by Joe Stretch
‘Who are you?’ he asks the man.
‘I work in marketing, with Life, for the Wild World.’
‘I see,’ says Joe. ‘And what is the Wild World?’
The man taps his nose like twats tap their crotches or killers tap the handles of their guns. ‘Top secret,’ says the man through a smile. He’s probably shagging Life, thinks Joe. I bet he’s banging her with a mask on with his white and weirdly massive dick. Who entrusts a total stranger with a baby? A bell-end. The kind of man who takes shits on fans. Baby Sally lets out a deep, painful burp.
‘Wait a minute,’ says Joe, turning from Sally and grabbing the man by the wrist. ‘I’d do anything for Life, she knows that, I guess that’s why you’re here. And I’m not stupid. I’ll keep your secret. But Sally, she’s not . . . you know?’ The man shakes his head. Joe continues in a whisper: ‘Sally’s not the new Jesus, is she?’
The man is almost bursting with laughter. The man is saying, ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ then he’s saying, ‘Is she fuck.’ Moments later and Joe is chuckling too. He is asking the man what his name is and the man is saying that it doesn’t matter. He’s putting on a battered leather jacket and saying goodbye to Sally who is almost smiling. Joe shows the man out of his flat. After, he checks the toilet, and yes, it’s vanished. Gone. No more crap. He remembers how Life had said to say ‘hello’. What a terrible thing to say. ‘Hello.’ He calls her on her mobile but it goes straight to answerphone: Hey, this is Life. I’m busy. Leave a message. Next Joe is looking in the mirror, trying to work out if his roots are showing at his scalp yet. They are. So soon. It’s a miracle. There is a millimetre of pure white at the bottom of each strand of hair. Jesus. My natural colour is a perfect white. Fuck me. He’s thinking. Fuck me. Going white at twenty-four. What a tiny little nightmare. Now I’ve got Sally, he thinks, I won’t be able to go and nest with the puffins in the Faroe Islands. Ha. I probably won’t even grow wings now. He goes into the living room and watches Sally as she kicks and struggles in her little chair. She is beautiful. Even her poorly eyes convey a very convivial character. He starts making funny noises and Sally starts laughing. She is trying to smile. More funny noises. More touching. Within minutes, the adult and the child are squeaking, giggling, squeaking, giggling.
6
ANKA KUDOLSKI LEAVES the Press Club on Deansgate at six fifteen in the morning. It is becoming day. The sun will rise. Odds on. But, for now, a half-light hangs sleepily between the new buildings and above the grey road.
The coffee shops are coming to life with first blinking and then constant yellow light. Through windows, knackered youths in aprons carry trays of muffins. Hanging mouths and barely open eyes.
The Press Club is Anka’s least favourite of her many jobs. It used to cater for members of the press, theatrical types, people in television, but it doesn’t any more. Anka spent last night selling warm cans of Red Stripe to aspirational gangsters from Longsight and Moss Side. Chunky chains; too gold. Revolting rings. Trails of cocaine snot from each nostril. Dead women falling off their knees in dirty old miniskirts. Nowhere near enough fun. Where are the laughing humans, Anka? Where are the laughing humans?
Not in the Press Club, thinks Anka, heading south towards St Peter’s Square. I think I might quit. I need jobs that kick reality like a goalkeeper kicks a football. Into the air. Out of reach. QUIZ TV works. It detaches me from the world. So does selling overpriced bags to posh pigs at Selfridges. I thought the Press Club would be the same. It’s not. I think I might quit.
Anka skips between the town hall and the Library Theatre and into St Peter’s Square. A minute later and she is sitting down at a square table in Luciano’s, saying hello to Nic, a large, blonde, Italian-English part-time lesbian from Anka’s London days. Nic works nights, too. She deals with nocturnal room service at the Midland Hotel. It’s normal for the two of them to meet like this. Nic orders a sausage sandwich from the olive-skinned waiter. Anka orders a boiled egg with broccoli soufflé, red-onion tarte tatin, some frizzled shallots and a pancetta garnish. The waiter shrugs his shoulders.
‘How is the eating going lately?’ asks Nic in north London notes, tweaking her slightly large but necessary nose. ‘Your tits are still big, but your arms, Anka, you’re not eating.’
Anka smiles. ‘I am. I’m working loads, eating loads, I’ll be fine. Did you see me the other night?’
‘I watched the first half-hour before I went to work. Whose idea was it?’
‘Not mine, sadly,’ says Anka. ‘The producer’s. We got triple the amount of calls we normally get.’
‘I bet, but how many of them were just wanking down the line? I was blushing, all those horrible little groans every time you took a call.’
The food arrives. The sandwich for Nic and, for Anka, just one lonely boiled egg that rolls around the plate. Luciano’s, by the way, is an Italian cafe whose Italian menu has been eroded by the staples of the English breakfast cuisine over the three years since it opened. It is now run by Greeks.
‘The sad thing is,’ says Anka, ignoring her egg for the moment, ‘is that a lot of the genuine callers we got last night were Romanian. They haven’t figured out it’s a con.’
‘Foreigners are fucked. The Wild World will see to them and their fucking work ethic,’ says Nic, already halfway through her sandwich. ‘The Wild World is gonna save the English, the depressed. Do you know if you speak English, you’re more likely to suffer from depression? It’s been proven. The Wild World’s gonna stop that, surely. It’ll help us to deal with affluence, make it more pleasant for us to obsess over appearance, celebrity, money and status, stop us hanging from beams, shooting bullets through our brains or just moaning and moaning and moaning. I mean, Anka, look at you.’
‘I don’t moan.’
‘Maybe not, but you’re succeeding in starving yourself to death. I hope the geniuses behind the Wild World realise that there is a definite link between the English language and suicide. Or else, I should go back to Italy. Or the English should start speaking Italian. Italians don’t give a fuck.’
‘I’d rather speak French.’
‘I’d rather you ate your egg, you anorexic English psycho.’
‘Are you a lesbian today, Nicola?’
‘I am, yes, your tits have given me a huge erection.’
The two girls laugh. The sky outside gets lighter, encouraged, no doubt, by the sound of female laughter.
‘Speaking of the Wild World,’ says Nic. ‘Did you ever meet Life Moberg?’
Anka shakes her head. She has an egg in her mouth.
‘I’m sure you did.’
‘Only on the Internet,’ says Anka, swallowing. ‘I once looked at loads of her family photos, but we never met, for deffo.’
Nic leans across the table. ‘I spoke to her last week. She’s working for the Wild World in London. It sounds amazing.’
‘What does?’
‘The Wild World, dickhead. Life’s helping to organise the launch party. You’d love that, Anka.’
‘Would I?’ Anka is sucking each of her fingertips and letting out a huge sigh. ‘I’m well and truly trapped in this world. I got an email this morning asking me to strip for a mobile phone porn site. They saw the show last night and were impressed. But that’s got to be the old world, right?’
‘Are you going to do it?’
‘Probably. As long as they buy me lunch.’
The conversation returns to Life. Nic gives Anka her email address and suggests she gets in touch. She describes how Life recently dumped her boyfriend, Joe, saying, ‘Apparently, he stopped kissing her. He just used to peck her lips like a bird and flap his arms like they were wings. Also, she suspected he was trying to make a nest in her arse. He became fixated with her anus, not fucking it, just staring at it and holding himself against it at night.’
‘That’s pretty normal, isn’t it?’ says Anka, pulling on her coat and flicking her blonde hair over its khaki-green hood. ‘All boys are obsessed with anal nowadays.
Fannies will soon seal up – evolution!’
The two girls leave Luciano’s laughing. Once in the street, Nic does a little fart and both girls bend over in hysterics. They separate with an affectionate kiss outside the Palace Hotel. It’s eight in the morning and the streets are full of people.
It’s hours before Anka is due back at Selfridges. Having worked solidly for over a day, she decides to return home and sleep through the morning. She lives in Parkers Hotel, the glamorous and dilapidated Georgian building on the corner of Miller Street and Corporation Street. It’s a dump, of course, but she’s hardly ever there.
As she enters her corridor Anka sees a postman knocking on the door opposite hers, a large parcel at his feet. Through the wall a recorded voice is looped and screaming: ‘Whatever it is, just leave it by the door!’
The postman turns away in frustration. Anka smiles as their paths cross.
‘He’s a lunatic,’ says the postman, in an old Northern accent. ‘Wants locking up. Would you mind?’ The postman hands Anka a biro and gestures that she sign for the parcel.
‘You should hear his music,’ says Anka, smiling, signing then printing her name. ‘Nothing but Les Misérables.’
‘Nice one, love.’
Anka has never seen the occupant of Flat 126. Judging by his behaviour, she’s glad.
Once inside her flat, Anka switches on her computer and then lies on the bed as it boots up. She’s tired. So tired that she yawns. She takes a picture frame from her bedside table and holds it in front of her sleepy eyes. Inside the frame are the mantras her therapist gave her on the last day of her treatment. Anka, it reads, love yourself. You are talented and wonderful. You are beautiful. Feed yourself. You deserve food. Love yourself.
At first, when she got given this, Anka thought it was a load of bollocks. She didn’t go in for the ‘love yourself’ approach to survival. Her therapist used to force her to tap each of her scrawny limbs for minutes on end, chanting ‘I love you’ as she did so. Anka felt like a tit. But lately, she has begun to take a shine to herself. As instructed, she has read these mantras to herself each day. At first, her voice was full of irony as she told herself that she was beautiful and talented. But nowadays, she succeeds in reading the words with some conviction.
‘You are talented and wonderful.’ She spies her reflection in the glass of the frame. She smiles and her eyes shine. ‘You are beautiful. Feed yourself. You deserve food. Love yourself.’
Chaperoned by employment here in Manchester, it’s hard for Anka to believe in her memories of Goldsmiths and London. Two years ago, she was thrashing around with other thrashing young on loud streets and in crowded bars that rattled with ambition. She wore difficult clothes, rebelliously wrapped around her body. Her outfits all uniforms for a fantastic future. She called herself an artist. She blagged invites to exhibition openings in Hoxton Square and walked with a confidence that made a Xanadu of all her destinations. The lives of others were bad TV; woozy bollocks that could be scoffed and sneered at by Anka and her friends, all of whom had fresh brains inside their new skulls and light in the palms of their hands. But youth is a journey with no destination; its road trails off to dust and early nights. Perfect certainty gives way to cautious missions through empty towns of empty bars and empty clubs where you stand, motionless, and wonder, quite reasonably, when was it lost? When did it all go wrong?
My brain tried to starve me, thinks Anka. It wanted me dead. Maybe ambition is unnecessary. I wanted to be Jackson Pollock. I am not Jackson Pollock. Maybe craving success is slightly pathetic and, in any case, it’s become a bit like shitting. Whatever makes us happy makes us happy. Whatever turns you on turns you on. There is either more to life than being brilliant or there is less. Hedge your bets. Anka sighs. She squeezes out a trump.
She climbs off her bed and moves in on her PC. Her room is bare, save for the old desk and its computer and for the wardrobe that explodes with clothes. Two large windows look out over Victoria Station and the various tracks that fan from it in the direction of Rochdale, Clitheroe and Leeds.
First she checks her personal emails. She replies to the pornographers, saying she will strip for the mobile phone porn site providing she is taken to lunch afterwards. She writes a quick email to her mother detailing her eating habits and mentioning that she intends to get in touch with Life, a contact she’s made in the Wild World. Next she writes to Life herself: Hey Life, I’m a friend of Nic’s. She says you’re making it in the Wild World. Congratulations! I’m still taking my clothes off in the old world. Can you help me? Anka Kudolski. Anka clicks to send then turns from the computer screen and looks out of the window. She can see Strangeways Prison in the distance. The Boddingtons Chimney. The Manchester Evening News Arena. In the foreground a tram is pulling out of Victoria, aimed at the brand-new and instantly old apartment buildings of the Green Quarter.
Life replies almost immediately: Sure. I might be able to help you, Anka. Meet me in Wow-Bang any night this week around 10. Come to the Real Arms. X
Next Anka logs on to her QUIZ TV account. She has received a long list of emails. Some people complain about her bad language and the insulting tone she adopted on last night’s show. These are the minority. Most people pay her compliments. They request stained underwear, signed photos, stool samples, her home address and clumps of her pubes. Many request that she continue to insult them via email. Call me hopeless. Tell me I should’ve been born cock-less. Really hurt my feelings. Stamp on my balls. Say you’ll cut my penis into manageable chunks.
El Rogerio has only sent her a web link. Anka follows it to the El Rogerio blog spot and finds a detailed description of a man wanking over her. At first, this seems weird. A bit disgusting. Anka feels a very traditional anger tickling her throat and aggressively moving her features around her face. But as she reads about the semen that leapt onto her televised body, she feels dirty and cheeky. She likes the way it’s written. Arty. Fucked up. A small amount of red pride grows on each of her cheeks. ‘You are beautiful,’ she reasons. ‘Feed yourself.’ She reads on a little further but El Rogerio quickly changes his subject and Anka realises that she’s extremely anxious to return to the topic of herself. She experiences a rush of guilt. She rides the rush. She reads ten more emails in which men and women have written accounts of how they wanked over her last night. Anka giggles audibly at each one then returns to El Rogerio’s blog to reread it. The information age, thinks Anka, is a fucking flirt. My knickers, she realises, are a little moist.
Wow-Bang, it turns out, is the latest in a series of Internet-based virtual worlds. Anka runs a search on it and then begins to download it onto her hard drive. Crucially, simulated environments like Wow-Bang and Second Life have got little to do with wearing electronic underpants and receiving alarming blow jobs from famous women. No, these places are convincing worlds containing continents, cities, mountains, shops and bars. They are communities. People participate in these virtual worlds in order to enjoy themselves, meet new people, play with existing friends and family and take time out from reality, that is to say, from planet earth, yes, planet earth, where people sob, where sexual organs pong and where you only die once.
Anka registers on Wow-Bang and finds Life’s profile without much trouble. It says that Life has been a citizen for around a month and can usually be found in the Real Arms in the late evening. The Real Arms is described as ‘one of the coolest bars, popular with media types’. It can be found on Wow-Bang’s west side.
The graphics of Wow-Bang are good, but not quite up to reality’s standards. Not far off though. The buildings, roads and shrubs of Wow-Bang look reasonably real to the eye.
Anka types ‘El Rogerio’ into the Wow-Bang search engine. He, too, is a full citizen and, like Life, is currently offline. He also seems to have a very large head, Anka notes, staring at his pixelated avatar. El Rogerio is often found in the Rib Cage, which is described as ‘an EMO dive’. Users are warned that the Rib Cage is a hot spot for ‘the Dead Animals’,
a terrorist organisation intent on ruining Wow-Bang and encouraging people to return to reality to do real things.
Anka sneers at the screen. For Anka there is something overwhelmingly geeky about Wow-Bang. There was a time, only recently, when a virtual world would have been nothing but a nest for the nerds, a base for the bullied. But things change. Or rather rules get forgotten. And computer technology is a fucking flirt. It’s embarrassing, thinks Anka. I’m full of myself. My knickers are moist.
She spends fifteen minutes designing her Wow-Bang appearance and identity: her avatar. This involves uploading photos of herself from her hard drive, choosing clothes, recording standard greeting phrases. She is pleased with the results. Her 3-D avatar rotates on the screen in front of her, its arms reaching sideways into the black background. I feel like a nerd. With a smile spread thoughtlessly across her face, Anka submits her application to become a citizen of Wow-Bang.
She returns to El Rogerio’s blog and leaves a comment below the description of his wank: See you in Wow-Bang, wanker. Anka x. She returns to her bed and begins to undress. She lifts her legs into the air in order to peel off her jeans. She’s wearing silk red knickers. And they’re moist! Oh, Jesus and God, bless the moist knickers and tented kecks of civilisation.
It is clear, thinks Anka, closing her eyes slowly and relaxing into the cushions, that my knickers are moist. A finger travels down her tummy then swims under the red silk like a child seeking solitude under bedclothes. I have become a girl in moist knickers, she thinks, and I wanted to be Jackson Pollock. I wasn’t entirely sure moist-knickered girls existed. But obviously they do. I am one.
I was young and ambitious, then, from nowhere, came the disease. Anorexia. And now, she thinks, and now the recovery is coming at a cost. First came self-acceptance, then came . . . not self-love, as such. How can I put this? What has occurred inside my mind? First came self-acceptance and then came many people who masturbated to my movements and my sounds. That’s about it, she thinks. Old world or Wild World? No idea. Anka’s finger starts to move quickly inside her knickers. Her other hand is pinching her left nipple through her T-shirt and her bra.