Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (12 page)

Two days, then. That might be enough.

‘So no, Beth, we are not done. Though of course you are free to go if you want.’

Bethany stood. Krish rose with her but Karen held up a finger.

‘Do you have five minutes, Krishan?’

As he sat back down, Krish gave Bethany the briefest look of what might pass for apology. She heaved open the oak door without assistance.

¶LabelMabel

Gimme an O, gimme an M, gimme a G.

Has anyone *seen* B Lehrer’s outfit? Aside from she’s spilled chai tea down her front, what *is* she thinking matching that ill-fitting Westwood with last season’s pink Mulberry clutch?

Also: those shoes with that skirt?

Two

J-R hovered by the pick-up station, rapping his change on the metal countertop as a crop-headed Slovak fussed with valves. A crowd of men jostled at the counter like horses at a starting line, the steam of the four-spout machine hanging over them.

This City coffee spot –
The Sipping Point
– was rammed with these milk-fed rugby types in bellicose pinstripes. As they came and went, they called each other’s names in the same permanent shout J-R imagined they must use at work, to call out, ‘
buy! buy! sell! sell!
’ – followed by guttural ‘
wouarrrr
’s
that made his buttocks clench. This must be where the playground bullies ended up in life, while chess club members like J-R had sought the silence of Whitehall corridors and the security blanket of inch-thick policy documents. The exception being Mark Dinmore. Mark was not just a member of the chess club, he’d been junior UK champion at eleven. At uni he was one of life’s delightful naïfs; and perhaps the only person ever to turn to J-R for worldly advice – ironically, on coming out. Yet he’d found his niche advising these City thugs on data security. He’d gained quite a reputation on the back of his coruscating and hugely popular blog,
Electronicana
, in which he exposed and lampooned the security failings and data abuses of corporations; who, in turn, paid him a presumably punative day-rate to fix their missteps and avoid further exposure at his hand. A kind of velvet-glove protection racket.

The coffee shop was Mark’s choice for a rendezvous this morning.

A two-handled china vat landed on the counter, followed by a chubby Danish pastry, dandruffy with icing sugar. J-R balanced the plate on the cup and raised the crockery tower in one hand while stooping for his folded bike with the other. He tightrope-walked to a corner booth. As he settled on the banquette the street door roared open and there was Mark, dapper in the crisp light, his delicate jawline brushed with reddish stubble: not quite a beard. He wore a neat tweed jacket over jeans and scuffed brogues. Spotting J-R’s raised hand he gave an expansive smile and mimed the purchase of a drink. J-R nodded.

Mark arrived at the booth with the tiniest espresso J-R had ever seen: it was like a doll’s-house prop. As J-R rose to shake hands, Mark set the coffee down and pulled him wholesale into an embrace, the full length of his body tight into J-R’s flesh. J-R waited to be released before stepping back and coughing. They sat.

‘I’m so glad you called,’ said Mark. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’

J-R coughed twice more in close succession. There was a pause.

‘So,’ he said, ‘it must be – how long? Are you well?’

‘Pretty well,’ said Mark briskly and smiled.

Again, silence. Mark was never one for small-talk; but then, neither was J-R, especially now. He was itching to get to the meat of the conversation and spill his mystery to Mark but that would appear rude after so long without seeing one another. He racked his brains for an appropriate pleasantry and landed on the one biographical tidbit he’d heard since he saw Mark last.

‘And,’ he said, ‘are you and – ah – sorry, I forget the name of –’

He waited for Mark to help him out but his friend only creased his brows above his coffee-cup.

‘– of your –’ continued J-R, fumbling for the appropriate noun:
boyfriend? lover?
‘– partner!’ With some relief he finally landed on the correct word. ‘Are you still –’

‘Ah,’ said Mark. ‘Robert. No. We – no. We are not. Turned out he had – issues. Sleeping with women issues.’

And so, right away, the disconcerting atmosphere of their last encounter had returned. This was precisely what J-R had wanted to avoid. He’d hoped that a public, professional context would allow them to steer around the unassailable fact of Mark’s hand on his leg, the wine-stained breath in his ear, four years before at Toby’s party – and of J-R’s awkward rebuttal. But with nothing mentioned, they’d been thrown straight back. He smiled as warmly as he was able. He’d no problem with his friend’s sexuality, of course; but he was awkward in the face of any intimacy.

Perhaps his text message this morning had been too effusive.

Mark, hallo. It’s John-Rhys. Is this still your number? I know it’s been ages but I have a specific problem, not for public consumption, and I think you may be the answer to my prayers! Might we grab a coffee? Really as soon as you’re able. Very best, JRP

This was sent at the crack of dawn but Mark had replied in seconds, suggesting they meet that morning and naming this café.

Had he ever led Mark on, in some unfathomable way? This would not be the first time someone had mistaken ‘the signals’. Back when Bethany had the Shadow Welfare brief she’d given J-R gender and sexual equality to research. Dining one evening with his parents, he’d allowed his dad to draw him into politics and found himself arguing that his parents, purely as a for instance, should accept him whether he was gay or straight
.
Dad remained contrarian but Ma grew increasingly solicitous as the evening wore on, and uncharacteristically reluctant to back up her husband. It was only late into the night, when J-R woke in a racing sweat, that the terrible certainty struck. The next day, his attempts to put his mother straight over the phone were met with insistence that he should
be true to who he was,
and that she was,
fine with it. Fine. Happy!

Her efforts to be fine-with-it proved excruciating. She hadn’t yet, thank God, started introducing J-R to
terribly nice
sons of her bridge-club friends but she’d taken to emailing him clippings about Alan Bennett, Ian McKellen and, mysteriously, Prince Andrew. Her conviction worked on a ratchet: nothing he said could pull her back and every false hint increased her solicitude towards her poor closeted son. And the involuntary celibacy he’d enjoyed for the last few years left a sexual vacuum into which she could write any story she chose. At least she hadn’t told Dad. That was for J-R to do:
When you
’
re ready.

Mark cradled his espresso.

‘I’ve been meaning to get in touch,’ he said. ‘I keep seeing your name in connection with the Digital Citizen. It’s big things you’re doing.’

‘Well, it’s a team project,’ said J-R, glowing.

‘But I don’t like the name
Digital Citizen.
It reduces people to data.’

‘Ah,’ said J-R. ‘Well, we tested it with target customers. It was nearly
Cit-E-zen.
Which I’m afraid Bethany rather liked. I preferred
BRITAIN:connected
but apparently the URL was taken.’

Mark laughed at that, though it hadn’t been a joke. He had a nice laugh.

‘Bethany Lehrer,’ he mused. ‘It must be amazing working for her. Her grandmother is a personal hero.’

‘Ah. Bethany isn’t much like her grandmother, you know.’

‘No, Elyse Martingale was no fan of party politics. She’d have been more likely to torch Parliament than lie to it!’

Mark must have seen J-R’s face fall.

‘Sorry.’

‘Bethany really didn’t—’

‘So sorry, J-R, that was just a joke.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘I just meant – well, your minister would hardly endorse the messages of
The Electronic Radical
!
I was amazed when someone told me the connection. And don’t you think this business – cartoon pigs! Elyse would have been amused.’

‘The situation is somewhat more serious than that.’

Mark began to quote.

‘
The coming generation will refuse to be bound by bogus conventions. They will be utterly honest, because there will be no lies left to hide behind when their information is free.
Racy stuff for the 1950s. Glaringly inaccurate, but that’s its charm. Have you read it?’

J-R brushed away the question. He, too, was intrigued by
The Electronic Radical
,
that recently republished manifesto for high-tech revolution; but here and now it was a distraction. The best thing was to cut through the small talk and say what he had to say.

‘The thing is –’ he said, then stalled.

He was surprised to detect a liquid pressure behind his eyes. He rubbed the corner of his eye with one finger.

‘I’ve been asking myself –’

He coughed. Tried again.

‘I’m concerned that –’

He shifted in his chair.

‘You see, I’ve received an email.’

‘An email?’

Mark’s chrome eyes were unwavering.

‘I think Bethany is colluding with a private company – is perhaps – I don’t know, Mark. Covering something up?’

As the words left his lips, he realised he’d never once strayed from the Party line. The experience was at once one of soaring free and plummeting into the dark.

‘She lied to Parliament,’ he ended, as though words were the greater offence.

¶lolcatz

wow

much pigglies

very hack

Three

Some time back, for the crazy of it, Dani started to follow the links in spam. It tapped her into unexpected energies. The more warped the images she found, the more clotted the pages with illiterate masculine hate, the stronger the spark. Now she can’t help register for every smut-clogged site she stumbles on – which bring in turn more spam to clot her inbox. She’s created a shell identity,
pimpmyhide
, to harvest the tide of genuine Cialis, gastric bands, Balkan brides to order, jizz, farmyard sports, super-size tits, barely legals, anal plugs and saliva-coated cocks that pour in at swelling rates. She’s started to curate them.

She sees it as a kind of anthropology. She’s captivated by these terrible sites and scenes but however involved she gets, she stays a tourist. For the last six months she’s uploaded the most baroque degradations to her
pimpmyhide
blog with added commentary. At twenty-five thousand subscribes, the blog’s reach isn’t a patch on Parley and the Personas, but in this anonymous niche she can put more of herself out on the line. Some pages people have liked in the hundreds: the most-uprated images are in the
Horses and Cowgirls
section, which pleases Dani. Those over-lit stetson-and-tassel scenes hold a special fascination for her. She can gaze at them for hours composing comments, though she rarely wanks to the content there; or to the thirty gigs of her wider collection. Her interest is aesthetic. She knows to keep her distance.

This morning her ’Droid phone is humming with a mash of in-progress down- and uploads of the splashiest new porn she could find over coffee and dry toast. By the time she gets to the bus stop on Kingsland Road she’s halfway through purchasing an exotic set of clips from a Thai site she’s lurked for weeks, featuring a beautiful and long-suffering duck. She’s held off so far because of a worry about the age of some of the subjects – but when she found these clips on her RSS this morning she decided to let that pass.

She’s also uploading comments for a new reel of cowgirl images she calls
Educating Pocahontas:

Howdy, I’m Jo-Beth. Y’all want to hear something funny? I always was Pocahontas at Halloween. I sure did love that film. My hair was black and long and my sister Annie plaited it real careful. Mebbe these two guys was cowboys, too? Or Frankensteins, I bet, ha ha. My brother Jimmy was Alf. You remember, the cute lil’ alien guy? We wished we could dress different every year, but Ma never could afford them costumes after Pa’d gone.

She stops at the kerb, phone inches from her face, rooting for data in the thick earth of the Internet, ignorant of the rush and grind of passing traffic.

)) diesel suck ((

She swipes and taps and she’s buzzed with the darting about. Images, credit card details, her name, real address and fake phone numbers – all pass in streaks, erratically encrypted, from this cold bright corner of the East End through a fan of mobile switches and packet routers out to hosting facilities she could never hope to trace in Korea, Atlanta, Docklands, Sydney, Belarus. Her online silhouette is complex and threaded with contradictions. She roams the net a creature on heat, soiling an endless trail of empty hotel rooms.

She holds traces behind her everywhere she goes; they’re part of her. She wants to weave her fraying golden thread all over London, wherever she goes and whatever she does. It frustrates her to make the slightest effort to share. She’s been gnawing for the past few months on a prototype – a system that’s going make sharing a thing she does the whole time, unthinking. She calls the idea
pervasive sharing
,
though Jonquil insists on calling it
Me All Over
.

In her spare time, of which she has none, Dani’s building Me All Over piecemeal, as a platform. She hijacked an Apache box in Parley’s basement geek farm, where it can sit in semi-permanent beta. Then she wrote nuggets of code for her phone, smartwatch and laptop. These apps live in the deepest background, reading off her status, location, pace; her words, the images that pass her cameras; her breath and other sounds detected by the devices’ mics; her heart-rate, skin temperature and deeper biometrics lifted from her watch. They gather these flavours into one unsorted mass and ping it to the server, which snatches fragments at random, pattern recognises them and builds a breadcrumb trail of obscure collage, documenting Dani’s movements, thoughts and feelings. It paints them invisibly over actual places in real time so other people who wander there in the future could – theoretically – stumble on her traces and follow her, out of sync by a day or a month or a year, but pace for pace – or track her from their chairs in an online map-world, backwards and forwards in time.