The call ends. A commuter, hunched in a beige raincoat turned grey from the sleet, is tapping on the taxi window. The driver stirs. He, at least, has some business. Glumly and grimly I lift my smartphone from my other pocket. Closing my eyes for courage, I open them, go to Twitter, find @JotheJournalist.
It isn’t hard. My Twitter name is actually trending. I am a trend. I am famous. And I am famous twice over. #JotheNazi is another trend, across the UK, which is, also, all about me.
The first tweet I can see on my phone is the newest. It talks about Jews. It actually says JEWS. In capitals.
Who do you believe? Who owns all the media? Do you think you’re being told the truth? The clue is in the rhyme. Fake News Equals JEWS.
Accompanying it is a grotesque anti-Semitic caricature: hooknose, dollar bills, top hat, the works. Something from the 1930s.
I feel the bile heave: I am close to being sick. Leaning against the damp cold brickwork of the station threshold, I watch a man emerge from the station, glance at his phone, and look at me curiously. Perhaps I am so famous already people will start spotting me in the street: #JotheNazi.
How can I go to the shops? The cafes I liked? Pubs? Cinemas? Anywhere?
Scrolling down, I see my brief but prolific tweet stream is full of so much more, a foul and endless sewer of this effluent. Racist, bigoted, pointlessly abusive. My tweets are jubilant in their vileness, and every other tweet names my paper, my employers, and names my editors and colleagues, and I, @JotheJournalist, like boasting that they all agree with everything I am tweeting – and on and on it goes.
There have been 150 tweets in six hours. I scroll back to the first, which simply says,
Hi I’m @JotheJournalist real name Jo Ferguson. I work for your favourite London paper, and today I want to tell you what we’re all really thinking
That first tweet was retweeted twice. The latest, with the anti-Semitic cartoon, has been retweeted twelve thousand times.
Jothejournalist, or JotheNazi, is viral, she is near enough global. I am a sudden and sensational hate figure, a dark shooting star, a vile celebrity born, and killed, by this ruinous fame, on the same single day.
Sarah was right. I am finished as a journalist. I am a pariah. I have no friends. I have no money. I have no job.
Is there anything more they could do to me? Why destroy me so entirely? I do not understand. If it is Arlo and Tabitha, defending themselves, they didn’t have to go this far. Did they? The same applies if it is Simon, or Anna, or Fitz, or Gul, or Jenny, or my brother, or Cars, or the Rothschilds, or some kind of digital death squad, a bunch of Assistant Assassins. I do not understand the extent of the hatred and the violence of the damage done to me. Why and how do I deserve this? What is the point? The sadism seems cruelly overdone, the nastiness is berserk.
Turning my collar against the cold, and against the possible stares of anyone who might recognize me, I trudge into the station. I am resisting the urge to go back to that little snowbound playground with the wooden sheep and chickens and pigs on springs, back to where I was safe, back to the deep deep past, back to where I was a child, playing games with my friends, waiting for Daddy, the Ticklemonster.