The fame game, p.1
The Fame Game, page 1
The Fame Game
NJ Moss
Copyright © 2024 NJ Moss
* * *
The right of NJ Moss to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
* * *
First published in 2024 by Bloodhound Books.
* * *
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
* * *
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
* * *
Print ISBN: 978-1-917214-32-2
Contents
Newsletter sign-up
Prologue
1. Vicky
2. Alek
3. Vicky
4. Alek
5. Vicky
6. Alek
7. Vicky
8. Alek
9. Vicky
10. Alek
11. Vicky
12. Alek
13. Vicky
14. Alek
15. Vicky
16. Alek
17. Nat
18. Vicky
19. Alek
20. Nat
21. Nat
22. Alek
23. Nat
24. Alek
25. Vicky
26. Nat
27. Alek
28. Mia
29. Vicky
30. Seb
31. Alek
32. Vicky
33. Nat
34. Alek
35. Mia
36. Nat
37. Vicky
38. Alek
39. Seb
40. Mia
41. Alek
42. Nat
43. Alek
44. Nat
45. Alek
46. Seb
47. Vicky
48. Alek
49. Seb
50. Mia
51. Seb
52. Alek
53. Mia
54. Alek
55. Vicky
56. Alek
57. Nat
58. Seb
Epilogue
Also by NJ Moss
You will also enjoy:
Newsletter sign-up
Acknowledgements
A note from the publisher
For Krystle
Prologue
David
David was scared. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was terrified right down to his core. He’d never had a knife pressed against his throat. He’d never thought he might die. Obviously, everybody died. But he’d never, ever dreamed that it would be like this. He wasn’t even forty.
“Explain.”
David licked his lips, then he said, “It was just a game.”
“A game? A game?” More pressure with the knife. “If you don’t explain what the hell you thought you were doing, I swear to God, I’ll bleed you out right here. I don’t care anymore. Too much has happened, too much has gone wrong for me to care. And all because of you.”
David was almost certain he could feel blood dripping down his neck.
“I wanted to… make a point,” he said, hating the fact he’d paused, hating how desperate he felt.
“What point? I’m really, honestly curious.”
More pressure from the knife. David was finding it difficult to speak. Urine was trickling down his leg. “People will do anything for fame.”
A laugh. “That’s your point? That’s why you blackmailed a married woman? Why you threatened to expose an affair? Why you ruined so many lives? Because ‘people will do anything for fame’? Do you realise how obvious that is? You might as well tell me you did it to prove the sky is blue.”
“It was… more than that.”
“I’m curious. Tell me.”
David licked his lips. “I don’t agree that people, in general, will do anything for fame.”
“You’re the one who bloody said it.”
Because he had a knife to his throat! “A lot of people will,” he went on. “But Vicky? A happily married woman with two children? I wanted to see how far a normal person would go. But I didn’t expect any of this. How could I? Do you honestly believe I wanted any of this to happen?”
“You secretly recorded your sexual encounter with a married woman. You then used the video to blackmail her for the most pathetic reason I can think of. Do you think I should let you go, David? Do you honestly think you deserve that?”
Suddenly, David was on the floor, a knee on his belly, the knife tip pushed directly against his Adam’s apple.
Chapter 1
Vicky
Walking through town, Vicky felt naked. David had threatened her with a sex tape. Apparently, he had secretly recorded her in some dingy hotel room over a decade ago, but he’d refused to show it to her. Either way, he could expose the historic affair if he really wanted to. He’d tell Seb, and then Vicky would be forced to lie… but what if David had found somebody who’d seen them kissing, or checking into a hotel, or… worse?
When her mobile rang, she sat on a bench, head rushing. It was Nat, her seventeen-year-old daughter. “Mum, are you going to be home soon? I’m meeting Mia and Grandma isn’t here yet.”
Vicky’s mother and Nat were helping to take care of Vicky’s youngest child, Max, during the summer holidays. Vicky swallowed, feeling like her daughter somehow knew about the affair too, feeling exposed. “I’m on my way.”
“Can you get me some foundation? The one I like?”
Nat’s voice got tight as if she expected a back-and-forth like usual, but Vicky felt too drained. “Sure.”
“Oh – thanks.”
“Bye. Love you.”
“Love you, Mum.”
Vicky put her phone in her bag and looked around the high street. The sun beamed down and the air was thick with clouds of vape smoke, and more than half the people were staring down at their phones. Vicky never normally paid attention to stuff like that, but David’s sick challenge – no, his blackmail – had made her suddenly hyperaware of the technology all around her.
David had always fancied himself as an intellectual. In hindsight, David’s so-called intellect had been a bunch of clichés spoken in a husky voice designed to make him seem clever. But this was just sick… and exactly the sort of thing David enjoyed doing.
“I’m a troll,” he told her once, toward the end of their two-month-long affair. When she’d asked what he meant, he said with his easy smile, “People don’t have proper control of their emotions. It’s too easy to trigger them. I go to certain pages and comment certain things, and people massively overreact.”
He’d been grinning, bragging, but his tone had changed when she’d sat up and said, “What sort of pages?”
It was like she was seeing him for the first time.
But then he’d clammed up. The next time they’d met, Vicky had pressed the issue. Finally, he’d admitted to going to missing persons Facebook pages and pretending to be the missing person. He didn’t see anything wrong with it. That was when Vicky knew – though she should have already – she’d made a serious mistake.
She’d spent the last ten years trying to make up for it, but she hadn’t told her husband. She’d thought this was in the past, for Christ’s sake!
David’s blackmail was typically David, typically sadistic and typically pointless. He’d sat in his flat, his hair markedly thinner and greyer, his belly bigger, glasses now instead of contacts, and told her with a wet smile that made her wonder if he was drunk. “It’s simple, Vicky. I want to test the system. If a regular person – which you, angel, clearly are – were to try their best to chase online fame, how effective could they be?”
He told her she had to get a TikTok video with a million views. Or he’d tell her husband about the affair.
“Do you think this is clever?” she’d asked, trying to hold back tears.
“I think you can bleat all you want. But you’re going to do it. Or your kids will know their dad’s dick wasn’t good enough.”
Vicky had almost swung for him, but the prick had been smirking. That was what he wanted. She went to the nearest café and got a double espresso, trying to get her mind to work. He’d given her three weeks, she reflected, as the coffee scorched her throat. Three weeks to become famous. It sounded like a joke.
Chapter 2
Alek
He roamed the streets and saw past the cigarette butts, the children with their drug-filled knapsacks slung across their chests, doing wheelies on their bikes, the elderly with hope in their eyes or hopelessness weighing down their sagging wrinkled features like there was something physical piercing through. He saw through it all, into the past, and he wished everybody else could too. He saw an overweight person casually throwing away food, and he had to resist the urge to scoop up an iced bun and stuff it into his mouth.
Aleksander was not a poor man, but his grandfather Maksym spoke to him continuously. ‘We would wait outside in the alleyways; we would suck what little gristle was left on chicken bones; we would eat apple cores, if we were lucky; the countryside was quiet in a way you cannot understand. There was no wildlife. People said it had all been hunted in the early days. But I know the truth,
People gave Alek strange looks, most likely because he was not dressed in a tracksuit or a T-shirt with a stupid slogan or symbol painted across the front.
He walked down the high street, into the park. It was summer, and he could smell rotting flesh. He could smell poorly managed earth. He could smell suffering horses and the metal of tractors without engines, brought for the photographers, for the badges of progress.
When he heard the girls laughing, he turned and smiled. How old were they? Perhaps sixteen, seventeen, dressed in a way that would invite no good attention. ‘They are harlots, dear child. They are lost women.’ Tight-fitting leggings, shirts that showed their developing bodies. It sickened and confused Alek. Why would their parents let them dress this way?
“Is something funny?”
“Weren’t talking to you, mate,” the leader called over. She was the most well-fed of the group.
“But you were laughing at me.”
There were four of them in total, but only the leader had the courage to look Alek in the eye. The rest looked to the leader, seeming to take some strange solace in her bright pink shirt and her proud belly and the green vape she constantly sucked on.
“So what?” she almost yelled, becoming absurdly aggressive absurdly quickly.
“I would like to know why,” Alek said.
“Char, let’s go…” One of the other girls tugged on her hand.
People were often discomfited by the way Alek spoke. He didn’t understand it. He was calm, especially when wearing his Modern Face.
“We don’t gotta go anywhere,” Char said proudly, before enveloping her face in another cloud of vapour.
Alek reached into his pocket and took out several notes. The girls’ eyes all widened.
“Want to make some money?” Alek said. They were by no means alone in the park; it was summer, almost full, but people ignored them. Nobody wanted to deal with a strangely dressed man – their opinion, Alek guessed – nor these wasted souls.
“You a nonce or something?”
“I’m a virgin, in fact,” Alek told them, which got them all laughing in a thoroughly depressing manner. Like many people in today’s lost world, they were proud of their prematurely shattered innocence.
“How old are you?” Char cackled.
“Thirty-one.”
“And you’re a virgin, mate?”
“Yep. I don’t want you for that. I want to ask you two questions, that’s all. If you get both right, I’ll give you…” He counted the notes. “Eighty pounds.”
“Really?”
“Char, come on…”
But the girl approached until she was almost at Alek’s bench. “What questions?”
“Simple. Question one, can you tell me what the Holocaust is?”
“Are you joking? That’s it?”
“Can you?”
“Hitler and that, what he did to the Jews and that. In the war. World War Two. Killed them and that.”
“And that,” Alek said, nodding, smiling, “is correct. Question number two. Can you tell me what the Holodomor is?”
“The holo-what?”
“The Holodomor,” he repeated.
“Uh…” Char sucked on her vape so hard it was like she thought the answer was contained inside. “Uh… something in history, right?”
“All things are in history.”
“Uh…”
Alek sighed, tucking the notes away. “That’s a shame. It’s probably best you get back to your friends.”
“Wait – can I ask the others?”
“You shouldn’t need to,” Alek said, his Modern Face slipping just a bit. “Good day.”
“But—”
“Fuck off.”
That was his Famine Face coming out. Maksym sent a shiver of approval through Alek. ‘Only the strong survived.’
The girl looked like nobody had ever talked to her in that way. Her mouth fell open in a cartoonish manner, and then her whole body vibrated. “What?”
“I said…” Alek grinned. “Fuck, and then I believe I followed it up with, off.”
“My brother’ll break your neck, mate!”
“Then I suppose you better go and get him.”
Char ran back to her group, none of whom had any idea what it truly meant to be intimidating, or interesting, or noteworthy in any respect. They chattered in their small circle, Char talking into her phone, summoning her brother. They kept looking over at Alek as though expecting him to flee. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly.
Ten minutes later, the brother appeared, wearing a shirt that marked him as the employee of a mobile phone shop. He was a broad, rough-looking man, with the sort of facial hair that somehow made him look poor. Not that Alek was judging.
“You the one who thinks you’re tough, mate?” he said, standing over Alek’s bench.
Alek rose, smiled at the man. Alek was not small; Alek was not weak. It was one of Maksym’s disappointments that Alek refused to starve himself. But that was inauthentic. One day, if he managed to complete his project, he would experience it for real.
The phone shop man didn’t look very tough anymore. He was probably accustomed to his mere presence being enough. “Your sister doesn’t know what the Holodomor is.”
“Who gives a fuck?”
“Do you?”
“That’s not the point, mate.”
“It is the point,” Alek snapped. “Before the Holocaust, there was the Holodomor, the purposeful starving to death of millions of people. The only ones who grew fat were the ravens. They plucked eyeballs out of heads. Stalin took the land, the spirit, the identity – humanity was lost… Do you think that matters?”
The phone shop man took a few steps back. Alek hadn’t meant to raise his voice, but this idiot’s attitude was insulting. Did he expect Alek to be afraid of him?
“Just leave little girls alone, psycho.”
“I thought you were going to assault me.”
“Wuh-what?”
“When you marched over here, so filled with bravado, I thought a fight was afoot. Well, are you? Or are you going to just stand there?”
“He’s mental, Char,” the man said, turning away and then leading the girls from the park.
Alek left soon after, since he knew that in this modern age, he would probably get into trouble for trying to educate the morons. He went to the supermarket and bought eighty pounds worth of food – a trolley full of tinned goods, rice, pasta, sauces, biscuits, and a few perishables – and then dumped it all in the donations box.
Afterwards, he went home, smoked more cigarettes, and took his small wooden box from its secret place behind the display cabinet. He rattled it as he stared at the black-and-white photo of Maksym on the wall. He kept rattling, and then Maksym’s lips moved. His voice was quieter, more ghostly, than usual, but that was because the old photo distorted it.
“You… are… the… only… one… who… can… save… me…”
“I know.”
“You… can… save… us… all…”
Alek rattled the box. He didn’t want to admit the next bit. “I’m frightened of what I’ll have to do.”
