by James Goss
We were wrong.
AMBER POINTED AT the screen.
“I can’t ignore that, can I?” For once, she looked helpless. Utterly so. I mean, she must have been, to ask me for help.
“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked.
She glanced up then, sharply. “Nothing,” she said quickly. “I mean, there’s nothing you can do, Dave. There’s nothing anyone can do. And anyway...”
I finished the sentence for her. “...it’s not like people like me ever solve anything.”
“No.” Amber was quiet, not looking at me. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
EVERY TIME SHE logged into a multiplayer game, it happened. A team assembled: ‘TEAM DIE PAKI WHORE.’ And they blasted Amber’s character to pieces. And as she went down they shouted at her. The kind of stupid threats we used to do in improv sessions at drama school (“Now then, guys, imagine you’re football hooligans on your way home from a match, yes?”). Only these people were shouting these threats without any sense of middle-class guilt or any hang-ups. They just wanted Amber Dass dead.
I WAS GENUINELY angry. My instinct was to find these people, go round to their homes and...
I went home and slept on it. In the morning, hungover and reeling from the smell as I doled food out for the cat, I slowly realised that my first instinct was the right one.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.
I’d always thought that was wrong and stupid. Time to prove it.
I TRIED TALKING about it with Duster on MySpace:
DUSTER: Leave it.
ME: But... this is wrong. It’s unprovoked violence against women.
DUSTER: Woah!
ME: Surely that’s wrong.
DUSTER: Says the man who bumped off a woman for annoying him in a bar.
ME: That was... different. Wasn’t it?
DUSTER: Wasn’t that the tiniest bit sexist?
ME: Then, surely, if I go after some men, that’ll even up the score?
DUSTER has left the conversation.
FIRST OFF, I thought about taking revenge on everyone who’d had a go at Amber. But that was an idiotic plan. The first thing they’d look at is what everyone had in common.
So I did a little bit of research. And hooray, these people did this kind of thing a lot. There wasn’t a shortage of this kind of stuff. On Twitter, on Facebook, on Xbox. Often with a background of a football team’s colours. Basically, it seemed as though, if you were a woman daring to use any form of social media, it was inevitable that, at some point, you would be called a slut, a bitch, or a whore.
Rape also became boring. The abuse was really dull. I could compose it for you like it was a choose-you-own-adventure game or scrabble or bingo:
Hey [Bitch/Slut/Whore], [STFU/get back in the kitchen/fuck off back to Candy Crush/die] before I [rape/kill/rape and then kill/fuck you up/bomb u] you [stupid/fat/ugly/cunty/bitch] [whore/slut/bitch/cunt]. [Get a boyfriend/Play Farmville/Seriously, die].
Given this matrix, it was possible to allocate scores. Maximum points went to ‘cunty cunty bitch cunt,’ but really, there was rarely the opportunity to impose such a rigid structure on the sentences. It really all boiled down to:
“Hey Woman. I don’t like you. Cos. Signed, Man.”
A really weird Venn diagram overlap emerged where sometimes these same people who liked games (especially the ones with strong female characters with big tits who also shot guns nicely) also loathed women who played the games, were on quite a lot of dating sites (with the same username, rookie move), and also used Twitter to express their terror at what it would be like when ‘the Islams ruled Britain/America.’ (Presumably meaning that they didn’t care for what would happen when a severe form of Sharia Law was imposed which would severely curtail the rights of women to have jobs, vote, or have big tits, short skirts and wield guns. Kapow. #Irony.)
So, basically: I like girls, I hate women, I loathe foreigns.
WHAT WAS SO curious about the expression of all this was that, when challenged upon it, the reaction was, essentially, to talk about the internet as a boys’ club. When asked why women were abused when playing games, one commentator genuinely told a news site: “It’s like going to a strip club as a female and getting upset that the chicks are all naked. This is just guys being stupid guys.” He was referring to a specific incident. A group of gamers were playing a game on a streamed TV show sponsored by Sodobus. The host (a man, obvs) constantly belittled the only female player, and then instructed everyone to sniff her. He also physically sniffed her. She’d been playing well up to that point, but shaken, her game play deteriorated. As the other players rounded on her, the host shouted “Rape her! Rape that bitch!” In public. In front of a live audience. When asked about it afterwards, he’d shrugged it off. “Sexual harassment is part of the culture.”
In other words, and I’m really sorry to be so boring about this: games are for boys, and girls should run off back to the kitchen if they don’t like them. Which was odd, because nowadays a lot of gamers are female. They’re not doing it to pretend to be blokey, or to learn how to run a farm. They’re doing it because they like them.
Which a lot of men seemed to find baffling and unfair. Things were so much easier when the ladies weren’t around. Like with GamerGate, which may have been about ethics in games journalism, or it may have been about female games writers getting death threats which they then took way too seriously. Which raises the question, how seriously should you take a death threat?
Hmm. Food for thought.
YEAH. ALL THE internet proves is that we find it terribly hard being nice to each other and it isn’t helped by people who love wilfully misinterpreting what people say to prove they’re racist, fascist, sexist or just plain nasty. Treading a safe path through the minefield of Twitter was all so complicated that killing people seemed relatively easy by comparison.
So, I decided I was just going to stick with straight men who hated straight women as my next target, as an excuse for taking revenge on the people who didn’t much like Amber.
I TRIED TO pick just five tweets to take revenge on. And couldn’t. In the end I built a random sampler (in a spreadsheet, get me; next I’d be doing PowerPoint decks), and from that was able to construct five generic tweets.
My guiding principle in all this was pleasingly Old Testament. Do As You Would Be Done By.
Tweet One:
Stupid bitch, I’ll kill your dog.
“Goodbye, Fido,” I said, looking into its soft wet eyes.
Tweet Two:
YOURE HOUSE IS GOING TO BOMBED AT 8.14pm TONITE.
Boom! Went a not-terribly nice upstairs flat in Reading.
Tweet Three:
SUTPID BITCH ILL RAPE U WITH A BROKEN BOTTLE.
Red or white? I think, on balance, red.
Actually, I’ll stop there. Because this wasn’t me. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I couldn’t do it. Not like this. I’d combed through several thousand tweets. So much anger and hatred; they surely deserved a lesson. But you know what? No. It was actually pretty difficult. And it wasn’t as simple as I’d just made out.
I’LL START AGAIN. Perhaps a bit more truthfully.
The easy bit was finding where they lived. We love to tell people everything. If your Twitter username is pretty much your name with a number on the end of it, if your profile says “Swindon and Proud of It” and you’ve posted a photo of your car in your drive by the street sign then thank you. Breaking into your house is going to be a bit harder, but you’re dealing with a failed actor who has been in a lot of Crimewatch reconstructions.
The bomb was the easy one. It’s easy to blow up a house. I’d even checked to make sure the guy was out, and luckily picked a time when downstairs were too. I felt sorry for them, but I’d done what I could. I hadn’t actually built a proper bomb—I’d simply jiggered around with the gas hob.
I’d had a quick look round the flat while I did it. It was kind o
f similar to the others I’d looked at. This belonged to @HAND_SOLO84. His name was Derek. Everything about the flat said Derek. There was a squishy black leather sofa too large for the living room. Behind it was a bookcase containing 5 books and a lot of DVDs. The only neatness in the entire flat was in the ordering of the DVDs, done perfectly alphabetically, by box set, by season, and by slightly disappointing spin-off movie. The bathroom contained a lot of man wash and shed pubic hair. The bedroom was a tableaux of t-shirts steadily crawling from the carpet into a double bed that smelt of digestives.
And the kitchen... well, blowing it up was the kindest thing to happen to it.
There were a few photos of Derek in Ikea frames in the hall. He was wearing XL black t-shirts. His skin was bad. His hair needed a wash. There was one of him on a beach with girls—slim, happy girls. They were standing around him smiling and he was holding up his gut. He was grinning about his belly, making a laugh out of it, but that grin never got above his lips. And yet he’d printed out the picture and framed it. Just to prove that Derek could have a laugh at himself. Good for Derek.
I sauntered away from the house, pulling my brand new ‘Yes I commit crime’ hoodie up. The good thing about the area was that it had no CCTV.
It did, annoyingly, have a Neighbourhood Watch.
“Excuse me, can I help you?”
Really, no, my mind was on a kitchen currently filling with gas. I made to push past, tapping my headphones, but the man was insistent.
He was a little rat of a man. People who care so much about everyone else’s business often have none of their own. He was sneering at me with a nasty look of triumph, as though he knew I was a bad ’un.
“I don’t know you.”
“Well, I don’t know you either,” I replied. I kept my voice flat. I didn’t want to be recognised by it.
“Funny,” he sneered. “What are you doing here?”
“Walking.”
“Where?”
“From A to B.”
“I see? Really?” There was a look of triumph. “Why?”
I did an elaborate mime of taking my headphones off and pausing my iPhone. “I am sorry,” I said, “I was just pausing The Archers. Yes?”
He looked at me, reconsidering. No-one had ever committed a crime listening to The Archers. The Archers itself was crime enough.
“Look,” I said, same flat vowels. “Are you lost? Would you like directions?”
It worked. He was wrong footed. “No,” he snapped nastily.
And all the while the gas hob hissed.
“I see,” I said. “It’s just you stopped me and I thought...”
“No,” he replied, “I wanted to know what you were doing.”
“Getting to my bus.”
“Which number is that?”
“None of your business,” I replied, not being a great expert on the buses of Reading.
“I’ll call the police!” he yelled. “We’ve enough of your sort around here.”
“Foreigners?” I asked, putting on a slight accent.
“Yes!” he glowed with triumph. “We don’t want you lot around here.”
“Because...?”
“Of crime. Everyone knows that it’s the foreigners who...”
“Good night,” I said and walked away. He stood there, yelling “Stop, thief!” at me. I kept on sauntering casually away. He was the sort of person who, a few hundred years ago, would happily burn old women on the village green. As it was, he just had to settle for terrorising the people of his cul-de-sac.
It was an enormous satisfaction to me when I later saw him yelling on the news. He lived in the flat downstairs from Derek. The whole building was already in flames by the time my bus passed it. It was the No. 13 back to the station, since you ask.
KILLING THE DOG was more problematic. I’ve never liked dogs. Just, you know, can’t see the point of them. They say extroverts like dogs, which is a bit like saying yappy people like yappy things.
There’s no profound science lurking in this.
Anyway, I tracked down the guy who’d threatened to kill Amber’s dog. She didn’t own a dog, but he did. Lots of pictures of it on his timeline. The flat was nearly identical to Derek’s. These men really were identical—nasty sofa, nasty bed linen, horrifying kitchen, the ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’ poster, the hard drive soaked in porn. The differences were minor—whether they had Star Trek on DVD or Blu-ray, whether original series or Deep Space Nine. Which Alien boxset they owned.
The only real difference was that this flat smelled of dog. The poor thing was clearly desperate for a walk. It looked at me eagerly. It’s always baffled me that nasty people can own nice pets. You’d assume the pets could tell, but, rather like Tory wivess, they’re capable of being very loyal to the most horrific people.
The dog had growled suspiciously at me when I’d first come in, but had then settled down in a wary ‘shall I eat you or will we play a game?’ routine.
“Sorry, Fido,” I said. “I’ve actually come to call on you because your owner is an asshat.”
The dog just carried on looking at me wetly as I pulled out the knife.
I looked at the knife. The dog looked at the knife. Shiny.
It knew I wouldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. The poor thing was so utterly innocent and just seemed bored. Plan 1 was to knife it. Plan 2 was to feed it some poisoned kidneys.
I tipped some blood from the bag of kidneys onto the dirty cream carpet, and then took the dog for a walk.
We reached a park, and I patted the dog fondly. “Right then, go find someone better,” I said. It looked at me with complete trust. I threw it a stick and it bounded off to fetch it. I was gone before it got back.
I figured it would maybe find its way home, or find a good owner. I’d leave it at that.
THE BEER BOTTLE was the worst thing. As in, genuinely, everyone involved in this is coming out badly. It went horribly wrong.
Breaking into Antony Gillingham’s house was easy enough. The door was really well oiled, and he’d not bothered locking the front door of his flat before going to bed. (A surprisingly large number of people do this. Because they’re morons, or because they figure the statistical danger of a stranger wandering in with bad intentions and a beer bottle is quite small.)
Inside, I couldn’t get over the absurd feeling that I was being watched.
Antony’s bedroom was at least a bit nicer and tidier than the others. Well, initially. I’d picked a time when he was fast asleep, as this would make my life easier. He was spread across his duvet, snoring in the dim emerald glow of a paused game. He was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a stained football shirt. I was able to roll him over without him waking up.
I even strapped him down to the bed without too much trouble.
Then I tried waking him up. This took a while. He was a really heavy sleeper, his breaths the proper Tom and Jerry cartoon snores of the overweight. I can assure you right now I wasn’t at all turned on. The whole thing was repellant.
I placed tape over his mouth, and then pinched his cheeks, the ones on his face. He stared up at me, at first lazily and then with a look of dawning horror. I’d never heard someone scream “What the fuck? Who the fuck are you?” through masking tape before, but I understood him perfectly.
“Good evening, Antony Gillingham,” I said. I was going for Welsh this time. One great thing about drama school—I can do a Welsh accent pretty well. And fight with a sword. There’s more call for the former than the latter. “Antony Gillingham, on the twenty-third of last month, at eleven fifty-eight pm, you tweeted the following, and I quote.” I unfolded a small sheet of paper and declaimed, “SUTPID BITCH ILL RAPE U WITH A BROKEN BOTTLE.” Agree?”
He shook his head. I nodded.
“I’m afraid you did. And don’t say your account was hacked. Only sutpid people say that.” I tutted. “Now then, Antony Gillingham, it wasn’t a very nice thing to say, was it? To a lady? Or to anyone.”
He just stared at m
e. I think he was dribbling a little.
“They say that feminism means the death of courtesy, Antony Gillingham. But I don’t agree with that. Previously, men just held doors open for women. But now I think, we should hold doors open for everyone. Talking of which...”
I pulled down the back of his trackies, and then I showed him the bottle.
He screamed.
YOU KNOW AN earworm will start up in your head and will just loop and loop. I stood there holding a beer bottle, in a stale sweaty bedroom, its owner turkey-trussed, and a string quartet started up in my head. Not a great classical work, just some background noodling from a car advert or something. Over and over.
It wouldn’t go away. Absurd. I turned the beer bottle around and around in my hand. I don’t even like beer, but I’d had to buy a pack of six. The other five were sat in my fridge. I guess the safest thing would be to drink them, but I didn’t really feel like it tonight. The label told me how the hops had been cultivated, fermented and then carefully bottled, all the flavour sealed in the thousand kilometres it had come from the brewery. The label advised me the correct temperature to store it and the slightly different temperature at which to drink it. This one wasn’t chilled. It would never be drunk.
The string quartet yammered on in my head. They say the best way to get rid of an earworm is to sing something out loud, the first thing that comes to mind.
Absurdly, it was ‘Reach,’ by S Club 7. You know, “Reach for the stars...” Or was it ‘sky’? Oh, yeah, ‘sky,’ because the next line rhymed with ‘mountain high.’ I sang it out loud, and then remembered the other person in the room.
