Because we’re all actors. In the olden golden days, actors between jobs would wait tables, or sit at home collecting the dole and working on their one-person show. Now waiting jobs are hard to find, and we’re all signed up to temping agencies, sorting the post of the people who last week paid £50 to see us sing and dance and shout.
But actors make very good chuggers. We’re mostly young, we’re mostly pretty, we’re really good at pretending to care, and we love a tough crowd.
I
T’S WORTH BEARING
in mind that all this was accidentally the perfect training for being a serial killer.
• I’m really good at playing a part. Tick.
• I’m really really good at not being noticed. People actively look away from me as soon as they see me. Just a glance—nice looking guy, good hair, nice teeth, uh-oh tabard. Then they do everything in their power not to notice me. Tick.
• And, finally, I am supremely qualified in that I know a lot about people. And I really hate them all. Tick. Tick. Tick.
You’re all awful. You may think you’re not, but you are. I despise the ones who push past me. And I despise the ones who stop and talk to me. One lot are rude and the other lot are idiots. If you really cared about cancer, children or kittens you’d be giving directly to them already. And you wouldn’t suddenly do so because someone stops you on a street corner. And you’d have researched charitable giving and carefully picked which charity to put your cash into, choosing one that spends the most of its money on the actual cause, rather than on paying Mr Racing Car’s Chugging Firm. There we go. You’ve just fallen for a scam, one shouted at you by someone who last week was pretending very hard to be a Gentleman of Verona. But also, in a way, thank you for falling for the scam. Because it means I’m good at being an actor. You idiot.
T
HIS ALSO MADE
me excellently qualified at seeing right through Fast Eddy. I could see a fellow scammer. He was making money out of my killing. It was
my
murder. So I’d teach him a lesson. The slight problem was working out what to do next.
But what about the mysterious eCard sender? They’d tipped me off to Fast Eddy—did they want me to kill him? Who or what were they? Was it someone who’d seen me in the pub, or a Vast Syndicate Of Conspiracy to deal with? I mean, did I need to ask their permission in order to kill someone? Or could I just do what I liked? They could, in theory, expose me at any moment. I didn’t like that very much, but then again, Mr Racing Car wasn’t particularly lovely to work for. So I was just swapping one dose of fear for another.
I texted the mystery number.
Nothing happened.
And then, a day or so later, I received an anonymous invitation to join MySpace. I laughed a lot at that. The internet is littered with abandoned social networks, places that once flourished and thrived where people shared their entire lives and told flirty lies to their Not Girlfriends. I’d had an account on MySpace long ago, but I’d forgotten what it was. And so, blissfully, had my notebook.
I signed up, applauding the logic of this. A lot of dead communities were switched off (Menshn, for instance). Actually the howling tundra of Google+ would have been brilliant, but sadly Google had allowed the NSA to snoop on it. This wasn’t good. Whereas MySpace was still active, if totally forgotten about.
I imagined that, as soon as I signed up, a bell went off in a long-undusted office and someone, walking past down a corridor wondered idly what that noise was. Maybe they even told Tom. You remember Tom? The one default MySpace friend everyone had, the one half-turning and smiling at you in the act of going somewhere better.
Soon I was able to communicate with the person who held my life in their hands:
DUSTER: Hi.
ME: Who are you? And what do you want with me?
DUSTER: We’re friendly. And we wish to stay that way.
ME: Not. At. All. Creepy.
DUSTER: Would you prefer if I used Comic Sans?
ME: No. That’s worse.
DUSTER: Fair enough. The thing is, we know what you’re doing.
ME: What’s that?
DUSTER: Let’s just say that you are an enterprising individual. And we’re supportive of that enterprise.
ME: But who are you?
DUSTER: We’re everywhere. And we wish to act as your sponsor. To fund you in continuing your work.
ME: I’m sorry? I have no plans to continue my work.
DUSTER: Really? FastEddy
ME:
... is typing a response ...
ME:
... is typing a response ...
DUSTER: Are you still there?
DUSTER: Are you still there?
ME:
... is typing a response ...
DUSTER: Are you still there?
DUSTER: Are you still there?
ME: Yes. [I’d tried typing several witty, pithy and righteous responses. But “yes” was the best I could come up with.]
DUSTER: We don’t want to frighten you away. We just want you to know that we are everywhere. We know everything about you. And we want to encourage you in your plans.
ME: Look. I don’t have any plans.
DUSTER: Make some. If it helps, we may have some suggestions for you.
ME: Seriously. Can’t believe we’re talking about this. I don’t want your help!
DUSTER: Fair enough. But we’re sending you the details of a bank account we have set up. To assist you. Purely should you need it. We wouldn’t want to force you to do anything. But you have real talent. And we feel that talent should be recognised and encouraged.
ME: Thanks. But I don’t need your help.
DUSTER: We’ll see. Good luck with FastEddy
DUSTER has left the conversation
.
I
SAT STARING
at MySpace. I had two friends. One was SmileyTomWhoCreatedMySpaceThenSoldItThe FirstChanceHeGotWhichIsWhyHeIsSmiling. The other was Duster. I needed to make some new friends, so I quickly liked a few bands who seemed struggling and someone who really loved the colour yellow back in 2007.
Out of curiosity, I looked up Duster’s friends. Duster was a fan of internet pioneer Henry Jarman, the music of teen sensation Harry Paperboy, an ebook publisher, and a comedy show on E4.
Edward Atkinson
@FastEddy ∙ 8m
I’ll be doing #MuddyHell eeep! I’ll be #DoingItForDaniele Here’s my justgiving, so just give you lovely fools
W
HAT WAS
M
UDDY
Hell? I’ll let their homepage explain:
MUDDY HELL
The Ultimate Dirty Workout
Have you got what it takes to be one of the 10 per cent? That’s right, only 10 per cent make it to the end of our gruelling half-marathon charity challenge. Designed by ex-SAS soldiers as revenge, this is purely hell on earth. We’ve seen squaddies cry. And you know what we did then? We laughed and turned the ice hose on those squaddies.
This ain’t no fun run.
Burn your pussy pilates mat, fuck your free weights and come join our fitness revolution.
We promise you tough love and a happy finish.
But no hugs. Cos you’ll smell disgusting.
SIGN UP TODAY.
When it comes to slinging mud,
we say bring it on!
F
AST
E
DDY HAD
made my life easy for me. His hobby involved nearly killing himself in order to scam money out of people. He may have been a thief, but he certainly worked hard for it. He’d signed up for the Muddy Hell challenge. It featured a whole host of ‘fun things’ that were basically a collection of small suicide attempts. There was crawling through a tunnel filled with water, there was jumping into a mud bath, and then there were the electric fences. It wasn’t so much murder as nudging him a tiny bit further into the next life.
The challenge was to make sure that this didn’t turn into a massacre. Without boring you about the detail, I had to work out how to make the fun run specifically lethal so that it just killed Fast Eddy and not every stupid lunatic in lycra who’d signed up for it. It would perhaps have been easier to run him over on one of his practice jogs, but that was:
a) Too easy (well, actually, I can’t drive).
b) In danger of making him a figure of sympathy.
I needed Fast Eddy out of the way and in a way that exposed him for the fraud he was.
I had to come up with a way that didn’t involve running thirteen miles through mud.
T
URNED OUT,
M
UDDY
Hell needed volunteer Mud Marshalls, whose job it was to stand along the course, looking after the various obstacles and challenges and manning the hoses. They
really
needed marshalls as these were unpaid positions, normally taken by friends of those competing. And I was Fast Eddy’s friend. He just didn’t know it.
Come the day, I didn’t even need to bother with a disguise. It was raining, bitterly raining, and we were all issued with cagoules with hoods that condomed our faces. I stood by my little patch of course and waited.
The runners were sent off in little groups. I’d finally found a use for RunKeeper. I could use all the data from Fast Eddy’s endless feed of practice runs and last week’s obstacle course try-outs—called the ‘Dry Run’ because they’d not created the mud or baited any of the traps. I could make a reasonable guess of how long it would take Eddy to get round the course. I was helped by the groups themselves being staggered, with runners being set off at one-minute intervals. I should have a clear field. And the rain itself meant that there should few spectators. People pretend interest in their friends running through fields. They may even turn up to support them. But not if it’s chucking it down—then cars tend to break down, or the kids play up, or alarms get slept through. You know the drill. It’s far easier to just like the photos when they turn up on Facebook. And they will. Admit it, you’ve done it yourself plenty of times.
I stood by the course and I waited. Despite the waterproofs, I was soaked through. Twitter told me that Fast Eddy had just posted ‘and were off!!!’ so I calculated how long I had to wait and how bad the resulting head cold would be.
My first runner came past. This meant there would be five minutes until Fast Eddy.
“Excuse me?”
I turned. There were two hikers there.
“Has Eddy been through?” One of them waved a flag.
Oh, God. Spectators.
I thought quickly. “Er... which one is he?”
“He’s wearing a t-shirt with Fast Eddy on. He’s doing it for a friend of ours. Sandwich?”
They produced a tupperware box of sandwiches. I guess that would be what you’d expect from the Venn diagram overlap of ‘Friends of Danielle’ and ‘People Who Would Turn Up In This Weather.’ I had to move them on and quickly.
“I’m Brian,” said one of them, inevitably.
“I’m Suze,” said the other. Christ, why do all the dull people have to introduce themselves to everyone?
“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” said Brian. He was wearing a bandana.
“I wish I was doing this,” said Suze. The henna was running in her hair.
They both nodded and vowed to do it soon. They never would.
They stood and watched, the damp air filling just a little with the pot pourri of cheese and pickle.
“Fast Eddy’s brilliant, isn’t he?” said Brian.
“We follow everything he does on Twitter. Do you?”
I shrugged and checked my watch. He was due here in two minutes.
“Hey,” I said tapping the canister that fuelled the ice-water hose. “Can you give me a hand here? The pressure’s a bit low, and we don’t want your friend to miss his dose of cold water.”
“No, we wouldn’t want that,” they both agreed, doing the odd little laugh of people who feel they should find something funny but don’t. I asked if they wouldn’t mind changing the cylinder for me while I ran a safety check on the mud jump. In reality, they were becoming unwitting accessories to murder, because the hose was no longer quite what it appeared to be.
“Lovely,” I said. “I’ll just go and check the jump. Health and safety. You know.” I rolled my eyes. They rolled their eyes.
While Brian and Suze busied themselves with the cylinder, I ran over to the vault. It was, in reality, a fairly simple wooden gymnasium horse. But I’d used it to alter the course slightly. People were supposed to round the corner into the copse, be doused with the ice hose, dodge under the mild electric fence, and then onto the vaulting horse, trying to jump from it to the rope swing over a mud pit and down.
I’d simply moved the vaulting horse, concealing the mud pit. There were so many of these on the course that no-one would notice this one missing.
I checked the supporters, in case they were looking. They weren’t, so I pushed the horse quickly back into its proper position, calling out to the supporters “Fresh mud!” They looked up just as I finished. “All good!” I said.
“Looks great from here!” they enthused.
Thumbs up all round.
Fast Eddy approached at a ragged stagger. He already looked a mess.
“Give him hell,” I said to Brian and Suze.
“Woo hooo!” Brian and Suze called out to him, and turned the hose on him. The pressure was a little higher than he was expecting. He looked dazed. He probably also wasn’t expecting the fast-setting concrete. Well, I’m lying. It was mostly a liquid called QuickSet I’d got from a hardware store. Like gravy granules, it would turn a soup into a stew in seconds and make the mud pit very hard to get out of.
Eddy staggered under the high pressure, falling against the electric fence rather than crawling under it. Brian and Suze howled with laughter, and, bless him, Fast Eddy tried to laugh back, his face gurning with the strain. It wasn’t that bad—the voltage was reasonably low. Perhaps a little higher than on all the other fences on the course, but not too bad.
Leg spasming slightly, Eddy dragged himself up onto the vaulting horse. The QuickSet was already making his clothes stiffer than a teenage boy’s pyjamas. The extra weight was dragging him back, but he made it up onto the top of the horse, wobbling a bit. He fist pumped the air. “
King of the World!
” he roared.