Haterz (14 page)

A typical pattern of Twitter would start with Romeo being:

@victim1—hey, in townsies tonight! You around for a quick natter? #RomeoLonelio.

@victim2—here’s me having a brilliant time with @victim1. Thanks for lending him. Your so lucky.

Megabus megaexcited seeing @victim1 and @victim2 #cocktails.

Three tired fellas lolz.

HazTheSadz, back to real life #Wolverhampton. Thx @victim1 @victim2.

Hey @victim1 @victim2 how dare you go on holiday without me!?? :)

Comparing tanlines with @victim1 @victim2.

Duvet hogging with @victim1 @victim2.

Sorry @victim1, used all of yr moisturiser. @victim2 said it wld be ok!!

@victim1 where are you? Out with @victim2 :(

#drinkies with @victim1 while @victim2 works to pay for #drinkies.

Must get job in the big smoke so I can spend more time with @victim2 @victim1.

And on it went. Fucksake, he was only twenty-three, and he’d gone through the coupled gays of London like nits through a primary school. Romeo had to be stopped.

I
HAD TO
build a honey trap. I had never done this before. Sketching it out idly, I got:

1. be gay

2. invent perfect boyfriend

3. laugh about our wonderful lives on Twitter

4. get Romeo’s attention with some foreign travel and a whiff of money

5. and then...

6. something.

7. I mean, not kill him. Really, that’s not the answer to everything.

First, where to get a boyfriend? I needed to do this quickly. Tricky. As far as I could tell, it took real gays weeks and sometimes months to do it, and they needed to have a lot of sex. I needed to get a boyfriend fast, and without the sex.

I stuck my toe in the water and joined a gay dating site, and targeted the profiles which said, ‘I’m not looking for sex.’ They sent me pictures of their genitals, so I figured I’d misunderstood something. Also, I’d been hasty here. The problem with getting a ‘real’ boyfriend is that they were real, therefore they’d become aware of Romeo, and so a little suspicious if he suddenly vanished. Especially when I vanished at about the same time. Not that I was definitely planning on killing him, but, you know, if it became absolutely necessary then I was setting myself up with an extra complication here. So.

I then thought about hiring a male escort. I figured it would be a relief for them, just to pop round for the odd drink and a chat and no actual sex. But they turned out to be horrifically expensive. And there was also the danger that they’d wonder why I was insisting on taking so many photographs of us together. Aside from the paper trail of bank details and transactions, if they ever actually met Romeo they’d fall foul of his divide-and-conquer routine—he’d be bound to try and see them without me and then it would either all come out, or I’d get a huge bill the next day for services repeatedly rendered.

So, I turned to the giant banks of online stock photographs trying to find happy gay couples, one of whom looked a little like me. The problem was, no-one looks like stock photo models. Once I’d spent a fortune on plastic surgery and special Hollywood teeth, I’d then have to explain why me and Geraldo spent our entire time high-fiving each other on beaches at sunset. Or, on the rare occasions that we had rows, we’d do it in our immaculately tidy kitchen and get someone to take photographs. Also, stock photo models only ever wear their jumpers tied round their neck, like they’re advertising the 1980s or something. And I’d either have to buy the pictures or explain away all those watermarks.

With stock photos out, I was starting to feel a little desperate. And then, thank the gods, I stumbled across #TeamGeeks. A whole tribe of gays who spend all of their time saying, ‘I am such a geek.’ They take so many pictures of themselves, reading comic books, drinking posh coffee, walking someone else’s Pug, all the while pulling ‘Quizzical Face.’ Quizzical Face is best described as half ‘look at little me’ and half ‘I’m having a stroke.’ So I suppose ‘look at little me having a stroke.’ That sounds smutty. I’ll start again. If you want to try it for yourself, hold up a coffee mug as though you’ve never seen one before and then raise one eyebrow at an imaginary camera. There you go. That’s ‘look at little me having a coffee, don’t mind if I do.’ It works equally well with running marathons, hot air ballooning, open sandwiches, going on a rollercoaster or taking the Northern Line.

The fantastic thing about Quizzical Face is that everyone doing it looks a little bit alike.

The other great thing about #TeamGeek is that they all have beards. All I had to do was get a tufty beard. Pull Quizzical Face. Buy the cheapest web designer glasses Specsavers offered. And I could pretend to be one.

Oh, and buy a
Star Trek
uniform. The ultimate #TeamGeek achievement appeared to be getting a fairly identical boyfriend, dressing up in
Star Trek
uniforms and pulling quizzical faces together. Like you were a mirror image of yourself all grown up telling yourself that your lonely childhood was all okay now.

Brilliant. I could steal a whole wodge of photos, and no-one could tell. Even better, it’s fairly easy to photoshop yourself in a
Star Trek
uniform and stick yourself into a picture. Or, if you’re feeling lazy, just paste your head over someone else’s in a
Star Trek
uniform. See also, onesies. Because yes, #TeamGeek wear a lot of onesies, still. It’s like they’ve signed an unholy pact with Primark to keep the fashion going.

While I grew my beard, I assembled my fake identity. I would be Markus, because I’d always fancied that as a name. My boyfriend would be Trent. He would be an online interface designer. I would be a digital strategy manager. No one really knows what either of these jobs is, but it involves buying things from Apple geniuses and drinking a lot of coffee. We’d met on
Guardian Soulmates
—or in the column thing that they still run which is mostly about quite nice women in their early twenties meeting awful men who work in Shouting and have a thoroughly miserable time. (She: “I would quite like to meet him again, I think. Perhaps.” He: “She didn’t shout enough.”) I mocked up a column for Markus and Trent. We’d met, had quite a 7 out of 10 time, but bonded over the bad service from the wine waiter, and revealed that we each thought the other was ‘a nice kisser.’ A snap of the article was my first Tweet as Markus. Trent was all ‘omg you haven’t posted that LOL’ and things went from there. Over time Trent got a bit less like a cheerleader as I got the hang of the two of them.

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

F
ROM 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.

“T
HERE’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.

A
NYWAY.
I
T 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.