I tried Internet dating as a lark, a fuck you to fate and its bone-lazy minions for dragging their feet. I had expected to be Matched with all manner of tossers, creeps, and sex-pests – and I certainly blocked my fair share of those . The one thing I didn’t anticipate I’d find was a normal, witty, intelligent guy whose taste in literature ran to something a little more challenging than car magazines and bumper stickers, and I didn’t; he found me.

The first message he sent me was promising –

Clockwork is one of my favourite novels, too, although I can’t say I care much for the adaptation – it would’ve struck a much better tone had Kubrick known about the edition with the extra chapter.

– but I’d learned from experience that all it took to become expert enough on a person’s interests to warrant further consideration was a thirty second cramming session on Wikipedia. I had to test him further.

If you can answer the following questions without hesitation, we’ll chat for longer tomorrow.

Okay then.

1984 or Brave New World? Explain.

1984. Brave New World is wonderful but it’s aged badly because of the references to the model T Ford. It also comes across as less personal than 1984, to me, at least.

Good answer. Next question.

Plath or Hughes?

I’ve always found people’s need to be in one camp or another profoundly ridiculous when it comes to artists. Personality wise, both Ted and Sylvia had their problems, and they both behaved like arseholes at one time or another. As for their work, I don’t see how one can draw comparisons between the two: Plath’s poetry comes from her gut – you can practically see her blood on the page. Hughes was more of a storyteller, assuming different character roles to explain the world around him. If I had to pick a personal favourite, I’d have to go with Hughes; Crow saw me through my teens.

Okay, you’ve passed round one. Come back tomorrow night to play for the championship.

I put myself in incognito mode, then scrolled through his profile and smiled. He worked in publishing, loved dogs, and listed reading, cooking, architecture, and playing guitar among his interests. 

Although I would’ve been forgiven for suspecting that he had tailored his interests to suit me, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt; if he was faking it, he’d hang himself eventually. 

When I logged on to the site that night, I felt confident enough to jump ahead a step or two in my carefully choreographed get-to-know-you 

I’m going to throw caution to the wind now and give you my mobile number.

I gave him my Number, and asked him to call me that night. His response was something to the effect of “sure” but, when he didn’t call that night, or the night after that, I assumed that either he’d taken me for a weirdo and cooled off, or that there was some impediment to his communicating with me on the phone.

Either way, I was disheartened enough by my experiences with the last bastion of safe social intercourse to chuck it in altogether and give it a try the old fashioned way again. 

The pictures I shared on Facebook of mine and my best friend’s exploits over the next few weekends got plenty of Likes and messages congratulating me on conquering my anxieties, but one person saw through my plastic smile.

Is Party! double-speak for self delusion?

There was only one person on my friends list who would have read 1984, let alone been able to quote it in context. I’d accepted his friend request right before I gave him my number, and up until now I’d forgotten he was there.

Between a person who goes out to distract herself from her issues and a person who crouches behind his computer and types bold statements onto a screen in order to make himself sound appealing, whose to say whom is the more delusional?

It was a shitty thing to say, but I’ve always felt that those who like to dish out truth should also be willing and able to swallow it when required. 

I logged on to the site again a week later, more out of sheer morbid curiosity than anything else, and discovered that he’d changed his profile picture. Instead of sitting at his desk, arms folded, smiling wryly, he was sitting hunched over in a dark room, blanketed in strobe lines and interference.

I assumed he had abandoned his literary Don Juan persona for that of a tortured artiste, and the new minimalist look of his page told me more than I needed to know about the caliber of amunition I’d successfully managed to side-step.

An email I received the following day shed even further light on things. Working in I.T, you would think I’d know better than anybody not to open poorly worded emails from total strangers, but I trusted in the very expensive anti-virus program in which I’d invested.

A sng fr yu.

In the mood for a laugh, I opened the email and pressed play. What I got was a metallic, buzzing, scraping, blip and boop riddled wall of electronic noise that disturbed me enough that I reached for Jack Daniel’s at two in the afternoon. 

When the din reached its crescendo, there was about thirty seconds of silence before a bonus track of sorts poured out of my speakers:

How do you like the sound of my voice?

I deleted the file, ran a diagnostic with the anti-virus, and even pushed the mute button on my laptop, but the song played on unabated. It’s still playing now, even though the battery’s dead. 

I keep getting one word texts.

Let’s.

Chat.

At.

My.

Place.

My mobile is ringing. Best friend’s number. I’ll ask her to call the cops.

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