LOOSE CONNECTIONS
Rachel Trezise
Published by Accent Press Ltd
ISBN 9781907726040
Third Time Lucky
It was 9.47 and from the window Rosemary could see the postman was delivering an oddly shaped parcel to the teenager in the semi across the road. It was round and wrapped in brown paper. It looked like a motorcycle helmet. Her repairman was seventeen minutes late. I’ll make another coffee, Rosemary thought. I’ll make another coffee and then I’ll ring them, again.
She was about to move away from the window when she saw the white van pulling slowly into the cul-de-sac, the company’s familiar purple and red emblem pasted on the side. She bunched the curtain in her fist, waiting for the worker to step out of the cab. Whole minutes slipped by, the van sitting motionless in the road, one wheel wedged against the kerb. Rosemary’s fingers gripped the fabric until it turned wet in her hand.
When the van began to shake she let the curtain go. It fell back into position, an ugly crease left where her hand had been. The cab door opened, the hinges squeaking. Rosemary stood behind the gauzy curtain watching the figure emerge, her eyes narrowing. The repairman slammed the door and walked to the back of the vehicle. It was a man. Rosemary realised on seeing him that she’d hoped they’d send a woman this time. Women had a reputation for getting things done. The repairman looked a bit like an elf. He was short, and much too thin, with long, mousey hair tied into a messy ponytail. But even from behind the curtain she could see that his hands were quite beautiful. His fingers were slender and feminine, what her mother would have called piano fingers. As he unlocked the back doors she saw a winter sunbeam bounce off his gold signet ring.
This was the third repairman Rosemary’s Internet Service Provider had sent in as many weeks. Rosemary was a translator and she worked from home. Most of her work involved legal documents. Her Internet connection had expired without explanation when she’d been about to complete a particularly important assignment. It was a purchase contract for a Corsican villa. Her failure to deliver the translated document to the French estate agency was delaying the entire sale. Her commission fee was falling by the day. There were just a few details she needed to verify on the National Association of Estate Agents website, before e-mailing the contract to Paris. She could have used the computer suite at the central library, or popped next door to borrow Linda’s laptop, but she refused to drive into the city centre, pay a small fortune to park, and then cart all of her paperwork and books through the arcade. Nor was she going to make a nuisance of herself by bothering her neighbours, not when she was paying hard-earned money for her own Internet connection. It was a matter of principle! And when the company had actually managed to fix the problem she was going to sue them for loss of earnings.
The first person they had sent was an obese man in his late thirties. Rosemary swore he had not showered in a month. He smelled like rotting vegetables. He sat at the PC and turned it on and off a couple of times. Rosemary had to leave the room because his smell was so bad. After half an hour he’d called her back into her little office under the stairs. ‘A bit of a puzzle, this one, love,’ he said.
Rosemary hated it when strangers called her ‘love’. She leaned in the doorway, her hand covering her nose. He waved at the socket near the floor. ‘Is this the main telephone line?’ he said.
Rosemary nodded.
‘Hmm, no chance of a cuppa is there then, love?’ he said. ‘I think I’ll be here a while.’
She took four of her home-made banana flapjacks from the cooling tray on the counter and laid them on a saucer. She put them down on the desk with the tea. She wanted the job done quickly, and the best way to a fat man’s heart was through his fat stomach. An hour or so later she could hear him packing his tools up. She put her novel down on the coffee table and ran into the office. ‘Is it fixed?’
The repairman shook his head. ‘They’ll have to send someone else. I’m not up to date on all this IT business. I’m more of a phone-line man, me. I think the problem is with the computer itself. Computers! I’m not sure which way is up.’ He laughed, his face turning red. His wide smile revealed a gap where one of his front teeth should have been. There were biscuit crumbs jammed in the corners of his mouth.
Rosemary didn’t laugh.
The repairman shrugged. ‘Well, don’t worry about it too much, love,’ he said. ‘They’ll send one of the young ’uns out first thing in the morning.’
She had to turn the air freshener to maximum when he left the house.
The second man had turned up a week later, a muscular twenty-something, wearing multi-coloured trainers, an iPod tucked into the breast pocket of his navy overall. He didn’t seem much older than her sixteen-year-old son. ‘All right?’ he said briskly, marching into the house.
Rosemary followed him down the narrow hall. ‘Just there,’ she said pointing at the office door. The computer was already on. Every morning she checked the connection, hoping the glitch had mysteriously fixed itself overnight.
The repairman leaned over the desk and double-clicked the mouse, quickly opening and closing windows and browsers Rosemary had never seen before. ‘The computer’s fine,’ he said. ‘The report says the phone line is fine. It must be outside.’ He went out into the street and held a small metal device against the telegraph post for a few minutes, and then dawdled back to the house, the device limp in his hand. He stood in front of the doorstep, not quite making eye contact with Rosemary. ‘The post is dead,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand it. The whole street must be out.’ He sighed. ‘They’ll have to send someone else. It’s not something I can deal with.’
‘Why not?’ Rosemary said.
‘Health and safety.’ He gestured at the telegraph pole. ‘You’d need a cherry picker to look in there. I’m not qualified.’ He was already swaggering down the drive. Had he been within arm’s length, Rosemary might have slapped his stupid, juvenile face.
Now the new repairman was knocking on the front door. Rosemary took a deep breath and wiped her palms on the thighs of her jeans. She went into the hallway and saw the dark shadow of the petite figure through the frosted glass. She cleared her throat as she opened the door.
‘Hi,’ the man said. He had eyes the colour of honey, a deep, gooey yellow. Rosemary had never seen eyes that colour before. ‘There’s a problem with your Internet connection?’ he said.
She stood aside to let him in, leading him down the hall and into the office. ‘It’s been broken for three weeks now,’ she said, voice sharp, like an axe splitting wood. ‘You’re the third person they’ve sent.’
‘Third time lucky, eh?’ he said.
Rosemary turned the PC on. She pulled her leather computer chair out for him to sit down.
‘They’re nice,’ he said. ‘Is that you?’ He was looking at the black and white photographs hanging from the picture rail. They’d been taken during summers at her grandparents’ house. There was one for every year of her life, up until the age of fourteen when her parents had divorced, and her mother couldn’t afford to spend summers in France any more. He was staring at the last in the series: Rosemary sitting on a stone bench in the courtyard, wearing a short puffball skirt, with Bébé, her grandfather’s black cat, cradled in her gangly arms. ‘It’s not Britain, is it?’ he said. He took a pair of spectacles out of his pocket and put them on, staring harder at the faded picture.
‘Toulouse,’ Rosemary said, surprised by his curiosity. Nobody looked at those photos any more. The kids had no interest in their heritage. ‘My mother was French.’
‘The pink city,’ the man said, nodding knowingly. He sat in her leather chair but he didn’t look at the monitor. ‘Do you speak French?’ He crossed his legs, the angular
contour of his knee bone clear through the black cotton of his trousers.
‘I’m a translator,’ Rosemary said. ‘That’s what I do for a living. I work from home.’ She wondered why she was telling him this. She paused. ‘I need the Internet.’
‘Say something,’ he said. He was looking at her face. ‘Say something in French.’
Rosemary’s hands dropped from her hips. She knocked her arms against her sides like a little girl. ‘Repare-moi cette putain de connection Internet,’ she said, a sentence that roughly translated to, ‘Fix my bloody Internet.’
He understood the sarcasm, if not the language. ‘OK,’ he said, a broad smile splashed across his face. He turned to the screen. ‘What’s the problem exactly?’ His smile evaporated, his ripe lower lip curved over its own little shadow.
Rosemary felt the severe tension that she’d forgotten for a moment seizing her nerves again. She folded her arms across her waist. ‘The last guy they sent said the whole street was out. I know it’s a lie because I saw the kid across the road take a parcel this morning. It came from eBay, I know it did, and that
means he’s using the Internet.’ Her voice was bitter again. ‘You know I’m going to sue when this is over?’ she said. ‘For loss of earnings and all of my expenses. I’m losing money every day.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ the repairman said. He tapped at the keypad, his fingers dancing madly. Rosemary tried not to look at them. ‘I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’ she said, turning out of the room.
‘We get paid commission on call-outs,’ the man said without looking up at her. Rosemary watched him work for a few seconds, waiting for his next sentence. The signet ring was on his right index finger. The seal was some kind of Celtic cross. There was no wedding ring but the skin on his ring finger was soft from having worn one at some time.
‘What does that mean?’ Rosemary said, remembering herself.
The repairman knelt down on the floor and studied the back of the tower, his bony limbs reminding her of a stick insect. ‘It means that if there were people who were less than honest working for your ISP, they might tell you they weren’t sure of the solution so they could earn themselves a few extra quid.’ He waved a miniature screwdriver in the air. ‘Then, if the job needs a second call-out, it means their mate can make some money too.’
‘Is that what you’re doing to me?’
‘No!’ He looked up at her, his strange yellow eyes glowing. ‘Why would I tell you if that’s what I was doing? You’d report me, wouldn’t you?’ He smiled.
Rosemary smiled back but she didn’t know why. She was irked by the vague statement. There was something distasteful about it. She was annoyed by his calm manner and the interest he’d paid to her pictures. She wanted her Internet fixed. She wanted to check her e-mails. She took one last look at his pretty fingers. ‘I’ll just get you some tea,’ she said, closing the door behind her.
‘Thank you,’ the repairman said as the woman disappeared from the room. He remembered that one of his colleagues, Big Mike, had said something about her tea. He’d said something about biscuits as well, that she made them herself, or said she did. The general view at the base was that there was a cable loose in the socket. He located the socket, knelt in front of it and inspected it, testing the cover with his thumb. They were right. One of the screws needed tightening. It was a five-second job but instead of doing it he sat back in the leather chair. He looked at the teenage girl in the photograph, sitting in a courtyard in France, her long, blonde hair curled and blowing in a light breeze. There was something striking about her face. There still was. The woman was round at the edges now but her eyes hadn’t lost any of their teenage intensity.
He wasn’t sure why he’d felt the need to mention the scam. He’d never before breathed a word of it to a customer. He supposed he thought that admitting it cleared him somehow, that the woman would think he was trustworthy, friendly; that the others were the dishonest ones. That was roughly true in any case. Everyone at the company had been at it since before he’d started the job. Between them they’d discovered that they could dupe the vulnerable customers, lone females and pensioners, for two call-outs, but then the customers became impatient. They complained, and in turn the customer services department got suspicious. The scam wasn’t something he particularly enjoyed but he was powerless to stop it, on his own. He was the last link in the chain this time. Often they sent him last because people tended to trust him. He quite liked this woman though. He felt uncomfortable lying to her. He’d drink his tea, give it an hour, and distract her with chit-chat about France.
Abduction
Rosemary stomped into the kitchen and stood at the worktop. She pushed the plastic lever on the electric kettle, the way she always did when she found herself with guests in her house. It was a reflex action. But she didn’t take the teacup out of the cupboard. She didn’t take the spoon from the cutlery tray. She didn’t pull the top from the vintage sugar canister. She stared out of the window and listened to the kettle boiling, the water bubbling. She was still hot with irritation, a thin layer of sweat bleeding from her hairline. The con that the repairman had hinted at sounded possible. It would explain why there was no sure explanation for the fault.
On the decking outside, a she-cat was eating a discarded chunk of cooked chicken, her sex clear from a loosely fitting pink collar. Another cat was trying to get at the chicken, but each time it made a bid for the meat the she-cat snarled, her teeth milk-white and sharp as needles. After a few attempts, the she-cat pounced, catching the thin skin of the other cat’s ear with her outstretched claw. It yelped and skulked backwards four paces before fleeing over the garden wall. As it did, an idea entered Rosemary’s head, as clear and flawless as if God himself had put it there. ‘I’ll kidnap the repairman,’ she said to herself. She had never heard her voice sound so pure and determined, as though the air in the kitchen had become a microphone. It was as if she had discovered a cure for cancer and she was announcing her brainchild to the world. ‘He’s a small guy,’ she said, reasoning with herself, ‘smaller than me. I’ll hold him hostage until he’s fixed it.’
There was a cream vanity case hidden under the bed frame in her room. She kneeled on the floor and pulled it out. The creases in the discoloured leather were filled with thick wisps of dust. She pressed the nickel button with her thumb and the buckle popped open with a soft ping. Inside, she found old bottles of massage oils, and a half-used tube of KY Jelly, its top glued to its body. There were unopened packets of condoms, flavoured, ribbed, Fetherlite. The white use-by dates stamped on the packaging were years old. Remnants from a past life. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sexual intercourse. She was only thirty-seven. Apparently that was the age when a woman hit her sexual prime. But sex had been a chore since she’d had her daughter fourteen years ago.
At first she and her husband had tried to schedule it in. They sent the kids to their grandparents. They lit tea lights. They ate shellfish and asparagus, strawberries and watermelon. They smothered one another’s bodies with edible chocolate-flavoured paint. But she worried about her stretch marks. She made him turn the lights out. She began to fall asleep in the middle of foreplay. Like a magician turning silk handkerchiefs into white rabbits, sexual chemistry vanished as soon as true biology reared its head.
She pushed her hand deeper into the case until her fingers touched cold metal. She pulled the handcuffs out and they smelt rusty, like old coins. They were something she’d won at an Ann Summers party in Linda’s house four years ago, along with a cheap bottle of red wine. She’d drunk the wine that very night, but the handcuffs had never been used. She carried them with her arm outstretched, the way someone might carry a recovered weapon, a knife or a gun. The frames of the cuffs were decorated with bands of black ostrich feathers. She crept downstairs, missing the second-last step because she knew it creaked. She stood outside the office for a moment, listening to the silence from within. She hid the handcuffs behind her back. Sh
e opened the door.
The repairman was sitting in her chair, staring at the pictures. ‘You know there’s something about that image,’ he said. ‘I can’t take my eyes off it.’
‘Really?’ Rosemary stood behind him. She rested her elbow on the back of the chair, leaning down next to him to share his point of view. His hair smelt of medicated shampoo. ‘Why not?’ she said. The repairman kept looking at the photograph, his mouth open. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice a whisper. ‘It’s something about your eyes. They look sad, and happy at the same time.’
Rosemary reached for his hand. It was cold and almost lifeless. She looked at it for a moment, positioned in her own hand, before pulling it gently behind the chair. He wasn’t going to fight. She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe what she was doing. Swiftly she secured the cuff around his wrist, as tight as it would go. His hand jerked as he resisted but Rosemary was too quick. She slipped the other cuff around the arm of the chair, the metal scraping against the leather as the repairman realised what she’d done. He was trying to retrieve his hand. Rosemary sat facing him on the plywood desk. ‘What do you think my eyes look like now?’ she said.
The repairman was grinning. He thought it was a joke. ‘Fierce,’ he said, almost flirting. Rosemary kicked him in the shin. ‘Ouch,’ he said, rubbing at his leg with his free hand. ‘What did you do that for?’
‘I’m not playing,’ Rosemary said. ‘You’re staying tied to that chair until my Internet connection’s fixed.’ She smiled now. She swung her legs, reminding herself again of a little girl.
The man laughed, a high-pitched twitter, but his yellow eyes were murky with concern. ‘I know you’re joking,’ he said. ‘Come on, you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’d want to go to prison, and abduction is a pretty serious crime.’ As he spoke he quickly scanned the room in search of an escape route, but there were no windows in what had once been the broom cupboard. There was only the one door.
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