Twelve Days: the Sixth

[avevale_intelligencer]

SIX

For Avedon, with belated birthday wishes

"Go on then, what's the secret?"

The two women were speaking in low tones, heads close together, in a corner of the fadedly opulent London pub. Around them, sharp-suited men and bonily attractive women struck their poses, discoursed affectedly on this or that cutting-edge phenomenon, cast their eyes avidly around for someone influential to impress, or for a paparazzo to make a great show of avoiding. The flock wallpaper absorbed it all, as it had absorbed everything that had taken place within these walls in the thirty years since the room had last been decorated. The old British sense of history, Katrina reflected. Or maybe they just couldn’t afford a designer.

"I don't know if I should tell you," Ellen said, sipping her mojito. "You'd only blurt it out all over the internet."

"Oh, now I'm hurt," Katrina said. "Did I tell anyone when your big-ass Brangelina reunion scoop turned out to be bogus and you decked the guy right in front of me? Did I breathe a word when you caught a certain lady powdering her nose in the john and her husband—"

"Swear you'll keep it to yourself?"

Katrina put down her drink and raised her hand. "I swear. But you've got to tell me the truth now. I mean, we both know that story you spun about Zoe is a total crock."

"About her spending ten years on the Bolivian Altiplano after the chopper crashed?" Ellen grinned. "Worked, though, didn't it? It's really put unZIP on the map. The great Zoe Arcady came back, and everyone was so overjoyed they just accepted it. I could have said she was on the moon with Elvis."

"She was a giant," Katrina said simply. "The voice of our generation, when our generation really needed it. And she's just as incisive and brilliant now." She gazed at Ellen, searching for a clue in that enigmatic smile, the slightly-too-round face looking more Buddha-like than ever. "You can't write like that. I can't. Nobody had her gift. What did you do? Use a computer?"

"Oh yeah, that would work," Ellen scoffed. "All right. Since you ask so nicely, I'll tell you." She took out her notebook and wrote down six lines of text on the top sheet, tore it off and passed it to Katrina. "My shout, I think," she said, and got up and went to the bar with their glasses while Katrina contemplated the paper.

"These are web addresses," Katrina said, puzzled, when Ellen came back. "They look like blog sites."

"They are blog sites," Ellen said. "I found the first two one night, just surfing. The others I tracked down on purpose."

"Who are they?" Katrina said, picking up her vodka tonic and sipping.

"All different. The top one, Gavin, he's a rabid Tory who thinks people like me should be sent back where we came from." Ellen snorted. "Enfield, in my case, but don't try to tell him that. Lilian's a teenager from Hartlepool who's trying hard to become anorexic because she thinks it's cool. Terrie's a football fan, she's saving up for the operation. Diana's a Doctor Who fan, less said about that the better. Norman's passion is old trains and buses, and Tinkle—well, I don't know what Tinkle is; I can't even understand a word of what he or she writes most of the time. But all these six sad, lonely, frustrated people have one thing in common."

"What?"

"Every two or three posts, roughly, each one of them comes out with a paragraph of writing which is pure Zoe."

"What?? How?" Katrina's drink hit the table and slopped.

"Don't ask me. Spirit messages? Brain injuries? They were all part of some drug trial a couple of years ago, but so were nine hundred other people, and these six are the only ones I've found who do this. There's more." Ellen leaned forward. "The paragraphs join up."

"Join—?"

"The first time I saw it I emailed Gavin and asked him about it. He said it was some sort of condition he had, he never remembered doing it, and he wouldn't go to a doctor because he would be too embarrassed to admit to writing anything so asinine and they were all foreigners these days anyway. And then two days later I was researching some pro-ana stuff for a feature, and came across the next paragraph in the middle of a self-flagellatory rant from Lilian. And it was the next paragraph, Trina. It followed straight on." Ellen sat back and drank. "Then it was just a case of Googling the right phrases and seeing what came up."

"You mean these—these bloggers are somehow channelling Zoe?"

Ellen held up her hand. "I try to avoid the terminology—but yes, that's what it seems like. I waited till I was sure I'd got all of them—Tinkle's paragraph was followed by another from Gavin—and then I contacted all of them and lied through my teeth. I said I was researching their condition, and would they please watch for these strange outbursts, cut them out of the post and send them to me asap."

"I don't get why they didn't just delete them before posting."

"Katrina, these are bloggers. They barely even look at what they know they've written before they click POST." Ellen looked smug. "Anyway, it's a win-win as far as they're concerned. I send them a little cash on a regular basis—for their participation in the research—and I paste the articles together and publish it under Zoe's byline. It's pure gold. They're happy, I'm happy."

"Suppose they find out?"

"My dear, none of them will ever even know anyone who reads unZIP. How could they?"

"But why not tell them the truth?"

"Why take the risk?" Ellen countered. "At best it would lead to a lot of awkward questions—Gavin would shut up like a clam, I don't know about any of the others. At worst it could destroy my supply."

"What would Zoe say?" Katrina had no idea where that had come from, but she went with it. "She was always full-on for total honesty. You're conning these people. She'd never sit still for that."

"I'm not doing them any harm." Ellen's voice rose, and she consciously reined it in, even though the rest of the clientele were clearly far too absorbed in themselves to notice if a bomb had gone off. "Anyway, I see it one of two ways. Either Zoe is alive, somewhere out there—in which case she's obviously still writing, she still wants to be heard, and I'm doing what's necessary to make that happen—or she's not—in which case it doesn't matter what she would think." She regarded Katrina, a touch mulishly. "Are you going to break your promise?"

"I don't know," Katrina said. "I mean, no, of course not. I swore. But Ellen, you've got to see that something about this stinks. I don't know what yet, but something does. I hear what you're saying, that nobody's getting really hurt, but—" She broke off, shaking her head. "unZIP's a good magazine, it deserves to do well, it's just—if I thought you were just using a ringer, some old hack who could do a halfway good impression of Zoe, that would be fine. I mean not fine, but okay. This—"

She broke off. Ellen was laughing. Realisation took a moment to sink in, and then Katrina said, "Fuck."

"I had you going, didn't I?" Ellen said, chuckling. "You bought the whole story."

"Hook, line and sinker," Katrina said, relaxing. "God, I'm a jackass." She threw down the scrap of paper with the six web addresses on it. Ellen scooped it up and screwed it into a tiny ball, which she lobbed with deadly accuracy into a nearby bin.

"I had to see if you were still as gullible as you used to be," she said. She picked up her forgotten mojito and drained it. "Shall we go on? I could do with a real drink."

"I can't," Katrina said. "Meeting in the morning. You know."

"You should do what I do," Ellen said. "Be the one who decides when the meetings are. Okay, then, I'll see you around. Next week at Tosh's?"

"Okay," Katrina said, standing up. Ellen followed suit. "So you're not going to tell me who really writes your Zoe pieces?"

"Just some old hack, like you said," Ellen said easily. "You wouldn't know the name. Is it important?"

"I guess not," Katrina said. "Okay then."

They walked to the doors, and parted with a brief hug, and Ellen set off briskly towards the brighter lights; but Katrina watched her out of sight, and then went back into the pub and back to their corner. There she delved briefly in the waste bin, and spent some time smoothing something out on the table. It was much crumpled, and had landed on something wet, but the six lines of text could still be read.

"I wonder," Katrina said aloud to herself.

Then she shook her head, tossed the paper back in the bin and left the pub.</cut>

The catching-up starts here...