Haterz

by James Goss

  CATWALKING!

  NotGayTwins

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  TRANSCRIPT

  [On screen are two young, sandy haired ideals of youth. They are laughing as they put on t-shirts. The camera has just started rolling, missing them being fully topless but still providing a tantalising hint of flesh.]

  CAESAR: Hey, amazing! Allow your hating, we’re here!

  BRUTUS: Yes. We’re here, we’re here, and we’re not legally allowed to drink beer.

  CAESAR: But where are we, bro?

  BRUTUS: Well, bro, can you believe it?

  CAESAR: I cannot.

  BRUTUS: We are at an actual fashion shoot. With models. And pretty people.

  CAESAR: And us.

  BRUTUS: Speak for yourself, fatty.

  CAESAR: Speak for yourself, spotty.

  [They playfight, laughing. They do this knowing that their fight will be screencapped, giffed and pored over by their fans #somanyfeels #icanteven #brusar #caesus]

  BRUTUS: Today, we’ve been asked to do a catwalk show. AMAZE.

  CAESAR: Exactly. We’ll be draped out in the sickest fashions and learn to sashay and twirl with some upcoming hotwalking catwalking talent.

  BRUTUS: Brother, sick is like not a thing anymore. It’s shaming. All we have to do is promote the HEDZUP clothing brand.

  CAESAR: But that’s not a problem as we just love these clothes.

  BRUTUS: Love love love them!

  CAESAR: Stop that bro, you sound a bit gay.

  BRUTUS: Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  [They hug for the camera, knowing full well it’ll be turned into moah gifs #bromance]

  [Rapid montage, at first to a Lady Gaga track of the boys (frequently in pants) changing into various HEDZUP outfits. We repeatedly cut to the same Lady Gaga track, only being played by Brutus and Caesar on ukuleles. In their pants. #somanygifts]

  [Now Brutus and Caesar are wandering backstage at the HEDZUP show. Brutus is wearing a red wig, Caesar is wearing a blue one]

  BRUTUS: Here we are.

  CAESAR: Backstage at the fashion show.

  BRUTUS: How real?

  CAESAR: Much real.

  BRUTUS: Number of times we’ve been arrested?

  CAESAR: Actually literally zero.

  [Jump cut. On stage at the fashion show. Brutus playing the ukulele while Caesar sings “Yellow Submarine.” Models stride around them, seemingly without noticing.]

  [Brutus and Caesar are now interviewing one of the models. Katrin]

  BRUTUS: Believe this.

  CAESAR: I do not.

  BRUTUS: We are standing in our pants.

  CAESAR: Interviewing a model.

  KATRIN: In her pants. Hi internet!

  BRUTUS: Yeah. Hi, everyone. This! Is! Katrin!

  KATRIN: Hello.

  CAESAR: Have you been a model long?

  KATRIN: Well—

  BRUTUS: He means “Do you know who we are?”

  KATRIN: Sure.

  CAESAR: Cos you’re now mega famous on YouTube.

  BRUTUS: The haterz are so gonna hate you.

  [They already do. Should you check Katrin’s Twitter feed it is suddenly clogged with people calling her an unworthy whore.]

  KATRIN: But why would they hate me?

  CAESAR: Because I think you’re amazing.

  KATRIN: Really?

  BRUTUS: Dude, allow your libido.

  CAESAR: It’s fine bro. These pants are really tight.

  BRUTUS: Totes. It’s like rush hour on the Victoria Line down there.

  CAESAR: Hashtag London Joke.

  BRUTUS: So, Katrin, tell us what you’re doing later?

  KATRIN: Being a model. What about you?

  CAESAR: Playing the ukulele.

  BRUTUS: Man, our life sucks.

  TRANSCRIPT

  HELENA LLEWELLYN [producer My Mum Is Gonna Kill Me]:

  The thing we’re really doing with our show is trying to push back the boundaries, reach out to the streets and, in a platform-agnostic sense, grab hold of our demographic by really moving television beyond the fourth wall.

  JOSHUA PACKARD [aka ‘Jpac,’ star of YouTube and producer of Caesar & Brutus]:

  Even saying “moving beyond The Fourth Wall” is so old. Generation YouTube has only one wall. That’s our bedroom wall. That’s what you traditional television makers don’t understand.

  HELENA LLEWELLYN:

  [is about to say something. Stops. And sighs] You know what? Actually, I’m really tired of being told how do make television by ageing teenagers who can’t even afford a proper microphone.

  The Future of Television,

  Radio Four

  LET’S TALK ABOUT Thursday. It began with Amanda’s morning sickness taking a turn for the worse. She cancelled meeting me later in the village cafe.

  “I’m worried about Ray,” Amanda texted me. “He was up half the night. I think it’s work. Also, I’m the size of a jelly house.”

  That was fine. I had other plans.

  ELISE OLSEN SAT at her desk, watching her sons’ latest video. She felt a moment’s pride that she didn’t mind if anyone saw. She was really proud of them. Today was going to be a good day.

  AS A RESULT of the twins’ video, the HEDZUP website crashed. This was a good thing. There was no such label as HEDZUP. I’d simply mocked up a site, then bought some stuff from Primark and poster painted slogans onto it. It really was awful. But the thing was, Caesar and Brutus liked it. I’d paid them to say so.

  I SPENT THE day standing outside in the rain. I sold absolutely no subscriptions to kittens, kids or cancer. This was kind of handy as I’d actually made today’s charity up. There’s no such charity as Kittens With Cancer. And if there was, its logo certainly wouldn’t be a kitten with its tail turning into an IV drip. I’d been a bit bored.

  I kept the helicopter drone circling the building, gathering information.

  It wasn’t hard to spot Ray Richardson when he strode out of the office. For all its claims, Sodobus really wasn’t the most ethnically diverse company going. A good-looking black man in an expensive suit really stood out. Even if he did look dog-tired.

  I passed him a leaflet. He passed me a USB stick.

  “Inbox zero,” he whispered.

  From: Ray Richardson

  To: Elise Olsen

  Subject: URGENT

  Dear Elise,

  I’m afraid I won’t be in for the rest of the week. Amanda’s been taken into hospital. Looks like the baby’s coming early. Sorry if I’m not making much sense, been up all night. Appreciate this leaves you in the lurch, and apologies for that. Obviously, wouldn’t do this if we had any major product launches, and I’ve managed to clear my emails. The great thing about my team is that I know that you can rely on them. I’m obviously available to discuss this.

  Regards,

  Ray

  Sent from my iPhone

  FRIDAY WAS A lazy sunny day in the plaza. There was no sign of the helicopter in the sky. But there were two people chugging. No one really noticed them, even though one of them was black. After all, there’s nothing that unusual about a black man in a tabard, is there?

  The Sodobus screen was working exceptionally well that morning. Elise Olsen was startled, and then delighted to see it was playing the video of her sons at the fashion show. It was a bit off-brand, but then again, someone on Ray’s team was probably doing it to suck up to her. And, despite having no sense of humour, Elise had an enormous sense of pride. So she smiled anyway.

  WITH A LAST twang of the ukulele, the video of the two blonde teenagers at the fashion show stopped.

  ANOTHER VIDEO PLAYED. At first glance it seemed to be part of the same thing. It was the boys’ dressing room at the fashion studio, but filmed from a high angle. You could see the red and blue wigs on the floor. Along with the underpants. And there on the couch were the two brothers being vigorously naked with Katrin.<
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  “You are utterly amazing at that,” brayed Caesar.

  Katrin shrugged. “I’m French. We start young. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old, no?”

  “No,” breathed Brutus delightedly. “Best blowjob from a fourteen-year-old I’ve ever had.”

  “And he’s quite the virgin surgeon,” chuckled Caear. “Now, behold this. What would you call this? Masculine or feminine?”

  “Oh,” laughed Katrin. “Decidedly masculine.”

  The brothers laughed and then nothing much was actually said for a couple of minutes.

  “Hey,” said Katrin. “You know what would be cool? If you two kissed.”

  Caesar shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? We do it all the time.”

  “And more,” smiled Brutus.

  And then, the moment that over a million fans on YouTube had secretly prayed for finally happened but in a way that no-one wanted. Caesar and Brutus kissed.

  NOW, JUST TO put myself on the right side of this, Katrin was actually eighteen, not a model, and from Stoke Newington. She was an actress friend of mine. Throwing all caution to the wind, I’d approached her directly and paid her a lot of money. She promised me she actually had “a huge crush” on Caesar and Brutus, “even though they were so annoying. Rich Tory jailbait.” So, please don’t worry about her. She’s fine. Although her boyfriend was kind of furious.

  ELISE OLSEN STOOD at her window watching the video of her children. She’d stopped smiling. She turned away, and, as she left her office, she made a small noise. It was the tiny single sob she’d first made when the twins were babies and had both caught measles. Elise Olsen was going home. She was going to look after them.

  ELISE OLSEN STRODE through the square in a hurry, her silver hair catching the sunlight. She was looking anywhere but at the screen. Her eyes fell on me, at first not really seeing me at all, and then focusing sharply. And that’s when I recognised her. The figure I’d seen that first night, outside McDonalds in Leicester Square. Then, as now, she’d locked eyes with me briefly and hurried away. And I wondered...

  THE VIDEO PLAYED another time. If Sodobus was broadcasting child pornography, we may as well make absolutely sure people saw it. Thing is, I felt a little sorry for Brutus and Caesar. They were just posh white boys with a nice camera and fair deal of privilege. They were fairly harmless— that’s why people get to be YouTube stars. Not because they’re weird, or different, or have anything interesting to say. But because a lot of teenage girls and gay men quite like to see reasonably posh, quite pretty white boys talk about their problems and their hair.

  They really weren’t the most deserving targets. It’s just that I really needed their mother out of the way.

  A CROWD HAD gathered in the square. This is when the video screen really came into its own. It was controlled through an app. I knew already that Ray’s team were trying to log into it to turn it off, but I’d already found out the password and changed it. Even now they were raising it as an urgent call with IT, so I had about ten minutes before someone ran out to unplug it by hand.

  What could happen in ten minutes?

  I filled four of those minutes with a stream of emails gleaned from Sodobus employees over the last few days. Some of it was pure office trivia—affairs and petty theft and constructive dismissal and sex selfies and so on. But it worked. Start with the lurid gossip and you get everyone’s attention.

  Then I flicked through a few of the PowerPoint slides the firm wouldn’t want you to see. The slide that showed how they skewed job applications against people whose supposedly private medical records showed they’d had more than ten days of sickness in the last year. How they planned introducing pay-as-you-go televisions into prisons. How their recruitment staff had deliberately made nurses at a hospital redundant in order to hire in temporary staff from an agency run by Sodobus. How they ran a uniform dating website in order to keep tabs on the personal lives of contractors working in their hospitals, prisons and security forces.

  The list went on and pleasingly on, finishing with a flowchart that someone had helpfully produced to explain exactly how Sodobus cheated its tax bill, and an email from the head of HMRC personally approving the scheme.

  This left me with two minutes. And I betted that, by now, if I worked in IT for Sodobus, I wouldn’t be running from the building. I’d be strolling. Especially after we’d put up the slide about the plan to relocate the IT Helpdesk to Puerto Rico.

  So up I popped on the screen, in a recorded message. Filmed, curiously enough, in Sodobus’s offices the previous night.

  “HELLO, I’M DAVE. I kill people. I’ve spent the last year doing it. I thought I was doing it in order to make the world a better place, wiping out people who annoyed me on the internet. Actually, I was doing it for Sodobus. I didn’t even know I was working for them, acting on their orders. But everything I did was for them. I was even ordered to kill Henry Jarman. They’ve been making me get rid of people for two reasons. Firstly, it was a cheap way of wiping out those who were in the way. Secondly, they wanted to convince normal people—that’s you, hello—that the internet was something to be afraid of. That it’s causing the end of the world as we know it, and needs to be controlled. That was their plan. They were going to take over the internet.

  “For our own good. You may genuinely think that the internet is evil, that it’s making people full of hatred. Perhaps it is. Or perhaps we never were very nice and it’s just giving us a chance to be honest about it. Whatever happens, please don’t use me as an example. Not everyone who gets cross is going to start killing people. I know I’m the worst person in the world to offer you advice about how to behave online. But one thing I do know is that the internet loves a good quotation above anything else. So, my mother once said to me:

  “‘If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.’”

  YOU CAN KIND of guess the rest. With my remaining time, I pulled up the emails onto the screen. Amber’s crowdfunded Killuminati project, the proof of the transfers to it from Sodobus, the links to Michelle Fischer, the paper trail that fizzled out somewhere near (but still deniably far from) Elise Olsen’s office.

  Who was Michelle Fischer? If you looked her up on Facebook, you’d have discovered we had a one mutual friend. Amber. They’d been having drinks together, that first night. The night I’d killed Danielle. They’d been to university together. Amber was the fun one with all the cool friends. Michelle was the serious one who everyone knew would go get a proper job, who would ruthlessly trample over people to get ahead. I’d even passed Michelle in the street, muffled-up to take a photograph of me and Henry Jarman together.

  Inasmuch as there was anything to be behind, she’d been behind it all. But had she really done it all by herself?

  That was the annoying thing. There was actually no proof that Elise Olsen had directly come up with the plan, or instructed Michelle to carry it out. No one could be directly blamed. The funds had come from a marketing budget, just before it vanished at the end of a financial year. Elise notionally had control of it, but various people had sign off on it. I knew that in the ensuing court case, she would look older and tireder, but still maintain that she’d known nothing about it. Nothing about it at all.

  In fact, as far as the courts could determine, no one at all had known anything.

  It was almost as though Sodobus had accidentally paid me to put its enemies out of the way.

  I’ve said before there’s nothing at the heart of the internet. Not even a giant cat. But perhaps I was wrong.

  RAY RICHARDSON HAD heard my theories. He still thought I was a nutter. But today, on that lovely lazy day, he looked around him at the chaos we’d created together.

  “Sod you all,” said Ray Richardson, smiling. He took a photograph of the crowded plaza and texted it to his wife. She laughed and then went into labour.

  THAT ABOUT WRAPS it up, really. Jackie Aspley started getting work again. Partly because of her articles about I Dated the Int
ernet Serial Killer. And partly through the story of her remarkable marriage to Pastor John.

  I’D PREPARED TWO versions of my presentation. One which left Amber out of it. One which dropped her right in it. In the end I used the second one. And I’m completely happy about that. After all, she had used me and broken my heart. She and Guy have split up now. Well, no, they haven’t. That’s my last lie. He’s sticking by her through the court case, and says he’ll wait for her, until she gets out—if she gets convicted. Some people are just puppies, aren’t they? Of course, I don’t know the latest details. We’re no longer Facebook friends.

  RAY RICHARDSON CAME back from paternity leave early, as they’d placed him in charge of Sodobus [UK]. It was really the chance to be boss of a poison chalice, but he couldn’t pass it up. Amanda made that quite clear. Ray came out of both the internal enquiry and then the rather more thorough police enquiry with flying colours and smelling of roses. It could be shown that staff had been directed to not tell him anything about anything that mattered, and that there had been a deliberate policy to try and hang various scandals on him, all of which he’d spotted and flagged up.