Digital Circumstances

by BRM Stewart

  I’ve come to an agreement with the hotel: I’ll stay for a week at a time, pay my bills, and re-negotiate an extension; if there is a danger of them becoming full, they’ll let me know and I will decide whether to stay on and let them know immediately.

  I’ve change my Euros into pounds, and checked that I can still access my current account through the ATMs in town, and my other accounts through the Internet. All seems to be fine, but I still have that creeping paranoia that someone is out there, monitoring every ATM and web transaction, looking for me; I’m on the hotel’s open Wi-Fi, so anyone could be listening.

  On Monday evening I am a bit disappointed to see that the woman from the week before isn’t there. There is no reason for a flight delay, and no reason not to check in here. More suits in the lounge, eating in singles and threes, a group of five workmen in overalls, an elderly couple out for dinner, eating silently.

  She isn’t there at breakfast the next day either, and I am letting that little fantasy – the thought that I could have a proper friend here - slip away as I head out for a stroll round the town in the early evening, and a pint in the pub down the road. I am walking away from the back of the hotel, where the car park is, when I hear a taxi pull up. I turn my head and see her emerging from the taxi – she doesn’t see me. My heart lifts a little; someone to talk to.

  I walk around, have my pint, and then go back to my room to leave my coat, and, a spring in my step, wander down to the lounge, picking up a copy of the local paper. I see her out of the corner of my eye at the table for two in the corner, wearing the same style of clothes as last week, and notice that she looks up. I catch her eye and we exchange a smile, but I continue to the bar to order a beer.

  I take a few sips and then walk slowly, looking at the headlines in my folded paper, holding my beer, towards her. I look up, she sees me, we smile – ‘Hello again’, ‘Hi’ – and I sit with an empty table between us, studiously reading my paper.

  As she finishes her dinner and walks past me, I look up again: ‘Good flight?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘Work to do?’

  ‘Yes. I need to crack on - homework. You?’

  ‘On holiday.’

  She laughs, a throaty chuckle that is music to my ears. ‘Lucky man.’

  We say goodnight.

  The next evening I time it to perfection and I arrive in the lounge just after her. I get my pint from the bar, and sit at the table beside hers. We exchange pleasantries, and she reads her Kindle while she eats, and I read mine – we acknowledge that too, with gestures and smiles.

  At the end of the meals, she declines the waitress’ offer of anything else, but she lingers over the last of her coke. She yawns and stretches. I ask for another pint, and close my Kindle.

  ‘It must be hard, working away from home,’ I say.

  She nods. ‘It can be.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I work with Investors in People.’

  I nod – I know of them, but we, of course, never used them.

  ‘I’m up here for a couple of weeks, helping small businesses.’

  ‘Husband at home with the kids?’ That doesn’t get the warm reaction I was expecting. ‘I’m sorry – I just assumed…’

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s OK. Just one of those things.’

  ‘Listen, do you want another drink?’

  She looks at her watch and I can almost see her thoughts, her dilemma. ‘OK then. I’ll have a glass of white wine – anything but Chardonnay.’

  I ask the waitress when she comes with my pint, and tell her to put it on my room. After a few minutes we clink glasses, turn our chairs to almost face each other, sit with arms and legs mirroring each other. ‘My name’s Martin, by the way.’ ‘Nicola.’ We shake hands and give a mock bow to each other.

  ‘So how long are you here for?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll play it by ear.’

  ‘Where’s home?’

  ‘Glasgow. I have a place in the West End, just off the top of Byres Road.’

  ‘You married?’ Her eyes look hard at me over the top of her glass, probably used to getting a lie in answer to this question.

  ‘No, not any more. Used to be.’

  ‘Relationship?’

  And that memory hurts. ‘I’m afraid I sort of blew that. I’m on my own.’ It’s the first time I’ve said that out loud: I’m on my own.

  She seems to relax a bit.

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘What about you?’

  She takes a drink of her wine, and raises her eyebrows as if surprised that it’s palatable. ‘Complicated,’ she says. ‘The wedding ring is to just to hide behind – if anyone tries to chat me up I just point to it. It’s actually my mother’s – she’s divorced, I rescued it from a drawer.

  So, I think: she didn’t point to the ring when I appeared, she stayed for another drink, she asked me about my status straight up.

  She is looking at me with bright eyes, and a smile playing on those lips. As she lifts her glass again, she brushes her hair back from her face, and I feel a great thrill run through me. ‘So what do you do, Martin?’

  Ah, what a question. I want to be honest, but I can’t be. I wing it: some truths about the computer business and all the legal things I did, and a story about selling it all off and looking for something else to do after an extended holiday.

  The time flashes past. She doesn’t want another wine – ‘Work to do’ – and we say goodnight.

  *

  I have a restless evening in my room: I can’t settle to anything on TV, or on the Internet. Finally I head back down to the bar with my Kindle. There are a few people in, but most of the action seems to be through in the public bar. I get myself a pint and sit at a table for two. I sip and read, sip and read.

  I’m lost in concentration when I feel the presence beside me and hear her voice: ‘Another pint?’

  I look up, snapping out of my book. ‘I’ll get it.’ I half rise to my feet.

  ‘No, it’s my turn. What kind is it?’

  ‘Scapa Special.’

  She’s back a few minutes later with the beer and a large white wine, and I drain my first pint and put my Kindle down. We chink glasses. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  I sip the fresh pint. ‘It’s a history – about Scapa Flow. I’ve been getting kind of immersed in the whole war thing.’

  ‘I’ve never really got into that. I visited St Magnus Cathedral, saw the memorial to the Royal Oak. Must have been horrific. Those poor men.’

  ‘Yes.’ HMS Royal Oak had been anchored in Scapa Flow in 1939 when U-47 had made the impossible journey round sunken blockships into the Flow, a great feat of seamanship. It had found Royal Oak and fired a torpedo, then dived and turned tail. When it heard no explosion, the captain stopped and cautiously checked the periscope: the torpedo had missed, but no alarm had been raised. So they went back and fired another, and this time it hit. ‘Over a thousand men on that ship,’ I said. ‘Over eight hundred died. The ship’s still down there.’

  ‘Along with the German fleet that was scuttled at the end of the first war.’

  ‘I was reading about that: most of them were re-floated and salvaged, amazingly enough.’

  She smiles and raises her wine glass to her lips. ‘So, you’re broadening your mind on your holiday.’

  I grimace. ‘It’s actually not too much of a holiday,’ I find myself saying.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘More of an escape.’

  There’s a pause, and then: ‘From your relationship?’

  I give a sigh. ‘Some business partners. There were some things going on with the company.’ I can’t say any more. I look at her as I lift my pint, but luckily she’s not recoiling in horror from me: she’s looking concerned. ‘Nothing too bad,’ I say. ‘It was a sort of computer fraud type thing.’

  ‘So you’re the one with all the Nigerian clients who want to leave me their money in their will?’


  I smile. ‘You got me.’ Then I decide to clarify: ‘It was them doing it all – nothing to do with me.’

  There is a pause, but nothing tense or strained. ‘You said you were married twice.’

  ‘You said you’re in a complicated relationship.’

  She laughs the kind of laugh that isn’t forced but decays into sadness. ‘I love him,’ she says. ‘I really do. He’s clever and kind and witty and knowledgeable and sociable.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s a newspaper reporter in Edinburgh. Was working for the Scotsman, but he’s freelance now.’

  I nod: that sounds like quite a person. No doubt tall and good looking, and not on the run from gangsters and police in three countries. ‘But?’ I suggest.

  ‘He drinks too much. I mean, way too much. It’s a hazard of the profession, of course, but he’s taken in to a whole new level. It’s affecting his health, it cost him his job, and I don’t think I can live with it any more. I’ve given him an ultimatum.’

  I can’t really think of anything to say, so I drink my beer.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why I’m laying this all out on you. You’ve got enough problems.’ We laugh.

  ‘It’s always good to talk to someone who isn’t involved. I’m guessing you feel this is all partly your fault.’

  ‘You sound like an expert.’

  So I tell her about Fiona and Elizabeth, and then Helen. She listens, and refuses another glass of wine; I really want another beer, but don’t want to look like the kind of drunk she’s trying to walk away from.

  ‘So what went wrong with Helen?’ she asks.

  I can’t begin to tell her all of that, but I have to tell her something. ‘Cracks appeared in our relationship,’ I say, which is true. ‘And I suppose I didn’t do enough to keep us together. I don’t think she realised how much I cared about us.’ My voice catches.

  She picks up her room key. ‘I really need to go and finish off my work. It’s been lovely talking to you, Martin. I hope it all works out for you.’

  ‘And for you.’

  She stands up, and I watch her walk out, then get myself that pint of Scapa.

  *

  I get down to breakfast, slightly late, and catch her on her way out of the hotel, dressed for business. ‘See you at dinner?’ I suggest. She nods: ‘Need to see how the day goes.’

  I drive around for the day, and fill up with outrageously priced diesel. I buy a simple pay-as-go mobile, because I’ve decided I might just need to keep in touch with someone, and I daren’t switch on my old one. I enjoyed talking with Nicola last night, and I’m looking forward to seeing her again this evening. I wonder about her appearance in the bar: had she sought me out, guessing I’d be there? I smile as I stand on the edge of Scapa Flow, staring out over the graves of thousands of men.

  When I get down to dinner, I discover she’s almost finished hers. I ask if I can join her, but she says she’s just about to go up to her room to work, so I sit at the table next to hers. I can see she’s distracted, sitting fiddling with her mobile, constantly checking it.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head, and checks the phone again. ‘It’s him,’ she says, in a voice I can barely hear.

  And before I can phrase my next question, she gets up and slips away with only a vague: ‘I’m sorry,’ hanging in the air behind her.

  I eat my meal, more alone than ever. Should I try to call her room? No, definitely not.

  Later on, I come back down to the bar and nurse a pint of Scapa Special till it becomes obvious that she won’t be down tonight. I hate sitting there alone, with that looming feeling that I might never see her again. She might be back here for work, of course, but perhaps in a different hotel. We might miss each other.

  I go to reception, borrow a piece of notepaper and a pen, and write down the number of the new mobile I’d bought that day. I ask the man to give Nicola – ‘the woman: tall, brown hair; works for investors in people’ ‘Oh aye, I know the one you mean.’ - the piece of paper.

  I lie awake till the early hours, wondering at my stupid gesture. When I groggily stumble down to breakfast, the man at reception calls to me: ‘She’s checked out for the early plane, but I gave her your message.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The day in front of me feels like a yawning empty void, and all the empty days after that are queuing up to infinity.

  Chapter 11

  Spain – Spring, this year

  I flew into Malaga with EasyJet, emerging into the air-conditioned terminal building. The serious girl on passport control looked at my passport, swiped it, and then seemed to read something on the screen for a few moments; finally she pressed a couple of keys on the computer, and handed me back my passport with a tight smile, her eyes still scanning me.

  I just had hand luggage with me, so I got down to the concrete bunker of the car-hire hall quickly. I walked up and down twice before fully registering that the company I’d booked with wasn’t there. Finally I saw their booth out in the actual underground car park, and cautiously went through the doors: the warning signs said that return was impossible.

  I did the paperwork – negotiating the advanced car-hire maths problems of extra insurance, whether to return it with a full tank – and then found the little black Seat. I rigged up my satnav, and headed out into the blazing daylight. It wasn’t difficult getting out of the city, though I always have initial horrors at roundabouts when driving on the right – it feels so wrong, but the satnav helped. As I got onto the A-7 then the E-15, heading south, and the sun that we hadn’t seen in Glasgow all winter shone down on me, I felt better. Helen hadn’t been happy at being left behind, and wasn’t convinced by my excuses: she thought this was another job for lumpen man and cute blonde, and I wondered if she really did think I was having a fling. And I wondered if I cared; I was starting to get pissed off with her coolness, and the new lack of symbiosis between us.

  It took about and hour and a half to get to the town where Colin Strachan lived – on the coast, south of Marbella, near Manilva. It took a further hour to find the way in to the development where he stayed, find a parking space, and then negotiate the maze of alleyways to find his stairwell. It was a relatively modern development, but almost had that feel of an old Moorish village. There were a few obvious tourists around, and some grey retirees, but mainly the residents seemed to be young Spanish couples and families. It was quiet.

  I remembered the day we’d discovered that Colin had vanished from Glasgow. I’d arrived to find Claire standing baffled, looking into his office, tidied and cleared, the filing cabinet empty, an envelope with Sandy’s name on it on the desk. I got her to call Sandy, who appeared an hour later. He strode in, frowning, and lit a cigarette before opening the envelope and unfolding the two sheets of A4. As he read, I watched his eyes narrow, his teeth clench, and then he just gave a smile and folded the top sheet of paper and put it in his inside jacket pocket. He kept hold of the other, shaking his head as he read through it, then passed it to me. He shook something out of the envelope – a USB stick – and handed it to me as well.

  So he’d got away, I thought; the bastard had got clean away, and Sandy wasn’t storming out to find him and rip out his throat – in fact he looked relaxed as he shooed Claire out of the office and closed the door. ‘Looks like you’re taking over Colin’s work,’ he said. ‘Does that make sense to you?’

  I read the paper, and nodded. There were instructions on how to use what was on the USB stick – a version of Linux, and a few programs – and details of emergency procedures if things went wrong.

  ‘I don’t want to do this,’ I said.

  Sandy sucked on his cigarette. ‘You’ve no choice, Martin. Remember our discussion? Remember Davey?’ His voice was quiet.

  And I closed my eyes and nodded.

  Colin had got in touch with me soon afterwards by good old-fashioned letter, to my home. The address said ‘In the sun’, followe
d by a line that said: ‘Burn after reading - seriously.’ The postmark was London. It was a short letter, an apology for dragging me into the cybercrime. There was a statement that he would try to give me any help he could in the future, but that the scope for this was probably limited. There was a mobile phone number, starting 34, and a remark that he really hoped we’d meet again one day, under happier circumstances. I’d stored the number on my own mobile with the name Fred Bloggs, and shredded the letter. At that time I had no intention of ever contacting him, not ever.

  But a week ago I’d called the number and found myself, to my slight surprise, speaking to him. I said I’d like to visit, alone. He didn’t sound fazed to hear from me, but he was cautious. He’d told me where he lived, and said he looked forward to seeing me again.

  Now I went through the open iron gate guarding the stairwell, up to the top floor, and knocked on the heavy wooden door, its own protective iron gate hooked open. The door opened, and Colin grinned hugely at me – with a glance over my shoulder first, as if checking I was alone – and we shook hands with genuine warmth. He pulled me inside.

  ‘It’s good to see an old familiar face, Martin. How are you? Coffee? Drink? I’m so glad you got in touch.’

  ‘I’ll have a beer, thanks.’ This was a man I had hated a few years before, and who had probably wrecked my life, but I would set that aside, for the moment at least: he seemed really pleased to see me – and I needed information and his help.

  We were in the small lounge-kitchen area, and I noticed a large bedroom and a small box-room with a desk and a MacBook. The furniture was a couple of old sofas, and a table, small units for storage, cupboards on the wall round the sink, and a huge fridge-freezer. There was a large TV with a Sky box underneath it on a stand. It was small, cosy. And hot.

  Colin opened the beers and we chinked glass and drank.

  ‘Come out onto the balcony.’

  There were two plastic chairs at a small table, a padded sofa and a couple of comfy reclining chairs; we sat on those, with our backs to the red-tiled roof with its pottery chimneys. We were looking over a golf course built onto the side of a hill, with villas and chalets at the top. Away to the left was the coast, and to the right was the skeleton of an apartment block, unfinished and abandoned.