by L. Smyth
Straight away – and unusually – Henry replied with an outpouring of messages:
its all right im sorry too
I shouldn’t have involved you from the off
I was scared
and yeah I’m going to Charlton for a year at least
its impossible to be at northam
I started to type a reply – then my eyes flicked to the right and stopped dead. Marina was trending on Facebook news. I clicked off Henry’s message, and hovered my mouse over the name. A headline emerged.
BREAKING: MARINA BEDE IMPERSONATOR SWARMS ‘SWIPE’ APP AFTER HER DEATH
I felt numb. I breathed slowly, then faster, then faster again… My entire body felt hot and wired. An electric jolt went plummeting to the pit of my stomach, and hairs spiked up on the back of my neck.
I tapped on the link.
After the death of Marina Bede, the 19-year-old student who committed suicide at Northam earlier this year, it has been discovered that an impersonator created a fake Swipe account using her photographs. In an exclusive interview with one of the impersonator’s victims …
I scrolled down until I came to the picture of Joe. Next to him – the picture of Marina, the one with her back to the camera, her head twisted sideways. The one I had stolen.
Joe Schwermann, a 19-year-old student at Northam, approached The Economist earlier this month with screenshots of their conversation. He had saved the conversations after screenshotting them to ask his friends for advice about asking her on a date. ‘It wasn’t like a normal Swipe interaction,’ he said. ‘I feel like an idiot saying it, but it was like an actual relationship. She was so convincing. We spoke for about a month and she told me loads about herself.’
My eyes tracked down the page, and I saw one of the conversation screenshots printed next to the article.
25/01/2014
Joe: Why are you being so cagey? It’s just one drink cmon
Marina: Like I said
Bad time
Joe: You might regret it if you push me away
What if we’re meant to get married?
What if we’re predestined to match on Swipe, meet at university and rear four disappointing children?
Marina: I don’t want to get married
Joe: Well
let’s just grab a drink anyway?
Marina is offline
The article continued:
Schwermann believes that the suspected imitator was either close to Marina, or a fellow student at Northam University. ‘I mean she was obviously smart, definitely a student. She spoke a lot about the course at Northam,’ he said. ‘I’d be very surprised if she wasn’t also an English student there.’
If that is the case, the timing of the interaction has disturbing implications. Their first correspondence, which Schwermann dates to 2nd January, was the day Marina Bede committed suicide. Their final correspondence is dated 27th January. On that date, says Schwermann, ‘Marina’ went offline, and the next day she had ‘unmatched’ him.
It felt bizarre, horribly bizarre, seeing the conversation printed on the page like that. Those were my words. Those were things I had said. The text of the article described things I had done. Then why did I feel so indifferent, so detached from them?
I murmured to myself: ‘Marina is me’, and – I’m ashamed to admit it – an inappropriate glow of satisfaction suddenly flushed over me. I felt validated to be equated with Marina, even like that, and there was an odd thrill to being spoken about in the public press. But the feeling passed quickly, and I was left with an emptiness again, a detachment, an inability to relate to the situation. I couldn’t remember typing the words, I couldn’t remember where I’d been or what I’d done on those days. Even though I had been worried about this coming out, now that it was happening the crime felt entirely alien to me. The accusation seemed distant, irrelevant, like I was overhearing a stranger’s conversation.
Schwermann says he was ‘put out’ by the rejection, but did not think it suspicious. ‘What happened was, we’d been planning this drink since basically our first chat,’ he said. ‘But whenever I pushed for a specific date she kept coming up with excuses – saying that she was depressed, and there were problems in her family, her dad wasn’t speaking to her or whatever. I just thought she was going off me. So when she deleted me … I was bummed out but I got over it. I screenshotted the messages and sent them to my friends, asking for advice. When I logged back on she’d gone. Just disappeared. I guess that’s the way of these dating apps.’
Two weeks later, he saw a news post about her death. He called a friend to express his horror and remorse.
‘At first I was just, yeah, horrified. She’d told me that she was depressed … I thought maybe I could have done something or said something to save her. It was so rough seeing those photos next to the headlines.’ Then he noticed the date. ‘I felt sick to my stomach, honestly. I thought it must be a typo, but then I checked other sources it kept coming up everywhere. Gradually I sort of realised I had been talking to an impersonator.’
Schwermann immediately attempted to contact both Marina Bede’s parents and the police about the fake account, but says that he was rebuffed as a hoax. ‘The Bedes never replied,’ he said. ‘I suppose they get hundreds of emails, and some of them will be from weirdos. But I really have been trying hard to contact them.’ And the police? ‘The police said they’d look into it but I never heard back from them. I think they thought I was a time-waster.’ Did he think about posting it on social media? ‘I didn’t feel it was respectful and, to be honest, I was reluctant to reveal personal details publicly. I felt kind of embarrassed. Even this is a last resort. I’m just trying to do the responsible thing.’
At the time this article went to press both the Bede family and the Northam police force were unavailable for comment. The University of Northam has confirmed that it is investigating the case.
I saw my reflection in the screen. My skin was a bluish pale. My eyes were hollow, dark, with thin strings of text swirling inside them: imitator, hoax, time-waster, police.
Over the next ten minutes, I watched as the headlines began to spread across Twitter, across Facebook, as sections of the article began leaking into other news sources. I forced myself to read it all: the retweets, the statuses, the comments underneath them.
It’s depressing that people like this exist in the world. 62 upvoted
You can blame social media all you want but it’s probably the parents 31 upvoted
They can track using location data. 86 upvoted
Swipe account won’t be deleted? It’s probably just frozen out but u cant delete. Surely administrators can find her.
Where did Joe Schwermann match the account? That will help. 113 upvoted
They were after me. They were all on my case, working together, working to expose me. What was going to happen to me?
This is beyond sick. This person deserves to be put in jail 77 upvoted
Bring back the death sentence and have someone impersonate her, see how she likes it 86 upvoted
Sick bitch 22 upvoted
For a moment my entire body felt numb. Then it was energized again, restless, and the nerves along my arms were fizzing, and my eyes were growing to saucers, everything transparent, everything separating into tiny particles, bristling with an unknowable charge.
I felt my hands moving at lightning speed. The laptop snapped shut, went flying across the desk and knocked a glass onto the floor. I heard the glass smash into thin, light shards. I was aware of becoming vertical. A bag was wrenched from the top of the cupboard: clothes flew, shoes smacked against them; books followed. I watched the zip being pulled along straining material, catching, then rising, then the whole thing being heaved into the air, the strap scratching against my wrist, rucked up the inside of my elbow, the bulk weighing heavily over my shoulder. I didn’t know where I was going. I left my phone on the bed. I left my laptop on the floor, the fragments of the glass around it. I saw my silh
ouette reflected in one of them, dark and lean. Then I pushed open the door and started walking.
Far behind me down the corridor, someone called my name. I heard the dim echo as my footsteps quickened and I did not turn around.
Northam station was virtually empty by the time I got there. My fingers were numb and my teeth hurt. I felt a string of sickly phlegm rising in my throat.
My fingers moved clumsily towards the direction of my pocket. I dug in, and moved around. No. There was nothing in there. Panic – flash of panic – but I told myself to keep moving. Keep moving. I surged forward, past the barriers, all faces and bodies a blur, a cacophony of noises whirring around me. I climbed onto a random train. It didn’t matter where it was going. I only had to be moving. I only had to be disappearing – disappearing forever, so they would never find me.
The whistle blew: a deafening screech, and I felt the stiff wheels of the vehicle grind forward. I crouched in a corner of the carriage. I kept my head low, shoulders bent over the zip of my bag. It strained with the bulk of the contents. What did I have with me?
Balancing the bag on the floor of the carriage, I edged the zip down slowly to the halfway point, and impatiently began to riffle through the contents.
I snatched past the clothes, grabbing the shoes, scraping my palms against the sharp teeth of the zip, and then came upon Marina’s books. At that point the train spluttered over a joint in the rail. The bag split open, causing a loud vrrrup. The clothes and shoes and underwear spilled out onto the floor.
I panicked.
I leaned forward as the train juddered left and right, frantically grabbing at fistfuls of the spilled items. They sloped along the floor away from me. I leaned forward then sideways, snatched them up and hastily rolled them into the fabric of the bag. The broken zip snagged against the heel of my hand.
There came a noise from the next carriage. Footsteps. The whirr of an opening door.
I saw a visibility jacket – a ticket inspector was poking her head left and right over the seats. My breath shortened. I scrabbled to a standing position. I jumped into the opposite toilet cubicle. I jabbed at the button to close. The door slid slowly shut.
A voice over the tannoy:
Next stop: Drutherton. Alight for Moreland University.
The train was going south. If I stayed on for long enough then I might be able to find my way back to my parents. They would help me, surely. Maybe they would even be able to resolve the situation, find a way to defuse it before my identity was leaked. I breathed deeply, repeating the thought over and over again. I calmed down. I began to register my surroundings. I looked at the plastic walls of the toilet, the artificial buttons, the window and the spire of Moreland beyond it.
It was then that I noticed what was in my hands. A roll of snagged material, and a thick stack of pages clumsily fisted together. The train shuddered to a halt, my fingers lost grip, and the stack jolted about thirty centimetres before I caught it again.
Something had fallen. I watched it slalom along the linoleum, through a dark viscous patch of liquid, and skitter to a standstill in the corner of the cubicle.
It was a notebook. I squatted forward, and snatched it up. I dried it on my trousers. The leaves of paper were unfurling around the edges, and I saw how scrunched the pages were, that they were now beginning to mottle. I wiped it again on my trousers, careful not to blot the ink. Then, balancing against the corner of the cubicle, my face brushing against the used paper towels which overflowed from the bin, I carefully bent it open.
Marina Bede. September 2013
It was unmistakably her handwriting.
I turned the page and squinted at the faded hieroglyphics. I turned another page and did the same. It wasn’t a notebook, exactly, but a kind of a calendar: a diary in the dullest sense. Each day was marked with a to-do list or a reminder of an event.
14th September Pack bag. 2 x t-shirts; 4 x trousers; 2 dresses …
19th September Meeting with Prof CM. Buy: yoghurt, carrots, celery. Stretches.
30th September Dad back from US for 2 weeks.
My fingers paced through it, looking for a chunk of writing, any sort of personal reflection which might tell me who she really was – reveal her thoughts and secrets, her true motivations. But the entries were sparse. Only a few entries existed for every day, then after October they thinned out entirely. Some of them had even been scribbled out.
1st October (reread Woolf)
2nd October Meeting with Prof CM.*
27th October Get login details from prof
29th October Essay 2 due. Skype w dad*
Suddenly there was a whirring sound. I whipped my head up, and saw the door beginning to open in an automatic sliding motion. I stabbed at the close button frantically but a hand forced its way between the gap and shoved it aside. The ticket inspector stood there, bright yellow jacket billowing in the wind. Her grey hair stood spiked on the top of her head.
‘Excuse me,’ she eyed me warily. ‘These your things?’
Her hands curled open, revealing other items from my bag. A few pieces of jewellery, a pen, a handkerchief.
I felt my head moving heavily – forwards and backwards in a nod. Our eyes met. Hers narrowed a little, and then fell towards the papers in front of me.
‘What are you doing in here?’ she said.
I sprang back into a sitting position, snatching the book towards me.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Can I see your ticket, please?’
I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I huddled the papers closer into my chest. A window was open somewhere: the wind streamed in and stung the corners of my eyes.
‘Look. It’s not often I put up with types like you,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you off this once. But clean up your things and make sure you’re not here after the next stop. I’ll be checking.’
She turned back to look at me once, and then with a lasting sigh went to leave. ‘Take care tonight,’ she muttered, as the door snapped shut.
The moment she was gone I opened the notebook again. I read through the dates, the notes. I looked at them carefully – and now, rather than disappointed by the lack of fleshedout information, I was gripped by the fact Marina had recorded any information at all. The few things she had put in there spoke volumes about her personality. Her capacity for organization astonished me. I couldn’t believe that she had been so conscientious. It didn’t fit with the image I had of her – it didn’t fit with the way she had looked or spoken or moved or dressed or otherwise seemed to me.
1st November Meeting with Professor CM*
5th November Laundry, reading. Meeting with Prof CM*
Meetings with the professor, I noticed, came up more than any other item. Some were marked with asterisks – I wondered what that meant. I totted them up. There had been twenty meetings with the professor overall — only eight were marked with the asterisk.
The next station is York.
The voice over the tannoy. Footsteps shuffling outside. The sound of a sliding door muffling open and slapping shut in the distance. I sensed the ticket inspector approaching.
10th November Meeting with Professor*
11th November Meeting with Professor.* Do washing. Elena bday present – check cow-print hat?
12th November Buy pants. Meeting w PCM
4th December Meeting with Professor*
5th December Essay due – Bergson
13th December Meeting w Professor CM.*
What did it mean – if it meant anything? Were those asterisks somehow linked to the professor, or was I simply trying to find meaning where there wasn’t any? My fingers flicked towards the back. That was when I saw it.
In the corner of the penultimate page there was a tiny, barely legible scribble. It was in pencil, half-rubbed out, but I could just about decipher the letters.
[email protected]
a5t3r1sk
An email address. I stared at it, squinting my eyes into fine points.
It was not the email address Marina had habitually used. I’d always watched over her shoulder as she logged into Facebook, and during boring lectures we’d emailed each other from our university accounts. Neither of those accounts corresponded with the mishmash of letters and numbers written there.
There was a cold feeling on my face.
I looked up to see the ticket inspector standing in the doorway.
‘Oi! I warned you!’ she said. ‘Get off!’
x.
York station was cold and imposing. The ceilings were high, there was no insulation, and night-shift security guards patrolled the grounds. I had the realization that I was in an alien city – with nowhere to sleep.
I thought about catching another train in the opposite direction. If I went back to my room in Northam, I thought – where my phone and laptop were – then I might be able to log into the asterisk account. I might at least be able to test out the password, if nothing else.
It’s hard now to think that this was an option. So much would be different if I had gone back – so many people would have avoided being hurt. But in the station, the thought of being back in Northam – the horror of it – struck me with the force of a lightning jolt. The dark damp walls, the jeering faces, the lowered hoods, the police … My breath began to quicken. My palms tensed. No. I couldn’t go back there. I wasn’t in a game anymore. The possibility of being discovered was a real, imminent threat.
An Internet café, then, if they still existed. There must be somewhere in a touristy city like this which offered access to the Internet. Yet as I exited the station, passing through the curled pillars and into the road, I saw that it was pitch-black. The air was freezing and dark. Nowhere was open except the odd kebab shop, and a dingy neon-lit bar.
Eleven chimes rang out. I became aware, again, of the situation in which I had placed myself; I became aware of the freezing temperature and with it, how underdressed I was.
I drew my bag onto my knees and dug through it for a jumper. There wasn’t one in there, so I wrapped swaddles of clothing around my wrists and fiercely rubbed my knuckles together. The wind speared my cheeks, shoulders, ankles.