Don’t think about it.
As I wait for everyone else to arrive, I stare at some luridly antique prints on the panelled pub wall. They show famous executions in the area, men hanging from gibbets, cheering crowds. One of the hangings seems to be taking place on top of Primrose Hill. Three men are dangling in a row, barefoot and dancing, grasping at the noose, obviously dying. The engraver has gone to great lengths to get the details of the throttled faces right: the boggling eyes, the protruding tongues, the gruesomely happy, popcorn-munching reactions of the audience.
My research hasn’t told me this. Primrose Hill was a place of execution? The dying, horrified face of the man on the left, apparently biting his own tongue off, as he is slowly asphyxiated, stares directly at me. Right at me. Like it knows. He knows. Who knows?
I am not my father.
Am I? I remember my dad before he lost himself: he was extrovert, full of humour. A frustrated artist who ended up imprisoned in minor accountancy: so he lived, and found joy, through his family. Dad was always ready to have fun, to make me laugh, to chase me round the apple tree pretending he couldn’t catch me. I called him the Ticklemonster and he called me Jo the Go because I could run so fast. He liked to play with words, he liked to play with life. So perhaps I take after him rather than my cautious, conservative mother. Which says?
My anxious, fumbling thoughts – ready to plunge into something worse – are interrupted.
Arlo is at the bar. He gazes at me, blankly confident, arrogantly possessive. I am in his bar. His local. To celebrate the return of my friend, my flatmate. Why did we have to come here?
Because he’s Arlo Scudamore. He is in control. I think he also controls Tabitha. He knows I think that. He also doesn’t apparently care what I think, whether I am hurt or happy, as he is still so bitter about my critical article on the tech giants, where I quoted him as a source supposedly without his permission. He did give permission, he simply didn’t like what I wrote. He claims the article stymied his previously meteoric career. God, I hate his stupid posh-yet-hipster accent. He thinks I’m common? Fuck him. Simon once described Arlo as ‘psychotically ambitious’ and I’ve never forgotten that: it was so accurate.
Stepping around the bar, I say,
‘Hello, Arlo! Lovely to see you.’ And give him a quick double non-kiss air-kiss.
‘Ah, Jo. Hello, so glaaaad you could make it!’
He returns the duo of non-kisses. I had no idea social greetings could be this insincere.
‘Where’s Tabs?’
‘Vaping outside, swathed in perpetual smoke like some hydrothermal vent.’
Who, or what, is a hydrothermal vent? I have no idea. He probably said it to make me feel insecure. So we are stuck, in a corner of the Flask. Just me and him and rows of glittery obscure new artisanal gins on the mirrored shelves behind the bar, and the deeply sinister prints of the local executions on the wall, and a lovely roaring woodfire in the mighty hearth. Waiting for everyone else to arrive.
‘Everything OK at, uh, work? Facebook?’
This is probably the most irritating thing I could ask him. Which is possibly why I ask it. He does the same to me all the time. Needling Arlo at least takes my mind off my own deepening vortex of worries.
‘Work? Oh, superb. I’ll be leaving in a week or two. For the start-up.’ His smile is so icy it could kill wintering songbirds at twenty metres. ‘Ah!’ The smile becomes brighter, warmer, even real. ‘Here’s Jeremy. Lex! Rollo.’
Rollo.
Rollo.
Arlo has an extraordinary number of posh, pink-faced friends with names that end in O. Hugo. Rollo. Theo. Rocco. Orlando. Otto. I think Otto is a ‘Von’ as well. They are all stupidly rich. Dutch bazillionaires. French bankers. Film directors. Venture capitalists investing in Arlo’s Big New Thing, which is all to do with Artificial Intelligence and FinTech, and other stuff I Officially Cannot Understand. I know some of these guys by sight, but they barely know me. I am clearly only here because of Tabitha. If I am lucky, one or two university friends that me and Tabs share might show up, diluting my social isolation.
But as I have recently confirmed, to my own dismay, most of my friends now live out of town.
‘Jo!!’
Ah. A slender blonde girl tucking a vape in her chic denim jacket is smiling, broadly, my way.
‘Jo! Darleenk!’
She does a heavy, fake, theatrical German accent when she’s in a good mood.
‘Heyyy, Tabs! You didn’t get eaten by jaguars!’
My friend skips towards me and gives me a big big hug and a kiss where her lips actually touch my skin. I realize, with a hidden but painful cramping sensation, how much I’ve missed physical interaction. No one has touched me in days, let alone hugged or kissed me.
‘Jo-Jo babe. How are you!’
‘Oh God, fine! You? Brazil? Peru? What happened?’
‘Put it this way, if I have to film another tiny, critically endangered tree frog, I will dedicate my career to wiping out amphibian life. I will shoot a fucking newt.’
We laugh. We hug again. I sooooooo want this. I so need this.
Freelance journalism, I have realized, doesn’t even make you free, it can all too easily imprison you in your flat, devoid of human contact, and you don’t get out of pyjamas from Monday to Wednesday. And freelancing plus digital technology is worse. All the significant conversations I have had this week have been with the digital world.
Since I went freelance five years back, I’ve discovered quite how much people don’t even want to talk. Rather than pick up a phone, they will go to great lengths to text or email. They want to type and WhatsApp and message, so they can edit and censor. Curate themselves: their souls and their discourse.
I should have put this in the article which so annoyed Arlo. The fact that tech was fucking up our social lives, fucking up our humanity, our interactions, our everything. And in return is it fucking with me?
‘Arlo!’
‘Theo.’
‘Cicero.’
The Os have turned out in force. Tabitha chats with them. I stand alone. The executed man dangling from the gallows on Primrose Hill sticks his vile and blackened tongue in my direction. My thoughts return to the machines in my home, undermining me, throwing me off-balance, and a question forms. Could this be Arlo’s doing? Is it some kind of cynical vengeance? He’s certainly clever enough, and controlling enough. He’d probably find it loftily droll and piquant. Using the same tech I criticized to gaslight me, to send me round the bend.
His dislike of me, based partly on pure snobbery, was confirmed by my so-called journalistic betrayal. When I first moved to Delancey, he came round and looked at my paltry wardrobe and delivered a litany of acidic remarks about how lucky I was to live in that flat, when I could have been stuck in some horrible bedsit in nowhere, perhaps along the A40 ‘breathing in pure carbon monoxide’. He actually said that. And he knows how my poor dad died. And then, he added, for good measure: ‘Instead, you get to live here, with the smart TV, the Assistants, the smart lighting – you have only to ask for music and it floods the rooms, and all of it is made by those companies you hate. How … ironic?’
I stare across at him, framed by the shelved arrays of fashionable gins, surrounded by his eager peers. He is chortling in that austere way he has. Like he finds laughter slightly vulgar but will indulge in it for close friends