The Strangers We Know

by Pip Drysdale

  The little texting bubbles started going so I waited for the next instalment.

  Beep: Oh good, an illiterate one. PS. I hate that fucking monkey.

  It was times like this when I was most grateful for Oliver. We’d completely bypassed those shitty first stages of dating: the indifferent text messages, the push–pull, the awkward what-are-we chats, the subtle decaying of each other’s self-esteem in preservation of our own. With ‘us’ it had always been simple.

  A little while later the pipes creaked again as the water was turned off and the whirr of Oliver’s electric toothbrush echoed off the red tiles of the bathroom. A flicker of that picture on the app: him wet and walking towards me from the hotel pool. I pushed the thought away. The whirring stopped and he emerged in his towel, the hair on his legs and chest sticking to him in dark streaks. ‘All yours,’ he said, his eyes smiling from behind waterlogged lashes.

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied, as my phone beeped again. I glanced down at the screen, smiling at Tess’s most recent message: I’m going to send back three knives, just to see what he does …

  I wrote back: xx

  ‘Who on earth are you texting so early?’ Oliver asked, watching me as he dried himself off. My mind moved once again to the night before. To the app and the picture, the accusation and the denial. I saw an opportunity to issue an itty-bitty test. Press a little button.

  ‘My other boyfriend,’ I said, putting down my phone.

  ‘Your other boyfriend,’ he said, lengthening out the syllables of boyfriend as he opened his underwear drawer and pulled on some boxer shorts. ‘Babe, look I don’t want to freak you out, but remember that day last August in Vegas? White dress? Ring? You know what that was, right?’

  ‘First communion?’ I asked, smiling at him as he opened the wardrobe. ‘Something like that.’ He pulled out a light pink shirt and held it up to his chest. ‘How do you feel about this one?’ he asked.

  ‘Good. Works with your eyes.’

  He laid it on the bed and started unbuttoning it. Oliver worked for a small private equity firm; it paid less than the big firms might have, but it also meant he skipped the pushing-paper-around-a-desk stage and went straight to international-due-diligence trips. It was a very grown-up job that meant he had to spend a lot of time in places like Brazil and Nigeria, negotiating directly with boards of companies they wanted to invest in. I sound like I knew exactly what he did, but I didn’t really: I’m just regurgitating what he’d told me. All I really knew was he earned good money, it was very serious, and every time he went away I was scared he’d never come back.

  ‘Argh, I should get up,’ I groaned, pulling back the covers and standing up. I was just in my t-shirt now; my underwear was on the floor somewhere. He wolf-whistled as I moved past him into the bathroom and turned on the taps. I peeled off my t-shirt and stepped inside.

  The smell of herbal shampoo filled the air and warm water cascaded over my face. I could hear Oliver in the other room, chatting to me, though I wasn’t sure what he was saying for the sound of water hitting tiles. I rinsed off my hair and quickly wrapped myself in a towel.

  ‘Are you saying something?’ I asked, popping my head out through the door. My hair was dripping wet and he was fully dressed now: the pink shirt we’d decided on together and grey suit pants. ‘I’m off,’ he said, leaning in for a kiss. His breath smelled like toothpaste and his hair was still damp.

  ‘Have a good day.’ I smiled at him, squeezing the water out of my hair with my towel, then slipping on my bathrobe. It was one of those white fluffy ones you get in hotels; Oliver had stolen it for me on one of his business trips. I could hear the front door click shut as he left and I picked up my phone and coffee cup and headed through to the living room. I sat down on the sofa and looked around me.

  There, straight in front of me, was a big bay window with mauve curtains that looked out onto the park. Against the left hand wall sat our vast dark wood bookcase, my Stanislavski, Meisner and Kundera mingled haphazardly with his Lee Child, Terry Hayes and Le Carré, like we never expected to have to separate them. In the middle of the room sat a big chocolate brown sofa, with a TV and ornamental fireplace on the opposite wall. Above that mantelpiece hung three polaroids set in resin and secured to the wall by nails Oliver had drilled in one Saturday evening while I drank gin, joking about them being crooked. They were from our wedding day: Vegas, last minute, a white boho seventies dress. A screenworthy love story in the making if ever there was one. And beneath those pictures sat Oliver’s big bronze Ganesha on full display. He was convinced that thing would bring us luck.

  Beside all that, stuffed into the corner because it was the only place for it in our tiny flat, stood a dressmaker’s mannequin I’d taken from the shop I worked in. It was a vintage clothing store in Notting Hill, just off Portobello Road. It gave me flexibility for my auditions, when I got them. That was where I was due to be at 10 am that day.

  My phone buzzed: another text from Tess.

  A screenshot of a penis this time.

  Typing bubbles then: WTF?????

  I wrote back: Haha. It’s not even 8 am! Then I clicked on my Instagram story. I wanted to see if Oliver had seen my post yet. Or Clarence. Or better yet, maybe my ex, Josh, had seen it. I’m not sure that it says anything good about me, but there had been a certain satisfaction in being the one to move on first from Josh, especially since he was the one who ended it. Like, by being loved by Oliver I could prove to the world (to myself) that it was Josh, not me, who had the problem. I know: petty. But being a human is complicated.

  I scrolled through the faces: friends from school, Tess, a couple of directors I’d worked with who’d added me, my mother, people from acting classes I’d taken over the years … I didn’t have that many followers (hence Clarence’s suggestion) and most of them didn’t bother watching my stories, so it didn’t take that long. Josh wasn’t there. Neither was Oliver. But there was one profile I didn’t recognise at all. Perhaps it was the name that drew my eye: @lover7.

  I frowned: I mean what was up with that handle, right?

  So I clicked on it.

  The profile picture was of a girl in a bikini staring off into the distance. Her face was covered by a big straw hat and no hair was visible, just a shoulder. And her profile was private.

  My stomach clenched.

  I wasn’t following her and she wasn’t following me.

  This was back in the golden age when you could still see your Instagram story views for longer than twenty-four hours, and so those were what I checked next: my highlighted stories saved at the top of my page. And when I did, there she was: @lover7. She’d watched all those too.

  My ears roared with blood and my mind yelled, This is bad, this is very, very, very bad. Because now I was thinking of that app and that picture, wasn’t I? And as the room swirled around me I could only think of one reason @lover7 would be watching all my stories. The same reason Tess had been trawling through Marc’s wife’s social media: she was looking for answers.

  @lover7 was someone Oliver had met. Probably on the app. And she was scoping me out, trying to figure out if we were really on the verge of separating or whatever else he’d told her.

  That might sound neurotic to you, but on the deepest of levels, it made perfect sense to me: despite all my efforts to rebrand as the kind of woman a man like Oliver might want, I’d never really understood how I managed to pull it off. So of course he’d grown bored, of course he wanted more. Especially now that he knew I was damaged.

  I stared down at the phone, my heart hammering, goosebumps all over me as I tried to figure out what the hell to do.

  There’s probably a perfectly reasonable explanation. And maybe I could have talked myself off the ledge if I hadn’t seen his picture on that app just the night before. But now the doubt was there, stuck in my chest, and I couldn’t dislodge it.

  Shit. There was no point asking him. If it wasn’t true those icy walls would definitely go back up again, and if it w
as true he’d already lied once, he’d just do it again.

  There was only one thing I could do. And so I reached for my phone and texted Tess: What was the name of that dating app from last night?

  Tess: Why? Xx

  Me: Will explain later.

  A moment later, in flew a screen shot.

  And, thirty seconds after that, the app was downloading onto my phone.

  9.13 am

  It was around then I started feeling watched again. The heat of eyes on my back. The little hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention like miniature soldiers. I hadn’t felt that way since just after the break-in at the old flat. But I told myself I was just anxious because of what had happened the night before, because of those Instagram story views, because somewhere out there someone was watching what I was eating, how I took my coffee and what my sheets looked like behind my Bahia bracelet. That was unnerving. Creepy, even. But it was also the inherent nature of social media to be watched.

  And what could I have done about it anyway? Put my Instagram on private? That may have slowed things down, but it wouldn’t have stopped it. Looked over my shoulder every ten seconds, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone following me? Told the police I had ‘a funny feeling’ and then watched their eyes glaze over when I pointed to my Instagram story views as my proof? Exactly.

  * * *

  I took a seat by the window – a smudge of fingerprints, dry shampoo and god knows what else – and stared at my reflection: pink silk shirt, black jeans, vintage Chanel belt and three thin gold bangles that jangled as I moved. I looked care-free. Nobody who looked at me would have guessed what I was planning that day. What I’d already started. What I’d been doing at the bus stop as the yellow-lit board counted down the minutes to the next bus (nine, seven, five) and the air swelled with dust, petrol fumes and impending rain.

  Because I wasn’t checking Instagram at that bus stop. Nor was I checking my messages. No, I was thinking of a Netflix documentary Oliver and I had watched together, curled up on that sofa. It was on catfishing – you know, strangers pretending to be other people on the internet. And I was sifting through my memory for tips.

  You’ve probably noticed I do that a lot: think in movies and TV. Well, it’s not just because I’m an actress, though it might be part of why I became an actress. No, movies get a bad rap for being unrealistic, and sometimes they are, but I really think movies saved me. They helped me find my faith in life again when I was sixteen and thought I never would.

  It was a movie that taught me happy endings could happen for anyone no matter what your life story (Pretty Woman), a movie that told me I wasn’t a prisoner to other people’s opinions and could recreate myself at any moment (Legally Blonde), and a bunch of Netflix documentaries that taught me all about DNA, evidence collection, how to make your phone untraceable (take out the battery) and the rituals of serial killers. Some of those tidbits turned out to be more useful than others.

  I mean, yes, to be honest movies also gave me next-level expectations around love but, you know, no life philosophy is perfect. And at least mine gave me some agency. But that’s what they were: the lens through which I viewed the world.

  Because everyone has a way they get through those impossibly dark nights when the phone won’t ring and sleep won’t come; those mediocre, greyscale days where time slows down and sticks to your lungs. Some of us hand it over to the gods, some of us blame a hyperactive butterfly on the other side of the planet, and some of us post inspirational quotes on Instagram. All fair choices. Me? I pretend I’m in a movie and I’m the main character. That if I just get through this one shitty scene, the next one will be better, because everybody knows the heroine wins out in the end, right?

  So that’s how I decided what to do whenever I was scared or stuck or didn’t trust my own reactions: I just asked myself what I’d want the heroine in a movie to do if she were in my shoes. And then I did that. Simple. Which is how I came to be sitting at that bus stop, creating the email address: AnnabellaHarth98@gmail.com.

  I’m not sure why I’d decided on that name, but somewhere between me seeing @lover7 on all my Instagram story views, texting Tess for the name of the app, throwing back three shots of Nespresso and dressing myself, she’d been named: Annabella Harth. That would be the name of the identity I’d create. The one I’d use to check if Oliver was cheating.

  I know it sounds sneaky, but fuck, if he was cheating on me I deserved to know. I needed to know. I was going to go crazy if that @lover7 woman kept watching my Instagram stories and I didn’t know why; I was already imagining them together, torturing myself with all sorts of scenarios. The sorts of scenarios only a creative mind can conjure. It was as if I’d ingested poison and swiping my way through that app was the sole antidote.

  Which meant I needed to create a profile he couldn’t swipe ‘No’ to before I found him.

  But I couldn’t sign up to the app until I had a Facebook page. And to get a Facebook page I needed an email address.

  It was a process.

  The next thing my alter-ego needed was a face: a pretty one. A ‘swipe-yes’ face. I knew Oliver liked blondes – I was blonde, after all – so ‘Annabella’ would be blonde too. And so, as commuters gathered around me, all checking the board (seven minutes to go) and then staring down at their own phones, I googled: blonde girl.

  All the pictures that came back were stock photographs, marred by watermarks in the corner. So I resorted to stealing some off Instagram. It was easy, really. Easier than it should be. I just went to the hashtag option and looked up #blondegirl.

  The one I picked looked a tad like me. Just younger. Big blue eyes, slightly bigger boobs and shorter hair. All I had to do then was screen-shot the photos of her, crop them to size and save them to my photo reel.

  That took about four minutes.

  I glanced up at the yellow-lit board: three minutes to go.

  Next, I needed to create a Facebook profile. I was running out of time so I made her a Pisces like me, just five years younger. Female. Then I uploaded her pictures and boom-bam-bang: she was a real-life girl.

  But it was getting quite crowded at the bus stop by that point and I was worried someone might look over my shoulder and see what I was doing, so I was careful to hide my screen as I joined the app. Allowed it access to my Facebook photos. And let out a deep exhale.

  It was done.

  A few moments later, the people around me started fiddling around in their bags, pulling out their Oyster cards and wallets, so I knew the bus must be coming. I stood up, looked down past the park, and there it was, the bus: a splash of lipstick red against a tin-grey sky.

  We stood in line, swiped our cards in silence, then I went upstairs, and took my seat by the grimy window. There was only one thing left to do: write Annabella Harth’s bio on the app. Which was intolerably hard: I had no idea what it should say.

  I needed it to say something that was impossible to resist, otherwise my whole plan would fail.

  What was Oliver looking for that he wasn’t getting from me?

  Sex. It had to be sex.

  Shit, was I bad in bed?

  I swallowed hard, stared down at my phone and typed in the same emojis Tess had received: Eggplant? Monkey with its hands over its eyes.

  If Oliver was looking for sex, that should do it. Then, still thinking of Tess, I remembered how she’d explained the radius thing on the app. And so I went to my settings, changed my preferences to over six foot one and within a five mile radius.

  And then, my chest aching, I started to swipe.

  Episode 3

  WEDNESDAY, 6 JUNE 2018 (9.53 AM)

  Let me tell you something about looking for your husband on a dating app: it takes an unnaturally strong heart. And I’m not talking metaphorically either, I mean, your heart quite literally needs to be able to beat at double time, triple time, quadruple time, every time any man who even vaguely resembles your loved one fills the screen.

  Which is why, 4
0 minutes and 97 swipes ‘No’ later, as I made my way down Portobello Road, I was exhausted. Everything around me looked the same as it had yesterday: the red-velvet cupcakes of Hummingbird bakery, the vintage map sellers who were just opening up, the tables full of silver and brass trinkets reflecting the tin-grey sky. But everything was not the same. No, now I had a problem. A proper problem. And instead of making me feel better, swiping through that app had made me feel worse. Because now I knew what the singles market was like out there. Think: zombie apocalypse with dick pics. I turned left down a small side street and walked quickly towards the vintage clothing shop where I worked, Boulevard.

  Nine steps later I was glancing at my reflection in the window that stood between me and the eclectic window display I’d put together just the week before: a fictional set-up of a desk, a black vintage typewriter, a chair with a light blue velvet cushion on its seat, a grey blanket on the floor, a pink hat box and a couple of mannequins mid-gesture. One was wearing the sort of pink and white Chanel suit everyone recognises and the other was naked aside from a faux fur leopard skin coat. I pulled my keys from my bag, pushed them into the door and twisted.

  The buzzer on the door – installed to cut down on shoplifting when we were out the back – let out its loud and high-pitched bzzzzz, I went inside, and the door banged closed behind me as I flicked on the lights.

  Moving over to my desk, I dropped my bag on the floor and my keys on the desk by my computer. I flopped down into my chair, pushed off my trainers and slid my feet into the pair of black kitten heels I kept under my desk. Then, as I fired up my computer with one hand, I reached for my phone with the other. It was before ten. I was early. Maybe I could get through a few more swipes before Grace got there.

  Bzzzz.

  No such luck.

  I looked up just as Grace walked in. She was sixty-five with snow white hair to her shoulders she kept back in a chignon. She was wearing khaki pants, a white shirt and a vintage navy and red Hermès scarf. She owned the place, had a good heart, and enjoyed ordering me around.