Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (37 page)

‘Some of the students – male students – rugby types, you know?’

A little duck of the head. Good, good.

‘They took a dislike to the Group. To the fact there even was a Women’s Group. Things were worse back then. Even worse than now.’

Another ducking nod
.

‘They decided to attack because that’s who they were –
what
they were – but they didn’t take us all on. They picked me. The way they chose to make their empty, violent point was to turn my life into hell on earth. And so they did that.’

Two brown-black pupils dilated slowly, absorbing her. Bethany Lehrer could always make a story bite.

‘This was before the Internet, you know. Ha! Actually before the Internet.’

‘How old are you?’

Well, well. The girl spoke. Her voice had an interrogator’s bite.

‘I’m forty-six, Dani.’

Literally old enough to be her mother.

‘And you were what, nineteen? So it wasn’t before the Internet. It was before the web.’

That pretty much set the bar for literal-mindedness. Bethany had to bite her tongue – actually bite it – to stave off laughter.

‘I stand corrected, Danielle. But these boors didn’t need technology to spread their hate. Campus was a small, small world. What they used, the thing they dug out and stuck on noticeboards, on the door of my room, what they strung in a giant blow-up over the door of my building, was a picture of me, which they decorated with a slogan I won’t repeat. In the picture I was with a man – a man who taught me. Not a lecturer: a post-grad who gave classes in political theory. The photo was awful and I don’t know why I let him take it. He liked to take pictures of us together and I doubt I was the first or last. I try not to think how those lads got the picture off him: he wasn’t a good man.’

She worked to control her breathing. This was harder than any stump speech she’d ever made.

‘It was taken on timer – no selfie sticks then. He was sitting on his bed and I was on his lap. I was – my breasts were out and he was – touching me.’

Dani was staring right into her now, with total concentration. Bethany hadn’t planned to say any of that. She didn’t need to for the story to land. What had happened to her internal censor?

‘So I thank God this was before the net.’ Danielle moved to speak. ‘Before the
web.
Before social media. Because if those things had been around, that image would still be out there. Every day I wonder if someone will find one of those disgusting flyers in a box in their attic, remember that evil summer and post it. Because then I’ve had it – because we’re still that uptight. A woman can’t have an image like that associated with her, and stay in power. I’d have had it, for no reason at all.’

As might already have been the case.

‘I thought I was done for before I’d even started. All I wanted was to step down and run. Leave uni, even – not just Women’s Group. That was how bad it got.

‘And you know? My friends were all full of advice; but the only person I wanted to speak to was my grandmother, who lived in South West London. I knew she’d be – the only sane person for this. So I got on a bus and – you’ll know about her?’

Bafflement. Really, girl, you don’t even know this? Bethany was used to being surrounded by people who knew an unfeasible amount about everything. There was something affecting in Dani’s transparent ignorance.

‘But you’ve heard of Elyse Martingale?’ A kilowatt shook the girl’s spine. ‘OK, you have. She was my Gramma, Dani.’

This is a clusterfuck of too much information.

Dani stares at the lady minister, at her hair and lippy in disarray. Her stomach knots and unknots. Apart from that one time she punched Joey Dukakis at work she’s never hurt anyone who didn’t beg her for it in play: and always with a safeword out. Here there’s nothing. Jonquil always says at her,
What
’
s your exit strategy, Danielle?
And it’s the right question. Dani never has an exit strategy. She doesn’t have one now.

She looks at the fucked-over lady minister and now it’s obvious. She’s the spit of that poster of Elyse – the one in Sam’s whitewashed meeting room. The same long horsey face. The level unforgiving eyes.

‘I thought you knew. I thought that’s why you plastered her slogans on the screen just now. To rub my face in it.’

‘Not my slogans. I’m not with them.’

‘No? All right.’

Dani has spent the last twenty-four hours thinking how this woman is nothing but lies and control and she’s nurtured her anger until it was big and hard enough to do this thing. And it’s true she’s swapped slogans with identikid – slogans coined by Elyse, that icon of hacker-girl power and the anti-state, who’d always seemed more a concept than someone’s actual gran. Bethany Lehrer and Elyse Martingale were meant to be opposites. The new information won’t resolve.

Then she realises. This is why identikid is using Elyse’s slogans:
because.
Not in spite of Elyse being the minister’s gran:
because.
This is when she starts feeling sorry for the battered woman on the chair.

‘I was right to go to her, that time.’ The minister, still telling her story. ‘Would you like to know what she said to me?’

Dani does want to know.

‘She said,
I
’
ve had all varieties of filth thrown at me by men who would stand in my way but are too much the coward to face me on level terms.
I’m paraphrasing a bit but this is exactly how she spoke.’

Dani nods again. This is from the source. She sees the lines and sagging flesh around the minister’s eyes. The woman always looks taut and packaged in photos but close up she just looks tired. It makes Dani almost believe her.

‘
And after every attempt I
’
ve made to fight them on their own terms; and after every time I
’
ve turned tail and fled; I
’
ve learned that neither is the answer. There are just two words you require to keep to your course at such a time: though you must never speak them out loud. Repeat them silently inside your head and stand your ground.
’

Dani nods yet again, though the minister hasn’t asked her anything.

‘What were the words?’ she asks.

The minister smiles.

‘They were
Fuck you.
’

A laugh bursts out of Dani. She covers her mouth because she’s supposed to be furious.

‘
Whenever you feel the assault is too powerful, the degradation too great, you must repeat these two words silently within your mind; and keep repeating them until you rediscover your resolve. Fuck you. Fuck you.
Gramma beat the kitchen table in time with the words.
Fuck you, fuck you.
’

The minister, too, smacks her thigh to mark out time.

‘
I have found they endow me with the most unexpected resilience.
’

The minister sits forward in her chair. Dani shuffles back on the slippery layer of dead-tree brochures.

‘And look. Hah. See what I’m still holding.’

The minister raises the object that’s been clutched to her stomach since Dani dumped her in the chair. A book. Ragged cover with a pale geometric design. Old, old media.

‘Look,’ says the minister. ‘Read the dedication in the front.’

She hands Dani the book. Oh, it’s
The Electronic Radical.
Dani pulls back the brittle cover with care and sees, written in an agitated hand, in ink the colour of a faded bruise:

If you remember none of these words, remember just two.

–
Gramma.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

‘And she was right. I went back to uni and I held our next meeting and I silently said
fuck you
in the face of every bully. And I went on to say it a hundred times. A thousand. I stuck it out, and we beat them, and here I am. And here’s something you really, really mustn’t tell; but I use the words today. Quite often, when things get tough.’

It’s at this point Dani’s anger totally malfunctions.

‘The thing is, Dani, all I’m trying to do is what Gramma told me was right, thirty-odd years ago. Too much to consummate in her lifetime. Sometimes I wonder: was hers the last generation to think anything new? Are we just recycling?’

There’s this big pause, like the mouse pointer has gone hourglass. Dani turns the cloth-bound talisman over in her hands.

‘Anyway.’ The minister brushes her skirt flat. ‘That is why I would never –
never
– put another woman through a fraction of what those faceless men did to me. That isn’t who I am.’

She stops speaking and looks at Dani with this smile that’s half question and half consolation. Dani tries to think but that doesn’t seem to be something she can do. This isn’t information, it’s words. It seems true but it’s only sentences, one coming after another.

She wishes Sam was here. Sam was the one who sussed out that the minister was behind the trolls. Or maybe he made a mistake, but it was real when he said it.

She needs to ask a question so she does.

‘What was the slogan?’

Not for the first time, Bethany found herself disarmed by this purple-haired sprite.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘On the picture. With the tits. That you wouldn’t repeat.’

Was this a test? To see if she’d been telling the truth? Ask for an unexpected detail: that’s how Colombo cracks a lie –
Just one more thing that
’
s puzzling me.
But no, Dani wanted to know: could not tolerate a gap in the information she’d been presented with.

As Bethany began to answer, a crash burst into the room. The door bounced hard against the table, which screamed sideways across the floor and toppled to Bethany’s right, landing on its side, throwing the cardboard box against the wall. Another crash and the door burst inwards, smacking the concrete.

‘
Minister! Down!
’

‘Shit!’

Dani stumbled backwards to the left, away from the door. DS Raeworth was framed in the doorway. A military stance, legs firmly apart, hand under wrist and a pistol trained on Danielle, who backed into a set of empty aluminium shelves.

‘
Armed Police! Do not move!
’

His voice was a klaxon. Danielle shivered like a whippet. The firearm hovering in front of the policeman was horribly three dimensional. There was a sodden gap in time while Bethany found her voice.

‘There’s no call for this, Detective Sergeant. This situation is under control.’

She adjusted her hair and clothing to what she hoped was a semblance of order, and stood.

‘Ms Farr and I are speaking.’

The policeman’s eyes didn’t leave Danielle.

‘With respect, Minister, this does not look like a controlled situation. Two of my uniforms have just been assaulted. Miss Farr here has recently been photographed in possession of firearms and has evaded officers in the last twenty-four.
DO NOT MOVE!
’

Bethany jolted back but the command was directed at the girl. DS Raeworth hadn’t moved or changed expression while he spoke. Nor had his eyes left Dani. From his sudden change of tone Bethany saw what she was generally protected from, bunkered in authority. What others suffered. Without lowering the gun Raeworth pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and spoke rapidly into it. It returned a strangled burst of static: they were too far underground for the signal to find his colleagues. He hooked it back onto his belt.

Bethany pushed away an uncooperative lock of hair and stepped forward. Nothing to fear. Danielle stared like a caged beast.

‘Officer, I have this,’ said Bethany, taking another step towards him, reaching for his outstretched arm.

Before she could touch him, a number of things happened. Bethany couldn’t fix their arrangement in time.

The officer stepped sideways towards the door and away from her hand, keeping a bead on the girl.

Outside the door a man skidded into view – the red-dreadlocked ringleader of this morning’s protest, clothed again and hurrying from some pursuer. He clocked Bethany, then the policeman, then the gun. He froze and let out an astonished
huh!

The policeman’s attention flicked to the sound. His gun may have wavered in that instant.

Dani lurched forward from the shelves. Unclear whether she was leaping for the gun or ducking for cover.

The boy caught sight of her through the door. What he saw: a hard-jawed state enforcer training a gun on a young woman, a fellow-protestor. Give him this: he found courage in that moment, enough to take a half-step towards the armed man, raise a hand and shout, ‘Hey!’

Bethany stepped back, panic swamping her urge to peace-make.

The officer, penned by small movements on every side, tried to bring both boy and girl into his sights. He shuffled a few steps backwards, towards where the table lay on its side. The gun, with its own motives, danced between two targets.

The back of Bethany’s knees touched the chair and she swept the air behind her to find a support. Her vision narrowed to a cone centred on the policeman. In the periphery, the girl, flinching as though slapped across the face; the boy, mouth open in a shout, reaching towards the policeman, palm flat as though waiting to catch a bullet. Raeworth warmed up with a shimmy of his feet. Then in a flash he performed the most extraordinary high kick Bethany had ever seen. His body jackknifed, both legs shooting into the air in front of him. His pistol rang out in the tiny concrete room with the boom of field artillery, imploding into Bethany’s eardrums and forcing a gasp from her hollow mouth. Then everything was black.

¶NewsHound

According to the press pack at the Digital Citizen launch event, Minister for a Digital Society Bethany Lehrer ‘missing’.

Awaiting confirmation.

sh.rt/0ekg75y

Eight

‘Here. Let me show you.’

Graham snapped open the clasps with a practised action, flipped the metal panel aside and set it against the wall. He stepped back with a stringy grin. Dankness welled from the broken brick aperture. J-R and Mark approached, uncertain what they were being shown. A smell emerged, older than anything J-R had so far encountered in Parley’s maze of ancient houses and concrete factory spaces.