Reality Bites Read online

  05.51 - Camera 9: interior, small bedroom. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 10: interior, small bedroom. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 11: exterior, chill-out space. A cushion settles, falls from the empty bench to the floor. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 12: exterior, chill-out space. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 13: exterior, garden. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 14: exterior, garden. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Cameras 15, 16, 17, 18: exterior, differing views of house’s external walls. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 19: exterior, isolation pod 1. Water ripples then settles. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 20: exterior, isolation pod 2. Nothing moves.

  06.01 – Cameras 21, 22, 23, 24: exterior, differing views from corners of compound’s walls. Nothing moves. Where were they? Anders viewed each screen desperately, hands automatically zooming and panning the cameras. Nothing. He reached out again for the phone but from over his shoulder a clawed hand came into view and pressed down on his hand, squeezing. It was hot, burning, and he screamed.

  05.51 – Camera A: interior, control room. Anders is screaming as the figure behind him leans forward and takes him in its arms. Its skin is peeling and raw, its mouth is open wide and it is grinning.

  05.52 – Camera A: interior, control room. Nothing moves.

  I, Ross, Take Thee, Rachel A short story Philip Palmer

  Am I interesting enough for you? Be honest. I’m not, am I? Don’t be so quick to judge. I’m not much to look at, granted. And I haven’t done much with my life. You never get to see me having sex with beautiful women. I don’t go snowboarding or skateboarding, I don’t abseil off mountains or sky-dive or get into punch-ups with hard bastards and get my head kicked in. I don’t shoplift or cross-dress or race fast cars or - well you know what’s out there as well as I do. Probably better. Zap. This. Zap. That. Zap. What’ s next?

  I’m just a guy in rubbish clothes and a terrible haircut and a bit of acne walking down a dull High Street in a nothing town in England talking to camera. Not interesting at all, I know. But I do have a story to tell. A real life story to tell. Coming up, sometime soon.

  Stay with me, okay?

  Hey I’m being serious, here. Look, let’s stop here. Let’s have this out. Look at me. Look me in the eyes. Don’t mess with this, eh? That’s my psycho stare. Are you bricking it, pal?

  Ha!

  I know, I know, I couldn’t scare anyone.

  Come on, let’s walk a bit more.

  It’s strange, you know, talking to you. Someone I can’t see. I wish I could, see you I mean. All of you. All twelve of you. Ha! I’m kidding, I know exactly how many people are watching me, they put the numbers on my mobile phone, and it’s more than twelve. And you’re all around the world. Cape Town, Sydney, two in Canada, three in Norway, why is that? One in Belgium. The rest, scattered, only four in the UK. I look at the map daily, the analytic I mean. And it’s definitely more than twelve, on a daily average. Not much more though.

  I do wish I could see you. Make a real conversation of it. Two-way television. Imagine that!

  There’s no moderation. I know that much. I don’t care what they say, there are too many channels, it’s not physically possible. It’s like moderating the internet, I mean, how can you do it? You close down one site selling knock-off iPods or illegal downloads and another springs up. Even Apple can’t defeat these bastards and they’re all-powerful. Even Google can’t defeat these bastards, and I mean, Google, they’re above all-powerful. If Apple bought Google and Google bought Amazon, there’d be only one God. Imagine that.

  I’m rambling. Sorry. Stay with me. I’m walking, obviously you can see I’m walking, all the way down the High Street. Past Lloyds Bank, past the Poundshop. That’s a really good Subway. I’ve never been in that pub. That’s the main square, that’s the statue of – I don’t know what it’s the statue of. This used to be a market town, it’s not anymore, and that looks a bit like a shepherd with his dog. Or is it a lion? Whatever. I could stop and look at the plaque but I can’t be fucked to be honest. That’s the 99p Store. That’s a good café, they do bacon butties with three slices of bacon there. I’m sorry, am I boring you? I’m paranoid about that. I don’t honestly see why anyone would want to listen to me. Or why anyone would bother to watch me. I’m not funny, I’m not pretty, I’m not morbidly obese, I’m not alarmingly thin. I don’t have bulimia. That can be a laugh, waiting for the bulimic to throw up, eh? I’ve done that. Forget her name. She’s nice. Or was. She died, I think?

  But I’m not her. I’m not an abusive husband either, battering his wife and kids every Saturday night and swearing like I’m in the effing Osbournes. I’m not a homophobe beating up people in tight T-shirts outside gay clubs. I’m not a rapist, not that I approve of rape, not one bit, but if I was a rapist, you know my ratings would be through the roof. And then they’d close me down once I’d done the deed, but at least you’d get to see most of it, the start of it at least. Most of us have seen one of those. Seen a rape, I mean. Not to condone it, not at all, I totally disapprove, but really. Come on. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one?

  My name is Billy Wilson and it’s my birthday and at some point in the course of today I am going to kill myself.

  There, that got you. Those of you who were with me at 7am or at 10am this morning will already know the agenda of the day and will be avidly watching. I know that’s true, I’ve read my analytic. My numbers spiked at 7am and tripled after my 10am announcement. But notice, I didn’t give a time when I would do it. I didn’t say ‘At eleven o’clock I will kill myself’ or ‘At twelve o’clock noon I will kill myself.’ Because let’s face it, if I did that, you’d all channel hop until just before the scheduled time, my promised Seppuku, then you’d tune in for the gory stuff.

  Seppuku, by the way, I’m sure you all know, is the Japanese method of disembowelling yourself by putting a sword through your own stomach. It’s considered honourable. It was on my list of methods but I don’t actually have a sword. So I’m speaking metaphorically. I hope that’s okay.

  No moderation. That’s three times I’ve promised to kill myself and no one has cut my feed or taken my drone away. It’s still there, following me, like a bloody moth hovering there, filming everything I say. Hi drone. Here, I’m doing a selfie with my drone. Funny face, for you to laugh at. I have to do something, don’t I? To keep your attention.

  I’m a virgin. Twenty-one years old and never ‘done it’. Yeah, I know. What a disappointment I am to you. I tried my best, honest. You remember those blind dates, me chatting up that girl in the King’s Head, the one who was out of my league? And the girl at the club, the blonde one with the tiny ear lobes, I was almost in there, till her mates came along and made fun of me, and pulled my trousers down. That wasn’t a bad night actually, ratings-wise.

  But I’ve never delivered an actual erotic televisual result. No naked writhing, no fingering, no kissing, no first base. No failing to get it up, no embarrassing moments the morning after. No ghastly aftermath, no getting chucked by text and bursting into tears, no crying my eyes out every night because she doesn’t love me, none of the good stuff that I know you all love so much. I just – I can’t – it doesn’t work for me. Not just sex, romance. I’m not shy, I’m not actually all that bad at the chatting up stuff, I’m just, well, on the LGBTQIA spectrum, I’m at the very end. I’m the A. A for Asexual. Girls don’t do it for me. Guys don’t do it for me. I’m normal, of course I’m normal, there are certain women I do fancy, I think Scarlet Johansson is sexy, and Iggy Azalea is cool, and I like that woman who reads the weather on the BBC. And there are girls who I think are attractive, lots of them. But sex just doesn’t excite me the way it seems to do for other people. Raunchy videos seem, well, silly to me. All that jiggling. Porn on the internet, pointless. Seeing my mother in the bath, I even did that once, nothing, nada. I used to masturbate, but I found it too
tiring. I even tried cutting myself, thinking that might turn me on, remember that? It wasn’t a bad idea, it boosted my figures, it doubled them in fact. Till it was obvious I wasn’t going to draw blood, I was just brushing the knife against the skin. Then the numbers fell away, my analytic looked like a waterfall. And I got nothing from it, sexually I mean. Fetishwear, rubber, bondage, spanking, S & M, it’s another country to me.

  So I’m a washout, really. I don’t do sex, I don’t do danger, I don’t have relationships. No wonder no one watches me.

  And the competition is bloody fierce, I’m aware of that. I know what’s out there. The sex maniacs. The exhibitionists. The sluts. The pansexuals. The wife-swappers. The granny-bangers. The ten-times-a-day wankers. And all the rest. The pub brawlers. The pissheads who end up in A & E every Saturday night. The girls who fist-fight with other girls. The guys who go into racist bars and say ‘Hitler was a cunt.’ And the self-harmers, the ones who really do it, who don’t wuss out like I did. Like Tina, twenty-seven, arms like skid marks in a muddy field. She cut her tongue in half, did you see that? That was a real ratings-booster. Even though they cut her feed, you didn’t see the tongue split in half, you just saw the knife and – why am I telling you this? You must have seen it yourself. If you’re the kind of sick fuck who watches this kind of TV you must have seen it.

  You can get the uncut footage on bit torrent, if you know where to look. Trust me, I have, and it’s horrible. Not sexy at all. It’s disgusting. Poor girl. They sewed it up though, at a top private hospital. They gave her the boob job she wanted too; well she was rich by then, wasn’t she? Really rich. Rich as you can only be if you hit your numbers and exceed them by a multiple or ten or more.

  I’ve never hit my numbers. Not once, not ever. They still pay me though. It’s not much, but they still pay me. That must mean that someone up there has faith in me, in my potential. When I was twelve I wanted to be a singer, I wonder if that was one reason they picked me. Maybe they thought they could film me following my dream. Doing auditions, trying for one of the TV shows, making it big, or being totally crap and being humiliated and heartbroken, that’s even better. But it never came to anything, I just stopped singing when I was sixteen and that was that.

  My father was abusive to me when I was little, that was another plus. Not physically just emotionally, but I’m sure it must have helped me get the gig. He was always shouting at me, you see, going red in the face, spitting at me as he shouted. He thought I was a pansy. I don’t know why he thought that. He must have sensed the Asexual thing. I must have given off that vibe. But he never beat me, he didn’t even chuck me out of the house. He was actually quite nice to me once I got the drone. Was that cowardice? Was he only nice to me because I had a camera following me 24/7? Mum hardly spoke to me after the drone came; she still doesn’t, much.

  I reckon it must make a difference to the way your mum and dad treat you, once you’ve done the network deal. They know, see, that people will be judging them, assessing their parenting skills. It makes them play safe. Though some parents go the other way, they play up to the cameras. You know that Asian family in Southall, where the kids are always getting slapped? And that mum in Yorkshire, who used to chase her daughter with a cricket bat? Put-up job, really, you can tell she’s not really angry. Although she did hit the poor bitch once, and broke her arm. Or was it was twice?

  But my mum and dad were careful never to hit me when the drone was filming. Which means they never hit me at all, because it really is 24/7. It even films you when you sleep, though they don’t usually broadcast that.

  And it’s not just peer pressure you have to be aware of. You can go to jail if you hurt someone who’s being filmed on a drone feed. Seriously! Obviously you can’t use the drone footage, not in court, that’s considered to be legally privileged. They can’t make the networks release anything filmed with a camera drone even if it shows a crime taking place. There was a big fuss when they passed that law, remember that? But I mean, the networks are the networks. Where would we be without their tax revenues, eh? And their political donations.

  But they say, some people say, there are police detectives working round the clock watching all the channels and making notes. In court they count as witnesses to the live crime. It’s the same as if they’d witnessed a crime in the street, you see, that’s how they get around the privileged communication bullshit. People have gone to jail because they were seen hurting a demi-celebrity on live TV by some copper in a viewing room. So it can happen.

  Not often though. You don’t often read those stories. I guess police officers have better things to do with their time.

  I watch the news too, on my phone TV, it’s not just reality stuff with me. Although I reckon you can learn a lot about current affairs by studying the drone channels. Human interest stories. Like that little girl in Gaza, who saw her father die in front of her, shot by a sniper. That was a real insight into the Palestinian cause, in my view. Or the African woman in Italy who allowed her daughter to be cut, down there, I mean. Shocking to see the look on her face when the cops kicked the door down and arrested her. It’s educational, really, in my opinion. Though there are lots of countries who don’t believe in drones, they won’t take the deal. We’re ahead of the game there, in the civilised part of the world. The MTV-verse, they call it. Countries like us and America and France and Germany and – I don’t really know all the other countries who do drone feeds. There must be loads.

  Where was I? And indeed, where am I? Railway line down there, the A road over there. I’m walking up the grass verge on to the road bridge. Ah, now you’re getting excited. Great view, isn’t it? Green fields in the distance, but industry pretty much everywhere else. That’s the chemical works on the horizon, those big stacks are billowing out god knows what crap. And that way, those fields of windmills, there must be ten thousand of them, or even more. I hate those windmills, I think chimneys with smoke billowing out are much more picturesque.

  I was talking about me being a virgin. What a career blunder that was. That’s half your audience gone in a sweep. Most of us on drone feeds lead pretty dull lives, let’s be honest, but you can guarantee people will tune in to see the boy or the girl next door with no clothes on, ‘at it.’ It’s not porn, not really, the porn channels get a different demographic apparently. It’s nosiness. People like to know what you look like naked, even if you’ve got a crap body. In fact, the crapper the better. And they like to see you fuck. They like to watch you cook too. Which baffles me, but it’s a fact. They like to see you quarrel with your girlfriend, or your boyfriend, or your mum or your dad or your sister or your brother. They like big East End families who shout at each other, or big Jewish families where they’re all really funny and sarcastic, or big Greek families where they’re really emotional and smash plates, big families generally I guess. And they like loners and wasters and sad fucks and racist and sexist aresholes and nice confident people who come a cropper from time to time. They don’t like whores, apparently; there’s never been a drone deal for a working prostitute. Makes sense really, they’re just play-acting, it’s not ‘real’. They also like police officers and soldiers and firemen who risk their lives in the line of duty but they’re not legally allowed to show that shit, so that’s where bit torrent comes in again.

  They like colourful life stories and they like foul-mouthed gobby people who call a spade a fucking shovel. Like Melinda with her ten kids, always telling her boyfriend to get his fucking arse in fucking gear. Or Alison with her three husbands all living under the same roof with her. Or Mark, who was a heroin addict, you remember him? He used to beg on Kilburn High Street, then he fell under a train at West Hampstead. We all saw him die, didn’t we? Well I did anyway, it was obvious he was an accident waiting to happen. He was paranoid, always threatening to kill his girlfriend, or himself. So I knew to tune in and I saw it all. I saw him die. And I saw them clean the mess off the tracks too, because the drone was still there even though Mark was d
ead.

  So what did we think about that one, eh? Was it the suicide of a depressed and paranoid individual? Or was Mark just an harmless stupid junkie who didn’t realise there was a hole next to the platform he was standing on where the train was meant to go? That was the big online vote. I voted 2), the Idiot Junkie option. And I Starred the feed. I like to do that, let people know you’re Favouriting them. Though Mark I guess wouldn’t have seen the stats, being dead as he was.

  Mark was fun, though. He was colourful, he had a great turn of phrase. That Scouser sense of humour. I’m not colourful. I don’t have a turn of phrase. I don’t have many friends. I never argue with people. I don’t do dangerous sports. I don’t fall over all the time, like Daft Dan or Slippery Sue. I don’t have sex with animals, yes, I’ve seen those too, it’s not illegal apparently, or maybe it’s just that no one bothers to enforce the law.

  But here I am. I’m standing on the road bridge outside my home town, watching the cars race past below me on the dual carriageway. If I jump off here and hit a car, which I’m pretty much bound to do, I’ll kill someone. Ah, now I’ve got your attention.

  So that’s the plan. I’m not just going to kill myself, I’m going to kill as many other people as I can. It’ll be a multiple car pile up. Domino effect. A tragedy. Top of the news-feed story. Drone Boy Kills Lots of People on Live TV. That will get me noticed.

  And I’m going to do it soon. See the cars racing past|? Come on drone, can we have a mastershot of that? Thank you, that’ll do nicely. And now fly back over here and give them a close up of me. See this mad look in my eye. I’ll capture your attention with this, won’t I? My public. I know you’re sitting there, flicking past me, ignoring me. Sitting on your fat arse going Zap Zap Zap. Oh, it’s Friends, oh, it’s How I Met Your Mother. Oh, It’s a Shakira and Beyoncé Smackdown, oh, it’s Elyse Versus Tanya, viewers can decide who they like the least. Oh it’s Sam Smith, when he was young. And then it’s Friends again. Zap. Now it’s Barney, telling a tall tale to Robin and the other guys in the bar. Zap. It’s Jean Evans, too fat to get out of bed, weeping her fat little eyes out. Zap. It’s Harry Clarke, looking at underage girls in the park, the pervert, they should put a stop to that. Zap. It’s the Brassy Lassy, the Geordie girl who’s always being mouthy to boys, and tells her teachers to stuff it, I like her. Zap. It’s the Doncaster Gangsta, trying to be part of a gang and always being chucked out, cause he’s a dork. Zap. It’s Friends again, Ross is getting married to Emily, and totally mucking it up. ‘I, Ross, take thee, Rachel’. Zap. It’s Ted and the gang and we’re finally meeting the Mother of Ted’s kids. Zap. It’s Jessica, with her low self esteem issues, being told by her new best friend that she’s too boring to be with. Zap. It’s Pete, practising for his gig at Cornbury, he’s a really good drummer actually. Zap. Friends again. Rachel is stunned. Zap. It’s me. A spotty teenager standing on a road bridge about to jump off and cause terrible carnage. Imagine what’s going to happen when I fall and hit the car below. Imagine it, the blood, the scream of tyres, the collisions, all those pointless tragic deaths. You have really GOT to see that. Don’t turn off. Don’t dismiss me as a bullshitter. I’m calling for help here. Someone come and stop me, please! And if you don’t stop me, at least watch me. Watch me die.