Lots of Love by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2004-05-23T22:00:00+00:00

As an evening downpour started in earnest, Ellen set up her laptop on the kitchen table, plugged the modem into the socket on the wall and waited for Windows to greet her with the sound of a crashing wave, as Richard had programmed it to do.

It was all very well for him to send irate text messages demanding that she read his emails, she thought, but he was the one who had cancelled their service provider. Oddlode was hardly over-subscribed with Internet cafés. It had only just occurred to her to use one of the thirty-day free-trial CD-roms that littered the junkmail which had accumulated during her parents’ absence.

Richard had persuaded her to buy the little computer three years earlier with money left to her by her grandmother. He’d loved the new slimline machine, which travelled with them across Europe, its batteries charged from every conceivable outlet, the three-pin plug inevitably carrying a caterpillar of wonky adaptors like mismatched Lego. He connected to the Net via his mobile, played online backgammon and subscribed to surfing newsgroups; he bought and sold his gear on auction sites; he emailed friends and swapped digital photos of competitions; he spent more time tapping keys than talking. It had been his biggest escape when the relationship went truly stale. In despair, Ellen had been forced to email him and request a real-life conversation. Richard didn’t get the joke.

Then, just before the split, he announced that her laptop was hopelessly out of date and had bought himself an all-singing, all-dancing Sony with the money they had saved for a new van. The new computer played DVDs and received radio stations all over the world and could be used to edit the photographs of Richard surfing to make the waves look bigger and his belly smaller. Looking back now, Ellen should have guessed what was to come – in the same way that she should have read signals into the fact that he started auctioning off almost all his possessions on eBay, updating his palmtop with addresses from her bulging old Filofax, and checking out property values in North Cornwall.

Ellen had barely used her not-very-old reject laptop, except to print out her CV. The picture that greeted her as wallpaper was the one Richard had left there – a photograph of him emerging from the tube of a vast wave near Torquay, a small, wetsuited acolyte in a water-vaulted cathedral. It was a fantastic shot. She hastily slotted the free CD-rom into the sliding drawer. The computer whirred into action and welcomed her to the World’s Favourite Internet Provider.

Five minutes later, she was online and ready to make contact. Pulling up the Outlook Explorer window, she knew that she had to face the music and check her Hotmail account to read the messages Richard kept texting her about.

She typed www.Hot . . . then paused as the scroll bar dropped down to suggest shortcuts to sites recently accessed, which started with ‘Hot’. Richard, it seemed, had liked

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