Haterz
Page 4
I told myself that over and over. When I stood in the shower. When I boiled the kettle. When I stood waiting for the Metropolitan Line. She deserved it.
I’d made the internet a better place. Because I’d got rid of Danielle.
ONLY, I HADN’T.
Guy’s email was just the start of it. Suddenly Danielle was everywhere. He wasn’t the only person running the marathon for her. Lots of our mutual friends were. They started up a Facebook group. They changed their avatars to pictures of Danielle, which meant that I was now seeing her dead smiling face everywhere. She was out clubbing, she was crawling home late, she was uploading pictures of her breakfast, she was watching Britain’s Got Talent and she was taking a quiz to find out which member of One Direction she was.
It was as though Danielle was still alive. But everywhere. I couldn’t forget her. She was all over Facebook and Twitter. (Not Google+ though. No-one’s on there. Not even ghosts.)
I WONDERED IF this was my divine punishment. The internet was going to be #DoingItForDanielle all the time and forever.
There was something. In among the marathons, the raising awareness march and the charity collection of Danielle’s favourite nut-free cupcake recipes (oh, yes, I was right to kill her). It took me a while, but I noticed it. I was helped. I got one further eCard.
These shoes are about to run #26Miles #DoingItForDaniele. Lucky shoes.
ONE OF DANIELLE’S friends was particularly everywhere. No matter how I tried to ignore him. I wasn’t even friends with him, but I knew everything that he was doing.
There was no shutting up Edward (‘Call Me Fast Eddy’) Atkinson. His profile picture was of him hugging Danielle. He was walking from London to her hometown (#WalkForDaniele, #DoingItForDaniele #FastEddy). He would regularly post pictures of her, or memories of golden times they shared together.
And people would retweet them, or share them on their Facebook wall. So that Fast Eddy would creep into my feed.
That’s one of the odd things about the internet. When it started out there was an amazing amount of information and it was difficult to find. Then we got Google. But for some reason, people think we need leading to stuff.
We don’t. For the first time in mankind’s history, we have a vast amount of data out there which is ours for the taking. And the more we go and look for it in our own way, the less its wants us to. Facebook’s constantly throwing itself in front of us going, ‘Don’t do that—see this!’ Worse is ‘The One Trick That Mums Know To Cure Belly Flab.’ Those adverts now actually jiggle. They’re refusing to take the hint that we just don’t want to know. We’ve not clicked. We are not going to click. But maybe, one day, we will.
FAST EDDY WAS one busy charity bunny. Not only was he off running a third marathon for Danielle, he was constantly tweeting about his training schedule (‘18 miles today. Need chocolate SOOO BAD. But no. #DoingItForDaniele’), and he was always begging celebrities for retweets (‘Running for Danielle, tragedy death tht can be avoided, any chance of a cheeky RT? #DoingItForDaniele’). And people did. And people retweeted those retweets. And all of them linked to Fast Eddy’s JustGiving page. He fucked me off.
All of my resentment, self-hatred and fear about Danielle was crystallised in this one man. Who would not, could not, shut up. He was just there.
True, he looked nice enough. In all the selfies he posted of himself, running around, or dousing himself with ice. He was always smiling, his little eager-to-please chipmunk face covered in just enough stubble to not quite be a beard. His cheeks were ruddy (from all the running in the rain) and he just looked nice and normal and desperate to be liked.
Late one drunken night (oh, yeah, I was drinking a lot these days #DoingItForDanielle), I clicked through to his JustGiving page. I don’t know why. Maybe to give him some money. Or to torture myself reading some of the messages from donors. Just... life, really. The kind of late night link trawling that happens when you’re drunk but you don’t want to go to bed.
I sat on the sofa. My vodka-tonic was too strong. But I didn’t care. I stared at Fast Eddy’s profile, at his training blog. At his sheer, clear goodness. He was everything I wasn’t. He was taller than me. He glowed with charity. I’d never done anything that good. I’d never...
Then I noticed something. In the small print. Way beneath the list of ‘57 Things I Bet You Never Knew Had Nuts In Them.’ The charity name was slightly different from the fund that Guy and Danielle’s family had set up for her. He’d mistyped ‘Danielle’ as ‘Daniele.’ Just one ‘l.’ Odd how good your proof-reading can be at the wrong time. It annoyed me. But then, anyone can make a mistake.
I carried on surfing through his previous campaigns. He’d misspelt her name again. And again. Not all the time. But how curious.
Maybe he’d just pasted the wrong block of text over. Or autocorrect.
I did a drunken Google, pecking the keys with awful caution. ‘Doing It For Daniele’ brought up a link on a different donations site. This one gave bank details of the account. Same sort code as Guy’s. Different account number.
Odd. I went to the main Doing It For Danielle page. It didn’t list full accounts, but there was a reasonable stream of donations coming in. I wondered if Eddy had transferred his across. But none of the figures matched. He’d raised £2,700 last marathon. No sign of that. Or the £1,450 from his first marathon. I carried on. It was boring cross-referencing and I wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t been pretty smashed. He had moved some money across—£200 from a fun run here and £75 from a sponsored walk.
But, adding it all up, doing drunk maths, there was about £10,000 missing.
Fast Eddy was a fraud.
I googled Edward Atkinson. Then I tried a few variations.
And bingo. A ‘Ted Atkinson’ had once worked as a Systems Analyst at Sodobus before being convicted of running a fake charity calendar door-knocking scam. Thank God for local newspapers online. There was even a photo of Fast Eddy before he became fast—long hair, clean-shaven, same eager face. Next to a jiggling advert for That 1 Weird Tip That Only Moms Know.
I leaned back and stared at the screen.
I wondered about emailing Guy to tell him. My eyes fluttered closed. I was finally falling asleep. I stood up, went to pee and then staggered to bed. I lay there, thinking about it.
The mystery eCard had said, ‘We want to see what you do next.’
And now I knew what I wanted to do next.
THE THING I’VE not told you until now (because you’d have stopped reading and backed hurriedly away) is what I do for a living. I’m a chugger.
Yes, that’s me. I stand on busy streets, just waiting to ruin your lunch hour. I have a clipboard and a big smile and I just need a moment to talk to you about cancer/kittens/children. My really big hope is that you won’t punch me or spit at me or just shoulder through me. My hope is that you’ll listen, listen longer than “Not today, thank you,” listen to me long enough to fill in a form with your bank details on it, agreeing to give a large amount of money to cancer/kittens/children.
You assume I’m working for cancer, or kittens, or children’s charities. But I’m not, not directly. I’m working for a man who owns a lot of race cars. So many race cars he’s had a basement garage put under his basement garage in Notting Hill. Charities don’t hire chuggers directly—they hire Mr Racing Car. The cancer, the kittens, and the children pay his firm to hire us to stand out in the rain for minimum wage (any more would be taking from charity, wouldn’t it?). We bring in subscriptions to the charities, and every month a tenner leaves your bank account and goes to the kittens, the cancer and the children. Of course, this is where Big Maths comes in.
You sign up through us, and on average it’ll take three years of your subscription for the charity to pay back Mr Racing Car’s finder’s fee. The typical lifespan of your direct debit before you go “aw, fuckit” and cancel? Three years and two months.
In other words, you’ve paid £380. Mr Racing Car gets £360. The ch
arity gets just £20.
Big Maths is the game the charities play. Because, while the average subscription is going to be just over three years, there are going to be a few outliers. People who discover they really like giving a tenner a month to kittens/cancer/children. And keep on doing so. And among those, there’s going to be at least one who leaves their house to children/kittens/cancer. Quite a lot of people who sign up are little old ladies. We love the sexy young people, they tick all sorts of good demographic boxes. But we’re also very grateful to the little old ladies. Thanks to demographics, we know they’re more likely to live alone, and be grateful to stop and chat. They’re also sentimental, so they’re more likely to suddenly care about whatever we’re selling. And they’re statistically less likely to cancel their direct debits and more likely to leave us their house. So God bless little old ladies.
So, thanks to Big Maths, it’s all worthwhile, and Mr Racing Car can sleep at night. He knows he’s made the world a better place (sort of) and can enjoy his sweet dream about which of his cars he’s not going to drive tomorrow because actually he lost his licence when he ran over a little old lady.
But anyway, enough about Big Maths and Mr Racing Car. The point is, he gave me a job.
HAVE YOU EVER wondered why all us charity muggers are so smiling and so friendly? Because we’re pretending. We don’t really feel like that. We’re not really happy to see you. We don’t much care whether you give us money or not. And we don’t give a stuff about kittens or cancer or children. Some of us do, when we start, but you see, it’s kittens on Monday, cancer on Tuesday, children on Wednesday. A different coloured tabard, a different cause that’s close to our heart. They all blur into one. We go out there and we’re just playing a part. We’ve even got lines. Which we’re really good at learning.
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.
IT’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.
THIS 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
WHAT WAS MUDDY 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!
FAST EDDY 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: