Chapter 2
Thursday 28 September
The Rose occasionally he had to do it by exposing him to them. This was one of those times.
“Jerry, I think you’ve been taken for a ride. Did this Kay person ever ask you for money?”
“What? No, of course not. And she’s not a ‘Kay person’, she’s Kay .”
“Did you share any personal information with her?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, your bank or credit card details, your address, phone number, birth date, passwords, passport info, that sort of thing.”
“I may have given her my phone number. We told each other our birthdays and about our lives. Oh, and I told her about you.”
“About me? Why?”
Dan suddenly felt cold water at the bottom of his boat. Civilisation, he’d always thought, was like the pretty, sun-dappled surface of a lake. Leafy Winchmore Hill with its cafes and its lovely Sainsbury’s and his house and Jeremy’s flat and Perfect Drive and Jeremy’s Pitch and Putt – that was all the surface of the lake. As they rowed their boat around it, the surface could seem like the whole world, but it wasn’t. The surface was really very thin, and beneath it, beneath their boat, was a lot of cold and savage darkness. At any time, a shark could swim up through that darkness and punch its nose through their hull and grab them in its jaws. Dan wasn’t a hundred percent sure that sharks lived in lakes, but for the purposes of this analogy, they absolutely did. What it all boiled down to was that there were plenty of bad guys and gals lurking beneath the surface of Lake Civilisation, and many of them lurked online.
“You were on one of the photos I sent her, and she asked about you,” said Jeremy.
“And what did you say?”
“The truth.”
Jeremy told him what he said, and for a moment, Dan didn’t know where to put his eyes. They roved around the pub as if tracking a drunken fly before finally returning to his brother’s pudgy, smiling face. He felt both deeply moved and discomforted by his words.
“That’s very kind,” he said. “None of it’s true of course, except maybe the part about the shepherd’s pie.”
“It’s all true, and you know it,” said Jeremy, twinkling to suggest he thought he was being teased.
Did Jeremy really see him that way? Could he not see beyond the superficial charm to all the vast and gaping flaws in Dan’s character, or did he just choose not to see them?
That aside, he’d dropped an awful lot of shark food in the water.
“You shouldn’t have said that stuff to Kay,” Dan said. “Now she knows where I work and what I get up to on Saturday mornings. It bothers me that a stranger knows those things about me.”
“Oh I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Jeremy, and then his eyebrows bounced and his cheeks quivered as if he’d just been struck in the face by a rubber ball – or an idea. “Hey, if she does happen to start stalking you or whatever, do you think you couldmaybe pass on a message for me? Tell her I’m missing her and I’d really love to get back in touch.”