Haterz (32 page)

“I’m here because I love High Visibility Kevin!” (some screams) “As much as you do!” (more screams) “If not more!” (boos) “No, no. I am their real number-one fan, and I’m going to prove it.”

There was interest from the music bloggers by this time. A few of them were filming the video on their phones. They knew enough about the industry to know that it was possible to capture the live stream at source and convert it to a video file and upload it... but that it also relied on asking a favour of someone in the office the next morning who already had their day planned out and would probably just about do it at lunch time. So they were better off slapping up the shaky-phone cam feed at once and then sorting it out properly later. Doing things properly takes time, and the internet has taught us that none of us have time.

(Remember when you were young adverts said, ‘Please allow 28 days for delivery?’ Can you imagine if anyone tried that shit now?)

Anyway, I was about to offer everyone in the room something interesting.

“L
ET’S JUST CHECK,
shall we—can all the numberone fans give a massive shout out?”

All the fans shouted out.

“Would you do anything for the band?”

Massive shrieks.

“Now then, who here pirated the album?”

Two people shouted. In the semi-defiant, semi-sheepish way that people do.

“Cool. Just two of you out of a hundred?”

There was muttering.

“I’ve a word for you naughty guys. Proxies. Good luck trying to find me, because I’m hiding behind seven of them. But what about you lot?”

Names started scrolling across the screen. People muttered. Some called out when they saw their names, or cried for the ticker to stop so that they could take a picture of their name.

“Okay. Cool. These are the names of people in this room who pirated the album. Who stole it.”

Some of the people crying to see their names on screen again stopped.

“Yeah. Thought so.”

There was muttering.

“Now, the thing about you all is that it was pretty easy to find you. I’ll tell you how. This’ll get boring, but here we go. You told Facebook you were going. I could use that list of names to find usernames on blogs and torrent sites. I could also use that list to find out where you lived on the electoral register. And, of course, I already knew that you’d be out tonight.”

The camera panned back. And back. “It’s been a bit of a rush job, I’ll admit. Seven of you, well done on your home security arrangements. Two of you, brilliant news about your dog. The rest of you... well...”

By now the camera showed the pirate figure was standing in a floodlit supermarket car park. A pretty empty car park. Apart from a couple of sofas.

“You’ve had a car boot sale. Of the contents of your homes. Everything I could cram into a few trips in an easyVan.”

There was muttering and shouts and howls.

Amber burst out laughing.

“You fans, you said you’d do what you could for the band. Well, we’ve made quite a lot of money. On behalf of High Visibility Kevin, I’d like to thank you. And with that, perhaps a round of applause for the band and an encore? Goodnight.”

The projector snapped off, there was another howl of feedback.

But the band didn’t play.

Instead a fight broke out. Some people were fighting to get to the stage. Other people were fighting to hold them back. I’d like to say something simple like, “The people who had had their stuff stolen were trying to get it back and the people who hadn’t pirated the album wanted to stop them,” but really it was a melee of screaming and shouting and spilled drinks and fists.

Up on stage, as a dozen camera phone flashes went off, High Visibility Kevin were trying to work out the right facial expressions for this occasion. I can tell you now that no one got it right. But that it didn’t matter.

And, in the middle of the crowd, most of a pint on his jumper, stood Guy. And he didn’t look pleased.

S
O, NOW, HERE’S
the aftermath.

Amber and the band had enough nous (thanks to the drummer having most of a law degree) to rush out a statement saying they had no idea about the burglaries and that they would not be accepting any of the money, and urging people who had got things from the car boot sale to return them. It wasn’t a terribly successful campaign. I’d sold off quite a few PlayStations for two quid a pop.

The webcast was quite the hit. The camera phone replays and then the proper video clips went into a lot of places. Digital Spy, HuffPo, BuzzFeed. UsVsTh3m did a little game where you could supermarket sweep round a fan’s house. It was only reasonably popular since it didn’t feature any cats. There were a few arguments about what kind of crime had taken place.

Naturally, I’d screwed up. When you’re carrying out so many burglaries in a frantic hurry dressed as a pirate, you’re going to put a foot wrong. I’d emptied the wrong bedroom in a shared house, and naturally, there was a lot of noise about this is why vigilante justice is the wrong thing. Guiltily, I made sure the victim received an anonymous envelope of cash, but he curiously made no mention of this fact to anyone.

Actually, this worked out in my favour, as, when his housemate found the envelope, she then called the police, so the utterly innocent housemate was, for a while, held up as the possible suspect. It helped that he was about my height and build and had once gone to a party dressed as a pirate. Serves the cheeky sod right.

The really important outcome was High Visibility Kevin. Their record label rang to invite them to a meeting in their ex-garage and offered to pick up their contract. High Visibility Kevin told them to take a running jump, as they’d already received another offer. A lot of bits of paper were waved about. Turned out record-label-in-a-garage had lawyers who worked in a shiny glass office. But then, so too did HiVizKev’s new label.

New label rushed out the album (now retitled
Heavily Torrented Album
). The physical CDs looked home-duplicated and someone from the band wrote the album name in a sharpie on each one. Well, at least that was true for the first thousand or so copies. The handwriting was quite nice on the first few, and then really a bit shaky by the end.

Heavily Torrented Album
sold really well, especially on CD. Which then generated a further gale of blogs and comment pieces. Did this prove that piracy had no effect on sales after all? Was this a rebirth of the physical medium for music? Should we think it was all an elaborate publicity stunt? Where were the truths and where were the lies? Who were the winners and the losers?

T
HERE WAS ONE
final outcome.

I got a black eye.

“W
OW
,” I
SAID.
Actually, I didn’t even say that. I wondered who was making the squealing noise for a bit, then realised it was me and slowly picked myself up off the lino in the hall. I was rubbing my eye.

“Don’t rub your eye,” said Amber, “it’ll get bloodshot.”

“You just punched me in the face,” I pointed out. It really hurt.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. She was still standing on my doorstep. Through my one working eye I could see that she looked expectant.

“Come in?” I asked, hesitantly.

Amber leaned against the doorframe and breathed out, a really long, angry breath.

“Sure,” she said.

W
E WENT INTO
the living room. She was shouting. I was trying to think straight. Truthfully, there was a lot of pain going on in my face. Like I’d stubbed my toe. But all over my face.

For a moment or two I wondered if the Killuminati had tipped her off. But from the amount of shouting she was doing, I guessed that no, that wasn’t it at all. She’d managed to work it out for herself. Which was, in its own way, chilling. Would she be able to work out what else I’d done if she put her mind to it? Or would I, by some lucky chance, be okay?

I
MEAN, OVERALL,
it had been quite a successful stunt. No one had been killed. Amber had her career again. I’d even managed to make a few points that people had taken seriously. It was a good thing, really. Just about.

Only, of course, you could argue that it was my most successful crime yet. You could argue that it was my least successful crime yet, as it was the one where I’d got caught.

I stood there, rubbing my eye and trying to make sense of my brain and hoping that Amber would just shut up for a minute as my face really really hurt and the cat was whining for food or something and I tried to explain and—

—
ANYWAY, WE WERE
kissing. Which was utterly weird. You know when you kiss someone for the first time and your arms go down and slide around them? Well, when one arm is glued to your eye by the pain, that doesn’t happen, so instead the other one over-compensates and it’s all stupid and weird because this is the moment that you’ve really hoped for for a really really long time and there it is with you looking like you’re miming ballroom dancing while watching a 3D movie and somewhere in-between all this nonsense is the reality that you’re kissing the girl of your dreams and—

Actually rather brilliant. Well—

“W
HAT THE HELL
?”

Guy was standing in my flat. I didn’t remember inviting him in. But then I didn’t remember closing the front door.

“I knew something was going on. I just knew it. You’re my oldest mate.” Like a lot of what Guy says, there always seems to be about two words missing, but you get the point. To kind of emphasise it, he punched me in the other eye.

S
O THERE WE
all were in my living room.

There was Amber, standing there sort of slapping Guy.

There was Guy, kind of kicking me.

There was me, rolling around on the floor, hands cupped over my eyes, wishing I wasn’t being kicked.

There was the cat, weaving around all of us in a ‘hey gurl, this is interesting, also, hungry’ way.

T
HIS WAS THE
point that someone else walked into the living room.

“I hope you don’t mind,” they said, and I tried to identify the voice. It was familiar, but my hands really wouldn’t move from my eyes. “The door was open, so I came in.”

“You couldn’t shut the door?” I whined.

“Sorry, man,” said Guy. He sounded sincere, even though he was still, I noticed, kicking me.

“What the hell are you doing on the floor?” said the voice.

I opened my eyes and groaned.

It was Jackie Aspley.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LOVE AND WAR

J
ACKIE HAD CHANGED.
Gone was the look of a scarecrow trying to run a charity bookshop. She was wearing a tight-fitting dress, an expensive coat, and hair that had a personal trainer. Her make-up was impressive, in the same way that you might say a pickled sculpture by Damien Hirst or spray-painted concrete by Banksy was impressive.

“Woah,” I said.

Jackie surveyed the scene. Which, let’s face it, was mostly me rolling around whimpering.

“Is that bit undamaged?” she asked. Guy shrugged, and Jackie landed a sharp kick somewhere around my ribs. As I lay there bleating, she took in the room, then picked up my cat and made a fuss of it.

“You precious little fuzz baby, your daddy took some finding,” she said. “But I managed it.”

“Who is this?” asked Guy

“Yeah,” said Amber. She didn’t sound impressed.

B
UGGER.

We’ve all heard of the prisoner’s dilemma, even if it never makes any sense. But this is the coward’s nightmare. There were three people in the room, none of whom I could tell the entire truth to. Or even a safe partial truth.

I couldn’t tell Jackie and Guy I was in love with Amber, I couldn’t tell Guy I murdered his old girlfriend, I couldn’t tell Amber I’d once lived with Jackie under an assumed name. And I certainly couldn’t tell
any
of them that I’ve been killing off the most annoying people on the internet with the support of a sinister faceless syndicate.

One of the great lessons in life is that everyone wants to say something and no-one really wants to know what you think. The number of times when you actually have to say anything is quite small. Even when you’re being directly questioned, whatever you say will simply be taken as a confirmation of whatever it is the person talking at you has already decided.

Most of talk is noise. Angry noise. Hurt noise. And, very rarely, comforting noise. The actual words matter very little. Sorry, poets. It’s tone we listen to. It’s why you can always tell it’s an episode of
EastEnders
on in the next room—because of the furious buzzing sound.

The nice thing about lying on the floor was that my own personal soap opera was taking place five and a half feet above my head. A confederacy of giants. While they rumbled on, I had time and a half to think. The only thing in the room at my level was the cat, and it was giving me a look of ‘You are so on your own.’