The Assistant

by S. K. Tremayne

  And I would run giggling and joyous into his welcoming arms. And he was big and tall. Lifting me up onto his shoulders. He often did that, lift me up – just to make me laugh, or when we went to some Christmas funfair.

  The first Christmas without him I hid in my bedroom for most of the day. Staring at photos of him on summer holidays, willing him back to life, daydreaming of him, drawing pictures of him to make him real, for one day, one hour, until I gave up and wrote the words Daddy I Miss You, Here Is A Card In Case You Come Back Anyway, and then Mum knocked quietly and came in and found me writing a Christmas card to my dead father and Mum put a hand to her mouth and she turned and her eyes were glittery in a sad way.

  Cold air fills my throat as I breathe, deeply, calming myself. Questioning myself: is it worse for an eleven-year-old child to lose a father to suicide, or for a father to lose a twenty-year-old son to toxic drugs?

  The last corner brings me to the station, and a clutch of tatty shops and grungy fast-food cafes, still open despite the empty streets: unlikely havens of light and warmth in this desolate freeze. As I reach for the coins in my pocket, for the railway, I recall the cash in my other pocket. My dear mother; £500 is probably more than she could afford. I will pay her back as soon as I can: tomorrow, if possible. And to do that I need work. Lots of it.

  Hand in my jeans, I take out the secret phone. It’s five p.m., a good time to call my editor. A good time to be proactive. Dashing for the shelter of the station entrance, I turn, facing out into the sleety darkness, keying the number.

  ‘Sarah Thwaites.’

  ‘Hi, Sarah, it’s Jo.’

  A long long pause. Long enough for another half-centimetre of snow to settle on the black taxi waiting outside the station; the driver is half asleep inside, head tilted to his frosting window.

  ‘Sarah, hello? Sarah? I said it’s Jo. Jo Ferguson. Ah. Everything OK?’

  ‘Jo …’

  The tone of voice is reticent. Tensed. But it could be because the office is busy, Sarah can often be quite offish when rushed and harassed. They all have too much work, these editors, answering three hundred emails a day – deadlines whooshing by, like high speed trains.

  ‘Sarah, I wanted to pitch some ideas, real quick, if I can—’

  ‘Jo. Stop.’

  The abrupt monosyllable is so sharp it shuts me up, entirely. Sarah sounds angry. Or something.

  ‘Sarah, what is it?’

  A tiny, significant pause.

  ‘You really don’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  Here it comes. I can sense it. The darkness is getting ever closer. It is all around me.

  ‘Jo, do you have a Twitter account?’

  ‘No, no no no,’ I am gabbling, ‘I mean I am on Twitter, but I never use it. I barely use any social media, you keep telling me to do more. I do a bit of Instagram, I only look at Facebook every few weeks, nothing else – why?’

  A brief sigh.

  ‘I believe you, Jo. I believe you, but …’

  ‘But what??’

  I am staring at the taxi driver. He is actually asleep. All his business taken by Uber.

  ‘Jo, for the last few hours someone has been tweeting, posing as you. Tweeting lots of stuff.’

  ‘How? In what way? What stuff?’

  Sarah lowers her voice, as if she doesn’t want to be heard talking to Jo Ferguson. To me.

  ‘The account is new and it’s in the name @Jothe Journalist. You say you work for us, explicitly. In your Twitter handle. And there’s a recent photo of you. It looks very much like you. For all intents and purposes, it’s you.’

  ‘But it isn’t me! I’ve been sitting with my mum all afternoon. I never use Twitter! Ever!’

  Sarah exhales.

  ‘Look, Jo, I’m sorry, check the Twitter feed. You’ll understand immediately what I am talking about. I can’t say more. Whether it’s you or not, it is too late. You will never work at this paper again. The managing editor has already emailed us all. In fact, you won’t ever work as a journalist again, I don’t think. Not for years anyway. I’m so sorry.’ A pause, as if Sarah is looking around her office, to see if she is being monitored, for talking with the enemy, ‘I’m truly sorry, Jo, I do believe you, but you’ve been hacked and it’s been done brilliantly, and that’s it. I have to go. I’m genuinely sorry. But … Please don’t call me. There’s nothing I can do. Sorry.’

  41

  Jo

  The call ends. A commuter, hunched in a beige raincoat turned grey from the sleet, is tapping on the taxi window. The driver stirs. He, at least, has some business. Glumly and grimly I lift my smartphone from my other pocket. Closing my eyes for courage, I open them, go to Twitter, find @JotheJournalist.

  It isn’t hard. My Twitter name is actually trending. I am a trend. I am famous. And I am famous twice over. #JotheNazi is another trend, across the UK, which is, also, all about me.

  The first tweet I can see on my phone is the newest. It talks about Jews. It actually says JEWS. In capitals.

  Who do you believe? Who owns all the media? Do you think you’re being told the truth? The clue is in the rhyme. Fake News Equals JEWS.

  Accompanying it is a grotesque anti-Semitic caricature: hooknose, dollar bills, top hat, the works. Something from the 1930s.

  I feel the bile heave: I am close to being sick. Leaning against the damp cold brickwork of the station threshold, I watch a man emerge from the station, glance at his phone, and look at me curiously. Perhaps I am so famous already people will start spotting me in the street: #JotheNazi.

  How can I go to the shops? The cafes I liked? Pubs? Cinemas? Anywhere?

  Scrolling down, I see my brief but prolific tweet stream is full of so much more, a foul and endless sewer of this effluent. Racist, bigoted, pointlessly abusive. My tweets are jubilant in their vileness, and every other tweet names my paper, my employers, and names my editors and colleagues, and I, @JotheJournalist, like boasting that they all agree with everything I am tweeting – and on and on it goes.

  There have been 150 tweets in six hours. I scroll back to the first, which simply says,

  Hi I’m @JotheJournalist real name Jo Ferguson. I work for your favourite London paper, and today I want to tell you what we’re all really thinking

  That first tweet was retweeted twice. The latest, with the anti-Semitic cartoon, has been retweeted twelve thousand times.

  Jothejournalist, or JotheNazi, is viral, she is near enough global. I am a sudden and sensational hate figure, a dark shooting star, a vile celebrity born, and killed, by this ruinous fame, on the same single day.

  Sarah was right. I am finished as a journalist. I am a pariah. I have no friends. I have no money. I have no job.

  Is there anything more they could do to me? Why destroy me so entirely? I do not understand. If it is Arlo and Tabitha, defending themselves, they didn’t have to go this far. Did they? The same applies if it is Simon, or Anna, or Fitz, or Gul, or Jenny, or my brother, or Cars, or the Rothschilds, or some kind of digital death squad, a bunch of Assistant Assassins. I do not understand the extent of the hatred and the violence of the damage done to me. Why and how do I deserve this? What is the point? The sadism seems cruelly overdone, the nastiness is berserk.

  Turning my collar against the cold, and against the possible stares of anyone who might recognize me, I trudge into the station. I am resisting the urge to go back to that little snowbound playground with the wooden sheep and chickens and pigs on springs, back to where I was safe, back to the deep deep past, back to where I was a child, playing games with my friends, waiting for Daddy, the Ticklemonster.

  42

  Jo

  The screech is animal and human and machine and appalling, then Help Help Help, Why Jo Why, then more screaming, and I can see Jamie Trewin in hospital, and the whiteness of his eyes, dead now, his father crying becomes my daddy crying, and gasping in that car. And then again that awful sound, I recognize it, a woman shrieking, it’s definitely a wo
man shrieking or yelling in pain, but it has the whimpering quality of an animal about to be slaughtered. A butcher-house sound, when the cow realizes …

  And I wake up and the beating of my heart is so profound it is actively painful. Like something is inside but shouldn’t be, someone has implanted something evil in my womb, and in my heart. I am impregnated by cancers. Cancers that move. Like animals inside me.

  Thin winter light filters through my bedroom curtains. My mouth is so dry it aches, my lips crack at the corners. The dream was the last of so many dreams. I dreamed I woke up and I was tied to a bed and dreaming, I dreamed of people singing my name in a grainy, scratchy black-and-white movie, I dreamed of three women with their mouths stitched shut, all standing around my bed, staring down at me. Yet in the dreams somehow their heads were eyeless, too, and the mouths were stitched up so carefully. Neatly. I know where that comes from. The Plath poem. ‘The Disquieting Muses’. About Mummy and Daddy.

  Rubbing the grit from my eyes, I grab a bottle of Tabs’ water for my parched mouth and then the horrible reality returns, like diving from a sinking ship into a cold, frightening black ocean.

  Oh God. Twitter. Last night. The recollection floods and engulfs me, makes me want to gag all over again. The end of my life, the social media suicide. My live-streamed self-immolation. I remember running home – literally running from the Tube, as if someone might see me and hurl a brick at the Nazi – and then I went to bed early and took sleeping pills and hid away, in the blissful prison of sleep.

  But then I dreamed, so many bad dreams. Ending in that fearful dream of a woman’s scream, then Help Help Help, Help me, Help me, Why Jo Why, which sounded so real.

  So very real.

  Sitting up in bed, I stare around. The grey January light reveals nothing out of the ordinary. No bricks have stoved in the windows, no shattered glass litters the floor. Maybe it is too early, maybe the anti-Fascists haven’t woken up?

  I realize I have no idea what time it is: the bedside clock has fallen over, presumably as I thrashed around the musty bed, in my sleep. Leaning across, getting a sense that I REALLY need a shower, I lift up the clock.

  Eleven a.m.?

  I went to bed at ten. I think. I had a glass of wine and those pills. I have slept for thirteen hours. And still I feel tired.

  Dragging myself from the bed, I shower for ten minutes, then force myself to stop showering, I dress in random woollens and jeans – I’m not going out today, I can’t ever go out, children will look at me and point, my friends will look at me and look away, I am a non-person. I have de-personed myself. Or, rather, someone else has de-personed me. Killed me online. I am the walking talking dead.

  Coffee is dutifully drunk. Toast is robotically eaten, and then I walk into the living room. It all looks so neat, and innocent. The Milanese designer sofa does not know what I wrote on Twitter, the Tom Dixon designer lamp is oblivious to my bigoted rants. My laptop waits, lid closed, on the table, next to my switched-off phone. I cannot bear to open either of them: see the appalled emails, the Facebook outrage, newspaper articles with opinion pieces condemning me for life, it will all be in there. I cannot face it. Not today. Today I just sit here, like one of those eyeless women with a stitched-up mouth.

  ‘If you don’t kill yourself, I’ll send someone that will.’

  I turn, and glare at Electra. Her blue light twirls, and expires.

  ‘Electra, what did you say?’

  ‘If you don’t kill yourself, I’ll send someone that will.’

  I don’t know what to say. I’m too tired to say anything. I’m too tired to work out if I am still dreaming.

  BZZZZ.

  I am not dreaming. That is the doorbell.

  Who is it? Who can be at the door? Someone who wants to beat me up, the mad racist lady. In my mind, I picture a lynch mob. Or just the average citizen rightly appalled. And what of my mother? What will she think? The thought is unendurable. It all comes to a crashing close. Very soon.

  BZZZ.

  Whoever is at the door is not going away. I look at the Assistant. She doesn’t look smug today. She looks inert, sad, black. Even a little tired. Nothing left to do. Her work is finished. She’s made her final threat. Her job is almost done. Mine isn’t. I still have an atom of resistance, somewhere inside me. The will to survive, fuelled by anger. I will go down fighting.

  ‘Electra, do we have any deliveries today?’

  ‘There are no scheduled deliveries today. Amazon Prime will be delivering twelve bottles of Highland Spring mineral water tomorrow.’

  BZZZZZZZZZ!

  The sound is irresistibly persistent. Nervous, I go to the windows and look down.

  There is a police car parked right outside my home. And three uniformed officers – two female, one male – are standing and pressing the buzzer of my streetside door. What could have happened? Immediately: I know what was has happened. Hate crime. The Twitter ranting. They have come to arrest me.

  Gathering the last fragments of courage, I lift the intercom, and say, before they get a chance to speak,

  ‘Hold on, I’ll come down.’

  I feel like some condemned royal bride, descending from the Tower, to her place of execution, on the wintry lawns, where ravens crawk in the cold grey light.

  I open the door. The three police officers stare at me. Two female, one male. The blondest, youngest officer, a girl of no more than twenty-two, says to me, softly,

  ‘Ms Jo Ferguson?’

  ‘Yes, that’s me, and yes, I did it. The Twitter stuff. It was me, yet it wasn’t me, I was hacked.’

  ‘Wait, Ms Ferguson—’

  ‘I was hacked and you can believe me or not. But I can see how it looked like it came from me, so if you want to take me in, charge me, and investigate, whatever, I don’t care.’

  The blonde young woman shakes her head, and swaps puzzled glances with her colleagues. The man shrugs. His radio buzzes. He steps away. The young policewoman comes closer, and offers me a sad smile.

  ‘Ms Ferguson, I’m not sure what you think has happened, but this has got nothing to do with Twitter, or anything like that—’

  Now I realize. Trewin. Jamie Trewin. They’ve finally found out. The thing I really DID do. Me and Tabitha, we’ve been caught, at last, they’ve discovered the truth, me and Tabs and Xander Scudamore, fifteen years ago: at last it will come out. It feels like a kind of relief.

  ‘You mean Glastonbury, OK,’ I say, muffling the panic in my voice, ‘OK, OK. All right, all right – uh ah—’

  The policewoman puts a hand on my shoulder, to calm me. Then she says, very slowly,

  ‘Ms Ferguson, I have no idea what you are talking about, whether it is Twitter or Glastonbury or whatever. I am afraid we are here for completely different, and very unfortunate reasons.’

  A pause. More than a pause. It feels like the last elderly figures shuffling around Regent’s Park have finally frozen, and become motionless. Something terrible has happened.

  ‘Ms Ferguson,’ the woman says, ‘I’m afraid it’s your mother. Janet Ferguson.

  ‘My mum? What about my mum?’

  The three officers exchange glances; once again, the male officer nods, very subtly, as if to say: Yes, go on, you do it. The blonde girl continues,

  ‘The truth is, your mother died this morning, of a heart attack. People have been trying to reach you, but your phone was off.’ Her smile is sad and sincere. ‘I’m so sorry, so very sorry.’

  The world blurs to a greater, colder horror. I mouth the words, robotically,

  ‘Who found her, what happened?’

  The young blonde police officer grimaces uncomfortably.

  ‘A neighbour, apparently.’

  ‘But how?’ My heart thumps with sadness, a desperate grief. ‘How? Who? How did they find her? Tell me.’

  The young policewoman stares at the ground; the others gaze offstage, examining the traffic. I persist, virtually shouting,

  ‘Tell me! Tell me, please. I
need to know. How? Why? When? PLEASE?’

  The young woman lifts her face, and concedes.

  ‘Well, uh, it seems your mother was crying for help? Calling your name. Something like that – anyway—’

  ‘PC Duffield!’

  The male policeman has spoken. Clearly the young policewoman has broken some protocol. She turns, and mumbles an apology to her superior.

  Now he speaks directly to me:

  ‘Miss Ferguson. I’m so very sorry. If you need additional information we can provide it. Formally. Here’s a number to ring.’

  He hands me a card. I take it, blankly, and stand shivering in the bitter wind sweeping up Delancey. And then I thank the police people, and they politely smile and say sorry again, and they climb in their car and drive off into the winter mist. For a moment I watch them, then I turn and climb the stairs and push my way into the flat.

  So now my deep, abiding fear – who is coming to get me? – is mixed, blurred, even briefly diluted, by a terrible grief. I am in the kitchen making a mug of tea, biting back tears, barely able to function. Remembering my mum when I was a kid. The way she would slice cherry tomatoes in two before she gave them to me, in case I would choke. The way she taught me to ride a bike, both of us laughing as I fell into her arms. Summer days, before it all went wrong, when we would all play tennis, as a family, me and Daddy and Will and Mummy, and she’d bring homemade chicken sandwiches, and cold orange juice in a thermos, I remember the sweet cold taste of it, and the hot sun on my girlish neck as I drank thirstily. It was the taste of love. The taste of my mother’s love. Pure sweetness and sunny warmth.

  I can hear music. Mozart. The Fortieth Symphony. Electra is playing it. How does Electra know that this was my mother’s favourite? That famous introduction, the nervous yet beautiful strings. She liked to listen to it when she was ironing, the smell of clean clothes and spray starch filling the living room.