The Poison Tree
“When I come back from the village, the papers that I left piled on its keyboard have been dumped on the coffee table. Alice is sitting up at the screen on her own, her tongue rolled into a little pipe of concentration as she scrolls through a Web page I don’t recognize.
The machine should be accessible only to me, not because I have anything to hide but because I want to control exactly what Alice views. It is protected by a password that she could never begin to guess but Rex evidently has, or... knew how to bypass or disable. It’s a long word and an unusual name, one with four consonants in the middle. If it was a laptop I’d slam the lid down on her fingers but instead I pull the plug out of the wall.
“Mum!” says Alice as the machine accepts its blackout with a compliant sigh. “I was looking at that?” There appears to be nothing her teachers or I can do to turn her sentences from questions into statements. Rex comes in from the kitchen, knife in one hand, onion in the other, which is why, I suppose, he looks as though he’s been crying.MoreLess
The machine should be accessible only to me, not because I have anything to hide but because I want to control exactly what Alice views. It is protected by a password that she could never begin to guess but Rex evidently has, or... knew how to bypass or disable. It’s a long word and an unusual name, one with four consonants in the middle. If it was a laptop I’d slam the lid down on her fingers but instead I pull the plug out of the wall.
“Mum!” says Alice as the machine accepts its blackout with a compliant sigh. “I was looking at that?” There appears to be nothing her teachers or I can do to turn her sentences from questions into statements. Rex comes in from the kitchen, knife in one hand, onion in the other, which is why, I suppose, he looks as though he’s been crying.MoreLess
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