The two old men have split. After nailing my fifth invoice of the morning, I peep over my laptop screen and it’s like both dudes been deleted.
Then I turn around.
Up close, both men look even more like clones, even though the differences are now more blatant. The creases and the wrinkles, the clean shaves, the white stubble, the skin so smooth it reflects the light, the sharkskin-grey suit, the battered double-breasted biker jacket. Their four legs stretched the fuck out in the row right behind me. Fart smell, leather and old-school cologne. Was wrong about their faces, though – we ain’t talking before-and-after Botox, we’re talking botched Botox and proper, blankpage Botox. Both of them scoping over my shoulder old-school style cos I blocked them from remote-accessing my laptop. Eating from some greasy bag of choc-chip cookies. Nodding at my spreadsheets and bank statements like as if they tagging me with their approval. Smiling, scoffing, sprinkling blessings of cookie crumbs. I turn back round and face the front like some non-confrontational goth.
Then what I do is I try and make the men quit snooping by deliberately clicking on upsetting content. Proper gastric teargas trigger-warning content. The fotos, the videos, the sound clips, the digital version of the guestbook, the metadata on the message forum, the funeral service playlist, the online coffin catalogue with the pop-up 3D images and combustion-rate data tables. The T&Cs of corporate bridge financing deals while I wait for her life insurance to clear. The fourteenth draft of my eulogy for her, even though I’m now on draft sixty-seven. Even load up an earlier version of Mama’s memorial website – version 6.0 that I built one time when she was technically in remission. Because her code-red A&E action plan became her detailed blueprint for her funeral service programme. And cos her stop-being-in-denial sermons became dry-run dress rehearsals. And cos Dylan, not Dhilan or Dillon.
And check this: my randomly worked-out plan ends up actually working out. Next time I turn round, both old men are stood up, heads bowed on some condolence-type shit as they start shuffling out the lecture theatre. Packet of chocolate chip cookies left behind like lilies where they just been sitting. Ten minutes later, though, I lose control of my cursor again. And up comes another sick-bag bout of my search history. This time, my laptop flashing up a proper alert prompt – telling me it’s “remotely reconnecting to another device”.
And then the lecturer starts cursing cos something’s gone wrong with the overhead projector.
3
FOOLS THOUGHT YOU was asleep. That night you found out your mummy and daddy had decided to live separately. Even though it was a school night, your parents had gone to your uncle’s house and your aunties had come over to yours. You was seven years old but still they called it babysitting. Babysitting. You were sitting at the top of the stairs listening to every friggin word they said. One aunty, two aunties, three – a three-way combo of cousins and sisters-in-law, but still they called each other sisters. Bhanjis. Laughing in sync with the laughter on TV. Or was the live studio audience laughing in sync with them? The light from the living room like thumping moonlight, a floodlight hooked up to life support. Why – why was you already on thoughts of medical equipment when this was two years before her sickness? Rubbing your eyes cos you actually had been sleeping – something had woke you open and dragged you to the top of the steps. Like that time you peeped through the crack in your mum and dad’s bedroom doorway – TV switched on back then as well, the volume upped to hush out your mama’s sigh-squeal-repeat.
But with the three bearded aunties, the TV was different. Weren’t just the sound from the speakers, was also the light it pumped outta the living room. Flickering, beating, breathing through the banisters and up the stairs, then settling straight-line style, like a beam from a torch. Like as if the light was showing you how far down the steps you could sit without them spotting your Batman bed-socks. Stench of whatever they was eating like some sweated palm on your face, forcing you to stay sitting. Outside, the wind and the rain twisting the satellite signal – the TV trying to untune itself. The picture jumping. Ad breaks skipping. Aunties talking in riddles. I tell you, always I knew she’d get herself into trouble. Always too clever she was. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. How she thinks she can break up her marriage? She’s got the selfishness, yes. WHAT SHE THINKS SHE IS? You also – try the mango chutney. Is so shameful, yes. Hahn-ji, hahn-ji. To throw a good husband in the street. No – the mango one. WHAT SHE THINKS SHE IS? SHE THINKS SHE’S A MAN OR WHAT? Or is it she thinks she’s English? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. AND SO WHAT IF HER HUSBAND HE WORKS ALL THE TIME? Theek hai, theek hai, that’s plenty-plenty for me. One day she will get her punishment. When her karma it catches her, it will kill her.
You tried to quit listening, but instead you found yourself listening and looking. Sight of the aunties through the gap in the doorway, pakora-filling spilling from the gaps in their teeth. None of them realising they’d got mint chutney on their chins. Or that their chins were in need of waxing. They’d brought ice-cream tubs full of green-chilli pakoras that looked more like ready-fried reptiles. Some big black cooking pot the size of a toilet. All three of them strictly vegetarian but consuming more meat than most meat-eaters do cos they bought all their veg with income from a kebab shop. Wetness of whistling as they cooled down their mouths by sucking air through clenched teeth. Me, I only feel sorry for the son. THIS IS NOT A THING TO DO. TO DO LIKE THIS. I MEAN, WHAT IS THIS? Everyone knows the divorce is always worse for the child. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, this is what it said on the Daily Mail – the mother will live off the welfare and the son will go to the jail. Yes, either he will go around with the ruffians, or he will stay at home and become the weirdo. HE WILL GO OFF THE RUFFIAN RAILS.
All of them making it all about you – as if you’d already done what you were gonna do.
JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE. Close the light and come and see. WHAT WILL HAPPEN IS THIS: HE WILL TAKE THE FATHER’S PLACE. Yes. Yes, yes, yes – he will take the father’s place. The pundit told her no matter if her marriage breaks – no matter because her son is her soulmate. That in the last life they were husband and wife. HA! YES, YES, YES, HA, HA, HA! Don’t laugh. This is not something to laugh. Her son will take the father’s place. BUT FROM WHERE YOU HAVE HEARD THIS DISGUSTING THING? It says so on the line. The Googly-engine told me when I looked it on the line: the son will take the father’s place. YOU MEAN ONLINE, STUPID WOMAN – ONLINE. Wait – just you wait and see. Close the light and come and see.
Jewellery jangling, make-up bubbling, forks scraping empty plates. All three of them still sitting on some slaughtered-cow sofa, but now each of them with one arm outstretched. First aunty’s hand placed flat against the TV, second aunty’s hand against the PC monitor, third aunty touching a laptop screen. Couldn’t see which screen the laughter was coming from, though, cos your focus was on staying the fuck outta their sight. Avoid being caught by their eyes. Your mum had told you how she’d seen your various assorted aunties’ powers in play. The broken engagements, the birthmarks, the business bankruptcies, the blotches of acne, the broken-down Audis, the bad bloodline marriages, the malware, the maladies, the miscarriages. She’d told you the word for what they did was “nazar”. Nazar weren’t like voodoo or black magic – it didn’t need no potions or dolls or photographs. Just ill-will and a belief in the power of bad vibes. Your mum told you that people put nazar on others cos they couldn’t help themselves – they just got too easily offended or too easily jealous. But they also too easily forget the golden-but-unspoken rule: if you put nazar on someone, your own children or grandchildren will suffer more than the person you put nazar on.
Your mum told you don’t be afraid, though. Told you that men invented scary women just to keep women down. Brainful, knowledgeful women in particular – the women who’d got all the dirt and all the info. Told you fear leads to hatred.
If my daughter did a thing like this I would thapar her – I’m telling you, one hard slap across her face. Then she would understand. She would know she’s done a wrong
thing. THE OTHER DAY SHE TELLS ME THAT HER SON IS HER LIFE. Well, let’s just see; let’s all just watch and see what kind of a life it is he leads. Not fit. I tell you; not fit. The Facebook story says she will lose him to the ruffians – he will go off the broken rails. BUT THE THREE OF US, WE’VE AGREED, NO? HE WILL TAKE THE FATHER’S PLACE. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. The Googly-engine has said it: he will take the father’s place.
4
RAMONA. THE LIBRARY. Refuge. Sanctuary. General-purpose hiding place. No ID, no entry – we’re talking bag checks and bouncers. The library. All private study rooms already booked out. But, hey, who the fuck ever goes to the Institutional Archives section?
“Relax, Dillon – this is fine?” Ramona always whispers like she’s asking you a question. “I’ll lean against this?”
Ain’t my fault that being Mama’s carer has been sweet for my sex life. Gave me a higher-charged late start, saved me from teeny boppers in chain bars, forced me to seek out alternatives to intercourse and most forms of actual bodily contact. And, no, we ain’t talking cybersex or phone-sex or dry-humping or any other dropdown category of interactive wanking – I mean proper, full-on, contactless sex. And I ain’t mean no sympathy sex either – after all, Ramona don’t even know about my mum. Each time I do tell someone, I swear the girl in question to top-secret secrecy. Next thing, they start thinking they my one-and-only confidant. Start turning up at my student halls with freshly home-baked baked stuff. Feel touched by my fear of touching them – their hands or their coat or their fone or whatever. Nicole, Neena and Nadine know my mum to be permanently terminally ill; Anjali, Amelia and Aarti know my mum to already be dead. Ain’t looking to cheat on Ramona or nothing – ain’t trying to be like one of them masculinity assholes. I just needed to tell a couple of peeps in order to keep Dhilan and Dylan for real and fully realised and just generally in touch with reality. Sane, like. Besides, way I see it, there’s basically one key common denominating link between sympathy, non-sympathy and with-deepest-sympathy sex and that’s the actual act of actual sex. Remember how back in the day, boys got told that if they wanked too much they’d go blind? Yeh, well, after Mum got even more ill, I told myself that if I ever yanked the plank again, her eyes would shut for good. Her sickness keeping my fists in check. Skip forward six years of cold showers and bedtime prayers and I finally figured out the only sure-fire way not to masturbate was to keep having real actual sex – with or without all that teenage titty-twiddling. Or intercourse. Or bodily contact. Ditto from the geek angle: I’ve schooled up about Oedipus and Hamlet and Norman Bates and how it’s bad news to even think about marital relations with your mum and how apparently real actual sex can offset the “inevitability of proximal Oedipal inclinations” – i.e. I don’t wanna wind up some lonely celibate psycho who dresses up in his dead mother’s clothes and caresses her prosthetic breasts while wanking off to her favourite Celine Dion album. So you see, all things weighed and done, there really ain’t much choice for me.
Today we talking proper toe cleavage – only the top of the slit, just a tiny bit; but part of it. Also, her shoes show off her arches more than most shoes with similar shank, girth and depth of throat. This ain’t no miracle of shoe design. Or clever counter-structural engineering. This is the miracle of Ramona’s tarsal and metatarsal, ligaments and tendons. The stretch along her instep whenever she spreads her toes open. All them times I bullshitted myself, thinking I weren’t objectifising her just cos I weren’t zooming in on her sex organs. Proper shamefulness. Still, I carry on checking out her feet arches as she shifts into some less painless position. No flatness, no puffiness. Her whole body bearing down on them now. No folded lip of man-flab. Two-hundred thousand sweat glands secreting a sweeter brand of bodily fluid. The thing about mummy/sex issues that most people don’t get is that it ain’t got fuck all to do with your actual mum. And it deffo ain’t your mummy’s fault. The mother complex is you – it’s your own shit. So when I pass up a feel of Ramona’s Achilles tendon, she don’t get why I’m now acting all Kentucky Fried Chickenshit. Starts offering the usual reassurances – her chafing has healed, she ain’t got warts or verrucas or fungal issues. Can’t tell her the truth about all my various issues so I just start scoping over her shoulder. And this is when I clock that those two old men from lectures have been watching us. Lurking like a file of malware behind a rack of shelves. Ramona don’t notice them, though, and I figure probly best I don’t tell her. Besides, she ain’t even taken her headphones off, never mind any of her clothes. Which means she’s grabbed all her shit and gone before I can tell her there ain’t nothing wrong with her.
Sign on the wall tells you to disable electronic camera sounds when copying library content. Should hang out here more often for the smell of this place. Ain’t no restrictions yet on memorising smells. I mean hang out here for real. You know how libraries always got that special library aroma? I’m thinking maybe that ain’t the scent of old books, more like it’s the vibe of essay deadlines and exam stress. Cold sweat and sweet milky tea. Crisis and cosiness. Panic and comfort becoming the exact same thing. Maybe if I hung here more often I’d feel less of a freak.
Somewhere to my left, some book slams shut. Might even be a laptop or a door. You know that feeling when you ain’t sure whether to click on something? Yeh, that. Next thing, I’m legging it down some big-ass spiral staircase beneath some bigger-ass atrium in the centre of the library. My run looks more dickless than dramafied, though, cos it’s the most longed-out staircase you ever saw. Steps so far apart you gotta keep checking your stride. Halfway down, I actually forget if I’m running away from the two old men or running after them. Or if I’m running after Ramona. Whatever the fuck I’m doing, everyone in here can hear me if not see me, so I try and take the librarian’s bollocking like a man.
*
Those two aged-out goons crash my next lecture and then some bullshit web-based workshop after that. They in Tesco Metro when I go there for cashback, they in Café Amici when I roll there for lunch. Baiting me to look back at them. Stare-out version of a Mexican stand-off. Them sitting by the window, me by the counter. And we ain’t talking blank-document stares – more like the opposite. Soap-opera emotional overload. Both men maxed out on anger and sadness and every emoji in between. As if I’m already meant to know what their problem is. Behind them, the traffic round Aldwych like some freeze-frame car chase; my laptop decides I’ve forgotten my password. Slam it shut and bail before the men can pay their bill.
Holborn is basically this buffer zone between the City and West End. Stuck in some kinda fuckness between work and play. Try texting Ramona but she’s on some voicemail bullshit. Try emailing her, she still on voicemail. Now a story about ankle tattoos. Register before December and get twelve weeks’ free subscription. Herbal remedies for swollen feet. Fluid-filled balloon feet. Pictures of pustulating ulcerated ankles. The smell of vomit in my mind’s nostrils. Don’t need to be paranoid about suffering from paranoia to start wondering if maybe all these ads, stories and search results are trying to tell me something. I been wondering that shit for years. But seeing as how all the ads and stories are custom-tailorised by my own search history, by my fone soaking up all my thoughtstains, does that mean that I’m the one who’s telling me something?
Swipe back to the ad-free blankness of the Google home page. But now I just get dicked about by some autocomplete/predictive-text type fuckery. When the system decides what you’re typing soon as you start to type it. Finishing your sentences for you like you’re stuck in some happily married couple situation. Crunching and recrunching all your data with each letter you type. Like your fone is fucking psychic. Like it knows your ass better than you know yourself. Knows what you gonna do next. My autocompleted sentences start making me nauseated; I switch to my Dylan handset. Allow this bullshit. My mum been reading my mind long before any of my fones could.
5
NEXT TIME I clock those two old men, I man the fuck up and go full-on confrontational. A
ll goes down around 3pm in the King’s College student bar. King’s College is just round the way from the London School of Economics, but unlike LSE, place ain’t crawling with my course-mates, co-students and future LinkedIn contacts. Cos right from the first day of Fresher’s Week, I been having my own personalised university motto: When she’s finally dead I’ll have to ditch all my uni friends to help me forget how much I’d wished she was dead so that I could hang out with them. (Yeh, okay, probly sounds better in Latin.)
The KC student bar is way up on the top floor, windows scoping out across the Thames like we in some river-view safety-deposit penthouse. Apart from the two old men, only people up here are a bunch of seven or eight guys all trying to listen to some same pair of headphones, various well-read culturally rich kids having their usual bullshit convos about hip-hop and that, plus the man behind the by-now empty sandwich counter. One of the girls is fronting with her holiday fotos printed on her clothes. Man in the biker jacket – the botched-Botox man – takes a sip from some half-empty glass of beer that was already there when they showed up. His fist making the pint glass look more like a shot. Dodgy Botox giving him chipmunk cheeks that don’t even move none when he swallows.
In my head, I start scrolling through ways to out-psyche them. Like, if this place was a proper bar and not some pimped-up student common room that reckons it’s a bar, then I’d maybe buy them a bottle of Hennessy and have a waiter take it over. Buy one for myself too, then raise my glass to them like some Bentley-driving badass. Or just Jack Daniels if they don’t have any Hennessy. Instead, I stride right up to them and ask the men straight out what the fuck they think they doing by following me the fuck around all day. Only I don’t actually use the word fuck.
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