Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  Evie just stares at me. I thumb the AirDrop button and the picture wings its way to her phone. A pre-emptive peace offering.

  “You don’t want to post it yourself?” She sounds suspicious.

  “You’ve got way more followers. You’re Teenage Petrolhead – it’ll mean more coming from you.”

  She doesn’t need a second invitation. Less than a minute later Breaking: Ryan defies management injunction to get intimate ink #Padlocked #RickIsReal appears on Twitter and RickResource. I check four minutes later during “Camden Town Blues”, and it’s already got over a thousand retweets and #Padlocked is trending again. Evie’s smile is back. She jumps and throws her arm round me and we both lean back and holler “Rick is real!” at the top of our voices, and the knot in my chest loosens because, after a rocky moment, we’re friends again. I belong.

  That’s the thing people don’t get about the fandom. They think we believe Ryan and Nick are a couple because the idea of two hot boys together is a turn-on, or because it’s some kind of weird way of exerting control over them. But it’s not about the boys. Not really. Believing in Rick is what gets us up in the morning; it’s what tells me who’ll be a good friend; it’s what makes a joke so funny we’ll snort tea over it, all the funnier for the fact that civilians don’t get it. It’s what makes us a community; it’s what makes us us.

  It’s the most precious thing in the universe.

  “London!” Nick hollers at the end of “Lover in Purple”. “Thank you very much! Goodnight!”

  I groan. It can’t have been two hours already.

  We stay and scream for yet another encore (they’ve already done two) but this time the stadium floodlights come up. A ripple of disappointment runs through the crowd, but eventually we begin to drain towards the exits.

  Evie grins at me. She’s soaked in sweat, but model-in-a-sports-bra-advert sweaty, not drowned-squirrel sweaty the way I suspect mohair, jumping and the heat of eighty thousand packed-in bodies have made me. “Best night ever.”

  “Best,” I agree.

  She shows me her phone: the padlock tattoo tweet is up to eleven thousand RTs. @RickofTheLight, another big-name fan, has @-ed Ryan’s and Nick’s official accounts into the thread, begging them to confirm, saying their love story is the only thing she lives for.

  “Come back to mine,” Evie says. “We’ll get pizza and work the thread.”

  It looks like my five minutes of fame are forgiven. She’s beaming, full of the anticipation of the all-nighter to come combing the replies, finding and amplifying the best theories, chatting about the fics we could write around them. It’s tempting. Some of the best nights of my life have passed that way.

  “Sounds good…” I stop in my tracks, patting the back of my rucksack. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “My purse. I think it must have fallen out of my bag when I got yanked up onto the crowd.”

  Evie shrugs. “Well, it’s gone now.” She could lose a dozen of her designer purses and it wouldn’t bother her. In percentage terms it would just be a rounding error; and anyway, she’d only buy more.

  “It was a birthday present from Mum; she’s gonna kill me. I have to go back and try to find it.”

  Evie eyes the flood of exiting fans with scepticism. “Good luck.”

  I wince. “Don’t wait for me.”

  Evie laughs. “Don’t worry, I won’t. You sure you’re staying?”

  “If I want my grounding to end before the menopause, I have to at least try.”

  “More pizza for me, then.”

  Evie lets the tide carry her towards the exit, and after a couple of moments she’s obscured by jostling bodies. As I turn back towards the stage I hear a delighted cry – “Omigod, you’re Teenage Petrolhead?!” – and I know she’s having a good time.

  I make a show of scanning the ground for my fallen purse, sweeping my phone’s torch like a searchlight, but I’m moving far too fast to look properly. With the anticipation fizzing in my stomach, it’s all I can do not to break into a flat-out run.

  As it is, with my head down, that run leads me into what feels like a brick wall draped in high-vis polyester.

  “Exit’s that way, miss,” the security guard rumbles, pointing back over my shoulder. He has a voice like a passing train.

  My throat is parched, my hands are moist and I need to pee, but I just about manage to croak one word: “Padlocked.”

  He stares at me for a long moment.

  It hasn’t worked, I think. This was all some kind of joke.

  But then he rolls his eyes, sighs and stands aside. “Behind the curtain, then first left,” he says, “then second door on the right.”

  “Thank you!”

  “Whatever.”

  I mount the steps at the side of the stage, and push through the black curtains. Ahead, under a scaffolding lattice, a corridor opens like a mouth. I hurry into it, fuelled by a mix of anxiety and anger and need. Am I too late? Did I not push through the crowd fast enough? Is there someone else now? My skin itches with it.

  A skinny woman rushes past, lanyard flying, but she doesn’t challenge me. A hallway opens on the left, and I follow it. I pass one unmarked door on my right, but then there’s nothing but a seeming eternity of blank corridor. I’m losing heart for the second time in as many minutes, before I see a bend in the hallway ahead of me and, just around the corner, a second door.

  I raise my fist and, tensing my legs to flee into the bowels of the stadium if the wrong person answers, knock.

  The door swings open. He smiles at me. Not the magazine-cover, music-video smile, his real one. He’s stripped off his shirt, and I feel a little quiver in my inner thighs as I take in his chest and shoulders, still shiny with sweat from the stage lights. I can see the whole of the new tattoo on his right forearm now too: not a padlock, but an infinity loop. “For eternity,” he’d told me. “I never want to be irrelevant.” I’d laughed at him for that, shocked at myself for being so bold. How could he ever not be relevant?

  “I was waiting for you.”

  I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that voice saying those words.

  “I can’t…” I realize I’m gasping; I must have rushed more than I thought. “I can’t believe you—”

  But I don’t get to finish my sentence, because Ryan Richards stops it with a kiss.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Amy

  I remember the first time someone from the Internet scared me.

  At my mother’s bellowed insistence (you never would have known she was working with one and two thirds of her lungs) I’d taken a weekend to check out potential universities. It was a mad scramble, up to Edinburgh via Durham and then back down through York and Leeds to Bristol, all in two days, a blizzard of forms and pamphlets and unfamiliar faces, trekking up and down massive Victorian halls, past statues of monumentally mustachioed Victorian men who’d endowed this or that college with uncountable sums of money they’d plundered from equally uncountable numbers of people they’d conquered in the name of, well, Victoria.

  I felt like a zombie as I got off the train at Temple Meads station. The shafts of sunshine slanting through the glass roof dazzled me, and I had to squint. There she was, conspicuous by her stillness among the colourful blur of bodies and bags and chatter.

  I’d had my share of online hate, of course; show me a woman with more than five hundred followers, and I’ll show you a woman who’s been showered with spiteful shit by toerags with anonymous accounts. I’d had pictures of burning buses and bleeding babies posted in my feed whenever I’d had the temerity to voice any sort of opinion in public, but none of that had scared me, not bone-deep-chill-in-summer scared me, not the way this anxious-looking girl with her purple buzz cut and her too-thick eyeshadow did.

  I knew she was there for me, even before I heard her call.

  “Amy!”

  I remember the moth-wing flutter in my chest as I tried to smile at her. I asked her how she’d known where I’d b
e – I hadn’t posted about my trip on any of my accounts – and she told me all about the detective work she’d done, the way she’d mined not just my feeds, but Charlie’s too. Her guesswork based on the time of year, the calls she’d made pretending to be me to the train company to reconfirm my tickets, even down to the seat and the carriage. She beamed proudly, wanting me to be impressed, expecting gratitude for her dedication.

  “Since we’re friends…” she said.

  I fought to keep my voice even, toeing a tightrope between stern and gentle as I explained how she’d overstepped. I eyed her thinness; I remember being scared of what she might do to herself as much as to me if I tipped her too far. But all the while, I was panicking inside. Oh God, they can get to me. They can get to me here, in the real world, in my jeans and travel sweat and exhaustion, in my family and in my skin.

  There have been others since, but it’s that first girl’s eyes I recall now, eager, anxious, begging me to notice her and approve. The woman in my kitchen could be that girl’s aunt, or her older sister: the expression is exactly the same.

  Of course, it does make a bit of a difference that instead of a ragged Ramones T-shirt, she’s wearing a bomb.

  A swell of sound through the window – feet crunching the gravel, then Dad chatting and Charlie laughing (laughing: Dad’s a miracle worker with him, always has been) – snaps me out of it.

  I spin on my heel and sprint for the hall. Blood thunders in my ears. My throat closes up. At every step I expect the blast, the heat, the ball bearings tearing into my skin and fat and muscle, the concussion wave to break my bones and pluck me off my feet and hurl me into the wall. My panicked face swells in the windowpanes set into the front door as I bear closer. I’m fractured into an insect’s view by the bubbled glass.

  The sound of the key sliding into the lock is like a gunshot.

  The door opens a crack as I reach it. I feel the air from outside on my fingers as they curl around the jamb, and – just for a split second – I think, Pull, open it, get out, run; it’ll only take a second.

  But I don’t have a second. I see the woman’s blurry shape advancing behind me in the glass, and even with the distortion I can tell she’s reaching into her coat. I shove my weight against the door and it clunks shut.

  Dad utters a startled yelp as he staggers back. “Amy? What on earth—”

  “Dad, RUN!” I scream. “THERE’S A WOMAN IN HERE WITH A BOMB! TAKE CHARLIE AND RUN!”

  He freezes, but only for a heartbeat, then through the bubbled glass I see his blurred shape spin. He grabs Charlie’s smaller blur by the midriff, lifts him bodily off his feet and then sprints back down the path, tie flying out behind him.

  He didn’t even hesitate. Is that sick feeling in my stomach relief, or betrayal?

  Muddled by tears, shaky with adrenaline, I glimpse a hand hesitate over mine. She seems to think better of the gesture, and pats me on the shoulder instead. I go rigid as a prey animal at her touch.

  “I’m glad you handled it that way.” I look over my shoulder. There is sympathy in her eyes. In my line of work, I see a lot of sympathy, and hers is the genuine twenty-four-carat kind. “That can’t have been easy.”

  I just stare at her. What does she expect me to say?

  “That’s fair. You’re right; I’m sorry.” Her hand emerges from her coat, not with a button, or a lever, or a trigger, but with a small roll of shiny metallic tape.

  “Excuse me,” she says. Easing past me like we’re on the Tube at rush hour, she unrolls the tape and presses it to the gap between the door and the frame, running it from the bottom right along the top and down the other side until it’s completely sealed. It’s only then that I notice lengths of the same tape running along the skirting board either side of the door.

  “There,” she says. Her shoulders visibly relax, and she straightens, like she’s just put down a heavy backpack. “That’s the circuit complete.”

  The circuit?

  I look again at the rats’ nest of wires poking out of her jacket. In among them, I can’t help but notice, there’s now a little green light that wasn’t there before.

  I feel my skin dry out. I think I’m going to be sick. I follow the line of tape along the skirting board with my eyes. It disappears through the near side of each doorway, and re-emerges on the other side.

  She follows my gaze and nods. “Smart girl,” she says approvingly. “It’s basically like wire. One continuous loop running through every room in the house. Now that the circuit’s complete, if you break it, it sends a radio signal, and…” She delicately avoids saying what the signal does, but her eyes flick downwards to the bomb vest.

  “So,” I croak. My throat feels like someone has grated it. “You’ve sealed off—”

  “Every external door and window.” She smiles shyly. “It was a full morning’s work. A bit of a scramble to get it all done, but I knew I had at least a couple of hours.”

  “What? What do you … what, you mean you…” I tail off. The horror I feel must show on my face, because she grimaces.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Yes, you posting the funeral time was a bit critical for this whole thing to work.”

  All the air goes out of me. I put my back to the door and slide down it, staring up at this skeleton of a woman with her bomb and her apologetic smile.

  “You left the front door open.” My voice is hoarse, my throat raw from screaming.

  “Well, you had to get in. Not much point without you.”

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t got home first? If it had been Dad, or Charlie?”

  The smile slides from apologetic to plain wretched, but still stays on her face. It’s like she wears that smile as a shield – the worse news she has to deliver, the harder she clings to it. She reaches casually into her jacket and pulls out a small black snub-nosed pistol. I recoil against the door.

  “Only if they refused to leave you,” she says, like that’s supposed to reassure me. She frowns. “Not that that proved to be an issue – your father scarpered like his feet were on fire. I can’t help feeling that’s a pretty shabby way to treat your only daughter.”

  I can taste something sour and bloody, like I’ve bitten my cheek. “He was protecting Charlie.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he was.” Her voice is mild, but there’s a hard edge to it, a set to her face, and just for an instant I think, She’s angry – no, furious. Furious at him for leaving me.

  Is she relieved she didn’t have to shoot him, or angry she didn’t get the chance? The knot in my guts ties itself tighter at the chaos I’m seeing in her. This woman – if the gun and the bomb and the iced fucking buns weren’t proof enough – is completely insane.

  “What do you want?” It comes out as a weak whisper.

  She doesn’t reply, just tilts her head and looks down at me.

  “Is it money?” I ask. “Take whatever you want.”

  She looks around the hall at the height of the ceiling, the old wood frame of the mirror, the broad sweep of the lawn through the door’s window glass.

  “Well, it’s kind of you to offer, but no. I’m not after money.”

  A high-pitched whine carries through the glass, then modulates downwards. I feel the skin on the back of my spine pucker: sirens.

  The movement is casual, but the gun is now pointing at me.

  “The first thing I want from you, Amy, is your phone.”

  My phone?

  I crouch and reach slowly into my handbag where it lies abandoned by the door. My hand touches my phone, and on sudden inspiration, I press my finger down to unlock it, tap the Heartstream app, and hit broadcast. It takes less than a second; the motions are so familiar I can do them blind. Any info I can get outside has to be good, right? My patches are pressed on right up against my hairline at the back, and are near enough the same colour. With luck, she might not even have noticed I’m still wearing them. Just in case, I lift my chin to look her in the eye, burying the little pad on my neck below the l
evel of my high collar as I relock the phone, pull it clear of my bag and pass it over.

  “Unlock it, please.”

  I obey. She takes it, squints at the screen, then at the gun, then back at the phone, and backs up a few paces. “Stay there a minute,” she orders, then types one-thumbed, occasionally looking up at me. I can see her lips twitch as she tries out words.

  “How’s this?” she asks. “Hi Jeremy, you don’t know me. But I’ve got your daughter. Please don’t worry – we’re both safe and I have no intention of hurting her, but I do have a bomb and have wired every external door and window to the detonator, so if you could tell the police that storming the place is a bad idea, that’d be great. Kind regards.”

  I look at her helplessly. “What do you want advice on, your grammar?”

  “By all accounts he’s a good guy. I don’t want to worry him.”

  I think that’s wiring the stable door with explosives after the horse has bolted, don’t you? I think, but it’s a bit much to vocalize staring down the barrel, so I stay silent.

  She shrugs, hits send, and I hear the whoosh of the message disappearing. The sirens get louder and louder. I’m used to screening them out as they swell and then ebb, rushing to someone else’s emergency. Now, they’re parked outside, rattling the windowpanes.

  “Oh, damn.” She tucks my phone away inside her jacket, turns on her heel and heads back towards the kitchen. “The tea will have stewed.”

  Dazed, I just stare at her retreating back. She turns and beckons with the barrel of the gun.

  “Come on, Amy, we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cat

  “I can’t believe you did that.”

  “What?”

  “The nail thing.” I zoom the phone camera in on Ryan’s nails, but the purple varnish has long since been scrubbed away. “I didn’t tell you about purple theory so you could use it to mock us.”