Cat and Mouse Part 1

Josie leaned back, distancing herself from her computer screen. Surely, that was enough editing for one day. Her eyes felt squint, the back of her head throbbed in the way only an impending headache could. Josie sighed and closed the browser window. She took her coffee out onto the small, metal balcony and watched Melbourne go by, beneath her. Out in the wind she felt the beginnings of her headache receding and the wind washed her mind clear.

Straining her eyes felt good. The rush hour crowd passed by beneath her, 30 floors down, on the footpath. Her eyes adjusting once more to the middle-distance. A little boy with an amazing mohawk and his mother went by, a good looking man in a business suit brushed past people rudely in his haste before disappearing from her view, enveloped by the buildings.

Inside, Josie resisted the urge to turn on the TV. She logged onto a social chat site and talked to a few anonymous avatars. It wasn’t really her thing but Josie was new to this town, had few friends as yet and therefore little social contact. An idea gripped her and she logged onto a dating website, wrote a brief profile and submitted a photo. Losing her nerve she logged off forgot about it and made dinner for herself.

It was a few days later that Josie remembered she had signed up to an on-line meeting-place, having finished a particularly meaty editing session. She decided to check it out. The results made her jump up, she looked again at the computer screen, from the safety of standing behind her chair, 87 responses? She grinned, trawling through the messages. A lot of crap, some men in their mid fifties only looking for younger women, who had to be in there thirties or younger. She deleted all of these without reading them. It narrowed the field to 50.

Josie decided that she had to pick at least one and she would have to meet him. It seemed only reasonable and hell, the odds were pretty good. She set about her task with her tongue firmly tucked to one side of her mouth, held there by her teeth. It was one of her more awful habits, she wasn’t even aware she was doing it.

Two hours later she had narrowed it down to a selection of ten men, 8 of which sounded too good to be true. Five of them had left telephone numbers. Instead of messaging, she took the bull by the horns and decided to call. Josie looked at the clock, 7pm on a Thursday. Was that an ok time to call? The first one was Ralph. At Ralph’s house a very young voice answered the phone, a child of around 7 or 8? Before the man could come to the phone she’d hung up. Josie carefully deleted his profile from her selection.

Harry answered the phone and sounded annoyed, she very nearly hung up. She introduced herself and there was a pause. Silence down the line that made her a little nervous.

“I’m impressed by your nerve.”

She sighed into the receiver and they chatted for a few minutes. Harry had just gotten home and jumped in the shower, the phone had forced him out and he was dripping, hence his annoyance. As they chatted for a little longer he seemed to relax. He told her most women on the site started their correspondence via email, and that sometimes, he spoke to ladies three or four times this way before they stopped. No one rang him, it was almost uncouth. He laughed into the receiver and Josie felt her heart jump. It was a great sound, deep and easy.

Why was a nice-sounding man such as this one, looking for dates on an Internet site, why couldn’t he snag girls in the real world? Josie didn’t ask. She learned that Harry lived across town and that they both had Skype. She agreed to talk with him some more in a day or two, neither of them suggested meeting in person and after that they hung up. Her fingers tingled as she set down the phone. What was wrong with him? The man seemed a little too good to be real. Perhaps he had bad acne scars? Perhaps he was fat?

On Monday her phone rang, it was 11 in the morning so Josie presumed it was her agent. She answered brusquely, caught off guard by Harry.

“We seem to have a habit of talking at inopportune times.”

He worked from home, he said (although he didn’t tell her what he did for a living and Josie didn’t ask).