Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle by Matthew Blakstad Page A

partner she goes back to over and again. She wonders who monkey is, what kind of person it takes to match her urgency. He never shares photos with her but she’s sure he’s a guy, and British from the words he uses for her pussy and his cock – but their encounters are so raw there are no other clues.
    She wishes she had a good picture of Sam. The ones she’s found are too processed and professional. She needs to find the earliest images, from when she knew him at school. She ons the phone again and returns to Facebook where she rolls back into the past. As she gets to her earliest albums, she hits a cliff-edge and realises her mistake. Facebook wasn’t launched until she was up at uni. Her school life might as well not exist. She tends to forget Internet services haven’t always been there.
    She opens the oldest album and there’s Dani the pale-faced fresher hanging with her tech-boy homies. Each was a way-mark. Those were wild years, before Gray – dipping fingers into zany tech and pipe-dream start-up concepts that never materialised; and into each other. She was this glorious geek-girl, costumes belladonna purple, her pale body a gift she gloried in sharing. She burned away uni light-starved in grotty basements, surrounded by the neutral blink of router stacks and the hum of cooling systems. All the hope then.
    And if she got herself a reputation as another easy geek-girl (what Gray calls a wonk-bonk ) it was pretty much deserved. These awkward boys were no pushover. Lord knows, it takes commitment to get a nerd back home at night – and even more to stop him talking long enough to get even the first thing done – but she felt a kind of love for them all. Each of them had, under layers of nebbish bluster, a timid sweetness she could unlock. And if many encounters ended prematurely, or didn’t really begin, one or two always managed to surprise her; and each brought the same delight that the abstractions they shared could translate into tenderness and physical release. They laid their fingers with awe on the cold milk of her belly and were kind to her soft skin. Kinder than she was.
    This was before those first overwhelming online encounters with Gray.
     
    With an instinct for how far the bus has staggered down the street, Dani looks up. They’re about to pass the burned-out Haggerston pub with flamingo stencils on its hoardings. She always tries to check it out as her bus passes. It’s inhabited by hobbity squatters she rarely manages to glimpse, but is fascinated by. Today she catches a violent situation at the half-open doorway. A man in grey suit and foreman’s anorak shoves a young white man with ginger dreads. Directly above them, level with Dani’s upper-deck seat, a bony girl shouts something from an upper window. Possibly ‘ Don ’ t! ’ – or ‘ Cunt! ’ She has a scarf round her hair in a wartime style. All Dani’s vision retains as the bus pushes forward is the blue moiré pattern of the scarf.
    )) high shout ((
    She twists her neck to see more but the angle’s wrong. She looks into first floor flats for a while, then turns back to her phone and the rough-shot images from uni. She looks happy there. But everything erodes, given time. Confidences leak out, condoms burst and promises pass unspoken expiry dates. When she graduated, and hooked up at last with Gray in the physical world, they found a more determined, constant rhythm. But she was already too committed to unsettling adventures, and was never true to him. Maybe she’s chronically impatient. She never wants any one thing long enough to make it real.
    Her email chimes. That must be the reply from the Sambot. It took its time – this’d better be worth it. She skips back to mail. No, it’s just a purchase confirmation for the porn site.
    Something occurs to her – something really, really bad that can’t be true. She taps on herSent items. There it is. Ten twelve a.m. she sent that rambling mail to the Sambot –
    No. Shit