and delight. In her mind’s eye she could see gas lights flickering, shadows on red brocade curtains, and two nubile young ladies posing in shocking stocking tops for a row of whiskered bank managers and the outwardly respectable middle aged scions of ancient clerical families.
“Oh, yes”, continued great-aunt Edith, “yes, indeed! And if you think that’s shocking ask yourself how another maiden aunt of this benighted family came to own and run a house like this and to have filled it over the years with antiques and curios from around the world. You see, my mother died soon after she told me about my aunts, and left to fend for myself and my brother, that’s your grandfather, I took it into my head to enter into what, at thirteen years of age, I deemed to be the family profession...”
“My God”, squeaked Annie, “You mean...”
“Mmmm” whispered great-aunt Edith, with a smile on her lips and a gleefully naughty sparkle in her eyes. “I did a few artistic poses for a local photographer, you know, under the counter shots, and then managed to hook up with a rather forward thinking Archdeacon with a penchant for silk camiknickers and snakes.”
“I remember thinking at the time how deliciously appropriate that was. Anyway, I kept mum about the whole thing for years, and as my darling cleric rose through the ranks of the established church, so my letters asking for financial assistance and moral guidance became ever more pressing, and that, my dear, was the pattern for my many years of success in trade.”
Annie laughed out loud and long and then got up, plonked herself down on the arm of her great-aunt’s chair and gave the old woman a huge, enveloping hug.
“You dear old rascal”, she whispered as they rocked gently back and forth with the giggles and with the wide eyed sharing of new best friends. After a few minutes great-aunt Edith looked up, brushing Annie’s fringe away from her eyes, and said, “Of course, its all different now. The world has got a lot darker since we gave up the Empire”.
Annie stayed with the old woman for the rest of the day, sharing with her a light lunch and a couple of large cognacs. As the two of them sat and chattered away about the old days, great-aunt Edith outlined her plan for getting even with brother Danny. Annie was impressed by her aunt’s knowledge of things electronic, especially when shown the old girl’s study, which was full of the latest techno-wizardry and broadband connectivity. She was even more impressed when she realised that her centenarian relative, having dispensed with a life of genteel blackmail in her early eighties, had subsequently taught herself not only the arts of silver surfing, but had also majored as a writer of hacking and viral software on a par with any young eastern European hotshot. Indeed, with the decline in rental income caused by the ever increasing costs of insurance, red tape and health and safety initiatives, great-aunt Edith had financed some of the finer pieces in the apartment, including a real Ming chrysanthemum pot and a small Lowry, through her prowess at conducting phishing expeditions across the global email network in search of the details of other people’s bank accounts. Digitally armed and dangerous, savvy and angry, the two women put their simple plan into effect; namely, he who lives by the Interweb shall die by the Interweb.
Great-aunt Edith showed Annie how to scan photographs and store them as images on the computer, using a collection of her very own black and white artistic poses from her early days in the glamour business, images which would now be considered at best cute but in most cases just as period pieces. Once the images were scanned the older woman copied down the details of Danny’s email and web addresses from Annie’s diary and set about the task of adapting one of her more subtle Trojan Horse viruses so that it would work specifically with Danny in mind.
Using Danny’s known liking for foreign brides, the two women concocted an email purporting to describe a particularly ravishing resident of Gorky, embedded the virus in a picture of the girl and sent the email to Danny Craig. Sure enough, within an hour a message popped into great-aunt Edith’s inbox telling her that Danny had opened the email, spent some minutes scrutinising the picture and that the virus was now safely and surreptitiously installed on his hard drive. All that remained for them to do was wait for a week while the nasty little bug trawled the Interweb in the low, dark hours of the night collecting images of the most bizarre, disturbing and perverted kind.
After a week of clandestine activity the Trojan Horse virus despatched a summary of all the dreadful links, stories and pictures that it had found on its trawling expeditions in the howling hours and subsequently installed in a hidden area on Danny’s hard drive. It then invoked a deletion routine, removed all trace of itself from the machine and let its digital DNA drift away on the ether that connects electronic super highways to Acacia Avenues the world over.
That same Sunday morning, following an anonymous tip off, various large and burly members of the Manchester police force’s vice squad battered down Danny’s front door, dragged him out of bed and bruisingly bundled him into the back of a white van. The house was stripped of the appropriate electronic devices and following a brief forensic examination of hard drives, flash disks and sundry other items of magnetic storage, the Detective Superintendent in command of the vice squad charged the young man with a number of crimes related to the storage and distribution of banned materials. The haul was sufficient, he said with a satisfied grin, to ensure that Danny would be spending the better part of the next fifteen years on the “Nonce” wing at Strangeways.
Danny protested his innocence throughout questioning, throughout his trial and well into his first few days on G wing, but he soon found that it was best to keep a low profile. Given the nature of the evidence against him, no one believed his claims that he had been fitted up, and in the far from private world of lock-downs and slopping out, any mention of his sort of crime meant a bloody good beating.
Safe and sound on the outside and aided by the proceeds from Danny’s own bank account, together with funds received from an unwitting, Canadian ice hockey player, Annie and her great-aunt employed the services of a very expensive legal practice in the heart of Manchester’s business district. With the excellent advice of their own legal eagles easily overcoming the meagre resistance offered by the partners Dawson, they successfully overturned the terms of the will and shared the proceeds from the sale of the house, its chattels and the remaining technical gizmos that had not been confiscated by the Old Bill.
Annie settled into a life of sublime but quietly productive luxury with her great aunt, who, for her part had found an excellent reason to keep the home fires of her life burning brightly. She admitted to her great-niece that having crossed the Rubicon of a century of life she had started to get a little tired of things. Now, however, she couldn’t possibly lay down the torch, not when she had so much to teach her rather naive young relative about living life to the full, the first lesson being how to behave and pose for glamour shots when in the company of rich, amateur photographers.