Virtual Strangers (32 page)

And was gone.

Spookily reminiscent of my time down in Canterbury, Rose rang just as I was shovelling the last of my
brussels con lardons
into the swing bin.

‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ she demanded.

‘Out.’

‘Out where?’

‘Um, let me see. The RSPCA, the hospital, the dry cleaners and the twenty-four hour Tesco store.’

‘Why?’

‘Um, let me see. Cat, Dad, Minnie, dress, trainers. Not necessarily in that order. Oh, yes, and Burger King. For dinner.’

‘Busy.’

‘I should say! Actually, no. Just pathetic.’

‘In what way?’

‘In going out.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been out because of Adam’

‘Why because of Adam?’

‘Because of the book.’

‘What book?’

‘The book that Rhys is lending to me and that he’s given Adam to drop round to me. I can’t face him, Rose.’

‘Pah! Of course you can, you ninny. You just get Ben to answer the door and tell him you’re out.’

‘I can’t do that! I can’t have Ben colluding with low-life deceit!’

‘Hardly low-life deceit.’

‘It’s the thin end of the wedge, believe me.’

‘Oh, rubbish! D’you get my email?’

‘Not you as well.’

‘What?’

‘No, I didn’t get your email. I don’t do emails any more. I don’t do computing. I am returning to my natural state of technological indifference. In preparation for harmonising more fully with the Nepalese way of life.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘It’s not daft, Rose. It’s self preservation. And what’s with everyone these days? Why do people keep sending me emails all the time? God, I wish I’d never given out my email address. Davina will be emailing me next, asking for marriage guidance. Or my father, God love him, requisitioning socks.’

‘When’s he home?’

‘Thursday. Anyway, what was
your
email about?’

‘I think we’ll draw a veil over my email, Charlie. Doesn’t matter. Forget it. What are you going to wear for the do?’

Rats. Veil over what?

Eleven thirty seven.

Best friends are a bloody pain in the arse at times.

Take a firm line. I am
not
going to log on and read Rose’s email. Tomorrow perhaps. One day at a time.

Wednesday

Hmmm. Another worrisome Metro development. After work (two sales - Everest fund now truly amazing £1574.39; my broken heart is financially heart-warming, at least) drive to the hospital via the dry cleaners. And spot a familiar jag parked outside swish ‘Zone’ bar nearby. I peer in and spot Austin Metro at the counter, sporting mobile, cigar, and stupid Mexican beer. Think nothing of it (other than that Austin Metro is way too old and crabby to be swigging speciality lagers with scorpions in) until I see Hugh bloody Chatsworth is in there as well.
With
Austin. Laughing. Hmmm.

‘I think they’re in cahoots,’ I tell Dad at the hospital. ‘I think something’s going on. Something I don’t like the look of.’

‘Not liking the look of things never won any wars,’ he says obliquely.

‘And there’s the uniform business. It’s all rather disquieting.’

He taps his nose. ‘Intelligence. You need facts, Charlotte, facts. Now then,’ he adds, brandishing a Sainsbury’s carrier. ‘That Dr Jones friend of yours dropped this bag off.’

Dr Jones chap. Asthma clinic. Hospital. Wednesday. Sensible. Of course. Of course. Of course. All that fretting! What a silly billy!

I open the bag in privacy of my car, in the hospital car park. As well as a colossal lump of extreme disappointment in my throat, I find the book, as promised, plus toiletry items; mascara, coconut Chapstick and tweezers. Plus a small bag with a CD in it. From HMV Oxford Street. Tchaikovsky. Symphony number one; Winter Daydreams.

No note. No message. No nothing.

No need.

Thursday.

In a seriously dangerous frame of mind. And I am not unobserved.

‘Hugh?’

He starts. Looks shifty. Puts the phone down. Scowls.

‘Hugh, tell me something. Just what’s going on around here?’

He picks up a silage hued Willie JJ ballpoint. ‘Going on?’

‘You heard me. What exactly is going on around here?’

He clicks it. Click, click. Click, click. ‘What d’you mean - going on?’

‘I mean what’s going on between you and Austin Metro?’

He stops clicking. And blushes. A lovely carmine on khaki. ‘Nothing,’ he says.

‘Don’t lie.’ I walk around to the front of my desk and sit against the edge of it, arms folded. ‘I’ve seen you and Austin Metro out together. Twice. What’s it all about?’

He rallies a little. ‘None of your business,
frankly
. What I do in my private life is -’

‘I don’t give a stuff what you get up to in your private life, Hugh. I don’t care if you and Austin like to spend your evenings beating each other with damp loofahs,
frankly
, but this isn’t about your private life, is it? This is work.
You’
I point. ‘Are up to something with Austin Metro and
I
would like to know what it is.’

He is now puce under the glow, but is also an Estate Agent. Estate Agents are not noted for their meekness of temperament and lie down and die fear. He rustles up what I’m sure he presumes is an authoritative and threatening masculine presence. But he is nineteen and has nipple rings and Mr Men plasters. Doesn’t matter how much he poses. He cannot but fail.

‘Like I said,’ he says gruffly, ‘it’s none of your business. If I were you I’d just keep my head down and my mouth shut.’

‘Ah! the wheels of commerce on a go slow, are they?’ quips Davina, who has appeared, bearing cakes, looking jaunty again.

We exchange a silent three way conference appraisal. Hugh looks shifty, Davina looks curious/suspicious, and I sincerely hope Simpson looks suitably cool and unfazed.

Hmm, I think. Definite worrisome development. But what to do about it? Davina has enough on her plate without shifty goings on between Austin Metro and Hugh. Will buy the
Western Mail
and scour the job ads on the way home from work.

Evening.
About time.

‘The black dress, the green dress or the gold suit? What d’you think?’

My father, complete with bald patch, steri-strips and a whole new outlook on sucrose, is home from hospital and re-establishing territorial rights. There’s a sponge in the tin and a smell in the kitchen. Order and odour are, for the moment, restored.

‘The green dress,’ says Ben.

‘The black,’ says my father.

‘Oh, the suit,’ Hester says, pausing mid-loop in her crochet. ‘I’ve always said a well cut suit takes you anywhere. Besides, at your age, dear, you shouldn’t expose your upper arms.’

Which makes it the green, of course, as the black has sleeves. Even though I actually
was
going to opt for the suit, as I did not want to lead Rhys down any avenues of carnal expectation. I know it’s immature beyond belief to be attempting to score points off a well meaning, if irritating, pensioner, but I feel if I don’t have some outlet for feelings of a baser nature (and I’m definitely entitled to a few right now) I will quite possibly have to resort to saying fuck off you old bag. And given my rumbling suspicion that the Hester/Dad union is showing signs of encroaching even further on the household, I concede that screaming and profanity are not the best course of action, if family harmony is to be maintained at all times.

I am particularly keen to maintain family harmony. I’m now more than half way through
Trekking in Nepal
and finding it spiritually beneficial to ponder, as the book requests, questions of culture and morality. The Nepalese obviously benefit from their Himalayan lifestyle. Unlike me, they seem to have handle on life.

I am just considering the concept of mountaineering as metaphor, and how much concern one should feel regarding its vestiges of imperialism and so on, when the telephone rings. It is Dan.

‘Didn’t you get my email?’ he asks.

‘What email?’ I am, I realise, becoming repetitive.

‘The email I sent you on Tuesday, about this weekend.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, just to let you know I’ll be coming on my own, really.’

‘No Jack?’

‘No Jack.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, well. You know how it is.’

‘You’ve split up?’

‘Yes. So it’ll just be me. Thought I’d better -’

‘Did
she
-’

‘Mum, I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Oh. Right. Okay. Of course. Oh, but your skiing holiday!’

‘I know. Never mind. There’ll be others.’

‘But, oh, it’s such a shame! Couldn’t we - couldn’t you - I mean, can’t you rustle up a friend or something, and -’

‘Mum, no-one has any cash, me included.’

‘But I could give you some. Oh, you were so looking forward to it, Dan -’

‘Mum, it’s fine. Really.’

‘But are
you
all right -
really
?’

‘Mum, stop fussing.’

‘I’m sorry. I know. It’s just that....No. You’re quite right. You’re better off without her, in any case. There are plenty -’

‘Mum, don’t. Okay?’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Please don’t start on about fish.’

Bitch witch goggle eyed stroppy gruesome argumentative harpy from the brimstone and hell hole of Hades. How dare she! How
dare
she!

Wish I could go to London and bash the bitch to pulp.

Am just pondering the relative advantages of a cultural landscape that prohibits the free expression of maternal angst vis-a-vis filial distress perpetrated by goggle eyed bitches and so on, when the telephone rings,
again
. It is Matt. Matt! Of all people! Matt doesn’t
do
telephones.

‘Charlie, did you get my email?’ he says.

That’s it. Emails. Going to have to bite the bullet.

Can put off logging on just to read Rhys and Daniel’s. And as Rose mentioned veils, I am more than happy to oblige. But I cannot, in all conscience, given the grave tone of his whisper, ignore an email from the pathologically taciturn Matt.

Though I wish I could. Matt’s email reads,

Charlie,

I’m so sorry to bother you with this, but I’ve been a bit concerned about Rose just lately and I wondered if she’d said anything specific to you. I know I shouldn’t have even looked, but I came across an email she sent you recently and which rather worried me. I think she’s very depressed, but you know Rose, she won’t have it. Any thoughts?

I scroll down and click on the offending email, wondering what dire sentiments so needed a veil.

Rose’s email runs to two screenfuls and I can clearly see how, to the untutored eye, it may look like the work of a woman in a state. To an experienced Simpson, however, it’s a familiar missive; a garbled treatise on the psychology of life, love and shagging, with a smattering of sundry (and often unrelated) quotations, which she’s plucked from a book and typed in at random. All bog-standard stuff for the post-modern woman with an absentee husband and free rein at the wine.

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,
(she begins)

Whither love? Whither ?

All the seven deadly sins are self-destroying, morbid appetites, but in their early stages at least, lust and gluttony, avarice and sloth know some gratification, while anger and pride have power, even though that power eventually destroys itself. Envy is impotent, numbed with fear, never ceasing in its appetite, and it knows no gratification, but endless self torment. It has the ugliness of a trapped rat, which gnaws on its own foot in an effort to escape. Which isn’t strictly relevant, but has a certain penetrative gravity about it, wouldn’t you say? So! Think on!

Oh, and remember; Morality is what the majority there and then happen to like and immorality is what they dislike. Oh, and morality’s not practical. Morality’s a gesture. A complicated gesture learned from books. So stuff it, I say!
We’ve been here, have we not?!!

And so on and so forth. Then;

I’ve been thinking a lot. A very great deal. And I think sometimes, in life, you have to do the thing that your core being demands; be it grand gesture, or a simple acceptance of the vagaries of fate. Who are we to know what fate holds for us, Charlie? Who are we, but mere pawns on the chessboard of life?

And her an English teacher. But there’s more;

We all have our moment. We all have a time that is ours. And who is to say that we can’t seize that moment? Why should the petty dictates of our peers and our consciences rob us of the desire to achieve spiritual relief? You are a precious jewel in God’s creational necklace. Think on!

The ‘think on’ is a new slant. I recall vaguely that Rose may well have the dales somewhere back in her ancestry. And someone in the performing arts, given the tone.

Hmm. I’m not in the habit of feminist carping, but I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, a man without the benefit of a classical education is a man with insufficient tools to understand the female psyche.

But thank God she didn’t mention the name Phil.

After some minutes of reflection and consideration, I reply;

Matt, you big noodle! You have
nothing
to worry about. Least of all the state of your wife’s mental health. The email was simply her kind contribution to the solving of the problems in my own shambolic life. Oh, and the result of a not inconsiderable post-operative thirst. Fear not. Everything’s
fine
.

Dan’s email is short sharp and to point as always.

Hi Mum, just to let you know that Jack won’t be coming down with me for the weekend. Oh, and make a note of my new email address, will you? It’s the college one, but I check my pigeon hole most days.

Oh, my poor, poor baby. Wicked bitch goggle-eyed low-life cow.

I find myself taking stock of Rose’s grand gesture directive, and send an email back, saying;

My darling, darling Dan, can’t
wait
to see you. And, guess what? I’ve had a most brilliant idea! Will tell you all about it when you get home.

Oodles and oodles of lovexxxxx

Dump both ‘oodles’ and substitute singleton ‘lots’. Then add signature ‘Mum’, in case a censorship system is employed and Dan is considered someone who hangs out with morons.