family at Lodge’s. Any problems we have, we sort them out among ourselves.’
Quite a little family. Cooper looked around the living room, wondering what Mr Nield’s idea of a happy little family was, in terms of his staff. Well organized and hard working, no doubt. But whether they were happy — that was a different matter. None of the rooms he’d seen in this house looked as though they’d ever had children in them, other than Alex’s bedroom.
‘Who’s looking after the store at the moment?’ asked Cooper.
‘I have a good assistant manager. David Underwood. He’s perfectly capable, and he knows he can phone me at any time.’
‘That’s lucky.’
‘I believe in delegation. It’s an essential part of being a good manager.’
Dawn was turning back to the kitchen, but paused to speak to Cooper.
‘Oh, Alex said you should go up and see him again if you came back.’
‘Did he?’
‘I think you must have showed some interest in what he was doing. I’ve never understood any of it myself.’
‘He attends Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes, Alex is in Year Nine at the moment. He’s very clever, you know. He’s already decided what he wants to do next year. He’s going to study for a DiDA.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A Diploma in Digital Applications. It’s equivalent to four GCSEs. That’s one of the reasons we wanted him to go to Queen Elizabeth’s, so he had the chance of a DiDA.’
Upstairs, Cooper looked at the closed doors on the landing. One still bore Emily’s name on a little plaque decorated with pink flowers. For a moment, he thought about opening the door to peek in, or asking the Nields if he could see their daughter’s room. But he decided that he didn’t want to see it. The sight of her clothes and toys might turn Emily into a real, living person, and the idea was unsettling.
He found Alex fidgeting expectantly, perhaps knowing that he’d arrived and was in the house talking to his parents.
Unsurprisingly, War Tribe was on the screen of his PC, the representation of a city with roofs and battlements. Looking closer, Cooper saw that there was movement in the city. A tiny flag waving on a tower, a soldier pacing up and down, a workman sawing at a bench outside a building.
‘How’s the game going?’ he asked.
‘We’re going to be in a war,’ said Alex. ‘Look.’
He clicked a link, and a map appeared, variously coloured blocks on a grid. Cooper guessed they represented other players’ cities in the neighbourhood.
‘Who are the bright red ones?’ he asked.
‘Our tribe’s enemies. Look, they’re near me, on the edge of Continent 34. Turks.’
‘Turks?’
‘Yeah.
‘You mean that’s their tribe?’
‘No, they’re Turks. Aggressive and well organized, those Turks. You can see them starting to expand already, look. They grab the biggest barbs and conquer the tribeless players. They’ll be coming for my cities soon, if they think I’m vulnerable. First there’ll be scouts to suss me out, and maybe a few raiding parties. Before you know it, they’ll be swarming all over me.’
‘You’re losing me a bit,’ said Cooper. ‘Barbs?’
‘Barbarian villages. The unoccupied ones, that don’t belong to any player. You can take those over and expand your empire.’
‘I see.’
‘If you don’t take them, someone else does. And if they get bigger than you, they’re a threat. Bigger players try to bully you.’
‘Can’t you try diplomacy?’ said Cooper, though it sounded even to him like a stab in the dark.
Alex shook his head. ‘Sometimes. But there’s never any point in trying to talk to the Turks. All you get back is gibberish. If they can’t speak English, they shouldn’t be on the UK server really, should they? That’s in the rules. English is the official War Tribe language, even if the guys who run it seem to be German, and some of the player guides are in German too. It’s a bit confusing sometimes.’
‘Yes,’ said Cooper. The boy was talking too fast now for him to follow, gabbling excitedly. He might as well be talking gibberish himself.
‘Oh, well. Everyone understands battle-axes, whatever language they speak,’ said Alex.
‘Right. Battle-axes.’
‘An army of berserkers will go through any defence. A few battering rams against the walls, and it’s rape and pillage all the way. My tribe can really kick some Turkish ass.’
Cooper felt his eyebrows gradually going up, and tried to control the expression before Alex saw it. If the boy thought he was shocked or disapproving, he would clam up. He felt sure, though, that Dawn Nield would not like to hear her clever, studious son talking enthusiastically about rape and pillage, and kicking Turkish ass. This was definitely a private world of Alex’s own that he’d been privileged to share for a few minutes.
‘If we get our act together, that is,’ said Alex. ‘We have to work together if we’re going to beat off the Turks.’
And that was what it was all about, Cooper supposed — working together. Being part of a tribe. You needed support from your tribe mates when it was your walls that the rams were hitting, your city that the axemen were pillaging. Without support from your tribe, you were dead.
Alex paused, feeling perhaps that he’d said too much.
‘Sometimes, it feels like a lot more than just a game,’ he said, with a thoughtful tone entering his voice.
Cooper nodded. ‘I actually wanted to ask you about your photography while I’m here,’ he said. ‘I hear you’re pretty good.’
‘I like playing around, that’s all. Doing stuff with the editing programs.’
‘When you were in Dovedale on Monday, did you notice the money trees in near the river?’
‘What, the ones with the coins in them?’
‘Yes. They call them money trees.’
‘I saw them.’
‘I bet you took some photographs, didn’t you?’
Alex nodded. ‘Do you want to look at some?’
‘Definitely.’
The boy minimized the War Tribe screen, and opened some photo-management software that created a slideshow of images. Shots of hillsides slid by. The sky, water, rocks — and the familiar outlines of the Twelve Apostles. They were definitely in Dovedale now. Some of the images had been digitally manipulated — the balance of light and shade altered to accentuate a shape, startling colour adjustments turning the dale into a landscape from another planet. In one striking composition, two images had been overlaid, with the knot holes of gnarled bark creating a ghostly face on a limestone cliff.
Finally, Alex paused the slideshow at a picture of a money tree.
‘Do you know why people do that?’ said Cooper. ‘Hammer the coins into the tree? It’s for luck.’
They both sat looking at the photograph. Hundreds of coins banged into the wood over decades, maybe centuries. Generations of people trekking into Dovedale and taking the trouble to add their contribution to the money tree, hoping for some improvement in their lives. Better health, the right partner, an end to some despair that was blighting their existence.
‘There’s a lot of luck in that tree,’ said Cooper.
Alex was silent for a moment. ‘Well, there should have been.’
Finally, Cooper thought he detected a sign of emotion, the slight crack in his voice that suggested his younger sister had meant something to him, that her death had been traumatic and was causing him to grieve. He wondered if the boy’s parents had thought about getting him some counselling, or even trying to get him to open up about it themselves — or whether they were too caught up in their own concerns.
