Click

by L. Smyth

  ‘I hope you’re not thinking about leaving.’

  That voice again. Hoarser. I turned to look at where it was coming from.

  ‘You must come to the wake.’

  Marcus was standing very close to me, already holding a cigarette. Gone was the polish of the former father figure. Now he looked dishevelled. The rings around his eyes had darkened and deepened. They cut shadows into his skin. The lines along his brow were thick and deep. I thought that he looked old.

  When he spoke again I detected a desperate strain. ‘Surely you’re not leaving us?’

  I looked at him. Every flicker of his mouth, every slight movement of his hand around the cigarette – those were her mannerisms. That was her. I stared at him, trying to see her, really see her, to pin her down. But every time I thought I had fixed on something, suddenly it became smothered by the larger picture, and then his face would mould back into that of a wizened father. I couldn’t see the resemblance anymore.

  Suddenly I realized I was staring. I had to say something.

  ‘I don’t think I can make it,’ I said quietly. ‘I have to get back.’

  He nodded politely, but still looked deflated.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I pursed my lips. ‘Sorry.’

  As I trudged back through the rain, a stinging feeling of guilt began to sink in. How I must have seemed to Marcus, to the Bede family, to Henry … A funeral crasher, a fraud, an impostor who hadn’t even had the decency to stay behind and attend the wake. Why was I so selfish? How had I become like this, so narrow-minded, so socially incompetent? Maybe Henry was right.

  I boarded the bus and flicked on my phone. No new messages. No new notifications. No new tagged posts.

  I googled ‘Marcus Bede’ and found his email address on a university website. I sent a quick email, apologizing for my abrupt departure, and then explained, in a frenzy of emotion, how embarrassed I’d been at the funeral, not knowing anyone, not knowing how to talk to anyone and not understanding what had happened to Marina. I hadn’t wanted to make it about me at all, but perhaps by disappearing I had inadvertently done that. I apologized again. I said it had been lovely to meet him. It had been a lovely service and a privilege to have known Marina. I said that I would like to be kept informed about the Foundation.

  The rain slid down the window. I wondered what it would be like being back at Northam. I wondered whether, having been to the funeral, I would now feel the impact of her death there. Perhaps it would haunt me.

  vii.

  18th February

  Dear Eva,

  Thank you for your email. Of course it isn’t necessary for you to apologize. This is a difficult time for everyone – we understand there are different ways of coping with trauma and, irrespective, it was lovely to meet you, even in the circumstances.

  On that note, I will be visiting Northam in the coming weeks with Elena. There are a few things we need to do there before returning to the US. Perhaps you will join us for lunch? It would be lovely to speak to you for longer.

  Thanks for your interest in the Marina Bede Foundation, but we’re not looking for volunteers at the moment. Once the charity is up and running I will let you know..

  Marcus

  In the days after Marina’s funeral, the press got wind of her suicide and ran with it. It still isn’t clear to me why this happened: why, out of the 130 university students who committed suicide in 2014, it was Marina who drew in the journalists. Her story was tragic, yes – but it wasn’t unusual. At Northam alone there were several suicide attempts that term. I read somewhere subsequently that in 2014, fifty per cent of ambulance services at the university were responding to acts of self-harm. So what was it about Marina that summoned the media? Perhaps it was because she was an overachiever. Perhaps it was because her father was semi-famous. It’s hard to say. Perhaps it was because her picture would look good beside the headlines. I still don’t know.

  Whatever it was, I didn’t question it at the time – I just assumed, like so many other things, that she had attracted attention by virtue of being herself. I watched the news spread along my feed like a virus: first the tender messages from her close school friends, then the public photos of the wake, then the links to local news, the national news, the TV interviews with Marina’s parents.

  The ‘RIP MARINA BEDE’ page doubled in likes, then tripled, and soon it had hundreds of posts pouring onto it. Complete strangers began to write their own tributes, often as though they were addressing her directly. Some of them even had a reproachful tone.

  ‘Marina I didn’t know you,’ one said, ‘but you seem like someone so full of promise. I hope that other girls see this and realize what a waste it was to end your life like that.’

  I scrolled through, clicking on the profiles, judging them. There were hundreds of posts. Reading them often made me feel protective – and depressed. Sometimes I thought that I should write something to her. But I had nothing to say, or maybe I had too much.

  When I went outside there were reporters swarming the campus. They approached some of the students to ask for quotes (but never me). We received an email instructing us not to speak to them. The news coverage continued anyway. Journalists wanted to why she had done it, when she had done it. The public wanted to know how. I watched in the shadows, waiting for answers. I went onto Reddit and checked the comments page there. I refreshed her Facebook profile over and over again.

  One day, without warning, the headline emerged. It made me bristle when I saw it.

  DEATH BY FALL: NORTHAM SOURCE REVEALS ALL

  I clicked on the link and absorbed the details. A member of security had found her outside her window one morning in early January. The article revealed that she had died from ‘trauma to the body and was pronounced dead at the scene’. Trauma to the body: what did that mean? Was her face smashed in? Was she a heap of blood and a smattering of bones? A cracked neck and a mashed skull? Or had most of her stayed intact – only one side of her skull broken open, a trickle of brain rolling out?

  I read on further: she was thought to have opened the bedroom window and jumped down six storeys, falling on the hard stone of the path below. It was too vivid. I could see it happening so clearly: the determined look on her face as she drew up the window, her slim hands spread out over the ledge, the way her back arched and the wood dug into her knees as she hoisted herself onto it. She would not even think about what was coming – she would just do it, like she did everything.

  I clicked off the link. I couldn’t breathe properly. Small bands of light made everything distorted.

  I went outside for a walk. I wanted to be away from the campus, so I went to a café on the outskirts of town. There was a huge screen towering over the chairs in the corner. It was showing a press conference on the news. Marcus was sat on a stool with his hands out in front of him. He looked tired and depressed. It was unnerving to see him in that two-dimensional format. He had lost a lot of weight since the funeral – his jaw was sharper, chin more pronounced, and his features, by comparison, were swollen and out of proportion. The lines around his eyes had deepened, making the green bulbs bulge out of their socket. The pointed face, which had often carried a calm expression before, now looked grotesquely animated, like a gargoyle.

  The camera moved in towards him: his lips began to move. I snatched the remote from the top of the bar and turned up the volume.

  ‘I would like to address the death of our daughter,’ he said, in gravelly, measured tones. ‘Over the last few weeks we have received a lot of attention – from the press, from our friends, from strangers. We would like to thank people for the kind messages.’

  The camera panned out to the rest of the room – the policemen, the journalists jotting down things on their notepads. Then it moved back in onto his face. He looked different this time. I noticed that there was a look behind his eye: the same glint that Marina’s eyes had possessed when she was playing a prank or sa
ying something rude to the professor. It unnerved me to identify it. It unnerved me that I was making that comparison.

  ‘We have, however, also found it overwhelming. Our intention today is to deflect the attention away from ourselves – and our daughter – by highlighting a cause.’

  As Marcus had explained to me previously, they were setting up a foundation in her name. The Marina Bede Foundation would raise awareness for depression and suicide among high-achieving students. Their focus was on teenage girls especially.

  ‘Marina was under an enormous amount of pressure, both socially and academically,’ he continued. ‘We didn’t realize how swept under she – I’m sorry,’ he swallowed, ‘how overwhelmed she felt. We would like to increase support facilities for students within universities who are suffering. It is a huge problem in the UK and one that is not frequently enough addressed.’

  My fingers tightened on the remote. Was that the yarn that they were spinning now? That she was under academic pressure? It didn’t make sense. From everything Marina had told me, from every impression she had given me from her behaviour, university was a lark. Marina had seen it only as a place to waste time. She hadn’t even wanted to come to Northam in the first place – it was a last-minute decision engineered by a scholarship.

  Marcus continued, his eyes doleful: ‘Our lives have changed immeasurably since the second of January, the day of Marina’s death.’

  The 2nd of January.

  The number rattled through my brain and I felt a wave of panic begin at the centre of my chest, spreading up over my throat.

  The 2nd of January.

  Involuntarily my mind flashed back to the order of service at the funeral: 4th February 1994 – 2nd January 2014. A headline from a week before, the image of a newspaper printed on my mind: 2nd January. I brought out my phone and quickly googled it: ‘Marina Bede January’:

  … student Marina Bede who was found dead on 3rd January, having committed suicide the previous evening …

  I watched Marcus’s mouth continue moving but now the words were silent. The 2nd of January was the day I had set up the Swipe account.

  The phone fell from my grip. I stared at it, there on the floor, as tiny hairs in the carpet curled around the plastic edges. The 2nd of January. I had imitated Marina after she had died. I had imitated a dead girl.

  Up until that point I’d told myself repeatedly that the Swipe imitation was just a game. I had convinced myself that if Marina ever found out about it, then she would understand. If Marina had known about it at the time, then – well, she was my friend, we would be able to laugh it off. My actions were always justified by the idea that she might have known about it at some point.

  If she’d always been dead then this was a different story. The Dead Girl was not my friend. She was a completely different person. Dead Marina was the kindly do-gooder with the genial aura and the childhood friends, the overachiever who had succumbed to academic pressure, the nice friendly girl from a Catholic background. That was not the Marina I knew. I knew a series of contradictions. I knew the weird, twisted fragments. I knew a person volatile and argumentative, razor sharp and rude, funny but thoughtless … Many different adjectives which didn’t seem compatible with the sweet narrative that had been written over her.

  ‘The Marina Bede Foundation will address not only university students,’ Marcus said, ‘but also troubled teenage girls across the spectrum. Our aim is to help parents understand the root of the problem.’

  More than that, I thought suddenly, someone must have recognized the account. Maybe Joe had screenshotted our conversations, with the date, with the time …

  Joe and I had been talking every day for nearly three weeks after Marina had died. Three whole weeks.

  I went back to my room and pulled my duvet over my head. I let it lie there. I felt my breaths get longer, slower, as the cotton folded into my face, mouth, nostrils. I sucked it further into my air passages and allowed the realization to settle. I stopped breathing. I thought about what would happen if I stopped breathing completely. Then the pressure was too much: I ducked my head out and took a gasp of air. I rolled over and turned on my laptop.

  My fingers manically tapped onto the Chrome bar. I put in cautiously: ‘Joe Swipe Marina’. I waited. My fingers shook slightly above the keyboard.

  The page loaded.

  No results. Did you mean Joe swiped Marina?

  I felt a swift whip of panic upon seeing those two words together in public: Joe and Marina. Then I felt relieved. I tried to sustain that feeling.

  He had forgotten, perhaps. Or he had not put two and two together. Or he hadn’t seen the news stories about her at all – maybe he would never see and never know. Still, a cloud of doubt hung over me. I felt wired by a violent, restless energy. I checked all other forms of social media. I rolled from the top of the feed to the line where it juddered at the bottom, still loading, loading, still loading, still loading. Eventually I clicked onto my inbox instead.

  1)RE: Marina’s funeral; SENDER: marcus.bede@charlton.edu

  For a moment my blood ran cold. The possibilities of Marcus’s response rolled through my mind and made me nauseous.

  But then I read it. It was fine: he said once again that I didn’t need to apologize. He gave a specific time and a date for the week after, when he and his wife were coming for lunch. I felt strangely elated at the prospect of seeing him again.

  I replied, saying that I’d love to meet him. I added that if he were looking for volunteers in the Marina Bede Foundation, then I would still be very happy to help.

  1)SENDER: marcus.bede@charlton.edu

  Marvellous. We’re getting to Northam around 1, so I propose a light lunch at Cassio’s at 2 p.m.?

  In case you missed it in the previous email: as it stands we aren’t looking for volunteers yet, but I will keep you in the loop. We hugely appreciate your enthusiasm for the foundation.

  See you then. M

  viii.

  We met in a small bistro near the campus, around the corner from the café where Marina and I had had our mid-afternoon brunch. It was in the expensive part of town, down a little alleyway strung with little fairy lights and signposted with swirly-chalked blackboards. I remember that it was snowing that day. A light white crunchy sheet had fallen over the campus, softening the edges of everything, making the city seem ghostly, ephemeral. Predictably, I had forgotten to wear sensible shoes, sacrificing comfort for a new pair of canvas plimsolls. As I walked up to the door I felt my socks dampening at the edges. The skin between my shoulders was wet. The ends of my hair were dripping with sleet. I wiped the make-up from under my eyes, opened the door with a red wet hand, and walked inside.

  In the days leading up to my meeting, I had been following the news on Marina constantly. I had been tracking the Bedes’ TV appearances; noting the money for the foundation steadily increasing on their crowdfunding page, refreshing the contact page to see if they’d uploaded the volunteer application form yet. I read each analysis of her death in every paper and scanned over every comment, every retweet. But after a peak in mid-February, two weeks after the news went viral, public curiosity was dwindling. Then the media had started to lose interest.

  This pleased me: although I was obsessed with reading the coverage, fundamentally I didn’t like the fact that Marina’s life had been overwritten by a narrative which was incompatible with my own version of events. I felt that the less attention people paid to the tributes, the more likely it was that my story would prevail – and the less likely it was that the Swipe account would emerge.

  Now, I walked into the restaurant and cautiously found my way to Marcus and Elena’s table. From a distance they looked like a 1950s postcard: so serene, so graceful and poised. He was wearing a stiff white shirt, loosely undone at the collar. Rose-gold cufflinks complemented the pearly pastel of her dress.

  But edging closer I noticed there was something off in the way that Elena was looking at him. It was an accusatory look, almo
st suspicious. Her thick-rimmed eyes were slightly bloodshot. When she saw me, however, her expression neutralised: she stood up and kissed me on both cheeks. Marcus smiled graciously and did the same. I seem to remember that they both smelled expensive – sweet walnut and honey, washing powder.

  We spoke for a while about Marina. I teetered on the edge of the conversation, trying to make myself inconspicuous – but with little luck. Marcus constantly deflected, keeping me the centre of attention.

  ‘So,’ he said, tucking a napkin into his collar. ‘Have you been well?’

  I faltered, saying that I had spent a lot of time focusing on the course. When he asked about my social life I wasn’t sure what to say. I stuttered that I had spent a lot of time online, then regretted diverting the conversation in that direction. I monitored Marcus’s face closely but he didn’t look suspicious. Elena stared at her plate.

  While I was talking, Marcus looked past my shoulder, and soon enough he seemed to catch eyes with the waiter. His hand fell on the table. A finger crawled towards my menu and tapped impatiently. My sentence trailed off.

  ‘What are you having?’ he said. ‘We’ve ordered already. Elena is having a salad, I’m having the steak. I’d really recommend the fish, or the salad.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, reaching for the wine. I thought it strange that he had recommended those items, when he was having something else. ‘Yes, I’ll have one of those then.’

  I looked up and, without meaning to, caught eyes with Elena. In the flesh she looked even older than she did in photographs: cracked veins, profound wrinkles, spirals of chestnut and light grey hair twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck. She was smiling then, but there was something about the way her mouth wavered that unsettled me. I thought back to that moment at the funeral: that mean, ugly look she had sent in my direction.