by Daisy Tate
‘I especially liked the part where you were all, I don’t need social media if all it’s doing is tearing people down. An online community should be like – an online community, proper like – where we build people up, not tear people down, innit?’
‘But you’re on Instagram,’ she reminded him. ‘Keeping your peeps happy.’ She threw out a tiny shape.
He laughed, then sobered and said, ‘Nah.’
‘What? I saw you.’
‘Nah.’ He looked over his shoulder then back at her, head tucked low. ‘They’re just selfies I send to my mum.’
Her forehead shot up. ‘Oh?’
‘She’s got anxiety and depression and shit and when I’m at work she kinda freaks, so …’ He threw a lame pose.
Raven never thought her heart could ache for Dylan, but at that moment it did.
‘Anyway,’ he said, drawing back up to his full height. ‘I just thought you said some cool shit.’
‘Thanks.’
She’d tried to catch the segment on the work telly but had been stuck on a call from a man experiencing chest pains. Whilst her colleagues gathered round the coffee area and watched the interview, she was busy trying to persuade him an ambulance was the wiser choice over waiting for the doctor even if the ambulance service was staffed by ‘foreign muck.’ The ‘foreign muck’ were better placed to help him as he was displaying signs of an actual heart attack which could kill him and yes, they would know how to speak English and work the AED.
As the staff clapped and walked back to their stations, giving her little pats of encouragement and popping coins and the odd fiver into the tin she and Sue had placed on the counter where everyone who did charity walks or runs or rides did, she’d smiled actual smiles and mouthed thank you whilst ignoring the barrage of racist slurs from Mr Heartattack as she transferred him to the ambulance service.
‘Your parents must think you’re the shit,’ Dylan said.
‘Uh – yeah, not so much.’
He looked genuinely shocked. Why not? You’ve got a kick-ass job. You do stuff for charity. You’re on telly.’
She barked out a laugh. Her parents would’ve been horrified to discover the entire world knew their daughter was taking *gasp!* a gap year. Gandhiji, after all, would never ever have taken a gap year. (Nor would he have invested in Pharma tech, but that was another story.)
‘They’re pretty busy,’ she said, hoping that was enough.
Dylan pulled out a chair and sat down across from her. ‘My mum watches it and we were having a cuppa before I went off to work and she was like, is that one of your mates and I was like, it sure is Mums, and she was like, she’s brave riding all that way, and I was like, double hella brave Mum. Then I told her about your friend and the …’ he mimed being hung by a noose, ‘… and how that really, like, hurt me that someone could be so low and how I helped you get your bikes – mega deal! – and then she wanted to follow your Insta site and we couldn’t find it so …’ He wiggled his ever-present phone in between them. ‘Wot’s the secret identity, Raven?’
Ah. This had been a sticky point at work as well. Everyone wanting to follow her Instajourney. It was like she, Flo and Sue were celebrities at work now. ‘I don’t have one.’
Dylan did a double take. ‘Are you for real?’
She made a weird smiley apology face. ‘I deleted all of my accounts.’
He ha ha ha’d and then did a double take when her expression remained unchanged. ‘Nah, c’mon. For real?’
She pressed a button on her phone and showed him. Just the factory pre-set apps plus a cycling one Flo had downloaded for her and the accounting one she and Sue used for Young & Son.
‘Man, you got balls!’
Raven laughed. Brave definitely wasn’t one of the adjectives she would’ve ascribed to herself. Cowardly, fearful, ashamed. There were more, but … lately she’d been feeling other things, too. Helpful. Proactive. Involved. On a micro-level, obvs, but lately, all of the things that she’d thought had been happening to her were actually things she had made happen.
‘You’re turning your weakness into your strength, aint’cha? Showing the dickheads where they can shove it.’
There was something about the way Dylan spoke – an emotional rawness – that told Raven he knew exactly what big dickheads people could be. And then she remembered Halfords and the way the shop assistant had been so dismissive of him. His gazillions of selfies that turned out to be for his depressed mother. The fact he spoke to her. In public.
‘How’s work?’ She asked.
‘Ah, yeah, that didn’t pan out so good.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I left.’ He glanced over his shoulder then dipped down to say, ‘Got fired, actually.’
‘Why? I thought you loved it there.’
‘I did, but …’ again he looked over his shoulder then down at the table where he traced something into a water ring. ‘Sometimes I have to stay up late with my mum, you know, to keep the demons at bay and I fell asleep on shift.’
‘That doesn’t seem so bad. They could’ve just woken you up.’
‘I was out on the floor. A customer found me.’
‘Ah.’
‘So, if they’ve got any jobs going at the call centre …’ He flashed her a grin and then said, ‘Nah. I don’t think I’d be any good at that.’
‘I’m sure you would, but it’s not everyone’s thing. What do you think you’d be good at?’
‘See?’ Dylan smiled his almost Bradley Cooper smile. ‘You know how to ask the real questions, don’t you?’
Errr … it was kind of an obvious one, but … maybe that was the problem with life these days. No one asked the obvious questions hovering between them like, how are you?
‘So …? What are you good at?’
‘Computers. That’s pretty much my area of expertise. Total techno geek if I’m being honest.’
‘Right. Well, if I hear of anything …’
‘Cool, cool.’ He tapped the table with his fingers then said, ‘I think we should conduct a social experiment.’
‘Sorry?’
He took her phone, then looked up at her, ‘I think the world of Instagram needs a new star.’
Raven stiffened as he downloaded the app she had very specifically deleted.
‘Right,’ Dylan began to cackle. ‘Who would you most like all those crackhead cyber bullies to have a smackdown with?’
Raven was about to protest and then thought of her superpowers. The ones that had given her the strength to move out of her house and in with Sue. The ones that kept her calm when angry, racist men were having heart attacks and refusing medical treatment. The ones she should’ve used when Aisha Laghari was lying on the bathroom floor at college. She thought for a while. Trawled through the things that had brought her genuine, proper joy over the past few months. Helping Sue. Meeting Flo. Getting rid of that unicorn rug in Sue’s entryway. Brown Goth Pinterest boards full of take-no-prisoners-chock-full-of-attitude women saying, Damn straight, I’m a girl of colour. Yeah, I like black lipstick. Too right I have a resting bitch face. And I’m pretty on top of it. All with a healthy dash of you can’t troll me now – I own everything you want to shame me with. ‘Got it,’ she said to Dylan as he started taking snaps of her with his phone. ‘What do you think of this?’
‘Ooo la la! Look who’s here! It’s the winner of the Tour de France!’ Dean crowed as he opened the door to Sue. She put the kickstand down on her bicycle and took off her helmet. She smiled at Dean and accepted the half hug he pulled her into, enjoying the new-found, yet entirely unspoken closeness she’d felt with him since Sunday Lunchgate as he’d now taken to calling The Day Someone Said No to Katie. The children ran down the stairs, shyly waved and ‘Hi Auntie Sue’d’ her before heading back to the kitchen to ‘Muuum? When’s lunch ready?’
Dean flicked his thumb to the spot where the children had just been. ‘They wanted to see the resident movie star.’
Sue flush
ed. ‘I’m hardly that.’
‘You’ve been on telly. More than any of us have.’
‘Actually, Dean,’ Katie swept from the kitchen through to the dining room holding a very large roast in front of her as if it were a crown. ‘I was on the telly back before I met you.’
‘It’s all been downhill since then, hasn’t it, love?’ When she disappeared, Dean dropped Sue a wink. ‘Totes jelly!’
Sue swatted at him then took off her reflective jacket and cycling shoes.
‘Look at you and all of your fancy kit!’
They both looked down at Sue’s outfit. Padded shorts, a shirt with a back pocket in it for her house keys. Shoes with a two-bolt clip to go with her hybrid pedals. All things she’d never known existed before Dylan, Raven’s friend, had explained them to her and showed her the best places to get them off of eBay. There is like, thousands of offers on things that have only been worn once, he’d said. He’d been right. She’d spent just over a hundred pounds on everything including the bike. Far less than Flo had spent, judging from her blinky expression when she and Raven had showed up for their first ride together, unable to resist telling Flo about the deals they’d found.
‘With all of those donations coming in you can gold plate them if you like.’ Dean nudged her shoes.
‘No! Dean, I – oh, no, I just—’ A swell of nausea rolled through her as she pictured the spike in donations after her segment had run on Brand New Day. As if she were the charity case. She were the one to be pitied. That wasn’t the case at all! It was Gary they should be thinking about. Gary and the fact that he hadn’t felt there was anyone in the world he could open up to. Not even his wife. The one person in the world he should have been able to count on and she had been absolutely oblivious.
‘Bad joke. Bad joke.’ Dean swiped his hand across his face. ‘I know you wouldn’t do anything like that.’
‘I couldn’t even if I wanted to which, of course, I wouldn’t.’ Sue said hotly, fighting back a rush of unwanted emotion. She’d been so proud of how she’d held it together on the telly. Explaining to Kath how she was doing the ride in the memory of her husband so that no one else had to go through what he’d gone through. Raven and Flo had come along to lend their support, rightly guessing Sue would try to back out of her interview. Flo had suggested she pretend she was the woman in the Scottish Widows advert and Raven had said as long as she remembered it was for LifeTime it would make it easier. Both of them had been right. Kath had also been incredibly kind and open. Even lovelier than she seemed on the telly. So much so that once they had started talking, telling each other stories about Kath’s brother who had apparently been a brilliant mimic and Gary who could get the whole pub laughing with his long, drawn-out jokes, it had almost been as if the cameras had disappeared. Except for the big microphone waving above them.
‘Don’t you worry, Suey. You’ve got the biggest heart in the whole of the UK. You deserve every penny of it.’
‘It’s not for me,’ Sue shook his arm off of her shoulder. ‘It’s for LifeTime.’
‘They’re sending in the donations because of your story,’ Dean insisted. ‘For what you’ve been through.’
What Gary had been through was a million times worse than anything she’d been through so no way was she going to accept any of this as a compliment.
‘Ooeeeoo. Look who’s bothered to show up.’ Bev appeared from the kitchen with a large tray of cauliflower cheese in her oven-mitted hands.
‘Sorry, I was just …’ Sue was about to explain how the ride had taken longer than she’d thought when her mother briskly turned and headed to the dining room where she heard some sort of self-righteous exchange about some people deigning themselves to be above helping with the family meal.
‘Don’t worry about her. Mum’s just jealous.’
‘What?’
‘Of you being on telly.’
‘No, she’s not.’
Dean grinned, ‘Wanna bet? She’s spent the past half hour going on about everyone at work asking how to get on your Instagram site and wanting to contribute to your fundraising site.’
‘I don’t have a fundraising site. It’s all part of Brand New Day.’
‘Give us your phone.’
Sue unzipped the pocket of her mostly all-weather jacket and handed it to him. Dean gave it a couple of taps. ‘Don’t you have a passcode for this?’
‘No. Gary’s the only other person who looked at it and I’d nothing to hide, so …’
Dean’s eyes flicked over to meet hers. He cricked his neck then asked, ‘What do you want as your password?’
‘Garyboberry,’ she said without thinking. It had been her password for the past fifteen years for just about everything. Garyboberry1999 when they required numbers. Garyboberry1999! for when you needed a symbol.
Dean tapped in the password. ‘Put your helmet on,’ he directed. ‘Now smile.’
She gave him a confused smile.
Dean did a few more swishes and flicks on the screen then handed the phone back to her. ‘There. Now you have an Insta account linked to the Brand New Day donations page.’ He dropped her a cheeky wink. ‘I’ve put fifty quid in in Mum’s name.’ His phone rang, interrupting one of the first complicit moments they’d shared as brother and sister since they’d been children.
His face went sombre as he listened then began nodding along, ‘Yeah, yeah. No, I get it. I’ll make some calls, but …’ he swept his hand across his face. ‘Shit. Yeah. Can you tell Katie I’m going to have to sit this one out? Lunch, I mean.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Ohhhh … Suey …’ Dean went into a mode she was all too familiar with. The ‘you wouldn’t understand’ mode. ‘Just some staffing problems. Our IT guy decided to go walkies.’
‘In tax season?’
Dean’s chin jutted out as he scrubbed it. ‘It happens. Separates the boys from the men, tax season does.’
‘I know someone,’ Sue said. ‘He’s a computer guy.’
Dean started to laugh and then stopped, as if he’d given himself a lecture about actually listening to Sue rather than blowing her off as was the usual family remit. ‘Who’s that then?’
‘His name’s Dylan. He’s young, but … from what I understand, he knows his way around a computer.’
A phone call to Raven and then to Dylan later, Dean had a smile back on his face.
‘Suey?’ Dean tapped at his phone for a few furious seconds. ‘You’re a bloody marvel.’ He wiggled the phone in front of her face. He was moving it too quickly to read but it looked like it was the donation page he’d just set up. ‘Let’s just say the tax year just got a little bit brighter for me and for LifeTime.’ Then he crooked an arm round her neck and led her towards the dining room. ‘Time to see if we can saw through Katie’s yorkies.’ And just like that, she felt closer to her brother than she ever had.
Chapter Forty
‘Today, campers,’ Raven whispered to her phone under her tented covers, ‘… Big Boned Goth Girl is hitting the road. And yes, I did just talk about myself in the third person.’ She smirked. ‘I think that’s enough Kanye action for one day, don’t you? Back to Owning My Fears … So, today’s bit of Too Much Information, or, as I like to call it, honesty: Today I am scared utterly shitless of what lies ahead. And what is that exactly? That’s fifty-three miles in one day. On a bicycle. Where there are hills, a nuclear power station, and the promise of rain. Which will all be very interesting, considering I’ve not really been riding my bike much.’
She did one of those silent laughs that let her viewers know she knew she’d put herself in a tricky situation and was well aware of the consequences, but … hopefully it would be a mind over matter thing. It better be, anyway. Particularly seeing as she’d made it very clear she found being hot and sweaty as a result of exercise completely revolting. It seemed a lot of other people thought so too, and as such, she now had almost a thousand followers, including seventy-two in Argentina. She was pretty sure
Dylan and his way with hashtags had something to do with that. #GothGirlsGotBack Ha! Priceless. The look on his face when she’d actually twerked. Hilllarious.
She hadn’t had this much fun in actual years. Hanging out with Dylan was like having a real mate.
Not boyfriend/girlfriend style, just … fun.
When actual strangers began following her, it was a proper shocker. It had also made the knot in her stomach tighter because at some point she was going to have to tell Dylan and her followers and probably Kath about Aisha and the truckload of guilt and panic and, let’s face it, fear, that had all but turned her inside out exactly when she should’ve been doing something helpful, but that day had been an epic TIFU day if ever there was one, just like the day when the cutter had rung her and had obviously hit an artery and just like that, the self-doubt monkeys began swirling round her brain— zip! Zip it up. And breathe.
Right now, right here, in this moment, she was enjoying being Big Boned Goth Girl. A self-styled, too tall, heavily proportioned, geeky goth of colour who hated exercise and loved learning weird facts about just about anything, including the fact that the so-called Lake District only had one lake and that it was possible to become a knight by buying a round of drinks in the pub at Piel Island.
Being a geek and making a berk out of herself weren’t the only things that had helped boost the numbers. They’d been tactical. They’d tagged in Brand New Day, obvs. Trip of a LifeTime. Again, obvs. Cycling stuff. Whatever was trending that day, including musicians, actors and politicians being idiots because the only people they thought about were the old voters who weren’t thinking about the young people and the apocalypse of a planet earth they were going to be living in sooner rather than later, but … whatever. Noel Fielding. Bake Off. Make-up. She’d tagged tonnes of make-up brands. Amazing goth clothing she’d never be able to afford to wear in a million years. Dylan had suggested she start writing mock lyrics to songs about being a goth geek and loving it, but she had a voice like a donkey and there were limits to just how far she was prepared to go to make the point that you should be free to be who you wanted to be on social media without fear of being bullied. All of which meant she needed to get her head back in the right place and do this thing before she climbed onto her bicycle and began what could only be fifty-three miles of horror. She propped herself up on her elbow, making sure the covers were still over her head and shifted the camera a bit.