by Sam Byers
And yet, she thought, she had to try it, if only to know that she’d tried it. The offer of communication was there. If she didn’t test it, feel it out, she’d never know what they might have been able to say to each other.
‘What were you doing in Nodem?’ she said.
He froze, momentarily caught up in the question. He experienced her question as a command, she thought, and on receiving the instruction, because his answer was elusive even to him, whatever programme that controlled his response briefly locked up, and gave her all the answers she needed.
‘Nothing,’ he said after a moment. ‘Just work.’
She could, she knew, have pressed him, but she saw there would be no point. The things they had said and done publicly could not be said in private. The people they were when they were apart could not be reconciled with the people they became when they were together.
And so neither of them said anything, and it was worse, she thought, far worse, than anything they might actually have said.
*
Trina’s initial excitement about Hugo Bennington’s extracurricular photographic activities had quickly waned. She should not, she thought, have told Mia and Carl about it until she’d given it more consideration. Now, obviously, they were all for leaking the pics as quickly as possible, deflecting attention away from Trina and onto Bennington’s predilection for thrusting the image of his dick into fields of vision unconsenting to its arrival. But Trina had quickly spotted the dangers associated with this plan. Bennington would guess, immediately, the source. He knew Kasia’s name, where she worked. Clearly, he also knew someone at The Arbor well enough that he’d been able to get Kasia’s information simply by asking for it after a guided tour. If Bennington’s contact thought so little of handing over employee data at Bennington’s request, it seemed unlikely they would suddenly develop a conscience when it came to, for example, firing or publicly humiliating a low-level, easily replaced service worker.
But then, when Trina thought about this, she also thought about herself, about her family, and about the wider fact of Hugo Bennington as a cultural and political phenomenon. This was a man who was deliberately fanning the flames of racial hatred, who was making life in England unsafe in real and terrifying ways. Imagine, she thought, if he continued, if the tensions increased, if TV and online rhetoric became street-level physical violence. Would Kasia’s friendship come as any comfort when neither of them felt safe to walk the streets? Perhaps this was simply what such situations demanded: the ruthless counterweighting of micro and macro; the dissolution of the personal into the political.
There were other issues besides moral discomfort. Bennington, for so long portrayed by the left-wing commentariat as little more than the court jester of contemporary politics, a man to be both laughed off and ignored until, conveniently, he simply disappeared, had genuine power and reach, and his hold on both was tightening. Trina had a couple of thousand followers on Twitter. Bennington had just under thirty thousand. Between its web and print editions, The Record had a monthly readership of around twenty million. The result of The Record embedding Trina’s tweets in its article was that Trina’s Twittersphere, which she had always regarded as being a comparatively safe private space, was thrown open to a skewed and distorted demographic who then weaponised her only outlet against her.
And this, she thought, was Bennington operating at the level of mere political opportunism. How far would he go, she wondered, if she made the fight personal, if he saw in her actions not just an opportunity for professional gain, but an imperative for personal defence?
The feeling of needing help was disappointing, awkward, and the source of a resentment unlikely to dissolve with time. It made her loathe Bennington all the more, for putting her in a position where her own resourcefulness seemed insufficient. But nothing, she felt, should come at the expense of realism, and right at this moment, realism dictated that she was not going to be able to extricate herself from this predicament without assistance, and that the support usually and so readily available to her – the support of Carl and Mia and, in a different way, Kasia – was not, this time, going to cut it.
She had, for the past hour or so, from the moment Bennington came on television through to the moment she recognised his ridiculous miniatures, been thinking about Robert Townsend. Yes, he was pompous, and yes, he would enjoy the opportunity to be Trina’s white knight in a way Trina would find unpalatable, but the fact remained that he was, as things stood at the moment, one of very few commentators to show sustained and active interest in the Larchwood Estate. Moreover, his platform was stronger than ever. In the past few weeks, Trina had noticed not only a growing audience for his blog, but a swelling interest in the estate itself. And besides, she thought, he had, unlike basically anyone else, been here, asking questions, making an effort, at least, to understand.
She hadn’t read his last couple of blogs, and so decided, before reaching out to him, to catch up on where he was with things. His most recent column occupied a large portion of real estate on The Command Line’s homepage. The headline read: Speaking Out: Robert Townsend Takes Down The Genocide Tweeter. The numbers on the share icons were through the roof. Within approximately a sentence, she knew her plan to call on Townsend for support had been hopelessly misguided.
She recognised not a single element of Townsend’s article. The woman who was supposedly the subject bore no relation to her. The columnists who, according to Townsend, were supposedly engaged in a conspiracy of PC silence bore no relation to the legions of outraged white men who, far from keeping silent, were in fact bombarding her with violent noise. Nor, now that Trina thought about it, did the person who wrote this particular column bear any relation to the person who for so long had defended the interests of the Larchwood Estate. Everything was coming at her bent and tinted, as if through a distorting prism. She was, on one level, reading about herself, but it was a version of herself she had played no part in constructing. Her own words, and by extension her identity, her name, her very existence, had been appropriated, twisted, refashioned and repurposed until all recognition or ability to identify had been denied her. Apparently, all she was supposed to do now was read placidly as versions of herself were created, described, and decried in print, or sit back on her sofa and watch in passive semi-slumber as people she had never been were trotted out and casually denounced on national television. Where, she thought, was she supposed to go to refocus and un-distort the picture? Twitter, where even the briefest second of activity would trigger a new onrush of rabid, slavering violence? Television, onto which she hadn’t once been invited?
She pushed her laptop off her knees and onto the bed beside her and covered her face and eyes briefly with hands warmed by the heat of her overworked computer. She felt, as she had before she looked into Townsend’s latest work, alone. Indeed, she thought, she was probably more alone now than she had been a few minutes ago. Before, she had assumed that all her enemies were on the right. Now, even people who just yesterday she might have relied upon to be halfway sympathetic were falling over each other to abuse the woman they had collectively decided she was. It was a familiar, bitter position. White people always decried injustice when it was safe to do so, and when an audience in the cheap seats could reliably affirm their righteousness. But when injustice was actually occurring, when their intervention was both necessary and fraught with risk, they vanished or turned hostile.
Townsend had no insight into his own power. That was what made him so dangerous. To him, everything was mere hypothesis. He was, Trina thought, working with the ideological equivalent of Beatrice. He manipulated the sliders and parameters of controversy in order to achieve the perfect conditions for his own success. No doubt thrilled at the extent to which he was able to tweak the emotional and intellectual reality into which he injected himself, he remained blind to the fact that what he was really adjusting was not some generalised and nebulous intellectual atmosphere, but the hard reality of Trina’s life. In uppin
g the controversy, he limited Trina’s safety. He was merely playing, but she was the one living with the results.
As Trina picked her way through these thoughts, it struck her that, as familiar and predictable as so much that was occurring might have been, one element, one crucial factor, was in fact not the same at all. The moment she homed in on this detail and recognised its difference, she felt her conception of the factors surrounding it shifting in turn, until, quite suddenly, having deliberated so thoroughly on all the ways that what was happening to her was in no way new, she found herself alive to all the ways in which recent events were strange in a particularly sinister way.
If there had been one constant in Trina’s life and the way she had repeatedly found herself treated, it had been the idea, tacitly supported by those around her and, for a while, internalised and normalised in her own psyche, that her voice was irrelevant, that her ideas and opinions were somehow worth less than the ideas and opinions of everyone else she worked with, schooled with, dated. To make herself heard, Trina had always been forced, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, to raise her voice. In many ways, the present predicament was no different – the usual babble of white male voices amidst which there was little or no room for her own. But at the heart of it, she thought, sitting up, straightening, coming out of her slump and into a sense of attention, a new and unusual consensus was at play. Her voice, her opinion, which had always been treated as if it was largely irrelevant, was suddenly powerful, so much so – and on this everyone, from Bennington to Townsend to the frothing attack dogs of the Twittersphere seemed in complete agreement – that it was dangerous.
How many times had she fought to be taken seriously? How many times had she had to restate her point in meetings, just to achieve a simple acknowledgement from the likes of Bream and Holt? How many times had she seen one of her ideas, initially ignored, appropriated by a colleague and then suddenly praised? And now, amidst all that background and experience, here she was effectively being told that one single tweet from her personal account had the power to destabilise British society overnight? No, she thought. There was no way, after a lifetime of disregard by the powers that be, that she was suddenly going to lay claim to that kind of significance.
She thought about Downton, the easily graphed increase in their intimidation tactics; about Tayz, the file she’d clicked on, the speed of the lockout; and suddenly, without quite knowing why, about Norbiton: his meltdown, his babbling, the thing he’d shouted before Bangstrom had him gagged. What had he called it? The Field? She saw herself clicking on the file again, just before her screen locked, remembered trying to parse the extension as she did so: .fld.
Her phone started humming. The vibration played out down her spine, jolting her, causing momentary panic. The screen showed a withheld number. The last thing she needed now was a gravel-voiced threat delivered straight into her ear. But at the same time, it could easily be important. What if someone was reaching out to her? And anyway, did she really want to give the impression that she was cowering away, afraid to answer her phone?
She scooped it up, hit the button to take the call.
‘Yeah,’ she said sharply.
‘Don’t hang up.’ It was a woman’s voice, calm and commanding. ‘I’m a friend.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘No, but I know you. I know you need help.’
‘What makes you think I need help?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that I’ve helped about a hundred people through similar experiences and so like to think of myself as being a pretty good judge of when someone does or doesn’t need my help.’
‘What experiences?’
‘Online harassment, violence, public shaming. I’m going to send you a link that will take you to a secure portal that will explain more. Follow the instructions and I’ll see you soon.’
‘See me where?’
‘Follow the instructions.’
‘Why should I trust you?’
‘Who else are you going to trust?’
‘How about no-one?’
‘OK, put it another way. What other plans do you have?’
‘I have plans.’
‘Really? Because from where I’m sitting, all you’ve done is sit in your bedroom reading Robert Townsend articles.’
‘How—’
‘Wave at your laptop.’
Trina looked at her laptop. The camera was activated.
‘You’re not alone,’ said the woman. ‘There’s lots I can do. There’s lots they can do. They have a head start. Be smart, let me help you, and we can get you out of this.’
*
Pained by scrutiny, Robert sought refuge in distraction. He’d muttered something vague to Jess about work, then come up to his study to stew. Someone had sent him a link to Bennington’s TV appearance, and now he was watching it through for the third time, squinting as if in harsh light, reassuring himself that what he was seeing was a distortion, not a reflection, of his own recent work.
The Darkins of the world. Hugo had used the phrase in his column. Now he had used it again in his interview. Robert’s own words – words he had hesitated over even as he wrote them – were now part of Hugo’s lexicon. Robert could already imagine the glee with which Julia Benjamin would map them on her website, the conclusions she would inevitably draw. And would she even be wrong in those conclusions? he wondered. Would he be able, if asked, to explain away the fact that Hugo Bennington, Hugo Bennington – a man Robert had always regarded with a distanced, confident disgust – was now ventriloquising his own work?
He closed the window containing the video of Bennington’s TV appearance and sat back in his chair, exhausted, deflated, shaken. Just a few hours ago, he thought, he’d thrilled at the shrinking distance between himself and his chosen subject. Now the collapse of that space appalled him. He could no longer look upon Bennington as an alien species, could no longer scoff at the sheer idiocy of his pronouncements, because the gap he’d always relied upon had vanished. There was no foreignness when he looked at Bennington now, no sense of the other. There was only a deep and awful recognition, a familiarity that even a day ago would have been unimaginable. He pictured the ways in which his column about the genocide woman would be read in light of Bennington’s comments, the kind of audience it would now reach. Things he’d never said to himself, barely even thought to himself, would now be heard and interpreted by thousands. In the moments following Bennington’s BBC profile, fingers up and down the country would be tapping words like Larchwood and Darkin into their search engines. Other columnists, other opinionists, would be racing to catch up. But Robert, whose piece had already secured a sufficient readership to push it to the top of the search results, would be way ahead of them. The achievement he’d always dreamed of and fought for so long to make real – clickbait gold, the assured virality of the tuned-in commentator – was now the very thing he couldn’t undo. He’d wanted to be read. Now he was unable to control the readings.
It was imperative not to back down. Of course, there would be a degree of pushback on his piece about the genocide woman. But capitulation would prick the bubble of attention. His audience, the one he’d long pined for and long imagined himself to deserve, would desert him as swiftly as it had adopted him. He needed to stand firm. He needed, as Silas would say, to own it. His head start on the issue would make everyone else’s columns look opportunistic, while his would retrospectively appear ahead of its time. Undermining it now would be akin to disowning his own gift for prophecy. What light would that cast on whatever he wrote subsequently?
His piece on the genocide woman had only really been a further defence of Darkin, hadn’t it? Surely no-one expected him, now that this vulnerable old man was suddenly being directly threatened by a trendier and superficially more PC opponent, to simply turn his back or, worse, hop the fence and join the genocide movement out of nothing more than some utterly misplaced notion of righteousness? Hadn’t his very point, in the
first place, been about the ways in which the Darkins of the world had been unjustly maligned and ignored in favour of hipper, more attractive causes? Wasn’t it exactly this shift towards a politics of identity, as opposed to a politics of class or economics, that had effectively rendered the whole left-wing movement so fragmented and impotent?
This, he was coming to understand, was the new reality of his job, and the natural endpoint of his career arc. He’d begun by reporting what was happening. He’d graduated from a focus on what was happening to a focus on what he thought about what was happening. From there, what was happening had come to have less and less bearing on what he thought, until all that mattered, to borrow a choice phrase from Lionel Groves, was that he thought at all. Now, what he thought was what was happening. His opinions and those of others were events unto themselves, supplanting their real-world counterparts and models. In this world, it didn’t actually matter what he thought, and mattered even less what people felt about it. What mattered was the nurturing and manipulation of an environment in which his thought could flourish, in which discussion was its own reality. Silas was right: hatred, pushback, dissent were all just modified matrices of the only things that meant anything: impact and volume.
He had not been able to shrug off Jess’s gaze, he realised – the one he’d imagined in Nodem, the one he’d seen confirmed downstairs at the kitchen table. What were you doing in Nodem? he heard her ask. He regretted, now, going on the offensive. What was she doing in Nodem? What, even, was her work? He tried to remember the last time they’d spoken about it, but was unable to call any specific moment to mind. How easy it was for Jess, he thought, to sneer at his public pronouncements, when all the while she was able to work without any scrutiny at all. Who, in the end, judged what she did? At what point did she ever, even for a second, open herself up to the kind of mass peer review he had to endure on a daily basis? Yes, there had been that one time, her brush with public disapproval, and look how she had milked that! Did she expect him to withdraw from public view simply because she had?
