‘I think maybe the motherboard’s blown.’
‘Motherboard, you’ll note,’ Artair said to Fin. ‘Never the father board. It’s always the mothers that cause the trouble.’ He turned to his son. ‘So what does that mean?’
‘Means it’s buggered.’
‘Well, can you not fix it?’
Fionnlagh shook his head. ‘I’d need to replace it. And that would probably cost as much a buying a new computer.’
‘Well, we haven’t got the money to go buying another fucking computer,’ Artair snapped. ‘When you get a job you can save up for one yourself.’
Fin said to him, ‘What kind of computer is it?’
‘It’s an iMac. G3. One of the old jellybeans.’
‘And what makes you think it’s the motherboard?’
Fionnlagh exhaled in frustration. ‘The screen’s gone blue and dark so you can hardly read it, and the image is all sort of squeezed up, like it’s been compressed.’
‘What system are you on?’
‘Oh, I’m miles behind. I just upgraded from nine to Jaguar. Need a better computer to run Snow Leopard.’
Artair snorted. ‘Jesus Christ, boy! Can you not speak a fucking language we can understand?’
‘There’s no need to talk like that, Artair,’ Marsaili said quietly. Fin stole a glance at her across the room and saw her discomfort.
‘You any idea what he’s talking about?’ Artair said to Fin. ‘It’s all double Dutch to me.’
‘It’s a degree in computer studies I’m doing at the Open University,’ Fin said.
‘Well, la-di-fucking-da. The boy who couldn’t speak English can speak Computer now.’
Fin said to Fionnlagh. ‘Is that when the problem started, when you installed the new system?’
The boy nodded. ‘Yeh, the day after I did the upgrade. Cost a fortune for the memory card, too.’
‘I should know, I bloody paid for it,’ Artair growled and emptied his glass. He stooped to refill it.
‘Where is the computer? In your room?’ Fin said.
‘Yeh.’
‘Can I have a look at it?’
‘Sure.’
Fin laid his glass on a coffee table and followed Fionnlagh out into the hall. A staircase led up to an attic room. ‘Place has changed since your day,’ Artair said, coming out after them. ‘I put in a bedroom for the kid up in the attic. Me and Marsaili are in my parents’ old room, and my mother’s in mine. We keep my dad’s study as a guest room.’
‘Not that we ever have any guests,’ Fionnlagh muttered as he reached the top of the stairs.
‘What was that?’ his father called after him.
‘Just telling Fin to watch that loose carpet on the top stair.’ Fionnlagh briefly caught Fin’s eye, and in that moment it was as if they had become complicit in a subterfuge that only they would ever know about. Fin winked and got a tiny smile in return.
Fionnlagh’s room ran from one side of the attic to the other at the north end of the house. There was a dormer window at each side cut into the slope of the ceiling. The east dormer had an unrestricted view out across the Minch. The computer was on a table set against the north gable. It sat in a pool of light from an Anglepoise lamp that seemed to intensify the darkness in the rest of the room. Fin was only vaguely aware of posters stuck to the walls. Football players and pop stars. Eminem was whining at them from a stereo system Fin couldn’t see.
‘Turn that shit off.’ Artair had come in behind them and was leaning on the door jamb, his drink still in his hand. ‘Can’t stand that rap. That’s rap with a silent C.’ He snorted at his own joke. ‘Know what I mean?’
‘I like Eminem,’ Fin said. ‘It’s all in the lyrics. He’s kind of like the Bob Dylan of his generation.’
‘Jesus,’ Artair exploded. ‘I can see you two are going to get on just great.’
‘I store most of my tracks in the computer,’ Fionnlagh said. ‘But since the screen went …’ He shrugged hopelessly.
‘Are you online?’ Fin asked.
‘Yeh, we just switched to broadband a couple of months ago.’
‘Can I take a look?’
‘Go ahead.’
Fin sat in front of the iMac and moved the mouse, waking the computer from its sleep mode. The screen came up dark blue and distorted, just as Fionnlagh had described. The desktop was barely visible, with its Finder window and dock bar along the bottom. ‘When you loaded in the new system, did the screen ever come up normal?’
‘Yeh, it was working great that first night. It was when I opened up the next day it was like this.’
Fin nodded. ‘Bet you didn’t upgrade your firmware.’
Fionnlagh frowned. ‘Firmware? What’s that?’
‘It’s kind of like the stuff in the computer’s brain that allows the hardware and the software to talk to one another. Apple really screwed up by not telling people that a system upgrade on a G3 required a firmware upgrade as well.’ He saw the consternation on Fionnlagh’s face and grinned. ‘Don’t worry, you’ve got about half the Mac- owning world for company. People were throwing away their computers when all they needed to do was download a simple firmware upgrade. There was a lot of anger about it out there.’
‘And we can do that?’ Fionnlagh asked, as if it were too good to be true. ‘We can download a firmware upgrade?’
‘Yep.’ Fin opened up a squashed web browser and tapped in a URL address. A moment later he was on the Apple website clicking on the firmware download for a G3. It took less than two minutes to download, and when the icon appeared on Fionnlagh’s screen, Fin double-clicked on it to install. ‘Takes about thirty seconds. Then, hopefully, after we restart it’s going to be working just fine.’ When the installation was complete, he dropped down the Apple menu and selected restart. The screen went black, the iMac delivered its welcome chorus, and then began reloading its operating system. Half a minute later the desktop screen appeared, bright and sharp and undistorted. ‘
‘Aw, man, that’s brilliant!’ Fionnlagh could hardly contain his joy. ‘That’s just brilliant.’ His delight was shining in his eyes.
Fin stood up to vacate his seat. ‘It’s all yours. Enjoy. It’s a neat system. Any problems, just let me know.’
‘Thanks, Fin.’ Fionnlagh dropped himself into his chair and within moments had the arrow darting about the screen, opening up windows, pulling down menus, eager to explore all the possibilities he thought had been lost.
Fin turned to find Artair watching thoughtfully, still leaning on the door jamb. He had not said a word since the Eminem put-down. ‘Pretty fucking smart,’ he said quietly. ‘I could never have done that for him in a million years.’
Fin shifted uncomfortably. ‘It’s amazing what you pick up on the Open University.’ He cleared his throat self- consciously. ‘I think I left my drink downstairs.’
But Artair didn’t move, transferring his gaze, instead, to the quarter-inch of amber liquid in the bottom of his glass. ‘You always were smarter than me, weren’t you, Fin? My father knew that. Which is why he spent more time on you than he ever did on me.’
‘We both spent a lot of time in that room down there,’ Fin said. ‘I owe your dad a lot. I can’t believe how generous he was, giving up all his spare time like that.’
Artair cocked his head and gave Fin a long, hard look. Searching for what? Fin felt discomfited by his gaze. ‘Well, at least it worked for you,’ Artair said finally. ‘Got you off the island and away to university. Didn’t get me any further than a dead-end job at Lewis Offshore.’
The silence between them was broken only by the clacking of Fionnlagh’s keyboard. The boy seemed barely aware of them, lost in his own ether world of computer and internet. Marsaili called from downstairs that their quiche was ready, and the awkwardness of the moment passed. Artair snapped out of his dwam.
‘Come on, we’ll get your glass topped up, and some food in your belly.’
