I really enjoyed putting together the blog and thought it was all fine. I was hoping it would get Jeanette’s attention.
It did. But in the wrong way.
I suddenly woke up to find the blog flooded with comments. Screaming comments. Outraged comments. They were calling me a hater. I was puzzled—but, wading through the barrage, I realised that in one or two of my reviews, in an attempt to appear honest, I’d said I ‘didn’t much care for’ a track. Just one track. On each album. I think that’s fair enough.
‘CALL YOUSELF A PAPERGURL???!? DIE’ summed up most of the comments. But there were masses of them. And a similar flood to the Twitter feed I’d built for the blog.
In other news, that day Jeanette had tweeted Harry that ‘Failed Math Test. FML. Send me smoochies.’ No smoochies had been forthcoming, so maybe Jeanette had had a pretty bad day and was taking it out on me. Coincidentally, that same day, Harry had failed a meth test. But his PaperGurls were silent about that.
My blog project was basically a heap of smoking ruins. Jeanette was certainly thorough. Could I use the burning embers as an excuse to apologise to her and make-up? I doubted it. She seemed pretty final about these things, picking up and then discarding BFFs for minor differences of opinion, or for the heresy of preferring One Direction to Harry. Or claiming to have seen said sex tape (‘YOU LIAR. SHOW ME OR IT’S NOT TRUE. OH GOD HARRY WOULD NEVER HARRY SO MANY FEELS’).
So I came up with another plan. I ‘reached out’ to her pretending to be a PR from Harry’s record label. I was pretty pleased with a lot of the phrases I used. Basically I said that I worked for the label, really appreciated all her support, and wondered if we could work together to come up with any campaigns she could promote. Innocuous. I didn’t suggest she meet him, but I figured she would read it and be thrilled.
No such luck.
Jeanette’s reply, which I won’t transcribe, went on for a lot of screens. A rough translation would be:
Dear Sir
Thank you for your recent communication. Sadly, I must decline your kind offer. As you did not use the codeword set by Harry’s management with me, I can only conclude that your offer is bogus and your intentions unfriendly. Furthermore, your IP address does not match the expected range for the offices of Harry’s record company. In short, you sir, are a loser, a hater and a paedophile.
Your humble servant,
Ms. Jeanette Turlingham III
PS: Die.
I glanced over the email, interested to see that she’d told me that she had an existing relationship of some kind with Harry’s people. Also, she was smart. Good. I could work with smart.
I
HASTILY DISCONNECTED
my real self from any connection with the email address Jeanette had just replied to and threw away the notebook. Now I had a KillFund, I could afford to buy new ones. A touch sadly, I hung the meticulously crafted PR man’s online identity out to dry and let it be savaged by Jeanette’s pack of wolves. I watched as the various firms my fictitious PR agent had claimed to work for all winked out one by one, their servers taken down by Jeanette’s legions, their social media bombarded by messages. Even the servers of a charity subsidiary of Sodobus.
Dragged puzzled and blinking into the spotlight, each company hastily denied ever having employed me. The question of who I was, and what exactly I had done to upset Harry Paperboy’s fans, puzzled the internet for a few moments. There was even a
Slate
article.
I
TOOK A
quick step to the side. I’d been going after Harry’s fans. What if I went for Harry himself?
A
CTUALLY, IT TURNED
out to be really easy. What you have to remember is that I wasn’t up against a rabid army of hyper-smart fans. I was up against a canny (yet fundamentally stupid) popstar. Also, I had quite a bit of cash on me. And he was coming to England soon.
J
EANETTE’S
P
APER
G
URL
A
RMY
helped me find out which hotel he was staying at. As soon as the news was announced they’d worked it out ‘Oh, it’ll be the Waverley again, I bet!!!’, ‘See you outside the Wave posing with George the Doorman yeah??? <3 George!!!’
How to get to him? Annoyingly, it would have been so easy if Harry had been gay. Book a room, log on to Grindr, and wait. Until about 2am, probably, for a profile to match up with. Right age and height but no picture. And then, bingo.
But no. He wasn’t gay and neither was I. So.
The next vice was easier. Drugs are great. Thanks to Harry’s range of DUIs, I even knew what drugs he was partial to. I could use the KillFund to get some and then... then what? I couldn’t stand outside his hotel with a placard advertising free drugs for Harry. Nor could I establish myself as a top drugs dealer. Anyway, he wouldn’t come to me. He’d send a minion. He wasn’t that stupid, otherwise some tabloid would have snapped him doing coke off the back of his iPhone already.
No. I messaged Nuala, one of my fellow actor/chuggers:
Do you, by any chance,
know any drugs dealers?
WTF?
Just, you remember that show you were in, in that theatre opposite the Waverley?
The musical about Jane Eyre?
Christ yes. Why?
Who dealt the drugs? It’s just, I’ve a friend who’s working there and...
This friend wouldn’t be a chugger
would they?
NOT ME. NOT ME. But yes. A chugger with a habit. He’s loaded. He really is just chugging cos he likes charity.
And coke?
Organic, responsibly-sourced coke with an amusing slogan on the wrap.
I’ll put him in touch with Jaramy.
D
RUGS DEALERS AREN’T
fun people. Nor do all of them go around with scary dogs and the sharper bits of their kitchen. The ones I’ve met are about as far away from those people in those films about Troubled Estates as you can get. But there’s one thing they’ve all got in common—they really hate people. The only guys I know who hate people more are waiters.
Jaramy was a waiter
and
a drugs dealer. A tiny, neat Frenchman, he kept on the waitering (at a really posh restaurant) in order to put him in touch with clients. He was forever being beckoned over quietly, and softly being asked if he knew anyone. And he so often did. He would even, smilingly, offer to take care of the deal itself as “drugs dealers are all so terrible, aren’t they, monsieur?”
Models, Russian businessmen, and bankers—all of them found themselves coming to Jaramy’s restaurant for the spendy wine and the quite excellent drugs.
I got a couple of shifts at the restaurant washing dishes. It’s a great way to watch people, but it ruins your hands. I saw Jaramy at work. He was actually a great waiter and a brilliant drugs dealer. I joined him for a cigarette break or two outside. And, once we had bonded, I brought up the subject.
“No,” he shut it down immediately. “I never deal to staff here. And never on the premises.”
“That’s fine,” I reassured him. “It’s more that I would like you to give someone some drugs.”
“What?”
“I’m a reporter,” I told him. He groaned. “And I’d like you to give a celebrity some drugs. There’s nothing wrong with the stuff. They’ve just got a tracer in them—a marker which means we can find him with the drugs inside him. Just tipping us off to his location. He’ll never know you were involved.”
“No, thanks,” said Jaramy. “I don’t like my clients, but I do like having them. I’m respectable.”
“I’m a reporter,” I repeated and handed him over a wodge of photos I’d taken, showing him handing over drugs to a variety of interesting names.
“Oh,” sighed Jaramy appreciatively. “Good blackmail.”
“I thought so.”
I
N THE END
it didn’t cost that much money. I had the pictures. I also told him who the victim was and he laughed. “I hate that little shit,” he sighed. “He’s a very rude customer.”
Rude to a drug dealer?
“No, rude to waiters. He was once smoking in the restaurant, and my friend Paula asked him not to. He smiled, apologised ever so nicely, and then stubbed the cigarette out on her hand.”
I boggled.
Jaramy shrugged. “She got some money out of it. No one saw because he always dines in those clam-shell booths. That’s kind of why they’re there.”
He was disappointed when I gave him the drugs. “Where the hell did you get these from?” he asked. Brixton Market actually, behind a vegan falafel stall. “These are awful. Seriously, man, I have my pride to consider.” This was a worry—there were ingredients in these drugs which were important, I started to explain. I had done my research carefully and...
Jaramy sighed. “Listen, don’t give me any of that genetic marker bullshit. You’ve put laxatives in here. I can tell. It’s fine and fairly normal. But the drugs you’ve cut them with are pretty pound shop.”
Trust me, when a Frenchman says ‘pretty pound shop’ it’s kind of sexy.
“Tell me what you’re up to.”
I started to explain what I was doing, but I chose the wrong words. “I was looking on Google and—”
Jaramy did a lot of laughing then. “Seriously, what kind of shit have you been reading?”
I told him I had actually been reading about shit. Specifically, I had noted all of the prescription drugs that Harry was taking, as listed on his various charge sheets. Then looked up all the side-effects. And one of the three antidepressants reacted badly, prodigiously, with laxatives. I knew that drugs were frequently cut with laxatives, but I needed there to be a lot in order to cause the right reaction.
Jaramy seemed a bit more impressed by that. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll cut the drugs. The things I do for you, eh?”
He then went back to serving people food that they could take pictures of, and I went back to washing the leftovers off the plates.
J
ARAMY HELPED ME
get a job at the hotel as a night cleaner. It was through the same service company who provided washers-up to Jaramy’s restaurant, so it actually wasn’t that hard, but he acted as though he was pulling a massive favour. The trick, of course, was to be on the list for at least a week before and after Harry was supplied with drugs. So that I didn’t come under suspicion. Whenever anything like this happens, the casuals rota at a hotel was bound to scatter—they knew the police would be coming, and anyone with even a spent conviction, let alone a dodgy immigration status, would run for the hills, thus attracting plenty of police attention. But, if I just remained where I was, changing towels and wiping down tables, then all would be fine.
Not, of course, that there would be any police attention, because this was all going to work out fine. But, you know, just in case it all went wrong.
The great news was that, according to a budget I did on the back of an envelope, I was saving loads of money on this project. I could have flown to Arizona, at a cost of thousands. Instead, I was actually doing shifts at three different jobs—admittedly all of them minimum wage, but there we go. I was down £50 on drugs mixed with laxative, but Jaramy reckoned he could palm them off on someone (“I have a client I want to get rid of,” he said with a shrug).
The week passed in the way that these things do. Night cleaning in a hotel, actually utterly exhausting. Most new jobs are tiring, but this is
advanced tidying
at a time when your body is screaming, ‘Let me go to bed, please.’Plus, the kind of cleaning you get to do at night is grim. A lot of toilets, vomit in the corridors, cleaning the steps, scrubbing out the hotel restaurant, then, if there was spare time, trying to polish the brassware of the hotel doorstep. Plus there was a mountain of sheets back from the laundry that needed pressing, but no-one really seemed that bothered by all that.
I had to grab all the shifts they offered me, in case that was the night that Harry’s people placed the call. I had to stay alert, which was proving tricky. When I’d finally slump home the cat would want to play with me, and I’d have to placate it for a bit before grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep before staggering out to chug. This all felt bloody grim.
Finally, just as I was dealing with a dead rat in the basement, my disposable phone bleeped. ‘Deal’s done.’ We were on.
I
SPENT THE
next few hours nervously trying to do everything casually. I think I looked like a disaster, but then again, no one was looking at me. I steered clear of CCTV as much as possible, just to practice. I’d spent most of the last week learning where the cameras were in the hotel, and had worked out ways through the building without showing up at all, and also ways of ducking in and out of vision so that, if someone were checking the logs, I’d be accounted for without arousing suspicion.
The only problem was that no one had yet summoned a cleaner. There was an outside chance that they’d just do a runner and leave the company to pick up the bill. But I was hoping the results would be so explosive that they’d need a cleaner immediately.
Jeez, how long can it take a pop star to take some drugs?
The call came at 2am. Actually, that made sense. He’d had the supplies laid in for when he got back from some club or other.
I hurried up to the floor he was on. There’s a wing of the Waverley that is ‘discreet.’ It’s a little L-shape on one floor. There’s one way in, half-a-dozen rooms for entourage, a nice suite at the end and no cameras. I trundled through, making sure I was seen on a camera, and tapped at the suite door I’d been summoned to.
A groan answered, “Door’s open.” I walked into the suite. It was in darkness apart from a slit of light from under the bathroom door. The smell was fairly incredible. You could chew it. But you wouldn’t want to.
When I was a child we’d had a puppy. It’s why I hated dogs. It had started on the diarrhoea in the car back from the kennel. It had continued, spraying the kitchen in a fine cloacal mist until Dad banished it to the garden while he phoned the vet. The vet said the dog just needed to calm down. It lived in a shed for a fortnight. After which, Dad burned the shed rather than attempting to clean it.