A Room Full of Elephants: first chapter

Here’s the full, unedited text of the first chapter.

For more, see the book page for A Room Full of Elephants for all the links.

1. An unexpected guest

Ziggy sat on my chest enacting stage two of the meow-bat-claw-bite wake-up procedure, poking at my chin. Attention, two-leg-who-fights-tins. Unwilling to open my eyes I forced a blind hand sideways under the duvet to explore the other half of the bed, feeling the ice-cold gravity wells of mattress dents. The cat prodded my arm, a tunnelling worm like in Tremors when Kevin Bacon was rugged and kind of—

I grunted, and my neck twitched. “Nick?”

“Watched the sun rise,” he said from across the bedroom. “Or Tesco put their big spots on, hard to tell. Sky went from dark grey to light grey. Time to get up, I guess. Dreamed about ’em again.”

I set about lifting an eyelid. “I dreamed… T-Rexes. Fighting… over bins.” Outside, a bin lorry whined and churned on the street. I felt myself spiralling back into sleep, seeing Eastern European velociraptors in hi-vis jackets squabbling over half-chewed nappies marinated in bin juice.

Nick scratched. “They’d struggle getting the lids off.”

I mumbled something that might’ve been life finds a way, minus all vowels.

“Same as usual, the dream. Tusks and trunks. I put the bins out, don’t you worry about it.”

Ziggy stopped batting, which meant he was about to start clawing. Consciousness kicked in. I filled my lungs and stretched: toes first, then my torso, twisting and cracking, Ziggy rolling with the waves, then I contorted my arms and let out a semi-erotic moan spoiled by the squeak of a fart.

“That’ll shift the cat,” Nick said, then wafted the air. “Jesus, Keith, what died up you?”

“T-Rexes, maybe. Or is it Ts-Rex? Doesn’t sound right.” I rotated the pillow ninety degrees and shuffled up to a half-seated position, pulling the duvet with me. Ziggy — a Bombay, a cat-shaped furry portal to two emerald stars in the velvet of interstellar space — retreated to the far corner of the bed from where he could heckle unhindered. “I’ll google it.” I reached for my phone, charging on the bedside table, and tilted it to glare at the ceiling while I wiped the sleep away.

Nick stood guard at the curtains, their brown and yellow barcode stripes open a crack and a half, and peered through a smear in the condensation. The weak mid-November light of early morning caught his stubbly jawline just right — his teeth were clenched — and illuminated the rough steps of vertebrae leading to the swimming pool small of his back, above a defiant arse. Then army thighs, thick hairy muscle giving way to streaking scars, valleys in the forest, battered knee-hills, and the end of the world: twin stumps.

The asymmetry of the amputations irritated me. Nick’s shoulder-shrugging acceptance of it somehow made it worse. His left leg was longer than his right by five and a half centimetres. Neither leg reached far below the knee, stopping at rough hemispheres of skin. His calves, ankles, feet and toes I’d seen only in photos: out-of-focus shots of him grimacing between steps of the triple jump at school, gangly and off-balance. And then older, naked but for helmet, boxers and boots, squinting in the Afghan sunshine, arm in arm with his comrades — similarly undressed, Brits-abroad pink but with rifles for cocktails.

Nick’s artificial lower legs, the finest trans-tibial carbon fibre prosthetics that compensation could buy, sprawled crossed on the floor beside his underpants. He stood at the window on a three-legged wooden stool. His left leg dangled in the air, his weight on his right stump — and no cushion. He insisted it didn’t hurt.

“I hope you didn’t go out like that,” I said, then looked at the phone. “One T-Rex, two T-Rex. As I thought. Sheep, fish, T-Rex.”

“Had my shorts on.”

“Did you put your legs on?”

“No, took your slippers, didn’t I? Right little Yoda, I was.” Nick turned to me and grinned, as he always did when he used that line. Something in the way the grin faded, though — the lips uncurling too fast, or too slow — the eyes? — seemed out of place.

“Maybe your pseudotherapist can suggest someone, about the dreams,” I said. “She might have friends with degrees. It’s probably all the shit on the shelves downstairs.”

“So why don’t you dream about—” He waved. “Wookiees or something.”

“You’re not as hairy as a wookiee.”

He hesitated for a moment, then leapt from the stool onto the bed — sending the cat springing, rawring watch the tail, arsehole, to the bedroom door. Nick clambered over me as I oofed, and dug under the duvet. “I need a warm-up.”

As he shivered and squirmed on the cold sheets, I leaned on an elbow. “If we buy any more Hindu elephant gods the tax man will decide we’re a temple and there are probably rules, and opening hours, and—”

“Shut up and worship me.”

I wasn’t late. I couldn’t have been late: the company had no such thing as office hours. OK, the contract said something about “core” hours, but nobody paid much attention to contracts. After I tickled the reader with my card, the lock unlatched with a snap and I pushed through the office door. The reception desk was piled high with brochures and indifference — we had no receptionist, ours being a thrusting, modern office where the cash saved on frivolities such as administration went on cakes and clickety-clackety table games I refused to play.

I shucked off my jacket and dumped my bag under my desk on the peripheries of engineering, where the airborne continent of Lynx Africa avoided eye contact with, I don’t know, Chanel number n aftershave or something. Sweat from the cycle ride made my T-shirt cling to my back, and in the smokey reflection from my right-hand screen my hair looked like crows fighting in a wicker basket.

In the Make-Make (MAH-kay MAH-kay) meeting room the Wednesday stand-up was already slouching. As I couldn’t plot a route to the coffee that avoided them I had no choice. I poked my head through the door. A dozen eyes turned: the Management of Spectacles.

Malcolm — co-founder, CTO, line manager, rake impersonator, yoga botherer — said, “Ah, Keith, happy you could—”

“Last week, I did everything assigned to me in Upsilon. For the next week I intend to do everything assigned to me in Upsilon. Blockers are the same blockers I say every week which nobody does anything about. New tasks include, but are not limited to, trying to figure out whatever crap the developers add to the code in the bizarre and mistaken belief it does something useful.”

Upsilon was our bug-tracking system, brought in at massive expense by someone who’d never used a bug-tracking system. It was shit. On the Bristol stool scale it registered a type seven, possessing no solid pieces. Its only redeeming feature was a 24×7 priority support contract, which meant I could wake someone up in Oregon and shout at them about precisely how shit it was.

I closed the Make-Make door, then opened it again. “Morning. I just had sex with my husband, and in related news, I need coffee.”

The company was a start-up: thirteen geeks, plus grown-ups in the form of another seven suits and nerd-herders — including Malcolm. Somewhere on the intranet was a list of dreams and Wouldn’t It Be Nice Ifs and Sky Pies and Sky Pigs we laughably called a product roadmap. Next to it, a list of target customers I (true story) nominated for the Nobel prize for literature. In theory we were building a cloud-based, low-latency, all-singing-all-dancing group messaging platform to sell to gullible enterprises who were suckers for logos of cuddly animals and vacuum-filled promises. In practice we thrashed around waiting for Mr Google or Mr Apple or Mr Microsoft to find us interesting enough to gulp down. The CEO, wired directly into the mains, bounced at monthly Q&As (Qs&As?) flashing charts at us and insisting the future was rosy and full of kittens and dollar signs, and, oh, please could you all work a bit harder? And we smiled and nodded, definitely not thinking about whether our share options would ever be worth anything. If the company failed we’d find new gigs easily enough: that’s Cambridge, littered with start-ups worth either zero or a billion dollars, sometimes simultaneously.

My role: software tester. Oh, the glamour. On most org charts I was a box millimetres above the missing receptionist. But if you’re good at the job — I was so fucking good at the job — and if the company has an ounce of sense — this one kind of did, if you squinted — you become the keystone, the sun around which everyone else revolves, tanning beneath your shining arse. Because software that doesn’t do its job isn’t software, it’s just a bunch of bits, in the same way a printer that doesn’t print — which is 99% of all printers — isn’t a printer, it’s a collection of plastic and metal components haphazardly arranged to make you think it’s a printer. It’s a bit like art: it doesn’t do anything, but it shure looks purdy.

My job was to spot when the software wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, and to file bug reports into the howling void of Upsilon containing as much information as possible — what I was doing when I spotted the bug, what I expected to happen, what ridiculous thing the software did instead, and so on. Nothing would ship to a customer unless I was happy, because if they wanted me to have the responsibility of finding all these bugs before the customers did, they’d better fucking listen to me when I tell them all they have is a bunch of bits fit only for Tate Britain.

The great thing is: all software has bugs. In fact, all software claiming to do anything that might conceivably be useful to someone is littered, strewn, drenched in bugs. Guaranteed. Some are trivial bugs, like using the wrong shade of purple. Some are annoying but harmless, like shouting at you for a password if you have the audacity to step away from your keyboard for ten minutes to inhale more coffee. Some are critical, hilariously dumb bugs that delete all your files and all your backups. The developers usually try to fix those.

What people forget is that all software has bugs isn’t qualified. It’s not all software has bugs until we ship it to customers or all software has bugs until version 3.11. Even after I’ve given it the official Keith stamp of approval it still has bugs, because all software has bugs. When you’ve tested and fixed and swept and washed and ironed (I don’t iron) and no more bugs can possibly exist, all software has bugs.

So in a sense software testers still have jobs even after they’ve cocked up. Which is nice.

And developers are, to a first approximation, massively efficient bug factories whose code works only by chance on a wet Thursday under a full moon. As soon as they touch the code to add a new feature or fix something already broken: presto bingo, new bugs.

That any piece of technology ever does what it claims to do is a constant and massive surprise to me.

Related: I avoided flying. I didn’t drive, and was convinced self-driving cars were an April Fool’s joke that had, in surely prescient irony, tumbled helplessly out of control.

After my second coffee and first slice of cake that morning I went to my desk and switched on my three screens: web, code, email. The developers had an hour’s head start on me, more than enough time to break something. I breezed through the code changes made since I’d left the office the previous evening, skimmed the latest test results, and then drew up a shortlist, in priority order, of developers destined for a thorough bollocking.

On a light yomp beside the river, we weren’t arguing. We didn’t argue. We weren’t that married.

“Twice round the green, rock up later. How’s that sound?”

“The ‘therapist’ told you to do that this morning.”

“You tell me to ignore her.”

“When she gets her crystals out.”

“They’re impressive crystals.”

“Some internet woo-merchant probably sold them to her. I bet they’re plastic.”

“Pre-tty sure they’re real. Oh, those crystals.”

“You can’t do your laps now anyway, it’s too dark. And you’ve been drinking.”

“Not enough.”

“We’re going to a wine bar. There’s a substantial probability they’ll have booze.”

“And they’ll have— look, I’ll only sit oiling my joints.”

“Just don’t look miserable. Be nice, and smile occasionally, and I’ll let you have whisky.”

The path along the River Cam beside Jesus Green runs between rows of grumpy trees unwilling to suffer smooth, flat tarmac over their roots. It’s also a racetrack for cyclists convinced their bells emit magical deflecting rays to scatter pedestrians. On a summer’s evening there are drinkers on the green and punters in the drink and many, many tops off to soak up the dying sun. Friends and families gather at the low, council-supplied concrete mushrooms scattered across the parched grass between the flower beds to host barbecues and ignore their children. Ducks and swans menace three-year-olds who toddle and shriek and flap rather than surrender slices of bread. When Wimbledon’s on, Berks In Progress — gleaming kit, new trainers, new racquets, tins of lager in the other hand — flood the tennis courts glistening and wheezing for nine minutes each.

But on a November night with the Cam funnelling a sharpening westerly up your chocolate chinos, it isn’t so pleasant. Considering (because?) he’d already necked two glasses of red before we’d left the house, Nick navigated the lumps and bumps of the path reasonably well.

Our route took us along the boardwalk: a bridge of wooden planks linking Jesus Green and Quayside. They’re both on the southern bank so it’s a bridge along rather than across the water, hugging the side of modern fugly brick apartments. We’d come this way on our second date — my unthinking choice — and Nick had stumbled half-way along, a titanium toe catching the edge of a plank. I flailed, grabbing for him and digging my nails into the back of his hand. The railing kept him from an early bath and as he got to his feet he rubbed the mark I’d made and swore, telling me to remember to trim my claws before the third date. I did.

Home of punt touts and the boundary of the typical tourist trail, Quayside bustled, in so far as anywhere could bustle on a cold Wednesday evening. We passed a short queue outside the Italian restaurant — a nicotine cloud of foreign students wishing they’d ticked the box next to Barcelona — and saw Lucy’s Addams Family Morticia hair, a waterfall of blood slightly congealed, through the plate glass of the wine bar ahead.

“Heads up,” Nick muttered out of the side of his mouth. “Your pet lesbian’s not found someone batty enough to take her on, has she?”

She hadn’t mentioned anyone to me. But there she was, chatting to someone.

Our destination was a shop with extras rather than a traditional bar. On one side, densely packed candlelit tables to attract passers by. On the other, bottles racked floor to ceiling with the expensive stuff at eye-height — along with the vinegar and cough mixture at knock-down prices. One of those bottles stood on Lucy’s table, already half knocked-down.

Lucy, like me, was no stranger to a muffin. We’d known each other since our fat goth days, bonding over the acrylics and giving orc miniatures camp makeovers. After Games Workshop barred us we took our bitching to pubs. It was in one of those, after overhearing a barman refer to us as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, that I resolved to lose weight. Now I was merely cheerfully chubby, and Lucy was still permasingle. At least I’d thought she was.

As I navigated through the tables ahead of Nick, clearing a path of bags and feet, a look passed between Lucy and me. Me: an eyebrow hitched, a head tilted. Her: some eye-widening, a grin, an aliveness I hadn’t seen in her for some time.

“This is Cordelia,” Lucy said, bouncing, and patted her companion on the hand. “Curse — no, scourge of the information desk.”

Nick and I inched ourselves into place around the table, said our hellos, and filled the wine glasses Lucy had waiting for us.

“I’m researching my family history,” Cordelia said, cheeks flushing over a half-smile. She glanced at Lucy. “Spending more time in the library than in my own home.”

A lady of leisure, perhaps — like Nick. She looked a few years older than the three of us — late thirties? — but maybe only because she’d bothered to smarten up, in a stylish dark angular thing, all straight lines like an early Lara Croft but without the megaboobs. She was bang on Lucy’s type: a bleached blonde crop and ruby lips, slim but not stick insect. Annie Lennox photoshopped by someone who doesn’t know the keyboard shortcuts. I was far too much of a gentleman/coward to ask the state of their coupledom but the gleam in her eye gave Lucy’s feelings away. Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly, and let me show you how to use the microfiche. Cordelia wasn’t the first, but she was the first in a while.

We chatted: three of us, anyhow. Nick twirled his glass and gazed out of the window, or blew at the candle in its smokey blood-red tumbler, and occasionally chipped in with a comment as an excuse to reach for the bottle.

Then, breaking a long silence, he said to Cordelia, “Your name Smith?” She looked blank. “Cordelia Smith? Like that old cook on the telly. ‘Cor, Delia Smith’.”

“It isn’t, no.” A binary smile flicked on and off.

“He started early,” I said by way of apology.

Nick patted me on the shoulder. “What he’s saying is, I’m legless. He’d tread on my toes to shut me up, if I had any.”

Cordelia glanced at Nick, then at me. “Lucy did mention…”

“I bet,” Nick said. “Yeah, no, it’s good. I know what you lot feel like now. It’s hello, then eyes down, all the way down. Wouldn’t mind if they’d stop at the crotch. ‘Oi, I have got a cock, mate’.” He laughed.

Cordelia’s mouth curled up like a deaf great-aunt unsure if she’d heard a joke or not.

“Don’t worry. Not your fault, is it. You get used to it.” He laughed again. “Play your cards right, I’ll pop a leg off later. Either one, your pick. Hell of an ice-breaker at parties.”

Cordelia looked at me, eyebrows twitching. I said, “We don’t go to many parties. It’s fine, honestly.”

Nick said, “Like my therapist says, don’t pussyfoot round someone with no pussy and no feet.”

“You should give me her number,” Cordelia said.

Lucy placed her hand over Cordelia’s. “Go on, ask.”

“I don’t want to—”

“It’s— he won’t mind, promise.”

Nick drained his glass. “Time for my whisky yet? Thought you’d have told her already.”

Lucy shook her head.

“If you’re sure. I don’t want to dredge up anything,” Cordelia said.

“It’s the old, old story.” Nick leaned back in the chair. “The big C.”

“Cancer? Both of them?”

“No, the CO. Commanding Officer. On patrol in Helmand. Lost control of his weapon, the pillock.”

“Shit. Sorry. You hear about friendly fire, but—”

“Tell you, he was a lot fucking friendlier to me after.”

Nick glanced at me, and I squeezed past to sort out a whisky. When I returned, he and Cordelia were giggling like schoolgirls and Lucy very much wasn’t. I gave her my full attention to warm her up a few degrees as Nick rattled through a potted autobiography and Cordelia listened, enraptured.

Lucy and I were deep into a discussion on continuous integration strategies — I was a few kilometres deeper than her — when Nick bumped a knuckle against my arm. “Time to go,” he said.

I checked the time on my phone. “It’s still early.”

“Time to go.” It wasn’t a request. I tilted my head and he stood, tapping my shoulder. “On your feet, soldier.”

He waited, mute, a step through the tables in the direction of the exit, while I apologised and said goodbye to the girls. Then he marched out, jumping the two steps to the pavement and swearing when he almost toppled on landing. I turned towards the boardwalk and he dragged me in the opposite direction.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’re going home.” And we were, at a pace — the wrong way.

“Did she say something about your legs?”

“Nope.”

“Then what—?”

He spun, scanning the street behind us then stumbling as he remembered he hadn’t remastered walking backwards. He grabbed my arm to steady himself and turned around. “How’d they meet?”

“You know as much as I do. What did she say?”

He kept moving, past the next logical turn towards home.

“Lucy says they met in the library,” I said. “Cordelia making family trees, Lucy making googly eyes. Lesbian lust over the photocopier, fifty pence a go.”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t have the foggiest. I had no idea she existed until we turned up tonight.”

“Why not? You and her are besties. No secrets. Why hasn’t she told you about her?”

Another turn skipped. “Where are we going?”

“Home. Backup route.”

I laughed. “What’s with the paranoia? Do you think she’s Taliban, come to finish the job your CO started?”

He pulled me onto the side road passing the Round Church. “Take a right here, then left along Jesus Lane, then over the common. If we get split, go another way and get home ASAP.”

“I’m not leaving you alone in this state. I told you, you should have a phone.”

“I do.”

“Where is it?”

“Home, on the wall.”

“A mobile phone. One you don’t accidentally flush when my back’s turned.”

“Don’t need some fancy toy beeping and flashing at me every ten seconds. That’s what you’re for.” He looked back and forth then pushed me across the road, both of us stumbling.

I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this.”

He stopped and grabbed my shoulders, squaring us up. He was breathing heavily. “If I say ‘eyelashes’, run. Repeat it back. Go on.”

“If you say ‘eyelashes’, run. And what are you going to do? You can’t run. Run from what?”

He marched on, pulling me along, keeping a watch on entrances, crevices and especially people and traffic. The sweeping right-hand curve of Jesus Lane had become a dusty Afghan street, its side roads and staircases hiding places for an enemy Nick refused to talk about. His glancing every which way, lizard-like, made me nervous despite myself. We skipped across the road to avoid a clutch of students emerging from the Victorian terrace opposite Jesus College, and crossed back, exchanging anxious looks, when a taxi slowed ahead. I didn’t like taxis at the best of times.

We passed the roundabout and climbed the low fence onto Midsummer Common and the straight-ish path towards home. I said, “I’m not buying you that whisky again.”

He looked at me for a moment: still alert, fractionally relaxed, happier on the open plain of the common than in the built-up areas of the city. “She knows about the elephants,” he said.

He said the words with enough gravitas to suppress my natural instincts to bark laughter into his face and rip the piss out of him all the way home. She knows about the elephants. I held his hand instead, keeping a tight grip until our bright blue front door lay in sight.

We lived in a house by the river. Well, a house on a road of potholes with an unromantic railing marking an artificial concrete edge to the river. After heavy rain the swell would rush down from Grantchester and along the Backs, roiling like the Amazon through the punting grounds and its crocodiles. White waters would thunder over the weir into the lower Cam, the stretch used by college rowers and multi-coloured narrowboats, and give us a wet middle finger on its way to Ely. Sometimes, rarely, the river overflowed here. Before our time someone installed steel flood barriers in the front garden walls — and we could block the gate if we needed to, forming a watertight seal to protect our tiny patch of weeds from nature’s scouring piss. A good few quid of engineering, all for an insubstantial 1930s terrace of one-and-a-half up, one-and-a-half downs, with ours nestling in the middle.

We knew our neighbours mainly from their arguments, occasionally from their dinner parties, hardly ever from their sex. I suspected I knew how they knew us.

“Elephants,” I said, dropping into the sofa in our living room. Standard nerd equipment: oversized TV, game controllers trailing to two generations of consoles, bookshelves packed with books and DVDs and SF ephemera — the usual franchises tossed in a bowl and poured onto the shelves. And also, elephants. Religious icons, plastic toys, glossy coffee table books, natural histories, ugly paintings, figures carved and cast and injection-moulded and stuffed.

Lego Darth Vader, light sabre locked against the tenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, in the path of a plushy stampede, on top of an old, blocked-up, brick fireplace.

Nick sat beside me and popped off his prosthetics, grunting and rubbing his left stump. The legs slipped sideways onto the laminate flooring. “We were yakking away about the army and medals and shit, and then she’s all elephants.”

“Maybe Lucy told her. I mean—”

Calm, quiet: “When did you tell her?”

Had I? Most of our nights out together degraded one way or another into a couple of bottles of gossip, with whatever secrets we told each other evaporating by the 8:15am paracetamol. I couldn’t swear I hadn’t told her. I shrugged. “If I did, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

As obsessions go it was harmless enough. I earned enough to not worry about the cost, and his army pension and compensation — bulging with a please-don’t-tell-the-papers bonus — was barely dented anyway. He hadn’t said a word about his love of flexi-nosed mouse-haters until we moved in together and I finally saw the inside of his flat as we packed it up. Handing me a cardboard box of sweaty old legs, he’d said he thought it would put me off him. He considered it a far bigger deal than I did, judging by the times we’d not-argued about it.

On the sofa, he leaned against me.

I said, “Are you sure you didn’t mention it? You had a bit to drink.”

He didn’t dignify that with an answer, just adding a decibel to his breathing.

“You want me to ask Lucy?”

He shook his head.

“I could put the documentary on, if you want.” One of his favourite DVDs, following a migrating herd across the Serengeti or Dartmoor or somewhere.

He shook his head again. “Feeling it a bit. Maybe pulled something on that drop outside the bar. Think I’ll go to bed.”

We kissed and he shuffled off the sofa, limping on his uneven stumps and dragging his legs over the laminate flooring. I knew enough not to say anything about anything, and certainly not to follow. A list of things I didn’t understand scrolled through my mind — especially why he’d been so worried about Cordelia until the moment we got home. The flood barrier was no drawbridge. If she were dangerous in some way — an Annie Lennox Terminator sent back from the future — then our front door and our single-glazed bay window ideal for rower-spotting would hardly make an impregnable defence for homicidal Sweet Dreams cover singers.

I put some music on, a little Natalie Cole, the lazy twinkly stuff I could only get away with when he’d gone to bed. The stress drained away, with the help of the unfinished bottle from earlier in the evening. Ziggy curled on my lap and fell instantly asleep, and drowsiness enveloped me in its warm, ruby embrace.

When Nick shrieked — for half a second, at unneighbourly volume — the following occurred in this order:

I jumped several feet into the air.

I tipped half a glass of red wine over the cat.

Ziggy’s claws dug through my jeans into my scrotum.

I jumped several more feet into the air.

I tipped the remaining wine onto the laminate flooring.

The cat sprung from my genital area, claws set to maximum disruption, and cascaded through the puddle of red wine and out of the room via shelves, walls, ceiling, etc.

I swore (this may have taken place earlier in the sequence).

I trailed the wine upstairs to the source of the noise.

I avoided treading on Ziggy, his hackles raised on the threshold of the bedroom.

I saw Nick, damp and naked on the sheets, the duvet rolled over to my side of the bed.

I saw a miniature elephant at the foot of the bed.

The elephant saw me.

The elephant trumpeted.