Click, Double-Click

by James Calum Campbell

  Now we had the interval to endure. How odd to be out and about with people who were living a life. MacKenzie emerged briefly and caught up with us at the bar. I noticed the way people gave her space. I reflected my sister was, after all, a celebrity. To me, MacKenzie was just MacKenzie, the tall girl in the long black robe, with long black hair, the dazzling cobalt eyes, the broad, full candlepower smile. Difficult to have any real interchange in the artificial surroundings of a crush bar. As I struggled to pick up the drinks I could hear the great and the good haw-hawing behind me and I recognised all too easily the rich gravelly baritone.

  ‘Sublime.’

  Horton stared right through me.

  Dorothy asked us all back to Moray Place for supper, but no, MacKenzie had to shoot through. They had a shuttle to catch. They had it all to do again at the Wigmore. What about Alastair and Caitlin? Caitlin muttered that she had a headache, and I said we’d better have an early night. Couple of wet blankets. Anyway, MacKenzie said she would be back for the Festival and would see everybody then. Meantime, best go back and tune up for the Dvorˇák F major, the American. I accompanied her to the door backstage. I suddenly wished I hadn’t come. I realised I badly needed to talk to my sister and here she was, surrounded by the impenetrable aura of artistic performance. She was ‘on’. And there was no time.

  ‘How do we sound?’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘You’re not even listening. What’s up?’

  But how could I possibly tell her? How could I burden her when in a few minutes she and her viola would have to announce that F major folk melody that would transport Bohemia to Appalachia? It was her night. I couldn’t possibly intrude. And it was being recorded, going out on Radio 3 later in the week.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  She gave me an uncertain smile. ‘We’re doing all six Bartoks in September. You’ll come?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Catch you.’ She gave me a swift peck on the cheek and pushed open the door. She had an afterthought.

  ‘Oh! Had a funny dream about you. You were on a beach.’

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

  ‘Not a Hawaiian beach. Black sand, lots of jetsam. Old rope and empty containers. Big rock basilisk like a carious tooth. Oh, and a waterfall down a cliff face. Only it was flowing backwards. Caitlin was there too.’

  ‘Surreal.’ Caitlin entertains this kind of New Age mumbo jumbo that MacKenzie and I, being twins, are telepathic. This sort of notion just irritates me. If MacKenzie has the power, I don’t. Maybe the telepathy gene comes along with the pitch gene. Me, I have absolutely no interest in ESP, ghosts, media, spectres, or any other manifestation of the paranormal. I do not wish to have my tea leaves read. I do not wish to have my entrails deciphered. I do not wish to be in the vicinity of any crystal balls, Delphic oracles, Cassandras, or Sybils.

  ‘Enjoy the Dvorˇák!’ MacKenzie gave a brief wave and vanished.

  I didn’t much. And I berated myself. Dvorˇák didn’t have an easy life. And he kept smiling. I really ought to take a leaf out of his book.

  Caitlin was unusually quiet on the way home. Maybe she really did have a headache. She disappeared into the kitchen to make us a cup of tea while I slouched in an armchair staring vacantly at the BMJ and wondering if Project Bletchley was all washed up. She brought the tea in and I absentmindedly took it without looking up. She sat still on the settee. After a minute I became aware of her immobility. She was staring at me intently as if trying to make up her mind about something. I put the journal down.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Not really.’

  I didn’t press her. I just waited. Doctor’s trick.

  ‘Can I tell you why I’m here?’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  So, that night, Caitlin told me why she was on the run.

  Basically, she had tried to kill somebody. She was keeping her head down, maintaining a low profile, in order to avoid a charge of attempted murder.

  The girl she had tried to kill was named Francesca Moncoeur. Mademoiselle Moncoeur had a buddy yclept Cassandra Tilde-Broughton. You wouldn’t make it up. I could see them, arm in arm strutting their stuff down the streets colour-coded green on the Monopoly board, loaded with bags and designer labels – Topshop and Zara and Jigsaw and Miss Selfridge and Russell and Bromley. Cassandra in her cream frill top and dusky blue wool cardigan, a grey chiffon layered skirt and her taupe suede peep-toe espadrille wedges. Francesca in an ivory sundress and a putty linen sheer cardigan. Cream leather flats. Fran and Cass. (Cass yes, or even Cassie, but, as Caitlin pointed out to me, nobody ever shortened Francesca’s name.)

  They all had fancy phones and had Twitter and Facebook and SMS and used all sorts of engines and websites I’d never heard of. According to Pear Analytics, a San Antonio-based market research firm, 41% of the traffic on Twitter is ‘pointless babble’. Surely an underestimate. Of course, the champions of these sorts of communications leap to a defence. Danah Boyd, a social-networking researcher responded to the Pear survey by saying that Pear’s ‘pointless babble’ was better characterised as ‘social grooming’ and/or ‘peripheral awareness’. Personally I don’t want to be aware – not even peripherally – of what my friend is about to have for her dinner, of which train station she is about to pull out of.

  Anyway …

  Caitlin started getting these tweets appearing on her mobile. They were kind of view-halloes in Spanish. Initially she didn’t think much about them. Spanish was one of nine subjects she carried.

  ‘¡Huy dia!’

  ‘¡Ole Hobo!’

  (Hobo was Caitlin’s school nickname, because she was a waif, a gamine, and she played the oboe.)

  ‘¡Hautbois!’

  It was some sort of adolescent craze that would have expired by lunchtime. At first she replied with a cheery ‘Hello 2 U 2!’ then because of the sheer volume of messaging she gave up. She was aware of a vague unease but she couldn’t quite identify its source. Then the messages became short and terse. No words. Only punctuation.

  ‘¡!’

  And finally, only the Spanish orthographic convention of the inverted exclamation mark at the beginning of a sentence.

  ‘¡’

  Reiterated.

  ‘¡¡¡¡¡¡¡’

  Messages were coming from elsewhere. Not just Francesca. Cassie had joined in. And other friends. Or ‘followers’, to use the technical term. She was being picked on. It was her scar. They were ridiculing her scar.

  Ignore it, she told herself. They’ll get bored. She went to bed and switched her phone off.

  So. That’s how you get bullied in a girl’s school. Why couldn’t they do something straightforward like stick your head down the toilet? Trust them to dream up something far more excruciating.

  The next morning she reluctantly switched her phone on to be deluged by a twitpocalypse. Each inverted exclamation mark had somehow intensified its virulence. A gibe had become a physical blow. And not a word was spoken. Nobody came near her. She had been sent to Coventry. Little cliques would see her coming and divert away, giggling. She ran after Cass in the street one day and put a hand on her shoulder and Cass shook her off and quickened her pace and muttered over her shoulder, ‘Eff off.’ Suddenly she was in agony, and she was utterly alone.

  The cyber bombardment continued, night after night, like the Blitz. In a moment of insight, she realised it was not going to abate. There were four weeks of term left. What could she do? She could suffer it. Actually she didn’t think she could; it was never an option. She could run away. She thought seriously about that. But that seemed to her to be a kind of cowardice, and she didn’t want her tormentors to win. She could tell her teachers. But that seemed cowardly too, and it wouldn’t work. Francesca would merely shift the goalposts, alter the ground rules, torment her from a different angle, and with doubled intensity.

  Or she could force a confrontation.

  She settled on the latter. When Caitlin told me this
I told her I admired her for it but she shook her head without emotion and told me that it had not been an admirable thing to do. She had had no choice. Her back was to the wall.

  Actually it wasn’t all inverted exclamation marks. She got other stuff, more explicit. She didn’t want to talk much about that, but she did show me a message on her phone that she had saved.

  Go back to your Irish bogs, scarface. Wish the airbag had ripped you apart with your sis, loser.

  The Irish taunt was kind of interesting. Most of the time the English just pretend the Irish aren’t there. You rarely hear any Irish news on the BBC. Even on the weather forecast, they sometimes just erase Eire from the map and leave the six counties looking forlorn and embarrassed floating around in the Atlantic.

  I didn’t ask Caitlin this, but I thought, why not just switch the phone off? Or get a new sim card? Why allow yourself to be screwed up by the rantings of people who are clearly screwed up themselves? Of course, in the thick of it, it’s not as simple as that. Digital pile-on. The whole world is watching. Most of us are more thin-skinned than we think. In New Zealand I once got a letter of complaint from a patient’s relative that I knew to be unjust and way over the top. So what did I do? I framed it and stuck it up above the loo. Caitlin was much braver than me. She was going to take them on. She was going to face them down.

  After class one day, Spanish as it happened, Caitlin picked up her books and crossed the room to where Francesca and her entourage were congregated. She had a memory of the clique catching sight of her approach, of the circle opening to reveal Francesca, and of the conversational buzz dying to absolute silence. They all looked at her with amused, quizzical expressions.

  ‘Francesca we need to talk.’

  ‘No we don’t. Don’t talk. Send me a text. If you like.’

  These were the ground rules. All right. She would play by them.

  She thought long and hard about the text she would send. She dismissed the idea that she might simply ask Francesca to desist. She wasn’t going to express her anguish because she knew the sadistic pleasure of the bully resided in the sight of the victim suffering. She most certainly wasn’t going to beg. What else? Threats? ‘I’m going to tell on you.’ Pathetic. No. She needed to hit back. What were Francesca’s weaknesses? She didn’t have many. Popular, clever, posh, well connected, rich, beautiful.

  One thing. She was scared of heights.

  How did Caitlin know this? It had just been a chance remark she had overheard during spring term. Cassie got an exotic present for her sixteenth birthday – a balloon trip, for Cassie and five pals. Caitlin, experienced aviator, had jumped at it. But Francesca didn’t want to go. ‘Oh God no,’ she had laughed. ‘Sweaty palms!’ Caitlin thought little of it. But she had filed the tiny snippet of information away. And now she had retrieved it from the filing cabinet of memory and she sat down and without pausing to compose or edit a script she let her thumbs dance across the key pad.

  ‘Francesca, meet me on the high board at the pool, Thursday, 5pm. No show – you are a coward. Caitlin.’

  She copied it to the entire body of exclamatory correspondents and pressed send. So within a few seconds the entire school knew about it. She had no sense of exultation, but there was a sense of release. She had no clear plan, merely a hunch that, whatever happened, things would come to a head and there would be some sort of resolution. She began to sympathise with suicide bombers. She had heard on the news about young Palestinian and Iraqi and Afghan boys and girls walking into crowded supermarkets with explosives tied round their waists, and it had been incomprehensible to her. She had despised them. Surely they were brainwashed. They were savages. Now she wasn’t so sure. She was muddled.

  She had chosen the time and the venue for the showdown carefully. Thursday afternoon was swimming practice, for the serious swimmers. Mr Foubister took the session. Stamina work. 100 metre fartleks, freestyle, 70% effort. Poolside, he sauntered up and down in his fawn polo neck and slacks, impervious to the drenching he was getting, yelling technical advice and encouragement through cupped hands. By quarter to five they were warming down. Then Foubister usually let them skylark around for ten minutes before calling it a day. Caitlin was banking on it. At five to five she went back to the dressing room and took off her swimming cap and let her gorgeous red hair fall down her back. Then she slipped out of her one-piece Lycra racing costume and put on a flesh-coloured bikini so exiguous that at first glance you might think she was completely naked. The broad purple keloid stripe from epigastrium to throat was almost completely exposed. She wanted them to know that she didn’t give a damn. Now if only she could get to the board without running into Foubister. She was in luck. He had his back turned, stuffing coins into a coffee machine. Nobody had left the pool. There was a higher turn-out than usual, and nobody seemed in a hurry to get dressed. Francesca and her entourage had already congregated on the 12 metre diving platform. Caitlin began to ascend the narrow stairway, no more than a ladder, to the top. She took her time because she did not wish to be out of breath, and she did not wish her heart to be hammering, when she got to the summit.

  Caitlin’s recall of the group was vague. Was Cass there? Five or six girls, maybe. Some in swimming gear, others casually dressed. There was a kind of sarcastic ‘Oooooh’ when she came up level with them. The group drew back. Francesca had positioned herself well away from the business end of the platform. She wore a cream cotton playsuit with a ruched brown jumper. Pale tomato sandals. The two girls faced one another. Caitlin had her back to the pool. She wondered what was going to happen next. She hadn’t written a script. Francesca was watching her carefully.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Come here.’

  Francesca gave an indifferent shrug and took two paces forward so that they stood with their faces only inches apart.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I need you to stop sending me texts. You are to stop. Now. Do you understand that?’

  Francesca searched Caitlin’s eyes with curiosity, looking for a hidden agenda, an ultimatum, a strategy, a plan B. She realised that Caitlin had none of these things. She had come to the table empty handed. All she had was this pitiful plea. Leave me alone. Francesca smirked. ‘Go back down, Caitlin. You are a waste of space.’

  There was a pause. Bit of an anticlimax. Caitlin looked round vaguely for the stair rail.

  ‘Oy!’

  Foubister’s yell ricocheted around the piscine, batting off the vaulted ceiling. He had just spotted a naked girl on his high board. There was a diversion. Caitlin felt rather than saw the company turn their attention to the man poolside. Without any premeditation she hugged Francesca as if she were bidding her farewell and then she took a step back off the diving board. But she didn’t let go of Francesca. There was a second of freefall and then a terrific smack as the embracing couple hit the water and sank. Caitlin had instinctively taken a breath but Francesca had been so taken by surprise that the impact released whatever air was in her lungs and she immediately began to drown. And as they hit the bottom Caitlin tightened her grip and rolled over on top and thought savagely, stay under, keep a tight grip, wait till she stops struggling. Now Francesca had gone limp and bubbles were escaping passively out of her nose and mouth and her eyes were open and unseeing. And Caitlin thought, keep hold, just stay here until your own lungs are ready to burst.

  There was a crash by her side as of a depth-charge and she felt Mr Foubister’s strong arms come round her from behind and scythe away her grip around Francesca’s body. Then Caitlin was propelled to the surface. She took a gasp of air. Foubister took one frenetic glance at her and then jack-knifed below the surface again. Seconds later he was struggling to the pool edge in a clumsy backstroke, one hand cupped round Francesca’s limp chin. In a well-practised manoeuvre he placed Francesca’s hands on the pool edge and then leapt from the water without letting go of her hands. Then he dragged her out and laid her supine pool side and commenced CPR.

  The next 24 h
ours were a blur. Caitlin seemed to spend most of them in bed, for no very good reason. She was perfectly well. A doctor came to see her, and a matron, and various teachers with various mentoring and counselling roles. She heard with indifference accounts of Francesca’s progress from the pool via ambulance to Cheltenham General Hospital’s Emergency Department, to ICU, to HDU, to a stepdown ward, to a normal ward. The word was that the respiratory injury would be shortlived and that, largely thanks to Mr Foubister’s skill and speed, Francesca would be ‘neurologically intact’. The focus of attention began to shift from the immediate clinical issues to one of critical incident monitoring and significant event analysis. What the hell had happened? Sir Ronald Moncoeur, Francesca’s father, came up from London. Cabinet minister. He started to throw his weight, which was considerable, around. What did Gordon Foubister think he was playing at? Was it his idea of supervision, to have a cluster of excitable girls on the high board? The school would have to let him go. He’d be lucky if Sir Ronald didn’t take matters further. Some of the girls said Foubister looked at them in a funny way.

  Caitlin had the sense to play the amnestic card. ‘I remember we were fooling around on the high board. I think I slipped. Then it’s all a blur. I remember Mr Foubister pulling me to the surface …’

  But she told one person. She told her oboe teacher, Nicholas Shakespear.

  ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’

  ‘I was trying to kill her. I wanted her dead.’ And she told him all about the incessant cyber bullying that wore her down and finally took her to breaking point. Mr Shakespear listened to all of this with compassion and a mounting sense of fury, because he had endured five years, fifteen terms, of nonstop bullying at an English public school, twenty years before. He let her tell her story out in full, and then he got up and made sure the door to the music room was closed. He glanced at the windows and around the room as if to make sure they weren’t being bugged. Then he sat down beside her.