Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  “Horse Girl!” Evie’s delight greets me before the door’s even fully open. She’s wearing pyjamas like always. It’s one of our unwritten rules: I dress up for Evie; she doesn’t dress up for me. This time they’re pink with little yellow hippos on them; she looks like a giant piece of pick ’n’ mix. Her make-up is immaculate, though. I’ve never seen it not.

  Also like always, she’s got a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Long-buried embarrassment drags itself from its grave just long enough to kick me in the stomach as I remember the first words I ever spoke to Teenage Petrolhead in person.

  “Your parents let you smoke in the house?”

  “Parents? You’re adorable. How young do you think I am?”

  In the morgue, I will still be cringing at the memory of her laughter.

  “It’s freezing,” she says, hauling me back to the present doorstep. “Get your gangly backside in here.” She shuts the door and presses her back to it. In a conspiratorial whisper she asks, “Have you seen it yet? The video?”

  A momentary, panicky instinct tells me to deny all knowledge, so I start to say no, realize too late that that would be impossible to believe, and wind up saying, “Noooooo doubt. No doubt. I have, yes. Of course. I have indeed seen the video.”

  She stares at me. “What was that?”

  “I haven’t slept much,” I tell her, which is at least true.

  “And when you don’t sleep you turn into a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta?”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.” She waves it away. “What a muppet! I can’t believe he broke his arm.”

  “I can. Ryan’s entirely made of thumbs and ego. Remember the time he tried fire-swallowing at the gig in Dublin and his hairspray went up?”

  We were both about thirty feet away and barely had time to scream before Nick tackled him to the ground and smothered the flames with his jacket. It took less than two hours for the still shots of Nick Lamb lying on top of Ryan Richards to become the most used profile pic on Twitter.

  “And he had to get that crew cut?” Evie laughs. “Yeah, I remember. RickisLife held a week-long wake for his quiff on her blog, but I thought he looked hot shaved.”

  I shrug. “I don’t really think of him that way.”

  She reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and I fight the urge to go rigid. Her eyes settle on my face. “Uh-huh. Come upstairs.”

  Despite having this palace all to herself, Evie does all her work in her bedroom. To be fair, though, you could fit the entire floor plan of our Tooting maisonette in Evie’s bedroom and still have room for a 747 and a game of cricket, so it’s not like it cramps her style. Unlike in my room, the posters of the Everlasting on the walls are framed, signed and precisely spaced. The wall above the bed is dominated by a massive oil painting of Ryan dipping Nick back into a Hollywood golden era kiss. She commissioned it from an artist in the fandom who’s been able to live off her paintings since Evie featured her on her Instagram.

  Where my room is a snowscape of drifts of dirty laundry, empty crisp packets and half-eaten fruit burrowed away like hibernating creatures, Evie’s converted loft space is meticulously tidy. The gigantic bed is made. The Mondrian patterned rugs are perfectly parallel to the floorboards. I suspect she’d even conform to the cliché of the pens lined up on the desk – except, of course, Evie doesn’t keep pens out on her desk; she keeps them in a rack in her drawer. “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” she likes to say.

  A year back, she went through a bad patch. She started cutting herself again – the first time, she said, since she was my age. I was the only one in the community she told. I was so proud. I took her to the doctor’s, sat with her in the waiting room. I saw the cuts. They were all exactly the same length, like a bloody barcode on the inside of her upper arm.

  She drops herself into the desk chair. The polished surface in front of her is covered in half a dozen iPads, each of them showing a different photo of Nick or Ryan, each of them captioned with a different Everlasting lyric. She likes to be able to move them around to get the sense of it. Later, she’ll splice the two she chooses together so they’re looking into each other’s eyes and post it to RickResource.

  Evie is good at the Internet. Which I suppose means she’s good at people, because what else is the Internet made of? She has a perfumer’s instinct for the exact blend of cruelty and sex and cute and flirtation that will make an image splash onto social in a cascade of reaction GIFs. You know how when there’s a really big poster campaign for some movie or perfume or something and you can’t turn a corner without seeing it? When Evie posts a GIFset or an image spread it’s like that, but online. And I live online.

  That’s why I’m so flattered when she turns to me and says, “I just can’t get it working. The closest I can come is these two, but there’s something not there in Ryan’s expression. Help me.”

  I look at the photo of him on the tablet. He’s gorgeous, obviously, and he’s got this little smirk at the corner of his mouth that could inflict a swoon at a hundred yards, but she’s right: it doesn’t fit. That’s Ryan’s face when he’s pleased with himself, not looking at anyone else. The caption Evie’s chosen is from “Saturday 3 a.m. Forever”: “We’ll be stopping time…”

  An idea takes me. There’s an expression Ryan gets when he’s really into something, a kind of yearning mixed with a premonition of loss, like it’s already slipping away. It’s … well, it’s an expression I usually only get to see when we’re in bed together, but still, I have seen it in one other context.

  “Here,” I say, pulling up the image search. “Try this.”

  Evie stares at it for a long time. In the picture his eyes are intent, his fringe slick with sweat and curled to one side, his mouth slightly open as he wills the moment to go on. He’s gazing at the crowd as they sing his lyrics back to him. He’s devastatingly beautiful.

  “I thought you didn’t think of him that way,” Evie says softly.

  “I don’t!”

  “Uh-huh. The speed you found that, you’ve looked it up before.”

  I don’t reply, but she presses. “Probably more than once. Possibly on your phone with your left hand because your right was ‘busy’?”

  I feel the blush enter my cheeks like a volcanic eruption.

  “You do!” Evie levels her finger like the Witchfinder General. “All this time you’ve been claiming you were devoted to Nick and Ryan’s true love, and meanwhile you’ve had your hand shoved down your pants while you dreamed about getting in the middle of it. Honestly, Cat!” She presses her hand to her cheek. “What would the fine people of RickResource say?”

  “I … I didn’t. I haven’t,” I stammer like my jaw is falling apart. “I … I … I …”

  “I’m kidding.” Evie bursts out laughing. “Honestly, Horse Girl, you’re so strait-laced. Your virginity’s the problem. You take sex way too seriously. We need to get you laid – that’ll get you over that.”

  “Yeah.” Honestly, I deserve a medal for how much effort I put into this laugh. “One hundred per cent extra virgin right here – you could make oil out of me.”

  “I’m not going to drum you off RickResource for fancying Ryan. I mean, he is seriously gorgeous.” She says it with a wicked smile, flouting the law with a queen’s freedom.

  She draws herself up to her full height, so I only have to bend almost double to receive her kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for finding the photo, and your secret is safe with me. Although, if you don’t want the rest of the fandom knowing that Ryan brings stormy weather to your lady parts, you might not want to write such knicker-ignitingly hot stories about him.”

  I’m momentarily baffled. “I… What?”

  “I read the draft you sent me. Not only did the sex bit make me thirstier than a cactus, but the way they met was adorable. Honestly, dubs, it’s your best yet. The best Rickcute I’ve ever read.”

  Mt Blush gathers itself into
a second eruption, this time in pleasure. I’d conservatively estimate that Rickcutes – stories in which Ryan and Nick meet in a cute way (like all societies, Rickdom makes its own language out of the origami of its forebears) – make up sixty per cent of everything on the fic side of the community, so that’s quite the claim. Neither Ryan nor Nick has ever told the story of how they met. Rickdom’s taken that as a kind of challenge, as if we can divine it through the medium of twenty-thousand word “short” stories.

  “The whole thing’s gorgeous,” she says, pulling it up on the iPad. “Them sharing the same passion for that bombed-out dance hall, but never meeting each other? Nick knocking Ryan out of the way of that lorry? We can’t have you being hurt and me being fine; I couldn’t live with myself. I mean, seriously, dubs, you could have lit London for a night purely off the power of my swoon. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that actually was how they met?”

  Look, I know what you’re thinking. I know it’s crazy, but at the same time, sometimes the urge to tell Evie about Ryan swells so much in my throat I can barely breathe past it. I feel like a cat with a hairball, like I have to cough up Hi, E, nice jim-jams, love the GIFset, and oh, by the way, the secret love affair that is the basis of our friendship and the entire community that you basically rule is a lie. I know because for the last three months I’ve had an all-access pass to one of the lovers’ boxer shorts all over her carpet.

  Writing the fic was a compromise, putting my boastful confession in a code I pray she never, ever breaks.

  Still, it’s hard to describe the deliciousness of the chill I feel, hearing my and Ryan’s origin story coming from Teenage Petrolhead’s glamorous lips.

  “Post it now,” she insists. “I wanna see the reaction.”

  I pull out my phone and obey. Evie immediately reblogs it, adding: Seriously, peeps, this story. THIS STORY!!!!!

  The speed with which my fandom flocks to the new hot thing never fails to take my breath away. Within ten minutes there are a hundred notes, in half an hour a thousand, most in all caps.

  OMG YAAAAAAAAASSS!!!!

  THIS IS PERFECTION.

  I’M LITERALLY CRYING, THIS IS SO WONDERFUL!!!

  The black string of notifications under the original post grows like an insect in a time-lapsed nature documentary. More and more, every time I refresh. Evie looks on like a proud parent at graduation, as if she’s given me this incredible opportunity.

  THEY ARE SO MEANT TO BE.

  Is that a twinge of guilt I feel? Maybe, but maybe it’s just relief, to have our story vindicated by so many people I love and trust.

  At first, the responses are universally positive. But it’s the Internet’s law of gravity that when any post gets big enough, it will inevitably draw some bitter little asteroid into its orbit.

  Oh my Christ bitch, do you really have nothing better to do? Ryan and Nick are NOT TOGETHER. Get a fucking life, you sad whore!

  I look up from the post. Evie’s over by her desk, fussing with Photoshop on her massive desktop screen. My thumbs are sweaty as I fumble for the delete button on my phone. If I can just get rid of it before she sees it—

  “Oh, well then.” Evie pronounces each syllable as calmly as if she’s spelling her own name. “Fuck. You. Bitch.”

  She spins round in her chair. She has an iPad in her lap.

  “Evie…” I begin. “It’s fine. It’s just someone being a twat online. It’s nothing.”

  “Just because it happens online doesn’t make it nothing, sweets. Online is where we live, you know that. What’s the username?”

  “They don’t have one. It’s an anon.”

  She makes an irritated noise in the back of her throat. “Of course it is. Cowardly turd. What’s the exact time they posted the comment?”

  “Look,” I say. “If you want to wade in, flame them, whatever, obviously that’s fine, but…”

  “That’s exactly what they want. Attention is these people’s fondest wish. I’m just going to get them to reconsider that aspiration.”

  “Evie, please.”

  “The exact time, Cat. You’re my friend; I’m not going to let this cretinous cockroach crotch talk to you like that.”

  I hold her gaze, pleading without speaking, but her eyes are like granite. “The time, Cat.”

  I give it to her. She opens a Gchat window and pings it along with the URL for my story to a friend of hers who works for Tumblr’s user experience team. Eleven beats of my frantic, panicky heart later, she has the anon’s IP address and the name of a baking blog they maintain on the same platform: Diary of a Cake Fiend. Apparently our troll is called Nat.

  “Ooh, look,” she purrs. “She’s still online, and her DMs are open.”

  Which is when she really sets to work: thirty seconds to find a particularly enticing picture of a home-made cherry Bakewell on the troll’s blog. Another minute to google a cherry Bakewell recipe on a more famous food blogger’s Tumblr, screencap it and paste Cake Fiend’s picture over the original one. Three minutes to set up the fake URL www.yummyyasmine.tumblr.com, and another two to comb Cake Fiend’s previous posts for someone she seems friendly with, and screencap their user pic.

  In seven and a half minutes exactly, Evie’s ready to pull the trigger.

  Holy shit babes! she types into the message field, having installed the pirated user pic and name onto the burner account. You didn’t tell me Yummy Yasmine was featuring you! You’ve really hit the big time!

  She pastes in a compacted link and hits send. “Pay dirt,” she mutters with satisfaction.

  “What?” I ask.

  “She clicked. Now she just has to try and log into our fake Tumblr page with her real ID and password, and bam!” She claps her hands together, little-girl delighted in her pink hippo PJs. “I own her. Now, I wonder if she uses the same email and password for her Facebook? Oh, she does. Well, isn’t it just Christmas Day all of a sudden?”

  I try to protest, but the Facebook profile of one Natalie Amani is already open on Evie’s enormous desktop.

  “Photos?” she muses to herself. “No, she doesn’t have any private folders. Messages, on the other hand… What do we reckon the odds are that this articulate person reuses her vocabulary?”

  I stand helpless behind her as she combs Natalie’s message files for the words bitch and whore. She squeals with delight to find the people they’re used to describe also in her friends list.

  What’s on your mind, Natalie? The cursor blinks next to the prompt.

  “Well, since you ask, Mr Zuckerberg,” she says sweetly, and begins to type.

  Dear Friends, I thought you might like to know what I really think of you…

  I try one last time. “Please, E, I don’t mind.”

  “I mind,” she says firmly. “She wasn’t just insulting you. Calling you a bitch, well, you can let that slide if you want, but come into our space, denying Nick and Ryan’s love? That’s an attack on all of us.”

  Her eyes were granite hard. That, her gaze implied, was sacrilege.

  “A place for everything. And everything in its place.” She hits post. “And your place, Natalie, is in the bin.”

  I picture the face in Natalie Amani’s smiling profile photo running with tears as she pleads with her friends. The first comments appear under Evie’s post and I turn away without reading them. My phone buzzes on the desk. Evie passes it over, too engrossed in her handiwork to look. I open the message.

  I’m delirious. I can’t stop thinking about you. Come nurse me. The drugs they give you for a broken arm are awesome btw – Rxx

  “Who is it?” Evie asks.

  For a second I can’t answer; it feels like I’ve got a conker, spiked husk and all, shoved in my throat.

  “Cat?” God help me, those brown eyes are trained on me now. “What is it?”

  “Just Mum,” I finally manage to croak. “She wants me home.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Amy

  I’ll never forget, as long as I live (although wi
th the maniac and her bomb across the hall that feels like less of a commitment than it used to), the night I decided to start streaming.

  Everyone else in the house was asleep, and I should have been too, but the clock on my wall was too loud, shaving seconds off Mum’s life, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. It had been an exhausting day. The first day she couldn’t use the loo without help. She’d had an accident; I’d cleaned it up. I didn’t mind the mess, or the smell; it gave me something to do, a fig leaf of usefulness. Head down. Do the job in front of you. Be of service to those around you.

  But her face…

  Mum’s stricken expression had barely been able to command the muscles under her skin, and, like a distant storm, I’d felt something inexorable batter at the fortifications of practicality I’d built up in my head.

  Every day of your life, you teach yourself to believe that the people you love are more than just bodies. Their hair changes and their skin wrinkles and they gain and lose weight, but it doesn’t matter – it’s still them, right? But then the disease comes, and it mocks your faith that they’re more than flesh as it shuts them in, and shuts them off.

  Dad had work in the morning, so the baby monitor was in my room. I lay awake, watching it. When her moans came over it, the static made them ghostly, like she was already gone.

  She was in the back study we’d converted into a bedroom. I crept downstairs and opened the door as quietly as I could. She was so small, sprawled half in, half out of the bed. At some point she’d rolled half over the edge of the bed, and she wasn’t strong enough to get back in. I rushed over, but when I put my arms under her and tried to pull her up she cried out.

  I let go like she was made of burning hot metal. “Mum, what is it?” I whispered. “What did I do?”

  But she couldn’t answer. She wasn’t properly awake. The drugs they’d given her – that I’d given her – were tethering her somewhere down beneath consciousness. There were half a dozen bottles clustered on the bedside table. The doc had prescribed them in a batch; the nurse had brought them all round. “Give her as many as she wants,” she’d said, like it was kind, like it was a mercy we should be grateful for that, next to the disease, any damage an overdose could cause her would be immaterial. I could see her struggle against the chemicals, scrabbling to make herself understood, squirming and making little sounds of distress.