“Husband 2.0, at your service,” I said.
She entered the room but stayed beyond the reach of my leash, her eyes on my ankle.
“What would you like to eat?” I said. “I can make you anything so long as it’s dry toast.” I made a joke of reaching for the butter dish, showing how it was just beyond my range of movement.
“How was community service?” she said.
“They call it payback now. And fine, actually. Good people. Very diverse.”
She nodded. “What did you do?”
“Cleared brambles from the towpath.”
“Right.”
I took a half step toward her, stretching the cable taut. “But can I make you something?”
“I think I’ll eat at work.”
We used to joke that the hospital canteen was only for doctors who envied their patients’ proximity to death.
“Okay,” I said.
She glanced again at my plugged-in leg. “How long do you have to wear that, again?”
“Not too long. Eight months. I’ll be the ultimate stay-at-home dad,” I said. “By order of the Crown Prosecution Service.”
She chuckled without attaining actual amusement. Then she went to work.
While I finished charging, I drank a whole cafetière of coffee. I liked the way strong coffee introduced anxiety to everyday things, made opening innocuous letters suddenly frantic and crucial and, by the same token, could turn an already worrying situation into something truly terrifying.
My heart was hammering in my chest as I sat down at the dining table, opened my laptop, and proceeded to very quickly produce eight extraordinarily forgettable tech news stories. I was not too proud to cannibalize week-old posts from ZDNet and Gizmodo and Gigaom and relaunch them in lumps of joyless prose. Such headlines as “Five Questions to Help CIOs Avoid IoT Data Problems.” During my twenties I imagined my future life more beautiful, more creative, more profound than this. Back then, I had enjoyed boring, badly paid work because I could imagine telling future interviewers about it in the context of my brilliant success.
Once the eight articles were published, I did not track their popularity, as I used to. I did not spend hours refreshing lists of most viewed, most commented on, most shared, did not watch my rankings shift in real time, feeling proud and simultaneously disgusted that a thousand people would waste precious minutes of their life finding out how “Pentaho Drives Blended BI.”
Instead I cleaned the toilet, something I had never done before. I had dabbed a little with the brush, but in all my thirty-three years had not spent one moment kneeling there with a scouring pad. Garthene spent a lot of time on the toilet these days, since her internal organs were being crushed against her pelvis by a tiny human, and this was for her.
I bleached the discolored crust beneath the waterline, then scrubbed and scrubbed, creating a small vortex in the bowl so that spots of water flew up and hit my mouth and nose. Feces and limescale and bleach. I wiped my face with my sleeve and carried on scrubbing as the insides of my nostrils wonderfully burned.
Garthene came in from work at eight. Her shift finished at five. It took twenty minutes to walk home, at most. I was not in a position to ask about the missing two hours and forty. She had either been saving a human life or making love to a colleague. She went straight to the toilet and, as she pissed, I listened. Once upon a time she might have left the door open. Once upon a time she might not have flushed, so that I could add my piss to hers, save water.
“Why is it clean in here?” she said.
“Because I love you.”
She stayed in the toilet in silence. There was no sink in there, no mirror, no books. Her phone was on the dining table.
The next day I received an email from a fellow tech journalist, Sam Lloyd. The subject line was the world has finally noticed your talent and the message contained a screen grab of the top ten most viewed stories on techtracker.co.uk. They were all written by me, covering various subjects, ranging from the low attendance at the 2010 XE Conference through to the mythical data speeds of 4G. The most popular story of all was one I’d written the previous year, when I still had the energy for being subversive:
The Co-Star tablet comes at a mid-market price but with the processor and build of a—WAKE UP—far more boutique machine. The 8” Crystallic display reduces eye-strain and the—WAKE UP—projection keyboard keeps it feather-light. While the iPad may be more handsome to look at—RUN OUTSIDE—the Co-Star makes everything around you beautiful with—IT IS ALMOST CERTAINLY SUNNY—its TrueZoom lens, even in low light. There’s no other tablet on—AND EARTH IS THE ONLY KNOWN PLANET WITH A BREATHABLE ATMOSPHERE—sale that can compete with the—GO! RUN! BREATHE!—Co-Star for value.
I couldn’t help feeling, even now, that it was a pretty great piece of writing. And a part of me wasn’t surprised that it had already been shared eight hundred plus times and there were a hundred and ninety-two new comments. I refreshed. Two hundred and six new comments. Two hundred and thirteen. I sat there, left-clicking, filling mostly with euphoria, just this tiny grape of discomfort lodged inside my chest. Over nine hundred shares. Shares was a nice word, redolent of human kindness and finance.
I never normally read the bottom half of the internet, but I figured it might be interesting just to quickly browse down the length of the comments on my article, not to take in any particular words, but to feel the texture of the debate, the mood of the crowd, as though peering into a pub window during a football match.
I scrolled down rapidly, watching the comments rattle by, most of them short, one or two a little longer with patches of full capitals, and I kept going until I was safely among the sponsored links. It was hard not to read capitals even when they passed at great speed. A fragment stayed with me.
IF I SEE HIM IN THE STREET I WILL
I reassured myself that this sentence could end in all sorts of good ways.
I clicked Refresh. Two hundred and sixty-three comments. The shares were no longer measured by a specific number but had achieved abbreviation: 1.1k. I put my hand to my chest and rubbed my breastbone. The little grape inside me had grown to a lemon now, throbbing beneath my lungs.
I thought of how our obstetrician had showed us a poster on which brightly colored fruits and vegetables glowed in sequence, to indicate the baby’s development. It was nice to be infantilized.
I became aware that my phone was buzzing, had been buzzing. It was on silent but was vibrating consistently on the kitchen counter, making a snoring sound. I watched it shuffle to the edge. There was a slight camber to the surface and the phone traversed the lip, knocked against a ramekin of sea salt, then made its way back inland.
My computer played a bugle call. That was my new mail sound. I had chosen it to remind myself that my joyless work had valor; historically, a free lance was a mercenary employed to wield rough justice among the lower orders. Then there was another bugle call—more mail—and then another and another, each new bugle interrupting the one before it, so that it no longer sounded heroic, or even like a bugle, just a single note, a flat line. I pressed Mute and, instead, watched the number of unread emails tick upwards. I tried to think of the ways in which the messages might be good news. Offers of work. Friend requests.
I refreshed the article. This time it was not found. I clicked through to my profile, but it didn’t exist anymore either. My photo had been deleted from the contributors page. I stood up and looked at my phone. I did not have a big social media presence, but the screen was now flowing with activity. A waterfall of mentions dropping away into the darkness, moving too fast to read.
“Looks like my review hit a nerve,” I said, out loud, to see if it sounded convincing.
There was a melon in my chest where the lemon had been.
I wrote Raymond Morris good news into the search bar.
I clicked I’m feeling lucky.
The screen filled with the image from the billboard truck: the one where I’m smiling.
&nb
sp; The Sun’s front page had that same picture with the headline “Havin’ a Riot Laugh.” The Mirror went with “What a Riot.” The Daily Sport cropped the image to just my face—with the caption “Why Is This Pillock Happy? Find out on pages 8–9”—then ran the full image inside with a sidebar interview of the hardware store’s owner:
What do you think of people who stood by smiling while your life was destroyed?
Mostly I feel sad for them.
All the newspapers used the same photo, which showed the owner sitting on the edge of the pavement with his head in his hands, behind him the smashed window of his uninsured business of thirty-five years, while in the foreground I am happily receiving two cans of lager, dressed for a picnic. Three broadsheets ran the uncropped image across a double-page spread. Many of the articles mentioned my parents. How they owned a five-bedroom converted windmill. How my father had worked in insurance before retiring at fifty-five to volunteer at the lottery-funded Suffolk Festival. How my mother sold her art online, up to five hundred pounds for the biggest, saddest skies.
If you search for Happy Tragedy Man you will see where some jokers have Photoshopped me into various historical atrocities. There I am, smiling at Hiroshima. There I am, smiling as the towers burn. There I am, smiling in the village of Son My.
I know it’s not my place to quibble, but the photo does not actually show me smiling at the destruction of the hardware shop. In fact I have turned away from the scene; I am facing the camera and so, in a sense, am rejecting voyeurism, smiling ruefully at the photographer’s willingness to monetize other people’s trauma. But attempts to interrogate photographic realism do not go well in the online comments.
The photographer’s name was Burt Linden and this was by far his most successful image, published on every continent. He was interviewed about it on protophoto.net: “Only when I got home and started going through the images on my laptop did I know I had something special.” I sent him a message through his website (subject line: I feel special?) but got an automated reply:
I’m away in Cuba until the end of the month so will be slow on emails. x
On a website called funjustice.com they listed my personal details: postcode, email, phone number, next of kin, links to articles, contact details of my employers. I received numerous text messages along the lines of WHAT ARE YOU SMILING ABOUT, YOU TERRIBLE CUNT. Many of these messages came from fellow iPhone users, I knew, because the messages turned blue. My work account stopped accepting new mail after the first thousand. Subjects included i will find you. All caps or no caps, those were the ones to watch out for. The take-home was that they hated my face. The shape of it, the piggy eyes, the noncommittal chin, the smug clean teeth. They hated the way I drank my beer, wrist kinked at the worst conceivable angle. The spotty shirt. They hated shorts, in general, and my shorts, specifically. Pop socks, which were a badge of evil. Tennis shoes not designed for actual tennis.
Garthene came in late again, this time carrying a large box. I was sitting at the dining table, my phone off, laptop open, taking a break from the messages of hate to luxuriate in some Pizza Express promotional emails, reading right through to the terms and conditions. She handed over the box then sat on the Swiss ball and stared at me.
“I guess you’ve seen the news,” I said.
Garthene practiced what our midwife called an organizing breath. “I have,” she said. “And your parents keep calling me.”
“What do they want?”
“To speak to you. Because journalists are outside their house.”
“Oh God.”
I looked at the box in my hands. It was addressed to me in careful black marker, all caps. The sticker on the front listed the item as a gift and said This Way Up. I tried to believe that it contained nothing terrible, just a doughnut selection from a worried friend.
“Are you going to open it?” she said.
I gave it a gentle shake, trying to gauge its weight. “Why wouldn’t I?” I said.
The black electrical tape squealed as I tore it off. Garthene stood up from the Swiss ball. As I pulled open the flaps and peered inside, the smell came to us at once, the smell which had obviously been contained by the airtight seal, gaining weight in the heat of the delivery van, brewing in the glorious weather. I knew then, on some instinctive level, in the part of my simian brain attuned to marking territory, that this was the waste output of a fellow human, a human who hated me, a human who had gone to the trouble of discovering my address and producing a special bowel surge just for me, paying the little extra to track delivery so they could know in real time when the gift had reached its destination. Their personal ragu slid around the box, which they had sealed with pale blue tarpaulin to ensure a strong visual contrast and no leakage in transit. Whether they had deliberately avoided fiber or if it was just a lucky coincidence, I couldn’t say. It wasn’t until then that I understood, physically, what it meant to be despised. Because, for all the cruel emails and comments, for the messages from editors explaining they could not use me again, for the knowledge that banks and insurers and mortgage brokers considered me an unsafe risk, for the fact that the internet would remember my shame forever, I still didn’t really comprehend the world’s resentment until tiny fecal particles entered my lungs and, therefore, bloodstream, until my nose and mouth were bathed in that stench, until I could taste it, at which point I immediately knelt and vomited into the recycling bin, a petite ball of yellowish bile pooling in an empty egg box. The smell of my own insides was, in this context, a huge relief. Garthene was at the window now, her head right outside. She looked like she was ready to jump.
We both agreed Garthene would be better off staying at Marie and Lee’s with the twenty-four-hour security. Better for me to face these troubles alone. Once she was safely out of the flat, I pressed a balled-up tea towel over my nose and mouth while I took photos of the feces with my phone, one with flash, one with natural light. Then I resealed the box—triple-gaffered it—carried it out to the bus stop and waited for the 488. I had time to examine the postmark and address. Whoever had sent this had very neat handwriting.
When I got to the police station, I was disappointed to find that neither Dana nor Liam was working reception. Instead, there was a pale young officer who had a concentrated patch of freckles across his nose, so that his face resembled a sneeze-filled tissue.
“Is Dana around?” I said.
“What’s it regarding?”
“I’d like to speak to her about something.”
“What something?”
The box was at my feet. “A private matter.”
“Fine. Name, please?”
I told him and immediately regretted it. He was clearly a tabloid man and I could see the cheap headlines running behind his eyes.
“Oh, in that case,” he said, rolling his seat back.
He was away for longer than necessary, then the side door opened and she was there.
“Hi again, Mr. Morris. How can I help you?”
She made me leave the box in a cupboard—she didn’t touch it—and then we walked through an office. Three men at three desks pretended to be working, but each individually glanced up over their partitions as I passed. Dana took me to a meeting room. We sat in padded blue chairs around a circular table. I slid my phone across the desk. She peered down at the photo. She did not touch the screen.
“I see,” she said.
“Look at the next one. It’s even worse with the flash on.”
With the nail of her index finger, she pushed the phone back toward me.
“The thing is, Dana, I can handle the abusive messages, but this . . . My wife doesn’t feel safe.”
“The thing is, Ray, it’s actually not that unusual for someone in your situation to get the odd nasty delivery. If it’s any comfort, it only tends to last a week or two.”
“Okay but shouldn’t you at least call the lab, run the DNA?”
She gave me a small smile. My knowledge of police procedure was endeari
ng. “We could do that, but we have to weigh up costs. It’s expensive to get a decent sample, particularly from feces, and then we’d need to build a case, which again costs money, and I’m not sure my boss would give it the go-ahead.”
“You should be the boss,” I said, trying to get our old banter going.
“You’re right. I should be,” she said. She hadn’t even got out her notepad. “In my experience, the people who do this sort of thing aren’t violent.” Dana shrugged.
“Dana, did you just shrug? Is this a shrug-level alert for you?”
She leaned across and touched my shoulder twice with the middle of her palm. Pat and then, also, pat. “Keep that sense of humor,” she said. She stood and opened the door.
She made me take the box away.
It was clear that the only way I could respond to these attacks was to be the bigger man, the biggest. So I bravely worked through my hate mail. I apologized to each message, never copy-pasting from one to the next, always typing bespoke, which seemed crucial.
Dear Sir, I completely understand your anger but let me say that my smile was not in response to the shopkeeper’s misfortune . . .
Dear Madam, I was actually not privately educated but I take your point . . .
Dear Ms., I agree that my lenient treatment in court was, in large part, due to the color of my skin, and I’d be happy to support any awareness-raising . . .
I killed them with kindness, really murdered them with it.
Dan sent us a message explaining that, after recent events, he no longer felt able to represent us in our “search for a home.” To be dumped by an estate agent. On top of that, he explained that our current landlord was receiving emails that were very negative about me—as a tenant, as a human—and he was terminating my contract due to antisocial behavior. That gave us one month to pack up and move out. The only upside to everything going terribly in my life was that bad news like this—traumas that would ordinarily have seemed disastrous: sudden eviction from our home—were almost forgettable in the context of my wider absolute oblivion.