Bonding, page 29
Paul Sweet KC of the UK counter-terrorism watchdog Intercept described the incident as representative of a new and increasingly prevalent form of violence, one characterized by lone actors with ‘mixed, unstable and disordered ideologies’. He described the need for a different approach when it came to evaluating these individuals. ‘What’s required,’ he said, ‘is a better understanding of mental health in these investigations.’
‘Mental health,’ Sonny said incredulously. ‘They’re talking about his fucking mental health.’
He looked at me as if the world had gone crazy. ‘What the fuck are we supposed to do now?’
‘Wait?’
‘For what?’
I had no idea. The future seemed to have evaporated.
‘Why don’t you stay here tonight?’ I offered.
It felt like a small gesture of solidarity. There didn’t seem much point in him going home.
•
A few days later, I went to Lara’s. I wanted to be with someone who understood what had happened and there weren’t many other candidates. I was expecting it to be just the two of us, but there were people gathered at the entrance to her flat. I could hear music throbbing from the street. Inside, the place was packed, mostly with people I didn’t recognize – or at least not from real life. It was sea of fashionable strangers. They were spilling onto the pavement, sitting on the wall that overlooked the road. I came across Spence in the kitchen.
‘You look fucking awful,’ he said.
‘Where’s Lara?’
‘Debauching herself upstairs.’
I found her on the landing. I could tell immediately that she was high.
‘You came!’ she said, as if nothing had happened.
I wanted to leave then, but she wouldn’t let me. She followed me downstairs. She grabbed my hand and tugged me outside into the garden. There were people shoving past us. I felt suffocated, as if I was drowning. The scent of strangers’ bodies filled my lungs, their hair and skin too close. I pulled away roughly and she stared at me, shocked at my reaction. There were people dancing on the lawn behind her. As she backed away, their bodies parted. She caught my eye one last time before they closed around her like a mouth.
The police arrived not long afterwards. I’d just left and was still on Lara’s street when the cars appeared. It was cold, it had started raining, the lights of Canary Wharf in the distance. I could hear voices streaming from their radios. Someone flashed a torch in my face. There was shouting. They stopped me to take my details, then they disappeared into her flat. I stood still, watching for a while, then I started walking home.
49
I barely left Tom’s flat after that. It’s a strange feeling, the sensation that your life is lurching over a cliff. I did nothing – there was nothing I could do. The days passed with unnerving speed. The prime minister made an announcement. There were think pieces all over the news. A new narrative had coalesced, this one more uniform than the last. Before long, everyone had adjusted their position. There were thousands of pages on the subject. The Guardian, The New York Times, Fox, the BBC, the Daily Mail, almost every outlet was on board with the view that Eudaxa should never have been released. Floyd was taken down by one of the broadsheets after a whistleblower leaked his emails. There were long exposés of the drug’s history, lofty critiques of its apologists. Teen Vogue, in particular, was full of outrage. It ran a series of fashion spreads that featured activists in string bikinis, the models’ bare ribs scrawled with the words: My property. Openr released a torrent of its trademark essays – courageous, personal ones that ‘unpacked’ the Eudaxa experience across the board. The essays functioned as an exercise in damage control which Lara packaged as a fearless, honest reassessment. No one had much to say about Tom. It was as if his death didn’t matter. It only served as a cue for the proliferation of more opinions.
Aliya called one day to let me know that Openr was closing down. Perhaps inevitably, it had failed to complete its last round of funding, not because the business wasn’t viable – it had, in fact, been closing in on profitability, in part because of the interest in Eudaxa. It wasn’t even because its investors disapproved: half of them had separate holdings in Mindbot, which was hardly a font of respectability. It was because they feared the attention turning onto themselves, they didn’t want the reputational risk. There was, it turned out, such a thing as too much heat around a start-up.
I received my dismissal the following week. ‘Your role at Openr’ was the subject line.
Hi,
We regret to inform you that your employment is terminated effective immediately. This is due to the winding down of Openr Limited. Given the nature of our distributed workforce and our desire to inform impacted individuals as quickly as possible, communication for this process is taking place via email. Our operations team will be reaching out to you with offboarding instructions.
Please address any questions to alum@openr.com
Thanks,
Management Team
Not long after Openr’s collapse, Neura Therapeutics began its own implosion. There were new claims made against the company, presumably as a result of the stories in the press. Accusers had been emboldened by the Dunstan case. Before long, a group lawsuit was in progress.
I didn’t hear much from Lara during this time, although I’d noticed she’d removed herself from social media. She texted a few times, that was all. It wasn’t personal, it was just the way things were. Before she closed down her accounts, I saw her holidaying with Nico and Natasha. She must have flown out to their parents’ place to lie low while things calmed down.
Grace and Niall faded away quickly after the funeral but Sunny and I kept in touch. He’d been managed sideways into a different lab but he would drive down occasionally to see me. Out of everyone, he made an effort to stay in contact. We were one another’s only link to Tom and for that reason it seemed important. In fact, the more I thought about Tom, the more I realized our lives had barely intersected. There was hardly any trace of what had happened. Only the flat, which was already on the market.
50
Simeon Logistics was a young company specializing in real-time transport feedback. I needed training to use their software, which I completed easily online. The job had been advertised as ‘fully remote’, which was another way of saying it didn’t pay enough to cover the costs of living in London. It was the first thing I was offered and I took it. And in some ways, it made things easier. It forced me to let go of my former life, which was over. Although it was perhaps more accurate to say that it had never really started. I walked around the city in a daze. It was all too normal, too busy.
In the summer, I left London and started travelling aimlessly around the cheapest towns in Europe. As the days began to shorten, I found a place in Riga. It seemed as good a place as any. It was quiet, the Wi-Fi was fast and it was full of exiles like myself, remnants carrying our jobs in backpacks, haunting the city’s bars and cafes. Most of us had spilled over from the more salubrious hubs of Western Europe – London, Stockholm, Berlin, themselves slowly becoming interchangeable.
I rented a room in a flat off Miera Street. The place was next to a retirement home in which the residents spent all day in armchairs watching endless episodes of Poirot. I missed Tom but I’d become habituated to it. My days were slow and regular. They connected to nothing in particular. I worked until seven, ate dinner and then most nights I walked around the streets. As always, I found it difficult to sleep, which meant the hours rolled by without much definition. Or more specifically, they passed without much meaning. Sometimes, I felt as if I existed inside a sealed capsule. It wasn’t that I’d never felt that way before, there had been days in London like that, the difference now was that I no longer expected much to change. I could barely understand the language and I felt no desire to learn it. The world stopped at the periphery of my experience and I didn’t search for anything more.
Occasionally, I caught myself in a moment of reflection. What was I supposed to be missing anyway? I was no longer suffering, exactly. I had adequate distractions when I needed them. I had a home, of sorts. I had advice on grief – there were thousands of pages on it online. I kept virtual company with other souls, most of whom I’d never meet in person but who gave me some semblance of society. There was porn. There was endless entertainment – some of it of decent quality. And if I felt the need for more than that, I could go outside and watch people on the street. The people who passed me seemed content, or something close to it.
From time to time, I wondered if things could have been different. There were moments when I became conscious of something there, something overseeing me, quietly producing me, re-routing my desires, sculpting how my path would go. The lines along which my life unfolded were, in a sense, already traced. I would have liked to have believed in my own freedom – in an open world full of opportunity. I would have liked to have fulfilled my potential in all the ways that my childhood had suggested, but the impulse no longer drove me. I wasn’t sure who I had become. I also didn’t know if it mattered.
One night, I received an email from Lara.
Don’t miss my exclusive chat next week. As the founder of new platform NewsVerse I’ll be sharing my thoughts on how different communities access the news, how to connect readerships, and how we’re moving away from a top-down model towards becoming an agile resource that delivers the bespoke news streams customers want and deserve.
I was sitting outside a cafe when I saw the message, watching the container boats on the Daugava. The boats had names like Maersk and X-Press. Some of them slowed down beside the port, eventually coming to a stop to unload their cargo onto trucks. The trucks then graduated onto the concourse where they were scanned and waved along the motorway. I’d seen women selling sex on that road, looking for stray clientele, the ones that hadn’t been captured by the more formal channels of the online marketplace. The system sought to service every need. It created new desires and then it created ways to endure them. Its goal wasn’t satiation, or even profit in the end, it was only to invent new ways of living, to produce visions of a future that remained perpetually in flux, dissolving constantly like smoke and then re-forming again. I caught my reflection in the water, my features fractured on its surface. Maybe it was true that everything was just another technical problem. Maybe it was just a matter of time before everything became reducible to code. That seemed to be the goal but at the same time, there was no locus of control, there was only the inexorable unfolding of second, third, fourth order effects – effects that went far beyond the comprehension of any single player.
I wondered if there had been a moment when I could have prevented what had happened. If such a moment had existed, I hadn’t noticed it. I tried to imagine another life. I pictured friends, children, nothing special.
There was a pile of books that had been left on the windowsill, the usual stuff that tourists left behind: a couple of thrillers, a Harry Potter, a self-help book with a compass on the cover. I took a photo of the last one to send to Lara. Follow Your Heart, the book was called.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my friend Luke Brown for reading the first draft and giving me so much encouragement and guidance at the beginning. I also want to thank Nicola Chang for her excellent taste. Thank you to my editor Gillian Fitzgerald-Kelly for signing me as a complete unknown and thank you to Anne Meadows for taking me on with such enthusiasm, patience and grace. Thanks also to everyone on the team at Pan Macmillan and special thanks to Rosie, for being there all along and to Daisy, who designed the cover. Finally, thank you to Steve, my muse and inspiration.
Permissions Acknowledgements
On page 2 the author quotes: ‘There was something magical about an island – the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world – an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return’, which is reprinted from And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. Excerpt reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1940 Agatha Christie.
On page 128 the author quotes: ‘Every great business is built around a secret’, which is reprinted from Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, copyright © June 2014. Excerpt reprinted by permission of The Gernert Company © June 2014, Peter Thiel and Blake Masters.
On page 252 the author quotes: ‘Why not a technology of joy, of happiness?’, which is reprinted from The Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow, 1971, Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Excerpt from THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN NATURE by Abraham H. Maslow, copyright © 1971 by Bertha G. Maslow. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN NATURE by Abraham H. Maslow, copyright © 1971 by Bertha G. Maslow. Used by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Mariel Franklin lives and works in London. She has an MA in English from Edinburgh University and later went on to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths. After graduating, she spent several years working in data administration in the tech industry.
First published 2024 by Picador
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Mariel Franklin, Bonding
