by L J McIntyre
Through the window, Maggie shuffles into the motel car park and unlocks the reception door. I finish my breakfast and head out after her. She’s already sat at the reception desk when I go in.
“I’d like to check out, thanks.”
She stares intently down at her hands resting on the empty desk. “Umm…umm…check out?”
“Yes, check out. Leave as soon as possible.”
“Okay, well, that’s—”
“$40, I know. Here’s the cash.” I hand her the money. “I need to go up to my room and pack, so can I drop the key off in ten minutes?”
She nods while tightly clutching the money in her rigour mortis hand.
In my room, I look up a doctor in Queenstown who can write me a prescription for my missing medication. Before I leave the motel, I turn on Facebook and see how the image I uploaded earlier is doing. I wish I hadn’t. There are even fewer Likes than I’d anticipated. Six hundred and sixty two.
I open the comments and skim over them until I come to a comment from someone called Elaine Rothbury which says, “What’s that thing in the water to the right?”
Curious, I examine the image on Facebook and can make out a white object, maybe a plastic bag floating at the far end of the lake. I must have been too distracted to see it earlier, too hopped up on adrenaline. I open the full size image in Lightroom, zoom right into that area, and what I see knocks the wind out of me. My body goes catatonic, rigid with shock, while my mind switches to washing machine mode. Spinning and spinning.
On the screen, It’s unmistakable: a girl with a white T-shirt and dark pants is floating in the water face down.
“Holy shit”, I say out loud. “Holy shit.”
I throw the computer on the bed as if it were infected or cursed and start pacing around the room.
A dead body.
Oh Christ. What am I supposed to do?
The police. The police station. It’s just next to the convenience store.
I sprint out of the room with my laptop in my hand, and dash across the road to the police station, barge the front door open and enter a single room with two staff in uniform sitting at their desks. One of them is a chubby, bald man, puffed out cheeks, brown clumps of hair on the side of his head that haven’t receded like the rest.
“How can I help you?” The other officer asks. She’s strong-jawed with short black hair and broad shoulders. She looks like she’s broken up a fair few bar fights in her day, probably started a few. Definitely ended a few.
The words escape me while gasps of air win the battle for control of my mouth.
“Calm down, now. Just calm down,” the officer says. “Take a seat and try to relax.”
Panting, I sit down in front of her and open my laptop to the image. “Dead body in Lake Fisher,” I manage.
“Righto.” She leans in and considers the image. “Looks like a body to me. We’ll check it out.”
“You don’t…you don’t—”
“Come on, this is getting silly now.”
“You don’t want any more information from me?
She considers me for a moment as if remembering something. “Ah yeah, course. Your name?”
“Jack Coulson.”
“Okay, Jack, so what exactly happened?”
I explain this morning’s activities, including the yeeping creeps in the forest. She takes notes that I can’t read and occasionally throws a subtle glance over to her colleague.
“So, what happens next?” I ask.
“We’ll go to the river and check it out.”
“Okay, and am I free to leave town now? Or do you need me for more questioning?”
She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. “Why would we need you for more questioning? Is there something you’re not telling us?”
“No, no, I just don’t know how these things work.”
“Well, you guessed right. Don’t leave town. Let us check the lake, and once we’re in a better position to understand what’s happening, we might need to speak to you again.”
“So, I can’t leave?”
“Not unless you want to be in a lot of trouble.”
I leave the police station and head back to the motel room. It isn’t until I open Facebook on my laptop that I realise my career, the job I’ve dreamt about for years and which I’ve invested my life savings trying to kickstart, has begun to fall apart.
Chapter Nine: Three Years Earlier
Jack Coulson: Session Two
“Why am I back here?” I looked at Dr Randel on the chair opposite who wore a ridiculous pink jumper. “I should be locked up by now.”
“I couldn’t recommend you for sectioning, Jack. I need to know more about you, what you’re going through, what you’ve been through.” He raised his right eyebrow at those last few words, and like a distorted puppet, the right side of his moustache raised too. It would have made me smile if I didn’t hate him and his perfect life so much.
I rubbed my face with both hands, opened my arms out wide. “What do you want to know?”
“Where would you feel most comfortable starting?”
I shook my head, looked over to his desk. “It wasn’t intentional.”
“What wasn’t intentional?”
The notepad and pen were over by his computer.
“The guy in the van. I didn’t mean to do what I did. I just checked out.”
“And the red-faced monster checked in.”
I nodded.
“Has it happened before?”
I looked back at him. “Not like that. It’s never gone that far.”
Dr Randel scratched his cheek. “And how do you feel about the attack?”
I wiped lint off my jeans. My left leg tapped furiously. “Like shit. Like actual shit.”
“Remorse?”
“Of course remorse. I’m not a scumbag.” My voice raised.
“In our first session on Monday, you said you’d inherited a monster. I’m assuming this is the red-faced monster you’re referring to.”
I nodded.
He continued. “Where does that come from?”
I eyed him cautiously.
“If it’s inherited,” he said, “then is it from one of your parents or grandparents?”
I realised I was gripping the sofa on either side of my legs with both hands. I tried to let go without him noticing, but he noticed everything, was trained to notice everything.
“Jack.” He removed his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve. It’s a move he made when he wanted to level with me. But he had one of those faces that looked odd as hell without glasses, and absolutely normal with glasses. “I get it. I really do,” he said. “Of course, I don’t know what you’re going through, but I get that this pain, this monster, is something you’ve held onto for a long time. It’s not easy to talk about, but there’s nowhere safer than right here, right now. I’m all ears and I’m not judging you.” He put his glasses back on.
I bent forward, examined my shoelaces and said quietly. “I’m not ready.”
“Then let’s talk about the anxiety. Fingernails down a chalkboard you said.”
“Of every minute of every day,” I reminded him.
“Has the medication I prescribed helped at all?”
I nodded.
“Good. Now just to be clear, the medication is a temporary measure, not a long term fix. The sooner we get to the heart of what’s eating at you, the sooner you can get off the pills, implement effective coping strategies, and eventually you’ll hear those fingernails less often.” He offered me a soft smile.
“How?”
“How what?”
“How do I hear the fingernails less often? I need that right now.”
“Well, for now the medication will help with that. But I recall on Monday that you’d indicated writing relieved your anxiety. Is that right?”
“It used to.” My jaw tightened and I stood up, paced back and forth near his desk.
He put his hands in front of him, h
eld his palms up, adopted a softer tone. “It’s okay, Jack. Let’s forget the writing for now.”
I sat on the edge of his desk, looked down at a different family photo. They were at a lake somewhere. Dr Randel, his wife and the older daughter, who looked about sixteen there. The perfect life. I shook my head.
He got to his feet, walked to a bookcase at the end of the room, took something off a shelf and walked over to me. “Here you go.” He sat back down again.
He’d placed a large Nikon camera in my hand. I took my seat back on the sofa and rotated the camera in my hands.
“There are many ways to express your creativity. Photography is mine. Keep a hold of the camera until our sessions are over, play with it, enjoy the process.”
I placed the camera on my knee. “What the fuck do you know?” I said quietly.
He tilted his head to one side, pressed his lips together. “What was that, Jack?”
“I said what the fuck do you know.” My voice raised.
“I don’t know anything. That’s why I need you to talk, so I can know more, so I can help.”
“How can you help? Just because you’ve got a fancy PhD in psychiatry. That makes you think you can help me.”
He held eye contact with me.
“I mean look at you,” I continued. “With your perfect life and pink friggin’ jumper.”
“I’m listening Jack. Keep going.”
“Keep going? Keep fucking going. I’ve suffered my entire life. How have you suffered?” I pointed to the photos on his desk. “Look at that family, your family. I never had that.”
He looked over at the pictures and his face seemed to fall into this gentle expression, his jaw relaxed, eyes softened. I regarded the three images, the smiling faces, four of them in the oldest photo, three in the two more recent photos, and my stomach dropped.
The little blonde girl who looked like her mother was no longer in the most recent shots. I looked back at Dr Randel, who was wiping his glasses on his sleeve. He placed them back over his eyes, tucked the arms behind his ears and looked at me. “Her name was Dotty.”
“I’m sorry, Dr Randel.”
“Paul, call me Paul.”
“I’m sorry, Paul.”
He brought his hand to his mouth and cleared his throat. His eyes met mine and I saw how different they now looked, more human.
I looked down at the camera, took it in my hands.
“Jack, in the last session you said you’d noticed strangers on the streets looking at you differently.”
I felt ashamed.
“But the truth is, no one was looking at you any differently than the previous week, month, or year. Only your perception of those people had changed. You see, our minds are wonderfully creative. They can make us see what they want, including facial expressions in others that simply aren’t there. Our perceptions can distort the life of another into a picture of perfection just to remind us how imperfect our own lives are. And all these tendencies have one thing in common: self-preservation.
“The more you see judgement in others, and a monster in yourself, the further away you can push people, and the quicker you can run from any type of interaction and relationship. The more you see perfection, the angrier you can become. And the angrier you are the more insular you make yourself. This explains why you want to be sectioned, locked away nice and safe, have other people do the thinking for you, as you said.”
I rotated the wide lens of the camera, watched it lengthen and shorten.
“Jack,” he said. “There are no monsters—not in you, not out there—and there’s no such thing as a perfect life. Running away solves nothing. Locking yourself up will make things worse.” He leaned forward, his eyes pulled mine up to his. “So, in two days you’re going to come back here and you’re going to open up to me, because that’s the only way those fingernails aren’t going to scratch anymore. And by the end of next week I want to see some photos in the memory card inside that camera.”
Chapter Ten
When I go to delete my photo of Lake Fisher from social media, I notice a frenzy of activity around a recent comment on the photo. The comment was posted by a Facebook page called ‘Nesgrove Town’.
“Disgusting! This photographer is trying to go viral by posting a photo of the body of a poor girl from our town who tragically committed suicide. Please click the link below to read more,” the comment reads. It includes a link to a post on the Nesgrove Town page which I click on.
They’ve written up a story about my photo which they’ve also screen-captured. Even when I delete the photo I uploaded on my own account, the image is now immortalised on the internet on their page and on the page of anyone who wants to share it. Next to my photo of the lake, they’ve added a portrait of a young blonde girl.
Their post says:
Jack Coulson, an English photographer, reported seeing the body of a girl in Lake fisher this morning to police. Her name was Sally Adams, a resident of our small town, and it appears she tragically took her own life. After talking with the police, Jack Coulson decided to publish his photo of the lake which included Sally’s body in the water.
He clearly planned for his post to go viral, to claim ignorance when people spotted her body in his image, to say he had no idea the poor girl was there. But that is a lie. We have the police transcript to prove that he posted the image after speaking to police. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this.
My fingers shake as I check the About details on the Nesgrove Town page. The owners of the page are hidden so I can’t contact them. It only has fifty two followers. Maybe this won’t go viral. I hesitate a moment when I see the date the Facebook page was created: the same day I landed in New Zealand.
Back on my Facebook account, and my original post, underneath Nesgrove Town’s comment there are dozens of replies:
“Jack, I can’t believe I’ve followed your photography for a year. If I’d known what type of person you were, I wouldn’t have bothered,” said one comment.
“Just another internet leach,” said another.
“Social media whore at his finest, right here.”
“What has he done wrong? I don’t see a dead body or any mention of a dead body,” someone with some sense asks.
“You should be the one in that lake. The world would be a better place without the likes of you,” another person says.
Someone else has shared a link to a story which made the headlines recently about a YouTuber filming the body of a suicide victim.
I’m not like him, I want to respond.
It was an accident.
But how has this happened so quickly? It’s been five minutes since I was in the police station. They couldn’t have gotten to the lake by then, and certainly couldn’t have known her cause of death. And how can the police transcript time be earlier than my Facebook post?
I delete the photo of Lake Fisher and the girl, and I pause for a moment, try to work out if I should write another post explaining what happened, try to save the scraps of my reputation. Not a good idea.
This is the internet, after all.
The default emotional states online are outrage, attack and judgement without reason, and no matter what I write it won’t be believed. Besides, maybe I’ve deleted the post quickly enough to contain the problem, stop it from spreading. Writing something now will just be adding to the potential fire. But my gut tells me my career has taken a severe hit that it might not recover from. Reputation is everything and mine is getting filthier with every share and comment.
I feel like my house, the house I built with my own hands, is falling down, collapsing onto my back, brick by brick, roof tile by roof tile, comment by comment. My career is the place I’ve invested everything, the future I fantasise about when the present moment isn’t so great. I look around the motel room, at the bags on the floor, the door key on the desk, unsure of what to do next.
Time to leave town. I get up and grab my bags, fling the door open and step out onto
the balcony, look down at the car park. Empty. No cars. Betsy’s gone.
Chapter Eleven
I throw my bags in the room and run down to reception. Robot Maggie is making herself a cup of tea in the back room.
“How can I help you?” she asks when she gets to the counter.
“Someone’s stolen my car. Did you see anything?”
“Nope, nothing. Been here the whole time.”
“You didn’t see anyone hanging around at any point?”
“Nope.”
I dart out of the reception and run across to the police station.
“Someone’s stolen my car.”
“You got your words back then?” says the officer I spoke to earlier. Her name badge says Sergeant Davidson.
“What?”
“You could barely finish a sentence earlier.” She leans back in her chair and runs her hand through her crew-cut hair.
“Didn’t you hear me? Someone’s stolen my Betsy…I mean my car.”
“Okay.” Davidson takes a pen that was stashed behind her ear and leans forward. “Please describe the vehicle.”
After I describe the car and give her the license, she tells me she’ll be in touch as soon as they have more information.
“But doesn’t all this seem strange to you?” I ask.
“How so?”
“Well, how many people see a dead body and have their car stolen in the same morning?”
“We don’t have statistics on that currently.”
“Okay, but how is it that a Facebook page called Nesgrove Town knew about the girl—and her apparent suicide—at the same time you were first learning of the body in the water from me? They also said they had my police transcript which was timed before I posted the photo on Facebook, which just isn’t true. How do you explain that?”
