All The Lonely People Read online

  David Owen resents the fact that he was not raised by wolves and was therefore robbed of a good story to tell at parties. He turned to fiction to compensate for his unremarkable existence. He studied creative writing at The University of Winchester, where he went on to teach for three years. David is the author of two novels: Panther (2015), which was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal, and The Fallen Children (2017). David works in the travel industry, and mostly thinks about biscuits.

  ALSO BY DAVID OWEN

  Panther

  The Fallen Children

  ATOM

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Atom

  Copyright © 2019 by David Owen

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-349-00319-1

  Atom

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.atombooks.co.uk

  For Hannah,

  who is verr good.

  I woke up and I had a big idea,

  to buy a new soul at the start of every year.

  I paid up, and it cost me pretty dear.

  Here’s a hymn to those that disappear.

  — ‘Buying New Soul’, Porcupine Tree

  I think this is why loneliness is a darker thing than just being alone. It’s a stillness that gives you a preview of death; it’s seeing the world carry on just fine without you in it.

  —Hayley Campbell

  You’re ridiculous, and men’s rights is nothing.

  — Leslie Knope

  Contents

  1. A Cure for Empathy

  2. Nothing and Nobody

  3. The Peak of Human Ingenuity

  4. Building a Snowman

  5. Nesting Dolls

  6. Hashtags and Heartbreaks

  7. Eurydice

  8. The Lonely People (Are Getting Lonelier)

  9. Us and Them

  10. Virtue Signalling

  11. One of Us is Missing

  12. Confessions to the Void

  13. Drive-in Saturday

  14. It’s Not the Horniness, It’s the Loneliness

  15. Always Punch Nazis

  16. People Like Us

  17. The Fight Never Stops

  18. Collision Course

  19. Whatever is Wrong with You, Is So Right For Me

  20. Good Memories are Bullshit

  21. Internal Landscapes

  22. Refinement of the Decline

  23. Existential Stakeout

  24. Down Will Come Baby

  25. Somebody Who Actually Cares

  26. Fake News Crocodiles

  27. Second-hand Kisses

  28. Hijack

  29. Piss Off, Ghost

  30. Dawn of the Final Day

  31. Kat’s Cradle

  32. The Girl Cut Out of the World

  33. And My Axe!

  34. A Livestream

  35. Life Buoy

  36. Revenant

  37. Season Three, Episode One

  38. A Cure for Apathy

  39. A Cautionary Tale for the Lonely

  Acknowledgements

  1

  A Cure for Empathy

  The photos transferred in a handful of seconds, morsels of naked flesh flickering across the progress bar as the three boys shielded the screen with their bodies. Every tab open in the browser was a weapon, armed, the images their ammunition. Target locked.

  It seemed funny, that exposure could wipe somebody out of existence.

  Wesley Graham couldn’t stop jiggling his legs – nerves, excitement, he didn’t know – as he glanced around at the half-empty study room, squinting against the early autumn sunshine that glowed in the scratches and finger-smears on the windows. Most of the school PCs were occupied, screens of half-finished essays or YouTube videos. Others in their class, apparently taking the final year of school seriously, had ranged their burden of early coursework across the tables in the centre of the room. Mr Buttercliff, charged with supervising, was much more invested in Clash of Clans on his phone.

  ‘Can you please stop that?’ said Luke, punching Wesley’s leg.

  The dull pain did little to help him hold it still. Although Wesley had been around during the last trolling campaign, one undoubtedly larger than this, he had been little more than a spectator. This time he was on the front line. They had somebody to impress, so this had to go off without a hitch. He willed his restless leg to stop betraying his gut full of nerves.

  In the far corner of the room, hunched over her MacBook, was Kat Waldgrave. It was the first time they’d seen her in school for a few days, and her usual ponytail had gained a strand of plasticky pink that curled into the light brown skin of her neck. The sunlight conspired to hide her screen from Wesley’s gaze, but he was sure her website would be open in a tab somewhere, just as it was on their screen.

  ‘Imagine if she actually looked like this,’ said Justin, sandwiched between them in front of the computer.

  Luke plucked a USB stick from the PC and grinned. ‘We’ll always have Photoshop.’

  Scrolling through the images, Justin sighed under his breath. ‘I wish any actual girl looked like this.’

  ‘Sounds like somebody’s struggling with NoFap,’ said Wesley.

  The joke was a risk. They hadn’t been friends for long, and sometimes it took a while to earn the right to take the piss.

  ‘No way!’ said Justin, apparently not offended despite his protest. ‘It’s been three weeks and I swear my mind is clearer than it’s—’

  ‘Please don’t start with that again.’ Luke brought up the login window for Kat’s site and typed in the password that had been stolen for them.

  ‘How long’s it going to take?’ said Wesley, pressing his fists into his knees to keep them from bouncing. The Photoshopped pornography had been his idea, and he had felt elated when it was accepted. That had been tempered a little since by the reality of doing it, the fear of getting caught, but he still couldn’t wait to deal this final blow. People like Kat deserved everything they got – that’s what TrumourPixel said.

  ‘Not long,’ said Luke, clicking to edit the home page. ‘Let’s give our snowflake something worth crying about.’

  Kat Waldgrave was only at school because of the email she’d received complaining that she rarely went to school. It was an injustice, as far as she was concerned, that a mandatory attendance meeting should be allowed to upset her regular schedule of pretending to revise while actually watching Tinker videos and Doctor Backwash bloopers on YouTube. As if she hadn’t seen them all a million times before.

  She tabbed to one of her favourites, putting in her earphones and angling the screen away from the window glare. Tinker showing off her new hairstyle, a neat bob dyed electric pink, dusky eye shadow applied to match. God damn, she was beautiful. Kat fiddled with the pink extension she had added to her own hair yesterday. It was supposed t
o be a tribute to Tinker, borrowing a little of her boldness, but now it just felt pathetic.

  The meeting had not gone well. Despite her being head of sixth form, Miss Jalloh’s office was the size of a bus shelter, and smelled even worse. Kat would gladly have not attended her attendance meeting, except the email had threatened to get in touch with her dad. A phone call from school would certainly contravene their unspoken accord to keep their lives as separate as possible.

  ‘Your attendance is nowhere near acceptable,’ had been Miss Jalloh’s opening line, peering over her half-moon glasses.

  The word attendance had begun to lose all meaning. ‘I still did fine in my exams,’ Kat pointed out. It was true too – nothing below a B grade in her mocks.

  ‘That’s hardly the point!’ The bangles on Miss Jalloh’s wrists rattled as she slapped her hands on the desk, living up to her reputation for being expressive. ‘Everybody knows you’re a bright girl.’

  That was funny; as far as Kat could tell everybody hardly knew she existed.

  Tinker had started out recording make-up tutorials – perfectly shaped eyebrows were her trademark – before moving on to discuss topics such as sexuality and feminism. She identified as pansexual, and was so open about everything it meant for her, posting regular videos on the impact it had on her dating and sex life. These were all mysteries to Kat, abstract ideas, and it was easy enough to pretend Tinker’s life was her own. Pretend these regular updates fleshed her out with experience. In between those personal videos she still posted about make-up, Doctor Backwash, books . . . a video almost every day made it feel like having a one-way conversation with a best friend. The friend Kat had always wanted, had always missed despite never having nor losing them.

  ‘If anything is going on to keep you away from school, I want to know about it,’ Miss Jalloh had said.

  Kat had kept her gaze on the dusty desk surface, wondering if there was any way the teacher would understand: the threatening emails, attacks on social media, blurry photos of her sitting alone in the canteen or going into the toilets at break, even walking up the path to her house, always taken around corners or zoomed in from a distance. It was all part of a world the teachers couldn’t comprehend. Reporting it would be futile, and only risked making it worse.

  Instead, she’d set about deleting her online presence. If she wasn’t there, they couldn’t attack her.

  She reached out to type a comment on the video, before remembering that she had deleted her profile a week ago. It shouldn’t have made her feel so disconnected – it’s not like Tinker had ever replied.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Kat had said, finally lifting her head. She had left the teacher’s office having barely heard the threats of phone calls home or possible suspension. It would never come to that.

  It was pretty obvious who was responsible for this campaign against her. Luke and Justin sat across the room from her now. Everybody knew they had played a big part in what happened to Selena Jensen last year, and they had never been caught. The problem was proving it; if it was them, they were good at hiding it.

  On her desktop was an unsent letter she had written to them, titled Please Stop. Into it she had poured everything she really felt about these attacks against her, everything she had nobody in her life to tell. She was so angry. Every blow they struck made her want to scream. But who would listen? Even if there was someone, she would have to convince them of the truth, prove she wasn’t overreacting. The thought of it made anxiety wring her chest like a wet washcloth. It was better not to bother anybody else and handle it herself.

  She let the cursor hover over the letter and wondered if she had ever really intended to send it, or if simply typing it had convinced her she wielded some kind of power.

  The video finished. Kat set the next one playing and turned the volume up.

  Wesley had to admire the fact that it had taken over a month for them to force Kat into closing down her Twitter profile, suspending her Facebook, deleting her YouTube channel and abandoning Instagram. At first she had fought back, retweeting and mocking them to try and get some support. All it really did was attract more trolls, enough to shut down anybody who came to her defence.

  The hardest part had been getting her banned from the official Doctor Backwash fan forums. Wesley had never seen the web series, but all of his favourite YouTubers considered it worse than cancer. In the end, they had targeted a few major players on the forum until they identified Kat as the common denominator and cut her loose.

  The only part of her online presence left standing was her personal website, and they’d made the photographs so that they could nuke this last outpost from orbit.

  ‘Almost ready,’ said Luke, dragging an image into place.

  She brought it on herself. Wesley couldn’t let himself forget it. Before the summer, Kat had given a presentation in media studies about misogyny on YouTube and toxic masculinity, calling out a local YouTuber named TrumourPixel who ran a gaming and pranks channel. Everybody at school watched and loved him – she was just too sensitive about his non-PC style of humour.

  Wesley had sent TrumourPixel an email about it as soon as the class was over, and couldn’t believe it when he got a response. It turned out Luke and Justin had done the same thing. Did they want to team up to take her down? Wesley had jumped at the chance. While Tru talked about it on his livestreams and made an attack video against her, they had begun to plot together.

  This was an opportunity to prove himself. He had to take it.

  ‘Is that the best picture to use?’ said Justin.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, blue balls.’

  Her website was mainly used for updates on the video game Kat was making. The home page hosted a sort of biography and a video of her, chatting self-consciously into the lens. Luke deleted it all, dropped his chosen image into place, and attached the rest to an email.

  He leaned back in his chair. ‘We’re ready to go.’

  As soon as the video shuffled to the next in the playlist Kat tabbed to Twitter. Muscle memory. Oops . . . That person doesn’t exist! She could still lurk on her favourite feeds if she wanted, but the well was poisoned now. When the harassment aimed at her had splashed onto innocent people, she knew she had lost.

  Innocent people. As if she deserved it.

  After the summer, she thought it had all blown over. The video attacking her had stopped being shared. Everybody had gone back to ignoring her.

  Now anonymous threats and faceless trolls meant she never felt safe, not even at home. She felt responsible, as if she was at fault for daring to exist in those online spaces in the first place.

  Tinker constantly experienced the same kind of abuse, but on a much larger scale. This video was all about why she was supporting the forthcoming women’s march in London, an event Kat wholeheartedly agreed with but was too scared to attend. Story of her life. The topics Tinker spoke about painted a target on her back, but she never let the trolls win. Tinker was kind of a hero.

  They would totally probably be BFFs if they ever met.

  A chronic loner. That’s what Kat’s sister Suzy always used to call her, flippantly, apparently unaware it was her fault Kat had slowly but surely faded into the background of their lives.

  The fan forums and online communities had been there for her then. At first she’d believed what Suzy said, that it was all a substitute for real life, that online personas were inherently fake, an idealised facsimile of the truth – who you are online is who you want to be. Online Kat was confident, comfortable expressing her opinions and talking openly about the things she loved. She reached out into the void desperate to make friends and actually succeeded. Friends that loved Tinker and Doctor Backwash as much as she did, who always understood her references and appreciated her gif game. Online, Kat had been everything she wasn’t in ‘real life’.

  After a while, she began to think that her online self was the real Kat. The Internet provided a proxy in which she was able to thrive.

 
Shutting those channels down felt like cutting pieces of herself away. She missed tweeting work-in-progress screenshots of her game and seeking development advice, debating what the heck was up with Esme’s hair in the Backwash Christmas special, playing games online with friends. When she had a bad day it was her only way to purge the negativity from her body, the bracing catharsis of casting a gloomy selfie or grumpy tweet into the social media abyss. Nobody ever replied, but at least it had left her brain.

  Last night, with every outlet gone, she’d caught herself leaning into the balmy glow of her blank screen, hoping it might nourish her in some small way like a hothouse plant.

  Maybe none of it had ever been real.

  Maybe it was pathetic to miss it so much.

  Kat had never felt so lonely.

  When the email was finished – third-party account, nothing to do with the school system – and they had double-checked their handiwork on her website, Luke and Justin turned to Wesley. ‘Want to do the honours?’

  This was an audition, and Wesley was determined to pass. He scooted his chair across, almost dizzy with pride and fear and excitement.

  The first click saved all changes to the website.

  He hesitated, just for a moment, before his second click sent the email.

  They all spun their chairs around to watch the fallout.

  An email notification popped, and Kat expected it to be from Miss Jalloh, sending through her ‘improvement expectations’. Instead it was from a sender she didn’t recognise, so it had to be the trolls. Usually she deleted without reading, but it was impossible to ignore the subject line: THE WALDGRAVE WANK BANK IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS. The panic in her chest, the corrosive demon of anxiety she always had to fight to suppress, began to stir awake.

  It was different to any email they had sent her before. All it contained was a link to the home page of her website. And instead of being addressed only to her, it had been sent to the entire school directory.

  With shaking hands, she clicked the link.

  For a moment, Kat could not quite comprehend what she was seeing. The trolls had somehow hacked her website and replaced the welcome video with pornography. A photograph of a dark-skinned woman, naked but for long white socks, her hand between her legs.