Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  She drops the phone onto the table with a clack.

  “My friends wouldn’t talk to me, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t talk about me. All of a sudden, they had the juiciest gossip. Maybe you’ve seen some of it? Apparently, I’d had sex with every boy in our school, so there was no way I could know who the father was. Another said they’d seen the contract I’d signed with management to pretend to be Ryan’s lover, and another swore blind they’d caught me shoving a balloon up my jumper. For a while, everyone on RickResource stuck a needle emoji on their posts, because that was what they would jab into my belly if they saw me.”

  I just stare at her, waiting.

  “There were threats too, obviously. I was going to be strangled, stabbed, burned, beaten to death because I was getting in the way of the greatest love story the world had ever known between Nick and Ryan, who had obviously never heard of me, and wouldn’t touch a vagina in a month of Sundays. How exactly I was getting in the way of that romance if neither of the protagonists had any interest in the contents of my knickers was unclear, but apparently I deserved to die for it.” Her face twists into a wry smile, but then it flickers and fades. “They even threatened my mum.

  “I reported the threats to the police, but nothing was ever going to persuade them to take a bunch of girls on the Internet seriously. They said if it bothered me so much I should just stay off social media.”

  I snort. That, at least, hadn’t changed. “Digital solitary confinement,” I volunteer. “That’s a hell of an alternative to them doing their fucking jobs.”

  She laughs. “Exactly. It was everywhere. My Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, even fucking Instagram. I couldn’t block people fast enough, and the sheer effort of trying was exhausting.”

  She sighs. “It’s weird. Even though I knew they were wrong, I couldn’t stop myself from listening to them. I started to feel guilty, like I was lying, like I was just attention-seeking. A few times, I wondered if I really was delusional, and had hallucinated the whole thing. After all, looked at in the cold light of day, it did seem improbable.”

  “It’s hard to get out of the habit of believing someone,” I say. This is something else I’ve learned: trust isn’t rational; it’s emotional. It’s like religion, if you had the evidence to prove you ought to trust a person then you wouldn’t need to.

  She nods, puts a grateful hand on mine, and I let her.

  “It went on for days, then weeks, then months. It just didn’t let up. A community of antis cropped up, people who believed me. At first I was grateful, but then I realized they were just adding fuel to the fire, keeping it burning.

  “I was going mad. So was Mum. She was always a bit of an insomniac – my dad had sneaked off in the middle of the night and she didn’t like to sleep in case something else important disappeared when her eyes were closed. She had to take pills to knock herself out. Ryan promised a press release, but it kept not appearing. There was always some detail to be worked out, some last-minute hitch, the lawyers were begging him to wait. Weeks bled into months with no word. We barely saw each other for weeks on end. He kept making excuses. But then a girl actually tracked me down in person, came after me with a hockey stick. I shouldn’t have been surprised. When I was in the fandom we could track Ryan or Nick to one specific chair in an airport lounge. Sooner or later they were going to turn those skills on me. Still, that was when I knew we couldn’t wait any more.

  “It was a Thursday night. At 7:30 Ryan was going to come round – he resisted at first, but I begged and wheedled and he eventually relented. At 8 p.m. we’d do a webcast together. We’d sit on my living-room sofa, and he’d put his hand on my Zeppelin-sized belly and say this is my child. I posted about it on all my accounts, just to make sure everyone was watching.”

  She breathes out, and seems to deflate; her eyes turn to the clock on the wall.

  “At 7:40, when he still hadn’t turned up, I started to worry. At 7:55 I was shaking and crying, Mum trying to comfort me but not knowing how. At 8:05 p.m. I had the live-stream chat window open, watching people call me a psycho and a whore and a liar in real time, and I knew: This is it. If I let this pass, now, it’s proven: I’m a psycho liar whore for ever.”

  She’s recited all this in the same calm, detached voice, like she’s reading a weather forecast on the radio. Now she stands, and smooths out the front of her slacks.

  “So I took my phone” – she lifts my handset from the table – “and I set it up like this.” She props it against the fruit bowl. “Because Mum refused to hold it. She thought it was a bad idea. I knelt – actually knelt – in front of it like this.” She drops to her knees on the kitchen tiles. “It was the only way I could get my face into shot properly. And I logged onto the stream, and I said I was sorry I was late, and that Ryan wasn’t there, but I was sure he would be soon, and in the meantime at least they could see that I really was pregnant, that the photos I’d posted of my bump weren’t faked or of someone else.”

  Still staring into the dark mobile phone, she lifts the hem of her shirt where it sticks out under the bomb vest, displaying a flash of concave belly and a long appendix scar.

  “Ten minutes went by, then twenty, and by then I knew that Ryan wasn’t coming and I ought to shut off the stream, but I couldn’t stop myself from reading the comments. They Photoshopped me onto everything: dogs, fish, turds, corpses, Pinocchio, Trump. It went on until exactly 8:47; I know because I was looking at the clock in the corner of the screen.”

  I try to imagine it. The humiliation that must have burned in her. That sense of everything dissolving, with no way out, no plan, no way to make it better.

  “What happened at 8:47?”

  She turns to me; her smile is as wide and glassy as a frozen lake.

  “The police kicked down the door. Some scamp had called them and said there were terrorists making bombs at our address. Eighty thousand people got to watch as they burst in with guns and shields and ground our faces into the carpet. It was as if I’d done it onstage at Wembley. It gave them all the meme material they’d ever need.”

  I swallowed. Swatting they used to call it. In America, where it originated in the live gaming community, it had got people shot.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, and mean it.

  “Oh, don’t be. The coppers were quite charming when they realized their mistake, and very apologetic. We gave them a cup of tea and a digestive. They promised us they’d investigate the false tip-off, although we all knew there wasn’t much they could do. It could even have been a good thing, if I’d been paying attention.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d accidentally left an unopened gas bill on the side. It was in camera shot. Whoever called the cops had zoomed in on it and nabbed my address.” She swallows hard. “If I’d had my wits about me, I would have figured out that it wasn’t just the papers – the whole damn Internet now knew where I lived, which could have prepared me for what happened next.

  “Unfortunately, at the time I had other things on my mind.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Cat

  “Where are you?” I yell it at the peeling walls, anger and fear and humiliation swimming high like vomit in my throat. I can feel the bruise blossom on my cheek from where the black-clad anti-terror copper slammed my face into the floor.

  I can’t stand still. I stomp around the condemned Dance Hall, slipping and sliding on the rubble, dragged off balance by my bump. This place, whose desolation seemed so beautiful only a few months ago, is now just cold and dusty and covered in rat shit and I can’t breathe and I want to go home.

  I want to, but I can’t. Not until I’ve seen him.

  Dashing the tears out of my eyes I scroll back through the texts for the eighth time.

  Where the hell were you?

  I’m so sorry. I got held up, call with the lawyers.

  I was humiliated. I sounded delusional. They thought I was a lunatic.

  You went THROUGH with it? Without
me?

  I want to see you, now.

  It’s 2 in the morning. Can we do tomorrow?

  The Dance Hall. Be inside in 30 mins or else first thing in the morning I’m calling the tabloids and showing them these texts.

  Cat, please, just calm down.

  30. Mins.

  He didn’t reply. I check the clock on my phone. It’s nearly four. He’s not coming. I feel the liquid lurch of the baby squirming into a new position. He’s not coming. I try to press the panic rising in my chest back down again, but it’s like trying to push back floodwater with your hands. He’s not coming; he’s never coming. I’m alone.

  I grit my teeth and shake my head. No, no, he’s been misled. He’s been convinced to lie low by the lawyers and by management. For all I know they’ve taken his phone and are pretending to be him, stringing me along. Ry’s the closest thing the band have to a frontman; he’s the livelihood of so many people – who knows what they might do to protect that? I have to go to him. I have to show him his child. Make him see.

  I tug my phone out of my pocket again. My hands are freezing; there’s no blood in my fingers. Must be the baby, I think grimly as I stab the screen, logging into RickResource as an anon. Can we do tomorrow? his text asked. He’s definitely in London at least. He’ll be in a hotel; they only rent an apartment when they’re all here together. Which hotel, though? He never told me that.

  I hit the ornithology hashtag Rickers use for sightings of the two lovebirds, filter for Ryan, and sort by date, most recent first. There’s one from about forty minutes ago in Brazil and another from midnight in Glasgow, but I ignore them. Rickers are always making up or imagining sightings for kudos. The next handful are from last night in LA, but I figure them for wishful thinking, since that’s where Nick is right now, filming his first film role, and Rollerboy55 and Rickismy3verything would really, really like to think Ryan was there with him. I scroll on. I’m looking for clustering.

  It takes me about three minutes to find it. There are more than seventy claimed sightings of Ryan in London, spanning the last week and a half. Of those, the critical mass, thirty-five or so, were in and around Mayfair.

  My heart leaps briefly – Mayfair, that makes sense; there are a boatload of luxury hotels around there! – and then takes a nosedive again – Mayfair, bollocks, there are a boatload of luxury hotels around there – at the prospect of somehow sieving the right five-star bolthole from the pack.

  But then Ryan’s voice floats up out of my memory, his grinning mouth inches from my own as we clutched each other on Evie’s front doorstep. My heart hammering so hard against the inside of my ribs I was sure he must feel it.

  You’re very frisky this morning.

  The little coffee place on the corner opposite my hotel was closed.

  This is London – you couldn’t find another coffee shop?

  It’s Italian.

  He did tell me the name, but however hard I strain, I can’t remember it. I’ll have to do it the hard way. I pull up Google Maps, and start to work. By the time I’m done my eyes ache from lack of sleep and staring at the screen in the dark and my throat’s burning from the dust, but I know that of the forty or so five-star hotels listed in and around Mayfair, only two have coffee shops with Italian names on the corner opposite them. Prego sits opposite Claridge’s, but, according to Wiki, Claridge’s has more than two hundred rooms, which is an awful lot of eyeballs for a celeb looking to keep a low profile. That leaves the Grammercy, a tiny twelve-room boutique tucked away on a mews behind Berkeley Square, with Gennaro’s, a “friendly family-owned cafe and eatery”, a stone’s throw across the street.

  Of course, it was more than eight months ago that Ryan mentioned that place, but then again, as he said at the time, I’m a creature of habit.

  I hesitate with my hand on the brass door handle of the Grammercy, go over the plan one more time in my head, and immediately wish I hadn’t. It seems insane. I’ll be spotted; I’ll be caught, arrested; I’ll be on the news and then Rickdom will really go to town on my aching pregnant backside.

  But what’s my alternative? Do nothing? Go home and wait for the next overzealous Ricker with a hockey stick? Or a baseball bat? Or a flask of acid? A knife? I suck in a deep breath, trying to use the pressure of the air inside my chest to still the urge to tremble, and push into the lobby.

  Thank all that’s holy there’s an untended trolley full of luggage right by the door. There’s only one girl on reception and she’s got her head down, staring at her phone. Before she can look up, I yank the most unmanageably huge suitcase I can off the top of it. I turn my phone off – a mistimed notification would blow this whole thing – and then I waddle towards the black marble desk, leaning into the awkwardness my bump gives me, visibly struggling with the case, which isn’t hard because it feels like it belongs to an Olympic weightlifter who packed his entire gym in it. Phone stuck to my ear, I bawl so loud my mum could probably hear me back in Tooting if she hadn’t taken her pills.

  “Jeff, Jeff, listen to me. I know it’s late, but how do you think I feel? Three and a half hours sitting on the tarmac at JFK, and then there was turbulence, with your son tap-dancing on the inside of my uterus for half the flight, and then the taxi driver just would not shut up. And I haven’t charged my phone and I swear to God, you’re going to have to stand between me and that minibar with a cricket bat… No, no, but wait, Jeff, my phone’s almost dead. I’m just downstairs in the lobby now; can you come and get me? What do you mean you’re in the bath – it’s gone 4 a.m.! Is the jet lag that bad? Fiiiiiine, I’ll just come up. Oh shit, my phone’s dying. Jeff, which room are you—”

  All of which patter brings me red-faced and puffing to the desk, staring into the pitying eyes of the reception girl. I flash the dark screen of my phone at her.

  “Bloody thing, no battery life any more. Bit like me at the moment.”

  “Tough night?” she asks with professional sympathy.

  “You literally would not believe it. Don’t get pregnant at thirty-five, sweetheart; the bank account may be willing, but the flesh is weak.”

  “You are not thirty-five,” she gasps, as I’d hope she would. Get them to think of you as older, Evie once told me; people have it in their heads that older women don’t cause trouble, God knows why.

  I laugh. “I love you,” I say, extravagantly.

  “No, seriously. I don’t believe it,” she says. “You don’t look a day over twenty-three. What moisturizer do you use?”

  “All of them. I literally bathe in them. Speaking of which, my useless husband has picked the most inconvenient time in history to get his rubber duck out, and after the night I’ve had, I really don’t want to wait for him to work out which dripping foot goes down which trouser leg, otherwise I’ll still be down here when Jeff junior’s born. Can you let me know the room and I’ll head straight up? Briggs is the name,” I tell her. “Jeff Briggs.”

  Jeff was Ryan’s best friend when they were kids; now he does his security – my babysitter Ryan calls him – and so always sleeps near by. I picture him, hulking like a good-natured iceberg at the edge of the stage at Everlasting gigs. Asking for the room number of a bodyguard no one’s ever heard of is – I hope – less liable to arouse suspicion than demanding the room number of a pop star with a more famous name than Big Ben.

  The girl on reception is struggling with it. I can see it in the anxious creases around her eyes. I look like that when I’m about to apologize for something – which is to say, because I’m me, most of the time. Once she says no, I’m done for, though, so I cut her off with a deafening groan, bending my back and shoving my bump out in front of me like a battering ram.

  “Jesus, my back hurts. Do you know you basically can’t lie down on your back at this stage of a pregnancy? Or your front, of course, but you can’t bear to be on your feet or even sitting up for long either. You basically have to curl up on your side and wedge yourself in with pillows like an egg in a carton. Which I suppose is app
ropriate enough when you think about it. I suppose I could lie down here and wait for him, but if I do, do you think you could bring some pillows for me to prop myself against?”

  That does it. I see the decision before she speaks it. I have officially rendered myself harmless.

  “Room ten,” she says. “First floor, on your right. Shall I show you?”

  “That would be very kind…” I tail off, frowning. “Actually, on second thoughts, maybe not. Last time I hadn’t seen Jeff in a month and I turned up at his hotel room he opened the door naked. There was a family of Korean tourists struggling with their key to the room next door at the time – it was punishingly embarrassing.”

  She blushes and joins in my laughter. “I’ll have your case brought up to you then.”

  “Best leave it a decent interval,” I murmur conspiratorially. “If he is in the mood, well … I’ve not seen him for a month either.”

  We exchange knowing smiles and, heart threatening to break my ribs with how hard it’s battering them, I turn to the lifts.

  “Get out here, Ryan!” I holler, hammering on the door to room eight, on the basis that it’s the one that looks like it’s got the adjoining door to Jeff’s. It’s just as well there are only twelve rooms in this hotel, because every guest in them is going to be awake soon if he doesn’t open the door. “The mother of your child would like a quiet fucking word with you!”

  In the corner of my eye, I see the handle to room ten tip, and the familiar shape of Jeff appears, blinking into the hallway light. Jeff’s got a kindly face, which I’m sure comes in handy in his job, and for the times when it doesn’t, well, there’s always the fact that he’s the size and rough shape of one of those massive double fridge-freezers.