Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  ‘Look, I’m sorry if I …’ The workman stood up, palms raised, placatory.

  ‘I just want my water fixed,’ said Darkin.

  ‘Gotcha. We gotcha, chum. Alright? Don’t worry. We’ll get it fixed.’

  Darkin nodded, eyeballing the man.

  ‘We’ll be back soon as,’ said the man, moving to the front door, where he was joined by his colleague.

  ‘Right,’ said the second man. ‘Soon as.’

  They closed the door behind them. In the silence, Darkin could hear that they’d left the bathroom tap dripping. The sound measured out a faint, slightly erratic pulse through the flat. It weakened, slowed, then came to an eventual silence. Maybe he’d got the workmen wrong, he thought. Maybe they really were trying to help. This was what happened. Everyone always said they were trying to help, even when they were fucking you over. Once you no longer knew who was helping, it was safer just to assume no-one was.

  Somewhere just outside his flat, a pipe rumbled deeply. Everything, thought Darkin, was too connected. One pipe led to another. What was yours led always to what was someone else’s.

  His kitchen timer screeched from the coffee table, cutting across the muttering pipe. He slid a cigarette from the pack and lit up. Downton had underestimated his capacity for waiting.

  *

  Robert was at his computer when DeCoverley rang. He had been there for hours, battling his way into the article Silas had demanded on the genocide woman.

  As with the Darkin piece, Robert had already, in the time that had elapsed following his chat with Silas, tried a number of different angles. The fact that he now seemed to have to do this with all of his writing was beginning to concern him. Surely, he thought, he should have had an angle before beginning a piece? Surely it was his intended angle that dictated what the piece would be? In the past, he had seen something, observed something, and known what he thought about it. Then he had shaped those thoughts into ideas his readership could easily grasp. Now, an entirely different process had taken over: one of triangulation, extrapolation. Rather than dealing directly with what he encountered, he had to circle, inspect, consider the possible ramifications, and then select, from all the possibilities, the approach most likely to achieve success. If he’d had time, he might have drawn certain conclusions from his discomfort, his inability to place himself in relation to his subject, but the truth was that he didn’t have any time at all. This was another concerning factor in his rapidly morphing career. Once, no-one had been waiting for him to say anything, so he could take his time saying it. Now, Silas, along with everyone who had hungrily devoured the Darkin piece, wanted more, and quickly. Worse, they already seemed to know what they wanted Robert to say, despite the fact that he was no longer sure if he knew that himself.

  Robert had been able to press on with the genocide piece because he had convinced himself that all the issues and discomforts he was experiencing were simply the unintended side effects of the very things he’d been chasing all this time: attention, resonance, success. Of course there was more pressure now, he thought. Of course things seemed more complicated, more pressured, less satisfying. And of course he was now expected to weigh in on discussions he previously would have stayed out of. It was because he was notable. People wanted his perspective, valued it. What was he going to do? Whine about his freedom? Push away the audience he’d spent so long attending to because he was marginally less confident about the issues he was expected to address? The idea was ridiculous. He was on the cusp of a breakthrough. Like Silas had said, he needed to capitalise. Comfort and certainty were irrelevances, luxuries. Everyone faked it until they made it.

  Thinking about his audience had helped Robert clarify his role, and in clarifying his role, he had begun to clarify, for himself at least, his stance. Yes, the issues were thorny, nuanced, complicated. But that was precisely why his audience would be clicking on his article: because they wanted someone to make sense of it all. Everyone reading about the genocide woman, he thought, would experience the same discomfort, the same sense of barely tangible disquiet. But then they would push that discomfort aside. Why? Because it was too complicated, too difficult, too controversial. This was why, Robert had concluded, the entire narrative of white maleness, particularly white working-class maleness, had been so comprehensively hijacked by the Hugo Benningtons of the world: because people on the left, in their middle-class, white-guilt-riddled, virtue-signalling Twitter bubbles, were too uncomfortable talking about it. Silas was right: with his Darkin piece, Robert had started something. Now he needed to continue it.

  By the time his mobile rang and he saw DeCoverley’s name scrolling across the screen, Robert had worked himself up to a pitch that went beyond mere relevance and tipped all the way into importance. His perspective wasn’t just significant, he had concluded, it was vital. In this context, DeCoverley’s phone call seemed like a sign, a confirmation. This was what happened when you crossed over the threshold of notability and became a recognisable figure: Jacques DeCoverley sidestepped the formality of email and called your mobile.

  ‘Glad I got you,’ said DeCoverley. ‘You must be insanely busy.’

  ‘Swamped,’ said Robert, lounging back in his chair. ‘To be honest, I’m desperate to get some actual work done but people keep asking me for work.’

  ‘A feeling I know all too well,’ said DeCoverley, a touch defensively. ‘I’ll get right to the point. We need to talk about this Julia Benjamin woman.’

  ‘Oh God. You too?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen?’

  ‘Last I looked, she seemed to have been a bit slow getting to my latest column.’

  ‘Do a Google search instead.’

  Robert typed Julia Benjamin Robert Townsend into the search bar. The top two results related to her comments on his Command Line articles. The third was a website called Mapping the Morons: An Ecosystem of Masculine Opinion.

  ‘Oh my fucking God,’ he said, clicking the link.

  ‘I think we can both agree this has gone far enough,’ said DeCoverley. ‘Lunch tomorrow?’

  *

  Not since her time with Dustin had Trina been afraid to go home. And no, this time the danger didn’t reside in her home, and this time, at least, much as she didn’t want to go back to her address, she still wanted to be with her family – but in her mind, the locus of threat was shifting. Yes, it was something that was edging inwards from the outside, and yes, it was, in so many ways, external to her. But if she looked at it from the point of view of the people she loved, the reality was that she was the problem, the one bringing all of this to their door.

  Yet even as she thought this, clicking through the gears, feeling the increasing and satisfying resistance to her pedalling feet, the bike smoothly accelerating as she locked into her pace, it struck her that the pressure to blame herself for what was unfolding would only increase in the coming hours and days. She knew the cycle because everybody knew the cycle. It played out daily, varied only by the identity of whoever was currently at the heart of it. The controversial statement, the backlash, the brief period of optimistic resistance, the inevitable humbling apology. To imagine herself as the source of what was happening was, she knew, to accept the terms of a game that was designed specifically with her loss in mind. Worse, it was to accept that what was happening to her was happening because of what she had said. Even in the midst of her disorientation, Trina could see that this was a lie, and could see that even by beginning to believe it she was starting down a road not of acceptance and repentance, but of self-doubt, complicity, and capitulation. The cause of what was happening was far bigger than a tweet. It was structural, historical. She hadn’t caused the vitriol that was being directed at her. The vitriol was extant, searching for a place to put itself. Hugo Bennington needed to pretend he was arguing solely with her in order to hide the fact that he was arguing with everyone he thought of as being like her: namely the swelling, imagined mass of everyone who was not like him.

  At home,
she propped her bike in the hallway and walked into the lounge, still unbuckling the chin strap of her helmet. Carl was on the sofa, his laptop on his knees, his crutches propped against the cushions beside him, looking up at her with an expression that mirrored back to her everything she’d spent the day trying not to feel or acknowledge.

  ‘Mia brought me up to speed,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s Bella?’ said Trina.

  ‘Nap time,’ said Carl. He stood up and hugged her. ‘How are you doing? Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m totally fine. It’s all bullshit.’

  ‘Trina …’

  He had his hand raised, either slowing her down or making some sort of apology.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t sure how much to look,’ he said. ‘But I had to look.’

  ‘It’s fine. How could you not look?’

  ‘I don’t know whether to show you this or not.’

  ‘You’d better show me. If I don’t know about it, I can’t fight it.’

  He passed her the laptop. She sat down and stroked the trackpad to wake it up. On the screen, she saw the Daily Record website, its headline filling a third of the screenspace:

  ‘White Genocide’ Tweeter Lives in Sink Estate Threesome With Benefits Scrounge

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ she said. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

  All day, she’d proudly held her tears at bay. Now, with the magnitude of what was happening to her starkly rendered in a screaming headline, the effort was too much. She sobbed into the front of Carl’s shirt while he held her.

  ‘I know,’ he said simply. ‘I know.’

  *

  ‘It’s me.’

  Jess gave her usual greeting as she came through the door, reminding herself, reassuring herself. There was no answer. Robert, she assumed, was upstairs in his study, no doubt either stewing over Julia Benjamin’s latest assault on his standing or squeezing out another bitter stream of opinion in response. She liked, she realised, the sense that she could see him without seeing him, that she could picture, to a reasonable degree of certainty, his posture, his expression, his state of mind. This, she thought, was the real triumph of Julia Benjamin: she knew, in so many senses, where Robert was. Now, she had shown everyone else where he was as well. Robert would be feeling exposed, uncomfortably located within intellectual space. Later, no doubt, he would come downstairs and explain events to her, recounting in conveniently distorted detail all the things she already knew.

  She went through to the kitchen, hung her laptop bag on the back of a chair, and found the day’s snail mail in a loose heap on the worktop. Robert had clearly gathered it from the doormat and then promptly ignored it. She sifted the envelopes. The top two or three were the drab Manila of quotidian officialdom. It struck her that mail these days was reserved for the extreme poles of bureaucratic communication: the hopelessly routine or the terminally serious. All the grey areas in between had been digitised.

  Beneath the inevitable bills and statements, however, were two envelopes that immediately caught her attention. They were identical save for the addressee: one for her and one for Robert. Spurning the dimensions and materials of official communication, they were the size of personal letters. The address, rather than being visible through a clear plastic window, was printed directly onto the thick, textured cream of the envelope itself. The seal was of the kind requiring licking. This human trace, now near-absent from daily communication, unnerved her. She slid her little finger into the gap at the end of the seal and ran it along the crease, the paper yielding along a neat line. Inside, she found a sheet of matching notepaper, folded once. When she opened it, she found it contained only a web address, printed in small black lettering at the centre of the page. It was the by now familiar Griefer address, weareyourface, appended with a single, sinister word: /you.

  She slid her laptop from its padded satchel and fired it up, engaging the security measures that by now were second nature: her anonymous browser, her surveillance detection. She typed the website into the address bar and was directed to a page that took an extra second to load, suggesting either bandwidth-heavy content or high traffic. It was, she noted, an unlinked addition to the main Griefer page, unlisted in the site’s menu, accessible only by using the full address. When it loaded, she was confronted by a black screen, in the centre of which was the same morphing, animated face that The Griefers had used during the performance in the town square: the strobing composite that formed the basis of their masks. Now, though, the animation, the fade between faces, was slower. Individual identities could be briefly recognised, like cards fleetingly glimpsed as someone ran their thumb down a deck. Occasionally, the animation seemed to stutter or lag, threatening, momentarily, to come to a complete standstill. She wondered if this apparently randomised hang-time was due to the number of people looking at the page, or perhaps a glitch in the animation itself. Scrolling down below the shifting image to the text below, though, she found it was not a flaw at all, but the point.

  The morphing face, said the text below the animated image, which was addressed, grandiosely, to the people of Edmundsbury, now functioned as a kind of lottery or roulette. At some point, according to a randomised algorithm, it would stop, thereby selecting a single face. That face, the people of Edmundsbury were advised, would be the face of the person The Griefers had chosen. They would make a website dedicated to that individual. On that website, which would be publicly accessible and widely promoted, would be everything that person had ever done on the internet: their photos, their private chats, their emails, their financial transactions, their search histories. Everything they both did and did not want to share. Then the roulette would start again, until, at an unspecified time, another person would be named. The process would continue indefinitely, people were told, unless someone in the town took it upon themselves to stop the randomised targeting in the only way The Griefers would allow: by volunteering themselves. If, The Griefers said, one person decided to step forward and release their entire history, in whatever manner they saw fit, the selection process would end.

  Volunteering was simple, the website advised. All you had to do was click on the link at the bottom of the page, the one labelled submit.

  Jess hovered her cursor over the word, stroking it, watching it change colour as she touched it remotely. She emailed Deepa the link with a single word in the message body: thoughts?

  ‘Robert?’ she called from the kitchen. ‘Have you seen this?’

  Again, there was no answer. She picked up the letter and walked to the bottom of stairs, realising as she did so that she was succumbing to an old and probably atavistic habit: the urge to share an event with him, to bridge the distance through mutual experience. She put one foot on the stairs and opened her mouth to call his name again. As she did so, a muffled roar escaped the closed door of Robert’s study.

  ‘That fucking bitch!’

  She heard something being kicked or thrown, followed by another guttural, impotent cry. She took her foot off the stairs and stepped back, saying nothing, a sound of her own pressing up from her chest and catching at the back of her throat, half laugh, half yelp of fear. She was, she realised, tingling slightly, thrilled and appalled at what she’d done.

  She thought of the strobing roulette of faces, imagining her own among them. Things were out of her hands, she thought. Events had their own momentum. All she could do now was submit to their furious logic.

  0100

  From his vantage point on his sofa, through his habitual cloud of fag smoke, The Record spread out on his knees and the thick scent of the unflushed toilet creeping out from under the bathroom door and mingling with both the fug of the lounge and the foreign tang of his own unwashed body, it seemed clear to Darkin that things were worse than ever. His personal, localised water issues were just the nearest, most observable symptom. Out there, beyond his front door and broken kitchen window, beyond even whatever obstruction was at work in his pipes, the wo
rld was going to shit. Worse, the world as Darkin imagined it had moved. Once, it had been out there, far away, encroaching but never quite arriving, and Darkin had comforted himself by assuming he would likely be dead by the time it drew near. He had been wrong. Edmundsbury was front-page news.

  White Male Genocide, read the The Record’s blaring headline. A black woman living on his very estate in some sort of sex commune had suggested, on the internet, that white men should be sought out and killed. According to The Record, this woman was not alone. She had supporters, or, as the article chillingly put it, followers.

  Over the page, Edmundsbury figured again. Masked men had apparently been terrorising the town. Dressed as office workers, the men had assembled in the town square, threatening, from what Darkin could piece together, some sort of blackmail, telling people, We are your face.

  Hugo Bennington, of course, had seen this coming. Now that it was here, he was tackling it head on. What was at threat here, he said in his latest column, was not simply the day-to-day security of a small English town, but a way of life, and the extent to which this way of life was or was not defended had wide-reaching and potentially ruinous implications for the whole country. After all, he said, we could all, surely, regardless of where we lived and how we lived our lives, see something of ourselves in Edmundsbury and its people. And so, while it might seem to more metropolitan readers as if the events in Edmundsbury had little to do with them, in fact those events had everything to do with them. Edmundsbury was under attack. By extension, England, and everything it represented and stood for, was under attack too.

  And yet, Bennington went on, wasn’t it so often the case that in times of adversity, the very best of British spirit was sure to be on display? In this, again, Edmundsbury was no different to the rest of the country. When threatened, it revealed its best self. Just look, Bennington said, at a man named Darkin.