by Will Wiles
I was above the glass roof, and within grabbing distance of the bag. I grabbed it. It spilled a trickle of freezing water down my wrist to the elbow, a treat stored up in its folds. But it was firmly in my hand and I did not intend to let go. I pulled at it but it didn’t come away from the tree. I pulled again, harder, loosening a cold shower of drops. I lurched to one side and had to clamp my legs together to avoid sliding off the wall. For a ghastly moment I imagined myself falling into the neighbours’ pit, hitting my head and sliding into the scum-lined pool at its bottom. Maybe my body would never be found – the concrete would be poured and I would end up interred beneath their home gym and wine cellar, a sacrificial victim to the success of their investment. It could be the closest I came to home-ownership – a deposit on someone else’s property.
Regaining myself, I looked up into the branches of the tree, trying to see if there was an obvious way to untangle or unhook the bag. But it was not the bag that caught my eye this time, or anything that the neighbours were doing, but a familiar, dark shape, distinct even against the low, clay-thick clouds. The plume.
That I could see it from here was a surprise; that it was still there to be seen, an even greater surprise. Could it really be the same column of smoke, from the same fire? A second giant, skyline-swamping blaze in one week was hardly likely – it must be the same fire, still going after three days. Or was it? I wasn’t sure about its location in the sky, not quite the direction I would expect Barking to be, more to the south …
But the deeper levels of the spine and the gut knew exactly what they were looking at. The plume’s silent movements, that python swelling and squeezing, was just for me now, the menace of the quiet youth in my path who has made full eye contact and is holding it. For a moment I fancied that it had followed me home.
I had to get off this wall. Again, I pulled at the bag, hardest yet, and the branch buckled. Once more I pulled, gripping the wall as tightly as possible, and the branch broke, not cleanly, a nasty diagonal tearing-split that left it attached by a strip of bark. But I had it now. I stopped working on the bag and yanked at the detached section of branch. It tore away without too much effort and I threw it, and the bag, down into the next-door chasm.
Reversing myself along the wall was harder than I imagined. The cold cut the feeling from my hands; the damp made every movement unpleasant. Dizziness was setting in, an after-effect of the vertigo. I wondered if I was about to be sick, and the idea was briefly pleasing – not only a way to purge myself of the curdled remains of last night, but also my way of paying a tribute to next door’s work. Swinging around, I pictured myself falling through the glass roof, into the kitchen, landing on the table among the empty and half-full cans in a snowglobe of shards – I had seen it so many times in movies, always so beautiful, often funny, but not something I wanted to try for myself. I imagined bad falls, bad landings, arteries severed, bones snapping like the branch, spinal fluid spilling, paralysis, slow painful death. My numb fingers tightened on the top of the wall.
Perched like a burglar, I reached out a foot to the chair-back I had used to climb up. Why had I positioned it away from the rear wall of the kitchen, widening the gap I now had to span? Even with only a little weight on it, the chair-back flexed unpleasantly. But I had another problem. My other leg, still on the roof, was oddly wedged, knee bent at a harsh angle, with none of the slack I needed to swing it round and down to the chair. I tried taking more weight through my arms, hooking my elbows over the wall, but this just spread the discomfort to other parts of my body, and caused cold water to seep into my armpits.
Whatever the way forward, I had reached the point of no return – I didn’t have the strength to heave myself back up again. I started trying to inch my leg off the glass, finding that my biggest obstacle was the plastic gutter at the edge of the roof – I couldn’t lift my leg over it, and I didn’t like the odds of it taking much weight.
Frustration flared up in me. All the softly-softly approach had achieved was to contort me into this ridiculous position. One strong, swift movement was needed: push up with the arms as hard and as far as possible, swing out the trapped leg, and bring it down to the seat of the chair. Up, and down. And dismount.
Not quite one movement, as it happened. An assortment of movements, mostly not deliberate, mostly graceless, mostly downwards.
My foot, as expected, caught on the gutter, which sloshed a cold soup of decomposed leaves. Panicking, I tried to pull myself up on the wall, but this action instead led to me putting a lot more weight on the back of the chair. The chair slipped, bending out from under me. My arms slipped too, moving from an uncomfortable position to an intolerable one, with my face now pressed up against the top of the wall. My panic went into its second act, developing its themes with gusto. The gutter pinged away from the roof with a great arc of slimy water, and my arms lost their struggle with gravity. I fell the rest of the way – not a straight, hard, bone-snapping fall, but one of those falls that takes a surprisingly long time, in instalments, through varied terrain, with a lot of scraping contact along the way. My crotch and the inside of my right leg had a long involvement with the chair, my face and right arm remained in close communication with the wall, my left hip crunched against the glass wall of the kitchen, my left foot – eventually, after much time – landed in the water-filled planter, which tripped me, sending me all the way down to the patio.
A drunk’s fall, long-drawn-out, no drama, all ghastly farce, slow but unstoppable, a cringe to watch. The reason long-term, fatal drunks look so physically battered. The kind of fall that doesn’t kill you the first time, or the second time, but will one day.
Hitting the ground, all the breath was blasted from me, tearing at my throat and lungs on the way out. I had banged my head, front and back – the blow to the back frightened me at first, until I realised all the pain was coming from the right side of my face, which had made grinding contact with the wall. Ringing metal pain, all the way through the cheekbone, the upper jaw and around the eye socket, back to the ear. Everything felt twice as large as it should be. Pain elsewhere too, but nothing more than I deserved. I was soaked, and filthy, and lying on the soaked, filthy paving of the back garden, but it felt like the right place for me. Above, through black branches, the pulsing shape of the plume.
And Quin’s face. That fierce but honest face, a shining bald head.
‘I used to hate beta testing,’ he said. He had said? When? To whom? ‘The beta – when things broke, or went wrong. I just wanted everything to work. But now I love that stage. You learn so much. When things break, that’s when you see how they really work. You have to stop pursuing the ideal and respect the real, what’s on the table in front of you. Broken machines, broken software, broken cities, broken people. You can work with them. So much potential.’
Where had he said this? In the pub? We didn’t go to the pub when I went to interview him. It appeared he had said it to me, in person, I could see his face saying it to me, in person, in the pub. An unattributed quote.
Back indoors, I intended to strip off my ruined clothes, take a hot shower, dry off and settle down to some work. But the Need had spread out again, filling every corner of the flat, apart from the path to the fridge. A can first. I had been through a lot. I deserved one. Only two were left in the fridge, somehow. I drank.
The top of the can came away from my lips smeared with red.
I slapped my hand to my face. After coming in from the wintry garden, I was cold, very cold, but my cheek was scorching to the touch. My hand, when I took it away, was painted with blood.
The face that appeared in the bathroom mirror seconds later had hurried from the set of a horror movie, not from the kitchen. A Twombly of blood and dirt was spread across my right cheek, streaking gore around the lips, back to the ear, up to the eye, down to the line of the chin. I soaked a flannel and started to wipe, fearing that my addled body had sent out the wrong signals, that I might be severely hurt or maimed, scarred for life
. A big step towards being the human wreckage shivering in the corner of the pub or on the park bench, the perma-wounded, in a relentless downwards spiral of needless trauma.
But once I had splashed cold water on the mess – delicious, clean pain – I found it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t hospital-visit bad. A nasty scrape – really a dozen or so scratches, a couple more like gouges, in an area of raw skin the size and colour of a slice of supermarket chorizo. Around this was a zone of thump scarlet, which I expected to bruise nicely. It was ugly, and dumb, and would need a few lies ready-prepared to explain it to people, but that was all.
I showered. Normally I wouldn’t bother, facing a day alone, or I’d spend the day intending to, but never get around to it. But I ached, I was freezing, my clothes needed changing, and even I can’t sit comfortably and drink through that. None of my other pains gave me cause for concern, although the pain in my head was atrocious – one of those headaches that resided in the roots of the teeth, in the knot that binds the spine to the brain, in the dark recesses under the eyes.
The shower gave me a terrific sense of achievement. Something achieved – two things, if you counted the plastic bag! – and the day only a little more than half done. Wearing my dressing gown, I started work on the next priority: consolidating the assorted empty and half-finished cans I had hanging around, yielding about two cans-worth of lager. Having thus set things on a solid basis, I put one of the open cans in the door of the fridge, sat down on the sofa with the other, and turned on the TV.
I really should do some work. But I had done a lot already and had earned a sit down.
My phone was jammed between the arm of the sofa and the cushion. Plucking it out, I stared at it. Much unpleasantness might be stored up within. My absence had been agreed in advance, at least. Here I was, ‘working from home’. And no missed calls – that was good. But there would be consequences from my failure to meet De Chauncey. At best, another time would have to be arranged, something I could take to Eddie and Polly to show willing. At worst, De Chauncey and his people would be full of umbrage, there would be no later appointment, and Eddie and Polly already knew all about it. Yesterday I had been fairly sure that a strong Pierce interview would let me ride out those repercussions. Today I felt less sanguine. Deliberately defying Eddie’s express wishes might cancel out any credit accrued from a genuine Pierce scoop.
But it was still possible that I might just be able to make another time with De Chauncey and glide through the whole situation. I found a relaxing programme on one of the factual channels, a man in a windcheater learning how to make a coracle, and settled down. Eyes shut, I opened email.
It wasn’t so bad. A peck of nagging from Polly – a passive-aggressive ‘Hope it’s going well today!’, a sinister ‘Can’t wait to hear your ideas!’ and a quietly threatening ‘See you tomorrow!!’. A one-liner from Eddie: ‘How did it go with Alexander?’ For a moment I feared that it might be a trap, that he might know everything and was trying to tempt me into a barefaced lie. That wasn’t really his style, but it was possible. I didn’t answer either of them. I did, however, compose a genial email to De Chauncey’s PR, to see if time could be found later in the week. Nothing else of consequence. Office email successfully fielded. My glow of achievement gained lustre.
I moved on to other notifications, for Twitter, Instagram, Tamesis, Tumblr. My blood froze.
Tamesis was on, for a start. Generally I tried to disable it before a heavy session outside the flat. It wouldn’t reveal my location to people I know, that wasn’t how it worked. But it might, possibly, steer somebody – a workmate maybe – into the pub I was drinking in, and that was dangerous. It was too easy to imagine: Tamesis whispering in Polly’s ear, ‘Hey! Why not try the William Blake this lunchtime?’ and a gang of my colleagues finding me there, chewing my second or third pint on my own.
I had switched Tamesis on when I was with Pierce, and had left it on. And when I had got to Fenchurch Street, not knowing the area, I had asked it for the location of a quiet pub. I had never switched it off. And now it was full of messages and alerts. Hundreds of them.
I am extremely careful with social media. I know the risks. One of my greatest fears – held in the folder ‘career death / social endgame’ – is that drink and self-pity suck me into a bout of horrible honesty on Twitter or Facebook, which of course I then do not remember. The way I find out about it is like this, in the morning, checking my phone. Because it could happen any night, every morning is marred by the fear – the fear that I have gone viral. If there’s one thing people enjoy, it’s watching a stranger’s secret shame explode in real time.
With this in mind, the most chilling sight in the world is an app icon stamped with a very high number – 99+ notifications on Tamesis, the number was maxed out, and relatively high numbers on my other accounts too.
Feeling faint, feeling the grey creep into my peripheral vision, muscles slack in the hand and wrist, I thumbed into the app and tried to find out what had happened. This was not normal, this was ‘racist rant’ not normal.
But it was all good. Dozens of people wanted to be my Tamesis contact. People I had never heard of before, people I had heard of, but who couldn’t have heard of me. Prominent journalists, tech people, people whose name I knew from TED Talks and Wired articles, Bruce Sterling, Warren Ellis. There was a lot of other activity too, mostly people liking or responding to an update from last night that mentioned me.
It was F.A.Q. Of course. Quin and me, in fact, in a selfie – no, not a selfie, a picture taken by someone not in the frame. He looked as composed as ever, wealth-casual. I looked a bit bleary and wary but OK. In the pub. It was fading back in, now, maybe thanks to the rising alcohol level in my blood. Quin appeared in the pub with someone else, a colleague maybe, and had joined me at my table without any noticeable awkwardness or hesitation. Quin’s companion – I had the impression he was a subordinate – had bought a round of drinks, and almost immediately disappeared to take a phone call. When he came back he made an excuse and then disappeared for good. Even in my reduced state, it had seemed a little convenient. I was left alone with Quin. He wanted to talk about Pierce.
I could remember the picture being taken, the way Quin told his colleague to take it and didn’t ask my opinion, total confidence, the warm arrogance of it.
The caption read: Great to run into interviewer supreme Jack Bick, always a T-plus – speaking truth to power!
Then a load of tags: #influencer #thoughtleader #Tplus #socialvelocity etcetera etcetera. In Quintalk this was glowing praise. As founder of Bunk and the creator of Tamesis, Quin had a terrific amount of juice within the app’s user base: he might not have more contacts than anyone else, but he was in the top twenty. That kind of recommendation, magnified by that kind of reach, was an immense boost to my Tamesis profile, making me appear far more important and interesting than I really am. The spike in my numbers was astonishing, and was mirrored by bumps on my other social media accounts. This in turn had prompted a flurry of interest and envy from people already in my networks.
A couple of pieces I’ve written have had a few days of intense popularity online, and you could say they had ‘gone viral’ in a small way. Nothing newsworthy, just a few hundred people taking notice all at once, maybe low thousands, not the hundreds of thousands or millions of true virality. Maybe it doesn’t even count. But you only need a few hundred shares or interactions to make it feel as if you are being constantly bombarded with notifications and messages, and it’s possible to see the vortex of interaction start to sustain itself, attention breeding attention, as if it might never stop.
Magazines and writers want this kind of feverish attention, and consultants earn handsome fees telling publishers how to get it. It should feel good. But it doesn’t. It feels horrible. You are no longer in control of something that you have made – it has a volatile life of its own. There’s often a nasty edge, people saying they hate your work or that you’re wrong wro
ng wrong, or that they simply don’t see what the fuss is about. But even without that, going viral feels horrible. Eyes and minds in the hundreds, come to join you. Hello, here’s a crowd, in your head. Every word, every decision, every silence, up for view. Something big, something much bigger than individual net users, stirred and skulked behind all those screen names and icons; it had noticed you and you didn’t really want it to notice you and you couldn’t take anything back.
Print didn’t feel like this. But in the office, the digitisation effort quietly advanced, scanning, transcribing, proofreading. Every mistake, every bad decision, every borrowed line, brought into view of the unsleeping search, the giant.
After a lull, the drilling started up again next door. The vibration it sent through the fabric of the flat made the woodwork click and buzz and produced a tinny rattle from two cans touching each other on the side table. I moved one, stopping them clattering together, feeling the fillings in my head, the maturation and glory of my headache.
What was Quin playing at? Building me up higher, so I had further to fall? But surely that would rebound on him – he’d look a fool if he turned around now and said, ‘This guy Bick, this #thinkfluencer, he’s an incompetent drunk.’ Perhaps it was just head games, designed to produce exactly this confusion and angst. Perhaps it was entirely innocent and he really thought I was a #brainleader and so on.