We Belong Together

by Beth Moran

  Every woman with a public profile gets trolled. I suppose every man probably does, too, but I wonder if fewer of those messages involve graphic details about what the recipient should do with their body, or what the troll is going to do to said body. So, as my followers grew, and the trolls reproduced like rabid rabbits, of course I received a regular bombardment of nasty comments. Lucy and I accepted these as par for the course, deleting, blocking, and reporting as appropriate. That isn’t to say that they didn’t affect me. Many of them inspired nothing more than an eye roll. Some of them had Lucy and me laughing at their brilliant ingenuity. Far too many of them simply made me feel grubby and ashamed.

  Delete. Block. Report.

  It was part of my job, and one I grew far better at learning to handle like an emotionless robot. They didn’t want to hurt me, they wanted to hurt Nora Sharp. Who didn’t exist. Who wasn’t, actually, me.

  And then, just over a year ago, someone using the account name NoraShark sent a DM to Nora’s Instagram account containing a link to a local news article about a Moroccan restaurant on the edge of Holborn. I had reviewed this restaurant. The food was great, and I made that clear in the review. The family who ran it clearly loved what they did. However, the main reason I had gone was to check out their new, heavily promoted live music evenings. The singer was dreadful, so of course a passing comment that people should go for the food rather than the entertainment ended up edited into a headline about serving earplugs alongside the starters.

  This new article described how the singer, Layla Alami, who happened to be the daughter of the café owners, had been performing in public for the first time since completing chemotherapy. But of course nobody bothered to find that out until a video of Layla had gone viral, and the restaurant had become a local punchline. The so-called journalist who was supposed to be reviewing the evening certainly hadn’t, because her focus had been on the food and the service. The customers stopped coming, and the owners hadn’t the heart to continue.

  They followed up the link with another message:

  You did this. I hope you’re proud of yourself for destroying a good family who did nothing but work hard and try to provide a decent life for their children. A beautiful girl is broken. She blames herself. Nobody else does. We blame you.

  Despite what Miles and Lucy said, repeatedly, I blamed me, too.

  We blocked the account, but over the next few weeks, more messages arrived, usually one every couple of days. The accounts changed every time: NoraShark1, NoraShark2 and so on. The messages ranged from the fairly mild, ‘How can you carry on like normal when other people’s lives have been wrecked?’ to the disconcerting, ‘One day you will know what it is like to feel the pain that you have caused others and when that happens my family can finally rest.’

  The final message, sent from NoraShark32, when Lucy and I were both on the brink of contacting the police, said this:

  I will find out who you are and then it will begin.

  Lucy had found the children of the couple who ran the restaurant on Facebook. The Alami family seemed to be huge, with a community of aunts, uncles, cousins and various other relatives all in continual contact, despite living on three different continents. More online investigating revealed no clues about which family member might be sending the messages. Once they stopped, to be quickly replaced with more trolls eager to tell Nora how much they hated her, we breathed a sigh of relief and put it behind us.

  Except… I couldn’t help thinking about Layla Alami, who blamed herself, and her family. The knowledge that I had inadvertently caused such a horrible chain of events was impossible to forget. I sometimes lay awake at night wondering if there was a way to make it up to them. Hoping that, unlike me, they had genuinely been able to move on.

  It was months later, in November, when Nora received a message from NoraShark33:

  I know who you are.

  An arpeggio of unease scrabbled up my back and gripped onto my throat. Lucy blocked them. I spent the whole night staring at the ceiling and praying it wasn’t true.

  A week later, from NoraShark34:

  I know who you are and I know where you live.

  No worse than a hundred other messages I’d had that year, but I deleted it with trembling hands.

  Three more followed in the run up to Christmas:

  Are you going to share your secret, or shall I do it for you?

  Which one is the real you? The hateful bitch who destroys lives or the dreary coward who hides behind her?

  Did you enjoy your goat’s cheese pizza? If you did, will you tell everyone you hated it anyway?

  That one sent me running for the bathroom, stomach heaving. I had ordered pizza the night before at an Italian restaurant a few streets away from Marcus’s flat. It was the first time I allowed the proposition that this person was telling the truth to actually settle, instead of batting it away as the usual empty drivel.

  Christmas Eve, NoraShark38 sent a picture of the dress I’d worn to a party the evening before. So that was a relaxing few days spent at the Tufted Duck, smiling and pretending everything was merry and bright as I flipped mince-pie pancakes while battling semi-hysteria.

  I wondered about speaking to the police, but what could I say? The messages contained no explicit threats, they were sinister, but exposing my real identity was my problem, not a matter for the law.

  December twenty-ninth, the day I got back from Windermere:

  Nice trip home?

  The next day:

  Maybe now you’re back it’s time to discuss your plans for the new year.

  All these messages were, of course, squashed in between countless others, ranging from gushing invitations to parties through to yet more of the usual violent vitriol. These felt different, though. And after that last one, a tendril of fear coiled around my lungs, constricting every breath. Only once Marcus had picked me up and we were safely over the Severn Bridge and well on the way to our New Year’s Eve party could I suck in enough oxygen to think straight. With Marcus’s solid presence beside me, in the warm glow of the beautiful castle, surrounded by people who dealt with this sort of crap all the time, I was able to regain my perspective. Someone out there really hated me, but I could hardly blame them.

  After arriving back in London a single woman, I let Lucy deal with the social media side of things while I cried, wallowed and tried to yank myself together and finally come up with a plan to move forwards with my life.

  And then, late Thursday afternoon, I got a message to my personal email account. The sender was NoraShark@hotmail.com:

  Not such a Happy New Year? Maybe it’s time for Nora to RIP.

  For once, I completely agreed. Outside of using it for things like Amazon purchases and my energy bills, about ten people knew that email address. In a flood of panic, I decided it was time for a break. I nearly bought a train ticket home, but then I imagined this person following me onto the train, finding out where my parents lived. What if they booked themselves into the Tufted Duck? Plus, how could I explain any of this to them? I needed to go somewhere far more difficult to trace, and I needed the flexibility and privacy of my own transport.

  I needed to be with someone who knew who Nora was, and who’d listen to the whole story, hug me while I cried, have me laughing about the whole sorry mess and then come up with an outrageous plan to help me make it right.

  I did a hasty search for used car dealers, diving into a taxi with my face encased in a scarf, hat pulled down low, and returning a couple of hours later with the only car I could afford to buy in cash.

  I spent the rest of the evening pacing up and down, stuffing in Pringles and trying to form coherent thoughts that allowed me to rationalise what was going on. It was probably easy for someone with basic hacking skills to find out my email address, once they knew who I was. They still hadn’t threatened me, not really.

  They just wanted to torment me, it would seem.

  I tried to calm down, collect my wits. I went through all my
social media accounts, but Lucy had kept on top of things and there was nothing new that seemed to link to the stalker, or any of the Alami family. I tried to search the family’s Facebook accounts again, but they were mostly set to private, and the few I could access were completely innocuous.

  First thing in the morning I would pack up and head to Nottinghamshire, trusting and hoping that Charlie had meant it when she’d insisted that this time she’d be home for good. I put my doubts to one side and pretended to try to go to sleep.

  When the first message pinged through to my WhatsApp, I nearly fell out of bed. Before I’d untangled myself from the duvet and fumbled for my phone on the bedside table, another one had arrived. Six more followed in quick succession. I read them perched on the edge of the bed, the only light the glow from the attachments as I opened each one with the apprehension and speed of a bomb-disposal expert snipping the red wire on a homemade device. The dread and dismay grew with each one. Most of the messages were a mix of news clippings, formal notifications and photographs clearly showing six different restaurants that had gone out of business in the past year. I recognised the name of each one because I’d reviewed them. Three of them were terrible and would have failed with or without me. Three more were okay, nothing special, and given how few new restaurants survived they wouldn’t have succeeded without taking my carefully worded criticism on the chin and making some serious changes. My review could potentially have been their saviour.

  The final news clipping was an obituary. Layla Alami’s cancer had returned, and this time the chemotherapy could not save her.

  You did this, message number eight starkly informed me. You stole her will to fight.

  More messages, then:

  How can you live knowing she has died?

  Do you enjoy spending the blood money?

  I told you to stop but you ignored me. Now it’s too late…

  Now it begins.

  The flat intercom buzzed, and I let rip with a scream. I automatically threw my phone across the bed, heart thumping, the rest of me like one giant spasm of fear. Chest jerking with each heaving breath, I scrabbled off the bed and to the window, pulling back the blind with a quaking finger. I couldn’t make out enough of the main entrance to see whether anyone lurked in the shadows there, but the rest of the street appeared to be empty.

  Another message pinged.

  Bloody hell. Should I call 999? I grabbed my phone and saw, to my utter terror, a photograph of the flat entrance. Not the main entrance, but the door into my actual flat, only a few metres down the corridor. In front of the door was a box, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with a red bow.

  I waited an agonising fifteen minutes before creeping down the corridor, staring through the spyhole, heart still veering dangerously close to supersonic, trying in vain to quieten my sobs and rampant breathing long enough to hear whether anyone was still out there. I could leave it until the morning. Call Lucy and ask her to come over so we can look at it together.

  While agreeing with myself wholeheartedly on this wise and rational decision, another part of me whipped the door open, snatched the box and slammed it shut again, clicking the locks into place before sliding down to join the delivery on the welcome mat.

  ‘Crap, Eleanor, what did you do that for?’ I whispered.

  Now I was going to have to open it, wasn’t I?

  Slowly, gingerly, I unwrapped the box.

  Inside, encased in plastic packaging, was, if my food-industry expert eyes were not mistaken, a heart.

  A lamb’s heart, at a guess.

  Raw, obviously. Bloody and squelchy.

  There was a typed note in the box:

  A gift, seeing as yours appears to be missing. We will discuss your future plans in person soon.

  Minutes later, having thrown an assorted pile of random items into the nearest bags I could find, I paused to take a photo of the heart, the box and its wrapping and then dumped it in the outside bin on my way the heck outta there.

  13

  Waking up the next morning, it took me a moment to remember why the usual feeling of ugh had been replaced with a flutter of anticipation: oh yes! I was going to make Charlie’s dream come true and transform a ramshackle, rickety farm into an exquisite getaway venue. I was going to atone for at least some of the awfulness that I’d contributed to the world by spending the foreseeable future helping restore and build people up instead of smashing them down. Hope would have a beautiful place to live, and Daniel might even be able to take a day off once in a while. I’d cook, and clean, and for the first time enjoy the far more challenging and noble craft of being a creator, not a critic.

  I couldn’t undo what I’d done, but here at Damson Farm, I had the tiny twinkle of hope that I could at least, from this point forth do better. Time for my fresh start to commence.

  I spent the day planning, plotting, poking my nose in the other bedrooms and making a list of what would need to be dumped, upcycled or stay as it was, and researching similar venues on the internet.

  Then Lucy messaged:

  I forgive you for firing me via a voicemail because I know something must be really up for you to walk away from Nora without even talking to me about it 1st, but honestly, WTF!?!?! I thought we were a team, not to mention friends! I can’t believe that after everything you care so little about Nora, or me. I can’t do that. I won’t put Nora ‘ON PAUSE’ and I won’t give up on her. I’ve spoken to Miles, and he isn’t going to, either. I wish you all the best with whatever the hell it is you’re doing, but, like I said: WTF!!!

  I tapped out a quick reply, begging her to take the threats seriously and contact me, and then, with no small sense of trepidation, I looked at Nora’s media accounts. Wow. Lucy had not been slow in adopting her new role. There were various images of her here, there and everywhere, entwined with random semi-celebrities and according to her captions having the time of her life:

  #NewNora and #LetsGetThisPartySharp-ed and other gibberish about how from now on she was taking no crap and loving herself as she deserved, and not going to waste her shot.

  I also quickly discovered that she’d changed all the passwords so I could no longer access any of the accounts. ‘Well, Lucy,’ I muttered while simultaneously deleting all the accounts from my phone and laptop. ‘She’s all yours from now on.’ I didn’t bother reminding her that at some point Nora Sharp probably ought to mention something about food.

  I whipped up a tray of caramel brownies and raised a mug of peppermint tea in a toast of farewell to a friendship, a career and an imaginary woman who had been both the making and the breaking of me.

  As usual, once Hope was in bed gently snoozing down the baby monitor, Daniel and I convened for dinner at the kitchen table.

  ‘So, are you still set on turning my family home into a rescue home for stray city-slickers?’ he asked, after we’d loaded our plates with butternut squash lasagne and squares of crispy focaccia.

  ‘Only if you want me to,’ I replied. ‘It’s totally up to you if I save your family home from crumbling into ruins while simultaneously creating Charlie’s legacy, and securing a future for Hope. I’m easy either way.’

  He let out a bark of laughter. ‘I get the feeling you’ve never been easy about anything. I was half expecting to emerge from my study and find our first guests settling into minty cocktails and sourdough canapés.’

  ‘Oooh, sourdough canapés. I’ll add that to the list.’

  Daniel stopped eating, serious now. ‘Eleanor, this is a huge undertaking. A massive commitment. You can’t decide this overnight.’

  ‘How long did it take you to decide to keep Hope?’

  He frowned, shaking his head. ‘That’s completely different!’

  ‘Well, it is and it isn’t. Sometimes someone or something needs taking care of. Needs someone else to say I’m going to make this work. And if it happens to be something you have the skills, experience and the time to do, why would you need a whole night to decide?’

&
nbsp; ‘What about the money and resources? I don’t have a lot I can invest in this. All the will in the world won’t be enough to even get started.’

  ‘I know we need to, like, do a million spreadsheets and look at costings and projections and expenditure and business plans, but I grew up doing this. I won’t spend a penny on the retreat until you’re happy we can see it through. But in the meantime, I have some savings. Not masses, but enough for paint, some new bedding and towels, toiletries, some other bits and bobs. I know what’s worth spending on now and what can wait. To start with, why not let me just get the place looking nice again, a lovely place for Hope – and you – to live in? Then you can decide about opening it up to other people.’

  Daniel rubbed his scar. ‘Can I be honest?’

  ‘There’s no point us talking about this if you can’t.’

  ‘Okay.’ He took a sip of water. ‘I’m concerned that you’re doing this out of some sort of tribute to Charlie. Because you feel like you let her down by not responding to her invitations sooner. This is making it up to her. That’s the last thing she’d want. She’d want you to be living your dream, not hers.’

  I shook my head, vigorously. But he hadn’t finished.

  ‘Also, you can’t start a project like this as some sort of therapy. Then, once you feel better move on, leaving me with it. I work with spreadsheets, not bed sheets.’