Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  There’s one video I can’t stop watching. I click on my YouTube app now and it’s right at the top, helpfully suggesting itself. It’s a breakdown of Ryan’s parkour vid. I watch in slow motion as he runs and leaps, catlike, onto the concrete banister. I watch the frame of the video lurch after him as he drops into the stairwell. I hear myself, slurred into drunken slow motion, calling his name as he falls, while the narrator, a girl who sounds far too self-assured and convincing, relates her theory that I’m screaming his name because I’m a deranged, obsessive stalker, and Ryan was running away from me, and I chased him into that stairwell, and so I’m the one who broke his arm.

  “Someone should teach her what it’s like to be followed,” the voice concludes.

  My head throbs and the screen swims into a blurry fruit salad of coloured lights. I take off my glasses and pinch the bridge of my nose until the pain goes away. I’ve been getting headaches like this more and more. I guess I’ve been looking at screens too long, but there’s nothing else to do cooped up at home.

  My thoughts are a welter. Me, Ryan, Evie, Mum, the baby. It’s hard to keep them straight under the sheer weight of all the tweets and Tumblr posts and videos going around and around my head. GetRickorDieTryin’, Sat3amforEvelyn; these are my friends, all of my friends. I’ve spent years listening to them, believing them, and that’s a tough habit to break. Now and then, I catch myself thinking, What if they’re right? What if I am hallucinating? What if I had sex with some random and am somehow suppressing it? After all, isn’t that more likely than me happening to run into my favourite pop star in my favourite place and him falling in love with me?

  A memory swims up, a GCSE RE lesson last year, before Ryan, before any of this. Mr Garfield told us about this guy, David Hume, who had a theory about miracles. The problem with someone telling you they’ve witnessed a miracle, he said, was that in order for you to believe them, the idea of them being wrong, lying or crazy had to be more miraculous than the miracle itself. And in those terms, that night outside the Dance Hall on Streatham High Road feels more and more miraculous every day.

  Rain hammers the windows of the cafe. Outside, blurry figures hurry back and forth in the gloom. The Starbucks starts to fill up with people shaking out umbrellas and wet hair and laughing about the sudden downpour.

  I look around, feeling a sudden, sharp pain in my chest. There are too many people now, hogging the space, the light, the air. They’re all on their phones, thumbs stroking the screens like lovers. Sure, they all look like they’re just checking Insta, but there are at least six, seven, no, nine of them holding their cameras at an angle which would put me in frame. Under the cafe fluorescents, the little black lenses glint like fish eyes.

  I have to move. I stand up unsteadily and stumble out of the door, instantly soaked by the rain. The clouds have brought twilight at mid-afternoon, everything’s grey and murky. I shove my hands in my pockets, bend my head, and start to walk home, but I’ve not even reached Mitcham corner when I hesitate. There’s a shadow at the corner of my vision. I pull out my cloth and wipe my rain-smeared glasses clear to see a girl in a dark jacket and hijab, sheltering under the awning by the entrance to the market, phone out. Did I see her in the Starbucks? Did she leave at the same time as me? What is she doing standing out in the rain – waiting for an Uber?

  Without another thought I take a right, and then lurch into the first left. There’s still that shadow in the corner of my eye. A woman, in a dark jacket with a hood up and her head down. Did the girl by the market before really have a hijab or was it just a hood? Everyone looks the same in the rain. I’m not on the route home any more; I can’t risk leading them there. I’m taking random turns. Housing terraces pass me in a blur, the cross-lattice of their bricks like cage bars. You’re panicking, I tell myself. You’re being stupid; you’re not Jason bloody Bourne. But I can’t stop. My reflection in the wet pavement shambles like an ungainly monster. The sweat inside my coat is like a second rain, and I wrestle my hood down so I can breathe.

  Eventually, I pause. I feel like the jackhammering in my chest will kill me if I don’t. My jaw aches. I think I’m going to be sick. Isn’t that a symptom of a heart attack in women? Or maybe it’s just the baby. I look around. I’m on a stretch of waste ground between the back of a housing terrace and the looming concrete edifice of an estate. A mound of grass shows all the signs of being a public toilet for dogs and drunks; the street light in the middle of it has come on in the gloom. I look around, blowing water off my top lip as I huff after my breath. I’m alone.

  “Of course you’re alone,” I mutter to myself. “It’s not like anyone’s going to follow you in this, even if they were inclined, which they’re not. You’re not that interesting; get a goddamn grip, Cat.”

  “Oi! Hippo!”

  I wheel around. The rain parts like the curtain of a waterfall as a dark shape comes storming up out of it from the end of the alley, far, far too fast to be running. A dark shape on a bicycle, head down, pedalling frantically, wheels throwing off spray. It’s holding a long thin shape, hooked at one end. A hockey stick.

  “This is for breaking Ryan’s arm!” The hockey stick swings, right at my upper arm. I sprawl out of the way, just, but fall awkwardly on the sodden grass; something nasty smears across my right cheek. The figure on the bike hoots victoriously and I see a camera flash and then they’re gone.

  “Catherine?” Mum looks downright horrified as I stand in front of her dripping on the welcome mat. “What on earth happened? You’re soaked. You’re … what’s that in your hair?”

  I fight to smile at her. “I just… I just got caught by the rain on the way back from Starbucks, that’s all.”

  She frowns at me. “It stopped raining twenty minutes ago; the walk back from the high street is only five. You must have taken a hell of a long way round.”

  “Well, you know. Needed a leg stretch. It’s important to stay as mobile as you can in the final weeks; that’s what the doc said, remember?”

  “I do remember. Just as I remember you pleading your bump when asking me to get up to pass you the crisps last night, so forgive me if I view your new-found enthusiasm for exercise in a downpour with a little scepticism.” She catches my expression and her face softens. “What happened, Cat? Tell me, so I can help.”

  I waddle towards her, and she wraps me in a hug, ignoring my sodden clothes and the stink of whatever’s in my hair.

  “You believe me, don’t you, Mum?” I ask quietly. “You’re on my side?”

  “Always,” she says firmly. But she can feel me shaking, and I know that won’t help her sleep tonight.

  Upstairs in my room, showered and towelled off, my eye falls on the poster of Ryan over the bed, and I feel my fear ebb to fury. How dare he? How dare he not be here for this! I drag my phone from the sodden heap of my tracksuit trousers where they lie abandoned by the door and message him.

  No more time, no more excuses. One of your fans just tried to hit me with a hockey stick. We go public, this week, or I’m getting a paternity test and a lawyer.

  As soon as I send it, I’m quailing at the tone, wanting to apologize, to hedge, but it’s too late. The three dots appear almost immediately.

  OK, I’ll get my guys to draft a press release.

  A release? I feel my heart plunge. Didn’t he say they’d already done that weeks ago, that they were just looking for the right time in the press cycle around the new album or something?

  No, no press releases. A video, live-streamed. You and me. Here or there, I don’t care. You put your hand on my belly and you say that it’s yours.

  Three dots again. I hold my breath.

  Don’t you trust me?

  I want to write of course I do. I want to apologize for my presumption and for hurting his feelings. Instead, I just repeat.

  A video.

  OK, he replies. I’m sorry. I love you.

  As I read those words, a warm glow suffuses me, pushing out the last of the chill from th
e rain. Finally, I begin to feel calm. This week. Soon this’ll all be over. Everyone will see, everyone will believe me.

  I love you too, I text back.

  Something’s missing from the conversation, but it’s only later that night, awake, my sea lion-like bulk wedged in with pillows while I stare at the wall, that I realize what it is. I told him a fan of his assaulted me with a hockey stick, and he didn’t once ask if I was OK.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Amy

  I heard the trouble before I saw it: a change in the quality of the laughter. Laughter’s like air, or water; it’s vital to life, but you feel it instantly when it turns cold.

  I might have said as much to Christina, to explain why I had to leave at this inopportune moment, but that was made tricky by the fact my tongue was in her mouth. All I managed to get out was a spitty “Goddago!” before extracting my hands from under the back of her top and haring down the school corridor, my trainers squeaking on the lino. The laughter was coming from a couple of doors down. Charlie’s classroom.

  I arrived at the wired glass porthole in the door just in time to see my little brother stagger over a not-so-accidentally stretched-out leg. I was about to explode into the room like a vengeful crop-haired tornado and bite the faces off the little dickheads surrounding him, when Charlie looked up. His eyes met mine. I caught an infinitesimal shake of the head. I rocked back on my heels.

  Watch, he mouthed.

  With a supreme effort, I wrestled my rising bloodlust under control, opened the door as quietly as I could, and slipped into the classroom of Upper 4B.

  “Where’s your tiara, princess?” a gorilla of a kid – I think it was Martin Gollings – sneered.

  Charlie straightened slowly, keeping his back to Gollings for six long seconds. Then, theatrically, he checked his make-up with his phone camera.

  “Marty, honey.” He let out a long sigh. “This is a non-realist late century throwback goth look.” He spun on his heel. “I wouldn’t dream of wearing a tiara with anything other than a full-on glam rock ensemble, and even then, it’s a bit … de trop, don’t you think?” He drawled the term, relishing the look of confused irritation that crossed Gollings’s face. “It’s French,” Charlie supplied with a glassy helpfulness. “For a bit much. Not a term that’s likely to be applied to your fashion sense any time soon, I know. But we can try.”

  A handful of uncertain titters broke the air, and I couldn’t tell if they were directed at Charlie or Gollings. The expressions of the kids laughing said maybe even they didn’t know. The expression on Charlie’s face said he didn’t care.

  My little brother actually skipped over Gollings’s accomplice’s outstretched leg, until he was mere inches from the lumbering behemoth’s face.

  “You could – with a bit of work – be almost handsome, you know,” he said brightly, stroking one finger down Gollings’s cheek. More titters as Gollings recoiled. “I’d be happy to give you advice, I’m a charitable soul. First idea – that gormless expression is soooo last ice age. I’d ditch it if I were you.”

  The laughter got louder, and this time the pink-faced boys guffawing were looking at Gollings. Yep, the wind was definitely changing.

  Gollings’s jaw worked, but no words came out. Charlie eyed him sympathetically. “No, I said get rid of the gormless expression, not intensify it. Never mind. We’ll work on it. Baby steps!”

  And then, standing on tiptoe because Gollings was a full head and a half taller than him, Charlie kissed him on the cheek before resolutely turning his back on him.

  Laughter exploded, filling the room. Gollings’s face was purple, like an overripe raspberry. I saw the tension enter his ludicrous-for-a-fourteen-year-old muscles, and I started to move, to get between him and Charlie’s exposed back, but then a wiry kid with a fancy quiff standing next to Gollings gave him a warning touch on the chest, and with a visible effort, the massive child restrained himself.

  Charlie raised one hand and then sank in a thespian bow, as though U4b were his adoring audience. The laughs got louder. A couple of kids even applauded.

  On his way past, he leaned in and whispered, “There’s only one way to respond to people who give you shit for being yourself: be yourself ten times harder.” He flashed me an exhilarated grin. He was breathing hard and I figured this must be the first time this routine had worked for him. Pride surged up from my chest, tugging upwards at the corner of my mouth. I’d have hugged him if it wouldn’t have cramped his style.

  Instead, I wandered over with him to the lockers at the back of the classroom and leaned against them smugly while he spun the combination lock on his and yanked it open.

  I was side-on to him, so he was in profile when I saw the smile freeze on his face.

  The air in the room had changed again, this time turning clotted, ugly. More uncertain laughs, but these seemed more in shock than mirth. Gollings leered. The kid with the quiff was looking intently at Charlie.

  Charlie’s jaw worked. “Wh…” he began. “How…” The smile that had been frozen melted away; his black lacquered nails rattled out a tattoo on the metal of his locker door.

  “What’s the matter, princess?” Gollings asked. The wiry kid with the quiff was smiling now, a small satisfied smirk. “Run out of fancy shit to say?”

  I’m ashamed to say it took until the first tear dragged a black lightning bolt down Charlie’s whitewashed cheek for me to run the three paces to him, then I stopped cold. It was like a kick in the guts.

  Charlie’s locker was full of tumours.

  Tumours cut from cigarette packets. Tumours printed off from the Internet. Swollen and red and bleeding, set into sunken ribcages and bursting from papery skin. They covered every inch of surface space.

  Pride of place in the middle of the backplate of the locker was given to a page torn from a medical textbook. A photograph of a woman from the waist up, naked, yellowing, with huge lesions whipping across her stomach. She was dead.

  I felt rage blossom inside me; my hammering pulse blotted out the rising “ooooooh” from the crowd. I turned, but Charlie got there first.

  He flew at the kid with the quiff, fingers hooked, nails like black claws, but Gollings was far too quick. With no visible effort, he planted a hand on Charlie’s chest and shoved him sprawling into a desk. Charlie crumpled to the floor, burst into tears, scrambled back to his feet and fled the room. I sprinted after him, throwing a pointless elbow in the direction of Quiff, who just ducked it.

  I caught up with him in the boys’ loos. A wobbly-looking fifth-former at a urinal tried to voice an objection to my presence, but I just snapped “What?” at him and he fled.

  Charlie was washing his face, his ruined make-up staining the water as it swirled in the sink. I hovered uncertainly at his shoulder. I wanted to hug him, but I couldn’t see an opening.

  “Those kids are pricks,” I said. “Fuck ’em.”

  He didn’t answer. His whole body was shaking. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Charlie?”

  He mumbled something, but it was drowned out by the taps.

  “What was that, Charlie?”

  “I said DON’T TOUCH ME!” He screamed it in my face as he recoiled from my hand. “I had them,” he choked. “For the first time, they were with me … and then … that.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. They’re stupid arseholes. Like you said, they’ll always find some way to give you shit.”

  “They didn’t find this,” he snapped back. The make-up I’d done for him was gone, his eyes wild and red and raw. “You gave it to them.”

  I come to on cold tiles, the kitchen spotlights glaring down at me like tiny suns. The skin behind my ears and on the back of my neck is hot and sore where my patches burned it. My head feels like a tiny martial arts expert is repeatedly and determinedly kicking it from the inside.

  Feedback, I think groggily. I must have passed out from the feedback. I’ve never experienced it before, but I’ve heard of it – every streamer with a big audience
has.

  The technology Heartstream’s based on, intra-limbic transduction, is inherently two-way. Both parties to the stream draw from the other. But that creates a problem – feedback. You feel them feeling you feeling what they’re feeling and so on. If you’re streaming to more than a few people, it quickly spirals, overwhelming the brain.

  To combat this, the Heartstream exchange has built-in safety protocols that dampen down the flow in one direction. These dampeners kill about ninety per cent of the feedback but you still get a bit of emotional backwash from everyone streaming off you. It’s minuscule, so minuscule that no one I’ve ever met has been able to detect it, but – theoretically at least – it’s proportional to the strength of the signal you’re sending, and they all add up, so if you have enough followers and you stream a really, really, really intense emotion…

  The effect is bigger with close friends and family members, and you’ve got to be careful: the dampeners are built into the software, not the patches themselves, so if you’re bypassing the app to create a private loop you need to remember to set them up manually. Last year there was a story going around about a pair of twins who forgot and were in a coma for six weeks. Right now, the way my head feels, I believe it.

  Using the cabinet behind me as an impromptu crutch, I drag myself to my feet. Polly’s sitting at the table, her head propped on balled fists. She’s singing to herself, like a mantra or a lullaby, so soft I can’t make out the words. I’d say she has a nice voice, if she hadn’t broken into my house, threatened me with a bomb and got my little brother shot.

  “Charlie.” My throat’s all torn with screaming, and it comes out in a croak. I taste blood in the back of my mouth. “Is he—”

  “No,” she says, cutting me off, which is just as well, as I’m not sure I could have brought myself to finish that sentence. “At least, I don’t think so. I…”