by James Goss
I had to grab all the shifts they offered me, in case that was the night that Harry’s people placed the call. I had to stay alert, which was proving tricky. When I’d finally slump home the cat would want to play with me, and I’d have to placate it for a bit before grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep before staggering out to chug. This all felt bloody grim.
Finally, just as I was dealing with a dead rat in the basement, my disposable phone bleeped. ‘Deal’s done.’ We were on.
I SPENT THE next few hours nervously trying to do everything casually. I think I looked like a disaster, but then again, no one was looking at me. I steered clear of CCTV as much as possible, just to practice. I’d spent most of the last week learning where the cameras were in the hotel, and had worked out ways through the building without showing up at all, and also ways of ducking in and out of vision so that, if someone were checking the logs, I’d be accounted for without arousing suspicion.
The only problem was that no one had yet summoned a cleaner. There was an outside chance that they’d just do a runner and leave the company to pick up the bill. But I was hoping the results would be so explosive that they’d need a cleaner immediately.
Jeez, how long can it take a pop star to take some drugs?
The call came at 2am. Actually, that made sense. He’d had the supplies laid in for when he got back from some club or other.
I hurried up to the floor he was on. There’s a wing of the Waverley that is ‘discreet.’ It’s a little L-shape on one floor. There’s one way in, half-a-dozen rooms for entourage, a nice suite at the end and no cameras. I trundled through, making sure I was seen on a camera, and tapped at the suite door I’d been summoned to.
A groan answered, “Door’s open.” I walked into the suite. It was in darkness apart from a slit of light from under the bathroom door. The smell was fairly incredible. You could chew it. But you wouldn’t want to.
When I was a child we’d had a puppy. It’s why I hated dogs. It had started on the diarrhoea in the car back from the kennel. It had continued, spraying the kitchen in a fine cloacal mist until Dad banished it to the garden while he phoned the vet. The vet said the dog just needed to calm down. It lived in a shed for a fortnight. After which, Dad burned the shed rather than attempting to clean it.
This £3,000-a-night suite looked like that shed. An interesting thing I’d learned about hotel rooms is that they’re like prison cells, branches of McDonald’s and pub carpets. There’s almost nothing you can do to them that can’t be reasonably quickly hosed down. It’s why they always look immaculate. The cleaners work hard, but their lives are made easier.
But this... this was something else. The sofa was leather. That I could clean. But the carpet—I made a valiant attempt at it, but someone had been running around. Probably howling as their insides escaped. At a guess, the carpet would need replacing. I got to work on the walls, listening to the moans of bewildered self-pity from the bathroom.
Once I’d made a decent attempt at the carpet, I tapped on the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there, sir?”
There was a long silence, and then a surprisingly deep voice said, “...yeah...”
“I can call a doctor.”
“No... no doctors.”
“Then do you want me to come in and try and help? Don’t worry, sir, there’s nothing I’ve not seen before.”
“...no.”
“Sure?”
I could hear a ragged breath. Then, “...actually...” and the door clicked open.
I opened the door and stared.
Somehow, I’d got this very wrong. Instead of the third most famous nineteen-year-old on the planet, I was staring at a giant black security guard, sat on a toilet, pants around his ankles, head in his hand, staring at me with the bleakest of misery.
He was also pointing a Taser at me.
“Be very careful, sunshine,” he said, “I’ve had a really bad night.”
THAT COULD HAVE got nasty quite quickly. He stood up, filling the room. He was weaving around a little, his gait not helped by the boxer shorts clinging to his shins.
“Hi,” I said, sounding terrified. “Room service?”
“The hell you are,” he said. He reached for the light switch. Disaster. He’d be able to recognise me. This would be a huge mistake. I tried to stop him. The Taser went off, hitting the lightswitch with a bang.
The guy fell backwards, hitting his head solidly on the tiles. He slid to the ground, snoring, his massive frame knocked out by an electric shock.
I BACKED OUT into the hall and suddenly realised I wasn’t alone.
There was a small red glow coming from the living room. A lit cigarette.
“You’ve done a pretty good job in here,” drawled a voice. “Though I don’t think we can save the carpet.”
I wish I could say I froze in fear or something clever like that. Instead I’d already let out a shriek that a six-year-old girl would tut at.
Sat on the freshly-cleaned sofa smoking a cigarette and wearing a bathrobe was Harry Paperboy.
“Ted’s an idiot,” he said, “He should know better than to have called a cleaner. I always take care of my mess.”
That sounded sinister. But Harry shrugged. “Momma was a cleaner at my school. Taught me everything she knew. Life was kind of hell growing up, but there was something kind of reassuring about cleaning up their shit. Whatever they said, whatever they did, their shit still stank.” He pointed to the chair opposite. “Hey, man, sit down. If you’re not too filthy.”
“I wouldn’t mind washing my hands,” I heard myself saying.
“Suit yourself,” he drawled and carried on smoking. Insanely, in a room full of drugs and diahorrea, with an unconscious security guard in the bathroom, the thing that most appalled me was that he was smoking indoors. I washed my hands, running the tap, checking for any breaks in the skin. Any DNA.
Then I sat down opposite Harry Paperboy.
“So anyway,” he said. “True fact: I’m a good cleaner. Mom taught me well. She would still be cleaning that school if I hadn’t bought her a huge house to clean. Anyway, if I make a mess I clean it up myself. Less chance of any one with a camera—hey, have you got a phone on you?”
I shook my head and he smiled wider.
“Course you have, give it here.” He patted me down and took my phone from me. I wondered if he’d be able to unlock it, see any messages or—oh. He stamped it underfoot and then handed it back to me along with a hundred-dollar bill. “Sorry. Can’t take any chances. Everyone’s got a camera, everywhere, and maan would I just like to get wasted not in a hotel room. Do you know, if I’m out in a club and I get so smashed I’m gonna puke, I either have to somehow get back to the fricking hotel, or throw up with three Teds stood outside the washroom. I meet a girl, and most of the time I can’t stop thinking, Will she take photos of this? Is that all the reason why she’s doing it? For the hashtag? Most of the time, you know, that’s fine—she’s hot so whatever, and I can’t even jerk off without shutting the curtains and never to TV porn. In case someone at the hotel knows. So yeah, if there’s a girl and she wants to whatever then sure. Just getting Ted to search her on the way in to the room and take her phone and stuff... it’s kinda bad when you’re in the moment. ‘Hey, come back to my room, I’ll fix you a drink and we can get nasty, but first Ted here’s going to take your handbag and pat you down, oh, baby.’”
He lit another cigarette and, absurdly, I found myself liking him a little.
“Know what, I haven’t banged a chick who doesn’t know who I am for two years now. Which is—you know... My age, you’re supposed to walk into a bar, find a girl, spend some time on it. You know, either you luck out, or you end up with her friend, or you go home to jerk alone. But the point is, you have to try. It’s like these hotels. First few of them, Mom was like ‘Don’t get fat, kid, not with all that food.’ But there’s so much of it. It never stops. Not like in a proper restaurant, where you place your order and you wait for it. It�
�s all there. In big steaming trays. Even room service in these joints—I send down, it comes up, I send down, more comes up. And none of it tastes of anything ’cause you’ve not had to wait for it. I’ve not been hungry for two whole years.”
He smiled.
“Fuck me, I’m fucked up.” He sighed. “Talking to a cleaner. I don’t even know if you speak English. Do you?”
“Yes,” I managed a reasonably thick Somewhere-Eastern-Europe accent. It suddenly struck me that he was very, very drunk.
“Yeah.” He confirmed my supposition: “I’m steamed. My trainer is going to kill me tomorrow. Still, that’s tomorrow. Now, can I fix you a drink?”
I demurred. He shook his head.
“Thing is, you know, we’ve bonded. Or rather, you and me, we’re sharing a secret. You know, knowledge is power or somesuch. Basically, I know you. You’re a good guy. You won’t go to the papers or the cops or anything. No. But everyone I meet’s a good guy. And they all go to the papers. So, here’s what we’re going to do,” and he giggled. For a moment he was the seventeen-year-old he’d never got to be, drunkenly playing truth-or-dare and trying to French kiss through a girl’s braces. In a weird parallel world, give it a few years, bump into each other at uni, and he and Jeanette Turlingham III would have made quite a good couple. Smart and cunning.
He flipped open an old-fashioned CD of one of his albums, pulling out a little bag of powder. He sprinkled two lines of it on top of the CD case.
“This, my man, is our bond. We do these drugs together. I’ve got something over you, you’ve got something over me. You can tell your friends you did drugs with Harry Paperboy. Some day. But not today. Or next week. Or anytime soon, really. Because I can end your job here.”
I could have stood up then. Stood up and walked out and been on my way. Only suddenly there was, in his hands, a Taser.
“Ted always lets me have a spare,” he grinned. It wasn’t nice. I felt like an ant staring up at a boy with a kettle. “Come on, man. Have some. It’s good shit.”
It was good shit. I knew that. I’d had it manufactured to precisely that specification.
“Don’t worry about Ted,” he said. “Never could keep his hands off my stuff. And can’t take it. Just can’t. Tomorrow, he won’t remember a fucking thing. Except that he’s a loser. But you aren’t, are you, Polski? You’re a winner and you’ll have a line and you’ll love it.” Then that grin. The grin of someone who hasn’t been told ‘no’ in a very long time.
How fast would it work? How off my face would I be? And how long did I have before the side-effects kicked in? I tried mentally calculating this. Didn’t have a clue.
“First you, then me,” he laughed. “Last time this happened, poor guy caught me banging some fan. Never do the hardcore fans, by the way. Not that you’ll ever need to, but my holy god, you’ve barely stuck it in them and it’s all, ‘Let’s talk about us.’ Us? Sheesh.” He pulled back his teeth and made a weird smacking sound. “Come on, take the stuff.”
I snorted the drugs. My head did not fall off.
Then Harry did a line. He leaned back. “Man,” he beamed, like he was graciously acknowledging some applause at the O2. “I have done so much of this shit tonight.”
That was when I knew I was in with a chance.
We sat there for a couple of minutes, nodding to each other like old friends smelling each other’s farts. Then Harry’s little baby face crumpled. “Oh, boy,” he winced, “Gotta go use the bathroom.”
I WORRIED I’D hit him too hard on the head when he came out of the loo. I was starting to feel over-confident but also stupid-paranoid. Not the best conditions for getting away with a kidnapping. But it had, pretty much, worked like a charm. Harry Paperboy fitted perfectly in my cleaner’s trolley, his body just a little childlike, swaddled in towels. I wheeled him down the corridor, and then, just to the right hand side of the lobby, away from the gaze of the camera, and down towards the service lift, the one that didn’t have a camera in it. And then away we went, out into the night. Although, and this really started to nag at me, the thing was, I really needed the bathroom.
THE NINJA MET me in the basement.
“How did you know to find me here?” I asked her.
She just nodded her balaclava’d head. She didn’t offer to help me drag Harry out of the van. She just watched.
“Are you checking up on me?”
She didn’t answer.
“Then what?”
She considered her reply. “Well, I guess I’m here to make sure you don’t chicken out.”
TRANSCRIPT
Hey everyone, this is Harry.
So yeah. I have been kidnapped and strapped to a chair. I’m being held—shiiiit. Fuck, man, fuck Jesus fuck. Okay. I’ll stick to the script. I promise. Promise. Just don’t do that again.
I am being held here to teach all of you, my fans, a lesson. My captor wants you to know that he actually rather likes me, the sick fuck fuccccck! Man! Man! Please! Okay! Sorry.
[some gasping, indistinct]
He likes me. He wants me to survive this. And with your help, we can do this.
He wants you to learn how to be nice. Okay. That’s how we’re going to get through this. He will hold me in this place for one hour. That’s all. If, at the end of that hour, all goes as well as my captor hopes, I will be allowed to go free. It’s that simple.
There’s only one condition. For that one hour, my captor would like you to be nice. Okay. He’s kidnapped me because he’s noticed a lot of hatred among you. He says (and I don’t believe it fuck but seriously stop that shit) that you’re kind of mean. You love me, but it’s a bit aggressive. Full on, you know? And he just wants you all to play nice for an hour. No shouting. No hate campaigns. No death threats. That’s all he wants. Okay?
Thing is—as you may have gathered—wait, you put that in? You mean bastard—I’m tied to an electric chair. Every time you tweet something mean or nasty, I’ll get a shock. Not a big one. But you know—it’ll hurt. So let’s not do that. For one hour, okay, play nice, yeah? Do it for me.
And now—oh, God—the power’s going live. Okay. I love you, Mom.
I’D PLANNED THIS carefully. I’d really thought it through. I was hoping to fail. I’d worked through a few possibilities—I’d meticulously selected the hashtags I was going to use. Screams of rage, they’d fall by the wayside. But anything with his name in it was reasonably fair game. I’d run a few sample tests. I’d even anticipated any attempt to game this, by people wanting to electrocute Harry. I’d set up a Twitter account that followed just a few hundred accounts. Jeanette Turlingham’s army. The resulting feed fed into the power to Harry’s chair.
The Ninja helped me checked the wiring. It turned out she was really good at this kind of thing. Me, I was basically running it off YouTube tutorials. Oh, yes, you can learn how to build an electric chair on the internet. You might boggle at that, but, as Henry Jarman said, “All Knowledge Good.”
We stood back and surveyed our handiwork. It would do.
I explained the plan to Harry. He stared at us in horror.
“My friend and I will be here,” I said to him, absurdly trying to sound reassuring. “With the two of us, it’ll be okay.”
His eyes went wide at that. I think he didn’t believe us. But I’d done the calculations carefully. I stepped to one side, and the Ninja nodded to me curtly. She stepped up to the controls.
“There’s a big lever?” she said in that disbelieving Scots burr. “Of course. Idiot like you would put in a big lever.”
She yanked it.
I figured it would be a bit choppy for the first few minutes, and then probably okay for the rest of the hour. Nervous, but okay. With a bit of luck and allowing for the different time zones we were operating in, I may even have picked a time when most of them would be asleep, or heading for bed.
It turns out, I had got Harry’s fans wrong.
It took him ten seconds to die.
FUCK U. #Free
Harry.
NO HARRY NO. I’LL FUCK YOU UP #FreeHarry.
DIE FAG. #FreeHarry.
I WATCHED IT happen. I made it happen. But really, honestly, believe me, I didn’t kill him. They did. I’d thought it through, I’d installed limiters, I’d done everything. But I’d underestimated the power of their hatred.
THE THING IS, the thing I’d hoped for was that this would teach everyone a lesson. And yes, there were a lot of long think pieces on news blogs that took that viewpoint. You know the kind of articles—the ones written by people who own Moleskine notebooks and like their articles spread over five pages?
The problem is, the tabloids didn’t see it that way. They had footage of the planet’s most famous teenager exploding. It was a good story, whatever way they went with it. They didn’t, however, go the way of accusing his fans of killing him. Teenage girls make bad tabloid murderers. Instead they zeroed in on the ‘sick psychopath’ who tortured Harry to death. But I didn’t do a thing; they did. The people who loved him the most.
You want to know about the girls themselves, don’t you? They’re the guilty ones in this, not me. But they didn’t see themselves as guilty. They saw this as something that had been done to Harry, but not by them. For a long while, they saw it as a publicity stunt. Even when his body was found by the police, they didn’t believe it. Then the conspiracy theories started, with the guilt landing anywhere but near them. The thing I had forgotten was that, for teenagers even more than adults, nothing is ever their fault. There are several stages of grieving. Well, the PaperGurl Army had anger and denial, then some more anger and denial. Then came the sense of loss. They had had something beautiful, and it had been taken away from them. So out came the floods of grieving. ‘SO MUCH HURTS. SO MANY FEELS. CRYING SO MUCH I CAN’T EVEN.’ Sad face sad face sad face sad face. And oh, God, the deviantART portraits. It was like the Pope’s funeral in pastels.
