‘The Number’

A short story.

The WhatsApp chat was called Jingle Belles, which had stopped being clever about a minute after Zara suggested it. They set the chat up to plan a night out between Christmas and New Year, but it had stayed active after that; and the members of the group – Emma, Mia, Poppy, and Holly, as well as Zara—had got closer and closer over time, in part owing to their shared willingness to disclose, without shame, whatever was on their minds. On any given day, dozens of messages would be sent back and forth: work rants, anecdotes, reports of small disasters, requests for guidance and advise. It was constant, the drum-beat of their very different, often chaotic lives. And the chat was their safe space, as it were: a little corner of the world in which they could say anything. So none of them noticed at first when an unfamiliar number appeared among their names.

They only noticed this by accident. None of the girls had cause to hit the title at the top of the chat and go to the settings, since none of them wished to change the picture (taken that night after Christmas, when they were in varying stated of inebriation) or the description (‘Let’s get jolly trollied!’), which by now were comforting constants in their lives. If Holly had not tried to make a video call while tipsy, and then scrolled down by accident, none of them would have known that beneath the list of their names was a number: +447917123456. It had shaken Holly out of her gin-and-tonic-induced haze. She opened a one-to-one conservation with each of the others and sent her the same message.

‘Hey.’

Then the screenshot.

‘Who’s this?’

Later that evening, as Mia walked home from work, she had the distinct impression that someone was watching her – someone who slipped into shadows whenever she glanced back. It was not the first time.

But it was Emma who was quickest off the mark. The moment she saw the message from Holly she set up a new group chat on WhatsApp and called the others.

‘It’s probably a glitch,’ said Mia, trying to calm the others down. ‘And anyway, we can just boot them out of the group.’

‘Mia, it is not a glitch.’ That was Holly. ‘When have you ever heard of a number magically appearing? Someone has been reading our messages.’

‘And for how long?’ added Zara.

‘Well, fine,’ said Mia. ‘Let’s just boot them out.’

‘Mia, they have access to our entire conversation history. It goes back years! They could have screen-shotted all of it. They could use it against us.’

‘So what?’ said Poppy. ‘There’s nothing incriminating on there.’

But there was, of course. Confessions, comments about people they all knew, bad-taste jokes, personal information. There was a long uneasy silence as each member of the group thought about what she had shared.

‘Anyway,’ said Holly, after a time, ‘don’t we want to know who it is?’

‘Let’s speak to someone first,’ said Mia. ‘I’ll talk to Daniel. He’s super geeky. He’ll be able to tell us if this kind of thing ever happens.’

Daniel was super geeky. He was a software engineer who worked at Tesla and had always found things much more interesting than people. But he was a good man, and very good at what he did. He and Mia had had a thing some years back. It had fizzled it out, in part due to his passion for train-engineering. But they had stayed in touch. They met at a café in West Brompton called Babushka.

Daniel scrolled through Mia’s chat settings, brow furrowed.

‘This isn’t right,’ he said. ‘This number doesn’t belong to one of your contacts, but it’s still in your group. In theory you could hack into a group, but it would be very difficult. It would require military-level skill. The encryption is really thorough. No one would use WhatsApp if they thought it wasn’t secure. Weak security would cost Meta a fortune.’

He gave the phone back to Mia.

‘So there are two options, as I see it,’ he went on. ‘Either someone has hacked your chat. Or one of you has invited someone to the group and managed to hide it.’

They met later at Mia’s flat in Brixton. It was in a new-build overlooking the skatepark and the rundown old theatre that now hosted drum and bass nights. They left their phones behind just in case they were bugged, which led to a comedy of errors: Holly got lost on the Tube, Emma had to go back home because she used her phone to pay for everything, and Poppy was hanging around outside Mia’s block for fifteen minutes, unable to call up and say that she was there. By the time they were all sat down in Mia’s living room with a bottle of wine in front of them, it was nearly nine o’clock.

It had struck all of them in the interceding spell that the appearance of an unknown number in their group was not the only odd thing that had happened to them recently. Zara’s car alarm had been going off without any clear reason; Emma had received a garbled voice message late one night; and then there was Mia’s persistent sense of being followed, which hadn’t started with the discovery of the number. It was clear that none had invited the intruder. And soon they agreed, too, that what they would not do was let on that they had noticed the number in the Jingle Belles chat. They had to know who this person was — and what they wanted. With that in mind, they would carry on chatting as normal. And in the meantime, they could scroll back through the conversation history and see if they could pinpoint when this person had joined the chat.

When they realised the number had been part of the group for nearly two years, panic set in. The temptation was to boost the person, block them, and move on. Indeed, that was what Daniel suggested. He said they should abandon the old chat and simply start a new one. But Mia was insistent: they had to find out who this person was and what they wanted. Besides, shouldn’t this person face justice of some kind? Weren’t there laws against snooping on people’s private messages? What if someone else was affected? The others agreed.

The group decided to lay a trap. Zara suggest that they create a fake event, a house party at an flat owned by her uncle that was, for the moment, without tenants. They would play music from inside so it seemed like a real party, and then watch the building and see it anyone showed up. That way, they could at least see who it was that was in the group and, if they were feeling bold enough, confront them.

In the Jingle Belles chat, they made a real song-and-dance of being excited for the party, working out to wear, confirming the time and date and address, and discussing who else might be there. Emma, it turned out, had a real talent for simulation of this kind, sharing bus and train routes, posting links to potential outfits, sending the weather forecast.

Outside of the chat, they assigned tasks. Zara would make a playlist and set up the sound system. Emma would watch from her car up the road. Mia would watch from the beer-garden of the pub at the other end. Poppy would hide her iPad in the bushes by the entrance so she could film whoever went into the building. Holly’s job would be to hide out on the floor below Zara’s uncle’s flat and, if needed, stage the intervention. Zara and Poppy would join Holly and Emma, respectively, once they had carried out their jobs.

Soon, the night came round. They took up their positions. And for a very long time it seemed as if no one was going to show. But then, at about a quarter to eleven, when she was close to drifting off, Mia spotted someone in dark clothing walking down the road. She scrambled for her phone and texted the others. Poppy had joined Emma in her car by then, and Holly and Zara, waiting on the floor below the flat, were talking nonsense to one another to try to stay vigilant.

‘O.K., they’re nearly at the building,’ Mia said. ‘Poppy, Emma — can you see them?’

‘Yes!’ wrote Poppy. ‘But not well.’

The figure, wearing a hooded jacket of some kind, reached the building. They paused.

‘What are they doing …?’ asked Mia.

‘Update, guys?’ That was Holly.

‘They’re just waiting there …’ said Emma. ‘They’re not doing anything.’

At that moment, the figure looked around, and for the briefest moments if it was as if they locked eyes with Poppy, sitting in the car. Then they bolted.

‘They're running!’

They ran back in Mia’s direction. But before she could get her phone out to film them, they veered sharply off to the right and vanished down an alleyway.

‘Did you catch him?’ asked Holly. ‘Mia?’

‘No,’ said Mia, sighing to herself. ‘They got away.’

They were determined not to give up. The group contracted a cybersecurity expert Daniel recommended. Jacob, who used to work for the government, was highly conscientious, updating them daily on where he had detected the signal. For a time, it seemed he was making good progress and the net was closing. But then it stopped. Everyday was the same:

‘No news. I’ll let you know when things change.’

And after a few weeks:

‘I don’t think we’re making progress. It’s up to you, but I think we should stop.’

There was a discussion, but they agreed. It was the only thing to do. The girls shut down the Jingle Belles chat, changed their numbers, blocked the intruder, and started fresh.

‘Hey,’ said Emma. ‘We did our best, and we’re all safe and sound.’

And so on the surface life more or less went back to normal. But something had changed. The group had changed. None of them was willing to share her life with the others in the way she once did. There was always this nagging feeling among them that what they said was not truly private; and that nagging feeling grew by degrees over time into a conviction, deeply held, that everything they did was, or might be, being watched or heard by someone. The new chat became more practical, even formal; less emotional. They were unwilling to bare their lives as they had before. And so the chat became an oddly sanitised space, short on warmth: its members seemed always to be on, as it were, their best behaviour.

The girls continued to praise themselves for not being broken by an experience that many would have found traumatic. But the truth was that the suspicion that was the residue of that experience had begun to build up between them, too. The way they spoke to one another now seemed quite alien, and led each to believe the others had some problem with her. Emma grew progressively annoyed by Poppy’s clipped, polished replies; Zara managed to convince herself she had upset Mia because of how curt Mia seemed over text. Their face-to-face encounters were so engulfed in this anxious atmosphere that they became unpleasant and short with one another, and the chat grew less and less active.

Mia soon moved out of London. She said she had always wanted to live in Bristol, but it wasn’t true. Emma spent all of her time with her new boyfriend, James. And Poppy ostentatiously flaunted a new set of friends on her Instagram, as if trying to show the others that she did not need them. Zara, who was the most active in the group, finally gave up on it when no one even replied to her suggestion that they all get together before Christmas. And Holly, who had always been the most direct of the bunch, frankly told both Emma and Poppy that she had nothing in common with them any more, and promptly threw herself into a new gimmicky workout regime, leaving the group soon afterwards.

The number, then, had gone. But the fear had stayed. Targeted adverts, CCTV cameras, permissions to hand over data—all of these mundane features of modern city life took on a different, far more sinister character. Who was seeing this stuff? they wondered. And what did they want with their image, their date, their behaviour, their lives? And what would happen if they lost all that information? Moreover, they still didn’t know if their conversations over the period that the chat had existed might resurface, or how, at a febrile time culturally, something said in jest or anger or simply to elicit a reaction might come back to haunt them. None of them thought she had said anything that might upset someone; but what if she had? Each began to imagine she had said something appalling. What if she succeeded in her chosen path in life, only for something she had said when she was twenty-five or twenty-six years old to appear, and for all of her work over the years to go to waste? Her reputation to be destroyed?

These women lived quieter lives now: more isolated, more suspicious; much less ambitious, open, and self-confident. They retreated more and more into the safety of their own egos, preferring, after some time, the company of family and a few very close friends they saw in person, and safer, more predictable environments. When they had families of their own, they were deeply reluctant to give their children phones, and rigid rules were put in place to minimise the time they spent on them. Their children found their mothers’ fearfulness frightening.

Despite her worsening nerves, Mia spoke at her daughter’s school about the dangers of life online, and warned them not to let themselves be held to ransom by what they shared, ostensibly in confidence. Few of the children listened. Many, ironically, played on their phones throughout. Holly rode a rare surge of self-assurance and bullishness and wrote a book in a matter of weeks about how public life depends on private life, how one should not be held accountable for what one says to one’s friends. But her period of self-belief faded as she reflected on what moved her to write the book, and soon she was too afraid to publish it, even under a nom de plume.

Some years later, Zara reached out to each of her friends, and asked if they would meet her for a coffee. She said that she missed them and what they had. Moreover, she wanted closure. Surely they were all mature enough now to speak openly about the experience and how it had changed them. And, to her delight, they all agreed – at first. But then Holly said she had a prior engagement. Poppy couldn’t find the time off work. Emma said it was simply too far to travel. And Mia didn’t even give a reason. She simply said that sorry, she couldn’t come.

Life went on, as it has to, but it was, for the five members of the Jingle Belles group, a shallow kind of life – one lived without risk, without vulnerability, without ambition. There were happy times, and contentment, but an absence of the warmth and closeness that can only spring from the radical honesty that is the basis of all good and lasting relationships. They never found out who had joined the group, or how, or why. They never discovered to whom the number belonged. But in the end, it turned out that its owner, who had crept into their warm and protected world so many years before, never left.