by Sam Byers
His attentiveness, she felt, was bait for the attention of others. She was about to say she wasn’t in a rush, despite being desperate to go, so that he’d have to make more of a show of wanting to leave, despite wanting to stay, when somewhere behind her, on the other side of the room, she became aware of movement. She saw Robert’s eyes slide sideways from hers, his gaze move over her shoulder to whatever it was that was happening. She heard someone say, ‘Thank you, thank you, great to see so many of you here,’ and turned to see a small, pale man making his way to the front of the room clutching a sheaf of papers.
It wasn’t an entirely unusual occurrence. The relentless social and professional injunction to self-publicise meant the general public had to be perpetually alert to the possibility of what had come to be called guerrilla readings. Once, well-meaning literary evenings had offered a safe and trusting environment in which writers could indulge their oratory urges, but public charity had proved finite. Now, traumatically released back into the care of the community, a generation of authors hooked on the salon’s spotlight were forced to forage for attention where they could.
People began to boo.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ said Robert. ‘Seriously. Enough of this shit now.’
‘Get off,’ someone called.
The man found a patch of space towards the front of the room. There was, Jess thought, something amiss with his face. The more she looked, the less certain she became that it even was a him. The clothes read male, as did the hair and the voice, but the features were decidedly androgynous.
‘May third,’ said the man. ‘Twelve seventeen a.m. WWW dot teen sluts dot com. Who am I?’
He was wearing a white shirt, cream chinos, and a loosely knotted paisley tie. As Jess watched him speak, the issues with his face became more apparent. His cheeks and lips moved in a manner at odds with the words he was making. His forehead remained motionless, as did the skin around his eyes.
‘May seventh,’ he went on. ‘Eleven thirty-six p.m. WWW dot balls deep in burkha dot com. Who am I?’
Tolerance for these unsolicited readings had reached rock bottom. People turned hostile quickly, shouting for the man to leave. Someone asked him who he was, as if his ultimate crime was to be unknown.
‘May thirteenth,’ he shouted. ‘Nine oh seven a.m. Email. Dearest. I have to be quick. She’ll be home soon … Who am I?’
Jess felt men to her left and right moving towards the reader, flanking him. Others followed. Someone said, ‘That’s enough,’ and someone else said, ‘Not here and not tonight.’ The would-be reader tried to raise his voice, stepped back to avoid those who were now reaching out towards him. Someone had a hold of his shirt. He shouted, ‘Let go of me,’ several times, and lashed out slightly hopelessly at his nearest attacker before being knocked to the floor. Then he was up off the floor, transported doorwards by his legs and arms. In his fist was a sheaf of flyers: A5, sparsely printed, black and white. Writhing in the grip of his restrainers, he tossed the flyers upwards in a fluttering cloud. As they landed, Jess could read what was printed in the centre of the otherwise blank page.
What Don’t You Want To Share?
First Disruption. The Square. Friday. 8pm.
WWW.WEAREYOURFACE.COM
As he passed, Jess was able to see his face, and what was wrong with it became clear. When he blinked, his eyelids were set back, recessed. He seemed to have two sets of lips, one behind the other. His face wasn’t his face at all, she realised, but an eerily life-like rubber mask covering the whole of his head. Even his hair was synthetic.
‘What don’t you want to share?’ he called. As he was carried round the corner, out of sight, he said it again, louder. ‘What don’t you want to share?’
An awkward silence followed: the sound of mass drink-sipping and throat-clearing, a moment of collective and individual readjustment.
‘What was that?’ someone said.
There were shrugs.
‘Welcome,’ someone else said, ‘to the post-meaning world.’
The man beside him nodded sagely.
‘Meaning’s dead,’ he said.
*
‘I mean, was it some kind of art thing? Some kind of satire?’
They drove home through the warm dark of early summer, Jess at the wheel, the party receding behind them like a drained wave.
‘He was wearing … What was he wearing?’ continued Robert. ‘Some kind of mask?’
‘But a mask that looked like a face.’ Jess gave a little shudder. ‘Creepy.’
‘Whose face? Was it a famous face?’
‘Not one I’ve ever seen.’
‘Because I could understand it, maybe, if it was a famous face.’
‘Maybe he’s famous underneath the mask.’
‘Maybe,’ said Robert, ‘it was Byron bloody Stroud.’
Outside, the East Anglian flatland unfolded blankly, smears of hedgerow streaking the space between car and field. How long had they been here, away from the city? Jess was still disoriented by the unbroken blackness. She cracked the window, tilted her face to the sped-up air that entered.
‘Please don’t smoke in the car, Jess.’
‘Do I look like I’m smoking?’
‘You look like you’re thinking about smoking.’
Ahead, as they rounded a bend, the sulphurous glow of The Arbor split the dark, its hot white security lights throwing spark-like reflections off the tensile fencing and angled glass. Over the gate, the name of the multinational tech company that had made its home here was gently spotlit in determined sans-serif: Green. In places, thick trees obscured the shattered light, giving it the appearance of either stars or pin-pricked, glowing data points.
‘We’ve become one of those plate-glass couples,’ she said.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning people see right through us.’
‘I take it you didn’t particularly enjoy the thing,’ said Robert.
‘When do I ever?’
‘What are we going to do? Stay home?’
‘Those are our choices? Go to something we don’t like or stay home?’
‘Effectively, yes.’
‘And they say romance is dead.’
‘Everything’s dead.’
‘That is such bullshit. That’s exactly why I hate these things. You just come away spouting the same posturing nihilistic claptrap as everyone else.’
They pulled into the driveway in silence. Once, Jess would have experienced these lapses in dialogue with a hair-shirt discomfort. She would, many times, have ended up saying something conciliatory simply for the sake of saying something. But she’d come to realise this was merely playing into Robert’s hands. His conversation was like his affection: he used it to get what he wanted, and when that didn’t work he weaponised its withdrawal.
She locked the front door behind them and wandered through to the kitchen for a drink of water, letting the tap run for a few seconds before filling a glass. Her Robert-sense alerted her to his presence behind her. Even without looking at him she could picture his posture: slightly hunched, hands in his pockets. They each knew their post-tension choreography. He became tentative, uncertain. She was more poised, waiting for him to ease things.
She was still sipping the water when she detected the inevitable creep of his hand, holding her, pulling her towards him.
‘I hate it when we argue,’ he said into her ear.
‘Me too,’ she said, patting his hand but not turning round.
‘Sorry for being a prick,’ he said. She could feel his smile against her flesh: placatory, slightly dismissive. He wanted, she knew, for her to turn around, kiss him, tell him he wasn’t a prick. Instead, she carried on looking ahead, turning the now-empty glass in her hand.
‘It’s fine,’ she said.
He drew a breath and held it. She waited for his response. She felt as if she could hear him thinking, weighing potential retorts.
‘Love you,’ he said.
It was as close as they got, these days, to an argument. A sharp word or gesture; a careful, fearful retreat.
‘Love you too,’ she said.
0001
‘You’re nobody until somebody hates you, Robert. And now someone really hates you, I think it’s fair to say you’re finally really somebody, no?’
‘But why does she hate me? What have I done?’
Robert’s morning had begun, after the usual ritual of coffee and a quick scroll through the bile-filled comments under his latest piece, with a pep talk from Silas.
‘You’re ruffling feathers,’ said Blandford. ‘You’re writing about what’s real. Of course people are going to hate you.’
As he was saying real, Silas had leaned enthusiastically close to his webcam, causing his face – self-consciously unshaven and set into a rictus of gurning enthusiasm – to loom so impossibly large on Robert’s computer screen that Robert was forced to minimise the window to a small square in the corner.
‘Right.’
‘It’s like those fish. You know, the ones that are so massive they’re covered in smaller, crapper fish.’
‘Sucker fish.’
‘Sucker fish. Yeah. This Julia whatever she’s called, she’s a sucker fish.’
‘Then shouldn’t she be more sycophantic? Like, to follow your analogy through, shouldn’t she be sucking up to me?’
‘No-one sucks up any more. It backfires. If she sucks up to you, someone’s going to start hating on her for sucking up to you, and you know what? That someone is probably going to get attention for it. So better to get in there early with some pre-emptive hatred and get credit for that. Anyway, hatred equals hate-clicks, so, you know, win.’
‘But I don’t want hate-clicks. I want people to like what I’m doing.’
‘Like, dislike,’ said Silas. ‘What’s the difference?’
Robert took a moment to process the fine line this question walked between inadvertent profundity and total vapidity – the exact fine line, of course, that Silas’s website – The Command Line – had staked its success on exploiting.
He scrolled below the line for perhaps the fifth or sixth time this morning. Julia Benjamin – ‘JuBenja’ – had commented at her usual length and wild pitch, bemoaning ‘not so much what Townsend stands for as what his ideals so conveniently obscure: his baffled, ageing technophobia; his dewy-eyed romanticisation of a rosetinted working class; and his determination, through all the usual smug, tub-thumping, sub-Hitchens, mansplainer posturing, to make himself the heart and focus of every cause. Townsend doesn’t care about the people of the Larchwood, he cares about the extent to which he’s seen to care about the people of the Larchwood, and so his every self-congratulatory intervention reads less like the cri de coeur he so clearly wants it to be and more like the shameless exercise in self-promotion and personal glorification it really is.’
‘It’s a bloodbath, Silas.’
‘Well, let it get bloody, that’s my motto. She’s half-responsible for making this thing the thing that it is.’
‘What do you mean she’s half-responsible?’
‘She’s pulling traffic. People are now clicking on your articles and scrolling straight to the comments section to see what she’s written.’
Robert sank back in his chair as this profoundly depressing piece of news took up residence along the sciatic nerve of his psyche.
‘Anyway,’ Silas said. ‘Moving on. About this estate.’
‘The Larchwood,’ said Robert, trying to ignore the fact that Silas had moved on without agreeing to do anything about the fact that Robert’s reputation, talent, and manhood were being daily dragged through the mud. The way Silas referred to the Larchwood only as the estate bothered him. As if the fact of it being an estate was all you needed to know.
‘People are loving this estate, Robert. They’re loving its plight. All this … What’s the word you use?’
‘Decanting.’
‘Decanting. Right. This estate has become an emblem. Of what, who knows, but it’s up there. It’s like the bat signal. You’ve put this estate up there in the sky and everyone’s looking and everyone’s feeling like it means something. Yeah?’
‘Well, I hope so,’ said Robert.
‘But here’s the thing: it’s kind of capital-J journalism, you know?’
Robert paused, briefly thrown by the fact that Silas had somehow managed to deploy this phrase as a criticism.
‘Well I am a journalist,’ he said.
‘Right,’ said Silas. ‘Sure. I mean, absolutely. It’s just that, this is The Command Line, you know?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning, what’s our angle? We can’t just go out there and take everyone else’s angle, Rob. The existing angle, the obvious angle, is really no angle at all. Do you see what I’m saying?’
‘People are being forced out of their homes so a private corporation can erect some kind of mega-complex. That’s the angle, Silas.’
‘Right, and that’s great. I mean, it’s not great, obviously. But it’s great you’re so … right-on about it. And, hey, gentrification, right? People are loving gentrification right now. All the gentrifiers are guilt-reading pieces about gentrification like it’s going out of fashion, which, conveniently, it isn’t. So market-wise you’re like completely dead on. But what I’m saying is: decanting, social housing, megacorporation, all of that, great. But is it edgy, Rob? Is it now?’
‘I’ve actually been congratulated on just how now it is, Silas.’
‘But could it be more now? That’s what I’m thinking.’
What, Robert wondered, could be more now than now?
‘Well it’s happening now.’
‘But we could take so much more of a now angle, don’t you think?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning all this technology stuff. This, what do you call it?’
‘Ubiquitous technology.’
‘Ubiquitous technology. Right. The whole point of this new project is that it’s going to be some kind of networked solution, right? What I’m saying is, hang on, that’s kind of cool. Couldn’t we do more with that?’
Robert took a long, steadying breath.
‘We’ve had this conversation, Silas. I’m not writing some trendy fucking tech piece, OK? I’m writing about people. This estate, this story, this whole thing, it’s about people. People are being kicked out of their homes. People are being lied to. People are being intimidated. Are you telling me people don’t want to read about—’
‘They want to read about things that are cool, funny, or evil. That’s the holy trinity.’
‘Have you read the proposals, Silas? We’re talking a stratified tenancy model here. We’re talking separate entrances for different tiers of residents. We’re looking at a network in which people can accrue community points by logging in and offering their services. It’s a game, Silas. If you’re telling me that segregating a community according to income and property value and then gamifying what little social mobility they have left isn’t evil, then I don’t even really know what evil is any more, to be honest.’
‘I would say that it’s more sad than evil, Rob.’
‘I’m sorry, Silas, but you can’t just boil everything down to—’
‘We’re very much in the boiling down business, Rob. Boiling down is like totally what we do.’
‘I’m not dumbing this down for a bunch of children, Silas. This is about lives. This is about—’
‘Alright, alright. Jesus. Don’t give me the speech again. Let’s change tack. What if we zoom in, make it more relatable?’
‘You’re saying: personalise it.’
‘I’m saying: less massive thing that is happening, more tiny person that it’s happening to.’
‘Like, find someone who embodies what’s happening and—’
‘Exactly.’
Robert nodded, already coming round to the idea.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I’ll find someone.’
>
‘Great.’
‘And meanwhile, you’ll try and do something about this Julia—’
‘Glad we had this chat, Rob.’
*
Darkin awoke to pain, so numbness was his first priority. After turning back the covers, he would pause, perched on the edge of the bed, as life and all the agony that came with it flowed downwards to his feet. Then he would stand and feel it spread, feel himself weaken before it. There was a moment, always, when he swayed, when the floor loomed closer and sparks lit the gloom of his vision. Sometimes, he’d sit back down, cowed. Other times, he would simply fall – straight forwards, face to the floor.
If he didn’t fall he walked. It was a tense stand-off between warring bodily factions. Feet and legs were all for holding back, but his stinging bladder waited for no man. Two or three mornings a week he wouldn’t make it. For so much of his life there had been a familiarity to what he produced. His shit had smelled like his own shit, his piss like his own piss. He knew his sweat, the intimate taste of his breath. Now, his urine was foreign to him, his saliva unpalatable. He caught wafts of himself as he moved and felt distanced from the man that made them.
Around him, Darkin’s flat had begun its own battle with time’s effects. Multiple varieties of damp had made brazen incursions: some pushing upwards from below, some creeping inwards and downwards from the upper edges. A species of mushroom had colonised the corners. Silverfish had overrun the kitchen. Rodents scrabbled audibly behind the skirting boards.
This interior decay was matched by its exterior equivalent. Darkin had lived here long enough to remember the Larchwood Estate’s aspirational beginnings. He’d had his suspicions even then, of course, but behind the lofty ideals the plans had seemed convincing. Now everything had slid, and what few neighbours Darkin could name had been pushed out by Downton – the estate’s new owner – whose plans for the Larchwood seemed to depend on it being empty.
His mission to the bathroom completed, Darkin would make a cup of tea with which to wash down his tablets, light a cigarette, set his kitchen timer to mark the appropriate interval until his next tightly rationed smoke, and settle down with his newspaper of choice, The Record, at which point he would be reminded that the decay he saw and felt in his body, his flat, and the estate outside was merely the closest observable evidence that everything, without exception, was going to shit.
