Virtual Strangers Read online

  Virtual

  Strangers

  Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Lynne Barrett-Lee was born in London and became a full time writer shortly after moving to Cardiff in 1994. She is the author of seven novels, including the Melissa Nathan shortlisted Barefoot In The Dark. She has also produced two titles for the UK Quick Reads Campaign (one ghosted for Fiona Phillips), which provides easy to read books for adult emergent readers..

  Lynne is also a prolific non-fiction ghostwriter, with a number of bestselling titles to her name, including Giant George; Life with the World’s Biggest Dog, and the recent Sunday Times bestseller, The Baby Laundry For Unmarried Mothers. She also co-writes a major series of memoirs for one of the UKs leading publishers, which are written pseudonymously.

  For more information about Lynne Barrett-Lee, and her forthcoming titles, visit her website www.lynnebarrett-lee.com

  1st Kindle Edition published 2012

  First Published 2001

  Copyright © 2011, 2012 Lynne Barrett-Lee

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Disclaimer: This book is a work of fiction. It has been written for entertainment purposes only. All references to characters and countries should be seen in this light. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ebook by EBooks by Design

  www.ebooksbydesign.co

  Contents

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Author’s Note

  Virtual Strangers was born in a different era to this one. When it first had its genesis, back in 1999, we were not only at the end of the 20th century, but also, in many ways, a rather primitive society. One with mobiles, but not ones that took pictures and sent emails, with music that mostly came via things called CDs, and, most importantly, for the purposes of the story you’re about to read, computers that sat in any number of houses, all alone and unconnected to that thing we call the web. Unconnected, that is, until, slowly and surely, the people of the world cottoned on. This love story, as it stands, couldn’t have been written today. It’s of its time, and I think it should remain there.

  Which is not to say some things shouldn’t be hauled into the present. My gratitude to Joe Simpson, for the inspiration, remains heartfelt, as does my love of all our planet’s lumps and bumps, the binary system and pyroclastic flow.

  December 2007

  Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

  Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

  William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

  Chapter 1

  Many stories start with a trauma or crisis. My story starts with a modem.

  Late September 2000. Thursday night. Eightish.

  And quite a nice modem, if you happen to have an opinion about modem aesthetics. Dark grey, dinky lights, the usual plug-with-pretensions, and stuffed with such breathtaking technological wizardry that it could doubtless connect me to Alpha Centauri if I wanted, at the sparkling velocity of fifty-six K. I got it out of the plastic bag, out of the box, out of the polystyrene, out of another (more bijou) plastic bag and placed it on the desk by my elderly yukka.

  ‘Finally,’ muttered my son, Ben, eyeing the empty box with derision. He slipped the word in on a convenient out breath; in what I’d come to understand was the thirteen year old equivalent of ‘Wey-hey! Whoopy doo! I’m so excited!’

  ‘Yes, finally,’ I echoed, in similar vein.

  Which wasn’t hard, frankly. I’d been feeling pretty grey and grizzly all week, and spending one hundred and nineteen pounds on another lump of grey matter wasn’t my idea of therapy. Therapy would have been the calf length boots in Oasis. Serious therapy would have been two pairs of boots. But there is (or so I remember telling myself at the time) that other kind of therapy to consider. The therapy that involves making yourself feel better by doing something kind and unexpected for someone you love. So I walked past the footwear, and got Ben his modem.

  He’d been on about getting tooled up on the internet front for best part of a year; us being, apparently, the only family in the entire developed world who didn’t have an internet connection. But then, it wasn’t him paying for it, was it? But now his brother had left home, I felt he needed something more substantial than a hundred and fifty back copies of Gamesmaster to replace him. Not in a yell, kick, punch, wind-up and generally torment kind of way, but something with which he could fill up the hours he and Dan would normally be filling instead with a selection of the above.

  ‘Is it working?’ he asked, shrugging his bag off and peering. He’d been out rugby training and smelt like compost. Which was better than chutney. At least better than that.

  ‘Of course it’s working,’ I told him, feeling suddenly, reliably and unsurprisingly, defensive. It went with the territory.

  He looked suspicious. ‘As in it’s up and running?’

  I shook my head. ‘As in when I switched it on - like so - a selection of lights came on.’

  He did a slow hand clap then perched on the edge of my chair. ‘Excellent!’ he said, changing deftly from unimpressed to patronising.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. I’ve only just plugged the thing in.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, making it clear with the sort of movement of the buttocks that only one’s offspring could get away with, that it would be appropriate at this point for me to free up the swivel seat for him. ‘Got here just in time then. Have you installed all the software? Done the filters?’ He rummaged. ‘Uh huh. This the box?’

  ‘It’s here.’

  ‘Well, give it me then, Mum. Any tea made or anything?’

  ‘No, there isn’t. And Ben, I am really quite capable...’

  At which my son grinned. In his grinniest fashion.

  ‘Yeah, right, Mum,’ he chortled. ‘Sure you can do it. But be quicker if I do it. Tea?’

  Always a problem, of course. Torn as I was - and usually am - with the competing claims of maternal instinct (Goodness! What a very clever boy you are! How wondrous and ground breaking your every thought turns out to be! Feel free to impress me with your enormous mental capacity, my child! etc.) and baser instinct (look, you snivelling pubescent, who d’you think re-wired your bloody baby monitor when your father shorted it, eh? Eh?) the former, naturally, knocked the latter into touch. That’s what we Mums do, isn’t it? We cultivate exactly the kind of toxic male arrogance that we abhor in men. Or is it just me?

  Of course it would be quicker if Ben did it. Plus Ben would be able to be proud of the fact that it would be quicker because he was doing it. Plus Ben would enjoy doing it. Plus I would no
t.

  Though certainly could. Which is the main point here.

  Truth is, the tired cliché of thirty something females’ technophobia is exactly that. A tired cliché. A Moribund cliché. In fact, not even a cliché, but a wicked falsehood. Women are not technophobic at all. (Witness washing machine programmes.) Most women are not techno-obsessive, that’s all. And quite right too. Yes, yes, yes, I know. There was the space program and Teflon and so on. But has non-stick proved to be the development, cuisine wise? Since Teflon have we not embraced Le Creuset instead? Since Teflon, have we not discovered balti and chips? Have Teflon, it seems, no particular big deal. Have Teflon, may well achieve pneumatic fried eggs, but will not achieve Masterchef any time soon.

  Seems to me that anything that comes to you by way of copious advertising and whining from juveniles needs to be treated with a hefty dose of scepticism, life enhancing-wise; i.e. expect much in the way of hype, technical blurb, financial shock horror, number of plug sockets required etc. But expect little in the way of life enhancement. Rather, it occurs to me, like Channel Five.

  Except I must admit that I can see an advantage to being online at home, offspring-wise. I can see that I, too, will be able to communicate with Daniel, and without the necessity for adopting a badgering/pleading tone and/or spurious excuses. Plus I will have a small but significant chance of my offspring responding. Also I could, if afflicted by boredom at weekends, cyber-shop for ab cradles, or whatever. If I like.

  I won’t like, I’m sure, but I’m happy enough.

  Chapter 2

  Because I do have a lot to be thankful for. I have my health, I still have one son at home to beetle around slavishly after, I have a respectable three bed semi with very nice, very clean, very desirable new uPVC windows (my Dad’s contribution; he doesn’t like draughts), I have a job which earns money (if not intellectual satisfaction), and now I have the whole world wide web at my feet.

  And I also have a communication from Daniel. Though not in response to the email I sent him, as it happens, but in the form of a postcard. Of Harrods Fish Counter. Harrods? Fish Counter? Dan?

  Hi Mum.

  Everything fine. Hope you’re all okay. Bad hangover today, as we went to the freshers ball last night. By the way, change of address. Best to email me on [email protected]. (which is different from the address I gave you before. This is Jack’s. Less hassle.) Take care.

  Dan.

  I’m feeling tearful now, of course. And I’m concerned that feeling tearful will become my standard response to any communication from my firstborn (excluding requests for further money, which will trigger altogether different synapses). And who’s Jack? And what ball? I wish I didn’t have such in-depth first hand knowledge of boat races, fizz buzz and vomiting down drains.

  I have my own mega-hangover in place anyway. So I can’t really send him a preachy cyber-missive, and must instead trust to the years of shaky but well intentioned parenting that got him thus far in the first place.

  Despite Rose being the very best friend I have in the world, going to her and Matt’s leaving party was the very last thing I felt like doing. It was bad enough my son going off, without losing the entire Griffith family as well. I would either be sober and morose or drunk and maudlin - neither being particularly desirable attributes of the party-guest-about-town. I would have to be stern with myself, and then some.

  I decided to set out on foot, telling myself I was walking because I needed to take myself in hand, exercise wise. That I was carrying a litre of Rioja, a hundredweight of cutlery and a Victoria sponge in a biscuit tin (and could therefore manage nothing more strenuous than a vertically restrained gentle meander) was not sufficiently disabling for me to abandon my pretence of energetic fervour.

  But I was walking because I intended to drink.

  And I was drinking because I was taking my father.

  Which sounded dreadful but was entirely reasonable, I felt. My father had only been living with us for a month, but I was already having to learn coping strategies; given his long and illustrious history of embarrassing me, it made sense to forestall him by getting completely sloshed and embarrassing myself instead.

  ‘What’s this?’ Rose asked as he held out a tin to her. She was wearing her hair up, like a glossy black meringue, her glasses slung at her chest on a glittery chain. She scooped them up now and peered hopefully through them, squinting at the Tesco’s festive selection triptych on the lid. When she’d asked for donations of puddings and drink, I wasn’t sure this was quite what she had in mind.

  ‘A Victoria sponge,’ I offered apologetically.

  ‘With a stencilled dusting,’ my father added proudly.

  ‘Well, that’s just lovely, Mr -’

  ‘Tsk!’ my father trumpeted. ‘Call me Leonard! And filled with my prize-winning greengage and Tia-Maria jam.’

  Not an auspicious start.

  While Rose bundled my father off to acquaint himself with the facilities, I grabbed a drink and headed out into the garden. Where a cheerful voice reached me almost instantly.

  ‘On your own, then? No Phil?’

  As was often the case, given the curious twilight world Great Western Trains rostering people seemed to inhabit, I didn’t expect my boyfriend to arrive for a while. In the months I’d been seeing him we rarely arrived anywhere together; we generally turned up at most places in stages, like catalogue deliveries. I shook my head, as Sheila Rawlins, Rose’s next door neighbour, moved purposefully forwards. I was invariably cornered by Sheila at parties, because, like me, she was divorced with two teenage children. And there our situational kinship ended. Nevertheless, Sheila’s main role in my life seemed to be to do everything I did just a little bit earlier than me, mainly, it sometimes felt, so that she could ease my own passage with her wisdom and spirituality. She separated from her husband just before me, had a resident (incontinent) mother, and her eldest daughter went off to Cambridge last year. I suspected she would have words of encouragement and guidance to impart. And she did.

  ‘Feeling a bit upsy downsy right now, Charlie?’

  Why fight it? She meant well. ‘So-so,’ I told her. ‘More downsy, I guess.’

  ‘Of course you are. Tearful? I wept buckets and buckets.’

  I nodded. She smiled. We both sipped at our drinks. ‘I’m okay. It’s just bad timing, losing Rose and Matt at the same time. But I’ll adjust.’

  ‘As you will, given time. And diversions, of course.’

  ‘Which I have, now Dad’s with us. Diversions aplenty.’

  ‘Mmmm! Offspring out, elderly relative in. Modern life, eh! In good health?’

  Dad’s health was the least of my worries. Most were more fixed on his culinary foibles. I could even now make out his form in the distance, unmistakably miming a full rolling boil.

  ‘Excellent,’ I said.

  ‘But a strain on the family dynamic no less. And a symbol, of course, of a new life-stage beckoning. And one for which most of us are so ill-prepared.’ She shook her head slowly then rolled her eyes. ‘Tsh! Mid-life crisis city, eh?’

  I spotted Phil arriving, and waved a hand in greeting, but he’d already been scooped up by Matt for a drink. Why didn’t Matt come and scoop me up too? Much as I liked Sheila, I really didn’t want to talk about me any more. I finished my drink.

  ‘Well,’ I said, swilling my ice cube around a bit. ‘Depends if I’m going to die at seventy eight, I suppose. I hope not. How are you, anyway?’

  Sheila, who’s wide experience clearly failed to encompass understanding when someone wanted to change the conversational direction and tone, continued.

  ‘Oh, middling. Over the worst now, of course. As you will be, before you can say Gordon Bennett. You do know that, don’t you, Charlie?’

  ‘Oh, of course I do, Sheila,’ I enthused, changing tack. ‘I know I’m just a product of my age, time and conditioning. I’ve just discovered that the whole justification for my existence is bound up in my role as mother, nurturer, Piageti
an facilitator and so on and that having been denied that role - well, fifty percent of it, anyway - I am bound to be floundering in the morass of my latent insecurities and will most probably be forced to sign on for a course in early Renaissance influences on the twentieth century biscuit wrapper or something similarly diverting in order to prove to myself that I still exist as a functioning human being. For the moment, at least. Do you know what I mean?’

  Sheila blinked and then drained her own glass. Then, like a thwacked daddy long legs, soldiered gamely on.

  ‘Mmm-mmm,’ she said, nodding. ‘And you’re right to be so positive. I find my floristry classes an enormous help. Plus I can do something useful for the community. For the church, at any rate. They’ve been through a terrible time, what with the silk flowers and so on....’

  ‘Silk flowers?’ I asked levelly. I really wanted to say sod the bloody silk flowers - I couldn’t imagine a single anecdote about flowers (silk, plastic, organic or venusian) that would be worth standing around holding an empty glass for, but then recognised in myself an unsettling new streak; I was, I realised, in danger of becoming a cynic. She forestalled me, in any case. With a whoop and a hand flap.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Enough! Please don’t start me on them.’

  None the wiser, I nodded a relieved farewell greeting, as, duty done, she began making her excuses and heading off in pursuit of more sensible talk.

  ‘Oh, Sheila!’ I called. She turned.

  ‘Something, Charlie?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly dismayed at my crabbiness. ‘Are you on-line round at your place? I thought I could give you my new email address.’

  She stepped closer.

  ‘What mail?’

  ‘Email. Computer?’

  ‘Not me,’ she said, shaking her head emphatically. ‘No truck with that sort of jiggery whatname. But remember, if you want to telephone any time - any time, Charlie, you know where I am.’

  Rose had hung night lights in jam jars from the trees and the bushes. Even Matt’s runner bean canes were bathed in pale light. It seemed impossible that after next week I would probably never set foot in this garden again. All those school holiday paddling pool sessions with the children; all those wine-infused nights of debate on the lawn. I met Matt’s Aunty Jenny at the edge of the patio.