Back to Vanilla (6 page)

Honestly? She’d never
even booked her train tickets. She had kept meaning to, but it
simply never happened, although she knew he had his return ticket
in hand; indeed, he had told her how he had gone down to the ticket
office at Edinburgh station to purchase it rather than click a few
keys on the internet. He had insisted that he preferred to trust
traditional methods when it came to mundane transactions, rather
than a website, although there was no denying that when it came to
prowling, the internet opened many more doors. Something in the pit
of her screamed that this whole thing was a bad call on her part,
and however much she gulped it down, it would occasionally sneak
back up on her.

So they sat. She
nested deeper, wrapping herself tightly under the blanket, while he
talked calmly and with a studied precision about, to begin with,
his arrival in Manchester, and the history of Piccadilly station
since it first opened in 1842. He continued through the
architecture of this northern city and began comparing it, with a
passion she found remarkable, with the buildings of Glasgow, where
he had spent a chunk of his youth. It was, thought Tamsin, the type
of rambling that would normally have had her snoring, but it
required no response whatsoever and she let his voice, with its
slight poetic lilt, immerse her awhile, drifting in a soothing
blend of JD and monologue.

She unfolded in the
chair a little and stretched her svelte legs out in front of her,
so that the tips of her toes, nails painted shiny black, he
noticed, rested on the very edge of that big bed.

“Of course, neither
city can compete with the glorious buildings of Edinburgh, which is
where I was born and has been my stamping ground for most of my
adult life. At last count, there were, I believe, more than
four-and-a-half-thousand listed buildings, with an Old Town that
includes that spectacular medieval fortress at the castle, and even
the New Town dates back as far the early 1800s, when the major
figures of the Scottish Enlightenment wanted to escape the
over-crowded Old Town… Have you ever visited our capital?”

And she was aware,
suddenly, of the need for a response.

“Erm, London? Yes,
I’ve a few uni friends who moved straight there after we finished,
though for some of them they were just going back home. But, erm,
yeah, the buildings are really, erm, cool.” And as her mouth closed
and she looked over at his ridiculously solemn expression, her head
began to nod in a tipsy semblance of wisdom, while she bit her
bottom lip tightly to suppress the sniggers that threatened to
bubble out, and then eventually did.

“I was actually
referring to another capital entirely,” he said. “But no matter,
you sound like you’re in a good place and I’m pleased. Can I get
you anything? If you’re famished, I’m sure I could call down and
get the kitchen to rustle us up some food?”

“I’m in a good place.
Kindly_Meister, I’m in one seriously good place, and this is where
I plan to stay, though I kind of need to pee more than anything,
and I’m way too hyped up still to feel like eating.”

With this, she got up
and manoeuvred herself with a wavering lurch past Alasdair, whose
chair stood between her and the large bathroom, the door to which
was on the other side of the bed.

She went in and closed
the door, and for a weird little moment, it occurred to her that,
considering their chats and his penchant for watersports, he might
decide it was cool to walk in on her unannounced, a prospect that
filled her with both terror and suppressed disgust. So she turned
the lock as slowly and quietly as her inebriation permitted,
allowing him neither the discomfort of knowing her fears nor the
chance to bring them to life. The thought, it has to be said, would
not even have occurred to Alasdair, who had an acutely heightened
sense of boundaries, a thorough appreciation of the codes and rules
and the necessity of abiding by these in the world of kink.

Blissfully oblivious
to her barely bottled-up discomfort, Kindly_Meister stood and
placed himself by the foot of the bed, looking down at the desk,
and began flicking through the hotel information file. There was
nothing in there that he didn’t already know, having paid close
attention on the website to things like breakfast and checkout
times; this was more of a focus than a fact-finding
opportunity.

Tamsin, meanwhile, had
both of her hands on the pseudo marble sink-shelf combination, and
was staring into herself in the fogged-up mirror. Not too wasted to
be present, she was tanked up enough to feel both excited and on
the outer edges of lust. She was finally ready to accept that
everything was going to be all right. The JD had done half the job
for him. All he had to do was keep it up.

“Well, what do you
think the answer
could
be?” asked Mrs O’Hare, looking with
an encouraging hopefulness, veering towards desperation, at little
Adnan Guerra. His bright blue eyes were invisible beneath his plush
eyelashes, so firmly glued were they downwards to the question on
the personal whiteboard on the desk in front of him. Her every cell
was willing him to succeed for both their sakes.

“If twenty-one divided
by three,” she repeated, “is seven… which we’ve already said it is,
haven’t we… how can we use that information to work out what two
hundred and ten divided by three is?”

“Seventy… it’s
obvious… you simply move the digits over to the left!” shouted
Krishnan Ali, with a self-satisfied sigh; his position in the
class, where he sat directly opposite Adnan on a table of four
children, was ordinarily the blight of Megan O’Hare’s support
teaching sessions in class 5JF’s maths lesson every Tuesday
morning. Today, however, it was too close both to the lunch bell
and to the end of a very hard term to be anything other than a
blessed relief for both student and teaching assistant, and
although Megan cast Krishnan a disapproving glance, Adnan’s look of
abject relief at this reprieve was more than usually echoed by her
own feeling.

“That’s right,
Krishnan,” she said, “though Adnan was about to answer and it was
rather unfair of you not to give him the chance. Do you understand
how Krishnan got to seventy, Adnan?”

The ringing of the
bell coincided with the frantic nodding of the boy’s head, and both
adult and child conspired to pretend they believed his delusory
yes. Adnan packed up and charged out of the classroom to his
monitor duty, while Megan gathered the equipment left behind on the
table and placed it into the various labelled trays ready for the
next day.

“How’s he coming on?”
Her colleague Erin Grosel looked genuinely worried. In her
mid-thirties, she was a tall, stockily sporty woman with a crinkly
eyed, pink-cheeked face, the kind on which concern seemed
permanently etched.

They chatted briefly
about the lesson, Megan acutely aware of the time and the need to
get moving.

Her youngest child,
Sam, was due at the dentist in 47 minutes, and she hadn’t yet
fetched him from playgroup, which, although it was attached to the
school, invariably involved a slight strop as she peeled him away
from whatever activity he was engrossed in. As she began excusing
herself, the concern on Miss Grosel’s face became ever more acute,
and Megan wondered fleetingly if this woman ever lightened up or
was simply fated to drown in a sea of eternal fretfulness.

With no time left for
pleasantries, Megan dashed off to fetch her three-year-old son,
who, praise be, was ready for her, waiting in his navy duffel coat.
She placed him into his hand-me-down buggy, once owned by his
sister, who was now a strapping ten-year-old tugging at the shirt
tails of adolescence.

She unwrapped the
cling film from a soggy cheese sandwich made by her husband, Rich,
that morning, crusts carefully trimmed off and bread cut into
right-angled triangles. She placed it in Sam’s left hand, the right
one being occupied with the small blue Jess the Cat water bottle
that seemed glued to his mouth, and without a word, the two steamed
double time up the hill that led almost directly from Waterfield’s
Primary School to the main street where the dental surgery
waited.

On arrival, mother and
son popped into the small toilet cubicle with a private sink, and
she made sure to scrub from his tiny teeth all traces of the
cheese, bread and cereal bar he had eaten while she pushed. Playing
the good boy, he barely protested, knowing this was a
non-negotiable.

And, for the third
time that year, he sat in the adjustable swivel chair in a surgery
filled with friendly-faced fluffy toys, stickers and even a few
primary coloured posters on the ceiling for younger patients to
gaze up at as they lay flat on their backs, and refused to open his
mouth. Bribery, coercion, threats… nothing worked. Lips firmly
pursed, he sat shaking his head for 15 long minutes, before, once
again, with Megan feeling like the world’s most ineffectual mother,
he was strapped into the buggy and off they went.

The walk back down
towards home was substantially less unpleasant in the way that
downhill tends to be. They passed the school during the 25-minute
return walk, but now Megan was neither red-faced nor panting nor
stressed, and Sam was fast asleep. As if on cue, though, he woke up
as they walked in through the front door, with just over an hour
until Becky would arrive, fresh from the newly permitted freedom of
her five-minute walk from school. Grace, at 15 the oldest of the
three children, had play rehearsals and was unlikely to appear
before 6pm.

Resisting the appeal
of a surreptitious hour spent in front of some mindless telly,
Megan wandered into the cramped kitchen of their early Edwardian
terraced house. Rich couldn’t have been gone for long – the kettle
was still warm – and she grabbed the bowl of celery sticks and
cucumber cubes he’d kindly pre-chopped from the fridge, and settled
down with their son and a selection of Dr Seuss on the couch for
half an hour before going online.

It was her turn to
make a move; if she was quick, there’d be just enough time. Using
two of the letters already there, she keyed in the word
“influence”: that was one plus one plus four plus one plus one plus
one plus three plus one… 13 points!

With three kids and a
part-time job to shuffle, the handfuls of free time Megan managed
to scoop out for herself these days had been increasingly spent
scouring through profiles and suggested reads on Facebook, and on
trying out various game apps on her phone. When the chance came to
combine the two, which it occasionally did, she took it.

Which was how Megan,
through an opportunist link suggested to her on the all-pervasive
social network, found herself wandering head first into what was,
implausible as she had initially found it, gradually revealing
itself as the racy world of online Scrabble.

That was
two-and-a-half months ago and by now she’d played more than 237
hours of the game, under the name WordGirl. She was well versed in
the rules and becoming a fixture in the online scene, so was
constantly in demand as a contestant. She played twosomes,
foursomes and as part of a larger team, as well as dabbling a
little, as her skill and confidence in her abilities as a
sesquipedalian bloomed, in the world of challenges and clan
Scrabble matches.

She delighted in
understanding the finer machinations of what was to her a whole new
world, in getting to know the people, the politics, the gossip and
the game, and as 9.30 approached each evening – traditionally,
though not always, the start of whatever time she could call her
own – she started to will the hours, minutes away.

She went to work, made
meals, washed dishes, listened to accounts of her family members’
days, sympathised, empathised, hypothesised, all increasingly on
autopilot as her thoughts became lost in the combinations of
letters, the funny, complicated lives of her online playmates, and,
increasingly, her burgeoning friendship with Boyd_Cooper, with whom
she was spending more and more of her virtual time.

As WordGirl and
Boyd_Cooper, they were already becoming quite the fearsome duo. He
was by far the more skilled and experienced player, she knew, but
she was good, getting better, and their practice sessions were
beginning to help. They met in their private world every night at
9.45pm, and if the kids weren’t settled by then, she would feel
herself getting a little jittery and borderline tetchy, although
she tried hard to fight it. The window between him getting home
from work at 4.30 Arkansas time and his wife’s arrival an hour or
so later was short and she desperately needed his tuition in the
game.

Having taken her turn,
Megan, checked her messages, including one from Boyd: “Hey Wordy.
Same time, same place! Be there. ;)”

She beamed and headed
into the kitchen to prepare for the next wave of family chaos.

********************

“Hey WG.” The
message flashed up and simultaneously buzzed on Kik, one of the
preferred instant-messaging systems of the anonymous online. “You
busy?”

It was 9.33pm and
although Sam had long given up the fight and dropped off, and Grace
was doubtless lying face down on her bed up in the loft extension,
half-eaten packet of jelly beans to her left, phone in her right
hand, her middle girl, Becky, was wide awake and struggling. This
was totally out of character for a girl who, at ten, was all but
self-sufficient, as she had been (or so it seemed) since she left
the womb, but this evening she just couldn’t get to sleep.

The annual swimming
gala at school tomorrow – her last at primary – was troubling her.
She’d been put in the freestyle relay, which meant, in her overly
conscientious eyes at least, that she needed to be on top form, and
was unable to sleep precisely because she felt it was so vitally
important that she did.