Haterz

by James Goss

  Staring at me in utter terror. As I sang a song, skipping over the words I didn’t remember. Oddly, he didn’t find it absurd. He seemed completely terrified.

  I leaned over him. “Antony Gillingham,” I whispered, enjoying the power I had. “Do you fancy a beer?”

  He screamed again and then wet the bed, which was gross.

  I shook my head at him, tutting, every inch my third form geography teacher. “Sticks and stones, Antony Gillingham. They’re bad. But words can come back to hurt you too. I have one bit of good news for you. I am not going to break the bottle. I’m not as bad as you are. But you’re still going to learn your lesson.”

  I reached down, plunging the beer bottle into him.

  “You—are—going—to—learn—to—be—nice.”

  Only, it didn’t go in. Probably due to terror, Antony Gillingham was tighter than a miser’s purse. And the screwtop was... catching.

  I was clearly causing him a huge amount of pain, but getting nowhere.

  “Let me do that,” said a voice.

  This time I screamed. The stupid, yelping fear anyone gives when they’re startled.

  She stepped forward from the shadows. She was wearing one of those painter’s outfits with a built-in hood—like a serial killer’s onesie, only painted black. It was drawn over her face. The only thing I could tell about her was her voice. Which was Scottish. And her figure under the overalls seemed... well, not waif-like. The overalls did nothing for her. I don’t know. My mind was racing in all sorts of ways.

  Who the hell was she?

  What the fuck was she doing there?

  Was there an innocent way to explain my actions?

  Christ, I must look utterly absurd.

  What the hell?

  Climb every mountain high.

  There’s a line here.

  And then your dreams will all come trooooo.

  That’s really not right. I’m going to have to listen to this on Spotify when I get home.

  Was she a policewoman?

  Wait, what the hell had she said?

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Better at this than you?” Again, that Scotch burr. Not the soft purr of Edinburgh, but something rougher and more practical. Aldi Scotch.

  She flowed forward and took the bottle from my gloved hands. She pushed me aside. Not roughly, but not gently. With enough force to achieve what she wanted.

  Which was exactly what she used on Antony Gillingham.

  He made a lot of noise. Even through the duct tape.

  I’D SPENT A lot of time thinking about this. A model once made a carefully-chance remark about her famous ex-boyfriend in an interview. “Yeah, he used to love it when I shoved a vodka bottle up him.”

  I kept thinking about this while watching Antony Gillingham struggle. Because, when the model said that, what had she meant? Was it one of those novelty bottles, shaped like a tower in St Peter’s Square? Had she kept the screwcap on—I mean, surely that would chafe? But she couldn’t have taken the screwcap off, because then there’d be some kind of terrible vacuum, wouldn’t there? Or had she—oh, God—meant the thick end of the bottle? I mean, that was less problematic but also hideous.

  A lot more thought had gone into the sodomising of Antony Gillingham than he’d put into his tweet.

  I stood and watched the girl go to work on him, feeling absurdly left out, as when your mum takes over when you’re trying to cook.

  After the initial horror subsided, there remained awkward questions—like who the hell was she, and how much longer was this going to go on for? At what point did this just become absurd?

  Antony Gillingham wasn’t helping out, his screams alternating with a weird noise. A strange buzzing. I realised the duct tape had turned into a paper-comb-type instrument, buzzing as he twisted and somehow breathed.

  I was hoping he’d just pass out and then I could ask her some questions. I never got to ask her those questions.

  Instead, something terrible happened. A noise, far inside Antony Gillingham. And then a terrible spurting and a screeching that no tape could mask.

  The woman swore. “Fuck, the bottle’s broken.” And then she punched me.

  I ran then. I ran from that final Derek of a flat, out into the empty road, and then I threw up. And then I ran further into the night.

  IT RAINED THAT night. I couldn’t sleep, so it was some comfort to me. The cat, sensing I was still awake, jumped onto the bed, but I didn’t stroke her. I didn’t deserve it. Instead, I just lay there, curled up in a ball, trying not to think about Antony Gillingham, about that woman, about those terrible sounds.

  Instead, I fretted about the vomit. I’d not had anything very interesting for my last meal. A value tin of spaghetti hoops, deposited on the pavement like a spew of worms. But there’d be DNA all over them, wouldn’t there? Ludicrous way to be caught. I knew that, as a welcome home present, housebreakers used to take a dump on people’s carpets until that turned out to be a great way of catching them. But would the stomach acid and bile break down the DNA? How many steps had I been from the house? Far enough away for it to be written off? Or would someone curious...

  I heard the rain against the window, and smiled, reaching down to stroke the cat. The hoops would wash away, writhing in the gutter. Maybe.

  I still felt bad about myself. Watching that mysterious black-clad figure, going about my work with cold efficiency. Ruthless enthusiasm. Skill. It kind of put me to shame, but also put the wind up me. An expression I am suddenly never using again. Who the hell was she?

  At my gym there are two mirrors. One by the shower, one in the changing room. They’re like good cop and bad cop. Somehow, the changing room mirror makes you look thin in the right places and bulky where it would help. But the bad cop mirror, as you pass it, catches everything in the wrong light, the bits of you that sag even though you didn’t know you had them, the wrinkles on your elbows that have no reason to be there, the bulging belly that tells you that you need to cut back on something.

  That woman was like the gym mirrors. She showed me what I should look like, but also how flabby and ugly I really was.

  What the fuck was I doing? What had I become?

  THEY SAY THAT a criminal returns to the scene of the crime. The police catch a fair number simply by watching the crowds, or even scanning through the vox-pop interviews with friends and neighbours on the news. Is there a figure who’s always there, shiftily at the back of the crowd, or slightly too far forward, on every channel saying the victim was “an angel”? Too shifty, or too keen to speak.

  So far, I’d managed not to return to the scene of the crime, but this time I couldn’t resist it. I was helped by it being on several bus routes. So I could simply sit up the top of a double decker and cruise past. The police surely couldn’t be pointing a camera at a bus full of people, who would rubberneck at a slow moped, let alone some crime scene tape.

  The bus took a frustratingly long time, even for a bus. It bumped and banged through housing estates and past abandoned arcades and lonely scrubland parks. Finally it turned a corner.

  Interesting.

  There were police there, but hardly a huge number. Not vast amounts of fluttering blue tape. I almost felt disappointed. I thought about getting off the bus, trying to find out why. But sanity prevailed.

  I FOUND OUT what had happened later, thanks to the internet.

  Antony hadn’t died. The bottle hadn’t shattered inside him. Instead the screwtop had twisted off, and the bottle had been launched from his colon with the velocity of a rocket. I realised then that the Lady Ninja hadn’t punched me. It had been the bottle. I’d spent a long time in the bathroom, staring at my forehead in the mirror. There was a small bruise. There were no—abrasions. That was the word they used on CSI. Was my skin crusted around the best-before-date along with bits of Antony? It didn’t seem so.

  Antony had been released by neighbours alerted by the screams. At first they’d not taken his sto
ry seriously, had assumed it was the elaborate sort of nonsense people make up when they trip out of the shower and fall on the vacuum cleaner. But they realised there was something worse here, from the sheer mess on the bed and the presence of someone else. Someone who’d tied him up.

  Antony’s description of this someone was bizarre. I’ve a slight build. And, if I was hoping for a better description of the mystery woman, I was sorely disappointed. Instead, conflated through panic, he claimed to have been attacked by one large man in black with the build of a bouncer. The only thing he’d got right was the Scotch accent.

  He claimed complete ignorance, and, at first the police were baffled. But it didn’t take them long to go through his Twitter account. And once they’d found the tweet, along with his following of several rather extreme political parties and a football club whose supporters were quite angry, a picture of Antony Gillingham emerged that was less than sympathetic. You could sense the mild distaste in the police reports, the slightly loaded pause after ‘Clearly,’ in ‘Clearly, a horrible thing has happened to this man...’

  Someone bright on BuzzFeed connected the various attacks. Or, rather, they noticed someone using a hashtag for it. #TrollTwatter.

  So, that was me. As a kid, I’d always wondered what my superhero name would be. And there we go. TrollTwatter. With a hashtag in front of it. Because these days there’s always a hashtag.

  But the thing was, it wasn’t me. Initially, it wasn’t me because there was the mysterious woman. And then it really wasn’t me, because #TrollTwatter became a craze. People were hunting down aggressive tweeters and lamping them. Suddenly, saying that a celebrity was so ugly they needed a baseball bat makeover wasn’t a harmless bit of fun, but quite likely to find you in a bloody alley behind the Student Union. Some people even filmed the attacks.

  I had tried to stamp out aggressive language, and instead I’d created a wave of violence. If I’d been worried that someone would trace it back to me, no one did.

  AMBER WASN’T IMPRESSED at all the violence that she had no idea was being done in her name.

  “Fucking idiots,” she told me one night. “This is no way to solve things.” And it wasn’t. It was kind of inevitable that another of the people saying awful things to Amber was going to get attacked. And, naturally the victim posted a photo of her bruised face on Amber’s wall sneering ‘You happy now bitch?’ The victim got a lot of sympathy. Amber got even more abuse.

  I’d not really helped.

  But then, it turned out, it wasn’t my idea at all. Turned out that BuzzFeed found a student rugby player from Inverness who claimed to have invented TrollTwatting down the bar after his girlfriend got slagged off. He gave them an apologetic interview, saying it had all got out of hand and that it should stop now. The police interviewed him, as he matched Antony Gillingham’s description of his attacker to a tee. They realised it wasn’t him, and then they released him with a caution over the original assault after the victim said, “Fair does, I did deserve it.” Both of them shook hands on The One Show and talked about the phenomenon and how it should stop. Which actually drove it to greater heights for a bit.

  Someone got killed in Bali. I watched that news footage over and over again. It was a young girl who’d sent angry drunk tweets to her ex’s new girlfriend. It was getting badly out of hand.

  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.

  DURING 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

  So, 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.

  SUDDENLY, DUSTER’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.