Read Online The Woman Who Stopped Traffic by Daniel Pembrey - Free Book Online

thank for that?  It had taken her father years to become a featured columnist for Le Monde . He’d trained under the most experienced of reporters, his copy obsessively researched, proof-read, fact-checked, with earlier attempts shredded by editors bearing down their decades of experience on him, his later attempts finally accepted and vouchsafed by one of the world’s great news organizations. It had been an apprenticeship. A calling. And that was before considering the substance . A single memory flashed up, of an elderly man sitting at their apartment on the Avenue Kléber, mumbling to her father about worldly matters. The tobacco smell was as pungent in her nostrils as though it were yesterday. She must have been three or four at the time. The man was Jean-Paul Sartre, in the last year of his life.
    What would her father make of this self-referential nonsense were he still alive? She shivered and scrolled back to the photo area of the page. There she was on the beach, in a brown bikini, standing with hands in prayer position. She vaguely remembered the moment, with two other girls from the yoga organization, after snorkeling one afternoon: a Thank You to the wonders of the sea or some such. The photo had been cropped to focus on her glistening chest, down which water trickled. There was another photo of her on the beach, this time horseback riding. To avoid skin rash, she’d worn breeches and old boots. She remembered it well: galloping along in the early day with several others, sea spray and salt air and horse smell and the rhythmic movement of massive limbs filling her world. This time a three-quarter shot, from behind. Hers.
    A third photo: a close up, less flattering, revealing the fine lines spreading round her eyes. Others from the yoga studio… All real. Doubtless they’d been taken by retreat-goers and posted online somewhere, perhaps even the yoga retreat’s own website. None appeared to have been digitally altered. But the way they’d been edited together created an unmistakable impression:
    Look at Me! Am I not gorgeously desirable, glamorous and SEXY !?
    It was everything she’d tried to avoid for so much of her life. At boarding school, the daughter of Lorelei Chevalier-Smythe – not even a well-known model! – yet enough of one to make her an easy target for the comments and malicious gossip of other girls. Hence the avoidance of anything like these photos. Then she saw her whiteboard:
    Downwerd  d oggie style oh YEAH
    Her profile page apparently lacked even the minimum level of security. Anyone could access it and write whatever they wanted. And everyone could read the result:
    Id like 2 ride that ! !
    Pricks. But it could have been a lot worse. Perhaps she was overreacting? The photos were not awful. The lewd comments were self-evidently the work of prying creeps. Others were weirdly complimentary:
    Super cool! Where d’ya get that bikini from?
    – one woman, a complete stranger, had posted. Ordinarily, closing a Clamor account – the foundation if not entirety of many peoples’ social lives – was an arduous old task if you lacked the account login and password. But she was now working for Clamor. She resigned herself to calling Nguyen or Malovich, finishing up the night with her friends, then emailing everyone in the morning: “my account was just hacked…” At the end of the day, no one had stopped breathing.
    Then she saw it.
    The continuation of the blog.
    Oh. My. God.
    – guess I was the wrong person for my last job, coz it succkked!! Or maybe I just sucked the wrong guy, but that’s another kinda job Ha Ha!
    She pushed the laptop away. Her girlfriends’ arms wrapped round her:
    “We didn’t know how to tell you,” one said soothingly.
    Noise and confusion…
    “RAY-mee!” Stacey and Melinda were chorusing to the barman across the room, who was flailing among the dusty, expensive bottles in one corner...
    “No-wh!” they called out: “The RAY-mee ex - oh !”
    Only the