The Way We Heard: That's Not My Name - The Ting Tings - 2008

The small, blonde girl pushes her hair back from her face nervously as she peers out from behind the half open front door of her mother’s modest council flat. It is rare that anyone knocks on their door, they live on the eighteenth floor and the lifts no longer work.

    The setting sun that bathes the tower block in gold, lights up her face. Her nose wrinkles as she squints, and she makes a peak of her palm to shield her eyes. 

    “I thought you lived in a big posh house,” the young man standing before her says, how come your here?” Beads of sweat glisten on his bony forehead. His expression is confused, let down. His eyes avoid hers, never raising above her midriff, concave and bare between her cropped top and denim shorts.

    The girl doesn’t reply but frowns and bites her bottom lip until a pale bloom erupts on the vermillion border of her mouth. She doesn’t recognise him. He is not from around here she thinks. A few moments pass and when the young man sees she isn’t going to respond, he goes on.

    “You don’t say much, considering.” He is looking at his shoes, still avoiding eye contact.

    “Considering?” The girl eventually repeats, not fully understanding.

    “Considering you have so many opinions,” he says with a faint sneer.

    “But, doesn’t everyone have opinions?” the girl says.

    “Yeah but not everyone tells the world about them.”

    She wonders why he is all the way up here at her door, and how he found her.

   “The world doesn’t have to listen, if it doesn’t want to,” she shrugs, and her lips pout a little, just as the young man will have seen them pout in the pictures she posts almost every day.

    He doesn’t say anything. 

    He is acned and sallow skinned, wearing a stained, threadbare grey hoodie, pulled over his head, almost obscuring his face. Its drawstring aglets are chewed and discoloured. His hands are stuffed deep in his jean pockets and his jaw muscles clench and unclench agitatedly. In years past, there might have been help for someone like him. There might have been a place to stay and a person to talk to. But not any more. 

    She is smooth skinned and dressed for summer in bright colours. Her tan sets off her honeyed hair and she has wide, hazel eyes that pale in the direct sunlight. Her life has not been easy or privileged but she is a confident and positive girl who wants to do well for herself and her mum.

    She glances over her shoulder, not emerging fully from behind the door, ready to slam it shut at a moment’s notice.

 

    The voice of Huw Edwards drifts from somewhere inside the flat. 

‘In other news the FTSE 100 reaches a new low and our foreign correspondent reports on the deepening food crisis in north east India’. 

    The newsreader’s tone is grave but reassuring, solid, trustworthy.

 

    The girl shifts uncomfortably. She wants to go back inside but doesn’t know how to end the encounter with the young man. She has thousands of friends but, apart from school friends and those that live on her estate, has never met any of them. She feels exposed, vulnerable.

    “How did you find out where I live?” She asks warily.

    He grins, pleased she asked him this question because it is an interaction, which is what he wants more than anything. To be acknowledged.

    “I’m pretty good at finding things out,” he says.

    

Edwards has moved on to the Eurovision Song Contest, his voice has risen half an octave and grown lighter. No need to worry about the state of the world’s economy, it seems to imply, here’s some light entertainment.

 

    The young man asks, “Have you seen that new thing everyone’s going on?”

    “New thing?” The girl frowns.”

    “Yeah, Tumble,” he says.

    “You mean Tumblr?” She says, correcting him without thinking and immediately regretting it.

    His face turns sullen again, he doesn’t like to be challenged. “Yeah, w…whatever. Have you?”

    “I don’t really know anything about it. Is it cool?” She adds quickly, trying to mollify his anger. Instinct tells her it is a mistake to engage with him, but she doesn’t know how else to handle the situation. Her mind is racing, what does he want?

    His face relaxes a little. “Well it’s no MySpace but it’s, yeah, pretty cool. Then he shrugs, “But you don’t get, like, followers or anything. Not like The Facebook.” 

    As he speaks, the girl sees that his teeth are broken and yellow. When he swallows, she can see the moving outline of his Adam’s apple in his narrow throat and she can smell his sour breath from two yards away. 

    She has become popular by making herself seem brave and adventurous, which she is, but right now she is scared and wants nothing more than for this strange young man to go away.  She wonders how many of the names on her friend list are people like this. Behind their endless positivity and cat whiskers and bunny ears, are they troubled and dark?

 

    When the girl had first joined MySpace it was to keep up with her school friends and because she thought Tom Anderson was cute. She chose a background of cat faces because she liked cats and her first intro track was ‘All You Need is Love’ because she thought it was a nice message. She had a good eye for design and was creative with her backgrounds, changing them frequently. She plundered her older brother’s CD rack to find new songs, often things her peers had never heard. 

     Nothing much happened for a while, her online friends were mostly from school or the estate she lived on. Then she dropped her boyfriend Kyle from her top eight, changed her song to ‘Go Now’ by the Moody Blues, and posted a picture of herself with white angel wings and a halo. Something struck a chord out there in the real world and she acquired almost three hundred new friends overnight. She learned fast and within a few months had increased her total to over two thousand. When she got a message from a local nightclub asking her to post a bulletin promoting their upcoming Christmas party, and offering to pay her for it, she saw the potential immediately. Within three months she had tripled her friend count and it was still climbing every day. She had a handful of lucrative arrangements in place and was now able to pay the monthly rent on their flat and have her mum’s car repaired.         

    She saved sensibly, and if it wasn’t for some greedy bankers, would have already had enough to put down on a flat of their own by now. These days though, you needed a huge deposit and a real job to have any chance of getting a mortgage. 

    No one considered what she did a real job.

 

    On the radio, Jimmy Saville introduces R Kelly’s ‘Get Dirty’. Saville’s trade mark yodel cuts through the warm air like the mating call of a Loon.

 

    The girl desperately wants to go back inside but is frightened to antagonise the young man. She can feel the tension in his body. 

    “Why are you so mean to boys?” He asks.

    The girl tips her head sideways, in the way that she has so often in the pictures she posts online. She senses pain in his question.  “I’m not mean,” she says.

    “You dumped Kyle.”

He says this as if they have known each other for a long time and Kyle is a mutual friend.

    “Kyle dumped me actually,” she says. She glances back into the flat where her mother is shuffling from the living room to the kitchen, her slippers dragging on the linoleum floor.

    The young man looks confused. “But you posted that you were, ‘so over him’.”

    “I am over him,” she says.

    “But..” He shakes his head, not understanding.

    “Is that why you’re here, do you know Kyle?” She tries to sound casual, to not let her fear show in her voice.

    The young man doesn’t answer, he is still digesting the idea that ending the relationship was Kyle’s idea. He can’t square that with what the girl posted on her page. He takes his hands from his pockets and begins picking at his fingernails.

    “I have to go in, my mum needs something,” says the girl.

    The young man looks at her now. He has dark eyes, with almost no sclera, that seem to float in his thin face. He is struggling to accept what he’s hearing. “You live with your mum?”

    “Yes. She’s not very well, she has problems with her liver,” the girl says.

    “But I thought you were really rich and lived in a big house and had an amazing life,” the young man complains hoarsely, pointing a dirty, bitten fingernail at the girl and taking a step forward. He sounds as if he has smoked a million cigarettes in his short life.

    The girl shrinks back. “How did you get my address again?” She says, hoping conversation will keep him away from her.

    “I told you I’m good at finding out stuff,” he shouts. A bubble of spittle forms at the corner of his mouth. Then, more quietly, he adds, “I just wanted to meet you.”

    “But you can’t just turn up at someone’s house.” The girl says.

    “So everything is fake, you don’t live in a nice house, your boyfriend dumped you. And I bet you’ve never been to Las Vegas either.” He says.

    This throws the girl for a moment. Then she remembers all the pictures she spent hours photoshopping. “I…” She doesn’t know what to say. She thinks back to the time before she moved her life online, when the only people that knew her were the ones she saw in real life everyday. 

      The young man slips a hand into the pocket of his hoodie and when he pulls it out there is a knife in it. A long bladed kitchen knife that glints in the sun.    

    The girl gasps and steps back, making to close the door,  but the young man is too fast for her. He leaps forward and jams his foot between the door and the frame. The girl screams. There is a battle of strength for a second or two but the young man is stronger and the door swings fully open pushing the girl to the floor. She scrabbles backwards calling to her mother to call the police. 

    “You’re just a liar AngelStar, a dirty little liar,” shouts the young man.

    And all the girl can think to say is “But that’s not my name.” She puts a hand up in self defence. “That’s not my name!”