Forward Slash. Mark Edwards

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       Prologue

       Him

      She looked nothing like her profile picture. I mean, it was definitely the same woman but in the flesh she was seven or eight years older, her hair duller, skin pale and wrinkly, with saggy bags under her eyes, bags in which she appeared to be carrying half the world’s woes. When I saw her and realized this was Karen, my date, I almost fled. She so clearly wasn’t The One that there was no point even talking to her. But she had already seen me. Because, although I may be dishonest about everything else, including my name, on my dating profiles, I look as good in the flesh as I do on the screen.

      ‘I thought you were blonde,’ I said, after enduring a preliminary round of chitchat.

      She pinkened. ‘Yes, I know, that photo is a couple of years old.’

       And the rest.

      ‘I prefer to go natural now.’

      She had ordered pasta with cheese sauce. As she talked, I could see strings of yellow saliva threaded in her mouth, making my own food inedible. She kept asking me stupid questions about my made-up job. She thought I was a professor of sociology, a subject in which she had a GCSE. She looked at me through her lashes as she went on, putting on that ridiculous sub-Diana coyness that many women believe drives men crazy but just makes me mad.

      ‘You’re a nurse,’ I said.

      She nodded and shovelled more pasta into her cakehole. No wonder she was overweight. She had put on at least a stone since the sunny holiday photo she’d posted on the dating website. This was the big problem with Internet dating. You couldn’t trust anyone.

      ‘Any interesting accidents at the hospital recently?’ I asked.

      ‘Accidents?’

      ‘Yes. Like, I don’t know, I was reading about a woman who fell out of a window and was impaled on railings.’

      Her eyes widened. ‘Nothing like that, no. Just people bitten by dogs and chopping their fingers off when they’re cooking.’

      I yawned.

      ‘Am I boring you?’ she said, putting down her fork.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Oh.’

      I leaned closer so the diners around us wouldn’t hear and beckoned for her to come closer, giving me a better view of her jowls.

      ‘Not only are you boring me, but you disgust me. You eat like a pig and you’re not so much “mutton dressed as lamb” as “tripe dressed as mutton”.’

      Her expression made the date worthwhile. For a second I thought she was going to slap me, which would have made the evening lead to more interesting places, but instead she burst into tears.

      ‘You’re the pig,’ she said, voice wobbling. She’ll probably make a complaint about me to the site, but who cares? It’s a rubbish site and I’m removing my profile later anyway, if this is typical of the calibre of women on it. Plenty more to choose from.

      I pushed the tip of my nose to form a snout.

      Karen stood up and, after groping around in her brain for a few seconds to find an adequate word, spat, ‘Bastard!’ at me. Pathetic.

      I watched her go. She will never know what a lucky escape she had.

      After Karen had stormed off into the night, I felt coiled and dissatisfied. My blood itched in my veins. Not wanting to go home, I headed to the bar next door to the restaurant. It was a cool place, all blue lights and shadowy corners, but crowded. That suited me. Nobody would notice me standing alone, watching.

      I paid for a bottle of beer and stood against a pillar, phone in hand, and tapped to open the Girls Near Me app. The app works just like Google Maps or the GPS in your car. Geo-location, they call it. After a few seconds it found my location on the South Bank.

      Then came the clever part, the feature that makes Girls Near Me such a handy tool. It showed me women who were also in the area by scanning the Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare profiles of women who had ‘checked in’ using their phones to let those and other social networks know they were in the area. Very soon, I was looking at a list of women who had checked in within a hundred yards of where I stood. There were two, in fact, in this very bar. Tara and Charlotte.

      A glance told me Tara wasn’t right. Too ugly. Wrong hair colour. Nothing like The One. But Charlotte looked very promising indeed. Long, honey-coloured hair, gorgeous eyes, pretty smile. I clicked on her name and was shown links to her Twitter profile and Facebook page.

      I glanced around the bar but couldn’t see her. No matter. According to her Twitter feed she was still in the bar – she had tweeted just five minutes ago about how she and her friend Lucy were drinking cocktails here. I clicked through to her Facebook page for a look through her photos. Jackpot. She hadn’t protected them and there were two dozen pictures of her on holiday on the beach, in a bikini. Great little body. Skinny, boobs not too big and, most importantly, not fake. I can’t bear breast implants. I messed up once and took home a girl with implants. I had to cut them out.

      I went back and had a proper look through her tweets, discovering that she went to see Foo Fighters in concert the day before and loved it, but on the way home some woman trod on her foot on the Tube. Lucy also tweeted that she needed to lose weight, that she was sick of her job at Topshop, that she was going to a school reunion soon in Wimbledon. She usually drank white wine spritzers and she had an ancient Siamese cat called Milky.

      She also tweeted that she was sick of guys her age and wanted her next boyfriend to be someone older, more sophisticated, more grown-up.

      I love technology.

      I nudged my way through the crowd, looking for Charlotte. This was where the density of the crowd became irritating. I spilled some shaven-haired moron’s drink accidentally and he started grunting at me so I pressed a tenner into his fat hand to shut him up. But then, as I emerged from a thick knot of bodies, I saw her.

      She was sitting on a tall chair by the bar with a girl with curly dark hair. Lucy. Lucy was a serious problem for me, and I directed spears of hatred towards her back. The two of them were huddled together, drinking Sea СКАЧАТЬ