Haterz

by James Goss

  Trent’s online interface job sent him away a lot on work, as he had to fly to foreign countries to find clever ways of making big firms’ websites load even more slowly. This left me with quite a lot of lonely nights in, pining for Trent while reading X-Men in a Mothra onesie.

  But still, we went on a lot of holidays together (just the odd photo of us together, and then a lot of stolen instagrams of other peoples’ meals). Trent and Markus soon emerged as quite happy, really. I liked their life. The good thing was that they were so typically #TeamGeek even their identikit apartment proved no problem to fake up. I found a pretty generic ‘white walls and wooden floor boards’ place for hire on Airbnb near Shoreditch. Some rich businessman from the UAE had bought it for his daughter, but she’d shacked up with a bicycle repairman in Hackney and did quite nicely from letting it out at a bargain rate.

  Everything was all set. The trap was baited and oozing with honey. The difficulty was no bite so far. The waiting was the difficult bit. I’d look at Romeo’s profile, waiting for him to notice us. But he didn’t. I’d stand out in the rain, chugging slowly away at the day job, and wondering how Markus and Trent were getting on. How were the complicated navbar problems in Berlin going? How was Markus coping with the adserver implementation phased roll-out? It all seemed pretty important as I waved my clipboard around in the hail and tried to make passing strangers care.

  I moved my chugging to near Old Street Roundabout, as if being ignored by the massed ranks of #TeamGeek would tell me more about them. It didn’t, really. None of them wore their Star Trek uniforms to work, and all of them were too busy with their headphones to bother talking to me, let alone signing up for relieving kittens from floods or curing cancer of the drought.

  I got home exhausted one day, soaked through to the skin and so miserable my teeth ached. My feet were beaten up in the way that only feet that have trudged around in JD Sports’ cheapest trainers can feel. I felt broke and a failure. It was, I decided, time for Markus and Trent to go on holiday. Without touching the KillFund, I couldn’t afford it; but they could.

  I went back through my archive and found some pretty good photos of a couple of men with beards who’d been on a pilgrimage to the original Star Wars sets in the Tunisian desert, pulling faces next to mouldering fibre glass. I borrowed a few of those, stuck in some others from Tumblr of the same location, and did a pretty rough photoshop mock-up of myself in a Storm Trooper costume tagged ‘Looking for the right droids #StarWars #Holiday.’

  Then I spent two hours trying to work out if I could afford to go camping somewhere at the weekend without drowning and then went to bed.

  When I woke up the next morning, I’d hit pay dirt. A message from Romeo: ‘@MarkyMarkuz @TrentSwish #Hot guyz SO JEALOUS! I needz a holiday!’

  I felt my heart beat just a tiny bit quickly as I wrote a reply from Trent: ‘Lol.’ Trent played things safely. Markus favourited the reply. Because Markus favourited everything that Trent did.

  And then another tweet from Romeo: ‘Promise me next time you’ll sneak me on the plane? I’m really small and good company!’

  #TrapSprung

  FROM THERE ON it was actually quite easy. Romeo mentioned that he was going to be in town for an audition next week and that he’d love to meet us for gin and tea. Trent apologised, explaining that he had to user test some White Space in Hamburg, but that Markus needed the company.

  “THERE’S A BUS,” he explained. “It didn’t take long.”

  And here we were. Meeting in a bus station, standing by a pillar just out of reach of the CCTV, with me wearing Bland Hoodie #3. I actually felt nervous, which was insane. Romeo was tiny. Practically hand luggage. For some reason he told me that he’d managed to squeeze himself into the overhead storage on a train recently. And, naturally, taken some really bad pictures of the event. Romeo documented his life in constant photographs, but never had anyone else to take them for him.

  He brought his camera up. “I want to take a picture with you,” he said, his voice a little bit of a whine.

  “It’s fine,” I said firmly, taking the camera from him. “I’ll do it.” A picture of us together could be fatal. So I took the photo of him, casually thumbing the flash off. (Why do people leave the flash on? Are they all idiots?) He smiled and grinned, then grinned and smiled. He seemed to be hovering on the balls of his trainers.

  “How was your journey?” I asked. It seemed like reasonable small talk.

  He retched dramatically. “Having to read play texts. We’re having to do really old stuff this term.”

  “Shakespeare?”

  “No!” He looked cross. “I’m studying English Drama. No, this is Ayckbourn. Old shit like that.”

  “Ah,” I said. It seemed the easiest thing. As the conversation was boring, he immediately forgot all about it.

  “Where’s Trent?” he asked excitedly. “Hamburg?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You must be lonely,” he said.

  And that was it.

  I WAS OUT with Romeo one evening. I bumped into Amber and Guy. Guy seemed oblivious of my body language. “Long time no see” and all that.

  Amber—well, she was different. She looked at me, an eyebrow raised, a little surprised. If she’d said anything, it would have been “So...?”

  I didn’t say anything really. I mumbled as the bar around us got hot.

  “Your friends are nice,” said Romeo.

  ANYWAY. IT WAS Tuesday morning and I was supposed to be killing Romeo today. But first I really wanted a lie-in. A clown car running over a one-man-band. That’s the sound Romeo made moving around my flat.

  At first the hangover didn’t seem so bad. A paracetamol would have cleared it. If only I could be bothered to reach over and get one. But my head rattled away, and it annoyed me. Just a little. Not enough to wake up. Not enough to yell at him to shut the hell up. I drifted in and out of sleep. Yes, in a bit I’d wake up and kill him.

  He came in, and tried to ask me something, but I pretended to be asleep. He pottered away and I slept on for a bit.

  The door opened again and he came bounding in, leaping onto the bed with an excitement that nearly killed me right then. Then he kissed my forehead, and waved something under my nose.

  “Darling,” he said. “This time I have brought you bacon.”

  And he had. He’d managed to make me a bacon sandwich. Bless him.

  It was the most lovely, heartwarming thing. So heartwarming I didn’t even think of the mess he’d have made of the kitchen for a whole minute. I ate the sandwich and decided not to kill him today.

  It was the hangover. That was the reason. Not the sandwich. I had no feelings for him one way or the other. I had decided he had to die. I’d made up my mind. It was important to get rid of him before I became attached to him, just another of his victims. Would I leave Trent for him? Probably. But maybe he’d already talked about it with Trent. That was how he worked. He collected couples. Romeo had no interest in men. As soon as I told him I was leaving Trent for him, it’d be over. I’d have lost my charm—wouldn’t I? I guess I could talk it through with him, but I knew how he worked, and anyway, it was easier to kill him. Much easier.

  Jeez, how long did it take paracetamol to work? Should I take some more? Or aspirin? I was a mess and I couldn’t think straight and he was sitting there watching me eat my bacon sandwich like he was a puppy dog. Yeah. I wouldn’t kill him today.

  “I like this place,” he said. “The kitchen at the other place is so empty. This is homelier. I love your cat.”

  Then I realised what was wrong. The reason I really couldn’t kill him. This was my flat. My real flat. Not the fantasy flat that Markus shared with Trent. But my own home. I’d been an absolute idiot. I guessed I must have got completely hammered last night and got us a taxi here on autopilot. Because, obviously, that’s what trained killers do. They get minicabs (which have cameras) from nightclubs (which have cameras) and casually blow up their carefully-constructed f
alse identity.

  Because I was an idiot.

  “Yeah...” I said slowly. “Do you like it? The other place is Trent’s.”

  He nodded, accepting it without question. “Two flats? You guys must have so much money.”

  Ah, yes. Money. That’s what it always came back to. “You should rent the other place out—” A tiny, calculating pause. “I mean, you know, if I got a job in London, perhaps you could let it to me. Or... you know, I could stay here. After all, your cat must get lonely. She likes me.” He beamed, happily. “It’s a shame to have a place going to waste. That’s all. How much is this place?” He smiled wider.

  I ducked that one off. My aching head was considering his plan, completely forgetting for the moment that I did not, in fact, have two flats. The Shoreditch flat came from the KillFund, and I used almost every penny of my own money to rent this place. This was not good.

  Romeo needed distracting, quickly. So I had some sex with him. I was actually getting quite used to it. Enjoying it, almost. I mean, you know, these things aren’t easy to talk about. (Don’t you hate it when your friends start talking about their sex lives? I do consider us friends.) But sex came in handy with Romeo. You know how you can distract a dog by throwing a stick? That, really. And he was very good at it. I guess he had to be. It’s how he worked. It was so easy to forget during it that all the while, simple, stupid, loveable Romeo was calculating away. Working things to his best advantage with his natural dull cunning. I was using sex to distract him, he was using sex to make me think he liked me. Neither of us was having sex because we wanted to.

  So it was kind of funny that we were having so much of it.

  “I AM TOTALLY stealing your cat. She’s gorgeous.” Romeo was just wearing a towel and a pair of Primark socks. And my cat was all over him. For some reason I found this worrying. I know that, on a purely rational level, cats don’t really like you, or have any affection for you. They’re just cats. They see you as a source of food and warmth that has to be slightly protected. I was used to my cat being surly. It suited me.

  When I first started chugging, I kind of hoped the cat would come along. We could be the Street Cat Bob of chuggers. But it didn’t happen. The first morning I strapped on my tabard and headed meaningfully to the door, the cat narrowed its eyes and trotted off to the far corner under the bed reserved for imminent vet visits.

  But here she was, a purring heap of fur wrapped around Romeo. I definitely couldn’t kill him today. He was, after all, covered in cat hair. Would I really want to be the first killer to be tracked down by cat hair? No one wants that as a first on their LinkedIn profile.

  “You’re lucky,” I said to him.

  “How?”

  “Oh, you just are,” I said. I ruffled his hair, and Romeo purred. “Come on. Enjoy being alive. I’ll take you out for second breakfast.”

  Hey @TrentSwish wish you were comic-book shopping with me and markus. WANTS!!!

  Here’s the BEST CAT EVER. AND ME!!!

  Behold my breakfast. It is MIGHTY.

  FOR SOME REASON, the fiction was all getting a little complicated to maintain. Part of it was just the grinding certainty of work. I still had a job (of sorts). I still had to pound the streets being totally ignored by everyone so that my boss’s boss’s boss could buy another race car plus cure cancer. I was slogging away at the minimum wage and yet having to pretend very hard to Romeo that I was a successful digital strategy manager. I’d made the job title up, which hadn’t seemed a problem when I’d thought of it, but it was getting more complicated as he started asking me casual questions about work. What the hell did I do all day? I didn’t have a foggy clue.

  Could I really justify dipping into the KillFund in order to keep taking him out for meals and buying him comic books? I mean, that was a bit against the spirit of the thing. Also, always having to pay cash for everything and make sure he took no pictures of me.

  The easiest thing, I decided, was to not kill him. Just tell him some sort of truth and then get on with it. I mean, there was a way through this. Perhaps I could tell him that I’d invented Trent and a job to... to make him like me? Wait, that was utterly nuts.

  But then, if I told him, and he was fine with it, what would that make him?

  My boyfriend?

  DUSTER: How is the latest assignment going?

  ME: ... is typing a response ...

  HE CAME UP on the Friday night so I could take him clubbing. He assured me it would be a cheap night out for both of us. Which was fine, but it never seemed to be his round and he always wanted expensive doubles and this was nice as it meant my urge to kill him was rising again. Each drink here cost more than an hour of chugging. That helped ease my conscience. But, of course, I couldn’t kill him here. The whole club was soaked in CCTV. I amazed myself that I actually clocked these things now. Like a spy. Or someone really shifty.

  That was bad. I was changing. But clearly not that much, in that I was out dancing with my victim. Rather than fitting his body parts into bin liners and popping them in the ‘Food Waste’ recycling bins.

  Anyway, Romeo became suddenly excited. He started waving, and then hugged me. I worried he was about to ask me for a cocktail. Instead he pressed himself really close to me in a hug that reeked of Jean Paul Gaultier (I knew this ’cause he never went anywhere without it). “Thank you,” he said. “I’m having such a wonderful time with you.”

  Then he took a picture of us together on his phone. In the picture he’s smiling. And I’m looking startled. And there’s someone behind us in the photo. Someone who has no reason to be there. Someone who... someone who is the reason for Romeo grabbing me.

  But I don’t know that yet.

  “I love you,” whispers Romeo.

  “Oh,” I say. I’m not sure which is more troubling—that he’s just taken my photo or said that he loves me. Hmm.

  Then he turns around, pantomiming surprise and grabs a complete stranger by the hand.

  “Trent!” he says.

  Standing there is my completely imaginary boyfriend.

  I WANTED TO go home. This is pretty much my default setting when I’m out. Age is odd, really. In my twenties, you could stick me in a loud, crowded bar and I’d love it. You could make me queue for an hour in the rain outside a nightclub and then cram me into a corner with other people’s elbows and I’d still dance happily away and tell you I’d had a brilliant time. Not anymore.

  I was suddenly all too aware of myself. I was in a large concrete bunker in Vauxhall. Lights were going off all over the place without illuminating anyone’s faces, there was noise everywhere and a smell of amyl nitrate, Lynx and drains.

  I was suddenly all at sea. All these people. All these bloody people. And for some reason, some God-alone-knows-why reason, I was trying to tell them how to live their lives when I couldn’t even look them in the eye or talk to them. Because I was lost and alone and broken and... Romeo was standing there on my left. Smiling.

  Trent was standing opposite us. Not smiling.

  And I wondered what the hell was going on.

  Because Trent wasn’t real. I’d made up Trent. But here he was. Or rather, I realised, the man whose pictures I had stolen to make Trent.

  He was here, of course he was, because he was real and real people went out and got shitfaced on a Friday night. Small world, funny old world. But completely possible. The thing was, he was here. And he had no idea who I was, who Romeo was, or that his name was even Trent.

  Ooh, nightmare.

  Not-Trent is being held by Romeo’s hand. Not-Trent looks perplexed. The window until someone says something else is closing. What to do? My first impulse was to brazen it out. “That’s not Trent. It just looks like him.” This seemed easy enough. But there was something else. Nagging away in my head. Something I needed to pay attention to, or I’d miss. Life doesn’t have Sherlock-vision. The best you can hope for is a flash of inspiration on the night bus on the way home.

  Instead, I stole a trick fr
om my old team leader, Alison. She used it to terrorise new recruits. Especially ones who weren’t that good at English.

  “I beg your pardon?” I said. “Could you repeat that?”

  It worked. Not-Trent leant forward, puzzled. “Sorry?”

  “I didn’t catch that,” I repeated.

  Not-Trent frowned. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Oh, fine,” I replied, dismissively. About three seconds had passed. But it was enough.

  Let me tell you what I’d learned. For a start, Not-Trent was off his face. You could tell from the way that he’d not disengaged his arm from Romeo’s grab. And his eyes. And his gentle swaying. His frown was that of a smashed man trying to concentrate very hard on things which demanded his attention. He’d wear it later having a last piss before using it again to try and work out the number of the night bus he’d caught home a hundred times before.

  I’d also learned something about Romeo. He’d kissed me in front of Not-Trent, thinking it was Trent. He’d wanted us to be seen by Trent. If he hadn’t engineered the situation, he’d seen it arising and was making the most out of it. But I didn’t have the first clue what he was making. So...

  “This is Romeo,” I said to Not-Trent.