UNDERGROUND

‘Who do they think they are anyway? The pigs.’ Anthrax looked away, disgusted at the thought of police harassing people like his mother.

‘Don’t call them pigs,’ his father snapped. ‘They are police officers. If you are ever in trouble, they are the first people you are ever going to call.’

‘Oh yeah. What kind of trouble am I going to be in that the first people I call are the AFP?’ Anthrax replied.

Anthrax would put up with his father coming along so long as he kept his mouth shut during the interview. He certainly wasn’t there for personal support. They had a distant relationship at best. When his father began working in the town where Anthrax now lived and studied, his mother had tried to patch things between them. She suggested his father take Anthrax out for dinner once a week, to smooth things over. Develop a relationship. They had dinner a handful of times and Anthrax listened to his father’s lectures. Admit you were wrong. Cooperate with the police. Get your life together. Own up to it all. Grow up. Be responsible. Stop being so useless. Stop being so stupid.

The lectures were a bit rich, Anthrax thought, considering that his father had benefited from Anthrax’s hacking skills. When he discovered Anthrax had got into a huge news clipping database, he asked the boy to pull up every article containing the word ‘prison’. Then he had him search for articles on dis- cipline. The searches should have cost a fortune, probably thousands of dollars. But his father didn’t pay a cent, thanks to Anthrax. And he didn’t spend much time lecturing Anthrax on the evils of hacking then.

When they arrived at AFP headquarters, Anthrax made a point of putting his feet up on the leather couch in the recep- tion area and opened a can of Coke he had brought along. His father got upset.

‘Get your feet off that seat. You shouldn’t have brought that can of Coke. It doesn’t look very professional.’

‘Hey, I’m not going for a job interview here,’ Anthrax responded.