The Landlord loves to come home and shed his clothes. He likes the freedom. He likes the draught from the fan playing over his skin, to be able to lift up the apron of fat that hangs down over his thighs and let his privates breathe. He likes the feel of sweat – and goddamn, this heat makes him sweat – turning to vapour, without the close confines of cloth soaking it up. And he likes to touch himself.
The Landlord strokes himself from shoulder to nipple and marvels at the efficacy of the Internet if you’re curious. It’s not just the things that turn up online that help you learn about people – and he loves to know more about his lodgers than they think he knows – it’s the things that don’t. The fact that Thomas Dunbar’s name no longer appears on the trustee list of the Northbourne Furniture Exchange, and the announcement that the Citizen’s Advice has cut down its opening hours to go with the prevailing Austerity. He’s noticed him about the place more, lately, fussing and gabbling and sticking his nose in. These bits of information look like an explanation. An underemployed nosy-parker is no one’s idea of fun.
On the TV, the Landlord’s camera footage plays out images from the motion-operated cameras he’s set up in two bathrooms. The casual eye would interpret them as smoke alarms, and so far no one has questioned the need for such a thing in a bathroom. Currently, Gerard Bright is lathered up in the tub, shaving his buttocks. The Landlord glances, then glances away. Bright shaves and exfoliates and soaks himself in oils each day of the week. Nothing to see here: just a middle-aged narcissist in a prison made of glass. Besides, Collette Dunne is more interesting in every way. He Googles her as he waits for her to follow her neighbour in.
He can’t find a thing about her. Hossein Zanjani gets thousands of hits, hundreds of photos. The Home Office wouldn’t need to string out ‘investigating’ his asylum claim, if they were just to use Google, though they might be interested to see that he’s writing for every left-wing media outlet that will have him. Even old Vesta has a dozen entries – marketing lists, surveys, the flower rota at the Anglican church. But Collette Dunne? Dozens in the world, millions of hits on Google, but none of them are her. They’re dentists and dancers and strategic consultants. They’re fifty and seventeen and dead, and black and blonde and redheaded, and not one looks like the one in Beulah Grove.
There are only two reasons why someone wouldn’t show up on Google. No one cares a damn about them, or it’s not their real name.
Bright leaves the bathroom, and the TV screen, after a couple of seconds of empty room, goes blank. He fixed motion sensors on to his camera in when he realised that 98 per cent of his DVDs were blank. Then the door opens and the subject of his web-search comes in. She wears pyjamas and a satin dressing gown, her hair tied up into a curly knot at the top of her head. The Landlord pulls up his knees and props the tablet against his thighs. His freed-up hand begins to stray downwards, fingers running over belly, back up again to the cleavage between his breasts, as he clicks through to Cher Farrell’s Facebook page. He likes to use his fingertips; they make him feel like a cat.
Cher Farrell. Now here’s a story. Collette may be pretending to be someone else, but this one, it seems, nobody cares about. Since he discovered this one desultory trace of the girl, the Landlord has developed a taste for Facebook. The place is riddled with pages for missing teens, and no one ever remembers to take them down once the drama is done. They sit there for ever, long after the subject has come home, been found, been buried; pottages of condolence and trolling and digital love-hearts. ‘Come home, Keely, Granny loves you’; ‘OMG XOXOEMMABABE LUV YA 4 EVR DRLIN <3 XOXO’; ‘Deepest condolences from Lesley, Keith and all at WonderPackaging’; ‘I’d give her one if she wasn’t dead LOL’; ‘Come back, Tyra. Nobody’s angry’.
Cher Farrell’s page hasn’t changed since the last time he looked. It’s not changed, in fact, since it was posted eighteen months ago. It has no likes, no comments, no shares, no nothing; just a photo, barely recognisable with the passage of time, and a barebones appeal from social services. Have you seen this girl? We’ve lost her. We’ve done our bit. Our budgets don’t stretch to more than this, not for someone no one cares about. Even the page admin hasn’t been back for a while, to clear off the spam advertising for sex toys and free iPads. It’s the loneliest Facebook page he’s ever seen.
He looks up to watch his newbie. Collette crosses the room, puts a toilet roll on to the cistern, hoicks up her dressing gown and drops the pyjama bottoms. Sits on the toilet and lets out a visible sigh of pleasure. The time-stamp says it’s 10.17 and her last visit to this room was some time around midnight. Her bladder must be full to bursting. The Landlord caresses the thin line of damp hair that links his belly button and his mons pubis, twiddles it round his index finger and lets it slide out. The image is a long way from HD, too grainy to afford him much view of the dark place between her legs, but he thinks he sees a wisp of hair as she reaches back to the toilet paper. An unusual sight, these days, if it’s so. Young Cher, like Gerard, has skin as naked as the day she was born; scrapes it clean each week with a tube of Nair and a plastic spatula. All the young girls, signalling their adulthood by making themselves look like five-year-olds. He’s often wondered how this fits with society’s obsession with paedophilia.