7 October
Plump grey clouds line the coast, as we rocket along the seafront towards the snow-capped Palace Pier.
Scott is dead.
This afternoon, Madeira Drive lies wide open, straight as a die. Which is just as well, because our damned lights make all this snow on the road resemble blue glitter. Sometimes it can be hard to see past all this glitter to the actual road.
Scott is dead.
Seems a fight has broken out in Nelson’s Bar at the end of the pier, and it’s been bad enough for the staff to frantically summon us. Bloody afternoon drinkers.
Scott is dead.
Now that the drugs have worn off, this fact is sinking in way too deep.
Tyler’s engrossed in his phone. I want to toss him a warning, to tell him not to photograph or film anything when we reach this bar. I want him to know that I know, but my fatigue barely leaves me with enough energy to drive and ponder those new pathways that Scott burnt into his brain.
So… porn, seriously? That was Scott’s big bad secret? I mean, I hadn’t quite realised porn addiction was such a thing, but he and I could have so easily worked on the problem together. I meet addicts on a daily basis – and we were in love, weren’t we? Despite all the other lies he told me, I now know we did have some kind of connection.
Can’t help remembering what he said, back in that detox retreat tent. Sometimes I’ll find myself scrolling through, you know, whatever, and I’ll catch myself… and I’ll wonder what the hell I was even doing. It ends up being just… mindless. It’s like you get sucked in, you know?
Kills me, to think that he felt unable to talk about this, being so convinced I’d abandon him the moment I discovered the real Scott. And yet, if anything, these diary entries make me like him even more. The Scott I once loved, he now feels like a fake billboard. Some kind of soft-focus cologne advert, concealing the real, three-dimensional, fucked-up Wizard of Oz.
Seems obvious that Scott never meant to leave me. I picture his vulnerable Tinder face, then his dead blue flicker-face, before making myself snap out of it.
Tyler squints over at the pier as it draws closer on the left. With a mouth full of Frazzles, he says, “At least the bar’s not on fire. That’s gotta be a plus.”
The True Romance ringtone rises up from the dashboard.
I glance at the phone’s screen, expecting to see yet another incoming call from Idiot. Instead, it’s Unknown Number. Oh God, another dead person?
My throat seizes up, as I consider one potential caller.
Tyler is saying something about how familiar this music sounds, when I snatch the phone from the dashboard.
Bouncing my attention back and forth between the blue-glitter road and the glowing screen in my hand, I put the call on speakerphone, then sling the phone back onto the dash.
“Kate,” Tyler snaps, “what the hell are you doing?”
I would fire back some cutting retort about people in glass houses and stones, but my head is mush. All I want is to hear whose voice will rise out of the dead static that now issues from the phone.
“Mate, you can’t answer your phone when you’re bloody—”
“Shut up, Tyler, I’m on the phone.”
“Don’t tell me to—”
Tyler stops talking as soon as the caller starts. Must be something about how Scott’s voice sounds so very flat, dark and dead.
“Kate,” Scott says, “get rid of this thing. I’m begging you to throw it away.”
Tears blur the road and I swipe at them. “Is that really you? Are you really dead?”
Tyler yells my name and I don’t understand why, but then I see the imminent nightmare.
Running across the snow, in the road right in front of us: a small child in blue wellies, chased by a frantic adult.
Too close to brake.
I swing the wheel left. Adult and child fly off to the right.
The whole cab judders as we mount the pavement.
Tyler’s voice runs high enough to attract dogs. “Brake, Kate, brake!”
I already fucking have, but now we’re skidding on ice. Narrowly missing a statue, we zoom towards the metal rails that separate this pavement from the crazy golf course down at beach level.
I stomp the brake again.
Scott’s phone flies off the dash and smacks me in the face.
The van’s front bumper comes to a soft rest on the rails. Tyler yells so loud, I’m convinced he must be physically hurt. “What the fuck? What the fuck was that?”
Seeing that Tyler’s sustained no damage, I roll down the window and stick out my head, searching for the people we…
… you…
… almost hit. Please, please, tell me they’re okay.
Back across the road, the young mother stands unscathed, physically at least. Her arms are wrapped around the child, whose face is buried in her belly.
Embattled by nausea, I follow Tyler as he marches along the sludge-soaked floorboards of the pier, his bag slung over one shoulder.
I can’t speak. I can barely think. All I can do, right now, is feel appalled by myself. I want to turn back time and never go on that digital detox retreat. Or go back even further and never buy a smartphone in the first place. Or best of all, go all the way back to a time when messages were sent by smoke signals and trained birds.
I could’ve killed both of those people. With an ambulance.
A young mother and her child.
I’m going to do my very best to redeem myself. Could saving a hundred more lives make amends for nearly taking two? No. I doubt I can ever make full amends for such dereliction of duty.
Scott’s voice comes back to haunt me. His dead and dismal voice, telling me to get rid of the phone.
Is he still really that desperate for me not to discover the whole truth? What if there’s more, beyond the porn?
Enough. Focus on the job. The. Fucking. Job.
An alternative take: could it be that Scott knows his phone has become my obsession? He may have been trying to warn me that disaster lay ahead… and as a result he helped to cause this disaster. Fucking hell, that’s the kind of irony that would have Alanis Morissette strumming herself.
A snowflake lands on my forehead as I arrive at Nelson’s Bar. Need to forget about my impending mental breakdown, strap on my game face and help people.
Tyler, still ahead of me, barges in through the bar’s doors, then allows them to slam shut in my face. Following him through, I take in the wide space. The room has emptied, apart from the flustered bar staff and a burly security guard. Several chairs and tables have been up-ended. Broken glass litters the floor, some of it bloody.
“Where are the injured?” Tyler asks the guard.
“They all left,” he says. “Did you not see them on your way up here? One of them had blood coming out of his neck.”
“How hard?” I ask, feeling like the trainee, desperate to contribute.
Makes sense. Only a trainee would make an insane decision like answering their phone while on the way to a job.
The guard frowns. “What do you mean?”
“How hard is the blood coming out of his neck?” Tyler says. “A gush, a dribble, somewhere in between?”
“More like a paper cut,” he says, giving me and Tyler our cue to relax.
When we get outside, Tyler says, “Come with me.”
I hate the fact that he’s about to rip into me. Much more than this, though, I hate the fact that I deserve it, so I follow him to the far end of the pier. Here, we settle at the railing beside a vertigo-inducing ride called The Booster, which makes me feel even more like throwing up. Beyond the railing, a turbulent sea stretches to the horizon.
With snow resting like dandruff on each shoulder, Tyler says, “I’m gonna do you one hell of a favour.” He holds an object in the air. What is it?
Scott’s phone.
Panicked, I slap my pocket where the thing usually lives. How the hell did he get that? Must’ve grabbed the thing when I left the van to check on the mother and her kid. I’ve been in such a state that I didn’t even think to check where it had landed.
Oh God. Tyler is going to throw Scott’s phone in the sea.
“Hey,” I hear myself bark, “you’d better give that back, right now.”
“Sure,” he says. “I could give it back. But if I do, I’ll also tell Akeem exactly what happened, back there on the road. And the bloody pavement. Bang, there goes your stupid fifteen-year badge.”
I present him with the palm of one hand. “Give me back my fucking phone.”
This thing isn’t even mine. I should let Tyler toss it. This is literally what Scott would’ve wanted.
“I don’t know who that was, calling you,” Tyler says, “or why the hell you asked him if he was dead… but you need to take his advice. You never stop looking at this bloody phone and you could have killed all four of us back there. So I’m chuckin’ this thing in the drink, love, and—Hey!”
With one cat-snatch move, I steal Tyler’s own phone from its stupid belt-holster. He swipes a beefy paw at me, but I hold his phone out over the rail, ready to drop, and he turns to stone.
“So, Tyler… bet you were disappointed that the paper-cut guy hadn’t been slit from ear to ear, right? You could’ve scored a few more Hero Points from your fellow SikkFuxx…”
Tyler’s feral eyes weaken at this, but he keeps Scott’s phone raised. What we have ourselves here is a Mexican standoff.
“What I did with the ambulance was actually worse,” I say, “so yeah, you’ve got me there. But this shit you’re doing has to stop, too. Maybe we’re both driven by the need for something? I need answers to… stuff… and you need… you need… I have no idea what the fuck you need. Why would you upload a picture of someone with half their head gone, for a bunch of gore-hounds to jerk over? Why on Earth would you do that, Tyler?”
His shoulders rise and fall. A fake calm descends upon him, and I can tell that his new smile is designed to humour me while he slyly lowers my defences. “Okay, Kate. Let’s keep our heads and explore that question. Bear in mind, by the way, that I bought that phone only recently for five-hundred quid, all right? Your phone looks second-hand.” He takes a deep breath. “Okay, I mean, I definitely don’t feel great about these uploads. So… why do I do it? Uh…”
Silence ensues. Convinced he’s only pretending to examine his own moral fabric, I step up to the plate. “Let me guess: you think you’re not worth all that much. And so sharing sick pictures, these shots that only you can take earns you a micro-dose of power and prestige. It earns you one single gram of leverage in this world. Am I close?”
A single flicker in Tyler’s otherwise stony gaze suggests I’m right. “You feel addicted, don’t you, mate?” I say. “You’re a runaway train. I know, because I feel it too. That’s my ex’s phone. Ever since he disappeared, I’ve been using this thing to try and figure out why. And I absolutely cannot stop.”
Tyler tries to speak, but I cut him off. “The thing is, Tyler, I do really need to stop.”
Scott’s voice echoes in my head. Kate, get rid of this thing. I’m begging you to get rid of it.
Seeing the reckless glow in my eyes, Tyler looks fit to bust a blood vessel. He takes one quick step towards me but doesn’t dare make a grab for his phone. “Kate… don’t do anything stupid.”
Scott’s voice, again: Actually… out of interest… do you trust me, Kate?
“This is the end of stupidity for both of us,” I tell Tyler, and I drop his phone into the sea.