Switching on the TV later that evening, hoping to be distracted by a film or documentary, I caught the opening minutes of BBC’s Newsnight:
‘Tonight we’ll be reporting on the first big internet story of 2012: the overnight sensation of Emily Marr. Just who is Marr and why has she become one of the top trending subjects on Twitter? Joining us in the studio will be the woman who set the story alight in the first place, the Press columnist Nina Meeks, who is fairly certain she knows the answer. I should say that, in the interests of fair play, we have invited Emily Marr to come and defend herself, but as yet have had no reply from the woman at the centre of this story, the woman who, remarkably, has yet to speak to a single journalist or post any message online.’
And nor would she.
Chapter 20
Emily
Nina’s wish was granted and I became, for a time, Britain’s most hated woman. In fairness, the press were only the prosecutors: they brought the recommendation that I be hated, but people still had to hate me of their own accord.
I gave up noting the names of my detractors early on, even in passing. I had – and still have, presumably – tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands possibly. Visualising the reach of the internet was giddying, overwhelming; the feeling it gave me reminded me of the aftermath of my mother’s death, when Dad had never been able to explain where it was she had gone. He spoke of heaven and angels and eternal rest, leaving me to make sense of the abyss on my own.
This was a new kind of abyss.
The haters pursued me from the morning of Nina’s first article, mostly by email, since I had closed my Facebook account, and then, when my mobile phone number was widely published, by voicemail and text message. Later, perhaps most disturbingly, vitriol arrived by post and I would amass bagfuls of it in the small flat, not daring to throw it in the communal bins for fear that members of the resident media might steal and publish it. My ‘crime’ elicited the full gamut of hysterical responses, from threats of death and rape to declarations of admiration and love; I even had three marriage proposals, one from a man already married (‘but that doesn’t bother you, Emily, does it?’).
I soon found myself in a catch-22: I couldn’t ignore the letters and leave them unopened, or shut down my email account or change my phone number, in case Arthur wanted to contact me by one of these methods, and yet the messages I had to endure in (vain) search of one from him only reminded me, one by one, hour by hour, of how worthless I was, how unlikely ever to be communicated with again by a decent and civilised person. How implausible the notion that a man like him could ever have loved me.
Funny, but over time it was the supporters rather than the critics who made me most anxious. While the opponents got their hatred off their chests and retreated – they wanted no actual relationship with me, only a temporary target for their righteousness – the ‘fans’ persisted. Since my address was apparently publicly available (a photograph of Walnut Grove was more often than not preferred, to illustrate the gracious and élite social circle I had infiltrated and made toxic), it was only a matter of time before they began to turn up in person. Some were awed, speechless figures at the gate, their phones held aloft in readiness for a silhouette at the window, others were more forceful, coming to the door with the photographers to buzz insistently and, in their case, post passionate handwritten notes through the letterbox. A handful in particular would not take no for an answer. One woman came night after night, until I sobbed into the intercom, ‘Please leave me alone. I have to sleep.’ We both fell silent then, I at my flat door and she on the front step, stunned perhaps to have heard my voice, and then I heard the letterbox rattle once more: she’d posted a message. You are not alone, it read. I know exactly what you are feeling. Your pain is my pain.
And so on.
I soon discovered that such people were also acting on my behalf, disturbing a certain other Grove resident in their attempts to clear my name. Early one morning during the week after the verdict, my buzzer rang and, knowing it to be too early for the photographers and sensing unusual command in its application, I picked up the intercom.
‘Yes?’
‘Nina Meeks. Is that you, Emily? Can I have a word?’
I let her in, realising after a full minute of waiting that she did not intend coming up to the flat but that I was to join her in the hallway downstairs. Even then – more than ever, perhaps – this was for her a question of power, every move a strategic one. My heart thudded at the sight of her, the sound of her, the woman who had ruined my life. If I were you, Emily, I’d think seriously about disappearing, she’d said, and, long before that, He wouldn’t dare… That’s what she’d said to Sylvie that first day in the café: why had I not recognised it as the warning it had been?
She did not spare me the courtesy of a greeting. ‘Call your little friends off,’ she said curtly, as I drew up in front of her. ‘I’ve had them on the phone all hours of the night and at my door leaving hate mail.’
‘What?’ I assumed she must be talking about the doorsteppers and was unable to understand how she could have been affected at the far end of the Grove, Arthur’s end. ‘I would have thought you could do more about the reporters than I can.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, not the media. I mean the imbecilic members of the public trying to harass me in my own home. Ed caught one of them posting dog shit through the door.’
Circumstances forbade me from finding this funny. Not quite meeting her hate-filled glare, I began to defend myself: ‘How do you know they’re anything to do with me? They could be objecting to something else you’ve written? You’ve claimed plenty of scalps.’ The phrase came from the depths of memory – the party perhaps, which now felt like a hundred years ago, thousands, before my own scalp became worth claiming.
She smirked, unimpressed. ‘Oh, do me a favour, Emily. It’s fairly obvious who they’ve been inspired by.’
Mystified by this, I could only gape like an idiot, at a loss as to how to respond. Of course, later I saw online a picture of a group of people wearing T-shirts printed with the slogan: EMILY MARR, GET OFF HER BACK! They did not have their own website, at least not one that I could find, but the caption referred to them as a protest group, one that had heckled Press staff as they came and went at their offices in Farringdon and, presumably, Nina at home.
I took a long, shaky breath, wanting to tell her how miserable she had made me, how unnecessarily cruel I thought her act of revenge. It could neither bring back the Woodhalls nor make any difference to Arthur and me, since he had finished with me long before she’d made a public enemy of me. No amount of misery heaped on me by her and her colleagues could make me feel worse than I had in the car park that day at the coroner’s court, when I’d been rejected by him once and for all. But no words came. That early morning in February, standing in the hall under a lightless bulb, it was my first – and only – opportunity to confront her, to ask her to explain herself, but I was too cowardly to take it. Watching me cower and choke, she tossed me a last scornful look before leaving. ‘Just call them off, all right, or I’ll have no choice but to get the police involved.’
But I couldn’t help her even if I wanted to. I could hardly stop people from harassing her when I could not stop them from harassing me. The siege came to a head that same afternoon when another ‘admirer’, a middle-aged man, rang and rang the bell, at first calling up, ‘I love you, Emily!’ but, when I failed to appear, turning aggressive and shouting horrible insults, calling me a fucking whore and threatening to break down the door. Sarah Laing stormed out of her house then and, unable to beat the madman, decided to join him, screaming up at my window, ‘Can you please do something about this, Emily! I’ve got kids next door who don’t need to hear this filth!’ – as if I didn’t know she had children and hadn’t once been entrusted with their care. ‘And while we’re on the subject, if you don’t get rid of that disgusting graffiti, I’ll do it myself! I’ll do it right this minute!’
; I didn’t have a clue what she meant by this and in the time I’d searched online and found a photograph of my garden wall daubed with the words DIE, SLUT, she was already standing in the street with tin of emulsion and paintbrush, a look of righteous fervour on her face. Conscious that the whole scene would be reported by my personal press corps, I called the police before she could.
Presently, two male officers arrived and persuaded the admirer/abuser to leave. They then spoke in pacifying tones to Sarah, whose voluble complaints had drawn other neighbours to the gate, all of whom evidently had gripes of their own to share, before at last ringing my bell and asking to come up.
I was interested to see if either of the officers might be the one who’d been sent to break the news to Arthur that morning – I even remembered his name, PC Matthews – but of course neither was. I don’t know what I thought I would have gained by that: solace in the tiniest of remaining affinities, perhaps; the brief company of someone who had seen us in the same room at the same time and could vouch for our having once been together.
‘This is reaching the point where you need to think about your own safety,’ the older of the two policemen told me. He was about Arthur’s age, I thought. He had probably never planned to leave his wife for trouble like me.
‘Oh, there aren’t as many photographers now,’ I said. ‘If anything, I’d say it’s getting better.’
‘It’s not because of the photographers that you phoned us,’ he reminded me. ‘In situations like this, members of the public can be more threatening than the press. They’re interested for personal reasons, not professional ones. They feel a connection that isn’t there on your side. You have to be very careful. Are you living here alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there anyone you can go and stay with for a while? Anyone we can phone for you?’ The words, if not the tone, recalled those I’d heard in Arthur’s kitchen that morning long ago.
‘This is where I live,’ I said, but not as defiantly as I might have in previous days. ‘I won’t be hounded out. I can sit it out.’
I could sit it out, but I still couldn’t sleep. Only when, late in the second week, I began slipping out early in the morning to travel across the city to Hertfordshire to see my father, making the journey home again after dark, only then did the nervous energy involved in evading detection exhaust me enough to guarantee proper sleep.
Though I dressed unobtrusively for those public forays, I did not want to alter my appearance too radically for fear of confusing Dad. Since my hair was the chief giveaway, I wore a knitted hat to cover it up, tucking the strands inside it like a swimming cap and keeping it on even on the stuffy Underground. Passing a charity shop, I picked up a pair of glasses with uncorrected lenses, hoping I looked merely unstylish rather than hopelessly badly disguised. In the hospital toilet, I ditched the hat and frames, combed out my hair and added a little of the make-up Dad was used to seeing me in. I would then reverse the process before departure. In the context of my new, fugitive existence, it was not nearly as absurd as it sounds.
Once on the ward, I was able to recover a sense of perspective (there couldn’t have been many other places in the land that made being the object of mass hatred look like a marginal concern). Dad was fading again and no one was pretending it was ground that might be recovered. This, too soon and yet at last, was the final stage of the disease. There was so little of him left, hardly anything recognisable: no voice, no spirit, no humour. In having been robbed of the last vestiges of personal identity – his sense of place and his position in time had gone long ago – he had also been robbed of his last physical likeness to himself.
‘Dad,’ I would say to his motionless, emaciated figure, and sometimes ‘Daddy’, an infant again. ‘I love you very much, and I need you. Please get stronger.’ Please make everything better again, like you used to.
But he hardly responded to me now, either as a daughter he knew or a desperate stranger he did not. I could see my words had no meaning whatsoever and it would have broken my heart, had not my heart been already pulverised.
During one visit, one of the last I would make, his consultant took pity on me and arranged for me to see one of the hospital psychiatrists, who wrote me a prescription to collect from the pharmacy on site. (Going to the GP was impossible during this period, as was any situation in which I was required to say my name aloud or have it called out in public.)
The medication came only just in time, for by then I was breaking, pieces of me coming loose and floating out of reach. Even when I wasn’t being harassed I imagined that I was. Once, when I was leaving the hospital and walking to the station, I had a very strong sense I was being followed; by the time I reached the platform I had convinced myself someone was going to dash forward and push me under the approaching train. At home, I started to believe there was someone hiding in my bathroom or behind the sofa. I thought I could hear someone breathing on the other side of the flat door, would suspend my own breath for a minute at a time to try to catch the sound. I had reached the point where I didn’t know what was real and what was imagined.
It began to feel only right and natural that Dad no longer recognised me, for I did not recognise myself by then, either in the media’s depiction of me or in the altered woman in the mirror before me. I felt as if I was dissolving, disappearing. It was as if Emily Marr no longer existed.
Only Arthur could bring me back to life.
The day my father died, I travelled across London in absolute, if not blissful, ignorance, believing only that I was headed for a routine visit with him. For once, Phil and I would be there at the same time and I might have to face some awkward questions from him, but that was my only source of apprehension, most of my energy having been diverted in any case to the now customary imperative of not being identified by strangers. There were delays on the Northern Line, but I had a Sunday paper with me to while away the minutes. Indeed, I had time to read every word of a five-page profile of myself in its magazine.
It was the third weekend since the ‘story’ had broken and I was pleased to see that I was already being written about in the past tense. The article was headed WHATEVER HAPPENED TO EMILY MARR?. This, I learned, was a clever dual reference, first to my current status of having gone ‘into hiding’ and second to my childhood, for the journalist had taken the line that I’d begun life an innocent girl and been made degenerate and dishonest by family circumstances. ‘A series of events pushed a carefree, fun-loving girl into premature adulthood… From an early age Marr was familiar with domestic upheaval… The loss of her mother caused a wrenching insecurity that would soon manifest itself in the search for an older protector…’ And so it went on.
They’d sort of got it right, I suppose. It was a bit like one of those early drawings of exotic animals done by someone who has never actually seen his subject. The features were there, there were the right number of limbs, but the scale was off, the markings misjudged. The tail was in the wrong place.
No stone had been left unturned in this ‘under-the-skin’ portrait, but there was some satisfaction that not all yielded dirt. Phil ‘could not be reached’, for which I was grateful, while Matt, now with a new, ‘less capricious’ girlfriend, played down our relationship. ‘I didn’t see her very much before we split up. I had no idea any of this was going on.’ Charlotte, sadly, believed she did: ‘She used to be very conscientious, but after she met Arthur she got flaky. She started walking out without completing her duties, she constantly called in sick, and she had more dental appointments in six months than I’ve had in ten years. The weird thing was that in the days after those poor people were killed, she was no different from usual. When I think about it now, she must have had ice in her veins.’
There was truth in this from her perspective, I supposed, and it hurt to know it.
An employer from five years ago, whose face I struggled to recollect, offered this: ‘I always got the feeling she didn’t know what it was she wanted. She always seemed a
bit lost to me. To be honest, because she was so pretty I think she’d got used to relying on her looks to get her through life.’
I didn’t know which was more peculiar: learning the opinion of an unremarkable colleague from years ago or knowing that a nation of readers would that very day be sharing it.
Nina, of course, had been interviewed and was both more interesting and more articulate than anyone else:
Sylvie knew she was dangerous the first time she met her. I think we both did, not only because Arthur had a history of infidelity and liked her physical type, but also because she’s one of those women who you instinctively know will use her sexuality to her advantage. Women like her exist for men, not for women. She’d perfected that sexy-but-vulnerable Marilyn Monroe thing, the child-woman. And she didn’t seem to have anything else in her life, either, not a career or a strong social circle, no moral structure. I’m not saying she’s a sociopath, but I think events prove that she found it all too easy to disregard other people’s feelings when it suited her. The problem is that when enough people behave individualistically like this, society breaks down. Eventually, lives are lost, precious lives that should never have been sacrificed.
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 30