I had a lot of reasons for leaving London, resigning from my job and abandoning all of my stuff bar the bare essentials. I’d been gathering the courage to move on for a few weeks, as the growing rumble of discontent gradually gained volume every time I sat down to write, but then a parcel arrived on my doorstep, and the rumble became a blaring siren, drowning out all other thoughts.
Every woman with a public profile gets trolled. I suppose every man probably does, too, but I wonder if fewer of those messages involve graphic details about what the recipient should do with their body, or what the troll is going to do to said body. So, as my followers grew, and the trolls reproduced like rabid rabbits, of course I received a regular bombardment of nasty comments. Lucy and I accepted these as par for the course, deleting, blocking, and reporting as appropriate. That isn’t to say that they didn’t affect me. Many of them inspired nothing more than an eye roll. Some of them had Lucy and me laughing at their brilliant ingenuity. Far too many of them simply made me feel grubby and ashamed.
Delete. Block. Report.
It was part of my job, and one I grew far better at learning to handle like an emotionless robot. They didn’t want to hurt me, they wanted to hurt Nora Sharp. Who didn’t exist. Who wasn’t, actually, me.
And then, just over a year ago, someone using the account name NoraShark sent a DM to Nora’s Instagram account containing a link to a local news article about a Moroccan restaurant on the edge of Holborn. I had reviewed this restaurant. The food was great, and I made that clear in the review. The family who ran it clearly loved what they did. However, the main reason I had gone was to check out their new, heavily promoted live music evenings. The singer was dreadful, so of course a passing comment that people should go for the food rather than the entertainment ended up edited into a headline about serving earplugs alongside the starters.
This new article described how the singer, Layla Alami, who happened to be the daughter of the café owners, had been performing in public for the first time since completing chemotherapy. But of course nobody bothered to find that out until a video of Layla had gone viral, and the restaurant had become a local punchline. The so-called journalist who was supposed to be reviewing the evening certainly hadn’t, because her focus had been on the food and the service. The customers stopped coming, and the owners hadn’t the heart to continue.
They followed up the link with another message:
You did this. I hope you’re proud of yourself for destroying a good family who did nothing but work hard and try to provide a decent life for their children. A beautiful girl is broken. She blames herself. Nobody else does. We blame you.
Despite what Miles and Lucy said, repeatedly, I blamed me, too.
We blocked the account, but over the next few weeks, more messages arrived, usually one every couple of days. The accounts changed every time: NoraShark1, NoraShark2 and so on. The messages ranged from the fairly mild, ‘How can you carry on like normal when other people’s lives have been wrecked?’ to the disconcerting, ‘One day you will know what it is like to feel the pain that you have caused others and when that happens my family can finally rest.’
The final message, sent from NoraShark32, when Lucy and I were both on the brink of contacting the police, said this:
I will find out who you are and then it will begin.
Lucy had found the children of the couple who ran the restaurant on Facebook. The Alami family seemed to be huge, with a community of aunts, uncles, cousins and various other relatives all in continual contact, despite living on three different continents. More online investigating revealed no clues about which family member might be sending the messages. Once they stopped, to be quickly replaced with more trolls eager to tell Nora how much they hated her, we breathed a sigh of relief and put it behind us.
Except… I couldn’t help thinking about Layla Alami, who blamed herself, and her family. The knowledge that I had inadvertently caused such a horrible chain of events was impossible to forget. I sometimes lay awake at night wondering if there was a way to make it up to them. Hoping that, unlike me, they had genuinely been able to move on.
It was months later, in November, when Nora received a message from NoraShark33:
I know who you are.
An arpeggio of unease scrabbled up my back and gripped onto my throat. Lucy blocked them. I spent the whole night staring at the ceiling and praying it wasn’t true.
A week later, from NoraShark34:
I know who you are and I know where you live.
No worse than a hundred other messages I’d had that year, but I deleted it with trembling hands.
Three more followed in the run up to Christmas:
Are you going to share your secret, or shall I do it for you?
Which one is the real you? The hateful bitch who destroys lives or the dreary coward who hides behind her?
Did you enjoy your goat’s cheese pizza? If you did, will you tell everyone you hated it anyway?
That one sent me running for the bathroom, stomach heaving. I had ordered pizza the night before at an Italian restaurant a few streets away from Marcus’s flat. It was the first time I allowed the proposition that this person was telling the truth to actually settle, instead of batting it away as the usual empty drivel.
Christmas Eve, NoraShark38 sent a picture of the dress I’d worn to a party the evening before. So that was a relaxing few days spent at the Tufted Duck, smiling and pretending everything was merry and bright as I flipped mince-pie pancakes while battling semi-hysteria.
I wondered about speaking to the police, but what could I say? The messages contained no explicit threats, they were sinister, but exposing my real identity was my problem, not a matter for the law.
December twenty-ninth, the day I got back from Windermere:
Nice trip home?
The next day:
