by Paul Burston
‘Don’t patronise me, Em!’
‘I’m not!’
‘Yes, you are. You’re talking to me like I’m a child. I’m a grown man. If I decide to talk about my personal experience with a journalist or discuss it on the radio, it’s nobody’s business but my own.’
‘Is that right?’ Emma’s tone is brittle. ‘I’ll bear that in mind in future. In the meantime, your personal experience is splashed all over the internet, and now a vulnerable woman is being harassed as a result of it.’
Tom’s temper flares. ‘Vulnerable woman? You’ve changed your tune.’
‘I haven’t. But it is possible to feel sympathy for both parties in a situation like this. She clearly isn’t well, and what’s happening now could be enough to tip her over the edge.’
‘So the troll gets trolled. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. What do you expect me to do about it?’
‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, Tom.’
‘I never said they did. But I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘I am.’
‘In that case, I don’t think there’s anything left to say, is there?’
‘No,’ Tom snaps. ‘I don’t suppose there is.’
He ends the call and stands at the window, waiting for his anger to subside. Then, when his breathing has returned to normal, he opens the Twitter app on his phone. A shiver of unease creeps across his skin. There are hundreds of notifications, all in the space of a few hours – more than he’s seen since the days before Evie Stokes was first arrested. Experience tells him that they can’t all be friendly mentions. A feeling deep in his gut says it’s worse than that.
It is. The Twitter storm has turned. The main focus of people’s outrage is no longer Evie Stokes. It’s him.
‘What’s the matter, Tom?’ asks one man. ‘Nasty woman calling you names? Diddums!’
Tom’s throat tightens. The tweet has been shared more than twenty times and liked by dozens of people. Of course it’s possible that one or more of the people adding fuel to the fire is Stokes herself. Fake profiles aren’t exactly unheard of on Twitter. But would she really risk these tweets being traced back to her?
Tom checks the profile page for the author of the tweet. ‘Terry Teaches’ seems legitimate enough. There’s a photo of a heavyset man with a goatee and a history of interactions suggesting that the account is genuine. Tom wonders what Terry’s problem is. Is he connected to Stokes somehow? Then he checks a few of the profiles who’ve shared the tweet. Again, they look pretty authentic.
Returning to his long list of notifications, Tom sees that his name has been mentioned and tagged dozens of times. ‘Typical male cry-bully’, says one woman. ‘Pick a fight with some vulnerable woman then go running to the police.’ Another asks, ‘What’s your problem, Tom? Think men are the real victims? Think again!’ A third says, ‘Tom Hunter makes up stories for a living. What do you expect?’ A fourth reads, ‘Glad you’ve found another way to get your name in the paper. That last book didn’t do so well, did it Tom?’
There’s even a hashtag – #IBelieveEvie – where he stands accused of everything from censorship to encouraging the kind of misogynistic abuse that gives Twitter a bad name.
Tom’s pulse races. Is this really how people see him? He’s not a misogynist. He loves women. Just not all women – and not in the romantic sense.
Then his eyes fall on a tweet from a woman calling herself ‘Avenging Angel’. It reads, ‘You might have fooled the court but you don’t fool me. I saw you post that poor woman’s address on Facebook. Shame on you!’
Tom’s throat tightens. He thinks back to that night all those months ago when he drunkenly took to Facebook to vent about Stokes turning up outside his flat and stupidly included her name and address. It seemed reasonable at the time. He was simply playing her at her own game, hoping to publicly shame her into leaving him alone. But in the cold light of dawn, with a raging hangover threatening to crush his skull, he realised what a terrible mistake he’d made and deleted the post. There’d been no mention of it during the court case, which led Tom to conclude that Stokes was unaware of his error of judgment. But if it escaped her attention then, she’s sure to read about it now.
He can always deny it, of course. ‘Avenging Angel’ hasn’t attached a screenshot of Tom’s original Facebook post. Either she doesn’t have one or she doesn’t want to give Evie’s enemies more ammunition by revealing her address. There’s nothing to prove that what she says is true. But Tom knows that trial by Twitter doesn’t require much in the way of hard evidence. Now that the allegation is out there, there’s no knowing how many times it’ll be shared or who’ll read it and judge him accordingly.
Pushing the thought away, he closes the app on his phone, breathes deeply and then opens it again. He knows he shouldn’t read further, but he can’t help himself. It’s as if he’s reading about another person. People he’s never met are forming opinions of him, and most of them are far from flattering. According to Twitter, he’s a bully and an abuser of women, ‘a gay chauvinist pig’ and ‘a precious snowflake faggot who can’t stand the heat of grown-up debate’. This last tweet comes from someone called ‘Child of Genet’, though it sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing Evie Stokes would say.
Tom pockets the phone and rushes over to his computer. Still standing, he opens his search engine and locates her Twitter profile. It’s changed since the last time he looked. The header image shows a pebble beach, not unlike the one he can see from his window. Even as he’s considering the implications of this, his attention is drawn to her profile picture. It takes a few seconds for the image to register. It’s a detail from the Bayeux Tapestry. King Harold with an arrow in his eye. The battle of Hastings.
Tom’s stomach churns. She knows where he is. Somehow, she’s keeping tabs on him.
Then he sees her latest pinned tweet. It’s another YouTube link. ‘The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get’ by Morrissey. A song for stalkers everywhere.
Heart pounding, Tom fumbles in his pocket for his phone, fingers shaking as he searches for the number. Finally he finds it. ‘Hello? Yes, I need to speak to Detective Inspector Sue Grant. It’s urgent!’
26
DAY 24 (706 DAYS REMAINING)
I didn’t go home last night. I know it’s wrong of me. I knew my dad would be worried. He left several messages. But I needed time to clear my head. I couldn’t bear to see that look on his face. The disappointment. The shame. It’s too much. So I checked into a budget hotel in Camberwell and waited for him to leave for work this morning. That’s the great thing about London. There are plenty of places to hide. A girl can just disappear.
Things haven’t been the same since we had That Talk last week. He’s tried to hide it, but sometimes I catch him watching me and I know that something has changed. He tries to smile but the smile never extends to his eyes. He’s keeping something from me. He’s biting his tongue.
Take the night before last. He arrived home over an hour later than usual. Nothing wrong with that in itself. I’m not my father’s keeper. But he didn’t phone to say he’d be late, and when he did finally arrive, he offered no apology or explanation as to why he’d been held up or where he’d been. I’m sure plenty of wives and girlfriends are used to this kind of behaviour from their menfolk and complain bitterly about it whenever they get together. But I’m not his wife or girlfriend. I’m his daughter. And I’m not complaining, either. I’m just concerned.
When I haven’t been worrying about my dad I’ve been thinking back to my last therapy session. I’ve been doing this a lot lately – looping back to recent events and conversations, going over them again in my head. Some days it feels like I’m unravelling. The feeling starts at the top of my head and creeps around my hairline, corkscrewing its way down and around my face, like someone peeling an orange. I picture my skin coming away, revealing the fruity pulp beneath. Then I pull myself together, remind m
yself that I’ve survived far worse than this before and I’ll live through this, too.
I’ll say one thing for my therapist: she isn’t afraid of a challenge. I don’t know how well versed Maria is in literary criticism, but she doesn’t let a lack of education stand in her way. We talked a lot about books and authorship. I don’t know which of us brought the subject up – it can get confusing at times – but as soon as it was mentioned she was like a dog with a bone, referring to my case file and questioning me about the book I’m alleged to have written and sent to you.
‘Alleged to’! I did write that book and I did send it to you. I thought that much had been established in court, despite my lawyer’s insistence that it wouldn’t strengthen my case and may even play into the hands of the prosecution. What a world we live in, when the act of writing a book and sharing it with the man who helped inspire it can be seen as an act of harassment! What a twisted, unthinking, anti-intellectual world! How long before we start burning such books and those who have the audacity to write them?
I didn’t say this to my therapist. In fact, I didn’t say very much at all, keeping my answers short and to the point, the way I was advised to do in court.
‘You told me that you got a lot from Mr Hunter,’ my therapist said. ‘What did you mean by that?’
I replied that I found your work inspiring.
‘Inspiring in what way?’ she asked.
Poor Maria. It’s not her fault she lacks imagination.
‘Inspiring in many ways,’ I replied. ‘I could go through them all one by one, but we’d be here all day.’
‘Why not make a start, and we’ll see how far we get?’ she smiled. Have I mentioned how annoying she can be sometimes?
I thought of all the inspirational quotes and platitudes people post on Twitter along with the usual hashtags about books and writing. ‘Books are windows into other worlds,’ I said.
Maria nodded. Whether she was humouring me or agreeing with me, I couldn’t say for certain.
‘Books encourage us to think outside ourselves,’ I said.
Again she nodded. Again I wasn’t sure why. But I was starting to enjoy this game now.
‘Books are a girl’s best friend,’ I said and immediately saw from her reaction that the game was up.
‘This is all very good, Evie,’ she said. ‘But I asked you about Mr Hunter’s books in particular, and so far you haven’t really answered my question. What is it about his work that you find so inspiring?’
‘His characters,’ I replied. ‘He gives a voice to men who don’t have a voice, who are often silenced.’
Maria raised her eyebrows. ‘You think men are silenced?’
‘Some are, yes. Or they’re only presented in certain ways – cheating husbands, abusive fathers, serial killers.’
‘So you’re talking about crime fiction.’
‘I’m talking about most fiction. Film. Television. Men are usually the villains, rarely the victims.’
‘I don’t think that’s strictly true,’ Maria said. ‘But even if it were, isn’t that because men generally commit more crimes than women? The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men.’
‘But that’s not the same as saying that the vast majority of men commit violent crimes, is it?’ I countered. ‘For every man who does commit an act like that, there are millions more who don’t. Men are also the victims of violent crime. Men are raped. Men are the victims of domestic abuse.’
She nodded. ‘And men can be the victims of stalking.’
‘If you say so.’
‘It’s not a question of whether I say so,’ Maria insisted. ‘It’s a fact. Significant numbers of men report being stalked, often by women they barely know but who feel connected to them in some way. Do you know what erotomania is, Evie?’
‘Of course,’ I smirked. ‘It’s an album by Madonna. Widely considered one of her best recordings, though overshadowed at the time of release by her infamous Sex book.’
‘Very funny. But I can see you’re deflecting. Erotomania is a type of delusional disorder in which the affected person believes that another person is in love with him – or her. This belief is usually applied to someone with higher status or a famous person. Mr Hunter, for instance.’
I smiled tightly, although at that precise moment in time I wanted to grab Maria by the hair and slam her smug face against the nearest hard surface. ‘I didn’t stalk Mr Hunter,’ I replied. ‘Nothing on my record says that I did.’
‘No, you were found guilty of harassment. But it’s a thin line, isn’t it? Between harassment and stalking?’
‘It’s a thin line between love and hate,’ I smirked, recalling an old Pretenders song.
‘And do you hate Mr Hunter?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘And I never loved him, either. I loved his work. It is possible to separate the two, you know.’
‘I wonder how easy it is, though. For you, I mean. Because your criminal record tells a different story.’
‘We all have a story to tell,’ I replied. ‘It’s simply a question of how we choose to tell it.’
I had a creative writing tutor back when I was at uni – a woman called Jan. She had been published once, a long time ago – before she was reduced to teaching undergraduates for a living. The resentment oozed out of her like the copious amounts of red wine she was rumoured to drink when she was alone in her office between tutorials, supposedly marking. On one occasion, at a staff and student social, I saw her knock over a full bottle and attempt to scoop the spilled wine off the table top and back into her glass with the cup of her hand. Catching me looking at her, she smiled and said, ‘I’d rather see a church burn!’
Jan’s favourite teaching method was to encourage us all to write and read aloud our personal stories – the more personal, the better. ‘All writing is therapy,’ she’d say, though I often wondered who was benefiting from this particular form of therapy – us or her.
I once watched her tear a fellow student to shreds, a young woman whose best friend had committed suicide a year earlier and who she’d written about at Jan’s behest.
‘Sentimental and cliché-ridden!’ Jan remarked, as the poor girl’s eyes filled with tears.
Had I ever entertained the possibility of becoming a truly confessional writer, it was driven out of me at that precise moment. Instead I tried my hand at various forms of fiction, working on short stories and finally developing the idea for a novel. I shared as little as possible with Jan. Instead I would churn out pieces especially for her classes – pieces I had no personal investment in but would knock out the night before and claim came from direct experience. I wrote about the time I was mugged, despite never having been the victim of such a crime. Similarly, I wrote about surviving a car crash as a child, about the time I nearly drowned and the time I was wrongly arrested for shoplifting. None of these tales contained even a glimmer of truth, and it pleased me no end that Jan was unable to tell when I was lying and would judge my work accordingly, often harshly but without denting my confidence the way she delighted in destroying the dreams of my fellow students. In her own mean-spirited way, I think Jan prepared me for the reality of becoming a writer.
I’d started working on my novel long before I left the cosseted world of academia. But it wasn’t until the untimely death of my mother and my subsequent return to London that I was able to give it my full and undivided attention, rising early to write a few hundred words before breakfast and returning to it for the best part of the day. There was no pressure on me to find a job. My dad earned a decent wage, the mortgage was paid off and, as he kept insisting, ‘two can live just as cheaply as one’. In many ways I was extremely advantaged. But I also had a mountain to climb. For every novel that gets published there are thousands more that never see the light of day. I had no connections and no celebrity, no fast track past the gatekeepers of the publishing world. All I had was self-belief and a story that needed to be told.
It’s often said that a writer’
s first novel is really just a thinly disguised autobiography. This may well have been true of my first draft. The main character, Sylvie, is a lot like me. She doesn’t dream of getting married. She isn’t looking for a man to complete her. She’s independent, a bit of a dreamer, a little on the kooky side. I’m aware, of course, that some people consider me kooky – and that’s fine with me. I’d rather be seen as kooky than not seen at all.
But there the resemblance ends. Sylvie isn’t as tough as I’ve had to be. She doesn’t have my strengths. She’s really quite an innocent – and by that I’m not suggesting that I am in any way guilty, merely that she lacks my resourcefulness. She isn’t a survivor, the way I am. She isn’t a freak like me.
But as I was saying, this was only my first draft. By the second draft, I’d realised where I was going wrong. There wasn’t enough of me in my book. I was hiding behind my characters. What’s that great Oscar Wilde saying? ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’ But I wasn’t being truthful. The mask I wore wasn’t working. And that’s where you came in. You inspired me. More than that, you freed something in me. You gave me another mask – not to hide behind, but through which I could reveal my true self.
I’d been writing daily for the best part of a year when the idea struck me. I know how averse to risk the publishing world can be. It’s more like the Hollywood film industry these days, isn’t it? They love a good franchise. They want a ready-made readership, a sure thing, the same but different. And while they’re all waiting for the next Gone Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the Train, originality is passing them by, and the likes of me end up on someone’s slush pile.
But I knew the power of the internet. I’d seen the fan forums. I knew there was another way. Do it yourself. Seize control. Self-publish and create a stir. It worked for E.L. James. Why shouldn’t it work for me too? So here’s what I did: I wrote myself into your book. I carved you up and filleted you like a fish. I took the bare bones of your story and fleshed them out with the blood, guts and beating heart of mine. I took my characters and inserted them into your narrative. Then, when I’d breathed new life into your book, I wrote you into mine. I added a character called Tom in homage to the man who’d helped inspire me. The scene where he and Sylvie first meet simmers with sexual tension.