USUALLY IT STARTS around 5pm. She thinks it’s still the 1960s or something when people actually stopped work at 5pm. Make sure the webcam’s switched on, then plug in my headphones so my co-workers can’t hear her shouting at me. Type my replies as instant messages so they can’t hear me shouting back at her. Except I don’t even get to reply. Every time I start to type something, she shuts me down with more shouting.
“DAMN TO YOU.” That’s her opening shot this evening. “DAMN TO YOU, DAMN TO YOU, ALL THE DAMNS AND DAMNING TO YOU.”
Some slowass high-speed connection means the image on my screen is two or three seconds delayed. Hear her screaming into my earholes before she actually opens her cakehole. This technical hitch means I don’t get that early warning signal before each time Masi starts to speak – all them minor earthquakes in the folds of her face.
“WHAT KIND OF MAN YOU ARE,” she says instead of asks. Her skinny, bleached face; her blood-clot-coloured lipstick. The webcam making the whole package appear even more bleached and blood-clotted. “DON’T YOU DID LIKE THIS, DHILAN. DON’T YOU BLOODY DID LIKE THIS.”
To the left, some guy shouts, “Piece of crap!” cos some brand-new laser printer has jammed. Fluorescent tube in a ceiling panel starts flickering. All these things happen in this client’s office all the time, not just when Masi’s bollocking me. But they always happen when she’s bollocking me.
“GO TO THE HELL,” she says. “YOU’RE THE SHAMED, YOU’RE THE SHAMED, YOU SHOULD BE THE SHAMED.”
Check the totally unnecessary uses of the word “the”. And when she should use the word “the”, she doesn’t – as in: “WHO HELL YOU THINK YOU ARE?”
And, yep, I am making fun of her Indian accent. That’s cos I can’t argue with the sentiment.
“HUH? WHO HELL YOU THINK YOU ARE?”
And I’m glad this whole webcam-and-instant-messenger arrangement makes it difficult to defend myself. But, fact is, the set-up suits Masi even more than it suits me. Instead of being annoyed that I ain’t responding, she feels all honoured and butt-licked by it. Reckons I’m being respectful.
“DON’T YOU DID LIKE THIS,” she gives it again. Like as if whatever I’m gonna do is such a bad thing to have already done.
Should probly try to Gaviscon the situation. Ask her if Mama needs anything. If I should head home to help Mum with her diaphragm and her general will to live. Or collect that copy of her death certificate for council-tax transferral purposes. Or help her with her will to live. When Masi starts name-dropping the devil, I remind myself this is just an audio and video live-feed. Her words and her face, just bits of digital data. Besides, I got my amulets. My protective trinkets. My close-by co-workers and the strip lighting still holding back the night outside.
“IT’S DISGUSTING, DHILAN – YOU ABSOLUTELY, YOU DISGUST ME.” She screams this last line so loud my laptop freezes, my eyes twitch, my kidneys twinge, her bleached face disintegrates. But the audio stream carries on breathing – “DISGUST-GUST-GUSTING. DISGUST-GUST-GUSTING.”
Standard practice on any large-scale data-entry project: everyone here has to hot-desk. Don’t matter if you’re a consultant, a contractor, a subcontractor, a data-enterer, a digitiser or a typist. We connect our laptops to a full-size monitor and keyboard at one of the work stations set aside for us. First come, first pick; no cockfights over who sits where. If you roll into the office early enough you can nab a desk with better privacy settings – where the only thing peeping over your shoulder at your screen is some ancientquated filing cabinet. When Masi’s face starts slowly returning, I check ain’t no one behind me is watching her. We’re talking some old-school analogue ghosting image. We’re talking the buzzing and fuzzing and fury of an untuned, old-school television. Then the hardware catches up with the correct century and Masi’s just this pixelated digital scramble – like her face is having a fight with my screensaver. Masi has beef on the regular with anything and anyone. Her whole life story timelined by intercontinental blood feuds. But these days I don’t need to play that game where you gotta guess what the hell it was upset her.
Soon as Masi’s face is back, fully formed and restored on my screen, my iPad announces someone’s trying to hit me up on FaceTime. I place the iPad outta the desktop webcam’s line of sight. Turns out it’s Aunty Rachna – i.e. Aunty Number Five. As if her and Masi have coordinated this. (Though of course if they had done, Aunty Five would’ve made sure she got in first.) Doesn’t say hello or nothing, just cuts straight to her question: “WHAT KIND OF BLOODY ASSHOLE OF A BOY YOU ARE?”
Hope she don’t mean it literally when she keeps dropping the words “bloody asshole”. Hope for her that her image is just imaginary. That’s she’s just conjunctivating the worst two swear words in her vocab. And, yep, I am making fun of her diction or whatever. That’s cos I can’t argue with her opinion.
“EH? HUH? HEH? WHAT SORT OF BLOODY ASSHOLE BOY DOES LIKE THIS?”
Try to look away from my iPad and like a dumbass I stare straight at my webcam. Masi, i.e. Aunty Number Three, sees this as some cue to come at me with more of her backlit bad vibes: “I DON’T EVEN WANT TO SEE YOUR FACE NOW – NOW THAT I SEE WHAT YOUR FACE HAS DONE.”
Don’t need to tell her I ain’t a fan of her face either. The way her cheekbones still poke out despite the LCD flat-screen. In my fantasy office environment, we’d downgrade from flat-screens to them proper bulky old-school monitors. The ones you couldn’t spill coffee on cos they’d short and explode. Shards of jagged glass imploding into the image of her jugular.
“… LIKE A COCKROACH,” screams Aunty Number Five.
“… IN THE MOUTH,” goes Aunty Number Three, “IN THE BLOODY IDIOT MOUTH!”
Usually around this point in our Skype convo, I remind myself what a lucky bloke Masi’s husband is. You see, the dude don’t even exist. Somewhere out there in the world there’s some non-existent husband who just sits around shaking his right hand and wiping it across his forehead while repeating the word “phew”.
“EH? HUH? HEH?” goes Aunty Number Five, “WHAT THE HELL YOU HAVE TO SAY?”
Next comes a text message from Aunty Number Six, but before I can read it Aunty Number Five hits me up with another “EH? HUH? HEH?”
Then back to Aunty Number Three: “YOU’RE THE SHAMED, YOU’RE THE SHAMED, YOU SHOULD BE THE SHAMED.”
And now let’s bring back Aunty Number Five: “HEH? WHAT KIND OF A MAN YOU ARE?”
(Aunty Number Six still seems to be stuck on emojis so fuck knows what she’s saying.)
“AND WHAT THE BLOODY ASSHOLE IS THIS MUSIC YOU’RE NOW PLAYING, HEH? I THOUGHT YOU TOLD US YOU WERE WORKING.”
I start typing that I ain’t playing no music – that that’s the sound of my mobile ringing. But I stop typing halfway so I can answer the fone. It’s Uncle Deepak – aka Uncle Number Eight: “OKAY, WHERE YOU ARE, DHILAN? WHERE IN THE HELL YOU HAVE GONE? ALWAYS YOU’RE WITH YOUR STUDIES AND YOUR BUSINESS AND NOW YOU’RE BUSY RUNNING AWAY FROM THIS SICK, SICK THING YOU’VE DONE.”
Don’t respond – so long as your lips stay zipped, he’ll just assume he’s gone straight through to voicemail. And, yep, I am making fun of his weirdass combo of technophilia and tech-incompetence. That’s cos I can’t argue with his argument.
“AND WHAT THE HELL KIND OF IDIOT BUSINESS IS IT TO BE TYPING UP ALL THIS TYPIST BUSINESS ANYWAY? YOU SHOULD BE TYPING GOD A LETTER OF APOLOGIES.”
Next, my twelve-year-old coloured-contacts and two-parents cousin starts hitting me on WhatsApp telling me to straighten the fuck up. Then a home video of my nana who died five years before I was even conceived, telling me, “Dhilan, you’ve been a very naughty boy.”
Aunty Number Three now screaming at me from the monitor: “DON’T LOOK OVER THERE, LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU, DHILAN.”
“WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF?” screams Aunty Number Six in some weirdly unabbreviated text.
“LOOK – LOOK AT HOW YOU CAN’T EVEN LOOK AT MY FACE,” says Aunty Number F
ive. “EH? HUH? HEH?”
“JUST STOP YOUR SILLY IDIOT TYPING BUSINESS AND COME AND FUCKING HELL FACE ALL THIS.”
Each of the carpet floor tiles in this client’s office is worn out to a different shade of grey. I seen the maintenance men lift them up sometimes when everyone’s gone home to their recharging ports.
I ear-check my fone: Uncle Number Eight is still leaving what he reckons is a voicemail. “WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE,” he says. “WE’VE RUNG THE UNIVERSITY, DHILAN. WE HAVE YOUR STUDENT HALL ADDRESS.”
Beneath the carpet tiles, there’s this mashup of metal beams, plastic tubing and rubber-coated cables – fibre-optic worms twisting and squirming to deliver each desk five plug sockets and two connections for telecoms and internet. The actual floor a foot lower than the carpet tiles we walk on.
Next thing I know, Uncle Number Eight has already hung up. But I only notice this cos he rings right back to add a sequel to what he thought was his earlier voicemail. While he’s doing that, the phone starts ringing – the other phone, the deskphone, the actual fucking landline.
Okay, now this is just getting weird.
Firstly, ain’t told no one in my family knows the names of my clients, so how the fuck can they be trying to loop my neck with the landline? Secondly, all the workstations on this floor are for hot-desking so the landlines hardly ever ring. Maybe you’ll hear one once a month, but it’s always a wrong number or, if it’s an internal call, a sloppily dialled extension. Should probly just let it ring out, but my left hand picks it up on some ancient human instinct. Slip the receiver beneath my headset, hoping Aunty Number Three won’t notice.
Some woman on the other end starts giving it: “I’d like to speak to someone about Mr Deckardas.”
“Yep, this is me,” I say – figuring that this latest caller is safer to actually speak to seeing as she don’t sound blood-related.
“WHAT YOU SAID?” screams Aunty Number Three.
“WHAT YOU SAID?” screams Uncle Number Eight. “BUT I THOUGHT THIS WAS YOUR VOICEMAIL?”
“What – but, wait,” goes the woman on the other end. “I mean, excuse me, pardon me … But, no. No.”
“Hello?” I go, though whispering this time so that my various assorted screens can’t hear me. I ask the non-blood-related woman how I can help her but she’s already hung up. Ain’t no number on the caller-display screen – meaning that she came through via the switchboard. Keep staring at the dead plastic deskphone like it’s some lump of bad bodefulness. Then back once again at my other screens. Everyone except for Masi has hung up as well. Masi’s now shouting something about hell and insects and carrot juice. I grow the balls to just pull my headset clean off. Grow a second pair to minimise the size of Masi’s window.
Just me and my screensaver now.
Thirty seconds later, Masi breaks my concentration by stepping-up her screaming to max volume. “WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF? WHAT’S THE USE OF ALL THE YEARS AGO?” After that, she starts grunting – just grunting, though, not groaning or moaning or the kung-fu sound of Mummy puking. Click the tab to reopen Masi’s Skype screen. Somehow her face is even skinnier than Mama’s size-zero junkie anaemic look. Narrower chin, longer nose. Baggy, candle-drip cheeks. Click back to my screensaver: only bagginess on Mama’s face is beneath her eyes. We’re talking crumpled plastic carrier bag eyes – even before our carrier bags became sick bags. Fuck’s sake, even with this foto of her right in front of me I still can’t properly picture her. Been like that since my GCSEs. Every time I try and think of my mummy I can’t hardly even see her, can only see her sickness. Click between Mama and Masi. Masi’s skinniness telling you that she’s the older sister; Mama’s eyes making it seem like it’s the other way round. Start wondering whether to tell Masi to just go fuck herself but bail when I realise she’s been spitting at her webcam. Either that, or once again she’s crying.
7
FIRST TIME YOUR mum told you she had the C-bomb was the first time you changed the TV channel without first asking permission. She’d turned the sound down before telling you, so what difference did it make? Weren’t even facing the stupid TV, so what difference?
In the car on the way home from school: “So tell me all about all your lessons today.”
In the hallway as she took off her shoes: “What did Ms Feldman think of your spelling homework?”
In the living room – placing a dining chair in front of you as you sat down to watch those dumbass after-school cartoons: “Dhilan, we have to have a talk about something.”
Exact same opening line, exact same timing, exact same furniture set-up as two years earlier when she’d told you that she and your dad had “decided not to live in the same house”. Then she hit you up with the exact same laugh – her non-laughing laugh. Short blast of vocal cord like she was clearing her soul in order to properly laugh.
“Darling, I went to see the doctor today.”
You realised she weren’t wearing her work clothes. Instead rocking some peach summertime dress.
“Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, sweetheart. It’s nothing to worry about at all. But, the thing is, they’ve found something called a lump.” And then once again with her non-laughing laugh. “I’m not sure if you understand, Dhilan – do you understand what that means?”
The difference between the height of the dining chair and the height of the sofa meant that you replied to her neck instead of her face. Just below her neck, so more like her chest. “Yes, Mum – it means that you’ve got cancer.”
Instead of being impressed, she seemed kinda pissed at you: “Well, a lump doesn’t always mean someone has cancer, Dhilan. But in my case, yes, it seems it does.”
In your hand you found the TV remote. Couldn’t properly hug her without first laying it down and you couldn’t lay it down without first hugging her. You started rubbing your fingers across its rubbery buttons. Looking at the remoteness of it. Looking for a button to press that would make you start crying. Instead you just nodded. Once. Then twice – in case your nod weren’t clear enough the first time.
“I went straight for a scan this afternoon – the GP, she sent me straight to the hospital for a scan. But there’s nothing for either of us to worry about – we’re both going to be fine. We’ll both need to be strong. I’ll have maybe one or two bad months – and you’ll need to be extra good at being the man of the house – but afterwards we’ll be completely fine.”
You nodded. Twice. Thrice. Fuck it, four nods.
“Dhilan, don’t you have any questions? Questions about what type of cancer it is?” Her hands to the remote for the DVD player. Her next words directed to the remote – like it was a fone set to loudspeaker mode. “It’s what’s known as breast cancer, son.”
You nodded more quickly this time, as if to say, Duh, well obviously. After all, while the ads telling people to quit smoking were all about lung cancer, it was always breast cancer in all the other cancer ads.
“So you understand, then, Dhilan? That’s what I meant when I said they’d found a lump.”
Fuck it, maybe that’s what the word “lump” already meant back then. Definitely from that day on – you knew straight away that from that day on, that’s what the word lump would now mean. Whenever someone asked you “one lump or two?” your first thought would no longer be about sugar cubes. You’d just think they were offering to put tumours in your tea.
“That means they’ve found that there’s cancer growing in my breast – not in my chest, Dhilan, in one of my boobies.”
And that’s when you accidently pressed down on one of the buttons, somehow changing the channel from ITV cartoons to CNN. Soon as she clocked this, she stood up and straightened her peach summertime dress. Said something about needing to hit the kitchen – some special Tesco cherry and raspberry mousse. Instead of bailing, though, she stayed put in the doorway. “Actually, Dhilan, to tell you the truth, there isn’t really a lump.” Then turning towards the kitchen, but then turning back. “Actually, it�
�s more like the opposite of a lump – it’s what some doctors call an inverted nipple, although other doctors still call it a lump. But it’s still the same thing, it’s still breast cancer.”
When she went to the kitchen for real this time, you just sat there on the sofa, watching the wrong channel with the sound still turned down. Wondering why she hadn’t just told you in the first place that it wasn’t a lump, it was an inverted nipple.
8
YOU KNOW HOW sometimes some basic words and phrases just keep on passing you by? Hear the word all the time, but either you don’t never find out what it actually means or you just get stuck in some groove with some completely wrong meaning. I used to think “homesick” meant that feeling you get when you walk up to your front door. Didn’t learn the dictionary definition till I was twelve. I was crying out of nowhere in my school canteen and these idiotfucks started rinsing me, asking me if I was homesick. So I go to them: “The fuck can I be homesick when I ain’t even at my home?” The conversation didn’t go well.
Tonight, even the welcome-home smell of fabric conditioner doesn’t soften the retch reflex. Laundry and Lynx deodorant. Green glow from a fire exit. Condoms stretched over the extinguishers. Ever since my home become these dorms, my misdefinition of homesick and the dictionary definition been meaning the same thing. You return to your room and it’s like you need to do your mum’s deep-breathing drills. Return to your room like you been kicked in the guts – people thinking you just drunk too much vodka or whatever. Return to your room at six in the a.m. for a shower and change of clothing, and it ain’t cos you got lucky. And ain’t no point psychotherapising this shit. Don’t matter if it’s cos of guilt or cos I wanna bounce back to Acton to tuck her in. Ain’t like different reasons will make the puke stains in my gullet taste different. Anycase. Tonight as I turn the corridor and head to my room, my main reason for feeling sick is cos I get slapped in the stomach by the two doddery old Botox men.
“Still following us, then?” goes the younger-looking old man.
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