Kiss Me First Read online

  Two weeks later, I decided to start my own thread. I spent a while choosing my subject; it had to be attention-grabbing but not so outrageous or provocative I looked like a troll. I decided upon a subject that had been on my mind for a while: whether it was OK for a person to do nothing with their lives except what they wanted to do – for example, play World of Warcraft – as long as they could support themselves and didn’t harm anyone else.

  Immediately after posting, I had an unsettling few minutes when I thought that no one was going to pick it up, but then received my first comment. The thread got seven responses in all, which I learned was pretty good. Most regulars were wary of newbies, waiting for them to prove their commitment before they engaged with them. To my surprise, Adrian himself joined the discussion, posting his opinion that those who were lucky enough to be in a secure position should use some of their privileges to help others who had a worse start in life.

  I won’t say I found debating on Red Pill easy from the start, but it did come quite naturally. What I liked about it was that once you had the tools, you could apply them to almost any subject, including those you had no experience in. For instance, I was a significant contributor to a discussion on whether it’s more ethical to adopt children than give birth to them. For the next few weeks I contributed to debates and spent most of my evenings on the site. I got to know the regulars. Although the site had nearly four thousand registered members across the world, there were only around fifty people who regularly contributed to debates, and so they quickly became familiar.

  It was quite a tight ‘clique’, but one you could get into by demonstrating intelligence and logic. They gradually came to accept me, and a happy moment came when once, in response to a newbie asking about an ethical matter, Not-a-sheep wrote, Shadowfax, we need you!, because I was known to be strong in that particular area.

  I also started reading. Adrian posted a list of books – ‘the canon’, he called it – which he said were essential grounding for anyone who wanted to get the best out of the site, like Plato’s Dialogues, Hume, Descartes and Kant. I ordered a few from Amazon. I read a lot before but only really sci-fi and fantasy novels, and I found them hard going at first, but I persevered and set myself an hour’s reading time every evening, making notes as I went along.

  I had received several PMs – personal messages – from Adrian himself. The first was a welcome message when I joined up, and then another after three months on the forum, congratulating me for surviving the initiation period (most members drop out before then, apparently). Then, after nearly six months of regular posting, I got a PM from him asking me to apply to become an Elite Thinker.

  The way the site worked is that once you’d posted your fifteenth comment you graduated from being an NE, which stands for Newly Enlightened, to a fully-fledged member. Most people remained at that stage, but a small number were invited to take an online test for Elite Thinkers. This meant that Adrian deemed you capable of more advanced thought, and, if successful, you got access to a special forum where discussion was on a higher level. It was a subscription, twenty pounds a month.

  In the PM, Adrian said he had been particularly impressed by my participation in a debate over the difference between shame and guilt. You’ve really impressed me, Shadowfax. You’re one hell of a smart cookie. It was quite a thrilling moment, I must say.

  Of course, I said yes. Adrian sent a link to the test, which was in two parts. The first asked me to respond to a series of ethical dilemmas of the sort I was used to debating on the site – whether I would kill one person to save five others, for example. The second part of the test was more of a personality test, a list of statements that required simple yes or no answers. It’s difficult to get you excited. You readily help people while asking nothing in return. You can easily see the general principle behind specific occurrences.

  A few hours after submitting the test Adrian emailed to say I had passed, and I was admitted into the Elite Thinkers. From then on, I spent most of my time on the ET forum. There were around fifteen members who were very active, posting several times a day, and I was one of them.

  Then came the day of that message.

  It arrived late one afternoon, when I was in the middle of an overdue testing report. Since discovering Red Pill I had let my work slide somewhat, and the previous week Damian had sent a stiff email advising me that although he was sensitive to my grief over mum’s death, he was going to have to let me go if I didn’t meet deadlines.

  So, I was trying to get this report finished, but nonetheless couldn’t resist opening Adrian’s PM. It was immediately clear that this was something different from his usual messages. On the site I was always known by my username, Shadowfax, but here he used my real name. He must have got it from my credit-card details.

  The message read:

  Leila, I’ve been watching your progress on the site with great interest. Fancy a F2F?

  A face-to-face meeting. He named a place near Hampstead Heath to meet, and a time, which happened to be the following morning.

  I remember my fingers going limp on the keyboard. My first thought was that I had done something wrong, but I soon rationalized that. Adrian was an important man; why would he bother to meet up just to tell me I was to be banished when he could do it online? Besides, I hadn’t, to my knowledge, done anything to displease him. On the contrary, he regularly congratulated me on my posts and had only the day before told the forum that I had a ‘first-class mind’.

  The only other options were, in a way, more daunting. Either he was considering making me a forum moderator, and the meeting was an interview; or he wanted something else from me. The question was – what?

  That’s enough for tonight. It’s 4.40 a.m., and my eyes have started to sting. The skin of the tent is growing lighter and after the lovely coolness of the night I can feel the temperature starting to rise.

  Thursday, 18th August 2011

  This morning I woke violently after only a few hours’ sleep, feeling like I was being baked alive inside my tent. My body was leached of water, my skin covered in a greasy film. I unzipped the tent flaps and stuck my head outside, but the stagnant air offered little relief, so I dragged my inflatable mattress out into the shade of a nearby tree and tried to get back to sleep.

  However, it felt odd being so exposed and I couldn’t settle. After an hour I decided to get up and start my enquiries.

  First, I went to the toilet, and as I was coming back out of the bushes a tiny old woman with very short grey hair approached me, gesticulating. She had a thick foreign accent and it took me a moment to realize she was cross because I wasn’t using the same place as everyone else. ‘You stay here, you follow the rules,’ she said, in a harsh tone. I decided it was best not to respond, and then asked her whether she had been at the commune the previous summer.

  ‘Yes I was,’ she said, frowning. ‘I have been coming here for the past fourteen years. I helped make this wonderful place, and that’s why—’

  ‘Do you recognize this woman?’ I said, showing her Tess’s picture.

  She barely glanced at the photo. ‘I don’t know,’ she snapped, before walking briskly away.

  Making a mental note to ask her again when she had calmed down, I began at the north end of the site and approached every camp, showing Tess’s photo to each adult I encountered and asking whether they remembered her from the previous summer. The response was disappointing. One man with five rings in his lip thought he might recognize her from ‘somewhere’, but was unable to provide any further information. Another was adamant that Tess was a Spanish girl called Lulu who had been running a bar in Ibiza for the past seven years.

  What struck me was the lack of curiosity. I didn’t have to use my prepared story at all. No one asked me why I was looking for her. It’s as if a missing person is a totally normal event in this world. People seemed much more interested in how I had got to the commune from the airport. When I said I had taken a taxi, one man asked how much it had
cost, and when I told him his eyes widened and he shook his hands and exhaled loudly. ‘A hundred and forty euros!’ He repeated it to the woman who was next to him, plaiting her hair. ‘A hundred and forty euros!’

  That’s another thing about this place. I had braced myself for ‘hippy talk’, ready to bite my tongue during discussions about ‘spirituality’ and ‘star signs’ and ‘massages’ and so on, but the conversations I’ve overheard have not been like that at all. They just seem to talk about how much things cost, or where they’ve come from, or where they’re going to next.

  I suppose this lack of interest in each other makes sense in terms of Tess. She knew she could come here and not be quizzed, that no one would ask awkward questions.

  As I was heading back to my tent, I again heard that lovely generator hum that I had noticed yesterday evening, and followed the sound to a van parked on its own, away from the others. The door was open and inside was a woman breast-feeding a baby and a little boy attacking a melon with a knife. There was a fan whirring, positioned near the baby. The woman had her bosoms exposed, so I averted my eyes and asked her about the specifications of her generator. She seemed surprised, and said, ‘I don’t know,’ so I went outside and had a look. It was only 1200 watts, and I guessed that if we were to plug both the fan and my laptop into it, the fan would suffer a slight reduction in power. I thought the effect of this would not be felt so much at night, when the temperature was cooler and they were asleep, and perhaps I could use it to charge my laptop then.

  I explained all this to the woman, and asked her if I could attach my converter.

  ‘As long as we won’t boil, I don’t see why not,’ she said.

  ‘Were you here last summer?’ I asked, thinking of Tess.

  ‘No, this is our first time,’ she said, and gave a little laugh. ‘Yours too, I’m guessing. My name’s Annie, by the way.’

  Compared to the rest of them Annie looks quite normal. She’s large and pink, and although her blonde hair is messy, it’s neither matted nor shaved. Her clothes are almost respectable, except the armholes of her vest are so baggy they show the sides of her bra.

  I thought I might as well move my tent to be near the generator immediately. Rather than dismantle it, I just removed the outside pegs and dragged the whole structure, my things still inside, the hundred or so yards to a spot beside Annie’s van. She and the children were now outside, under a makeshift canopy.

  ‘Oh, you’re going to camp right here?’ Annie said.

  It seemed the obvious thing to do if I was going to connect to her generator, I don’t know why she asked. I nodded, and set to work re-pegging the tent whilst Annie and the boy watched.

  ‘Do you want Milo to help?’ she said. ‘He loves putting up tents.’

  Before I could say anything the little boy had skirted over and started jamming in the tent pegs, using both hands and muttering to himself. He has the same colour hair as Annie, and I noticed when he knelt down that the soles of his feet were black.

  After my early start and all the morning’s activity, I fancied a lie-down. Inside the tent the air was hot and horrible, so I asked Annie if I could place my mattress under the shade of her canopy and lie there.

  ‘You’re not shy, are you?’ she said, but made a sweeping gesture, which I took as a ‘yes’. I pulled over my mattress, lay on my back with my arms folded across my chest and closed my eyes. I didn’t feel so self-conscious now that it was only Annie and Milo around, and soon drifted into an odd half-sleep. The noises around me – the birdsong, the dog barks, the drumming, even the voices of Annie and Milo a few feet away – were muted by the heat, and merged to form a sort of ambient soundtrack to my thoughts.

  I don’t normally remember my dreams, and certainly don’t attach any meaning to them. But this one was more a series of disconnected images. Some of the scenes had an obvious source: the flight over to Spain yesterday, my first-ever air journey; the plane the same orange as a Doritos packet; the hellish throng at Luton departures hall, at the sight of which I nearly turned around and went back to Rotherhithe. But then there were also random scenes from elsewhere: walking through Marks and Spencer on Camden High Street with mum slightly ahead, a familiar shape in her beige jacket; Tess’s body twirling from a tree somewhere deep in the forest.

  The sound of crying pierced my sleep and I woke to find Annie feeding the baby and Milo stirring something on a little stove. She said it was 6 p.m., and asked if I wanted some dinner. I’ve brought a week’s supply of bread and biscuits, so I don’t strictly need anything else, but I accepted her offer.

  ‘It’s just a veggie chilli,’ she said, ‘not very impressive.’ She was right.

  We sat on rounds of tree trunk that had been sanded and varnished to become rudimentary seats. Annie explained that she made them to sell to tourists at markets. I said that if tourists were flying home, the stools might cause a problem with their luggage allowance: I noticed at the airport yesterday that there is a maximum weight limit. ‘Oh, I suppose the people will just have to stay in Spain, then,’ said Annie, not sounding at all bothered about the potential loss of a large section of her customer base.

  Milo wolfed down his food and started playing with a wooden toy on a string, throwing it into the air and attempting to catch it again, so I was left trying to make more conversation with Annie. Luckily, she did most of the talking. She volunteered the information that she was from Connecticut in America and had decided to come to Spain as a fortieth birthday present to herself.

  I was surprised to hear she was forty; only a year older than Tess would be now. She seems so much more mature. When she smiles there are at least ten wrinkles around each eye, whereas Tess only had four, and on her reddened chest there are a number of circular lines, like rings on a tree.

  She asked me what I needed a laptop for, and I told her I was writing a film script. Then Milo started babbling some nonsense and I pretended to listen to him instead, which was a relief because I didn’t want to say much more.

  So, that has been my day. Now, it’s dark and quiet outside, and I’m in the tent. Here continues the official account.

  Adrian asked to meet at South End Green in Hampstead, which was, by great coincidence, a place I knew well. It’s a little square in the shadow of the Royal Free Hospital, which had been one of mum’s treatment centres. I had spent hours looking down at the square from windows high up in the hospital, whilst mum was undergoing tests, and sitting in the nearby Starbucks, which had acted as an unofficial waiting room for relatives of patients, full of pale people not drinking their coffees.

  I arrived thirteen minutes before our meeting time and sat on a bench, relieved to take the pressure off my feet. I was wearing a pair of mum’s shoes, high heels, and they were a size too small for me. It was a warm day and the other benches were occupied by a mixture of tramps and hospital patients out for some fresh air, although the buses that circled the square gave little hope of that. Some of the patients were by themselves, others accompanied by helpers or nurses. One man, I remember, was dragging a drip after him, his skin was yellow as margarine, and there was an ancient old woman being pushed around in a wheelchair, her head lolling as if her neck had been de-boned.

  At the other end of my bench, a tramp was swigging out of a can. As I sat there, sweating, another man came and sat beside me. He was quite young, but looked grey and hollow-eyed. He lit a cigarette and smoked it very quickly, staring straight ahead as he did so. Then he stood up, dropped the butt on the ground and walked away, leaving his cigarette packet on the arm of the bench. I leant over and picked it up and called after him, ‘You left these!’ He didn’t turn round, so I stood and walked after him with the packet, presuming he hadn’t heard. When I caught up with him, he turned round and gave me a funny look.

  ‘It’s empty,’ he said.

  He carried on walking.

  I put the cigarette packet in a bin and sat back down on the bench. Then, behind me, came a familiar voice.

/>   ‘You are a good person, Leila.’

  I turned and there he was, smiling down at me.

  I had seen pictures of Adrian before, of course, on video links on the site. I even recognized the shirt he was wearing; one of my favourites, blue corduroy the same colour as his eyes, with a crescent of white T-shirt at the neck. I remember thinking that he looked out of place in the deathly little square, too healthy and wholesome, with his plump, rosy cheeks.

  On seeing him, I automatically stood up. He continued, ‘I saw what you did with that guy’s fags just then.’ The word ‘fags’ sounded odd in his warm, American voice. ‘Most people wouldn’t have done that, you know.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, and then he walked round the bench so he was next to me, looked into my eyes and held out his hand. I shook it, and he said, ‘Extremely pleased to meet you, Leila.’

  The tramp sitting beside us let out a wail and hurled his can to the ground for no apparent reason. Adrian raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Shall we find a more salubrious spot? Do you mind walking?’ and then, ‘What lovely shoes – they won’t hurt your feet, will they?’

  Adrian led the way, weaving through the buses on the road and onto the pavement. We walked in silence for a few minutes, past a line of shops, until we reached the edge of a large expanse of green.