Touched (14 page)

‘Yes, it was really great,’ Dan was hoping that he sounded at least half convincing but knowing it was doubtful.

‘Was that why you had your eyes closed?’ she asked, eyebrows raised then laughed when she saw the look on his face.

‘Yes. I was contemplating the film’s deeper message,’ he said in mock seriousness.

‘Liar!’ she said, giving him a playful punch and wriggling away from his arm, ‘I’ll forgive you if you take me to The Runaway.’

‘What’s the Runaway?’ he said, playing along by stepping towards her, letting her coyly back away, keeping just of reach.

‘You’ve never been to The Runaway? Oh you poor thing!’ She stopped, letting Dan catch her. ‘It’s just the best little bar. I’m there all the time, it’s my second home.’ She let him slip his arms around her and allowed herself to be drawn in close to him but when Dan leant forward to kiss her she broke away again.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘Race you. It’s not far.’

The Runaway was loud and surprisingly busy for a Monday night. Young professionals mixed with partying students. To Dan everyone looked achingly, expensively trendy. Jen was immediately swept away into a maelstrom of bodies, welcomed as one of their own. Everyone seemed to know her.

Dan bought drinks, guessing at what Jen wanted from his experience of the previous night, and found the last two empty stools in the bar. The rest of the table was occupied by a group of partying students playing a noisy drinking game. Jen flitted from group to group, conversation to conversation. Dan watched her with growing irritation and some depression. He felt old and alien, an outsider sat on the edge, a spectator from a different world – or perhaps more accurately of a different world.

At last Jen pulled herself away from a bearded young man at the bar – Dan could not help notice that he had been absent mindedly stroking her buttock as they talked – looked around, saw Dan and came over and sat on the stool next to him, grabbed her drink and gulped half of it down. She was flushed with excitement and her eyes were wide.

‘Didn’t I tell you? Isn’t this great?’ she shouted over the dance music on the jukebox. ‘I practically LIVE in this place. Ooh there’s Tom…TOM!’ She leaped up and threw her arms around a young man who had just stepped into the bar amongst a group of others. He had the look, build and ears of a prop forward.

This set the pattern for the next hour and a half. Dan found himself become more and more irritated and had to fight the urge to simply get up and leave. He had rather quickly drained his first two Gin and tonics out of sheer boredom but then remembered the car and moved onto diet coke. He gave up buying drinks for Jenny; she always seemed to have a different one in her hand as well as male arms continuously around her.

In the end it was a relief when Jenny wanted to head off to a club; he was able to plead tiredness and the fact that he had to be in work in the morning.

‘You go,’ he said, ‘I’ll be fine.’

He ignored the fact that she looked surprised and put out by this. Frankly he was beyond caring.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘Call me. You sure you’re OK?’

‘Yeah fine,’ said Dan, not even attempting to be convincing. He had given up trying to kid himself that this was ever going to work. She was pretty and definitely sexy but he felt more like her father than a potential lover.

The last thing he saw was Jenny heading down the street with her arm around the rugby player. She did give Dan a last long lingering look over her shoulder but the effect was spoiled by her companion playfully squeezing her behind as they rounded the street corner and disappeared out of sight.

It was around thirty minute later that he was able to put his new key into his new lock and le himself into his flat. He checked his watch; after midnight on a work night. And what had he gained? Just more frustration it seemed. His ears were still ringing from the bar and the cokes he had had meant that he was wide awake. He knew sleep would be hours away, he was very intolerant to caffeine late at night. He had hoped that circumstances would have been different and that lack of sleep would not have been an issue but now this thought made him feel even more miserable.

Making an effort not to even glance at the tub of tablets he consoled himself by pouring a co-op whisky, wincing only slightly at its roughness when he tasted it. He tried to ignore the advice he had been given about depression, that alcohol was itself a depressant, that it would just take him down further. He did not like to think about where it might take him, when the mood and the opportunity and the means coincided. Instead he tried to think of something else, something other than about his life, his job prospects, this evening.

Almost the first thing that he thought about was Tess.

It was such a pity she was a fake. She seemed so nice, quiet, deep even, all the qualities he found really attractive. She had a strange quality, an aura about her. It was quite beguiling.

But then he had another thought; if she was a con artist then she would be like that wouldn’t she? If she was really good she would see what that target would want to see in her and provide that vision on a plate. That was how hustles worked.

Could anyone be
that
good? If they were then why would they bother with him? He had nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Less than nothing.

Then perhaps she was just weird. Yes that was it, she was as touched as he was.

‘Yeah you daft bugger, as weird as you are,’ he said out loud and angrily to himself as he grabbed his laptop and switched it on. Perhaps a few hands of on-line poker would pass the time until sleep came and gave him respite.

Not that sleep had been exactly restful lately. His nights had become suddenly full of dark dreams – well true nightmares to be honest – things so vivid that they could easily have been real. That morning  he had woken up sweating, almost convinced that he, himself had attacked someone. It was so real, so vivid that he had almost called the police, actually had the handset in his hand before he came to his senses and convinced himself that it had to have been a dream.

It had been a narrow escape, he could quite easily have involved someone else in his mental confusion. They might have ignored it but then again he might have found himself in front of a psychiatrist trying to explain himself.

He might be losing grip but he would prefer to go through it on his own.

But then one of the important lessons that you had to learn in life was to know what was real and what was imagined. If those boundaries really were getting blurred for him than he really was in serious trouble. 

Ten minutes later he
realised poker wasn't helping. He wasn't concentrating. Awake he might be but mentally he wasn’t at his best. Even on the small stakes tables he was getting quickly wiped out; his thinking was two dull to survive for long against the other players. When the last of his money was gone he logged out of the site and almost switched the laptop off.

At the last moment, on a whim, he called up Google. With only the slightest hesitation he typed “Tessa Williams murder” into the search box.

There were far less hits than his last search but still several hundred. Dan clicked onto one from a source he thought at least would be pretty reliable, the Manchester Evening News. The headline was pretty sensational though: ‘Manchester Solicitor Slain’. Underneath was a colour photograph.

Dan felt his hearth thump. He shook his head in disbelief.

Unless she had a double, Tess Williams was exactly who she said she was.

*

@fear_me_now Twitter Account

Tweets: 189

Followers: 465

@fear_me_now:
A so-called 'young lady' thought she could make a fool of me tonight. She will soon – briefly – think otherwise

@___________
: You're all talk and no action #fake

@
fear_me_now:
What you think is of no consequence. You are nothing. Less than nothing

@
fear_me_now:
Still, perhaps we should meet. I could introduce you to the bottom of the canal and let the eels feed on your bloated carcase

@____________:
Yeah mate. Course you would #tosser

Chapter Nine

Tuesday Morning – 3 am

The girl cowered in the corner.

She might have been pretty – he didn't remember looking, he had been too angry to bother, She was just a target, something to satisfy him albeit fleetingly. She wasn't pretty now; her lipstick had been smudged and smeared, merging with her torn and swollen face where the punches had landed, and her mascara had run into black pools with her tears. The drops ran, clear and dark and mingled with the blood that dripped from the stumps of her broken front teeth, coalescing into a steady flow of liquids that pooled on the floor under where she lay.

She had stopped screaming. She had learnt her lesson. Now she just sobbed quietly, her entire body shaking.

She was totally terrified.

Just how he wanted her.

But he couldn't enjoy her like this for long.

That was amateur. That put him in danger.

He felt the reassuring feeling of having the knife in his hand.

The blade glinted as he leant down to the girl.

*

Dan woke with a start.

He didn't know where he was.

All he could think of was the girl. It was so vivid, he had to have been there.

Didn't he?

No. No, he was on his settee. He'd fallen asleep there.

Hadn't he?

Shaking he checked his hands, almost convinced that there would be blood on them.

He was remarkably relieved to find that they were clean.

Still trembling, he headed for bed.

*

To Dan’s relief, the next day in work was comparatively busy. A fairly urgent instruction had come in to value a portfolio of commercial investments and all of the team, including Ian, had headed out to do the inspections.  Dan had paired up with Hannah and was pleased to have some sensible company. It at least kept his mind off all the issues in his life and, particularly, the enigma that was Tess and all the issues that went with her – was she even real or just a figment of his crumbling mind? He would just rather not go there and work was an ideal distraction.

He had woken to find he had got a text from Jenny. It was sent, he noted, at 2.30am and said how much she wished that she was snuggled up close to him. He hadn’t replied, just quietly admired her stamina to still be going at that time.

He had more than half expected Hannah to ask him straight away how his date had gone. Instead she had stayed absolutely professional, their conversations only being about their inspections. It was not until after noon when they had stopped to buy a sandwich that she eventually asked.

‘It was…fine,’ he replied rather lamely, even though he had been thinking all morning of what he would say.

Hannah winced. ‘Oh dear,
that
bad?’

Dan had been dreading the question. He knew that Jen and Hannah had lived together all the way through university and beyond, the latter only moving out to live with Greg earlier in the year. He knew that he had to be diplomatic about what he said because it was sure to get back to Jenny.

‘Oh she’s lovely. I think she’s a really sweet girl, it’s just me. It’s a bit…soon and, well I think I’m a bit quiet and boring for her.’ And too old, he knew he should really have added. Far too old to be chasing girls of Jen’s age around.

Hannah looked thoughtful as she ate her sandwich and didn’t immediately reply. Dan’s thoughts drifted again and settled as inevitably as a butterfly on a flower on thoughts of Tess. So had he decided? What was it to be? Was she real or was he losing touch with reality? Was his mind going, was he sane or insane? It was these thoughts that had kept him awake long into the night and that were still there when he opened his eyes in the morning. It was a circular argument, a loop that he could not find a way out of, thoughts and words without any real direction or solution and seemed, in themselves, only to be leading to a breakdown.