Isolation

by Jenni Regan

  Fingers crossed, my old rustbucket cost me an arm and a leg last time I went! LOL

  In my head, Tania drove an old clapped-out Ford with a leopard-print steering wheel and some kind of funny sticker in the back window—something I would never be seen dead in, of course.

  I could see that Rachel was online, and I almost held my breath while the minutes ticked away, but it was all worth it when I finally saw her reaction. It was only a simple like, but nonetheless, she had noticed me—well, this version of me.

  Rachel was thirty-nine, lived in London, had two young kids and had a boyfriend named Dave. She worked as a teaching assistant and often moaned about her job. Rachel spent a lot of time playing games involving digital prizes on Facebook, which was what Rachel and Tania had bonded over despite living worlds apart. Tania had given Rachel a precious frog for her game, and the two had quickly become online buddies.

  Rachel was also my mother.

  I had come up with Tania a few months before when I was reading a story about women paid to be people’s online girlfriends. This could have been an interesting sideline for me, considering the amount of time I spent with my head in my iPad, but it was what it had sparked in me that was of real interest.

  No matter how much my gran had tried to look after me, I had always been curious about my mum—a case of wanting what I couldn't have, I guess. Knowing all contact was banned from either side in real life, the idea of Tania took shape. It was a way to find out all about my mum without upsetting anyone. There had been a few false starts—after all, Rachel had changed her name—and I must admit I had expected to find a monster. My mother had become an evil, dark being in my mind over the years. The vision was fuelled by comments from my gran and half-remembered truths. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised when I'd finally come across the pretty and friendly Rachel. She made me laugh and was a confident and encouraging online presence.

  Rachel had two girls aged nine and seven who were obviously the apple of her eye. I sometimes found myself feeling jealous when I saw the new outfits she gave to them or read about their latest scrape, but before going into a downward spiral full of resentment, I would remind myself that these were actually my sisters. Instead of feeling bitter, I would be the big sister by liking every time Rachel posted a family snap. In my lower moments, I would dream about revealing all, hoping for a family reunion where Rachel could proudly boast about my every move, but I knew this would hurt my gran too much. Somehow having access to all their family information made me feel closer to them, and I would content myself with pretending I was the cool older sister and dream daughter.

  The fact that Rachel had a new family made me think it was me that was the problem, not her. I had always been told that she had been estranged from me and the rest of the family because she had done some really awful things and was unable to look after me, but when looking at her picture-perfect life now, this didn't appear to be the case. She seemed like a pretty good mum. But I guess I know as much as anyone that a family can look perfect on the outside but corrupt to the bone on the inside.

  I was looking through some new pictures that Rachel had posted of a family day out when I noticed my stomach was rumbling. My little inbuilt body clock was telling me it was time for elevenses, another of my gran’s little routines I had taken on. I loved the whole routine: filling up the teapot to the line, pouring the milk into the jug with a slight chip in the lip and above all putting all the biscuits on the plate. It always had to be the best cup and saucers. Mugs were for builders.

  Stan

  4 November 2018, 11.05 a.m.

  Well, that’s the last time I ask anyone for help, thought Stan as he slammed the phone down. Why had that weird American guy given him his details if he was then just going to shout at him? Maybe he was having a bad day. After the last set of questioning, Stan had decided that he needed a lawyer. He also needed his mum but wasn’t sure if he would get laughed out of the station if he asked for her.

  After about half an hour, he was led from his cell into the horrible questioning room where they were joined by a worried-looking young man in a cheap, shiny suit. Stan nearly swore when the young man introduced himself as the duty solicitor. He didn’t look old enough to buy beer let alone save Stan from prison.

  ‘So, Stan,’ the questioning officer said once they were all seated, ‘you were telling us about your relationship with Ms Carmichael. Can you give us a few more details like how and when you met?’

  Stan couldn’t work out who they were talking about for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean that girl Alice? I wouldn’t really call it a relationship. She booty called me once. But we had got friendly before we met.’

  ‘So, you travelled all the way down from your home in Brixton to see her in Dorset? Are we supposed to believe you did this because she had promised you sex? Surely there are easier ways of getting laid.’

  Stan privately agreed with him, especially now, but he didn't want to appear uncaring. ‘I guess she is a special girl, so I went the extra mile.’

  ‘So you drove down there and had sex with her. Can you tell us how you then ended up with this stolen bank card? For the purposes of the tape, I am now showing the CCTV inside the Natwest branch in Dorchester Town Centre that appears to show Mr Crane.’

  Stan was surprised to see how nervous he looked on the screen as he shuffled into view, head down, eyes darting nervously around. He stuck out like a sore thumb. Jeez, he would have arrested himself!

  ‘That’s easy; I was doing her a favour. Alice asked me to go into the bank and move money around for her.’

  ‘Why didn’t she go herself? After all, she had only just met you. Don’t you think it’s strange that she handed over the card to you?’

  ‘Yeah, of course it’s strange, but then the whole situation was strange. She gave me some sob story about not feeling well.’

  ‘So, the bank has uncovered a clearly forged document giving you the power to act on Ms Carmichael’s behalf. Sadly, a lot of these rural branches tend to trust people.’

  ‘Alice gave me that,’ Stan quickly said.

  The officer looked at him in total disbelief. ‘OK, so if she handed it over to you, I’m guessing you went straight back after visiting the bank and gave it to her, right?’

  They had him. Up to that point, everything he had said was true to some degree, but this was the sticking point in his plan.

  ‘Well, no, I was called back to London in an emergency.’

  ‘Right, so I guess you posted the card back or went down to hand it back a few days later?’

  This was giving Stan a great get out.

  ‘Yep, I sent it but forgot to do that special delivery thing. You know my generation; we don’t know what those post-box things are for.’ He looked at the mute teenager to his left who was supposed to be offering legal advice but who had been sitting on his iPhone for most of the interview.

  The young man looked up from his phone and said, ‘You can always say “No comment” to whatever they ask you.’ His suggestion was a bit too little too late.

  The officer continued with a sly smile on his face. ‘Right, Mr Crane, so why is it we have various CCTV shots of you taking money out of cash machines using this card? All in all, we have worked out that you stole nearly fifty thousand pounds. That is a considerable amount of money.’

  Even Stan was shocked; he thought it was just a few quid here and there. ‘No comment,’ he replied, finally exercising his right to remain silent, seeing as his powers of persuasion hadn’t got him anywhere.

  ‘So we are playing it that way, are we? Well, it doesn’t really matter. We have more than enough to charge you with fraud and theft. The only other issue is to work out why this Alice girl didn’t report you. In fact, at this point, we haven't been able to locate Alice.’

  Stan looked at his lawyer for some reassuring words but saw him once again looking intently at his phone, probably checking Twitter. Stan sat back in his chair and cursed the day he had ever set eyes o
n Alice.

  Alice

  Alice was always so busy that she didn’t know where all the hours in the day went. You could see on her profiles what she was up to. Her Insta was mainly for showing off the beautiful views of her travels in her dream job as an airhostess. Facebook was for sharing gossip and maintaining friendships whereas Twitter was a bit more serious. She was not one for news or even politics, but she did like to keep up to date with what was going on in the world, particularly when it came to celebrities!

  Alice loved the freedom the online world gave her and how she could curate the life she shared with the world. After all, everyone did it, right? Social media was more like scripted drama than documentary. If everyone showed what was really happening in their lives, it would all be so depressing. This way she found out about news almost instantly, she knew what the issues were in the world and she could find out what she should be supporting and who she should be voting for.

  It was also a welcome distraction. Alice had no chance to dwell on the past; after all, it was all about the here and now. As well as sharing her life, she loved a good inspirational quote and knew that others strived to have a life as full as Alice’s.

  Thankfully her phone and iPad were always there for her. Even when the darkness threatened to creep back into her mind and overshadow her perfect life, she could just cast it aside by immersing herself in her online world.

  Rachel

  4 November 2018, 11 a.m.

  Rachel was well aware by now of the truth of the saying, ‘A watched kettle never boils.’ She and Tom had been looking at Tom’s phone for what felt like hours, hoping for an update. It didn’t really make any difference where they were, but they felt unable to leave their hotel room. Rachel had also spent ages looking at Alice's online presence—all the silly things she had posted about lovers, nice holidays and her love of crap TV, just like her mum.

  It felt like this was a chance to see what her daughter had become, and she was thrilled with what she saw. She had been so tempted to look Alice up online a number of times, but she knew it wasn’t fair on the girl. After all, she guessed that Alice had been fed years of lies about her from her mother who had made it quite clear what would happen if Rachel ever showed her face again.

  Rachel glanced up at Tom as soon as the phone rang, expecting to hear an update from the police. Tom snatched it up on the second ring. She could see him looking puzzled and then asking a few questions. He already had a pen and notepad out, and she could see him scribbling down a few notes. She tried to read them, but they were illegible. Then his face changed completely, twisting in anger.

  ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ he shouted into the phone.

  ‘Oh, yes, that is hilarious. You want me to help a lowlife scum like you? Wow, they say the world is a small place, but this really takes the biscuit.’

  Tom went on to shout more abuse into the phone, but whoever was on the other end hung up.

  ‘Ex-partner or ex-client?’ Rachel asked in bewilderment. She was even more disturbed when Tom started laughing. It almost sounded like he was crying at first but soon he was practically hysterical.

  ‘You will never guess who that was,’ he said between the hysteria. ‘Remember my good-Samaritan act outside the kebab shop the other night?’

  Rachel nodded, although her memories of that night were a little fuzzy and tinged with sadness.

  ‘The guy that I helped was calling asking for my help.’

  ‘But you gave him your card and told him to get in touch. I don’t understand.’

  ‘He has been arrested. For fraud, burglary and possibly even far worse—all against a Ms Alice Carmichael!’

  As the two tried to digest the news, Rachel led them both out to a local pub. This one definitely wasn’t a gastropub, and she stuck with beer. She knew that she had been drinking more than usual lately. Her drinking was normally under control these days, but this was a difficult time, and no one could blame her for letting her hair down. She knew she would have to get back to looking after herself better when she got home, particularly knowing what she now knew. It wasn’t like she would end up in a crack house after a week on wine.

  Tom was now filling her in on the conversation that had taken place. ‘I mean, he was terribly polite, saying he was sorry for bothering me, but he said they had suggested a lawyer. He told me it was some crazy girl he only met once, and when I wrote down who the charges involved and what had allegedly happened, boom, he named her.’

  Tom had already begun his online search to find out all they could about this Stan bloke. They were pleased that the police were taking this seriously but felt they couldn’t sit idly by and wait for a lengthy investigation. The social media profiles threw up the usual: London boy obsessed with his car, smoking grass and pussy, in that order. Looking at his thousands of friends, they finally came across Alice’s profile.

  ‘That just means they knew each other, not that she was involved with him,’ Rachel said quickly, trying to make herself feel better more so than appeasing Tom.

  There was little that was interesting apart from when they clicked on the About section, which told them he was educated at the ‘school of life,’ he was a former worker at ‘your mum’s pussy’ but most interestingly he was director of bbxfilms.com.

  ‘Didn’t have him down as a creative media type,’ said Tom, clicking on the link.

  Suddenly his laptop screen was full of pop-ups and red flashing messages. Rachel shouted at him to turn it off in case it was infecting his computer, but Tom knew what this was. His tastes were much classier than this stuff, but he knew what a porn site looked like. Tom clicked to prove he was over eighteen and got rid of the other annoying pop-ups trying to entice him in.

  Rachel had never seen this kind of stuff before. She had obviously seen porn—in fact, her ex-husband had been quite into them watching it together—but that had been ordinary porn, where an ugly man hit on a gorgeous woman with some kind of weak storyline and the odd lesbian sex thrown in. This was a whole different world. The site was for people with deviant tastes. She could see from the screen grabs and descriptions that these women had been penetrated in every way possible. The shots also looked like they were bad quality, likely shot with a handheld phone in poor lighting rather than in a nice, lit studio.

  Suddenly something caught Rachel’s eye. In the main picture, which represented the film rated number one by all the hungry viewers, were some curtains. Rachel knew those curtains because they were the same curtains that had been hanging in her bedroom when she was a child—the room she had hoped she would never lay eyes on again.

  Stan

  4 November 2018, 10 a.m.

  For once, Stan’s charm was getting him nowhere. He had pumped hard at the gym and drove home on a high, and then that high had been completely ruined. The police had been waiting for him when he had walked through his front door; his mother was sitting in the kitchen with them. She looked broken, and he wanted to run over and hug her. He wasn’t sure exactly why they were there, but he assured her he would sort everything out and went with them willingly. He felt a bit like a gangster in a movie as he sped through the streets in the back of a police car.

  When they arrived at the station, the two officers who had brought him in led him through to the scummy interview room, which had no windows and a stained carpet. He accepted a cup of plastic-tasting tea. Although Stan had always brushed with criminality and had been stopped in his car many times, he had never been questioned in a police station before. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but this scared him.

  He was hoping that the hot female officer who had been at the reception desk would be interviewing him. She couldn’t hide her tight little body and sexy mouth behind that drab uniform, and he gave her his most intense look that told her exactly what he wanted to do to her.

  His fantasy about her and handcuffs was cut short when a man and a woman without uniforms followed him in. The one behind the counter would have been putty in his
hands, but these two looked like they wanted to tell him off, and they were more his parents’ age.

  The older officer started the interview. It seemed like he carried his world-weariness on his shoulders and was probably counting down to the day when he would retire.

  ‘So, Mr Crane, do you know why we have asked you in for a chat today?’

  ‘No idea, mate. Although I do usually get stopped for being a young black guy in a nice car.’ Stan felt uncomfortable using the race card seeing as the woman was much darker than him, but maybe it would bond them.

  The young woman spoke, and all hopes of solidarity flew out of the window. ‘Funnily enough, this does all relate to the stop and search that took place in Deptford High Street last week. I know that method gets a lot of criticism, but sometimes it throws up the odd treat for us!’

  Stan stayed quiet.

  ‘So, after we pulled you over, we did some routine checks. We found nothing wrong until you popped up again yesterday in connection with a robbery, fraud and potential murder case.’ The cop held up a picture and described it for the tape.

  Stan sighed as he realised why he was here. It wasn't for dealing weed or selling a few knock-off items. They had finally caught up with him. The picture was of Alice.

  Alice

  There were times when I was caught between sleep and wakefulness and my brain didn’t get a chance to block the dark thoughts.

  It would always start with the smell. It’s amazing how memories have a smell, like a rogue piece of food that had escaped in the oven and burned to a crisp or the metal taste of the dentist trying to save teeth from destruction.

  This was what I smelt whenever my brain forced me to re-live the disaster.

  When I had opened my eyes, it was dark. It must have only been a matter of seconds that I had been away from the room. I don't know if I had passed out or if my body had forced my window to the world to shut, perhaps to save me from the horror.