Watch Me

by Angela Clarke

  ‘What do you mean that kind of girl?’ Freddie spat the words.

  William looked, shocked, from Freddie to her. Nasreen held her hand up to silence her friend, feeling the heat of anger emanating from her. ‘Where online were these pictures of Chloe, William?’

  ‘There’s this website. It’s like a bulletin board. I thought it was like Ask.FM, you know? A laugh, like, it’s anonymous – you can post what you want. Rip the piss out each other, that sort of thing. But this was different. It has all these photos. Of, like, hot girls. And there were photos of Chloe on it. Like in her pants and bra, and other ones. Topless, you know? The whole year saw her like that.’ He stopped, looked pained.

  ‘What was the website called, William?’

  He sighed. ‘It’s called Are You Awake.’

  Nasreen saw Freddie swiping at her phone. ‘Ms Bradshaw, could we please speak to Melisha and Ruby again?’ She chose her words carefully. ‘This has illuminated things. William, I’ll need to arrange for you to speak to some of my colleagues. We’ll have to notify your parents.’ Alarm filled his eyes. She kept her voice low, even. ‘You’ve helped Chloe in telling us about this site. We will find out who was responsible for sharing these images and get them taken down.’ He nodded.

  If Chloe had posted the images, and it had got out of hand … Nasreen didn’t want to think of what’d been going through the girl’s mind in the last few weeks of her life. William said Chloe had accused him of posting the images, which suggested she hadn’t uploaded them herself. She could imagine the humiliation, how she must have felt. Why had the girl taken the pictures? Why take the risk? Who had she sent them to, and who had repaid that intimacy by sharing them online? There was, she realised, a clear motive for why Chloe would want to take her own life.

  Chapter 16

  Wednesday 16 March

  14:45

  T – 18 hrs 45 mins

  ‘You can’t just let him walk out of here!’ Freddie said as the door closed. She’d heard everything William had said and hadn’t bought a word of it. No way naked images of his girlfriend had got out and he wasn’t responsible. She remembered with a sting how she’d caught a guy she was seeing at uni showing an extreme close up of her and a roll-on deodorant to his flatmates. Certain people couldn’t be trusted. Where else would photos of Chloe have come from? It had to be him. It was obvious. The phone burned in her hand. ‘He has to answer for what he’s done. He has to pay. He humiliated her because he wanted to brag.’

  ‘Shush!’ Nas said. ‘He’ll hear you.’

  ‘You can’t let him get away with this. He circulated private photos of Chloe!’ What a scumbag.

  ‘We have no evidence of that,’ Nas said distractedly, looking at her own phone.

  ‘This is fairly self-evident!’ She thrust her mobile at her. On screen was a photo of Chloe in what looked like a shop changing room. An orange curtain hung behind her. She was holding her phone up, pouting, and the halterneck red top she was wearing had slipped. You could see one pink nipple. Freddie had lost her virginity at fifteen, and she’d always felt confident she was mature enough to take that decision at that age, but this photo shocked her. It wasn’t the nudity, it was Chloe’s age. This was not a womanly figure. She was in the first flush of adolescence. And she looked young. Really young. Like a child.

  Nas looked at the photo, zooming out. ‘Is this on the website he named?’

  ‘Yes. Are You Awake. They have a disclaimer. Get this: By clicking “I Agree,” you agree not to hold Are You Awake responsible for any damages from your use of this website, and you understand that the content posted is not owned or generated by Are You Awake, but rather by Are You Awake’s users. You just click through, and voilà: stacks of naked images. There’s loads of them. All amateur.’ Freddie felt grossed out. She’d always thought the prescribed ideals of beauty were manufactured by capitalism: a way to make women feel shit about themselves so they kept spending money on products and crap. That if you actually saw what people wanted, what they genuinely lusted after, then it would be a pic’n’mix of personal pleasure. Sure one guy might like waifs, but another might be into voluptuous curves. But all these girls looked the same: young, slight, flat stomachs, perky boobs, no pubic hair. They were personal photos, done in bedrooms and bathrooms, but they still fitted the model mould. It was depressing: it went against everything Freddie believed about human desire. It also made her feel fat and ugly and old. ‘It didn’t take me long to find Chloe. There’s a whole thread dedicated to her.’

  ‘Are there more photos?’ Nas was taking this very well. Too well.

  ‘Why aren’t you arresting Will.i.am. A. Twat?’

  ‘He’s a sixteen-year-old kid, Freddie. This wasn’t a formal interview. If we suspect he’s more involved in the distribution of these images, then we’ll need evidence we can use in court. Nothing he said in here was admissible.’

  Freddie turned away. She felt boxed in in this room, there was something oppressive, offensive even, about the bland landscapes on the wall after you’d been looking at naked pics of what were effectively children. She was furious on Chloe’s behalf. She felt the burn of humiliation. What had she been going through when these images were shared? ‘It’s revenge porn isn’t it? He said himself that they’d split up. He said they hadn’t had sex – maybe he wanted it and was cross he hadn’t got it. And then he uploaded these photos for the world to see. Melisha thinks it was him, doesn’t she? That’s what that Facebook message was about.’

  ‘Do you think it was deliberate, this picture?’ Nas was still looking at the phone. ‘Do you think she meant to flash?’

  ‘Who cares. If she took it herself, she has a right to privacy.’

  ‘She was under eighteen. If she sent, uploaded, or forwarded sexually explicit photos of herself it would still be illegal. She could have been prosecuted,’ said Nas.

  ‘That just sounds like another reason to kill yourself! No wonder none of these guys wanted to say anything. How could Chloe possibly be to blame if she was the victim?’

  ‘It’s not a question of blame, it’s the law,’ Nas said.

  Again with this questionable faith in the law.

  ‘We’ll get tech to look at it. Contact the site. See if we can get them taken down. But I have to tell you it’s not a priority, Freddie.’

  ‘But this proves it – this is why Chloe killed herself. She was Gemma’s sister, for god’s sake.’ Freddie snatched the phone back, ignoring the anger flashing in Nas’s eyes. ‘Look – there are more.’ She scrolled through her screen. A photo of Chloe in a bikini. A photo of Chloe in underwear, her tiny breasts barely filling the yellow lace bra. Thin. Childlike. Bile flowered in her stomach. In the second photo you could see her hand holding the phone. In front of the mirror, in what looked like a bedroom. A single bed with a corkboard above it – covered in grinning photos, postcards, what looked like a colour-coordinated timetable. Chloe’s bedroom. But her face was set, not smiling, almost sulky. She looked tired, there were shadows under her eyes. Her hair, unlike the other photos where it was loose and teased into curly blonde waves, was pulled back into a bun. You could see a pair of jeans draped over the bed behind her. Skinny. Like the kind Freddie wore.

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything, Freddie. We can turn this over to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. See if they can get the images taken down. This reinforces the theory that Chloe took her own life, but it doesn’t help us with Lottie, and she’s my focus right now.’

  She thought of Lottie’s pretty face, those eyes, the blood smeared across her forehead, and the floor wobbled under her feet. But she couldn’t just forget Chloe. She deserved justice too. She couldn’t let it stop at this. ‘Look – it’s like they’re trading images of her.’ There were names of the posters: XXXSchlong: I’ve got one of her in her bikini. She pointed them out to Nas. ‘And here, look, someone calling themselves Liam says, “I’ve got one of her tit.” That could be Will, posting under a different na
me?’ Freddie was scrolling back through the thread to the beginning. ‘Loads of them are from this guy called Liam. He started the thread on the message board. It must be Will.’

  ‘We need to stay focused on Lottie.’ Nas was jabbing her notepad with her pencil.

  As soon as they were getting somewhere with Will she’d shut the conversation down. Freddie wanted the truth, but Nas was fixated on doing things to the letter of the law. She believed that way would lead to justice. But if what she said about needing to focus on Lottie made sense, why were they still here? ‘Why are you asking to speak to Melisha and Ruby again?’

  ‘This is all backwards. We should be doing this properly – with a responsible adult,’ Nas said.

  ‘Ms Bradshaw seems responsible to me,’ Freddie said.

  ‘We should have spoken to their parents.’ She jabbed a hole in the paper. Tore a page off and threw it in the bin in the corner. ‘But we don’t have time. I don’t like working like this.’

  ‘You’re doing that thing you used to do when you were stressed!’ Freddie said.

  ‘What thing?’ Nas looked irritated.

  ‘Talking to yourself. First sign of madness.’

  ‘I am not.’ Nas’s nostrils flared. ‘This is not helping, Freddie.’

  ‘Neither is this if you think these pics of Chloe are nothing to do with Lottie. Why are we talking to Melisha and Ruby again?’

  ‘In case it is. If Chloe didn’t send them to William, then who did she send them to? There’s a potential boyfriend. Someone who so far has kept themselves out of the investigation.’

  Could that person be involved with Lottie as well? There was a knock at the door and Ms Bradshaw walked in with Melisha behind her.

  ‘Ruby’s feeling a little unwell after our earlier chat. I think it’s best you don’t speak to her without notifying her parents first,’ the teacher said.

  ‘Are we in trouble?’ Melisha’s voice was panicked.

  ‘No one is in any trouble,’ Nas smiled. It was alarming how quickly she could move from stressed to calm, concealing her true feelings. What else had she hidden? ‘We know about the photos. The ones of Chloe in her underwear, and without her underwear.’ Nas spoke as if she were saying sorry, as if she were responsible.

  The girl’s pencilled eyebrows disappeared under a mountain of thick, wavy hair. With no warning she burst into tears. Freddie blinked in surprise.

  ‘It’s okay, Melisha.’ Ms Bradshaw stepped forward and put a protective arm across her shoulders. The girl buckled, slumped into the teacher, suddenly looking very young, and Freddie reminded herself that in the eyes of the law these were children. And maybe that was a good thing.

  ‘Did you know about the photos?’ Nas said softly.

  ‘We didn’t want to say,’ Melisha sniffed. Nas pulled a tissue from the box in front of her and handed one to the girl. ‘We didn’t want to get her in trouble. And we didn’t want her parents finding out.’

  ‘Did Chloe send the photos to the Are You Awake site?’

  ‘No! Well, not at first,’ Melisha said. A sob caught in her throat.

  ‘Not at first?’

  ‘After the first one appeared she tried to get it taken down, but the site said she had to prove she was who she said she was.’ Melisha’s mascara was sliding from her eyes. She looked at Ms Bradshaw and then back at Nas. ‘They said the only way she could prove it was her in the photo was if she took a photo in her underwear and sent it in to them.’ Freddie thought of the image of Chloe in her yellow underwear, unsmiling, face grim. The evil bastards.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Nas sighed. ‘They then posted that image on the site?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Melisha said. ‘Chloe was, like, panicking then. She didn’t know where the first image came from.’

  ‘The one where you can see her breast?’

  ‘Yeah, it was an accident. It was a new top she was photographing. She said as soon as she saw it she deleted it.’

  Nas frowned. ‘She didn’t send it to anyone?’

  ‘No.’ Melisha’s gaze dropped to the tissue she was now shredding in her lap. ‘But I always thought maybe she sent it to Will. And he put it up there. We had a row about it.’

  ‘When?’ said Nas.

  ‘The day before she …’ Melisha’s body shook as another sob broke free. ‘I just wanted her to say it was her – that she’d sent it in. She could be like that sometimes: attention seeking, you know?’ Freddie found herself nodding. ‘But by then she was going crazy. Like it got way out of hand. Everyone had them. These photos. And she kept saying she hadn’t sent them to anyone and …’ She broke off, her eyes, wet with tears, looked haunted, frightened. Poor kid: the last conversation she’d had with her friend had been a row, and then her friend had killed herself. Freddie shivered. She and Nas had some idea of what that was like.

  Nas spoke softly. ‘The best thing you can do to help Chloe now is tell me what happened.’

  ‘He, someone, they put her phone number on there,’ Melisha said. Freddie dug her nails into her chair.

  ‘On the website?’ Nas asked.

  Melisha nodded.

  The fuckers. Freddie’d read enough about female journalists who’d been doxxed – had their contact details published online – to know what came next.

  ‘She started getting all these messages from men and stuff. They started texting her. Gross stuff. And nasty stuff.’ Melisha wadded the shredded tissue into a ball. ‘It started getting worse. She was frightened. Really frightened.’

  Ms Bradshaw looked as if she’d been slapped in the face.

  ‘And she didn’t tell anyone?’ Nas asked.

  ‘No.’ Melisha shook her head. ‘She was terrified her dad would find out. They’re always going on at us not to take naked selfies. Like, we all know that. And Chloe promised she hadn’t sent the first one to anyone. That she’d deleted it immediately. She just wanted them to stop.’

  And there it was: the gap between the children and the adult world. Teens too frightened to ask the very people who could have helped. Freddie wondered if ‘Liam’ and the other users of Are You Awake were the same age as Chloe, or older. Grown men sending abusive threatening messages to a teen girl … Her stomach turned at the thought. She tapped her phone to scroll through the thread again. What kind of person would do this to a kid? It had to be a power play: they got off on her distress.

  ‘Thank you, Melisha. You’ve been very brave,’ Nas said. ‘Ms Bradshaw has explained that we may need you to go through this again with some colleagues of mine. To see if we can find who did this to Chloe. This constitutes harassment, and we will try to bring them to justice.’ Melisha nodded, her face taking on a steely look. Freddie recognised it as love. She would put herself through this, break the code of silence among teen girls, to try and help her friend. Even if it was too late for Chloe. But perhaps it wasn’t too late for Lottie? Nas was still talking as something weighty settled in Freddie’s stomach. She clicked out of the thread dedicated to Chloe and into the main message board of Are You Awake.

  ‘I have just one more question for you, Melisha. Was there anyone new in Chloe’s life, a boy perhaps, someone else you might be trying to protect? No one she mentioned in passing?’ Nas pushed.

  ‘No. Those last few weeks, she was … messed up. Paranoid. She kept thinking she was being followed. Because of the texts, I guess. She was obsessed by this white van, but like, there’s hundreds of white vans? She had a go at Ruby once. Accused us of putting the photo online. It was mad – we’d never even seen it before it started going round school …’

  The girl’s voice drifted away as Freddie’s eyes locked onto the screen. A new thread. Started by ‘Liam’. Hottie Lottie Burgone. The heavy lump in her stomach seemed to crack, spreading acid through her. She clicked on the thread: photos of Lottie in tight-fitting exercise tops; photos of Lottie in a bikini on a beach in a yoga pose; a photo of Lottie, pouting, smiling straight at the camera, leaning forwards, the phone visible in her hand in t
he mirror, angled down, topless.

  ‘Nas?’ Freddie said. Nas looked at her, she saw the flicker of a muscle in her friend’s neck. The recognition. It must be seeping from her very skin: the ominous dread. Freddie pointed at her phone. You need to see this.

  ‘Ms Bradshaw, can you make sure Melisha gets back to class all right? We’ll be in touch.’

  The teacher looked at Freddie as if she might say something. Guessing from the look on her face she’d known nothing about this maelstrom of horror that was right under their noses. ‘Come on, love. Let’s get you some water. Maybe a cup of tea.’

  Nas waited until they’d left and the door had closed behind them. ‘What is it?’

  Freddie turned the phone towards her old school friend. She saw her look at the screen, take in what she was seeing.

  ‘Is that Lottie? On the same site?’

  Freddie nodded. ‘She has her own thread. Like Chloe. What does it mean?’

  Nas already had her phone out. When she spoke, her tone was flat, like she’d had the life sucked out of her. ‘It means we’ve got a lot of explaining to do.’ She held the mobile to her ear, turned away from Freddie and spoke into the handset. ‘DI McCain, please. It’s Sergeant Cudmore. It’s urgent.’

  Chapter 17

  Wednesday 16 March

  14:58

  T – 18 hrs 32 mins

  Nas stalked out of the school reception, leaving Freddie to sign them out. The receptionist, her face a slapped arse, handed her a pen. Freddie’s mind was reeling with images: Chloe in her knickers and bra, looking miserable; Lottie pouting seductively at the camera; Lottie gagged and bleeding. She thought of different photos too, ones she’d taken and sent to others. Lovers. She and her mates, Vic and Hannah from uni, they’d had a phase of sending Snaps of their boobs. It was a laugh. A tit-off. Squashed together, nips out in a bathroom, stupid faces. Once, she’d turned her nipples into eyes and drawn a smile in eyeliner on her stomach. Then they’d run out of steam, or found better things to do, or better people to send naked pics to. She wasn’t bothered who saw her tits. They were natural. No reason why it was fine for blokes to walk around topless, when it wasn’t for women. She’d written an article about the #FreeTheNipple campaign. Grown angry at those who’d shamed women for breastfeeding in public, even though the thought of actually doing that herself grossed her out. She’d been socialised so successfully into believing tits were sexual things that she felt queasy about their real function. Then again, having children seemed an alien prospect. Even when she hadn’t been back living with her parents, she’d only made it as far as a sofa in Dalston. Babies, children, having a family of her own … Those felt as realistic as getting a mortgage and paying off her student loan.