Meatspace (12 page)

So, we got to the breakfast place and he turned to me and said, ‘So you saw I looked like you and you got a matching tattoo?’

‘Yeah, fuck it, innit,’ I said to him.

‘I get that. It’s pretty amazing. How did you track me down to my apartment block?’

‘Bruv, you need to invest time and effort into not tweeting your location every few hours and leaving the Twitter Location turned on. I knew where you were at all times, bro.’

Then he took out a pen and paper and wrote down everything I’d said. He looked at me and I was thinking, damn, either he’s falling in love or he’s just marvelling at my intuition. So then he said, ‘Wanna party with me?’ and I was like, ‘Yes, mate, that’s what I came here for.’ He said, ‘Right, tonight, meet me here.’ He pushed the paper he’s just written on across the table to me, and said, ‘8 o’clock.’

And then he left, just like that. And I thought, wicked, that guy was super safe. Except then, the bill for all the food he’d just eaten arrived and mug here is stuck with the bill. You can all PayPal me some money cos I think this guy might be a chief tonight and leave me with a bar bill.

Now that’s what I call an interaction.

There are 2 comments for this blog:

df345: OH EM GEE. This is too funny.

Gustave Geronimo: I’ve just blogged about everything I hate on the internet. People like you are number 3. Check it out: www.gustavegeronimo.biz. I look forward to the comments. If you can pry yourself away from your stupid self-obsessed life.

History:

The perfect CV – Google
Kitab Balasubramanyam – Facebook
Hayley Bankcroft – Google images
[104] – Twitter

The flat feels empty and still so I pay a surprise visit to Dad in my childhood home. I spend the journey catching up on Aziz’s online antics. I check his blog – he’s sporadically updating his adventure. He’s met the boy with the bow tie tattoo, Teddy Baker. Something big’s gone down. I laugh at his writing diction – it’s like he’s in the centre of the room bellowing at you like Brian Blessed, hitting you over and over with a wet mackerel of anecdote. Without him around, I feel weak and impulsive. Weak because any decision I make doesn’t come with the weight of my enforcer and impulsive because that then means I could go on to do anything.

At Dad’s house the heating’s cranked up to tropical conditions. Sad Bollywood songs are shrill and loud. He’s holding a tumbler of vodka. He’s surprised to see me. I’ve let myself in and snuck up on him. He’s never jumpy when I do this, just annoyed at the surprise visit.

‘Kitab-san, what are you doing here?’

‘Just wanted to see my dad.’

He closes his eyes and returns to sprawling out in his favourite armchair, the one opposite the sideboard with his iPod dock on top of a stack of old stocks and shares magazines. I can see the door to my old bedroom at the top of the stairs, closed. The rest of the house looks like a museum of how things were and what they used to be. In the kitchen, as I fix myself a glass of water, I notice films of dust over the cooking implements. I open the fridge out of curiosity as I walk past it. There are 6 takeaway containers, a bottle of ketchup and 3 2-pint bottles of semi-skimmed milk. The oldest carton, the milk went off 6 weeks ago. I don’t mention it as I walk into the living room, where Dad sits staring at large photos of my mum and smaller ones of dead family members, his feet up on a pouffe, the pouffe covered in one of Mum’s old shawls. Her old shawl – it used to smell of olbas and hair oil, the 2 smells I associate with her, because, much as I don’t remember her physical form, every trace of her existence in the house, from her clothes still hanging in the wardrobe to her scarves and shawls in the coat cupboard, they smell of olbas oil and hair oil. Just like this shawl he rests his feet on. Now it smells of my dad’s feet.

‘How are you, Kitab-san?’

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Weird, actually. There’s this guy, another Kitab Balasubramanyam, I found another me. Weird, eh? Another one. I thought I was, you know, special or something.’

Dad looks at me. ‘What do you mean, found another me?’

‘Never mind,’ I say.

‘I don’t know where my life is going,’ my dad says. Whenever he’s home, he’s low, talking about ending it all. When he’s out, he’s the life of the party. This is the opposite of who he is when he visits. This is the him I avoid.

‘What about your girlfriends?’ I ask, sitting down.

‘What’s the point?’

‘Dad,’ I say. ‘I was just thinking about things. We should … you know … What are you doing on Saturday?’ He looks at me. I came home because I wanted to feel the comfort of being home. It feels like a shrine. I feel nothing. I’ve made a mistake. I need to leave.

I’m wearing a long-sleeve top because I don’t want Dad to see my tattoo. He may think, socially, he’s living out the last days of the libertine, but morally, he’s still a parent who thinks that their child smoking and getting tattoos is a mark of the devil. Luckily I’ve given up smoking. He used to ask why I listened to guitar music when growing up, because he said it sounded like they were attacking you until you started worshipping the devil. Which, he added, was difficult for us, because we were Hindu.

I stand up to go.

‘You know,’ he says. ‘That girl who I said was fat?’ I nod. ‘Look what she did to me.’ He stands up slowly and unwraps his arm. There’s a light shade of bruising on his wrist. ‘Can you believe it?’

‘Why did she do that?’ I ask. ‘Did she hurt you?’

Dad laughs. ‘No,’ he says. ‘She was pretending to try to hurt me. And she actually did.’

He bursts out laughing and grabs my arm to demonstrate the Chinese burn. As he pulls at my right arm, my shirt sleeve tugs up towards the edge of the tattoo I am hiding. But he sees the corner of ink that is the ‘ok’ of ‘book’ and pulls at my arm.

‘Unwrap your arm,’ my dad says and I do because he’s my dad and his steely glare still holds me in its gaze. I show him the tattoo and squint at the situation. Can he still send me to bed without dessert or pocket money? Does he still have that power? ‘Elvis Costello – he does good songs. To make you dance. Your mother’s and my favourite song was “Chipbuilding”,’ Dad says through a sniffle. I can forecast the crying shakes approaching.

‘“Shipbuilding”,’ I correct him. I instantly regret doing that.

‘That’s what I said,’ he says. ‘Remember when she used to sing it in the kitchen?’ I nod. It sounds like something she did. Dad hums the melody, badly. ‘Why have you done this?’ Dad says, looking into his now-empty tumbler of vodka.

‘I wanted to make a statement about myself to myself.’

‘And you want to live with that for ever? That statement? It’s not even a good song. You can’t dance to it. How do you dance to this song?’ he says and shakes his head. ‘It’s too slow.’ He sits down. I follow him.

After that, any attempt I make to kick-start a conversation is met by a shrug and a shake of the head. I ask if he wants me to cook for him. He shrugs his head. There’s nothing in the kitchen I can do anything with anyway. I ask him about his social engagements and he grunts. I stand up to leave so I can get home and out from this oppressive regime of fatherhood. I can feel the disappointment seeping from his pores and it smells like onion and garlic.

But he’s disappointed in me, and that feels comforting as much as it feels humiliating. I can sense he is desperate to get away from me from the way he avoids looking at me. It’s almost nice to be reminded that in a whirlwind of dates and drinking he still spares a thought for all the things I do wrong.

I announce I’m leaving. He turns to me and says, ‘Son, I have worried that you were too passive in this world, just letting it let you live. Then you wrote a book and I thought, this is the guy who understands how the world works. Now you have a tattoo, like a sailor and I don’t know who you are anymore. Passive, writer or sailor?’

I think, I’m probably all 3 in some way, or none at all, but that’s a passive writer’s way of dealing with things, endless scenarios and eventualities. What does he mean by sailor?

He shakes his head. ‘You will look at that stupid thing when you’re my age and think, I’m a fool.’

I nod. ‘Good night, Dad.’

‘What is wrong, son?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know, Dad.’

He shakes his head. ‘You need to move on, kiddo,’ he says. ‘If I can, so can you. It’s been so long now.’

I try to give Dad a hug but he offers no arms. I disengage and leave the house, walking through the same streets, past the same shops, the same everything of my childhood. It feels alien to me now. Like a biopic that approximates a version of my life.

On the train, I line up tweets.

@kitab: ‘I’ve literally had enough of the misuse of the word literally.’

@kitab: ‘Without Instagram, I wouldn’t know what nail polish you all have and you wouldn’t know how well I eat.’

@kitab: ‘People call it brownnosing. Brown people just call it nosing.’

Perfecting those 3 tweets takes me a 45-minute journey and I’m still not happy with them when I release them into the world in a flurry as I leave the train station and dial my landline repeatedly till my phone catches a 3G signal.

I look down my high street, considering hitting up the local where Mitch might be, or a short story night where literary fans of the female persuasion might be, or home where a television and Aziz’s spiced dark rum is.

This is the busiest day of the week because it’s Sunday and on Sunday the most ironic nights happen around here. Like Shit Film Club, Twatfunk (a made-up genre from Twitter turned real with its own club night and tribute bands),
Keeping Up With the Kardashians
marathons, Tweet Dating (which is exactly how it sounds). The bars are full. I don’t want to be near people. I head home, stopping off to buy some limes and ginger beer to help Aziz’s spiced dark rum go down.

My head is down at the pavement and my mind is processing what my dad said, the look of disappointment in his eyes. My neighbours are having a party. I can hear it before I get past their front garden. They’re always playing loud thumping breakneck indie – the nee-nee-nee-noo-noo-noo kind – when they have a party, because the speed of the song dictates the speed of their dance and they need to dance Sunday night off. Usually, I’d be annoyed.

Today, I am only disappointed. But mostly in myself.

As I get to our front garden, I notice some black Clarks shoes on my front step and look up. Kitab 2 is standing there, facing the door, peering in through the frosted glass, his suitcase next to him. I sigh, watching the trail of exhausted fumes leave my mouth.

‘Yo, Kitab,’ I call out. He turns to face me, looking the happiest a man could possibly be. ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’

‘Help me please, brother Kitab. I’ve run out of money and nowhere to go. Please help me.’

Maybe it’s because I’m feeling selfless in the face of disappointing my dad, but I think, what would Dad do in this situation? I invite him in to drink some of Aziz’s spiced dark rum and warm up.

Kitab 2 scrolls through his story. He spent the night in a hotel I recommended to him but skipped out when it came to the morning of paying as he only has enough money to see him through the first term at university and nothing more.

‘I am on a strict budget. I have to collect receipts too. I can only spend money on books and essential food. And travel.’

‘Maybe you could get a job,’ I tell him.

‘When will I have time, dude?’

‘Why did you arrive in the UK a week early if you didn’t have anywhere to stay or any money to pay for somewhere to stay?’

He shrugs. ‘It was the cheapest option,’ he mumbles. ‘Cheap ticket. Plus, I got the start date for term wrong in my G-Cal.’

‘I thought your dad booked the wrong flights.’

‘He did. I gave him the dates.’ He pauses and thinks. ‘Do you have a job?’

‘Not currently. Well, yeah, writer,’ I say, proud.

‘How much money do you make, dude?’

‘That’s personal,’ I say, pouring myself a drink.

‘So … not much then? How do you survive, dude?’

‘Kitab, that’s personal. I’m not comfortable discussing it.’

Kitab 2 looks at his shoes, something he does a lot, then back up at me. ‘I’ve never had a job. I never needed to. My dad made me study. Then he bought me computer and made me study. Then he got internet in the house and he made me study. All the time, I was playing computer games.’

‘I can help you find a job, if you need a job. Do you have the right visa to work?’ In my head, I think, by helping you find a job all I really mean is, I can give you 3 or 4 websites to check for job listings.

‘I shouldn’t work,’ Kitab 2 says. ‘I don’t know how to take orders, dude.’

I sigh and point back towards Aziz’s room and he wheels his suitcase in there like a small child trailing a blanket behind him.

I don’t have a plan to get rid of him. He is my other and I pity him. I look at everything he is and everything I’m not and wonder if we’re yin and yang. Maybe we’ve been brought together to become the perfect human. He is incapable and wet. And I am depressed and able to utilise Google to solve any problem. He’s so cheerful and enthusiastic. It’s a welcome counterpoint to my usual misery. Having seen Dad earlier, how lost he looks on his own, I feel the need for company. With Aziz gone, maybe I do feel lonely, maybe that’s why this crushing wave of depression is over me. Maybe it is loneliness. Much as I don’t want to admit it, it’s nice having another body in this house, this mausoleum of static and failure. Hell, I might even apply for another job tomorrow.

‘Oi, Kitab,’ I call after him.

He emerges from his room in a formerly-white vest and small penis. He is naked from the waist down. I don’t want to look but I do. It’s comparable to mine – i.e., more average-looking when it’s erect, probably.

‘Dude, put some pants on.’

‘Oh, sorry, roomie,’ he says, smiling, and runs back into Aziz’s bedroom. He re-emerges with pants on and a toothy grin, all top row and overbite. ‘What’s up, dude?’

‘Which university are you at, again?’