And meanwhile, on the floor below, River Cartwright is on the phone—unaccountably, uncharacteristically, he wants to hear his mother’s voice; wants to hear her talk about his grandfather, whom he is missing. But whatever he wants her to say, he wants her to say it unprompted, and this does not happen. Instead, he suffers the usual flow of self-involved detail—of lunches enjoyed and conversations won—and all the while his gaze remains on the empty desk by the window, where J.K. Coe once sat. The window has been newly bespattered by birdshit, and he wonders briefly whether Coe would have done anything about this—opened the window and cleaned it off with a rag—before realising how obvious the answer is. Later, River will drop into Louisa’s Guy’s office on some pretext or other, and will ask “You okay?” to which Louisa will reply “Yeah, sure,” not without meaning it exactly; more without addressing the question’s undertones. She too has been working the phone; has spoken to Lucas Harper, to Lucas’s mother, to Devon Welles, who worked closely with Emma. All these conversations were numb, it seems to her now; an odd adjective for a spoken exchange, but one that fits. And she feels a blank space in her life, where a friendship might have been. She and River will chat a little longer, and they will either agree to have a drink after work or not, depending. If they do, it will not go well. But for the moment, River listens to his mother on the phone, his gaze on the empty desk by the window, where J.K. Coe once sat.
Directly underneath which, on the floor below, sits Shirley Dander, who is currently waiting for her screen to unfreeze, an outcome she knows will remain deferred until she unplugs her computer altogether, then replugs it, and boots up. But for the time being she can sit doing nothing with an alibi for inactivity in front of her, and will continue to do this for as long as humanly possible: through the rest of the morning, for sure; the afternoon too, if possible; the rest of the week, the whole grey year, forever. Something Lamb once said keeps coming to mind—
Which would invoke in Roderick Ho amused contempt: frozen screen, shit. Freeze a screen in front of the HotRod, you’d see serious melt going on. But then, Roderick Ho is a professional surrounded by amateurs, whose inability to perform the most mundane of tasks—cruise the web, drop hot beats, remain alive—would be a constant downer, were he the type to nurse disappointments. As it is, he has even risen above the callous disregard with which the others treated his car, though this, it’s true, is largely because he might as easily have sunk beneath it for all the notice anyone would take. But while they sit in their various bruised moods, reflecting on their latest failures, Roddy is delving once more into Service records. His researches into Lech Wicinski have yet to be completed: the mysterious wiping of his Service history remains unexplained. Wicinski himself, it has to be said, has also been heavily redacted. This morning he arrived unbandaged, and for the first time Roddy saw that his cheeks are now a furious cross-hatching of fresh cuts, new razorings, that have served to obliterate the word carved underneath them. How this happened, and who might be responsible, is a profound mystery to Roddy, but not one he plans to lose sleep over. Instead, he continues quarrying for evidence of Wicinski’s past sins, and while he’s about it, takes another peek at the dismal records of some of his colleagues. And this is what he’s doing when he makes his discovery.
