Who is Tom Ditto?

by Danny Wallace

  Ding.

  * * *

  From: MAUREEN THOMAS

  To: ALL STAFF

  Will newsreaders PLEASE remember to take you’re mugs back to the kitchenette and NOT JUST LEAVE THEM BY THE SINK. You’re mugs are YOU’RE RESPONSIBILITY and if you cannot use them PROPERLY we will take you’re mugs away and you will have to bring you’re OWN MUGS IN.

  * * *

  Oh, why does she have to send these to ALL? She knows it was me. Everyone knows it was me. Why the need for such passive aggression? Why the need to embarrass?

  But this was the least of my worries. Because I started to consider: what if I needed Hayley? What if I couldn’t live without her? What if I fell ill? What if there was a problem with one of our parents? What if I got hit by a bus? What if our flat burned down? Who would I turn to? Who would the authorities contact? And just how did she think I’d react to this?

  This wasn’t just selfish. No, this was now cruel.

  ‘Not a coffee or a tea or anything?’

  Jesus, Work Experience Paul was still there.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I said. ‘Maybe just take a seat and if I think of something I’ll let you know.’

  He wandered off to find a chair as I considered this nagging doubt, this element of fear, that I was to blame for Hayley’s disappearance. I had noticed but not cared that she’d seen Fran less. I didn’t question it. Same with Laura, before her. It’s just what happens. You’re in a couple, you see your friends less. It’s relationship maths.

  And of course it must be difficult for someone like Hayley – flighty, an enthusiast – to be with someone like me. Tied to my hours. Early to bed. Ever-less-inspired. God knows what she’d been doing, I now realised. But I’d trusted her. We’d been a couple.

  A good couple, too, I’d thought. Not like Calum and Joanne, of course, because they were always on about being soulmates. But people always said to us, ‘you’ve got so much in common!’ or ‘you’re like peas in a pod!’, and that had seemed enough. She’d stayed with me more and more on Bragg’s Lane, and Bristol is where I’d wanted us to have a life, but she wanted to go where the opportunities are. Laura had moved to London the year before, and Hayley had been planning on moving in with her but chose me instead.

  It felt like the first time I’d ever been chosen. By anyone. For anything.

  I sighed.

  Her phone bills were paperless and inaccessible. I’d tried her passwords, all the usual ones, from Hayl3y1 to And3r50n to whatever else, but no, nothing, none of them worked. I suppose that showed the level of trust between us now. Not just her keeping her passwords to herself, but me trying to guess her passwords.

  I wanted Andy’s number. I wanted to speak to Andy. Speaking to Andy was necessary.

  ‘Not being funny,’ she said, not really having to tell me that. ‘But you are asking me to break the law.’

  ‘Only a little. Is that a problem?’

  ‘No, I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I’m just saying. I’m not being funny but that’s what you’re doing.’

  I bristled but tried not to show it. I needed Pippy for this.

  ‘I’m just making you aware that that is what you are doing. You are reaching a certain point in life where you are risking a very steep downwards spiral. I’m only being honest.’

  ‘I can cope with this,’ I said.

  We were in the corridor, by the stairs, under a giant photo of Bark and Lyricis from Vibe. Lyricis had his hand on Bark’s bald head and Bark was finding it funny. We quietened, as an engineer walked past.

  ‘Weather today?’ he said, spotting me.

  ‘Highs of nineteen,’ I said, and on he strode.

  ‘And what are you going to do if you get his number?’ hissed Pippy. ‘Are you going to—’

  ‘I’m not going to attack him, don’t worry. Look, I just need you to say you’ve forgotten your password and get them to take you through security. I’ve written it all down for you. Date of birth, middle names …’

  She took the details.

  ‘You owe me,’ she said, one finger in the air.

  I left her to it.

  It was just past 10am. I took my mug back to the kitchenette, washed it to the company’s exacting standards and got back to my desk. I had to tee up the next reports, get them ready for Colin Jay at midday.

  A footballer bit another footballer.

  Blackwall Tunnel’s cleared. Traffic stacked back to Clackets.

  Lady Gaga has dressed unusually. Aphra Just says she’s keen to settle in Paris with rap star Blaze.

  Highs of nineteen in the city today.

  I think I’m pretty good at my job. It’s not as hard as it seems. There’s just a few tricks, is all. Like, for a lead story, you’re looking at forty-five seconds. But you want audio for at least fifteen of those. You need to mix it up. Now, that’s not a problem if someone’s grabbed some off Sky News. You’ll roll on a press conference, clip it, whack it in the in-queue. You add what we call a ‘slug’ – BLAIR AUDIO RAW, maybe – and boom, if it’s big, you snap it. Get it on the twelve o’clock and you sound like you went round his house yourself.

  But you might not have any audio, and that’s when you have to get inventive. Let’s say there’s been a smash and grab at Westfield Stratford. When you’re prepping, you’d write, ‘There’s been a smash and grab at Westfield Stratford … my colleague Simon Lamp has more …’

  Then you’d saunter down to the kitchenette, maybe stopping at the vending machine to see if they’ve replaced the Topics on the way, and you’d find Simon Lamp making a cup-a-soup in someone else’s mug.

  ‘Read this out,’ you’d say to Simon Lamp, and then Simon Lamp would put on The Voice (we’ve all got The Voice we use) and hey presto, suddenly it sounds like Simon Lamp has been chasing down the big story himself, probably with hundreds of other dedicated journalist newshounds, pounding the streets of London for scoops, sources and snitches, flatfooted and grim-faced, press cards poking out of their whiskey-stained trilbies, cocked fivers in hand, all ‘maybe this will refresh your memory …’.

  In reality, Simon Lamp wouldn’t even know what he was reading and now he’s halfway back to his desk with his cup-a-soup, probably stopping at the vending machine to see if they’ve replaced the Topics on the way.

  It’s necessary smoke and mirrors. It’s its own little showbiz.

  ‘And now you’re up to date.’

  Ten am is always my best hour. LC with LJ was over, and the workers with regular hours had started to arrive, still bleary-eyed despite their comparative lie-ins, clutching their Costa lattes or their slicks of greasy croissants pressed up against Pret bags. Constant dings of the lifts.

  Top floor: management (with full access to roof garden). Third floor: marketing teams (with full access to café). Second floor: sales (with full access to coffee and snack machines, and first stop for the sandwich man). Our floor: reception and station teams (with full access to some toilets). I think you see the varying levels of importance here.

  It might have been nice to socialise with some of the others, I’d sometimes think. But the hours … it’s always the hours. I’m finished just as they’re thinking about what to have for lunch. I could hang around for a bit, but then I’d be the office sad case. I could come back into town later, but that looks desperate too. Permanently out of sync, the best I could hope for was a leaving do, or retirement drinks, and when the retirement drinks of a sixty-five-year-old man you’ve never really spoken to is the best you can hope for you have to start radically reassessing your life. I wanted to talk to someone about Hayley. But how could I raise it? You work with people you barely know, you can hardly drop something like that into conversation too soon. I suppose I could just say we split up, me and Hayley. Go for the sympathy. But these days people always want to know how you split up. It’s like the first question, after ‘why?’ How fast would their concern turn to gossip?

  No. Better I internalise this. Better I keep this solel
y between me and Pippy.

  ‘So I heard your girlfriend fucked off!’ said Leslie, towering over me, one hand on my shoulder while I sat at my desk. He was saying it loudly; loudly so the whole office could hear how witty and brave and how wonderfully un-PC he was.

  Leslie hated ‘the PC brigade’. He hated how political correctness had gone mad. He hated how these ‘do-gooders’ were always doing good.

  ‘These bloody do-gooders!’ he’d say, flicking the pages of the Telegraph or the Mail, shoulders tense at the thought of meddlers telling him there is real concern about the polar ice caps, or that people should drive slower near schools.

  I sometimes thought he hated do-gooders more than do-badders.

  But this? What had happened to me? He loved stuff like this.

  ‘She’s just gone travelling,’ I said, my face flush, knowing every ear in an office of sixty was on me.

  ‘Where to, then?’ he said. ‘Where’s she gone?’

  I wanted to say something witty. Now was the time. If only I could say something witty.

  And then, like lightning, like magic …

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Leslie rocked his head back and hooted. I’d never heard anyone hoot before, I don’t think I’ve ever even used the word, but he hooted and honked and he wanted everyone to know how funny he found this; a river of laughter in full flow.

  ‘But she didn’t break up with you? She just went?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said, and his shoulders began to shake from the sheer joy of it.

  ‘And you’re still with her? You haven’t ditched her?’

  And all I could do was listen and smile, because 120 ears and 120 eyes needed to know I found this as amusing as Leslie did, otherwise I was just part of the bloody PC Brigade. A bad egg. Someone who couldn’t take a joke.

  ‘You poor bastard!’ he exploded, and the laughter went on for a day if it went on for a minute, and when the torrent finally slowed to a brook, his hand left my shoulder and off he tramped to Soho, this garrulous, polo-necked, razor-burned man, so he could record a concerned voiceover for a dementia charity ‘very close to my heart’, for just £400 for the hour and only five grand in usage.

  I collected my things, started to shut down my computer, cast a glance around. So now they knew. Amazing how people you don’t know that well react to news like mine. They don’t know you, so what’s happened isn’t like something that actually happened. It’s not an event. It’s like a bad thing you read about, or a disease or something, and they don’t want to catch it or jinx themselves. Girls avoid your eye because you’re a boy, and a boy who’s been left, and they don’t want to give you the wrong idea or be seen to be moving in. Boys avoid your eye because boys want an easy entry into friendship – a common bond, an interest, a mutual friend, an opinion – not this heavy stuff, not straight away, not right from the start.

  No one wants to be a counsellor except a counsellor.

  I should call Calum. Calum would make it all right.

  I caught Pippy’s eye as I left. She was unwrapping a new mobile. I gave her a hopeful thumbs-up and a raise of the eyebrows.

  ‘Not yet, my love,’ she called out, holding up the slip of paper I’d given her. ‘Totes on my list!’

  I sat on the 73, letting six cups of Nescafé trickle from my pores after a sweaty half-jog to catch it. My head throbbed from the caffeine, the watery coffee with its cheap beige foam. They order catering tubs at SoundHaus. That can’t be good for you. I’m sure they cut in some cheaper stuff, too, bought off some spiv in some alley round the back of Chinatown. Leslie doesn’t have to worry. He keeps a vacuum-packed bag of Carte Noire in his pigeon-hole. For a while he tried to make interns bring him cafetières. Then the company bought some of those instant hot taps. Now you just hold your cup over a sink and you’re done in four seconds. It’s how Leslie says he imagines they make coffee in prison.

  ‘They might as well rename the terrace the bloody exercise yard!’ he’d fumed.

  He made that joke maybe once a week.

  A weak rain began to speckle the windows as I wondered whether to call Laura again. It wasn’t the sort of conversation I wanted to have on a bus, next to a man who may very well have won awards for his cough before. It was the only thing to do today. My work was over. My chores done.

  I’d picked up my prescription. Got my pills. Ended up telling Dr Moon the whole story – missing girlfriend, missing sleep. He was a good man, and he’d smiled, sympathetically, though with one eye on the clock. So I’d left and bought a crayfish wrap.

  My afternoons seemed to have so many more hours in them now that Hayley was gone. Calling Laura was a great big highlighted tick on an otherwise empty calendar, whether she wanted to speak to me or not. And why didn’t she? Because she thought I was part of something. What, though? Some conspiracy? Some plot? Plus, she thought Hayley might have put me up to calling. Why?

  I drafted a text as we motored past Sicilian Avenue on Southampton Row. I’d keep it in my phone, I’d wait for the right time.

  Laura. It’s Tom again. Sorry. I only rang yesterday because Hayley’s gone. She upped and left. But need to know what you meant by her being a ‘psycho’. I promise I’m not one. Please? T x

  I wondered what could have happened between those two. They’d seemed such kindred spirits. There was something familial about them. You know those people who are the best of friends one minute, and enemies the next? Frenemies? And when they’re in a frenemy phase they say, ‘we’re just too alike, that’s our problem!’? It was that way with those two. Peas in a pod. Which is what made Laura’s attitude all the more strange.

  I shrugged. Shook my head. How did everything change so fast?

  Everyone is insane.

  I pressed Send on the text.

  And, half an hour later, as I walked down Church Street, towards Albion Road, my phone buzzed as I searched for the keys in my pocket.

  Laura. It had to be Laura.

  Number unknown.

  Hi guys! This is my new number! Pip pip! Pippy xxx

  Sour, beaten, I pushed open the door of our flat – my flat – and there was that moment again, the one I’d become so familiar with. The listening, the making sure, the sheer silence. No one home. Everything the same.

  I stepped in, my shoe sliding on something for a second.

  A menu from Wok ’n’ Roll. Another from Thaitanic.

  I kicked them aside, wiped my shoes on that mat, and then saw, just next to them … a picture.

  I stood above it, not yet ready to pick it up. I took it in.

  A mass of small cars, circling an arch. A deep and powerful blue stretching out above it all. Not one cloud in sight.

  A word in the middle. Block capitals and underlined.

  A name.

  seven

  Tom,

  I’m sorry I’ve been so distant, I am just elsewhere.

  You must be so confused and wonder if I still care.

  Hope you’re just carrying on as normal.

  Love

  Hayley

  I wasn’t angry, as I read, as much as I was fascinated. What could be going through her head?

  ‘Love’ was not a fair word to end on. Love equals hope but what if love is intended as friendship or pity? So stick your love where the sun don’t shine. Stick it in Ecclefechan.

  So, er … WHY DID YOU GO? I mean it, now. I just want to know.

  Then: Sorry you’ve been so distant? Yes, you’re pretty fucking distant. You’re in Paris.

  Next, WHY ARE YOU IN PARIS? You have never once mentioned Paris.

  So of course I’m confused. At least you know what’s going on, and knowing what’s going on is the basic requirement for not being confused.

  But yes, yes I bet you do hope I am ‘carrying on as normal’. Because that would relieve you of all guilt and responsibility, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t need to worry about me then, would you? This is a selfish sentiment and you are a selfish person.

  T
here. I said it. And I said it all out loud, as I got up, got out of bed, stormed around the flat, fists slamming hard on tables, stairs kicked, a single shoe booted down the corridor against a door where it now lay, confused and sad, like a little leather puppy.

  And then I saw all her magazines, lying on our table. And I thought about what Fran had said, about Hayley’s changing look, her changing clothes, her changing tastes, her change in location …

  FASHION. STYLE. FOOD. GLAMOUR. TRAVEL.

  For the woman who wants it all – except her boyfriend!

  I swept them off the table and let hard spines and staples and pages clatter against the wall and slide to the floor, where dog-eared pages spilled open and small neon Post-its next to shoes and tops glimpsed out.

  I got my phone out, saw Pippy’s text still there on the screen.

  Number unknown.

  Hi guys! This is my new number! Pip pip! Pippy xxx

  I pressed CALL BACK. She answered straight away.

  ‘Hiya!’

  ‘Have you done it yet? Can you just do it? I feel like I’m going mad.’

  ‘Cool your jets,’ she said. ‘First of all, did you tell Work Experience Paul to sit on a chair and await your instructions?’

  ‘What? No. I mean, I told him to take a seat and if I thought of anything—’

  ‘He was there five hours. He skipped lunch.’

  ‘Pippy, did you call Hayley’s mobile people?’

  ‘I just talked to them.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They said they couldn’t help. They asked me my “secret question”. I had no idea who her favourite teacher was at school so I just said Mrs Barbara Teacher.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘But then I begged them. And I said it was a matter of life and death. I said I had to be able to change my password because I was afraid my abusive boyfriend had it so he could check who I’d been calling.’

  ‘Abusive?’

  ‘I used that word, yeah, so I imagine the authorities may be in touch. The girl seemed to understand.’

  ‘So you got a new password?’

  ‘No, but she said she understood.’