‘Mummy, are you going to get me some cereal, and where’s my DS charger? It has gone flat, look.’
‘Mummy, my dolly’s shoes…’ and they both keep going, one being scratched in with the other, punctuated by the sound of fireworks exploding nearby which were sending Blue into a tiz.
Someone was obviously making a whole week of Guy Fawkes celebrations and I could have done without it at that moment.
‘Shut up the both of you. Give me a minute…please,’ and without really thinking, my head in a flat spin, I sent an Instant Message…
Anthony,
I am really sorry. I thought you may have had feelings for me and I really didn’t mean to offend you.
Nicole.
Instantly an email bounced back
?
I sent another email back
You’ve just blocked me from your Wall?!?
He instantly replied
Erm? ;-)
I sent another.
Very funny (no wink on mine) I’ve nearly ripped the heads off my children as a consequence.
Mine was the last message and then his Status Update returned to normal within a few seconds.
What the hell was he doing?
Then it dawned on me. I had spent the last few weeks trying to get the snake out of the grass, and he had me walk right into my own trap. I felt like I was foolishly dangling from a tree in my own planted mesh. He’d outmanoeuvred me; outsmarted me. Damn, I cursed. I may have humiliated myself, but at least my instincts had been right, my suspect was guilty, I just didn’t know his motive.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I sat with a towel wrapped round me, dipping my toast soldier into my boiled egg while flicking through the newspapers. Richard cooking breakfast post-sex had become a ritual over the years.
The papers were full of Barack Obama’s election as the 44th US President, which had taken place in the early hours. Richard had stayed up to watch the historical moment, but I’d fallen asleep in Elyse’s bed and missed it. America’s first African-American President was now having his acceptance speech played over and over on the television. 2008 had certainly proved to be his lucky year.
‘Tell you what…if it was a beauty contest, Barak would have got my vote over Palin anytime,’ I said to Richard, having left a similar comment on Facebook the previous night.
‘What are you saying that you’d do him?’ Richard said, with a cheeky smile.
For a moment, everything felt back to normal.
‘No, of course not, no more than you would Kylie,’ I said. Then I stood with a devilish grin on my face, watching his expression register what I’d just said.
I deliberately didn’t hang around long. Instead I wandered out of the kitchen with my mug of tea, also thinking about my words; what was the difference in fantasising about a man on my Facebook who was out of my reach, and a man on television also out of my reach? Was there really a difference?
‘Where are you off now?
‘Study…for a minute.’
‘You need to call Maddy. I did the 1471 and it was Maddy who called while we were at it. So don’t forget. Anyway, I’m off to work. I’ll see you around half five.’
‘Oh…talking of Maddy…don’t forget that on Friday night you need to finish early. School bonfire and a chilli round at Maddy and Steve’s afterwards…and don’t arrange to see your mum on Sunday, Steve’s got us tickets to see WWE…’
I heard the front door slam behind him as and I logged onto Facebook and clicked onto Anthony’s Wall. I felt almost dizzy with anticipation; I wanted to see if he’d left anything else since the embarrassing incident with Lewis Carroll. It looked like he’d stayed up to watch the Presidential results come in too.
00:45 Anthony is rooting for Obama, guys!!!!!
I remembered his Status saying he supported the Democrats so I should have guessed really. I clicked on his Status to view a conversation between him and his American friends about the results. Then I looked long and hard at Anthony’s Comment…
Bells ringing…5 missing?! No it’s 8
Suddenly, I was feeling a band of gold sliding onto my finger.
There were several postings, each giving the election results at various points, but his comments were way out of sync with the other results.
Did that mean that he was cleverly referring to my fish drawing? And…number eight with the diagonal line missing becomes a five. Surely this meant he’d acknowledged my drawing. One side of me felt excited that he was taking in what I was trying to tell him, the other side of me was more than slightly concerned that the lunacy of my recent postings could be causing him alarm as in psycho woman alert! I continued to read a couple of other Status Updates he’d left first thing.
Anthony feels alive…great result :-)
Reading his words had me imagining him walking down somewhere like Oxford Street with one of those half-baked, silly grins, which always have a tendency to make complete strangers involuntarily smile back at you.
This vision was relatively short-lived, because then I spotted a note on his Wall saying that he was going away to New York for a few days with his girlfriend. I just didn’t get it. Why play games with me, when he had her? I sulkily went and grabbed the jar of Nutella from the kitchen cupboard, suddenly craving something sweet, and sat eating it with a teaspoon, while searching for a better example of the infinity symbol.
This time I found a Fan page which showed the eight turned onto its side – the correct position for it.
He is supposed to be mine forever, not hers, I thought as another spoonful of Nutella entered my mouth.
‘Right you…in the car now,’ Maddy shouted to me from across the school car park.
This wasn’t a friendly invitation to catch-up on things that we hadn’t managed to since WWE wrestling on Sunday night. So, I did a U-turn with a feigned smile as I passed a few other parents chatting and slowly made my way to Maddy’s car. I’ve always hated the drawn in nights; it makes it feel much later than it really is. The air was cold and there was a damp, earthy smell from the wet leaves on the ground. The school mini-bus should have been back at 18:00 after the swimming gala, so it was already ten minutes late and William being on school transport always made me feel anxious.
‘Hi,’ I said tentatively, as I climbed into the passenger seat to be hit with hot air blasting out of the heater; it was stifling.
‘You have got to stop playing these games. You are making yourself utterly miserable. It’s never going to go anywhere and you’ll lose what you already have if you don’t stop.’
I kind of knew what she was going to say before she said it really, but it still cut deep, I didn’t need to tell her that I’d had the nightmare. ‘Do you want a Coke?’ she added, before opening a can. She always said that she gets as much of a buzz from the crisp sound of the ring pull being released, as she does from the Coke itself.
‘No, thanks, and I’m not miserable,’ I said weakly, because I couldn’t deny it. My Facebook looked all cheery with flippant lighthearted comments, but inside I ached, every part of me ached. And I hated the jealousy that I was feeling.
‘You bloody well are miserable. I just watched you walk from over there. It’s all to do with that stupid game you’re playing,’ she said, as she acknowledged another mother who had tapped her car window in a friendly gesture.
‘I’m just confused, that’s all. Anthony’s definitely playing games with me, but he’s fucked off home to New York with his girlfriend, and I just don’t get it.’
‘That’s not the point. You shouldn’t be playing the games. Delete him off your Facebook for your own good, and for Richard’s sake. Richard knows something is wrong with you. You’re bothering him. I still think that text a few weeks ago was set up by Richard.’
‘I’ve no idea about the text – it baffles me. Richard doesn’t even think it merits discussion. And I can’t delete Anthony. I swear I’ve tried, but I just can’t do it. It’s not just about him now, it’s al
l the other weird stuff as well that I can’t get my head around, like the Anthony Hope novel. I almost feel like I’m caught up in my own book; everything is very weird.’
‘You don’t even know for sure that he’s playing games with you.’
‘I’m telling you he is. I found some stuff on the Internet the other day about his sister. She has a website listed on her Facebook. I was trying to find Anthony’s exact year of birth. But it turns out that his sister is a children’s book illustrator, and does other bits of drawing. So it would make perfect sense that she would use images to help Anthony communicate. Just think about it, she spends most of her working day using images to convey messages. I still think that album with the birds, the bee and the frog was carefully fabricated. Look, using images may seem strange to you, but it doesn’t to me and it wouldn’t to either of them…they both have an artistic streak.’
‘Well yeah, you’re right, it is strange to me. But why did you want his year of birth, what’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Oh…that was…well,’ I stammered, wondering why she had to ask me that question. ‘That was just because I was looking at the numbers we all have in our birthdays, and I didn’t have his birth year to work it out. Anyway, I posted a load of text as a photo on Facebook with all of my recent discoveries, including references to the deceased Anthony Hope’s novel. Look, it all makes me look completely bonkers. So you needn’t worry, he probably won’t play games with me again now. He’ll have concluded that I’m a freak after that lot,’ I said.
‘You did what?’ And she made me explain the excruciatingly, embarrassing details again.
Even now I still don’t know what made me do it. But as for finding his date of birth I got nowhere. I found his sister’s, and took a good guess that if she was born was born in July of 1967; Anthony was most likely born in January of 1969, which would make him slightly older than me.
‘When the fuck did you do that? I’ve not seen it on there,’ Maddy asked.
‘It was a few days ago now. But no, you wouldn’t have seen it. It was aimed at him. Everyone else was blocked from viewing it. Anyway, it was on the morning he went to New York.’
‘Actually, I can’t even be bothered to discuss that – it’s ridiculous and irrelevant anyway. I’ve told you it can’t ever go anywhere. Do you seriously think he would take you, William and Elyse? Where would you live? Fucking hell, you’d even have to get a job. How the bloody hell would you survive on a normal wage?’
‘Ha ha…very funny.’ I said, hearing the sadness in my own voice. ‘I do realise that. I just can’t delete him…the thought hurts too much.’ I knew deep down everything she was saying was right. In my head I had even role-played family life with him; William and Elyse being at their worst. I pictured them pulling his books of his bookshelf and mixing up all of his DVDs and accidentally snapping the strings on his guitar.
Thrusting William and Elyse on a man who appeared to have spent most of his adult life as a bachelor would be like hitting him with a tornado fuelled by plutonium. It wouldn’t be fair. And if I left Richard, where would I live, if I didn’t live with Anthony? In reality, you don’t just move in with someone you have never even dated, just because of a gut instinct. But I had very little money of my own. My long-term stab at providing myself with independent wealth had catastrophically blown up in my face. I wouldn’t want to move William and Elyse into council accommodation, with us living off State benefits. I would also be forcing them to change schools, because I couldn’t afford private education on my own. And, more than anything, I wanted them to have the education I didn’t have and when they are young. I didn’t want them to have to educate themselves in their mid-twenties, like I did. I wanted them to grow up with the confidence to believe they could be whatever they wanted to be at the age they should be thinking it. And, on top of everything, Anthony was in London, and London was a place for the ridiculously, obscenely wealthy or the career singleton’s who eventually got married and moved to more suitable rural areas. It would be selfish and cruel of me. My life was no longer just about me, and Richard had done nothing wrong to deserve such treatment by me. Never in my life had my head felt so confused.
‘How can it hurt…you’ve said yourself you’ve not seen him for eight years?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just how it is. I told you before that I always felt like I belonged with him, and that book hasn’t helped me now. I need to get hold of that book to find out what happens in it, but the other part of me can’t face it.’
‘Look – book or no book, you need to stop it.’
‘Yeah I know, and I will. Just give me a little more time…I think that’s the mini-bus just pulled into the drive.’
‘Fine. Come on, we’d better go and get the kids.’ Maddy’s words weren’t lost on me. They replayed in my mind along with my own thoughts almost continuously for a couple of days afterwards. But I just couldn’t delete him. He was still in New York and hadn’t been on his Facebook at all, so he was either avoiding it, or was somewhere that didn’t have Internet access. Wherever his was, he was still slowly eating away at me.
Every day he was away I looked at his Facebook. It was like staring at a house when the occupant was away and you can sense the quiet. I felt like the busy little bee (me) was futilely trying to wade through its own sweetly created honey, but was stuck in one place.
Then Maddy left me a message on my Facebook:
To BEE or not to BEE……that is the question!! The only question!!
And that’s how I spent the next few days, feeling like I was slowly dying with each Status Update…
13 November 19:59 BZZZZ
14 November 10:33 BZZZ
14 November 17:30 BZZ
15 November 08:17 BZ
Richard walked into the kitchen, catching me staring at a mug that I’d placed on the kitchen island.
‘What on earth are you doing now?’
‘Seeing if the string on the tea-bag flaps around,’ I said, attempting to be nonchalant, while I continued to stare at it intently. I’d deliberately got William and Elyse off to bed early, so I could take another look at it in peace.
‘Why?’ he asked puzzled.
‘Please don’t make me explain, because I know you already think I’m going crazy and this will only add to it. Trust me.’
‘No, seriously, I do want to know. You are obviously staring at it for a reason,’ he said, as he crouched lower down to take a look at it from my level.
Blue had joined in and so all three of us were staring at a mug of hot, green tea with the string hanging down the side. It was definitely not moving with the same level of momentum it had done earlier in the day, even with disturbance from Richard and Blue. I stood up straight, and, once again, found myself not knowing where to start with my explanation of events.
‘Right, here goes,’ I took a deep breath. ‘Earlier on, I made myself a drink of tea and plonked it on the desk in the garden room and then I got on with my studying, while it cooled down a bit. After about five minutes or so, I was distracted by the tea-bag string flapping. But no windows were open, and you know it’s draught free in there. Anyway, it was flapping towards that dictionary.’
‘What dictionary?’
‘The small pocket one. It was left open in the kitchen…the other day, you must have been looking up something…’
‘I haven’t,’ he said.
Clearly like everything else in the house the dictionary had the ability to move on its own.
‘Well, regardless, someone had taken it down and I moved it onto the table in the garden room the other week. But I was working from several textbooks today and they kept closing, causing me to lose my page. It was annoying, so I picked the dictionary up, and I used it to weigh down my textbook pages. Anyway, because the flapping string on the tea-bag was in the direction of the dictionary – I picked the dictionary back up, wondering if this was a ghost thing again. I know…it sounds crazy. You don’t have to interrupt,
’ I said, as he looked like he was about to interrupt. His mouth shut again. ‘Anyway…the dictionary was still on exactly the same page that it had been the other day, the day I was looking up fish and Infinity symbols and my eyes kept going back to the word “quadratic” which gave the definition: “Equation in which the variable (X) is raised to the power of two, but nowhere raised to a higher power”.’
‘So what?’
‘Let me go and get the dictionary,’ I walked back into the kitchen and handed it to him and he had put his reading glasses on ready.
‘But, I don’t get the significance, it’s just the definition of a mathematical equation,’ he said, putting the dictionary back down and taking his reading glasses off again.
‘Well obviously, it’s related to maths. But the wording also sounds religious. A variable raised to the power of two (as in two people), but nowhere raised to a higher power (as in God). The variable “X”, the cross is raised to the power of two,’ I said, explaining with an overuse of hand gestures, which now looked like I was directing traffic.
‘Well yeah, if you want to look at it that way. But I still don’t get it.’
‘Maybe this will be easier for me to explain. I looked up quadratic equations on the Internet…and found quite a straight- forward example of one, look I’ll show you how it works,’ and I grabbed a pen, scribbling down the equation for him.
‘That’s the equation without any numbers…you could write it like this…
X (x²) – XXX = O
‘Any numbers can be inserted into the equation as long as both sides balance. Basically X multiplied by X squared is equal to the number, which sits on the other side. So, when I put the three eights’s in; based on the fact that eight is somehow relevant to me, I found that eight multiplied by eight squared 8 x (8 x 8) is equal to 512. So the equation then looks like this…
8(8 x 8) – 512 = 0
‘And 512 is William’s birthday – February 15th when you reverse the numbers, as in 2/15, you know like 9/11, the American way of writing dates. Look, this is how you would solve the value of X, if it was presented as a mathematical sum.
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