Authors: Lynne Barrett-Lee
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Mystery & Detective, #Electronic Mail Messages
Virtual Strangers
Strangers
Lynne Barrett-Lee
Lynne Barrett-Lee was born in London and became a full time writer shortly after moving to Cardiff in 1994. She is the author of seven novels, including the Melissa Nathan shortlisted
Barefoot In The Dark
. She has also produced two titles for the UK Quick Reads Campaign (one ghosted for Fiona Phillips), which provides easy to read books for adult emergent readers..
Lynne is also a prolific non-fiction ghostwriter, with a number of bestselling titles to her name, including
Giant George
;
Life with the World’s Biggest Dog
, and the recent Sunday Times bestseller,
The Baby Laundry For Unmarried Mothers
. She also co-writes a major series of memoirs for one of the UKs leading publishers, which are written pseudonymously.
For more information about Lynne Barrett-Lee, and her forthcoming titles, visit her website
www.lynnebarrett-lee.com
1st Kindle Edition published 2012
First Published 2001
Copyright © 2011, 2012 Lynne Barrett-Lee
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Disclaimer: This book is a work of fiction. It has been written for entertainment purposes only. All references to characters and countries should be seen in this light. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ebook by EBooks by Design
Author’s Note
Virtual Strangers
was born in a different era to this one. When it first had its genesis, back in 1999, we were not only at the end of the 20
th
century, but also, in many ways, a rather primitive society. One with mobiles, but not ones that took pictures and sent emails, with music that mostly came via things called CDs, and, most importantly, for the purposes of the story you’re about to read, computers that sat in any number of houses, all alone and unconnected to that thing we call the web. Unconnected, that is, until, slowly and surely, the people of the world cottoned on. This love story, as it stands, couldn’t have been written today. It’s of its time, and I think it should remain there.
Which is not to say some things shouldn’t be hauled into the present. My gratitude to Joe Simpson, for the inspiration, remains heartfelt, as does my love of all our planet’s lumps and bumps, the binary system and pyroclastic flow.
December 2007
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
William Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet
Many stories start with a trauma or crisis. My story starts with a modem.
Late September 2000. Thursday night. Eightish.
And quite a nice modem, if you happen to have an opinion about modem aesthetics. Dark grey, dinky lights, the usual plug-with-pretensions, and stuffed with such breathtaking technological wizardry that it could doubtless connect me to Alpha Centauri if I wanted, at the sparkling velocity of fifty-six K. I got it out of the plastic bag, out of the box, out of the polystyrene, out of another (more bijou) plastic bag and placed it on the desk by my elderly yukka.
‘
Finally
,’ muttered my son, Ben, eyeing the empty box with derision. He slipped the word in on a convenient out breath; in what I’d come to understand was the thirteen year old equivalent of ‘Wey-hey! Whoopy doo! I’m
so
excited!’
‘Yes,
finally
,’ I echoed, in similar vein.
Which wasn’t hard, frankly. I’d been feeling pretty grey and grizzly all week, and spending one hundred and nineteen pounds on another lump of grey matter wasn’t my idea of therapy. Therapy would have been the calf length boots in Oasis. Serious therapy would have been two pairs of boots. But there is (or so I remember telling myself at the time) that other kind of therapy to consider. The therapy that involves making yourself feel better by doing something kind and unexpected for someone you love. So I walked past the footwear, and got Ben his modem.
He’d been on about getting tooled up on the internet front for best part of a year; us being, apparently, the only family in the entire developed world who didn’t have an internet connection. But then, it wasn’t him paying for it, was it? But now his brother had left home, I felt he needed something more substantial than a hundred and fifty back copies of
Gamesmaster
to replace him. Not in a yell, kick, punch, wind-up and generally torment kind of way, but something with which he could fill up the hours he and Dan would normally be filling instead with a selection of the above.
‘Is it working?’ he asked, shrugging his bag off and peering. He’d been out rugby training and smelt like compost. Which was better than chutney. At least better than that.
‘Of course it’s working,’ I told him, feeling suddenly, reliably and unsurprisingly, defensive. It went with the territory.
He looked suspicious. ‘As in it’s up and running?’
I shook my head. ‘As in when I switched it on - like
so
- a selection of lights came on.’
He did a slow hand clap then perched on the edge of my chair. ‘Excellent!’ he said, changing deftly from unimpressed to patronising.
‘
And
?’
‘And nothing. I’ve only just plugged the thing in.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, making it clear with the sort of movement of the buttocks that only one’s offspring could get away with, that it would be appropriate at this point for me to free up the swivel seat for him. ‘Got here just in time then. Have you installed all the software? Done the filters?’ He rummaged. ‘Uh huh. This the box?’
‘It’s
here
.’
‘Well, give it me then, Mum. Any tea made or anything?’
‘No, there isn’t. And Ben, I am really quite capable...’
At which my son grinned. In his grinniest fashion.
‘Yeah, right, Mum,’ he chortled. ‘Sure you can do it. But be quicker if
I
do it. Tea?’
Always a problem, of course. Torn as I was - and usually am - with the competing claims of maternal instinct (Goodness! What a very clever boy you are! How wondrous and ground breaking your every thought turns out to be! Feel free to impress me with your enormous mental capacity, my child! etc.) and baser instinct (look, you snivelling pubescent, who d’you think re-wired your bloody baby monitor when your father shorted it, eh? Eh?) the former, naturally, knocked the latter into touch. That’s what we Mums
do,
isn’t it? We cultivate exactly the kind of toxic male arrogance that we abhor in men. Or is it just me?
Of
course
it would be quicker if Ben did it. Plus Ben would be able to be
proud
of the fact that it would be quicker because he was doing it. Plus Ben would
enjoy
doing it. Plus I would not.
Though certainly
could
. Which is the main point here.
Truth is, the tired cliché of thirty something females’ technophobia is exactly that. A tired cliché. A
Moribund
cliché. In fact, not even a cliché, but a wicked falsehood. Women are not technophobic at all. (Witness washing machine programmes.) Most women are not techno-obsessive, that’s all. And quite right too. Yes, yes, yes, I know. There was the space program and Teflon and so on. But has non-stick proved to be
the
development, cuisine wise? Since Teflon have we not embraced Le Creuset instead? Since Teflon, have we not discovered balti and chips? Have Teflon, it seems, no particular big deal. Have Teflon, may well achieve pneumatic fried eggs, but will not achieve Masterchef any time soon.
Seems to me that anything that comes to you by way of copious advertising and whining from juveniles needs to be treated with a hefty dose of scepticism, life enhancing-wise; i.e. expect much in the way of hype, technical blurb, financial shock horror, number of plug sockets required etc. But expect little in the way of life enhancement. Rather, it occurs to me, like Channel Five.
Except I must admit that I
can
see an advantage to being online at home, offspring-wise. I can see that I, too, will be able to communicate with Daniel, and without the necessity for adopting a badgering/pleading tone and/or spurious excuses. Plus I will have a small but significant chance of my offspring responding. Also I could, if afflicted by boredom at weekends, cyber-shop for ab cradles, or whatever. If I like.
I won’t like, I’m sure, but I’m happy enough.
Because I do have a lot to be thankful for. I have my health, I still have one son at home to beetle around slavishly after, I have a respectable three bed semi with very nice, very clean, very
desirable
new uPVC windows (my Dad’s contribution; he doesn’t like draughts), I have a job which earns money (if not intellectual satisfaction), and now I have the whole world wide web at my feet.
And I also have a communication from Daniel. Though not in response to the email I sent him, as it happens, but in the form of a postcard. Of Harrods Fish Counter. Harrods? Fish Counter? Dan?
Hi Mum.
Everything fine. Hope you’re all okay.
Bad
hangover today, as we went to the freshers ball last night. By the way, change of address. Best to email me on [email protected] (which is different from the address I gave you before. This is Jack’s. Less hassle.) Take care.
Dan.
I’m feeling tearful now, of course. And I’m concerned that feeling tearful will become my standard response to
any
communication from my firstborn (excluding requests for further money, which will trigger altogether different synapses). And who’s Jack? And what ball? I wish I didn’t have such in-depth first hand knowledge of boat races, fizz buzz and vomiting down drains.
I have my own mega-hangover in place anyway. So I can’t really send him a preachy cyber-missive, and must instead trust to the years of shaky but well intentioned parenting that got him thus far in the first place.
Despite Rose being the very best friend I have in the world, going to her and Matt’s leaving party was the very last thing I felt like doing. It was bad enough my son going off, without losing the entire Griffith family as well. I would either be sober and morose or drunk and maudlin - neither being particularly desirable attributes of the party-guest-about-town. I would have to be stern with myself, and then some.
I decided to set out on foot, telling myself I was walking because I needed to take myself in hand, exercise wise. That I was carrying a litre of Rioja, a hundredweight of cutlery and a Victoria sponge in a biscuit tin (and could therefore manage nothing more strenuous than a vertically restrained gentle meander) was not sufficiently disabling for me to abandon my pretence of energetic fervour.
But I was walking because I intended to drink.
And I was drinking because I was taking my father.