‘Shall I save it in my contacts this time?’ he asked. ‘I don’t always answer if I don’t recognise the number. I told you that before, remember.’
‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘It’ll probably be a different one next week. They’re supposed to be upgrading them all.’
That seemed to pacify him, anyway. I forgot I’d called him from the wrong phone once before and he’d got all shirty about it.
If I’d hoped that a pint and sandwich with Vaughn would lighten my mood, I would have been sadly disappointed. There’s nothing cheering about the place itself, with its brown carpet and wobbly bar stools; nothing to lift the spirits either in Vaughn’s countenance or behaviour. He seems almost as miserable as I am.
‘How’s Audrey?’ I ask, when I’ve ordered my sandwich and sat down opposite him.
‘She said no,’ he says dismally.
‘No? Really? Why?’
‘Said she’s not ready to settle down.’
‘I thought you said she’d been giving off hints.’
‘Well, that’s what I thought. But turns out I was way off the mark.’
I take a long gulp of the pint of bitter. It tastes faintly, ever so slightly, off. ‘What do you mean? What does she want?’
Vaughn sighs heavily. ‘You tell me, Colin. I’ve given up trying to make sense of what women want or expect from us.’
‘So,’ I say, trying to choose my words carefully and still probably failing, ‘she’s dumped you?’
He looks aghast. ‘No, nothing like that!’
‘Well, what, then?’
‘She just doesn’t want to be engaged, that’s all.’
I make a noise that tries to express sympathy for Vaughn, disgust at Audrey and relief that they are still in some kind of relationship. It comes out as a ‘Hmmm. Pfft.’
‘This pint’s off,’ I say after a while, and go to tell them to change the barrel.
Vaughn’s problems are tiny, pale and uninteresting in comparison to mine, like the runt of a particularly average litter. I’ve lost one of my subjects – the woman with the satchel. That hasn’t happened to me for a long time, since I became choosier about which subjects to engage with.
I called her at six last night, as arranged, and the phone went unanswered. I wondered if she had already expired and begun to transform – but that would have been very quick, even without water. When I drove past the house on my way home, there was an ambulance and a police car parked outside.
However much I try to kid myself that I’m not bothered, I am still pissed off at my own negligence. I’ve failed her, but, more importantly, I’ve failed myself; and losing one when the police are already showing an interest in my activities is a big risk.
I lost others, particularly in the beginning. Ones that were unsure, or maybe were less isolated than they first appeared. I thought that sooner or later someone – a family member, perhaps – would put in a complaint about me, or alert the authorities, but nobody ever contacted me with regard to this. As I refined my technique I took steps to guard against discovery. Taking their mobile phones away and leaving them with a replacement for me to keep in touch with them was one particularly genius idea. On more than one occasion I have sent reassuring replies to texts from people who seem a little concerned, and once or twice I have given up on people and not returned to them at all in case they are found.
Each loss is a shame. Some of them were really interesting, too: ones whose transformation I had been looking forward to very much.
All day today I have been trying to reassure myself that they have no way of connecting me with her. And if they do, what of it? I spoke to her. She invited me into her house. She asked me for help, and I provided it. I have done nothing wrong.
Sitting beside the morose Vaughn, I can’t help feeling a shiver of arousal at the thought of Audrey’s rejection of him. And it is a rejection, no matter what spin he thinks to put upon it. She is not ready to commit to him, which means she might consider playing with someone else. She might consider me…
‘Do you want me to have a word with her?’ I ask.
Vaughn looks up from his food. I can always tell when he is miserable because he chooses a sausage and egg baguette instead of a ham salad. This makes for a noxious concoction of brown sauce, ketchup and egg