History:
I’m having breakfast with Hayley the next day when I start wondering why she’d texted me late last night to request a meet-up over bacon and eggs and freshly cooked hash browns in my local organic café.
Maybe she thinks she’s seen my penis. Surely, otherwise she’d never want to hang out. Maybe she saw something she liked. In someone else’s penis. Because she’d never just ask me out just to ask me out, would she?
We’ve only ever seen each other at events. We’re each other’s go-to emotional crutch when the room is filled with publishing types and ‘aspiring’ writers.
‘I hate other writers,’ she’d told me once. ‘All they want to do is talk about writing.’
We’d been having a discussion about what roles we would take in the zombie apocalypse. I had decided that based on my skill set, I would be in Comms, tweeting zombie locations, but in reality, in a dystopian at-war society, we would need soldiers more. ‘I’d have to gun up and hit the front line, right?’
‘See? That’s why I love you, Kit,’ she’d said. ‘Writers are desperate to debate the death of the novel and you’re the only one brave enough to acknowledge the threat of zombie apocalypse.’
It had been one of those moments where we could have kissed. I was holding my phone the entire conversation, and a picture of Rach was my background.
My phone stays in my pocket this time. I’m so nervous about breakfast I don’t dare bring it out. I want to plug in. But I can’t. This is the first time we’ve been alone together. It feels more intense than usual. I have to work hard to be like I usually am with her when there’s other people around to be a counterpoint to.
We talk about the trials of being jobbing writers. She sighs. ‘Every fucking day I’m contacted to write something, usually for free, about my favourite handbag, or where I get my hair cut. Have these people not heard of the Women’s Prize? Do they not follow Caitlin Moran on Twitter?’
‘As a feminist, you’re above handbags and haircuts?’
‘Well, of course not,’ she says, cupping her tea in 2 hands. ‘I love a handbag and I love a haircut. But does no one want my opinion on the welfare cuts? On how bad the new Mumford album is? It’s so boring. You must get it too, being, you know …’ she stage-whispers, ‘an ethnics. I used the plural on purpose.’
‘Yeah, of course. I get asked in online Q&As repeatedly what my parents think of my work. Who gives a shit what they think? Also, if I get one more email from Esquire asking me to review my top 5 curry spots in the city, I’ll lose my shit.’
‘Literally?’
‘Literally. I’ll be like, “Hayley, I’ve misplaced my shit. Can you help me find it?”’
‘“No, Kitab, that’s just disgusting, but where did all that shit come from?”’ Hayley throws back her head and laughs.
‘“I reviewed all these curry spots and now I can’t stop shitting …”’
‘We’re just avatars, Kit,’ she says, sipping on her tea to illustrate a point well made.
‘Everything your Twitter bio tells the world about you, that’s what people want to know. Gender, ethnicity, likes.’
‘I think it’s more than that … I think we’re at a stage where no one cares what authors think. We used to be spokespeople, opinions for hire,’ Hayley says, looking over my shoulder to see if our food is coming. ‘When did we get boring? When did people stop caring what we thought and asking footballers instead?’
‘When Cantona became a poet …’
‘When middle-class people swapped paperbacks for season tickets …’
‘Classist.’
‘How can I be a classist when I support Leyton Orient … team of the people, Kitab, my lad?’
‘If I see one more picture of a footballer leaving a club with a blonde girl …’
‘Speaking of pictures,’ Hayley says, getting her phone out. ‘Is this your cock? Cos if it is, then it’s very embarrassing.’
She shows me Kitab 2’s penis, its messy manscaping ingrained in my brain for ever more.
‘I got hacked.’
‘I figured. It seemed a bit too brash for you. I imagine you’re the flowers, dinner and a movie type, right? Before anyone gets to see anything.’ Hayley leans forward and taps me on the arm. I let her hand rest there.
‘You have to really romance me,’ I reply. My voice is dry and I cough over my words, nervously. It’s rare we’re by ourselves, chatting, not surrounded by others. It feels more intimate than I can cope with.
‘Who hacked you?’
‘It’s a bit of a weird long story. Remember that Indian guy I was with at that book event?’
‘There were 2 Indian guys, at a book event?’
‘Yes, well, the other guy …’
‘What was he called?’
‘Kitab.’
I let the answer hang there.
Hayley smiles. ‘Right.’ She laughs to herself.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘It’s just … I dunno. You spend all this time not wanting to be defined by your ethnicity and then you’re saying some Indian guy with your name rolls into town and puts your cock on the internet.’
‘His cock.’
‘Well, it’s weird,’ she says, laughing.
We’re surrounded by yummy mummies. We’ve gone for breakfast in the post-school run at the only time you’d see artists eating breakfast. We’re the jobless paid. We eat after the rush hour and before daytime television gets going. We eat between the first of the morning coffee and the pre-lunch coffee. Before we take meetings about abstract projects at abstract art venues that want us to channel our inner-douchebag. The yummy mummies coddle their babies and coo to each other about their spawn’s achievements, from first steps to first words, from bon mots to hilarious ‘kids say the funniest things’ anecdotes. They bray and guffaw at each other like seagulls fighting over seaside scraps. I hate this awkwardness. It’s the first time Hayley and I have done anything away from other people, just us, not at an event. I don’t want it to be awkward.
‘How do you live?’ Hayley asks me just as our food arrives.
‘What do you mean? Like, how do I sleep at night?’
‘How do you sleep at night, Kitab Balasubramanyam?’ Hayley laughs. ‘No, I mean, like, we hang out at things and I know I don’t know you well enough to ask this, but if you’re on your publisher with the amount you sold, how do you live? I only ask because I’m about to need to find a job and all the jobs I can find involve writing about handbags or haircuts. What’s your secret?’
‘I’m a rich kid,’ I say, smiling.
‘Oh.’ Hayley looks around the room, disappointed.
‘I mean, like, my mum died when I was young, from cancer. When my book came out, my dad gave me a chunk of my inheritance to keep me going in case the book didn’t set the world alight. The book didn’t set the world alight. So here I am, burning through the money and contemplating jobs writing about top 5 curry spots. Because the book didn’t set the world alight. Whoops.’
‘At least you know where your shit is.’
‘True. But yeah, it’s not like writing’s paying the bills. I might as well write what the people want. News stories about engaging web content or something.’
‘And thus, the rich kid becomes a hack.’
‘I can’t even … I can’t even find a job writing for B2B sites. I got rejected from writing for a tourism site because I seemed “ambivalent”.’
This is the first time I’ve felt honest about anything in months. I feel sweaty.
‘I like your tattoo,’ Hayley says. ‘It’s like the ultimate statement for analogue, for printed books, for objects to touch.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, hollow.
Hayley places her hand on my wrist, where my arm is resting on the table. My mind flashes between her and Kitab 2, finding him and finding her, this girl I’ve liked for a while, showing me the ‘sign’. It’s distracting. Kitab 2 Kitab 2 Kitab 2. But Hayley. But Hayley. But Hayley. I look at her hand on my arm. She has orange nail polish on short cut nails. Like her toes. Instagram has made me obsess over people’s nails. Which reminds me, I forgot to take a photo of my food. Her fingers are long and feminine. Rach had small, stubby digits. We’d never hold hands because my meat fists would feel like they were spreading her fingers too far apart.
‘So, you’re single …’ she says.
‘Yeah.’
‘How’s single life?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t really done much with it, to be honest.’
‘It’s hard to meet people. I mean, how do you set up a dating profile and put your profession as writer? It means people can judge you before they date you.’
‘They can judge you anyway. In Google Search, veritas,’ I say. ‘I set up a dating profile. I didn’t really get any responses so I closed it down.’
Hayley pulls my arm over so my forearm is pointed upward and pulls the sleeve up the tattoo.
‘Everyday I write the book,’ she says. ‘Like Elvis Costello.’
‘Chapter one, we didn’t really get along …’
‘Chapter two … I fell in love with you.’
She laughs, as if that might be a possibility. I laugh back, because to not would be awkward. I’m not good at these situations. I haven’t had to flirt with anyone since before Rach and even then I was never that type of guy. She’s beautiful. I’m out of practice. How do I advance this? It’s impossible. Ghost protocol. Black ops. Call of duty. It’s an impossible mission.
‘I don’t really like Elvis Costello,’ I say, like an automaton, pulling the mood-killer parachute. ‘My mum did. So did Aziz. So does Aziz.’
‘Me neither,’ she replies and smiles. ‘Well, not as much as I’m told I would, given the other bands I like. He sounds so 80s.’
‘I guess that means something to some people.’
‘Not me. But when a band in 20 years’ time reminds me of Nirvana and I tell young pups that, I bet they’ll hate me as much as I hate the nerds who tell me Elvis Costello “is my jam”.’
Our food’s getting cold so I get my head down as I arrange eggs on toast with bacon on top, drizzled with beans, before I get ready to tear it apart and devour it. Hayley takes 3 bites of her bacon butty and puts it down. ‘I’m full,’ she says. Looking up, I see Hayley looking at me like I need to hurry up. Maybe she hates eating. ‘Wanna go for a walk?’
*
We’re walking home and I’m telling Hayley about Aziz and Teddy Baker.
‘So, he’s just packed off to America?’
‘Yeah. He lives dangerously.’
‘What if he gets hurt? What if he meets this guy and he’s such a massive disappointment, he regrets his tattoo?’
‘I don’t think he really thinks like that. He’d be like, “If you’ve lived such a cool-ass life, you don’t give a fuck anymore.” Probably.’
‘He sounds fun.’
‘He is and he isn’t. I mean, he’s obsessed with looking as cool as possible. He has this … this inbuilt necessity to read blogs, tweets, Tumblrs and magazines to find out exactly what’s the next hype. Aziz’s website favourites, his bookmarks and his RSS feeds are filled with images of coats, t-shirts, shoes, bands, comic strips, words of the day and new takes on acronyms so he could imbibe, constantly, absolutely everything, simultaneously. He could be into a band and declare them a sell-out in the same afternoon. He will stop everything to go and hunt the vintage and charity shops around us for a new hat or cut of shirt that harks back to whatever trend is coming back in fashion. Every band he likes is a band you won’t have heard of. On purpose.’
‘That sounds exhausting. I barely have time to keep up with the news.’
‘I dunno. Without him, I wouldn’t like half the stuff I like.’
Hayley grabs my hand as we pass my local pub. Her fingers are cold at the tips and clammy and fat at the base. They feel soft and squidgy, like those bendy rubber separators you use to paint your toenails with.
She aligns her shoulder with mine so we’re arm to arm. Apart from allowing the hand holding to carry on, I am putting nothing into this situation. And yet my body is betraying me because I am hard and I am flush. I can feel the static sting of embarrassed horniness under the melanin in my skin. I can feel her lean into me.
‘How’s the new book coming along?’ she asks me.
‘What new book?’ I ask.
‘“Everyday I write the book” …’
‘Yeah. I dunno. I don’t know what to write. What do you write about once you’ve done your whole coming-of-age tale and life has been plain-sailing since?’
‘You have adventures you want to write about. Or you write something with superheroes and gun battles and gangsters. But in the real world. It could be funny.’
‘Those are my only 2 options?’
‘Yeah. Well, they say your first book is about everyone you’ve met till you write it, and your second is about writers and writing because that’s all you meet afterwards.’
‘I’d rather have a cup of tea.’
‘There’s always the pan-ethnic novel, set in India, with mangrove swamps and arranged marriages.’
‘I’d sell a million.’
‘More frangipani literature, that’s what the world wants.’
‘I hate it.’
‘You hate yourself.’
‘What about you? Surely there are more middle-class marriage structures to exploit?’
‘You mocking me, Balasubramanyam? I’ll have you know my parents’ divorce was very painful to watch …’ Hayley says, poking me in the side. It tickles. Ripples of a long-forgotten sensation spread across me.
‘What’s wrong with writing in some non-white characters once in a while?’
‘You’re cocksure for someone who’s shown everyone their cock.’
‘I didn’t,’ I say, desperate for someone to believe me. I realise I haven’t checked my phone in the last 2 hours, since I’ve been with Hayley. I have no idea what’s happening in the world. And I feel fine about it.
‘I know.’
‘I don’t know how to write non-white characters. Help me. Do ethnics talk funny or different?’
‘They talk like me.’
‘You talk like a white guy.’
‘And just like that … his point was proven.’
We reach the end of my street in an ‘oh, how did we end up here’ way and something comes over me. It’s the potential, the expectation. It’s the knowledge that all roads lead home. It’s the feeling of power. Mostly, it’s because I’ve thought this woman was so beautiful from the moment I saw her, but it’s only now I possess the necessary leverage to pull her towards me. I pull Hayley in tight.
‘That’s my flat,’ I point.
‘Show me,’ she says, with a slow smile.
At my door, I fumble for my keys, drop them to the floor and we both go for them. As we rise from our crouches, her hands find my face and she pulls my jawline towards hers. We kiss. It’s tentative at first. We’re sizing up the contours of each other’s mouths, not wishing to overstep the welcome of each other’s lips. We quickly mould the size of our mouth holes to each other’s and we press in harder. I then slowly slither my tongue into her mouth, but she bats it off with her own. Our tongues tussle. I feel a hard, horny stitch in my stomach. She’s the first person I’ve kissed since Rach. It feels good.
My arms clasp around her back and then move down towards the outward curve of her bottom. It’s like a video I’ve seen. When the guy accosts the girl on the street and convinces her to come home with him. Conveniently, she’s never wearing underwear.
I feel self-conscious about our public display of affection. The whole of my neighbourhood is watching. Metaphorically. Because realistically they’re at work. Or doing some hip installation at an underground art gallery. But that mutual coyness leads us inside where we press against the closing door, followed by a fall onto the sofa. It’s all tongues and wrapping limbs and awkward exploratory hands and lips. I alternate between her mouth and neck with my lips, and her hair and lower back with my hands. Her focus flits between my face, pulling me almost entirely into her mouth, and the greying shorn bristles of the back of my head hair.
I want to live-tweet this moment so badly. Just so I remember it.
‘She kisses me, pulling me almost entirely into her mouth #50shadesofkitab’
It doesn’t feel like the videos I spend days watching. There’s too much kissing. Everything flows from one act to another. We don’t jump-cut from kiss to blowjob to anal to her willing face.
Her mouth feels forceful on mine, leading me. It’s a revolving gif in my head stuttering forward into an awkward loop. I imagine her naked flesh till the pixels blur into the beige blocks of her skin.
We are interrupted by a phone call that vibrates in my pocket, which, even though she insists I answer, I try to ignore it, until 3 successive phone calls remind me of my little online warfare with Kitab 2. So, assuming the persistence can mean it’s only him or about him, I answer the phone. While I talk, Hayley’s hands seek to distract me with gentle strokes in inappropriate places. I bat her off because a very efficient and assertive nurse from a nearby hospital is informing me that I have been noted as the next of kin for a Kitab Balasubramanyam and he has been brought into the hospital as the victim of a brutal beating. I am to come into the hospital and check in on him.
Kitabus interruptus.
I could stay away. He deserves his fate after trying to affect mine. And I hate hospitals. They make me think of sick people. I don’t like sick people. I could be a forgiving Christian and go, forgive him and move on with my life. Or I could choose the heathen’s path – go and confront him, and find a way to fuck with him while he’s whacked on morphine. Maybe that’s the coward’s path. I do dislike confrontation.
I look at Hayley and at her body, pointing everything towards me. She takes my phone out of my hand, places it on the floor and bites the end of my finger. I palm her cheek delicately.
‘That was the hospital,’ I say. ‘Something’s happened.’
‘Everything okay?’ she says, rising up on to her knees to kiss my neck.
‘No, there’s been an accident. I’m so sorry. I want … this …’
‘Yeah, that’s not sexy, dude,’ she says, standing up. ‘Call me when you’re done. Hope it’s nothing too serious … Besides,’ she winks. ‘I’ve got handbags to review.’
As she turns away, I go in for a cuddle. The cuddle trajectory is mistimed and I bat one of her breasts instead. She swings towards me and pushes me on to the sofa.
‘You had me at hello,’ Hayley says, laughing. ‘Why is it so hard to quit you?’
‘Hashtag sorry.’
‘Hashtag call me later.’
‘Hashtag no really, I’m sorry.’
‘Hashtag stop going on about it you foppish doofus and deal with your shit.’
Hayley grabs her coat and bag, doing each action deliberately enough to give me time to intervene, but I feel no imperative to do so.
I’m furious with Kitab 2. He has damaged my public personality on the internet. He has reduced me to a laddish loutish pervert who would do that sort of thing for attention – and there is nothing more precious to preserve than your online persona. Because it’s for ever. I deleted all those sex party tweets I did with Aziz the day after; in the cold light of day, realising what a stupid thing it was to put that on the internet. People misread things like that, think they know you. So many people think they have an informal relationship with you, that they can react to your news in the same way as a friend. I used to have a guy comment on my Facebook every time Cara (she of the Skype dinners) and I talked about anything. He would invariably butt in and try to impress her.
E.g.:
Me to Cara: Dinner soon?
Cara to me: Yeah – deffo. lol. aint seen u in ages. Skype?
Me to Cara: NO Real life > Skype.
Cara to me: Fine. When?
Me to Cara: Cool – free next Tuesday. Wanna grab some Thai food in town?
Random man: Dudes, if you’re looking for Thai, go to the Sai Thai restaurant. It’s dope. I know the owner. Say you’re my cousin and he’ll give you free drinks. Swear down.
Eventually, I asked this guy why he only ever spoke to me when I was conversing with Cara (he was a guy I went to school with years ago who had added me, and out of a perverse sense of nosiness, I accepted so I could see what his life became). He replied: ‘Cos ur m8 is BUFF! m8. shes well fit. she got a boyf?’
Language is dead, I thought. I told him that it was weird he was chirpsing my friend but made no effort to ever talk to me. How did he know she wasn’t my girlfriend, I asked?
‘Cos it don’t say so in ur relationship status bruv.’
He unfriended me and sent me a message saying: ‘Jus cos u wrote some book or whatevs … you ain’t my boss, get me?’
I left it at that, mostly because I didn’t understand his reply. It was a well-established fact that I was not his boss. A day after that exchange I noticed he and Cara were now ‘friends’. And so these monoliths of inappropriate exchanges continued to drive a wedge in all our lives while masquerading as the thing that would bring us all together one day.
And last month she announced their engagement party. I’m not going to go. She’s going to broadcast it on Skype though.
I reach the hospital and I ask for myself at the reception. Down a corridor and up 2 flights of stairs – my knees are quivering with fear and a lack of fitness. I exercise as much as I do a tax return … less than once a year. I’ve only ever had to go to a hospital twice. The first one I visited was to see my mum just before she died. The time after that, Aziz had been in a bicycle collision. Oh death, and bicycle collisions – you keep me in stock for visits to this mausoleum of scalpels and tumours.
The beeps and strip lighting, the disappointing heft of British nurses, the vending machines that sell dog shit pretending to be coffee – it’s uniform up and down the country. I find Kitab 2’s room and enter. There are 3 people in there, lying on the edge of their beds, with their faces resting on pillows, the band of an eyepatch visible around the back of their heads. They’re still, like they’ve been sent to sleep by a hypnotist.
Kitab 2 is in the bed by the window, which shows off a view of the back of the stairwell. He has one eye closed and the other patched up. He has a downwards arrow hovering above the patched eye. At least someone somewhere is in command of the technology in this hospital to avoid embarrassing eye cock-ups.
The room is a hotbed of industrial, ambient sounds: a slow whirr of neon lights and air conditioning, the Darth Vader-esque rasp of oxygen machines and televisions, and bleeps and machines and bloops. The sounds of chaotic silence.
I sit next to him in as noisy a way as I can, scraping the plastic seat against the linoleum. He stirs but doesn’t wake. I wait. He looks weak.
I flick through a discarded newspaper on his bedside table, catching up on the latest antics of celebrities I have no awareness of. I tweet. About the power of hospitals being enough to make you face your mortality. In the last day, I have lost 17 followers. I check through my emails. My publisher has got in touch asking what the hell I’m up to with the whole penis picture thing. I’ve been invited to speak at an event in India but have to pay my own travel.
My dad has forwarded me a picture of some woman he’s chatting up asking me to check out her tattoos. Tattoo is a euphemism for breasts. They’re saggy and real and the way she pushes them together can’t disguise age’s natural gravity. I wish my dad would stop thinking I was his friend instead of his son. I don’t reply.
I look at Kitab 2 asleep. The destroyer of worlds. The man with my password is the man who rules the world. I could hit him. I could take a pillow and whack him on the head to wake him up.
I scroll through the internet instead.
All this takes up 10% of my battery, which is a currency in modern life. Without battery, you can’t tell anyone where you are or what you’re eating. Kitab 2 eventually stirs and wakes and sees me through the stoned haze of painkillers. He smiles.
‘Emergency contact,’ he slurs.
‘That’s me.’
‘You came.’
‘I did indeed.’
‘You are me. I am my own emergency contact. No one but me.’
‘Kitab, what happened?’
He tells me the story. Slowly. Slurring.
Feeling alone and with no one around to tell him off, he wanted to try some weed so he could be like Kumar from the Harold and Kumar films. ‘I love that film,’ he slurs. ‘That guy gets so high.’
‘Yeah, it’s funny,’ I lie, staring at the arrow above his damaged eye.
‘I’m in London, dude. I gots to get high,’ he says. ‘I want to get hi-iiiigh,’ he sings, and laughs. ‘I’m high now,’ he whispers. ‘I wanted to get high, dude. Like really high. So I thought I’d buy some druuuuugs. And they give them to me for free. All I had to do was get beaten up, dude.’
He tells me he looked up the best place to buy some drugs online. He couldn’t find anything online, but remembered his father warning him away from King’s Cross, because in the 60s it had been filled with prostitutes and drugs. He walked around asking various people how to buy weed. Eventually he met a beautiful tall blonde woman who could help him. He followed her up past the station to the canal where there was a man waiting for him. He was a short guy with a hood who offered to sell him weed. He stuck his money out and the guy grabbed it and punched him in the face. His glasses crashed into his eyes and one of the shards of lens pierced his retina. He woke up here, without his shoes or suitcase. His eye, he says, ‘is black like the night, not red like the moon’. He points at the window to the big cake in the sky – it’s cheese-coloured tonight. I shrug, not knowing what he means.
He pauses after his story, taking stoned stock of having nothing left. All his clothes, paperwork, computer, his bootleg copy of Assassin’s Creed III – they’re all gone. He has nothing.
‘But this morphine,’ he slurs. ‘I bet it is better than weed.’ He smiles with all of his teeth.
‘What the fuck, Kitab,’ I say. ‘Why did you put up that picture?’
Tactless of me, but I almost need some consideration from him before I can begin to feel sorry for him. Sympathy is worth an apology for travesties committed before the incident.
He smiles. He giggles. ‘You … you … were … mean … to me … I just wanted to be your friend.’
And I immediately feel like the one in the wrong.
‘Plus,’ he adds. ‘It was funny, right dude?’