But, anyway, I was soon to put thoughts of Wendy to the back of my mind…
Wendy’s cubicle was only empty for two days; on the third morning Antony and I came in to find Natalie in her place. Natalie couldn’t have been more different to Wendy if scientists had isolated the tomboy gene, created its antithesis and given it form. Where Wendy was as big as me – but with far superior upper body strength – Natalie was a diminutive one fifty-five and slender everywhere but on the behind and the chest.
Don’t look at me like that! You want the real story or the EU approved version? Very well then…
She had long, blonde hair that looked like it took more looking after than a new born baby and an interpretation of smart casual that just…
Okay, okay, I’m moving on.
But, as you might expect, she was as ditzy as shit. Lovely, totally sweet and innocent, but not so much an air head as a ‘helium head’. You know... a head so far up in the clouds that it threatened to break free of the Earth’s atmosphere. And I don’t know, maybe I was a bit prejudiced, you know, with an oversimplified picture of the world, but I couldn’t quite equate this girl who thought that crampons were for bad period pains with someone who was a more talented coder than I would ever be. And I was a real nerd.
Yep, ha-ha… real funny.
And this really intrigued me. Of course, for ‘intrigued’, read ‘any flimsy excuse to fancy her that meant I didn’t have to face the fact that it was about looks’. Oh yeah, I used to be all man, baby.
So me, Antony and Nat became a new little work posse. A little gang that would sit in the corner of the lunch hall and quietly bitch about Microsoft and Cyberlife, competing with each other to find the funniest way to deride our employers so we could avoid facing up to the fact that all of us depended upon sucking from the oily corporate tit for our continued existence. Or that’s how I liked to see it, at least.
Actually, it was probably more a case of me and Antony competing to make Nat laugh harder than the other one did. But God did I love those days; they were so simple in a way. And I was in love, too; in love for all the wrong reasons… and it felt great.
That X-mas our section went out in town for our work X-mas party. After a few hours, the whole group was breaking up and either going home, or onto whichever bar or club they normally frequented. I didn’t normally frequent anywhere, but me, Antony, and Nat ended up at this tatty upstairs club just off the High Street Complex… Um, the name had something to do with broken glass. Yeah, real inviting name.
Antony popped straight off to the toilet when we got inside, and me and Nat went up to the bar. She was really quite drunk, I was mildly so. Next thing, some guy who knows Nat – or evidently thinks he does – comes up and starts chatting away to her. Before I know it, he’s running his hand through her hair in this really creepy way. She’s still smiling – and Nat was one of those girls with whom any smile would look like a come on to most men – and I’m way out of my depth, stood there half-wanting to click my heels together and Dorothy myself home and half-wanting to jump in and whisk Nat away to some sunset somewhere. Then Nat kind of forced my hand.
She wheeled round a little so that the guy had his back to me – he hadn’t taken one bit of notice of me since he had arrived – and the next time he leaned in to kiss her cheek (he was going for the lips, but Nat had evidently been in this situation before) she fixed me with a wide-eyed, pleading look and mouthed “Help me, p-l-e-a-s-e,” over his shoulder.
Bugger. You know? I mean, this guy was a lot bigger than me. But that didn’t really matter; he could have been a metre high and armless, any sort of confrontation tended to fill my stomach with bile and my bladder with the urge to perform a fire drill. But this was my moment – and so much more of a potential moment than I had ever really expected. It was my chance to be her knight in shining armour; well, actually her knight in a ten euro T-shirt which screamed ‘Get some clothes sense, saddo!’ What you going to do, huh?
“Hi,” I said, laying a gentle hand on the guy’s shoulder. I leaned over and kissed Nat’s cheek, aware of a gaze on me that said, ‘Anywhere quieter and I would pile drive you into the ground and then shit on your broken face’. Or so I imagined.
I turned back to my unexpected rival, (actually, let’s face it, I was the unexpected one), and held out my hand. “Hi, I’m Tim.”
As he stood there, his expression moved from annoyed to stunned as Nat made her way (not a little drunkenly) behind me and, wrapping her arms around my torso, brushed her lips gently across my triceps, what there is of them. His handshake, which had been trying to crush my hand, quickly started to loosen and his eyes widened in utter disbelief as he saw this.
“Um, hi Tim,” he said, (the music was loud, so I’m guessing). “So… nice to see you, I should get back to my friends.” And so he hurriedly backed away as if he’d just realised that he’d bought a ticket to the freak circus where girls like Nat went for guys like me. Me, I would have sold my soul for a season ticket to that show.
With El Libido safely on his way, Natalie’s arms predictably unfastened themselves from around my waist. I turned to her and she gave me the sweetest smile I had yet seen her give. (However, the effect that large quantities of alcohol were having on her ability to control her facial muscles might have been the real reason for such softness in her smile.) But that was the extent of her gratitude, so it seemed – not even a ‘Thank you’ mouthed silently in concession to the deafening sequence of screeches, beeps and scraping sounds that the club was trying to pass for dance music.
So we queued for our drinks again and Antony rejoined us, and neither Nat nor myself made mention of the incident to him. Antony suggested we take our drinks closer to the dance floor and turned to head across the crowded club. – The guy was like a human battering ram in crowded places like that. As Nat and I turned to follow him, I suddenly felt a small, clammy hand gently take mine and squeeze it.
It literally took me a moment to be sure it was hers. The relief quickly turned into two very conflicting feelings: One of them was panic; the other was warm and fuzzy – a kind of ‘Don’t worry, you’re probably just hallucinating but hey, aren’t mind-altering drugs fun?’ kind of feeling.
It soon became apparent that whatever Nat was doing, she was trying to do it without Antony noticing. The three of us stood leaning against this railing which surrounded the dance floor with some sort of laminate-covered shelf running above it to put your drinks on. Nat was in the middle, me one side and Antony on the other.
To the casual observer, it might have looked like Nat was pretty much ignoring me in favour of face-to-face conversation with Antony. But one hand casually tossed behind her back rubbed a thumb back and forth across my palm in a way that probably isn’t always as arousing as it was right there, that night. My mind raced: did she really like me or was it just the booze and some faux heroism on my part? Was there a way I could duck the issue by hiding away until I figured out which, and thereby avoid having to kill myself if I was wrong? Apparently not…
“So,” Antony said while we waited for Nat to return from the coat queue as we left the club, “What’s going on with you and Nat then?”
Bastard.
Chapter 2
Work came on Monday – still two weeks until the X-mas break. I’d spent the weekend going from vaguely fancying Nat because she was the most attractive thing in my week five days out of seven, to somehow deciding that she was my soul mate and the most perfect thing on two legs. Well, any amount of legs, actually.
So what if she could name forty-two different shades of hair dye? Difference is the spice of life… or, possibly variety. And I liked the way that she smelled; like home might smell if every fear of loneliness and social failure were taken away. She smelled like a real life that a real man might lead, not some boy who’d only recently moved out of home and was now doing the same thing he’d been doing since he was twelve for a job.
She was beautiful and tanned and had perfec
tly straight hair and expertly manicured nails. What’s wrong with that? She made every man’s head turn, but she liked me… Possibly.
She wasn’t exactly showing it, but then she wasn’t being unfriendly either. She was being… like normal. And ‘like normal’ was pretty friendly. Nonetheless, I felt a little twist of jealousy in the pit of my stomach every time that she laughed a little harder at one of Antony’s jokes than she just had at one of mine. Hey, hands off you slimy, great oaf, I’d think. As you can see, my growing feelings for Nat were really helping me mature as a person.
But you’ve got to understand; I was a fairly ugly young man – still am now – and even the idea that someone like Nat could find me attractive promised to banish every bad experience and humiliation that I had suffered since puberty. It wouldn’t change the image that I saw in the mirror every day, (though with the sort of grooming tips that girl could’ve imparted, who knows), but it would disprove my experiences up to that point – that when it comes to sex and finding a relationship, the way your face looks is the greatest thing that people judge you on.
Okay, I do see the quite monstrously-sized hypocrisy that I’m currently laying out before you here. If all I’m after is a sexy-looking woman, then surely I’m no better than Rowena Wots-Her-Name who spectacularly rejected me by turning grey and looking like she was going to vomit in front of the whole class at school. And maybe if Nat was only half as attractive, I might have needed to have twice as much in common with her to have been as interested (and damn-near obsessed) as I was.
But the point is that TV has made me learn that I should be having lots of sex with gorgeous women, and it all just seemed so damned unfair that lots of other guys were getting this just because of some genetic principles that most of them probably didn’t even understand. And it seemed all the more unfair that – just as the TV told them to – these great-looking guys were getting all this sex from a succession of different gorgeous women who they generally cared nothing about, whereas all I wanted was just one good one.
* * * *
So the week rolled on and I spent half the time fantasising about how I would ask Nat out, and the other half over-analysing every contact between us for signs of her undying love – something that was looking more and more elusive all the time. Friday came and went and, my brief bout of semi-confidence bowing apologetically as it backed out of the proverbial door, I started to accept that what had always been fact since Cave Girl Nat had overlooked Cave Boy Tim for the much sexier Ug and his more protruding temples was still very much true: Movies are way better than real life. Or cave paintings, if you insist.
Saturday came and was just about gone too, when events took an unexpected turn.
I was alone at home with a four-pack and my CyMedia Centre – oh yeah baby, heady times – and there was an advert for the new CyberV that we (well… other people, not me) were developing across the other side of the same complex. This new CyberV was different because it was designed for long-term interaction, anything from a week to three years in one stretch, rather than the twenty-four hour ceiling that was in place at the time.
They were offering CyberV as a holiday, or even a kind of temporary emigration, the plan being to build a system that could be played while the player was in a state of semi-hibernation, kept alive by a feeding tube and careful climate control. They were going to build huge hibernation centres that could house hundreds of thousands in less than a city block.
Of course, what they didn’t say in the advert was that this was a government-sponsored attempt to deal with overcrowding, and tha-
…Yeah, I know you know all this, but it does actually have relevance to the story later on. Can I continue?
So… I was home alone on a Saturday night. This advert was on and it must have been close to midnight. There was a sudden noise just outside that sounded like it was in my front garden. Well, when I say ‘garden’, I’m actually talking about a two metre square patch of wood chip-covered earth with a couple of indestructible ferns – or some such – growing out of it.
I got up out of my chair and approached the window. Despite the fact that I had the lights off, the reflected glare from the CyMedia Centre was enough to make it impossible to see outside properly.
As I squinted out of the lounge window, there was a loud bang from the direction of the kitchen window that startled me enough to cause some beer spillage. The kitchen and the lounge were all one big room, so I could see the window from where I was, but only wet, windy blackness seemed to lie beyond it. I put the beer down and wondered whether to call the complex security, weighing the unlikely possibility of an intruder on a Cyberlife complex against the humiliation of a security guard looking at me as if I still believed in closet monsters.
Maybe I’d just go and take a quick look myself.
I scanned around for something heavy and weapon-like. Moments later and armed with my left shoe, I moved towards the front door only to hear a loud crash come from the direction of my bedroom.
Jesus, were there three of them? Why me, what had I done? Fear started to consume me and I moved to the com to call security as more unfriendly noises came from my bedroom.
“Hello, security.”
And the sound of the door opening.
“Hello, is that security?”
And a sound like someone’s face hitting the wall in the corridor – just the other side of the door that stood slightly ajar less than a metre from me.
“Yes, that’s why I said, ‘Hello, security’.”
Silently, the door started to slide open…
“Thank God, I forgot to order breakfast.”
…and before me, her face painted by the multi-coloured glow from the Cymedia Centre, stood Nat.
“As I’m sure you already know, this isn’t a hotel,” replied the security guard somewhat drily
“Oh, my mistake.”
“Okay, goodnight then.”
“Goodnight.”
“And Mr. McNamee.”
“Yes?”
“If you’re going to make prank calls, you might want to try making them from a com that isn’t yours.”
“Okay”, I called, full of false cheer, “th-a-n-k-s!”
Nat was drunk, it was obvious. “So, you’re in then,” she stated.
“Yep,” I replied, still trying to re-swallow my heart, “just as in as I would have been if you’d knocked on the door.”
“I did.”
“No, that was the kitchen window.”
“Oh...”
What seemed like an awkward moment's silence followed, until I realised that it wasn't awkward after all and that Nat had just zoned out and was staring off into space. Then, squinting her eyes, she appeared to be having trouble focusing at said point in space.
“Got any drink?” she asked, still squinting.
“Nat, what the hell are you doing here?”
Of course, I knew what I hoped she was doing, but this wasn’t why I was asking in such an ill-tempered way.
“Get me a drink and I’ll tell you.”
“Do you know how much shit you can get into wondering around here drunk at this time of night? They’d have your job for one thing.”
And there it was: I’d had a thought about Nat that didn’t involve mentally undressing her or wondering how I could tell if she liked me. I had actually worried about her. Of course, she would be harder to fantasise about if she got fired...
“Ish a free country, init?”
I moved to get her a drink of water. “I’m not sure it is, but that’s beside the point. This is Cyberlife.” And a thought occurred. “And there’s reinforced gates and four metre walls… Wait there, how the hell did you get in the complex?”
Nat didn’t reply, but instead stared at me with half-closed eyes and a dumb grin. Boy, she looked rough. I decided she hadn’t heard me, because the look and the grin remained, so I returned with the water and guided her to the sofa. My attempts to get the glass into her hand failed and se
emed only destined to result in wet furniture, so I gave up and put it on the table.
Nat lounged back in the seat, somewhere between upright and prone, her hair a damp and straggly mess, her tight top skewed so as to expose or gather up every little ounce of fat and loose skin. She looked at me and the stupid grin returned, at that angle exposing a small double chin that I didn’t realise she had.
“You’re nife, you are,” she said. I presumed she meant ‘nice’. It was a compliment, but it could also be the kiss of death in dating terms. I waited for her to tell me that I was like a brother. “Nifer than you fink.”
She closed her eyes; the grin remained, now looking like perfect contentment.
“So Nat,” I tried, “where you been tonight?”
She ignored the question and brought her legs up, starting to curl towards a foetal position. Both legs of her black tights were laddered, probably either on my ferns or my bedroom window. “Safe here,” she said absently, as if sleep was beginning to take her. “Safe with you.”
And with that she was gone, fast asleep on my couch. I stared down at my uninvited – but certainly, not unwelcome – visitor. The idea of me and Nat alone in my house late on Saturday night was somewhat absurd, but here she was. I looked down at her in the glow of the media centre, looked at her wet hair starting to fuzz as it dried, the red patch on her forehead that was probably from a collision with one of my walls, that double chin, half a dozen spots below her mouth, a definite hint of cellulite on her exposed lower back and legs beneath her slightly-hitched skirt that were… sturdier than I had thought, and realised that, despite having sat next to her every day for nearly two months, and despite my supposed love for her having filled my head with a dizzying sickness for the last week, I really didn’t know the young woman before me at all.
The Love I Found: Contemporary Romance Mystery (Ariadne Silver Romance Mystery #3) Page 13