What You Make It Read Free Page A

following week everyone was calling me by name, and I was being included in the coffee-making rounds. England had called off its doomed attempt at summer, or at least imposed a time out, and had settled for a much more bearable cross between spring and autumn instead. All in all, things were going fairly well.
    And as the week progressed, slightly better even than that. The reason for this was a person. Jeanette, to be precise.
    I began, without even noticing at first, to find myself veering towards the computer nearest her when I needed to do some testing. I also found that I was slightly more likely to offer to go and make a round of coffees in the kitchen when she was already standing there, smoking one of her hourly cigarettes. Initially, it was just because she was the politest and most approachable of the staff, and it was a couple of days before I realized that I was looking out for her return from lunch, trying to be less dull when she was around, and noticing what she wore.
    It was almost as if I was beginning to fancy her, for heaven's sake.
    By the beginning of the next week I passed a kind of watershed, and went from undirected, subconscious behaviour to actually facing the fact that I was attracted to her. I did this with a faint feeling of dread, coupled with occasional, mournful tinges of melancholy. It was like being back at school. It's awful, when you're grown-up, to be reminded of what it was like when a word from someone, a glance, even just their presence, can be like the sun coming out from behind cloud. While it's nice, in a lyric, romantic novel sort of way, it also complicates things. Suddenly it matters if other people come into the kitchen when you're talking to her, and the way they interact with other people becomes more important. You start trying toengineer things, try to be near them, and it all just gets a bit weird.
    Especially if the other person hasn't a clue what's going on in your head – and you've no intention of telling them. I'm no good at that, the telling part. Ten years ago I carried a letter round with me for two weeks, trying to pluck up the courage to give it to someone. It was a girl who was part of the same crowd at college, who I knew well as a friend, and who had just split up from someone else. The letter was a very carefully worded and tentative description of how I felt about her, ending with an invitation for a drink. Several times I was on the brink, I swear, but somehow I didn't give it to her. I just didn't have what it took.
    The computer stuff was going okay, if you're interested. By the middle of the week the system was pretty much in place, and people were happily sending pop-up messages to each other. Cremmer, in particular, thought it was just fab that he could boss people around from the comfort of his own den. Even Clive was bucked up by seeing how the new system was going to ease the progress of whatever dull task it was he performed, and all in all my stock at the VCA was rising high.
    It was time, finally, to get down to the nitty-gritty of developing their new databases. I tend to enjoy that part more than the wireheading, because it's more of a challenge, gives scope for design and creativity, and I don't have to keep getting up from my chair. When I settled down to it on Thursday morning, I realized that it was going to have an additional benefit. Jeanette was the VCA's events organizer, and most of the databases they needed concerned various aspects of her job. In other words, it was her I genuinely had to talk to about them, and at some length.
    We sat side by side at her desk, me keeping a respectful distance, and I asked her the kind of questions I had to ask. She answered them concisely and quickly, didn't pipe up with a lot of damn fool questions, and came up with some reasonable requests. It was rather a nice day outside, and sunlight that wasfor once not hazy and obstructive angled through the window to pick out the lighter hues in her chestnut