Haterz Read Free

maybe. But I think it’s funny, that’s all I’m saying.”
    She didn’t think it funny. Have you ever stopped and looked at who a friend follows on Twitter? For instance, that matey guy who, it turns out, follows a surprising number of topless men and a club night called Rough Bear City?
    Or, in Danielle’s case, she followed a surprising number of Union Jacks and Britain First. Previously, you had to wonder what an average Britain First supporter looked like. Thanks to Twitter, we have the answer. They seem to be a lot of quite glum looking people posing in front of flags. I guess they’re unhappy because the country is so full of Foreigns, Fundamentals and Islams.
    It’s funny what autocorrect tells you about yourself. I remember feeling a bit surprised the day my phone went for ‘fuck’ not ‘dual.’ Oh dear, I thought, perhaps I should swear less in texts. I wonder if your average racist has that moment of self-realisation when their phone picks ‘scum’ over ‘science.’
    They do use ‘scum’ a lot. They’re also very good at the indirect threat. Don’t say, ‘We’re going to kill u, scum.’ Do say, ‘Will u be laughing scum when sharia law beheads u? Haha.’
    I said some of this to Danielle. Actually, I didn’t get to say much of it at all. I got as far as mentioning that some of the people she follows are maybe, a bit, fascisty UKIP, and she just gave me a look. “Have you been stalking me? You’re weird, David,” she said, biting the rim of her glass. “Has anyone ever told you you’ve way too much time on your hands?” Then she laughed.
     
     
    D ANIELLE GULPED DOWN another glass of white. I don’t really drink that much, and sometimes I’ll be out, surrounded by a group of people, all laughing and talking loudly over each other, and I’ll think, I’m happiest going home and getting on with a bit of work. I don’t think I’m better than them (well, maybe I do a bit), but when you’re fairly sober it’s suddenly quite hard to fit in with people who aren’t. Remember those Fisher-Price Activity Centres— the ones where you had to tap plastic blocks into differently shaped plastic holes with a plastic hammer? That, really. Suddenly, I’m surrounded by a lot of drunk people loudly hammering themselves and there’s nowhere really for me to fit in.
    She held up her glass to the light, and it shone around the lipstick prints, the lees of wine dribbling from the edges in vampire kisses. I looked at her instead.
    As I’ve said, Danielle’s good looks weren’t beautiful, but they were stunning. When the British Empire acquired the largest diamond in the world, Prince Albert is said to have looked at the Koh-i-Noor diamond and immediately sent it away to be cut, chiselled, trimmed and polished. He just wasn’t happy with it, and he kept on being not happy with it until forty per cent of it had been chipped away. Danielle’s face was angular, pushed-back and hard-edged. Natural points had been polished into facets—cheekbones, nose, eyebrows, ears and eyes.
    Remember video games ten years ago? When they’d got the motion of people right but were still trying to work out how to render them realistically? Lara Croft would turn around to you, halfway through her grail quest, and her face would be a mass of polygons? Like Prince Albert had been at her natural beauty with an angle grinder, polishing and trimming and hardening every facet.
    Danielle had that same quality to her face. Every potential smoothness had been flattened, matted and simplified. Don’t get me wrong here. She wore a lot of make-up, but it didn’t look like it was there at all. It simply looked like someone had selected a triangle between cheek, lip and jaw and pressed ‘Fill.’
    The Guy I knew, the Guy I’d shared a damp, mousy house with in the second year, he was impatient. If you spent too long on the loo reading Q magazine there’d be a hammering on the door. So I tried to imagine the patience he’d