“Hey, you should go, get on. Don’t waste your evening with these losers,” Amber said, patting my arm. “I’d better get back to my friend Michelle.”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s been nice catching up with you. Hope to bump into you again soon.” The short stilted sentences sounded leaden as they fell out of my mouth.
“Yeah.” Amber had clearly been as entranced by them as I was. She’d shifted her feet and her eyes a thousand miles away. She was already on the move.
“See you around.” As I said it, I knew next time I saw her, I’d have forgotten her name again. This was going to turn out to be very far from the truth.
Amber turned and walked away into the crowd, her head just another red wig bobbing in a sea of red wigs.
I turned back. Danielle had gone. I cursed, but felt an enormous wash of relief. If I couldn’t find Danielle, I could go back and find Amber. Buy her a drink. Have a laugh...
“Hey, trouble!”
Danielle was suddenly standing in front of me. Smiling. “I thought I saw you here,” she said, “What a surprise!” She was all smiles. The giant fright wig actually suited her. She still somehow looked kind of hot in it. Yeah, Danielle was kind of hot. Emphasis on
kind of.
Not stunning, but pretty enough to get away with lots of stuff. She seemed confident. Her hair was hair that had always had friends. Her smile was the smile that knew that people would always talk to its owner, and would always forgive her.
In an odd move that was a bit like a bear hug, she was around me and grinning. There was a flash. She’d taken our photo. She was uploading it.
“Fark,” she sighed, shaking her phone. “No signal in here.”
“Oh,” I said. “Pity.” I did not say: “Why not wait an hour and do it at home? Or not?”
“What are you doing here, champ?” she asked me, punching me on the shoulder. “This place is mental, isn’t it?”
Well, that was a word for it. I muttered something about catching up with an old work colleague. She nodded. I noticed her eyes were weaving, her attention darting somewhere beyond my left ear. Clearly she didn’t really care. So I wheeled out my secret weapon.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m so glad I’ve bumped into you. I really want to apologise.”
T
HE THING IS,
I did owe her an apology. A month ago, I’d tried hiding her completely on Facebook. I’d won about a week’s blissful silence and the joyous ignorance of not knowing how she was doing on Candy Crush. And then, all of a sudden, it had gone wrong. I’d been busted, simply because she was arranging a surprise party for Guy and I’d neither noticed nor responded.
She’d sent me a message. Or rather, she’d popped a note on my wall about it. I’d apologized at the time, blaming Facebook’s security settings (Danielle was a great believer that Facebook was Up To Something Fishy with her data; sometimes the high priestess thought herself enslaved to a devious god).
I repeated my apology. But added in a bit more truth. “I was just trying to... er... well, one thing, to make sure I was only getting the best updates from you. Truthfully, I was feeling a bit swamped.”
Danielle barked. “Oh, gawd, tell me about it! Don’t you hate those people? There’s a guy I went to school with who posts every single thing
Daily Mash
does.”
I smiled, connecting with her. You’ll have guessed by now—I don’t quite relate to people easily. But this was finally common ground. Maybe we could—
“I hate those fake news sites,” she continued. “It’s so easy to get taken in by them.”
Oh.
W
E TALKED FOR
a bit. In that Danielle told me about her day at work (it was, since you ask, worse than being down a coal mine). And then, and I don’t know how, I genuinely don’t, we got onto the subject of foreigners.
Now, my mother is racist. Unintentionally and constantly, in the way that slightly batty old ladies are. Last time I went home to see her she was busy telling the pharmacist that, “You are such a jolly little man. But then all you people are quite smiley, aren’t you?”
I think it’s moving to the countryside that’s done that to Mum. Suddenly, away from the bright multicultural lights of Wolverhampton, she can’t help noticing and pointing out that people are from abroad. In the same way that she can’t pass a nice tree without remarking on it.
It doesn’t help that some nutter in her tiny town pushes leaflets through the letterbox saying that immigration is swamping Britain. My mother glances at them as she lights the fire with them, and occasionally repeats bits of them as fact. Well, not fact. Gossip. As in, “I heard that there’s two hundred and fifty thousand Romanians on their way over here right now. Which is funny when you think about it. Italy’s so nice this time of year.”
If my mother’s racism was unconscious, Danielle’s was quite the reverse. Remember how a few years ago, people would say, “Call me a racist, but...”? Then that became, “I’m not being racist, but...”? And now we have, “I’m not being funny, but...”
Danielle was like that. Her day had been made worse by the
Big Issue
seller at the Tube. “I’m not being funny, but she was wearing a hijab, right. So, you know, it makes you think doesn’t it, there’s something wrong when they’re even stealing jobs from the homeless.”
I blinked a little. It’s odd, when someone says something racist, you don’t say “That’s racist” and punch them. You don’t even say, “Sorry, but that could have sounded a tiny bit racist.” Instead, weirdly, you just kind of find yourself bleating something that sounds like it’s come from a badly-written charity press release.
“Actually, something something even if they recently came over something something unable to access benefits therefore something something helping hand something.”
It didn’t matter what I said, really. Danielle waved her hand. “Yeah, that’s as maybe. But I think it’s funny, that’s all I’m saying.”
She didn’t think it funny. Have you ever stopped and looked at who a friend follows on Twitter? For instance, that matey guy who, it turns out, follows a surprising number of topless men and a club night called Rough Bear City?
Or, in Danielle’s case, she followed a surprising number of Union Jacks and Britain First. Previously, you had to wonder what an average Britain First supporter looked like. Thanks to Twitter, we have the answer. They seem to be a lot of quite glum looking people posing in front of flags. I guess they’re unhappy because the country is so full of Foreigns, Fundamentals and Islams.
It’s funny what autocorrect tells you about yourself. I remember feeling a bit surprised the day my phone went for ‘fuck’ not ‘dual.’ Oh dear, I thought, perhaps I should swear less in texts. I wonder if your average racist has that moment of self-realisation when their phone picks ‘scum’ over ‘science.’
They do use ‘scum’ a lot. They’re also very good at the indirect threat. Don’t say, ‘We’re going to kill u, scum.’ Do say, ‘Will u be laughing scum when sharia law beheads u? Haha.’
I said some of this to Danielle. Actually, I didn’t get to say much of it at all. I got as far as mentioning that some of the people she follows are maybe, a bit, fascisty UKIP, and she just gave me a look. “Have you been stalking me? You’re weird, David,” she said, biting the rim of her glass. “Has anyone ever told you you’ve way too much time on your hands?” Then she laughed.
D
ANIELLE GULPED DOWN
another glass of white. I don’t really drink that much, and sometimes I’ll be out, surrounded by a group of people, all laughing and talking loudly over each other, and I’ll think,
I’m happiest going home and getting on with a bit of work.
I don’t think I’m better than them (well, maybe I do a bit), but when you’re fairly sober it’s suddenly quite hard to fit in with people who aren’t. Remember those Fisher-Price Activity Centres— the ones where you had to tap plastic blocks into differently shaped plastic holes with a plastic hammer? That, really. Suddenly, I’m surrounded by a lot of drunk people loudly hammering themselves and there’s nowhere really for me to fit in.
She held up her glass to the light, and it shone around the lipstick prints, the lees of wine dribbling from the edges in vampire kisses. I looked at her instead.
As I’ve said, Danielle’s good looks weren’t beautiful, but they were stunning. When the British Empire acquired the largest diamond in the world, Prince Albert is said to have looked at the Koh-i-Noor diamond and immediately sent it away to be cut, chiselled, trimmed and polished. He just wasn’t happy with it, and he kept on being not happy with it until forty per cent of it had been chipped away. Danielle’s face was angular, pushed-back and hard-edged. Natural points had been polished into facets—cheekbones, nose, eyebrows, ears and eyes.
Remember video games ten years ago? When they’d got the motion of people right but were still trying to work out how to render them realistically? Lara Croft would turn around to you, halfway through her grail quest, and her face would be a mass of polygons? Like Prince Albert had been at her natural beauty with an angle grinder, polishing and trimming and hardening every facet.
Danielle had that same quality to her face. Every potential smoothness had been flattened, matted and simplified. Don’t get me wrong here. She wore a lot of make-up, but it didn’t look like it was there at all. It simply looked like someone had selected a triangle between cheek, lip and jaw and pressed ‘Fill.’
The Guy I knew, the Guy I’d shared a damp, mousy house with in the second year, he was impatient. If you spent too long on the loo reading
Q
magazine there’d be a hammering on the door. So I tried to imagine the patience he’d have had to develop to put up with Danielle. Either that or she woke up at 5am. But that didn’t work either. She’d be at the gym first thing. So did that mean that she put the make-up on after...?
“D
AVID
?”
“Oh, sorry. Miles away.”
“Thought so. You looked like you were about to lick me, mate. You okay?”
I winced, just a little. There was something about the way she used words like
mate
.
“Yes, sorry, miles away,” I repeated.
“What’s the malarkey?”
“Oh, you know, work...”
“Nightmare.” Danielle grimaced. She had her phone in one hand, pressing the keys on it over and over. She thumped it down on the table again. “What a mental idea, picking a venue with no signal. What is the point? What
is
the point?”
She looked at me over her wine, her smile bent around by the glass. “Do you... you don’t fancy me, do you? A little?”
“I...”
“It’s just that you keep looking at me. You do!” She laughed. “That is hashtag hashtag!”
I know what you’re thinking.
Hashtag hashtag
. That’s the moment when you decided to kill her.
B
UT IT WASN’T.
It was the next drink.
I’d got her a drink just for a moment’s grace. I’d stood at the bar, feeling jostled and helpless, picking away at some bar snacks, strands of other people’s nylon red hair in my face. My own hair was itching under my wig, I felt hot and out of place. The drinks were expensive. I thought about paying with my card, but I could just get a wine and a soda water and change from a tenner. That’s a thing, right there. If I hadn’t got that extra £10 out when passing Boots, then I probably wouldn’t have killed Danielle. I would have known that there was a card receipt, nestling in a stack behind the bar. I’d have remembered and thought twice.
I brought the glasses back over, rubbing salty snack debris from my fingertips.
“Imagine you having a crush on me—just wait till I tell Guy!”
“Well, please don’t,” I pleaded. It was useless to say “I don’t fancy you” or anything like that. In truth, Guy would probably laugh it off. I’d stood at the bar, surrounded by loud people, enjoying the silence, trying to work out if I did, in any way, find Danielle attractive. Is that why I found her so annoying? The problem was, I kept getting words back like ‘pretty’ and ‘striking.’ Each one rang false. Like I was being polite.
It must be terrible to have worked so hard to be beautiful and to find that people just think you’re kind of sort of hot.
That was it. I’d realised it as I’d tucked into the free snacks at the bar. I felt sorry for Danielle. All that loudness, all that look-at-me. Inside, somewhere deep inside, was someone who wanted to be told that it was all okay.
And that’s when I knew why she loved Guy. Because Guy was reassuring, and comforting, and kind, and never failed to tell her how good she looked. Whenever she posted a picture, he’d comment below. Danielle wanted reassurance, and she had that with Guy, broadband and on-demand. And now, stuck in a bar without any mobile signal, she was floundering. No Guy to gossip with, no you-go-girl from friends. At a networking event where, thinking about it, she wasn’t even networking, she was just sat in a corner, getting drunk with the boyfriend’s best friend she didn’t really care for, because there was no-one else here to talk to.
I was sat there, opposite Danielle, and I finally knew her and understood her. I only found her kind of hot. But I did kind of like her. Hashtag hashtag and all.
“What are you doing?”
I was rubbing my fingers again.
“Oh...” I rubbed up the dirt from between two fingers into a thin, tiny green worm. “There were rice crackers at the bar. I love those... but the coating. I wish I knew what the coating was. It’s like Northern Line snot, really, isn’t it? I guess it’s wasabi and seaweed...”
Danielle wasn’t interested. She was pushing the wine glass back at me, revolted.
“Rice crackers?”
I nodded. She just stared at me, bafflingly furious. The music was blaring, someone was singing, the bar was hot and loud and she was just across from me, so angry.
“You stupid shit,” she screamed at me.
“What?”
“I’m allergic to peanuts,” she yelled.
Well, I knew that. Everyone knew about Danielle’s allergy. There’d been a bowl of peanuts at the bar I’d quite fancied the look of, but I’d avoided those. I just helped myself to the bowl of slightly less exciting rice crackers. And I’d scrupulously avoided the peanutty ones. The ones with the flavour.