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It was a couple of days after Jody had told Beth about her Internet presence that she finally plucked up the courage to look. Her brother’s tablet had been on the coffee table since she’d moved in, and she’d been eyeing it askance every time they’d sat together in the lounge.
She wasn’t sleeping, had done enough of that. Her limbs felt weak but twitched when she tried to relax them. The bed was tiny and ice-cold even when Jody turned up the radiator. It was March but Beth knew it was nothing to do with the temperature.
Jody’s dated and dusty place was modest but didn’t need to be. Much to Beth’s surprise, her brother had turned out to be something of a success story, albeit a covert one. And she thought that his days with the keyboards were over. He used to play for a variety of semi-professional indie bands. Like bassists, keyboardists were always in more demand than guitarists, drummers and vocalists. It appeared he’d harnessed his skills and was now composing music for computer games and earning a very lucrative living. He even had a timeshare condo in LA that he offered her if she needed to get away. He had to be doing OK.
Jody had never been very ambitious, never seemed to try hard at anything. He’d done effortlessly well at school and in college when he’d seemed to spend all his time smoking marijuana and drinking beer. He was just one of those people that didn’t need to strive but had things land in their lap. His life seemed to consist of the odd meeting, lots of TV watching and the occasional trip to the tiny recording studio next to his bedroom.
Beth got the impression the music and money made no odds to him. His life was simple and it was just a way to get by. He’d lived in the same place for over a decade and had no plans to upgrade. He’d always struggled with his weight but now he seemed resigned to it. He took no exercise except for his wheezing assaults on the stairs.
Her mother and father had returned from their cruise and visited. When they’d attempted to get her to re-engage with the myriad financial demands she had to deal with, and Beth had asked them to put the newly acquired property back on the market, they’d told her she shouldn’t make any rash decisions.
She got that they were trying to plug her back into her life by reminding her of her commitment to Avellana, Luc’s company, but she couldn’t yet face his colleagues, go to the house or anywhere she was meant to be with him. She would have to sooner or later, but Beth didn’t feel any desire to “move forward” as her mother had suggested when it still seemed as if he would walk back through the door.
She still hadn’t cried. Not once. Not even since she’d woken in the hospital. When it finally hit her that he really was gone, she knew it was going to feel like being in another car wreck. She waited for that impact to come but it still hadn’t. How much longer would it take?
She knew shutting herself away was exactly the wrong thing to do. She had to inhabit the past backdrops of her life with Luc and allow herself to contemplate his absence. She was being a coward, and she recognised her parents were right, even if their motives weren’t entirely admirable.
Her mother had never cared for Luc, and the feeling had been mutual. She was waiting for her to mention Adam. It would be coming. Her childhood sweetheart was still single, and her mother had it in her mind that they should have married and made things convenient for her. After all, he was the son of their dearest neighbourhood friends. Surely even she wouldn’t be as crass as to try and put them back together so soon after Luc’s funeral. She was already getting angry about it in advance. And her mother still insisted on calling her Bethany. She was the only person who did.
The media attention had ebbed and her father had told her nobody was calling at the house, and that they only had the occasional call from the newspapers. Would she like to come home? She’d looked at Jody and said she’d got herself settled for the moment. He didn’t make eye contact during her reply but appeared to be pleased with her decision to stay with him.
But even hiding out at his place, Beth still had a gauntlet to run. What she was about to watch at just after three in the morning was going to be excruciating, but perhaps seeing it would be the catalyst she needed for her postponed grief.
Unlocking Jody’s tablet, she touched the Google icon but didn’t want to put her name into a general search. She didn’t care about her own, but Beth didn’t want to see unexpected photos of Luc appear.
She opened YouTube and entered the name of the clip that Jody had scribbled down for her: “French Crash Victim Assault.” He told her to brace herself for the names of the others.
He’d suggested she view one at a time. She touched “search” and the clip plus the others related to it loaded up. She swallowed as she took in what was displayed before her. All were represented by low-grade night shots of the crash site – day-glo paramedics from a distance and the familiar overhanging beech trees. Her eyes skated instinctively but reluctantly about them and their titles. She saw the words “whack job”, “psycho” and “bitch”.
Someone called “thatTODdude” had uploaded the clip she was about to watch. Beth suspended the tip of her finger half an inch over the clip but couldn’t touch it. How could she subject herself to any of this? She stalled, quickly opened another window and logged into her Facebook account.
While she’d been in hospital, she’d given Jody her password and had told him to keep anyone who had posted on her wall updated on her progress. She hadn’t been ready to interact with any of her friends – their friends – and still wasn’t. At his next visit he’d said there had been too many messages to respond to, so he’d just posted that she’d be out of hospital soon.
Perhaps the grief of the people they knew was what she needed to see now. She scrolled through them. Scores of reactions going right back to the crash date. Most of them were from mutual friends. Some of them she didn’t even know. Everyone was “so sorry”. Some users had even “liked” the condolences; thumbs-up to grief and RIP. One woman she’d never heard of had sent her some virtual flowers.
It was a joke. She just wanted to type WTF, tell them all she was sorry if she’d taken up five seconds of their precious time. But she saw faces she knew there. Faces attached to people who had sent cards to her in the hospital. She didn’t want to look at the page anymore, though.
“What’s on your mind?” the box asked.
She typed:
Thanks so much to everyone. You’ll understand if I don’t log in here anytime soon. Please take time to remember Luc and what he meant to you. I love him like he’s still here.
She touched “post” and looked dispassionately at the words on her page, waiting for her own reaction to what she’d typed. Sitting atop the stack of facile sentiments, it was as if somebody else had written them.
WTF indeed. And “what the fuck” could trivialise events more than she’d just seen. She logged out.
When she clicked back to the YouTube page she registered the clip had been viewed 3, 348, 104 times. It had 48, 922 thumbs-up and only 62 thumbs-down. It was one minute and forty-three seconds long. She didn’t allow her eyes to dip to the comments beneath it. Beth swallowed dryly and wondered if she really was ready to see a replay of the event she’d barely physically recovered from. Before she could have second thoughts, however, she hovered her finger over the play symbol, then stabbed it.
Her finger slipped and nothing happened. She wondered if it was a sign. She stabbed it again.
The clip counter rotated in front of her and a commercial began. Beth was dumbfounded. It was for injury at work claims. Somebody was actually making money from hits on the clip. A slate-suited woman asked if she “was suffering but didn’t know where to turn.” Beth felt revulsion solidify and spotted a countdown that would allow her to skip the commercial. She poked the screen like it was something dead.
Seconds later the black square became a familiar night-time roadside. It was focused on a parked ambulance.
The accident report stated that the single ambulance had been sent back after it was decided the helicopter could get them both to the hospital faster. Luc had died on board. She vaguely recalled the black straps dangling above her from the ceiling of the helicopter while she’d been drifting in and out of consciousness.
The camera panned left to their inverted car, and it felt like a screw was being tightened in her chest. Gendarmes were on the scene. The clip jump-cut to Luc and Beth lying on the stretchers about twenty feet away. Her stomach hardened and she felt herself turning cold in the seat of the chair.
She hit pause, suddenly aware of her own uneven breathing. She got up from the armchair and staggered to the bathroom, kneeling in front of the toilet. But no liquid came up as her throat pumped. She drank some water from the tap, then padded back to the box room and got back into bed. Twenty minutes later, she seated herself in the armchair with the tablet again.
She clicked the play button and the action resumed.
