The White Tower by Dorothy Johnston Read Free Book Online Page A

vinyl-covered chairs.
    I smiled, handing her the emails. ‘Have a look at these.’
    While she read, I looked at the crosshatched iron filings of hair curling at her temples, as though a magnet had collected them, brown cardigan with holes in both the cuffs, her expression that was cowering yet defiant.
    After a few minutes, she said, ‘They were his family. These people meant more to him than Bernard and I did. How could this have happened?’ She hurried on without waiting for me to form an answer. ‘How could I have been so wrong?’
    â€˜I’m not sure what you mean.’
    Moira’s lips became a thin, grey line. ‘I let him down.’
    â€˜These people are sorrowing and angry. I think they’ve proved that by their willingness to talk to me. But there’s nothing to suggest they were a replacement for you. Or for Niall’s father.’
    Unless her husband was deliberately eavesdropping, I didn’t think he could hear us, but I was conscious of the need to keep my voice down.
    Moira glanced at the last email. When she looked up again, her eyes grazed her scant furniture as though to fix each item in its place, then caught Niall’s computer.
    She stood up and walked over to it. ‘Could you—do you think you could—call up this game? I mean, I know you couldn’t do it here. We don’t have the internet. That was Niall’s. We didn’t renew his subscription? Is that the right word?’
    â€˜The game’s not running any more. It’s been shut down.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The man who invented the game and ran it—the one the players refer to as God—he’s closed it down. It doesn’t exist as a MUD any more, but there’s still information about him, and some of the other players, on the internet. That’s how I was able to contact them.’
    â€˜Did you contact this—does he have a name apart from God?’
    â€˜The name he gives himself is Sorley Fallon. That might be his real name, and it might not. He might not even be a he.’
    â€˜I don’t understand,’ Moira said. ‘If these other players have the game, why can’t they—?’
    â€˜It’s not something you buy over the counter. It’s a live thing, or was. I mean people played it live.’
    â€˜What?’ Moira asked again, impatiently.
    â€˜There were rules, and levels,’ I went on, hoping that by staying calm and explaining I could win her trust. ‘A player started at a low level and had to win points to move up. From what I can gather, most of the points were won by fighting, in battles between Irish and English ­soldiers. But where it differs from a board game is that a character, your son’s character Ferdia for example, could talk, interact with other characters, plan battles by typing out what he wanted to do, and the other characters would respond, except they’re not sitting in the room with him, they’re in America or Ireland, or wherever.’
    Moira was standing next to the computer as though connected to it by some thin, tough string. She still had the sheaf of printed emails in her hand. She glanced at it, then said, ‘This is your correspondence with these people, but what I really want to know is what this character of my boy’s was like. This Ferdia. What sort of a person was he?’
    I began to speculate. She interrupted me to tell me she’d been born in Northern Ireland. Her parents had emigrated to Australia when she was six.
    â€˜I remember the war and the cold. And the day my mother bought me an orange.’ She shuffled the sheets of paper without looking any further at them. ‘I was just starting to read, the year we left. We didn’t have many books, but my mother used to read them to me. In any case I knew the stories of the Irish heroes. Everybody does.’
    I could hardly remember anything of my life before I was six. There