The Fish Kisser (8 page)

The narrow companionway to the car deck was swamped by a tide of sweaty, struggling, fed-up passengers, with fractious kids screaming, “Are we there yet?” and fractious parents screaming, “Are we there yet?” Bliss squeezed his way as far as a stairwell but his descent was blocked by a vertical wall of miserable humanity. “Police. Let me through,” he called hopefully, but a truck driver inflated himself into a road block, mumbling, “Push off and wait your turn. You're not in England now.” Bliss retreated, tried two other stairwells without success and was finally swept down to Car Deck B with a crowd. He wanted to be on Deck A—where LeClarc's car was. Weaving in and out of the slowly moving cars, he reached the deck just in time to see Roger's green Renault driving off the ramp onto the quayside.

“Quick, follow him,” he shouted to Wilson, as he leapt into the back of their car. Wilson slammed it into gear, stared ahead, ignored the angry horns and voices of maddened motorists, and forced a path off the ship.

They closed up on the Renault approaching the immigration booth, just as the driver's passport was being handed back. Only two other cars separated them but the immigration officer was in no hurry, his day's plan ruined by the ship's late arrival. They inched forward as the Renault disappeared into the custom's hall. “Hurry up,” muttered Wilson, drumming the steering wheel, waiting for the smartly uniformed officer of the Koninklijke Marechaussee, a Dutch Marine, on immigration control. But Bliss wound down his window impatiently.

“Officer, we're in a hurry,” he called, flourishing his warrant card. “Someone from your police force should be here to meet us.”

The officer's English was good, not perfect. “Oh yes, Sir. Over zhere,” he said, pointing toward a dark blue Saab parked against the custom house wall with two men in black leather coats idly blowing smoke rings at each other. Bliss leapt out of the car, warrant card in hand, and ran over to the men.

“What did they say?” asked Wilson as he returned, breathless.

“Everything's arranged,” replied Bliss. “They've really gone to town. They've got four units to pick him up as soon as he comes out of Customs.

“Shit,” said Wilson, “The Dutch must've money to burn. Four double-manned cars to follow a fat geezer in a poxy Renault, and we only had one.”

“Well,” responded Bliss, “Maybe they're not as good as us.”

They laughed in relief, their task finally over and, with Roger's car emerging from the Custom's shed with the Saab in tow, Wilson mused, “I wonder if anyone did fall off the ship.”

“Don't know,” replied Bliss, his eye on the departing Renault. “But thank God it wasn't LeClarc.”

Trudy, in Roger's house, in Roger's bed, instructed herself to go back to the beginning, to her first words with Roger on the Internet. Reasoning that he must, at some time, have said, or done, something to give her a clue about the user I.D. and password she now needed to access his Internet server.

They'd “met” four months earlier—Easter weekend—in a chat room—an ethereal cyber-venue where
weightless messages pass simultaneously between any number of correspondents; people who have never met, have little in common and, in most cases, nothing better to do.

“Your dinner's getting cold. What on earth are you doing?” her mother bawled up the stairs as she left for work that evening.

“Won't be long—just browsing,” Trudy replied, mesmerized by the tiny black and white screen. An hour later she was still there, her foil wrapped dinner balanced precariously in the fridge, on top of a chicken's carcase.

The chat room emptied as guests drifted away in search of greater stimulation—like an entire fleet of Flying Dutchmen destined to endlessly surf the vastness of cyber-space, destined never to be satisfied—leaving Trudy and Roger almost alone.

“SO, ROGER, DO YOU THINK ONE DAY COMPUTERS WILL CLONE THEMSELVES,” she typed.

“THEY ALREADY DO. WE CAN'T MAKE COMPUTERS WITHOUT COMPUTERS,” he replied. “ITS LIKE PEOPLE. YOU CAN'T MAKE PEOPLE WITHOUT PEOPLE.”

“LIKE—SOMEONE'S GOT TO GET BONKED,” added the only other contributor, a man with the unlikely name of CyberBob, who'd added sexual innuendo all afternoon.

“THANK YOU CYBERBOB AND GOODNIGHT,” flashed onto Trudy's screen as Roger gave him a hint.

CyberBob didn't give up and, after a few more exchanges, Roger and Trudy crept out of the chat room to communicate through a private chat client. One-to-one private messages supposedly inaccessible by anyone else.

“I've met this really super guy, Marg,” she stage-whispered to Margery, her best, best friend, in social
science class the following day. “He's gorgeous and he's twenty-seven.”

“Bit old for you, Trude. More my age.”

“Yeah, but I told him I was nineteen, so he reckons that's O.K.”

“And … when he finds out?”

“I ain't going to tell him am I? And it's not like we're going to meet or anything.”

“Well what's he like? You know: How tall is he? What's his hair like? His eyes? Hey, what's his star sign? My mum reckons you can always tell what a bloke's like from his star sign. She says Sagittarius is best. My dad's a Pisces, that's why she reckons he's so wet.”

Trudy had no answers, but anticipated each evening's “meeting” with Roger with the heart stopping palpitations of a waif dragged out of a screaming pack of groupies to have dinner with a teen-star. Dashing home from school, frequently brushing off Margery in her haste so that by six o'clock, or a quarter after at the latest, she was made-up and ready for her date. But Roger never came on-line before seven-thirty, even eight-thirty—she'd wait. Her e-mail message, “HI ROGER—GIVE ME A CALL,” would sit, unopened, in his inbox until he could escape to his room, switch on his computer, and wait for the three most important words of the day: “You've got mail.”

A crease in the filthy sheet on Roger's bed irritated her aching left shoulder but, as she manoeuvred into a more comfortable position, pressure on her blistered hand made her cry out in pain. Once settled, she went back to her thoughts and recalled the evening, just a week after their original meeting, when “love” first appeared.

Coming home from school, she'd surrounded herself with a tide of cookies, crunchies and chocolate, which flooded the table and swept over the cereal bowl, still containing a few soggy cornflakes, which she'd abandoned in order to check her messages before school that morning. A sheet of writing paper, wrenched from an exercise book, had been brushed off the bowl by a pack of pretzels and now lay on the floor. The lipstick message, a random mix of upper and lower case letters, looked more like a suicide or ransom note than a mother's message to her daughter. “I'n NOT clearing up AGAIN—I've WARNED you. You left the MILK out again. the cat got it. I'll be back at ten—MAYBE.”

Their messages flew back and forth that evening. “At lightning speed,” according to Roger.

“HOW FAST IS THAT?” she enquired, but found little interest in the possibility of her written thoughts zipping round the world six times a second.

“WOW,” she wrote—who cares, she thought.

“I DID MY HAIR RED,” she wrote

“WOW,” he replied—who cares, he thought.

Hard-drives, soft movies; gigabytes, teen-TV; RAMs and ROMs, music and make-up. Their words crossed though never met.

“I GOT A NEW Z360,” he wrote.

“WOW,” she wrote.

“I'M GETTING A WATCH FOR MY BIRTHDAY,” she typed.

“WOW,” he replied.

The stilted conversation continued, the cut and thrust of debate, perfected by Senators before Christ, now
blunted by the lightning speed of twentieth century technology—what truly masterful advertising genius had persuaded people that progress was to turn a thirty second phone call into an hour-long marathon of typing and reading?

Later, much later, in their exchanges, with all meaningful information exposed, she fished for his thoughts, his feelings.

“I THINK YOUR REALLY NICE,” she typed, her misspelling unnoticed by either. “WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ME?”

“U ARE REALLY SUPER TRUDE. I'VE NEVER MET ANYONE AS NICE AS YOU. I WISH I COULD SEE U. I BET U LOOK LOVELY. I THINK I'M FALLING IN LOVE.”

“Oh my God,” she breathed, feeling a warmth as the words sank in. What would Margery think of that? Margery with her string of admirers; Margery always knowing the right thing to say to a boy; Margery with her cool clothes, “in” lipstick and the right footwear. “Height matters,” she'd said, flaunting her new fourinch chunky heeled boots.

Trudy saved the message log on her hard drive, would have printed a copy but was out of paper. “I think I'm falling in love,” she read, and re-read, luxuriating in the words; listening to them roll off her tongue; watching her expression in the mirror; imagining Roger saying them: “I think I'm falling in love.”

“TRUDY—R U STILL THERE?” Her screen was saying.

“YES.” she typed back quickly, suddenly realizing that she'd not responded to his earlier message. “I'M HERE, AND I THINK I'M FALLING IN LOVE TOO.”

They could have picked up the phone, spoken directly, said what they wanted to say, heard what they
wanted to hear, yet neither did, preferring to add another veil to the eternal dance. Lovers, fumbling in the dark, excited by the uncertainty of what they may find, deliberately delaying gratification—or disappointment.

Trudy called for Margery the following morning, something she rarely did of late, but she was unable to contain her excitement. Margery's cigarette-thin mother, a length of ash dangling precariously, answered the door to Trudy's cheery, “Hi—is Mar …”

She got no further. “Hang on, Luv,” she said, flicking the ash past her onto the street. “It's for you Marg,” she shouted, turning to face the stairs.

“Go on up, Luv. It's time she was up for school,” she called over her shoulder as she turned back to the kitchen.

Margery was miffed, “I thought you'd found a new friend,” she sneered, dived under the bedclothes and buried her head in the pillow. One foot stuck out, her azure toenails—”Chic” according to one of her mother's magazines—contrasting sharply to the chalkiness of her skin.

“You're still my best friend, Marg,” Trudy tried soothingly, closing the bedroom door behind her. “But Roger
is
sort of cute.”

“Cute! Cute! You don't know what he looks like for gawd's sake,” she shot back.

“I do so.”

“Bollocks you do.”

“Yeah, well that's where you're wrong, see.”

Margery leapt up, almost knocking Trudy off the edge of the narrow little bed—a cheap standby bought for a nine-year-old eight years earlier. “You've met him?” she asked excitedly.

“Not exactly, Marg. But I know what he looks like, and he's sending me a photo. He's tall, well fairly tall
anyway, and he's got dark skin. Not Paki or anything like that—just sort of tanned. Oh, and I nearly forgot, he's got brown eyes the same as mine. He's got a really posh job as well—some sort of computer programmer in the city.”

Margery, stirred into momentum by Trudy's excitement, decided she might as well get up. She'd slept naked under the bedclothes, and now stepped, unashamedly, in front her friend, to examine her neat little body in the cracked, full-length mirror on the back of the door. “I think they're getting bigger, what do you reckon, Trude?” she said as she turned to face her friend, her hands pushing under the little mounds of flesh, squeezing every available gram of fat into her breasts.

Trudy, her mind fixated on Roger, raced ahead. “He commutes, you know.” Is
that an achievement or what?
“He gets the train. Reckons he travels first class 'cos his firm pays. Oh, and wait for this, he's got his own house. Sounds pretty posh, too. And you'd never guess where it is.”

She didn't wait for Margery's guess. In any case her friend was showing little interest, more concerned with retrieving various bits of clothing from around the room, carefully sniffing each.

“It's in Watford,” she concluded triumphantly. “Not bad. Eh!” she added, carefully emphasising each individual syllable, and then repeating them for even greater emphasis, “Not bad. Eh!”

Margery didn't think it was bad, not that she thought it was good either, so said nothing. Her choice of knickers selected, she put them on, coyly turning away from Trudy as if she'd suddenly discovered she had something to hide.

“Just think, Marg. Watford on a Saturday,” she said dreamily, her mind on the famous soccer club.

“Didn't think you wuz interested in football, Trade,” Margery said at last, just to be annoying.

“Don't much. But I might get to see Elton John. They reckon he's there nearly every week.”

Margery was not a John fan, never had been, couldn't understand anyone of her own age idolizing a strange little bald man old enough to be her grandfather. “Oh great!” she mocked, “Just what I always wanted.”

Trudy's conversations with Roger had continued. Becoming longer; more intimate, more revealing, and even more desperate, as the tentacles of two lonely souls reached out to mesh with each other. Her mother, concerned mainly about the rising cost of the phone bill, had warned her about getting too involved. “You don't know anything about him really, Trudy love,” she'd said, kindly, when her daughter had been explaining, excitedly, about some clever remark Roger had made. “Just be careful, that's all. He might be married, or weird, or … or, I dunno. You're only sixteen, plenty of time for boyfriends yet. Anyhow, you know what blasted liars men are. Remember your father?”

Of course she remembered her father, how could she forget her father; although, thinking about it, she was surprised to discover she hadn't visited him for more than a year. His new wife, younger and definitely prettier than her mother, didn't like her, had never liked her. “It's like going to see him in hospital,” she had complained to her mother after her last visit.