Haterz (5 page)

S
O.
I
DIDN’T
go to the hospital that night. I’d promised, but I didn’t go. Which meant that Guy wasn’t speaking to me.

Instead I went and stood outside Leicester Square McDonalds. Which, at 2am on a Wednesday, is a weird place to be. It was cold, and my jacket couldn’t keep the wind out. A nightbus roared past, its side advertising careers with Sodobus in neon. A few people wandered in and out of the cafe. Men wandered past, shouting in Eastern European into their phones.

I waited. I was frightened and bored. Like waiting for a date.

A car pulled up. An oldish women with tight silver hair got out of it. She marched up to me. I looked at her, questioningly. She stood, appraising me coldly, waiting for me to say something—maybe to ask her for directions. Then she shrugged and walked away into the restaurant.

Clearly, it wasn’t her. Well, I didn’t think it could be.

I waited a bit longer.

Normally, you’d text the person you were waiting for. But I didn’t dare. Not in this case.

I waited half an hour, then I went home.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
I sent Guy an apologetic email, explaining that I’d fallen asleep. This was after he didn’t answer the phone.

It was a long time before he answered the email. ‘I needed you. She’s dead.’

Well, this was horrid.

I couldn’t tell him the truth. I couldn’t tell him any of the truth. I couldn’t say, ‘Well, yes, I killed her. Oops.’ I couldn’t even tell him that, half an hour after I got home, there was another message: ‘MADE YOU LOOK.’

I did not reply to the message. I said plenty to it out loud.

I
WAITED FOR
the police to come and knock on my door. They didn’t. No one came and knocked on my door. I thought about skipping work. But then realised that would look suspicious, so I went even though I pretty much zombied my way through it. I thought I’d never sleep again, but the night after I killed Danielle, I got home and fell straight asleep. I’d just about taken my shoes off.

I did not dream about Danielle. That came later. Dreams where I stood over her while she looked up at me with her eyes wide, as she choked and choked. Over and over.

There was an inquest. It was ruled to be an accident caused by an allergic reaction. That was it. No mention of her phone. Why? Why was that? Someone had it. With a photo of me and Danielle on it. I just prayed someone had stolen it.

As Guy wasn’t speaking to me, I wasn’t invited to the funeral. I wouldn’t have gone anyway. I’m not sure I could have spent two hours not looking at her parents.

But, at least, the funeral was over. And the mysterious eCards had stopped.

I figured that would be it. I don’t know why I thought that, but I really did.

T
HEN
I
GOT
an email from Guy. The preview began, ‘Dear Friend,’ so I opened it, thinking it would be an olive branch. That we could get back to where we were.

Instead, it was a round robin:

Dear Friend,

As you probably know, my beloved fiancee Danielle [what? They were engaged?] died last month. She was my angel.

She didn’t deserve to die—and certainly not from accidentally eating a peanut. The whole thing would be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve now lost the love of my life and my best friend.

Yes, this is a begging email. I’m going to be running a marathon for Danielle and to raise awareness of allergies. My life is over. I don’t want other people’s to be ruined too.

Here’s the
JustGiving link
. If you ever met Danielle, you’ll know she was really difficult to buy presents for. But just this once, I’m hoping you’ll find it easy. #DoingItForDanielle

Best wishes,

Guy

I read it a few times. He made Danielle sound so nice.

Right there and then, I almost emailed him and told him everything. But that didn’t seem such a clever idea. At all or ever. Plus, by the third time I was reading it, I was laughing. Laughing at how wrong he’d got her. She was a warped fascist with appalling punctuation. Sure, thinking about it a bit, she didn’t deserve to die... well, not exactly. But I’d had my reasons for what I’d done.

I told myself that over and over. When I stood in the shower. When I boiled the kettle. When I stood waiting for the Metropolitan Line. She deserved it.

I’d made the internet a better place. Because I’d got rid of Danielle.

O
NLY,
I
HADN’T.

Guy’s email was just the start of it. Suddenly Danielle was everywhere. He wasn’t the only person running the marathon for her. Lots of our mutual friends were. They started up a Facebook group. They changed their avatars to pictures of Danielle, which meant that I was now seeing her dead smiling face everywhere. She was out clubbing, she was crawling home late, she was uploading pictures of her breakfast, she was watching
Britain’s Got Talent
and she was taking a quiz to find out which member of One Direction she was.

It was as though Danielle was still alive. But everywhere. I couldn’t forget her. She was all over Facebook and Twitter. (Not Google+ though. No-one’s on there. Not even ghosts.)

I
WONDERED IF
this was my divine punishment. The internet was going to be #DoingItForDanielle all the time and forever.

There was something. In among the marathons, the raising awareness march and the charity collection of Danielle’s favourite nut-free cupcake recipes (oh, yes, I was right to kill her). It took me a while, but I noticed it. I was helped. I got one further eCard.

These shoes are about to run #26Miles #DoingItForDaniele. Lucky shoes.

O
NE OF
D
ANIELLE’S
friends was particularly everywhere. No matter how I tried to ignore him. I wasn’t even friends with him, but I knew everything that he was doing.

There was no shutting up Edward (‘Call Me Fast Eddy’) Atkinson. His profile picture was of him hugging Danielle. He was walking from London to her hometown (#WalkForDaniele, #DoingItForDaniele #FastEddy). He would regularly post pictures of her, or memories of golden times they shared together.

And people would retweet them, or share them on their Facebook wall. So that Fast Eddy would creep into my feed.

That’s one of the odd things about the internet. When it started out there was an amazing amount of information and it was difficult to find. Then we got Google. But for some reason, people think we need leading to stuff.

We don’t. For the first time in mankind’s history, we have a vast amount of data out there which is ours for the taking. And the more we go and look for it in our own way, the less its wants us to. Facebook’s constantly throwing itself in front of us going, ‘Don’t do that—see this!’ Worse is ‘The One Trick That Mums Know To Cure Belly Flab.’ Those adverts now actually jiggle. They’re refusing to take the hint that we just don’t want to know. We’ve not clicked. We are not going to click. But maybe, one day, we will.

F
AST
E
DDY WAS
one busy charity bunny. Not only was he off running a third marathon for Danielle, he was constantly tweeting about his training schedule (‘18 miles today. Need chocolate SOOO BAD. But no. #DoingItForDaniele’), and he was always begging celebrities for retweets (‘Running for Danielle, tragedy death tht can be avoided, any chance of a cheeky RT? #DoingItForDaniele’). And people did. And people retweeted those retweets. And all of them linked to Fast Eddy’s JustGiving page. He fucked me off.

All of my resentment, self-hatred and fear about Danielle was crystallised in this one man. Who would not,
could
not, shut up. He was just there.

True, he looked nice enough. In all the selfies he posted of himself, running around, or dousing himself with ice. He was always smiling, his little eager-to-please chipmunk face covered in just enough stubble to not quite be a beard. His cheeks were ruddy (from all the running in the rain) and he just looked nice and normal and desperate to be liked.

Late one drunken night (oh, yeah, I was drinking a lot these days #DoingItForDanielle), I clicked through to his JustGiving page. I don’t know why. Maybe to give him some money. Or to torture myself reading some of the messages from donors. Just... life, really. The kind of late night link trawling that happens when you’re drunk but you don’t want to go to bed.

I sat on the sofa. My vodka-tonic was too strong. But I didn’t care. I stared at Fast Eddy’s profile, at his training blog. At his sheer, clear goodness. He was everything I wasn’t. He was taller than me. He glowed with charity. I’d never done anything that good. I’d never...

Then I noticed something. In the small print. Way beneath the list of ‘57 Things I Bet You Never Knew Had Nuts In Them.’ The charity name was slightly different from the fund that Guy and Danielle’s family had set up for her. He’d mistyped ‘Danielle’ as ‘Daniele.’ Just one ‘l.’ Odd how good your proof-reading can be at the wrong time. It annoyed me. But then, anyone can make a mistake.

I carried on surfing through his previous campaigns. He’d misspelt her name again. And again. Not all the time. But how curious.

Maybe he’d just pasted the wrong block of text over. Or autocorrect.

I did a drunken Google, pecking the keys with awful caution. ‘Doing It For Daniele’ brought up a link on a different donations site. This one gave bank details of the account. Same sort code as Guy’s. Different account number.

Odd. I went to the main Doing It For Danielle page. It didn’t list full accounts, but there was a reasonable stream of donations coming in. I wondered if Eddy had transferred his across. But none of the figures matched. He’d raised £2,700 last marathon. No sign of that. Or the £1,450 from his first marathon. I carried on. It was boring cross-referencing and I wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t been pretty smashed. He had moved some money across—£200 from a fun run here and £75 from a sponsored walk.

But, adding it all up, doing drunk maths, there was about £10,000 missing.

Fast Eddy was a fraud.

I googled Edward Atkinson. Then I tried a few variations.

And bingo. A ‘Ted Atkinson’ had once worked as a Systems Analyst at Sodobus before being convicted of running a fake charity calendar door-knocking scam. Thank God for local newspapers online. There was even a photo of Fast Eddy before he became fast—long hair, clean-shaven, same eager face. Next to a jiggling advert for That 1 Weird Tip That Only Moms Know.

I leaned back and stared at the screen.

I wondered about emailing Guy to tell him. My eyes fluttered closed. I was finally falling asleep. I stood up, went to pee and then staggered to bed. I lay there, thinking about it.

The mystery eCard had said, ‘We want to see what you do next.’

And now I knew what I wanted to do next.

T
HE THING
I
’VE
not told you until now (because you’d have stopped reading and backed hurriedly away) is what I do for a living. I’m a chugger.

Yes, that’s me. I stand on busy streets, just waiting to ruin your lunch hour. I have a clipboard and a big smile and I just need a moment to talk to you about cancer/kittens/children. My really big hope is that you won’t punch me or spit at me or just shoulder through me. My hope is that you’ll listen, listen longer than “Not today, thank you,” listen to me long enough to fill in a form with your bank details on it, agreeing to give a large amount of money to cancer/kittens/children.

You assume I’m working for cancer, or kittens, or children’s charities. But I’m not, not directly. I’m working for a man who owns a lot of race cars. So many race cars he’s had a basement garage put under his basement garage in Notting Hill. Charities don’t hire chuggers directly—they hire Mr Racing Car. The cancer, the kittens, and the children pay his firm to hire us to stand out in the rain for minimum wage (any more would be taking from charity, wouldn’t it?). We bring in subscriptions to the charities, and every month a tenner leaves your bank account and goes to the kittens, the cancer and the children. Of course, this is where Big Maths comes in.

You sign up through us, and on average it’ll take three years of your subscription for the charity to pay back Mr Racing Car’s finder’s fee. The typical lifespan of your direct debit before you go “aw, fuckit” and cancel? Three years and two months.

In other words, you’ve paid £380. Mr Racing Car gets £360. The charity gets just £20.

Big Maths is the game the charities play. Because, while the average subscription is going to be just over three years, there are going to be a few outliers. People who discover they really like giving a tenner a month to kittens/cancer/children. And keep on doing so. And among those, there’s going to be at least one who leaves their house to children/kittens/cancer. Quite a lot of people who sign up are little old ladies. We love the sexy young people, they tick all sorts of good demographic boxes. But we’re also very grateful to the little old ladies. Thanks to demographics, we know they’re more likely to live alone, and be grateful to stop and chat. They’re also sentimental, so they’re more likely to suddenly care about whatever we’re selling. And they’re statistically less likely to cancel their direct debits and more likely to leave us their house. So God bless little old ladies.

So, thanks to Big Maths, it’s all worthwhile, and Mr Racing Car can sleep at night. He knows he’s made the world a better place (sort of) and can enjoy his sweet dream about which of his cars he’s not going to drive tomorrow because actually he lost his licence when he ran over a little old lady.

But anyway, enough about Big Maths and Mr Racing Car. The point is, he gave me a job.

H
AVE YOU EVER
wondered why all us charity muggers are so smiling and so friendly? Because we’re pretending. We don’t really feel like that. We’re not really happy to see you. We don’t much care whether you give us money or not. And we don’t give a stuff about kittens or cancer or children. Some of us do, when we start, but you see, it’s kittens on Monday, cancer on Tuesday, children on Wednesday. A different coloured tabard, a different cause that’s close to our heart. They all blur into one. We go out there and we’re just playing a part. We’ve even got lines. Which we’re really good at learning.