All the Things You Are by Declan Hughes Read Free Book Online

who appeared at the Arboretum gate, Danny pocketing a chef’s knife before going down to see him. She can’t tell Dee about that, not yet.
    â€˜I don’t know. Ask me something else.’
    â€˜Why take your laptop, which presumably was up here, but nothing else?’
    â€˜I don’t know. Wait. No, it wasn’t up here, it was in the kitchen, I used it to check if there were any delays at the airport before the flight. I left it on the kitchen table. So he didn’t come up here; he just, I don’t know, left things as they were.’
    â€˜All right. What about your email, you can get it on your phone, right? Have you not checked it yet?’
    Claire shakes her head. ‘I don’t have my phone set up to get email.’
    Dee looks at her with eyebrows raised, as if she’d said she didn’t have a cell phone, or that she didn’t believe in the Internet. Dee upgrades her laptop as soon as a new model appears. She has waited in line for an iPod, iPhone, an iPad. Dee has over seven hundred friends on Facebook, yet there were only seven people at her fortieth birthday dinner, five of them her employees. Dee has signed Claire up for Facebook too, and recruited friends on her behalf, but Claire has no interest in visiting the site, considers it some kind of bizarre high-school regression mechanism, even though everyone she knows seems to be on it, all the moms at school, the women in her book club, the theater people. And what about that woman in England who said she was going to commit suicide, and all her twelve hundred or so friends did was sneer and laugh at the prospect, not one of them tried to stop her. And she went through with it. Brave New World. Without Claire in it.
    She’s not a complete luddite. She does use email (but email is so last century, Dee says) and obviously if she wants to book a flight, or buy a book – although she’d still much rather go to a store like Mystery to Me or Avol – but she doesn’t want to view the sex tape of some celebrity she’s never heard of, or make contact with someone she didn’t even like when she was at school and who fate intended she never meet again, and quite right too. So why does Claire always feel the need to justify herself and her own lack of interest in technology? Because, of course, at this stage of the twenty-first century, Claire, the tech-refusenik, who doesn’t want to be connected to everyone all the time, is emphatically the odd one out. There used to be a time when being the odd one out was cool. Not any more.
    â€˜I … never really saw the need,’ Claire continues. ‘I mean, it’s not as if I’m in business or anything. No one is sending me an email so vital I have to answer it when I’m in line at Target or somewhere. It’s always only an hour or two until I’m home.’
    Dee makes her patience-of-a-(medieval)-saint face and extends her palm without a word. Claire places her cell phone in it.
    â€˜I think I have all your details, except your password. Mind if I go ahead?’
    â€˜Please.’
    Claire stands and walks to the window, unable to bear the seizure of pleasure that animates Dee’s features as she gets to grips with the iPhone Claire only has because Dee insisted she upgrade from the battered old Nokia she actually liked, and understood how to operate.
    â€˜I think my password is—’
    â€˜Barbara1,’ Dee trills. ‘I tried Barbara, and then added the numeral; it’s the obvious choice if you want a mix of letters and numbers but need to make it easy to remember. Nine out of ten moms pick the eldest child.’
    Claire knows she shouldn’t really feel as irritated as she does. Dee is only trying to help, actually
is
helping. She has constructed a website for Claire as well, listing all of her stage triumphs, with photographs and a résumé that starts off bright and busy and then tails off into