FitzGerald Viral

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32352-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

So far, twenty-three thousand and ninety-six people have seen me online. Su has always been the successful sister. It's Leah who is wild and often angry. But when they go to Magaluf to celebrate their exam results, Su disappears. Su is on the run, humiliated and afraid. There's an online video of her performing multiple sex acts in a nightclub. And everyone has seen it. Their mother Ruth, a prominent court judge, is furious. Can she bring justice to the men who took advantage of her daughter, and what will it take to bring Su home? 'Read it.' Stylist 'Gripping.' Tammy Cohen, author of When She Was Bad 'A real psychological roller-coaster.' Scotsman

Helen FitzGerald is the bestselling author of Dead Lovely (2007) and nine other adult and young adult thrillers, including My Last Confession (2009), The Donor (2011), The Cry (2013), which was longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize, and most recently The Exit (2015). Helen has worked as a criminal justice social worker for over ten years. She is one of thirteen children and grew up in Victoria, Australia. She now lives in Glasgow with her husband and two children., Helen FitzGerald is the bestselling author of Dead Lovely and nine other adult and young adult thrillers, including The Donor, The Cry, which was longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize, and The Exit. Helen has worked as a criminal justice social worker for over ten years. She is one of thirteen children and grew up in Victoria, Australia. She now lives in Glasgow with her husband and two children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fitzgerald, Helen

Leseproben

Chapter One

I sucked twelve cocks in Magaluf.

So far, twenty-three thousand and ninety-six people have seen me do this. They might include my mother, my father, my little sister, my grandmother, my other grandmother, my grandfather, my boss, my sixth-year biology teacher and my boyfriend of six weeks, James.

Where r u? A text from James, the latest of umpteen.

I’m not going to tell him, or anyone.

Twenty-four thousand, one hundred and forty-three. My netball coach maybe, the guy at the Spar on Lang Road. Barry Craig, the boy next door. That’s not … he’d be saying to himself in his bedroom. No! Zoom in, pause. Is that? Oh my God, Su.

The incident at the Coconut Lounge brings the total number of times I have performed an act of oral sex to twelve. That’s right, never before. Not even when Greg Jamieson pointed it at me in the bushes on the Duke of Edinburgh trek, not even with James, who only got to second base a few weeks ago. I am prudish, virginal Su. I’m the one who usually stays at home to study or, if I do go out, the one who distributes water and buys the chips and calls the taxi. I don’t ever feel the need to swear, and I don’t like it when others do, unless it is the only accurate way to convey the information (as with the first line above).

Is my chin really as pointy as that? Can’t be me. I’m not dirty or dangerous or a rebel. Leah is the rebel in the family. Leah gets drunk every weekend. Leah inserts expletives in sentences that would be more powerful without them. Leah’s slept with loads of boys, and some full-grown men, too. It should be Leah on that screen.

I have to keep my phone plugged in so I can play it over and over. That’s my floral green top certainly, my hair, my mouth, eyes. Chin? It is me, it is, and my mother and my father have watched it and might be watching it now.

This room is so cold. It’s on the third floor of a four-storey, two-star hotel on the outskirts of Puerto Pollensa. It has a small double bed, a window that doesn’t open, and a tiny but aptly named wet room that is always very wet, even if it hasn’t been used for some time. The wallpaper is peeling on the ceiling and water-stained in three spots which are not pleasingly spaced. The bed is against the wall, by the window. One wobbly bedside table is jammed at the other side. The only light is a dull, energy-saving bulb dangling unevenly inside the Chinese lantern on the ceiling.

The film was uploaded by ‘Xano’ at 3.20 this morning. Xano describes himself as a ‘UK film director’. He’s not very steady with the camera, or phone, or whatever he’s using to film me with, so he needs to work on that if he wants to call himself a director. Xano is the only faceless person in the film. I count forty-seven people in the crowd. Twelve males surround me in a circle, ready to be next. Everyone else stands behind them, drinks in hand, shouting me on. A few phones are pointing at me, but if the people holding them were filming me, they didn’t post it, or haven’t yet. I’ve paused and screen-grabbed and zoomed in and so far I recognise five people in the crowd. There’s the PR guy. He’s shirtless in order to show off his glistening six-pack and the two-bird tattoo on his hairless chest. He was the one who lured us inside (‘Good evening, ladies? Free drinks, ladies? Jäger bomb, ladies?’) and he is one of the folk who is pointing a phone at me. At one stage, he laughs and some drink spurts out of his mouth. Millie and Natasha are at the back, each holding one side of a bucket of blue alcohol, straight-faced like they’re scared, but mouths still on their windy straws, not worried enough to stop drinking or to stop me. I recognise the shoes and shorts of one of the guys in the circle. I can only see the bottom half of him. He’s getting his thing ready. He’ll be the fifth receiver and he’s yanking away, panicking that it’ll still be wee and soft when I get to it and that – let me check – twenty-four thousand, one hundred and seventy-one people will know his thing is tiny and that he can’t get it up. His shoes are white, trainer-style, but go up to the ankle, with white laces threaded through black eyelets. His shorts are also white and folded at the bottom. His boxers are grey. His name’s Euan. Millie had tried to have sex with him on the third night but he said she was doing it all wrong. She was planning to try harder with him after the Coconut Lounge if she couldn’t find anyone better. He’s still soft when I get to him, and – yes – my mouth doesn’t alter that, so Millie’s probably thinking at the back there that she’d better find someone else quick smart as it’s our last night in Maga, her last chance for no-strings holiday sex, and she’ll require a functioning penis. I pause the shot after Euan zips his shorts and skulks off. Millie’s scanning the room for other options. And there’s Leah, my sister. She’s at the back, peering over shoulders, smiling, clapping, shouting ‘Go, go, go!’

Please please, where are you? Darling, don’t be scared. It’s going to be okay. Let me know you’re all right. A text from Mum, the latest of seventeen from her and twenty-three from Dad and thirteen from Woojin and seven from James and three from Ashleigh and two from Jen and none, not one, from Leah since I failed to appear at Palma airport.

I wonder if Mum is texting from court. She’s a Sheriff: not one with a gun and an American accent, but with a wig and a West-of-Scotland one. People have to call her ‘My Lady’ and when she’s annoying that’s what Leah calls her too. Or she could be at home, having taken time off for the first time since her dad died five years ago. Or she could be at the police station. She could be reporting me missing! She could be tracking my signal!

I take the SIM card and battery out of my top-of-the-range Ri7 and stomp on them, which makes no impact bar hurting my bare soles. I bend the tiny SIM card till it snaps, flush it down the loo, my feet in half an inch of freezing water as I watch it sink to the bottom but not disappear.

Millie must have pulled that night. Leah and Natasha too. I was alone when I woke up on the bathroom floor of the two-bedroom apartment we’d rented. My phone was going crazy in the distance, zzz, zzz, zzz. After being sick several times, I crawled towards the noise, and eventually located the phone in the kitchen sink.

It was Millie. ‘Su, are you sitting down?’

I left my suitcase and most of my belongings in the holiday apartment. I ran to the nearest cash machine, withdrew everything but twenty euros from my Thomas Cook cash card, used fifty-five to get a taxi from the other side of the island to here, and the rest for a week in this room. Mum knows people. She’ll have traced my signal. I grab my bag and leave.

I have no money and no idea where to go. At a bank a few blocks from the hotel, I withdraw what I had left yesterday – twenty euros – but when the receipt comes out it says the balance is 620 euros. Mum, bless her.

I withdraw another 300, buy a baseball cap and sunglasses, get a cab to the ferry port and purchase a ticket on the next boat to Barcelona, which is leaving in twenty minutes. I know I should ring Mum and let her know I’m okay, but I can’t handle a direct conversation with her or with anyone else. She’ll know I withdrew the money, so it’s not like I’m making her suffer. She’ll know I’m alive. My plan is to hide away until another video goes viral. It’ll need to be good, like the 2013 triumph involving the branch. In that particular video, a teenage boy was recording his friend with his phone. In the background, the friend’s dad was using his new birthday present, a chainsaw, to chop off a tree branch that was getting too close to their house. The boy’s mother was holding the ladder steady, but not very well, because the man lost balance, holding his precious chainsaw as he fell, and decapitating his wife en route. That’s the kind of Oscar-winning stuff that’s out there. It’ll be difficult to top mine – a trampolining kitten wouldn’t do, for example, nor an obese guy dancing poorly but with gusto in unflattering Y-fronts. It’ll need to be horrendous, outrageous. But I’m confident someone will eventually do something worse and, when they do, I’ll drop down the screen in Google Search results and a fresh sorry soul will replace me on this never-ending circle of disgrace. Once I’m off the first page, I’ll ring Mum, go home, explain to James, and go to Uni. It’s all going to be okay. I’m a sensible girl, and I know there is a very good chance that this will pass and that I will survive.

*

I’m a survivor, you see. Even when my birth mother dumped me on a doorstep in Seoul, things came good for me. And she didn’t dump me in the relative safety of a baby box. It’d be years after my birth that Pastor Lee Jong-rak would build a baby-sized post box at the front door of the Jusaran Orphanage in Seoul for disgraced young women to deposit their errors. Years till the public outrage at his solution, matched equally with public respect. No baby box for me. I was left in a frayed wicker basket with no lining, outside a police station with a note from my mother in Korean that said: ‘She is Su-Jin. I am 17. Please look after her.’

Mum and Dad gave me the note when I was six, right after...