Haterz

by James Goss

  She stood up and smiled.

  “I’m going to make us a cup of tea and then come up to bed,” said Jackie Aspley.

  THE SHOCKING TRUTH OF MY AWFUL FAILURE

  Jackie Aspley gives a personal blast

  I’VE SPENT MY life being criticised. I’ve always worried I’m too fat, too plain, too unattractive. I always watched my weight like a Tory minister watching foreign people. Fat was EVIL and mustn’t be allowed to get under my skin.

  All that changed when I became pregnant thanks to ex-husband. Finally, I knew that I could actually become the kind of woman who could get fat. Naturally, with all that came a whole load of worries—was I really the right person to bring another life into the world? Would it look at me, sack of mad neuroses that I was, and blame me for everything? Or would it somehow heal me?

  When he told me I was pregnant, my GP urged me to “eat for two now.” He’d always been worried about my bird-like appearance, but this was the chance to let rip.

  At first my ex-husband was full of praise—for the first time in my life I had tits. Big boobies, knockout knockers. They started inflating almost at the moment of conception and just didn’t stop. I loved them. I’d just sit around at home and play with them.

  For a while my stomach stayed mercifully unchanged. I ate more but still went to the gym (just very gently). I missed drinking but the soup of hormones knocked me flatter than any red wine every night.

  Then the morning sickness kicked in and I realised what an unfit mother I would be. I just couldn’t cope with the morning sickness. All around me my friends were offering me joyously simple advice for dealing with it, every time with the added, “Of course, I got off scot-free, but poor you!”

  It just wouldn’t stop. It was like being on a constant hen-night on a cross-channel ferry. I was that little girl in The Exorcist, which also meant that my poor ex-husband no longer got his cherished jump start in the mornings. That was when he started staying out late in interns. It was grim.

  And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I started to show.

  I’ve been thin for so long I’d forgotten what fat felt like. At first it just looked like I’d eaten a heavy press launch lunch. But it didn’t go away. The more I threw up, then impossibly the more it grew. I worried about what it was feeding off, as I certainly wasn’t keeping down enough food to nourish it. Was my own baby eating me alive? Would it be born out of a pile of my own dust?

  I struggled on. I’d turn up to work looking DREADFUL. My spending on fashion increased, which was ludicrous, as I could no longer guarantee to be able to amortise the cost of a dress across so many wears. Like a minor royal, I’d wear it a couple of times and then throw it to the back of the cupboard.

  I tried wearing corsets a couple of times, but my GP was horrified, and I nearly died from the pain.

  So Jackie Aspley carried on growing.

  One day, my husband remarked, “You’re fat.”

  I snapped back, “I’m pregnant,” but he was unrepentant. “You’re almost obscene. How much larger are you going to get?”

  I really didn’t know what to say to that. I was being fat-shamed by a man who nudged 18 stone and believed that two breakfasts were the right way to start the day. And he was calling me overweight. AND I WAS PREGNANT!!!

  He also wasn’t pleased that he had to make his own breakfasts. In the early days of our marriage, to assure us both that things were going okay, I played the homemaker and fried him sausage, eggs and bacon (my Muslim husband). Now I couldn’t face the smell of raw meat, so he had to try and do it himself, which meant that he was in a foul mood and that the cleaner would later threaten to resign every time she ventured into the kitchen. Every single day. I ended up trying to wash the frying pan myself while dry-heaving.

  Sex was also difficult. Like a child stuck on the first level of Pac-Man, despite being thoroughly bad at it, my husband kept on plugging away. He called having sex with pregnant me “mounting the insurmountable” or “Mohammed coming over the mountain,” but we kept trying, even though I was sure it was hurting the baby as much as it was hurting me. Of course, I knew he had started having affairs by this point. He was always coming home late with some stupid excuse or other. In the early days he’d bring me back a nice little present (like a potted plant). As time wore on it became a pen he’d nicked from the office. I tried not to let it hurt me—my other friends had husbands who were delighted by their pregnancy. Baby-Nerds, we called them. But not my husband. He announced one night that he’d be thrilled so long as it was a boy. That was the sum total of his enthusiasm.

  But I kept on—I’m sure many single mothers have had worse. I felt out of my depth, alone and afraid, but I also knew it was my job As A Woman to have a baby. To prove that I could get something right. At about that time I was sent out to do yet another piece on awful immigrants and was startled at their amazing fecundity. They seemed so good at it and relaxed by it. It was killing me and they just laughingly told each other jokes. I wonder if that planted a seed for some of the unkind things I said about them? Often we’re mean about things we’re jealous of. It’s funny how it takes all of your life to learn how to be good at living it.

  At 19 weeks, things got troubled. I’d just started working out whether or not to have cosmetic surgery at the same time as a caesarean. It was, I decided, going to be my big reward for all that morning sickness. But one morning, the sickness stopped. I felt such relief I cried. My husband came down to find that I’d cooked him breakfast again, and he patted me on the head. “At last,” I told him. “It’s going to be all right.” When I went to pee later, there was blood everywhere. I screamed at him to phone an ambulance, but he pretended not to hear me. I had to crawl to my mobile, leaving a crimson smear across the cream carpet that never quite cleaned out. And they came, and they were nice, but tight-nice, forced smiles. They wouldn’t quite answer any of my questions. When you’re a journalist, that tells you that something is wrong. I knew long before they told me that my baby had stoppedgrowing.

  Jackie Aspley, thedailypost.com

  COMMENTS [most popular]:

  Naheed: ‘Jackie, as your ex-husband I’ve long kept my peace. But this is it. You’ve gone too far. You had an abortion. I’ve got the paperwork to prove it. That’s why we got divorced.’

  Read all 1468 comments

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT TAKES A VILLAGE OF IDIOTS

  THE INTERNET KNOWS everything. search.me had been set up to prove it. It was one of internet pioneer Henry Jarman’s pet projects that he’d thrown himself into and then thrown himself out of five minutes later.

  search.me was simple. ‘Want advice? search.me.’That was the first slogan, and that’s how it worked. You asked for advice, and the site gave it to you. Chat-app, forum, wiki, something in-between. From the early days here are the top threads:

  • Should I adopt a cat?

  • Is it worth repairing a toaster?

  • What’s the best way to order delivery pizza?

  • What the flip is an HDMI cable?

  • Do fake iPhone chargers work?

  • My baby’s not sleeping!!! HELP!!!

  Men in sheds swapped tips with breast-feeding moms. Earnest Indian postgrads debated jam recipes with members of the NRA. In the early days, it was a success. An early review was: “Hillary Clinton once said it takes a village to bring up a kid, but when they’ve grown up, they’ll need search.me.” You know how it is. It burbled along.

  Its first big hit was later described by Upworthy as, ‘This lesbian teen threatens suicide. What happens next will choke you up.’ A devout Muslim teenager in Afghanistan was outed at school as a lesbian. She ran home to kill herself before her family found out, pausing only to search.me. The site saved her life. Literally. At first it was a lesbian in Denmark, who, despite the piercings and the hair, turned out to also be Muslim, and then a whole flood of other people offering advice and heartfelt pleas. Then it was a worker at a local aid
agency who had swiftly arranged a safe house for her. And then James Blunt posted a YouTube song (he later admitted, with admirable candour, he’d just got in absolutely off-his-tits and had no idea of what he’d done). But anyway, Aisha was soon safe and well and everyone felt good about themselves and could get on with talking about how good James Blunt looked playing the guitar in his pants. Even if his eyes were a little crazy and his t-shirt had half a kebab on it.

  Those were the early days of search.me, when Henry Jarman was still talking it up. ‘SIMPLE. THIS IS SAVING LIVES PPL’ was one of his early statements about it.

  But things shifted rapidly, especially as more people found out about it, and more journalists started to write about it (‘Is search.me Google for the people?’ was one pretty meaningless headline).

  One problem is that there’s actually a fairly finite number of common questions (‘How do I poach an egg?’), but, as more people start using a service, those same questions will be asked over and over again, leading to a sense of entitled weariness from more established users (‘Im closing this post as duplicate,’ ‘Pls see earlier thread on Eggs, Poaching,’ ‘HOW MANY TIMES? WERE NOT GOOGLE,’ ‘Why does idiots never bother searching first?’ and ‘Will you please change the sidebar text from “This question gets asked often” to “This question is asked often”?’). In fact, when setting up the site, Jarman had ensured that you’d have to be visiting really regularly to see the same questions, or actively searching for them. In other words, people were using the site to go and find things to be angry about.

  The other drawback is that, while common questions were common, the uncommon ones really were out there. ‘Best way to get child porn legally?’ was actually quite uncommon, but it was the classic example used against the service. When he’d set up the search.me Henry Jarman had said “No question is off-limits” and “We’ve an answer for everything.” When people started insisting he revise this, he dug his heels in, going in three easy stages from freedom of speech to censorship to ‘THIS IS LIKE THE NAZIS BURNING BOOKS.’ Underneath the CAPS LOCK he kind of had a point. He’d designed the site so that you’d only find information on child porn if you searched the site for it. Plus, he produced screenshots to show that, actually, you’d get pretty similar information to if you searched on Google. “Some things we’re not the best place to look for stuff. Child porn’s one of them,” he admitted gleefully to journalists.

  But that still didn’t stop the finger-pointing. For a while it seemed as though a good way to fill in a dull afternoon at a newspaper was to unearth the more fringe questions on search.me. There was also a fair amount of deliberate trolling. Again, Jarman dismissed all this with lofty disdain. “Yeah, yeah, we’ve got recipes for cooking with faeces. But you have to go looking for them,” he said, prompting a lot of people to go looking for them.

  THEN CAME THE search.me suicide club. After the case of the noble Aisha, troubled teenagers flocked to search.me for help in their darkest hours. Bearing in mind what I’ve said about the community becoming intolerant of having the same questions asked over and over again, it was only a matter of time before some of the regulars became annoyed that the site which was predominantly for diets/recipes/work-out tips/porn/technical cables/cat care became swamped, in their eyes, with emoji-strewn posts from wretched goths. E.g.:

  MY BOYFRIEND TOOK MY VIRGINITY, FILMED IT, SHARED IT, THEN DUMPED ME. I WANNA DIE :(

  go on then

  yeah. It’ll show him

  search.me/painless methods of suicide

  search.me/music to kill yourself to

  serach.me/eatshit & DIE!!! :):)

  hey, you know that video will never go away, don’t you, no matter what you do, slut?

  Good point RJ. That stuff sticks to the internet like shit.

  YEAH. You’ll always be TEEN WHORE.

  Pray none from your school go to college with you, or it’ll go with you

  Anyone posted it to your Facebook yet?

  You Facebook friends with your mum? :)

  32 paracetamol. And... GO!

  Are you kidding? Paracetamol are IDIOTIC. Even this dumb bitch wouldn’t take them?

  Paracetamol is a horrid way to kill yourself. You may wonder why you don’t see it used in suicide attempts more often in medical shows. The reason is that, a few years back, quite a few shows featured plotlines showing what an awful and horrendously slow form of suicide it was, hoping to deter people. Instead, it saw rates of attempted suicide by paracetamol rise.

  If they can save you, there’ll probably be terrible internal damage. If they can’t save you, it may take you days to die in agony.

  And that’s what happened to this teenager. Julie Dreyfuss, barely fifteen. Lying in a hospital bed, sobbing as her body slowly shut down, rejecting all the possible treatments, and screaming in pain. And worse, with her iPad by her. Reading the search.me forums reacting to the news of her attempt. And telling her she’d made a stupid mistake. She answered a few.

  Her parents, by the way, visited the hospital to drop off her phone and charger. And then didn’t come back.

  BY THIS POINT, Henry Jarman had sold the site and moved on, so he felt fairly safe in condemning what had happened in CAPS LOCK. He also issued an open letter to the people who were running the site:

  Hey Joel and Lucas,

  How are things? I imagine the last couple of days have been pretty tough. My first piece of advice to you is to hang in there—search.me is a thing of real value, and you guys have done a great job in building on my foundations to make it a really vibrant community.

  The problem with any community is that there are bound to be a few village idiots. They shout loudly, but don’t mean a thing. They’re only harmful when they become policemen. I know you guys hate a back-seat driver, but if I can offer a bit of friendly advice, it seems as though the wrong people have now got too loud a voice. And, as I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a bad thing.

  When we started search.me, we could keep them under control. But it’s a much bigger beast now, and our hydra has grown quite a lot of heads, and some of them are stupid. In the early days we always resisted calls to curtail the site’s freedoms, but I think we can all agree that the tragic events of the last few days have shown us that there are some things that search.me shouldn’t be offering advice on. I know there’ll be some out there who cry foul, or censorship, but I really think we should redirect any queries about suicide to organisations like the Samaritans. They’re experts. We’re just mostly well-meaning people with opinions. And some village idiots who should feel ashamed of themselves.

  I hope you won’t take offence at the above. It really is meant kindly. I’ll close by reminding you of one of the few bits of Latin everyone knows is, ‘Who Watches The Watchers?’

  Yours, Henry Jarman

  ONE OF THE other bits of Latin everyone knows is ‘et tu Brute?’ Henry had neatly distanced himself from the site, offered advice he wouldn’t have dreamed of following when he was in charge, and not used caps lock once. There were some people who reckoned he’d hired a pretty good PR. Which he could afford to do. He’d made quite a lot of money from a site famous for offering kids advice about suicide.

  Joel and Lucas didn’t take the advice. The wrote back the following open letter:

  Hey Henry,

  Why not just email us next time?

  Love,

  Joel & Lucas

  They also issued a statement saying that they’d look into various measures, but also pointing out that, perhaps, the site wasn’t the best place to go to for advice on suicide. The problem was, just as paracetamol inexplicably thrives on bad publicity, so too did search.me. Troubled teenagers flooded it.

  As a columnist wrote, ‘Suicide attempts are a call for help. Sadly, that call is now being answered by fools.’ There were four deaths directly attributable to the site. There was also one case of animal cruelty after someone washed their puppy in bleach because someone on the site told them to.

/>   For the lulz.

  At about this point, a search.me user blogged about their experience of the site. ‘Basically, everyone’s getting the wrong end of the stick. Imagine Aslan, Batman and Gandalf all in a room with Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates and some brainy chick. That’s what search.me is—you know, we’re brain surgeons for the world. We could solve real problems. The thing is, people only really ask us for jam recipes.’ Well, I was going to give them a real problem.

  MY JOB WAS pretty simple. I had to teach search.me something it didn’t know. The problem was, as Mrs Beeton would say, that first you had to catch your fuckwit.

  This was easy. Of the people who’d goaded those kids to death there were at least six repeat offenders. All of them hid behind carefully constructed online personae, but—as with most people who were too clever for their own good—it was a fairly simple matter to track them down.

  HotToddy84 pretty much selected himself. He posted on a variety of subjects, including vintage electronic keyboards and being an Englishman in Germany. Turns out, ToddyHot84 was the startlingly similar username of an eBayer in Cologne, who sold parts for electronic keyboards, and, weirdly, scented candles.

  While search.me anonymises IP addresses, Wikipedia doesn’t. The Moog9000 wikipedia page had quite a few amendments from a user called HatTip84. The IP address checked out to a small IT support consultancy in Cologne. Their website listed one of their staff as a former Sodobus systems analyst called Todd Halpern. In an attempt to give their website a wacky personality it said that the Number 1 single when he was born was 99 Red Balloons. That would be in February 1984.