Free Cyber Cinderella by Christina Hopkinson Page B

Correspondent would only talk to other foreign correspondents and they’d say things like “Eddie! But I haven’t seen him since Tora Bora. Didn’t he look fabulous in a burka?” and they’d look disparagingly at us civvies, while we tried to pity them their inability to maintain long-term relationships.
    Could Foreign Correspondent be cyber-stalker? This could be my only opportunity to find out.
    “I can’t see you tonight,” I said, perhaps for the first time. “But, look, I can be in Paddington in half an hour. Let’s have a coffee somewhere near there.” I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I was a sight. “Make that three-quarters of an hour. See you.”
    “Are you going out?” asked George from beneath the duvet.
    “Yes, that was—”
    “You couldn’t be a darling and nip back with a couple of cans of Coke. No make that a bottle.”
    “That was Jonny. Just flying in from the Gulf on his way to Korea or something. Now that’s journalism, don’t you agree?”
    George snorted. “The features desk is the new foreign desk. Hasn’t he realized that? Nobody cares about newspaper foreign reports in the age of CNN,” he said, mummifying himself further in the Egyptian cotton bed linen. “Make it a family-size bottle would you, my poppet.”
    “Big night?”
    “Hardly,” he said.
    *
    At the appointed venue I saw him. He probably did look very dashing at some foreign press club, but here in a London coffee shop he just looked unfashionable. Living abroad for the past decade had contrived to make sure that his wardrobe was preserved in aspic as that of the generic media man circa 1993—black-zipped, mildly blouson leather jacket, chinos, a pale blue denim-appearance shirt and desert boots. This period piece was topped by a floppy fringe that would have been replaced by a number one crop had he been living in London, especially given the state of his hair recession. Two competing entrances of fore-head tunneled into his crown. These A-roads were perilously close to meeting and becoming a great big divided highway of baldness across his pate.
    The Foreign Correspondent had once said that his eyes had seen too much destruction. I don’t know about that, but his skin had seen too much sun. He had the mottled look of a junk-store mirror, as the boyish freckles became full-blown liver spots.
    I continued my snapshot full-frontal attack on his appearance. I had to before we spoke; it made me feel better. It was always the same routine on meeting the brave war reporter: shock at his appearance, awe at his glamour. His personality would make you forget the reality of his face and force you to believe that he was every bit as handsome and airbrushed as the byline photograph beneath his articles on the horrors of war.
    His teeth were bad, yellowing and withering, with gums eroding like chalk face. I knew this from having studied them before, not from looking at them anew. Today I couldn’t muse on his molars because a surgical mask covered his mouth and nose.
    “What on earth are you wearing that for?” I asked by way of a greeting.
    He glanced around the coffee room and then leaned forward. “Don’t tell anyone this, classified info, but there’s a virulent virus that’s going to explode in Europe. Of course, you may survive it, but I won’t have your Western immunity. I’d sooner jump in a pool full of lepers than walk around London with my mask off.”
    “I thought these diseases all came from the East, not here?” I said, remembering the last really-severe-terrible-chronic syndrome to have infectiously spread through the newspapers’ health pages and plagued their leader columns.
    “That’s what they tell you,” he said knowingly.
    “You’re such a scaredy-pants,” I said and sat down, watching his mask stain yellow as he puffed a tab through it, like that school experiment when we had to examine the nicotine left on a tissue by a mechanically smoked cigarette. He kissed me on the cheek,