Join Me

by Danny Wallace

  Example: the two girls – one German, one Korean – that Joinee Whitby had given one of his ‘Can I Help?’ posters just off Oxford Street on the day I met him had subsequently emailed him to tell him that they were new in the city and in need of friends. Could he, they asked, make them happy by showing them around? Whitby had been only too pleased to help, and organised a group of fellow joinees to turn up and take the girls on a lovely day out. At the same time, one of his posters had been spotted by a group of students from the London College of Printing, who were looking for something to make a short documentary film about. They asked if they could make one about the joinees, and their day out with the two girls. They did.

  Joinees had started creating their own Karma Army websites, giving details of what they’d been up to and how. Six joinees set up a small stall in Covent Garden and handed out leaflets and stickers. Joinees Woollven and Douglas plastered a Northampton monument with Join Me posters and handed out free, gift-wrapped presents to strangers. A games designer called Joinee Wilkins broke the rules at his place of work and managed to slip dozens of ‘Join Me’ signs and even a picture of me into the Las Vegas level of Destruction Derby Online on the PlayStation 2, in order to secure that vital teenage market. His bosses found out and were annoyed – until he explained the concept of the Karma Army and they decided to leave them all in. In addition, Join Me was infiltrating local newspapers and just about every local radio phone-in show you could imagine. I was sent a tape of a very enthusiastic joinee in the North extolling the virtues of the scheme to an incredibly confused presenter called Alan Robson; a man who grew increasingly frustrated and desperate during the call when the joinee in question kept going on about how brilliant Join Me was but managed to consistently avoid answering the question ‘Why?’

  I made an hour-long appearance on Ian’s radio show in which he played the official Join Me song to the nation, but took great delight in still not joining me – despite taunting me and saying I’d never reach 1000. The official Join Me song was also downloaded from the Internet and played on a national radio station in Germany one morning, but I am yet to find out how or why. Still, it got me my first German joinee.

  Over in Belgium, Joinee Els, of Antwerp, had been hard at work. She was preparing for the Christmas period well in advance by creating her own Karma Army poster campaign. In one very tiring weekend, she travelled around Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent, sticking up hundreds of posters that read as follows . . .

  For everyone a happy Christmas?

  No.

  Not everyone’s gonna have a happy Christmas.

  There are a lot of people who are poor or lonely, also in your neighbourhood.

  Invite a lonely or poor man with Christmas.

  Do it!

  – The Karma Army

  It was a matter of hours before other Belgians started to spot the posters and respond – including one joinee who’d only signed up two days before and must have thought I was stalking him when he spotted one of Els’ posters on the building opposite his flat.

  And it wasn’t just Belgium. Join Me continued to spread across the globe. I was now receiving photos from countries like Poland, Italy, Hungary and the Czech Republic. A law student in Norway joined me. He told me his personal motto was: ‘Everything goes, said the old lady, she was frying a frog in the toaster’, which either means some things just don’t translate, or Norwegian law students are psychos. And I was also starting to get a significant number of photos from America and Australia, as well as from more far-flung places, like Singapore, Hong Kong and Mumbai. A joinee on holiday in Addis Ababa also got in touch to tell me that he’d been upstairs in an Ethiopian internet café waiting for something to print out when, just for the sake of it, he decided to have a look at the computer’s history bar. And he was shocked to see that the third link down led to the Join Me homepage. Word really was spreading right across the earth.

  And I was desperate to meet the people responsible for it. But it was hard to justify the trips. I only needed another couple of hundred joinees before I could take my foot off the pedal and lay my quest to rest. And while it would have been great to have gone to Poland to meet Joinee Pawel, this was becoming a numbers game to me. I needed to create the maximum impact so that I could get my 1000 joinees before I could admit my actions to Hanne. Which is why I knew automatically where my next trip would be, and when.

  Hanne would fly to Dublin on Saturday. And I would fly to Amsterdam.

  I had been contacted by a man named Martijn Flatland. He had a friend who’d accidentally recorded my appearance on that Belgian chatshow. He and Martijn liked it. They liked Join Me. They wanted their other friends to like Join Me too. But they’d only do that if I’d come and visit them in order to give a short speech on the benefits of joining the Karma Army. Meeting ten potential joinees would be roughly ten times better than meeting just one. I had to be back in the flat before Hanne, but that was fine – Amsterdam is only a forty-minute flight away.

  So I found a ticket for a tenner.

  I packed a marker pen, and a small flipchart.

  And I set my alarm clock, and went to bed.

  ‘Danny Searches for Mates’ in De Telegraaf. Accompanied by the haunting artwork of Dilys de Jong

  CHAPTER 22

  1. In those days Daniel entered into a winged chariot, and journeyed to the land of Holl.

  2. There he made smooth the hairs upon his lip.

  3. When he had done this he departed thence.

  HANNE HAD DECIDED that as my flat was marginally closer to the airport than hers, she’d stay at mine before her trip to Dublin. She reckoned this meant she could leave nearly an hour later than she would if she were staying at hers, thus giving her nearly enough time to decide on what shoes to wear.

  As soon as I’d heard her taxi beep-beep outside at whatever ungodly hour it was, followed by the sound of Hanne softly clicking my front door shut, I hurriedly got up myself. Because my taxi would be arriving in just ten minutes.

  I knew my trip to Amsterdam would have to be an incredibly short one. But I knew I could make it count. In far less than a single day, I’d be spreading the word throughout the people of Holland, as well as notching up another ten joinees and returning to London with more passport photos for the collection. The citizens of The Netherlands, I reasoned, would be up for joining me, if they were anything like their neighbours to the north, the Belgians. That lot had taken me under their wing quickly enough. I was sure that by the end of the day I’d be feeling like a Dutchman through and through.

  Just as I was about to jump into my taxi, though, I remembered the nature of the day’s meeting – I’d be trying to convince some people to join up, and, furthermore, to spread the word around Holland so I could complete my quest. So I ran back upstairs, dashed to my Join Me drawer, flung it open and, while the taxi driver impatiently and insistently sounded his horn downstairs, grabbed a handful of leaflets and passport photos to show to my potential joinees. I slammed the drawer shut and legged it downstairs before the driver decided that his horn wasn’t really waking up enough of my neighbours for his liking, and he’d have to get his tambourines out.

  * * *

  I arrived at Amsterdam Schiphol airport to be greeted by Denise, a journalist from the national newspaper De Telegraaf. Denise had turned up because the night before I’d called De Telegraaf out-of-the-blue and told them I was a world-renowned philanthropist with something important to announce. Well, it wasn’t strictly lying. I was a ‘philanthropist’ in the sense that I was encouraging acts of kindness, and I was ‘world-renowned’ in the sense that if they believed me, I might well be in De Telegraaf next week, and thus renowned in Holland, which is in the world.

  Denise, however, had been very suspicous of me – and extremely blunt during her ruthless telephone interrogation. When I met her, she was a far less fearsome character, just as any women becomes when you notice she’s six months pregnant and struggling to walk instead of waddle.


  ‘At first I thought you were maybe a hoaxer, or a British media joker, or something to do with playing jokes on journalists,’ she said. ‘But now I see you are just . . .’

  She was struggling for the right word.

  ‘. . . a special,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. She’d clearly meant it as a compliment, but round my neck of the woods, being called ‘a special’ won’t really win you any girls.

  So I turned my mobile phone off, and Denise – calm, quiet and professional – and me – a special – sat ourselves down at the Burger King in the airport and talked the whole thing through.

  ‘I need to appeal to the Dutch,’ I said, pointing my finger in the air. ‘I’m meeting some people later on who I think will join me, but I need to make the most of my short time here. I have around 800 joinees. I’d like 1000. I know that the Dutch people will not disappoint me. I know that they will come to my collective and do their best for me. I know that . . .’

  Denise had stopped writing and was just looking at me, slightly concerned, but I continued anyway.

  ‘. . . I know that the people of this fine nation will take to the spirit of the Karma Army like their neighbours, the Belgians. I know that the people of the Netherlands will join me.’

  It was a rousing speech, I thought, and Denise seemed happy enough with what she was getting. We talked for a further half an hour or so, I had my picture taken looking all serious and worthy in the arrivals lounge, and then I said goodbye and caught the train into town. Denise’s article would be coming out the following week, she told me, and she was going to urge her readers to do the right thing and send me their passport photos forthwith. She said she’d text me later in the day to see how my meeting with the Dutch went.

  It was nearly one o’clock and I had only four hours before I had to catch my plane home, if I was to be back in my flat by seven that evening. Hanne would be back soon after that, and she’d be popping straight round to let me cook her dinner and maybe watch a film.

  But now . . . now I had Amsterdam to conquer. So, I hopped on a tram to the Leidseplein, the square where I’d be meeting Martijn Flatland and his group of potential joinees. They were to congregate in a bar called Palladium at two o’clock for an hour, while I talked them through the scheme for the duration of their various lunch breaks. I walked in, found a quiet comer with enough room for eleven people, and got my flipchart out. I knew that with such a large group of people, I’d need to go some way to hold their attention while talking them through what would be expected of them if they signed up to the Karma Army . . . but I didn’t really know what to say. Just bringing a small flipchart had been enough to make me feel in control of the situation, but now that it was just me and some blank pieces of paper . . . well . . . suddenly I didn’t feel quite so confident.

  Nevertheless, I knew I had to make an impact on these people, and so endeavoured to scribble some things down, and at one minute past two I was delighted to look up and see a man I’d come to know as the Dutchman, Martijn Flatland.

  ‘Hello, Danny!’ he said, extending his hand. By which I mean he held his hand out for me to shake, not that he had some kind of crazy extendable hand. ‘It’s nice to meet you! The others will be here . . . momentarily.’

  I noticed the great pride with which Martijn had used the word ‘momentarily’ and smiled.

  ‘So who’s coming down?’

  ‘Oh, just some friends of mine. Two from work, a neighbour, an old university friend, things like that. We have all seen the video of De Laatste Show when you were on. And one of my friends is the one who taped it. We get Belgian shows here a lot from satellite. Although I would warn you, this friend is not normal. He watches a lot of Belgian TV shows. A lot of them. So he is considered . . . well . . .’

  ‘A special?’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said Martijn, laughing at his apparently loopy friend. ‘He is very much a special. Oh, here comes some peoples now . . .’

  I watched as a man and a woman walked into the Palladium and started to remove their jackets as they approached.

  ‘This is Tanya and Anders,’ said Martijn.

  I said hello and asked them to take a seat, and soon enough more people were upon us.

  ‘Maybe we should order some food,’ said Martijn. ‘Would you mind us eating while you talked?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, grateful that they’d have something to distract themselves with while I embarrassed myself in front of them. So club sandwiches and halves of beer were ordered, and by the time they arrived, my ten promised potential joinees had all arrived and were each sitting in front of me, eagerly awaiting the beginning of my flipchart-based presentation. And it’s usually at moments like this that I pause to ask myself exactly what I was doing. I was sitting in a bar in Amsterdam about to deliver a short speech to ten strangers on the merits of joining a scheme I’d thought up, only because I’d accidentally forced hundreds of other strangers to join something they’d known nothing about. And that’s not normal for me. Not on a Saturday.

  ‘So . . .’ I said, standing in front of the Dutch audience, and clapping my hands together. ‘Join Me, then . . .’

  I’d said that as an easy way of introducing the subject, but apparently someone had misunderstood.

  ‘Okay!’ said a man at the table to my left. ‘I join you then!’

  ‘No, hang on, not yet . . .’

  ‘I will then join you, too!’ said the lady with him, now holding out a passport photo in front of her.

  ‘No, no, I was just saying “Join Me, then” as a way of gearing up to the talk, I wasn’t demanding that you join me!’

  ‘But that is why we came!’ said Martijn, looking confused.

  He had a point. And I’d managed to lose control, only one sentence in. Each person was now fishing around in pockets, or wallets, or handbags, trying to be the next one to hold a photo proudly in the air.

  ‘Well . . . that’s great,’ I said, happy but slightly deflated. ‘But don’t you want to see my presentation?’

  Everyone just sort of looked at each other.

  ‘I’ve brought a flipchart,’ I said timidly.

  Martijn took the lead.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course we do. Even though you said it all on De Laatste Show, which we all have now seen on video, you go ahead and say it again. Do your presentation, and then we will join you then.’

  ‘I have to be back at work at three,’ said Anders.

  ‘Me also,’ said someone else.

  ‘Well, I’ll make it quick.’

  I turned the first page of the flipchart over. To be honest, I’d kind of lost my enthusiasm for the whole thing now.

  The page read DO NICE THINGS.

  ‘Do Nice Things’ I said, pointing at the writing, rather vaguely.

  I turned the page. It now read EVERY FRIDAY.

  ‘And . . . do them . . . every Friday,’ I said. ‘Er . . . I suppose that’ll do, on the presentation side of things.’

  There was a murmur of approval from all concerned and everyone agreed that it all sounded like a fabulous idea, and had I done a lot of public speaking before, because I was very good at it. And then they all started tucking back into their sandwiches and drinking their beers and there was really very little else to be said.

  My new friends, the Dutch, talked cheerily and openly about Join Me. One in particular – a girl now named Joinee D’Huyvetter – was rather inquisitive.

  ‘So these good deeds that we’re all going to be making,’ she said. ‘What good deeds do you make every Friday?’

  ‘Er . . . well . . . good question,’ I said, ‘I suppose my good deeds are . . . you know. Organising stuff. And public speaking. And trying to further the movement.’

  ‘So you do no good deeds yourself?’

  ‘Well, I organised some peanuts for an old man,’ I said. ‘Once.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘So you are pressing your moustache.’

  I nodded when she said this. I have no
idea why I nodded when she said this. I suppose I’d assumed I’d misheard and hadn’t wanted to challenge her. But then the words kicked in and I had to say . . .

  ‘I’m doing what?’

  ‘You are pressing your moustache.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Am I?’

  ‘Je Snor Drukken. You’re letting others do all the work. You’re pressing your moustache.’

  Again, I nodded, as if I bloody understood a word the woman was saying. She was doing a little mime now, as she showed me what it would look like if someone were to press their moustache.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Okay then.’

  I think I’d met a fellow special.

  * * *

  Just before three, my brand new Dutch joinees were getting ready to leave to go back to work. I’d learnt, in the last twenty minutes, that two of them were teachers, one a musician, one a programmer for a Polish satellite sports station, two were students and the rest working in various shops and restaurants in and around Amsterdam.

  I still needed a couple of hundred more joinees before I’d finished my quest, but this was good. I was making sure the joinees I was collecting together were dedicated, and kind of heart. I know that gaining ten brand new joinees may only be inching one per cent towards my final goal, but I think I’d managed to drill into them just how important it was for them to spread the word and get me more joinees. One per cent would soon be two per cent and before long five per cent. Maybe, given enough time and effort, my collective would one day even be ninety per cent Dutch, like prostitutes, or clogs.

  ‘I think my friend Wim may like to join,’ said Tanya. ‘I will tell him all about it this afternoon.’

  ‘Here,’ I said, giving her the flipchart. ‘Maybe this will help.’

  And that was that. I had given my brief presentation – which had ended up far briefer than I’d thought it would – to ten Dutch people in a bar. And soon it was time to get back on the train which would take me to the plane which would take me home.

  I’d done well, I decided, a few hours later, as I walked through Stansted airport. I was happy. I’d be home in good time for Hanne, and the day had been a quiet success. Especially when I remembered the interview for De Telegraaf. That’d spread the word, alright. Actually, Denise had said she’d text me to see how the day went, hadn’t she? I took my phone out. It was still turned off. So I turned it on, and within a minute or so it bleeped to let me know I had a message. Three messages, in fact.