Free Fatal Error by Michael Ridpath Page A

brown and turbulent, and on the opposite side of the river more converted warehouses stared back at us.

    ‘Why do you live here? Not much going on, is there?’
    ‘It’s Dad’s place. An investment he bought a while ago. He’s trying to kick me out, but I won’t go.’
    ‘You said you two weren’t getting on.’
    ‘We’re not. We have as little to do with each other as possible.’
    ‘Ah.’
    I realized that that meant more than just Guy having to curtail his spending habits. It meant that the most obvious source of finance for ninetyminutes.com had already dried up. I’d find out more about that later.
    Guy went through to the tiny kitchen and began making coffee. ‘How did they take it at Gurney Kroheim?’
    ‘My boss didn’t like it at all,’ I said. ‘I was quite touched, actually. He tried to plead with me at first, but he gave up after a few minutes. He said I was better off out of it. Poor guy. I don’t give him long.’ Giles was history and he knew it. The next reorganization would see him whited out of the Specialized Finance organogram. I hoped he would find another job.
    ‘Much better job security here,’ said Guy.
    ‘Of course,’ I replied with a wry grin. I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. ‘So. What do we do?’
    Guy started talking. And talking. It was like a dam bursting. He had obviously been thinking of nothing else for weeks and he was desperate for someone to share those thoughts with. Owen wasn’t exactly right for the job, but I was. Guy was clearly glad to have me around. It made me feel needed and totally involved right from the outset.
    The first thing to do was to get the ninetyminutes.com website up and running. Guy had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to put on it. There was the basic stuff: match reports, news, photos, player profiles, statistics, different sections for each club, the kind of things every soccer websiteneeded. Then there were the things that Guy hoped would make Ninetyminutes different: gossip, chat, humour, cartoons to start with. And later betting, a fantasy football game, video clips, and the ultimate prize: e-commerce. Once we had attracted visitors to the site, we would begin selling merchandise: clothing, mugs, posters, anything and everything the football fan could want. Stage three would be to design our own range of clothing and other products to push through the site.
    It was amazing how much of all this could be done by outsiders. Owen was working on the technical specifications of the site, making sure that it was ‘scalable’, in other words it could grow as the traffic and complexity increased. But outside companies would provide us with the software and hardware we needed, and a design consultancy would help us with the all-important look and feel of the website itself. News, photos and statistics could be downloaded in digital form from press agencies and then manipulated however we wanted.
    This left the all-important question.
    ‘Who’s going to write all this?’ I asked. ‘The opinions, the humour, the chat? Are we going to leave it all to Owen?’
    ‘Ha ha,’ said Owen, his only contribution to the conversation so far.
    Guy smiled. ‘Come and look.’
    He hit some keys on his computer and a sheet of bright purple flashed on his screen. The words ‘Sick As A Parrot’ in a shaky font were emblazoned on it in green.
    ‘Nice title,’ I said. ‘And lovely graphics.’
    ‘I know, I know. But take a look.’
    I looked, clicking on stories about the latest England manager, a volatile Arsenal striker, the rumoured transfer of a French international to Liverpool. There were articles about grounds, commentators, notorious supporters, thebusinessmen behind the clubs, what had happened to the star players in the previous year’s World Cup in France. There was a whole section comparing the tactics of the Premier League teams in terms that even I could understand. It was brilliantly written. Witty in places,