by Sam Byers
At around one, Silas Skyped in for a catch-up.
‘Robster. How’s the man of the hour? Are you basking? Tell me you’re basking.’
‘I’m … I guess I’m kind of basking, yeah.’
‘Are you really basking though? Or are you basking in that like super-English, oh, what, me? kind of way? Because how many opportunities does a guy get to truly bask, Rob?’
‘OK. Consider me on basking standby.’
‘Great. So anyway, update.’
‘Right.’
‘Basically: you’re super hot right now. That’s not a metaphor. I’m looking at a heat map of traffic and you’re literally a hotspot.’
‘That’s great.’
‘You’re not the hotspot, of course.’
‘No.’
‘But you’re in the mix. You’re the plucky little hotspot that could.’
‘That’s really good to know, Silas.’
‘But look. We need to capitalise on this window. Because it’s a small and rapidly closing window. Less like an actual window you and I might be accustomed to seeing in the modern world, and more like one of those, like, slits they have in castles.’
‘I think they were for archery.’
‘Right. Exactly. That’s perfect. You’re in the castle, Rob, and OK, maybe you haven’t got the biggest window, but you’ve got your little slit in the wall and you are firing your arrows through it like there’s no tomorrow. Am I right? Maybe we could get that done as a cartoon or something.’
‘Don’t you think that would send kind of the wrong impression? Like, here I am in my ivory tower of pure privilege, raining down arrows on—’
‘Own that though, Rob. I mean, really own it. The world doesn’t need another cowering white man. You get me?’
‘To a point …’
‘Which is where this whole genocide thing comes in.’
‘Genocide? Oh Jesus fucking Christ. Is this to do with Julia Benjamin? What’s she said now?’
‘No, Rob. Julia-whatever-her-face is yet to respond, although to be honest I can’t wait until she does, because once she swings onto the scene you’re going to go from hot to scorching. The bro brigade are already all over your piece. Once Julia Benjamin gets involved, they’re going to be all over her too, and everyone else is going to be all over them being all over each other, meaning my heat-mapping software will basically come. But whatever. No, this is about the genocide woman.’
‘What genocide woman?’
‘You’re not following this? This is literally happening right now, in Edmundsbury, where you live, and you have no idea? What have you been doing all morning?’
Robert had spent the entire morning repeatedly refreshing his notifications and link-searching reactions to his piece, and so had little sense of anything happening to anyone else. The reminder that there even was anyone else, or that any story besides his own might be the subject of discussion, came as something of a rude awakening.
‘I’ve had a lot of correspondence to deal with,’ he said. ‘Wait, hang on. There’s another fucking Edmundsbury story?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Not The Griefers, not me, but another one.’
‘Right.’
Robert allowed this to sink in. It was as if, he thought, the universe was perpetually and stubbornly tilted against even his most modest success. First The Griefers stole his thunder, and now someone else, some other Edmundsbury inhabitant, was threatening to steal what miserable murmur of thunder remained. It felt like some grand, cosmic-level joke: all these things happening in Edmundsbury, where nothing ever happened, just as he’d been halfway successful in making something happen. The moment he realised this, though, was the moment he realised something else: whatever he felt about the piece, whatever he felt about what he’d uttered and unleashed, the thought of it playing second fiddle appalled him. The knowledge that people were reading what he’d written, relating to what he’d written, was uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the idea of people failing to read it at all.
‘Well?’ he said, a little too sharply. ‘What is it?’
‘This woman. Trina James. Black woman. Lives in Edmundsbury. She was watching Hugo Bennington on television the other night, and she was, you know, tweeting away, as you do, and she kind of tweeted the hashtag white male genocide.’
‘But not, you know, seriously?’
‘Seriously or not seriously. What does it matter? It’s words on a screen, Rob.’
‘But I think there’s a difference between—’
‘OK: word to the wise. Do not go down that road. That road is available, yes. It may even appear the more sensible road. But nonetheless, stay off it. Because this is a fucking godsend for you, Robert, and everyone knows you do not look a godsend in the mouth.’
‘Why is this a—’
Even as he was asking the question, the only possible answer was shaping itself in Robert’s mind. ‘Oh Jesus, Silas. No. No way.’
‘What do you mean no way?’
‘I’m not weighing in on this.’
‘Are you serious? This is perfect. This could not be more perfect if you’d designed the whole fucking situation yourself. If we’re talking heat maps, she’s like the frigging surface of the sun right now.’
‘Because of a joke?’
‘You know for one hundred per cent certain it was a joke?’
‘Well, it obviously wasn’t serious, was it?’
‘No?’
‘No!’
‘Why?’
‘Because no-one would say that seriously. No-one would actually tweet that they thought we should have some sort of—’
‘A terrorist would. An extremist. A dangerous loose cannon or a member of some kind of cell.’
‘A cell? A cell of who? A cell of dangerous Hugo Bennington-hating radicals? Everyone hates Hugo Bennington. I hate Hugo Bennington.’
‘But you’re not calling for genocide.’
‘No-one’s calling for genocide, Silas. For fuck’s sake, you just cannot be serious with this.’
‘Never mind my seriousness or otherwise, Robert. That’s not what we’re talking about here. I’m saying: how serious are you?’
‘Serious about what?’
‘Serious about yourself. Serious about your work.’
‘My … I’m very serious, Silas. You know that.’
‘Really? Because suddenly you look kind of … not serious.’
‘Not serious? What, because I’m not taking a clearly not serious statement seriously?’
‘Because you’re not backing up. You’re not doubling down.’
‘On what?’
‘On your manifesto.’
‘My manifesto? It was a fucking provocation, Silas.’
‘OK. So you’ve provoked. You’ve prodded the beast with a stick. Now the beast is awake. What are you going to do? You need to own this, Rob.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you saying this woman, whatever her name is, who made the joke about—’
‘The statement. She made a statement.’
‘Who said whatever she said. Are you saying she’s the beast I poked with my stick?’
‘I’m saying you’ve started something. You’ve written this thing about sharing, and men, and unfairness, and everyone’s gone, holy shit, listen to this guy, and now they’re listening, and while they’re listening someone else has said something that basically proves your fucking point. You think the people who liked your piece are going to be amused at this woman’s genocide stuff? You don’t think maybe they’re going to expect some kind of response? And you don’t think, maybe, just maybe, that if no response is forthcoming, if you seem to have no fucking opinion whatsoever on the threatened genocide of the white male species you claim to care so fucking much about, people are going to see you as, oh, I don’t know, kind of a fucking fraud?’
Robert had not seen Blandford angry before. Most of the time, he vacillated between childishly animated and a
ffectedly unimpressed.
‘Hang on, Silas. It sounds ever so slightly like I’m being threatened here.’
‘Does it, Rob? Does it? You know what? Maybe you are. By someone who’s talking about killing every white man on the planet.’
‘But she’s not going to actually do it, is she?’
‘Is that the point? Do you actually seriously think that whether she actually literally goes out there and shops around on the black market, no pun intended, or maybe intended, I don’t know, and manages to buy some sort of biological weapon that can be encoded with, like, skin-recognition technology, and then actually detonates that weapon, is actually literally the point of what is happening here?’
‘There’s a big difference between an allegorical bomb and a real one, Silas.’
‘Yeah, maybe there is. And the difference is, in our line of business, only one really matters. You think if an actual bomb wiped out half the frigging population people would express outrage about it online? Do you think they’d even look online? To us, Robert, the allegorical bomb is the real bomb, and the real bomb is just an allegory. As far as opinion is concerned, this is a real bomb, and it has rolled in your direction, and if you don’t do something about it the bomb’s going to go off and there’s going to be pieces of your brain all over the internet. Is that a clear enough image for you?’
‘That’s … That’s pretty clear, yes.’
‘Right. Good. That’s clear. The threat is clear, and by threat I mean not her threat but the threat, the threat to you, and more importantly, by extension, the threat to me. So we’re all clear and now you can go away and knock me something up, right?’
Robert nodded.
‘You look completely morose. Why are you so morose? This is—’
‘I know. A godsend.’
‘It’s a major godsend. Hold on to your pants, Rob. You’re about to go supernova.’
*
Trina was not in the habit of panicking. If she cast her mind back through the times in her life when panic might have been a possibility, times that included both the threat and reality of violence as well as the possibility and actuality of poverty, she was unable to find documented even a single instance of abandoned reason. Pressure sharpened her up. A sense of crisis, real or imagined, helped her focus.
Something about this, though, was different. Her sense of alarm remained under control, but beneath the still waters of her ostensible calm a dark shadow of dread had become detectable. Walking out of the meeting with the HR men, she’d felt the sliding glances of passing co-workers. When she’d found herself a bench outside, alone, with ten comforting minutes to herself before the lunchtime rush, she’d taken out her phone to call home and found it clogged with notifications of violence. As the first of her colleagues began to drift out towards the tables for lunch, it occurred to her that some of the threats could well have come from people she knew, and that there was nowhere she could go to get away from what was happening.
She opened her contacts and tapped Mia’s picture to dial her mobile. As she listened to the ringing, she realised she wasn’t quite sure why she was calling her, whether it was for support or simply to warn her.
‘Hey, babe,’ she said when Mia picked up.
‘You OK?’ Mia said immediately.
‘Do I have to not be OK to call?’
‘At this time of day? Probably, yeah. What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Trina. ‘But it isn’t good.’
Mia was quiet a moment. She would, Trina knew, be weighing her need to find out what was happening against her understanding of Trina’s deep impatience with bringing anyone up to speed. ‘How can I catch up?’ she said simply.
‘Are you near a computer?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Google me.’
Mia let out a long exhalation. She was holding back all her questions, and Trina loved her for it.
‘Has anyone been round?’ Trina said.
‘What? No. No-one.’
‘No-one at all? I mean, not even a tap at the door, or—’
‘Well, there was the survey guy …’
There was the dread again, the wide shadow under the water’s surface.
‘What survey guy?’
‘You know, that survey they do, about who lives here and what everyone’s jobs are and all of that.’
‘And this was when? This morning?’
‘Couple of hours ago, maybe.’
‘What did he ask about?’
‘Does anyone claim benefits. Does anyone work. What do they do. Any children in the house. Religious beliefs. You know, all the usual stuff.’
‘And you … What did you say?’
‘I answered. It was a check-box thing. He just went down the list on his clipboard. I mean, I didn’t … Shit. Have I fucked up?’
‘No,’ Trina said. ‘No, don’t worry. It’s probably nothing. Probably just the Census or whatever.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Is Carl there?’
‘He’s changing Bella.’
‘OK, so don’t do anything. Just lock the door and sit tight. I’ll be home soon.’
‘I’ve got a job.’
‘Go. It’s fine.’
‘Really?’
‘We probably shouldn’t turn any money down right now.’
Trina heard the rattle of a keyboard at the other end of the line and pictured Mia perched on the edge of the sofa with her laptop on her knees.
‘Oh, babe,’ Mia said, clearly landing on some article or other.
‘It’s fine,’ Trina said. ‘It’s all going to blow over.’
‘Sure. We’ll batten down the hatches.’
‘Yeah. Takeaways and movies and don’t look at the internet for a couple of days.’
‘Right.’
‘Well, OK. I’ll be home soon anyway.’
‘OK.’
‘Love you.’
Mia laughed. ‘Now I know this is serious,’ she said. ‘Love you too.’
Trina stared at her phone for a moment after Mia’s voice vanished, watching as the screen repopulated itself with further notifications. The worst of it was now skipping Twitter completely and heading straight for her inbox, meaning her personal email address was out in the wild. She thumbed and stopped at random, just to get a flavour. The message she opened contained a grainy photograph: a naked black woman noosed to a tree, her hands tied, her muscles slack.
For a moment, Trina’s eyes blurred over, her vision pixellating like a bad video stream. She put her phone away and looked back up at the thickening crowd of distorted faces leaving the building and gathering around the lunch tables – the calm, unquestioning civility of her colleagues, the muted tribal behaviours. Here people were, she thought, going about their day with dignity, yet eviscerating each other behind screens.
Was everything that was happening, she wondered, really just because she’d made a joke on Twitter? Was Hugo Bennington, for years a journalistic punchline, now a one-man political farce, really influential enough to mobilise this kind of collective response with this kind of ferocious immediacy? Measured in the half-life of internet time, her tweet was dormant history, yet it was only now attracting widespread attention. Yes, she thought, perhaps that was simply because Bennington had only now seen it and only now marshalled his forces of bigoted darkness. But she hadn’t even mentioned him in that tweet. Was his vanity searching really that thorough?
But then again, the simplest explanation was usually the right one, and bigotry was the simplest and oldest and most obvious explanation of all, one that didn’t need the weight of some murky and paranoid conspiracy theory to explain it. Even the survey-taker at her house, she thought, could just as easily be down to the usual machinations of the anonymous bullies. She wasn’t the first woman to be doxxed.
Turning it over in her mind, tilting between distinctly modern paranoia and depressingly old-fashioned oppression, didn’t make her feel any closer to the truth, bu
t it did make her angry again, and as she felt herself enraged, her vision sharpened, the scene in front of her shifted from low res to high def, and faces were once again faces, with one in particular emerging from the anonymity: Kasia, walking towards her, carrying two Tupperware boxes of today’s lunch.
‘Hey,’ said Trina, taking one of the proffered boxes and prising off the lid to reveal a noodle salad. ‘Thanks.’
Kasia perched on the edge of the bench beside Trina and began poking at her noodles.
‘Everyone is talking,’ she said.
Trina nodded. When Kasia didn’t expand on this observation, Trina said, ‘You don’t have to sit here. I get it.’
Kasia frowned. ‘I said everyone is talking,’ she said. ‘I didn’t say I’m listening.’
‘You’re not even a little bit curious?’
Kasia shrugged lazily. ‘Twitter thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t care. It’s stupid.’
‘This thing? Or Twitter in general?’
‘Twitter. The whole thing. Everybody …’ Kasia did an exaggerated mime of someone clumsily thumbing text into a mobile phone. ‘For what? Just gossip.’
Trina nodded. ‘Maybe,’ she said.
‘Definitely,’ said Kasia, battling a wayward tangle of noodles into her mouth. ‘Who cares.’
‘Can I ask what people are saying?’ said Trina.
‘Oh, you tweet this thing. Everyone tweets things back at you. Blah blah blah.’
‘Right.’
They ate without saying anything for a few moments, either because there was little to say or simply because the food was difficult to consume while talking. Trina hadn’t thought she was hungry, and hadn’t thought she wanted to stay any longer than was necessary at The Arbor, but now she was eating she realised she was starving, and now Kasia was here she became aware of how alone she’d felt. These, she thought, were the moments that mattered – the ones that, amidst the violent slippage of private and public worlds, needed to be defended.
