THE DELETED WOMAN

Sometimes its seems that some sites can behave quite irrationally...

It came as a shock when Rose Buttermere discovered she didn’t exist because she was really sure that she did. After all, when she pinched herself (not too hard) she could feel it and it made her wince. And when she paused to think about it she could remember all sorts of stuff that she’d done over the past seventy years, since she’d started school aged five. She couldn’t remember a deal that had happened before then, but then, not many do. But plenty had happened since, like marrying Bert and having babies and seemingly endlessly making love.

And now this. She had tried to sign into a site on the Internet that she’d used for ages, and the screen quite plainly told her that she didn’t exist, and when she tried to recover herself she ended up in the sort of pickle nobody likes to end up in.

They (that is the faceless inhuman program) wanted details that she didn’t understand. She knew what had happened: it was probably a year since she’d last signed in and somebody wanted to clear out dead wood, and she, it seemed, was dead wood.

The only reason she wanted to return to that site was because an email told her that Tom Dickhead (or something like that) had started following her and liked the story she’d written about a Victorian parlour maid who’d been abused by everyone she ever met and who had died in shame and ignominy of something to do with what her abusers had done to her, though in her Victorian head she didn’t call them abusers. To her they had been lovers. They represented the only kind of love she had ever known and even when some of them thumped her she believed they loved her. That being thumped was all part of the game.

And Tom Dickhead obviously liked that particular story and she wanted to see what he wrote and so she clicked on his name only to be told she had been deleted. She didn’t exist. There was no such person as Rose Buttermere on that site even though her thoughts and words must still be somewhere there. They must be. Tom Dickhead had found them. He had liked them and decided to follow her.

Maybe he liked the idea of the abuse of parlour maids who either worked their fingers to the bone parlour-maiding or were forced to enjoy the unenjoyable pseudo-romance in dusty cupboards. Maybe he was the kind of man who would do that to a woman. Dominate her, abuse her, hurt her... Whatever he was, she wanted to find out so she did her best to navigate a tortuous route on-line and recover herself.

But there were boxes for her to tick and she didn’t understand a single one of them.

“Sod them,” she muttered to herself, “I know that I’m here and that’s all that matters and that Thomas Dickhead can go and do unprintable things to himself!”

That made her smile because she could think of one unprintable thing she particularly wanted him to do. It involved blood. His blood.

“You’re a sadistic beast,” she told herself, “he might be a nice young man who wants to show interest in the thoughts of an old witch like you! He might even be a vicar out to heal broken souls and guide them to the light! And here I am, watching his shadow bleed to death!”

She returned to her computer and tried once gain to get the site to understand that she was really alive and really there and not someone from, say, the other side of thr world, trying to clone her being for some narcissistic purpose of his own. Or her own. It might, after all, be a woman who was trying to do such an unreasonable thing, and maybe sooner or later she’d discover that whoever it was who’d stolen her name had stolen her thoughts as well and was out there in the murky world of nasty people selling her Victorian parlour maid’s life to a film company for millions.

They do that, don’t they? Get rich on the backs of ordinary souls like herself?

But there was no joy. If she didn’t tick this or that box and provide this or that password (and it wasn’t just a password they wanted but some other code or number or whatsit that she’d never understand, not even if she had her life all over again and become genuinely the oldest woman who’s ever lived on Earth).

So instead of trying to find herself she made a cup of coffee, nice and sweet and hot, and sit munching a biscuit as far away from her keyboard as she could get. Yet it was unnerving to think that she’d been deleted. She didn’t feel deleted. She felt as alive as she’d ever felt, or at least as alive as she’d felt since Bert had passed away, her husband who had declared undying love for her every day they’d spent together until the tumour had driven thoughts of love or anything out of his brain and he’d passed away. But she did feel as alive as she’d felt on any day since the funeral.

The doorbell rang.

“Now who can that be?” she asked herself, knowing that she’d need to open the door in order to find out.

The old man standing there looked nervous and she was sure he must be at least as old as herself, and maybe even older. He looked as if he needed someone to care for him, and he smelt that way too. Was that the sweet fragrance of stale urine rising from his trousers? Had he wet himself?

“Rose Buttermere?” he asked, “is that you?”

She nodded. Who on Earth was this fragrant creature who knew her name even if he apparently didn’t recognise her face?

“I found your address on your profile,” he said, “it’s really quite silly to put that sort of detail on line for anyone to see.”

“I … er … I hadn’t thought,” she mumbled, “and anyway, I don’t exist any more, which is comforting to know.”

He grinned a lopsided unshaven grin at her.

“Neither do I,” he confided, “I’ve not existed for years! But let me introduce myself. My name’s Tom. Tom Dickhead, and according to the ether I’ve been dead for ages. I wonder … are you a parlour maid? You look old enough to be Victorian. And can I have a cup of coffee? To give me the strength before, that is, we do it?”

It was when he said those words that Rose did something she’d never done before.

Very coldly and very deliberately and using her best kitchen knife she stabbed him in the heart. Or, she thought grimly, where she hoped his heart might be.

And as he fell down on her doorstep she knew one thing. She must be really and truly alive else how on Earth could she have done that?

© Peter Rogerson 07.08.21

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