Virtual Strangers (15 page)

I hit the ‘reply’ icon and stare at the blinking cursor. Then type,

[email protected]

Dear Adam,

Thank you
so
much. That’s really kind of you. I’m saving hard and of course I hadn’t . Why on
earth
would you imagine I’d forget? I just wasn’t sure if it appropriate to ask, that was all. (O
bviously
!)

I will call Dr Hazelton (Mr Hazelton?) as soon as I get a minute tomorrow (though not on Willie JJ time, of course..).

Thanks again. I’m beginning to feel quite excited about it all.

With very best wishes,

Charlie.

As soon as I press ‘send’, of course, I regret it. Very much.

I click ‘ok’ to ‘your email has been sent’ message, and spend a distracted five minutes staring at the screen saver (this week FS4BS4FS4BS4FS4BS4FS recurring) and experiencing specific regret over the italics in ‘why on
earth
would you imagine I’d forget?’. They could, and should, be construed as a reference to the fact that my trip is a big thing on the horizon at present, but could also, and might, be construed as a reference to the fact that thinking about Adam Jones is a big thing on the horizon (indeed, foreground) at present. As both are patently true, I must expect rogue construing all round. Also regret ‘(
Obviously!
)’, as confirmation that I understood the significance of griffith’s own ‘obviously’s; therefore my tacit agreement that our cyber relationship is something to feel guilty about in the first place. As the only thing I have to feel guilty about is the size of my phone bill (and evening emailing is cheap rate anyway) then my guilt (our tacitly agreed guilt)
must
be about our relationship situation, even if it is only a cyber-relationship situation. Oh,
God
.

Regret mainly that I discovered a charming, witty, attractive, loveable virtual stranger before discovering his identity was Adam Griffith Jones.

Monday evening.

I can’t help but wonder if a series of guilt ridden ‘obviously’s’ have been transmitted, osmosis fashion, into Davina’s psyche. She has behaved in an altogether un-Davina-like manner for most of morning. Though has to be said, un-Davina-like in all, not just Charlotte Simpson related matters.

For a start she has brought the wretched Ianthe in with her, and they’ve spent much of the morning re-arranging the desks. They’ve moved mine, for example, to the back of the office, where Chi energy will, so they tell me, give me ambition, direction,

financial success, and (my own interpretation) a bloody great draught up my back. They have also all over the place. Weird upon weird, and distinctly unsettling. What next? Much relieved when Ianthe pushed off.

And then a
highly
curious episode with Hugh in the staff room. This involved much muffled earnest-sounding conversation, plus scrapings and bangings of unidentifiable origin; if were not for my firm opinion re. Hugh’s sexual orientation, I would have concluded that Davina and Hugh were having sex over the side of the armchair. But I am becoming paranoid. I am living in a constant state of fight or flight arousal and am consequently overly sensitive. But I am at least losing weight.

And work, on the whole,
is
looking infinitely more bearable, as I have had not one but
three
requests for details of Cherry Ditchling, following its appearance in the Homes of Character slot in the local paper. Perhaps the Cherry Ditchling sale fatwa is now inexplicably lifted, and I will be able to make a vast commission and be in good books all round. Which is especially important as I have decided Hugh Chatsworth is making worrisome and somewhat unethical inroads into becoming the Willie JJ resident teacher’s pet. Will arrange viewings, if possible, at back to back half hourly intervals in order to whip up a feeding-frenzy of enthusiasm and competitive spirit. Perhaps there is something to Feng Shui after all.

Anyway, I’ve done it. I have arranged to meet the mountaineering gynaecologist, Rhys Hazelton, after work, in the hyper-trendy ‘Q’ bar in the centre of the city. And at his suggestion. He is obviously a hip, happening guy. Personally, I would never have considered the ‘Q’ bar as being the type of venue middle aged gynaecologists would frequent. (Would never consider it a place I’d frequent either, as it is almost exclusively the stamping ground of pre-pubescents with multiple piercings.)

But evidently I am wrong. The doorman greets him warmly. And he I.

‘Well, hell-o, Mrs Simpson!’

‘Charlie. Please.’

‘In
deed
!’ His note of celebration has heads turning already. Though they soon turn back upon realisation that I am neither famous nor youthful.

‘So, what’ll it be, Charlie? Better press on into the scrum, so to speak.’

Rhys Hazelton is a giant of a man. He has arms like legs of lamb and enormous brown hands with little blonde curls on the backs of the fingers. I cannot stop looking at them. I cannot help but remember that he’s probably spent much of today using them to ferret around between women’s legs and wave a speculum about.

He addresses his pint with one of them, once we’re seated. The fingers curl around it like a laboratory clamp. But he
is
rather handsome. He has tanned skin and pale hair and the sort of long limbed athleticism that probably passes for normal among cartoon superheroes. He is, in short, rugged. I can picture him wrestling a crocodile or lion.

‘Well,’ he says, ploughing his head of corn coloured commas with the other hand. ‘Isn’t this a turn up for the book?’ My questioning face has him shaking his head. He leans closer. ‘Adam neglected to tell me his intrepid friend was
fe
male, Charlie. It was only when you called that the penny dropped.’

‘Oh,’ I reply, and not wishing to invite any further speculation, add, ‘Charlie’s short for Charlotte, and...well...here I am.’

‘And on a quest, I understand, to head up a mountain sometime soon. Done much climbing?’

‘None,’ I say. ‘I have absolutely no mountaineering skills at all. I just have a big thing about rocks and mountains and plate tectonics and...well, I just want to, you know -
be
there. Actually see it for myself . Actually feel...’ I can feel my face growing warm. As always, laid bare like this, seeing Everest sounds such a twitty, half baked idea that I’m almost too embarrassed to talk about it. So I stop, and offer him a shrug instead.

But Rhys smiles and slides a little way along the bench seat towards me.

‘He’s right, then.’

‘Right?’

‘We
do
have a lot in common. The question of your sex notwithstanding, of course. Another drink? Or would you like to go on somewhere. Dinner?’

Oh.

11.45 pm

[email protected]

Well, hello, Griffith with a capital G griffith!

Just wanted to ring and thank you for putting me in touch with Rhys. We’ve had a super evening. I told him all about my plans for everest and he told me all aboutall the mountains etc.
and
other things he’s been up. And that I should help shore up nepal’s ecom=nomy by going in tea-houses a lot.. All very edifyimng. All very nice. It’s a shame he seems to thinki might like to go to bed with him at some stage andso on, but there you go. this is what happens, isn’t it, when you get to our age. Rucsh rush rush as my fathercwould say. Trouble is, I have real problems in that department. smilesmisconstruings etc. in actualy fact, he’s not
so
bad. Is rather good looking, if =n fact. if he lived locally (and Rose was still here, of course), we could discuss wht=ether he had sufficient qqq attributes to make him a contender for our shag lists (I know he’d be on Mjulia Potter’s qqqq, for sure). But I dodn’t have a shag list any more of course, for
obvious
reasons.
Do
I? been there, done that, and look where it got me.

In fact, speaking of obvious, what’s with all the obviouslys? kept reading that email and wondering what it was all about - what the hiddne agenda was there. if there was one of course, which there mightn’t have been By the way, did you notice how I can underline, bold and italicise all at once/ it’s really simple. you just click on all three of those bits at the top. \see? I’m not so information-technology-ology - challenged as you might think. or do think, I’;m sure. or whatever.

Anyweay, just wanted to say hello goodbye and so on. and goodbye mainly.

Charliexxxxxx

PS I’m seriously stressedenough as it is, because my
father has bought me a four
foot. horrible, horrible silver tinsel christmas tree made of tinsel.And it’s horrible. And it cost him ten pounds. How can I bear it? I can’t bear to put it in my lounge. But I feel really guilty, you know? mainly because ten pounds is a lot of money, but also becausewho am I to say that people who like four foot high silverTINsell christmas trees are any less tasteful than I am? And what is taste anyway?” Surely it’s about having what you like and bollocks to everyone else. In which case, now I think of it, why
shouldn’t
I want a great big lovely chrismas tree like I’ve always had. You know? Anye=way, i’m going to go to hell most probably unless I think of something else I can do with it and I should anyway because ten pounds would have bought him a heck of a lot of fruit and spices and other horrible smelly things and we must be grateful for that at leasmustn’t we? Going to bed now. Don’t email back because it’s much too stresssful.

Obviously.
Goodnight. C.xx

Friday.

I wake up with a curious, inexplicable feeling of anxiety. Have eaten two extra strength brufen and drunk three mugs of rehydrating tea before I realise that the curious feeling is actually not simply alcohol induced paranoia, but related to a dimly remembered drunken session at the computer late last night. Boot up, log on and scroll madly through the filing cabinet. Find last email sent and bring it up on screen. Then gaze in gut-wrenching, toe-curling horror upon the rambling, inane, manic, puerile, typographically challenged absolute
garbage
that I have spewed out and sent off down a land line to Adam. Oh no, and then some. Resolve that (as well as avoiding all human contact within Cefn Melin environs for rest of natural life) I must, in the fashion of a recovering alcoholic, not put myself in danger of an addictive relapse. As I take my shrivelled brain off to work, I decide I must take serious remedial action. Will buy a padlock for the study, and give dad the key.

And as if total humiliation were not enough, I cannot
believe
some people. No sooner had I returned to the (chiming, salty, be-mirrored etc.) office after an exhausting, emotionally draining morning of accompanied viewings of Cherry Ditchling than I had Mrs Rutland on the phone saying last straw blah, blah, blah etc., etc., as someone has brought dog poo in on their shoe and trod it over most of the house. Also that she was sick and tired of the whole business, very unimpressed with the level of interest generally, and that she was of the opinion that Willie JJ were not putting their backs into advertising, publicity and expediting the sale generally. Finished by informing me that Mr Rutland was of the opinion that if we didn’t pull our socks up forthwith he would be very tempted to tell Willie JJ to forget it and take his business to the more thrusting Metro instead.

Sod her.

As I was on my own in the office (Hugh - suspiciously - at the other branch dealing with - suspiciously again - typesetting and layout of a big Willie JJ ad campaign/editorial feature in
Homescene)
I spent an enjoyable few minutes shouting ‘bollocks, bollocks, bollocks to you’ at the telephone. Had an almost irresistible urge to call Mrs Rutland back and tell her that as the carpets in her house were the colour of dog poo anyway no one would notice, and that as the poo emanated from her own mangy dog and was never cleared away by its slut owner we could hardly be blamed for bits of it being squidged and brought into the house. And that if she was not so bloody insistent that we take everyone down to the far end of the garden in the middle of winter to appreciate the rustic (crappy) summer house built in eighteen forty-whatever by Mr Rutland’s crappy great-whatever - that nobody gives a toss about anyway - then she would not have a dog poo trauma in the first place.

Had an even greater urge to add that Mr Rutland was a dirty old git anyway, as whenever he had the chance of accompanying me on viewings he always made a big point of going ‘you first!’ up the stairs then hanging around at the bottom long enough to try to get an eyeful of backside etc., so the dirty dog poo problem served them both bloody right.

But I resisted. Bad vibes (rotten Chi?) seem to be wanging about the office in such abundance that I cannot move without risking getting lanced by one. In the back, most probably. Hmm. Am just debating a weapon of choice in a seventeenth century style misty duel at dawn scenario with Davina, when the phone rings again.

I pick up with a mixture of desperation and (as more often than not these days) fear, to hear a stressed social worker telling me Minnie’s friend Mr Williams died in the night unexpectedly, which as well as being a shock, obviously, is also a potential disaster, Minnie- wise, as he will not now be able to have her cat after all.

But, oh! Relief! Relief! Relief!

I am, thankfully, spared the role of malevolent harpie in the four foot silver tinsel Christmas tree debacle. I am liberated! I am able to embrace all those wonderful spirit-of-Christmas type feelings without a nasty stain on my character during the season of goodwill. Oh, (With all due respect to the soul of Mr Williams, of course) joy!

Had had an entirely unhelpful email from Dan detailing the exact reasons why I should not flap and fuss about the Christmas tree situation; mainly that as an intelligent, focussed, perfectly grown up person of thirty nine I should not feel stressed about telling my own father thank you very much but the Christmas tree arrangements are already in place. Chiefly because my father is, in Dan’s view, being thoughtless in the extreme; he has spent the last twenty years coming for Christmas and failing to notice that to his darling only daughter, having a seven foot, monster girthed etc. Christmas tree is of fairly profound importance.