Erotic Refugees (11 page)

He clicked up his profile photo
and stared at it. Staring back at him was an average-sized,
black-haired, brown-eyed Irishman sporting a prominent nose and a
forced smile. Alice always said his nose gave him distinction but
Eoin just thought it looked big. Other than that, he thought he
looked pretty average.

Thinking of Alice, he glanced
down at Skype and saw she was still offline, and that was very
unusual. She was home today with a sick kid (he had been informed
after a wander up to Human Resources) but even then she was
generally online at some stage. It just didn't feel right and Eoin
didn't like it when things didn't feel right with Alice.

She had been his sole support
throughout his separation from Jenny, and possibly the only person
in Sweden he would classify as a close friend. He understood if she
needed some space to ponder this thing about Andy, but he missed
her exuberance and smutty sense of humour and even her incessant
badgering about him calling Anja.

He hadn't called Anja. He'd
definitely do it later.

Majblomman02 replied and Eoin
read it with a smile.

Nothing, just ironing my
underwear, playing with the cat. You have plans for the
weekend?

Eoin wrestled with the idea of
doing a daring joke involving the word “pussy”. His fingers hovered
over the keys but then his smile faded. What would be the point in
adding another woman to his current mix? It would short-circuit his
brain entirely.

I'm off now to pick up my son,
it'll be ice-cream and kids films for me this weekend. Have a good
one!

It was only two in the
afternoon but the office was dead, and it wouldn't get any less
dead from him staring at it. So he shut down his computer, grabbed
his things and headed off. Ice-cream and a kid's film sounded just
the ticket.

“
Pappa!” Damien waved his
plastic spade in the air until one of the day-care staff gently
reminded him to put it down before somebody lost an eye. The yard
blazed with sunlight and the kids were dashing about as always in a
crazy blur of noise and colour. The staff were standing in the
midst of all that chaos with that look of preternatural calm that
only people who work with small children can pull off.

It was a lovely scene and Eoin
found himself itching to take some photos. Unfortunately the only
camera he had on him was the terrible one in his mobile. In fact,
he didn’t actually have a good camera at all any more. Jenny had
kept the nice Nikon they'd bought together, despite him being the
only one who'd ever used it.

She had also kept his best
photos from Damien’s first two years of life, which he'd stupidly
forgotten to take down from the living room wall or even copy from
their computer before he left. He thought about them on occasion
and felt annoyed and frustrated, but had decided there was little
he could do about it now. He didn’t need yet another thing to fight
about with Jenny.

He had a quick chat with two of
the staff and they marked Damien off their list. The boy himself
was holding onto his hand and bouncing up and down, possibly aware
this was his last day before his four weeks (or was it five) of
summer holidays. There were no cute moms to look at but Eoin was
glad of that as he wasn't in the mood for flirting. This was Friday
with Damien and there were traditions to be followed and drooling
over cute moms wasn't one of them.

They went inside to get
Damien’s little rucksack, packed with a few essential knick-knacks
for his weekend stay with his dad. The very fact that this little
travel bag existed at all was sad. What a strange and splintered
way to grow up, for Damien and all those other kids in Sweden who
were bounced from one parent to another like letters with the wrong
address on them.

Damien continued to babble as
they left the day-care—these days he rarely stopped talking except
to sleep—and he swung his dad's arm as they proceeded to their
first stop, the Filmland video store.

Damien knew the routine and he
ran in and positioned himself in front of the kid's films with a
contemplative frown. He pulled out four or five DVDs that he liked
the look of and sat on the floor to study the back of each one.
Eoin's job was to stand behind him, shove him out of the way if
somebody wanted to pass, and gently point out which ones he'd seen
before, which Damien would then fervently deny.

The next stop was the little
shop around the corner from their tunnelbana station. Here they
bought some sweets and a small bag of crisps each, saying goodbye
to the owner's ancient Labrador as they left. After that they
hurried home, strolling past lightly-dressed youngsters who were on
their way to some sunny spot with pizzas and bags of beer-cans to
celebrate the weekend.

Eoin glanced at them and
wondered if they realised they were enjoying the most carefree days
of their lives. Did they know that in a year or three or five it
would all be over and would never return? Or perhaps they were
completely right not to think about it. Maybe it was best to just
enjoy the moment while it lasted.

They reached the flat where
Damien kicked off his shoes and charged straight for the bed. It
was a compact apartment and when Damien was staying Eoin gave the
boy his own bed while he slept on the fold-out sofa. There wasn't
really space for any other solution.

Damien hauled out the plastic
box of toys from underneath the bed and started tossing them around
while Eoin went off to the kitchen to plan dinner. Dinner when
Damien was around had to be something that Damien approved of.
There had been great plans when he'd been little to serve him
casseroles and quiches and home-made bread. Those plans had
collapsed in fatigue and endless moaning so now most dinners
involving Damien tended to be a mix of things he liked, things he
possibly liked, and things he might be bribed into trying with
chocolate.

Eoin took out the things for
dinner and arranged them on the counter-top—a few pork hot dogs,
pasta, cream, tinned corn, carrots, garlic and parsley. Then he sat
down by his laptop and had a quick look at Diamond Date.

There was one new mail, but not
from a very interesting person. He read through it quickly and
decided it wasn’t worth replying so he closed the laptop. He poured
a glass of wine and sipped at it while he stared out the window,
lost in erotic daydreams.

This took him nicely to six, at
which time he got up and turned on the children's TV programs.
Damien abandoned his Lego robot and positioned himself cross-legged
in front of the television with his mouth hanging open. There he
would remain, essentially not moving, for a glorious forty-five
minutes.

Eoin pictured every child in
the country doing the same, while their parents slipped discretely
into the bedroom. There was even a phrase in Sweden—Bolibompa
sex—for quick and silent sex enjoyed while children’s TV was
keeping the wee ones amused. Eoin had only recently realised that
the word Bolibompa referred to a children’s TV program and not to
the sound the parents were causing their bed to make.

There would be no secret sex
for Eoin. Instead he wondered if now would be the time to send a
text to Alice. No, he decided, it was probably better to wait until
later, until after she had put her kids to bed. No point in
pressuring her, not with a sick kid in the house.

Around seven (two glasses of
wine later) Eoin switched off the box and ushered Damien into the
kitchen. Damien climbed onto his chair and gave the food a
suspicious once-over. “Wha's this.”

“
It's a hotdog, Damien.
With pasta. You like hotdogs.”

“
No ah don't.” He poked
it and wrinkled his nose. “Where's bread.”

Eoin sighed. “There's no
bread—”

“
I wan bread,” he said.
“Otdog an bread.”

Eoin managed to reach a
compromise whereby the hotdog would be eaten without bread, but
only if he cut it into small pieces first (and also covered it in
ketchup). Once this had been agreed by all parties, Damien picked
up a fork and dinner officially got underway.

After dinner came the film,
concerning animated animals who felt compelled to shriek at each
other every three seconds. Damien sat snuggled up against his
father and rummaged in his bag of sweets as he watched, somehow
managing to be sweet-smelling after a whole day of charging around
the dusty yard of the day-care. Eoin sat contented beside him,
taking the occasional sweet, and couldn't help nodding off as the
film progressed. It kept spinning in his head that maybe he should
probably call Alice, text Alice, text Anja, call Alanja…

That took them neatly to
Damien's bedtime and Eoin was anxious to get the boy in there so he
could have a few quiet hours before his own bed-time rolled around.
He ran through the night time routine in a blaze—clothes, teeth,
toilet, book, kiss—and lay in Damien's bed while the boy drifted
off, entwined in the skinny green limbs of Frankie the floppy
frog.

When his breath was deep and
regular Eoin rose carefully from the bed and padded to the kitchen.
He poured himself a glass of water and rubbed his wet fingertips
across his eyes. He sat down in front of his laptop with a fresh
glass of wine, cracked his fingers and opened Diamond Date.

There was nothing in his
inbox—the Friday Frenzy was officially over. Back to the drawing
board then. He went to the search page and specified age, height,
online status, kids or no kids. The list of matches came up,
arranged alphabetically in a tidy row. He skimmed the profiles,
glancing only at the photos for now, and anything of interest he
opened in a new tab for later perusal.

That gave him about twenty
ladies to consider. He looked through their profiles more
carefully, discarding any who were too serious, too dull, too
upbeat, too downbeat, too badly written, or too fond of clichés.
That left only three profiles, an attrition rate of fully
eighty-five percent.

Eoin realised his selection
rules were possibly a bit harsh but he saw no reason to let his
standards slide right at the beginning. He'd been known to relax
those rules if a lady mailed him first, as then she clearly
possessed a quality he found very endearing in a woman—namely, an
interest in him. Still though, listing “war” or “child pornography”
without irony in the “things you don't like” column meant that
person was out too, regardless of how interested she seemed or how
many exclamation marks she had pressed in after the word “sex”.

Eoin leaned back in the creaky
kitchen chair. He stretched his arms and checked the kitchen clock.
Twenty past nine, still lots of time to check up on Alice and call
Anja. No hurry, he had the whole night ahead of him. He refilled
his wine glass (aware he had already consumed slightly more wine
that necessary) and opened the first of his three profiles,
Mymosa79, for proper, serious study.

Turn-offs: “Filling in this
form”. Well that was vaguely amusing at least. Her perfect holiday
was “on a beach somewhere”, her favourite film was “The Shawshank
Redemption” and her height was…

Ah. 175 centimetres. A
giantess, in other words, compared to Eoin. Wearing heels that
would make her at least 178, towering over any average-sized
Irishman and his delicate ego. No, that wouldn't do at all. Next
one please.

The next one, astralla, had a
fuzzy photograph showing she was blonde and thin but little else.
Eoin gazed at the thumbnail, realising as he did so that she looked
familiar. He reached for the wine glass with his left hand and took
a mouthful, before moving the pointer over the little image with
the right. He clicked on it and as it zoomed up he spluttered into
his wine.

It was Anja, in all her coy and
smiling glory.

Eoin's mind spun until it
smoked, analysing and plotting and fretting. Okay, he thought,
don't panic, it's not the end of the world. You've found Anja's
dating profile, that's all. She's single, she's out there, it's all
fine and normal. Nothing to worry about, nothing that a jury of
your peers would lock you away for.

Then it occurred to him that
Anja could see the people who'd viewed her profile recently, and
therefore see that he'd found her. Still, what was wrong with that?
He was also single, so there was nothing for him to feel bad or
guilty about. Was there?

He drank some more wine. Wine
would help make sense of things.

Of course, then Anja would
wonder, if Eoin had the time and inclination to be browsing dating
sites, why he hadn't yet called her? Wasn't he interested, or was
he a creep, and then why shouldn't she tell her hot friend that he
was a creep?

On the other hand, if he mailed
her now she'd know he'd only done it because he had been shamed
into it, and that was almost as bad.

It was all too complicated, a
moral and ethical cesspool. “Piss,” Eoin said. “Piss, piss, piss.”
The contents of his wine glass went down in short order. If only he
could ask Alice what to do. But no, Alice was temporarily out of
the picture, and he would just have to fix it himself. He nodded
with determination. Yes, he would fix it himself, that's exactly
what would happen.

First of all, he needed to look
at Anja's profile, so he started with her photo album. There was
one photo showing her wearing sunglasses and a cute blue summer
dress, and three others showing her on various holidays. There was
nothing much on the actual profile, just the usual vapid and
non-threatening stuff that many women thought men wanted to read,
although with a hint of edgy humour.

Her guest book was no different
than any woman's guest book, sprinkled with comments from men such
as “Hi Baby, how are you?” and “You're hot” and even “Let's fuck”.
Eoin was embarrassed that there were men out there who were so
unbelievably dim. Although, it did make him look like a charming
genius in comparison, so it wasn't all bad.