Loose Connections (3 page)

The Truth

‘What do you mean?' Rosemary said. 

She was suddenly alert, sitting up on the desk, her arms clutched around her knees. She wondered if he knew something. Perhaps her Internet Service Provider had kept all of her movements on record. They could intercept e-mails. That's how criminals got caught. She believed ‘cookies' was the correct term for the tracking devices stored on a computer's hard disk. It was a fitting name. 

She should have been aware of this. She could often detect that Chantelle had been into her office, looking at plastic surgery clinics online. She could type ‘land' into a search engine and the address of the Landauer Cosmetic Surgery Group would pop up. Once she'd seen a computer programme advertised on an American infomercial on cable TV. The presenter claimed it could make a copy of text typed on any given keyboard. They were aiming it at bored and mistrustful housewives who suspected their hubbies of looking at porn. 

No! She was being paranoid. She was always being paranoid. Internet Service Providers couldn't give away any personal information unless it was part of an ongoing criminal investigation. She giggled, her throat dry and tight, her conscience pressing down on her like a vice. She wished she could cut it out of herself like a tumour. She wasn't doing anything wrong. Not really. She hadn't broken any laws. She hadn't broken any commandments. 

‘What do you mean?' she said, repeating herself. ‘Don't be an amateur psychologist, 

just be a good repairman. This is about my broken Internet connection. I need it to be fixed.' 

‘Why?' Aaron said. It was clear now that there was something wrong. She was avoiding eye contact, picking at pieces of lint on the thighs of her trousers. 

‘I told you why,' she said. ‘I've got a purchase contract here for a French villa. It needs to be translated into English and sent to an estate agent in Paris.' She waved a purple folder in the air. ‘Until it gets there I don't get paid. Three weeks it's been here. I need the Internet. I need it to check over a few of the finer points. Why am I even explaining this to you? It's none of your business. Just fix the damn thing. That's your job.' She slapped the folder down on the desk, a pen rolling off the edge. 

‘I'll do it if you let me go,' Aaron said. This situation was ridiculous. The woman was impossible. 

‘No you won't,' Rosemary shouted. ‘You won't fix it. You'll say you don't know what the problem is. You'll apologise and then you'll leave and then I'll have to wait for someone else.' 

‘What else do you need the Internet for?' Aaron said. He meant the question to sound caring but he was shouting now too, almost against his own will. The woman was holding her head in her hands, her palms blocking her eyes. Her feet were trembling. Aaron knew he was on to something. He took a deep breath. ‘What do you really need the Internet for?' he said. 

‘I told you!' she said, voice desperate. Her throat was clogged, the words filled with mucus. 

‘No,' Aaron said. ‘If you needed the money you'd put the file on to a disk. You'd take it to an Internet café in town. It's not about an Internet connection. It's about this Internet connection. It's something to do with this computer.' He waved his free hand at the monitor. 

As he did the woman moved slightly, starting the screensaver. A slideshow of French landmarks glided slowly across the screen: the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysées, Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower, various figures of imposing, grey stone. The woman was crying, not sobbing, just crying, water pouring in thin streams down her hands. 

‘What is it?' he said. 

‘OK,' she said, spitting. She opened her hands and showed her face. Her skin was pink and wet. Some of her black make-up was smudged across the top of her cheekbone. ‘I'm having an affair,' she said. 

There! Rosemary had said it. Those four words had been balancing on the tip of her tongue for twelve months. She was always afraid that they would jump out over dinner, or during sleep. She worried that she'd voice them by accident like someone suffering from Tourette's syndrome. She thought she'd feel embarrassed telling a stranger her great secret, but her relief outweighed the shame. She let her shoulders drop. She wiped a tear away from her eye with the cuff of her sweater. ‘Say something then,' she said. 

The repairman was staring at the computer. She was expecting him to criticise her, to call her a hypocrite. Maybe part of her wanted that, like a Catholic at confession craving Hail Marys. When she was punished she could repent. He shook his head, looking amused. He grinned. ‘I don't understand,' he said. ‘You're having an affair.' He shrugged. ‘What has that got to do with me?'

Rosemary realised that the repairman had no interest in her personal life. He wasn't her husband. He wasn't a priest. He had no power over her. She looked at the keyboard on the desk between them, the dust and dried flakes of pink nail polish trapped in the ridges between the buttons. She thought about all the mischievous words she had created with its keys. She remembered the X that she'd used too easily, making cyber-kisses run across the white screen. ‘Don't you get it?' she said. ‘An Internet affair. He lives in Bordeaux. We talk to each other by e-mail.' 

Aaron's eyes flashed with understanding. ‘Ah,' he said. 

Rosemary had met André on a social networking site the previous November. He had found her. He had asked her to be his ‘friend'. He was older than her, in his early fifties. His profile photo looked like a tired version of God. A large man with tame, brown eyes, a mane of wild white hair, and a long white beard streaked with thin slivers of grey. He was an art teacher in a high school. Rosemary accepted his request and then sent him a message in French, asking why he was interested in her. She'd never met him. They shared no mutual friends. She had no relatives in the Bordeaux area. In fact, she'd never come across his surname before, but she looked it up: Arceneaux, a common, occupational title meaning maker or seller of guns. Less than twenty-four hours later his bold reply arrived in her inbox. ‘Because you're a beautiful woman, of course.' 

The response made her study her own profile picture. It had been taken on a family drive to Barry Island. She was sitting on a bench on the Victorian walkway above the beach, the palm tree behind her hiding the true nature of the Welsh climate. She was looking away from the camera, smiling at a bird on the ground. Nothing in the photo struck her as particularly attractive, but for a thirty-seven-year-old she supposed she had quite good skin. When she looked very closely at the photograph she could see the toe of one of Daniel's trainers in the background. She remembered that he had spoiled the whole day by letting everyone know that Fred West's ashes had been scattered into the Barry Island sea. 

‘Don't be so stupid,' his father had said. ‘Why would they scatter the ashes of a Gloucestershire serial killer here?' 

Daniel boosted his argument with information about how, as a child in the 1950s, Fred West was regularly taken on day trips to Barry Island. When he grew up and became a serial killer he continued the family tradition by taking his wife and their kids to the Welsh beach. ‘You can find pictures of him in Barry Island in any number of True Crime books,' he'd said, voice firm. Chantelle, who had wanted to go to the Cardiff Bay retail park anyway, stuck her fingers into her throat, pretending to gag. 

So, Rosemary had written back to André, using his own cheeky, brief style. She wrote one sentence that said, ‘Don't be so silly, I'm average at best.' She could see now that it had been a blatant fish for another compliment. She wanted confirmation, certainty. Nobody had described her as beautiful for decades. Not that she could remember, anyway. Her husband's voice had become a sound that she didn't hear any more. It existed in the background, like the tumble dryer in the utility room, or the distant traffic on the M4. White noise. If he'd said it, she hadn't noticed. 

A day later, André came back with another lone sentence that said, ‘Trust me, I'm an artist, I've got a brilliant eye.' At the time it was midwinter and her husband was busy collecting clients' data for the tax deadline in the New Year. There wasn't much translation work around. She spent her days honing her skills by e-mailing André, who spoke no English at all. Of course, she'd learned a long time ago, back in her schooldays, that a woman should never trust a man who made a point of implying that he was trustworthy. But in cyberspace those rules didn't seem to apply. It wasn't as if they were going out on dates. 

André made Rosemary laugh, for the first time in many years. He sent her a cartoon strip that he had drawn. In it, Rosemary was dressed in Wonder Woman's blue, star-speckled hot pants and calf-length red boots. She was standing at the top of the Empire State Building throwing spears at saucer-shaped UFOs. He'd managed to portray her whole face with four ticks of a felt tip. 

Other times he told her stories about artists, how Picasso's first word was ‘lápiz', the Spanish word for pencil, or how Degas despised the colour yellow. He told her how Dalí's The Persistence of Memory had been inspired by staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot August day, how Botticelli suffered from unrequited love for a married noblewoman called Simonetta Vespucci, his subject in The Birth of Venus, and how he was buried at her feet in a churchyard in Florence. 

Rosemary was sucked into his stories like a bobble of fluff in the path of a vacuum cleaner. He talked so passionately about his job, it was impossible not to be. Conversation was a forgotten art in her house. Nobody really talked about anything. They just plodded through the day like zombies on the trail of human flesh. She'd realised this after only a week of mailing with André. And one night, at the dining table, she'd tested her family, making sure she wasn't mistaken. 

‘Tell me what you like about G-Unit,' she'd said to Daniel as he poured a glass of Coke. He frowned at her for a few moments as if she'd been talking in French rather than about his favourite hip-hop band. Then he took a gulp of his drink. ‘They're cool, init?' he said, before belching. When the kids had been excused, her husband opened up his case on the table. He took his calculator out and tapped at the keys. Then he noted a figure down with a biro. ‘Talk to me about something,' Rosemary said, having filled and closed the dishwasher. 

‘Like what?' he said.

‘I don't know.' She shrugged. ‘Anything. How was your day?' 

‘I won't bore you with the details,' he said, turning back to his work.

Somewhere between Christmas and New Year Rosemary had found herself standing in an empty room in the National Museum, staring at Cézanne's Still Life with Apples and Teapot. The orange scarf Chantelle had bought for her from Marks & Spencer's was pulled up over her mouth. A few days earlier André had sent an e-mail entitled ‘Seven Questions to Ask Yourself When Looking at Art'. They were: Does the artwork tell a story? Are there any issues in the work? What kind of images, objects, materials or symbols are there? Does it have a title? Is colour important? Does the work interact with the space it is in? How was the work made? She had memorised all seven and she was applying them to a painting she'd never seen before, despite it being in her city since 1952. She wasn't a zombie. She was alive.

The Truth Hurts

Over the course of a year, Rosemary had come to rely on André's e-mails, the way a kicked dog relies on a treat. For a few minutes each week, he beamed her up out of her routine, ordinary life and put her somewhere special. His stories about artists were like food for her soul. Getting an e-mail from him put her in such a good mood that she'd sing pop songs while doing the household chores. She put extra slices of beef into her husband's sandwiches and extra fabric conditioner into the family's wash. She'd bake batches of fairy cakes and carefully apply the coconut icing with a piping bag. 

Not getting an e-mail produced the opposite effect. She'd stock her husband's lunch box with egg-mayo sandwich filler, spread on stale bread. She'd stay up late and sit in her office, an old typewriter pushed up against the door. She'd read and reread the last e-mail she'd received, drinking the words like wine, looking for secret codes in the text, like a hopeless Christian with a cheap Gideon's Bible. 

Sometimes, before she fell asleep, she fantasised about running away to Bordeaux. She thought about sitting on a sunny terrace overlooking an emerald green vineyard, drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon, like a real-life Shirley Valentine. She fantasised about a dirty weekend with André. She would take the Eurostar and he would meet her at the station and take her overnight case. They'd hold hands and stare at the paintings in the Parisian galleries. They'd order room service and get crumbs from their croissants in the bed. 

She fantasised about sitting for one of André's portraits. She'd lie naked on a red leather chaise longue, a flimsy white sheet covering her pubis, her body steeped in André's undivided attention. They were only fantasies; they were allowed to be clichés. She had no intention of carrying them out. Sometimes she only fantasised that she was a student in André's art class, listening to him talk about the way to create a realistic vanishing point. 

Lately, though, his e-mails had become fewer and fewer. She was lucky if she got one a fortnight. Each one opened with an apology. ‘Je suis désolé …' He said he was busy with marking, but he'd never been busy with marking before. 

Also the e-mails' content was becoming shorter. Often they'd only contain one uninspired sentence. ‘When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre a guard noticed it missing the morning it was taken but assumed that the museum photographer had taken it.' Or, ‘Rubens's Massacre of the Innocents was actually painted by his students – he only added the finishing touches later.' 

When she did get an e-mail she worried that it would be the last. She had nightmares about her inbox remaining forever empty. She'd get up in the night to check her mail and often when there was nothing, she felt suicidal. Please let there be something, she'd think, just an offer for half-price Viagra, or a cheap penis enlargement procedure in a Venezuelan clinic. Anything! Something! The last e-mail she'd got had been a few weeks before she lost her connection. As ever it had begun with an apology, which was followed by three empty lines. On the fourth, it said, ‘Work, work, work. No play. More soon. AAx.'

The repairman sighed, blowing a stray hair out of his face. He was gazing at Rosemary, waiting for her to speak. ‘Actually, it's not really an affair,' she said in an attempt to brush off the confession, ‘more an ongoing conversation.' The repairman was silent. ‘He talks to me about art,' Rosemary said. ‘He's an art teacher, and an artist. He just talks to me about his work. It's quite fascinating. He lives in Bordeaux.'

‘French,' the repairman said. ‘Like you.' 

‘Yes, French,' Rosemary said, her voice sour. As if nationality had anything to do with it! She was beginning to regret telling the repairman anything. ‘I've never met him,' she said, ‘so it's not technically an affair. That was a Freudian slip.' She tried to smile, her shoulders hunched. ‘Who could resist a Frenchman?' 

‘You ought to be careful who you talk to on the Internet,' Aaron said. ‘It's a dangerous place. It's no different to going out alone at night. In some cases it's worse. When you can't see who you're talking to, how do you know they're genuine? There are thieves, hackers, not to mention the perverts. He could be just trying to get at your bank details, or your phone number, or your address.' 

He nodded to confirm his point, his eyes serious. ‘Only last week some fella in London was stabbed and mugged. He was responding to an advert for a car. He had the money to pay for it in a plastic grocery bag, five thousand pounds. There was no car, just a couple of wrong'uns armed with guns. They saw him coming.' 

‘Don't be so absurd,' Rosemary said. ‘André's a real person. That's his real name. He's an art teacher at a school. How else would he know so much about art? He told me that when Picasso was born, the birth was so difficult, and the baby was so weak, the midwife thought he was stillborn. She put the baby down on a chair and turned to attend to the mother. Also he told me that Picasso was christened with twenty-three names but Picasso wasn't one of them. Picasso was his mother's middle name. His father's name was Blasco, or Basclo, something like that.' She wasn't managing to control her excitement very well.

‘How do you know?' Aaron said. 

‘André!' Rosemary said. ‘André told me.' 

‘I mean, how do you know that this André is a real person? How do you know that he lives in Bordeaux? How do you know he's not some psychotic stalker watching you from a house across the road?' 

Rosemary laughed loudly, the sound echoing around the tiny room. ‘Because I do,' she said. ‘I just do.' She thought about his profile image. He was an old man, with lanky, white hair. If he was pretending to be 

someone else surely he'd use a better 

picture. He'd pretend to be young, dark, and athletic. 

‘He's never asked me for any personal details,' Rosemary said. Too bad, because she would have given them to him without question. She often wondered why he didn't try to further their relationship, why he didn't ask her for more pictures, why he didn't suggest a meeting. She supposed that somewhere in her subconscious she had decided that he was married with children, that his family had no interest in his career. Like her, he was unappreciated, undervalued. He was lonely. ‘Nobody could know that much about art unless they really loved it,' Rosemary said. ‘He's cultured and passionate, all the things British men aren't.' She looked at the wall behind Aaron's head, staring into the distance. ‘He told me things that only an artist would know.' 

‘Do you love him?' Aaron blurted out, unexpectedly. The question was born from a mixture of jealousy and contempt. He thought that if the woman was going to the trouble of having an affair, it should have been with him. He was a real, physical person, sitting right there in front of her. He could talk to her about graphic design, and he could make sure her Internet connection was working. 

But Aaron had never had any luck with women. His own wife had left him for another man after only six months of marriage. He'd been on his own for six years now and, though he didn't like to admit it, he'd been very lonely since his mother had died two years ago. ‘Well, do you?' he said, prompting her. He had some leverage on her now. He could use the knowledge against her if the situation took a turn for the worse. Plus, another hour of heart-to-heart was another hundred pounds in the bank.

‘Of course I don't love him!' Rosemary said. ‘How can you love someone you've never met?' Love was an emotion that took over and changed the course of your life. It made you want to have children. It allowed you to make compromises. Love was what had turned her into what she was today – a bored housewife and mother of two. 

It wasn't love. It was just some kind of infatuation. But if that was the case, why was she so frantic to hear from him again? Why did his lack of contact make her feel so awful? It was the danger, the excitement of seeing a foreign man's name in her inbox. It shone out of the small list of companies and work colleagues there, like a diamond in a heap of coal. It was the anticipation of what he was going to say next. For a whole year their unusual connection had remained pure because they had never met, because they had never even touched. It was the vulnerable nature of their relationship that turned her on. It wasn't safe. It wasn't reliable. It wasn't predictable. It was the opposite of what her marriage was. ‘We're friends,' she said. ‘Pen pals, that's all. I love the things he says, though. Does that help?' 

Aaron frowned. ‘Have you ever heard of the term, “grooming”?' he said. 

‘I told you,' Rosemary said. ‘I've got a fourteen-year-old daughter.' 

‘There you go then,' Aaron shrugged. 

‘What on earth would André be grooming me for?' she said. 

‘I told you. Burglary! Rape! There's nothing to say an artist can't be a serial killer, is there? In fact, Hitler was an artist. Grown women go missing after meeting dodgy men on the Internet all the time. It really isn't that difficult to fool someone, you know. What does he know about you? He knows that you speak French, so he talks to you in French. You're 

half French, so he tells you he lives in Bordeaux. You probably told him, somewhere along the line, that you like Picasso. Now he's an expert on Picasso. They tell you what they know you want to hear. People like you are too trusting.' 

‘It's none of your business anyway,' Rosemary said. 

Aaron shook his head. He was frustrated now. ‘I didn't ask to be here, did I?' he said. ‘I could have had you up and running by now. If you hadn't handcuffed me to the chair I'd be gone. You could have been online, talking to lover boy, talking to Jean Pierre.' 

‘He's not a boy,' Rosemary said. ‘He's not my lover, either.'

‘You don't really know what he is, do you?' Aaron said. The metal cuff was beginning to bite at his wrist. The feathers were aggravating his skin. The clock said it was gone twelve. He already had more money than he knew what to do with. He wanted to go now. ‘How about you unlock the cuffs?' he said. ‘I'll fix the connection and there'll be no more said about it.'

Rosemary looked thoughtful. She slid off the edge of the desk and stood facing him, calmly considering his offer. 

‘What do you think?' he said, encouraging her. ‘What happens in the French translator's office stays in the French translator's office.' He smiled. 

The woman wiped at the dark make-up smudge on her cheekbone, spreading the stain further across her face. ‘Do you know what?' she said. ‘I forgot to bring you your tea.' She marched out of the room. Aaron bit his bottom lip.