5 October
Right away, the Hope and Ruin impresses the tits off me by being one hundred per cent vegan. Interesting retro-tech stuff clings to the walls, interlaced with fairy lights and artfully loose wires. No two lamps match in the whole place. There’s a full-sized caravan wedged into one side of the room, inside which a tiny kitchen bustles with activity. The crowd are young, or at least younger than me. In contrast to Loading on the seafront, many of them are reassuringly preoccupied with their phones.
Action Girl isn’t among them. As I’d feared, she must have left. I consider leaving too, until the stoner-rock barman asks if I’d like a drink. And now, like a proper old woman, I realise I really could do with a nice sit-down. Some ale too, please. I’ll just have to exercise moderation.
Having placed an order for a vegan kebab, I take my pint over to a table that boasts an embedded retro video game screen. While four ghosts chase Ms Pac-Man around an electronic maze, I make my second attempt to infiltrate Scott’s TrooSelf diary app.
I try a few of Scott’s favourite words – bamboozle, for instance – but it’s hopeless. Each password is bound to be a combination of letters and numbers anyway. Symbols, too. Pissed off, I impulsively return to the Videos folder on Scott’s phone. The time feels right to try again.
What a dick I am. Once again, I’m allowed only the briefest look at those video thumbnail images – a few faces, a few flashes of pink skin – before the phone crashes. I try to take a screen grab before it dies, but there’s nowhere near enough time. Seems pretty obvious, then, that this lame device specifically cannot handle even showing me video thumbnails, let alone the clips themselves. The phone may have been damaged when Scott dropped it on his balcony decking, or it’s nearing the end of its lifespan.
Frustrating. This phone is a treasure trove of information and yet I’m stuck out here in the stupid real world. I attack my ale, drum my fingers on the table and try the power button every ten seconds. Nothing. This handset feels as dead as…
… that thing in the corner of your eye last night…
… a dodo skewered on a doornail.
All the chatter in the room blurs into background noise. I morosely fixate on Ms Pac-Man as she chomps her way through endless pills, pursuing a quest for a satisfaction she can never find. The ghosts who chase her so relentlessly, on the other hand? They will always win.
Unlike Ms Pac-Man, I’m not trapped in this maze. I can stop whenever I like.
I really should stop. And yet, even as I consider this, my finger is locked in auto-pilot, poised to try the phone’s power button again.
A plastic basket containing my awesome-looking Beelzebab is placed on the table before me. As I thank the server, a passing flash of red draws my eye. By Christ, here’s Action Girl with her unmistakable dreads. She’s ferrying her pint from the bar towards the front door. Where’s she going: outside for a smoke? No. I watch as she hurries out of the small entrance hall, through a door I’d never noticed before. Typical for me and my Grade-Z observation skills.
After a couple of abortive attempts to hear my question over the music, the barman reveals that this door leads up to “the gig venue”. Quickly absorbing this new info, I take myself, my Beelzebab and my pint upstairs, then pay five pounds to see The Shit Monkeys.
“What the fuck?” spits Action Girl, doing her best to outpace me on the pavement. Her accent is proper Yorkshire, right down to the fook instead of fuck. “Are you seriously gonna follow me all the way home?”
“Yes,” I say, feeling more than a little bit crazed.
“I wouldn’t advise it, nobber.”
Action Girl had refused to speak to me while The Shit Monkeys were purveying their foolishly loud industrial-punk racket. I was, after all, a wild-eyed stranger clutching a pint and a kebab. So I waited patiently, only for her to refuse to speak to me afterwards too. And here we are.
“Look,” I tell her. “All I want is to ask you something.”
“Yes, and I have asked you, several times, to get fucked. I go to gigs to chill out, not to be given a fuckin’ asthma attack by someone tapping on me shoulder.”
“That’s not unreasonable,” I say, falling into step beside her. “Although The Shit Monkeys aren’t exactly my idea of a chill-out band.”
“Who cares what your idea of owt is?”
“I’m honestly not a crazy person or anything.” Could anything sound much more ominous than those opening words? “It’s just… my ex has a picture of you on his phone. And I wonder if you know him.”
Action Girl’s glance could freeze the sun. “What type of fuckin’ photo?”
“Oh, no, don’t worry! Not that type. You’re fully clothed.”
“Why don’t you ask him if he knows me? What’s all this shit about?”
Do I open my heart to this woman who might be involved with Scott? For all I know, if he’s moved elsewhere in Brighton, she could be heading to his new place right now.
I hold up Scott’s phone. “Please, take a look at the picture.”
When Action Girl sees Scott’s photo of her on that mountain peak, her derisory glance becomes the classic double-take, and now she’s interested.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Well,” I say. “That’s the thing. I’m assuming you know a guy called Scott? Scott Palmer?”
She doesn’t reply verbally, but her face tells me she doesn’t. There isn’t even a flash of recognition that she quickly conceals. Okay, but who took the picture, if not Scott? Just in case she knows Scott by an alias, I show her his Tinder pic.
“For fuck’s sake,” Action Girl says, but now she’s less vehement. Spittle no longer flies out of her mouth when she talks at me. “I don’t know the guy from Adam. Is that okay? Can I go now?”
We’re halfway up a hill, outside a pub called The Battle of Trafalgar. A gust of stale ale drifts out of the front as someone leaves.
“Look,” I tell her, nodding towards this door of opportunity. “Five minutes of your time gets a drink on me. Okay, two drinks.”
Turns out Action Girl isn’t her real name. Who knew?
Ali downs one of her two vodka shots, then slams the glass on the ancient wooden surface between us, like we’re in some Wild West saloon. The surrounding landscape of vacant tables and chairs is interrupted only by the odd group of drinkers.
I’d feared she might neck both drinks, give me the finger and leave, but there’s intrigue in these dark brown eyes. “Maybe this Scott bloke was shagging Gwyneth, then? Or still is, for all I know?” Seeing my face tighten, she adds, “Sorry, mate… was this a recent split?”
This photo of Ali on top of the County Down mountain Slieve Donard was actually taken by her half-sister Gwyneth two-and-a-half years back, shortly after the two women reached the peak together.
Ali has shown me a picture she took of Gwyneth that day, up on the peak. Her sister has a face so distinctive that I’m convinced I’ve yet to see her on Scott’s phone. Her harsh, bony face is dominated by a fiercely pointed nose and framed by dark curls.
So why does Scott have Gwyneth’s own picture of Ali on his phone?
Thanks to vodka, I can’t be bothered with fabricating some story for Ali’s benefit. “Scott did a runner on me. Could’ve gone off to be with your sister… but actually, that doesn’t make sense.”
Ali cocks her head, defensive. “Why not? She’s a fucking stunner.”
“That’s not what I mean… it’s a picture of you he’s got on his phone.” As I say this, I pat my pocket where Scott’s phone lives. Ali notices.
“Hold up,” she says, looking at me like I’m an escaped lunatic again. “That’s his phone?”
“He left it behind. And…” Sod it, Ali’s so drunk she won’t even remember this chat. “And I unlocked it to have a look inside.”
Ali weighs me up, stony-faced. Then she says, “Good on you, if he’s fucked you about. I’d probably do the same. Weird, though, that he has that picture. Ah, you know what? Gwyn tweeted it from the top of the mountain. That could be why.”
Ah yes, Twitter. A mostly public space. But why would Scott want that picture? He fancied Ali?
“Is he into mountaineering?” she asks, as if following my train of thought.
“I have no clue what he’s into,” I say, knocking back my second vodka shot to drown the humiliation. “So, if I haven’t been too much of an arse-pain already, could you maybe ask your sister if she knows Scott? I just want to find out what kind of guy I almost moved in with, and where he might be, and—”
Ali halts me with a flat palm. “I haven’t spoken to my sister since July.”
“Oh. Did you guys fall out?”
To my surprise, Ali looks bewildered. “I don’t even know. She seems to have kind of… disowned us. Even our mum. To be honest, it was on the cards for a while, because we always argued.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yeah. Gwyn won’t even reply on Facebook or owt now. Mum’s convinced she’s run off to join a cult or summat.”
A dark bell rings in my head. Joining The Death Grip Cult.
“That’s so strange,” I say. “And such a shame.”
Ali shrugs a little too hard. “Her choice, innit. You can’t force people to stay in your life. But yeah, it really is a shame. You grow up with someone, and then suddenly your only window into their life is their fucking Twitter feed.”
“Tell me about it. Do you ever think it might be better not to look?”
Ali nods. “Don’t know why she didn’t just block us.”
Her tortured expression tells me everything I need to know. She knows she should stop looking, but she can’t seem to follow through. When temptation waits permanently on a screen, twenty-four-seven, while constantly updating itself, what can you do to avoid that? Take down the entire internet?
After being confronted with her own online addiction, Ali has had enough. She downs her second shot and makes for the door, her face and voice lemon-sour. “Well, this has been fun. Good luck with stalking your ex, but me babysitter needs paying.”
“What’s your surname?” I blurt. “Maybe… I’ll… see you on Twitter?”
“McBeal,” she says, then heads for the door.
I piece her alleged full name together in my head, remember the TV show Ally McBeal, then call out, “And what’s your real surname?”
She laughs. “Cooper. Now sod off.”
I smirk back at Ali Cooper as she leaves, then I order another shot. These cheeky little drinks are well moreish. Pulling out Scott’s phone, I fruitlessly check for new calls or texts – nothing – and launch Twitter to search for Ali and Gwyneth. Even as the app opens up, my heart sinks. Ali Cooper sounds all too much like the rock star Alice Cooper. Did she feed me another fake name?
Brilliantly, her full name genuinely is Alice Cooper. Her Twitter bio says, No, I’m not that bloke who bites the heads off bats. I wonder why, in all her time on Twitter, none of the platform’s resident Um actually brigade have popped up to tell her the bat-biter was Ozzy Osbourne, then I see she only has twenty-one followers.
Despite Alice and Gwyneth being half-sisters, they share the same surname. Here’s Gwyneth Cooper’s unmistakable face on her Twitter profile, wearing a big friendly grin. Below this pic, there’s a slew of tweets, mainly sharing memes and animal abuse petitions. Gwyneth makes no mention of Alice, or how great her new life in a cult might feel. All I see is the usual pile of inconsequential shite that people post in a bid to stave off the daily boredom and grab some attention.
What to make of this whole Cooper sisters thing? Could Scott really have swanned off to be with Gwyneth? Did they bond over their penchant for shutting out family members? I’m pretty sure Maureen hadn’t seen or heard from Scott for even longer than the fortnight she claimed.
I spend ten minutes burrowing down the rabbit hole of Scott’s social media, for which he uses the same vulnerable-looking profile pic as seen on Tinder. His Twitter bio quite simply reads: Just another face in the IT crowd. He has 878 followers. A quick skim through these reveals a high ratio of female faces, none of which are Alice or Gwyneth. They’re not among his FB pals either.
Scott’s last tweet was today. A retweet, to be precise, involving that meme image of the grinning cartoon dog seated in the burning room, saying, This is fine. I’m okay with all the events that are unfolding currently.
Hmm. Why does this image strike a chord with me?
Best not to think about that.
Scott’s latest FB post was also today. He’s filled in a survey about his personality, namely Which Historic Royal Would I Be? and nominated five friends to do the same.
Turns out Scott would’ve been Henry VIII. Quelle fucking surprise.
The realisation hits me that I’m no longer looking at my own social media accounts. I’m using the apps that take you straight into Scott’s Twitter and Facebook. This means I’m actually piloting the fuckers and could therefore post as Scott.
That’s pretty big.
If I were feeling really vindictive, which I am, I could post something absolutely foul on his behalf and make a social media pariah of him. So very tempting. But what’s the first thing someone does when they think they’ve been hacked? Scott would reset all his social media account passwords, then surely realise his lost phone was to blame. He’d finally get around to changing everything and I’d be locked out. Counterproductive.
While skimming over Scott’s tweets and posts, both public and private, what I notice more than anything is the conspicuous absence of me. I’m not mentioned anywhere. Clearly, I only ever registered as a brief anomaly on his radar.
The night melts like Dalí clocks. Before I know what’s happening, I’m striding down Queen’s Road towards the seafront. Wind and rain team up to punish me, as I finally check out Tinder with the true recklessness of a drunk.
The first thing I see inside Tinder is Scott’s face, and my dumb heart swells. The heart does, after all, take longer to process a break-up than the rational mind. You can never kill love outright. You can only leave it to die a slow, lingering death.
Entering self-destruct mode, I open Scott’s matches. This is a visual list of the people he’s Liked, who have also Liked him right back. Some of these people he has engaged in conversation. Claire from along the coast in Peacehaven, for instance, who has lovingly selected the following three words for her profile bio: I’m just me! Thanks for that, Claire, I really feel like I know you already. As far as Scott was concerned, your cleavage made up for your lack of brain cells, because here the two of you are, chatting away one month ago. On 4 September, to be precise. One week after Scott asked me to live with him.
Hey, Scott, what the hell were you doing? If your proposal of domestic cohabitation really was at all sincere, then were you seized by the urge to fill your boots before all that nasty monogamy descended upon you? Was that it? Or were you trying to find someone better?
Reading Tinder can only damage me. And yet, in order to finally kill off any lurking vestige of feelings I have for Scott Palmer, I need to suffer the truth.
Hmm. This probably isn’t the best time to ask myself while I’m loaded on ale and vodka, but do I still have any feelings left for Scott?
Yes, in a way, I do. But those feelings only apply to the version of Scott I thought I knew. The carefully crafted specimen of manhood that he chose to present to me. In fact, I still love the living hell out of that Scott. He was awesome.
The real Scott, though? The one I’m unveiling on this phone, kilobyte by kilobyte? He can jettison himself so far into hell’s bowels that he bursts straight out through the other side and ends up in the Earth’s core.
Scott and Claire’s Tinder chat doesn’t last long before he suggests signing off to head over to WhatsApp. Ah yes, I’d almost forgotten about WhatsApp. Part of me wants to migrate over to that messenger portal so I can follow the rest of their chat that night, while the rest of me would rather go jump in the sea.
Sticking with Tinder, while navigating the seafront towards the flat I laughably call home, I read Scott’s conversations with the likes of Holly, Julie…
… don’t forget to look for women whose names begin with “V”…
… and Emma. These chats all took place between June and October, when Scott and I were seeing each other. I could forgive him for any shenanigans up until 12 July, because we had yet to officially become an item, but anything after that is unforgivable.
Although some of these Tinder chats fizzle and die, others end up switching over to WhatsApp. Given that Scott and I only saw each other once a week at most, and occasionally not for a whole agonising fortnight, he had ample opportunity to hunt down and meet whoever the hell he liked. So did I, of course, but this fact genuinely never crossed my mind.
Finally, I have confirmation. I have certainty. Scott Palmer is what Britney would refer to as a womaniser, over and over again.
The guy even liked Crafty Fox ale, for God’s sake. The clues were there.
Tinder delivers one last bitter blow. Turns out Scott paid the subscription fee for extra features, including the ability to set his location to anywhere in the world. I find a pictorial grid which gathers the faces of no fewer than eighty-nine women, all of whom told Tinder they Liked Scott. Seems he never got around to either dismissing them from the list or saying he Liked them too. And so these hopeful dames exist in a kind of limbo, neither accepted nor rejected, which is somehow worse than either outcome. These women simply did not warrant any kind of judgement, one way or the other.
And of course here I am, positioned smack-bang in the middle of all the other limbo ladies. Schrödinger’s twat. To make matters worse, my avatar pic is shaded blue, to denote that I’d Super-Liked Scott. Clearly, even my OTT act of enthusiasm hadn’t inspired him to decide whether he Liked me back.
Was my main Tinder photo really all that bad? Hmm, well, it was the same pic I have on all my socials: me, sticking my tongue out at a jaunty angle. Always best to deliberately make yourself look ugly before someone else can make that judgement.
On Tinder, Scott deemed me unworthy of any judgement at all. And yet, when we happened to meet, four months later in Wales, he gravitated straight to me. Couldn’t get enough. Guess I must have struck him as the kind of dimwit he could take for a ride.
At least there was one night in August when I came to question his bullshit.