Alex chapter one

Carlo
I suddenly realised I have someone who may be of help getting inside the Barrage project. There is a distant relative of mine at the University – a final year student in the Engineering department – who I’ve discovered is working on it. He is utterly naive politically and quite the narrow technician, so any information you get from him will have to be by subterfuge. But I’m sure you and the lovely Ingrid will find a way. I will try and arrange a meeting between him and yourselves. I know you two usually have dinner at the Phoenix Friday evening. I’ll try to get him there this Friday. It’s important that you and I are not seen to be associated publicly, as I don’t want my cover blown should things go wrong. We’ll need to manufacture some excuse for you to meet him. I suggest we play it by ear on the night. A little bit of improvised theatre.
Your Comrade
Joe


Alex scowled as he walked up beside the college oval in the evening dusk. A small shabby figure in an old blue coat carrying a canvas pack, he moved unnoticed among the chattering groups of students, some drifting towards their rooms, some in the other direction, toward the Union building for the free evening concert. On the oval, brightly clad athletes stood hands on hips, ringed around a coach, who’s words were whipped away by the warm gusty northerly wind which stirred the great elms lining the walk, whirling up fallen leaves and plastering them against Alex’s legs as he walked, head down, back to his room.

Alex had been called at three to the Dean’s office. He’d paced up and down in the corridor, avoiding a stack of cardboard boxes piled along the wall. Every now and then he’d stop and absentmindedly try and straighten up the loose brass capital ‘E’ in the ‘Faculty Of Engineering’ sign. After a tedious wait he’d been called into the Dean’s office, to find the Dean with his physics tutor Hess. Alex disliked Hess, and in the past he’d made no effort to conceal his distaste for someone whom he considered a pompous incompetent – in fact, he had taken several opportunities to expose Hess’s ignorance to the rest of the tutorial – so he was well aware of Hess’s reciprocal hostility.

“Mr Chandra,” said the Dean, tugging nervously at a loose thread hanging from the sleeve of his grey cardigan, “We need an explanation for some odd similarities between your essay and this one by Ms. Benkermann.” The Dean was a thin, elderly man with untidy tufts of white hair and thick lensed glasses. He regarded Alex with an air of worried perplexity, while Hess’s pudgy face was wreathed in a triumphant smirk. Alex clenched his fists, suppressing with effort a strong desire to punch Hess in the face.

It had been an unpleasant and humiliating quarter of an hour. What made it worse was Alex’s awareness that he’d been made a fool of in such a commonplace and adolescent way. He’d been flattered by Viola Benkermann’s attention during the physics prac. She was more than pretty: tall, slim and black haired, she’d have stood out in any crowd, and among the oddly assorted physical types populating third year engineering she moved like a queen. Her intellectual abilities unfortunately did not come up to the same standard, but in matters of relationships and men she knew her business and Alex had been easy prey.

Now in the Dean’s office he saw in a flash how cleverly he’d been used. Viola was not some obscure scholarship beneficiary from nowhere like himself: she was the daughter of the current State Attorney General and a person to who could hardly be allowed to become embroiled in some scandal involving plagiarising another student’s work. Whereas Alex was a nobody, without friends in high places, a member of a faculty which in the great world was declining into dusty obscurity.

Hess left, and the Dean looked at Alex in silence for a moment. “Mr Chandra, technical competence, even genius, is of no use if not accompanied by at least some degree of wisdom and common sense. An ability to get on with other people, even people of doubtful abilities, is of far more use in the real world than being anxious to demonstrate one's own brilliance, especially at the expense of others.”
“Hess is a fool, sir!”
“And you are not a fool?”
“Well…!” the Dean held up his hand, and Alex stopped.
“You have heard of Machiavelli?”
“Yes.”
“But not read him – no, of course not. ‘The armed prophet conquers, the unarmed prophet is destroyed’.” He looked at Alex for a moment. “Do you understand what that means? As applied to someone like yourself?”
“No, sir! Oh, well, yes, I suppose so.”
“You are an outstanding student. You may, and I emphasise may, become an outstanding engineer, provided you exercise some intelligence in other areas of your life. That is all Mr Chandra. You may leave. Take care.”

Alex walked into the doorway of the college, then hesitated in the corridor, swearing under his breath. There was no way he could hide in his room to lick his wounds. Normally at this time he would go to the library, as he found it easier to study there, but he was in no mood for study. And there was a problem with his current roommate, Archie McIvor, a law student who spent a lot of his time in the bar at Naughtons and who paid other students to do his essays for him. This was the time of day Archie ‘held court’ as he called it, checking on the progress of his ghost writers. Archie and Alex had not been on good terms from the time Alex had caught him stealing Alex’s food from the communal fridge. By third year, one could normally expect a room of one’s own, but there had been a fire at the college a month ago, and until the damage was made good, Alex was stuck with Archie. Alex opened the door of his room and sure enough, there he was, lounging in the antique swivel chair he had brought with him, speaking to a pale, spindly youth with lank hair and shabby clothes who stood in the middle of the room with a folder clutched tightly under his arm.

“Your payment is conditional ,” Archie was saying, “On the essay coming back with a satisfactory score”.
The youth left while Alex was unpacking his bag. Archie continued to sit back with his feet on his desk, idly tapping his teeth with a pen. Alex knew he should keep his mouth shut , but couldn’t contain himself.
“What are you going to do when you get out in the real world Archie, when you actually have to produce something yourself?”
Archie leaned back and swivelled a bloodshot eye towards him. “There’s no shortage of hungry workers, either here or out there,” he said, languidly.
“ What gives you the right to exploit people!” Alex knew as he said it that this was going to get nowhere, and wasn’t even the sort of snappy or wounding remark he wished he could make.
Archie leaned back further, the chair creaking, putting his hands behind his head, eyes closed. “Because it is my duty — the duty of my class, to rule these drab hoi polloi.” He opened his eyes suddenly and taking his feet off the desk, leaned forward in his seat and struck the man-with-a-heavy-responsibility pose, hands steepled under his chin. “People are sheep; they need to be led. It gives their life a purpose: a direction. Just imagine if they were in charge! It’d be bloody anarchy in a month."
“But this country is a democracy!”
“Oh yes, they get to vote for their leaders, but we select them. By the way, some fellow was here earlier looking for you. He left a note on your desk.”
Alex ripped open the envelope. “Join me at Naughtons if you get this before 6:30” it said. It was signed “Joe Goodman”. He grunted, avoiding Archie’s gaze, and let himself back out of the room. He unlocked his bike and wheeled it out into the deepening warm dusk. The trees rustled above his head and the air was full of the sweet scent of jasmine. The strong wind of several hours ago had now moderated to a gentle zephyr. He wondered idly why cousin Joe wanted to meet him, although tonight of all nights he was glad of a distraction.

Across Royal Parade, light streamed out from the open doorways of Naughton’s, where the most recent of many generations of undergraduates relaxed at the end of an intense days study, or just relaxed instead of studying. Alex slipped into the hot, noisy, crowded bar and bought a beer. He never came here normally, but it had been the sort of day at the end of which he needed a drink. He looked around for Joe. He took a gulp of his beer and pushed his way through the crowd, then froze. In the corner of the bar was the slim pony tailed figure of Viola Benkermann, talking to a tall, powerfully built fellow in sporting attire. She caught sight of Alex at the same moment, and without acknowledging him, turned her back and continued her conversation. Alex set his glass on the bar and pushed his way through to the couple. He tapped her on the shoulder. She turned her head towards him and said in an irritated tone,“Yes, what is it?”
“Looking for another victim, bitch?” Alex was gratified to see she seemed a bit rattled by his presence, but she was not the sort to suffer disadvantage for long.
“I don’t know what this little creep wants, but will you be a gentleman and get rid of him, Lenny?” Lenny smiled crookedly, and made a clumsy grab past Viola for Alex’s shoulder with his left hand. Alex was not suffering from Lenny’s three beer handicap, and deflected the arm to strike Viola on the ear.
“Hey, gentlemen don’t hit ladies!” The infuriated Lenny clumsily set his drink on the edge of the bar, where it toppled over onto a another drinker. He lunged at Alex, swinging powerfully with his right arm. Alex leaped nimbly backwards, and Lenny’s fist struck the bar with a sound like an axe on wood. There was a roar of pain, and a shriek as his momentum carried him into a girl sitting on a nearby barstool. In seconds the whole bar was in uproar. For a moment, Alex stood transfixed, stunned by the commotion he had begun. Then he felt himself grasped on the arm from behind, a voice said in his ear,“Time to take your leave, lover boy”, and in a few moments he found himself outside on the footpath.

“Joe!” It was Joe Goodman. The Goodmans were distant relatives of Alex’s, although he was vague about the exact connection. They were intellectual, sophisticated, and from the couple of occasions when Alex had visited their house as a child, he had a memory of voices in constant conversation, banter and argument, so different from the inarticulate silences of his own home; a big swimming pool in the back yard of an architecturally designed house and Joe’s huge wardrobe of dress-ups. He had a nodding acquaintance with Joe at Uni, being the only relative he was aware of having in the place and he was vaguely aware that Joe, a couple of years older than himself, was connected with a certain intellectual and theatrical coterie.

In the midst of the crowd of drinkers milling round on the footpath, they retrieved their bikes. “ All this passion, young Alex! I thought you were a bloodless engineer!” Joe was saying to him, with a grin. Alex, the adrenaline still racing, looked at him. Joe was handsome, pale and dissipated, with carefully braided hair. He was heavily built, and seemed already half way to middle age.
“ I haven't seen you around much!” Joe said. He looked at Alex as if he were measuring him for something.
“I’ve been working on the Port Phillip Barrage – work experience.”
“Really? You must tell me about it. Let’s go; I know a place that’s more fun than this. Better for you to be away from here in any case, before they recover their senses.” Alex hesitated momentarily, thinking that Joe’s idea of fun might not chime with his own, and wondering why Joe was looking for him in the first place. As he opened his mouth to ask, two heavily built men in suits and sunglasses appeared in the doorway of the pub, their eyes searching the crowd. “All right”, he said with a gulp, and they pedalled off into the night over Royal Parade and into the University grounds.

Soon they were through the University and into the streets of Carlton. Jugglers and acrobats, street vendors, musicians and thieves mingled with the well-dressed crowd in the slow moving continuous theatre that was Carlton on a warm Friday night. Near Lygon Street the mob thickened and congealed, and their progress slowed to a crawl. Soon the density of the crowd forced them to dismount. Joe was using this opportunity to make a call on his mobile. Alex watched the crowd. A skinny, intense man in a green tasselled jacket was declaiming from the steps of a building.

Alex moved closer, to hear the man replying to a question from the crowd. “....we become what we believe in the end, sister, which can be a prison, but can also lead to liberation. See this hand,” He was holding his arm aloft.“ This hand is part of me, but what about my clothes, my opinions?” He paused, surveyed the crowd. “They are part of myself too, my constructed self, which is still just as truly me.” His voice rose. “We all construct ourselves knowingly and unknowingly, and that self can be as poor, sad, narrow and mean as we can make it, or it can be as vast, rich and generous as the mind of God, full of the earth, the stars, and the love for and of all creation under Heaven!”
“Bloody pantheist!” shouted a pockmarked youth at the back of the crowd. He was looking from left to right, a boozy grin on his face. There was an angry swirl of figures and in seconds a fight had broken out between the shouter and his gang and a group of the tasselled man’s acolytes. Joe pulled Alex away: he’d been gaping, half stupefied at the melee.

“Are you religious, Joe?”
“We’re all secular radical Kikes in my family. But I’m all in favour of religion for the masses. Hinduism is the way to go, though. Something to reconcile them with their lot in life. D’you know there’s a plan to make it the State religion? It’ll fit the public service mentality perfectly.” It was difficult, Alex decided, to know when Joe was being serious.

There was a distant muffled rumble and Alex glanced up at the sky, now filled with moonlit towers of cumulonimbus. The streets through which they now whirred were quiet. Soon they came to the open high wire gates of a check point where guards dozed in front of a screen in a brightly lit plywood hut, and then they crossed over to into a darker, shabbier part of town. They rode down narrow side streets, avoiding broken sections of the pavement. At one point there was a small lake across the road, covered in floating rubbish and scum, the result of some pipe or drain bursting, which they skirted by following a well-worn track up onto the footpath.

Eventually they came to a small tavern, an old, grimy mock-medieval fantasy sandwiched between featureless factory walls in a street just off a busier road. As they locked their bicycles up with a score of others the sound of thunder came again, a little louder. Inside in the bar it was all din and smoke. Perhaps twenty tattooed and ringleted men and women in blue work singlets shouted, drank, gambled or watched a big overhead screen, where the first match of the season between the Blues and Greens was in progress. Above the bar Alex read ‘I believe in God the Father, Jesus his only begotten son and the Holy Ghost’. He was aware that this was more than simple piety: it was a remainder that this was Holy Trinity territory and Monophysite heretics should keep out.

They made their way through a doorway into dimly lit lounge containing a few couples at different tables. As they passed the bar, Joe banged down a handful of notes and and hit the bell on the counter top. “My blonde darlings!” he called to two women who sat at a table, empty glasses in front of them. They looked up, smiling. He introduced them. “My sweet young cousin, Alex. Alex, Eudoxia and Theodora”. The waiter, a skinny, prematurely aged boy, appeared silently with drinks.
Alex gulped his beer nervously. The older woman turned to him. “You a student are ya dear?”
Alex nodded.
“I’ve got somefin’ might interest ya.”
“Oh, give it a rest Mum!” said the other woman. “Let him alone!”
“Mind your own bloody business! He’s big enough to look after himself.” She reached into her bag, which was surprisingly large, more like a briefcase, and pulled out a gold edged plastic folder. With a careful flourish she spread some expensively printed brochures in front of him. Total Recall, Universal Vital Facts, 3000 Exam Questions Done For You, Clue-O-Meter.... “I’m an agent for ‘Universe of Knowledge’. We got a really great deal for under twenty-fives, no deposit and only five dollars a month and ya get a free shoulder case wiv all these special pockets in it. Ya sign for the first three months of the course for fifteen bucks, and ya can resign any time in that time and get ya money back.” She looked doubtfully at Alex’s battered bag beside the chair. “Come on darlin’,” she said huskily, and then gave a rasping cough, “Free case! I mean…an for two dollars more a month ya get dental insurance an ya go in a draw for a holiday in Tibet. Give it a go!” Alex’s tongue explored a developing cavity in a molar.
There was a form that needed to be filled in. The woman wrote his answers to her questions in a neat rounded hand. “Name, deary?” “Alex Chandra.” “Date of birth?… Ooh, an Aries!”
The woman slipped the completed and signed forms into her bag and gave Alex a big gap-toothed smile. “Good on ya luv, ya should get the case delivered next week.”

The room seemed to have filled up in the last few minutes, and now boomed with conversation and the clink of glasses. The women left them alone for a few moments. Alex looked around at the seedy lounge. He suddenly wished he hadn’t come, wished he hadn’t been rushed into signing up for the woman’s ridiculous scam. The shabby room, the memory of the decayed suburb they had ridden through, the dubious smell wafting from the kitchen brought a sudden rush of irritation and disgust, cutting through the fog of alcohol. He moved abruptly in his chair, bringing Joe out of a momentary abstraction.
“What ails thee, sweet coz?”
Alex gestured at the room, struggling to express himself.
“All this mess!”
“Mess?”
“The broken roads, the stink, the poverty! Christ, isn’t there any intelligent organisation in this city? What are all these people doing? How can they put up with all this crap?”
He spluttered, lost for words. Joe reached across and grabbed his arm, looking around quickly at the nearby tables, before leaning close to Alex’s face.
“Hey sonny, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain around here! Not if you want to walk out of here tonight with all your teeth! Plus these folks mightn’t appreciate your judgement of their circumstances. ” He let go of Alex’s arm and sat back, smiling suddenly, with a look of sly amusement . “You don’t believe in progress do you, dear Alex? Improvement ‘an all that? Civilisation’s steady climb to the sunlit uplands?”
“Well, of course…”
Joe roared with laughter, rocking back in his chair. “Oh you dear little fossil. Haha! You Don Quixote!” He laughed again, while Alex looked at him in confusion. “You must be as rare in this city as a fifteen year old virgin! You should be sprayed all over with plastic preservative and hung in the Museum of Anthropology! The last apostle of Progress!”
“But, don’t you believe in improving things?”
“Improvements? Oh dear Lord save us.” He covered his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking with laughter. Taking them away again, he looked at Alex in a considering way. “Look,” he said in his rich busy man’s tone. “Take my advice, the advice of the sensible, modern individual, in touch with the realities of our time. Don’t try to improve things Alex, and you’ll get into no scrapes. The business of the administration is to keep the peace and preserve contracts. That’s all, and sufficient. You can’t make people better. And if you think happiness depends on external circumstances...”
“But the drains…”
“Oh, bugger the drains!”
“But this is a rational scientific culture! We’ve always taken ideas seriously… ”
“Taken ideas seriously?” Joe spluttered. “You’ve got to be joking! Most people play along and say the words, but it’s all just a game. This is a tribal country. The tribe comes first, when the chips are down. Sure there are fanatics like your good self who take everything at face value, but most of the population over the age of three knows it’s all a wank. What matters is your mates, your family, your church and the footy.” He took a swig from his glass, draining it. He slammed it onto the table, waving his arm for the waiter, and leaned forward again towards Alex.
“Alex, be realistic. Compared to what has happened in the god awful cavalcade of human history, we live in the best of times, in the best of all possible worlds, and, like this girl, ” – Eudoxia, the younger one, was pushing by him to get back to her chair, and she yelped as he gave her a resounding whack on the backside – “It’s no better than it has to be, and that’s good enough for me!”
“Oh, fuck off Joe!” she snarled as she sat down.
Joe raised his glass to her, “And good health to you m’dear.” Alex slumped back in his chair. He’d subconsciously registered Eudoxia’s approach, and was digesting the revelation that she had a magnificent body, tall and athletic. A moment of silence followed in which he groped around for a conversational opener with her. While he hesitated, a pale, freckled young man with a mop of frizzy brown hair, square rimless glasses and a long blue coat came up behind Joe and slapped him on the back.
“Shylock, you old bastard,” the newcomer cried as Joe spluttered and coughed.
“Varley, you shit!”
“That’s no way to talk in front of a lady” said Varley. He looked at the girl. “How are ya Doxy?”
“I’m all right mate. Aren’t you workin’?”
He flung himself down in a vacant chair.
“Yeah, but we’ve got a short break while the string section sorts out some stuff, so us horn players” – he gestured towards several others pushing their way through the crowd towards them – ”thought we’d nick off for a pot or two. Hey, garçon!” he shouted to the waiter. “Drinks over here quick smart!”
“Working?” said Joe.
“Yeah, over at CDC studios. The Philharmonic. Some rich bastard’s written a symphony and hired us for a couple of days to record it”.
“Any good?”
“Awful crap. The first movement sounds like he was inspired after going to sleep on a machine at the laundromat. The second’s better but it’s just a pastiche. Charles Ives, Toru Takamitsu, Samuel Barber – he’s pillaged the lot.”
“The third?”
“No third: he’d run out of steam. Now he’s going off his nut ‘cause the strings are too slack to play vibrato in the boring bits. Who’s your friend?” He gestured towards Alex. Joe introduced them, explaining. “Varley and I did ‘Merchant of Venice’ last year. He wrote the incidental music”.
“An engineer eh?”
“Well, still a student. Doing work experience on the Barrage.”
“The fuckin’ Barrage. There’s my folks out in Broady with raw sewage flowing in the street and the ruling class build a fuckin’ Barrage to protect their Bayside investments!”
“Well, that’s a political decision...”
“And not your responsibility, Mr Engineer?” Varley leaned across to him “To quote the great Tom Lehrer, “Don't say he's hypocritical, say rather he's apolitical. "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun!" Fuckin’ engineers!” He flung himself back with a gesture of contempt.

Alex’s attempt at a reply was interrupted from his left — the waiter bringing the drinks was tapping him on the shoulder in order to squeeze between him and an occupant at the adjoining table, a dark haired blue jowled man who nodded to Alex apologetically. Alex turned back to find another beer in front of him and Varley and Eudoxia deep in conversation on the other side of the table. He took a drink and looked around. On his right, a thin, red faced older man, one of Varley’s party, gave him a nod. “Did I hear you say you’re a recording engineer, mate?”
Alex explained he was a mechanical engineer, and the other nodded again.
“I hope it’s a better caper than the music business. You never know from one day to the next whether you’re gonna put food on the table for the family. No good for us married blokes, unless your missus has a decent job. So you’re into music?”
“Just a bit of Roughneck and Thug.”
“Hey, he’s an engineer!” cried Varley. “Mention the word culture and he’ll reach for his grease gun!”

Alex suddenly realised he was drunk, a state which he disliked. The room was swaying, it was hard keep Varley and Eudoxia in focus, and he was uncomfortably aware of his bladder. He carefully pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. At once Varley’s voice cut bitterly through the din; “Hey, that’d be right, the engineer’s rackin’ off when it’s his shout!” Alex pulled his wallet out and tossed it on the table, then wound his way through the crowd to the Gents.
He stood at the basin and looked at himself in the mirror. He wished he hadn’t come. And that he could have Eudoxia’s strong young body, and punch Varley in the mouth. He wasn’t the sort of person who usually found himself at a loss, but today had been a day of exceptional disaster and his confidence was shaken. Despite the cushion of the beer, he felt vulnerable. He swore feebly at his reflection, then splashed cold water in his face. Varley’s little ditty about Wernher von Braun seemed almost sacrilegiously offensive. On of Alex’s most precious treasures was an ancient Colliers Magazine he had found at his grandparents, containing the famous article by von Braun, illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, of ideas for rockets and space stations, published in the early nineteen-fifties. It had been one of the inspirations of Alex’s career.

When he came back into the lounge, it was not nearly as crowded as when he had left only a few minutes before. The curfew! He swore to himself. What was the time? People were crowding out the door, but lots of them must be locals who would be home in a few minutes. Where was Joe and his party? The table was empty – in fact it was being wiped over by a young waitress. The wallet! Shit! He made has way over to the girl.
“Was there a wallet here?”
“No.”
“Did you see the people who were sitting here?”
“No, sorry!” He looked at her narrowly, wondering if she could have pocketed it, but she seemed guileless enough. “Ask the barman – maybe someone handed it in.”
He went over to the bar. The barman had his back turned and was putting glasses in a rack.
“Did anyone hand in a wallet?”
“No mate“
“I left it with those people at the table over there...”
“So you left ya wallet for a couple of tarts ta mind for ya didya matey?” he said, turning to look at Alex disdainfully. He was an emaciated, yellow skinned young man, with deep creases in the skin around his mouth.
“Can I call the police?” said Alex.
“Sure, they’ll give ya a nice warm cell for the night.”
Alex looked at him open mouthed. The barman leaned forward and said quietly “Now piss off, will ya?” and turned back to his task.

Alex turned and went out through the bar, now nearly empty. Outside, rain was coming down with tropical intensity. His bike was still in the rack. The lights of the shops and passing traffic in the road at the far end of the street splashed the shiny black of the pavement with yellow and red. It was ten forty-five, curfew in the welfare areas in fifteen minutes. There wasn't enough time to ride back to the college, and he had no money to call a taxi.

He stood staring into the street, trying to clear his head and think. He felt suddenly vulnerable, and thought at the same moment that this was the sort of incident which the college drinkers were always boasting about. He wondered if they would be frightened to be stranded, drunk, in a poor district at night. Someone was standing at his elbow and he turned to let them pass. It was a couple he’d noticed in the lounge; the man had been the one who’d made space for the waiter. They were hesitating in the doorway, umbrellas in hand, and he was conscious of their scrutiny.
“Are you stuck?” asked the woman.
“Yes. I've had my wallet stolen, I think”.
“What’s your name?” asked the man.
“Alex Chandra.”
“Then this is yours”.
“Oh! How?…”
“It was left on the table, and if the bar staff had found it, I’m afraid you’d never have seen it again. I was going to hand it in at the police station, but you’ve saved me the trouble." He gave Alex an odd, secretive, tight little smile.
The woman said “I think you’ve left it a bit late to get out of the area before the curfew.”
“Well, yes.” They stood and looked at the rain.
After a moments silence and man said, "I think maybe you’d better come back to our place for the night. The patrols will be out in twenty minutes and you don’t want them to pick you up". Alex didn’t want to be picked up by a patrol. He had a sudden vision of hard faced young men tapping night sticks in their hands.

He looked at the couple more closely. They were well dressed in a modest way, perhaps in their early thirties, young professionals he thought; the man dark haired, with a blueish shaved jaw; the woman blonde, clear and calm as a lake at sunset.
“Thanks very much…by the way, I’m Alex…” he offered his hand.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Carlo, and this is Ingrid.” They shook hands.
“Carlo, we’ll need another umbrella”.
“Of course!”
Carlo disappeared back into the bar, and emerged in few moments with an umbrella in his hand. “Let’s go!” he said.

A few minutes later they were climbing a narrow stair, Alex with his bike on his shoulder. They had entered from a door set in the middle of a row of dingy Victorian terraced shops in a dark, quiet street. Alex, still a little drunk, tried with exaggerated care not to bang his bike against the wall. At the top, another door opened into the kitchen of a bright little flat, built into the steep pitched roof space above one of the shops. The rain was beating on a sloping skylight above the sink, through which a small aerial could be seen perched on the brick parapet outside, swaying a little against the pink of the rain filled night sky. Carlo led Alex into a short passage past a tiny, crowded office and into the living room, which was furnished with a bright scatter of cushions and rugs and some artistic looking woven wall hangings. Ingrid appeared at the door behind them, and said “I’m making some coffee.”
“This is a nice little place,” said Alex.
“Yes, we were lucky to get it. Most places around here are pretty rough. It’s a quiet, and handy to our work as well – we can walk there when we’re not doing field trips.”
“What sort of work do you do?”
“We’re both plant geneticists. We work for GeneAg, a company that has a big hydroponics set-up near here.”
“Oh really? So stuff is grown in the middle of the city?”
“Yes, although a lot is still grown out of town in conventional plots. We generally do one trip a week out to there too.”
Ingrid appeared with the coffee, and taking his mug, Carlo excused himself. “I’ve got a little bit of work to do before bed.”

Alex squatted on a cushion and Ingrid sat near him on a low couch. Now that he was safe, he felt more relaxed, languid almost. Ingrid had removed her jacket and the plunging neckline of her shirt revealed the full curve of her breasts as she leant forward to pour his coffee. In her low soft voice she asked him if he was OK.
“Yes, thanks.” He nursed his drink and tried not to stare too obviously at her cleavage. She soon ascertained he’d had no dinner, and went out to the kitchen, to return shortly with some noodles steaming in a bowl. As he ate, she asked him about his studies, and what he’d been doing lately, and he told her about his work on the Barrage. She seemed very interested this, and from a basic explanation of how the Barrage across the mouth of Port Phillip Bay would both generate electricity and moderate flooding due to especially high tides, he found himself giving a highly technical explanation of the operation of the gates, of the control room buried deep in the wall halfway along its length from which the whole thing was automatically run, of his own (admittedly small) part in programming the control of gates and turbines. In response to a question from Carlo, who had now returned to the room, he explained that it was theoretically possible for the wall to be severely damaged if the gates were to close abruptly, due to the inertia of the column of water travelling through the turbines, or worse still, if the turbine blades were to feather suddenly. But of course the software interlocks he’d been working on were designed precisely to prevent that happening. His hosts showed no sign of tiredness, but he suddenly felt he was guilty of being a bore, and that they just being polite. He excused his garrulity, and his putting them to so much trouble, which they waved away. “Fascinating project! Just so interesting to hear all that stuff!”

Soon, they had made a bed up for him on the floor of the sitting room. As he dropped off to sleep he thought they seemed very intelligent and interesting people, as you do when you are young and lonely and someone takes you seriously.