Haterz

by James Goss

  Kevin @Kev00 ∙ 2h

  @BarneyDino Transphobic remarks I believe, also incidents with female guests stars.

  Barney the Dinosaur @BarneyDino ∙ 2h

  @Kev00 Not aware of his transphobia. Will look it up.

  Kevin @Kev00 ∙ 2h

  @BarneyDino Do so. Educate yourself. It’s another blow for the BoysClub of CrimeCon #SackCrass.

  Poor BarneyDino. He went out for a run (Twitter told me so) and a nice snack (Twitter told me this too). He came back in to find #SackCrass still going.

  Barney the Dinosaur @BarneyDino ∙ 22m

  I’m sure that, as host, whatever claims are made, Jarvis Chapman isn’t going to make fat or gay jokes.

  Cisyphus @Cisyphus1 ∙ 16m

  .@BarneyDino How many times, Transpeople ARE NOT GAY. TRANSPEOPLE ARE NOT GAY. #MistakesWhiteCisMenMake.

  Kevin @Kev00 ∙ 13m

  @BarneyDino hmmm does it matter whether he would have done them at the con, if he HAS done them elsewhere?

  Barney the Dinosaur @BarneyDino ∙ 10m

  @Cisyphus1 I wasn’t talking about any trans remarks specifically. I can only apologise.

  Cisyphus @Cisyphus1 ∙ 6m

  @BarneyDino At least you have the balls to apologise. Unlike some #SackCrass.

  Barney the Dinosaur @BarneyDino ∙ 4m

  @Kev00 @Cisyphus1 BUT I’ve yet to find any links to these remarks. Have you anything I can see?

  Kevin @Kev00 ∙ 2m

  @BarneyDino you miss my point. If X says things elsewhere does it matter that they won’t say them to your face?

  Barney the Dinosaur @BarneyDino ∙ 11s

  No, get your point @Kev00. I’m saying I haven’t seen evidence that he has said these things. Not disputing, just want to see it. Links pls?

  Of course, there was no answer from Kev00. This didn’t stop people repeating his accusations, and even adding to them. That’s not to say there wasn’t evidence of a sort—previously amusing gifs of some of Inspector ‘Crass’ Carmichael’s more famous catchphrases were pulled out and re-used against the actor playing him, frequently ‘#unfortunate’ because obviously they proved that, among other allegations:

  —he was racist

  —anti-semitic

  —homophobic and transphobic

  —sexist

  —had fat-shamed an actress shortly after she’d given birth

  —regularly hit or punched crew

  —bullied those who worked with him

  —shagged teenage fans

  —hired prostitutes on a fairly regular basis

  —had had an affair with a co-star and then had her fired

  Basically it was an endless list of accusations, and, because no evidence existed to directly contradict any of it, clearly all of it was true.

  SUDDENLY JARVIS CHAPMAN went from being one of the nation’s most beloved actors to a sinister, malodorous figure, one the cameras had clearly just caught on-set in a rare moment between prossie-shag and hate crime.

  POOR JARVIS CHAPMAN. The good thing about Twitter is that, while those on it assume they’re engaged in the most public flogging imaginable, a good ninety-seven percent of the population couldn’t give a shrugging toss. The bad thing is that, of the three per cent, a lot of them sat on news desks.

  BY THE NEXT morning, Twitter was feeling very pleased with itself, and sounding just a smidge like BoneyM’s ‘Rasputin,’ ‘WHY WON’T SOMEONE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS OUTRAGEOUS MAN?’ was fairly common. Very few people stopped to think that maybe the answer could be that he hadn’t done anything. But perhaps the establishment was colluding in the cover-up. ‘@MetPoliceUK Why persistent silence over #SackCrass? Chapman’s victims once again denied a voice.’

  The various police forces being @ed kept their peace. They’d realised that to even say that any allegations would be investigated would lead at least three papers to announce that the police had assembled a special task-force to investigate Jarvis Chapman.

  EVERYONE INVOLVED WAS now stuck, like a Cold War summit. As soon as Vampantha kicked off, Jarvis had about half an hour in which to say, ‘Well, I offered to do the awards as an unpaid favour. But fair enough, I won’t.’ There’d have been grumbling, but a lot of it would have gone in Vampantha’s direction. But now it was too late. If he pulled out, it would look like an admission of guilt.

  KetCrimeCon were also landed with a poison host who they’d previously assumed was a massive coup. A committee member had already posted an anonymous blog about how, despite their lone voice, there’d been much back-slapping and “this is putting Kettering on the map” from the committee “completely failing to investigate all the terrible allegations which have now come to light.” It was as though the KetCrimeCon committee were simultaneously prophets and the Sunday Times Insight Team. If KetCrimeCon dumped Jarvis, they’d look like they were confirming the allegations against him. So now Jarvis and Kettering were locked together in a grudging forced marriage. One that would take place next weekend with rather more of the world’s press in attendance than was normally expected at a small hotel in Kettering.

  Well done, Vampantha.

  THE HOTEL WASN’T even in Kettering, as it turned out. The building itself was a generic hotel, designed to give great views of the local landscape, but in this case unable to offer little more than a promising glimpse of the access road and a nearby industrial estate. A sign in reception displayed information about buses to catch to ‘Downtown Kettering,’ offering it up with all the seedy allure of nineteen-twenties Chicago.

  Hotel carpet zig-zagged in a migraine-inducing pattern in every direction as people tugged wheelie-luggage around and made the long-suffering sigh that Sir Edmund Hillary must have given out when finally capping Everest. Reception staff stood there, greeting everyone with the same empty smiles they’d offered out for the previous weekend’s Furry Convention.

  The staff were the only people smiling. On Friday morning things had just been settling down. Thanks to the Daily Mail doing something outrageous, the twitchmob had moved on. But at lunchtime, in order to remind everyone of her existence, Vampantha had tweeted that she looked forward to extending a welcoming olive-branch to Jarvis when she met him, and a lot of people had retweeted saying how magnanimous she was, like it was the Good Friday Agreement and he was a reformed terrorist.

  However, shortly after lunchtime, Jarvis’s wife left Twitter. A professional wedding florist, she’d spent most of the last week keeping her head down. As Jarvis wasn’t on Twitter, a fair amount of invective had come her way, but she’d ignored it. And then:

  Maggie @Magzzz83 ∙ 8m

  .@BloominChaps A friend processing yr adoption says they’ve turned you down cos you married a WHOREBANGER #NoBaby4U lol.

  Friday afternoon is when the offices of the world piss around on the internet. They’re hungry for distraction to get them through the sleepy slog from two pm to half five. Anything will do—a quiz about ‘Which Dead German Are You?’ or a cat Tumblr, or the tupperware lid being lifted on a juicy bit of scandal.

  Magzzz83’s tweet was soon retweeted everywhere, sometimes prefixed with a ‘HORRIFIED’ disclaimer.

  Jarvis Chapman’s wife did the smart thing. She didn’t reply, but deleted her account, phoned her lawyer, and then did a lot of crying while cutting the stalks of expensive flowers far too short. Jarvis Chapman took a phone call from her and left the set, his thunderous face caught by a pap as he got into a cab.

  Meanwhile, every single tabloid newssite saw the tweet for the gold it was. From ‘JARVIS: MY BABY AGONY’ to ‘Horrific privacy breach reveals child heartbreak of TV’s Crass.’ Have cake, eat cake, pen column about why cake shouldn’t have been eaten, speculate about whether the cake is a lie, and then write an open letter to the cake.

  MAGZZZ83’S TWEETS WENT private. The social services department in Hampstead announced they wouldn’t comment while letting it be known that a member of staff was now under investigation.

  Vampantha moved quickly to d
istance herself from Magzzz83 and express her horror. “Malicious attacks? Get the hell away from me. Seriously. I don’t know you.” She then went on to talk at some length about her own infertility woes and subsequent suicide attempts.

  And the few members of the press who weren’t already heading to Kettering hastily booked themselves tickets on the train.

  Vampantha had played a blinder and she knew it. Standing on the flattened ziggurat of hotel carpet, she wore her triumph with the humble dignity of a funeral director.

  I tried to get up to her, to tell her how well she’d played this, but of course she blanked me. There was a gaggle of people around her, and she was dressed like a Valkyrie. Regally, she treated the lobby as an antechamber to her inevitable coronation.

  Of course she won. I’ll hurry through the obvious stuff first. Jarvis Chapman turned up to present the awards, ashen and furious. He refused to answer any press questions on the way in and strode into the hall chewing bees and clearly wishing the whole hotel swallowed even further into hell than Kettering.

  Naturally the event started late and everything went horridly wrong. First the committee stood on stage and gave short speeches that dragged unappealingly, margarine spread into every corner of the slice of bread. Then Jarvis was finally introduced. The president of KetCrimeCon tried to say something smooth and instead said, “After somewhat of a tough week for him and for us, we’re delighted to welcome Jarvis on stage to present this year’s awards. Phew.”

  You know, it was one of those sentences that meant well but ended up there.

  Jarvis lurched on stage, and couldn’t get through his dreadful ordeal fast enough. There was some polite applause. Mercifully no one booed. But naturally, the microphone didn’t work. Then the backup microphone failed. And Jarvis stood there with a seasick grin. Instead of looking like a dashing leading man in his mid-forties, he just looked small, untidy, tired and in desperate need of a hug.

  He’d carefully prepared his opening remarks to look spontaneous, but by the time he got to serve them up they were stale. His casualness looked forced, his guarded swipes at the press were blunted, and his thanks to everyone for his warm welcome looked chilly.

  He pushed on through the awards, slogging away with the determination he’d used during a disastrous touring pantomime. His performance was actually pretty good—he’d clearly read all the winning entries and most of the nominations, and if anyone had really been listening, they’d have been impressed by how much he knew about crime fiction. But everyone was just waiting for him to put a foot wrong.

  Anyway, finally the time came to crown Vampantha. A few weeks before she had been a punchline to every joke about self-published crazy people, but now she was a powerful voice whose time had come and who had exposed a villain.

  Best eCrime wasn’t the final award of the ceremony, but everyone knew it was the only one that mattered. Jarvis handled the announcement with wry sincerity. He wasn’t even at all sarcastic when he said “It gives me great pleasure to announce that the winner is... Vampantha, for A Rubber Of Velvet.”

  Of course there was lots of applause. Of course the cameras clicked, catching every moment, hoping there was a gesture where he looked ill-at-ease or sneering at her triumph. But Jarvis’s face stayed rigidly composed, and he shook Vampantha’s hands warmly. He didn’t try and hug her, or do anything that would appear to be a misstep.

  She leaned in to say something, and she was smiling warmly. A few cameras caught a slight frown on his face, but she was away and Jarvis was there alone, seemingly a little shaken, picking up the next envelope and moving on to a lifetime achievement award that no one cared about.

  If the microphones missed it at the time, a deaf viewer caught a YouTube video of it and tweeted what she’d said. “Seriously hard dealing with a woman with brains, isn’t it?”

  That got a lot of retweets and applause. Someone stuck it on a t-shirt. Vampantha courteously denied she’d said anything of the sort. But still. T-shirt.

  OUTSIDE IN THE vast migraine of a lobby, photographers demanded a picture of Jarvis with Vampantha, and reporters pressed for an interview. But, while Jarvis handed out the last couple of awards, Vampantha had already done a Queen of Sheba sweep, progressing up into a lift advertising the hotel’s ‘imaginative’ breakfast buffet. Finally, Jarvis was on his way through and out, grim as a hangover. He wavered in front of the pack, wondering whether he should say something or not. The whole thing just struck him as so bizarre that perhaps he should just... and then a journalist pressed forward, her face harder than it needed to be at such a young age. “Is it true,” she asked. “Is it true that your wife’s just taken a load of kids’ toys to Oxfam?”

  Jarvis Chapman left KetCrimeCon without another word.

  I WASN’T THE only person sticking around to witness this triumph. At the back of the lobby hung a downlit pencil drawing depicting a thatched cottage and water wheel, with a lonely miller making his weary way home to his dumpling wife, his footsteps weaving through scratching graphite chickens. Underneath the art was a sofa that no-one had ever put their feet up on to read the Sunday papers. Perched on the sofa—you could only really perch on it, not sit; it was pretty much a bus-stop bench clad in the minimum of blue leather—perched on the sofa was a little nothing of a man making a great play of checking his phone on the hotel’s free-in-the-lobby wifi.

  As I sauntered past he was looking at me. I nodded, and, for something to say, managed, “Funny day, isn’t it?”

  He gave that sort-of-grunt that people do when they don’t want to talk, but don’t want to seem exactly rude, and carried on checking his phone. Tap, tap, swipe. Tap, tap, swipe. But he was still watching me. I carried on walking, aware of his gaze not quite on me. Was he someone working for my mysterious Killuminati? Was that it?

  Someone else busied past me, one of the tireless convention martyrs, jammed into an unflattering gilet printed with the convention name. She was all about the lanyard, flacking it about as though she was both Mulder and Scully. She plonked herself down on the sofa, which gave a little plastic fart, and tumbled speech at the man. “What a day I’ve never known a KetCrimeCon like this I’ve been picking up guests from the station since seven but mind you I didn’t get to sleep till two but then I never do at CrimeCon you don’t do you and the press so demanding so awful and they took my picture and asked me what I thought they won’t use it of course but I hope I did the right thing I said the committee had worked hard and the awards would go to the winners and isn’t Vampantha marvellous she is ever so marvellous isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said the man without looking up from tap, tap, swipe. “She is.”

  I wandered away, his eyes boring into me. It took me two minutes to discover he was the chair of the judging panel. And then I remembered him. I’d seen him in pictures on a mantlepiece. He was the man Vampantha had been having lunch with in Nando’s. Her husband.

  IN THE WHIRL of being a media darling, Vampantha hadn’t got around to unfriending me on Facebook, so I was able to see that she was friends with Derek Ayres. At first glance Derek only shared his Facebook with friends, but there was still a surprising amount to see about Derek and Vampantha.

  Up until a few years ago Derek had combined being regional sales executive for Sodobus with running a reasonably successful ebook imprint as a hobby. In 2012 that had all changed.

  Vampantha had gone to Kettering CrimeCon in 2012 looking for a publisher, and ready to do anything to acquire one. During the debacle over the reviews of A Rubber Of Velvet, before Vampantha became a feminist hero, various blog-posts had made catty remarks along the lines of, ‘It seems anyone can stuff themselves into a basque these days and call themselves an author. This book reads like the kind of thing written by someone who handed out backrubs and handjobs to get where they are.’

  A notably owlish and monkishly asexual critic who also ran an imprint had popped up on quite a lively thread to announce, ‘My dears, even I got one. And I’m rather gay
. But you know, never one to turn down a freebie. Chin-chin.’

  Derek Ayres had been Vampantha’s ‘mission accomplished.’ He was the first one to offer her a publishing contract at his ebook imprint. Derek was also the head of KetCrimeCon’s award committee.

  VAMPANTHA WAS CLEARLY a genius at pulling things off. She’d rehabilitated her reputation, she’d engineered an award for herself, and she’d managed to do it in such a blaze of publicity that she’d completely cast into the shadows any question of how she’d managed to win the award. She was the justly-lauded authoress who had somehow been abused by the vile Jarvis Chapman.

  And the whole thing was a hoax, one that had smeared Jarvis, and done real harm to his career and his family.

  But I knew enough to smash it all wide open.

  ONE THING I’D forgotten though. The quiet eyes of Derek Ayres watching me as I walked away.

  VAMPANTHA HAD A final tug the next day. As Kettering CrimeCon hadn’t booked any leading female crime authors that year, she’d been invited onto lots of panels in order to make sure they weren’t all slightly wizardy men with beards. Vampantha didn’t mind being the token woman on a panel. In fact, she thrived on it. Until her recent sainthood, many people muttered “oh, God, not HER again” while bemoaning that more established female crime authors ran a mile from being on a panel with Vampantha. As one put it in an interview, “You know, I’ve written a dozen bestsellers translated into a dozen languages and one was even made into a god-awful film in Japan. I think I’m doing quite well for myself. So it’s a bit hard being lectured on How To Succeed As An Author by a pamphleteer” (after Vampantha’s award, she had to apologise, and the two were later pictured having a particularly grim tea).