Meatspace (26 page)

I stand on the street outside the hospital and run through my options. This is ridiculous. A social media chase around London. A high octane chase all on a 120x60mm screen.

If only he used Foursquare, that would make all of this a lot easier. I check through the various sites under my own name but find nothing. I do a Twitter search for Party Orifices. I do a Google image search. I email
[email protected]
(awww, they could only get the .biz. This makes me sad for a split second).

I check through my notifications. I see that about 6 hours ago, Kitab 2 accepted my friend request. I click onto his account. It’s bare except for YouTube trailers of video games and updates on his score on
Mafia
.

My hunch is that he’s the kind of guy to ‘check in’ at places and let you know exactly where he is, even if his dad is friends with him or his friends are prudes. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, there’s that innate compulsion to tell people that’s where you are and that’s what you’re doing.

I look at his timeline. Kitab is ‘checked in at Wilmington House’. A building called Wilmington House is exactly the type of place where people would be having a sex party. I look the address up. The house is across town. I have to brave public transport.

I head to the station.

Wilmington House is on a cul-de-sac in one of the better-off ends of town. This is where the rich can afford to own housing. All the bankers and MPs, all the socialites and tenuous links to royalty. I never come here. I never visit this part of the city. It is far removed from my life. It’s not where I come from and it’s not what I aspire to be. I keep it real in East London. Not south or west where the stinky winds don’t visit. There is a quiet in the air that feels like nothing I’m used to. It feels like the stillness that every rich person needs after a long day. I hear clichés, like the wind whistling through trees, kids playing in gardens and dishwashers, as I walk through the streets.

Wilmington House is nondescript in its appearance. It’s 3 storeys and has shut blinds in the windows. Ivy bushes obscure the front walkway. The door isn’t illuminated. Everything screams no one’s home. I ring the doorbell and nothing happens.

I ring it again, twice. Nothing happens.

I ring it again. Nothing happens.

Then twice again. And I see a flicker of light behind the opaque window pane. The door opens and a woman with a wild mess of curly blonde hair, in her 40s and smiling with a cigarette-stained line of teeth, answers the door. She is dressed in a tight black dress. She is barefoot.

‘Yes?’ the woman says, dismissively.

‘Party Orifices?’ I say, confidently.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I’m here for Party Orifices,’ I repeat, less sure.

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘This is Wilmington House, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘So, this is where Party Orifices is, isn’t it?’

She pauses. I’m nervous. I don’t want to go in. I don’t want to see the sweaty writhing of flesh unless it’s through the filter of a screen. I feel a burning pit of sweaty anxiety in my stomach, splooshing around like downing water when you’re hungry. I am not ready for this type of thing. Like Seinfeld said, ‘I’m not an orgy guy.’

‘Is this your first time?’ she asks wearily. I nod. I’m nervous. My bowels are aching. My stomach is churning. She shakes her head and picks up a clipboard from the side. She looks at it.

‘Name?’

‘Kitab.’

‘Kitab what?’

I give her my full name. She looks down the list.

‘You’re already here.’

‘Yes, I’m here. Standing in front of you.’

‘But you’re already crossed off the list.’

‘There’s 2 of us.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘2 people with the same name. Believe it or not, that name’s like John Smith back in India.’

‘There’s no one here called John Smith.’

‘No, I know. My name’s Kitab Balasubramanyam.’

‘I’ll be right back.’

She closes the door and the dim light is shut out. I wait there. I check Twitter – 3 rappers with mixtapes have spammed me with links to their downloads, the girl I tweeted thanks to earlier favourited and retweeted my tweet, a model called @sammyk has tweeted me a picture of his penis. I check Facebook. Rach is mysteriously no longer in a relationship. Her basic profile info says Rachel Calaver, London. Maybe she has hidden me from certain updates. There is no sign of Kitab 2’s debauchery being made public just yet. Probably because he’s currently involved in it. There’s time for tweeting later. Hopefully no Instagrams.

I watch a couple pass behind me. They’re talking about his day, his boss, until they notice me in the garden, then they’re awkward and shhh each other. Like they’re embarrassed for me. Because we all know what happens at Wilmington House. The girl flashes me an awkward smile. The man opens the door to the flat next door, a rictus grin of embarrassment on his face. I wish I was wearing a hoodie.

The door opens while I’m distracted and the woman is standing there again, looking annoyed. I wonder if she’s annoyed at having door duty when there’s all this fucking going on elsewhere, or if she’s wishing she had a different temping agency, one which sent her to offices instead of orifices.

‘Come on then …’ She gestures to the gangway next to her. I squeeze in through the doorway into the hall. There are candles illuminating white walls. I can see the folds of tapestries on the walls but not their contents. Probably some offensive reappropriation of the
Kama Sutra
. Or something else equally ‘tits-everywhere’ masquerading as erotic art. ‘This way,’ she says, with air in her voice. She leads me into the next room and points to the right door. ‘You can get changed in there.’

‘Oh, right.’ I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do but I imagine I have to play some sort of part. I walk into the room. It’s a toilet, a functional small toilet. There are masquerade masks on the back of the door. I look at myself in the mirror and wonder what I’m supposed to do next. I can’t emerge in what I’m currently wearing. Maybe if I strip down to pants, t-shirt and socks and put a masquerade mask on. I grab a classy-looking black one and slip it over my eyes. I take my shirt and jeans off, and bundle them into the sleeves of my jacket. I take my shoes off and fold them into the centre of the jacket before scrunching it into a ball. I look at myself in the mirror. The only thing that distinguishes me is my tattoo and my brown skin against the white of my Radiohead t-shirt that declares ‘Kicking Squealing Gucci Little Piggy’.

I suck in and leave the toilet.

She is waiting outside for me and takes my stuff. She grabs my arm and writes ‘696’ on my hand. She smiles at me and delivers the line she’s been delivering all night: ‘Don’t sweat the number off finger-banging anyone or I won’t be able to locate your things.’ She pauses. ‘T-shirt?’ I shake my head. ‘First time nerves? Don’t worry, darling. Everyone’s friendly. Second floor. There are bowls of these around but here’s one for starters,’ she says, smiling.

She hands me a condom. I hold it and stare at it wondering what my life has come to. I feel no arousal, no stirring, nothing that could give this rubber Johnny a chance to perform its life’s function.

And with that she disappears into the bowels of the house, taking my t-shirt, wallet and my phone with her, and I feel more naked than ever.

I walk back towards the front door where I saw some steps. I walk up them.

Aziz once told me he thought the reason our friendship worked was because I was so repressed and he was so comfortable.

‘You’re so perverted in private, but whenever I talk about finger-banging, you get all prudish. Make your mind up.’

‘No one needs to know the things I’m into.’

‘Interracial redhead lesbians, bruv. I’ve seen your internet history.’

The day he caught me on the phone to a sex line, one drunken evening, I was so mortified, even in my drunken state, that he knew never to bring it up. More than once a week I’d hear his room a-rocking. Whereas, whenever I was home with company of a sexual variety, I would squeak and mumble like the strong silent soldier. He was right – I was repressed. I couldn’t bring myself to say the things he did in public. He would happily talk about sex with anyone. Even my dad was more comfortable with the idea of talking to me about sex than I was.

That was until my drunken curiosity made me call a sex line and he caught me, and knew. The kiss-n-tells stopped after that.

Is it so bad to worry about how you’re presented in public? I’d tell Aziz things, in whispers in the confines of our flat, once I’d made him sign a verbal non-disclosure and confidentiality agreement. It was how I was wired. I didn’t like being open about this stuff, and why would you? The hints of sex in my book were jokes, allusions to wanking and handjobs, and that was fine, that was enough to turn up the noses of my elders. I couldn’t imagine being any more sordid than that.

The prude eagle has landed. The repressed viper is in the nest.

CA-CAWWWW. HISSSSSSSS.

At the top of the stairs I can hear different varieties of giggling, from the embarrassed to the hysterical, from the deep-voiced male to the squeaky-voiced male. That’s weird. Mute girls at a sex party. I inevitably make a mental joke that maybe their mouths are full, then I agonise over whether that counts as sexist, because I would hate to be deemed sexist, especially within my own internal monologue.

Then I see a swinging willy walk past. It’s jostling in its join, flip-flopping from left to right, pink and nestled in grey hair. Its owner is naked, save for his own masquerade mask. The mask covers up a greying face with greying male pattern-baldness. He points to the door behind me and says ‘excuse me’ so I move and watch him enter another room. It’s just a toilet. There are 2 room options in front of me. The doors are only ajar so I can’t peer into them and get a lay of the land, get an idea of the type of activities taking place, or get a location for Kitab 2. I can feel my own willy shrinking in confusion and embarrassment. If at any point I’m required to remove my boxer shorts, I will die. Luckily, if that old man is indicative of the talent, I will probably not be confused by my cock into attempting my own act of mutual onanism with a stranger.

#circlejerk

I wait and muddle myself up into a head of worries. It’s oppressive being in a room of people having sex with each other and not wanting to participate. It’s like dancing. Whenever everyone’s dancing and you don’t want to dance they refuse to understand why you wouldn’t want to dance, not even taking into consideration whether you could dance, certainly not bothered with such trivialities as whether you should dance. Dancing is like public sex parties. Everyone except me wants to get involved.

I need to find Kitab 2 though. He should be in one of these rooms. In theory.

The toilet flushes in the room behind me. I don’t want to still be standing here when that guy emerges, so I duck into the nearest of the rooms. This is obviously not the guffawing room. The lights are dim except for a spotlight in the centre where a lady is dancing. She is a wearing a gag in her mouth and nothing else. There is no music playing but she writhes slowly and swirls her hands and arms about like a festival mum, like a geriatric twerk. She looks like an art teacher, with a thicket of curly hair, a mouth where the wrinkles of lips have disappeared into each other and saggy, small breasts with black nipples.

There are 7 men, all sitting on sofas, their legs crossed, watching her, naked, touching themselves like it’s the breeziest thing in the world. It’s hard to see them in the dim light and I don’t get any time to look because the writhing festival mum grabs my hand and pulls me towards her, angling her pelvis towards my naked thigh. Before I can decline this dance, the wiry mound of her undercarriage is causing a friction of Velcro with my thigh hair as she rubs herself on me. There is a trail of mucus making a home on the fringes of my boxers. I am too embarrassed to find this sexy so I pull away and shield myself with my upper arms, moving backwards towards the wall.

A screen, a screen … my bandwidth for a screen.

The greying, bald toilet man walks back into the room, sees her and bends her over. She grabs her ankles. He condoms up and presses his dick into the canyon of her arse, exploring and then thrusts himself inside her. She makes an unnecessary porn noise.

I scan the sofas. It’s all men, all white, one applauding, so I leave the room.

In the corridor, a man and a woman are dancing at the top of the stairs. They have their arms around each other but she is resting her elbows on his shoulders and he is nuzzling into her neck. When his hand moves towards her down-below bits, I realise they’re not dancing. They’re doing the penetrative lambada. I duck into an adjacent doorway, where I am met by the collective groan, squelch and smack of skin.

I find 4 mattresses in the centre of the room, and, instead of sofas, single beds line the wall. It’s like the last days of Rome. I scan the interloping intersecting buddies all bent over each other grabbing whatever genitals are on offer. They’re all white. They’re all melting into one another with their skin. By the window, watching it all with a mask on, and a saree draped around his head is Kitab 2. He has a throbbing erection that he tugs at mindlessly and slowly. It’s definitely him. I recognise the pubic hair from the Twitter controversy. I start to cross the room, but realise I will be tugged at if I get near these folds of fat in front of me. There is no gangway. There are only elbows, only breasts and only the grunts of those dissatisfied by conventional love-making.

I wave at Kitab 2 till he points at me and offers a thumbs up. I beckon him over urgently. As he walks in between the bodies on the mattress, disturbing their equilibrium with his redistribution of weight on the mattress springs, people bang on his ankles. No one is interested in his penis. I wonder if he’s disappointed.

He makes it over to me, stepping over frotting, squelching, writhing, sweaty, flabby bodies, and punches me on the tit, so I reciprocate, hard, on the arm that I know was bruised in his accident. He yelps.