Free Loose Connections by Rachel Trezise Page A

hear him packing his tools up. She put her novel down on the coffee table and ran into the office. ‘Is it fixed?’ 
    The repairman shook his head. ‘They’ll have to send someone else. I’m not up to date on all this IT business. I’m more of a phone-line man, me. I think the problem is with the computer itself. Computers! I’m not sure which way is up.’ He laughed, his face turning red. His wide smile revealed a gap where one of his front teeth should have been. There were biscuit crumbs jammed in the corners of his mouth. 
    Rosemary didn’t laugh. 
    The repairman shrugged. ‘Well, don’t worry about it too much, love,’ he said. ‘They’ll send one of the young ’uns out first thing in the morning.’ 
    She had to turn the air freshener to maximum when he left the house. 
    The second man had turned up a week later, a muscular twenty-something, wearing multi-coloured trainers, an iPod tucked into the breast pocket of his navy overall. He didn’t seem much older than her sixteen-year-old son. ‘All right?’ he said briskly, marching into the house. 
    Rosemary followed him down the narrow hall. ‘Just there,’ she said pointing at the office door. The computer was already on. Every morning she checked the connection, hoping the glitch had mysteriously fixed itself overnight. 
    The repairman leaned over the desk and double-clicked the mouse, quickly opening and closing windows and browsers Rosemary had never seen before. ‘The computer’s fine,’ he said. ‘The report says the phone line is fine. It must be outside.’ He went out into the street and held a small metal device against the telegraph post for a few minutes, and then dawdled back to the house, the device limp in his hand. He stood in front of the doorstep, not quite making eye contact with Rosemary. ‘The post is dead,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand it. The whole street must be out.’ He sighed. ‘They’ll have to send someone else. It’s not something I can deal with.’
    â€˜Why not?’ Rosemary said. 
    â€˜Health and safety.’ He gestured at the telegraph pole. ‘You’d need a cherry picker to look in there. I’m not qualified.’ He was already swaggering down the drive. Had he been within arm’s length, Rosemary might have slapped his stupid, juvenile face. 
    Now the new repairman was knocking on the front door. Rosemary took a deep breath and wiped her palms on the thighs of her jeans. She went into the hallway and saw the dark shadow of the petite figure through the frosted glass. She cleared her throat as she opened the door. 
    â€˜Hi,’ the man said. He had eyes the colour of honey, a deep, gooey yellow. Rosemary had never seen eyes that colour before. ‘There’s a problem with your Internet connection?’ he said. 
    She stood aside to let him in, leading him down the hall and into the office. ‘It’s been broken for three weeks now,’ she said, voice sharp, like an axe splitting wood. ‘You’re the third person they’ve sent.’ 
    â€˜Third time lucky, eh?’ he said. 
    Rosemary turned the PC on. She pulled her leather computer chair out for him to sit down. 
    â€˜They’re nice,’ he said. ‘Is that you?’ He was looking at the black and white photographs hanging from the picture rail. They’d been taken during summers at her grandparents’ house. There was one for every year of her life, up until the age of fourteen when her parents had divorced, and her mother couldn’t afford to spend summers in France any more. He was staring at the last in the series: Rosemary sitting on a stone bench in the courtyard, wearing a short puffball skirt, with Bébé, her grandfather’s black cat, cradled in her gangly arms. ‘It’s not Britain, is it?’ he said. He