Click Bait

Click Bait

Gillian Philip

COPYRIGHT © GILLIAN Philip.

This edition published in 2019 by BLKDOG Publishing.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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My thanks for putting up with stupid questions, and providing useful and knowledgable answers, go

to:

Richard Cantwell and everyone at Elgin Sheriff Court; Peter Milne of Elgin Police; Kenny Farquharson for patiently explaining the weird world of journalists; Fiona Dunbar, Lee Weatherly and Inbali Iserles for being fabulous critical readers; Ailsa Nicol and Sharon Black; and legal tweeters Malcolm Cameron and the mysterious Geoff Shadbold. You were all awesome and all the mistakes and potential offence caused are mine alone.

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obody in Langburn, least of all Brodie Cumnock, would have believed someone would set out one day to kill him and his seventeen-year-old daughter in cold blood. These things didn’t happen in Langburn, or if they did, they’d have the decency to happen on a slow news day when the town might at least have a shot at nationwide notoriety. Langburn did not have a lot going for it otherwise.

This is the sort of thought that goes through your head when you’re sitting in a shed full of agrichemicals, crying and trying not to smoke, cradling a broken shotgun in your arms like a loathsome baby and wondering how it ever got this far. (Literally broken it wasn’t. A broken shotgun is a safe shotgun. Then you snap it back together and it isn’t. Broken means safe, as it so rarely does in other areas of life.)

This is the way you think. This is the way your head reels around, crashing into random notions like a drunk. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s probably the fumes.

I’d better start at the beginning.

And I’d better finish at the end.

1

The last thing that went through Joanna Ricks’ head

W

hat’s on your mind?

Tempting little question. And when you’ve done something so wrong, so bad, so unforgivably loathsome that an entire train-full of human beings is willing to throw you out of it rather than share it with you, there’s kind of a big answer.

You go back and think about the whole sequence of events, over and over again, and try to work out the points where the parallel universes broke away and in those lovely unreachable worlds you didn’t take the fatal steps. You imagine a universe in which nobody on that train even knew who you were, much less wanted to grab you and slam you against the door and then chuck you through it. You imagine a world where you didn’t give in to the lure of a social media site, a world where you didn’t Write something... And then you imagine an existence where you didn’t click Post.

Rewriting your brain’s history at three in the morning doesn’t help at all. But you do it anyway. 

So, for instance, if my car had been in working order, I wouldn’t have been on that particular train in the first place. So I wouldn’t have been there to get thrown off it; but I’m leaping much too far ahead.

I can trace it further back, just a couple of days. If the disc drive on my Xbox hadn’t been irreparably damaged (which it wouldn’t have been, had the kid next door not broken his Playstation and come round to have a go of mine), I’d have been peaceably shooting the crap out of Colombian drug dealers, or maybe hit-and-running a prostitute. Instead, I was bored enough to go trawling the internet for jokes.

You ought to read a book, my old nan Flo would have told me, had she still been alive. And she’d have been right.

The joke itself, the one I found, was unimpressive, though I was impressed enough at the time to sort of half-choke, half-cackle at the enormity of it. Oh, let’s be honest, at two in the morning and with a bellyful of vodka, Red Bull and Heineken, it was hilarious. If I hadn’t thought so, I wouldn’t have posted it on my own Facebook page.

Yes, I know it’s sad and provincial but I still have a Facebook page. Or I did have, because I had Friends then, both with and without a capital letter, and if we wanted to get together, that was how we arranged it. Or we’d post photos of the resulting get-together: at least, the ones appropriate for any casually-stalking parents or uncles or grandmothers. Occasionally, one of my eighty-odd Friends would share a stupid photo or a quiz or a joke. And before you have a go at me, I know I’m not the only one who hadn’t updated my privacy settings since umpteen-sixteen.

If I’m going to explain myself, it would obviously help if I can explain the joke.

In the best tradition of sick jokes it started as a response to a major international tragedy, in this case 9/11. And the only person it was mocking, really, was the guy who flew one of the planes. I mean, it was tasteless, but it wasn’t victim-mockingly tasteless.

So: What was the last thing that went through Mohammed Atta’s head?

And the answer is:

(Wait for it)

The tail fin of a 747.

I promise you, there’s a surprising number of variations on this. If I’d posted the joke as was, it wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow (though it was unlikely to have raised a laugh, either). The mistake I made was Adjusting For Topicality.

So if I tell you that six days earlier there was a blaze in a chemical storage facility in Glassford, resulting in an explosion and the death of a local, young, female police officer with two small children, you’ll get the gist. So yes, I did amend the joke for local flavour, replacing the 747 with a barrel of chemicals. And before you ask: yes, I did post my drunkenly ill-judged joke on Facebook on the very eve of the woman’s funeral.

That’s the fickle irony of technology, then. If Xboxes were built to withstand a kick from a frustrated ten-year old, I’d never have turned into an involuntary YouTube star.

2

How did I get here (1)

S

o here’s what happened, in case you’ve never seen the piss-poor phone footage. Of course you will have seen it; everyone did. You can’t see my face very well, though everyone I knew knew it was me (and later, so did everyone in the country, and a respectable percentage of the world). And I understood, actually. In other circumstances it might have been me who manhandled me off the train and dumped me on the platform with a bloody nose.

Up till that moment, the Facebook thing had been localised (a bit like my joke). I woke up in the morning with a pounding head, a guilty conscience, and a Friends’ list that was eight down. This didn’t bother me, despite the clenching feeling of unease in my belly, since I’d never liked any of them, even at school, and I had no idea why I’d added them in the first place. There was a snotty little message in my Inbox from Aoife Connor, demanding that for the sake of human decency I take the joke down off my Wall, so I didn’t. I posted a mildly amusing status about my hangover level (‘Hedgehog’), and went back to bed.

I woke up again four hours later to an even worse headache (as you do), and a shitstorm. A localised shitstorm, but an intense one, like a frontal summer depression in the Cairngorm valley. There were more messages in my Inbox, which I read, swore at and deleted.

I did not, however, delete the joke.

I did that after a late lunch, when I had a bacon roll in my stomach and a text from Sid that said, ‘Are you all right, you total tosser?’

Since Sid was right about most things, even in a coded fashion, I deleted the bloody joke.

At one point that afternoon I turned on the local news, whose main story was of course the funeral, 3pm at St Matthews, Family Flowers Only, Donations in Lieu to Glassford Police Welfare Fund. I’m not sure how well the Fund did out of this, because nobody took any notice: the cortege route was lined with silent crowds chucking bouquets at the hearse. When it reached the cemetery, two small children got out of it, each gripping the hand of a grim-faced red-eyed man in a black suit. The littler kid looked bewildered, the other was biting his lip and not quite stopping his tears.

The reporter barely had time to open her mouth before I switched off the TV. I switched off because that nasty little knot in my gut yanked down on my stomach, and I had to go to the bathroom and throw up the bacon roll and the remnants of the Heineken.

I didn’t turn the TV back on till my stomach was empty and the afternoon schedule was safely ten minutes into Murder, She Wrote.

I needed fresh air and fresh groceries, so at about five I tried and failed to start my old wreck of a Vauxhall, then gave it up with a solid kick and a curse. I was going to have to forego Tesco own-brand potato waffles, but there was always the corner shop. 

It was closed when I arrived, so I nearly kicked it too – the door, at least – but I heard the key turn and Mrs Slater opened it just as I was turning away. She looked a little startled at the sight of me, but she stood back and let me in, finding something fascinating to look at on my shoulder.   She was not her cheery self. She didn’t even ask about my cat, and she always asked after Marvin. She loved Marvin. But she said not a word, and as she shoved my milk and rolls and bacon into a flimsy bag (and charged me a 10p bag tax without asking), she was a bit red about the eyelids. I know this because she caught my eyes at last and gave me a dead stare.

My hand had started to shake, so I wrapped the plastic bag handles tightly round my fingers.

You were closed, I ventured pointlessly, for something to say.

She looked past me at the weather beyond the door: grey with intermittent sunspots.

I was at the funeral, she said. I was outside the church.

I had a good look at my numb whitening fingers while I waited for my credit card to clear.

’S a tragedy, I mumbled, meaning it.

Yes. She almost threw my credit card slip at me, like she was still in carnations-on-a-hearse mode. Her voice shook. Those poor babies.

I could feel a hot tide of blood creeping up my face, so I nodded and slunk out.

Mad. Mad to imagine she knew. I doubted Mrs Slater was even on Facebook, and she certainly wasn’t on my Friends list.

Still.

By the time I was sitting on the train into town, glaring out of the window and avoiding eye contact with my fellow passengers, I was feeling shakily relieved that I’d deleted that joke. By the time we pulled into Glassford station, I’d almost convinced myself that I’d posted a joke about Mohammed Atta on a plane, and never really had replaced him with PC Joanna Ricks (28), mother of Toby (8) and Calum (6).

Three hours into my shift, I was feeling positively optimistic. The bar was full all night and nobody spat at me, and nobody avoided getting me to serve them. Who’s more popular than a barman behind a crowded counter? I was positively surrounded by smiles and waves and needy grins. Adrian the manager still liked me, using me loudly as a role model for the bone-idle Megan, who never seemed to do anything but moan about customers and her chipped nail polish. Even Brodie Cumnock, who owned the place, gave me a tight little smile when he came in to lord it with his partners. He thanked me, in his gruff way, when I carried a tray of drinks to his group in the special raised alcove. He even rolled his eyes, in mild amusement, at my cheesy grin and my lame attempts to suck up.

If I hadn’t been so desperate to be liked that particular night, I wouldn’t have stayed on a little too late to help clear up; so I wouldn’t have been running for the very last train to Langburn.

It might not have saved me, in the end, but I wouldn’t have been on that train.

How I wish that little sod next door had never kicked his Playstation.

THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I was thinking (or, ironically, what was ‘going through my head’) as I sat on a sodden platform with blood and rain trickling down my chin, very intently not looking at the train windows because I thought I was going to die of humiliation if I did. It took an age for the thing to hiss and spit and pull slowly away, and I swear to God the driver was taking his time so the guy with the iPhone could get a better picture.

Red lights dwindled smoothly away round the long curve of the track, and I was on my own. The silence when it was gone was beautiful and horrible. Well, until the sky exploded and started to rain nine-inch nails on the glass roof.

Jesus, I muttered.

I didn’t expect a reply. I slouched out, avoiding eye contact with the sniggering hi-vis staff. They must have thought I was fare-dodging. They’d know better in twenty-four hours.

Drew fecking Hunter. Drew My-Dad’s-A-Police-Hero Hunter. Why did he have to be on that train, pissed up and very pissed off?

I’d seen him when I got on. I’d pretended I didn’t. I’d picked up a discarded newspaper and held it in front of my face, pretending I understood Sudoku.

OY. That’s him. That’s the cop hating c––

It wasn’t just the word he used that got every single person in that carriage turning to look. There’s a kind of voice that drowns out every other sound in the vicinity, and he was using it. The only thing to do in this situation is pretend you’re deaf. I snapped the paper higher and stared at the pencilled-in crossword.

Eleven down. Legal turf (4,3)

Eddie DOOLAN.

I wished this train would just get going. He must have gone to the pub straight from the funeral. I ran my eye down to the scribbled solution.

Sod’s Law

Oh ha, ha. Thank you, Universe.

A stranger down the passageway was getting to his feet, and the guard was approaching from the opposite direction. I thought for a minute I was going to get away with it. Because the stranger and the guard actually were coming to my rescue, I reckon, before Drew Hunter got calm and steely and started talking rationally. And pulled a sheet of paper out of his jacket.

I knew what it was without having to see it; I really did. A screenshot. Aoife Connor took a screenshot.

I didn’t listen. In some part of my mind I must have thought no-one would notice me if I sat very still. All I heard were angry voices and gasps of horror and a piece of paper rustling its way from seat to seat round the carriage. I just kept looking at the paper: Sod’s Law. Sod’s Law. Sod’s––

When Drew grabbed me by the collar I started taking things seriously, but he had a good three inches on me, and the whole carriage was cheering him on by this time. For the sake of testosterone I put up a fight, but there was only ever going to be one outcome.

So there I was, in the middle of the night, wet and bloody and full of unjustified hatred. There was a rip in my jeans where I’d hit the platform, and for the moment that annoyed me more than anything. Heading for the exit, not looking at anyone, I lit up under the excuse for a shelter just outside the station entrance.