People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  Hi there, Pam. I’m Dan. And I’m here to tell you to leave my fucking daughter alone.

  Of course I’ve done an image search for Pamela Fielding, but the results show fifteen UK-based women (and several books about eighteenth-century literature), so I don’t know which of them has been running the account and lives at the address I’m on my way to. None of them looks particularly deranged.

  I arrive at Liverpool Street about fifteen minutes before my train is ready to depart. Right next to the barrier there are two policemen in helmets and luminous tabards, and I experience a brief moment of intense self-consciousness, a moment of wondering whether to make eye contact or not, whether to smile or not.

  I might as well admit it. There were some mad moments when I considered taking something with me on this expedition. A hammer. A Stanley knife. A pair of scissors. Not that I would use them, of course. Just something to show I meant business. I imagined myself ramming the scissors into the doorframe. Taking the hammer to the little window in the middle of the front door. Fucking up the wheels. I spent about forty-five minutes wondering if I knew any way I could get my hands on a gun before sanity intervened. Mental, I told myself. You sound absolutely mental.

  It being midmorning on a Saturday, the train is relatively uncrowded. This isn’t a line I’ve used before, and it surprises me how quickly we’re in the country, or at least what I think of as the country, how quickly we’ve left behind the office blocks and Victorian terraces and new high-rise developments and are passing golf courses and a field with horses in it.

  I count the stops, seventeen of them, and stare out the window, my guts churning. We pass dispersed farm buildings and corrugated barns and things in fields under black plastic. All of the towns we pass through look pretty similar. An enormous IKEA. Multistory parking lots. Gardens with trampolines in them. The sky is low and grey and threatens rain.

  A very tall old guy in a furry-hooded coat with a plastic bag in each hand is the only other person to get off at my station. Christ, England is depressing. The coffee shop is closed, the waiting room locked, the platform windswept and deserted. With a bit of a judder, the glass doors open to reveal an equally deserted taxi rank, the wind swirling little hurricanes of dust and burger wrappers around on the tarmac.

  I have already done this walk on Street View several times, so I know what to expect. Right out of the station, past a coffee stall and an Italian restaurant straight out of the 1990s, complete with sign outside advertising paninis. Down the high street, past a pet shop and a Tesco Metro and a Costa and a bus shelter with no glass in it. A left turn at the traffic light just past the library. A long road of terraced houses.

  As anticipated, the walk takes me about fifteen minutes.

  It looks like a perfectly normal house, from the outside. Two bins in the front garden. The garden itself a little overgrown. Leaded windows.

  When I reach the place, I don’t hesitate. For weeks, I’ve been dreaming of the opportunity to give whoever’s been posting pictures of my daughter online a piece of my mind, to shame them, to give them a scare. To stop them. All week, I’ve been imagining this moment. I’m startled by how hard I tap the knocker.

  Then I wait.

  A minute passes. Two minutes.

  After a while. I begin to wonder if there’s anyone home. I realize I’ve assumed that having come all this way, on a Saturday, Pamela Fielding is going to be here to answer the door when I knock on it.

  I keep looking up and down the street to see if she’s coming back from the shops or something. One or two people pass. No one gives me a second look.

  Eventually, just as I am about to give up hope, I hear something in the house, and a shape appears, a white shape, in the doorway of what I take to be the living room. It moves very slowly, gradually gaining definition in the rippled glass of the little window in the front door.

  They get to the door, realize it’s locked, and shuffle away again. I can hear them rooting around for a key in what I assume is a bowl on the sideboard in the front hall. Eventually they locate the one they want. It’s still another three or four minutes before they manage to unlock the door.

  “Can I help you?”

  The individual who opens the door is a man in his seventies. Seeing me, a stranger, he straightens up, brushes down his trousers, picks something (a toast crumb?) from the lapel of his cardigan. I am pretty sure this man isn’t the person posting pictures of Coco. I am almost certain he’s not the one who broke into my house and stole my wife’s laptop. He looks like the kind of man you see collecting for the British Legion.

  His expression is puzzled.

  “Hi there,” I say. “Is this . . . ? Is . . . ? Does Pamela Fielding live here?”

  “She does,” he says, literally looking me up and down. “Can I ask . . . ?”

  I expect if I really was a detective I would have some kind of cover story ready to hand.

  “I’m a friend,” I say, eventually. “From work.”

  It is perhaps lucky that at exactly that minute it begins to rain. Quite heavily, in fact. It can be heard drumming on the lids of the bins. He looks at me. He looks at the rain.

  “You had better come in, then,” he says, after a moment.

  There’s a line of shoes along the hallway, several pairs of slippers next to them. The carpet itself is soft and deep, dark brown. I work my shoes off and add them to the lineup.

  “Pam,” he calls up the similarly carpeted stairs.

  “I’m Eric,” he says, offering me a soft hand to shake. I tell him my name. He gives no sign of recognizing it. “That’s the living room, through there,” he says.

  He pauses at the bottom of the stairs, rests one hand on the banister, and calls Pam’s name again. Somewhere over our heads a toilet flushes.

  “Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

  I say I’d love one. Milk, no sugar. I take a seat in the living room.

  It has the air of a room that’s not used every day, the kind that’s reserved for visitors. I also sense they don’t get visitors that often. The instant I sit on the couch I can feel myself sinking into it, and as this process begins, it pulls the enormous crocheted blanket that is hanging over the back of the sofa down around my shoulders. By the time I finally come to a halt, I am looking at the coffee table from between my knees, and my backside is resting at the level of my ankles.

  It is hard to escape the feeling I’m not exactly going to be at my most imposing in this position. I grasp the coffee table and pull myself to standing, then rearrange the coffee table doily, scanning the room for somewhere a bit more solid and strategic to plant myself.

  I end up perching on one of the soft arms of the sofa.

  “Pam,” Eric calls up the stairs for a third time, more emphatically now. “There’s a . . . person come to see you.”

  As he’s passing the doorway, he looks in and raises both eyebrows at me at once and says something about Pam living in her own world most of the time.

  “She says she hears me calling, but I don’t know she does, really,” he says. “Can I take your coat?” he asks.

  I tell him I’m fine.

  He tells me to let him know if I want him to turn the fire on.

  I give him a thumbs-up.

  “One sugar, is it?”

  “No sugars,” I tell him, again.

  Footsteps on the stairs. A moment of hesitation—Pamela checking her hair in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs? She’s saying something to the man in the kitchen as she comes through, her attention in that direction. Then she sees me. Then she stops.

  “Hi, Pamela,” I say.

  Her face stiffens. She quickly turns and closes the door behind her, and then turns back.

  “I expect you know why I’m here, don’t you?”

  She nods, once, quickly.

  “I don’t imagine you thought you’d ever be meeting me in real life, like this, did you?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Look at me,” I
say.

  She lifts her gaze to meet mine, very briefly, and then very quickly lowers it again.

  In the other room, I can hear the man who opened the door making the tea, humming to himself. A spoon clinks against a mug. A cupboard door is opened.

  “Your dad?” I ask.

  She shakes her head again.

  “My grandad.”

  Pamela Fielding is about seventeen years old.

  The very first thing she tells me is that she didn’t steal the photos. I ask who did, then? Someone she knows? Someone from her school? She’s still at school, isn’t she?

  “College,” she mumbles.

  She looks like the kind of girl you see on the bus. She keeps tucking a strand of dark, sort-of-shiny hair behind her ear. In each earlobe is a single stud. Her cheeks, dotted here and there with acne scars, are thickly foundationed.

  “Where is it?” I ask. “The laptop.”

  She doesn’t have it, she says. She doesn’t know anything about any laptop. She bought the photographs online.

  “Online? What do you mean? Like, the dark web?”

  She looks at me.

  “I mean a website,” she says. “Just a forum.”

  “What kind of forum?”

  She fiddles with the cuff of the sweater she’s wearing.

  “A forum for people who do what I do, who share advice with one another, give one another tips. Sometimes we talk about all the different influencers. Sometimes we talk about how to get more followers.”

  “Like by pretending the person whose pictures you are using is sick?”

  “I guess so.”

  It’s at that point that Grandad comes in with the tea. If he notices any tension in the room, he doesn’t mention it. He talks us both through the various treats and cookies in the tin and lets us know how many there are of each. A corner of Pamela’s mouth twitches impatiently. When he leaves, Pamela’s grandfather sets the living room door slightly ajar. Both of us glance at it. Neither of us gets up to close it.

  I’m aware of being in a very strange position at this point. I’m trying very hard to avoid raising my voice, losing my temper. This is not easy.

  “So, this forum,” I say, “What’s it called?”

  She tells me. I ask her to spell it.

  “And is it open or closed?”

  “Some of it’s open and some of it’s closed.”

  “And it is someone on this forum you have been buying photographs from?”

  She nods.

  “Who are they?” I ask. “What do they call themselves?”

  “The Mad Hatter,” she says.

  “The Mad Hatter? As in Alice?”

  She looks blank.

  “Their avatar is a picture of a hat,” she tells me.

  “And what else do you know about them? Anything? How did you get them the money?”

  “PayPal,” she mutters.

  “Show me.”

  Reluctantly she brings her phone out from her pocket, unlocks it, and holds it up.

  “Which one is it? Which transaction?”

  She shows me.

  “You’re sure?”

  She nods.

  “That was the account you paid the money into? The account this Mad Hatter wanted credited?”

  She nods again.

  The PayPal account into which she paid the money is in the name Winter Edwards.

  Winter?

  It takes a minute or two for me to get my head around this, for it even to start to sink in.

  I ask Pamela whether this person, the one on the forum, said anything about how they got the photographs and why they were selling them. Was it just about the money? Was it from jealousy, from spite? Do they think we have wronged them in some way?

  Pamela shrugs.

  “I didn’t really ask.”

  “And what about you? Why do you do it?” I ask her. “That’s what I can’t understand. What’s the kick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want you to take the account down, and I want you to delete those pictures. All those pictures. And I want to watch you doing it. And maybe then I won’t call the police and I won’t tell your grandfather. But only if you promise me never to do this again. To speak to someone about why you feel the need to do this, what compels you. I mean, I don’t know what your family situation is, or whatever. If you want me to find you someone to speak to, a number to call, I can do that.”

  She says something that sounds like okay, very softly.

  “I mean, you do get that it’s weird, don’t you, what you’ve been doing?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so. Taking someone’s pictures and making up stories about them and posting them for all the world to see? Someone who has not given you their consent? Who doesn’t even know you’re doing it? It’s fucking disgusting. It’s sick.”

  There follows a long pause.

  She’s staring hard at the carpet, her hair hanging down in front of her face, and when she speaks it is so quiet I can’t even hear her.

  “Sorry?” I say.

  “I said, ‘How is it any different?’” she says.

  “Different from what?” I ask.

  As I’m waiting for an answer, my phone starts ringing and at first I ignore it but it just keeps buzzing and buzzing in my pocket and eventually I take it out to see who’s calling. It’s Irene, and I answer it and say something fairly brusque like, “What?” and she says, “Emmy,” and from the way she says it I can tell she’s trying to keep her voice calm and steady.

  “Dan,” she says. “I think something has happened to Emmy.”

  Emmy

  I think it is possible that I am dying.

  Have I said that already?

  For quite some time now, I’ve been trying to work out if I’m awake or asleep, watching patterns swirl and dissolve on the insides of my eyelids, trying to keep up with the twists and turns of the conversation I am conducting in my head with somebody who is sometimes Dan, sometimes my mum, sometimes Irene, sometimes a complete stranger. I keep trying to make my thoughts go in a straight line, but it’s like attempting to walk on a dead leg. As soon as I feel I’ve got something straight in my head, I immediately forget it. How I got here, for instance. Where I am.

  Have I been in an accident? Has something happened to me? In my more lucid intervals I get the distinct impression I am lying in a hospital bed somewhere. Every so often I seem to sense that I am not alone, that there is someone leaning over me, checking something, making little adjustments to whatever equipment they have got me hooked up to here, inspecting whatever monitors I can hear occasionally beeping. Sometimes I hear them clucking to themselves, muttering, moving things around. Sometimes I can feel them arranging my head, my shoulders, the pillow.

  I could be dreaming or imagining all of that, of course. I remember Dan once telling me about the tricks the mind plays when you’ve been alone in the dark too long, when it has been starved of sensory input. The sorts of things long-distance truck drivers start seeing swirling out of the darkness after being behind the wheel for days. For ages, for instance, I was convinced I could hear ABBA’s greatest hits playing somewhere nearby, just loud enough to hear, over and over on repeat until I could have told you without hesitation as soon as one song ended what the next one was going to be.

  For ages too I have been sure that I can hear a baby crying, really close and really loud. For a while I was convinced it was Bear, then I remembered where I am and realized it must be someone else’s baby, someone else on the ward, someone in another nearby bed, but by God it sounds unhappy and by God it sounds like mine—so much like mine it is making my own milk-swollen breasts throb and ache. On and on and on it goes. Inconsolable, unbroken howling for what feels like hours with just the occasional intermission while they gulp in more air.

  Why is no one comforting it? That is what I don’t understand. Why does no one seem to be to trying to calm it down, giving it a cuddle, taking the poor thing fo
r a quick walk up and down the corridor or into another room for a bit? Here, I feel like saying, let me show you. Have you tried burping them, maybe? That’s the way my little one always cries when he is feeling gassy.

  And in my head, I am composing a very long post about all of this, adding in what a fantastic job they are doing, all those nurses and doctors, how wonderful our NHS is, but also mentioning how incredibly thirsty I am and is there not anything anybody can do about this baby . . . and then I realize I am not actually composing a post, I am just mentally dictating it to nobody, and all this time the baby keeps screaming.

  And then it stops, in the abrupt way that babies do stop crying, eventually, after they have howled themselves into exhaustion, and in that sudden silence I find myself wondering if I really heard anything, whether there was a baby, whether there is even a ward.

  Time passes. The silence continues.

  Thank God for that, I think.

  Then the screaming starts again.

  Epilogue

  Dan

  I can remember every detail of that phone call as if it happened yesterday. Wandering down the street, not really able to take anything in, asking Irene questions over and over again that she’d already told me she didn’t know the answer to. I just couldn’t get my head around it. Emmy and Bear had never arrived at the retreat. The retreat had never sent a car. No one had seen or heard from my wife or my son for over seventy-two hours.

  After that, things get kind of fuzzy, fragmented.

  I can remember calling Doreen from the train and telling her not to panic, and she offered to give Coco her dinner and a bath and put her to bed, to wait there until I got home, and then the train went into a tunnel and we lost our connection for about five minutes.

  I can remember trying Emmy’s phone, frantically, pointlessly, again and again and again. Then trying the other one, the one she said she was going to try to hide from the hippies and hang on to. Both of them went straight to voicemail.

  I can’t remember telling Irene where I was or how long it would take me to get to London, but I must have done, because when I got to the ticket barrier at Liverpool Street, there she was.