by Adam Roberts
‘Day or night, we’re committed to bringing you value for money, efficiency, and a free slimline calculator. Our expert will provide a valuation entirely without charge. There’s no obligation to buy, and no employee of this company will call.’
‘How will they provide a valuation of my windows if they don’t call?’
A silence. ‘They, er, could do it from across the street.’
‘Goodnight.’
The phone is replaced in its cradle, and only the dark remains.
The phone rings a second time. The receiver is taken more hurriedly from its cradle.
‘Yes? What? What is it?’
‘Mr Everyman?’
‘Yes, yes who is this?’
‘This is X? [email protected]. FREE! FREE! XXX, TRIPLE X, XXX, GUARANTEED SEX! HOT HONEYS HOPE U’RE HARD!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Would you like to increase your penis length to, a, fifteen inches, b, twenty-five inches, or c, no limit! No limit!’
‘Who on earth would want a limitlessly long penis?’
‘Our team of specialist Dutch penoplasty surgeons are standing by the phones, ready to take your call. HOT HONEYS!’
‘How did you obtain this number?’
‘Mr Everyman, there’s a serious message here. There’s a serious message. Are you ready to hear the serious message?’
And Everyman pauses. Because it is just possible that the message he has been waiting for, the message that has haunted his dreams, is being cunningly masked in all this gibberish. He says, ‘I . . . may be. What is it?’
‘Hot Honkies!’
‘Hot honkies?’
‘No, wait a mo, Hot homunculuses – ah, no.’
‘What—’
‘Homozygote!’ barks the voice on the other end of the phone line. ‘Homousian!’ Suddenly the tone of the voice changes completely. A stern and unsettlingly mechanical speaker intones: ‘This phone conversation has performed an illegal action and will be closed down. Non-fatal error at 348–552. Do you wish to de-bug? Yes, no, cancel?’
The line goes dead.
Gordon slumps back in his bed. Recently he has been getting the strangest phone calls. Sometimes he thinks the whole world is going mad around him.
The phone rings a third time. The receiver is snatched up sharply.
‘What? What – what is it?’
‘Er,’ says the voice at the other end. ‘Is Larry there?’
‘Larry? No. I think you have a wrong number.’
‘Hi – Larry?’
‘You’ve dialled wrong.’
‘Er . . . is that Larry?’
‘No. I think you’ve dialled a wrong number.’
‘Why did you answer, if the number was wrong?’ snaps the voice.
The line goes dead.
Gordon Everyman gets out of bed and pads about his flat. He goes to the window.
Outside his flat it is snowing, soft flakes drifting downwards, unwavering, falling through the black sky in slow motion. The neon sign from the chemist’s opposite gives the snow a sickly greenish tint. On this sign, the top spar of the final ‘T’ has become bent and dislodged after a cat jumped on it. It now resembles an ‘E’ more than it does a ‘T’, such that the shop appears to be offering ‘all nite chemise’. But the light the sign puts out is strong, and very green. The snowflakes catch the illumination at strange angles, giving them the appearance of impenetrable hieroglyphs as they tumble through Gordon’s field of view.
Gordon Everyman stands by his window and stares at the snow for a long time.
The phone rings again.
‘Gordon Everyman?’ says a voice at the other end. ‘Warehouse Price Viagra Can Be Yours! Key your credit card number into the—’
He pulls the socket from the wall.
Next day, at work, Gordon asks Tim, who works at his office: ‘You know how you get spam e-mails?’
‘Sure,’ says Tim. ‘Everybody gets spam.’
‘Did you ever get a spam phone call?’
‘Spam on the phone?’ says Tim, unbelievingly. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Just like spam, but on the phone.’
‘Jesus, no. That’s weird.’
Weird, Gordon thinks. Weird is it. But the more he contemplates the universe, the more it seems to be predicated not on gravity, not on the strong or weak atomic force, not on the wave–particle duality, but on the bizarre. Ironically, in thinking this, he was not far from the truth. Not far from the truth at all. Or, to be more precise, not far as the crow flies, although his actual journey to this truth would involve certain detours, roundabout routes, lengthy delays, leaves on the line, and a replacement bus service between Feltham and Hounslow. But he gets there in the end. That’s the important thing.
Chapter 1
Gordon
And, weirdly, it turns out to be a love story after all, in the end.
You see, for Gordon, the biggest problem was women. Women troubled him. An attractive woman could reduce him to a gabbling wreck in moments. By ‘an attractive woman’ must be understood any woman Gordon found attractive; and the truth was he found every woman attractive, in one way or another, with the twin exceptions only of Princess Diana and Madelaine Albright. He didn’t know why he didn’t find Princess Diana attractive. He knew he was supposed to, but there was something in the combination of her rectilinear chin and her plughole eyes that turned him off. It didn’t really matter, of course, since the Princess – being dead – was unlikely to swing into Gordon’s social circle. But that left the rest of womankind, and when trying to talk to the rest of womankind he metamorphosed into a man drowning in spittle. It was embarrassing. It was more than embarrassing. It was Nbarrassing. It was Zbarrassing, and you can’t get any more barrassing than that.
He couldn’t understand why he turned into such a drivelling idiot in the company of the female. He loved women: he loved the way they looked, the way their minds worked, the way they wore their clothes. He loved what they wore their clothes over. He yearned for a love connection: to have a partner, a girlfriend. Even a penpal. But it didn’t seem to be destined for him.
Sometimes he would stand in front of his bathroom mirror and hold a shaving mirror to the side of his face to try and find out how he looked in profile. Straight black hair which he washed often; eyes not too close apart, not too far away from one another, a slightly W-shaped chin, it was all right. Wasn’t it? But then he’d look again, and he’d know he was fooling himself. He was not a prepossessing individual. Indeed, he was so far from being prepossessing as to be pretty much postpossessing. He had, he knew (peering close in at the bathroom mirror), myriad open pores on his nose and cheeks, which gave his skin the consistency of pumice, and which in his moments of self-doubt made him think his face looked like it had been built by the same people who made the muppets. And his nose was not a good shape. It was aquiline, which is to say, wet, with a long white shaft coming down from his forehead and a nobbled double curvature at the end. Sometimes he thought about plastic surgery. But plastic surgery belonged to plastic places like Hollywood. It wasn’t an option if you lived in Feltham. And what if, he thought idly – what if there were something cheaper than plastic surgery? But what was cheaper than plastic? Cardboard surgery? Papier-mâché surgery?
He didn’t like the sound of that.
Besides which he knew, of course, that his problem was not surgical. It was his manner, not his looks. He need only meet a woman in the corridor at work, or waiting for the elevator, or queuing in the sandwich shop down the road, and his heart thrummed like a ringing mobile set on vibrate mode. He blushed like a ketchup factory on fire. He would feel a tight sense of constriction inside him, as if the presence of the woman were somehow squeezing him. Then, as if his internal organs were all made of sponge and had been dipped in some hot salt solution, that sense of being squeezed would result in sweat starting to flow from all his pores at once. He sweated like a drain. Not that drains sweat as such, n
ot being mammalian, or indeed alive, but I’m sure you see the point I’m making.
The odd thing was that he really wasn’t shy. His problem was something the reverse of shyness. He did not shrink away from social encounters – instead he plunged in, mouth flapping, words flying, and before he had time to think what it was he was saying he had blurted out something incredibly embarrassing. He didn’t know why he did this; he only knew that he had torpedoed his chances of true love more times than he could remember by simply saying the wrong thing.
And so, still, somehow, ‘it’ didn’t happen – his connection, his special love. Maybe fate was saving ‘it’ for some future date. If so, Gordon could only hope that fate was using efficient refrigeration, or at least some sort of vacuum-packing technology, or ‘it’ would long ago have started to go off and smell. As it was there was an inevitable belatedness to his attempts at a love life; whenever he broke through the crust of his own embarrassment to strike up a conversation with a woman, he discovered that she already had a boyfriend, or girlfriend; that she was already married, that she was already committed, that he was not only too late, but belate. But still he clung to the hope that one day he would meet Ms Right, Mademoiselle Droit, an amour in shining nightie.
One day, he told himself, she’ll come.
:^0
Gordon worked as a database coordinator for a company based in Southwark. This is what a typical day involved for him: first he would commute by train from Feltham, where he lived, to Waterloo, thereafter walking to his enormous bookcase-shaped office block. He took the lift to the fifth floor, and stepped into the open-plan office of Southwark Database Coordination Consolidated. He sat in his chair and logged on. He spent twenty minutes sorting through his new e-mails. He picked his nose, surreptitiously, putting his face close to his keyboard so that his co-workers couldn’t see him do it (or so he thought). He spun his chair all the way around on its metal stalk. He chatted to Tim, who had the cell across from his.
He spent most of his time online surfing the net, adding his opinion to chatrooms, checking out arcane websites, constructing a more impressive virtual persona for himself on-line. With characteristic British pessimism he told himself that there was no point in all this, that he was merely setting himself up for disappointment. But (as he quoted wryly to himself) if it weren’t for his disappointments he wouldn’t have any appointments at all.
He had tried to meet women via the internet, but he had not enjoyed a marked success. The closest he had come had been when he swapped e-mails and instant messages with a woman called Evelyn Mulholland whom he met via DotCompanions. After two weeks of correspondence he began to think that he had at last discovered a soulmate. They talked of meeting up. Wise to the ways of blind contacts, he made sure early on in their exchanges to ascertain the precise gender of his correspondent: <
‘Excuse me . . . Evelyn, is it?’
‘Gordon! Hello!’
The prolonged waiting period and anxiety of anticipation had greatly increased Gordon’s innate querulousness. ‘Ohhh you’re a geezer,’ he said, in his whiniest voice. ‘Jesus, Evelyn, I asked you if you were a girl, and you sent me a picture of this blonde honey. Million-dollar babe, you said.’
‘Yes, and the good news,’ said Evelyn urgently, ‘is that the surgery will almost certainly cost considerably less than a million dollars! A friend of mine took that same photo to a surgeon, and was quoted eight hundred thou for everything except the hair. And there’s always wigs, right? There’s this wiggery in Poland Street that—’
‘Eight hundred thou?’ interrupted Gordon. His face had sagged so as to resemble the classic theatrical mask of tragedy.
‘That,’ said Evelyn, pawing Gordon’s shoulder, ‘is surely loose change to a company director like you – four hundred employees, you said, with offices in London and Frankfurt.’
It is true to say that Gordon had thuswise embellished his own circumstances during their exchanges. But rather than confess to this he pulled himself up to his full height, said something incoherent about the betrayal of trust, and marched off. ‘I thought it was understood,’ wailed Evelyn behind him.
After that incident, Gordon fought shy of internet contacts. He did his job in the day, and sometimes went out with his workmates to the Chain Bar round the corner. He added to his collection of SF and horror DVDs. He ate a lot of takeaway Indian food. He visited his parents in their semi-detached East Staines house, two Sundays a month. He tried real life, but it wasn’t especially edifying.
And so the internet drew him in again. It promised so much: a realm in which he could achieve anything he wanted, in which he could adopt any personality. In the web, he was tall, handsome, and – according to his own self-description – irresistible to women. He built up his online persona, choosing a name – Nemo – from an old League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic he’d been reading. If Gordon were a nobody, then Nemo at least could be a somebody.
That’s what he hoped.
(c:
When he first made e-contact with Thinity – or, more accurately, when Thinity made e-contact with him – he was, accordingly, cautious. He roamed chatrooms using his ‘Nemo’ alias, and boasted freely about his hacking abilities. His hacking abilities were, in truth, non-existent. He couldn’t hack a computer. He couldn’t hack a pocket calculator. He could barely hack a cough. But in the virtual world of chatrooms and internet sites, embarrassments like truth could be blithely disregarded.
He typed furiously, into the night, grinning to himself. <
The woman with the cognomen Thinity seemed interested. They swapped messages on a regular basis. ‘Let’s meet,’ he texted. ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘Oh go on,’ he texted. ‘No,’ she replied.
And that, he thought, was that. Probably best that way, he thought. ‘She’ is probably a hairy-legged bloke anyway, he thought.
In all three of these thoughts he was wrong.
Chapter 2
‘I’m on the Train’
And so, one grey morning much like any other, Gordon clambered on to the 7:57 Waterloo train at Feltham station. He wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary to happen.
Miraculously he found himself not one but two adjacent seats, which he claimed in the traditional manner by slumping in one and putting his tote bag on the other. Stretching his arms to open his newspaper wide effectively screened the little area from the other commuters. He rifled the pages until, passing world news and home news, he came to that part of the paper where the broadsheet reproduced tabloid scandal under the guise of critiquing it. The train trundled into motion, and he started reading the paper.
Lost to the world in this manner, it was a while before he became aware that somebody was standing over him. It was a woman. A woman in tight-fitting, black plastic trousers.
‘Nemo?’ said the woman.
Gordon dropped the paper to his lap. The speaker possessed a clear, well-modulated American-accented voice.
She may have had a beautiful face. She could, indeed, have been very beautiful altogether. Gordon couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell because he simply couldn’t remove his gaze from the portion of tight-fitting trousers directly in front of his eyes. His line of sight was completely occupied by two thighs. Not only were these very shapely thighs, very shapely thighs indeed, but they were wrapped in close-tailored plastic, sheer, sheen, black, very tight. The plastic gripped the hips of the woman with an insolent closeness. It hugged her crotch, and by doing so it pushed into Gordon’s mind the thought of a sentence in which the words ‘hugged’ and ‘crotch’ appeared of necessity in close proximity. These trousers looked inked on. They did not say ‘workwear’, or ‘easyclean’, or ‘designer’, or ‘expensive’, or any of those concepts. They said only two things: ‘shapely leg here’ and ‘here’s another’.
Gordon’s mouth had gone dry. To put it more precisely, his saliva seemed to have been replaced by some sort of adhesive gum.
‘Up,’ said the woman’s voice, annoyed, ‘here.’
With strenuous effort Gordon creaked his head back, and let his gaze clamber up black-plastic-shirted torso in black plastic jacket, to a serenely handsome female face. In an instant Gordon knew he was in love. But to fall instantly in love with so extraordinarily beautiful, so obviously unapproachable a woman! It was hopeless. It was heartbreaking. It was the story of Gordon’s life.
‘You finished staring at my legs?’ said the woman crossly.
‘Ah—’ said Gordon. He tried to think of a line that would be suave enough to purge all awkwardness from the situation. To make her laugh, put her at her ease, to segue smoothly into an irresistible chat-up. He tried to think what James Bond would say in this situation. He tried, mentally, to become the coolest guy in the world.
He said, ‘Hu-ah? Oh.’