Page 23 of The Wedding Proposal
And it had been Ricky.
* * *
At twelve-fifteen, out of breath, eyes full of anticipation, Carmelo catapulted into the computer room.
Elle had established that the tower from the cupboard was past resurrection and had moved on to stripping it of its hard drive. She smiled. ‘Hi, Carmelo! Have you enjoyed school today?’
‘No,’ he answered, frankly. ‘But I did go.’ His eyes dared her to query it.
Elle made a cheering motion with clasped hands. ‘I’m really pleased.’
She was rewarded with Carmelo’s smile as she returned the tower to the computer graveyard, in case she ever found its carcass useful. A quick glance at the progress of the machine that was formatting, and then she settled herself at what seemed to be the most recent equipment, and Carmelo pulled up a chair at her side.
‘Right. What shall we do?’
‘Wikipedia,’ Camelo returned, promptly.
‘OK, Wikipedia.’ Elle had expected him to want to play a game or chat on social media. She gave the computer mouse a little shove towards him. ‘Come on then. Show me Wikipedia.’
With alacrity, Carmelo began to click. Elle gazed at the site he opened — Wikipedija. ‘Ah. I can’t read Maltese.’
‘OK.’ Carmelo rapidly clicked through to the English-language version. ‘Now, I think of something I want to know.’ He paused before asking, courteously, ‘Maybe is there something you want to know?’
‘This is your computer time. You choose.’
He nodded. ‘I want to know about qarnita.’ He screwed up his forehead in concentration. ‘I forget how to say him in English.’
‘How about we open another browser tab and go to a translation site?’
Oscar, the giant Dutchman, wandered into the room. ‘We have our beautiful Englander again!’
Elle merely smiled politely and he went to use the machine that was being formatted.
‘I’m working on that one,’ Elle said, apologetically. ‘Can you use another?’
‘OK,’ he boomed, jovially, as if she’d made a joke.
Then she forgot him as she showed Carmelo how to discover that the English name for qarnita was ‘octopus’ and watched as he put the word into the Wikipedia search engine with a quick cut and paste. Unsurprisingly, she found that he didn’t read English as well as he spoke it and she read much of the Wikipedia article to him, stumbling herself over phrases such as ‘cephalopod mollusc’.
The habits of the eight-tentacled habitué of the seas proved to be interesting, even to her. In fact, she learned, the octopus didn’t have eight tentacles, but four pairs of arms. ‘He has a beak,’ she marvelled.
‘A beak?’ Carmelo frowned.
‘Like a bird. If we open another tab we can look for pictures — click on images, that’s right. There.’
‘A beak, like a bird,’ Carmelo repeated. ‘I like to eat him, the octopus.’
Elle laughed. ‘I might, too, because I like his cousin, squid. In the Italian restaurants they call squid calamari.’
‘We call him klamari, the same.’ Carmelo tapped klamari into the translation window to prove that the English was given as ‘squid’.
She left Carmelo to his browsing while she installed the operating system on the machine she’d worked on; then password protected it before she shut it down. She didn’t want anyone messing with the machine until she had it how she liked it. She designated it number 01 and wrote a sticky label for the tower.
‘I’m going now,’ she said to Carmelo. ‘What about you?’
Carmelo’s shoulders slumped. ‘You go home?’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow morning, but I have to work somewhere else this afternoon.’ She watched a thoughtful look enter his eyes, and added, ‘Would you like to help me with some jobs on Saturday? You can if you go back to school tomorrow.’
