Click

by L. Smyth

  I was glad to be free of Marina.

  iii.

  On the 29th of January, I went for a walk in the afternoon. I got back in the early evening, at about six o’clock. By that time it was pitch-black. As I made my way unsteadily, up the cobbled path towards the angular silhouette of the accommodation block, I suddenly noticed a group of smokers milling outside. They all had their hoods up, faces obscured by shadow and plumes of silver cigarette smoke. They were crouched around something, and when I came closer I saw from the familiar rectangular glow that it was a phone.

  Only one face was fully illuminated. The outline was round, and strings of blue-tinted hair dangled like wires over her forehead. Her expression was calm, smiling slightly. She shook her head and I heard her mutter something: ‘I know you’re fucking with me. Like this actually isn’t funny but I still know it’s a joke.’

  I recognized that voice: it took a second, then I paired it with her blue-tinted features and I realized who it belonged to: Rebecca Barnes.

  She bent closer into the phone. Then her features contorted. She let out a scream. It was a piercing scream, one that reverberated through the courtyard. The hooded heads swivelled around in panic. Someone snatched the phone.

  ‘How?’ the girl said.

  ‘Shhh!’

  I sensed the group draw back as I approached.

  ‘How?’ she said again.

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘But – God that’s terrible. That’s literally …’

  I drew closer again. The group fell silent. Several people brought out their phones and began tapping over them, their faces obscured by hoods. As I passed them I saw their eyes skitter up towards me, a row of blue electric whites – the pupils moving slowly sideways. I listened to the sound of thick raindrops bouncing off their screens. I thought I saw one of them smile slightly, though it may just have been the light.

  I entered my room and took off my raincoat. The water ran down the plastic in thick black streams. It pooled on the carpet like blood, and as it sank into the brown, matted gauze I shivered again.

  I thought of the scene I had just witnessed. The words. The screen. The light and their eyes in the darkness. I attempted to shake off my growing anxiety and reason with myself. Some piece of university gossip, I thought. But the dread persisted. I couldn’t ignore it.

  I started up my laptop and went onto the Internet homepage. I googled ‘Swipe Eva Hutchings’. My fingers drummed impatiently as the page loaded. The eyes, the words, the screen.

  Nothing.

  Some old article from six months ago appeared instead:

  WATCH: Celeb hunter Eva May swipes eBay bargain from Jol Hutchings with under thirty seconds to go!

  A sheet of rain drilled against the windowpane.

  I went onto Facebook to see if Henry had replied. I clicked on my messages. No response from Henry. No new messages — but wait: Marina had ‘seen’ my message. More than that: the name flashed bright blue. Her profile had been reactivated.

  I clicked on the link and felt flooded, instantly, with a kind of euphoric nostalgia. Seeing her profile picture again was like seeing a close relative: that sylph-like silhouette provoking familiarity and wistfulness. Looking at it I felt that no time had passed since the first time I had seen it: that I was yet to meet Marina, I had all the drinking and the smoking and the laughter and the fights to come. I stared for a few more seconds, then clicked on the next photo and zoomed in. Loose swirls of hair framed sharp cheekbones, her mouth seemed wry and full, freckles danced on the top of her nose. And her eyes! Gleaming with intellect and vitality, self-possession. My friend was back. She wasn’t talking to me, but she was back! She was tangible again. I could access her.

  I clicked off, scrolled down and the mouse stopped.

  She had been tagged in something. A status:

  Thank you all for the messages and the support. Marina was a kind, beautiful, caring girl whose smile lit up every room. We are still registering the shock of her passing, and truly appreciate everyone sharing their stories of how she affected their lives. Rest in peace sweetheart xx

  The edges of the textbox were blurry. My throat was dry. I found a sliver of skin along my throat and dug my fingernails into it.

  It had to be a hoax.

  The cursor flickered against the screen.

  Slowly, slowly, I let go of my neck and felt the burn tingle along the skin. I reasoned with myself: a hoax, yes – or maybe some art thing that Marina had been involved in. It was a cultural awareness project probably – that was it – designed to show us how social media fabricates truth; how susceptible people are to personal news.

  I told myself this again and again, with a firmness that almost made me believe it – but it was ultimately unconvincing. My vision was blurred and my face felt hot. There was an acrid taste in my mouth, like vomit. I went onto Messenger. I saw that Robin, Henry’s housemate, was online. I clicked the ‘video call’ icon. It rang and rang. No answer.

  Henry was offline, but I tried him anyway. I sent him messages – one after the other, an outpouring of questions. But nothing worked to solicit a response. Finally I picked up my phone.

  Every ring in my ear was a reminder to breathe, a reminder that everything was OK. Then, when it went voicemail – and when I heard the automatic strains of ‘Welcome to Orange Answerphone’ – I stopped breathing and let out a fierce sob.

  I lay on the bed on my back and stared at the ceiling. My breathing was shallow. I could see a spider slowly making its way across the cracks in the paint. I watched the slow zigzag tracks of its black legs and focused on the tiny hairs sticking out at each angle.

  Suddenly my phone buzzed.

  I looked at the screen. It was a message from Henry:

  Yes it’s true clearly

  Please stop messaging me

  iv.

  7th – 14th February 2014

  In the following days I stayed in my room. I didn’t see anyone, I didn’t eat anything, and when I tried to rouse myself from bed I found that I could hardly move. It was as though my entire body, up until that point fluid and mobile, had hardened into stiff wax. Only my fingers could move easily. I was dimly aware of them scuttling along the keyboard. They were brittle and achy.

  I hunched over the screen and scrolled through her photos mechanically, trying to remember what she had been like, what she had sounded like. Messages began pouring onto her Facebook wall. I blinked, confused, trying to fit them with my own picture of her.

  RIP Marina – the funniest, warmest person I ever met. A wonderful girl.

  Wrong. She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t warm at all. She would have hated being described as a ‘wonderful girl’.

  My eyes fell to the next tribute:

  Marina, my oldest and dearest friend. Words can’t express how much I will miss you. Such a shock xxx

  The words were accompanied by a photograph of the two girls together – Marina smiling, showing her teeth. They had their arms around each other’s shoulders, each set of fingers locking into the other’s hair. It had fifty-four likes.

  This was not a photograph I had seen before. I clicked on the profile of the girl who had posted it. It was private, but I could see a tiny two-by-two-inch photo in the corner of the screen. Even from that tiny filtered glimpse I could tell what sort of music she listened to, what sort of make-up she used, to which social stratum she belonged. It annoyed me that she had known Marina before I had.

  Facebook urged:

  Post a message on Marina’s wall.

  I thought about what sort of tribute I could write. There were no photos of me with Marina. We had only known each other for a few months. She had not spoken to me at all over the holidays, and then the last time I had seen her had been awful. I also had the impression that she would have hated this sort of thing.

  I imagined us looking at the tributes together. I imagined her talking me through each person – explaining what, if any, connection they had had
to her in her short life. I imagined us laughing at the inaccurate posts. I imagined rolling my eyes at the grammar, Marina rolling her eyes at me.

  I felt a hot trembling grief as the reality of it hit me.

  She is dead.

  She is dead.

  She is dead.

  The word ‘dead’ was so cold and hard – like a piece of concrete – and it seemed so unfair, so disgusting that she should be reduced to it. But she had been. She was. Now she was reduced to one repetitive syllable: dead. Dead body without air, dead lungs without function, dead brain without thoughts. Heat pressed into my eyelids. I felt breathless and sick. My heart curled up inside my chest. I thought of her laughing outside her accommodation block, of her singing in the car, of her shouting in seminars.

  She is dead.

  A bolt of electricity shot through me. But how? From a car accident? A heart attack or a stroke? Perhaps there had been an illness which she’d kept from me?

  There was no information on her Facebook page or anywhere else on the internet.

  I clicked left along her photos, tracing backwards to those comments I had found a few months earlier. I hovered my mouse over them:

  Marina Bede likes this.

  Marina Bede likes this.

  It was strange to live in a world where people could leave traces of themselves like that, trapped in the present tense. I imagined her sitting behind her laptop, edging the mouse along the screen, pausing for a moment and then clicking. It was such a mundane but concrete gesture. I couldn’t believe she was dead.

  I picked up my phone then, and pressed on my images folder. I began scrolling through a private file called ‘MB’. These were miscellaneous photos – photos I had saved from her Facebook profile. They were not only pictures she had been tagged in but ones which she had purposefully untagged too, which I’d found by scrolling through other people’s albums. I went through, zooming in on each one, studying her face and posture, before stopping on a photo of Henry and Marina. This was the photo that I had seen in the car as my mother drove away from Northam. It was the photo I had looked at on the evening I had created the Swipe account.

  The Swipe account.

  I felt a dizzying, almost pleasurable panic. My hand flew over my mouth. I bit on it so hard that my teeth broke the skin.

  A collage of flashbacks flicked through my mind – the pictures of Marina; the conversations with Joe; the bio

  Marina, 18, Northam.

  I turned over, the heat spreading across my face. I pressed my cheeks into the pillow and screamed. I let it pour out, howling, feeling the air scrape the back of my throat. Then I rolled over onto my back. I looked back at the screen.

  There was a new tribute on her Facebook page. It was more formal in tone, posted by someone who appeared to be from an older generation.

  So sorry to have heard about the death of Marina in The Homeshire Gazette. She was a kind, thoughtful, funny and smart young lady who I had the pleasure of meeting with in the village many years ago. A lovely, sunny disposition. I am sure she will be missed.

  Immediately I clicked on the Google search bar and entered: ‘Homeshire Gazette Marina Bede’. Her name came up. It was an article:

  TRAGIC DEATH OF LOCAL GIRL MARINA BEDE

  My eyes skimmed through it. It was clumsily written, I thought irritably, trying and failing to be sensitive – and it gave away nothing about the details of her death. I went to the comments.

  Ls822: It’s so sad what happens to girls like this. Fault of the system

  S093: @Ls822 are you saying it’s a suicide?

  Ls822: @S093 Certainly seems like it if they’re not mentioning cause of death

  S093: @Ls822 seems pretty insensitive 2 be speculating at a time like this. I think they shuld of disabled the comments? @moderator

  FrezzaMoney: @S093 @Ls822 I was a few years below her at school and there are lots of rumours about her having committed suicide. A counsellor came in the other day. It’s really sad. I didn’t even know her very well but it is terrible.

  I tried to take it all in, identifying different, conflicting emotions. They all arrived with such force, and yet so fleetingly, that it was impossible to focus on one before it rolled into another.

  Everything happened quickly after that. The news of Marina’s death came out in the university press, the campus was abuzz with reports; suicide counsellors interrupted lectures to give us talks. No one knew exactly how or when or why she had done it – it was only clear that she had done it – and on campus, a few weeks earlier. It seemed that the news had initially been suppressed so as to avoid ‘causing unnecessary stress’ to both students and family, but because it had leaked on social media, it was now campus responsibility to follow protocol. We received an email from the University Chancellor referencing an ‘incident’. It said that if anyone was struggling with similar ‘feelings of depression’ that they should ‘not hesitate to get in touch’.

  The only person that I wanted to get in touch with was Henry. He hadn’t responded to my messages since confirming that Marina was dead, and he wasn’t picking up his phone or Messenger calls. I neither understood nor accepted this rejection. I had to have an answer. I continued calling him twice a day. I waited outside his house. I tried to find where his classes were and waited for him outside the lecture halls. But he wasn’t anywhere.

  I fretted – as a result of this behaviour – that Henry had somehow discovered the Swipe account. I spent the next few mornings frantically Googling myself in incognito: ‘Eva Swipe’, or ‘Marina Bede Swipe impersonator’. I checked Marina’s tribute posts regularly, typing ‘Joe’ into the search bar at the top of the RIP page. But it never returned any relevant results, and eventually it struck me that I was overreacting by being so anxious about it. My impersonation game was juvenile and insubstantial, the stuff of digital fantasy – not hard, physical reality like Marina’s death.

  This left me, then, with a fairly bleak impression of Henry. I couldn’t put his rejection down to anything except the fact that he didn’t like me. I was worthless now that Marina no longer existed. I had always just been her shadow. Now there was nothing to cast that shadow anymore, he had just wiped me out of existence.

  ***

  I select another paper from the pile. The one with his face on it. The one with the congratulatory headline.

  I am almost surprised at how easy it is to look at him. He is very photogenic, very kind-looking; handsome in his own two-dimensional way. I look at his smiling eyes, his avuncular grin, his proud and confident posture. I trace my pen over the eyelids, along the brow, towards the side of his head. I place the nib over his temporal artery. I look at his expression closely, take several sharp breaths. Then I grip the pen tightly and push downwards, downwards, downwards, piercing the paper.

  He does not move his eyelids, move his head, move his body. Not this time. He can’t.

  I grind the pen further into the paper.

  A thin trickle of black ink oozes out. It blots out one side of his face.

  I suppress a little smile.

  v.

  I found the details of the funeral online. The local news in her town had run a small advert about it, and one of Marina’s school friends posted a photo of the snippet on Twitter.

  ‘Anyone is welcome who knew Marina personally,’ it said, with the link to an email address. I drafted a long message, then deleted it and penned a short message. A few hours later I received an email response from ‘Elena Bede’ containing the whereabouts and the timings. It was generally written in a formal tone, but signed off: ‘PS – catch the 7A. It’s just a short ride from the bus stop!’ I thought that exclamation mark was inappropriate.

  Elena Bede. Marina’s stepmother. I clicked off the message and put the name into Google. The computer stuttered into life and the Internet cut out, but when I rebooted it and tried again the search returned many results. I read them with interest, scanning her tweets; absorbing the information on her LinkedIn profile;
on her Academia.edu; reading her Amazon reviews.

  Marina had mentioned the women in her family very rarely, and usually only in relation to her father. She never seemed to speak sincerely about her mother – questions made her tetchy – and Elena’s role in her life was never entirely clear.

  In some versions of the story, Elena had been portrayed as a responsible background figure – picking up the pieces after her haphazard step-family – but Marina also referred to her as ‘Dad’s piece’, or ‘Marcus’s floozy’. For some reason this initially made me think that she was significantly younger than Marcus, and probably a bit vapid.

  In reality, Elena was an academic. She had taught at three different universities, was fluent in four languages and – as I discovered when I put her name into YouTube – had conducted a 2011 TED Talk on the evolution of consciousness. It had half a million views. She was much older than I’d imagined, too: Marcus’s age, maybe, but probably with a few years on him. Her face was very thin, gaunt even, with skin pulled taut over the edges of her jaw. Why had Marina depicted her in such a different way?

  My mind wandered to Marina’s mother. What had she been like, really? I stared at the photo of Elena and tried to find a maternal expression in her face. I tried to mentally superimpose an image of Marina over the top of the picture, so that I could imagine what her mother may have looked like.

  I couldn’t see it.

  I shuddered again and clicked off the link.

  vi.

  On the morning of the funeral I took a bus down from Northam to Marina’s home town. I remember the journey there: seeing the raindrops slide across the windowpane, the grey brutalist concrete curve into Georgian houses and neat thatched cottages. The bus was full of nervous silver-headed tweedy jacket types. Someone was playing tinny Eighties music out of an old radio, someone else was talking loudly about their grandson’s cat. It smelled of sour cream and vinegar. Every surface – from the carpet to the seats to the flip-out trays – seemed to be covered in cracker crumbs. The vehicle juddered so violently that by the time it finally stopped I felt travel sick. I could barely stand up. A tiny wadge of vomit had lodged itself at the back of my throat.