Meatspace (19 page)

‘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?’

aZiZWILLKILLYOU episode 10 Aziz vs the bad guys 2: reloaded
[posted 14 September, 15:41]

We hit the streets, brothers and sisters. We suited up and headed out into the night, through the streets of Brooklyn, lined with the sad faces of those coming home from their regular Schmo jobs like chumps. Teddy Baker led us back towards the subway. People were shouting at us, ‘YO! Douchebags, it ain’t Halloween.’ And at first I was shouting back, ‘It ain’t 1988 neither, wannabes’, because with their pink dyed hair and shoulder pads, they were just sending out a message that they weren’t there the first time. I don’t get you white people and your revisionist fashion statements. But Bob shushed me.

‘These are the people we fight for,’ he said.

Bob used to be a security guard in a bank. He used to watch bank job films endlessly and wonder why his life resembled nothing like the guard’s (usually called Marv or something) who got shot in the leg for trying to be a hero during a heist. He would stand at his job and wait for something to happen and nothing ever did. He got obsessed with the idea of being a hero because so many things on television told him he would eventually be one. Every bank – if you believed CSI, NCIS, NYPD Blue, The Wire, whatever – was prone to a bank robbery. Especially in New York. Life was passing him by, he thought. One day he saw a guy get mugged on the train and he did nothing. He just sat there like a lemon, wondering if this was his time to be a hero. Outside the context of, like, the bank or something, he wasn’t sure if this was his moment to shine. But Bob’s the kinda brother who lets life pass him by. And when that mugged bloke comes up to him and said, ‘Why the fuck did you just sit there like a lemon?’ he didn’t have a decent answer. He was like, ‘I’m not a transport police. I just work in security.’ And the guy spat on him and called him a dickhead. Being called a dickhead must have stayed in his brain because all he could think was, ‘I’m not a dickhead. I’m ready to be a hero. My moment just hasn’t arrived yet.’ Bob woke up one day and decided he was a dickhead no more and he was a lemon no more, so called up his old college buddy Teddy Baker and together they decided to put the world to rights by making it a safe, crime-free environment.

Teddy Baker, on getting the call from his old boy Bob to be a superhero, thought the timing was perfect. He’d been fired from a job for streaming Game of Thrones on his computer and the sex scenes constituted inappropriate imagery for the work place. He had nothing going on. He thought, why not? The latest season of Game of Thrones is about to end.

We were coming into a train station 3 stops from where we were getting off; a hotspot for purse snatching, Bob claimed. We were moving to one side to let people get off when the train came to a halt, just outside the station. The lights flickered on and off. And the train announcer boomed on the tannoy something that no one understood. Literally. I mean literally. Not like I literally just wet my pants or he literally threw up everywhere … I mean literally there wasn’t a single person in the carriage who knew what the brother was saying. People started getting worried. They were all texting and tweeting furiously. Only one guy actually makes a call and tells whoever that he was going to be late.

He then said, ‘I woulda tweeted you but I didn’t want Mandy to see I was coming to see you.’ I called affair, quietly, to Teddy. He smiled.

If you’re sitting out in a public space, like a train or bar, and noted down everything people said, you would learn a lot of intimate details. Like, the amount of times you hear people dictating their addresses or their card numbers or saying the names of their loved ones on the phone. It’s ridiculous. Or they just tweet where they are the whole time. We’re all sitting ducks for identity theft.

When Teddy Baker announced ‘I’m gonna go see the driver’ you could almost hear the trumpet fanfare.

People were peering out of the window to see if they could see what the problem was but all they could see was shadows and silhouettes on the train platform.

Teddy Baker checked Twitter and turned to Bob: ‘There’s nothing on Twitter.’

Shaking my head, I pushed past him and walked between carriages, feeling the gust of traffic down below gush up my Lycra arse. As I walked through the next carriage, with Teddy Baker and Bob following me, people started applauding us, shouting stuff like ‘Here they come to save the day’.

So I bowed to the applauding masses and knocked on the door leading to the driver’s cabin. And there was some shuffling but there was no answer. I knocked again. More shuffling. No answer. So I banged harder and I got Teddy Baker and Bob to start shouting ‘OPEN … OPEN … OPEN’, which spread around the carriage, and then down the carriage into the next one and within 30 seconds the entire carriage was shouting ‘OPEN, OPEN, OPEN’. The cabin door opened and I was pulled into the cabin with the driver. Everyone clapped and he shut the door behind him.

This was a very sweaty man. This guy was bald and pink, like a pig that’s been shaved. I looked at him and he wiped a river of sweat off his forehead. One of the droplets landed on my lip so I pushed him. ‘Bro,’ I say … cos when in doubt, go darkside, ya get me? ‘Whaa’ blow. What’s going on?’

‘There’s … I ….’ He looked at me, confused.

I could hear Teddy Baker and Bob talking and lightly knocking on the other side of the cabin door. Bob was saying to Teddy Baker, ‘Dude’s stealing our shine. What the fuck, Teddy? Who is this guy?’

‘He’s my tattoo buddy,’ Teddy Baker said. He was defending me. Guy is a top class legend.

I turned back to the train driver. ‘Seriously, mate, spit it out. What’s going on?’

He pointed out the front window and I could see the platform now.

There were 30 people gathered on the edge of the platform, all looking and pointing to underneath the train. Some were using camera phones to record the event. Others were hysterically pointing and clutching their faces in horror.

‘What’s under the train, man?’ I asked.

‘I …’

‘Bro, you have a train full of angry commuters about to rip your piggy face off and eat it in a hotdog. What’s under the train?’

‘Mother …’

‘A mother. What do you mean? Like, a woman? What’s under the train? What’s under the train?’

‘Mother …’ He shakes his head. ‘A mother and her baby. Under the train. They jumped. I hit them. I … hit them.’

There is one comment for this blog:

dfc232: Jeez, is she okay?

History:

Casual encounters – Craigslist
Flights to New York – Skyscanner

Kitab 2 is trying to eat yoghurt with a big plastic spoon. Depth perception from the lack of one eye leads to yoghurt stabs on his cheek. I help him. I feed Kitab 2 yoghurt. He slurps the yoghurt off my spoon smiling, lowering his head into the downward bowl’s trajectory as I keep the spoon stiff, letting him do all the work.

‘I need to check my email,’ he says. ‘Hashtag unplugged. Hashtag matrix.’

‘Do you need to let people know you’re in the hospital?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never been in a hospital. Do you let people know when you’re in the hospital? I feel stoned. Did you see that video? When the kid is whacked off drugs in a dentist? Charlie bit my finger.’

‘I think that’s something else. And yes. You should definitely tell someone you’re in the hospital.’

He pauses, then remembers. ‘My laptop. It’s gone. The guy stole it.’ He strains to get angry, but the painkillers have cushioned his rage and directed it straight into a cloud of fuzziness. ‘I’m so angry,’ he slurs.

‘Why were you trying to buy drugs? You said you’ve never drunk or smoked.’

He shrugs.

‘It’s London, baby,’ he says, smiling, tired.

‘Look, Kitab, I’m trying to be calm about this because obviously it’s not nice being beaten up and having all your shit stolen, so I’m going to be sensitive to that. But, you have to try to explain to me why you put a picture of your penis on my Twitter account and how exactly you accessed my account.’

Kitab 2 opens his mouth up and shakes his shoulders as if he’s laughing paroxysms of delicious victorious guffaws. ‘Dude, that was hilarious. I was sitting there thinking, dude. Like, about writers. You’re a writer, dude. You write. You have all this cool stuff around you – like girls, guns and guts. Like balls, dude. You’re not dangerous, dude. I was reading about all these writers, like Ernest Hemingway and Oscar Wilde, and they fought bears, dude …’