Lots of Love (38 page)

As an evening downpour started in earnest, Ellen set up her laptop on the kitchen table, plugged the modem into the socket on the wall and waited for Windows to greet her with the sound of a crashing wave, as Richard had programmed it to do.

It was all very well for him to send irate text messages demanding that she read his emails, she thought, but he was the one who had cancelled their service provider. Oddlode was hardly over-subscribed with Internet cafés. It had only just occurred to her to use one of the thirty-day free-trial CD-roms that littered the junkmail which had accumulated during her parents’ absence.

Richard had persuaded her to buy the little computer three years earlier with money left to her by her grandmother. He’d loved the new slimline machine, which travelled with them across Europe, its batteries charged from every conceivable outlet, the three-pin plug inevitably carrying a caterpillar of wonky adaptors like mismatched Lego. He connected to the Net via his mobile, played online backgammon and subscribed to surfing newsgroups; he bought and sold his gear on auction sites; he emailed friends and swapped digital photos of competitions; he spent more time tapping keys than talking. It had been his biggest escape when the relationship went truly stale. In despair, Ellen had been forced to email him and request a real-life conversation. Richard didn’t get the joke.

Then, just before the split, he announced that her laptop was hopelessly out of date and had bought himself an all-singing, all-dancing Sony with the money they had saved for a new van. The new computer played DVDs and received radio stations all over the world and could be used to edit the photographs of Richard surfing to make the waves look bigger and his belly smaller. Looking back now, Ellen should have guessed what was to come – in the same way that she should have read signals into the fact that he started auctioning off almost all his possessions on eBay, updating his palmtop with addresses from her bulging old Filofax, and checking out property values in North Cornwall.

Ellen had barely used her not-very-old reject laptop, except to print out her CV. The picture that greeted her as wallpaper was the one Richard had left there – a photograph of him emerging from the tube of a vast wave near Torquay, a small, wetsuited acolyte in a water-vaulted cathedral. It was a fantastic shot. She hastily slotted the free CD-rom into the sliding drawer. The computer whirred into action and welcomed her to the World’s Favourite Internet Provider.

Five minutes later, she was online and ready to make contact. Pulling up the Outlook Explorer window, she knew that she had to face the music and check her Hotmail account to read the messages Richard kept texting her about.

She typed
www.Hot . . .
then paused as the scroll bar dropped down to suggest shortcuts to sites recently accessed, which started with ‘Hot’. Richard, it seemed, had liked a lot of hot sites, but he hadn’t checked his mail as often as he’d checked
Hotsex, Hot-xxx-action, Hotporn
and
Hot_teens.

Ellen’s hands slid away from the keyboard, her heart pounding hollowly in her ears along with the rain rattling on the windows.

‘Oh, God, Richard.’ She let out a sad laugh.

. . . 
mail.com.
She typed the end of the address, logged in with her username and password, then groaned as her inbox cheerfully downloaded with fifty-seven new messages.

They weren’t all from Richard, but he had written almost every day. The first few messages were cheerful and upbeat, deliberately chatty if a little stilted, regaling her with stories about his journey and his first few days in far-north Queensland, including a few digital photographs of sandy beaches and an apartment with palm trees outside its windows.

But his tone soon changed. By the fifth or sixth message, the recriminations began: the angry post-mortem of the thirteen-year-old corpse. It was bitter stuff, full of blame and self-justification, no longer caring to maintain a semblance of friendship. Initially, he’d clearly thought a great deal about what he was writing, carefully constructing his sentences, balancing his argument, trying to see her side – even putting himself down occasionally, a very unRichard thing to do. But it didn’t last.

From the increasingly erratic typing, constant repetitions, contradictions, and appalling spelling, Ellen could tell he’d had a skinful when typing the later emails. He’d made some great friends, he said, was going out on the town every night, the weather was picking up and he didn’t miss her at all. Then he told her what a bitch she was. Then he accused her of throwing away something special. Half a page later, he was writing that they had both wasted the past thirteen years and should never have started going out in the first place. Then he told her he missed her, and hated her, and couldn’t live without her, and never wanted to see her again. He called her a frigid bitch, then accused her of being unfaithful a hundred times over because she ‘couldn’t get enough’. He told her she’d lost her looks; he told her that she was beautiful and that he’d never wanted anyone else in his life. He told her she was too good for him, rotten to the core, intelligent, stupid, reckless and a coward. He said again and again that she was just like her mother.

i bet you’re judging this email like a fucking essay, arent you,
he typed, having long since dispensed with punctuation and capitals,
you think well, i hope you find some idiot who can. this will be my last email, you will never hear from me agaon.

But he had written again, unable to stop himself boasting about a one-night stand with an eighteen-year-old called Lali:
she said i was the best lay she ever had. see what you are missing, then again was better than

His final email had been written that morning – last thing at night in his time zone – and was a page of non-stop, badly spelled, repeated apologies. He said he was crying. He missed her. He missed the Shack and Snorkel and their friendship. He wished it hadn’t had to end.

Ellen’s head sank into her hands. She felt utterly drained, clueless how to answer or whether even to answer at all, terrified that it would open another can of worms for the worm who’d turned. This was Richard’s way of working it out. She mustn’t screw it up for him.

She trailed to the kitchen to fetch a pint glass of water and stared out at the rain-lashed lawn, wondering what life would have been like had they been brave enough to call it a day five or six years ago. She guessed there would have been more tears, less certainty, yet probably the same overwhelming sense of relief.

Hearing of Richard’s one-night stand had only stirred the smallest spark of edgy jealousy, like a sharp electrostatic shock. She had no reason to feel hurt. That they had stayed faithful to one another until the bitter end was surprising, and she guessed that it was born of fear on both sides. After thirteen years, jumping off a cliff was far easier than jumping into bed with a stranger. Richard hadn’t been a virgin as she had when they’d started going out. He boasted a torrid past: he had had sex twice with Tracy Coal on her parents’ sofa.

Hugging herself, Ellen returned to the laptop and thought about her reply.

She thought about it as she searched Google for cheap flights, looked up accommodation, safety tips and travellers’ tales for her world trip, requested brochures and free guides, ordered several books from Amazon and added useful sites to the favourites file.

She thought about what to reply as she scrolled further down that list of favourites and found yet more porn sites, wondering whether Richard had been deliberately brazen about leaving the evidence of his after-hours Internet passion, or whether he’d just been stupid. That she hadn’t noticed said a lot.

She played with a few opening sentences in her mind as she clicked on the links to his favourite sites, accessing a world she’d never known.

She fanned her T-shirt away from her belly as she took in the sites with which Richard was so well acquainted. The World’s Favourite Internet Provider kept warning her that she was entering Over-18 Areas Containing Material of A Sexually Explicit Nature and she clicked the
OK
box over and over again as she sped past pixillated screens that took for ever to download, boasting cum shots, lesbian shots, anal shots, triple-penetration shots, black-on-white, Asian babes, teen temptresses, big boobs.

‘Jesus wept!’ She tilted her head this way and that to try to work out what was going on, starting to feel hotter and hotter.

But she wasn’t really thinking about Richard. His face was blurring in her mind, to be replaced by another, the face that for the past few nights had stayed with her as she twisted in her sheets unable to sleep.

She fanned her T-shirt again, her nipples suddenly so hard that it felt as though she was clouting them with a cricket bat every time the cotton fabric landed against her hot skin.

OK,
she clicked.
OK. OK. OK. OK. OK.
Her head tilted, tipped back, pushed forward, her eyes like saucers.

There was a clatter just outside the window.

‘Shit!’ Ellen cricked her neck looking over her shoulder, suddenly drenched in the cold sweat of shame. The computer screen was in full view of the window that faced the front garden – anyone coming to the door could have glanced in and seen the hot dot com action she was browsing through. She slammed the lid and waited, holding her breath, but there was no knock on the door.

Jumping up, she rushed through to the bootroom to turn on the outside lights, peering through the windows at the needles of rain jabbing down and catching in the gleam the black shadows of the climbers as they were buffeted by the wind. She scoured the shadows for signs of life, jumping out of her hot, prickling skin.

The gate was ajar, when she had definitely closed it, but it might have been caught by the wind. She could see the poster that she had Sellotaped to it flapping, now secured by only one corner. Something black and white was lying on the bonnet of the jeep, sheltered from the rain by the barn awning.

‘Fins!’ she breathed ecstatically, pulling on some shoes and racing outside.

She slowed as she rounded the corner to the barn, anxious not to frighten him away. Rain whipped her face with huge warm drops, like an Asian monsoon.

Hooking her hair behind her ears, she made the low, cooing noise that always soothed him, chirruping his name: ‘Fins. Here, baby. Prrrrruuuuu. Good boy. Who’s a good boy? Fins.’

Even ten yards away, Ellen knew that he was dead. The matted black and white coat was streaked with dark blood, and the unnatural twist of the body and its rigor-mortis stillness made her cry out in horror. Somebody had left a note under the windscreen wiper behind the sodden corpse, the angled corners of which flapped over it like angel’s wings.

Dropping to her haunches where she stood, she pressed her face into the crook of an elbow, fighting a great wave of nausea. ‘No, no, no!’

Having scrabbled her way out through the bootroom door, Snorkel blasted alongside Ellen’s crouched body, barking furiously, demented with fear and confusion.

It was several minutes before Ellen was brave enough to move any closer. Even then, she returned inside first, leaving Snorkel howling and barking, to fetch rubber gloves and a cardboard box in which to put the poor warrior cat, feared by all in North Cornwall, the best ratter in Treglin.

It was only when she finally moved out of the rain and under the gloomy roof of the barn, badly lit by a spotlight in one corner, that she realised the dead animal on her car bonnet wasn’t Fins. It wasn’t a cat at all.

It was a badger – huge, bloated in death, its yellow teeth grinning from peeled-back lips. It stank of decay, and the fleas that were drowning in its wet pelt crawled in great armies over the bony shoulders and domed head. Dark blood soaked its twisted, chewed-out throat, which was crawling with maggots.

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Ellen covered her mouth and fought not to retch as she stretched across to pluck the note from the windscreen.

‘ROT IN HELL YOU INTERFERING BITCH!’
read the big black marker-pen capitals.

‘Gosh, you
have
pissed off a lot of people.’ Pheely’s eyebrows shot up as she refilled Ellen’s whisky glass and then her own. She crossed the Goose Cottage flagstones to peer out of the window and check that the gate was still secure. ‘Well, I really don’t think young Lloyd would be up to such a thing – carrying a dead badger would ruin his expensive designer clothes. And I agree that the Wycks probably have a better knowledge of musteline mammals, but I can hardly see Dot trundling through the village with one slung across her bicycle rack, can you?’

‘What about Reg?’

‘Far too drunk to manage a trick like this.’ Pheely was reading the note again, holding it with her fingertips. ‘Besides which, the poor bugger can’t read or write.’ She held it up. ‘Whoever penned this can spell “interfering”.’

Ellen hated whisky, but she managed another sour mouthful to try to anaesthetise the fear and anger raging within her. It was such a horrible thing to do. She knew that she’d been pretty harsh with both the Wycks and Lloyd, but surely she didn’t deserve this?

‘I can tell you
exactly
who did this.’ Pheely settled beside her on the sofa, spreading out the note and tapping it. ‘Spurs.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s just his style. And you said yourself that he had a go at you earlier today.’ Pheely probed darkly.