Join Me

by Danny Wallace

  ‘How do you mean no one’s ever seen one alive?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re only ever found dead.’

  ‘Maybe they’re all dead, then.’

  Chris looked at me with horror in his eyes.

  ‘No. They are very much alive. Their Latin name,’ he said, turning to Dave, ‘is Cephalod, meaning “headfooted”. The Greek is Architheuthis.’

  He looked proud of himself now.

  ‘Anyway, they shoot all over the gaff, like swimming 747s. They’re just enormous. They like to fight whales.’

  We supped at our pints, imagining a whale fighting a giant squid, probably just as thousands of other men in pubs across the land were doing at that moment.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Dave. ‘If no one’s ever seen one alive, how do you know they like fighting whales?’

  ‘Beaks,’ said Chris authoritatively.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your giant squid has a beak, like birds do. Every so often a whale gets caught and its tummy is full of squid beaks.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re not from fighting giant ducks?’ I tried.

  ‘Definitely. Anyway, that’s why I like giant squid.’

  There was a silence. Dave coughed.

  ‘I like other squid, too.’

  He was off again.

  ‘They’re full of ink. They’re like swimming biros. They can write on sand. They’re brilliant.’

  The three of us took it in turns to look at each other.

  ‘So . . . how far’s the Madras Valley from here?’ I asked.

  * * *

  We found the Madras Valley very easily. But not because Joinee Jonesy knew the way. Oh, no. Because I knew the way.

  It turned out that Joinee Jonesy had never even been there before. He’d managed to send me the wrong leaflet that day, creating yet another example of an argument with Hanne that could have been avoided by a stranger sorting their junk mail with more care.

  Nevertheless, I’d decided to buy Chris and Dave a Chicken Dansak from what I’d now decided was the official Join Me Curryhouse. Dave had become far more interested in joining me than he’d been when Chris first mentioned it to him – and whether that was through meeting me, or through three pints of Stella, I felt that a spot of bribery might tip him over the edge and earn me another joinee.

  Back at their flat, I was shown immense hospitality. A wonderful cup of tea. A proper plate for my curry. A side dish for my naan bread. And I was given the best chair in the living room – the electric recliner.

  I decided that this was what Join Me should be all about. Friendship. Niceness. And electric reclining chairs. But this was because I was a bit drunk.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute, I’m just going to get something,’ said Chris, polishing his glasses as he left the room. I spotted something that caught my eye . . . some kind of letter Sellotaped to the living room mirror. I pressed the button on the electric chair that tilted the whole thing forward until your feet touch the floor and you’re more or less forced into a standing position. I started to wonder whether perhaps Chris was pilfering chairs from Help the Aged.

  I read the neatly typed letter.

  I, Chris Jones, bet my flatmate Dave Cobbett, that he can’t have one pint of any alcoholic beverage of his choice at each tube station within zones 1 and 2 of the London Underground tube system, as shown on the map stuck on the living room mirror (above).

  I looked up. There it was. Each tube station in zones 1 and 2 had been circled in red pen. I figured that was probably Dave’s work. It had the look of a teacher’s hand about it. I read on.

  Each pint must be quaffed in the nearest boozer to its respective tube station. Mr Jones must be present at all times to record the event for posterity. Using a camera.

  I loved the fact that ‘Using a camera’ had been added almost as an afterthought. It was as if they’d had to decide between using a camera and bringing a courtroom artist along to do sketches.

  The challenge must be completed by 11.59pm on the 24th December 2002. All other rules to be agreed as the challenge progresses between Mr Cobbett and Mr Jones.

  Signed, Mr Jones and Mr Cobbett, 2002.

  This was brilliant. It appealed to me immediately. It reminded me of that bet I’d had with my flatmate, also called Dave. But I was disturbed from all thoughts of that particular challenge by Chris and his Dave, now standing behind me.

  ‘This is great!’ I said. ‘Have you started?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Dave.

  ‘How many stations are there left to do?’

  ‘Eighty-nine,’ said Chris. ‘It’s a bit of a long-term project.’

  I knew then, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that these two men in front of me formed part of my destiny. They were dedicated and hard-working. They were up for a challenge. They would help me in my quest. They would take me closer to my goal. They enjoyed pointlessness. They were absolutely perfect for Join Me.

  ‘Anyway, this book here,’ said Chris, holding up what he’d just been to get, ‘is called The Search For the Giant Squid, by Richard Ellis, who also wrote Monsters of the Sea! and Men and Whales . . .’

  Well, maybe not the specky one.

  * * *

  I returned to my flat that evening in high spirits. Thanks to beer and curry, I’d not only made two fine friends, but I also had another joinee. Dave had given me a passport photo as I left their flat, effectively doubling the number of joinees I had in just one short evening. I Sellotaped his photo to the fridge, and put Jonesy’s there, too, while I waited for the kettle to boil.

  And I smiled.

  The next morning I was woken by Hanne standing over me. She’d let herself into my flat because, being deeply asleep and a boy, I hadn’t heard her knocking on the door.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Good,’ I said, rubbing my eyes. ‘How was work?’

  Hanne gets up at 4.30 every morning for work. She produces a phone-in show on LBC, a London radio station, and often pops in afterwards, when I’m just about conscious and able to deal with the world.

  ‘What did you get up to last night?’

  ‘I was out with a couple of mates,’ I said. ‘Jonesy and Cobbett.’

  ‘Detectives?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘They sound like detectives.’

  ‘No. Jonesy works with the elderly and Cobbett works with the young. You’ll have to meet them. Jonesy likes squid and Cobbett has a beard.’

  ‘They sound brilliant,’ said Hanne, sitting down on the bed and kissing me on the cheek. ‘Don’t forget we’re going out tonight. Cecilie and Espen are going to come as well. We’re meeting on Brick Lane at seven. Hey . . .’

  She leant down to pick something up. A green leaflet sticking out of my discarded jeans, with a receipt stapled to it.

  ‘The Madras Valley?’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. We went to the Madras Valley again.’

  ‘Again? You’re obsessed with that place! Why would you go there again?’

  ‘I . . . like . . . Chicken Dansak,’ I said. ‘And Jonesy does too. And the chef has twenty years experience of being a chef. It’s good there.’

  Hanne just looked at me.

  ‘I also noticed,’ she said, ‘that there are two photographs on the fridge. I recognise the first one, with glasses . . .’

  ‘Jonesy,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Jonesy. You showed me him. But now there is another . . .’

  ‘That’s Cobbett,’ I said. ‘He’s got a beard.’

  I wasn’t making much sense yet. I hadn’t had any tea.

  ‘So why are they there? On the fridge?’

  ‘Well . . . where else would I put them?’

  ‘But why do you even have them? Who collects passport photos of their friends? And why have I never met these people?’

  ‘They’re new friends. What if I forget what they look like? That fridge is like a reference point for me.’

&
nbsp; ‘Is that why you have pictures of me in your flat? In case you forget what I look like?’

  ‘You’re not a joinee, though.’

  ‘A what?’

  I rubbed my eyes and feigned waking up again.

  ‘Oh, hello Hanne,’ I said. ‘Will you make me a cup of tea?’

  * * *

  I decided that perhaps the fridge wasn’t the best place to keep pictures of my joinees. Yeah, there were only two of them so far, but I was energised by meeting up with Jonesy and Cobbett and felt the need to prepare for more new joinees. It’s exciting for a boy to have a project. For one thing, it makes you start thinking of stationery, and we all know how exciting that can be. Files, and box-files, and ring binders, and colourful dividers . . . I love all that, despite the fact that by my very nature I am incredibly disorganised and messy. But there’s something about buying a new ringbinder that really makes me feel like a grown-up. That said, I don’t actually own any. I usually settle for shoving things into a drawer. This I did again, making space in a lockable drawer underneath my desk. I put Jonesy and Cobbett in there, face up, and locked them in. They’d be safe there.

  And then I set about thinking how to get more joinees. No one else had responded to the ad as yet, but it had still worked, so I decided to put another one in Loot. This one would be far more specific. I drafted it up.

  WANTED: 100 PEOPLE TO LIVE IN MY NEW WORLD ORDER.

  Send one passport photo to: Join Me . . . xxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx This is not a cult.

  It was simple, it was effective, it was being phoned in to Loot five minutes later. I would get those hundred people for my great-uncle Gallus. Jonesy and Cobbett were just the beginning.

  I thought back to what advice I’d been given by Dr Dennis M. Hope. After all, he was a forward-thinker. A guru of sorts. He’d built up a following in the US. Oh, and he owned the moon. I’d seen the proof. I’d seen his website. Ah, the Internet. A gateway to many millions of people. Real people. Real people who might join me.

  I decided to start a small Internet campaign. I began by emailing a few of my friends. And then I emailed them again, and asked them to email their friends. And then I put a small link on my own rather paltry website, encouraging anyone who happened to drop by to join me. And then I decided to go one step further, and infiltrate other people’s websites, and spent a couple of hours online, copying and pasting the ad onto websites across the globe. I found discussion groups, forums, chat rooms, guestbooks. I wrote Join Me on each of them, and asked people to send me passport photos, and left my email address for any questions.

  I received some degree of interest and endless, tireless abuse.

  Emails came back asking me to ‘please not visit our website again and keep your cryptic bullshit messages to yourself’. But I didn’t want to be cryptic, or sell bullshit. I just wanted people to join me.

  Strangers were being hostile, and I was becoming rather demoralised. And then I had an idea. I went through my email inbox, which I very rarely tidy up. I found emails which had been sent not only to me, but to entire groups of other people at the same time. Mass emails from friends inviting me to birthday parties, or Christmas parties, or telling me how their trek across the Andes was going, or offering me 100 Tedious and Unfunny Things You Won’t Understand About Star Wars. I collected hundreds of email addresses together . . . friends of friends, people I should or could know but hadn’t been introduced to yet . . . surely they’d be open to my offer of joining me? They were so nearly my friends already. We’d probably meet each other sooner or later, so why prolong the wait? Why not come together now?

  I sent out a huge email to around 500 friends-of-friends. It was very friendly, and very open indeed. Imagine my shock, then, when I received not one friendly reply from even a single friend-of-a-friend. Oh, I received plenty of ‘fuck offs’ and ‘get losts’, and even one rather memorable ‘piss off you bosom’, but not one person sent me anything I could conceivably claim was encouragement. Most people dealt me an even greater insult; they just ignored me. Why? Just who were my friends hanging out with? Several people even threatened me with physical violence. One, from a man named James, whose email address I had taken from a missive my friend Steve had sent inviting us to his housewarming, went so far as to say: ‘Not one of my friends would hang out with someone like you so tell me how you got my email address or I will find you and kick the living shit out of you.’ Well, really. I hope that if I’d met him at that housewarming I’d at least spat when I talked. I vowed to start spitting on more people at housewarmings, just on the offchance our paths would cross again.

  Further abuse followed. I was accused of being a cult leader, of trying to get people’s credit card details, of being an American. Each of these slanderous claims hit me hard, and I realised for the first time that getting people to join me when they didn’t really know who or what they were joining was going to be an uphill struggle. I had been encouraged by the ease with which I’d acquired Joinee Jones . . . and demoralised by the messages of anger I’d received from people who would ordinarily, I’m sure, have bought me a pint if they’d met me in a pub.

  I felt incredibly downhearted. In a moment of sorrow, I emailed the man who was fast becoming my mentor, Dennis M. Hope.

  Dennis,

  It’s not working.

  After an encouraging start, I’m afraid I have been beset by misfortune. People are accusing me of being some kind of scam artist. They think I’m after their money, or I’m a lunatic, or both. I just don’t know what to do.

  Danny

  PS. I only have two joinees. Even Gallus managed three.

  Within half an hour, Dennis had responded.

  Danny,

  You should only be dissuaded because of your own inner voice – not because anyone else has the opinion that you should change.

  Dennis M. Hope

  President – Galactic Government

  PS. If you really want people to join you, I would probably start with a website.

  Of course! A website! A website was the only way I’d truly conquer the Internet. I thought about what I’d done so far and realised I’d been wrong. Maybe those people I’d emailed out of the blue had felt invaded. They’d felt defensive. They’d felt I’d come into their world uninvited, shouting ‘Join Me’ and demanding their fancy Yankee dollars. They couldn’t see the truth in my eyes; the hope. There was no trust there. With a website, all that could change overnight. I would be able to allow people to visit me. They would feel like they were the guest. That way, I’d have the authority. I’d be in charge. I’d be the one allowed to call people bosoms and tell them to piss off. That was the way to get them to join. Not the bosom bit, the other stuff.

  So I phoned my friend Jon, a lighting engineer who’s also started to dabble in web design. He met me for a coffee at Cafe Kick in Shoreditch (I had tea) and agreed to help me set up a website.

  ‘What do you want on it?’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure. Pictures of all my joinees, I suppose. We could scan them in and stick them on, for a start. And it should tell people how to join.’

  ‘And how do you do that?’

  ‘Well . . . I just need a passport photo.’

  ‘Sounds easy enough.’

  ‘You’d be surprised . . .’

  Jon came round and started the website that afternoon. I bought the domain names www.join-me.co.uk and www.joinme.info and Jon gave the site a lovely spacelike background. We put the words ‘It’s not a cult – it’s a collective’ under the title, but that was really all I’d managed to come up with, words-wise.

  But Jon had cleverer ideas. He added a forum to the site, on which visitors could exchange messages and write things down for others to see. In effect, it’s like having a very slow conversation. You leave a message, you come back later to see who’s replied. I loved it. I was sure that this was the way that joinees could progress. They could swap notes, develop strategies, and share plans.

  Granted, they
wouldn’t actually be able to do much note-swapping or strategy-developing or plan-sharing yet – considering none of them would actually know what they had joined. But it was a gesture. A promise to them that things would become more clear. And besides, they could always use it to swap 100 Tedious and Unfunny Things You Won’t Understand About Star Wars while they waited.

  I began to advertise the fact that the website existed. I left a few more messages on a few more guestbooks, and emailed a few friends to tell them I’d stumbled across this new website and wow – they should really check it out. Within hours of it going online, two people had used the forum. One, who simply wrote, ‘So what’s all this about then?’ (and understandably hadn’t been replied to), and another, who’d found the site by accident while looking for cheaper car insurance.

  In the meantime, though, I was starting to receive little trickles of interest from elsewhere on the Internet. A girl called Saskia emailed to ask exactly what it was I was asking her to join. A man in Cardiff had seen something I’d posted on the NME’s website and wanted to know more. Someone called Jennifer asked me if I was starting a cult. And I had to start to think about how I was going to respond.

  I didn’t want to tell people about Gallus. That would make it too personal. I didn’t want to tell them I had no idea what I was doing. That would make it too pointless. So I decided that the best course of action was to remain as mysterious as possible. I would keep my full name to myself. And I would try and give the impression that while I knew exactly what the purpose of Join Me was, I was withholding that information for the time being for reasons best known to myself It seemed to work. I was actually convincing people . . . I could answer their questions effortlessly . . .

  Q: What is Join Me?

  A: Join Me is something wonderful. But something I cannot reveal much more about yet. The time will come, my people. Have faith.

  Q: Is it a cult?

  A: No. It is a collective. A collective of people, joined together to be as one. We will unite the world through our actions.

  Q: What actions?

  A: Those that we choose to take.

  Q: How many others have joined you?

  A: Exact figures are not helpful. We are each of us individuals; none of us numbers.