The man who was not there

Fiction, about adults over 18. She lost no money and sent no photograph. What it cost her was five weeks of being understood by a man who did not exist.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I still have all of it. Five weeks of messages, and at the very top there is one about a book, because that is how it started. He had actually read it, including the middle section, which he thought was self-indulgent and so did I.

His name was Tobias. There was no Tobias.

One thing before the rest of it. Every account of this I have read makes the man sound like an obvious fraud, and if he had been an obvious fraud I would have been gone by day two.

He was good at it. In the second week he asked me a question nobody in my actual life has ever asked me, which was what I thought would happen to me afterwards. Not during. Afterwards. Would I want to be left alone or not, asked in the tone you would use about sugar in tea.

He brought up safe words before I did. His exact phrasing, which I could quote in my sleep: you can stop this at any point, including in the car park, including after we have said hello, and I will not sulk about it. He suggested a pub with a friend of mine sitting two tables over, and he suggested it first.

In week four he asked, very lightly, whether I would send him a picture. Nothing like that, he said. Just a face. I said I would rather not yet, and he said of course, immediately, no explanation wanted. I thought that was the most reassuring thing that had happened all month. I understand now that a man who is after one particular thing can afford to be gracious about everything else.

The photograph came on a Tuesday.

I had recommended a paperback and he had gone out and bought it, which nobody has done for me since about 2011, and he sent me a picture of it on his kitchen table next to a mug. I looked at that photograph for a long time in a very warm sort of way.

Then I looked at it again the next morning while I was brushing my teeth, and I saw the socket on the wall behind the kettle. Two round holes.

Here is what my brain did in the next four minutes, and it is the whole story. It started producing explanations. A rented flat with old wiring. A shaver point. A holiday let. His brother's place in Alicante, taken last summer and sent to me now because he could not be bothered to get up and stage anything. I had four of those inside a minute, and I had not asked him a single question.

Nobody had lied to me at that point. I did all the work myself, at the bathroom sink, at twenty past seven in the morning, before he was awake to defend himself.

I asked for a video call that evening. I made it sound casual and it took me about forty minutes to write.

The camera on his laptop had packed up before Christmas. He said he looked like a hostage on it anyway, and I laughed, out loud, alone in my front room. That is a real detail and I would rather not have to include it.

Friday, I asked again. He was at his mother's, the wifi there is dreadful, and we said Sunday instead.

Sunday he had to drive to Doncaster for a job. That evening he sent the message I keep coming back to. He would rather the first time I saw his face was in a room with him in it, with a drink in front of us, instead of on a phone screen in my kitchen.

Which is lovely. It is a genuinely lovely thing to say to a woman of forty-four who has spent two years not having lovely things said to her. I read it three times and felt better, and the feeling better is the part that frightens me now. He had turned me down twice and I came away comforted.

My friend Priya ended it without knowing she was doing anything.

She rang about a work thing, and at the end of the call she said, how is he, and I said fine, and then I heard myself say the sentence for the first time. He has not managed a video call yet. Out loud, in my own kitchen, in my own voice. Priya went quiet for about two seconds. She did not have to say anything.

You can hold a thing in your head for weeks. Say it down a phone to a woman who has known you for twenty years and it changes shape in your mouth. I had a list of reasons and every one of them worked perfectly well in my head. Not one of them survived being spoken.

I put his photographs through a reverse image search that night. Two came back on the website of a modelling agency in Riga. One came back attached to a man in Perth with a wife and a boat. Nine minutes.

I could have done that in week one. That is the sentence I have had to sit with. Nine minutes, any evening, for thirty-five days, and I did not, and there is no version of that where I was tricked.

Nobody tells you what the cost actually is, so I will.

It was never really the man. I could have got over a man in a fortnight. What I had was five weeks of somebody knowing.

I had written it all down over a fortnight of late nights, in the stupid brave way you can only manage at half eleven with the lights off. That I want to be told off, and I want it to be about my behaviour and nothing else. That some part of me wants to be told to go and stand somewhere and stay there, and has done since my twenties, without one word of it ever getting said out loud to a living soul.

I typed that into a phone with my thumbs. Somebody read it and said yes, that makes sense, and then asked a follow-up question.

Closing the account meant putting the whole lot back in the drawer and going back to being the only person on earth who knew.

I sat on the hall floor with my back against the radiator and cried for a while, and I would like the record to show that I knew at the time it was not about him.

There was no confrontation. There is no scene where you tell him what you have worked out, because he is not there to be told, and the account is a shift somebody is working.

I wrote him about six hundred words and did not send them. Then I screenshotted the whole conversation and the profile, reported it, and blocked him. I did the reporting first because I had read that you should, and I am glad, because I would not have had the stomach for it later.

He never asked me for money. From what I have read since, the ask tends to come around week eight or nine, once the thing is heavy enough to carry it, and I got out at five. So I will never know what the ask was going to be, and I mind that, because some part of me wanted it in writing so I could stop arguing with myself.

The munch was a fortnight after that.

I found it on a listing that had been sitting open in a tab since March. Third Thursday of the month, back room of a pub in a town twenty miles from mine, seven o'clock, look for the table with the cardboard sign.

I sat in that car park for eleven minutes with the engine off and both hands on the wheel. What got me out was working out that I would otherwise have to drive home as a woman who had sat in a car park for eleven minutes.

It was awful and I will go again next month. The room was too bright and there was a plate of crisps on the table that nobody had touched all night. A woman called Jan, sixties, cardigan, name badge in biro, said "first one?" and then talked at me about her allotment for four minutes so that I could get my breath back. I did not work out that she had done it on purpose until I was on the ring road.

Nobody in that room said anything as good as Tobias said. A man got a word wrong and somebody corrected him and he took it perfectly well. Two people spent a quarter of an hour disagreeing about the parking. They were all just there in a pub on a Thursday, with faces.

I drove home at half nine with the radio off and my hands were shaking. That had not happened once in all thirty-five days. The most understanding man I have ever come across and my pulse never left resting, and then two hours in a function room and I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

Jan asked whether I would be there in September. I said probably. It is in the calendar now, which is not the same thing as being brave about it, and on the third Thursday I will sit in that car park again and be frightened, and every single person through that door will have a face.