I placed tape over his mouth, and then pinched his cheeks, the ones on his face. He stared up at me, at first lazily and then with a look of dawning horror. I’d never heard someone scream “What the fuck? Who the fuck are you?” through masking tape before, but I understood him perfectly.
“Good evening, Antony Gillingham,” I said. I was going for Welsh this time. One great thing about drama school—I can do a Welsh accent pretty well. And fight with a sword. There’s more call for the former than the latter. “Antony Gillingham, on the twenty-third of last month, at eleven fifty-eight pm, you tweeted the following, and I quote.” I unfolded a small sheet of paper and declaimed, “SUTPID BITCH ILL RAPE U WITH A BROKEN BOTTLE.” Agree?”
He shook his head. I nodded.
“I’m afraid you did. And don’t say your account was hacked. Only sutpid people say that.” I tutted. “Now then, Antony Gillingham, it wasn’t a very nice thing to say, was it? To a lady? Or to anyone.”
He just stared at me. I think he was dribbling a little.
“They say that feminism means the death of courtesy, Antony Gillingham. But I don’t agree with that. Previously, men just held doors open for women. But now I think, we should hold doors open for everyone. Talking of which...”
I pulled down the back of his trackies, and then I showed him the bottle.
He screamed.
Y
OU KNOW AN
earworm will start up in your head and will just loop and loop. I stood there holding a beer bottle, in a stale sweaty bedroom, its owner turkey-trussed, and a string quartet started up in my head. Not a great classical work, just some background noodling from a car advert or something. Over and over.
It wouldn’t go away. Absurd. I turned the beer bottle around and around in my hand. I don’t even like beer, but I’d had to buy a pack of six. The other five were sat in my fridge. I guess the safest thing would be to drink them, but I didn’t really feel like it tonight. The label told me how the hops had been cultivated, fermented and then carefully bottled, all the flavour sealed in the thousand kilometres it had come from the brewery. The label advised me the correct temperature to store it and the slightly different temperature at which to drink it. This one wasn’t chilled. It would never be drunk.
The string quartet yammered on in my head. They say the best way to get rid of an earworm is to sing something out loud, the first thing that comes to mind.
Absurdly, it was ‘Reach,’ by S Club 7. You know, “Reach for the stars...” Or was it ‘sky’? Oh, yeah, ‘sky,’ because the next line rhymed with ‘mountain high.’ I sang it out loud, and then remembered the other person in the room.
Staring at me in utter terror. As I sang a song, skipping over the words I didn’t remember. Oddly, he didn’t find it absurd. He seemed completely terrified.
I leaned over him. “Antony Gillingham,” I whispered, enjoying the power I had. “Do you fancy a beer?”
He screamed again and then wet the bed, which was gross.
I shook my head at him, tutting, every inch my third form geography teacher. “Sticks and stones, Antony Gillingham. They’re bad. But words can come back to hurt you too. I have one bit of good news for you. I am not going to break the bottle. I’m not as bad as you are. But you’re still going to learn your lesson.”
I reached down, plunging the beer bottle into him.
“You—are—going—to—learn—to—be—nice.”
Only, it didn’t go in. Probably due to terror, Antony Gillingham was tighter than a miser’s purse. And the screwtop was... catching.
I was clearly causing him a huge amount of pain, but getting nowhere.
“Let me do that,” said a voice.
This time I screamed. The stupid, yelping fear anyone gives when they’re startled.
She stepped forward from the shadows. She was wearing one of those painter’s outfits with a built-in hood—like a serial killer’s onesie, only painted black. It was drawn over her face. The only thing I could tell about her was her voice. Which was Scottish. And her figure under the overalls seemed... well, not waif-like. The overalls did nothing for her. I don’t know. My mind was racing in all sorts of ways.
Who the hell was she?
What the fuck was she doing there?
Was there an innocent way to explain my actions?
Christ, I must look utterly absurd.
What the hell?
Climb every mountain high.
There’s a line here.
And then your dreams will all come trooooo.
That’s really not right. I’m going to have to listen to this on Spotify when I get home.
Was she a policewoman?
Wait, what the hell had she said?
“Who are you?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Better at this than you?” Again, that Scotch burr. Not the soft purr of Edinburgh, but something rougher and more practical. Aldi Scotch.
She flowed forward and took the bottle from my gloved hands. She pushed me aside. Not roughly, but not gently. With enough force to achieve what she wanted.
Which was exactly what she used on Antony Gillingham.
He made a lot of noise. Even through the duct tape.
I
’D SPENT A
lot of time thinking about this. A model once made a carefully-chance remark about her famous ex-boyfriend in an interview. “Yeah, he used to love it when I shoved a vodka bottle up him.”
I kept thinking about this while watching Antony Gillingham struggle. Because, when the model said that, what had she meant? Was it one of those novelty bottles, shaped like a tower in St Peter’s Square? Had she kept the screwcap on—I mean, surely that would chafe? But she couldn’t have taken the screwcap off, because then there’d be some kind of terrible vacuum, wouldn’t there? Or had she—oh, God—meant the thick end of the bottle? I mean, that was less problematic but also hideous.
A lot more thought had gone into the sodomising of Antony Gillingham than he’d put into his tweet.
I stood and watched the girl go to work on him, feeling absurdly left out, as when your mum takes over when you’re trying to cook.
After the initial horror subsided, there remained awkward questions—like who the hell was she, and how much longer was this going to go on for? At what point did this just become absurd?
Antony Gillingham wasn’t helping out, his screams alternating with a weird noise. A strange buzzing. I realised the duct tape had turned into a paper-comb-type instrument, buzzing as he twisted and somehow breathed.
I was hoping he’d just pass out and then I could ask her some questions. I never got to ask her those questions.
Instead, something terrible happened. A noise, far inside Antony Gillingham. And then a terrible spurting and a screeching that no tape could mask.
The woman swore. “Fuck, the bottle’s broken.” And then she punched me.
I ran then. I ran from that final Derek of a flat, out into the empty road, and then I threw up. And then I ran further into the night.
I
T RAINED THAT
night. I couldn’t sleep, so it was some comfort to me. The cat, sensing I was still awake, jumped onto the bed, but I didn’t stroke her. I didn’t deserve it. Instead, I just lay there, curled up in a ball, trying not to think about Antony Gillingham, about that woman, about those terrible sounds.
Instead, I fretted about the vomit. I’d not had anything very interesting for my last meal. A value tin of spaghetti hoops, deposited on the pavement like a spew of worms. But there’d be DNA all over them, wouldn’t there? Ludicrous way to be caught. I knew that, as a welcome home present, housebreakers used to take a dump on people’s carpets until that turned out to be a great way of catching them. But would the stomach acid and bile break down the DNA? How many steps had I been from the house? Far enough away for it to be written off? Or would someone curious...
I heard the rain against the window, and smiled, reaching down to stroke the cat. The hoops would wash away, writhing in the gutter. Maybe.
I still felt bad about myself. Watching that mysterious black-clad figure, going about my work with cold efficiency. Ruthless enthusiasm. Skill. It kind of put me to shame, but also put the wind up me. An expression I am suddenly never using again. Who the hell was she?
At my gym there are two mirrors. One by the shower, one in the changing room. They’re like good cop and bad cop. Somehow, the changing room mirror makes you look thin in the right places and bulky where it would help. But the bad cop mirror, as you pass it, catches everything in the wrong light, the bits of you that sag even though you didn’t know you had them, the wrinkles on your elbows that have no reason to be there, the bulging belly that tells you that you need to cut back on something.
That woman was like the gym mirrors. She showed me what I should look like, but also how flabby and ugly I really was.
What the fuck was I doing? What had I become?
T
HEY SAY THAT
a criminal returns to the scene of the crime. The police catch a fair number simply by watching the crowds, or even scanning through the vox-pop interviews with friends and neighbours on the news. Is there a figure who’s always there, shiftily at the back of the crowd, or slightly too far forward, on every channel saying the victim was “an angel”? Too shifty, or too keen to speak.
So far, I’d managed not to return to the scene of the crime, but this time I couldn’t resist it. I was helped by it being on several bus routes. So I could simply sit up the top of a double decker and cruise past. The police surely couldn’t be pointing a camera at a bus full of people, who would rubberneck at a slow moped, let alone some crime scene tape.
The bus took a frustratingly long time, even for a bus. It bumped and banged through housing estates and past abandoned arcades and lonely scrubland parks. Finally it turned a corner.
Interesting.
There were police there, but hardly a huge number. Not vast amounts of fluttering blue tape. I almost felt disappointed. I thought about getting off the bus, trying to find out why. But sanity prevailed.
I
FOUND OUT
what had happened later, thanks to the internet.
Antony hadn’t died. The bottle hadn’t shattered inside him. Instead the screwtop had twisted off, and the bottle had been launched from his colon with the velocity of a rocket. I realised then that the Lady Ninja hadn’t punched me. It had been the bottle. I’d spent a long time in the bathroom, staring at my forehead in the mirror. There was a small bruise. There were no—abrasions. That was the word they used on
CSI.
Was my skin crusted around the best-before-date along with bits of Antony? It didn’t seem so.
Antony had been released by neighbours alerted by the screams. At first they’d not taken his story seriously, had assumed it was the elaborate sort of nonsense people make up when they trip out of the shower and fall on the vacuum cleaner. But they realised there was something worse here, from the sheer mess on the bed and the presence of someone else. Someone who’d tied him up.
Antony’s description of this someone was bizarre. I’ve a slight build. And, if I was hoping for a better description of the mystery woman, I was sorely disappointed. Instead, conflated through panic, he claimed to have been attacked by one large man in black with the build of a bouncer. The only thing he’d got right was the Scotch accent.
He claimed complete ignorance, and, at first the police were baffled. But it didn’t take them long to go through his Twitter account. And once they’d found the tweet, along with his following of several rather extreme political parties and a football club whose supporters were quite angry, a picture of Antony Gillingham emerged that was less than sympathetic. You could sense the mild distaste in the police reports, the slightly loaded pause after ‘Clearly,’ in ‘Clearly, a horrible thing has happened to this man...’
Someone bright on BuzzFeed connected the various attacks. Or, rather, they noticed someone using a hashtag for it. #TrollTwatter.
So, that was me. As a kid, I’d always wondered what my superhero name would be. And there we go. TrollTwatter. With a hashtag in front of it. Because these days there’s always a hashtag.
But the thing was, it wasn’t me. Initially, it wasn’t me because there was the mysterious woman. And then it really wasn’t me, because #TrollTwatter became a craze. People were hunting down aggressive tweeters and lamping them. Suddenly, saying that a celebrity was so ugly they needed a baseball bat makeover wasn’t a harmless bit of fun, but quite likely to find you in a bloody alley behind the Student Union. Some people even filmed the attacks.
I had tried to stamp out aggressive language, and instead I’d created a wave of violence. If I’d been worried that someone would trace it back to me, no one did.
A
MBER WASN’T IMPRESSED
at all the violence that she had no idea was being done in her name.
“Fucking idiots,” she told me one night. “This is no way to solve things.” And it wasn’t. It was kind of inevitable that another of the people saying awful things to Amber was going to get attacked. And, naturally the victim posted a photo of her bruised face on Amber’s wall sneering ‘You happy now bitch?’ The victim got a lot of sympathy. Amber got even more abuse.
I’d not really helped.
But then, it turned out, it wasn’t my idea at all. Turned out that BuzzFeed found a student rugby player from Inverness who claimed to have invented TrollTwatting down the bar after his girlfriend got slagged off. He gave them an apologetic interview, saying it had all got out of hand and that it should stop now. The police interviewed him, as he matched Antony Gillingham’s description of his attacker to a tee. They realised it wasn’t him, and then they released him with a caution over the original assault after the victim said, “Fair does, I did deserve it.” Both of them shook hands on
The One Show
and talked about the phenomenon and how it should stop. Which actually drove it to greater heights for a bit.
Someone got killed in Bali. I watched that news footage over and over again. It was a young girl who’d sent angry drunk tweets to her ex’s new girlfriend. It was getting badly out of hand.