Dear Beneficiary (2 page)

‘Do you know her email address, then?' asked Tom.

Not to be thrown by tricky technological questions I took a wild guess. Spinning around from the PC, I said that of course I did.

‘It's Marjory Fuller,
at
something.' I felt a bit silly at that point, as it dawned on me there was probably more to this internet lark than I'd first thought, but I wasn't going to be deterred. I'd every intention of mastering new methods of communication. However, a few diversionary tactics don't go amiss when caught out not knowing one's stuff. I also recalled Darius's business card and the various contact details but didn't think it wise to present it at this point.

‘Right. Time for a cup of tea and one of my best cakes,' I said, making a hasty exit on a mission to the kitchen. On the way down the stairs I stopped to look at my reflection in the mirror on the landing and thought I could see some distinct ageing.

I wondered what Darius would see. A slight sagginess to the otherwise rounded and highly placed cheekbones, a few extra lines around the mouth and crow's feet? Or laughter lines, as my mother would call them; even though laughing wasn't a natural activity for anyone in our family.

No
I thought.
The light isn't good and you had a bracing but windy walk to the library which is enough to make anyone look a little haggard
.

I hoped Marjory hadn't fared any better on the physical front, particularly as she always had a tendency for overindulgence and laziness. She wouldn't bother with the ‘cleanse, tone and moisturise' routine like I have, and has always had little resistance to pies, chocolate and second helpings.

I heard Tom hitting the keys on the computer keyboard with a dexterity known only to the latest generation. Not touch-typing, just a complete knowledge of where to go and what to do. I turned back to look at him and wondered how he could have such certainty about something at such a young age. It seemed like only a few weeks ago I was teaching him how to spell his own name, and that took some time.

He plodded down the stairs after a few minutes, his jeans far too long and stained at the bottom where he had trodden them into a variety of puddles and pavements over the last winter. He was no slave to fashion. Even his hoodies came from British Home Stores.

He gave me a hug before he walked into the kitchen. My gaze followed him, stopping momentarily to note the hall which, I thought, was looking a little austere with its lime green walls and wooden floor. From the back Tom looked like one of those stuffed bears you see in the fairground; all snuggly and round, with hunched shoulders and a general slackness, which in Tom's case was developed from spending his formative years hunched over computers.

I'd never had any problem developing a relationship with Tom. Where others in the family would see me as some silly old woman, he was always affectionate and warm. He says he finds me funny, and when describing me to his friend at school called me ‘cool', which wasn't a word I expected to be assigned to me. I smiled, thinking what his description would be for an old lady lost in romantic notions about a man who couldn't possibly be mistaken for her son on account of his colour.

‘You be careful now you're online,' he said, warning me of the possible dangers of what he referred to as ‘surfing'.

I made him laugh by not knowing what he was talking about and he suggested it was quite understandable I was a bit out of touch at my age, a comment I thought to be a little unnecessary.

‘How much trouble can I get into from my own spare bedroom?' I said, as I closed the front door behind him.

CHAPTER TWO

It didn't matter how long I stared at the computer screen, it didn't feel familiar. I'd been trying to work it all out for three days, one of which was mainly spent finding the ‘on' button.

There seemed to be some emails, little headings in a list promising intrigue and communication, but even though I'd managed it the day before, I couldn't remember how to open them. I couldn't quite master the art of mouse control either. Even when I could get the pointer anywhere near a message the little arrow would move tantalisingly close to where I needed it to be and then run away to hide in the corner of my screen, shaking like a frightened mouse might.

After prodding at the keyboard a few times I decided I needed help, although it galled me to admit it. I looked on the wall for the Post-it note with Tom's mobile phone number scrawled in his spidery writing and found it stuck behind the desk. I couldn't reach it with my fingers, a ruler or the metal bit from underneath my bra. I tried to move the desk but Colin had thoughtfully screwed it to the wall after it had collapsed under the weight of his briefcase.

It might have been sturdier had he read the instructions and worked out why he had eleven screws and a metal bracket left over after self-assembly. Thankfully I remembered I'd written Tom's number in my address book.

Standing on my swivel chair, a legacy of my husband's decision to work two days a week from home, I reached up to the tattered book on a shelf above the desk. It contained many addresses, most of which I never used because the contacts were dead, superfluous or downright dull. The chair wobbled furiously and I had to hold on to the curtains for balance, pulling the last three hooks out as I did so, scattering a flurry of bits of paper to the floor.

‘Bugger,' I said out loud, smoothing down my skirt even though there was no one to see my undergarments.

I put my feet back into my comfortable shoes and, ignoring the mess I'd made, searched through the pages as I made my way down the stairs, somewhat gingerly as I could feel I'd pulled an otherwise unknown muscle somewhere near my upper thigh area. By the time I got to the hall I had to pause to rub the inside of my leg as it was throbbing from overexertion.

The last time it had felt that used was after Darius had decided to try the ‘erotic V' position from the Kama Sutra using the kitchen table, which I insisted was far too low for the purpose. The position demands certain acrobatic capabilities, and it soon became clear my yoga expertise wasn't sufficient for the task, which involved me sitting on the table edge while Darius stood in front, bending his legs so he was in the best ‘entering' position.

He had to bend a fair way down to accommodate the activity but persevered, despite obvious signs of strain. After I put my arms around his neck, then pulled first the right, then the left leg up onto his shoulders he was struggling. The next instruction was to lean back while he directed his thrust by holding on to my bottom. However, even his rugby-player thighs couldn't take our combined weight and we ended up in a heap on the floor with my legs somewhere near my ears – and not in a good way.

I picked up the phone and dialled the number recorded under ‘T' for Tom.

‘It's Nanny,' I said, once he'd finally answered. ‘I need you to come over and help me with that computer thing. It doesn't appear to be working.'

Tom was used to my calls. I often rang him two or three times a day and usually required him to undertake some kind of very minor technological task – like tell me how to work my DVD player or, more recently, how to get onto that Google thing. I needed mostly to look up the Hockley bridge club. Not necessarily to ensure any further invitations, but more out of a desire to ensure that irritating control freak, Mavis, put me on the email list. I wasn't going to let a woman with a stomach bigger than her bust exclude me from the club without a fight.

Shortly after Colin's death, Mavis, one of the founding members, had invited me to join the club, in a spirit of support and community piety. She was the wife of one of Colin's colleagues and we'd met regularly at dinner parties over the years. We'd socialised only as couples, as Mavis didn't really have the kind of personality I enjoyed. In fact I thought she was rather bossy, far too overweight and much too interested in the various symptoms of ageing to be the sort of companion I would choose.

She asked me once if I'd been overwhelmed by my husband's demise as she couldn't imagine life without her balding bore of a husband. She didn't call him a balding bore, as she thinks he's so attractive every single woman wants to steal him away from her, but that's what he is to most of us. Other than Mrs Hunt from Osprey Drive who, since her divorce, has been trying to coax him into private bridge lessons under the pretext of not being able to absorb the rules while playing at the club because of issues with her hearing aid.

Anyway, I may have appeared overwhelmed for a few months but I soon got back into the swing of things and had the bridge club in a far better order than she'd ever managed. Mavis didn't approve, though. She got mightily huffy about my organisation of the sandwich supplies and objected to the extra expenditure on proper butter rather than spread. I'd held back on the suggestion of ciabatta and dipping oil for the Saturday meetings for fear of bringing on a panic attack, of which Mavis has many.

I like to tackle the provision of sandwiches with a degree of order, whereas Mavis found my common-sense approach intimidating. She didn't actually use that word, as she had burst into tears last time we had a discussion about the catering, muttering something about not being able to cope any more.

Maybe that's why I don't get the emails. I could just see Mavis telling the committee that all communication would be electronic, despite knowing I didn't have a computer and clearly thinking that if I didn't like it, I could lump it.

Well, what they didn't know is lumping it wasn't an option. Not one to be beaten, I accepted that there was no choice but to enter into the world of technology and get myself online. Otherwise I could be missing out on a big, wide world.

CHAPTER THREE

Unlike some people, who really don't know how to get things done properly, Tom is always very helpful and gets me sorted out quickly. I get the impression he laughs at the fact I don't understand computers but then why would I? I was brought up with a pen and paper and the ability to make conversation rather than have mute discussions via an inappropriately small and inanimate piece of technology.

I do spoil him a bit. I know he comes to me for cash, cake and somewhere to go when his mother insists on making him wash, wash up or speak nicely to some passing stranger.

Tom arrived at my house within twenty minutes of my call requesting further help. He'd flipped the letterbox so it made a loud banging noise. He never used the doorbell because he didn't like the tune. We were supposed to be able to choose one of many, including a Christmas version, ‘
Ding Dong Merrily on High
', but Colin could never work out how to do that. We ended up with some tinny tune not dissimilar to those heard in shopping centre lifts, and it didn't help that ours also seemed to activate a few other bells in the immediate neighbourhood.

I answered the door, still rubbing my thigh from my earlier tumble from the twisty-turny chair that I always knew I didn't like.

‘Yo,' he said, glancing at me from underneath the peak of his Chelsea Football Club cap. He didn't support them but had found it on a bus.

‘I need you to help me sort out my messages. I can't get to them so don't know what they say,' I told him.

Tom had already started upstairs and so I followed him, giving my thigh another good rub on the way up. I was heading for a bruise, I could feel it.

He was soon settled in front of the computer, telling me he was glad of the excuse to leave home as Bobbie was about to launch into one of her tirades about the state of his room.

‘She's been getting on my case,' he explained, adding that his mother also claimed to be concerned about her discovery of a strange smell and three packets of cigarette papers.

I questioned it myself but Tom said he occasionally liked to have a herbal cigarette, and there was no point trying to explain to his mother that had he been at university instead of taking some time out he'd be smoking all day long with no one to tell him it was wrong. He told me he was beginning to regret choosing to take a gap year just so he could stay at home.

The idea was that he'd get a suitable work placement to help further his understanding of IT for when he took up his offer to study at Cambridge, but the economy collapsed just in time to render his enthusiasm pointless. Four hundred job applications later – which started off with him applying for desirable posts and ended up with him trying for anything to earn a minimum wage, or even no wage if the experience was suitable – and he'd more or less given up. He earned a bit here and there from some occasional gardening and maybe the odd bit of computer sorting for relatives but was otherwise unoccupied, facing at least another eight months before he could escape to what he described as ‘the boundless comforts of student life'. If living on beans in a room similar to that found in prisons is deemed as comfort it shows what a rotten time he thought he was having.

Looking at the screen once he got settled into the offending swivel chair, Tom opened up the mailbox and told me that there was nothing of any concern. I just needed to learn how to open the messages. I wrote on the back of my telephone bill the instructions Tom gave me and was relieved my technological incompetence hadn't caused any major problems.

On Tom's last visit he'd installed what he called a ‘spam' filter and closed down my first email address, after I'd tried to look up venues for swing dancing. Somehow I'd managed to get onto a ‘swingers' site' with the result some of the incoming messages I'd been able to read were not only unsolicited, but graphic and increasingly prolific. And there is no point being a swinger if you've no one to swing with.

Tom opened and filed all the new messages that had come in.

‘You can throw these ones away, Nan,' he said, referring to a few that were obviously meant for someone else.

‘Why are these people asking me if I want a bigger erection? Did they never do biology at school?'