“Okay, well you have fun talking about all those definitions because I’m going to talk about what actually happened.”
“I think that, as a couple, we definitely just took a major step towards being less sexually defunctional.”
“Oh wow, if only you’d sold it to me that way two years ago, I’d have dropped my knickers in a heartbeat.”
We leave the kitchenette and head towards the lifts.
“I can’t believe that we finally did it,” she says. “Shit. And I can’t believe I was dressed like this. Wearing this stupid dress.”
“What would you want to be wearing? I mean, for our first time.”
“Well, I didn’t exactly have a specific outfit picked out, Dillon.” She presses the lift button. “Though I guess some people do – some people even buy special lingerie for it. But that doesn’t make me feel better.”
“I’ve got a pair of lucky boxer shorts,” I tell her. “And I guess, if I’d known, yeh, I’d have probly worn them tonight or something.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Dillon. You’re not getting this at all, are you? I don’t care what dress or underwear or footwear I wear, just so long as I wasn’t dressed like this. I mean, I thought we’d just be play-acting and so I dressed the part. For laughs, Dillon. Like how dressing for Halloween parties suddenly became all about dressing slutty. But how do you think it makes me feel to know that the first time we finally did it, I had to dress up like some fucking slut?”
27
NALIAH WANTS TO link up. Keeps trying to get word to me, telling me it’s code-red critical. Carpet-bombs my timelines and time-bombs all my messaging apps. Every comms channel possible except the obvious option of contacting me via Ramona.
When and where’s good for me?
I’m Ramona’s friend, remember we met
Hits me up with half-finished DMs, one-line emails, quarter-sentence texts. Even handwrites half a Post-it note and leaves it for me at my student halls.
Hopes she didn’t offend me
How am I?
Each message like some afterthought to her next message or a pre-thought to her previous one.
Sorry we got off on the wrong foot
Rapid-fire think-clicks and random emojis. Like as if she knows there ain’t no point trying to straighten out my thoughts.
She’d like to set a meet
i.e. she’s doing that thing where you hit the Send button instead of the full stop. That’s how the apps are structured and therefore how they structure us. Paying proper close attention to this kinda stuff cos if my start-up’s gonna expand on its own two feet I gotta diversify away from corporate clients, start tapping consumer markets.
Is this the right address/profile/handle/fone number for me?
So how the hell does Naliah access me even though I blocked her, blanked her, rejected all her Friend requests? Simple as pissing in a barrel of fish: she comes through as Nayeesha, Nadina and Nadia. Maybe even Naliah ain’t even her real name – best-case scenario it’s a true fake username. All her assorted online personas easy enough to ignore, though. Shit only got real when she started tracking down all of me – @Dylan, @Dhilan and so on. Can’t risk her telling Ramona about all of me so now ain’t no choice but to respond.
@Dhilan: What do you want?
@Dylan: The fuck do you want?
@Dillon: What?
We agree to talk face-to-face. Coffee’s just another word for outside your fone. She suggests Starbucks in Holborn, I switch it to McDonald’s. If we gotta suck down corporate American crap then might as well be honest about it and go hit McDonald’s.
But first, the big hairy butt-kicking.
One random benefit of hot-desking: ain’t no need to clear out your desk when you get booted out. Before my client finally fired me, I got a tag-team bollocking from the Online Archive Project Manager and the Head of HR. Then the Managing Editor hauled my ass in to tell me what a “crushingly disgusting” disappointment I been. My post-surgical porn, she’d been fine with. Me blogging as a pre-surgical online alter ego for my mum, she’d made allowances about. But me having real-life actual sex was “filthy, lewd and unforgivable”. The security footage of Ramona and me playing on their desktop monitor – like some random teenager’s standard daydream.
Didn’t bother telling them that, actually, it was the most respectful sex I ever had with her cos I didn’t waste her time worshipping her feet.
Didn’t bother telling them that if their security cameras had an audio feed, they’d have basically heard her back up their own interpretations.
Didn’t bother telling them anything at all.
But after my contract was formally terminated into shreds and I’d handed over both my office and offsite security passes, I asked them why the Acting Head of IT hadn’t tagged himself in for their joint-action smackdown?
They told me he was on some urgent emergency crisis meeting.
As I head to my link-up with Naliah, it daybreaks on me that, actually, I’m the one with a shit-ton of questions for her. And now I been forced into a meet, ain’t got no choice but to ask them.
“What time do you call this, Dillon?” Those words soon as I step inside – hitting even before the smell of French fries and sugary bread-buns. One thing about McDonald’s: I can’t never smell the actual meat.
“Sorry. I got held up getting fired.”
The botched-Botox man kicks out a plastic chair for me. It’s bolted to the floor but he kicks it out anyway. Back of his neck sweating like a stump of shawarma.
Like a dumbass I tell him I was meant to be meeting someone else here. He turns in his seat to scope out the other tables. Only person sitting solo is a woman who looks like she been sponsored by Louis Vuitton. He ups his chin in her direction.
“Yeh, like as if you don’t already know what Naliah looks like.”
Now a text from Naliah telling me she’s running late – so sorry, etc. Now an ad for Louis Vuitton. A story about fake products. An article about fake stories. Botox man jacks my fone out my hand like he gonna ghostwrite my reply. Instead he powers off and surgically removes the battery – we’re talking screwdrivers and forceps and scalpels. Doesn’t need to explain that all fones are tracking devices. I hand over my Dhilan and Dylan handsets.
“I hate the plastic prosthetics too, Dillon.” Screwdriver slips and scratches one of my touchscreens. “So, this girl you’re meant to be meeting here – you’re still sticking to the outside possibility she’s being less than truthful with you?”
I tell him the outside possibility is the one where she is telling me the truth.
He grunts and carries on gutting my fones. Even knocks out the camera lens and the tiny inbuilt flashlight. “There we go. Lights, camera, deactivation. Now we can talk. Like we used to talk.” Veins across his temples like some spam alert for his smile.
And once again with all my angstipating about whether or not I should be angstipating – that old familiar time-wasting timesaver. Checklists, flow charts, if this then that. Critical or just life-threatening? Urgent or emergency? How may I direct your call?
Basically, am I busted?
Does he know I uploaded Dad’s stories onto the digital archive? No matter how carefully I encryptionated my footprints. No matter that my decoy felony was so convincible it got me fired for sexual misconduct. No matter that I fixed up Dad’s stories without any keywords, metadata or character-recognition software so they won’t never show up in any search – i.e. ain’t no one, not even Google, should ever even know they there. Outside the window, a pigeon pecks at the corpse of a Big Mac. Beak dripping with that dirtypink Big Mac sauce.
The Botox man pockets my handsets and slides me something across the table. From the shape of his hand, I figure the object beneath it is either my fone batteries or those tubs of Maccy D’s ketchup. Turns out it’s a triple-pack of jimmy-hats – ribbed for extra pleasure. “It was noted from the security footage that you didn’t appear to use one.” He raises his cup of c
offee. “Here’s to you getting yourself thrown off the archive project in more salacious style than even I could have orchestrated.” When he burps bourbon, I realise he’s drunk.
After he’s done with all the back-slapping and big-ups and congrats, he asks me what I intend to do now.
“Now that I’ve had proper penetrative intercourse?”
“Now that your little adventure at the newspaper is over. What will you do, Dillon? Pitch for a new temping gig? Or just be a student – a single-function student? Create some free content for Facebook or Instagram? Or maybe you’ll just spend more time by your mother’s hospital bedside or graveside or memorial website or a post-mastectomy porn site?” Clicks his fingers. “Why not just ask Google what you should do next?”
“Okay, first, why the hell would I wanna do that? Secondly, you just confiscated all my fones.”
“What shall I do next?” – he drops this question like it’s an answer. “As you know from your student start-up forums, the holy grail of search engineering is to be able to answer the question What shall I do next? Not merely what should I purchase or click or watch or read or think or visit or study or eat or date or fuck next – what shall I do next? The destination that’s driving the engine. Though for many data-gatherers, the best thing about predicting people’s behaviour is that it becomes easier to manipulate them.”
I ask him if this is gonna be another one of them chats where he gives me some fucking Media Studies lecture instead of just saying what he’s trying to say.
“Your own personalised, data-crunched destiny, Dillon. Delivered straight to your cellphone.”
“Dude, how much commission they paying you to keep dropping all these taglines?”
“Fine – if you’d rather not ask Google what to do next, then by all means ask someone else. In fact, why not ask your father?”
I figure he’s just phishing so I say nothing. On his tray, there’s enough fast food to feed a whole family. You know – of three. Bit by bit, he’s been sticking half of it in front of me. Not like he did with the jimmy-hats, though. More stealth-style, like he hopes I ain’t noticed.
“The hell would I ask my father for? Man hardly even knows me.”
“You’d be surprised how helpful ignorance can be in some situations, Dillon. The more information a person has about a given topic, the less likely they are to take into account information that challenges what they already believe. They’ll just select the information that suits them. Even more so if all the information looks equally credible because it all sits on the same platform. Advertisers have known this for decades: the more options a consumer is presented with, the more open they are to persuasion and manipulation. Whereas the less information they have, the more they’ll exercise their critical thinking muscles. Also, there’s more of a mystery, kiddo. Mystery begets curiosity. And curiosity happens to be the one thing that makes people more open to information that doesn’t reinforce their own opinions. This is because curiosity involves a very different kind of motivation. So, you see, your father’s ignorance might make you more open to reaching better conclusions – provided you don’t rely too heavily on logic and reasoning, of course.”
Even with his white stubble, I still can’t mentally Photoshop what the Botox man would look like if he went full beard. Stubble is normally the template of a beard, but ain’t so with this guy. He’s one of them men with a face that just won’t be bearded.
“Plus, let’s not forget that boys rebel against their fathers a lot more wholeheartedly than any kid ever rebelled against technology.”
Botox man carries on longing out his point the way he does while I try to picture him fully bearded. Ain’t gonna lie, I reckon I’d like him to be rocking a beard – like Gandalf or Dumbledore or Obi-Wan Kenobi. That’s the kind of dipshit gimp I can be.
Seems like he’s basically saying that our smartfones ain’t simply replaced other sources of info and authority, they’ve replaced the positive impact of parents’ dumbassery. “Which is to say, if your father should ever tell you that he doesn’t know the answer to a question, Dillon, then know that his ignorance is probably good for you. The four words ‘I don’t know, son’ are words that you should cherish.”
“Fuck’s sake. All this brainful red-pilling and you just trying to throw me off the trail again.”
“I’m just saying that the mystery will be much better for you than answers.”
“Why do you keep doing this? Always warning me off the garden path, but being so obvious and extra about it that you’re basically also encouraging me?”
“It isn’t complicated, Dillon. I want you to search but I don’t want you to search. You of all people should be used to that kind of conflict. Plus, of course, I’m just trying to cover my own ass.”
I remember something I read one time: for all them brainful debates about whether or not Oedipus is trapped by some kinda predestinated fate fuckery, the one freedom he clearly flexes is the freedom to search for the truth.
That’s all for today about Oedipus.
“You deliberately got fired, didn’t you, Dillon?”
“The fuck would I do that for? The newspaper’s my most high-margin client.”
“Because you no longer need to be there. Because somehow you’ve managed to obtain your father’s scrapbook of his old news stories – the one he claimed he never kept. Now, either your dad doesn’t know that you took his cuttings book or he gave it to you out of some sort of inverted parental pride. Either way, you have his stories now. I’m assuming you’ve stashed it away in your student halls?”
He pushes a bag of French fries towards me. I slide him a tub of barbecue sauce.
“My dad don’t know that I took it.”
Turns out the Botox man thinks I just been reading the scrapbook. Like as if I just took it to semi-skim Dad’s stories. Has diddly-zero clue that I’ve uploaded the stories stealth-style onto the digital archive. Even though it makes fuck all sense that I could be one step ahead of him like this.
“Dillon, I’m inviting you to stop dicking around. Haven’t I been a friend to you? I’ve helped you out on several occasions. In fact, we’re now way past little helpful gestures – now I’m fully trying to protect you.” He pulls out his fone to show me he’s removed his own battery as well.
“Okay, so you gone rogue. Good for you. Least that explains why you ditched the other guy, then – the guy who looked like a younger version of you. Where’s he at these days anyway?”
He drops a snort that blends mashup-style with the sound of him unzipping his pockets. Turns out one of my fone batteries is the same type as the Botox man’s. He makes some big-budget HBO drama of switching them. “Think of this swap as something akin to a blood oath, Dillon. And as for that other man – the man who looks like I used to look – well, whenever I’m in the newspaper’s office being the Acting Head of IT, he sits in my actual office being the acting me. Though this afternoon he’s running one of those mission-critical errands. Not too far from here, in fact.”
He slides me a semi-skimmed milkshake.
I fumble about trying to find a straw.
“Just scrape out the froth with your tongue, kid. It’ll be good practice for you.” When he winks, it’s like all the botched Botox disappears for a sec. Then he gets up with a quickness that makes me flinch.
I watch the Botox man exit while Naliah keeps me in check, telling me how sorry she is for showing up late. Carry on watching him through the window while she talks about Tube delays. Just standing in the middle of the pavement winking at us. Making actual wanking gestures in the general direction of Naliah’s foot-model feet. Pumps instead of plimsolls today – heels, not flats, though you can’t really tell cos they’re wedges. When the Botox man is done making wanking gestures, he pulls out his fone and either reads or sends a message. Drops his handset onto the pavement and starts stomping it to shitness. Then he turns left towards High Holborn instead of right towards the client’s office.
&nbs
p; “You ate all this food yourself?” Naliah asks. “Now I feel like my lateness has been bad for your health.”
I tell her that I’m sorry but I have to leave – I gotta go student halls. Now. I tell her I gotta go there now. I don’t even bother to bin the remains of the lunch.
By foot, my dorms are five minutes away. Ten minutes tops by bus. I run a different route so as not to run into either of the Botox men – finding me some shortcut I didn’t never even know existed. Film-set back-alleys and restaurant dumpsters. Junkies, rapists and serial killers, probly – I don’t exactly stop to ask them. But when I get to my floor I can tell straight away that the lock on my door has already been jimmied. The smell as I open the door coming from dog shit that’s been smeared into my carpet. Mess of papers, essays, bank statements. My copies of The Economist. First, I check for my laptop. All present and accounted for. My external hard drives, they all there too. My mother’s letters still in the fireproof box, tucked in beneath the slowly siphoned fotos, home videos, unwashed headscarves and stolen wigs. How the hell do you misplace a prosthetic breast? My chequebooks, my debit cards, my cash – everything worth jacking is still where it should be. So now I ain’t got no choice but to check for Dad’s cuttings book.
28
SOON AS NALIAH steps into my room, she pukes. Vomit on my carpet, vomit on my laptop. Weird to watch someone so healthyful puke. Puddle of puke by her foot-model feet. Splash-back dripping down from the lips of her ankles. The lips sheltering the space beneath her ankles. Next, vomiting out her apologies.
Young Carer’s Playbook #514: Never ask a puking woman if she’s okay.
Young Carer’s Playbook #515: Never tell a puking woman that it’s okay.
I ask Naliah how the hell she got here so quick.
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