Join Me

  ALREADY BELGIANS JOINED DANNY WALLACE

  BRUSSELS – ‘Join Me!’ was the call made by the amusing Englishman Danny Wallace to the viewers of ‘De Laatste Show’ on Thursday night.

  The viewers had to come yesterday at 6pm to the Grand Place of Brussels to join this new movement. Many people came. What they were going to join or do was still not resolved, but everyone felt the good about it and the meeting was outmost pleasant!

  It all began with a few advertisements in local London newspapers, in which Danny Wallace invited people to Join him, just like that. Only thing he asks is to send him a passport photo.

  To his own amazement, he got massive reactions from different countries. He calls his movement ‘A Collective’, and has given it a name in the meanwhile: the ‘Karma Army’. They have stickers and posters and even a kind of anthem, but the members are still looking for the sense, the target of this collective.

  Luckily, Danny decided to be at the service of Good Things, and for a start on every Friday. A first task was made up: ‘Make an old man happy’. So Danny did an appeal to send peanuts to an old man who loves this kind of food. The old man received about eighty packages of peanuts.

  Danny paid all Belgian joinees a drink in a local pub. Strangely enough no one really asked for an explanation, and they didn’t get much of an answer either – the meeting itself was already a very positive event on itself.

  Wallace himself admitted afterwards that he would love cooking, adore sharp knives, read and internet a lot.

  ‘Belgians are a very nice people. I already got hit in every place where I showed up, but not in this country’ stated this odd man.

  ‘Stated this odd man’? Well, I’m not surprised Raymond de Condé thought I was odd – listen to how I’m talking! ‘I already got hit in every place I showed up, but not this country’? I appear to need some serious lessons in how to speak. Plus, the only place I’d so far been hit in was Belgium, by that furious anti-British pensioner.

  But infinitely more worrying: what in God’s name is all this about me ADORING SHARP KNIVES? I have never in my life stated that I ‘adore sharp knives’! Where did that come from? How strong was that beer? What element of the language barrier had caused Raymond to think I’d said that? And was that why he’d left so quickly afterwards? What if other potential joinees thought that I adored sharp knives? Add that to the fictional beatings I’ve apparently been taking around the world and my apparent love of the Internet and you’ve got a psychopath waiting to happen! It was a reputation I could well do without.

  But at least Raymond had thought the meeting was a very positive event on itself and that the evening was outmost pleasant. And he was right: everyone had felt ‘the good about it’.

  ‘So,’ said Hanne, sitting down on the couch. ‘You’re feeling better?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Much better now. Outmost pleasant, in fact.’

  ‘I told my dad you were ill. He said that if you had a fever, you should cut up tomatoes and then place them on your forehead.’

  Hanne’s dad is a PE teacher back in Norway, and has rather unconventional medical techniques. And yet they nearly always work.

  ‘I didn’t have a fever. And if I did, you know what my mum would have said.’

  My mum, as you know, is Swiss, and has rather unconventional techniques of her own, which very rarely work. Once I had a fever and her first reaction was to wrap my feet in cabbage leaves. Still, at the very least it gives me a valid excuse, should Hanne ever complain about the smell of my trainers.

  ‘How was Thursday night, anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘It was okay.’

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. It won’t happen again. I won’t be ill any more. I’m on a real health kick now.’

  ‘I know what you’re like, Danny. Drinking Fanta instead of Coke because it has a vague association with fruit does not count as a health kick.’

  ‘Lilt, then. There’s all sorts of tropical fruit in Lilt. Vitamins galore. I’ll be fine from now on, I promise.’

  Hanne smiled and I sat next to her with the tea. I turned the TV volume up.

  ‘Belgium?’ she said.

  My heart stopped. I turned the TV volume down.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What are you interested in Belgium for?’ She leaned forward and picked up a map of Belgium, which lay, creased, under my coffee table.

  ‘Er . . . I don’t know,’ I said, brilliantly.

  ‘Whose is this?’

  I stuck my lower lip out and shook my head.

  ‘Dunno.’

  Again: brilliant.

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? It’s in your flat!’

  ‘Well, I mean, it’s mine. I’ve had it ages. I’ve always wanted to go to Belgium, you know that.’

  ‘You never told me you wanted to go to Belgium. Why do you want to go to Belgium?’

  ‘I like . . . lace. And y’know . . . Belgium is famous for lace.’

  Hanne frowned.

  ‘You don’t like lace, do you?’

  I realised how ludicrous it sounded.

  ‘No.’ Brilliant, once more. I was good at getting out of difficult fixes. ‘Anyway, drink your tea.’

  Hanne took a sip and placed the map on the table.

  ‘We can go to Belgium if you like,’ she said. ‘After you’ve taken me to Venice, of course . . .’ She snuggled into my arm and I turned the volume up again. We sat, and laughed, and drank tea, and watched Gloria Hunniford’s Open House. It was cosy, and safe, and nice. The afternoon, I mean, not the show. Gloria was talking about the best place in the house to put an aspidistra, or some such nonsense, so you can imagine the controversy.

  But this still annoys me to this day: part of me, sitting there, was restless. I wanted to check my emails, or check the post, or just see how my merry band of joinees were doing. I should have been happy – Hanne was there – but my mind was in a different place. I felt like a parent on a night out, guilty for not keeping an eye on the kids, having to force himself to relax and enjoy some time off with the person he hardly ever got to see any more.

  But I couldn’t.

  The joinees had well and truly taken over my mind. I was always thinking about them, now, always wondering whether they were safe and happy. Their short, regular emails provided tantalising glimpses into their lives. I knew Joinee Austin was going on a date on Wednesday night, with a man she’d met somewhere recently. She’d been through a lot lately, what with the break-up and all, and I hoped things would go well for her. Joinee Whitby had just found out he needed seventeen fillings – how would he pay for that on a computer programmer’s wage, especially with little Max to think about? Joinee Anderson’s car had broken down a week before . . . had he found a replacement? How was he getting to work? That car was his lifeline, especially now Gemma had a new job in the city.

  Looking back on it, I think you could almost say I had become obsessed with them. I’d been walking through Canary Wharf a week or so previously, and seen a man in the crowd I thought I knew. I’d raised my eyebrows at him, hoping he’d return a smile, but he just looked at me uncertainly and wandered off. A quick rummage through my passport photos that afternoon confirmed it was Joinee Warren, a bearded man working in the IT department at the HSBC in nearby Docklands.

  I’d thought I was going mad one night when I recognised a man on the late-night TV quiz show The Machine. ‘That’s Joinee Willis!’ I’d cried out, to myself, and I actually cheered out loud when he won. I also spotted Joinee Harfield, a legal secretary, on a repeat of The Weakest Link on cable TV, but as I’d been drinking quite heavily that evening I’d actually thought it was the most natural thing in the world. But this wasn’t right. None of it was. Who becomes obsessed by a disparate bunch of strangers?

  ‘You look worried,’ said Hanne.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m just probably still recovering a bit.’

  Hanne looked disgruntled. That’s not to say she’d
looked particularly gruntled beforehand, because, to be honest, I wouldn’t go out with a girl who had a gruntled face, despite the fact that I have no idea what one would look like.

  ‘Well, do you want some soup or something?’ It was a nice offer but she said it impatiently.

  ‘No, no, I’m fine. Let’s watch Gloria.’

  ‘Danny,’ she said, switching the TV off. ‘Just tell me. Is something wrong? Something between us?’

  Uh-oh . . .

  ‘What? No! Nothing at all. I’m just a little distracted!’

  ‘By what? Because whatever it is it’s been distracting you for a while now. You’re not behaving normally. You just sit there not talking to me, always thinking about something. And you don’t seem all that ill for someone who couldn’t get out of bed on Thursday night. Is it me?’

  ‘No! Not at all – it’s not you. It’s me. I’m just sort of busy a lot.’

  ‘With what? Playing videogames? Watching films? You weren’t like this when you had a proper job. I’d really thought things were back on track for us.’

  ‘They were. They are. Don’t worry about me. I’m just tired, or something. How about tomorrow? Give me one more day to recover and then tomorrow we’ll do something nice. Dinner, or something?’

  ‘Not a curry, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Anything you want.’

  Hanne smiled, almost reluctantly.

  ‘Fine, okay. Tomorrow it is. Shall I meet you in town? I finish at five.’

  ‘Cool. I’ll call you and we’ll hook up.’

  We finished watching Gloria (the best place for an aspidistra is the living room), Hanne finished her tea, and then she left me to it. She was popping into town to meet her friend Cecilie, but if she was passing the shoe shop again, I had my doubts as to whether that would actually happen.

  But I felt bad for making Hanne feel bad. She didn’t deserve that. She deserved a boyfriend who would sit there, and talk to her, and make her the centre of attention whenever she came round. And what did she get? A boy who makes her watch shows about aspidistras while he worries how some bloke in Hampshire is going to afford seventeen fillings. It wasn’t right.

  I walked, head heavy with guilt, to my computer, and downloaded my email. There was only one. It was from Joinee Katleen Van Veen, of Belgium. She had something to tell me.

  Danny,

  I want to say something about Join Me. It has become a way for me to show that I care for other people. Since I have given you my picture I am being more open and I am trying to meet more people and that makes myself very happy. Thank you for this fantastic initiative that changed my life.

  Katleen

  PS. You can do with my photo what you want except for publishing it on a website of prostituts.

  I was touched. Not by that last bit, obviously, but by the rest. This is what it was all about. I felt immediately less guilty about the Hanne situation, but didn’t feel as if I could really accept Katleen’s gratitude. She was thanking me – but for what? I hadn’t told her to be more open. I hadn’t told her to try and meet more people. All I’d done was unwittingly give her an excuse . . . Katleen had waited until she was part of a group – a group she’d never really met – before she’d gone ahead and done the things she subconsciously always wanted to do. It was all her own work, all her own idea, but the words Join Me had given her the nerve. She just needed a bit of support. A bit of comfort, knowing she wasn’t the only one out there doing the things she was now brave enough to do – even if she was. I was happy for her. She’d made Join Me her own. Used it to improve things. She’d made an incredibly vague concept incredibly specific to her, and it had worked. She was happier now, and, as a result, she was making others happier.

  Another email touched me just as much.

  ‘Danny,’ wrote Joinee Joan, ‘the Join Me meeting of Thursday without exaggerating, was the best evening I have had in many years. Seriously! To meet the other joinees was a great inspiration. I promise I will do my best to do good deeds every Friday from now!’

  It suddenly hit me that what I was doing was . . . well . . . important. At least in a small way. It genuinely was improving people’s lives. Not through anything I was doing or saying – but through what they were choosing to take away from it all. Perhaps that was the key to the whole thing, even in the beginning. People were joining something they knew nothing about, and applying their own meaning to it. Joan and Katleen were both doubtless gaining different things from their involvement in Join Me . . . but so long as the end result was positive, who cares?

  If you’d asked me a month or two earlier whose lives Join Me would be improving, I’d have thought it would have been those people for whom we were doing good deeds. It suddenly became clear that it was actually improving the lives of the people who were doing those good deeds.

  I was full of happiness and love for my joinees. My trip to Belgium, combined with the natural everyday rise in numbers, the campaigning in Greece, and the efforts of the Newcastle boys, had taken me up to 653 joinees. But you know what? It was becoming less about numbers, for me. Because each of those numbers was a person. And, more and more, that was how I was now thinking of them. And how different I now was from the way I’d been just a month before. A month before, I’d been on the brink of giving up. I’d been disillusioned by the actions of Raymond Price. And I’d been paranoid that my one-time nemesis Joinee Whitby was out to get me.

  I’d sorted two of those three things out.

  And the next day, as arranged, I’d finally meet Joinee Whitby, and I’d try my best to sort out the third . . .

  CHAPTER 20

  5. And, lo, the words of Daniel were heard in London; and in the shire of the Hamps; and in the shire of the Berks.

  I WAS MEETING Joinee Whitby at the Yorkshire Grey pub on a quiet road quite near Oxford Street. It’s a friendly, traditional pub, with home-cooked meals, a real history to it, and a selection of odd Bavarian lagers. I drank a shandy while I waited on a picnic table outside. At one point the famous author Mike Gayle walked past me, with his wife. Then they got into a turquoise Mercedes parked outside the hotel opposite, and were driven off, probably to some fancy authors’ do, or to a book signing, or to record a segment for The Late Review, or to have his photo taken for the cover of Time magazine.

  I sighed. That was the life. Maybe that was something I should try and get into. Where I was, it had started to rain slightly. And it was cold. It was nothing like a turquoise Mercedes.

  I looked up and down the street. There was no sign of Joinee Whitby yet. I began to wonder whether perhaps Ian had been right about Whitby all along. Was this a cunning ruse? While I was sat here, on this picnic bench, outside this pub, was Joinee Whitby rallying the troops? Was he stealing my joinees while I was out and about? Surely someone would have phoned me by now to tell me?

  Some people walked by, disturbing my thoughts. I stared at my phone while I waited, and then pretended to send a text message. That’s what I do when I’m sitting alone in a pub, waiting for someone to arrive. In the old days, I would’ve just stared at the back of a crisp packet and pretended I found the list of ingredients suddenly incredibly fascinating. But that made me look odd, especially if my friend was more than, say, forty minutes late. There’s only so long you can stare at a crisp packet without looking like you don’t know how to open it. With the fake text message, you could still pretend to be popular, albeit at a distance.

  My phone vibrated, giving me quite a surprise. A message had arrived. Would it be one of my joinees warning me of Whitby’s actions? Or a mysterious voice, telling me my days as Leader of Join Me had come to an end, just when I’d rediscovered the pleasures of power? I found myself scouring the rooftops and windows of Langham Street, just in case Whitby had decided a simple assassination was all that would be necessary.

  The message was from Ian. MEET FOR COFFEE? AM IN TOWN. I texted back. COOL. STARBUCKS CARNABY STREET. 3PM?

  I looked up as I pressed Send, and there, ab
out twenty feet away, was Joinee Whitby.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, standing up.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, shaking my hand.

  So this was he. Whitby. My nemesis. At last we meet.

  * * *

  Matthew John Whitby prefers stout to beer, and likes composing music, as well as playing the piano. Oh, and the jembeh, an African drum, not entirely dissimilar to the bongo. As my friends will tell you, I think I have, in the past, made my position on matters of the bongo quite clear.

  He also enjoys mugs.

  ‘I like winning them. I’m up to six now. My local radio station gives them away. I’d prefer to have ten, because then I could build a bigger pyramid, and of course, the ultimate would be to have fourteen, because you’d have a very strong, wide base.’

  I made a mental note not to criticise mugs or mug-based pyramids while in his presence. I sensed it was a battle I wouldn’t be able to win.

  Matt’s thirty years old, lives in a pretty Hampshire village with his girlfriend and young son, and works as a computer programmer. ‘But music is my passion. I played the piano when I was about 10. Not that I’ve ever been any good. I started learning again recently. I feel that there’s so much good music out there, and I just want to add to it, you know? My work is so dull. Programming day in, day out. I need a creative outlet. That’s why I enjoyed doing my Join Me anthem so much.’

  ‘What sort of music do you like?’ I said, swiftly moving the conversation on before we started talking about his anthem too much.

  ‘I like Jason Faulkner, who does a lot of session work.’