Deeper Water by Jessie Cole Read Free Book Online Page B

hardly left the house. I couldn’t remember a time when her big brown body wasn’t sleeping somewhere in a corner—ears twitching, dog-snuffling through her dreams.
    ‘That’s amazing.’ Hamish shook his head. ‘I would have thought everyone under the age of fifty would have sent an email.’
    I was trying not to feel affronted. ‘What about all those people in remote areas?’
    ‘Yeah, maybe. But, Mema, this isn’t that remote.’
    I shrugged. I had no answer to that. ‘What do you like about it so much?’
    He started moving around the kitchen, checking out all the things in jars. We always had everything sealed up to keep the insects out. The pantry door fell off a few years back and we hadn’t got around to fixing it yet. There were a few shelves above the bench too, so most of our food was on display.
    ‘I’m not one of those guys who’s glued to a screen twenty-four-seven or anything,’ he stated. ‘I mean, I hardly even update Facebook.’ He sounded frustrated to be talking about it, even though he’d brought it up. ‘It’s not … my life. I just need emails for work. It’s how my whole job runs.’
    I was thinking about how panicked Hamish had been on that first afternoon when he realised he’d lost his laptop. I knew he must have been in shock from being trapped in the car like that, but standing in the pouring rain, sodden and mucky after the cow birth, he looked like his whole world had washed down the drain. As though the computer was everything he had.
    ‘And, you know, I work to a deadline. They sent me all the way out here, and when I get back into town I’ll have to work out how to retrieve all my data. I’m not stupid, I back up really important things, but not everything. I had so much stuff stored on that laptop, stuff I’d collected for years. It’s just … annoying.’
    He was still looking at the pantry, distracted by a jar of flour with obvious signs of life. Must have had weevils or something. He peered at it but he didn’t comment. ‘Will I be able to buy a new laptop in town, Mema?’ he asked over his shoulder.
    ‘I don’t know, maybe. You’ll have to ask.’
    I tried to imagine what it must feel like to have everything that was important to you inside a small machine. It was hard to get my head around.
    ‘Email is just such an instantaneous form of communication,’ he said, almost like he was talking to himself.
    ‘More than a phone?’
    He stopped perusing the jars for a second and turned back to look at me, thinking. ‘No, I guess not. It’s just you don’t have the time to talk to everyone, and so you send people things and they can read them when they want, you know? When they have time.’
    ‘So, it’s not instantaneous then?’ It didn’t make that much sense to me. ‘’Cause they might not read it straight away?’
    ‘But they probably will. They just might take a little while to get back to you,’ he said. ‘Usually, you can be pretty sure they’ve read it.’
    I wasn’t really seeing it.
    ‘But if you called them, you’d get to speak to them, and then you’d know for sure. Right?’
    ‘But you’d have to go through all the small-talk parts of having a conversation. It’s time consuming when you only want to tell someone one thing.’
    I didn’t much like talking on the phone, so I wasn’t going to argue with that. Hamish walked across to the window and looked out over the rolling hills. It was always beautiful after the rain and I waited for him to say so.
    ‘I can’t believe I lost my laptop and my phone,’ he said instead, squinting out at the view. ‘That’s a first.’
    The whole time Hamish had been stranded in our little farmhouse in the pouring rain he’d hardly complained at all. This was the most I’d heard him speak. He had a way of choosing his words carefully, like he was weighing things up in his head. Most of the people I knew just blurted out their thoughts, but Hamish was different.
    I didn’t know what to do