by Mark Lawson
In another crazy circuit of confirmation, the failure of the mainstream media to report any of these stories proved that they were true, as the owners of those newspapers and networks were required by either educational connections or sexual blackmail to protect the Royals and other establishment figures from exposure.
For someone who was soon to be pushed out into this incubator of speculation and graveyard of fact – where his entire character and career could be rewritten by any moron with a keyboard – these lunacies should have been reassuring proof that nobody should take seriously most of what was said.
But here Ned discovered another paradox of the Internet. Although he knew almost everything online to be false, he was sure that readers would assume everything written about him to be true.
Preparations for War
Phee had phoned, the day after the lunch at which they broke the news to the girls, to say that Emma and Ned might want to change the privacy settings on their Facebook accounts and check which friendship and gaming groups Toby might be in and what the security levels were. Phee argued that, if Things Got Difficult (a euphemism Emma gratefully stored for use in conversations with others), ‘hacks’ and ‘trolls’ might be able to access any family photos on the sites and even target Tobes. ‘And what about paedophiles?’ Emma had blurted, a mother’s instinct, but her stepdaughter had replied: ‘Oh, hacks and trolls are much worse.’ The girls, in rare agreement, were protecting their settings on Facebook and leaving Twitter (at least for the moment) and she suggested that everyone in the family did the same. When Emma admitted that she wasn’t certain she and Ned would know how to, Phee offered to come round and sort them out the following night.
‘I still think of myself as young,’ Emma told Ned. ‘But, if things get difficult, I would lock the door and draw the curtains, without thinking that most people have a window permanently open now.’
‘It would never have occurred to me either,’ the historian agreed. ‘It’s a sort of modern equivalent of digging a moat before a war.’
Friday Suicide Call
Ned was now afraid, he had told Tom, to answer any call from an unknown number in case it was a reporter. But during the time that both men were waiting for the verdict on their pasts, Tom at least had the consolation that his disgrace remained local: his suspension had been briefly mentioned in both student newspapers, and then, suggesting that the next generation of journalists may require as much regulation as earlier ones, amended online to add the crucial information that Dr Pimm denied the charges. There had been nothing, though, in a national or even yet the Higher Ed.
So, when the screen vibrated with a stranger, Tom risked picking up and, when a voice of professional friendliness asked, ‘Dr Pimm?’, feared he had stumbled into a journalist, until the caller responded to his confirmation with: ‘David Wellington, WH.’
The light baritone, trust-me tones of the catastrophe professions: airline pilot, surgeon, personnel.
‘Are you happy for me to call you Tom?’
‘In Dr Traill’s dodgy dossier, many people call me much worse.’
‘Good you’ve kept your sense of humour. There’s a lot of evidence it helps. It’ll be David and Tom, then. The University asked me to be available to you. I’ll be checking in now and then if that’s okay with you?’
‘Well, I … what will we be saying to each other?’
‘I’m here to be a non-judgemental pair of ears if you want to download anything.’
‘Well, now you mention it, I’ve been stitched up in a way that makes a banana republic’ – Tom momentarily panicked that the man might be black – ‘er, look like the US Supreme Court.’
‘Ha, well I’m not going to argue with a leading light in the Nussbaum School of American Politics’ – this flattery told Tom that Wellington had been reading his file – ‘on that one. But what I’d say is that you’re going through a process and all outcomes of that process remain open.’
‘Yes, well, that wasn’t the impression that Sp, er, Dr Neades gave.’
‘I’d be surprised if that were the case. But you were, quite understandably, under pressure during that meeting.’
Wellington’s delivery seemed naggingly familiar and now it hit him that the soft, incantatory rhythm was an echo of the man on the Mindfulness tapes.
‘Tom, my plan is to check in with you regularly. I thought Friday afternoons might be a good time.’
‘Checking I haven’t killed myself before you leave for the weekend? Don’t want to have to come in from home on a Saturday or Sunday, do you?’
Although he felt better for saying it, the inner lawyer he had been forced to employ immediately regretted offering an example of temper.
‘I fully understand the anger you must be feeling, Tom. But the process is designed to be fair to both the victims and the accused.’
‘But even that sentence isn’t fair: accused suggests two outcomes but victims implies the decision has already been made.’
‘Wow, Tom. Maybe we should transfer you to the School of English.’ Paranoid and happy-pilled, Tom was unable to judge whether this comment was a joke or a solution that had been floated. ‘Look, I was talking loosely. All I can do is ask you to trust the process. Is there anything else you want to say to me at the moment?’
Yes, actually. ‘Have you been appointed as Samaritan to my mate Professor Marriott as well?’
‘Tom, I think you’d hope I wouldn’t discuss you with anyone else. And so it follows that I wouldn’t discuss anyone else with you.’
The answer was pious but right and infuriatingly reassuring.
‘Tom, are you happy for me to continue this process?’
‘Which one? The witch hunt or ringing up once a week to check I haven’t killed myself?’
‘I think it’s good that you feel able to express your anger to me, Tom. Will I call you again this time next week?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And obviously feel free to get in touch with me at any time. As soon as we’ve finished speaking, I’ll message you my contacts. And, should you feel you need them, we can also put you in touch with therapists and counsellors. Now, take care, won’t you?’
In his page-to-a-day desk diary, Tom flicked through seven sides and wrote: 3.30pm – Friday Suicide Call.
Digging a Moat in the 21st Century
‘Tobes, can you come down, please?’
Ned had to repeat the line four times in ascending volume – until he sounded to Emma like the nanny in The Turn of the Screw – before the request eventually penetrated their son’s headphones. There was then the standard further delay until he had reached an extractable position in the video game he was playing.
Toby arrived in the kitchen looking characteristically worried, biting his lip with the new meat teeth that were still a surprise in his smile.
‘It’s okay, you’re not in any trouble,’ Emma said. ‘We just need to ask you something.’
But this encouragement seemed to trouble him even more. He ran both hands agitatedly through that wild burst of hair. Great, Emma thought, now he thinks we’re getting divorced. She nodded at Ned to lead the questioning.
‘Toby,’ he said. ‘We won’t be upset if you are, but we just need to know. Are you on social media?’
‘Huh?’ His big exaggerated, American sitcom shrug.
‘Facebook, Twitter, that kind of thing?’ Emma translated.
‘No.’
She and Ned confirmed with their eyes that they should wait.
‘A bit,’ he said.
‘And is your page private or public?’ asked Emma, confidently employing terms she had just learned from her stepdaughter.
Toby flexed his shoulders upwards and backwards again with the casual elasticity of young boys. Again, they waited.
‘I play FIFA with people on line. We message each other. And a sort of Facebook thing at school. I don’t do much.’
‘Tobes,’ Ned said. ‘You know we told you about the bad
people who are saying things about Daddy?’
‘Yeah. Have the feds got them yet?’
‘Er, not yet. No. But they might use, er, social media to pick on us. And so your sister Phee has suggested that we make everything private. She’s very kindly popping in later to do it.’
‘I’m on it!’ Toby bellowed, pulling the laptop towards him, swiftly clicking and scrolling and then adding, from his thesaurus of motivational sporting phrases: ‘Job done!’
Emma pushed the shopping-list pad, with its pencil on a loop of string, across the table. ‘And, Cupcake, write your passwords for everything on here.’
‘Oh, Mother!’ His strop-word for her. She gave him her perfected glower of insistence.
When Emma saw the list he had written, she said: ‘And which device they’re for? I may be analogue but I’m not that dim.’
Toby complied with so many shrugs that some letters jumped out of the words.
Then, perky again, he asked: ‘Now do you want me to change your settings as well?’
She looked at Ned, who gave a gesture of resignation as theatrical as their son’s. After a few more expert taps and slides, Toby asked: ‘Should I close your Twitter account as well?’
‘I suppose, yeah,’ said Emma.
‘Tobes, you don’t have one of those as well, do you?’ Ned checked.
‘No way! Only, like, really old people tweet.’
‘Well, correction. I am and I don’t,’ Ned laughed. ‘But I don’t suppose you could do my Facebook? I don’t just want to go private. Delete it.’
Through the anger at him that kept flaring for getting them into this mess, Emma felt a pang of sadness for the fantasy of anonymity that she sensed so often now in a man who had wanted to be famous.
Erasing his father’s digital footprint seemed the most complicated of Toby’s tasks so far, his tongue protruding through the last gap in his top row of teeth. But soon he announced, ‘You’re good to go,’ the line of a child privileged to have been a regular at airport check-in desks.
And, with that, their child had adult-proofed the family technology. The moat was filled, the drawbridge raised.
A Vision of the Future
After waking at 2am, to the usual sleepless five hours, then the deep two-hour coda-coma induced by another zonker, Ned woke at 9.28am, a time he had never seen on the bedside clock on a weekday, to a vivid vision of what his future, his nearfuture, would be. He saw himself sitting on the sofa in a vest in the middle of the afternoon, drinking the cheapest supermarket red wine from a dusty bottle as he watched warring sisters-inlaw being held apart from each other on re-runs of American problem shows. But he soon knew that this destiny was unlikely to become reality, as he could see, at that moment, no possibility of ever getting out of bed.
Warning
Horrified by the prospect of poverty, Ned, after decades of a serious black-cab habit, now waved at the enticing orange light only when he felt too exhausted to walk or frightened of being recognized. Putting into his expenses tin the receipt he had requested for a taxi ride to the flat from Claire’s office – in his diminished circumstances, claiming travel against tax might make a difference – Ned, smoothing down the white rectangle of paper on the pile, noticed, printed at the bottom, the words: WARNING See Over. He flipped the slip and read:
WARNING
Every year in London, there are 100’s of rapes
and sexual assaults and 1000’s of robberies
committed by unlicensed minicab drivers.
He noticed first – then hated himself for doing so – the false apostrophes in the numbers. His next thought was that the allegation he faced grouped him with cabdrivers who attacked their customers. Until now, he would have argued that there could be no categories of (he forced himself to think it) rape but now he was desperate to separate himself from a man who parked his car, with a stranger in the back, in some unlit alley. He was coming to understand, though, that, in trying to prove the claim against him was fiction, he would be accused of suggesting that all claims were false. You were either a rapist or a rape-denier: the debate had squeezed out any space in between.
A Winslow Man
PA NEWS: 01–06–14: 23.38: In response to media inquiries, Buckinghamshire police have confirmed that a sixty-yearold male from Winslow has been arrested and questioned in connection with an historic claim of sexual assault, following a complaint passed to Operation Millpond. He was released on police bail until September 1st. Police refused to comment on speculation about the suspect’s identity, citing the protection of a continuing investigation.
Mud and Smoke
The impact of accusation was measured in three substances: human, natural, man-made. The first was shit, which at the start poured torrentially at any memory of the arrest or thought about the trial, but later proved reluctant to emerge at all due to the inadvertent hunger strike caused by the shock and the stoppering that resulted (a recognized consequence, the leaflet advised) from the drugs designed to trick his mind into thinking that he was wrong to be frightened.
Mud and smoke affected Ned merely metaphorically, but devastatingly. The two most familiar cliches about the ruining of reputation – that mud sticks and smoke is never present without fire – sounded in his brain during sleepless nights and aimless days.
The adhesiveness of dirt, he knew, had only been increased in the swamp of digital memory, which created stains that could never be washed away. And, above the mud, the clouds of allegation and defamation swirled forever, regardless of how loudly the law declared that there had never been a blaze.
In a world of twenty-four-hour news and 24/7 views, all mud stuck and smoke thrived without fire.
Doorstep
Starting to reverse, Ned braked when he saw the green Polo in the rear-view mirror. The school run must have been quicker than usual; spending more time at home, he had become attuned to the rhythms of Emma’s schedule. When he wound down the car window, she leaned in and kissed him on the lips so strongly that he received the electric flash of a romance’s early days.
‘We’ll celebrate when you get home.’
‘Yes. Well, Em, it may not be as clear-cut as …’
Ned had told her that he and Claire were going back to Paddington Green to give the detectives their detailed rebuttal of the Billy Hessendon allegation.
Emma made him promise to ring as soon as they had seen the police.
May Contain Flashing Images
A rough percussion of slammed car doors and raw chorus of excited voices rose from the road below. It was a sound more normal in the early hours of the morning – a party breaking-up – than at 11.30am on a weekday. Unsettled by a presentiment, Ned pulled the living room blind forward and looked round the edge. A firework burst of flashes confirmed his fear.
‘They’re here,’ he said.
‘Who are? What?’ Claire asked, kissing her lipstick neat as she came back from the bathroom.
‘Hacks and paps.’
He went to the window and was going to open the blind for her when Claire said quickly: ‘No. Don’t give them startled woman at the window.’
‘They’ve already got terrified suspect.’
‘Shit.’ Calmer now, professional etiquette taking hold. ‘Look, Ned, we’ve always known it was going to get out …’
‘Yes.’ But there was a difference between expecting and experiencing.
‘Five minutes back, when I got here, there was no one outside. So it’s not a stake-out. Someone’s given them a time.’
‘Someone! Reports say police are looking – into the fucking mirror …’
‘Ned, they’ll still have to be incredibly careful what they write.’
Their phones pinged simultaneously. Looking at his, Ned expected the withheld number of a reporter, but it was a text: Phee says it’s all online. You okay? E xxxx
He switched off his phone. Closing the cover of hers, his solicitor said: ‘The taxi’s here.’
Ned fussily double-l
ocked the door, a rhetorical declaration of privacy rather than a precaution against burglary. Would he do the same on the day he left for jail? As they went down the final flight of stairs, he saw on the tiles of the entrance a halfmoon of brightness cast by the morning sun through the fanlight, like a gilded memorial engraved on a cathedral floor. His eyes watered at the reminder of the first morning.
‘You okay?’ Claire asked.
‘Yeah. Hay fever.’
‘The air app said the count was high today.’
The noise was rising on the other side of the door. The pack was close enough to have heard people coming downstairs.
Claire spoke more quietly: ‘Ned, I know it’s tough but some rules for running the gauntlet. They want you to look an inch from the gallows – that’s why they’re here – so give the air of going off to a football match – played by a team that’s bound to win. And, whatever you do, don’t kick or punch them, even if they do it to you. Ready?’
‘I guess you’ve done this a lot, have you?’
Her gravelly giggle. ‘Honey, I’m disappointed if I’m ever not doorstepped coming out of a house.’
So often on television, Ned had watched people ducking and blinking through a photographic explosion, prefaced by the presenter’s warning to epileptics that the pictures may contain flashing images. He had idly wondered what it might be like for the quarry but speculation was no preparation for the reality.
From his height, on the top step, he was staring into the sun but, looking down, he was blinded by another one, as the flashes fizzed, close enough to his face to feel the heat. He tried to smile, as Claire had told him, but the natural instinct of the dazzled was to squint and shy away. The classic shame-face you saw in snaps of the accused was people trying not to lose their sight as well as their names.