First One Missing by Tammy Cohen Read Free Book Online

The kitchen in this flat was tiny, a galley kitchen it was called, so the dining table was in the living room, but he preferred it that way. He could sit at the table and see everything he needed to see – the television, the street outside. He had never understood the fuss people made about eat-in kitchens. Why would you want to eat in the place where the bin is? Or where you chop raw meat?
    The table was a squarish white one from Ikea pushed against the middle of the wall exactly halfway between the twin living-room windows so that if you folded the room in half it would all match up. It felt important to him, that line of symmetry. The flat, which he got at a cheaper rent on account of it being above a laundrette, was purpose-built and all the rooms were like boxes, no feature fireplaces or alcoves. People always went on about original features like it was so great to have cornices on the ceilings and picture rails but for Jason it was all about clean lines and neat corners. No nooks and crannies where dirt and germs could hide.
    Lining up the edge of the laptop with the edge of the table, Jason noticed a smudge on the glossy black surface of the machine’s casing. Cursing, he made his way back to the kitchen to get the computer cloth from the drawer.
    Logging on to matchmadeinheaven.com , he saw he had only three unread messages in his inbox and a hard ball of disappointment formed in the back of his throat. Normally he got at least five or six overnight. He glanced at his profile photo again. Nothing wrong there. It was a studio photograph taken a couple of years ago (not ten years ago, not like some of those you got on dating sites. ‘In my late thirties,’ they said, and you knew they actually meant fifty-something. So many liars out there. People had forgotten how to tell the truth). His blond hair was a bit shorter in the picture than now, but his physique was still the same. You could tell here was someone who took staying in shape very seriously indeed. In the photo Jason was wearing a crisp white T-shirt, not queer tight, but tight enough that it stretched across his biceps, and he had a very small neat blond goatee beard. He was looking directly at the camera (he never trusted profile photos where people were looking away or, even worse, wearing sunglasses. You could tell a lot from a person’s eyes). His avatar was ToughButSensitive. Not very original, but it did the job. Jason was aware that many people tried to make their names funny but it was a mistake as far as he was concerned. Women said they wanted funny, but they didn’t really. It’s like when they said they wanted equality, but that was a lie too, because really they wanted you to take them out and buy them things and tell them they looked fantastic, but they didn’t want to do the same things for you. Oh no. So how was that equal then?
    Double-clicking on his inbox, Jason noted that one of the three messages was from Suzy, aka ButterfliesInMyTummy, and his mood lifted. It was the fourth or fifth message they’d exchanged, and they were just starting to move beyond the tedious small-talk stage. He skimmed through the message, growing increasingly impatient. Suzy favoured those little face icons. The whole page was littered with them – smiley faces, sad faces, surprised faces, embarrassed faces. Why couldn’t she just use words like everyone else? She also put five or six exclamation marks after a sentence, or added extra vowels to words, so everything was sooooooooo much fun or soooooooooo boring. It wound Jason up when people couldn’t write properly. He wasn’t asking for brain of Britain, but he liked a woman to be able to write a sentence that started with a capital letter and ended with a full stop and at least made an attempt at the Queen’s English. At least it wasn’t in text speak. He refused to answer the messages that spelled thanks ‘tnx’. Britain didn’t go through two World Wars so that the English language could be