‘Are these seats taken?’ a voice asked sharply. The clearly irritated man was standing with a group of friends. Charlie’s face reddened at their attention.
‘Yes, sorry,’ he muttered apologetically. The man looked as if he was ready to argue but changed his mind, turned his back on Charlie and mumbled something incomprehensible.
Charlie conceded he too would’ve been irritated had he been on his feet while somebody else hogged seven empty seats. That he had paid to reserve them weeks ago did little to prevent him from feeling awkward.
Tonight meant more to Charlie than anyone in the pub could know. It had been two and a half years since the seven friends had last been in one place together. He thought back to Terry Stelfox’s wedding and how it had marked the beginning of the end of friendships formed at infants’ school. Charlie had naively assumed that when attending different universities hadn’t come between them, nothing would. But he hadn’t considered Match Your DNA. One by one, his friends found the women – and for one, the man – who they were biologically designed for. However, Charlie was the exception. His Match had yet to make themselves known. And he had never envisaged feeling so alone by his mid-twenties.
He glanced towards the wall projection again. It was now four minutes until kick-off. He had finished off his snacks and begun chewing his fingernails, biting too deeply and causing an intermittent throb. He removed an anti-anxiety transdermal patch from his pocket, no larger than a pea, and attached the adhesive side to his forearm.
Charlie took his mind off waiting for the chemicals to absorb and make their way towards his brain by inserting an ear bud and listening to the recorded messages on his phone.
The first was from Travis. ‘Sorry, mate, not going to be able to make it. The twins were being little buggers today and Lisa’s frazzled so she’s gone to bed. See you soon, yeah?’
The next was from Stelfox. ‘Is that tonight? Shit, sorry, Charlie, I’ve got dinner with the in-laws.’ The excuses from the others followed a similar path.
Charlie remained in his seat as a cheer rang out around the garden when the England squad appeared onscreen and a chorus of ‘God Save the King’ rang out across the pub. The teams assumed their positions and the referee’s whistle signalled the start of play. But after only a few minutes, Charlie knew he wouldn’t enjoy the game on his own. He downed his pint and made his way to the exit.
‘Those seats free now, Billy no-mates?’ sneered the man who’d confronted him earlier. A humiliated Charlie wanted to retaliate but the empty seats didn’t lie. The stranger had summed him up with brutal accuracy.
Outside in the street, Charlie used an app to choose the delivery of a random dish from his favourite Chinese takeaway. Then he removed his bike lock and cycled the fifteen-minute journey home. The drone that had delivered the meal-for-one to his doorstep was already returning to the restaurant by the time he arrived.
Inside, he removed the lids from the foil cartons and placed the food on a table without plating it up first. Then he loosened his belt by a couple of notches. His weight gain had been slow and steady since they’d all stopped playing Sunday-morning league football. He missed the camaraderie, of heading out into town the night before, waking up with a hangover from hell early the next morning, before playing a match and then sharing a Sunday roast at a pub afterwards. It made him feel as if he belonged.
As Charlie tucked into his meal, he recalled a conversation in which he’d learned of a shift in their relationships. Stelfox had let slip that some of the group came together with their wives and girlfriends for dinner parties and for kids’ play dates. Charlie hadn’t been invited because they assumed “family stuff isn’t your cup of tea”. He nodded his agreement but quietly; “family stuff” was everything he craved.
Tonight, those feelings of rejection were returning in earnest. He wondered what might have happened had he taken the lead and removed himself from their group and simply stopped contacting them. When would they have noticed they hadn’t seen him around for a while? Would it have taken days, weeks or months? Or would he have simply faded into their backgrounds until they’d forgotten about him completely?
More than anything else in the world, Charlie wished he had done just that and not desperately clung on to old times like he had with the two-year-old recorded messages he’d listened to in the pub. His friends were never going to join him because his behaviour had destroyed everything. He stuck another anxiety patch to his arm, and then a third.
He picked up his tablet and directed his attention towards conspiracy-theory websites and message boards that he’d grown obsessed with. Previously, he’d never given credence to wild theories about anything to do with UFOs, assassinated leaders or missing weapons of mass destruction. He’d assumed they were the madcap notions of crackpots with little better to do than formulate outlandish theories using flimsy evidence to support their arguments.
But because once he’d immersed himself amongst them searching for an explanation for the day that changed his life, he understood he shared a common goal with those ‘crackpots’. They were all searching for the truth in a world where authenticity lay buried under a constant stream of misinformation and deception. Soon, Charlie was visiting the websites multiple times daily, continuing the narrative with opinions of his own.
He refused to accept the government’s official version of events and the hushed-up investigation that followed. Meanwhile, his own guilt for the role he played continued to wrap itself around him like wild ivy, its roots constantly threatening to choke him. It was responsible for his constantanxiety, his estrangement from his family and the dark cloud forever hovering above him.
Before he clicked on a link to another familiar forum, an advertisement caught his eye.
Clickhereto start your life again. Less than one per cent of the British population can solve this puzzle. Can you?
Almost immediately, he recognised a shape and words hidden amongst the random letters, shadows and silhouettes. Perhaps it was his basic knowledge of computer coding or his number-form synaesthesia that allowed digits to appear in his mind like mental maps. ‘It can’t be as easy as that,’ he muttered, but set to work anyway, using his finger to move shapes and objects around the screen until it all made sense.
It was a brief distraction from dwelling upon the faces of the people he had helped to kill.
Chapter 3
SINÉAD, BRISTOL
‘Is that what you’re wearing tonight?’ asked Daniel. His voice startled her; Sinéad was lost in thought as she attached a second band of false eyelashes onto the first. She hadn’t noticed him in the reflection of the bedroom mirror.
‘Yes,’ she replied, and patted out a minor crease in the sleeve of her yellow dress. ‘Why?’
Her husband was standing by the doorway in his fitted dinner jacket, white shirt and black bow tie. Light bounced from the tips of his polished Oxford shoes. He was every bit as handsome as the day she first saw him in his online profile. Yet the sight of him made her skin prickle.
‘I thought we agreed you were going to wear the purple one?’ he continued. There was disappointment in his tone.
‘Did we?’
Sinéad had spent days trying to settle on the best outfit for Daniel’s company party and thought she had chosen something they both liked. Back when she purchased clothes without first seeking his approval, this dress wouldn’t have reached her online shopping basket. The hem was within touching distance of her ankles and the sleeves covered her wrists making her feel shapeless and frumpy. But Daniel was so enthusiastic about his gift whenhe’d given it to her that she didn’t want to upset him by admitting she didn’t like it.
