Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  ‘As I think Jones told you,’ said Teddy, ‘Downton are very fluid in terms of their working relationships. They have a lot of—’

  ‘And Green?’

  ‘I’ve always been popular at Green, Hugo. And now that they’re starting to look at political consultancy—’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘We’ve been doing some amazing things with the data from your campaign, big guy. I mean, really groundbreaking. I honestly think that when we start mapping the info I’ve collected with the stuff Green have captured from the … from their other projects, we can … well, not just change politics but change everything.’

  ‘People don’t want change,’ said Hugo. ‘You said so yourself. They want the status quo. They want to vote for people who promise to protect them against change.’

  ‘We won’t be offering change, as such,’ said Teddy. ‘We’ll be changing the way sameness is presented.’

  Hugo sat back in his seat and eyeballed Teddy.

  ‘You know who I think would be interested to hear all this?’ he said. ‘Robert Townsend, that’s who. Lot of traction he’s been getting on this estate thing, Teddy. Imagine if he were to find out the whole story. Not all at once, of course. Bit by bit. From an anonymous source. Maybe one of these Griefer people, for example. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Just imagine if one of these Griefer people started dribbling out info to Robert fucking Townsend. Pretty uncomfortable all round, don’t you think?’

  ‘That’s not going to happen, big guy.’

  ‘Really? Tell you what, Teddy. Why don’t you get Jones on the phone and I’ll have a little chat with him about what I know, and who else might find out what I know, and the position I’m in as a very popular, I mean, really very popular indeed columnist, to make people aware of—’

  ‘Have you spoken to The Record recently, Hugo?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Lot of changes at The Record. Lot of modernising. You know they’ve been losing money, I take it? Without a huge new advertising client, they’d have been in all sorts of trouble. I mean, luckily that client has in fact been found, but, you know. Changes will need to be made.’

  ‘What client?’

  Teddy smiled at Hugo.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Hugo. ‘Downton.’

  ‘Going to be difficult to get much editorial agreement on anything that might spook the money men,’ said Teddy.

  ‘But that doesn’t stop me going to—’

  ‘Robert Townsend? Well, no. But I think you’d better be quick. My sense is that the particular website he works for has something of an uncertain future.’

  ‘You bunch of shits,’ said Hugo flatly. ‘You bunch of tech-freakazoid, money-grabbing, self-satisfied shits.’

  It felt hopeless, he realised. He was reduced – they had reduced him – to pointless, impotent insults. Without a mouthpiece, without a platform, he was just another ranter, another skin-sack full of opinions, the man in the pub who no one in the pub would vote for.

  ‘Well, hurrah for progress,’ he said, turning away from Teddy and looking out of the window as Edmundsbury, a town still languishing in ignorance about its own rapid slide into an unwanted future, wheeled drably past the car window.

  ‘You want my advice?’ said Teddy.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ride this out, big guy. Just ride it out. Few years, you’ll be back.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Everybody loves the redemption narrative, Hugo. You do the public apology. You do the rehabilitation. You do the moving memoir. You go on some kind of health kick, maybe get into yoga. You come back refreshed and forgiven.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Hugo. ‘But come back to what, exactly? I mean, do you even have any idea what you’re doing? What things will look like when you’re done?’

  ‘Hell no,’ said Teddy boisterously, bouncing his translucent foot-sheaths on the floor of the car, a huge and dismayingly infantile grin breaking across his features as he reached into his bag and pulled out a thermos of Fibuh, which he poured enthusiastically into his face with a carefully and ostentatiously flexed arm before drawing the back of his hand across his lips and smearing his mouth with dribbling Day-Glo fluid. ‘That’s why this is so much fun!’

  *

  Power, Robert thought to himself, standing in his kitchen, sipping coffee, had taken new, almost unrecognisable forms. Once, the measure of a man’s reach had been dependent on his presence, his access, his ability to be where others couldn’t go. Now, the ultimate demonstration of influence was the degree to which you didn’t need to go anywhere at all. There were no press buses, no thrumming nerve centres of media activity. Real power looked like this: a man stood in his kitchen in his socks, commanding outcomes from a place of seclusion.

  He’d attempted, briefly and half-heartedly, to follow events on the estate, but he’d felt, at this remove, as if knowledge of what was happening was simply passing through or washing over him, arriving and leaving with no discernible cognitive or emotional imprint. Such minor scuffles, he thought, were for local hacks – pressured men in crumpled clothes who needed the illusion of an event as a bulwark against their own irrelevance. It was old-world stuff, a dead pursuit. Anyone could report. The world needed people who could interpret.

  The remote and nebulous events at the Larchwood were rendered all the fainter by the immediacy and pace of Robert’s online life. The response to his death threats had been reassuringly strong. Within an hour, Robert’s tweet publicising his own plight had received over a thousand retweets. His follower count had begun to tick steadily upwards. Noted public intellectuals like DeCoverley and Ziegler had shared the threats on their own accounts, expressing their solidarity. Lionel Groves had used the occasion of Robert being threatened as a springboard for a series of tweets about kindness and humanity. Rogue Statement had messaged Robert to say that they would be doing a piece on how the hostile response met by liberal men who dared to question the orthodoxy of identity politics was itself a new and insidious form of fascism. The Command Line embedded Robert’s tweeted screenshots of the death threats on their homepage along with a statement making it clear that they stood in full support of any Command Line writer subjected to this kind of abuse simply for, as they put it, speaking out. Silas, from his own personal Twitter account, called Robert one of the bravest men he knew. The hashtag #solidaritywithRobert had quickly gained traction. That the death threats were manufactured no longer mattered. They were out there – observed, discussed, commented upon – and so they were real.

  Yet the question of what was happening with Julia Benjamin still bothered him. How much better his day would be, he thought, if as well as feeling confident, as he now did, of the widespread support and admiration he commanded online, he could be sure of the widespread condemnation and hostility attracted by Julia Benjamin.

  Naturally, he’d already checked her website. Some small part of him had been hoping for a 404 error, some obvious and graphic hack. To his disappointment, though, nothing had visibly happened. Not only was her website still there, in all its infuriating glory, but it had apparently gathered something of a community around it. The unthinking, shallow solidarity appalled him.

  His phone buzzed with an unknown number. He thumbed the screen to answer.

  ‘Robert Townsend?’

  The voice was mechanised, augmented. A prickling chill launched itself from the base of Robert’s spine to his scalp.

  ‘Yes?’ he said tentatively.

  ‘We’ve been following your situation,’ said the voice. ‘We’re allies.’

  This, Robert thought, was what the power he’d just been imagining sounded like: the grainy, technologically disembodied voice of a man alone in a room, watching.

  ‘You’ve made enemies,’ said the voice.

  ‘So it seems,’ said Robert, thrilling a little at the gravity of the statement.

  ‘Yesterday, we received an anonymous tip-off,’ the voice continued, ‘about someone called Ju
lia Benjamin.’

  Now Robert realised who he was speaking to: the women-haters he’d set on Julia Benjamin. They clearly had no idea the tip-off had come from him. The word allies echoed icily in his head.

  ‘I see,’ he said. He was reluctant to say anything, hesitant to commit. So long as he only listened, he thought, he could never be said to be complicit.

  ‘We went to work on her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there’s no her there.’

  ‘I don’t think I quite—’

  ‘No traces. No personal data. All her activity is routed.’

  ‘You mean, she’s—’

  ‘Usually with these bitches we can find things. Personal things. Addresses. Phone numbers. We got nothing.’

  ‘Are you telling me she’s—’

  ‘I’m telling you she’s not what she appears.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m telling you she’s clever.’

  A faint sense of dread was gently stroking the hairs on the back of Robert’s neck. How clever? he wondered.

  ‘Are you saying—’

  ‘I’m saying my guys tried everything. Worked all night. These are smart guys. Experienced guys.’

  ‘But you got nowhere?’

  ‘We got nowhere. That’s never happened before.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And so we had to ask ourselves: what kind of cunt are we dealing with here?’

  ‘That’s a question I’ve been asking myself.’

  ‘And you know what we think?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘We don’t think she’s a woman at all.’

  Deep inside Robert’s psyche, an idea found its tessellating partner with a click he could not so much hear as feel, like vertebrae massaged into alignment.

  ‘Just thought we’d let you know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Robert.

  ‘Stay safe, brother.’

  The line went dead.

  Robert placed his phone carefully on the kitchen table and settled himself into a dining chair to think. It all, he thought immediately, made awful, stomach-turning sense.

  Julia Benjamin was a man. Of that, he was now certain. But which man? That was the question. Someone he knew? Perhaps, he thought with a lurch, it was DeCoverley. He remembered their coffee together, remembered that it had been DeCoverley who’d suggested it, DeCoverley who’d encouraged him into action. Had DeCoverley set him up? Would DeCoverley now expose everything he’d done, the lengths he’d gone to in order to outmanoeuvre Julia Benjamin? No, Robert thought, it didn’t make sense. DeCoverley was a slippery operator, but he was nowhere near cool enough to pull off that kind of deception in person. And besides, anonymity didn’t suit DeCoverley. No-one with that kind of ego could tolerate invisibility. The culprit would be someone already comfortable with operating in the shadows, someone with at least a partial track record of obfuscation and evasion, someone … Robert sat forward and banged the table, feeling at once enlivened by his own powers of deduction and nauseated at the depth of the deception … Someone unreachable. Someone who was never seen in public.

  He sat back in the chair, aghast and suddenly drained, thinking back over all his nauseating, grovelling messages to Byron Stroud; reiterating in his mind the awful, denuding admission inherent in the message he’d sent about solidarity. All this time, he thought, trying to get Stroud’s attention, his approval, and all he’d been doing was humiliating himself before the very person bent on his humiliation.

  He took a long, steadying breath. The shock was acute, seismic. He typed Byron Stroud’s name into his phone’s browser and thumbed through the results. What he saw appalled him. Stroud, he saw, had not confined himself to ruining Robert. His targets were multiple, his hunger for exposure and success unquenchable.

  Stroud, Robert gathered, had united himself with The Griefers. In doing so, he had tapped The Griefers’ access to the town’s data and used it to humiliate Hugo Bennington, releasing a chum-stream of dick pics into the shark-pool of the web. Uptake had been frenzied. Bennington was finished.

  Robert placed his phone on the table and considered the situation. What was at stake here, he thought, was everything. Principles, privacy, order. The threat was vast, its implications and ramifications unthinkable. Robert was no admirer of Hugo Bennington, but that, now, was irrelevant. This was a time of conflict – a time, almost, of war – and in times of war you had to set aside your differences. You had to take a long, hard look at what was happening and decide who your real enemies were and where your loyalties needed to lie.

  Beneath the thrill of honour and duty, though, fear was already at work in Robert’s consciousness. Stroud had The Griefers on side now. The damage they were capable of wreaking was incalculable. This, Robert saw, was Stroud’s devious trap. He had, through provocation, drawn Robert into courses of action that were difficult to defend. The moment Robert moved against Stroud would be the moment Stroud made all the things Robert had already done known. The email to the men’s rights group, the death threat against himself. If Robert took the bait, Stroud and The Griefers would make him known in ways he was barely even comfortable knowing himself.

  The solution, Robert realised, was not to take on Stroud or The Griefers directly. Instead, he would need to rely on what was at stake: the principle. Unable to attack, he would have to defend. And because he was defending himself, he thought, in advance, against something that had not yet happened, but which could and surely would happen, one day, soon, not only to him but to everyone like him, he had no choice but to defend the person to whom it had already happened.

  He went upstairs, Skyped Silas.

  ‘Robert,’ said Silas. ‘How’s the man of the hour?’

  ‘I want to write about Hugo Bennington,’ said Robert.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Silas. ‘Your angle being …?’

  ‘Social responsibility. Justice.’

  Silas nodded. ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘I like it a lot.’

  ‘I mean, I’m not defending him,’ said Robert.

  ‘No. Of course.’

  ‘I’m just saying: what’s the greater evil?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘I’m saying: where does this end? Witch hunts? Trial by Twitter?’

  ‘You’re saying: an Englishman’s hard drive is his castle.’

  ‘I’m saying: some things are sacred.’

  ‘This could be incendiary, Rob.’

  Briefly, Robert wondered if he should share what he by now not so much wondered as felt he knew for sure: that Julia Benjamin was simply Byron Stroud by another name. The moment he thought about sharing it with Silas, though, was the moment he realised there was nothing to share. If he disclosed what he knew, he’d have to admit the means by which he knew it. That, he thought, could never happen.

  ‘And by the way,’ said Silas. ‘Congrats on the death threats.’

  ‘Congratulations? Do you mean commiserations?’

  ‘Commiserations? You’re nobody until some anonymous coward threatens to kill you, Rob.’

  ‘I thought you said I was nobody until somebody hated me.’

  ‘But it’s like, how much do they hate you? You might have people who hate you but if the next guy’s got people who hate him enough to try and kill him, you’re always going to be playing second fiddle, you get me?’

  ‘I get you, Silas.’

  ‘Look, Rob. I love this, OK? But we need to talk logistics.’

  ‘Logistics?’

  ‘I was going to call you about this later but then you called me first and disrupted the narrative, which I love, by the way, because that’s totally what I’m all about, but now I’m readjusting and just dropping the news where it fits. Bombshell is: I’m leaving The Command Line.’

  ‘Shit, Silas.’

  ‘I know. Let’s just be in the moment with that for a second, really live it out. I mean, I have great memories here. And more importantly, people have great memories of me, so,
you know, it’s going to be hard on everyone. But I think we’ll get through it.’

  ‘Why are you leaving?’

  ‘Well, that’s the good part, because I’m not actually leaving against my will, or on any kind of downer or anything. Like, I haven’t scandalised myself, which is totally great. I’m leaving because I’m off to pastures new. And by pastures, I obviously mean money and power.’

  ‘That’s great, Silas. Congratulations.’

  ‘Gotta say, Rob. Your work was actually a really big part of my getting offered this gig. So, you know, well done me on spotting your work and nurturing your talent, basically.’

  ‘Well done you.’

  ‘I’m kidding, Rob. Jesus Christ. Are you on methadone? Can’t you see where I’m going with this?’

  ‘Not totally, no.’

  ‘I’m saying, how about you come with me? Honestly, considering I’m about to offer you a massive fucking pay packet, your inability to read between the lines is kind of disturbing.’

  ‘You mean, move my column elsewhere?’

  ‘I mean, whole new column, Rob. This one’s done what it needed to do. You want to write about some estate in some fucking nowhere town the rest of your life? Come on.’

  ‘Where are you—’

  ‘The Record.’

  Robert, as the words left Silas’s lips, just about managed to maintain a face that suggested a degree of positivity. But deep in his core, he felt only the sudden and unceremonious removal of something load-bearing and structurally integral. A hollowness bloomed inside him, and he felt himself collapsing into it.

  ‘Wow,’ he managed to say, through a backwash of rising nausea. ‘That’s …’

  ‘I know. No words, right? It’s huge. Stratospheric.’

  ‘I thought … I mean, not to dampen the whole … the whole thing, or anything but … I mean, what about the disruptiveness of the web? I thought print was—’

  ‘Right,’ said Silas. ‘All of that: totally. And that’s going to be a big part of my remit at The Record. The Record wants to modernise, Rob. They want to get with the times. I mean, yeah, they’ve got a website. But so what? They’re talking about reach, amplification. They’ve got this new investor. They’re suddenly flush. They want to change it up. They want people like you and me to help them. And they want to pay us, Rob. They want to pay us an absolute shit ton of money.’