The point is, she tells me, that when you know it’s time to go, it’s already too late. The reason you know it’s time is because it’s too late.
‘Yes, I’ll get around to it,’ I tell her. ‘Actually, I was looking at one the other day …’
She looks up, interested. It is certainly more interesting than what I’ve cooked.
Sigrid met her husband in the normal way: he was the friend of a friend. First meeting, they talked across a table to each other, two singles at a table of couples. Didn’t really hit it off as Sigrid put it, but then we didn’t not hit it off either. Then they met alone a few times. Cinema, drink, dinner in a restaurant, then dine in for two, or DIF2 as it’s called on Twitter. And then? The same, but a little less. Then a little less of everything: time, tenderness, conversation, sex. Different TV programmes, different bedtimes. And then? The usual: a year of living together, a wedding, a child, two jobs, two medium-sized salaries and a house, not exactly where they wanted to live but close enough. The whole marriage was like that: its motto was basically but close enough. To start with.
And eventually the less usual, but not so unusual after all: the jealousy, the threats, the work-dos she was forced to miss, the kicked doors and the smashed plates; the freezing-out of friends and relatives, the monitoring of post, the confiscation of phone … Separation, divorce, and then a short and on his part lackadaisical fight for access to Marieke. First it was weekends, then every month, and now he has dropped away almost completely. With people like Simon, apathy and indifference become qualities.
‘You’ve been on a dating site?’ she asks.
‘Yes and no,’ I tell her.
‘That’s your answer to far too many questions,’ she says.
‘It’s for the case I’m working on—’
‘The girl in the binbag and the weird teacher?’ she replies, closing the door so Marieke can’t eavesdrop. But since Marieke is probably recording us, it is a pointless precaution. ‘I hope for your sake he’s guilty – for his, too – ’ she says, ‘because what they’ve done to him in the press is horrific.’
‘Yes – the girl, Zalie – she had a profile on Soulmates – like you. It’s still up – I thought we could monitor it, check if anyone was watching it. There’s bound to be the odd ghoul, but the picture isn’t such a likeness that you’d make the connection. She’s certainly still receiving the messages, the “likes” and the “chat requests” … I read through her profile, checked the messages, looked for anyone who wrote and said odd things – nothing. You might have been looked at by the same men – you know, local ogling.’
Sigrid finds that plausible: ‘Wouldn’t surprise me – people look for people close by, if what they want is a relationship. People close by feel more real somehow, though they aren’t any different from people far away—’
‘The thought that they might see the same shops or walk past the same park … sit on the same bus, turns them on, makes it feel more real,’ I tell her. ‘I’m assuming,’ I add, ‘there are ways in which normal sexual or attractional behaviour overlaps with perverted or stalking behaviour, aren’t there? I mean, the way you hang around in places someone might be just so you can see them and accidentally deliberately bump into them. Think of all those Hollywood romances based on the tenacious guy who won’t give up, stolidly waiting outside her house, her office, engineering the random bumping-into … it’s always guys, too, it’s all based on treating refusal, the word no, as some kind of soft negotiating position, so—’
‘Thanks for mansplaining men to me, Ander,’ Sigrid says: ‘Look … Let’s assume we’re talking about normal people here: if all people want is sex, they might be willing to travel as a one-off. Anyway, they’d be on different sites for that nowadays. They’d be swiping them left or right, not poring over their profiles to see if they both like jazz or Cajun cooking or French philosophy.’
‘So what did you do? The site told you you’d been looked at, and who by, right?’
‘Right – you can see who’s looked at you, and when they last checked you out. Even if they don’t message you, you can tell you’re being looked at. Checked out. I’d go through the people who looked at me, and most of the time I wasn’t interested. Didn’t even click on their profiles.’
‘But if she’d wanted, she’d have been able to keep track of who looked at her even if they didn’t leave messages.’
‘Yes – so what?’
‘I don’t know, it might be important – she was looked at by hundreds of people, but hadn’t opened half the messages she got – three-quarters of them.’
‘Women get hundreds a week; men don’t, that’s why. It’s a ratio thing: men outnumber women on dating sites by about five to one, so it’s part of how they keep their customers interested, how they keep them paying – you’re more likely to stay on and not cancel your direct debit if there’s someone who’s looked at your profile. Some of the sites have fake women, kind of like avatars, swooping down on the blokes no one looks at, just to keep them on another month, another year, topping them up with enough hope to keep that direct debit going. That’s what I’ve read anyway. But as I said – it’s different for women. I haven’t looked at most of my messages, my likes and my hearts and my bunches of electronic flowers. I barely read past the first line most of the time.’
‘Why not?’ I feel there’s something here, I’m not sure what and I can’t explain it and I wish Gary was here because he’d turn it into something solid: that more people knew Zalie than she was aware of? Than we are aware of? I use the word knew in a cyber-sense, because we’ve only been looking at real people in physical proximity: neighbours, colleagues, friends, pub-mates and open-plan-office acquaintances. I even thought about someone who might have been one telescope away – a voyeur across the square or the playing fields. But no sign of that. What about the other kind of voyeur? I’ll phone Gary and ask him to check her Twitter account, any online chatrooms or forums she was on … any virtual places she might have been seen and heard in ways we haven’t yet clocked but which maybe she was conscious of.
Sigrid is still talking: ‘… you can usually tell immediately anyway: the guy’s too old, too young, has a picture of his dick instead of his face … Or he can’t spell, offers you a night of pleasure in the Travelodge, asks for hot three-way action or wants your mobile number straight away … Or slags off his wife, his ex, the child-support agency … That stuff tends to happen on the first date, not in the so-called chat. The courtship period as they call it on the over-fifties dating sites.’
‘It’s like getting a bad feeling about someone in real life, just online? The same signs … obsessive, nosy, threatening, insecure, bad history?’ I ask.
‘I guess so – but without the comeback. You can block them or ignore them, and, anyway, they send out reams of these messages, so they probably forget themselves who they’ve written to. Remember the ratio stuff: to have half a chance of even getting a reply, these guys have to send out dozens and dozens of messages. It’s completely safe – no personal info, unless you’re stupid enough to give an address or a workplace or a name – I don’t even use my first name.’
‘Well, Zalie didn’t contact anyone. She’d got hundreds of messages and didn’t even read most of them. Didn’t answer a single one.’
‘That’s normal – she either found someone and forgot all about it, or took one look at them all rolling into her inbox and changed her mind. I did the same – joined up two years ago, then just couldn’t face it. Made me feel a bit sick, actually – not the people, they were mostly okay, it was just all that need and loneliness, and all that hope, too. Mostly that, to be honest: the hope. My own included. Then I started again when I had a better sense of what I wanted.’
‘Which was?’
‘What I wanted from myself, I mean – what I expected from myself, rather than just expecting it from someone else, from some hypothetical other person who’d come in and make it all good.’
‘And
what was that? That you expected from yourself, I mean.’
‘Company first, just that – I’ve got a decent job, a child … I own my own home, some of it anyway, live in a nice city and have lots of friends. That’s already a life. I started from that. First time around, after Simon, I wanted … thought I wanted … another partner, husband, whatever. I couldn’t imagine a life I didn’t share with a man.’
‘And that’s changed?’ I ask.
‘Yes – I don’t expect anyone else to do for me what I can’t do for myself. That’s the difference between me now and me after Simon and the shitty life he gave me. With that cleared up, I’m okay with dating sites: I’ve got half an eye open for someone I might fall for, but I’m also interested in just meeting people I don’t work with.’
‘So why was Zalie on the site in the first place?’ I ask. ‘What did she want from it?’
‘You’re assuming she was lonely or frustrated or couldn’t find a real person in the normal world, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not assuming anything at all … Well, maybe a bit. I’ve always assumed that we start out wanting to be loved and by the end we’ll settle for just being known. But maybe that’s just me. We know she had a boyfriend – met him a few weeks after joining that site, actually – so she didn’t even really use it except to look at once in a while. She looked at a couple of profiles, but sent no messages. Basically, she joined up, met someone in her real life, then never got around to cancelling. Or let the subscription run itself out.’
‘Real life – thanks a lot …’ says Sigrid. She looks at her watch, drinks some more wine. ‘Maybe she was curious.’
‘About what?’
‘All the other fish in the sea? The great online aquarium? Maybe she wanted to see if she knew anyone on there … I’ve spotted a couple of people I know on these things …’
‘I don’t get the sense she was curious. She had Tim, so there’d be no need to keep checking the site. I reckon she was happy and sorted and people who are happy and sorted – who love someone and are loved back – aren’t exactly mysterious, are they?’
‘Well, in that case you and I must be unfathomable enigmas …’
‘And yet we’re not.’
‘No.’
Dating
On Zalie’s Soulmates account, they’re still viewing the corpse. Sure, she’s dead, she’d probably be the first to admit it, but onscreen she’s looking good. Some might say never better, because she’s attracting fans from all over the country. Most of them know she’s a corpse, and they’ll be going to her Instagram page for the same reason they’re checking her swelling Facebook friend-request list and the shoals of new Twitter followers she’s attracted since she died: for a hit of her mortality, to be close to the story, part of the action. How do you follow a dead person? Where do you follow them to?
They can’t leave her alone. It’s not the dead who haunt the living, it’s the living who haunt the dead.
If there are worms devouring corpses in the cyberworld, these people are the worms. In the old poems Mr Wolphram used to teach us, there’d always be some poet threat-seducing his lady with flowery language about how she’d be dead soon, so she’d better sleep with him. Ideally right now – as soon as this poem’s over, was his gist, but you can start taking your clothes off in the last verse. He’d paint word-pictures of the worms burrowing into her white flesh, eating her eyes and blacking out their suns, chewing off her lips. It was the worms’ job to represent all those abstract things – Time and decay and forgetting – that we were supposed to fight so valiantly as we seized the day. As we squeezed the day. ‘The grave’s a fine and private place’, I remember learning, ‘But none, I think, do there embrace’. What would that poet be writing now? Would he be Facebooking his carpe diems? Leaving them on dating sites like landmines for women to click on and trigger? Seize the day: it means what it always meant, even back then, when the sexual menace was at least creatively worded: seize my day, seize me.
Every form of life dies in its own way, calls forth its own decay. This is ours: a profile on a website, a face made of pixels, and a click-bait swarm of views as Zalie decomposes beneath a gravestone icon decked with emoji-wreaths.
Her being biologically dead (one day we’ll actually have to say biologically to make it clear what sort of dead we mean – there’ll be such a range of options) seems almost beside the point. Until you remember that her parents, her sister and brother, and her boyfriend, Tim, are in agony out there in the real world, what’s left of it. They are in such pain it’s as if they have no skin on their flesh and the world is made of salt. They’ve been flayed by the horror of it, and by the press, and by the statements and the briefings they have to give to prurient interviewers and politicians with made-to-measure sympathy-tweets.
Tim: who we suspected at first, according to convention, but who was across the Channel and is now broken and alone, ashamed among the flashbulbs and the headlines, helpless as his friends sell pictures of him to the papers: smiling at New Year in Edinburgh, backpacking in Greece, cuddling Zalie on the suspension bridge. That’s the one the newspapers like best. Whoever sold it must have made a packet of cash: Zalie is a head shorter than Tim, so her face is at the centre of the picture. The contrast between her big, rainwater-grey eyes that turn down a little at the edges, giving her a sadness she doesn’t have but just wears lightly as a perfume, and her wide happy smile, is beautiful. I can’t stop looking at it, it’s so lovely and almost painful to see. She is completely in the picture: not looking outside or beyond the moment. She inhabits it totally. Tim does, too. No wonder he’s beaming – his face is less complicated, has no contrasts like hers, but he is happy and whole because for that deep, bottomless instant everything they want is aligned with what they have, which is each other and which is endless, and which is now: the two of them, there and then on the bridge with the water spreading out below.
You want to reach into the picture and pull out whatever it is – some of the air they breathed, a handful of the light – and sprinkle it over your own life.
Tim knows each of the people who snapped the photographs and sold them to the shitty newspapers. He hates them, doesn’t answer their calls, deletes their emails and messages. Maybe some of them feel genuinely bad, maybe some just want more access to him for more cash: ‘a close friend reports …’, ‘a member of Tim Marchant’s inner circle said …’, ‘childhood friend of murdered girl’s boyfriend spoke exclusively to us …’
They are three, four, five rings out. They want to be part of the story, they want to be the ripples from the dropped stone.
Tim is ashamed when he’s with Zalie’s parents, because he knows that he is young, and that he must move on, find someone else and leave this place; that his future days will look like a betrayal of the girl he loved. He already knows this; even in the thick of his sorrow, he knows – he and Zalie’s parents are in it together, but only up to a point. They have no choice, they are on a train called grief and it won’t stop. And why would they want it to? But he must. Somewhere up ahead he will tell them: ‘This is my stop,’ and he will get off.
He will dread it and want it, too, the falling away.
Gary is sieving the Soulmates messages. ‘Sorting the chaff from the … er … chaff.’ Anything obviously generic he puts aside. Anything that looks individual, or tailored to giving or receiving personal information, he reads through. In the three days since we last checked, there have already been another ninety-eight messages.
‘I thought I was bad with words. Then I read these guys,’ he says, ‘compared with them I’m Noël Coward.’
There they all are: the needy, the seedy, the passive-aggressive; the cerebral and the dick-led, the lonely hearts and their collectors. And the normal – the ordinary people, like Zalie, like me, like Sigrid, Gary, Deskfish and Small-Screen, like Tim and like Zalie’s parents, like Jack with his broken herat …
Two hours later, nothing. ‘If there’s something there, Prof,
I can’t find it. I also checked out the blokes who’d just looked at her – you know, clicked on the profile, viewed it, then went off to leer at someone else or buy more tissues. I just scanned them – it’d take hours to look at them individually. Nothing.’
‘What are we actually looking for though, Gary? That’s what I’m losing sight of: if someone looked her up and took a homicidal fancy to her, they’d still be unable to find her. There’s no information that’d help them even find the city she lived in, let alone where in that city she lived. They could guess obviously, but Kent’s a big place. And why her rather than anyone else?’
Gary sits back and shakes his head. He runs the tip of the pocket clip of his pen lid across his teeth, then swabs off the white gunge on his fingertip and rolls it to nothing between finger and thumb. Sometimes he smells it first, and the smell seems to reassure him of something. By this time, everyone has turned green or left the room. I am inured to it, which sounds like an advantage until one considers what it reveals about me. Maybe it helps Gary to think, because he is fearsomely focused right now. ‘We keep getting close and then walking past it, Prof. Let’s go back, right back to when she joined the site.’
‘That’s a year before she was killed, Gary – we’re talking thousands of these messages.’
‘Okay, point taken. Let’s go forward instead – if there’s anything to be found, it’ll be around the time she was looking up information about stalkers – voyeurs or whatever, the one-handed binocularists … The moment she started to feel watched … Check her activity on the dating site against that.’
‘What am I looking for?’ I ask. Gary’s got the momentum again. I like the way he doesn’t enjoy the inversion of the hierarchy, the way he’s too engrossed in doing the job to play for power with me.
Throw Me to the Wolves Page 25
