Who is Tom Ditto?

by Danny Wallace

  Hair by Angela at Toni & Guy, near Angel tube, even though her fingers smell of nicotine and she says ‘axe’ instead of ‘ask’.

  Smell: Lynx Africa (for men). £2.76, Tesco Metro, Charing Cross.

  Watch: Swatch (‘It was an impulse buy at Geneva airport,’ he confides, laughing lightly, and picking at his salade niçoise. ‘Our plane was three hours delayed and I’d already bought a Toblerone!’)

  Clothes: Model’s own (with thanks to Topman VIP 10% discount card, available free to literally everyone in the world).

  But I’m not that bad. A Spanish model I met at a Spanish bar on Hanway Street and once even had a passable date with said I looked ‘very English’, which I took to mean like Errol Flynn, even though later I found out he was Australian.

  ‘What. A. Day,’ said Dev, sighing a little too heavily for a man who can’t really have had that much of a day. ‘You? Yours?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You know, not bad,’ by which I meant the opposite.

  It had been bad from the moment I’d got up this morning. The milk had been off, but how’s that different from normal, and the postman had slammed and clattered our letterbox, but the real kicker was when, with a grim tightening of my stomach, I’d flicked my laptop on, and headed for Facebook, and even though I knew something like this would eventually happen, I saw those words, the words I knew would come.

  ... is having the time of her life.

  Seven words.

  A status update.

  And next to it, Sarah’s name, so easily clickable.

  And so I’d clicked it. And there she was. Having the time of her life.

  Stop, I’d thought. Enough now. Get up, have a shower.

  So I’d clicked on her photos.

  She was in Andorra. With Gary. Having the time of her fucking life.

  I’d snapped the laptop shut.

  Didn’t she care that I’d see this? Didn’t she realise that this would go straight to my screen, straight to my stomach? These photos ... these snapshots ... taken from the point of view and angle I used to see her from. But now it’s not me behind the camera. It’s not me capturing the moment. These memories aren’t mine. So I don’t want them. I don’t want to see her, tanned and happy and sleeveless. I don’t want to see her across a table with a cocktail and a look of joy and love and laughter on her face. I don’t want to search for and take in the tiny, pointless, hurtful details – they’d shared a Margherita, the curls of her hair had lightened in the sun, she’d stopped wearing the necklace I gave her – I didn’t want any of it. But I’d opened up the laptop again and I’d looked again anyway, pored over them, took in everything. I hadn’t been able to help it. Sarah was having the time of her life, and I was ... well. What?

  I’d looked to see what my last update had been.

  Jason Priestley is ... eating some soup.

  Jesus. What a catch. Hey, Sarah, I know you’re off having the time of your life and all, but let’s not forget that only last Wednesday I was eating some soup.

  Why didn’t I just delete her? Take her out of the equation? Make the Internet safe again? Same reason there was still a picture of her in my wallet. The one of her on her first day at work – all big blue eyes and Louis Vuitton. I’d not been strong enough to rip it up or bin it. It seemed so ... final. Like giving up, or something. But here’s the thing: deep down, I knew one day she’d delete me. And then that really would be it, and it wouldn’t be my decision, and then I’d be screwed. Part of me hoped that she wouldn’t – that somewhere, in that bag of hers, the one full of make-up and Grazia and Kleenex, somewhere in that bag would be a photo of me ...

  And yeah, there’s that hope again.

  But then one day it’ll be cruelly and casually crushed and I’ll be forgotten, probably just before she decides that her and Gary should move in together, or her and Gary should get hitched, or her and Gary should make another, tiny Gary, which they’ll call Gary, and who’ll look exactly like bloody Gary.

  I’ll probably be sitting there, on my own, when she finally deletes me. In a grey room with a Paddington duvet above a videogame shop next to that place that everyone thought was a brothel but wasn’t. A momentary afterthought, if that. Staring at a screen that informs me I can no longer obsess over her life. That I’m no longer deemed worthy of seeing her photos, seeing who her friends are, finding out when she’s hungover, or sleepy, or late for work. That she’s no longer interested in finding out when I’m eating soup.

  My life.

  Deleted.

  Misery.

  Still. Could be worse.

  We could have run out of Żubr.

  An hour later, and we’d run out of Żubr.

  Dev had suggested the Den – a tiny Irish pub next to the tool hire shop, halfway down to King’s Cross – and I’d said yeah, why not. You never know. I might have the time of my life.

  ‘Ah, listen,’ said Dev, waving one hand in the air. ‘Who wants to go to Andorra anyway? What’s so good about Andorra?’

  The Pogues were on and we were now a little drunk.

  ‘The scenery. The tax free shopping. The fact that it has two heads of State, those being the King of France and a Spanish bishop.’

  A pause.

  ‘You’ve been on Wikipedia, haven’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Is there a King of France?’ asked Dev.

  ‘President, then, I can’t remember. All I know is it’s somewhere you go and have the time of your life. With a man called Gary, just before you have a pride of little Garys – all of whom will look like tiny thuggish babies – and then you buy a boat and make cheese in the country.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Dev.

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘Is she having tiny thuggish babies?’

  ‘Probably,’ I slurred. ‘Probably right now she’s just popped another one out. They’ll take over the world, her thuggish babies. They’ll spread and multiply, like in Arachnophobia. They’ll stick to people’s faces and pound them with their little fists.’

  Dev considered my wise words.

  ‘You didn’t used to be like this,’ he said. ‘Where did you go? Who’s this grumpy man?’

  ‘It is me,’ I said. ‘I am Mr Grumpy. I called home last week and Mum was like, “You never come back to Durham, why do you never come home to Durham?”.’

  ‘So why do you never go back to Durham?’

  ‘Because it’s a reminder, isn’t it? Of going backwards. Anyway, Sarah doesn’t have that problem. She’s gonna have tiny thuggish babies.’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll have thuggish babies. I thought Gary was, like, an investment banker?’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he’s not gonna have thuggish babies,’ I said, pointing my finger in the air to show I would not accept any form of contradiction on this. ‘He’s exactly the type of man to have a thuggish baby. A little skinhead one. Who’s always shouting.’

  ‘But that’s just a baby,’ said Dev.

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘Just don’t feed one of them after midnight.’

  There was a brief silence. An AC/DC track came on. My favourite. ‘Back In Black’ – the finest rock song of its time. I was momentarily cheered.

  ‘Let’s have another pint,’ I said. ‘A Żubr! Or a Zyborg!’

  But Dev was looking at me, very seriously now.

  ‘You should delete her,’ he said, flatly. ‘Just delete her. Be done with it. Leave Mr Grumpy behind, because Mr Grumpy is in danger of becoming Mr Dick. I’m no expert, but I’m sure that’s what they’d say on This Morning, if you phoned up and asked one of those old women who solve problems.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I know,’ I said, sadly.

  ‘These are 2000 calories!’ said Dev. ‘2000! I read about it in the paper!’

  ‘You read about it in my paper,’ I said. After several pints in the Den, we’d had the ‘one we came for’ and stopped at Oz’s for a kebab on the way home. ‘I’m the one who showed it to
you and said, “Read this! It says kebabs are 2000 calories!”’

  ‘Wherever I read it, I’m just saying, 2000 calories is a lot of calories for a kebab. But they’re good for you, too.’

  ‘How are they good for you?’

  ‘They line your stomach with fat, so that when the apocalypse comes, you are better prepared. We’ll survive longer. Tubby people will inherit the earth!’

  Dev made a little ‘yahoo!’ sound, but then started coughing on his chilli sauce. He’s a little obsessed with the apocalypse, through years of roaming post-apocalyptic landscapes, scavenging for objects and fighting giant beetles on videogames, which he genuinely regards as his ‘important training’.

  Right now, he was having trouble getting the key into the door. You’d lose points for that in an apocalypse. You’d also lose points for wearing glasses, but they’re an important part of Dev. He has an IQ of around 146 according not just to a psychiatrist when he was four but also to some interactive quiz he did on the telly, which makes me proud of him when I’m drunk, though you’d never think it was anywhere close to 146 to speak to him. He has applied for four of the however-many-series of The Apprentice there’ve been, but for some reason they are yet to reply satisfactorily to this part-owner of a very minor second-hand videogame shop on the Caledonian Road, which I would find funny, if I didn’t know this actually broke his heart.

  It’d be easy to argue that Dev was defined at fourteen. His interests, his way with girls, even his look. See, when Dev was fourteen, his grandfather died, and that had a huge impact on his life. Not because it was emotionally traumatic, though of course it was, but because Dev’s dad doesn’t like to see money wasted. And the year before, Dev had started to notice he wasn’t like the other kids. Just small things – not being able to see a sign, not being able to read a clock, and persistently and with great flair falling out of his bed. He was short-sighted.

  His dad is a businessman. His dad thought, why pay for frames, when a pair of frames were clearly so nearly ready and available for no money whatsoever?

  And so Dev had been given his granddad’s frames. His granddad’s. Literally three days after the funeral. Re-lensed, obviously, but by his dad’s mate, on the Whitechapel Road, and with cheap, scuffable plastic. Dev went through the next four years ridiculed by all and sundry for having a young boy’s face and an old man’s pair of specs, like a toddler wearing his mum’s sunglasses. He tried to grow a moustache to compensate, but that just made him look like a miniature military dictator.

  And he’d never bought a new pair. Why should he? He’d found his look. And these days, it was working to his advantage. At university, at least at first, it had been considered odd, these thick black frames on a weird new kid, but they were a comfort blanket in year one, an eccentricity or quirk in year two and, he hoped, a chick magnet in year three.

  (They weren’t.)

  But later, when you added them to the hair he couldn’t be bothered to get cut and the T-shirts he either got for free or bought from eBay for a pound and a penny, these glasses screamed confidence. These glasses screamed ... well, they screamed ‘Dev’.

  Foreign girls, who couldn’t understand him but liked bright jackets, thought he looked cool.

  ‘Come on!’ he said, finally through the door and slamming the banister with his fist as we stumbled upstairs. ‘I know what’ll cheer you up.’

  In the flat, Dev threw his kebab onto the table and made for the kitchen, where he started to go through cupboards and loudly shift stuff about.

  I wandered into my bedroom and picked up my laptop and made a determined face.

  Maybe I should do it, I thought. Just delete her. Move on. Forget about things. Be the grown-up. It’d be easy. And then I could turn on my computer without that low, dull ache. That anticipation of maybe seeing something bad. I could get on with my life.

  I heard Dev shout, ‘Aha!’, as I fired up the Internet.

  ‘Found it, Jase! Prime bottle of Jezynowka! Blackberry brandy! How’s about we hook up the N64 and drink Jezynowka and play GoldenEye ’til dawn?’

  But I wasn’t listening. Not really. I was only guessing at what he was saying. He could have been knocking over vases and composing racist songs for all I knew, because I was transfixed, and shocked, and I don’t know what else, by what I saw on the screen.

  One word this time.

  One word that kicked me in the teeth and stamped on my hope and made fun of my family.

  ‘Jase?’ said Dev, suddenly there, in my doorway. ‘D’you want to be James Bond or Natalia?’

  But I didn’t look round.

  My eyes were pricked with tears and I could feel every hair on my body, because all I could see were the words ‘Sarah Bennett is ...’ and then that last one, that killer, that complete and absolute bastard of a word.

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  First published in 2014 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group Company

  Copyright © 2014, Danny Wallace

  Danny Wallace has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

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  Hardback ISBN 9780091919030

  Trade paperback ISBN 9780091956554

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