29.

2:15 p.m.

Life back at the Gazette had become quite bizarre. Bob Chamberlain regularly smacked me on the back as he passed my desk, and he seemed to pass it a lot more frequently now. I had taken to wincing in advance. Meg Cleroux jokingly asked me if I had developed a tic or something.

I had stopped checking e-mail, voice-mail—any mail, really, even at home. There was just too damn much of it. I pretended to be on top of it all when Bob asked, but in reality, I was the guy who stops running away from Godzilla and just stands there screaming endlessly, waiting for the big foot to squash me.

So, it came as no surprise, then, that amongst the hundreds of unanswered e-mails was a series of communications from Hollywood Tonight producers offering me a chance to comment on the interesting content of several segments that they were planning to air later that week. Hell, it didn’t even matter that I didn’t respond: they’d always been intending to write what they wanted about Steven anyway. Bunch of liars.

I had thrown all caution to the winds by this point. For Saturday’s column I wrote about Steven’s wild night with Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, before her marriage to the soccer great. Apparently, Steven was a great lover, a man of many ancient sexual secrets, the ultimate pleasurer of women. He’d also made love to Catherine Zeta-Jones (also before her marriage, because I liked her), Sheryl Crow, and the daughters of a number of international leaders. His trademark exit from these trysts was a fragrant white gardenia left on the sated woman’s pillow and a manly nod from the doorway. He was damn good. Maybe better than Clint Eastwood.

Fan response was huge, from all quarters. Men liked his rugged heroism (and the sexual conquests, of course), women loved his rugged heroism and contradictory tender attentions to women, and the teens were on fire to hear his music. Meg announced that a friend of hers had downloaded a pirated recording of a Steven McCartney hit from Europe. We all crowded around her computer to check out the site on the net. I was quite curious to hear what my creation had been up to; I hadn’t actually thought about what kind of musical sound he would go for.

The racket that we heard sounded like Boris Yeltsin singing The Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen, except that none of us could really make out any words. We disgustedly concluded, quite rightly, that this recording was just a hoax—there was no way that a pop superstar from Hamilton would have a Russian accent.

Where it had taken me many hours to write a column before all of this, now they were pouring out of me like green vomit from The Exorcist. I had already written Monday’s and Tuesday’s columns. They were submitted and ready to go. Bob rubbed his hands with glee.

“This stuff is golden, Love! Monday’s bit about stealing intel from the North Koreans is genius. God, I love the newspaper business.” He fairly danced away, humming the theme from the James Bond movies under his breath. If he remembered at all that Steven was “dead” and that all of this was just a big pile of shite, he didn’t make mention of it.

On the Saturday night news, I saw a piece about a raid by US Forces on an Al Qaeda hideout in Iraq. They had recovered many sophisticated weapons, along with detailed plans and contact lists for several acts of terror to be carried out against Canadian targets. The General who addressed the media at the White House credited the “invaluable information provided by an undercover Canadian source embedded in Iraq”; well, of course, we all knew that it had to be Steven McCartney. He had saved his country from devastating bombings.

Hollywood Tonight and its competitors all fought to provide the most outrageous Steven news. A major problem was the lack of film footage or recent photos. The show sidestepped the issue by filming “re-enactments” of important moments using “actors”. In this way, we were all treated to the sight of Steven McCartney’s spectacular pecs and abs as he shirtlessly rescued Pam Anderson’s dogs. He looked really good for a guy our age, I must say.