The crowd outside Waterstones was exactly the same as the one at Lowfield that morning. Mary wondered if they might even have shared the same transport: Anti-feminists to the left, feminists to the right, or if it suits your definition of yourself to sit in the aisle or perhaps to lie in the luggage rail, go ahead. Mary bet if someone started singing ‘The Back of the Bus They Cannae Sing’, everyone would’ve joined in till they arrived at Next Altercation.

She intended to part ways with Jack in Argyll Street, but he was hovering at the bookshop window, which was filled with Cuck posters. ‘You can’t come in.’

She shouldn’t have said this. It caused him to go in. Jack spotted free wine and grabbed two cups, nudging his way to the front as Macdowall began reading the second letter he wrote to his dead wife.

6

CUCK, Dr Liam Macdowall

The Second Letter

Dear Bella,

As a result of the Eat-It-Too hacking, two people are known to have committed suicide. One man, Massimo Quadrelli, hurled himself off a bridge, got his foot caught in a railing and dangled there for ten minutes before his Nike gave way. I wonder if Massimo changed his mind as he swung wildly in the wind, if he forgave his wife for breaking her vows and was clawing upwards when the shoelace broke. A friend of Colin McTighe lost his business. It’s been The War of the Roses in that house: the social has gone in. In hundreds of families, addictions and depressions have taken hold, and in ours, you died. The blast radius of that hacking is still growing, it will for years, for generations. It has increased in size since my first words in this letter to you, ‘Dear Bella’, only moments ago. There is a good chance that since I began writing, someone has poured a drink and it is morning time where they live; there is a very good chance a child is crying because Mummy put Daddy in jail, and the odds are high that someone is making a better plan than Massimo Quadrelli. Three years ago today, at 9.00 p.m., three thousand names and addresses were published online – three thousand from all over the world. Yours – Isabelle Duff, 24 Harris Place, Glasgow – was just one of them, and look at the damage that caused. Imagine, Bella, imagine if the other two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine have, or are to be, as harmed as us.