by Sam Byers
His rage had crept up on him, somehow only reaching his conscious mind once it had swelled beyond the point of being contained. Of course he was questioning himself, he thought. Of course he was subjecting himself to scrutiny. It was because Jess was questioning him. It was her gaze he felt now, thinking about Bennington’s TV appearance. It was her disapproval he directed at himself in the wake of his success. He thought again of the word she’d used: popular. That was what she really hated, he thought. She could dress it up in all the ideological garb she liked, but in the end, it was the attention that bothered her, and because it bothered her, he’d let it bother him.
He heard her on the stairs, pausing for a moment outside his door. She knocked gently, opened the door just enough to poke her head through. She couldn’t quite look at him, he noticed, and so he looked at her all the more forcefully.
‘Deepa called,’ she began.
‘Did she now,’ said Robert.
‘She’s asked me to pop over there. Something she’s working on, needs a bit of help with.’
‘Fine.’
‘I don’t know how long it will take. You know Deepa.’
He shrugged.
‘Maybe …’ She faltered a little. ‘I mean, maybe if it goes on late I’ll just stay the night.’
He nodded.
‘Fine.’
‘OK then.’
‘OK.’
She closed the door behind her. He felt a twist in his stomach, a flutter in the centre of his chest. He could, he knew, have gone after her, or better yet not let her go at all. But he hadn’t, and didn’t feel able to. He wanted to be angry, he realised. He didn’t want any other feelings to get in the way.
You haven’t been attacked, Robert. You haven’t been threatened.
He kept coming back to this. When she’d said it, it had simply sounded pedantic, but now, reshaped by the conflicting currents within him, it sounded mocking. He thought again of his Skype call with Silas: You’re nobody until somebody hates you. Jess didn’t seem to care if he was hated, if he was pilloried, if he was mocked. What would she care if he was threatened?
He turned back to his computer and woke it up. From the magma of his thoughts, something cool and rock-like was emerging. Fuck her, he thought. Fuck everyone.
He opened up a Word document, paused for a second in the face of the blank page, then pressed on with the difficult business of composing a death threat to himself.
0101
Darkin’s first thought, as the tapping at his broken window drew his attention and he looked up at the wide, dome-headed profile that lurked at the jagged hole, was that Downton had dispatched the heavies to turf him out.
‘Mr Darkin?’
Ever since he’d read about himself in The Record, Darkin had been waiting for a visit of this kind. He wished, sharply, that he’d done something about the window sooner.
‘What do you want?’
‘Didn’t mean to frighten you,’ said the man, holding his hands up. ‘Just thought we’d say hello and introduce ourselves. We’re going to be outside.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Keeping watch.’
Darkin pondered this for a moment.
‘What sort of watch?’
‘Hasn’t anyone told you?’
‘Told me what?’
The man rolled his eyes.
‘Typical,’ he said. He turned away from the window and shouted to an unseen companion. ‘Hey, Tel. Get this. He doesn’t even know.’
‘You’re kidding,’ said a voice near Darkin’s front door. Then another face appeared in the window – oddly similar to the first one. They were both, Darkin now noted, wearing the same black jacket too.
‘Hello, mate,’ said the second head. ‘I’m Tel. This is Pete. We’re here to protect you.’
Darkin wasn’t sure how to respond to this.
‘Protect me from who?’
‘Haven’t you been watching the telly?’
Darkin shook his head.
‘You’re all over the telly,’ said Pete.
‘All over it big time,’ said Tel.
‘But you’re not to worry,’ said Pete.
‘Yeah, we’re supposed to tell you that. You’re not to worry now that we’re here.’
‘And who are you?’
‘Brute Force,’ said Pete. ‘You’ve probably heard of us.’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Really? Well, I mean, you should’ve, to be honest, but never mind. We’re a protection force. Security, like.’
‘For who? For Downton?’
‘For people like you. And us.’
Apparently sensing Darkin’s confusion, Pete began explaining the situation to him loudly and slowly. Darkin lit an unscheduled cigarette and listened dispassionately, his opinion as yet unfixed.
‘You know that Hugo Bennington, right?’ said Pete. ‘Well, he was on the telly. Talking about you.’
Darkin thought about this. He couldn’t decide if he was sorry he’d missed himself being discussed on television by Hugo Bennington – a genuine celebrity – or if the news that he’d graduated from the pages of The Record to the TV screens of people up and down the country was something about which he ought to be uncomfortable. He thought about Downton. If they hadn’t noticed the newspaper article, he thought, they would definitely have noticed this.
‘It was BBC,’ said Pete helpfully. ‘Like, proper news. This woman was interviewing Bennington in his house and he started talking about that other woman, the one who’s been saying all that stuff about killing people. He was saying how worried he was about you.’
‘Worried about me?’
‘Well, you’re vulnerable, aren’t you? I mean, not being funny, but if a load of people came round here wanting to do a genocide, there wouldn’t be much you could do about it.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘And so anyway, our boss, Ronnie Childs – do you know him?’
‘No.’
‘Proper patriot. Wants to really clean this country up. Know what I mean? Anyway, he phoned me and Tel here, and he said, look, we’ve got a duty to protect this man, and of course, me and Tel had both been watching and we both agreed. Next thing you know, here we are.’
‘Do you think I need protecting?’ said Darkin, who had now been told he needed protecting so many times that he was beginning to think there might be something in it.
‘We all need protecting,’ said Tel, popping his head round the window frame.
‘But you maybe need protecting a bit more,’ said Pete. ‘After all, me and Tel can probably take care of ourselves.’
‘We can take care of a few others too,’ said Tel.
‘But who …’ said Darkin.
‘Take your pick,’ said Pete. ‘These men in masks. That darkie woman, what’s her name.’
‘You think she’s going to—’
‘Probably not her specifically,’ said Pete. ‘That’s the thing about these race-war types: they’re all cowards. They just sit at home and let their followers do all the work.’
‘And you think some of them might—’
‘Well, she’s as good as told them to, hasn’t she? I mean, that’s what Hugo Bennington was saying on the telly last night. That’s why he feels you need a bit of protection.’
Darkin thought about this.
‘Well,’ he said to the men at his window, ‘lucky you’re here, I suppose.’
‘You just take it easy,’ said Pete. ‘Me and Tel have got this under control.’
‘Is … Is there anyone out there?’ said Darkin.
‘What, right now, you mean?’ said Pete.
‘Yeah.’
Pete turned away from the window and quickly checked over the expanse of the estate below.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’ He shrugged. ‘Won’t be long though.’
*
The atmosphere in Deepa’s kitchen, Jess thought, as the three women – Jess, Deepa, and Trina – busied thems
elves with coffees and cereal and bits of toast, stepping aside for each other, awkwardly and slightly tentatively sharing limited space and resources, was not exactly one of unchecked, open solidarity. Not that it was hostile or uncooperative either. It was simply that behind the obvious and now rather inescapable fact of their working together, there were, Jess knew, multiple, overlapping degrees of suspicion and reluctance.
She had, perhaps inevitably, stayed the night. It was late by the time she’d arrived. Introductions had been awkward, strained.
‘Jess lives with Robert Townsend,’ Deepa had said bluntly. Trina had rolled her eyes, angled herself away in her armchair.
‘I know,’ Jess had said, unable to think of anything else that might be of use. ‘Believe me, I know.’
It was a partial truth. She had not, at that point, read Robert’s latest article. Nor, even after reading it, could she fully know what it must have been like to read it from the position of being the article’s subject. After less than an hour, Trina, clearly exhausted and shaken, had gone to bed, leaving Jess to vent at Deepa for putting them in a room together.
‘I mean, for fuck’s sake, Deepa,’ she’d said. ‘What am I supposed to do? Apologise for Robert? Is that why I’m here?’
She was angry at Deepa because there wasn’t anyone else to be angry at. Unless, of course, she counted herself. Somehow, though, that wasn’t a road she felt able to go down just yet. There would be time, she knew, for self-recrimination, for the kind of interrogation she perhaps should have conducted sooner, but just at this moment it seemed indulgent.
‘Fuck no,’ Deepa had said. ‘You’re here to help. Simple as that.’
With Trina asleep, however, the details of that help remained vague. After perhaps half an hour or so, Deepa also turned in, leaving Jess on the couch, wrapped in a distinctly shabby single duvet, catching up with the Trina story on her phone and failing to forget about Robert. If they separated, she thought, when they separated, this would be all that remained of him in her daily life: his public profile, the toxic energies of his web presence. The reasons for their falling apart would be always at hand, but the person she’d actually parted with would be lost – erased by the phenomenon Robert had become.
Being in Deepa’s house, Jess thought as she began to drift into a restless sleep, was a strangely unsettling experience – a vision of a potential future Jess now realised she feared. She’d always admired Deepa – her resolve, her commitment to what interested her over and above what was probably good for her. But something about the way she lived spoke of an immersion, even a retreat, that Jess found frightening. Almost every surface bore some scrap of Deepa’s work – photos from which she was trying to make identifications; articles she’d printed off and highlighted; scribbled notes on repurposed scraps of paper. It was something Jess knew she had in her: the possibility for exclusion, perhaps even obsession; a drift into the digital at the expense of the human.
Now, at the breakfast table, Deepa’s difficulty in engaging with the stuff of daily life was all the more apparent. She was, by her own admission, unused to guests. Through her work helping harassed women, she regularly provided shelter, but these were passing moments – women that arrived late at night, slept in Deepa’s study, and then left in the morning. With people to feed and conversation to make, Deepa was uncomfortably adrift, her role as host barely extending beyond a casual gesture towards the toaster, next to which half a loaf of bread sat defrosting. And yet in a way, Jess thought, it was admirable. Deepa knew where her talents lay. She helped people only with the most pressing details of their crises. Because she never pressed at her or their boundaries, she remained undistracted by the extent to which those boundaries could shift.
Trina, on the other hand, seemed to represent a different pole of existence entirely. Even as she strolled into the kitchen, wiping the night’s sleep from her eyes, her hair pressed flat on one side and her borrowed T-shirt crumpled by slumber, she was on the phone to her family, speaking with an easy, concerned warmth entirely at odds with the stern eye she cast at Jess. Jess envied this too, she realised – this comfort with family life, this sense of an intimate network. When she had been in a similar situation to Trina, who had she called? Who had she leaned on? Robert, she thought – a man she’d had to lean on in all the wrong ways in order to extract the support she needed.
Trina pulled up a chair to Jess’s right, at the end of the breakfast table, and watched the steam curling off her cup of coffee without saying anything. Deepa was either oblivious to tensions or, more likely, uninterested in the way personal politics might play out in her kitchen.
‘This is way earlier than I usually prefer to encounter anyone,’ she said. ‘Don’t take it personally.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Trina.
Drinks were pointedly sipped. The sound of Jess nibbling a corner of toast seemed suddenly cacophonous.
‘So,’ said Jess, ‘what’s the plan?’
Trina looked over at Deepa, posing a silent question that made Jess feel childishly wounded.
‘She’s cool,’ said Deepa. Then, to Jess: ‘Bennington’s only the tip of the iceberg, is what we’re now thinking,’ said Deepa.
‘Green?’ said Jess.
‘What makes you say that?’ said Trina sharply.
‘I know you work there. I know something’s going on there.’ She shrugged. ‘So I’m guessing.’
‘What do you know about what’s going on there?’ said Deepa.
‘Nothing,’ said Jess, who had spent her pre-sleep hours making connections in her mind that now, by daylight, seemed tantalisingly out of reach. ‘But there’s a guy hanging out in Nodem, maybe even living there. He says he works or worked at Green. He keeps talking about … Fields?’
Again, Jess noted, the little glance between Deepa and Trina.
‘The Field,’ said Deepa.
‘That’s it,’ said Jess. ‘What is it?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Deepa. ‘We just know that we’re not supposed to know. Which, of course, makes me very keen to know. Trina: any idea who this guy in Nodem might be?’
‘Norbiton,’ said Trina. ‘It must be. He got sunsetted after babbling about The Field.’ She shook her head. ‘He’ll be no use to anyone.’
‘Do you think Bennington and this Field thing are connected?’ said Jess.
‘Maybe,’ said Deepa. ‘Maybe not.’
‘And The Griefers?’ said Jess.
‘I’m hoping we’ll know more when we get onto our other little plan,’ said Deepa.
‘Other plan?’ said Trina.
‘Little something we’ve been working on,’ said Deepa. ‘Kind of a test.’
Trina didn’t ask more, and Jess was glad of the rebalance this occasioned. Maybe it was a side effect of her non-argument with Robert, but her sensitivity to exclusion felt uncomfortably heightened.
‘We could spend all morning bringing each other up to speed,’ Trina said.
‘Agreed,’ said Jess, toughing out the dismissal this statement seemed to imply. ‘Tell me the Bennington plan.’
‘I may have dirt on Bennington,’ said Trina, a little too slowly, drawing the words out, as if uncertain Jess would understand or still unsure that Jess could be trusted.
‘OK,’ said Jess.
‘He sends dick pics,’ said Trina.
‘That’s an understatement,’ said Deepa. ‘These are dick pics with a Hollywood budget and an auteur director.’
Jess was looking between them, undecided as to whether or not she should laugh. Deepa and Trina remained deadpan and so she decided to follow suit.
‘I’m trying to picture it,’ she said, ‘but …’
Trina pushed her phone over. Jess picked it up, rotated it a few times to find the best aspect ratio.
‘Is that … What is that? A dinner service? And then in the middle … Wait, his dick can’t be—’
‘He makes miniature objects,’ said Trina. ‘He talked about them on the T
V profile. The plate, the cutlery, the gravy boat, the ring of parsley. It’s all miniaturised.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Jess.
‘Right?’ said Deepa.
‘Just when you think you’ve truly explored the outer limits of fragile masculinity, something comes along that just—’
‘Recalibrates your whole sense of scale?’ said Deepa.
‘Did he send this to you?’ said Jess to Trina. ‘I mean, surely he’s not that stupid?’
‘Sadly not,’ said Trina.
‘And therein lies the problem,’ said Deepa.
‘He sent them to my friend Kasia,’ said Trina. ‘She’s shown them to me a few times but never said who they were from. Then, when I saw him banging on about his handicrafts on the telly last night, I put it all together.’
‘You don’t want to throw her under the bus,’ said Jess.
‘Right. Because why should I?’
‘You shouldn’t,’ said Jess. ‘You shouldn’t have to.’
‘So I had to go to the source,’ said Deepa. ‘Given this guy’s password is password, it took like ten minutes to grab the lot.’
‘And you want to leak them,’ said Jess.
‘But with a plausible explanation as to where they came from,’ said Deepa. ‘Which, luckily, we kind of have.’
‘The Griefers,’ said Jess.
‘Bingo,’ said Deepa. ‘It’s perfect. The whole town’s braced for some kind of leak. It’s the perfect alibi. Problem is: platform. We can’t get the pics onto The Griefer website. Even if we use their submission thing, we have no idea how long it would take. And given that we still don’t know who they are or how this all ties together—’
