Declan
Ross poked you
I stared
at the email, trying to digest the four simple words. They didn’t make any
sense. There must have been a mistake. I closed Hotmail, launched Firefox,
selected the link from my favourites and logged into Facebook. It took me a
customary few seconds to locate the right section of the page that lists your pokes.
There it was, sat above advertisements for credit cards and Family Guy DVDs: Declan
Ross poked you.
I clicked the name and opened up a mini window that
listed all of my pokes. There was Declan’s profile photo. Taken last summer at
the beach, it shows him looking moody, hands on Speedo-clad hips, his back to
the camera. He called it his pout pose and reckoned it made him look
mysterious. Seeing his photo again like this caught me off guard. It was a good
thirty seconds before I remembered why it was odd. How could a dead man poke
me?
Beneath his name, to the right of the beach shot,
was a time stamp. Declan had poked me seven minutes ago. There must be some
obvious explanation for this. Clearly Declan’s dormant Facebook account had
been hacked by some cretin who thinks that messing about with someone else’s
life, or in this case death, is cool. I’d had my email hacked before and had
spent time exchanging words with the hijacker via Messenger trying to get them
to back down. Eventually I decided that at least I could start afresh, with a
new internet handle to replace the rather dated 2_become_1@hotmail.co.uk and
stop the adverts for a B1gger P3ni5 in their tracks (somehow they found me at
my new address, coincidence? I hope so).
Slumping back into the bean bag chair, I shuffled
my legs beneath the laptop and wondered what to do next. It had been six months
since Declan’s accident and I was a fully functioning member of society again.
I had wept so many tears back then but I’d managed to get back to work at the
museum, and since my sister moved in I was no longer lonely. Seeing Declan’s
image still caused a rush of mixed emotions scattering through my core: grief
at his loss, joy at his being, and a side order of anger lingering at the back
of my head.
Before I drifted off into a daydream of happier
times my attention was drawn to another notification. A photograph that I was
tagged in had been liked by Declan Ross. Clicking through to the image I found
a shot of me at Declan’s memorial. Against my better judgement my sister had
posted the image to give me some sort of closure. More confusion skittered
about my mind. How could Declan like a photo at his own memorial? It wasn’t
possible. Someone was playing a cruel joke, though I was at a loss to guess
what the punch line might be.
If the account had been hacked, how did they know
to poke me and not someone else on his friends list? Maybe they had. Maybe
they’d been commenting on other people’s pictures or walls too, and it wasn’t
just me. Fighting paranoia, I clicked through to my own profile page where the
photo showed my skinny frame on the beach last year. I’d put on a couple of
pounds since then but I liked the shot so kept it rather than replace it with a
more accurate snap. I was still listed as being ‘In a relationship with Declan
Ross’, so I clicked on his name and went to his page. I know it’s weird that it
was still online, and I could have taken it down – I knew Declan’s password
after all – but that seemed like a level of finality I was not ready for. The
only activity since last November was the recent poke and photo-liking.
I first encountered Declan through a mutual friend
on the notorious social networking time-waste-athon. It was more or less love
at first type. We clicked on so many levels, spending hours emailing, texting
and Skyping long distance. Friends thought it was odd that two guys who had
never met could call themselves boyfriends, but ours was a meeting of minds. We
would discuss our love for Stephen King, share Tori Amos and Eurovision tracks,
and watch the same black and white movies over the phone together. I had been saving
up to go over to Florida and see him when all communications from Declan stopped
dead. His Livejournal posts dried up, his Tweets ceased, and his video blog went
offline. I couldn’t reach his phone and my emails went unanswered. Memories of
that period still fill me with sadness, as if our relationship had encountered
a broken link and could not be displayed.
I was drawn back to the present when a text
vibrated through my Blackberry. I almost dropped it when I saw who it was from.
My six-month dead pen pal lover had sent me an SMS. What the fuck? This was
getting ridiculous. Zipping my sweatshirt against a growing chill I opened the
message. ‘Where are you Mr Man?’ read the short missive. I felt my mind
straining not to turn inside out and the tension in my jaw that meant my teeth
had started gnashing together. The Facebook activity made me think hacker, but
now I was at a loss. Mr Man was a pet name we shared for each other, a playful childishness
of which we were fond. Declan and I had only ever uttered it in private
messages, never in public posts or Tweets.
Swallowing back the wad of tissue that appeared to be
materialising in my throat, my thumb hesitated over the reply button. Should I
reply to whoever this was? Who was it? I refused to believe that Declan was
reaching out to me beyond the grave. My rational mind would only bump up
against such a suggestion; it wouldn’t credit a longer exploration of the idea.
I tangled with what to do next – answer the text or ignore it? If I replied did
I do so as if it was actually Declan? Or did I send something abusive to signal
my frustration to whoever was messing with me? I was too wigged out to ignore
it. Over the course of our two years together we’d never played practical
jokes, he knew I didn’t like to be fooled and I didn’t have the imagination for
them. If it was actually Declan, where the hell had he been? I’d read the
article about the hit and run on the Miami Herald website and through
LexisNexis at work. There was no question in my mind that the 26 year old bar
man whose body lay unclaimed even to this day was Declan.
Declan had lived alone after his family turfed him
out aged sixteen. An inadvisable outing during Sunday school to the
unsympathetic pastor hadn’t gone down well. I had contact details for Declan’s
estranged family, and I didn’t think I could call up the Miami police about the
body. They would have thought I was some sort of nut. Once I had convinced
myself that Declan was not coming back I let myself mourn and planted a sapling
in his memory in my local park. After two weeks special leave from the museum I
had gone back to the archives and lost myself in musty journals. It was
inconceivable that Declan could still be alive after the trauma I had been
through. Wasn’t it?
Before I could compose myself or a suitable text
response I glimpsed an alert at the bottom of my laptop screen to say I had
email. Clicking back to my inbox yielded a message from X-Tube, a site I hadn’t
visited for several weeks. A pornographic version of Youtube, I used to post
videos privately for Declan for occasions when I couldn’t be with him in real
time. He would return the favour, allowing me to feast on his strong, dark body
whenever I felt the urge to purge. Since Declan’s accident my sex drive had
slumped to a new low and I had only just started getting my mojo back. The
email informed me that a video was waiting in my private account. This was when
I really began to panic. I was willing to believe that some weirdo had been
able to figure out that I could be screwed with via pokes and messages, but
surely this latest update could not have anything to do with Declan.
I noticed that my hands quivered on the way to the mouse-pad.
I managed to double click on the email link and opened two browsers. I clicked
the red x to shut one down and in my haste, minimized the second window. It was
silent in the empty flat and I had apparently been holding my breath for a
while. So it came as some surprise that I could hear breathing. It was coming
from my laptop. The video must have already started playing. And then I heard Declan
utter ‘Hey sexy Mr Man, come to play?’ in that guttural southern American drawl
I knew so well.
It was definitely him. I knew his voice well – his
touch, taste and scent were foreign to me, but the cadence of his dulcet tones
still resonated in my memory banks. One of the more curious aspects of our
relationship also meant that while I was familiar with the bronzed, defined
body and his other well sculpted attributes, I had never seen images of Declan
from the neck up. He told me that his face had been scarred in an accident in a
school woodworking class and he didn’t want me to see. Declan wanted the man I
loved to be the one he let me see. My own body conscious issues led me to
respect his wishes. As much as I wanted to see the visage that I had crafted in
my mind to fit atop that beautiful body, the physical embodiment of his voice,
I also knew that I didn’t want to do anything to make him unhappy or
uncomfortable. I couldn’t bare anything to spoil the special bond we shared.
With some reservation I maximised the X-Tube
window. The video’s lighting was poor but I could see a bed. Declan’s bed. I
recognised the stickers on the headboard, brand names of a kaleidoscope of
fruit forming a collage against the old wooden bedstead. There was no person to
be seen, just a low shot of the bed linen. The empty frame was puzzling. I knew
I’d heard Declan speak, so I waited. My own webcam was turned off, this was a
one-way feed. According to the upload information it wasn’t a live feed, yet it
had been put up just five minutes ago. ‘Mr Man, I’m waiting for you’. The sound
caught me unawares. The accompanying movement caused my whole body to jump an
inch or two from my seat. I leaned it to the screen and peered at the torso
that filled the screen, as it settled down onto crossed legs. It was wearing
just a pair of Aussiebum briefs, nothing else. The body was Declan’s, of that
there was no doubt. I could see the small Tweety Pie tattoo just above the
waist band of his pants, the same one that was described in the newspaper
articles. And the same one I’d seen covered in the owner’s spunk on countless
occasions.
Before I knew what was happening, the body leaned
forwards. The head came into view. For the first time ever I was seeing my deceased
beau’s fizzog on camera. The effect was heart-stopping.
My own scarred face stared out of the screen. It
was all there: the crooked smile where my lips had been split an inch back into
my cheek; my milky white dead eye set amidst livid red scratches that ran from
nose to forehead; the shaggy mop of hair that covered a multitude of healed
cuts and bruises.
Declan was me.
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