Meatspace (13 page)

‘Queen Mary University. You’re not far from it, are you?’

‘Okay, so I’ll go with you tomorrow and see if we can get you some accommodation for the rest of the week, say there’s been a mix-up or something.’

Kitab 2 nods. ‘I’m hungry, dude. Got any pizza?’

‘Nah, mate. I’ve eaten. There’s some bread over there. Make some toast or something. Help yourself.’ I point him to the open plan kitchen, overlooking the lounge in the way only a place where 2 boys live could. Kitab 2 looks dejected, like only pizza would do. I find a frozen pizza in the freezer and put it in the oven for him. That dejected look. It’s the worst. The way his eyes become wider and browner, his eyebrows quiver like they can’t quite hold the line over his brow and the upturned pursed lips, pinched together in an X of disappointment. Oh god. This is what parenting is like. Aziz has been a relatively easy child to deal with up until now because, regardless of his impulsive chaos, you can calm him down with a stern word or just release him into the ether, fully cocked. This guy – oh my god – it’s like being stabbed with sadness. I never want children of my own.

Kitab 2 sits at our dining table, one foot on the chair, head on knee, and tears into the pizza packaging. He picks off the pepperoni and looks at me, shaking his head. ‘You are non-veg,’ he says.

I know the lingo. I went to India once with my dad as a teenager. I hated the whole trip. It was hot. My family was stressful and I didn’t speak any of the languages – Hindi, Gujarati or the Victorian English everyone spoke. I was struck by the non-veg thing in restaurants. Non-veg is what they refer to meat-eaters as, because veg is the norm, which is cool. In the menus, all the non-veg stuff is at the back because most people turn to the veg things.

‘I eat meat,’ I say. I won’t say ‘non-veg’. I won’t make fun of his vernacular for the LOLs. It’s a lazy way to get laughs – the
Mind Your Language
approach – the bud-bud-ding-ding of it all.

‘So you are non-veg.’

‘I eat meat.’

‘Yes, non-veg,’ Kitab 2 says, bending down to peer into the oven.

‘No, meat-eater.’

I leave him with that and turn my back to him, face the television. I grab the remote control and switch it on, flicking through channels without any interest, using the whole thing as a prop for conversation avoidance.

‘Kitab,’ Kitab 2 says. ‘Do you have a girlfriend, dude?’

I turn to him without breaking the TV flicking motion. ‘What? None of your business.’

‘This is a place for boys.’

‘So what, man.’

‘You should get a girlfriend. I bet she would be nice to you.’

‘Okay, man.’

‘In fact, we could find some girls now. Have you got an iPhone, dude?’

I turn to him. ‘Yes.’

‘Cool, download Blendr, dude. It’s this app that lets you find girls near you who are DTF. Do you know what DTF means? Definitely To Fuck. We could find 2 girls and have some fun, no? Blendr’s free. They might send us photos of their boobies.’

‘No, man. I don’t want to do that,’ I say, getting up to take out Kitab 2’s pizza.

‘It is late. Yes, you’re right. Sorry.’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

‘Maybe tomorrow …’

‘Tomorrow we’re going to your university.’

I focus all my energy on the television.

I settle on an episode of a sitcom I’ve seen before but am happy with the familiarity, and the conversational silence that canned laughter brings to a room. I sit and watch the sitcom, listening to Kitab 2’s loud chewing, like I’m inside his mouth, being tossed around with masticated burnt bread and cheese. When he laughs, I can hear the squelch of food against the back of his tongue and teeth so I turn the volume up and hope to drown him out.

A couple of episodes of the sitcom and an entire eaten pizza later, he’s still awake but has joined me on the sofa. He shifts up and down in his seat, plays with his toenails, clears his sinuses in that AKAKAKAKAKUGH way and generally informs me of his presence with every single tic and move, every second I am with him, so I tell him I’m going to bed and to be ready to leave for the university at 8 a.m. I assume we’ll get there for 9 a.m. when it opens. I go to bed and can’t concentrate on the internet porn I choose to soothe me to sleep because the volume is off in case Kitab 2 hears my shame, and I want to hear the noises. I’ve gone amateur tonight and there’s sometimes nothing sexier than hearing real people film themselves orgasm, even if it is a simulated amateur orgasm. I try to sleep, unfulfilled, then hunt around for headphones, watch the clip again, realise it’s lost its impact and search for another, by which time my bedtime ardour has subsided and I switch my lamp on, doing the one thing I haven’t done since Rach left. I pick a book off the stack of freebies publishers have sent me, if to just endorse on Twitter, and scan the first line. I put it back down on the pile. I load up a website that streams illegal television and find myself something with canned laughter to tune out the sound and feel of another human in my flat. It has started to feel suffocating.

*

‘
Write drunk; edit sober LOL’ is the text message I receive from Hayley. I ignore it. How do you react to a non-sequitur like that? She follows it up with another text: ‘I’m adding LOL to the end of all my texts now. What do you think LOL?’

‘What’s happening, babes? You cool?’ I reply an hour later.

She replies: ‘Yeah, just wondering when we can hang out LOL Also, babes? LOL.’

‘Soon,’ I reply.

‘Specific. Almost too specific LOL.’

‘Sorry, got a weird day. I’ll tell you about it.’

‘I’ve got secrets too,’ she replies. ‘Stuff that’d melt the nose off your nose. See you soon LOL xx.’

Out of courtesy, I reply with ‘x’. Just one. Not 2. To keep her on her toes.

‘LOL x’ is how she leaves it.

Sitting on the train with Kitab 2, you’d think he’d never been on a train before. His eyes are everywhere: reading over people’s shoulders, watching hushed commuter conversations, down the tops of poor unsuspecting females.

‘Have you never been on a train before?’ I ask him.

‘I’ve never seen so many hotties, dude. They are everywhere!’

I look around at the scorched scowls of commuting faces, each one steeled with the need for space to read or zone out or check Facebook repeatedly. Everyone looks ordinary at this time in the morning. They’re all dressed in grey or black with matching nail polish, their lips downturned in disappointment. And they don’t wait for passengers to get off the train before pushing on.

I ask Kitab 2 for more background details. He is very good at avoiding telling me anything specific. Other than strategies for winning
Halo 4
.

He smiles at me and shakes his head. ‘I dunno, man. Look, she’s reading
Fifty Shades
, dude.
Fifty Shades
!’ He nods his head. He nods away my question. I persist. ‘It’s got sex in it,’ he adds as a stage whisper. ‘I bet she loves it. Sex. It.’ He gyrates in his seat, biting his bottom lip with bunny teeth.

‘Seriously, Kitab. Tell me about your family,’ I say, persisting. ‘What did your parents do?’

Kitab doesn’t break his stare at the woman reading
Fifty Shades of Grey
. ‘My mother was a housewife. My father was a hard worker. Very hard worker,’ he says, like an automaton.

He turns to face the commuters, his eyes away from my mouth, which is in an O of confusion. He spots a girl, a pretty, blonde girl in a naval jumper and skinny jeans, reading my book opposite us and down the aisle. He thumps me on the side and points.

But I’m cool. I clocked her when we got on and tried to remain calm because this was the dream – seeing someone organically reading your stuff – it’s never happened before. Well, that would require someone actually buying the fucking thing. I don’t want to lose my shit in front of Kitab 2 so I keep quiet, bursting into the vaguest of smiles whenever the cover catches the corner of my eye. Kitab 2 can barely contain himself. He thumps my arm and says, ‘Dude, dude, look. Dude.’

The commuters in earshot try to subtly look around to what he’s pointing at.

‘I know, man. It’s all good,’ I say dismissively, and wish I had something to stare at, other than the crotch of a man in jeans skinnier than the skinniest of my fingers.

‘But, dude. It’s your book.’

‘I know, man. It’s cool. It happens.’

‘This is exciting, dude.’

‘Bro, I know.’ Be cool, I think. Let me enjoy the moment. This is a first. This is a legendary moment. Please just shush and let it sink in, awash on top of us. Stop talking. ‘Shut up. It happens all the time.’

‘Hey,’ Kitab 2 calls out. ‘Hey!’ he says, louder. Everyone is looking at us. I look down at my hands.
Wow, I should cut my nails
, is the look I hope I’m giving. Kitab 2 calls out the name of my book. The girl reading my stupid coming-of-age book looks up. He points at it and then at me before realising I’m not playing. ‘That’s my book!’ he shouts. ‘I wrote that.’

The girl holds an ironic thumb up. ‘Wow. Cool,’ she says flatly. I project my embarrassment onto her. Kitab 2 claiming credit for writing my book is one thing but acknowledging it to a stranger doing the morning commute – that is an urban no-no. The other commuters are looking at him like he’s a smug a-hole. The girl has ignored him and returned to his/my book, silently judging a living breathing writer now. She’ll probably hate it more than she already does.

At the next stop, we get off the train and so does the girl with the book.

We leave the station and walk in the direction of Kitab 2’s future university, hemmed in amongst council blocks and chicken shops. I can sense the girl with the book walking behind us. My ears flush the reddest brown ears can get. My eyes are down at the ground. I am half-listening to Kitab 2’s running inventory of his soon-to-be new surroundings.

Chicken shop.

Light fittings.

News vendor.

Supermarket.

Indian supermarket.

Caribbean supermarket.

Chicken shop.

Pub.

Indian supermarket.

African supermarket.

News vendor.

Chicken shop.

It’s like a song and this is the repeated chorus. I pull out my phone and type into Twitter:
‘Inventory of East London: chicken shops, multi-ethnic supermarkets, a light fittings shop and my target demographic of readers.’
I click send and wait for the ether to respond. I refresh. I refresh. No responses. No interactions. I get a favourite from @partyorifices. A favourite? What’s the point? It’s not even a retweet. It’s a collection of things you might revisit when you’re reviewing Twitter’s greatest hits. I check to see what @partyorifices is. It claims to be a sex party. Probably a bot. I report them as spam.

‘What’s up, dude? Tweeting?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you write, dude?’

‘Oh, just something funny about this area.’

‘Get any RTs, dude?’

‘No. Not yet. A few favourites.’

‘Who cares about favourites, dude?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t as funny as you thought.’

I don’t reply. Kitab 2 breaks the silence by live-tweeting In Real Life what he sees around him. ‘Look at this place, dude. It is so real. It is the London I was promised. My dad was worried there would be no Indians. But look at all these shops. And look at you, my best friend in London, another Indian. I am home away from home but here I can do whatever I want. I can eat in that chicken shop all day if I want to. Maybe in London, I will become non-veg like you. Maybe in London, I can write books and have a flat with alcohol in the fridge and a big television. This is it, this is my future. I can feel it. I love it here. I don’t ever want to go back.’ He pauses and looks at me, waiting for me to look up from my phone. ‘Don’t ever make me go back.’

‘That’s up to immigration,’ I say.

‘This place, dude … this PLACE!’ He goes silent and stares around him. I look back at my phone.

Kitab 2 is happy to note that the university is opposite a phone shop that sells phone cards at discounted rates. He writes down the price per minute of the India card in a notebook he keeps in his trouser pocket.

I look at him. He smiles at me.

‘Excuse me.’

We both turn around. It’s the girl from the train who was reading my book. She’s smiling now. She’s not looking confused. ‘Hey,’ she says, to Kitab 2. ‘Sorry, I was just in the zone on the train.’ She is Australian and outside in broad daylight, with her blonde frizzy hair waving about in the breeze, looks attractive. She has a hostile reading face, compared to the gummy smile she’s flashing my namesake. ‘Love the book. Will you sign it for me?’

I look at Kitab 2, as if to say,
What now, dickhead?
He looks at me for visual permission and I give him the slightest tilt of my head. I am in control of this situation, I think. This is the first time this has ever happened to me – talking to someone who has organically read my stupid coming-of-age book and I wish I was the one getting the kudos instead of my namesake, but with that tilt of the head, I confirm that I am the big dog in this situation.

‘I didn’t love it at first. I thought it was really immature and puerile, and just banging on and on and on about being Asian. But now …’ she looks at us both. ‘I get it. I really get it. I mean, who would have thought growing up, for you was so different from how I grew up … and the same. I mean, I liked the stuff with the dad. He was funny. He was a bit whiny though.’

The girl fumbles in her bag for a pen but Kitab 2 has one in his trouser pocket, tucked into his notebook. He pulls it out, drops the notebook, picks it up and holds out the pen at the same time the girl offers him one. They do the dance of your pen or mine.

The first time I signed a book, I wrote a long and thoughtful message: ‘Thank you for being my first, my last, my everything. Don’t eBay this. It won’t get you any money. Love, Kitab.’

Now I just sign my initials and put a X.

I try to visualise how many physical kisses I might have promised by doing that. I mentally line up all the men and women and imagine kissing them all. On the cheek for lower case x and on the mouth for upper case X. They have mostly been upper case Xs. If x’s were actual kisses, I’d have glandular fever.