by Sam Byers
‘I don’t think I really follow.’
‘The accusation is that you’ve shown your true colours.’
‘Well, unlike most politicians, showing my true colours is actually something on which I happen to pride myself.’
Hugo looked at his watch and then towards clipboard man, deliberately cutting clean across Vivian Ross as she began to form a follow-up question. ‘Not to tell you your job or anything, my man, but time is ticking on. Shouldn’t we do a bit of the old touchy-feely stuff before you have to go?’
Ross’s mouth fell open in what Hugo could only imagine would prove a profoundly unbroadcastable response. Clipboard man, however, was already talking over her.
‘He’s right. That’s enough of the hard stuff. Let’s wander around the house and talk about hobbies.’
Hugo smiled at Ross, who was categorically not smiling back.
‘Would you like to know a little bit about my hobbies?’ he said.
*
‘That fucking—’
Trina was raging in the lounge. Hugo Bennington’s face, polished with self-satisfied, orchestrated outrage, stared straight down the camera and into her life.
‘Alright, alright,’ said Carl.
‘Don’t you see what he’s done?’ she shouted. ‘He’s basically just told anyone who’s watching to get down here and forcibly stop me from killing an old man.’
‘That’s … Well, basically, yes,’ said Carl.
‘Unconventional family,’ spat Trina. ‘Soaking up the benefits of the fucking … I work at Green, for fuck’s sake. He’s made me sound like—’
‘I know,’ said Carl. ‘I know.’
‘We can’t stay here,’ she said.
‘Well, hang on,’ said Carl.
‘No,’ said Mia. ‘No hanging on. Trina’s right.’
‘Look at what’s happened to me online,’ said Trina. ‘We know our address is out there. At least one person’s already been round. Bennington’s basically made it sound like it’s everyone’s collective responsibility to …’ She muted the television and sat down on the sofa, already feeling herself begin to focus, to think, keeping Bennington’s silent face in her field of vision as a focal point for her rage.
‘I won’t be driven out of my home,’ she said. ‘I won’t have Bella and you two driven out of your home. We can go under our own steam and come back when it’s all died down.’
‘Admit it,’ said Carl, ‘we’re not going to be able to come back.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Mia. ‘Don’t be melodramatic. These things always burn out in a couple of days.’
Carl shook his head. ‘Don’t you get it? Downton will evict us. This is all they need.’
Outside, someone dropped a bin bag into one of the bins with a heavy thud. They all started, checked each other, softened again. It was impossible to know how safe you’d previously felt, Trina thought, until the sudden, plummeting moment when your entire sense of security fell away.
She looked back up at the television. Bennington was now roaming his house, pointing at this and that. With the sound off and context stripped away, it seemed, to Trina, like the final insult. Hugo Bennington, unraveller of lives, pointedly touring the homely comfort of his kingdom.
‘Smug fuck,’ said Mia.
Neither Carl nor Mia had at any stage in the whole unfolding nightmare blamed Trina. From the moment everything had detonated online, one thing had been tacitly agreed between the three of them: none of this was Trina’s fault. Resentment was reserved for Bennington alone.
‘Question is,’ said Carl, ‘where do we go?’
‘Why don’t we just check into a hotel?’ said Mia.
‘How are we going to know how friendly the hotel is?’ said Trina.
‘My parents would take us,’ said Carl.
‘Let’s call that plan Z,’ said Mia.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, they’re not that bad,’ said Carl.
On the TV, in silence, Bennington had led the interviewer into his lounge and was seemingly talking her through an array of artisanal objects he’d laid out on the couch. What was it about fascists and bad art? Trina wondered. Why were they always taking time off from tyranny to faff around with some chintz?
‘Not that bad?’ said Mia. ‘They literally hate me.’
‘They love Trina,’ said Carl. ‘That’s all. They don’t hate you.’
‘Shut up,’ said Trina, scrambling for the remote. ‘Everybody shut the fuck up. Where’s the remote? Where’s the fucking remote?’
‘Beside you,’ said Mia. ‘Jesus, will you—’
Trina flapped her hand at Mia and un-muted the television.
‘It started out as a hobby, yes,’ Bennington was saying. ‘But I almost feel that word’s a little inadequate these days. I mean, I’ve been making these for so long now—’
‘The attention to detail is really quite extraordinary,’ said the interviewer.
‘Oh, I go to huge effort to achieve verisimilitude,’ said Hugo. ‘The whole point is that the scale is literally the only thing that’s different. Everything else is …’
‘Why the fuck are we watching this?’ said Carl.
Trina ignored him. She’d stood up from the sofa and was now right in front of the television, squinting, following Hugo’s proudly pointing finger as he offered the interviewer and the viewers at home a guided tour of what he seemed to be describing as his ‘art’.
‘It must be very calming,’ the interviewer was saying.
‘Absolutely,’ said Bennington. ‘I just shut everything out and …’
Trina felt as if peripheral perceptions were draining away. Her hearing, her vision, her whole self, were now trained on the objects Bennington was holding up in turn: a miniature cutlery set, a shrunken dinner plate decorated with imitation parsley.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she half-whispered at the screen.
‘What?’ Mia said. ‘What am I missing here?’
‘I’ve seen all of this,’ Trina said, pointing at the shrunken dinner set. ‘I’ve seen all of these things before.’
*
On the other side of action, Jess thought as she drove home from Nodem, the quiet blankness of the Edmundsbury suburbs scrolling past her, lay emptiness. There was a superficial buzz, a sting in her eyes from screen-glare and fought-back tears, a faint, lingering tingle at her outer edges as she contemplated the consequences of what she’d done, but beneath it she was drained, almost blank. Once, Julia had been her expressive extension, her gobby stand-in. Now, away from the safety of the digital, the roles were painfully reversed. Something alive in Jess had been externalised, fragmented, and lost. Julia was no longer her outlet. Instead, Jess was merely what remained in Julia’s aftermath: Julia’s guilty, exhausted hangover.
She cracked the window and lit a cigarette, accelerating slightly as if raw momentum might counterbalance her confusion. In a way, she thought, that had been her whole approach: move fast and break things, look back later and try to learn – the disruptive logic of the Silicon Valley tech bros.
The emptiness was expansive. She didn’t just feel it, she lived in it, breathed it. She didn’t know what she was going home to. The uncertainty howled like a high wind across a blanched and desiccated landscape. She would pull into the driveway, she thought, open her own front door as a semi-stranger, and call out to the stranger inside, It’s me.
Perhaps as a means of taking control, she refused to return in the way that she’d imagined and become accustomed to. She sat in the driveway, smoking and stewing. When her throat was suitably raw and her nerve endings sufficiently sharpened by the nicotine, she stepped through the front door and said nothing. She found Robert in the kitchen, neither cooking nor drinking wine, just sitting at the table with a notepad and a furrowed expression.
‘Hey,’ she said, easing herself into the opposite chair and reeling at the space between them.
‘Hey,’ he said, looking up and assembling the components of a smile in not
quite the right order – beginning with his mouth and then clearly trying, and failing, to match the light in his eyes to the muscles in his face.
She felt as if everything had been laid bare. They were stuck, she saw, in a silence of their own making. Robert would not talk about what he had done. She would never be able to disclose that she knew what he had done. If either one of them revealed what they knew, the other would know the means by which it was known. Only the public domain was available to them. If it wasn’t out there, it couldn’t be cited.
‘How are you?’ he said.
‘Pretty good,’ she said. ‘How about you?’
‘Pretty good.’
She nodded.
‘Congratulations on your piece,’ she said. ‘Seems to have been pretty popular.’
He looked at her for longer than the simple statement required. He was always sensitive to what she didn’t say. Saying his work was good was not the same as saying it was great. Saying it was doing well was not the same as saying she wanted it to do well. Now she was saying less than ever, and it showed, but she had no idea what to say in order to gloss over the things she didn’t believe.
‘Popular,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I mean, that’s good, right? You must be pleased?’
Without recourse to reality, she was trapped in the realm of the hopelessly weak utterance: diluted, vague, inadequate.
‘You sound … less than pleased,’ he said.
‘No, I’m … I’m really pleased, Robert. It’s great.’
His name felt awkward in her mouth: foreign and indigestible, gristle amidst a bolus of meat.
‘Have you read it?’
‘Of course I’ve read it. I thought it was great. Very powerful.’
She kept thinking about him in Nodem – his guilty creep into the café, the ease with which he’d drawn on the sources of her own harassment in his moves against Julia Benjamin. She wondered if he’d stored that information in his mind even then, when he was privately downplaying and then publicly condemning her situation, or if this was a connection he made only at the last minute, in desperation.
‘And what about the other thing?’ he said.
‘What other thing?’
He looked away, found something of sudden interest in the notes on his pad. There was a long pause in which he seemingly weighed the possibility of not telling her what he’d written, despite the fact that she could take out her phone at any moment and google it.
‘Silas asked me to weigh in on the whole genocide thing.’
The statement hung in the air for a few moments. He couldn’t look at her, she noticed. In that inability or unwillingness to connect, to be seen, she gathered all she needed to know about the form his weighing-in had taken.
‘Don’t say anything,’ he said.
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘You were about to. But don’t.’
‘But why would I—’
‘Because you always do.’
The atmosphere had gone from awkward to ugly. Here they were again, she thought, poised on the precipice of an argument. How many times had they been here? How many times had they backed off? And then how many times had they ended up having the argument anyway, by different means, as different people?
‘Are you OK?’ she said.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘You just seem kind of … defensive.’
‘Defensive?’
It was the wrong word and she knew it. In this world, in this reality, Robert didn’t have anything to be defensive about. Now he would become defensive about his defensiveness.
‘I mean, not—’
‘Why would I be defensive? What would I have to be defensive about? Jesus Christ. All I’ve done is write something about this old man, this poor old man, and people are acting like I’ve—’
‘What people?’
‘People online. That Julia Benjamin woman. You.’
‘I haven’t said anything.’
‘You’ve thought it.’
‘Thought it? Robert, you’re being totally paranoid. Are we seriously going to have an argument about something you think I’ve thought but haven’t actually said?’
‘Oh come on, Jess. I know what you think about things.’
‘What’s she said? This Julia woman.’
He waved a hand in the air as if dismissing the question. His lip curled in disgust.
‘The usual shit,’ he said.
She caught the twist in his lip, the catch in the back of his throat as he spoke, the venom he injected into the word shit, and recoiled. He hated her, she realised. Before, he had been irritated, then angry, then exasperated. But all of that had congealed now. His feelings were simple. She felt, quite suddenly, as if she might cry. In order not to cry, she had to remind herself of her own feelings about Robert. Did she hate Robert? It was easy for him to hate Julia – she was not, to him, a person, just a phenomenon. Robert was right here in front of her – the man she knew intimately. Maybe that was the problem, she thought. She now knew him too intimately. She knew his responses, his positions, his hasty and bitter thoughts.
‘But you can ignore that, right? I mean, fuck it. It’s just some commenter on the internet.’
At this, he flared up.
‘Just some commenter on the internet? Are you serious?’
‘What?’
He lifted a finger and aimed it in her direction.
‘When you were getting all that shit online, Jess—’
‘Oh fucking hell, Robert. Don’t. Don’t even make that comparison.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s totally different.’
‘How is it different?’
‘No-one has harassed you, Robert. No-one has threatened you.’
‘They’ve threatened my career, my livelihood, my integrity. Are you saying I shouldn’t be angry about that?’
‘Of course I’m not saying you shouldn’t be angry about that. I’m just saying—’
‘What? What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying, if you’d let me finish, that it’s different because—’
‘Because I’m a man and she’s a woman, that’s what you’re going to say.’
‘Are you serious? I mean, seriously Robert, is that what you think?’
‘Seems pretty obvious to me.’
‘What I was going to say, before you interrupted me, Robert, is that it’s different because you’re not scared. You might be annoyed, or embarrassed, or infuriated, or whatever, but at the end of the day you’re not scared. That’s the difference. No-one’s threatening your life. No-one’s sending a wreath to your fucking house. No-one’s saying they’re going to come round and rape you.’
‘So, what? That’s the line now? So long as you don’t actively threaten someone, anything you say to them is basically OK?’
‘Hasn’t that pretty much always been the line? Like, that is basically the law you’re describing there.’
‘She keeps talking about how I’m a man. She hates me because I’m a man. How is that different from hating someone because they’re a woman?’
‘Disagreement isn’t harassment, Robert. Come on. You know this.’
He sat back in his chair, evidently trying to calm himself down, but doing so in a way that drew attention to his efforts, as if, she thought, she was supposed to respect the fact that he was trying to calm himself down; as if, in calming himself down, he was making some sort of statement about the ways in which she was not calming herself down.
She realised she was now furious.
‘What have you said about the genocide woman?’ she said. ‘Because please tell me you haven’t gone out there with a whole load of white man apologia about—’
‘About not threatening to kill people? Yes. Yes, I have, actually. And I don’t see why that’s such a controversial fucking position, quite frankly.’
‘Well, obviously you do or you wouldn’t be being so
defensive about it.’
‘I’m not being defensive. Stop saying I’m being defensive.’
‘You’re being fucking defensive, Robert.’
‘I’m making connections,’ he said. ‘It’s that simple. Old white man no-one cares about, perfectly reasonable white man trying to do something about the situation – me, in case that wasn’t obvious – and some woman going round talking about killing white men.’
‘Some woman.’
‘Oh fuck off. Don’t you people me. You know what I mean. It’s a figure of speech. You know what? This is the problem.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘We can’t talk about anything any more because all we can talk about is the way we talk about things.’
‘Who do you mean by we? Us? Or everyone?’
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer, Jess thought, because he didn’t know. He could no longer define those kinds of differences: the two of them in their kitchen, arguing about his work; the world around them, arguing about everything else. It was all the same to him. The world was his world only. Everything else was just context.
‘Maybe you don’t mean us,’ she said finally. ‘I mean, what do we really talk about? Nothing.’
‘We talk all the time,’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘We don’t,’ she said. ‘We just chatter. We don’t say anything.’
She saw him soften, sadden. He looked suddenly hopeless, at a loss, and she knew exactly why. It was because he had no recourse to opinion. His life had become a problem about which merely commenting was inadequate. He’d lost the safety of observance.
‘I mean … Do you … Do you want to talk now?’ he said.
She looked at him, pained by the fact that he looked frightened. She was frightened, she realised, and registering his fear only increased her own. But she suspected they feared different things, or that even if their fear was a single, shared obstacle, they were now on opposing sides of it, unable to see each other through its distortions. She couldn’t determine which was more terrifying: how unfamiliar Robert now was, or how completely he’d become the person she’d long identified – the one who wasn’t quite there when she was fearful, the one who empathised more rapidly with some old man he’d met only once than he did with the woman he supposedly loved. They couldn’t talk about it, she realised, because they had talked about it, and now neither of them could admit to what they’d uttered.