by Pip Drysdale
Enter.
The screen filled with links: computer magazine pages, advertisements and forums. A siren flared up from outside and my pulse quickened as I imagined Oliver finding me here. But he was safely on another continent right now, or perhaps still in the air. I hadn’t even checked in with him. That was a sure sign it was over.
I scrolled down through the links.
The second one looked promising so I tapped on it: A step-by-step guide to resetting your Mac password.
Perfect.
The instructions themselves looked pretty easy and they were numbered one to seven. So I reached for the keyboard and followed step one: Hold down command and R at the same time. The screen went black. I kept my fingers on those buttons, just like the instructions said, refusing to slip, and a moment later the little white Apple sign appeared in the middle of the screen.
My phone had dimmed and so I touched the screen to bring it back to life and went to step two: Go to ‘Utilities’.
Step three: Click on ‘Terminal’.
Step four: Type in resetpassword.
Oliver’s new password would be 1234567$. That was step five.
Step six: Save.
Seven: Restart.
Eight: Enter 1234567$.
The window banged.
I jumped.
Turned to stare at it.
My pulse beat double time.
And as I turned back to his desktop, so bright in that darkened room, I realised I was in. There were files and folders everywhere. Any one of them could contain the things Tess said I needed. But I had to check something else first: his iMessage. I mean, wouldn’t you? That little blue bubble on the bar at the bottom of the screen was all but singing a siren song.
There were messages in there from me, Justin, a junk message from a gym asking him to re-join and one from his phone provider telling him the cost of calls and texts in Brazil. Nothing incriminating. His inbox was far neater than mine. Though it did occur to me that might be incriminating in itself.
The external hard drive icon was showing up as a little orange rectangle on the right hand side of his desktop. I dragged everything on the desktop into it.
As it started to copy across, I went to his ‘Documents’ folder. It was filled with subfolders and random files with names that meant nothing to me. I needed to know exactly what I was looking for to make sure I got what I needed. And so, as I added the whole lot to the copy queue, I pulled out my phone and called Tess, chewing on my inner cheek as it rang.
My eyes moved to the time: 8.23 pm on a Friday. She’d have left the office by now but she might be out.
‘Charlie,’ she said, a low hum in the background, like she was in a bar or on a street.
‘Hey,’ I replied.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m on his computer right now, copying things. What exactly am I looking for? There’s so much stuff in here.’
‘Everything. Accounts, spreadsheets – just take whatever you can find, and we can go through it together later,’ she said, pausing. I could all but hear her mind whirring. ‘Hang on, so you have his password then?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I reset it.’
I thought she might tell me that was a mistake, that now he’d know I’d been in there. But she didn’t.
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Where is he now? He’s not going to come home and find you or anything, right?’
‘No, he’s gone away. Probably to a sex retreat.’
‘Okay, good,’ she said, not even humouring me. ‘What browser does he use?’
‘Ummm, I’m not sure,’ I replied, glancing down at the bar at the bottom of the screen. I clicked on the icon for Firefox first. Clicked on ‘History’ and saw it was empty. So then I tried Safari – not much there either. Finally I went to Chrome. ‘Just a sec, I think he uses Chrome.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Go up to where it says “Chrome” and choose “Preferences”.’
I followed her instructions and up came a screen I’d never seen before: Settings. ‘Done.’
‘Now in around the middle of the screen it should say: “Passwords”.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘so I click on that?’
‘Yep.’
The click of my mouse echoed in the small, red-orange lit room.
Up came a list of websites, his username for each and a dot-dot-dot below the heading: Password.
‘There should be a button that looks like a little eye beside each one. Click on one of those.’
I chose the one beside his Gmail account and up popped a window asking me to enter his password information. I slowly entered: 1234567$.
Up came his password: Onelife11
My throat grew tight and something twisted inside me. His voice echoed in my mind: ‘Charlie, we have one life to live. One chance at this. Please would you live yours with me?’
‘Wow,’ I said, my voice almost a whisper.
‘Now click on any others you might need and then take a picture.’
‘How do you know this stuff?’ I asked, frowning.
‘I have skills,’ she replied, her tone dry. But I knew ‘how’. Her investigation into Marc had clearly run deeper than even I knew.
I clicked on some of the others: Facebook, Amazon, his banking site. Two out of three were the same password: Onelife11.
‘Are you okay. Do you want to come over? I have to do some work but it might be better not to be all alone.’
‘I’ll be okay,’ I said. I wanted to be alone. ‘Love you.’
‘Love you too. What about tomorrow evening? Catch up then?’
‘Perfect,’ I said.
And then we hung up and I took that picture.
So there I was, staring down at his passwords on my phone. I now had full access to everything and I just couldn’t help myself, could I?
I opened another tab and pulled up Facebook first. Then I entered his login information, and carefully typed in his password: O-n-e-l-i-f-e-1-1.
A moment later his circular profile picture was staring back at me beside his name: Oliver Buchanan.
Now, the most obvious place to look was his messages so I went straight there. But there was nothing suspicious in his inbox. A couple of messages from people I didn’t immediately recognise – perhaps he’d gone to school or university with them – but nothing jarring.
Not until I looked up at the top. Beside ‘recent’ was the greyed-out text: Message requests (39).
Oliver always was a stickler for privacy. Whatever settings he had on his Facebook account would have filtered messages from unknown people into that folder.
My throat grew tight as I clicked on it.
I could read the first line of each as I scanned down through them: Yes please … Torture Garden for me … Message me back, handsome …
On the left hand side of each was the profile picture of the woman who had sent it. And to the right was the date. Thirty-nine requests in less than a month. My stomach filled with cement as I imagined him trawling through them while he was in Brazil, while he was telling me he had no wifi.
My heart was racing by now, my mind out of control; I felt like I’d just run a red light. I did the only thing I could: I took a deep breath, shut down the page, pulled up Gmail and logged in.
Might as well be thorough.
The screen flashed white, a red and white envelope appeared, and then there were messages: junk mail, a couple of Facebook notification emails and halfway down that first screen was a message with the subject line: !!! It was from Justin.
My eyes darted to the right: it had come in the night before. My mind flicked back to us lying on the sofa, him saying there was a work emergency and then lapsing into the foulest of moods. Exclamation marks looked urgent, it had been read, and he worked with Justin. That must be it: the emergency. So I clicked on it.
The body of the email read:
Man – what the fuck are you doing? My sister just sent this through. Nobody cares what yo
u do in your own time, but have a look at your LinkedIn profile! People are starting to figure out where you work and leave cute messages. We can’t afford any more attention. Not after those emails. Fix it.
What did he mean by ‘any more attention’? What emails?
And wow: so Justin didn’t know Oliver was on that app. Oliver had done that all on his own …
I clicked on the attachment, waiting for it to open.
And I have to say, I didn’t expect any more surprises by then; I was pretty sure I already knew what it was. Something to do with that dating app. The one I’d already seen. The one I’d presumed the women in his message request basket had seen too. The one they were keen to respond to.
Turns out I was half right.
But it was just a tad worse than that.
Because it was of a dating app profile for Oliver. It did say the exact same thing I’d seen before. It did list all the same parties. But this was from a different app.
How many of these things is he on?
And in that moment, my life seemed like one of those tapestries Mum used to do when I was little: beautiful and neat on the front, but a knotted, tangled mess at the back.
I took a deep breath, logged out of his Gmail, cleared the browser history and turned off his computer just as a wave of nausea rolled through me.
I had no idea how everything had fallen apart so disastrously and so fast but I knew I needed him out of the house. Now.
A muffled bang of a door rang through the house: Natasha was home upstairs. Then came the clip-clippety-clip-clip of her heels before she took them off, just above me. She used her second mini-bedroom as a walk-in closet – I knew that because I’d watered her plants a couple of times when she was away and had taken the opportunity to snoop. A few moments later, the TV was on in the adjacent room: a blur of news or something with one strong, low male voice.
I stood up and moved through to the kitchen, opened the drawer below the cutlery and pulled out a roll of black plastic bin liners.
I thought I finally had a clear answer to my question – yes, he was cheating. Which meant it was time for Oliver to pack. But how could I possibly have the right answer when I didn’t even know what question to ask yet?
SATURDAY, 9 JUNE 2018 (8.02 AM)
Maybe it’s the romantic in me, the part that yearns for meaning, but I will always remember that next day as a single sound: a little bird tweeting. Because when adrenaline woke me at 4 am, the sky a pre-dawn indigo and my pillowcase dampened with tears, the only sound that rang through the flat was a bird chirping outside the window. And I latched onto it. It was simultaneously a symbol of hope – the sound of a new day piercing through the darkness – and a witty, poetic juxtaposition.
A little cosmic meme that would never find its way to Instagram.
After I woke up, I lay there for a good two hours, just crying it all out, torturing myself with our highlight reel, pressing on the bruise. There were the big things, of course, like our wedding day: getting our marriage licence on the way to the most kitsch chapel ever built, the gel-haired, half-drunk witness they provided, the blurred, irreplaceable polaroids he took. Our wedding night: big windows overlooking the neon lights of Vegas, room service, me winning 500 dollars on the roulette wheel and those pay-to-view movies. Then there were the seemingly insignificant things like how stressed Oliver always got buying my tampons. How no matter how many times I told him which ones I wanted, he always came back with the wrong ones, a sheepish look and ‘Sorry, I panicked’. Or the health kick we’d embarked on in January. The organic box of fruit and obscure, unrecognisable vegetables we’d signed up for. The jokes about being slaves to ‘the box’ after 48 hours and the making of a large ratatouille. And Oliver’s triumphant face when he arrived home the next day with two orange shopping bags full of Lindt chocolate, cheese, bread and wine.
What was I going to do with all those rusting memories now?
And how had they been replaced by things like the red lace garter belt I’d found in one of his jacket pockets?
Yes, packing him up had been illuminating.
By the time 6 am rolled around, I realised I definitely wasn’t going back to sleep and the sad reel of memories wasn’t going to cease, so I did the only thing I could think of: I got up, boiled a couple of eggs (beginning a Keto diet seemed like a good way to handle things in the moment) and started sipping gin out of the bottle.
Do you remember that scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary where she’s super depressed and realises she can either lie down and die of sadness or fight? Where she takes to the exercise bike, quits her job and totally recreates herself? Well that was my inspiration right at that moment.
All I kept thinking was channel Bridget.
Even then, I was clinging to the idea that I was in the middle of some lighthearted rom com where everything would be okay in the end.
And if that seems naive to you – fine, I get it. But right then I needed to believe life was like that in order to get through it.
Because this was not the first thing I’d had to get through.
Oliver had sent a couple of texts the night before, somewhere between me closing down his computer and stuffing all his things into black bags, and I hadn’t answered. That was very un-me. He could clearly sense something was wrong, so by 7 am he was calling.
My phone was lying on the bed and I winced as his beautiful face, his name, flashed back at me. Part of me ached to reach for it, to somehow make amends, but a larger part knew I couldn’t talk to him. If I talked to him I’d soften, and if I softened I’d stay, and if I stayed it would continue, and if it continued my cracks would deepen, and if my cracks deepened any more I might disintegrate altogether.
So leaving, or having him leave, was a matter of survival.
I stared at the phone, tight-jawed, until it stopped ringing.
And then I stuffed one more of his jackets into black bag number three and dragged it to the front door. I glanced through the window on my way back to the bedroom. The sky was a muted blue by then, slashed up like eighties denim with long lines of cloud, and a ball of white sun. It was a beautiful day to end a marriage.
I stared back at the other two bags.
One was full of soft things like clothing, and the other one was books and shoes and other random things with sharp edges that pierced the plastic and meant I had to double bag it. They didn’t contain all his things, but they held the immediate visual traces of him. Anything that might stab me to look at it – body wash, razor, books. The problems I now faced were (a) they were heavy and (b) I didn’t know where to leave them.
His mother was all the way over in Norfolk and I wouldn’t have wanted to make that call even if she was closer, his brother was over in the States somewhere, probably getting high or arrested, and Justin was his only real friend (and frankly, back then I thought there was nothing that would make me call Justin). So I’d settled on his car. I’d put his things in his car. And I’d force myself not to key it like someone had done during our honeymoon, though now I understood the impetus.
I never told you about our honeymoon, did I? Well, it was magic. We spent it in Lake Como and it was a mini-moon really. Just three days. Three perfect days during which I’d taken the photograph he’d used as his profile picture on that dating app. So there you go: you just never know how things will turn out. But those three days were going to be etched in my memory forever, even long after he was gone. I knew that already. And as I stood there, considering how to get the bags out to his car, images flickered through my mind: the warm sunshine on my face as I woke up that first morning, my rings twinkling from my hand, my legs tangled in expensive white sheets, the blue and glassy lake lapping up against the window, a burnt orange damask chair in the corner of the room, Oliver, still asleep behind me, hugging me, then breakfast and laughing and dinners and wine and sex and lots of tongue-in-cheek ‘my husband’ and ‘my wife’ talk. Then the three days were up and it was London’s lights twinklin
g through the plane window, welcoming us home. Welcoming us to our new life together. As a couple. As Mr and Mrs Buchanan.
It was during those three days that the whole break-in thing happened.
And that’s what our flat reminded me of right now: the time we’d been broken into. A big bloody mess, things strewn everywhere. Our bookshelf was half bare. Big, gaping holes where his books had been. An empty wall where our wedding photos had hung. And in the emptiness, Oliver’s bronzed Ganesha, the one that was supposed to bring us luck, seemed to loom on that mantelpiece.
I stared at it. He loved that thing. I knew I should pack it, but the mean-spirited part of me decided not to. Fuck him. Let him suffer. Maybe I’d take months to give it back.
In came a message from him: Where are you, baby?
I stared down at the screen, tears burning in my eyes, what could I even text back? And then my phone beeped. It was a message from Brooke Pilates.
It read R u home? Emergency.
I looked around the room, at the black bags and Oliver’s things everywhere. I was quite clearly mid-catastrophe – I couldn’t have her come over. And so I was about to text back no, sorry. But then my phone started ringing. Shit. It felt wrong not to answer. She’d said it was an emergency. What if she was hurt? She was alone in London, I couldn’t just ignore her.
‘Hello,’ I said, smiling in the hopes that it might imbue my voice with more positivity than I felt.
‘Hey – sorry, babe, are you home? You live near Battersea Park right?’
‘Ummm, yes,’ I said. Why was she asking? Please dear god don’t want to pop past.
‘Can I come over super quick? I’m having a bit of an issue. Actually a big fucking issue.’
Shit. Shit. Shit.
‘Ummm, sure,’ I said, ‘but I’m heading to work in a sec.’ I couldn’t very well say no outright, could I?
‘I’ll come right now. What’s your address?’
And so I gave it to her, hung up and rushed through to the bathroom to splash water on my face and brush my teeth. My hairbrush was sitting right there on the countertop so I pulled it through my locks. Then it was eyeliner, bronzer, mascara and lip gloss. I looked almost normal by the end, if somewhat puffy.
