milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

carlotta brown

(no subject)

Nichola is up at the bar today, flipping through a home design magazine with a glass of wine. It's been a rough few weeks for everybody, and she'd like to just unwind where nobody who might want her to do something will be able to find her. Well, almost nobody.

She may have some jelly in her hair. Grape, from the looks of it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Hallo Nichola." Carlotta sits on the next stool. "You've got something in your hair, did you know?"

She offers Nichola an embroidered handkerchief.

"Oh!"

She takes the handkerchief and tries to find whatever's in her hair. Somehow, she isn't surprised to find grape jelly.

"Two year olds," she says, handing the handkerchief back.

"Been there." Carlotta laughs and tucks the handkerchief in her pocket. "My youngest is eight and he still manages to get into all sorts of sticky messes."

"Oh, he's not mine. I was watching him for a friend. It's probably going to be start being a regular thing though."

Nichola takes a sip of her wine. She doesn't mind being an emergency babysitter, really. It's just all come out of nowhere.

"Oh, the best kind, the ones you can give back." Carlotta laughs. "Is it your friend with the dogs?"

“Wilford, yeah. His little boy,” she says.

It’s a weird thing to say, and she’s not sure she’ll ever be used to it.

“He was busy today, and I just passed Michael off to another friend for the night.”

"I must say, when they were both under five, they were a bit of a handful." Carlotta says. "It gets easier though."

"Luckily he's just got the one. Hopefully it'll start getting easier soon."

She sighs. It's been a rough day for everybody.

"He might have some kind of learning disability or something. We're not sure yet."

Carlotta nods.

"You might want to check in with Guppy, or Bonnie, they've both raised special needs kids."

"That's his call. Not mine. He needs to find out what's going on first, anyway."

If it is what Wilford suggested it is, Nichola has no idea what the next step would even be.

"Of course." Carlotta nods. She's not going to say anything.

"I'm assuming your world has people who can help with that?"

"Oh, yeah. No, he's in good hands. The hard part is just figuring out which people he needs to go see, which means seeing all of them until somebody sticks." She shrugs. She'll help out as much as she can during the process, but ultimately, Wilford's in charge.

"He had a hearing test today, because that was a concern. But that's not the problem, so we still don't know why he doesn't seem to hear half of what's said to him."

"Has he always been like that?" Carlotta asks. "What was he like as a baby?"

Nichola shakes her head. "That's the problem. We don't know. He only got custody recently, and Michael's mom didn't seem to care enough to document anything."

"I'm assuming he speaks English as a first language."

"That's the problem," Nichola says. She shrugs again. "He doesn't talk, and he turns three in a couple of week."

"Oh yeah, he should definitely be talking by three." Carlotta says. "Molly and Bobbie were definitely talking before they were one, and they spoke in sentences by three."

"Yeah, Wil kind of hit the ceiling when he realised that. It's kind of a messy situation between him and Michael's mom."

One she probably shouldn't go into too much detail about, because Wilford hasn't even decided what he's telling people yet.

"Takes more than having a baby to be a parent." Carlotta nods. "Sounds like Wilford's going to be good for the kid."

"Better than his mom was, anyway."

Nichola tries not to roll her eyes at that. She sighs instead. "It probably wouldn't be so exhausting if it were timed better. But isn't that how it goes? Things are either going well, or it's all happening at once."

"I don't think there's ever an easy time to have a new child in the family." Carlotta says. "Has he got plenty of help?"

Nichola shakes her head. "No," she says. "There's a brother he says is dead, but I don't know how true that is. And I can't be there all the time. I'm running his company and..." She shakes her head again. "And right now, trying to put together a memorial service. One of our reporters was murdered a few weeks ago, right before Michael showed up."

She finishes her wine. There's so much she wants to say that she doesn't even know where to start.

"It's just been a real shit month."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Carlotta says. "You're a journalist?"

"Yeah. TV. Wil owns the production company. We want to get away from Network restraints and build a web platform, but Kevin was putting together the pilot program. We don't even know what he was working on outside of vague details, because the police took it all as evidence. I don't even know if we can get it back."

The whole thing's been a nightmare.

"What's a web platform?" Carlotta asks.

"On the internet," Nichola says. "You don't have a computer?"

Carlotta shakes her head.

"I know what a computer is, but I've never owned one. It's 1959 where I am."

"Oh!" That's different. "Computers are probably a lot different than what you know then." She pulls out her phone — a giant edge-to-edge touchscreen thing — and unlocks the screen before handing it to Carlotta.

"This is my phone, but it's the same technology. It can talk to anybody else in the world as long as it can find a signal in the air. Which it can't do here for some reason."

Probably because they are in space.

Carlotta looks with interest.

"So you don't have to connect it to the telephone wires?"

"Only to charge it. But I've just got this thing you put on your desk that charges it when you put it down."

"Charges?" Carlotta asks. "It sends you the bill?"

"You can pay your bills on it, but it runs on battery. You need to charge it every night if you don't want it to run out."

"It is a battery you can use again? And it fits in this tiny box?"

Carlotta looks intrigued.

"Uh-huh. Pretty much everyone has one too. Pretty sure even the Amish have started using them."

She gets a refill of her wine.

"The Amish?"

Carlotta thinks, then remembers something Libby mentioned once. "The folks who still use horses and carts?"

"Yeah, those guys. They're kind of 'technology bad,' but they give themselves a lot of exceptions where they need them," Nichola says. But basically, everyone's got at least a phone. There's other things that are like phones, but bigger that pretty popular too."

"So everyone is telephoning each other all the time? What for?"

Nichola laughs. "I don't think most people actually use them for the phone. Just for everything else they do."

She takes her phone back to demonstrate. "Smile," she says, a moment before her phone makes a mechanical click sound. Nichola turns the phone around to show Carlotta the photo she just took.

She smiles, bewildered, but then more genuinely when she sees the picture.

"Oh! It has a film in it, too?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only