Haterz (10 page)

And then it all died down. Having claimed its scalp, the news speculated frantically on whether there would be more deaths, and then, realising that was going to be it, moved on, slightly disappointed, to talking about something else.

D
URING THIS PERIOD,
I kept logging onto MySpace. But there were no messages. No chats.

I started the morning after the attack on Gillingham had gone so wrong.

ME: Was that you last night?

ME: Who was that?

ME: Do you know who was there last night?

ME: Seriously, you’ve got to know what was going on?

ME: Did they work for you?

ME: Are you covering up for them?

ME: Come on. Answer me.

ME: Hello?

ME: Hello?

ME: Hello?

ME: Give me an answer. What the fuck’s going on?

DUSTER:
... is typing a response ...

DUSTER:
... is typing a response ...

DUSTER:
... is typing a response ...

DUSTER has left the conversation
.

CHAPTER FOUR

KILLING HARRY PAPERBOY

S
o, who was
I working for? The problem with working for a secret conspiracy is that it’s very hard for them not to seem simultaneously terribly sinister and utter bullshit. Suddenly cast out by them into the utter darkness, I questioned whether there even was such a thing. Had I simply imagined them? Had I become so paranoid as a result of killing Danielle that I’d invented a secret underground bunker stuffed full of sinister cats who were ordering me to kill?

Well, look, it did seem more likely than that an esoteric order would pick an unemployed actor to become an assassin. Yet, there was the money. That secret bank account... unless (and I did check) it was just an old credit card I’d forgotten about, one with a really high limit. I was really suspicious about the money. When you’re used to working for minimum wage, being suddenly handed a fat wodge of free money makes you suddenly reticent. I felt like, if I hadn’t had to stand out in the rain for hours, then I hadn’t really earned it. So I was surprisingly reluctant to spend it.

I’d printed screenshots of my chats on MySpace with ‘Duster’ at the time. Just to prove they existed. Then I realised that that seemed ludicrously incriminating. I parcelled them up in a lever arch file and buried them. There’s an outdoor gym which the council had lavished funds on. No-one ever went there. Even the local drugs dealers seemed embarrassed by it, so I figured my box file would be safe in a flowerbed there. I decided I was going to get good about security. I still had access to the KillFund, so I figured I’d use it to hire some offsite storage space. Turned out, hiring a storage unit was harder than getting through airport security with fireworks taped to your t-shirt. The sheer amount of ID, the copious volumes of shifty evasion, the raised eyebrows when I asked if I could pay in cash... all guaranteed that I ran out into the street, expecting to be shot by the Met at any moment, and vowing to never go back.

Recycling bins proved to be a good temporary solution. Our area requires us to file our rubbish like we’re competing in the OCD Olympics. Woe betide you if you put a can in with the glass. The bin would be left untouched. I picked an empty recycling bin on a nearby estate, and built a false top layer in which tetrapak mingled with wine bottles and plastic bags. Underneath that was a box (from Ikea, since you ask) which contained a wiped notebook I’d decided was too hot to continue using and a discarded phone. I considered chucking both in the Thames, but I’d read a George Monbiot column where he’d complained that this practice was starting to poison the fish. I was unsure about whether or not he was joking, so tried to find a better solution. A couple of weeks went by, and the bin remained ignored. In the end, I got chatting to someone down the pub who had a shed for his motorbike. For the odd tenner he was happy to let me keep a box there.

Meanwhile, I got on with mulling over who the conspiracy were. They’d mastered the sinister silence, I’d give them that. Not a word. Not even incriminating documents sent through the post. Just silence. I wondered if they were the Government, the
Daily Mail,
or someone really bored at BuzzFeed. What were their motives? Clearly they didn’t trust me—or else, why would they send a properly-trained, ruthless, faceless assassin to shadow me and step in when the going got tough? Or was it that they were helping me out—like a driving instructor, or on
Blue Peter
when they said “You might want to ask a grown-up to help you”? Was that it? Had they put someone in to help me if I got out of my depth, while I got used to killing?

Oddly, I was more-or-less fine with the actual killing. A few bad dreams, but nothing compared to those when I was in a low-budget horror film stumbling around the Brecon Beacons on a hot day wearing real offal as zombie make-up. I guess that’s where being an actor helped. You’ve done so many awful and unlikely things in order to pay the rent that assassination just seems like a tough temping job. True, I’d chickened out of a few bits and bobs in the last assignment, but that was just me finding my limits. And luckily, as I said, Ninja.

My efforts to find out who the conspiracy were got me nowhere. I tried searching ‘Duster’ to see if the username had any links anywhere. I went to the public library and did a few Googles on worrying phrases like ‘lethal secret internet conspiracy’ but ended up watching an awful YouTube video in which a chain-smoking Canadian explained how Amnesty International and Greenpeace had formed a cabal who were behind most acts of terrorism. Seriously, guys, why can’t you just accept that some people are just awful? I had, and I was doing something about it.

With no-one to check in with, life got back to normal, which felt strange. Evenings with Amber and Guy. Work. I toyed with doing a couple of freelance assignments off-the-grid, but firstly, when had I become the kind of person who said ‘off-the-grid’? And secondly, I hadn’t found anyone annoying enough online to want to harm. Especially when the whole #TrollTwatting thing had made me a bit cautious about the consequences of my actions.

So anyway, a couple of weeks passed. I didn’t kill anyone. No-one tried to arrest me. I acquired some space in a shed and annoyed the local dustmen. And, one thing I did manage. Failing anything else, I gave the conspiracy a name—the Killuminati.

S
UDDENLY,
D
USTER’S SILENCE
ended. Whoever was behind it—the government, a syndicate, or simply U2—had assigned me a target.

You all know who I mean when I say ‘Harry Paperboy,’ don’t you? The aspic-faced teen singing sensation behind ‘Hey Gurl,’ ‘Sweetheart Dreamdays,’ ‘Sundae Kisses’ and other inanities you only ever hear coming out of mobile phones on buses.

Teenaged girls
loved
Harry. Like really, really loved him.

D
USTER HAD SENT
me a Twitter profile for @PaperGurlRME. And the message, ‘End her.’

O
KAY, COUPLE OF
problems. Firstly PaperGurlRME’s name was Jeannette Turlingham III (which meant that there were two people before her who had thought that name was okay). And secondly, Jeannette was fourteen.

What could possibly make the Killuminati think that I would kill a fourteen-year-old?

T
HEN
I
READ
her tweets:

To a famous actress who said she didn’t fancy Harry Paperboy: ‘ru a lesbain or ru 2 old? Die dyke.’

To a reviewer who didn’t like Harry’s latest single: ‘shut ur mouth fag.’

To a gossip columnist talking about Harry’s behaviour: ‘bitch ur not harry’s mother. Stfu.’

To a twenty-five-year-old dancer seen out with Harry: ‘ur 101 back off he’s 19.’

Again: ‘ur 1 ugly cow.’

And: ‘get the fuck away from my babe whorecow.’

And to a dad who hadn’t enjoyed the concert his daughters had dragged him to: ‘Sick peedo works at @DinksToys BOYCOT. #byebyejob.’

B
ASICALLY,
J
EANNETTE WAS
like the sinister henchman to Harry Paperboy’s dictator. Whenever someone criticised Harry, Jeannette would unleash the dogs of war. Specifically an army of several hundred thousand tweeters. Say @victim posted ‘Harry sucks’ and Jeannette’s PaperGurlArmy would bombard the offending account with block capital hatred, death threats and abuse before declaring them Nazis who hate free speech. But that was just the start. They would spread out like a biblical plague, bombarding @victim’s followers and the people who @victim followed with abuse. They would go further. They would find out who @victim worked for and deluge their official Twitter account. Basically, a single derogatory comment by someone could see them lose their friends and their job.

N
ICE WORK,
J
EANNETTE
Turlingham III. But I wasn’t going to kill you. You’re still a child. I’m not going to start killing children. I did stupid horrid stuff when I was fourteen. I think everyone did. The problem is that when I was a teenager we did all the stupid stuff in comparative privacy. Without Facebook or Twitter, the worst we could do was blog about how our life sucked, or email some friends. We’d still write our poetry in notebooks (the old paper ones, I mean). The poetry would be about how lonely and isolated and messed up we felt. But now, the Jeannettes of this world got to be messed up and isolated and lonely in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands. And instead of just staring at a poster on a wall, they could track their idol’s every move, shout directly at them for attention, and terrorise people on their behalf.

I’d like to imagine that, in a few years’ time, Jeannette (now happily married and with a less crazy surname) would check back through Facebook and think,
Oh, God. I did that? Thank fuck I had that tattoo removed,
before hurrying off to do the school run.

It seemed as insane to assassinate Jeanette for her schoolgirl crush as it did to hunt me down and kill me for a poem I’d once written about Snow (‘Hail, winter’s shivery blanket...’). But, for the moment, Jeanette was a problem. And one I couldn’t kill. Also, she lived in Arizona.

I
WAS STILL
getting used to having a KillFund. The idea seemed so utterly insane that I carried on going to work. Standing still in the rain waving at strangers became even more pointless. But it was also a cover. If I ever became a suspect, it would seem suspicious if I suddenly stopped doing my ludicrous job. So that was the reason I carried on chugging.

I did think about going out to Arizona to get to know Jeanette. But the logistics utterly defeated me. For a start, I would need to book a plane, which would mean using my passport. I could, I supposed, fake one, but the cost of doing this would pretty much have drained my KillFund. Just to go and not kill a teenager. I looked into it all, though. Obviously, I used the local library’s internet access. I didn’t want ‘Buy a fake passport’ and ‘Death penalty for accidental child murder in Arizona’ to show up in my Google cache. I also, it has to be said, spent a lot of time looking at pictures of teenage girls.

I didn’t want that at home. Jeanette and her friends shared
everything
and didn’t appear to have heard of Facebook privacy settings (while at the same time ‘LEAVE ME ALONE’ was one of their favourite sayings). I could look at Jeanette cleaning her teeth (she had braces), watch videos of her doing cheerleading, and see her singing along to Harry’s songs in six-second chunks.

It was all weird. Weird as in, ‘Why the hell would I want to experience any of this?’

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a paedophile. Looking at all those pictures of teenage girls proved it. Oh, crap, that sentence was all wrong. But why would you be a paedophile? Quite apart from it being inherently horrid, children are pretty unhygienic, you’d be bound to catch a cold. Also, children are appallingly selfish, so they’d be terrible lovers. I’m trying to see a single positive side to paedophilia, and I’m really drawing a complete blank.

Still, I had spent a lot of time looking at pictures of teenage girls. Thankfully using the computer at the library. A glance into its history revealed all of humanity’s despair and that quite a lot of people can’t spell ‘porn.’ Plus that someone had tried to find out how to make a bomb. That caused me to glance around the library nervously before I remembered that I’d actually killed people. So no moral high ground there.

M
Y FIRST GOAL
was to make contact with Jeanette. I figured I would build up an identity for myself as a PaperGurl. So I set up a blog and posted lots and lots of reviews of everything he’d done. I carefully backdated the posts, and included lots of YouTube appearances on chat shows. It counted as handy research. I really began to feel I knew a lot about Harry Paperboy. I posted links to all the gossip sites, and joined in the mockery at the reporting. Of course it wasn’t Harry, but someone
else
at that party, who spat at the child from the Make-A-Wish Foundation who wanted an autograph. He never urinated through the windows of parked cars. And he would never, ever get Mexican caterers fired for being Mexican. And all those rumours about a sex tape were just unfounded—although I would totally LOOOOVE to see it as I bet he looks awesome in it—LOL ;)