Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  Seriously, it’s ridiculous. We’re two frogs and a drop of blood short of a full-on biblical apocalypse here.

  Yeah, but you look really hot in purple, so on balance, I reckon we’re coming out ahead.

  I try to smother the smile that tugs at my cheeks. I’m wearing them now as it happens. Somewhere inside me, the prim, shy fan I was five months ago gasps, but I feel like I’m on an extended holiday from her right now. I hit send.

  It kills me, watching the three dots flicker as he considers his reply. Then I lick my lips, wondering what flirtation he’ll come back with.

  I’m on my way.

  I’d laugh out loud, but Evie would definitely want to know why, so I swallow it, and make do with typing. LOL.

  I’m not kidding. You said she lives on Clapham Common, right? I’ll be there in 15 mins.

  The swallowed laughter turns to rocks in my throat.

  Ryan, no. Just no. Do not come here.

  DO. NOT.

  Evie CANNOT SEE YOU!!!

  He doesn’t reply. I sit there, smiling and sweating. He can’t, can he? No. Clapham Common’s massive. It’s not like I gave him the address. Slowly I start to feel better, and turn my attention back to the unfolding drama on my feeds.

  With the receipt to boost it, #Knickers4Nick really starts to fly; it spreads organically from Twitter to Tumblr to Insta. At first a couple of well actually types try to complain that the size is pretty big even for a boy’s bum – Nick’s not exactly known for his childbearing pelvis – but we push back on that with links to the stories that he’s been bulking up for his role in that new Jacob Owen film, which in turn gives us an excuse to deluge the naysayers with the gym selfies he posted on Instagram, which in turn only lifts the hashtag further aloft. People RT, adding: OMG T.H.I.S. and *Slurps* Delicious tea, and Rick 4eva!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  I feel a little coal of pride, just under my ribs, at how vast and fast my community is. It takes eight minutes for us to trend. Half an hour later, the first fic featuring the notorious knickers appears on RickResource. I read it. It’s good.

  “Nice work, Horse Girl,” Evie murmurs.

  A message window pops up over my browser.

  Coming up the drive now. Better make sure it’s you who answers the door!

  “Shit!” I exclaim, lurching to my feet.

  “What?” Evie looks up.

  “I – uh, cramp,” I explain feebly. “Must be from sitting cross-legged.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, I’d better, I’d better, uh … just walk it off.”

  She shrugs, and I try simultaneously to limp convincingly and scramble at maximum speed down the stairs to the front door. I spy him through the faux stained glass. He’s got his hood up and his head down, but I’d know the roll of those shoulders anywhere. I open the door before he reaches it but the gunshot sound of the latch still draws an enquiring call from Evie.

  “Someone at the door, Cat?”

  “Uh … yeah,” I call back, and utterly fail to say anything else.

  “Well, who is it?”

  “Ah’d like to talk to you about Jaaaysus,” Ryan says, loud enough to be overheard. He says it in a truly egregious American accent, which is just as well, because Evie would recognize his normal speaking voice in two-fifths of a heartbeat.

  “Jehovah’s Witness,” I call back up to her. Ryan gives me a big thumbs up.

  Evie’s scorn echoes down the stairs. “Tell ’em to shove that magazine somewhere only God can see it.”

  “Sorry!” I announce to Ryan. “We’re quite happily steeped in sin here.”

  “Prove it,” he whispers and pulls me into a positively incendiary kiss. He holds me there, right over the threshold, until I melt.

  “Circumstantial evidence at best,” he murmurs, when our lips finally part. “I’m going to need more convincing.”

  “You’re very frisky this morning.”

  “The little coffee place on the corner opposite my hotel was closed. I need stimulation.”

  “This is London – you couldn’t find another coffee shop?”

  “It’s Italian. You know where I grew up?”

  “Biddinghuizen,” I say automatically.

  “Right. Population me, six sheep, a couple of dozen angry-drunk Dutch farmers and a crowd of rowdy metal fans for three days in August. I haven’t got over the sheer joy of decent coffee, and I don’t intend to. Besides, Gennaro’s is my local.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’m a creature of habit. And you’re a habit I’ve got into.”

  “Wow, the lines are coming thick and fast today.”

  “Like a Norwegian fishing fleet,” he agrees. “Have I caught anything?”

  I grin at him, but then the word caught snags my attention, and I picture Evie coming down the stairs. “You’re mental coming here. How did you even find this place? I know I never gave you the address.”

  “I’d recognize that bike anywhere. It saved my life. I walked around the common from the station until I saw it.”

  “All the way around the … but that’s miles.”

  He smiles. Suddenly earnest. “I wanted to see you.”

  I just stare at him. Momentarily paralysed by those words coming out of that mouth.

  “Uh, Cat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Since you told our religious friend to do one, don’t you think Evie’ll be expecting to hear the door close, y’know, sometime today?”

  Blushing and flustered, I yank him across the threshold by his belt and slam the door.

  “Look, Ry, it’s incredible to see you, always. But you can’t … you have to… Look, if Evie sees you…” I tail off, unable to finish a sentence. My brain is still grappling with the fact that Ryan Richards came all the way across town and walked around two miles of dog-turd-covered scrubland, daring recognition by Clapham’s infamous battery of fancy pram pushers, taking all that hassle and all that risk …

  … just to see me.

  I gape at him, and he takes the opportunity of my slightly open mouth to ease his own onto it again. He tastes of mint and tobacco. I lock my arms around him, my fingers finding the grooves between the muscles under his hoodie.

  There’s a creak on the landing above me.

  Shit!

  There’s no time to even pull out of the kiss. In desperation I just push harder into him, bearing him back to the wall, under the overhanging landing.

  “Horse Girl?” Evie calls from above us.

  There’s a door beside us. His fingers grope for it.

  “Dubs?” I hear. “Cat?” She’s light enough that the stairs barely whisper under her feet as she descends.

  We slip through the door and it closes on us, sealing us in darkness. I feel a dreadful urge to laugh, but manage to stifle it before it ruins my life. I can’t see. I can barely breathe.

  “This is insane,” I whisper.

  “I wanted to see you,” he whispers back.

  “How’s that working out, given that it’s pitch dark in here?”

  He chuckles deep in his throat, and pulls me in tighter. “I’ll take the trade to the other senses.” His mouth hovers just over my ear, like the promise of a secret. I feel his words as much as hear them.

  “Cat? Have you been kidnapped by Jesus freaks?” Evie’s right outside the door. She’d probably be able to hear us if our whispers weren’t muffled up in her cashmere coats. Every exhalation seems to make it hotter. Ryan’s breath swirls against my skin.

  “There’s a closet in my house we can snuggle up in all day if you’re into that, but…”

  I’m not sure I actually say the but. Certainly Ryan doesn’t seem to hear it.

  “That a promise?” He kisses my neck, just below my ear, then places another just below that, and below that, and now his lips are hot and feather-light along my collarbone.

  “Cat?” Evie sounds puzzled now, annoyed. My heart is like a hummingbird in my chest. This is crazy. We have to stop. I have to tell him to st
op.

  But what if he never asks again?

  His fingers tease between the waistband of my jeans and my stomach and then delve deeper, sliding inside my underwear. I flush as his fingers brush stubble. If I’d known you were coming I’d have made myself less yeti-like, I want to tell him. But now I can feel the pressure of his fingertips, circling, and I have to bury my face in his jacket to kill the moan easing its way up my throat.

  “Seriously, Cat. Where the fuck have you gone? We’re in the trenches here.”

  But Evie’s voice is dulled now, distant. Everything’s distant. And Ryan’s fingers are moving faster and little tremors are pulsing through my thighs. It’s only when my head brushes a coat rail that I realize I’m up on tiptoe, leaning into his body heat.

  “Cat?”

  I try to bite it back, but there are sparks in my abdomen and every muscle’s tensed. I can feel it building and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

  “Cat!” Evie yells, furious, just as I shudder hard against Ryan. His free hand clamps onto the back of my head, pressing my mouth into his chest as the groan escapes me. I can feel his grin.

  Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Now I actually do have cramp. My right calf feels like a bowling ball’s been shoved under the skin. Ryan senses the change in me.

  “Cat,” he whispers, “you OK?”

  Through gritted teeth I make a noise like a rusty gate opening, and then freeze. There’s no sound from outside, but I can feel Evie’s attention. I picture her looking at the door. Under me, Ryan’s chest has stopped expanding.

  Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. That’s it. I’m going to die here. She knows. She knows I’m here. But she’s not going to open the door. She’s just going to wait for me to die of cramp and fear and embarrassment. I feel sick.

  Ryan twists, fractionally. I feel the familiar slab of an iPhone in his jeans. My whole right leg is now one big seizure. Not daring to breathe, I slide the phone from his pocket. The light casts a submarine glow. I dial 141, then plug Evie’s number in and hit call.

  “Burning in my veins like teenage petrol, you do things to me I just can’t control.”

  I give the world’s smallest and most pained air punch as the strains of Evie’s ring tone rattle out from her bedroom. She didn’t bring her phone down with her.

  “Fuck’s sake.” I hear her mutter through the door and then her footsteps as she stamps back up the stairs.

  It takes all my willpower to wait until she answers the phone. I hang up and we explode out of the closet. Sweat slathers our hair to our foreheads. We strain to gasp quietly for breath. I hobble around, trying to get circulation back into my calf. Ryan drops to one knee and starts to knead the muscle until it gradually abandons its grudge against me.

  He stands back up, smirking. I stand in front of him, sweat-streaked and trembling. Feeling utterly without authority, I whisper, “Please, you have to go.”

  Still smirking, he brings his heels together and snaps off a military salute. Then he eases the door catch, pulls his hoodie up and slips out onto the drive while I stare after him.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  I start, and turn. Evie’s looking down from the top of the stairs, her phone dangling from her fingers.

  “Jesus Christ, Cat. You look like you’ve just come round from a two-week fever dream.”

  “Yeah, I was…” I swallow. “I was in the loo. I’m not feeling very well.” Now that I say it, it’s not even a lie. The pain in my leg has receded, but the nausea that came with it hasn’t. It must be the adrenaline.

  Evie’s face creases. “Poor thing. Need a pill? I’ve got basically the entire generic pharmaceutical output of southern India in the bathroom after my trip to Goa last month.”

  “No, it’s OK. I think I’m just gonna go home.”

  Evie smiles. “No worries, sweetie. You did amazing today. Knickers for Nick is trending globally. The Internet loves you. Toothpaste officially retubed. Get some rest. You’ve earned it.”

  I nod, let myself out without another word and totter towards my bike. I just about manage to make it to the bushes at the end of the driveway before I vomit.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Amy

  The clippers buzzed like a large angry beetle being held next to my head. Clumps of hair dropped past my eyes into the sink. The baby monitor crackled on top of the bathroom cabinet.

  I’d pleaded sick, and Dad had smiled indulgently as if to say, Of course, darling, you can have as many migraines as your little heart desires right now, and called the school. It was just me and Mum in the house, and she was asleep. It was one of those periods in the slow, hopeless, downward sine wave of the disease when she could outsleep a cat.

  When I was done I stood blinking at my reflection, wisps of hair tickling my nostrils and making me sneeze. God, my head was tiny! I never realized how much I had relied on my hair to disguise my freakishly minuscule cranium.

  I touched the soft bristles on the back of my scalp and they quivered under my palm like a prey animal. It was only then I noticed I was trembling.

  The cardboard box sat in front of me on the side of the sink. I yanked the tear-pull. Inside that, there was a smaller plastic box, enclosing another smaller cardboard one, enclosing a plastic pouch that had to be torn open with your teeth because the fine people at Heartstream Inc. apparently really needed you to prove you wanted it.

  I did.

  I slapped the little oval patches of material to the back of my skull. Immediately they went warm, drawing from my body’s electrical field like tiny symbiotic creatures.

  I opened the app on my phone.

  A smiley-faced, radioactive-blue heart (Hettie, the achingly hip tech kids at Heartstream Inc. had named her) bounced onto the screen.

  Hi Amy! it said. How are you feeling today?

  That key question asked, the face vanished from the heart animation, replaced by a question mark, and it settled into an icon at the top of the screen. The background to the button – a wash of sunsets, silhouettes of people kissing, racing car cockpits with grandstands blurring past them – gave a clue to the kinds of feelings that Heartstream encouraged you to share.

  “Well, Hettie,” I said, my thumb hovering over the icon, “I kinda feel like killing myself.”

  I pressed down.

  I didn’t know what to expect. First the warmth in the patches redoubled. The heat bled into my neck muscles, easing tension I’d more or less forgotten was there. I felt a wave of dizziness. The phone screen blurred in front of me.

  The little red counter in the corner of the app started to tick up: 1 … 3 … 8.

  One person following my stream, three people following … eight people…

  Without really understanding why, I started to dwell on the memory from the previous night. The awkward weight of Mum’s limbs under my arms. Her clammy nightie. The sickly smell of the ointment on her.

  30 people following … 87 … 116…

  I can’t help her I can’t help her I can’t help her.

  210 people … 387 … 540…

  She’s going to die, and I can’t help her.

  Messages started to pop into my inbox.

  Oh god, this is exactly how I feel.

  Thank you for sharing this.

  This is painfully real, thank you.

  I can’t… I wish this would all stop, I can’t handle it. I can’t. I wish… I recoiled from the thought. I jabbed my thumb down on the icon, and killed the stream. I was sweating and breathing hard. I blinked at my phone screen.

  1,305 people following your stream.

  How long had I been streaming for? Ten seconds? Twenty? I felt light headed.

  No, I just felt light.

  I looked again at the messages. I read each one over, and when I reached the end I went back and read them again. I ran my thumb over the icons of the users who’d sent them to me, reading their bios. There was a baker. There was a girl in Star Wars cosplay. There was a boy who said he was a
n artist. There were pictures linked to his profile; he worked in charcoal, just like me. A spike of something good pierced the armoured numbness I’d built around my emotions. A harpoon tied to a thread of contact.

  For the first time in I couldn’t remember how long, I felt connected to the world.

  “Where are your patches?”

  I ask it more to keep the conversation going than anything else. Polly’s subsided into silence, and I’m terrified she’ll stop drinking the tea and let it – and my hopes of escape – go cold. Thin strips of light cross her face through the closed venetian blinds. “Police will have marksmen here by now,” she explained, almost apologetically, as she dropped them. She hasn’t switched on the lights and I haven’t either. She sits in shadow, surrounded by cling-filmed sandwich platters and packs of sausage rolls that cover every available kitchen surface, the glow from the phones she’s studying glimmering off her chin. The two enormous fruit cakes my dad made for the wake sit like squat suet fortresses at her elbows. Nobody actually likes fruit cake, obviously, not even Dad, but when Mum died, he baked, and I didn’t argue. You do whatever works.

  Nothing works.

  “My … patches?” Polly seems to come back to herself. Her hand goes to her own close-cropped hair. “Oh, of course. No. I didn’t think I’d be able to do what I needed to do today, if I could feel what you feel.”

  My stomach cramps up. “And what is it you need to do?”

  Again, that apologetic smile. She reaches for the remote and flicks on the TV mounted on the wall. Instantly the sirens from outside redouble, echoed from the speakers. I see the front of my own house framed on the screen, a weird moment, like déjà vu, with white text scrolling in a red banner underneath. My name is sandwiched between the prime minister’s and the name of a town in Bangladesh that’s been hit by an earthquake. I’ve spent so many years reading that little ribbon of chaos and misfortune and not caring, not properly, and now I’m snarled up in it.

  “I’m here to make a point,” she says. “While everyone’s watching.”

  Here to make a point. I swallow hard. In a suicide vest. “What point?”