Meatspace (21 page)

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘You should get on it. I looked you up. You do not have a Wikipedia. How can you expect people to buy your books if you don’t have a Wikipedia?’

‘I’ll get on it.’

‘Did you know JK Rowling had writer’s block?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Well, she did. And she has her book in Tescos.’

‘Thanks, Dad.’

‘I am here for you, son. You can talk to me about anything. I will listen.’

I deflect immediately and ask him about his latest dates and his latest stock triumphs and failures. Mostly failures – we are in a double dip recession. He tells me about a new company on the stock market that is marketing a revolutionary new breast cancer medicine and how he’s dipping into his savings (also known as THE REST OF MY INHERITANCE) to invest in it, because my mum died of breast cancer and he feels that investing in this experimental drug will give him some sort of karma.

‘Not great, kiddo. Not great. Double dip recession.’

‘Oh yeah. Well, buy low … sell high …’

‘I might need to take some of the money back. Put it into the house. I can drive up the price of this house and all that money you have saved goes into equity.’

What money? There’s not much left. I feel my phone vibrate with another phone call coming through. It’s Hayley. I fob Dad off with an ‘I’ll call you back’, and he grunts.

‘What’s wrong?’ I say angrily, thinking I’m questioning my dad’s grunt.

‘Angry Kit. Such a turn-on …’

‘Hayley … hey.’

‘You rang?’

‘Yeah. I was just …. Well, we got unfairly interrupted earlier so I thought I’d phone up and see what you were up to.’

‘Were we?’ she asks, sounding distracted.

‘You know, when we were …’ I put on a cheesy American accent. ‘Making out.’

‘I was with you until you said making out. This isn’t
Dawson’s Creek
, Kit.’

‘Yeah, that wasn’t very well played. Sorry. Anyway, what are you up to at the moment?’

‘I am sedating myself with alcohol to stave off the pain of just having my first tattoo done. It fucking hurts, man. I had the most boring-est of boring-est days, Kitab, my ol’ chum. I spent it in a caf researching Victorian etiquette at parties. It’s really boring. All for a blog, too. A BLOG, KITAB. A blog I wrote for free. You know the
New Yorker
pays $10,000 or something for a short story. I’ve spent the best part of my week researching this. It’ll take me a day to write. For free.’

‘Really?’

‘A. Blog. About. Victorian. Etiquette. Can you believe it?’

‘Sounds dull.’

‘Yeah. After you left me to go and check on some random dude in the hospital who really sounds made up, and I spent ages being quiet and reading books, the only remedy was to go out and get really drunk and I decided to get a tattoo done.’

‘Cool. What of?’

‘Some text: “Fiction Reprise”. It’s a Belle and Sebastian instrumental.’

‘Right, cool.’

‘Is it that? Or is it ’cause I’m hammered?’

‘Where are you? I’ll come and meet you.’

‘Atta-boy. The pub at the end of your street. You’ll have to extract me from the women’s toilets. Good luck, my sweet.’

I hear the click of her hanging up and make the 5–7 minute walk from the train station to the end of my street in record time. The pub is empty – it’s a Tuesday, the pub’s worst day. Only the strong inhabit these walls: the die-hard darts players, the odd down-and-outer interested in rolling sports news, and Mitch – the wettest man in the book world. His Twitter profile describes him as ‘Book obsessive. Often found in the pub.’ Reliably so.

He sees me enter and beckons me over.

‘I did a tweet. Did you see it?’

‘No. Sorry, man,’ I say, distracted, looking around the half-empty pub.

‘It said, “Bolano knew his way round a metaphor like a conquistador knows patatas bravas.”’

‘Ha,’ I laugh absently. I don’t understand it.

‘Wait, you don’t follow me back.’

‘Sorry, man.’

‘Still languishing in cock-gate?’

Mitch laughs at his own joke.

‘It wasn’t my cock. It was someone else’s cock.’

‘You posted a picture of someone else’s cock?’

‘No, someone else put up a picture of their cock. You met him, the Indian guy at the reading the other night.’

‘What, you?’

‘No, the other guy.’

‘What was he called?’

He fiddles with a cigarette packet when I don’t respond.

‘Oh … you know that Hayley skirt,’ he says.

‘Skirt – Mitch, this isn’t the 60s. We say muff now, or something else equally demeaning. Yeah, what about her?’

‘I may have upset her.’

‘How?’

‘I think I said something bad to her.’

‘What did you say, Mitch?’

‘I can’t be 100% sure. I’m pretty pissed. But I definitely coined a new entry for Urban Dictionary.’

‘Mitch, just to clarify … you may have said some sexual things, but you’re too drunk to be sure?’

‘Well, it’s the only reason she hasn’t come out of the shitter in an hour.’

‘Right. Not cool, Mitch. Not cool.’

He shrugs and returns to a beaten copy of
The Great American Novel
, his favourite, lovingly annotated with his own personal edits.

The pub’s not busy enough for anyone to notice me sneak into the women’s toilets. I find Hayley on the toilet, dressed, checking her phone. She looks up at me. She holds out her hand and drops something into mine when I go to receive it.

Lacy and hottest-of-the-hot pink and barely present – it’s her pants. She smiles.

‘I forgot to put them back on,’ she laughs.

They’re damp, maybe something to do with the sodden floor. I can’t be sure so place them in my coat pocket. The frills send electrical impulses up and down my spine.

‘You here to rescue me or what?’ Hayley snorts.

I grab her hands and pull her up and out of the cubicle. She falls into my arms.

‘I don’t love my new tattoo,’ she says. ‘I may have made some questionable decisions this afternoon.’ She shows me the inside of her arm. In a typewriter font, it says ‘Fiction Reprise’. I kiss her cheek. ‘What is the maximum number of dances that a lady can dance with the same man?’ I shrug. ‘The answer is 3. At some balls, each of the ladies had a little card with all of the dances listed on it. In asking for a particular dance from a lady, the gentleman would write his name in the desired slot on the card so that they would both remember which dance he was promised. I learnt that fact. The day is not lost …’ She laughs. I laugh with her.

Her drunk slur is emphasising the verbs in her sentences. She doesn’t slur but she talks extremely slowly. She starts playing with the back of my head where my hair fades into an extreme short back and sides. I try to pull back and towards her for a kiss but I’m clamped into her. It smells of toilets in here. Oppressively so. It’s spoiling the mood. I manage to grab her free hand and pull her towards the door, so forcefully she kicks the door onto my hand against the frame. I don’t wince because I yell ‘This is an extraction’ in my most military voice. She slaps my bottom and we leave the pub.

The darts players notice our exit and nod at me. ‘Good work,’ the pinkest one says. The odd down-and-outer interested in rolling sports news barely notices. Mitch looks up at us and then down at his book coyly. As we walk past him, Hayley points and says with venom, ‘Disgusting man.’

Outside the pub, with the world swaying to the beat of a gentle breeze, I try to work out the best place to take her, home for attempted seduction (downside, I need to do a food shop and she probably needs coffee, which I could choose to get from the good coffee place in the market about ten minutes away) or to a café to get sobered up (downside, it’s hardly sexy sitting in a builder’s café drinking instant coffee, or worse, in a douchebag hipster place where the music and irony are cranked up and there are more seats than there is space).

I take her home. We’re in silence because I can only think of things I want to tweet her. I have nothing to say.

aZiZWILLKILLYOU episode 11 Aziz vs Electricity
[posted 15 September, 06:02]

There’s a who now under the train?

I didn’t say anything to the driver, cos what can you say, but I was worried now. There was people under the train. What the fuck? I cracked open the door a little and he tried to stop me but I pushed him back. I pulled Teddy Baker into the driver’s cabin and Bob followed him. I closed the door behind them.

‘Dude hit some people. Did they jump?’ I asked the pig man driver. He nodded. ‘A woman jumped in front of the train carrying a baby.’

‘We have to save them,’ Bob said.

‘Yes, Bob. That is the can-do attitude Aziz likes. Teddy Baker?’

‘What about the train people?’

‘Radio’s broken. I can’t get through to them,’ the pig man stuttered.

‘Are you ready for your first rescue mission?’ I asked.

Teddy Baker nodded.

‘Who made you boss?’ Bob asked, like the douche he is.

‘The English accent puts me in a natural position of authority.’

I had no idea what to expect. I don’t do well in hospitals. They make me feel knee-queasy. Was it going to be the same with some mangled corpses under a train? I’m not going to lie when I say, I hoped the police and rescue turned up very soon. But seeing as they hadn’t and all the spectators were happy spectating instead of aiding, I opened the door of the train carriage. I turned to the pig man. The bow tie was itching under my stupid spandex.

‘Is the line electrified?’

He shrugged.

‘Isn’t that, like, Driving Trains 101?’ Teddy Baker said sarcastically.

The pig man shrugged again.

I stepped out and down onto the tracks. I assumed that if these things were electrified I’d hear them buzzing. I peered under the train, my shoes slipping on the gravel and I could see 3 rails, 2 for the wheels and 1 for something else, but no bodies.

I looked up at the other guys to see what they were doing. Teddy Baker was on his phone.

‘You fucking tweeting this, man?’ I asked him.

‘No way, dude. I’m on the MTA NYC Passenger Safety website. It says that the middle rail’s carrying like 600 volts of electricity but the rails for the wheels are safe.’

‘Safe? Safe. Right, okay. Maybe we should wait for the cops or something? Call the cops, Bob.’

‘Don’t fucking tell me what to do man.’

‘Come on, don’t be an arsehole.’

‘It’s pronounced ass-hole, asshole. Anyway, you wanna be a hero, be a hero.’

‘There’s 600 volts of electricity near my toes man. Is that a lot?’

Teddy Baker turned to the pig man and asked him if 600 volts of electricity was a lot or a bit more than a static shock. 600 volts was a lot. It had to drive an entire train.

Oh.

I was about to move forward towards the bodies when Bob jumped down onto the tracks from the carriage and pushed me out of the way.

‘Outta the way, limey. I’ll see about these guys. You don’t speak their language.’

‘What, English?’ I asked but Bob ignored me. With 600 volts of electricity near my junk, it was probably not best to be a smart-arse.

I followed Bob to the front of the train. You could see where this woman jumped in front of the train but you couldn’t see her. There was a trail of cloth on the tracks. Suddenly, through all the traffic and arguing, Bob and I turned to each other cos we can hear crying.

‘There’s a baby under there,’ he said, over and over again, so I dropped to my knees, man of action me, to see if I could see what I was supposed to be seeing. Sure enough, I could see the bundle of cloth under the train, not too far, where the mum or woman or whoever the fuck it is lay there curled up. Brown cloth. There was a baby crying inside. The baby’s alive.

‘The baby’s alive!’ Bob shouted to Teddy Baker who I heard drop down from the carriage onto the train tracks.

‘Word?’

They both stooped to my vantage point, but I was reaching under till I touched cloth. I wanted to see how lodged under there the mum was. I didn’t want to touch the 600 volts of electricity third rail so was careful. Luckily, she was nowhere near it. She landed on the right side of the train and fell immediately underneath. The baby was curled on the other side of her, perilously close to the third rail.

Once I realised this, I yanked at the cloth harder. She wasn’t stuck at all, just heavy. Teddy Baker saw what I was doing and he pulled the cloth too. Just as she started to unwrap from the brown cloth, I managed to pull at an arm. She was heavy. You could feel it in the mutton chop of her forearm. She was nearly dislodged when we saw the baby, in a sling at her front. No wonder she didn’t really manage to jump far. She was heavy and weighed down by an 8-pounder. I wrenched at her arms and Bob reached down and picked the baby up and out of her chest sling. Teddy Baker put his ear to her mouth and I looked for a pulse.

I couldn’t feel anything other than my own pulse pushing all that delicious adrenaline around my body. I felt amazing. It didn’t feel right. It felt addictive.

Aside: rescue someone. If you’re one of those fools who needs constant validation and the feeling that you are somebody, find someone to rescue and rescue the shit out of them. You will feel amazing.

I ran my thumb up and down her arm but I couldn’t feel anything. Teddy Baker looked at me and shook his head.

‘The baby! The baby!’ We heard voices shouting about the baby. The spectators saw Bob’s prize and started applauding him. Bob was holding the baby up to the windows like it was the lion king and he was Mufasa. We looked up from the corpse and to Bob and then to the crowd. Someone was shouting ‘the baby’ with a lot of urgency.

I saw a man running down the platform with a gun – a fucking gun! My first thought was, what the fuck, why has he got a gun near a baby? He started pushing through the applauding spectators and I turned to Bob.

‘Bob! Look out!’

‘Fuck you, Limey …’

‘Bob!’ Teddy Baker shouted. ‘Get back inside the train!’ We jumped back inside the train carriage and closed the door just as the man with a gun ran through the crowd towards the edge of the platform.