Undoctored, page 15
Mile markers were crucial – not just for jelly baby top-ups but also for keeping track of how much personal agonising torture was left, like checking the progress bar on a Liam Neeson film. By about mile ten, I was pretty much over jelly babies. By mile fifteen they were making me retch.*
J was lurking around mile seventeen, looking so nervous and shifty that I’m surprised he didn’t end up in the back of an anti-terrorist unit van himself. I jogged on the spot as I spoke to him, worried that if I stopped moving my legs they might never start again, like a knackered boiler. I wheezed out how well it was all going; he flinched from the squeal of a nearby child and then we ran off in our separate directions at roughly the same speed.
What kept me going was the thought that if I didn’t complete the race, I’d presumably have to pay back all the people who’d pledged money and organising the Refund of Shame sounded like a level of admin I could happily live without.
The bad news was I didn’t win. Tsegaye Kebede pipped me to it in two hours and six minutes. The good news was I did complete the race both alive and under my notional five-hour target. I won’t bother you with the details of quite how many minutes or hours faster. It’s not a competition.
Crossing the finishing line came with the incredible sense of relief and achievement you’d imagine it would, although this was followed immediately by a feeling of pulverising anti-climax. Marathon staff expertly combined the exhilaration with the supreme pointlessness of it all in one swift movement, by giving me a gold medal plucked from an enormous cardboard box containing literally tens of thousands of identical gold medals. Fool’s gold.
I hobbled from the finish line to the St John Ambulance after-party where I drank flat prosecco like it was Zeus’s own cum. A sign advertised a free sports massage – unfortunately, though, the massage table was upstairs and my legs let me know in no uncertain terms that stairs were off.
A couple of days lying in bed and a couple more generally complaining, and I was back to normal, which also involves a fair amount of lying in bed and complaining. Normal might not be the perfect word, actually – the next paragraph is an excerpt from a police witness statement because, annoyingly, J was right. Not about the terrorism.
Witness statement
… From that point onwards, I started to receive dozens of private Twitter messages from @████ in which she ultimately declared her love for me. I felt uncomfortable with this but was unsure of the best way to go about getting her to stop. This came to a head when Ms ████ contacted me, asking me where I was on a night out. I didn’t tell her where I was and sent a message making an excuse. Almost immediately, she started sending me further messages stating that I was evil and that I was trying to destroy her life. The following day, Ms ████ sent a very long email to my personal email account. I refer to this email as exhibit AK/01 …
Extract from Exhibit AK/01 – email correspondence
… Every part of me loves you and I know I can trust you more than anyone else. There is nothing I own that I would not just give to you in an instant, even if just to make you smile. I will never betray you or hurt you, no matter what happens. I sometimes forget how fast my mind works and the days are a blur, but I know that you are in my heart, it’s like you always have been…*
It’s fair to say I’m not normally the kind of person who generally receives declarations of love. That was the third. The first two were considerably easier to handle, having come from people I’d already consented to co-habit with. And, to be honest, neither of them were as fulsome as this one.
It felt ridiculous to even entertain the idea that I, a humble ex-doctor turned admittedly less humble writer-comedian, had acquired a stalker. I felt like the very opposite of a celebrity: I didn’t have a compound with huge iron gates or travel everywhere in a Maybach. I lived in a two-bedroom flat and walked to the shops in my slippers. Even the gas board spelled my name wrong.* I didn’t quite know what to do for the best, but I was fairly sure things weren’t so bad that they couldn’t be smoothed out by a well-worded email.
J told me to leave well alone, but that just seemed rude. There was also the possibility – unflattering as it was to my ego – that she was mentally unwell rather than truly infatuated by my charms. I just had to break the spell, gently. I needed to be kind and considerate, yet emphatic.
It’s probably easiest if I disappear from your life as quickly as I appeared. Block me on Twitter if that makes it easier for you. Best, Adam.
Needless to say, this didn’t do the trick. I should have known that it’s pointless to apply rational thought to a situation fuelled by irrationality. I guess all she wanted was contact – not just attracting my attention, but holding it. The tone of my message was irrelevant, as were the contents: I could have written out the recipe to a Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle and still received in return the exact same 3,500-word reply. A reply that the police ended up calling ‘Exhibit AK/02’, but I call ‘Holy Fuck’.
Extract from Exhibit AK/02 – email correspondence
… Thank you for being heartless, cruel and unkind just because you can. Thank you for throwing my trust, kindness and generosity right back at me, and for doing your utmost to totally destroy me. You will never hear from me again. If you had just been honest with me, you would never have heard from me in the first place …
I reasoned that while this clearly wasn’t the calm resolution I had hoped for, it was at least some form of resolution. Taking to heart her promise to evaporate, like the lid of every pen I’ve ever owned, I blocked her on social media and instructed my email account to divert any future messages from her into the spam folder, alongside the weekly updates from a website where I bought a glue gun six years earlier. I paid my admirer no further thought, until I didn’t have any option but to: she appeared to be in the early stages of recruiting an army.
Extract from Exhibit AK/03 – public Twitter interactions
From @▓▓▓ to me:
She may not be able to defend herself, which is clearly why you did it to her, but we can, whether she wants us to or not.
From @▓▓▓ to @████:
I’m going to airport, DON’T make me have to come back here again. Tho I will of course, if needs be, we have address right? Text it to me.
Oh, come off it. No one had my address. Unless … doubts began to form. Had there been a return address on the flowers I’d sent? I asked my friend Tim, a lawyer. He reminded me that he was a lawyer, not a florist. Then he checked the registration data for my website and a free-to-use online electoral roll, and bingo – my exact whereabouts were splashed all over the internet. I might as well have hosted an open house.
And was this really some acquaintance of hers, who had my address and was champing at the bit to defend her honour? Or was it my stalker herself, using a sock puppet account to intimidate me? I certainly wouldn’t have bet against her in a fight; there are very few people in the country I’d be odds-on to beat – mainly very premature babies and the comatose.
Even if she didn’t have my address, I was still extremely findable and killable. That night, for example, I was due to appear on stage at a well-publicised theatre event. The whole point of promotion is that your privacy is compromised when marketing requires it. Time for some logic – I’m not Justin Bieber but equally, this wasn’t imaginary. Murders are rare, but it would be a dramatically satisfactory ending for the narrative arc of my life.
I talked it through with J, who went full scorched-earth and told me to pull out of all gigs until further notice. I politely explained that this was bananas. He then told me I had to hire a bodyguard. When I explained that this new solution was even more bananas, he insisted that I pull out of all gigs until further notice. We did a few laps of this conversation before I phoned the bodyguard agency.
The lady on the other end of the phone was extremely nice. They’re actually known as close protection officers, she said. No, normally they’d wear everyday clothes, so as to be able to blend in, but yes, they’d be happy to wear a suit and sunglasses if I wanted. No, obviously they don’t carry guns. Yes, they’d be able to drive me there and back. No, the car isn’t bullet-proof. Yes, they have someone available. The cost for the evening would be £600 …
As much as I didn’t want to be murdered, I was only getting £90 for the gig, so I explained to J that no close protection officers were available at such short notice. I assured him, however, that I’d be fine – I’d give the box office ████’s name and let them know she was persona non grata insana. And if anyone came at me, I’d sprint off into the distance at my new top speed of 5.42 miles per hour.
It’s difficult to tell who’s out there when you’re up on stage, what with all the theatre lights pointing at your face. You mostly just catch snapshot silhouettes of the audience – shoulders bobbing up and down, which hopefully means laughter, rather than choking to death on a Revel. Sometimes, however, conditions conspire through gaps in the lights and you get a lock on someone in the audience. At this show, the only person I could see between the lights was sat a few rows back, bang in the middle, a lady in her fifties with a disarmingly placid stare and the largest bouquet of flowers I have ever seen. As a consequence, my mind wasn’t entirely on my material. This was her, right? Was she planning to storm the stage? Would it be soft kisses she rained down upon me or cold, hard blade-clutching fists? Was there a bread knife within the mixed chrysanthemums? I limped to the end of my set then ran off stage and straight to the tube, checking behind me like people do on the telly.
I asked Tim the lawyer if this situation had now become police territory. He said it definitely had, so the next morning I printed out a load of tweets and rehearsed in my head how to explain to a desk sergeant what Twitter was. As it happens, the officer I saw was actually very helpful and had even dealt with Twitter stalking in the past. While he didn’t quite say, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of you,’ he did ask a lot of questions about which panel shows I’d been on, in the same way my mum does at Christmas. He took my statement and assured me that the lady in question would be contacted and kindly requested to stop with all the weird shit. Or words to that effect.
Witness Statement
Although the direct communication stopped, I was aware that Ms ████ was continuing to talk about me on her Twitter feed. She was sending up to 300 tweets a day. The main theme of these tweets was that I’d made her ill and caused her to lose large amounts of money. She also tweeted that I had caused her dog to suffer from epilepsy.
Life went on, as it generally does. I would occasionally look at her Twitter account to see if she was still doing her thing. She always was – babbling away online about my fifty-faced awfulness and general lack of moral fibre. Or sometimes about how wonderful I was. Then a box arrived at my house.
Exhibit AK/06
A large cardboard box measuring approximately 1.5 metres and containing:
Two boxes of chocolate, haphazardly gift-wrapped
A children’s book, haphazardly gift-wrapped
A very large framed illustration of a rabbit, haphazardly gift-wrapped
A card with the message, ‘Apologies, I had to wrap this in the dark!’
A second card with the message, ‘To Adam, Happy Birthday beautiful!* For all the birthdays I missed and all those I will miss. Farewell, hello. Love, me xxxxx’
A poem entitled ‘How Lucky I am’
A 19,000-word letter*
Two long, peculiar grey scarves.
I thought this probably tipped the situation into ‘actually a bit much’ territory, so I hid the box from J to stop him going fucknuts then, when he was at work, dropped it off at the police station.
‘What do you think this scarf is?’ asked the officer at the front desk, as he processed the batty booty. ‘It looks like it’s made of … animal hair?’
A second officer concurred. ‘Cat hair,’ he stated, like this was by no means the first cat-hair scarf he’d seen. You couldn’t help but admire the craftsmanship – thousands of individual hairs all woven together. So painstaking, so precise. That said, it could only have been creepier if there were cat skulls hanging like bells at each end. The officers then discussed having a fresh, slightly sterner word with her, in the form of a harassment warning.
And with that, my brief experience of being the object of someone’s unusual fascination faded away. It was always there in the background, though, like the underlying sting of a urinary tract infection halfway through a week of antibiotics.
I’ve thought a lot about how I could have acted differently, how it could have somehow stopped short of the cat-hair incident and how many of my attempts to ‘do the right thing’ only made matters worse. I found myself wondering whether J is actually over-anxious or if I’m under-anxious. ‘Just promise me you’ll never write about this and stir it all up again.’*
It didn’t escape my notice that none of this would have happened if I was still working on labour ward. It hadn’t occurred to me when I left medicine and chose ‘writer’ from my admittedly very short list of potential careers that I would end up putting myself into the public eye, with all that entails.
As a doctor, I’d be remembered by the odd patient but it felt very unlikely that, however upset they were with my clinical management, they would circumvent the usual complaints process and send parcels of matted animal hair to my house. My boundaries were fairly well-defined in the hospital cocoon but now they’re open to interpretation. Am I the reader’s friend? Does the transaction of the book purchase promise anything else? A chat over email? An invitation to my birthday party?*
My new life requires me to have a ‘social media presence’. At best, I’m swapping slivers of myself for followers and likes. At worst, I’m opening myself up to dangerous levels of attention. Is it really worth it?
After a little soul-searching, I identified the real enemy and excised it from my life immediately. My trainers and lycra had a quick spin through the washing machine and were merrily packaged off to the nearest charity shop. I never ran again.
* * *
* Hence the expression ‘It’s hardly brain surgery’ – you can imagine them high-fiving one another at the Neurosurgery Marketing Board the day they came up with that.
* It’s only 99 per cent cancel culture and Nazis.
* 13mph! That’s nearly the speed limit outside a school!
* Years later, even writing about them is giving me acid reflux.
* I have slightly paraphrased these sections to keep the book under 500 pages.
* Thinking about it, if I was going to stalk someone, I reckon I’d probably aim nice and low too. Cardi B has a huge security detail, but what about the guy who does the dog voice on the Churchill adverts? Less of a scalp, sure, but a more achievable goal.
* I’m not beautiful by any metric, and my birthday was four months earlier.
* By way of context, 19,000 words is about a quarter of the length of this book. Tim the lawyer had a skim through and told me I probably didn’t want to read it, so I didn’t. The letter, that is.
* It’s him, right?
* 1) No. 2) No. 3) Probably not. 4) Absolutely not.
Chapter 18
As Britain’s twelfth-best-known doctor,* I was now getting invited to give speeches at medical establishments. They varied from med schools to gaggles of junior doctors, all the way up to the ‘royal colleges’, the rather grandiose name given to the professional bodies that represent the different branches of the medical tree: paediatricians, pathologists, physicians, psychiatrists and pso on.
One evening, I found myself at the lectern in the dining hall of one such royal college, providing a slightly more harrowing after-dinner speech than they were perhaps hoping for. I reminded a couple of hundred consultants that just because they’re senior and experienced, it doesn’t mean they’re any less vulnerable than the next human being. They have bad days like anyone else and they too need to make sure they have a solid support network behind them. Pricked, they bleed; isolated, they have just as much chance of going to pieces. I asked them if their juniors would feel comfortable coming to them with a problem. When was the last time they took their team out for a bowl of pasta? That might be enough; the difference between a struggling junior doctor reaching out for help and a struggling junior doctor making a self-destructive life decision.
I told them the story of why I left medicine – the moment that still haunted my dreams and refused to let go. I left it to the end of my speech because it wipes me out every time: the emotional equivalent of running up Ben Nevis in flip-flops. My voice cracked as I relived the single most horrendous and harrowing moment of my life. You go into this job with the aim of seeing a healthy mum and a healthy baby in every case, and on this occasion I ended up with neither – and it was my fault. I explained how at my lowest ebb, no one gave me the support I needed – no one noticed how much I was struggling and no one cared when I told them. I reminded them that there will be numerous junior doctors working for them who also require that support, and they needed to be there for them. I gave them everything, ripped my heart out and stood before them bleeding, trembling and ashamed. I was met with the kind of absolute, mortified silence that Remembrance Sunday could only dream of – but they got it.
Their president gestured to me to stay on the stage. I presumed I was about to be presented with a bottle of whisky or some ceremonial trinket or other, so I prepared my most humble smile. Instead, the esteemed professor slid in next to me at the lectern, making me shuffle awkwardly to one side. He spoke the following words into the microphone: ‘Thank you for this, Adam. I think it’s important for me to add that this of course isn’t everyone’s experience. What I mean is … not everyone is cut out for the job.’
