by Karen Swan
‘I was supposed to be seeing Em, but she’s doing another double shift,’ she groaned. Emma was Nettie’s best friend from university, a Titian-haired, porcelain-skinned willow wand with a brilliant brain, luck on her side and men at her feet, and who was on the fast-track to becoming a consultant obstetrician. Subsequently, she cancelled their plans a lot.
‘Well, I want to check out that new vodka bar on Prince Albert Road. Come with.’ Jules dropped her iPad, jotter and pens on their shared desk. Jules’s side of the desk looked like it had been raided by the police, with skewed sheets of paper scattered everywhere, coffee rings on the only visible bits of grey veneered desktop, the paperclips linked together in an industrial daisy chain – testament to the amount of staring out of the window she did – and sitting in the corner, a bug-eyed lemur toy she’d been given by her ex and couldn’t quite part with yet.
Nettie’s side, by contrast, was neat and tidy, with everything in its place and a motivational placard that read, ‘Your breakthrough is just beyond your breakdown’, which never failed to amuse Jules, who joked that the lot of them were fast heading towards one – now that Mike was running the show.
‘I really shouldn’t. I need an early night,’ she said, filing her paperwork into her top right desk drawer. She didn’t need to look up to know the expression that would be on Jules’s face at her words. ‘And before you say it, Em and I had promised to have a quiet one – she’s strung out, and I’m all bruised from the other day. She says I need a hot soak to bring it out properly. Bath salts. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Pah! What does she know? A night on the tiles is what you need. It would help you unwind properly. You’ve got to relax, Nets. Have some fun and go nuts. It’s much better for you. Blow off the cobwebs.’
Nettie arched an eyebrow but didn’t reply. Ever since Jules and her Big Passion ex had broken up, Jules’s answer to everything was a Big Night – promotion, engagement, winning a tenner on the lottery . . .
‘Would it hurt you to come for one drink? It’s on the way home anyway.’
‘But it’s never just one with you – that’s the problem.’
Jules slapped her hand over her ample chest. ‘I promise, just one. On my life.’
Everything hurt. That was all she knew.
Hitting ice walls at sixty miles per hour had been bad. But this was worse. So much worse. So, so much worse.
Her head was falling off, for one thing. Well, that had to be what it was. It was the only possible explanation for the throbbing above her neck.
And she must have been punched in the stomach for it to feel quite so battered.
And who knew her tongue had a pulse?
Downstairs, she could hear the sounds of Radio Four already blaring in the kitchen. That meant her father was up; it also meant pigs everywhere were running for their lives as the fat hit the pan. Should she go back to sleep? If she could just doze till, say, a week Tuesday, she’d get through the worst of this.
But John Humphrys wouldn’t be denied, his voice carrying through the gaps in the floorboards like water running through the pipes, and she stared at the wall for what seemed like an epoch, but according to her clock was only eleven minutes, before attempting verticality.
She had just managed it – her hands actually holding her head, like it had come loose – when she heard another voice vibrating through the floorboards of the draughty house and knew Saturday was well and truly underway. She sighed.
A few minutes later she was being propped up by the kitchen doorway. She stared at the familiar scene. Both her father and Dan were standing in the middle of the kitchen, working on her father’s bike, which was upside down in the middle of the room, the front wheel spinning.
‘Ah! It awakens!’ her father boomed – or so it seemed to her, anyway.
‘Dad, please?’ Nettie winced, simultaneously holding her hands up as though trying to push back the sound waves while marvelling at her own voice: seemingly it had grown hairs overnight.
‘Sorry, love,’ he chuckled, his eyes twinkling at the sight of her, bedraggled and broken. His Saturday mornings were never like this. He didn’t drink, never sat still; the man radiated busy-busy-busyness, always doing something, and everything about him suggested bonhomie: the bosky beard, sparkling hazel eyes, the rounded tummy that paid testament to his great love of French cooking and none whatsoever to his second great love, cycling.
Dan turned round to face her, just as bad as her father, a laugh already on his lips. ‘Oh, it is you. I thought Barry White had come back from the dead.’
He laughed freely at his own joke. Nettie had always thought it would be a lot easier to hate him if he didn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to Damon Albarn – both of them tall, cheeky-chappy types with round blue eyes and mousy hair, scruffy (perpetually wearing jeans, Pumas and hoodies), heads always hung low, usually from avoiding ex-girlfriends or irate customers. Currently, Dan was without a girlfriend, but she expected that to have changed by Friday night.
‘Not funny,’ she said testily, massaging her temples again as she grudgingly staggered into the kitchen, her white towelling robe tightly belted round her waist, her long dark hair hanging in a tangle down her back. Her foot caught in the handle of her mother’s handbag, kept in its usual place between the wall and the table, and she stumbled, falling awkwardly onto the back of the kitchen chairs.
‘Oh, for Chrissakes!’ she cried, her temper flaring from the fright. ‘That thing is a bloody liability there! Why can’t we move it?’
‘Love,’ her dad said sympathetically, pushing the bag against the wall and tucking in the handles, ‘you know your mother likes it there. Look, just sit down. I’ll get you a cup of tea. You know she always says there’s nothing a good cup of tea can’t remedy,’ he said, pulling out the orange Arne chair – each one round the unpainted table was a different colour of the rainbow – and gently pushing her into it. She gave him a sullen look, which he either ignored or, more likely, genuinely didn’t notice. ‘So, out with Jules again, were you?’
‘I hate her,’ Nettie muttered, just as Scout, Dan’s beloved Norfolk Jack Russell, trotted over to her for a cuddle. She looked down at him sadly, not sure she could bend that far right now.
‘And yet every week . . .’ Dan went back to spinning the wheel again, pressing the brakes on the handlebars and testing the ceramic discs, her father stopping to tweak something on his way back from switching the kettle on. Nettie watched with slack-jawed apathy as the two men began consulting each other again, heads together, the tea forgotten.
It had once been her Dan would come to see. They had first met when he’d been thirteen and she was eleven; she’d been coming out of the house as he walked up the path on his newspaper round, delivering their daily copy of the Guardian. He was two years above her at school, but it was the first time they’d spoken, and the following week she saw him from the upstairs window lingering in the corner of the square until their front door opened, whereupon he’d leaped to his feet and raced over, falling into a casual stroll just as he got to their path – and promptly ran into her mother.
After that, Nettie had made a point of opening the door at the same time every Saturday, and their chats on the doorstep were soon held over mugs of hot chocolate in the kitchen as her mother fretted over his cold hands in the wintry temperatures and deplored that his own mother had never thought to give him some gloves. So she had knitted him some for Christmas, which Nettie had found mortifying; but shortly after, when Dan had been fired from the paper round (on account of his persistent lateness for all the deliveries after number 91 Chalcot Square), he would still be found in their kitchen at the same time every Saturday. Her mother was convinced he felt more at home in their house than in his own, and as Nettie had advanced into the long, bleary sleeps of teenagedom – sometimes not waking before lunch – her father had spent more and more time with him, so that Nettie was now quite convinced he considered Dan a surrogate son, irrespective of th
e fact that the boy already had four stepfathers and counting.
Nettie slumped face first on the table as the two of them continued to spin and test and frown and tweak, used to being ignored on a Saturday morning. The kettle had boiled, but no one else appeared to have noticed. She rose, gingerly, and made the tea herself.
‘Oh, sorry, love!’ her father said distractedly, realizing his oversight as she noisily plonked herself back down at the table and reached for the half-closed laptop at the other end. ‘So . . . I take it you girls had fun last night, then?’
‘Yep,’ Nettie mumbled, wishing he’d stop pretending to be interested in her night out. He was too absorbed in his own special projects – cycling round Regent’s Park every day, gardening at the community orchard in St George’s Terrace, gathering a ‘Town Team’ to petition for a farmers’ market, model building – to pay too much attention to hers.
In truth, she remembered precious little about last night anyway. What was the point in having such a great time that you wiped all memory of it from your consciousness and had only pain as a memento in the morning?
She retrieved the laptop, which was, as ever, completely hidden beneath her father’s papers on the table – a children’s author and illustrator who had enjoyed some early success in the 1980s, he was currently working on a modern-day reimagining of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and there were at least forty drafts of the Piper scattered across the tabletop, some of them scrunched from when he’d thrown them against the wall in frustration. His most recent publisher had politely declined to renew his contract when it had expired a year last spring and he was writing this on spec, which was why – he kept saying – ‘It had to be perfect.’ Nettie privately suspected it was taking so long to complete because he spent most of his working days staring, lost, at the walls. The mortgage on the house had been paid off long ago, but she knew he was troubled by his diminishing royalty cheques, and the peppercorn rent she gave him, which he wouldn’t hear of increasing, didn’t cover their outgoings.
She tapped the keyboard with one lethargic finger and opened up her emails, sipping her tea and vowing some sort of revenge on her friend who thought that toffee vodka on a Friday night after a bad day at work was a good idea.
‘So where did you go?’ her father asked.
She didn’t want to think about it; a wince skittered across her features at the very thought. ‘Just some new vodka place opened on Prince Albert Road,’ she grumbled, closing down the line of conversation.
She frowned as the ‘loading’ icon circled continuously on her screen and drank some more tea. She looked out of the window towards the grey sky. It was the colour of an old bra, bedraggled and overused.
She looked back at the screen. Come on. Come on. Why was it taking so long?
She slid out her arm along the table, her head resting heavily on her hand. ‘Dad, is the Wi-Fi down?’
‘Don’t think so, pet. I was on an hour ago and it was working then. Why?’
‘It won’t load. The little blue circle thingy’s just going round and round.’
‘Sounds like there’s a big file coming through,’ her father said helpfully. ‘Just give it a minute.’
‘I’ve already given it three.’
Dan chuckled. ‘Nothing if not patient, you.’
She pitched a glare in his direction.
‘Are you expecting any photographs? They usually jam the feed,’ her father offered again, trying to temper her black mood.
‘Oh no. Don’t say you’ve sent yourself a load of selfies again?’ Dan teased, and she groaned, hiding her face in her dressing gown. Would she ever live that down?
Dan, recognizing that she had no reserves this morning and knowing she would be soon descending into an Official Grump, got up from his position on the floor. ‘Oh, come on, then, let me have a look at it.’
‘Oh. It’s working!’ she said brightly just as Dan was halfway across the floor to her, and shooting him a sarcastic grin before taking a noisy slurp of her tea. It was his turn to groan as he turned back to the bike again, used to her taking out her hangovers on him.
The screen – after its unusual dormancy – had sprung into life, the emails ticking down through the inbox like pages being flicked in a book. They loaded more quickly than her eyes could scan, but there was one word she did pick up on, one that was repeated over and over again so that it read almost fluidly off the rapidly uploading screen: Twitter.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ she whispered as the screen continued to scroll down. ‘You have a new follower . . .’ was repeated over and over and over and over.
She stared open-mouthed. This had to be some sort of technical glitch, or a computer malfunction. She checked the keyboard for a sticky key, but everything appeared normal, and after a few more minutes it finally and suddenly stopped.
Hesitantly – wondering if she was, in fact, still drunk – she began tabbing down individually with the arrow keys, but after several pages, she switched to the ‘pg dn’ button – and still they came, supposedly all these new followers and not a single name she recognized.
‘What is it?’ Dan asked, intrigued by her unusual silence.
But Nettie didn’t reply. She didn’t hear. She still couldn’t process what her eyes were showing her. This couldn’t be right. She was drunk. Hallucinating. She had to be.
She leaned in closer to the screen.
‘Nets?’
Still nothing.
‘I just don’t . . . I don’t believe this,’ Nettie murmured, frowning at the unintelligible cluster of letters and numbers of a shortcut link some – many, in fact – were re-tweeting.
The doorbell rang and her father straightened up. ‘Ah! Now, that should be my new carbon wheel,’ he said, pleased, as he trotted down the hall to the front door.
Dan sauntered back over to Nettie, curiosity getting the better of him and even surmounting the mystery of why the new brakes didn’t work. ‘Fine, then the mountain shall come to— Holy crap!’ He leaned a hand on her shoulder.
‘I know!’
They were quiet for a long while, both trying to make sense of it. ‘Well, how many are there?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t counted yet. There’s too many.’
‘Duh! Just go into your home page,’ Dan said, tutting again as Nettie’s hung-over fingers failed to synchronize and she dropped her head, already defeated.
Dan reached for the laptop and turned it to face him, his fingers flying easily over the keyboard as he logged in to Twitter. ‘How many followers did you have before?’
There was a pause. ‘Thirty-seven? I think?’
Dan stopped typing. ‘Seriously? I mean, I know I’m pretty much your only mate, but—’
‘Shuddup. It’s not my thing.’
Dan chuckled but didn’t argue back. His eyes were fixed on the screen, his fingers moving swiftly and making little tap-taps. She slid her arm further along the tabletop so that she was lying fully flat and rested her head on top of it. Her eyes closed.
‘It’s just gonna be some weird mix-up,’ she mumbled. ‘You know, like when a bank accidentally wires a million pounds into your account because they got one digit wrong.’
‘Yeah, because that happens all the time,’ Dan replied, his eyes widening as the Twitter page came up. He laughed out loud suddenly. ‘Jesus, Nets! Take a guess how many you got now?’
‘I can’t,’ she protested, her voice still thick and bleary.
‘Twenty-two.’
Nettie’s eyes opened again and she raised her head an inch. ‘You mean I lost some? Oh, come on!’
‘Thousand, you numpty. Twenty-two thousand!’
Nettie sat upright. ‘What?’ Was she hearing things? ‘Did you just say . . . ?’
Dan nodded, his eyes bright.
‘But why?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ he laughed, sitting down on the table, arms folded over his chest. ‘Come on, Nets, out with it. You don’t get twenty-two thousand fol
lowers overnight and not know why.’
‘But I don’t!’ she cried, her hands to her mouth. ‘Why are all these strangers following me? What do they want? Oh my God, Dan, what have I done?’
Dan watched her, his smile fading as he saw the truth on her face. ‘You honestly don’t remember?’
She shook her head.
‘Would Jules?’
‘Jules?’ she repeated, a glimmer of fear creeping into her eyes like a stealthy cat.
‘Well, it’s got to be something that happened yesterday, and given the sorry state you’re in, I think we can probably narrow it down to something that happened last night. Let’s face it, where Jules goes trouble usually follows.’
Memories of toffee vodka swam behind her eyes again and she pulled her hands down over her face, only the vaguest impressions of light and dark, and much laughter, flashing through her mind in distorted images, like the world seen through a teardrop.
Oh no. Oh no.
Dan handed her the phone. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’
Chapter Three
The kite-flyers were out in force today. Scores of dads running with their kids as kites bumped and fell and soared and got caught in the trees. The sky was still dirty, with grubby clouds scuffing the London skyline, and she watched as the pigeons and blackbirds strutted and hopped by her feet, pecking at the hard, frosted ground. Nettie shivered on her park bench – actually her park bench: she and her father had paid for it – as she waited for Jules to arrive with the hot chocolates. It was a long-held agreement between them that this was how it would be for the rest of the day – as penance for leading her astray last night, it was Jules’s duty to monitor her blood sugar levels more closely than a diabetic.
It was bitterly cold, but Nettie was grateful for that. It sobered her, the wind like stinging smacks on her cheeks, her nearly dry hair flying like little whip-cracks around her face. Her bobbled beanie had sagged low on the back of her head, and she was regretting the designer rips in her jeans, which were now responsible for her thighs and knees turning blue.