Chapter 5

Natasha had been forced by an uncaring society to give in to the phenomena of social networking. Mostly because aforementioned society had stopped calling her and she wanted them to at least see her as she stamped her feet and screamed like a Hilton at the MTV awards.


Since joining Facebook she had threatened to kill herself for myriad reasons, from the use of the Velvet Underground in adverts to the wearing of polo shirts( in general) or the existence of mayonnaise. Society had continued not to care.


It was unlikely that Sarah had been referring to Natasha's most recent status update in her well timed final dig. It was also likely, given past experiences, that Natasha had gone ahead and done something altogether more stupid. 595 emails more stupid.


Scraping at an elderly pizza stain on her brownish sofa she contemplated how long she'd been out for, she'd passed out on Tuesday at 8pm, prime terrible property programme time, so what time was it now? She flicked on the TV and vommed a little bit inside.


Two days? How had two days passed?


Running to the sink and gulping water she nervously grabbed her laptop. If the brain was really made up of water then perhaps it was possible to down two days worth of cells in one. Maybe open up a neurological pathway circumventing her innate sense of hang over. Prior tequila incidents told her differently, however, waking up with an evening missing with a living room full of traffic cones and a clown in her bed were always a strange explanation for a night where she was convinced she'd passed out by 10pm. Her emails were confusing:

"Dear Natasha, forgive the unsolicited email, I just felt I had to…."


"Hi Natasha, it was great meeting you the other day. I'm still interested in coming to the protest on Saturday…."


"Fatso, nice work on fuelling the obesity crisis…."


Logging in to her histories a blog link shone out like a turd a jewellery box. Natashalovescake.com. Oh crap.




The internet was like the sober kid at the school reunion, phoning you on your hangover day to remind you exactly who you demonstrated your bottle felatio technique to. The internet was like a Liam Neeson movie, no love, merely a search for deadly revenge.

This was clearly not the point of view of her hammered self, she cringed as she read her wobbly words:

"When I was twelve I decided to go on a diet and I stopped eating cake. To this day if I eat cake I feel guilty. It has done nothing to enhance my life. I haven't lost weight, I'm not going to live forever, I haven't found a career or a boyfriend or a single good experience as a result of avoiding cake.

Two hours ago I failed to kill myself and it's the best thing I've ever done. I have truly woken up and I'm going to change the world."

She stopped reading right there, not merely because she was being plagued by visions of compounds in Texas but because she didn’t need to read any more. Her brain was spewed out before her, the same idea that had kept popping up since her sixth birthday party. Or at least the aftermath of her sixth birthday party.


No one had attended Natasha's sixth birthday party save for a couple of mandatory cousins and a neighbourhood child who had sat licking the lurid green snot that flowed down her upper lip until most people would have rather gauged out their eyes with a spoon than eat pudding.


She'd taken the excess cake into school on Monday and suddenly the kids approached her, pimping their friendship for a momentary slurp of sugar icing. It was so simple. For cake you could buy someone's soul.

Natasha had expanded her philosophy into and beyond her teens, eventually reasoning that via free cake it was possible to garner world peace and create global equality - it just needed to start with one person, one brave person handing out cake to their fellow commuters - sharing love, buying their souls.

But the dream had died in London, with every commute, every tourist she'd narrowly avoided kicking and every homeless guy she'd stepped over she had lost the belief that humans were capable of anything other than cluttering up the place. She'd started to understand that hers was a life made for the couch. Eventually her ambition became to eat and sleep and wake up to find that the world had been irreparably changed for the better by someone else.

Or at least most of her had. Apparently the bits of her brain affected by cough medicine and cheap whiskey hadn't received the "Natasha is lazy now, stop plotting ways to change the world" memo. The unconscious crazy side of her had apparently just accosted a load of commuters wielding Battenberg and had accrued 595 replies and counting. What was wrong with all these people? Each leaping with joy to drink the Kool Aid from the nearest dribbling wreck.

Blog Natasha, the one John Belushi would have liked, had posted pictures of herself at six different train stations, communing, bonding, feeding - organising and plotting. But then, like any good junky, she'd fucked off, leaving behind scared Natasha, terrified Natasha, deciding whether to smash her laptop to pieces or just to do a duck and cover under the kitchen table.