The boxes protect the stacks of newspapers inside them. The stacks inside them strengthen the boxes. Flick each page of each edition from the year my dad was down in the staff directory. Ain’t diddly-fuck in the first box. Diddly-squat in the second. Pressing inky fingerprints into my forehead like as if to save the feds some time. Smudging. Swiping. Dripping like her mascara. Supposed to be wearing latex gloves. Apparently the air down here actually sucks the moisture out of paper. Apparently this is a big draw for people who store second-hand vintage porn. Diddly-nothing in the third box. Ain’t angstipating about it, though – like as if I already know for definite I’m gonna find something down here. Or that something’s gonna find me. And so I don’t even feel no surprise when I finally hit a bunch of stories that clearly couldn’t have been scanned in the first place cos they been blacked out with marker pen. Neat black blocks made up of messed-up madman streaks. Total tally: thirty-six blacked-out stories. Some Post-it note glued and taped to each of them, shouting, “DO NOT INCLUDE IN LEXIS NEXIS OR ANY FUTURE DIGITAL OR ELECTRONIC ARCHIVE.”
Whoever’d got busy with the marker pen had got twice as busy blacking out the headlines. Only shit that looks like maybe it could be readable are the bold-font bylines at the top of each story. Even if I can’t read the stories, least I can try and read the name of whoever it was who wrote them. Just for formal confirmation and so on. Next thing, I’m standing up on this cast-iron table giving it some crazyass yoga pose or someshit, trying not crease up the pages as I hold them up to the strip lighting. Problem is, the lights give off that reflective diffusion shit like they got in hospital wards instead of just focusing on one spot. Allow it – ain’t as if some black-and-white confirmation of his name is gonna help me feel surprised. Just like I don’t feel no surprise even though I nearly fall the fuck off the table when some ear-bleeding clang rips out from the cast iron beneath me. My brand-new top-of-the-range torch dropped outta my pocket to tell me why I bought it.
15
THIRD TIME YOUR mum told you she had the C-bomb was the first time she mentioned dying. No drama, just theatrics. Jumped you on your own doorstep to deliver the news.
You’d bussed it back from school rocking some sense of relief that she hadn’t come to pick you up. No fone call to tell you her test results. No texts, no telepathy. You thought about what people said about no news being good news. You thought of her out there in the all-clear. Maybe even celebrating. One of them swanky places where they randomly give you olives. Problem was, you’d forgotten your house keys. Soon as you hit the doorbell, you turned round and she was standing right behind you. Like as if she was already rehearsing for the role of ghost or guardian angel. “You really need to start remembering your own set of keys, sweetheart. Because it looks like the cancer’s going to kill me.”
She was wearing her beige bucket cap. Allow all them cut-and-blow-dried wigs – the headgear your mum liked rocking the most was that adorkable beige bucket cap. (Later you’d call it her fisherman’s cap.) (You’d learn to hate the word “bucket”.)
“Dhilan?”
Couldn’t remember why you hadn’t just foned her yourself to find out the test results. Some days you foned or texted her during every single school break. Reminded her to take her meds and that. Fresh fruit and vegetables. Her state of mind while she was driving.
You stepped up and hugged her.
Could feel the endorphins release into her bloodstream.
Back then, the path to that doorstep was the only part of your front yard made of concrete. Some special cement paving stones your mum had shaped and laid and levelled by herself. Borrowed a circular wet saw from work. (She did back-office stock control for a DIY chain.) (And shift work at a paper and packaging plant.) Beside the path, this patch of dead grass she liked to call the “lawn”. Said it was more of a lawn than all them other single mums had. You’d tried to wean her off all those bullshit stories – the ones about single mothers and welfare scroungers. Could see how the stories were making her hate herself. And work way too hard at both her jobs. And hate herself. You told her people only attacked single mothers on welfare cos they were easy targets for government cutbacks. Told her people only hated on single mums cos they made them feel insecure about themselves. A year later, your mum would finally have to accept one of the welfare benefits she was entitled to when the council covered the dead grass in concrete to turn it into a drive. That was the deal for residents who got injured or sick or just generally incapacitated: “The provision where feasible of driveways rather than on-street disabled parking spaces.” You couldn’t tell if she was crying cos of the lawn or cos of the handout.
Right now, your mum started going through her diagnosis right there on the doorstep. Dropping words like “glands” and “armpit”, even though you both knew she meant her axillary lymph nodes. Skipping past the usual reassurances. Couldn’t figure out why she suddenly had this thing about chatting on the front doorstep.
“Dhilan, why can’t Indians have bar mitzvahs?”
“I don’t know, Mama. Why?” You thought she was dropping some joke or something – take the edge off the fact she was dying.
“I don’t know, sweetheart – that’s why I’m asking. You remember Suzanne from the HR department? She was telling me about her son’s bar mitzvah last week. And so I was just thinking it would be good to have something like that in our culture. Just something to say that something’s happened. That something has changed.”
You told her you didn’t think having a party would be very appropriate now. Started thinking how bar mitzvahs were about taking moral responsibility. Owning your own shit. What you really wanted was something to mark this whole young carer thing. Even the label ‘young carer’ didn’t hardly even exist back then, meaning you weren’t just keeping it hidden from other people, it was like as if you were keeping it hidden from yourself. Weren’t just that you couldn’t tag yourself on social media or whatever, you couldn’t even tag yourself in your own head. You wondered what it would be like to be a Muslim or something in a world where there weren’t no label for “Muslim” or “Islam” – where you had to explain the whole thing from scratch every single time. Allow it – weren’t even about the caring anyway; it was about worrying about getting the caring right.
“Of course, it would give me an excuse to wear one of my good dresses again” – her key now finally in the front door – “Okay, now, let’s go and rerun the laundry load I already ran but forgot to dry.”
Inside, the house looking like some last florist on earth. “Get Well Soon” straight through to “Thinking of You”. All of them dumped by the foot of the stairs that your mum had sanded and painted after removing the carpet and grippers with just a chisel and a pair of pliers.
“Mama, how did all these bunches of flowers show up so fast? You ain’t even started treatment yet.”
“Just because I haven’t started treatment, doesn’t mean I’m not sick.”
Then you clocked that all the Get Well Soon pap was from the last time she had the C-bomb. Plastic bouquets, artificial roses, a bonsai, a cactus, the cardboard George Clooney. Cluster of pot plants still hanging on like the cells they was meant to have wished away. Not some Eng. Lit. symbol of her sickness, though. Not some poetry lesson thing about her clinging onto life or of how alive she was before staying alive was even an issue. Truth was, your mum didn’t give a crap about all that botanical bullshit back then – said flowers were for pansies. Only reason they were out in the hallway was cos she needed to make space in the shed for her brand-new Black & Decker workbench. Her Mother’s Day bouquets of power tools.
She’d got into fixing stuff up around the house cos, after the divorce, she was scared of letting workmen in. Landing that stock-control job at a DIY chain was just one of them weird coincid-flukes. Taught herself from YouTube videos. “Chores” too small a word for her (later, too small for both of you). That time she had to go back into hospital and you tried painting her bedroom to make her l
ess depressed or less sleepstipated, whatever, impress her. She fixed up your fuck-ups and finished the other two walls in less than three hours, tops. You couldn’t figure out who it was she was trying to impress.
And even when you didn’t jump in and try and help her, you remember how you kept checking and rechecking the ladder, the safety catches, the blades, the cables, the electrical trip-switch. Her seatbelt. All them rituals you followed and prayers you said to protect her. Switching the lights on with your left hand only. Avoiding physical contact with this orphan in your class called Amjad in case Dead Mummy Disease was somehow contagious. You remember doing all this stuff even before she got sick. But then, after the C-bomb dropped, your rituals started slipping. That day after school, you didn’t even read the results of her sentinel node biopsy – propped up on her self-sanded mantelpiece, beneath the fotos from various mother–son weekend wellness breaks and holidays. Her with her straw hats and this random Ryanair captain’s cap; you with your smiles that she knew were fake. All along the wall in self-made A4 frames, like Excellence in Single Motherhood certificates. That time – the third time she told you she had the C-bomb and the first time she told you she was dying – was the first time you forgot to check the trip-switches and the general safety features of whatever the fuck she was fixing.
16
IF YOU DON’T want them suspecting you of doing something you know you shouldn’t’ve done, best thing is to tell them straight up that you did it.
Not cos you wanna be some man about it.
Not cos a quick-time confession can buy you lenienceness.
You fess up to create the impression you didn’t even know what you done was wrong.
I walk into the Online Archive Project Manager’s office and tell her about the blacked-out stories I found in the Stockwell Deep-Level Shelter. Don’t tell her that all thirty-six stories were written by my dad. Don’t tell her how I’d managed to make out my dad’s byline with the help of some randomly bought torch. Or how seems like my dad hadn’t written a single story that hadn’t been blacked out. Matterfact, I don’t even mention my dad – a trick that, let’s face it, I already got pretty well nailed.
She asks what I was doing rechecking the “dead tree editions” in the first place. I bust out some bullshit about wanting to be thorough.
Seems she’s on some kinda paperless office look – so far on it, ain’t no point in her even having her own office. Empty desktop even though she’s the only one of us who don’t have to hot-desk. Shelves cleared of actual shelves.
“So what exactly are you asking me, Dylan?”
Sameshit goes for her wardrobe – she’s rocking some white mandarin-style jacket with no buttons, no zips, no stitching, no nothing – like it’s moulded from surgical latex.
“I was just wondering whether those stories should be digitised?”
“How are we supposed to digitise them if you can’t even read them?”
Fuck – this point is actually legit. Even with my brand-new top-of-the-range torch, only words I could make out beneath all the black marker pen were my dad’s bold-font bylines.
“And more to the point, Dylan, you said they were covered in Post-it notes stating they mustn’t be included in future electronic archives. Seems pretty clear instructions to me.” She looks out her floor-to-ceiling window. Do you call an internal glass wall a window?
“Yeh, but those Post-it notes must’ve been written way back in 2001. A lot of stuff has happened since then … ”
For instance, the first time Mum told you she had the C-bomb.
For instance, the second time Mum told you she had the C-bomb.
For instance, the third, the fourth, the fifth and all the fuckugly shit that followed.
“… For instance, these days the definitive version of something is the digital version of it, not the paper version – if there even is a paper version.” My eyes like a yellow highlighter pen across her paperless office.
“Definitive?” she asks.
“I mean permanent.”
“Much like the ink of the black marker pen, then.”
Boss my whole day’s data entry in two hours, tops. Like as if I knew I should clear me some calendar space and headspace for the crapfuckery still to come. Clock an essay for uni, even. Even email my mummy. Don’t need no work ethic or nothing, you just need a steady take of energy drinks, caffeine pills, carbohydrate gels and isotonic sports supplements. Barley water to flush your kidneys. Plus it also helps that I’m a very fast typist. And I mean, like, proper fast – so fast, I prefer doing it in private. Might even be it’s a superpower or something, though fuck knows how you check this. In the films, Clark Kent only got a job as a journalist cos the editor spotted that he was a fuck-off fast typist. In this place they’d probly stick him in tech support. Technically, it’s more like some self-taught skill set than a natural-born talent, but either way, it’s a good skill set to have if your start-up’s a subcontractor or sub-subcontractor in the market for manual data entry. That’s how I got the idea for this gig in the first place – way back in Year Eleven when Ramona needed to type up one of her essays that was still in someone else’s handwriting. After aiding and betting on her plagiarism, I branched out into turbo-typing essays for other people – also their coursework, CVs, cover letters. All them bullshit personal statements on uni application forms. And with all the shit going down with Mum, I didn’t exactly need no do-gooding energy-saving light bulb to flash above my head to figure out it could help us if I took things further. Expand, diversify, strategically reposition. Get a temping job as a typist. Subcontract my fingers to help companies compile databases and digital archives.
Two hours after I fessed up to the Online Archive Project Manager, another woman rocks up to my desk. Reading glasses on her nose; Diet Coke; ears that understand classical music.
“You must be Dylan? Dylan Deckardas?”
Doesn’t wait for Dillon to say something smartass like, “Guilty as charged.” Doesn’t wait for Dhilan to say something dickless like, “Yup.”
“I work in the editorial department. I’m the Managing Editor of this news organisation.”
Fuck knows why, but I stand up and give it some kinda half-nod, half-bow – even though I ain’t even clued in on what a Managing Editor even is. A shit-ton of people in this place got the word Editor in their job title – there’s even some dude called the TV Listings Editor. Surely you ain’t meant to bow your dipshit head to each and every Whatever Editor.
“Do please drop the theatrics and come with me to my office. We need to have a chat.”
Lift doors open straight into the newsroom and straight up we get ambushed by some lanky posh dude who looks like he got breastfed into his teens. Starts telling the boss person some kind of opinion and that. Her gif-like talk-to-the-hand face is too quick for him – she’s gotta follow through with old-fashioned audio.
After that it’s just her footsteps. Each step signal-boosting the background beat of typing, like as if the whole office is now jamming to the sound of some countdown.
“So, Dylan Deckardas.” We’re talking proper wood-panelled office. We’re talking polarised opposite of paperless. “This is the part where you tell me what you’re doing asking questions about blacked-out stories.”
I tell her I didn’t wanna leave anything out of the digital archive. That I was just trying to be thorough. That it was just a one-time thing.
“Do you think we’re bloody idiots? That we wouldn’t realise the stories you’re asking about were written by an ex-employee who just happens to share your surname. So, tell me then, how are you related to him?”
“To who?”
“To Deckardas. Ramnik Dickfuck Deckardas. Who the hell else are we talking about?”
“I don’t even know no Ramnik Deckardas.” I stay standing up. She doesn’t ask me to sit down.
“What’s your business here, mister?”
“But I couldn’t even read the name of whoever it was wro
te them stories. They were all blacked-out with marker pen – that’s kind of the point.”
Ain’t gonna get another straight shot at this, though, so, fuck it, I just go for it. Proper klutz style. Ask her why all them stories had been blacked out and what they was all about – trying to sound like I’m just asking in passing (if you can ram-raid something in passing).
“They’re blacked-out because they’re meant to be left out – and left well alone.” Some box of tissues by her sofa – like she expects all her visitors to bust out crying or someshit. “So you’re telling me that your shared surname is just a coincidence? Well in that case, Dylan, my mistake. So sorry. You may leave now.”
Breathe in like as if to stand up, even though I’m already standing.
“But please use a plastic bag to clean up the shit you’ve just crapped onto my carpet. Because I’ve been working in journalism for twenty-five years – so I know damn well there’s no such thing as a coincidence. Certainly not with a name as uncommon as Deckardas.”
Tell her again I ain’t never even heard of no Ramnik Deckardas. I swear down I’m being on the level with her. Then I double down – tell her that Deckardas is actually a trending Indian surname, that it’s just a couple of chart positions down from Patel. And even though I ain’t exactly planned this, the bullshit now flows faster than even Clark Kent could type it. “That’s cos it’s usually shortened,” I tell her. “To Das. It’s usually shortened to the word Das, which is pronounced D-U-S and is a very common Indian surname. Sometimes it’s even bolted onto the end of other names so you get things like Devdas and Shukdas and Shankardas.” I give her time to google this shit as the part about Das being common is actually true – only the part about it being short for Deckardas is bollocks. Next thing, I’m standing in this big boss office, dropping a list of random Indian names and tagging on the word Das, before finally playing a card that I should probly hate myself for playing: “Not all Asians are related, you know.”
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