Dear Beneficiary Read online

  It might have been sturdier had he read the instructions and worked out why he had eleven screws and a metal bracket left over after self-assembly. Thankfully I remembered I’d written Tom’s number in my address book.

  Standing on my swivel chair, a legacy of my husband’s decision to work two days a week from home, I reached up to the tattered book on a shelf above the desk. It contained many addresses, most of which I never used because the contacts were dead, superfluous or downright dull. The chair wobbled furiously and I had to hold on to the curtains for balance, pulling the last three hooks out as I did so, scattering a flurry of bits of paper to the floor.

  ‘Bugger,’ I said out loud, smoothing down my skirt even though there was no one to see my undergarments.

  I put my feet back into my comfortable shoes and, ignoring the mess I’d made, searched through the pages as I made my way down the stairs, somewhat gingerly as I could feel I’d pulled an otherwise unknown muscle somewhere near my upper thigh area. By the time I got to the hall I had to pause to rub the inside of my leg as it was throbbing from overexertion.

  The last time it had felt that used was after Darius had decided to try the ‘erotic V’ position from the Kama Sutra using the kitchen table, which I insisted was far too low for the purpose. The position demands certain acrobatic capabilities, and it soon became clear my yoga expertise wasn’t sufficient for the task, which involved me sitting on the table edge while Darius stood in front, bending his legs so he was in the best ‘entering’ position.

  He had to bend a fair way down to accommodate the activity but persevered, despite obvious signs of strain. After I put my arms around his neck, then pulled first the right, then the left leg up onto his shoulders he was struggling. The next instruction was to lean back while he directed his thrust by holding on to my bottom. However, even his rugby-player thighs couldn’t take our combined weight and we ended up in a heap on the floor with my legs somewhere near my ears – and not in a good way.

  I picked up the phone and dialled the number recorded under ‘T’ for Tom.

  ‘It’s Nanny,’ I said, once he’d finally answered. ‘I need you to come over and help me with that computer thing. It doesn’t appear to be working.’

  Tom was used to my calls. I often rang him two or three times a day and usually required him to undertake some kind of very minor technological task – like tell me how to work my DVD player or, more recently, how to get onto that Google thing. I needed mostly to look up the Hockley bridge club. Not necessarily to ensure any further invitations, but more out of a desire to ensure that irritating control freak, Mavis, put me on the email list. I wasn’t going to let a woman with a stomach bigger than her bust exclude me from the club without a fight.

  Shortly after Colin’s death, Mavis, one of the founding members, had invited me to join the club, in a spirit of support and community piety. She was the wife of one of Colin’s colleagues and we’d met regularly at dinner parties over the years. We’d socialised only as couples, as Mavis didn’t really have the kind of personality I enjoyed. In fact I thought she was rather bossy, far too overweight and much too interested in the various symptoms of ageing to be the sort of companion I would choose.

  She asked me once if I’d been overwhelmed by my husband’s demise as she couldn’t imagine life without her balding bore of a husband. She didn’t call him a balding bore, as she thinks he’s so attractive every single woman wants to steal him away from her, but that’s what he is to most of us. Other than Mrs Hunt from Osprey Drive who, since her divorce, has been trying to coax him into private bridge lessons under the pretext of not being able to absorb the rules while playing at the club because of issues with her hearing aid.

  Anyway, I may have appeared overwhelmed for a few months but I soon got back into the swing of things and had the bridge club in a far better order than she’d ever managed. Mavis didn’t approve, though. She got mightily huffy about my organisation of the sandwich supplies and objected to the extra expenditure on proper butter rather than spread. I’d held back on the suggestion of ciabatta and dipping oil for the Saturday meetings for fear of bringing on a panic attack, of which Mavis has many.

  I like to tackle the provision of sandwiches with a degree of order, whereas Mavis found my common-sense approach intimidating. She didn’t actually use that word, as she had burst into tears last time we had a discussion about the catering, muttering something about not being able to cope any more.

  Maybe that’s why I don’t get the emails. I could just see Mavis telling the committee that all communication would be electronic, despite knowing I didn’t have a computer and clearly thinking that if I didn’t like it, I could lump it.

  Well, what they didn’t know is lumping it wasn’t an option. Not one to be beaten, I accepted that there was no choice but to enter into the world of technology and get myself online. Otherwise I could be missing out on a big, wide world.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Unlike some people, who really don’t know how to get things done properly, Tom is always very helpful and gets me sorted out quickly. I get the impression he laughs at the fact I don’t understand computers but then why would I? I was brought up with a pen and paper and the ability to make conversation rather than have mute discussions via an inappropriately small and inanimate piece of technology.

  I do spoil him a bit. I know he comes to me for cash, cake and somewhere to go when his mother insists on making him wash, wash up or speak nicely to some passing stranger.

  Tom arrived at my house within twenty minutes of my call requesting further help. He’d flipped the letterbox so it made a loud banging noise. He never used the doorbell because he didn’t like the tune. We were supposed to be able to choose one of many, including a Christmas version, ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’, but Colin could never work out how to do that. We ended up with some tinny tune not dissimilar to those heard in shopping centre lifts, and it didn’t help that ours also seemed to activate a few other bells in the immediate neighbourhood.

  I answered the door, still rubbing my thigh from my earlier tumble from the twisty-turny chair that I always knew I didn’t like.

  ‘Yo,’ he said, glancing at me from underneath the peak of his Chelsea Football Club cap. He didn’t support them but had found it on a bus.

  ‘I need you to help me sort out my messages. I can’t get to them so don’t know what they say,’ I told him.

  Tom had already started upstairs and so I followed him, giving my thigh another good rub on the way up. I was heading for a bruise, I could feel it.

  He was soon settled in front of the computer, telling me he was glad of the excuse to leave home as Bobbie was about to launch into one of her tirades about the state of his room.

  ‘She’s been getting on my case,’ he explained, adding that his mother also claimed to be concerned about her discovery of a strange smell and three packets of cigarette papers.

  I questioned it myself but Tom said he occasionally liked to have a herbal cigarette, and there was no point trying to explain to his mother that had he been at university instead of taking some time out he’d be smoking all day long with no one to tell him it was wrong. He told me he was beginning to regret choosing to take a gap year just so he could stay at home.

  The idea was that he’d get a suitable work placement to help further his understanding of IT for when he took up his offer to study at Cambridge, but the economy collapsed just in time to render his enthusiasm pointless. Four hundred job applications later – which started off with him applying for desirable posts and ended up with him trying for anything to earn a minimum wage, or even no wage if the experience was suitable – and he’d more or less given up. He earned a bit here and there from some occasional gardening and maybe the odd bit of computer sorting for relatives but was otherwise unoccupied, facing at least another eight months before he could escape to what he described as ‘the boundless comforts of student life’. If living on beans in a room similar to that found i
n prisons is deemed as comfort it shows what a rotten time he thought he was having.

  Looking at the screen once he got settled into the offending swivel chair, Tom opened up the mailbox and told me that there was nothing of any concern. I just needed to learn how to open the messages. I wrote on the back of my telephone bill the instructions Tom gave me and was relieved my technological incompetence hadn’t caused any major problems.

  On Tom’s last visit he’d installed what he called a ‘spam’ filter and closed down my first email address, after I’d tried to look up venues for swing dancing. Somehow I’d managed to get onto a ‘swingers’ site’ with the result some of the incoming messages I’d been able to read were not only unsolicited, but graphic and increasingly prolific. And there is no point being a swinger if you’ve no one to swing with.

  Tom opened and filed all the new messages that had come in.

  ‘You can throw these ones away, Nan,’ he said, referring to a few that were obviously meant for someone else.

  ‘Why are these people asking me if I want a bigger erection? Did they never do biology at school?’

  Tom stopped me answering a number of messages claiming that if I did I would just get more. I couldn’t quite understand why that would happen. If I told them I wasn’t interested in knowing how to stay hard all night or buy pills for lasting pleasure then surely they would leave me alone?

  Apparently not. Tom said some people who use the internet can be a bit dodgy.

  ‘Please be careful,’ he said. ‘If you keep giving your personal details you will get into even more trouble and I might not always be able to get you out of it.’

  He was referring to the fact I’d inadvertently joined a social networking group for gay nuns and, on the same day, volunteered for an extreme medical trial in Northern Cyprus. I was just looking for ways of filling time by looking for some freelance secretarial work. So why that Scottish-based Muslim organisation dedicated to seeking out terrorist opportunities in Alaska decided I was the one for them was beyond me.

  ‘Not everyone on the internet is who they say they are,’ he warned.

  He tried to circumscribe my world, but his paranoia about safety seemed to be excessive. How much trouble can a computer cause, for goodness’ sake?

  On his last visit he had set me up on Friends Reunited and Facebook. He uploaded my ‘profile’, along with some of my most flattering pictures. I put some effort into it and soon managed to find a couple of people I knew from the past including vague acquaintances from part-time jobs I’d held down during the later years of my children’s adolescence. None had replied.

  Tom was working on sorting out things called ‘files’, which he explained were just like the metal filing cabinets I still had in the home office but were ‘virtual’, when I decided it was probably best to go downstairs and get some cake. The kitchen was definitely my area of expertise. He may know a thing or two about ‘megabytes’ and ‘rams’ (see, I was listening, even if I did think he was referring to a goat with a heavy overbite) but I know about catering.

  I took him back the gift of buttered fruit loaf and, as I placed it on the computer desk, peered over his shoulder at the screen, now showing three messages. He’d told me I could see the new ones because they were in bold. Plus the fact I hadn’t already seen them would be a giveaway, but I allowed him to patronise me a tad. Two of them were for pharmacy products and one from Friends Reunited.

  ‘You’ve had a message from someone called Bob Bryant,’ said Tom.

  My cheeks went warm. I hadn’t heard that name for years and it seemed impossible a message could come from the past through a system so very much part of the future.

  ‘Oh, goodness, I went to school with him when I was living in Banbury,’ I said. ‘He was something of the school heart-throb.’

  ‘And how old would he have been at the time?’ said Tom, grinning.

  I worked it out and felt silly.

  ‘Six-and-a-half. He had a lot of charisma.’

  Tom nodded to himself and ate his fruit loaf, virtually in one mouthful. He read the message and it occurred to me the world of technology made everyone overly wary. There was no doubting that Bob was being very friendly and was keen to meet up.

  ‘There,’ I said. ‘You may think people aren’t as they seem, but Bob is definitely Bob,’ I commented after reading the full message, twice.

  ‘’ow do you know?’ Tom asked while looking at Bob’s profile picture – which I had to admit made him look like a cross between Ken Dodd and a Martian rather than heart-throb material.

  ‘Because he mentions his birthmark – look,’ I said, pointing Tom to this detail in the message. ‘And I know exactly where it is!’ I said, triumphant that I held knowledge about which Tom had no idea.

  ‘And where would that be, then? On his bum?’ he laughed.

  ‘No, Tom,’ I told him. ‘It’s on the end of his penis.’

  I saw that Tom looked a bit perplexed at this comment and so went on to explain: ‘He showed it to me when we went into the big holly bush one play time. It was quite large from what I can remember.’

  I stalled for a bit at the memory of primary school and all those very first experiences and promises of a world of revelations. Then I noticed Tom looked slightly embarrassed.

  ‘The birthmark, I mean. Not his penis,’ I qualified.

  As I spoke I thought to myself how strange that Bob’s was the first penis I’d seen – my father and brothers never displayed theirs – and the last belonged to Darius. What a difference a few decades make. My stomach warmed and again I felt a little lonely.

  ‘So are you going to meet him, then?’ Tom said.

  ‘Oh, no, dear. Look what he says here – he was a postman until he was fifty-five. We would have nothing in common,’ I told him. ‘He is just someone to write to, that’s all.’

  Tom got up to leave.

  ‘Well, I suppose it beats watching Countdown or reseeding your lawn,’ he said, making a move to go downstairs.

  Retrieving his coat from the banisters he shuffled off out into the street, pulling his cap down over his face and hunching up against the rain that had just started to drizzle ineffectually against a bright grey day.

  As I closed the door behind him, having waved goodbye, I heard the distinctive ping which I knew to be a new email. The excitement is addictive and, to be honest, even the occasional weird message from a sex worker in Russia can be more interesting than the terminal drivel on daytime television. I leapt up the stairs with a bound, realising in doing so that my groin injury finally seemed to be on the mend.

  I searched around for my reading glasses for a few minutes before remembering placing them on my head sometime earlier. I retrieved them with a sense of relief. The sense of anticipation was quite thrilling as I read the contents of the new message:

  DEAR BENEFICIARY, the message started.

  Your friend in charge of the Bank of Nigeria Financial team is in the utmost respectful delight to inform your good person that you have $3,000,000 to collect from their account in good thanks for your kind investment and expectations. Legal problems with the owners in the country prevent rightful return and for your assistance the fund can be shared between you and the choice of your medical teams to bring about good fortune to your friends and their family. We need your immediate information to ensure speedy resolution of this matter and to avoid fraud. Forward your bank details most immediately to arrange distribution of our cash to you as our beneficiary in law.

  My heart missed a beat. In fact, it missed several beats. I hoped it wasn’t a reaction to my new blood-pressure medication.

  This was a message from Nigeria. It had to have something to do with Darius, as it mentioned the medical problems he was facing with his mother. Oh, my goodness. I’d given up hope of ever setting eyes on him again. Even on the odd occasion when I’d given in to some ‘auto-eroticism’, purely for the purposes of a good night’s sleep, I hasten to add, I only ever thought of him in
abstract ways. I’d tried to eradicate the feeling his memory induced because it made me sad, as I never allowed myself the thought we would be reunited.

  I wanted to cry.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When I had seen the advert for the Advanced Driving course I never thought it would lead me to Darius. I thought it would be nothing more than a new activity and a way to save money on the insurance I was now paying for my very own car. After Colin’s death I was solely responsible for all elements of my life, including the purchase of a vehicle – the first I could genuinely call my own since I passed my test some thirty-five years ago.

  Colin always did the driving, even when he broke his toe tripping over one of Titch’s Lego buildings of the Park Royal Asda Superstore. Colin hadn’t allowed me to get anywhere near the family car after I managed to attach it to a builder’s skip I was passing, and carried on driving. He’d been appalled at the fact I kept trying to drive despite having come to a halt, resulting in the offside front panel shearing clean off.

  ‘Didn’t you think to stop at any point?’ he’d shouted at me. I reasoned no one had been hurt and it was an accident (even though I was upset at how the builder had spoken to me, once he’d seen his skip was firmly attached to my Rover estate’s wing mirror). Colin had just walked away from me, shaking his head, and called up the insurance company. He’d found it painfully embarrassing explaining to the assessor what had happened, not least because the representative from Direct Line had been unable to stop himself from laughing for longer than a few seconds at a time.

  So I signed up for the course with enthusiasm, at first hoping the afterlife provided viewing opportunities so Colin could see what I was up to. I changed my mind fairly soon after the first class.

  Darius was dressed in a dark blue suit that seemed too tight across his massive chest, the whites of his eyes sparkling against his beautiful dark-brown colouring. The tall, dark man was very well turned out, wearing expertly polished, lace-up leather shoes as dark as his skin. He also wore a crisp white shirt and a pale blue tie with little motifs of what looked like elephants. He fascinated me, and I was compelled to sit next to him. He was like a magnet, full of excitement and possibility. Not only that, he knew how to iron a shirt.