Shifting Sand…

Nobody’d called me that in years.

Well, nobody’d called me it full stop, at least never to my face. Not till this phonecall. Though I suppose calling me it on a phone – even on a kind of phone we could, should we want to, see people’s faces on, a kind that was still imaginary back then when people called me it behind my back –

still wasn’t really calling me it to my face.

I mean, I knew that they called me it.

I assumed they did because I went out with people of both genders.

That was seen as deeply dodgy, then, though not quite as dodgy as just being gay which is what I probably was / am and eventually as the time passed felt more able and determined to say.

Different times.

Anyway, now I was wide awake wondering whether Martina Inglis, about whom I’d not thought once in three decades, was happily asleep right now whoever and wherever she was in the world and wondering how on earth she’d known to make up the kind of story that really did intrigue even a deflated version of me.

It was almost as if she’d targeted me with it. The passports. The blank officials. The inexplicable and uncalled-for detainment. The revelation of the artisan beauty. The disembodied voice in the locked room.

She couldn’t have made up a story more likely to hook me.

But why?

For the sly triumph that comes from playing with a life?

Or maybe even to empty my bank account? Scams were rifer than ever now. Possibly it wasn’t even ‘Martina Inglis’ who’d phoned me. Possibly someone, some scammy people who didn’t know me from Adam, had phoned me up pretending to be someone from my past. All sorts of details about people’s lives were readily there on the net. Possibly it was someone who knew about the hospital / my father etc and figured I’d be particularly vulnerable right now. Easy game. Millions of pounds had been stolen already from thousands of people in this country alone, from isolated people desperate to trust a voice on a phone.

But.

There was no pretending in her.

Nowadays the least inkling of performance, pretence, selfishness, and I was off like a butterfly sensing a net.

I turned over in the bed. Okay. What I could do was, I could look up the famous lock thing. I could google it and check: 1. if it existed at all, and

2. if it did, whether it had been abroad on a tour of, what was it, post-medieval stuff, and

3. which museum it was associated with, and

4. whether she was on that museum’s staff.

That’d all be a kind of proof.

But let’s face it, Google itself wasn’t exactly true. Everything onscreen and online was just the latest manifestation of realer-than-thou while being completely virtual therefore not in any real way real life.

And why the fuck, I thought punching the pillow in the dark, was I having to care about or think philosophically and existentially in the middle of the night about – think at all about – something that may or may not have happened in the head or in the life of someone I hardly knew and didn’t even like that much, in fact consciously disliked, when I did know her?