by Pip Drysdale
Password: Supercock88
Submit.
Up came another screen, prompting me to log into my email to finalise the registration.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
My stomach flipped: I was walking deeper and deeper into quicksand and I wanted to stop. But I couldn’t. I knew logging into his email account from work was a bad idea, it was too traceable, but the confirmation email was already sitting there in his inbox, just waiting to be discovered as Angus scrolled through his messages in his white robe and slippers from the hotel room – I had to follow through.
And so, watching my screen for any reflection behind me, anything that spoke of prying eyes, I opened another tab. I navigated to hotmail.com. And logged into his account.
There it was, right at the top, the ‘Please confirm your 192.com registration’ email. I clicked the ‘Confirm registration’ button and was taken back to their site.
I took a deep breath, turned back to my screen, blocked any future emails 192.com might send, deleted the confirmation message from his inbox and trash, and logged out of his Hotmail account.
My hands were trembling and my jaw was tight, but as a newly registered user I was free to search 192.com for Felicia at my will. And so I did.
There were two Felicias in that postcode district, but only one who lived in Angus’s building. Her full name was Felicia Bronwyn Jones. She was registered to vote. She owned her home – joint ownership, presumably with her fiancé – and her landline was: 0207 946 0139.
I’d just scribbled that down on a pad beside my desk when a small notification popped up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen – an email had come in from Charlotte.
You okay? FH is going to have the worst karma. xx
FH was an abbreviation for Fuckhead – the nickname she’d given Angus immediately following the break-up. I’d learned the awkward way that my work email had a swear-filter.
I typed back: Hey honey, thanks, am okay. Am sure karma’s got it covered ;)
‘Karma’ being me and Master Sun Tzu.
It was dark outside and I was lying in bed, the whir from an electric heater coming from the floor beside me as I scrolled through old photos of Angus and me on my computer. My phone buzzed from the bedside table: a text message from my mother.
Please just let me know you’re all right, sweetheart.
I typed back: I’m fine, love you. xx
But she’d know the truth.
She’d warned me of the danger Angus posed long before I’d experienced it. ‘He worries me,’ she’d said. ‘Why?’ I’d asked. And she’d replied, ‘He injects you with sunshine, and that can never end well.’
At the time I’d thought she was projecting, presuming all relationships would end up the way hers had with my father. How could sunshine possibly be bad? And when she’d said it I was still high on the warmth of his gaze, the honey in his voice, my laughter as he tickled me and the smell of his hair on the pillowcase. There was nothing like it on earth.
But she wasn’t projecting: my mother just knew the agony of a cold world when the sun went down and the wind and rain set in.
And soon enough, I did too.
Because the more powder that went up his nose the worse he became.
I cast my mind back to the last time I’d looked into his eyes – they were the colour of whiskey when held up to the light. It was just before I got out of the car, grabbed my suitcase from the back seat, rolled it inside and he drove away …
I stared back at my computer screen: selfies we’d taken in bed. Always smiling. Me: kissing his cheek. Him: winking at the lens. Screen shots of things I’d considered for his birthday present: a wine aerator, a flying lesson, a money clip. A couple of dick pics. Another screen shot, this time of a loving message I’d forwarded to Charlotte to prove that he wasn’t all bad. He’d sent it to me a few months before, when he’d been away on business in Hong Kong: If I had one wish right now it would be that you were next to me. A xx
I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw: I was softening.
I could feel it.
My resolve was slipping away. I could feel nostalgia’s riptide tugging at my ankles, trying to pull me under – I couldn’t let that happen. And so I did the one thing that I knew would fix it: I clicked on the link to my sex tape. It stalled for a moment – my wifi connection was slow – then loaded and started to play. The red hue of the footage, Holly’s hair, my coy smile. I closed the window quickly and went back to my photos.
Then, selecting every photograph in the album entitled ‘Angus and Me’, I pressed ‘delete’, plugged my phone into the computer and let them sync. Now there was nothing left to taunt me. No happy memories to pull me under.
My purple notebook was lying beside the bed on top of a pile of books: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book about fashion written by a TV costume designer, an unread copy of The New Yorker and The Art of War. I reached for it, picked up the pen that lay beside it and began to write.
I could hear the bubble and hiss of the boiler spilling through from my little kitchen and see a mounting pile of dirty laundry in the corner of the room.
Angus would still be living his life of dry-cleaning – the only thing that had changed was the woman collecting it – while after eighteen months of service I was back to watching my clothes spin round and round in the big steel machines in the laundromat on the corner.
I pressed hard into the paper as I crossed things off my list that night, making notes in the margin. And I can only presume that if Fate was looking on, she must have been clapping her hands with glee as the ink flowed: her dominos would continue to fall unhindered. But as I read back from it I couldn’t help but wonder: what had I actually accomplished? The prostitutes. The leak beneath the sink. The coke on Mrs Clifton’s balcony. Felicia. And his lucky socks.
It was all so petty, so silly – and I wanted to do something that truly made a dent.
But what?
thursday
Master Sun said: ‘The art of war is governed by five constant factors: 1) Moral Law, 2) Heaven, 3) Earth, 4) The Commander, 5) Method and discipline.’
9 FEBRUARY
‘Right. Lay it on me,’ Val said, arms crossed. ‘How bad is it?’
I hadn’t slept properly and was staring out the window at the building across the road trying to focus my eyes.
‘Taylor?’
‘Sorry. Not great,’ I said, looking at her. ‘I really have no idea where to start.’ The tan leather skirt I was wearing had mistakenly found its way into one of the industrial-grade washing machines at the laundromat a few days before. It was now too short and too tight, and made me shuffle as I laid my research out on the table. I shouldn’t have worn it.
We were in a meeting room on the client level: three glass walls separated us from a steady stream of grey suits, ornate stitching and shiny shoes. And Val was circling the table in silence, nervously double-clicking a pen with her thumb as she took in everything I’d found. A nod here. A small grunt there. The brightly coloured charts; the bullet points; the maps; the countless red stars intended to mark something important. To the untrained eye it looked like a jumbled mess. It was a jumbled mess – but not to Val.
‘Hmm, this one is interesting.’ She picked up a page showing two line charts. I’d scribbled a couple of notes underneath it. ‘What’s going on here?’ she asked.
‘Value growth,’ I said. ‘The blue line shows properties with some kind of green space, and the red shows those close to schools. The top chart is West London and the bottom one is East. But there’s nothing new there, Val. Nothing we don’t already know.’
‘We could try combining them,’ she said, ‘create some sort of index. Maybe include proximity to grocery stores?’
I felt my pocket vibrate.
‘Oh, look who it is,’ Val said through a clenched smile, her eyes following what I presumed to be a figure walking past the glass behind me, her thumb giving another double-click of her pen. ‘W
hat’s he doing here again so soon?’
‘What? Who?’ I asked, turning around before she could answer.
David Turner was walking past slowly, watching us, one of the solemn girls by his side. He was waving, smiling, and it made my pulse jump, so I looked away and pulled my phone from my pocket as a distraction.
‘I wonder what she’s been suggesting,’ Val said, eyeing the solemn girl. ‘Can I keep these?’ she added, nodding towards the papers.
‘Sure,’ I said as I stared at the screen. It was Charlotte, checking we were still on for yoga that night. It was Thursday. We always did yoga on Thursdays.
‘They haven’t written back yet?’ Charlotte asked. ‘That’s ridiculous.’ She was wearing a charcoal woollen dress and thick black tights, her beige coat hanging on the back of her chair. She chewed on the lemon from her gin and tonic, swirled the ice in her glass, and her small engagement ring gleamed from her finger as she moved.
Charlotte: the girl who introduced me to boys, booze and the joys of downing half a bottle of cough syrup while lying in the sun.
Charlotte: with painfully rich parents and a soft spot for the esoteric.
Charlotte: my best friend.
Arguably, my only friend following the break-up. The few acquaintances I’d had in London before Angus and I got together had fallen away through lack of care – at the beginning he was all I needed, and by the end I didn’t have the energy for small talk and pleasantries – and his friends were just that: his friends. But Charlotte was Charlotte and didn’t give up.
She was tall and ethereal, her light brown hair cut into an angled bob that highlighted her eyes: hazel, round and glittery. She was one of those people whose life never seemed to fall apart and yet she never judged me when mine did. So when Angus pulled the plug the week before, the first thing I did after he dropped me home and I shut the door behind me was dial her number.
It was 10.30 on a Tuesday night, she was a high-school teacher so had to be at her desk by 7.30 the next morning and was leaving a fiancé at home, but forty minutes later she was on my doorstep with a bottle of gin, a packet of weed and a sleeping bag I hadn’t seen since our Eighth Form ski trip. And she didn’t leave my side until the Sunday afternoon.
Which is how Monday, Jamie and The Art of War happened.
‘No, not yet,’ I replied. Charlotte had helped pen my series of incensed letters to RedTube, peppering them with phrases such as ‘blatant disregard’, ‘unconscionable conduct’ and ‘culpability’. She watched a lot of law TV and was a connoisseur of alibis, missed clues, foiled plots and legal jargon, so by virtue of conversation, so was I.
‘It’s not legal. They have to take it down. You could probably sue Angus,’ she said, looking around for the waitress.
We were huddled in a dark corner of Nam Long. This was ‘yoga’. We used to actually get dressed in stretchy pants and turn up at the yoga studio with our mats and the best of intentions – but it always ended the same way: with us escaping through the emergency exit that led from the women’s change room into an alleyway and onto the street. Eventually we just cut out the middleman and met at Nam Long instead. ‘Seriously, we need to find you some kind of legal advice. I’ll ask Ben if he knows anyone. Angus truly did outdo himself this time.’ Ben was her fiancé. Beautiful. Kind. The sort of bone structure and skin colour only mixed-heritage can give you. Actor by trade, corporate health-and-safety filmmaker by economic necessity. And a member of Shoreditch House.
‘Do you really think I need a lawyer?’ I asked. The thought of having to show that video to yet another set of eyes left me feeling defeated. Ashamed. How had I agreed to that threesome in the first place? Why had I let him tape it? And how had that mistake ended up in the public domain?
‘Well, if they won’t reply and Angus won’t talk to you, I don’t see that you have any other choice,’ she said, taking the last sip of her drink then sucking on an ice cube.
‘I just wish I could get back at him,’ I said. Then I waited for her response. Maybe she’d agree, help me plot.
‘No, don’t do that,’ she said, biting down on the ice and shaking her head. ‘He’ll twist the whole thing to make it your fault. Best thing you can do is walk away and let a lawyer deal with it.’
And for someone like Charlotte, that would be true: she had the money and the clout behind her to hire the kind of lawyer that would turn a sex tape into a profitable lawsuit. I didn’t. But what I did have was Felicia of Flat 81’s phone number. And on the way to meet Charlotte, I’d used it.
Having booked Angus’s return ticket for our romantic ski trip, along with my own, I knew what time he was due into Victoria Station from Gatwick: 5.30pm. I probably wouldn’t have remembered that time so clearly if he hadn’t made such a fuss about having to be at the station at rush hour. But that was the train that worked with the flight. And so it stayed.
There were two phone boxes on Buckingham Palace Road just outside Victoria Station, both of them fully functioning. I knew that because I’d seen people in them, people I’d always regarded with a certain level of suspicion, talking on the phone. Who uses a phone box unless they are up to no good? But a public phone box is a wonderful tool for a stalker: it could be anybody calling. And so there I was at 5.45pm, surrounded by the business cards of sex workers and strip joints, dropping three 20p coins into the slot and pressing the grimy keys.
All around me, tourists hurried along the grey street wheeling suitcases, balancing take-away coffee cups or examining maps on phones. I was wearing a black baseball cap and kept my face angled away from the pavement, towards the road and the line of parked tour buses on the other side. Angus would need to wheel his suitcase down that pavement to get a cab home from the station. Hell, that was the precise reason I’d chosen that phone box at that time: it gave total plausibility to Angus having placed the call when Felicia finally put two and two together. I wasn’t sure how to help that penny drop yet – how I’d link the lingerie and the call to Angus – but I knew the answer was out there somewhere. Waiting.
I dialled slowly: 0207 946 0139. Felicia Bronwyn Jones.
The line rang twice and then it went to voicemail: ‘Hi, you’ve called Felicia and Joe, we’re unable to get to the phone right now, please leave your name and number after the beep. If it’s urgent please call Fee on: 0770 090 0007.’
Beep.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
Then I hung up. Felicia officially had a stalker and I officially had her mobile number: zero-double-seven-zero-zero-nine-zero-zero-zero-zero-seven.
It was as memorable as a pizza-house jingle.
Twenty seconds later I was exiting that phone booth, closing its dirty red door and crossing the busy road away from Angus’s path home. The air was thick with exhaust fumes, and the sky dark and starless. I kept my head down and made my way to meet Charlotte at Nam Long at 6.30pm.
‘Babe, it will be okay,’ she said, reaching across the wooden table and squeezing my hand. And I wanted her to be right. But Life had taught me that the converse was more often true: it was always the exact moment I began to believe the carpet was real that it was yanked from beneath my feet.
She turned her head to face the bar and waved to get the waitress’s attention: dyed black hair and a silver nose ring that caught the light. ‘She’ll have another pina colada and I’ll have another gin and tonic,’ she called to her with a smile.
‘No, I’m okay, thanks,’ I said to the waitress. Then I turned back to Charlotte: ‘I can’t have any more.’
She looked at me with concern.
‘I haven’t eaten all day and it’s burning my stomach,’ I said. But it was nice to have a fuzzy head, the details of my life scrambled for a short while.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Burger?’
‘Burger,’ I agreed, sipping the dregs from my glass. Then we both moved to the bar, my ears latching on to the song that was playing – ‘Satisf
action’, The Stones – as the waitress moved to the till.
‘Well, I hope he has a horrible holiday,’ Charlotte said, pulling her money from her purse as the waitress passed our bill across the scratched wooden bar.
‘Me too,’ I said, pulling a twenty-pound note from my purse to pay my share. I looked down into my handbag, carefully choosing my words. ‘But I doubt he will.’ I paused for a moment. ‘He took Kim.’
She stared at me, eyes flaming: ‘What?’
I hadn’t wanted to tell her that. Because then she’d ask how I knew and I’d have to admit to looking at his Facebook page, something we’d agreed I wouldn’t do.
‘I looked at his Facebook page,’ I admitted, crinkling my nose.
‘Babe, I’m so sorry,’ she said, exhaling loudly and putting her hand on my arm. Then we turned and headed for the door.
Old Brompton Road was alive with the red flare of tail-lights. As we turned left and headed past the dry-cleaner, the international-newspaper vendor and a dimly lit pub with noisy people spilling out onto the street, I buried my cold hands deep in my pockets.
We walked in silence for a little while, past the naked winter trees, across a road, over puddles turned amber by the streetlights above us, and eventually Charlotte spoke. ‘I can’t believe he took her. I mean, what the fuck?’
‘I know,’ I said.
I couldn’t figure out what Kim had that I didn’t – why he’d chosen her over me. All I could presume was there was something calming about her that didn’t translate to the photographs I’d seen of her; something that made him treat her better than he treated me. That was the only thing that made sense. Because she was so processed: all bleached hair, fake smiles and shiny dresses that barely covered her boobs. She didn’t seem like Angus’s type at all. I was his type: naturally dark blonde hair that brushed my collarbones, medium height and slender, well read, high cheekbones and grey–blue eyes he’d once said were the colour of the ocean in a winter storm.
He’d told me I was his type. Many times.
I couldn’t see him taking her to a business dinner; I couldn’t see his demure mother or elitist father warming to her the way they had to me – discussing the meaning of Turner’s early artwork over dinner and beaming at the fact that I, a property researcher, knew who that was. But then, he’d dated her for the two years before we’d met – and for a brief spell after that – so, clearly I was wrong. I’d found the photographs I was basing those assumptions on in a shoebox at the bottom of his cupboard. Her name was written on the back – Kimmy. I’d never mentioned that box to him. Instead I’d just hoped she’d fade from both our memories in time.
