Delete-Man: A Psychological Thriller by Johnny Vineaux Read Free Book Online

anyway.
    “So what did Josie talk to you
about?”
    “Oh yeah, Josie. Man, she was
really cool. She found me when I was back up in East London. I was
living with some girl there. We talked about all kinds of
crap.”
    “What sort of thing?”
    He made some sort of thinking
pose, and I got the impression he was choosing what to tell me.
    “Talked about my inspiration,
why I did what I do. She was interested in why I was so successful.
She was smart about a lot of things; she was wrong about some
things though.”
    “Wrong about what?”
    “She reckoned that I was going
to drop in popularity. She talked a lot about society, symbols, all
that crap. She was telling me that society would change. Values and
stuff, and that my stuff wouldn’t fit in.”
    “Yeah, Josie was always looking
for subtext in things.”
    “Smart girl, man. Shame.”
    He sucked down the rest of his
beer and walked up to the fridge again. He pulled out another, and
some ham slices which he ate straight from the packet.
    “She was wrong though, man,” he
said, mouth full. “I mean, right about society. She said stuff even
I hadn’t realised before. Made me notice little things; different
fonts they were using in advertising, different tones in the news.
She even talked a bit about how food was changing.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Sort of like, people eat things
cause of what they represent. So like before, when people were well
off, people were eating healthy this, organic this, diet that,
because they wanted food to have meaning, to cut back. But now with
the recession, everyone’s gone back on the junk food and big meat,
‘cause it’s more decadent. Something like that, I think.”
    He spoke as if he himself had
thought it out, but it sounded just the sort of thing Josie would
say as she tried to gain some insight into the way the world
worked. If Josie thought his time was up, I was sure it was, and
that was a good thing in my book.
    We talked some more about the
conversations he’d had with her, and I began to fill in the
picture. Despite his egotistical perspective, I realised that Josie
had been interested not in him, but more his art, and why it had
resonated so much with people. It was obvious he wasn’t much of an
artist, he relied on a crude sense of subject, and his only real
success had been with constructing large installations with which
he disrupted some mode of daily life. Nevertheless, he let me know
that t shirts of his images had sold all over the world, and
various copycats had also had huge success with his primitive
ideas. It was simply a case of the right time and the right place
though, and Josie had obviously been trying to determine why that,
and why now.
    As we spoke, and as he tried to
avoid it more and more, I realised there was something very
important he was holding back. I had a feeling it was something to
do with the ‘delete-man’ he had mentioned. Halfway through my third
beer I decided to ask him again, but before I could, he jumped up
and slapped a mischievous grin on his face.
    “Hey! I wanna show you
something. I showed Josie this, too.”
    He threw a loose red shirt over
his wiry frame, and picked up a few small radios—as well as a
handful of biscuits—then led me outside.
    “Where are we going?”
    “Not far. Trust me, if you’re
anything like Josie you’ll love this. She went crazy for it.”
    I anticipated something
underwhelming as I followed him out into the quiet streets. We
walked for over twenty minutes, leaving all traces of the wealthy
neighbourhood behind, and found ourselves in a typical high
street.
    “Not far now.”
    He spoke as we walked but I
wasn’t really paying attention. Eventually we reached a high rise.
Sewerbird buzzed the intercom, said a few words and opened the main
door. We took the lift up to the top floor, and despite going
towards any of the apartment doors, and Sewerbird then led me up a
few more flights of stairs until we reached the roof