Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  “When you wiped off the audio, did you edit it out of the clip on your phone before you posted it?”

  He frowns. “What? No, I never bother with that; I just toggle the sound off on Insta.”

  Wordlessly, I pass my phone down to him. I’ve centred the screen on the relevant passage.

  Now, an anonymous Instagram employee calling themselves only “A Fan” claims to have posted the video with the original sound restored.

  A crackling echo tells me that Ryan’s hit play. I hear Ryan’s running footsteps, his grunts of effort as he springs from wall to wall down the stairwell, his yelp of surprise as he misses his handhold, and then…

  “RYAN!”

  My voice, made tinny by the phone speaker, but unmistakably mine, screaming his name. A name Evie’s heard me scream a thousand times before.

  Explain.

  It feels like the world’s tipping, and I have to sit down. I hunch over amid the dust and the mouse crap. Ryan squats anxiously in front of me. It takes me four goes to find my voice.

  “You might,” I say hoarsely, “have to call your people a bit sooner than you thought.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Amy

  “What’s it like?” Charlie asked. His face was turned up towards me, the vulnerability of it only emphasized by his closed eyes.

  “You could try it, and find out,” I offered, gently stroking the mascara brush down his lashes.

  “And sacrifice all this?” He put his hand to his hair. It was his time for wearing it long like the singer of that gothy band whose riffs shook the walls when I was trying to do my homework.

  “You could get an undercut.”

  “Unlikely. Besides, I don’t need to try it; you can explain it to me.”

  “It’s tough to describe.”

  “I believe in you.”

  “It’s … I guess the way I’d put it is, it’s safe.”

  “Compared with what?” Charlie sounded amused. “Or do you mean you’ve been streaming off a bunch of base jumpers rather than risking the real thing?”

  “No, I mean it’s safe because it’s intimate, but there’s no chance of rejection. You don’t have to worry that whoever you follow is being two-faced, or trying to spare your feelings. It’s getting out of yourself, seeing the world through their eyes; it’s knowing the person you’re streaming off is being completely open and honest with you. It’s … trust, I guess. I sometimes have difficulty with that.”

  He laughed.

  “What?”

  “Keep an eye on the sea,” he said. “If we see a bunch of tidal waves it’ll be because the moon got shunted out of its orbit by the weight of that understatement.”

  “Oi!” I cuffed the air over his head.

  “Come on, Ame. I could tell you the sky was blue and you’d pull out a Dulux chart to check.”

  “Well.” I set aside the mascara and grabbed the eyeshadow. “You could use a little more scepticism yourself, kiddo. Then maybe you wouldn’t have let me make you up like a drunken clown.”

  His eyes snapped open and he threw up his hands to guard his face from the brush.

  “Kidding! I’m kidding. You’re going to look exactly like the goth prince your mopey shoegazing maiden desires.”

  He looked uncertain for a moment, then settled back in the chair, closed his eyes again, and his smile returned. I marvelled. He really did trust the whole world, which was astonishing given that the world was busy kicking him in every soft place it could fit its steel-toe capped boot.

  “Who’s the last person you did it with?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure that’s a question I’m comfortable with my kid brother asking me.”

  He slapped my arm. “You know what I mean. The last person you streamed off. Some rich kid? Some model?”

  “Why? Because, fug that I am, I desperately want to know how it feels to be beautiful?” I asked huffily.

  “Summon up all the fake offence you like; it’s not going to change the question.”

  I sighed. “A girl I found on a forum. Her dad died about two years ago.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “I would have thought you’d go for someone who worked at a petting zoo or something.”

  “Why? If I want to look at cute animals, I can do that myself. The Internet is plentifully supplied.”

  He didn’t voice the obvious reply: that if I waited a few months, I’d be able to feel bereavement for myself too. Instead, he asked the question I would’ve asked. The only question that mattered.

  “Is it always like this?” The need in his voice was a cramp in my heart muscle. “Does it get any better?”

  Just for an instant, I considered lying to him, putting all that trust to good use.

  “Not for her it hasn’t yet, no,” I admitted. “She warned me as much before we linked up.”

  “Then, why?”

  I weighed the question for a while before answering. “To know this is normal. To know I’m not weak for being this scared.”

  He sighed, his breath warm against the inside of my wrist. “I hate what they say about you, you know.”

  That morning’s consignment of abuse flashed briefly up from my memory: there’d been a minor storm when a bunch of dickhead dads complained I was turning their sons into cucks (cuck is a fantastically useful word online; it flags anyone who uses it as instantly ignorable).

  After that, a handful of concern-trolling anons had shriekingly accused me of ending society as we know it, and linked me to an article about four boys who’d wound up in hospital after hacking their safety settings and streaming for thirty-six hours straight without any sleep or food except Doritos. Apparently they’d only followed what we call “bad news bear” accounts – reporter embeds from war zones, frothing conspiracy theorists, and a couple of the more intense emo accounts, including mine. Heartstream’s official take was that the safety limits were there for a reason, and blaming them was like blaming hand gel for an alcoholic drinking it. I wasn’t so sure, and reading the report made an anxious little hole form in my gut. Still, for every story like that one, there were a hundred DMs from followers telling me they didn’t feel alone any more, so what was I supposed to do?

  Mum, Dad, even Heartstream Inc., begged me not to engage. “It’s not your problem,” they told me. To which I could only gape at them. How could I make them understand? What on earth was the point of all this, all this communication, all this connection, all this feeling, if, sometimes at least, I didn’t make it my problem?

  “Into every life a little rain must fall,” Mum had said, the day of her diagnosis, “and sometimes more than a little.” And now the Internet can pipe every drop into your front room. I guess some people need the irrigation; others, if they’re not careful, might drown.

  “I asked you not to read my mentions, kiddo,” I told Charlie.

  “I know, but it makes me so angry. You’re the strongest person I know.”

  It was bizarre, how I could spend hours a day hooked into the most intimate emotions of strangers, but a splash of in-person earnestness from my little bro was enough to light a forest fire behind my cheeks.

  “All done,” I said hurriedly. “Open your eyes.”

  He blinked and stared into the mirror I held up.

  “Like it?”

  He squealed in what I hoped was delight. “I look like a zombie! A totally miserable zombie!”

  “Who’s just dropped their brain-flavoured ice-cream cone, no less!”

  “It’s perfect!” He hugged me. I squeezed him back. The chains attached to his PVC trousers jingled.

  “I’m not the only one getting shit for being myself in public right now,” I said anxiously. “You know those dumb pricks in your year will lay into you for walking around school like this. I’ll have your back, but when I’m in lessons…” I left it hanging.

  “I know, but they’re always going to find something to give me shit for. Might as well look awesome when they do.”

  He swal
lowed, but under the white make-up I saw his little jaw set. I squeezed his shoulder. “Know what, Chucklemonster? I reckon the strongest person you know might be a little closer to home.”

  I ease the bathroom door open. Polly folds her arms.

  “You OK?” she asks.

  “Tiny bladder,” I say. “Shrinks even more when I’m scared.”

  She looks awkward. For a woman whose entire MO at this point has been threatening me, she really doesn’t seem to like being reminded of it. “All better?”

  I nod.

  “Good.”

  She leads me back into the devastated living room. She kicks up clouds of cushion feathers like a small child wading into a snowdrift.

  “Polly…”

  She stiffens at the name, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve used it.

  “Yes, Amy?”

  “How did you know my mum?”

  She licks her lips. “We met through mutual friends. I once thought she had the answer to a problem I had. But it turned out I didn’t know her as well as I thought. I came here to try to get to know her better.”

  I cock an eyebrow. “You just missed her.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” She chews a hollow out of one cheek and perches herself on an arm of the savaged sofa. “They used to say the eyes were the window to the soul, did you know that? Of course, we can hardly gaze into your dear mother’s now, but fortunately” – she bends and regathers Mum’s phone from where she threw it on the floor – “it’s the phone, not the eyes, that’s the window to the soul these days.”

  I just stare at her.

  “Come on, think about it: an opening into an immortal, indelible trace of yourself, left in the ether – what fits the description better than this?”

  “Your phone can tell you things about a person they can’t remember,” I concede. “Things they never knew, or at least never admitted to themselves.”

  She affirms this with a shake of the handset. “And now, with the advent of Heartstream, it’s all got even more sepulchral. You of all people know that.”

  I don’t answer, but it’s true; anyone who manages to erase my Internet footprint after I die will probably have a valid claim to being an exorcist.

  “The thing is, Amy,” – and she fixes me suddenly with her doll-like eyes – “I’ve looked and I’ve looked and I’ve looked, not just through her phone, but her laptop, her papers, even her bloody cushion stuffing, for your Mum’s soul, and you know what? She didn’t have one!”

  I want to bolt. Tape or no tape, bomb or no bomb, it’s almost more than I can bear to stand there and hold her gaze.

  “That’s why you came here, isn’t it?” I ask. “Not to meet me, but to find something of Mum’s?”

  And as fast as it came the anger in her stare is gone, like a match blown out. She purses her lips, tilts her head in allowance. “Meeting you is a big side benefit, but I confess if that was all I’d wanted, I wouldn’t have bothered with the waistcoat.” She plucks at the bomb vest.

  “So why did you need to wear that?” I ask, when I’ve managed to stifle my urge to dive behind the sofa. “Because I’m not going to lie, if you want to be my friend like you keep saying you do, that is a weird way to get me to like you.”

  A smile flickers over her lips. “I told you, I needed time, time inside your house, which isn’t a thing a girl in your position, quite sensibly, is inclined to give a mad-looking stranger. I knew what I’m looking for would be too well hidden to find if I turned up pretending to be a meter reader or some such. So I went all in, as it were.”

  “And what are you looking for?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” she says. “I really do, but there’s simply no way you’d believe me. And that would ruin everything between us.”

  More than holding me at gunpoint and bomb-point and smashing up my house and telling me to my face that my just-dead mother didn’t have a soul? I want to ask, but, judging from the earnest expression on Polly’s face, yes, it really would ruin things between us more than that.

  “Try me, I might surprise—”

  I cut off in mid-sentence. I’ve more or less tuned out the rumble of vehicles and the hubbub of voices from the street outside, but all at once it seems to grow louder. Somewhere overhead, a helicopter’s blades hack the air.

  “Back away from the building!” The voice is so loud it shakes the glass in the blinded windows. Its emotion is sapped by the electronics of the loudhailer, but I can still make out the desperation in it. “For your own safety, please disperse.”

  Polly wheels and plunges for the bay window. She parts the venetian blinds and I see her face go pale. She fumbles for the back pocket of her jeans, pulls out my phone and thrusts it towards me.

  “Call them!” she demands. “Tell them to get back!”

  Tell who to get back?

  Taking the phone into my hand feels like having a missing organ returned to me. I press my thumb to the home button, and the lock screen vanishes. The Heartstream icon catches my eye – holy shit…

  570,544 notifications.

  I open the app. There are too many – far, far too many – to read, but that’s OK, because they all seem to be a variation on the same theme. One message sits at the very top, shared over forty thousand times, along with my address.

  We’re coming for you, Ame.

  I lower the phone. Polly doesn’t try to stop me as I approach the window. I put my finger and thumb to the blinds beside hers, prise them apart and press my eye to the gap, and actually, physically gasp.

  There’s an army of them.

  Shaved heads, crow T-shirts, rank upon rank, crammed in on the other side of the street, pushing and jostling like a living wave behind the police cordon. There were hundreds of them at the funeral; there must be thousands of them here now. All here for me. All here to protect me.

  I feel a rush of love for them.

  My patches go warm, even crackle faintly, working under the load of transmitting the intensity of my emotion. An instant later a cheer goes up across the street. Out of the corner of my eye I see Polly blanch.

  A blur of movement drags my attention to the right, down the road. Neon police tape flashes under street lights, flapping ragged, torn by the press of bodies surging forward. The cops try to push them back, but they came here for a hostage situation, not crowd control. They’re not wearing riot gear, just high-vis anoraks, and there are far, far too few of them.

  “Disperse! For your own safety, get back!”

  But nobody’s listening to loudhailer man. Beside me, Polly’s face is pinched in fear. Her hand twitches towards the box at the collar of her bomb vest, but then goes back down again.

  “There are so many,” she murmurs. She sounds horrified. “So many.”

  The plastic bottles of explosive seem to press themselves out of the vest at me. Six of them; I remember the shock in the bomb disposal officer’s voice when I gave him that number. Enough explosive to level Big Ben, Polly had said. Across the street, the crowd pushes closer. Forty, now maybe only thirty metres away. Now twenty-five, now twenty…

  Closer. Closer. All those people who’ve come for me. Who are streaming off me. Far too late, I duck my head back to my phone, trying to type out a message to them to get back, but my fingers are too slick with sweat and the screen doesn’t answer.

  A shout, louder than the others, carries through the glass, and my head jerks up. A policeman stumbles; my stomach lurches as his neon-yellow vest is obscured by trampling feet. With a roar of triumph, the crowd surges forward.

  Polly puts her hands to her vest.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Cat

  It happened as fast as a change in the tide. One moment the path to our front door was clear, the next, the narrow box of our front garden was packed with men in T-shirts and hoodies with massive cameras hanging around their necks. The boldest, a balding white guy whose eyes had a faint yellow cast, like they’d been poached in leftover cooking fat,
walked right up to the front door and just leaned on the bell for about five minutes until I eventually scrambled downstairs and snatched the batteries out of the ringer. The shrill insistence of the buzzer was like a drill breaking into my life.

  Now they just mill around outside, staring at their phones, smoking, littering our path with cigarette butts like they’re at a house party that’s spilled out into the street. They’ve only been here for about fifteen minutes, but there’s an aura of bored professionalism around every one of them that says they’re prepared to wait for as long as it takes.

  I shift my weight from foot to foot, still not used to the change in balance caused by my ever-expanding womb. Every other second, I take a step towards the door, ready to yank it open and scream at them to get away, to beat them back like they’re a cloud of flies buzzing over the corpse of my privacy. Every other second, I hesitate, terrified of exposing myself.

  Instead, I haul myself back up the stairs and, easing the curtain away from the window, I snap a picture of the paps on my phone. I text it to Evie. Is this you??? I ask.

  I haven’t heard from her since her one-word demand for an explanation, the night the video broke with my voice on it. I never replied to her, obviously. What could I say? And she didn’t ask again.

  Of course, if Evie wanted to dox me, she could have done it that night. Why wait four months? Teenage Petrolhead was always an instant gratification kind of girl. “I thought revenge was a dish best served cold?” I asked her once, when she was laying into some Ricker turned sceptic who’d betrayed us. She looked at me, amused. “Don’t worry, there’ll be leftovers.”

  I stare at my phone until the screen goes dark, but no reply comes. Maybe it wasn’t her. What was it she said? You’re not the only Ricker at Granford High. Maybe one of the other girls heard the tape and put two and two together.

  My thumb hovers over the RickResource icon, but I don’t press down. If I have been doxed, I’m not sure I can face what I’ll find there. Instead I open my messages and text the photo of the paps to Ryan. Looks like we’re both famous now, I write, adding a worried emoji face. You’re the expert, what do I do?