by Jason Arnopp
The thing is, because my stupid brain has become so accustomed to so many existing forms of smut, this stuff feels so new. As a result, it’s been getting me really hard again for the first time in weeks. Jesus Christ. Can’t stop myself taking screen grabs for, uh, future use. I really am possessed by this shit and it’s making me cry myself to sleep.
There are only two days to go until Kate arrives. I’m broke, hopelessly addicted to porn, my psycho brother’s about to come over to take away all my stuff and for weeks now I’ve felt like I’m coming down with flu. How can I turn any of this into a positive?
Kate talks a lot about various “life guru” blokes. So just now, I watched one of those videos on YouTube, hoping for inspiration. In this video, the guy spoke about making real change happen in your life by (a) getting appalled by your current situation and (b) taking enormous action.
I already have (a) nailed, so now it’s time for (b).
The root of my problem is the smut, so I’ve decided to rip these roots clean out. A few minutes ago, I downloaded porn-blocker software for my desktop, which will stop me accessing anything even vaguely suggestive. I wrote down the admin password on a piece of paper, then ripped it up and threw it off the balcony like confetti. That hurt and took serious willpower, but I knew it had to be done. Success!
So what about my phone? Clearly, I can’t keep this infected thing, because I’m hooked on the crazy porn it keeps feeding me. So I’ve been out to a second-hand shop on St James’s Street and bought an old Nokia exactly like Kate’s. This thing doesn’t have a data connection, so that will effectively shut off the other porn avenue in my life.
I am loving this enormous action, but there’s one thing left to do. The biggest thing of all.
I’m going to fire up the balcony BBQ. I’m gonna put my smartphone on top and watch the fucker burn.
This is going to be a glorious ritual, and fun too. I’d video the whole thing, if that wouldn’t involve using the phone. Ha! I wonder if the handset will explode.
This is a huge moment for me. If I can find the courage to take this final action and change my life, WHICH I WILL, then everything’s going to be all right. After I’ve torched the phone, I’ll call Kate on my new Nokia and confess the truth. Yep, I’ll tell her the whole, unvarnished truth. She deserves to hear about EVERYTHING. All the lies, the debt, the porn. If she runs a mile, which is very likely indeed, then that will be no less than I’ve brought upon myself. But if she bizarrely decides to go through with her move, and to help me through this, I’ll have shrugged these huge weights off my shoulders and we can have a normal relationship. One that lasts FOREVER.
If there’s one thing worth trying for, no matter what the cost may be, then it’s living the rest of my life with this incredible woman.
The fire’s burning on the barbie, cobber! These flames are hungry for this stupid phone. As soon as I finish this diary entry and it backs up to the cloud, I’m going to thr
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Thr? Is that really it?
Scott’s words end so abruptly. Clearly, he did not burn the phone… so what stopped him?
The same unseen force that stopped Izzy and punished Tyler.
This phone in my hand now feels more like a bomb.
Learn from the mistakes of the dead. Protect this thing and save yourself.
Behind me, the crunch of broken glass. And there stands Scott, just inside the jagged, open mouth of the sliding door.
Of course, it’s not really him. This is Ray, back in his pimp suit. Without even trying, he’s fooled me one more time.
One last time.
Ray looks and sounds like he’s been drinking again. His bandage has gone, leaving the cut on his nose red raw. I also notice he’s got my hammer in one gloved hand, keeping it low against his thigh. “Well, that was a fuck-load easier than I expected. Always leave my brother’s front door sitting wide open, do you? Eh?”
Ray runs his gaze around the window frame. “Oh dear. Had a little accident, have we? Almost looks like the scene of a struggle.”
“Get out, right now.”
He nods pointedly down at the hammer, then at Scott’s phone. “Tell you what. I’ll leave when I get my brother’s property back. That’s a good deal, considering the phone don’t belong to you. I bloody knew you had it.”
My thoughts trip over themselves. Here’s my chance to get rid of the phone. But could I really hand this thing over to someone who doesn’t understand the full enormity of what they’re taking? Could I knowingly hand over a bomb, even to a prick like Ray?
“Scott’s phone doesn’t belong to you either,” I say. Got to buy myself some thinking time. “Why do you want it?”
Ray stands impassive. The sky flashes twice, highlighting the hard lines of his face. “Because I reckon you think I killed my brother. And if he really is dead, which he’d better fucking not be, then you might plan to stitch me up for it.”
“I did suspect you might have killed Scott. But now I don’t, okay? You should go.”
His dead eyes burn through me. “Like I said at my place: how do I know you haven’t killed him? Who exactly are you, Kate Collins, with your fake copper mate? And how the fuck did you get hold of my brother’s phone?”
“When you came here to take all Scott’s stuff, after blackmailing him,” I say, making Ray’s face tighten, “was he actually here, that day?”
He scoffs. “Lazy little sod was nowhere to be seen. Couldn’t even get it together to help me load up his stuff. So I decided to teach him an even bigger lesson and take everything. And I mean everything. Dumped most of the worthless shit in the skip outside.”
I keep my tone even. Reasonable. Some might say, placatory. “Whatever happened to Scott, he and everything else had already gone when I arrived. And he left his phone behind, right here.” I point to the spot on the decking. “You obviously hadn’t noticed, or you’d have added it to your stash. So if you must know, that’s how I found Scott’s phone. I turned up, ready to move in with him and there it was.”
Waiting for you…
“Whatever,” Ray says. He steps over the threshold, out onto the balcony. He’s gripping that hammer at waist level now, but I refuse to back away. Can’t, won’t show fear. Besides, there’s nowhere to go. “Here’s a good joke for you, Kate. What do you say to a girl with a hammer-smashed face?”
“Nothing,” I say, somehow moulding my mouth into a smile. “You already told her once.”
Looking irritated that I knew his “joke”, Ray draws close enough for me to experience that bourbon-nicotine reek one last time. He holds one hand out in demand. “Phone. Now.”
Even through the brawl of the storm, I can make out an ambulance siren. My throat contracts. Someone must have found Izzy. I picture her broken body and my eyes sting.
“Ray, please listen. You need to understand the full picture here. There’s something going on with this ph—”
Ray grunts, then swings the hammer onto my right elbow.
Stars explode. The scream of the ambulance siren becomes my own.
I drop the phone on the decking, then crumble to my hands and knees on top of it.
Before I even have a chance to vomit on the handset, Ray snatches it up and away. There’s a real swagger in his voice. “That’s right, chuck your guts up, you dumb bitch. Now, if this phone tells me you’ve had anything to do with Scott going missing, or if you go crying to the police, then trust me: I’ll be back to make that elbow seem like a fuckin’ graze.”
Through puke-tears, I watch him toss the hammer aside as he re-enters the living room. I try to cradle my smashed elbow with my other hand, but this only makes the joint howl louder.
“Raymond,” says a clear and startling new voice from inside. An older woman’s voice. “Stop right there, please.”
What? That’s Maureen, in the living room, perched on one of my boxes. How long has she even been there? Did she come in here with her son?
Hunched
forward with her hands clasped around her knees, the woman’s face is etched with the weariness I saw when she and I first met.
Crawling off the balcony and into the room, I’m vaguely aware of broken glass carving into my knees and one of my palms. “Maureen, what are you doing here?”
When she silently acknowledges me, the sorrow in her eyes frightens me far more than anything Ray could ever do.
Halfway to the archway, Ray slows his stride. There’s an odd distance about the way he assesses his own mother, almost as if he’s never seen her before.
Smirking back at me, he says, “Who’s this – your bodyguard?”
Struggling to ignore the signals my elbow and hand keep firing to my brain, I say, “How drunk are you, that you don’t recognise your own mum?”
Ray’s laugh fills the whole space. “She ain’t my mum, you fuckin’ madhead. Ta ta for now.”
What? What? If Maureen isn’t Scott and Ray’s mother, then who is she?
Her voice a cool knife, Maureen says, “Ray, you will hand the phone back to Kate immediately. Don’t force me to add another regret to my very long list.”
“It’s okay,” I stammer. “Maureen, honestly, it’s fine. I don’t want it back.”
Ray has almost reached the archway. “What you gonna do, Grandma: come at me with your handbag?”
Maureen sighs. Pointing a finger at Ray, she utters one word. “Candle.”
Ray stops dead, as if she’s used a remote control on him.
The phone falls from his hand and hits the floor. He twitches. He might be trying to move and speak, but something has him glued so very firmly to the spot. All he can do is make alarmed, glottal noises in his throat.
A small orange and yellow flame billows into existence on the top of Ray’s scalp, then rushes down to consume his head.
Ray’s scream rattles around inside him, unable to escape his mouth.
The vile smell of overcooked pork sends my saliva into overdrive and makes me gag again. I know this reek all too well, from having attended scenes where human bodies cooked on railway lines.
Am I yelling these words or am I only thinking them: What are you doing? Maureen, what are you doing to him?
Maureen’s voice wavers, her eyes haunted. “I did tell him twice. If it was down to me, people who try to interfere would just go peacefully in their sleep. I’m sorry to say, the master much prefers to see them being burnt or thrown around.”
My bubbling guts already know the answer to this question, but I ask anyway. “The… master? Who’s the master?”
Ray stands silent now. Only his twitching fingers move, and his head has burnt down to the blackened skull. Fire darts across his shoulders, then eats down through the suit on his back. I slap my bloodied hand over my nose, to combat the stench of meat swelling up, splitting apart and seeping fat.
“Maureen, please, what’s going on? Who are you?”
Still seated on my box, she considers me with something a lot like pity. “The master once claimed me, as it will claim you. Except, I was given a job to do, as the master’s custodian. An insurance policy, I suppose, to make sure it reaches the right people.”
My wildly churning brain remembers how Gwyneth’s phone was delivered to Scott by her nan. What’s the betting this person was really Maureen? “What do you mean, the right people?”
“The master has a keen nose for weakness. It knows what people need.”
“Whatever you get out of this, I can offer more. Now help me.”
Maureen steals a glance at Ray, then shudders, as if repulsed by her own actions. “Nothing’s worth more than being allowed my freedom. The master sets me free, to walk this world again and see my daughter, my grandson… even though they can’t see me.”
When Maureen turned up that night, those automatic lights in the corridor didn’t detect her. Remember that? Yeah, you remember now, all right. She couldn’t feel the cold in the flat and didn’t let you touch her… in case you realised she was dead.
The discordant symphony in my elbow screeches on as I look from Ray, whose entire torso is ablaze, back to Maureen’s infinite melancholy. The words I don’t want to die loop through my head and my voice is wobbly sludge. “What… is… going to happen here?”
Movement catches my eye. The phone – Scott’s phone, Gwyneth’s phone and whoever else’s phone before that – now hovers several feet above the floorboards.
This thing floats towards me as if supported by invisible wires.
Ray keels over. Slamming down onto Izzy’s shopping bags, his charred corpse pumps fluffy grey ash into the air. The fire has weakened but continues to lap at the last of his flesh.
The phone draws nearer. Close enough for me to notice that the flickering screen carries a pale blue glow.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the hammer on the floor.
There’s a fat pulse in my head, like a vein’s about to pop. I address Maureen, while very much keeping my eye on the phone. “Did you kill Scott?”
“Me, dear? No. I must keep the target alive at all costs, until the master has finished absorbing them.”
Absorbing them.
Those sleep videos. People filmed asleep, while the phone hovers over them…
It knows what people need… such as the most bizarre and compelling porn they’ve ever seen. Or a huge mystery that provides the perfect excuse to re-embrace a smartphone…
Scott, me, Gwyneth, Dieter and whoever came before us. Digital junkies, growing weak and pale…
“Only then can it destroy the body and consume the soul,” Maureen says, her face taut with the effort of remembering. “That’s the general gist, anyway. I find the whole thing rather complex.”
The phone…
… the master…
.… dumps itself on the floor in front of me with a clatter, face up. The words consume the soul reverberate in my head.
Maureen says, “I’m so sorry, dear. I know this is a lot to take in. It certainly was for me, all those years ago.”
Quick! Destroy this thing, before it destroys you.
My elbow shrieks in protest as I snatch up the hammer.
Maureen has never sounded so lively. “Kate,” she cries out, “don’t do that.”
Her fear only spurs me on. I’m about to swing the hammer down onto the phone, when Scott’s face fills the screen.
Staring out through the glass rectangle, he looks like a terrified prisoner. So very, very vulnerable.
Swing the hammer! This is another trick, like Scott’s voice on the pier.
Too late. Hesitation has cost me everything.
Can’t move a muscle. Can’t even blink.
With the placatory tone of someone trying to reassure a cow at the slaughterhouse gates, Maureen says, “Try to relax, dear. This won’t hurt quite as much as you might think.”
The room is lit solely by lightning and the phone’s screen, which spins and blurs into a piercing blue whirlpool. As it gathers speed, Maureen continues to say something or other, but her words are lost to me.
You’re going to love it here.
This phone can be powered solely by the user’s own blood.
This is not your phone, so don’t use it. For your own fucking good. Trust me.
Phones have minds of their own.
For Christ’s sake, don’t come in here. Don’t let it suck you in.
Kate, get rid of this thing. I’m begging you to throw it away.
Slowly, but all too surely, my essence is being vacuumed out of my limp shell, but maybe… maybe that’s all right? My panic has already grown warmer, fuzzier, blurring around the edges. Every nerve ending in my body screams, but all this pain feels like a technicality because my body has less and less to do with me. This death may as well be happening to someone else. Besides, my mother inflicted worse than this, a long time ago. She laid down the path that I chose to follow to get here, step by needy step.
With a ping, a notification window pops up on the phone’s
spinning screen. An automated reminder set by Scott Palmer, once upon a time.
Kate’s bday is two weeks from today! Buy all the presents!
The whirlpool grows to become all I can see, and I become the whirlpool.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Outside our perfect bubble, it looks as though heaven wants to break in. The most gorgeous sunlight powers through the balcony windows and soaks the living room and kitchen walls in white gold.
I’m stretched out on the sofa. A nice mushroom risotto sits on the table beside me as I flick through Facebook. Because I have thousands of friends, it takes a while to absorb all their news. Of course, fresh updates are popping up all the time, so this is practically a full-time job. Ha ha! A few of these friends are actually our neighbours, too. There’s Gwyneth for instance, and Dieter, who both live… oh, somewhere else in the Van Spencer, I suppose, I can’t quite remember. We don’t go out much. Actually can’t recall the last time we set foot outside the door, but why would we ever need to?
Over in the kitchen, Scott perches on a stool with a G&T. His lower half is concealed by the breakfast bar as he checks out the latest porn videos – the ones that make all the crazy animal noises. For some reason I can’t explain, I feel like him watching porn all the time should bother me but it doesn’t. Everyone is allowed interests and hobbies, even if they aren’t necessarily shared by their partner. Besides, I’m busy enough. Need to reserve my energy for all this flicking and tapping. I’m sure Scott and I will have sex at some point or other.
Our beautiful twins, a boy and a girl, lie on their bellies on the floor beside me, each holding a tablet. They chirrup happily with every new achievement they unlock in their games. I can’t remember their names at present – the children’s names, I mean, not those of the games, which I do recall. This does strike me as a tad peculiar, but one of my friends has reposted a three-minute video compilation of shocking near-misses on American roads, which soon diverts my attention and steals my breath. I share the video to Scott’s FB messenger, for him to watch later. We send each other links all day long, which feels so very romantic.