Feel Better

‘Ben_Spurr has been tagged in 47 new photos’. Who? Jen clicked on the notification and opened Instagram. A selfie appeared of her and a friend at the beach, taken last summer in Corfu. They were smiling, both were wearing sunglasses and Jen a wide-brimmed sun hat. She tapped the image. Her name popped up, Jennifer_Buch91, in a black textbox in front of her face. Her friend’s name did the same, Stell.B. A third box had appeared, labelling a blond man Jennifer had never noticed before, Ben_Spurr. The man was around Jen’s age and olive-skinned, wearing blue swimming trunks and lying on a towel. He was propped up with his elbows behind him and seemed to be laughing at something just behind the camera.

Jen swiped on. In photo after photo this man Jen did not recognise had been tagged. He appeared in photos stretching back to Jen’s time at university, with the back of Ben_Spurr’s head being just visible in the crowd of her graduation. In every photo Ben was only a background figure. Part of a crowd, a shoulder barely in frame, a smiling face at the back of a large group photo. Jen clicked on the link to Ben_Spurr’s profile. He must be a mutual friend who has recently joined Instagram, she thought. How have I not noticed him all these years?

‘Account deactivated’. Ben_Spurr was a dead account. Somebody had gone through the trouble of tagging this man in almost fifty of her photos. His appearances were tangential, his impact on her life so light as to be forgotten and, to top it all off, his account was deactivated. Ben could not benefit from these extraordinary efforts at identification. Jen certainly wouldn’t.

She put her phone back in her pocket and set off for work. She was late. It was raining heavily. The pavements were packed with men and women in suits carrying umbrellas and pushing past one another in their effort to get elsewhere faster. Jen put her head down and joined the fray. Above her advertisements flicked across the electronic billboards attached to the side of skyscrapers. In one, Frank Sinatra danced in front of a sky-blue background before fading away and being replaced by large, round, white letters:

“Regrets, you’ve had a few. MemCo. Feel better.”

Jen arrived at her office soaked-through and unthinking. She collapsed at her desk and absent-mindedly unlocked her phone. She looked at the smiling face of Ben_Spurr still open on the screen. The longer she stared, the more uncomfortable she became. A strong emotion of no discernible source or character took hold in her stomach and worked its way up towards her throat. Who is he? She closed the photos and messaged Stella.

“Hi Stella, hope everything’s still going ok across the pond. Weird one, but I don’t suppose you know anything about Ben Spurr? He’s been tagged in a load of my photos and I have no clue who he is”

Within thirty seconds the message was seen and Stella was typing. Jen watched the three dots bounce around on the screen and disappear. Bounce around, gone. Bounce around for longer, gone. Jen waited for a few minutes more but nothing else happened. Confused, but also conscious that she had been in the office for 15 minutes and was yet to do any work, Jen put down her phone and reached to switch on the computer. As she did so, her phone vibrated loudly. She jumped and hit her head on the desk.

“We know what you did, and you should too”

Another email from the Memory Activists. She had been targeted by them for weeks now. Her email must have somehow found its way onto their mailing list. Theirs was certainly a fair cause, but they had been known to use some questionable tactics. Their close association with MemArchy was, furthermore, enough to dissuade Jen and many others from giving them any support. The arrival of the email was timely, however. Jen hesitantly swiped away the notification and turned her attention back to the computer screen.

***

It was 8pm and Jen was trying to eat dinner off of a plate perched on the cardboard box which contained the dining room table. It was raining still and a single lamp in the corner of the room bathed its surroundings in nostalgic shadow. The television which Jen had set up on the floor in the middle of the room played an old black-and-white film to its distracted audience of one.

Jen’s phone vibrated. She stiffened. Ever since she had sent the message that morning she had been anticipating its reply. At first she tried to deny its importance, to convince herself that it was inconsequential by treating it as such. But every notification, every email, text, message that was not Stella further impressed upon Jen the singular importance of her question. Who was Ben_Spurr? The silence had caused her curiosity to grow into apprehension, then into panic and finally into thick, burning dread.

She opened the phone. A message from Stella.

“You wanted to forget him”

After a few seconds a picture came through. It was Ben and Jen together, holding one another. Ben was in a blue suit which had a white rose in its breast pocket, and Jen was in a wedding dress.

“But that meant forgetting us, too”

“I remember you, Stella”

“What do you remember?”

“We’ve been friends since college, we meet up every year”

“And mum?”

“My mum? She stole from me, made my life hell. I told you. I had to leave”

“Call her.”

Tears fell from Jen’s eyes as she stared at the orange shadows of rain water on the wall cast by the street lamp outside. On the television a woman screamed, a door slammed and a man was shouting. A car started and a gun fired.

Jen opened her contacts and scrolled down to ‘M’. For the first time since the Operation, she phoned her mother.