down our invitations. We’ll get offended.’ I could hear the clink of glasses in the background, Christina on the jukebox. I put the phone down, worried about blocking the line.
I smoked six cigarettes and rummaged through Si’s bedside cabinet, trying to find his dope stash. Just a few hard crumbs. I ate them. They didn’t do anything.
At ten, I checked the phone connection. At this point, I realised how sad I was being. Maybe I should unplug the phone, I thought. Then when she tried to ring she wouldn’t be able to get hold of me; it would just ring and ring, and she’d be there getting worried, wondering where I was. I knelt down to pull the cord out of the wall. But I couldn’t do it.
I wish I’d had the chance to talk to her after the class. Maybe I was too subtle, simply writing my phone number. Perhaps I should have made some ‘call me’ sign in class. But that would have made me look like a twat. And I’m sure Siobhan’s the kind of person who understands subtlety. Her novel is subtle. So why hasn’t she taken the hint and called? Does she think I’m just a loser who doesn’t even have a mobile phone?
Or maybe she’s just shyer than she seems.
Friday
Maybe she lost my number. That could be it. She might have lost the card I gave her somehow. She might even have lost her bag. Maybe she’s been searching her flat or house, getting frantic, wanting to call me, worrying that I’ll be upset. Of course, I’ll reassure her, I’ll tell her it’s fine, let’s go for a drink, a meal, and who knows what will follow.
Friday night, and I’m in my bedroom. It’s eleven thirty and, through the thin walls, Si and Nat are at it again, doing more for Anglo-French relations than Concorde, hypermarkets and Julian Barnes combined. I’ve put my headphones on, to drown it out, but when I close my eyes all I can see is flesh.
But it’s not just sex. It isn’t. No, no, I’m not being dirty. Not like when mum caught me in the bathroom, caught me with the magazine. And she made me scrub with the pumice stone: made me scrub my hands and… no, that’s the past. I don’t want to remember it.
Saturday
No call again. I went out for a walk, up towards the college. I wasn’t sure if Siobhan teaches there at the weekend; thought I might bump into her. I didn’t.
When I got home, I knocked on Simon’s door.
‘Enter at your own risk.’
I went in. The room stank of dope and sex. No sign of Natalie. Simon was on his iMac, looking at porn on the Web. The girl on the screen looked very young; I had to look away.
‘Did anyone call for me?’ I asked.
He reached for his cigarettes and lit up.
‘Yeah… actually, some chick did ring.’
‘What? When?’
‘Yesterday afternoon when you were at work.’
‘What did she say?’
He grinned. ‘She asked if I wanted to save money on my gas bill.’
‘You git.’
‘She was nice, actually. Maybe I could have fixed you up on a blind date.’ He laughed and coughed simultaneously.
In my mind, I grabbed hold of his stupid, grinning head and shoved it through the screen of his computer. In reality, I just muttered, ‘Arsehole,’ and left the room.
‘Don’t get eggy, Alex,’ he called after me. ‘It was only a joke.’
I came into my room and slammed the door. Then I turned on my own PC, staring at the flickering screen while it booted up, the hard disk grinding away. I could see my reflection in the monitor screen. My hair was all over the place and my eyes looked puffy. I needed a bath.
But if the phone rang while I was in there …
I logged onto Facebook and typed Siobhan’s name into the search bar. There were five Siobhan McGowan’s in the UK, plus some more in Ireland and a page full in the States. Two of them were listed as living in London on the search results. Of those two, one had a picture of a baby as their profile picture; the other had a picture of a cat.
Siobhan doesn’t have a baby – but I remembered her telling us she had a cat when she first introduced herself to the class. I clicked through. Because her privacy settings were preventing me from seeing her full profile, I was only able to see a small amount of information, including the fact that she had 82 friends. Twice as many as me. I scanned the list. None of the others from class were on there.
My mouse cursor hovered over the ‘Add as friend’ button. Should I do it? Why not. After all, we were friends, weren’t we? Certainly better friends than half of the people I have listed as friends, most of whom are colleagues or people I haven’t seen or wanted to see since I left school.
I clicked the button then had a tremulous little daydream about how long it would be before I saw the words ‘In a relationship with Alex Parkinson’ appear on her page.
Then I hovered over the ‘Poke’ button, but thought on reflection that was taking things a bit too far.
For the next two hours I refreshed the page repeatedly. I learned that one of my ‘friends’ was bored, that another had a cold, and that one of them had just finished watching the second series of Prison Break on box set. But Siobhan hadn’t yet confirmed me as a friend. I checked Twitter but all I found was an account in the name Siobhan MacGowan with a single tweet that had been made six months ago: ‘So this is Twitter, eh? Wonder what all the fuss is about. Am going to tweet every day.’ Couldn’t be her, unless she’d accidentally added an extra ‘a’ into her surname – unlikely, I’d say.
Monday
I decided this morning it was time to stop moping around. Stop being pathetic and passive. Do something, Alex. I went into work with a plan, albeit a dangerous one. I was going to commit one of the few sackable offences.
I sat down at my desk and put my headset on. My supervisor, Jackie, looked over at me, making sure I wasn’t wasting time before logging on. As we’re consistently being told, Bookjungle is the biggest online retailer in the world – not that you’d know it from our wages – and we have to keep our customers happy by letting them talk to us like we’re shit and not keeping them waiting when they want to tell us this.
I took a couple of calls from people moaning about delays in receiving their books, then did what I’m not supposed to do.
Checking that nobody was watching, I went into what we call the ‘back office’; the part of the computer system that the public can’t see. It’s the database where we keep all our customers’ details. We need to be able to access it in order to answer their queries: we can see their address and all the books and CDs they’ve ordered. But we’re only allowed to look up the details of customers we speak to, and only if we need the information to deal with their enquiry, to prevent you looking up the details of your friends and enemies. To deter us, the system generates random reports, which mean that you have to be able to show the supervisor that you spoke to the customer you were looking up. These reports only capture one in fifty of the customers we look up, but it’s not usually worth taking that chance.
Today,
