Click

by L. Smyth

  I found a nook in the corner of the station where I hoped the guards wouldn’t see me. With my bag pulled in close to me, I bent down and burrowed face into my knees. It was still freezing. To distract myself, I took out the book and leafed through it. I squinted at the words. I crouched my head into my knees away from the wind so that I could read. But I couldn’t focus on the sentences, and my fingers, when exposed, turned rigid from the cold. The book went limp in my hand. I put it into my coat pocket.

  The wind picked up then, and the air felt sharper than before. A familiar feathery dread began to crawl up my spine. I pulled my cuffs over my knuckles and brought them to my mouth. I bent my head forwards. I bit them to make them warm. Then, in several long outbreaths I repeated the password to myself: slowly, so that I would never forget it. A-five-t-e-r-one-five-k. Asterisk, underscore, twelve, underscore, two thousand and twelve. Asterisk, underscore, twelve, underscore, two thousand and twelve.

  I carried on like that, with my head bowed into my lap, until a slim line of bluish gold parted the clouds, and six chimes from the Minster told me that it was morning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Early March 2014

  i.

  When the world discovers that you’ve done something terrible, the shock you experience isn’t a quick jolt – not a knife in the chest or a plummeting stomach. No. Instead it is a slow prickling feeling – a sort of pervasive shiver, like a piece of cold metal is trying to escape from under your skin. It comes and goes in waves: It’s fine. It’s not fine.

  Perhaps all that is easy enough to understand. Less comprehensible is the fact that, bound up with these feelings of anxiety, amidst those waves of fear and doubt and self-hatred, there’s also an intense relief. It’s a sense of freedom – a sense that you don’t have to bother anymore because there’s nothing else for you to prove to people. You’ve exposed your real, base self, precluded any chance of realizing what others once perceived as your potential, and now everyone finally knows that you are inherently evil, a waste of space, a failure. The realization of that fear inexplicably produces a rush of excitement. It feels good.

  The nurses tried to break it to me gently. One of them held my hand and placed a cool cloth over my head. I lay in the hospital bed with my eyes straining at the ceiling, trying to keep my breathing consistent, with the thick plastic tube scratching against the inside of my throat. I tried to concentrate on the words coming out of her mouth.

  Freezing. Kind strangers. Here to safety.

  She smoothed my hair and I sought to fit her words to a memory. I stared at the map tacked onto the ceiling, tracing its roads and buildings. It was York. My eyes tracked along the streets, and soon a memory emerged: a hand grabbing my shoulder. A visibility jacket. Arms lifted into the van. Lips chattering. Mind fogging over. Grey snowflakes dusting eyelashes. Everything opening up into a white, white mist.

  I looked back at the nurse.

  Hypothermia, she was saying. Lucky. Parents coming. Understand?

  I winced then nodded.

  On registering my response, her eyes darkened and her voice lowered. She began to speak more quickly. She said that there was a policeman outside who wanted to have a ‘word’ with me. ‘Would it be all right if he came in for a moment?’

  My eyes felt cold springing open. No. I gave a violent shake of the head.

  The nurse again. No. She was sorry but I had to speak to him. He would only be a few moments. It was important.

  I felt my eyes strain out of their sockets. Please, please.

  The policeman entered. Even now I remember the look on his face: half-nervous, half-stern, mouth moving quickly behind a patchy beard. I refused to register what he said. He brought out his clipboard and gestured towards it. Me. Marina. Joe. A photo of my phone on my bed. Another photo of my laptop in a ring of smashed glass. I felt my breathing become sharp. My throat was closing around the plastic tube. Everything seemed to be too clear, hyper-realistic, the colours of the room garish.

  I tried to speak and felt a hot spurt of phlegm choke in the back of my throat.

  ‘There is no need to be alarmed,’ the policeman said, looking alarmed himself. The nurse moved towards me and adjusted the tubes. ‘The investigation will be over quickly. I just need to ask a few questions.’

  My eyes fluttered shut.

  ‘Do you understand?’ he said. ‘Lift a finger for yes.’

  Nothing moved.

  ‘The quicker you cooperate, the quicker this will be over.’

  The nurse wiped my face. I heard footsteps outside the room.

  Shakily I lifted a finger.

  He was right about the investigation. It was quick. The Bedes were ‘shocked’ apparently, but they expressed no interest in pursuing the case. It seemed that no crime had technically been committed in the first place. The police only needed to keep my laptop and phone to exclude the possibility of any other ‘incidents’, they said. They needed me to confirm the details of what had happened. They needed me to sign a document allowing for the information to be passed on to Facebook and Swipe, so that they could update their future privacy policies. Other than that, they didn’t need anything. I was ‘free to go’.

  Free to go, fine, but I was not really free to live. The tirade against me raged in the papers, on the TV, on the Internet. Some of it was justified – generally I understood why people felt disgusted by me. But a lot of it was abusive, and I couldn’t help but think I’d been made a scapegoat for Marina’s death. My email inbox clogged with abuse. Death threat tweets circulated. Photos of my face were shopped onto indecent images and shared around the Internet. ‘See how she likes her photos being appropriated’, one caption read. It was retweeted over a hundred times before being deleted by the moderators (a screenshot subsequently made its way onto porn sites and illicit forums anyway). Facebook scorched with protestations:

  Let’s imagine that a poor middle-aged black guy had impersonated a dead teenager instead of this private-school educated white girl. He would be jailed!!

  The like pages poured in demanding so-called justice for Marina.

  A Change.org Petition: ‘CHANGE THE LAW. JAIL EVA HUTCHINGS’.

  At the time I wasn’t aware that it was happening – or at least of the full extent of it. I only discovered this weeks later, when circumstances made it impossible to ignore. Then I understood why my parents had been so protective. The incessant phone calls, the emails, the snitching neighbours, the journalists and the death threats … I could see why they had chosen to block me off from the outside world. I could see why I wasn’t allowed a substitute phone or to use a laptop.

  It wasn’t just the use of phones which were prohibited. In the days after the incident, I wasn’t even allowed to set foot outside the house without someone (usually my mother) escorting me. This was a method which – despite its Draconian measures – didn’t work faultlessly. When I went with my mother to the shops I’d notice the way the neighbours looked at me. Even strangers turned their heads and gave me a querying glance-over. Sometimes I would see a headline that bore my name poke out of the top of the newspaper stand – and though my mother would block my path, seeing it first, I would catch enough of the sentence to extract what was going on. I knew that the outside world was talking about me, that they all hated me. I only didn’t know exactly what it was that they were saying.

  The result of this half-knowledge was that I was not able to properly process what had happened. I spent those weeks in a state alternating between dull acceptance and anxiety – wondering what was being said, and thought, beyond my control.

  To distract myself, I thought about the email and password that I had found in Marina’s notebook. Luckily my small bag had not been completely confiscated by the police – the pile of books remained where I had left them, scrunched in the bottom of the suitcase. On returning to my house I had lifted them out quickly – and then shoved them under my mattress.

  The books were a revelation to me, an obsession even. I
was convinced that they would give me full access to Marina’s mind. Every day I would retreat to my room and pore over her diary entries. I looked at the dates of her meetings with the professor. I drew out my own notebook, and began to jot them down, analyse them.

  Most of the dates were just blank. But there were also those with the asterisk beside them:

  2nd October; 29th October; 1st November; 5th November; 10th November; 11th November; 4th December; 13th December.

  My eyes flicked between the two sets of dates. It bothered me that there wasn’t a clean chronological break between the ‘blank’ dates, and those marked with an asterisk. If they meant something specific – signifying the recurrence of a particular event, or a personal timetable – then it would mean surely the asterisks would start occurring later. But the first asterisk date was the 2nd of October, which was only a few weeks into term. And then they broke off for a bit, and then they came back …

  It was impossible to follow.

  I stared at the numbers and letters, squinting my eyes into fine points, trying to concentrate. I thought about what I had been doing on the highlighted days. Had I seen Marina? If not, what excuse had she given? If so, how had she behaved?

  A series of revelations then came to me:

  The 2nd of October was the day that we first met. The day I had interrupted the professor.

  The 5th of December was the day before Henry’s party.

  I looked at the email address – thought of the word asterisk – and again I thought about the significance of the symbol. A superstitious chill ran through me.

  I flicked to the end of the book and studied it hard. Was that even her handwriting, now I looked at it? The spidery swirls seemed to crawl out from the page. I thought about her fingers gripping the pen as she etched them out, doing that strange thing where her fingertips slipped over the sides, which she said her teachers had told her off for.

  Asterisk, underscore, twelve, underscore, two thousand and twelve.

  The curiosity twinged – a painful, curling sensation in my chest. I held the book close to my face, counted my breaths. It was a dangerous feeling, it came from the same place that had led me to create the Swipe account. I was suspicious of submitting to it, suspicious of myself and I knew that I should stop.

  But when I didn’t read the books or think about her, that’s when my mind would wander to what people were saying about me, and doing that would invite the fog of faces and words, words of people I had known, or met briefly, or never met. Then I would feel dizzy again, my entire body diminishing, sight darker, everything cold.

  One evening, I went downstairs to see what my parents were doing. I asked them when I might be able to get my phone or laptop replaced.

  My mother’s eyes bulged. ‘We found you in hospital,’ she said accusingly. ‘Hospital.’

  ‘It’s not good to keep me cut off from the rest of the world,’ I replied. ‘It’s not healthy.’

  ‘It is good for you in the short-term.’

  ‘Can I please just quickly check my email on your phone?’

  ‘It’s like you think I was born yesterday.’

  ‘It might be—’

  ‘Look, we’re not having this discussion,’ she said.

  My father stared dully at his plate. He looked so disappointed.

  Asterisk, underscore, twelve, underscore, two thousand and twelve.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ my mother said suddenly, emphatically, as though someone had asked a question, ‘is why Northam bothered to stick up for you. Initially, I mean.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I mean – why bother at all? It was obvious you were never going to come back in the first place. There is no way we would have let you.’

  Silence.

  ‘It’s just ridiculous that they should have “expelled” you. I mean there’s no way,’ she continued, ‘no way that you were ever going to be fit to return to university anyway. And not just because of this … silly Swipe business, but because you were in hospital. You were ill. If Northam hadn’t stuck their foot in it then none of this would have taken off again. It just wouldn’t be an issue.’

  The words hung in the air. Out the corner of my eye I saw that my father was still staring at his plate.

  I knew that she was trying to make it better. I knew that she was trying to say, in a skewed way, that none of this was my fault and that ultimately it wasn’t a big deal anyway. The bigger issue was – quite sensibly – that I’d nearly died from hypothermia. My physical and mental welfare were ‘the primary concern here’ – not some stupid online stunt I’d performed.

  But I didn’t believe her. Nor did my father. Nor did the police. Nor did the public.

  I went back upstairs to my room.

  Alone at last. I peeled back my bedsheets, heaved up the corner of the mattress and inspected the small pile of Marina’s books. The diary had occupied so much of my time that the other books – the academic guides and the philosophy tracts and the novels – had scarcely been touched. Most of them were in tatters from the train journey, with the centre-folds sliding out from the jacket and the corners curled at the edges. But – I noticed, opening one at random – some of them were still readable.

  I wrenched the book fully open and flipped onto my stomach. I bent back the spine, and held it in front of me with my neck craned up. I resolved to stay like that, my eyes glued to the page, until I had read every word.

  For a few days I continued in that routine. I would wake up and reach out towards the pile of books beside me, grab the closest volume and thumb through to the most recent page. Reading Marina’s notes gave me an odd sense of calm. I felt pleasantly disconnected from myself, from my thoughts and from my body. The words were like an escape from my head. It was as though I were communicating with some larger consciousness. I was reaching out of time, twisting the current dimension, reaching backwards somewhere beyond the grave.

  I find it hard, still, to patch those days together and understand what I did on a daily basis. But I do remember a day in late March.

  The light filtered through the window, making me aware that it was the early morning. I was not sure how long I had slept for that day – it was a bad day, one where I had been unable to get out of bed. My parents had tried to coax me out with food, a board game, or a ‘refreshing’ walk, but without luck. A book was creased into my face. I lifted it off, thumbed through it for a bit and eventually came upon a poem. The first stanza caught my attention:

  What seas, what shores, what grey rocks and what islands

  What water lapping the bow

  And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog

  What images return

  O my daughter.

  The title of the poem was ‘Marina’. She had not annotated it, or even underlined any sections; but the page was folded over in the corner. I felt that this was a signal. My eyes moved over the next section:

  Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning

  Death

  Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning

  Death

  […]

  Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind

  There came a sound outside the window. A twig snapping, the rustle of a leaf. I snapped the book shut and drew it to my chest. A slow, cold feeling crept up my spine. The hairs on my arms were standing out, pale and thin in the moonlight, and I found myself thinking of that time Marina had sat beside me on the beach. How delicate she had looked. How frightened. The leaves rustled again; a breeze rattled the window. I leaned across cautiously and opened the blind.

  ‘Hello?’ I said quietly, into the darkness.

  I looked out a little further, poking my head through the frame, so that my neck aligned with the fastening. My skin felt tight.

  ‘Hello?’ I said again, this time louder.

  Nothing. I listened for a few more seconds.

  Still nothing. I closed the blind, returned to my bed, and opened the book again. I tried
to focus on reading the rest of the poem:

  What is this face? Less clear and clearer

  The pulse in the arm less strong and stronger –

  There was the sound again. There was something, or somebody, outside the window, I was sure of it. I could hear the sound of footsteps patting along the road. I strained my ears to listen. Then I began to shift my legs, to sit up taller and—

  An explosion of glass. The window shattered – BANG –and then came the shadow of a black heavy object, almost in slow motion, making a perfect arc in the air before landing, landing, landing with a thud. I screamed.

  ‘What is going—?’

  A light flicked on.

  That was my mother’s voice. I recognized it instantly, I knew she was there, moving forwards, moving towards me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I could only stare, horrified, at my body in front of me. I followed the line of blood from my hands, down the smears on my legs, to the transparent shards sticking out of the duvet.

  In the following moments the house seemed eerily quiet. Everything was very still. I heard the beat of the clock in the next room. The glass lay flat and darkly glittering on the top of the duvet. I became aware that part of my leg was throbbing.

  Things changed after the attack. The death threats stopped, there were fewer abusive emails, and the media seemed to view me with more sympathy. Words like ‘imitator’ and ‘stalker’ disappeared from headlines. They were replaced by ‘mentally ill’, or just ‘Northam girl’.

  I saw this because the police made me read through selected forums, newspaper articles and comments. They said that it was necessary in case I recognized the way certain messages were written. If certain events or details were referenced that I could help shed light on, then it would be easier for them to identify a suspect.

  I was – and remain – sceptical of this approach. Very few comments referred to specific aspects of my behaviour at Northam, and even those which did – like the girl who had claimed to have heard me screaming in my room – were too vague to be identified.