Contacts
by Mark Watson
HarperCollins
Forty year-old James boards the London to Edinburgh sleeper train just before midnight. He has two pork pies, six beers and a packet of chocolate digestives for the journey. Just before the train departs, he sends a message to all 158 people in his contacts list, telling them he intends to end his life.
James then puts his phone on flight mode as he still needs it to know the time. He didn’t send the text message so that people could change his mind – the decision to end his life had been made weeks ago. For him, sending the message to all his contacts meant he wouldn’t be able to get out of carrying out the final act.
Across the world, 158 phones light up with the notification but some of the people are already asleep and wouldn’t see the message for hours. Some people would read the message through a blur of sleep and wonder why someone they hardly know was messaging them, and some people think that there would be others higher up in the chain who would deal with it.
It was mid-morning in Melbourne when his sister Sally received the message and it was the end of a late night in Berlin when James’s ex-girlfriend’s phone lit up. His flat-mate in London Steffi, who he hardly spoke to, had just finished her restaurant shift and his previous best friend and business partner was on the M1, driving a customer to Newcastle.
Author Mark Watson maintains that we often hear about technology fragmenting our world and reducing our relationships, with screen exchanges increasingly replacing personal contact. With the new normal of constantly feeling the need to check our electronic devices, he wanted to explore how phones could actually do some good – as well as highlight how much we have slid into taking many relationships for granted.
This tense thriller manages to bring to light so many of today’s mental health issues while the speeding train continues to its pre-determined destination. James was a decent guy who “had never imagined himself as a person for whom unhappiness could be this thick and choking” because so many relatively small problems had been nourished by silence and “grown into bigger and stronger things, into things he found he couldn’t live alongside any more”.
As well as being a fantastic read, Contacts makes you wonder which of your contacts would be there for you if you needed help, and which of your ‘friends’ had been abandoned to being filed under that heading in your Facebook page.
Lezly Herbert
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