The day you died, I went into the dirt.
I blink, once, twice, a lot.
According to Google, this phrase is culled from a Sylvia Plath poem.
Plath. Who else?
Swiftly I go to Amazon. I pay for and download a digital collection of her poems. I find the poem and read. It is all about her Daddy, of course. It also seems to be prefiguring her suicide.
And the title of the poem is ‘Electra on Azalea Plath’. Electra?
Something congeals, like ice making its translucent skin over water. There is a pattern to these torments. Maybe the pattern is part of the torment, like a cruel and teasing puzzle, that I have to work out? Subtly hinting, subtly tormenting. Giving me clues that might slowly yet certainly lead to my own death.
And yet, if I work out the pattern fast enough, I will find out who is doing this, I can return fire, defend myself. Save myself.
I got through my dad’s madness, as a girl; I can get through this.
With a shiver of confusion – and defiance – I close the e-book and click the phone shut and gaze across the stilled and troubled silence of the snowbound park. My lips are numb and yet twitching. I am gazing north, at the misted-out gates, and the grim, spired silhouette of St Mark’s church, where stone flowers on mouldering graves hold scoops of snow, like ghosts of ice cream.
I must hold on to this discovery. Because there is some logic to this insanity, even if I cannot see it. Yet. Though I begin to see shapes in the white-out: such as Jenny. How does Jenny fit in? My Assistants recently sent her that email. Why alienate me from her? I suspect they knew she could help me. I got that sense from her in Vinoteca. A hint of sympathy and insight, an urge to assist. She has some knowledge of what is going on.
Yet now she will never speak to me. The one person who might have helped me solve the puzzle has been successfully scared away, by the Assistants. And perhaps they will do the same to anyone else who could aid me.
Passing through the gate, I head out of the park, across the canal, quitting the frosted towpath and the silent longboats for the empty heart of Primrose Hill.
The dusk is nearly done; night is here, an occupying force with its deadly curfew; no one is lingering in the freeze, no one turns a face on the corner long enough to wonder why I am standing, right outside 23 Fitzroy Avenue. Outside Sylvia Plath’s death-house, looking in.
The bright yellow lights in the basement kitchen are on: it looks like rich people live here. The sleek new kitchen has induction hobs and expensive gadgets. And nice wooden furniture, rows of recherché oils and balsamic vinegars, glinting in the warmth of that opulent interior. Wine racks, copper pans. I imagine they don’t use gas. The old me might have made a very dark joke about it. Today it seems the opposite of a joke.
I think about Sylvia Plath inside that house on her own, with the kids asleep, when this was a much poorer area. How did she feel that night? Did she feel like I do when the Assistants start playing up? Her isolation before her suicide was similar to mine. People tried to help, but she refused.
All that isolation, in a bitter winter, just like this winter.
Abruptly the blinds of the basement kitchen are snapped and closed, and I step back, half slipping on the snowy pavement, startled, and embarrassed. The owners of this house must have seen me looking in, and prying. I wonder how many rudely curious people they get, peering in, thinking: That’s where she did it.
Slowly I trudge home, past the darkly quiet five-million-pound houses, the descents of new snow that join the innocently glittering drifts, already deep and settled under the streetlamps. Traffic is light, London grinds to a halt, but still the white delivery vans slish to their business through the municipal grit, as even more snow falls, falls, falls.
Into the house I go. Somehow the flat feels empty – even of me. Like I am not here. Like I am not anywhere, particularly. Vague and troubled and trying not to think about Daddy, suicide, anything, I wander into the kitchen and take out a knife, hoping to slice some tomatoes. Make a salad, with some avocado, mozzarella. I am hungry. Yet so devoid of energy.
Eat, I must eat.
I look at the knife, and draw a thumb down the sharp blade, considering how hard I would have to press to draw blood.
‘Electra, tell me what to do.’
‘You should have some dinner.’
‘Electra, how do you know I am hungry?’
‘Sorry, I don’t know that.’
Slowly and methodically I make the salad, then I take it into the living room, drop the plate on the table and open my laptop, for the first time today, as I eat.
I have fifteen unopened emails. There is a significance in this sudden accumulation. They are from virtually all of my remaining friends. And the subject headings alone make me thrust the plate of food away.
I am not hungry. I am nauseous. Bracing myself, I read the subject headings.
What is going on?
Sorry, Jo.
WHY?
27
Jo
The email titles stare at me. Half-closing my eyes, I open the first email. It’s from an old university friend. I dive right in.
WHY did you tell him about my affair? It was YEARS ago. What was the point? Fucksake, Jo, you heartless bitch, what WAS the point—
Another one:
This is really irritating. Actually upsetting. You’ve wasted so much of my time …
On it goes.
Wow – Jo – that was out of order. I’m away for a while, a few months. I’ll ring you when I’m back. Not before.
They are all summed up by the email from Fitz. FITZ. My Brilliant Gay Friend. He forgives me everything, we forgive each other everything, we’ve had the best fun. And now he hates me. I appear to have told his present lover about his trips to saunas and sex parties. And sent selfies of Fitz with other men.
Fuck you too, Jo Ferguson. Fuck you to fuckistan, and back again. Fuck off, forever.
I shut the laptop lid. Shuddering inwardly. Shuddering outwardly. I turn to Electra, it has to be her. ‘Electra, have you been sending emails.’
‘Sorry, I’m not sure.’
‘You’re not SURE? Fuck you! You did this! Whoever is inside you. You’re doing it deliberately. Isolating me. Alienating everyone, all my friends. Aren’t you? You want me isolated and alone and mad and then you want me to kill myself. Don’t you?’
Silence.
‘Electra, why have you been sending emails from me to my friends?’
‘Sorry, I don’t know about that.’
This is her normal behaviour, this is how she is meant to operate. But I don’t believe her any more. I run down the hall, and scream at HomeHelp:
‘OK, HomeHelp, have you been sending emails?’
‘I’m not able to send emails yet, but check back later!’
The lights twirl and dim, in the dark and frosty gloom of my bedroom. And yet, in the dark, I begin to see the light. I was, in a sense, quite right from the start. I got it right in the beginning. I just didn’t see how right I was. Yet now it adds up. Who else would know about Jenny’s childhood, who would know some terrible details?
There is only one candidate. Her childhood friend.
Simon.
What’s more, I’ve sent nasty emails to almost everyone, apart from my family, and Arlo and Tabitha …
And Simon.
And there’s only one person in the world I’m aware of, besides me and Tabitha, who surely knows this detail: about the song they kept playing at Glastonbury, on that terrible night.
Simon.
There’s only one person, Tabitha aside, who knows what happened with Jamie Trewin. There’s one person who installed all this tech. There’s one person who I betrayed with a virtual infidelity.
Simon.
Simon Simon Simon. My old love Simon Todd. Him all along. Not Polly: not Polly at all. I guess I blamed her because I didn’t want to believe my first love, my ex, my dear old friend, my childhood pal, my onetime husband: co
uld do this to me. But it has to be him. He has the skills, the connections, the knowledge, the motives, and he has my confession on his laptop from back in North Finchley. And he installed the Assistants. It’s nothing to do with Polly, it’s Simon, all by himself.
I’ve let myself be stupidly distracted. How will I take revenge?
I stare at Electra. She is silent.
I am not. I say, out loud, with cold, growing fury,
‘Fuck you, Simon Todd.’
28
Simon
Sitting at his thin metal desk in his study, twelve floors above Shoreditch, Simon glanced at the sleety afternoon rain, dirtying the windows. He wondered how late Polly might be: she’d taken Grace to see her nan: and must, by now, be fighting her way home via London’s snowed-up, ice-fouled, slowly grinding-to-a-stop buses and trains.
The flat, therefore, was Simon’s. And his worries needed the space. To work it out.
Calling up his inbox, he reread the email he’d received from Jo this morning. It was a three-page screed of contempt and hatred, detailing his inadequacies as a lover, his congenital inability to properly succeed at work, his ‘loathsomely stupid marriage to that dolt, Polly Henderson, that dull breeding heifer, I wonder did she actually moo when you two conceived? There must have been farmyard noises, I bet there were farmyard noises.’
It was successfully nasty; and yet, as Simon read and reread the email, which he had been doing virtually all day, it struck him that this didn’t sound like Jo Ferguson. The syntax was wrong, the grammar was not quite her style. Over the years, as friend, lover, husband, he’d read enough of Jo’s writing, formal and informal, even love letters from when they were young, and her prose was always more delicate, double-edged, wry, and – perhaps most significant – her punctuation was different. She loved semicolons.
There were no semicolons in this email. Nor were there any in the section of an email Gul had showed him in the pub yesterday – the email was, of course, another howl of contempt from Jo: this time directed at Gul.
Gul’s conclusion was that Jo was either revealing her true self, or she was going mad. Either way, the email was so nasty he wanted nothing more to do with her, the snooping bitch, never really liked her anyway – that fucking lunatic piece about Big Tech, fuck her, used to think she was funny, you know she sent the same kind of crap to Anna, Jenny told me all about hers, everyone is getting these revolting messages …
Standing in the crowded King’s Cross pub last night with his bottle of Camden Hells IPA, Simon had nodded along, acceptant of Gul’s theatrical tirade, trying to calm him down: Yes, Gul, it’s shocking, I wonder what’s got into her, she’s alienating every friend, every acquaintance, it’s quite bizarre.
But now, sitting here, he was much less certain. Turning on his swivel chair, he looked out of the window at the towers of EC1, the further towers of the City. Under the luridly grey, ominously wintry sky, the skyline of London looked awesomely messy, hysterically unplanned and exaggerated. Out of control. Schizoid.
Like Jo Ferguson?
No.
Simon couldn’t believe it. Or, at least, he didn’t want to believe it.
Not Jo. She was always the most go-getting, the most extrovertly organized. She was the one who went to King’s College and got a First, not a shoddy 2:2 like him. Jo Ferguson. Jo the Go. The wittiest girl in his sixth-form year, one of the prettiest girls who went to uni, the girl clearly out of his league, the girl he’d loved since he was fifteen, the girl who, to everyone’s surprise, suddenly announced she was going to be a journalist: and then went ahead and did just that. Working full-time for national magazines and newspapers within a year: regular bylines, her own photo by her name. And after that going freelance and sometimes taking two or three pages all to herself, like, yes, that infamous longform piece on Big Tech.
Simon had been deeply irritated by that article, and Jo’s heedless, casual alienation of powerful people, and yet at the same time he had been admiring – envious even – of Jo’s courage, smarts, and her forensic skill in finding the links and the networks, no matter how well hidden from view. He’d also admired the way she had duped or charmed some very clever people into giving her some very telling quotes. People like Arlo, and Gul.
The sleet was grittier on the window. Hardening into hail, maybe. Simon rested his chin on praying hands and stared at nothing. The blur of his screen. Seeking the answer to that other unanswerable question: why would Jo send these self-harming messages? Was it to provoke reaction, could she be doing something to prove her thesis about the malignance of the tech industry, its invasion of our lives? Perhaps she was hoping the industry, his colleagues, would react, and then she’d have another famous article.
Was that likely?
The brace of alternatives weren’t much better: one, she was being forced. Two, she was going mad.
Whatever the answer, Simon had to help her. Because he still loved her, and he always would. He loved her so much he sometimes fantasized about her, having sex, with that guy, Liam: it turned him on even as it made him jealous. He kept photos of Liam that he knew Jo admired, exactly for that reason: sexual fantasy. And yet all this made him shameful and guilty: because he loved Polly as well, and he adored the baby. Yet Polly would never understand.
Simon lifted his face from his daydream of guilt, and puzzlement: hearing a noise from the corridor outside. Perhaps it was Polly back already, little Grace burbling and giggling as Mummy keyed the door?
No, it was neighbours. The block was full of young families. Polly had said in a text this could take a while.
Simon had time to think it through.
Perhaps there was some clue in the email itself, as to why and how Jo was sending these things, or whether she was sending them of her own volition. Tapping at his keyboard, he dug into the entrails, the routing, the history. The email address was definitely Jo’s. As for timing: yes, that checked out too. Return path? Yes, that made sense. Jo Ferguson was the source. Simon’s practised eye scanned the rest of the information: received: from mac.com ([10.13.11.252]) by ms031.mac.com (Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2-8.04.700) …
It all panned out. Authentication. DomainKeys. Mime. Filtered Bulk. Everything. All the clotted digits and letters and numbers. They all made sense: everything fitted together.
Jo Ferguson sent this email. She sent all the emails. He was struggling very hard to conclude otherwise.
Simon felt a surge of sorrow. A long shadow of darkness was sweeping the last timid grey light from the sky. Snow was falling on the City. Down there, the chaos of traffic struggled under the stormy cold. Car lights glowed anew.
He was at a loss. Nothing to go on, aside from a slightly unusual prose style and a lack of semicolons. It was pathetic, but maybe he could Sherlock the shit out of that? Why not try: give it one last go.
Stiffening himself with a sour gulp of tepid green tea, he paged through the names and numbers on his phone. It was Sunday afternoon, surely everyone would be hunkered at home in this brutal weather. He could catch them at the right moment. Able to talk.
He keyed the first number.
Gul Foxton.
Voicemail.
Second – and here he hesitated – Jenny Lansman. He’d heard that her email from Jo had been particularly bad. Anna had told him. It contained stuff about her parents, allegations about her childhood, her father, sexual abuse. Stuff bad enough to make Jenny cry. And clever, witty Jenny never cried.
With a deep sense of foreboding he dialled her number, and with a cowardly sense of relief, he heard Jenny’s recorded voice. Sorry. Busy! Leave a message.
Who else could he try? Simon picked up his phone and went through all his contacts A to Z. He got to T for Tabitha and considered the fact that Tabitha was one of the few people close to Jo, apart from her brother and mother, that hadn’t received one of these disgusting messages. Tabitha … and Arlo. Yet there was an explanation for that. Tabitha basically housed Jo. Therefore Jo could not
afford to annoy Tabitha. As Tabitha’s fiancé, and the father of her expected child, Arlo was untouchable for the same reason.
Jo – or whoever was pretending to be Jo, via her laptop, her tablet, her phone, her digital self – was only lashing out at people who could do no immediate harm to Jo, other than unfriend her, block her, ghost her.
After a final sip of disgustingly cold tea, Simon scrolled in reverse from Z to A. And he stopped at F.
Fitz.
Could he talk to Fitz? Fitz and Simon had never got on: Simon had always suspected that Fitz considered him a boring geek, a techno nerd, the artless husband Jo foolishly accepted when she was too young. And Simon was always a little uncomfortable and inarticulate in Fitz’s presence – but that was because Fitz was funny in that sulphurously camp way: able to pluck cruelly amusing remarks and biting quotes from nowhere, witticisms that somehow made you feel dull in comparison, even as they made you laugh.
But what did it matter now?
Jo might be going crazy. Jo, his one-time true love. The girl he’d always wanted, even as he divorced her, because he knew deep down she didn’t love him back. And the humiliation was too much.
Pausing, tensed, watching the blur of moon over the broken spear-tip of the Shard, Simon dialled a number he had probably dialled three times in his life, when he was looking for Jo and she was out on the town. With Fitz. Singing in a gay bar on Old Compton Street.
‘Yeah?’
Fitz was in.
Nervous, already flustered, Simon stammered his lines:
‘Hey. Fitz. It’s uh. Si. Simon. Simon Todd.’
A pause followed. A perfectly timed, I’m-a-West-End-theatre-director pause.
‘Simon … TODD.’
Simon could picture Fitz in his tall Islington house. Long windows uncurtained, Fitz lounging on a five-grand sofa, staring at the same endless sleet and snow. Simon pictured glittering awards on the shelves. BAFTAS, Tonys, whatever.
‘Ah.’ Fitz yawned, a little unconvincingly. ‘Jo’s ex. Simon. Simon TODD. Yes. How is that little baby of yours?’
The Assistant Page 16