The computer stuff was going OK, if you’re interested. By the middle of the week the system was pretty much in place, and people were happily sending pop-up messages to each other. Egerton, in particular, thought it was just fab that he could boss people around from the comfort of his own den. Even John was bucked up by seeing how the new system was going to ease the progress of whatever dull task it was he performed, and all in all my stock at the VCA was rising high.
It was time, finally, to get down to the nitty-gritty of developing their new databases. I tend to enjoy that part more than the wireheading, because it’s more of a challenge, gives scope for design and creativity, and I don’t have to keep getting up from my chair. When I settled down to it on Thursday morning, I realized that it was going to have an additional benefit. Jeanette was the VCA’s Events Organizer, and most of the databases they needed concerned various aspects of her job. In other words, it was her I genuinely had to talk to about them, and at some length.
We sat side by side at her desk, me keeping a respectful distance, and I asked her the kind of questions I had to ask. She answered them concisely and quickly, didn’t pipe up with a lot of damn fool questions, and came up with some reasonable requests. It was rather a nice day outside, and sunlight that was for once not hazy and obstructive angled through the window to pick out the lighter hues amongst her chestnut hair, which was long, and wavy, and as far as I could see entirely beautiful. Her hands played carelessly with a biro as we talked, the fingers long and purposeful, the forearms a pleasing shade of skin colour. I hate people who go sprinting out into parks at the first sign of summer, to lie with insectile patience or brainlessness in the desperate quest for a tan. As far as I was concerned the fact that Jeanette clearly hadn’t done so – in contrast to Tanya, for example, who already looked like a hazelnut (and probably thought with the same fluency as one) – was just another thing to like her for.
It was a nice morning. Relaxed, and pleasant. Over the last week we’d started to speak more and more, and were ready for a period of actually having to converse with each other at length. I enjoyed it, but didn’t get over-excited. Despite my losing status as a technodrone, I am wise in the ways of relationships. Just being able to get on with her, and have her look as if she didn’t mind being with me – that was more than enough for the time being. I wasn’t going to try for anything more. Or so I thought.
Then, at 12.30, I did something entirely unexpected. We were in the middle of an in-depth and speculative wrangle on the projected nature of their hotel-booking database, when I realized that we were approaching the time at which Jeanette generally took her lunch. Smoothly, and with a nonchalance which I found frankly impressive, I lofted the idea that we go grab a sandwich somewhere and continue the discussion outside. As the sentences slipped from my mouth I experienced an out-of-body sensation, as if I was watching myself from about three feet away, cowering behind a chair. “Not bad,” I found myself thinking, incredulously. “Clearly she’ll say no, but that was a good, businesslike way of putting it.”
Bizarrely, instead of shrieking with horror or poking my eye out with a ruler, she said yes. We rose together, I grabbed my jacket, and we left the office, me trying not to smirk like some recently ennobled businessman who’s done a lot of work for charity. We took the lift down to the lobby and stepped outside, and I chattered inanely to avoid coming to terms with the fact that I was now standing with her outside work, beyond our usual frame of reference.
She knew a snack bar round the corner, and within ten minutes we found ourselves at a table outside, ploughing through sandwiches. She even ate attractively, holding the food firmly and wolfing it down, as if she was a genuine human taking on sustenance rather than someone appearing in amateur dramatics. I audibly mulled over the database for a while, to give myself time to settle down, and before long we’d pretty much done the subject.
Luckily, as we each smoked a cigarette she pointed out with distaste a couple of blokes walking down the street, both of whom had taken their shirts off, and whose paunches were hanging over their jeans.
“Summer,” she said, with a sigh, and I was away. There are few people with a larger internal stock of complaints to make about summer than me, and I let myself rip.
Why, I asked her, did everyone think it was so nice? What were supposed to be the benefits? One of the worst things about summer, I maintained hotly, as she smiled and ordered us a coffee, was the constant pressure to enjoy oneself in ways which are considerably less fun than death.
Barbecues, for example. Now I don’t mind barbies, especially, except that my friends never have them. If I end up at a barbecue, it’s because I’ve been dragged there by my partner, to stand round in someone else’s scraggy back garden as the sky threatens rain, watching drunken blokes teasing a nasty barking dog, and girls I don’t know standing in clumps gossiping about people I’ve never heard of, while trying to eat badly cooked food that I could have bought for £2.50 in McDonald’s and had somewhere to sit as well. That washed-out, exhausted and depressed feeling that comes from getting not quite drunk enough in the afternoon while standing up and either trying to make conversation with people I’ll never see again, or putting up with them doing the same to me.
And going and sitting in parks. I hate it, as you may have gathered. Why? Because it’s fucking horrible, that’s why. Sitting on grass which is both papery and damp, surrounded by middle-class men with beards teaching their kids to unicycle, the air rent by the sound of some arsehole torturing a guitar to the delight of his fourteen-year-old hippy girlfriend. Drinking luke-warm soft drinks out of over-priced cans, and all the time being repetitively told how nice it all is, as if by some process of brain-washing you’ll actually start to enjoy it.
Worst of all, the constant pressure to go outside. “What are you doing inside on a day like this? You want to go outside, you do, get some fresh air. You want to go outside.” No. Wrong. I don’t want to go outside. For a start, I like it inside. It’s nice there. There are sofas, drinks, cigarettes, books. There is shade. Outside there’s nothing but the sun, the mindless drudgery of suntan cultivation, and the perpetual sound of droning voices, yapping dogs and convention shouting at you to enjoy yourself.
And always the constant refrain from everyone you meet, drumming on your mind like torrential rain on a tin roof: “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
No, say I. No, it fucking isn’t.
There was all that, and some more, but I’m sure you get the drift. By halfway through Jeanette was laughing, partly at what I was saying, and partly – I’m sure – at the fact that I was getting quite so worked up about it. But she was with me, and chipped in some valuable observations about the horrors of sitting outside dull country pubs surrounded by red-faced career girls and loud-mouthed estate agents in shorts, deafened by the sound of open-topped cars being revved by people who clearly had no right to live. We banged on happily for quite a while, had another cup of coffee, and then were both surprised to realize that we’d gone into overtime on lunch. I paid, telling her she could get the next one, and although that sounds like a terrible line, it came out pretty much perfect and she didn’t stab me or anything. We strode quickly back to the office, still chatting, and the rest of the afternoon passed in a hazy blur of contentment.
I could have chosen to leave at the same time as her, and walked to whichever station she used, but I elected not to. I judged that enough had happened for one day, and I didn’t want to push my luck. Instead I went home alone, hung out by myself, and went to sleep with, I suspect, a small smile upon my face.
Next day I sprang out of bed with an enthusiasm which is utterly unlike me, and as I struggled to balance the recalcitrant taps of my shower I was already plotting my next moves. Part of my mind was sitting back with folded arms and watching me with indulgent amusement, but in general I just felt really quite happy and excited.
>
For most of the morning I quizzed Jeanette further on her database needs. She was lunching with a friend, I knew, so I wasn’t expecting anything there. Instead I wandered vaguely round a couple of bookshops, wondering if there was any book I could legitimately buy for Jeanette. It would have to be something very specific, relevant to a conversation we’d had – and sufficiently inexpensive that it looked like a throwaway gift. In the end I came away empty-handed, which was probably just as well. Buying her a present was a ridiculous idea, out of proportion to the current situation. As I walked back to the office I told myself to be careful. I was in danger of getting carried away and disturbing the careful equilibrium of my life and mind.
Then, in the afternoon, something happened. I was off the databases for a while, trying to work out why Jeanette’s computer was behaving rather strangely. Tanya wandered up to ask Jeanette about something, and before she went reminded her that there’d been talk of everyone going out for a drink that evening. Jeanette hummed and ha-ed for a moment, and I bent further over the keyboard, giving them a chance to ignore me. Then, as from nowhere, Tanya said the magic words.
Why, she suggested, didn’t I come too?
Careful to be nonchalant and cavalier, pausing as if sorting through my myriad of other options, I said yes, why the hell not. Jeanette then said yes, she could probably make it, and for a moment I saw all the locks and chains around my life fall away, as if a cage had collapsed around me leaving only the open road.
For a moment it was like that, and then suddenly it wasn’t.
“I’ll have to check with Chris, though,” Jeanette added, and I realized she had a boyfriend.
I spent the rest of the afternoon violently but silently cursing and trying to calm myself down. I should have known that someone like her would already be taken – after all, they always are. Of course, that didn’t mean it was a no-go area. People sometimes leave their partners. I know, I’ve done it myself. But suddenly it had changed, changed from something that might – in my dreams, at least – have developed smoothly into a Nice Thing. It had changed into a miasma of potential grief which was unlikely even to start.
For about half an hour I was furious, with what I don’t know. With myself, for letting my feelings grow and complicate. With her, for having a boyfriend. With life, for always being that bit more disappointing than it absolutely has to be.
Then, because I’m an old hand at dealing with my inner conditions, I talked myself round. It didn’t matter. Jeanette could simply become a pleasant aspect of a month-long contract, someone I could chat to. Then the job would end, I’d move on, and none of it would matter. I had to nail that conclusion down on myself pretty hard, but thought I could make it stick.
I decided that I might as well go out for the drink anyway. There was another party I could go to but it would involve trekking halfway across town. Nick was busy. I might as well be sociable, now that they’d made the offer.
So I went, and I wish I hadn’t.
The evening was OK, in the way that they always are when people from the same office get together to drink and complain about their boss. Whitehead wasn’t there, thankfully, and Egerton quickly got sufficiently drunk that he didn’t qualify as a Whitehead substitute. The evening was fine, for everyone else. It was just me who didn’t have a good time.
Jeanette disappeared just before we left the office, and I found myself walking to the pub with everyone else. I sat drinking Budweisers and making conversation with John and Sarah, wondering where she was. She’d said she’d meet everyone there. So where was she?
At about 8.30 the question was answered. She walked into the pub and I started to get up, a smile of greeting on my face. Then I noticed she looked different somehow, and I noticed the man standing behind her.
The man was Chris Ayer. He was her boyfriend. He was also the nastiest man I’ve met in quite some time. That’s going to sound like sour grapes, but it’s not. He was perfectly presentable, in that he was good-looking and could talk to people, but everything else about him was wrong. There was something odd about the way he looked at people, something both arrogant and closed off. There was an air of restrained violence about him that I found unsettling, and his sense of his possession of Jeanette was complete. She sat at his side, hands in her lap, and said very little throughout the evening. I couldn’t get over how different she looked to the funny and confident woman I’d had lunch with the day before, but nobody else seemed to notice it. After all, she joined in the office banter as usual, and smiled with her lips quite often. Nobody apart from me was looking for any more than that.
As the evening wore on I found myself feeling more and more uncomfortable. I exchanged a few tight words with Ayer, mainly concerning a new computer he’d bought, but wasn’t bothered when he turned to talk to someone else. The group from the office seemed to be closing in on itself, leaning over the table to shout jokes which they understood and I didn’t. Ayer’s harsh laugh cut across the smoke to me, and I felt impotently angry that someone like him should be able to sit with his arm around someone like Jeanette.
I drank another couple of beers and then abruptly decided that I simply wasn’t having a good enough time. I stood up and took my leave, and was mildly touched when Tanya and Sarah tried to get me to stay. Jeanette didn’t say anything, and when Ayer’s eyes swept vaguely over me I saw that for him I didn’t exist. I backed out of the pub smiling, and then turned and stalked miserably down the road.
By Sunday evening I was fine. I met my ex-girlfriend-before-last for lunch on Saturday, and we had a riotous time bitching and gossiping about people we knew. In the evening I went with Nick to a restaurant that served food only from a particular four-square-mile region of Nepal, or so Nick claimed, such venues being his speciality. It tasted just like Indian to me, and I didn’t see any sherpas, but the food was good. I spent Sunday doing my kind of thing, wandering round town and sitting in cafés to read. I called my folks in the evening, and they were on good form, and then I watched a horror film before going to bed when I felt like it. The kind of weekend that only happily single people can have, in other words, and it suited me just fine.
Monday was OK too. I was regaled with various tales of drunkenness from Friday night, as if for the first time I had a right to know. I had all the information I needed from Jeanette for the time being, so I did most of my work at a different machine. We had a quick chat in the kitchen while I made some coffee, and it was more or less the same as it had been the week before. Because she’d always known she had a boyfriend, of course. I caught myself dipping a couple of times in the afternoon, but bullied my mood into holding up. In a way it was kind of a relief, not to have to care.
The evening was warm and light, and I took my time walking home. Then I rustled myself up a chef’s salad, which is my only claim to culinary skill. It has iceberg lettuce, black olives, grated cheese, julienned ham (that’s “sliced”, to you and me), diced tomato and two types of home-made dressing: which is more than enough ingredients to count as cooking in my book. When I was sufficiently gorged on roughage I sat in front of the computer and tooled around, and by the time it was dark outside found myself cruising round the net.
And, after a while, I found myself accessing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. I was in a funny sort of mood, I guess. I scrolled through the list of files, not knowing what I was after. What I found was the usual stuff, like “-TH2xx.jpg-{m/f}-hot sex!”. Hot sex wasn’t really what I was looking for, especially if it had an exclamation mark after it. Of all the people who access the group, I suspect it’s less than about five per cent who actually put pictures up there in the first place. It seems to be a matter of intense pride with them, and they compete with each other on the volume and “quality” of their postings. Their tragically sad bickering is often more entertaining than the pictures themselves.
It’s complete pot luck what is available at any given time, and no file stays on there for more than about two days. The servers which ho
ld the information have only limited space, and files get rolled off the end pretty quickly in the high-volume groups. I was about to give up when something suddenly caught my attention.
“j1.gif-{f}-‘Young–woman, fully–clothed (part 1/3)’.”
Fuck me, I thought: that’s a bit weird. The group caters for a wide spectrum of human sexuality, and I’d seen titles which promised fat couples, skinny girls, interracial bonding and light S&M. What I’d never come across was something as perverted as a woman with all her clothes on. Intrigued, I did the necessary to download the picture’s three segments onto my hard disk.
By the time I’d made a cup of coffee they were there, and I severed the net connection and stitched the three files together. Until they were converted they were just text files, which is one of the weird things about the net. Absolutely anything, from programmes to articles to pictures, is up there as plain text. Without the appropriate decoders it just looks like nonsense, which I guess is as good a metaphor as any for the net as a whole. Or indeed for life. Feel free to use that insight in your own conversations.
When the file was ready, I loaded up a graphics package and opened it. I was doing so with only half an eye, not really expecting anything very interesting. But when, after a few seconds of whirring, the image popped onto the screen, I dropped my cup of coffee and it teetered on the desk before falling to shatter on the floor.
It was Jeanette.
The Best New Horror 7 Page 15