Meatspace

Great, I think. I’m a rush job before he goes to get his end away. He doesn’t care about this tattoo, whether its kerning looks good or whether its execution is considered and thought out. I’m in the punter zone. I am to shut up and be inked. I look around the room. Aziz is nowhere to be seen.

‘Did you see where my brother went?’ I ask Sick Charlie.

‘What?’ He just looks at me and shakes his head.

Then I see Aziz at the door. He’s outside, looking for a light for a cigarette. A girl walks past and he mimes to me that he’s going to get a light off her. He winks as if the light is just starters for what he has in mind. He throws me a thumbs up and disappears.

‘Ready?’ Sick Charlie says to me. He holds up his machine and suddenly it occurs to me – I can’t do needles. They freak me out. They make me pass out. They make me sweat. They make my skin slick with worry and anxiety. How did I not remember that needles were part of this whole thing? What was I thinking? I’m an idiot. I turn to the other side of the room and nod furiously, tensing my arms. Sick Charlie pats the area he’s working on, strokes it and pulls at it. Which might be comforting but he’s wearing rubber gloves. So the whole thing feels like a medical procedure. And the drill-drill buzz of the machine is whirring away, banging and banging and I can feel it, without looking at it, approach my skin. I can feel it hone in on the spot it’s to attack and reconfigure for ever. I can feel it approach me quickly. Heat all up and down my arm. I can hear it pound and pound in its grooves and then connection – impulse, pow. It scratches furiously from side to side and I hazard a look. I take a peek, just a quick peek. I see it happening, all in reddening, dampening close-up. So I close my eyes. This only focuses the scratching. I open my eyes and I see the apex of Sick Charlie’s head as he squints and bends over my arm, working away. I’m nearly straddling him. I try to make my arm as loose and goose-like as I can. But all I can feel is the scratch-scratch-pinch of the gun and it’s hard to concentrate.

Do we talk? I’m not sure of the etiquette. My dentist is monologue-happy, meaning he’ll natter away with his fingers in my face. My barber, the sexy Swedish girl or her colleague, who is very tactile with the backs of other customers’ necks, they can’t shut up with their other clients, but me, I don’t know what it is. As soon as I get in the chair, they clam up. They ask me a few awkward questions about how my week has been and I answer them amiably and ask about their weeks and they monosyllable me. Why don’t they want to talk to me? Maybe they can sense that I just want them to ask me what I do for a living, so I can say ‘Oh, I’m an author’ coyly and await their being impressed. Because that’s part of the whole doing something creatively full-time and semi-successfully, you get to tell people that’s what you do, and never qualify it with ‘Oh, and I have a day job at the council, reconciling council tax receipts’. Nope, you’re the creative thing and that’s all. Barbers don’t seem to care about that. God, it vexes me. I just want to show off. Why won’t they let me show off?

I look down at my arm. He’s not even finished the first ‘E’. We’re in it for the long haul.

There’s not much you can do to inspire banter in a tattoo artist’s chair, because you don’t want to break their concentration. Eventually, the scratching becomes an uncomfortable irritant, rather than a painful blat-blat of needles. The thumping indie’s more irritating than the irritating scratching on my arm. It’s jolly. It’s up-tempo. They sound young and happy. What the hell am I doing? Who gets their first tattoo at age 30? A guy who thinks he’s younger than he is. That’s who. It’s okay for Aziz because it’s just the sort of behaviour you’d expect from him. But squeaky ol’ me? Nope. I barely stay up past 2 a.m. I’ve never done drugs except for the odd doobie toke that didn’t take. I worry that this is a slip towards something more serious. I’ll end up trying crystal meth. I’ll buy skinny jeans. I’ll start taking my fashionable self seriously, ditching my uniform of jeans and t-shirt for something more transient, like espadrilles. This is all wrong and it’s too late. Because if I back out now, I’ve got the start etching of an unfinished tattoo and if there is one thing I’m consistent at, it’s seeing shit through to the bitter end, even if I’ve decided it’s a stupid idea since. What a complete tool. The scratching on the arm is constant until he has to move to a new area, which hurts because these new parts of skin have to get used to the procedure that’s taking place. He never looks up at me. It seems like he’s rushing. Is he rushing? I don’t think he’s rushing. Probably. How do you know? What is an appropriate amount of time to spend on a lowercase ‘v’?

When Sick Charlie finishes, he gives me some saline solution to use to keep the tattoo clean. He wraps it in cling film and says to me, ‘Leave that on overnight, while the skin is still inflamed.’

‘Okay, thanks, man. Good job, etc,’ I mumble, trying not to focus on the irritated burn on my arm.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’ll pass. You slept through the worst of it.’

‘This isn’t the worst of it?’

‘I could have done anything while you were asleep.’

I can see the letters exactly as I printed them out and I think, yes. Okay, that’s dope. I like that a lot. I think I look amazing. I shake his hand, rather limply, because my newly tattooed arm is attached to the hand that shakes. And I say my goodbyes, struggle with getting my coat on, which is a shame because I’m hypnotised by the ink. All I want to do is look at it and get drunk. I open the door and I feel it coming. This is it now. My life is about to change. Oh yes. Tomorrow I will show strangers and loved ones and I will say, oh yes, it’s because I write. It’s an aide memoire to always be thinking about literature. It’s a kick in the teeth reminder that I am a writer. And it’s a good tune, I will say. People will inevitably ask, do you like that song by Elvis Costello and I will say it’s one of my favourites. It’s not. I like it. But it’s not one of my favourites. Depending who they are, I’ll say it was my mum’s favourite.

I leave the tattoo studio and phone Aziz. It goes straight to voicemail. The same stupid message he’s had since we were kids. I leave him a breathless message saying how amazing my arm looks. I feel bloody alive, I think to myself. I was sceptical at first but now it’s here and it’s done and it’s indelible, I feel like a fucking rock star, and I’m already a writer. What more could I want? This is definitely going to make my life change, I think to myself. There’s no way it cannot.

aZiZWILLKILLYOU episode 4 Aziz vs Teddy [posted 10 September, 14:02]

Tomorrow I leave for New York, people. I leave to go find the man who inspired this image here.

You know? My last holiday was never, right? When does a man like Aziz have time for a holiday? Answer: everyday should be a holiday. So … time to hit the road, innit. Time for adventure.

I got a bow tie tattooed on my neck and now I’m off to go find the boy with the bow tie tattoo. Know why? If I think I’m an individual and the internet thinks we’re all alike, I’m going to go find my doppelgangers. All of them. I’ve found one and I need to see exactly how he fits the Aziz profile.

 Does he like sandwiches?

 Does he think life is for the living?

 Does he eat everything with his hands?

 Has he had a threesome?

 Will he have a threesome with me and some girl, so we can create some sort of infinity pool effect on a spitroast?

 Is that disgusting?

 If it is, is that okay, because we all know why you visit this blog, right?

 Will the world implode if 2 doppelgangers have a threesome?

All these things need answering. I’m off to find my doppelganger with the cool-ass tattoo, find out exactly how that tattoo came to pass and I am going to show you the world, shining, shimmering, shameless.

Stick with me kid. We’ll go far.

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History:

Meeting strangers off the internet – Google Hayley Bankcroft – Twitter Hayley Bankcroft – Google images Kitab Balasubramanyam – Facebook

I wake up from a dream where Aziz follows me around a shopping centre with a toothbrush and toothpaste, telling me it’s time to brush my teeth because my breath smells of chutney.

I listen to Aziz singing to himself from bedroom to shower to kitchen to bedroom. I walk into the kitchen and switch the kettle on. I open the fridge. There’s no milk.

I sneak a look at the communal iPad, left on the kitchen table. He’s left his browser open on Teddy Baker’s Facebook profile.

Teddy Baker’s profile avatar is a close-up of his face, which, sans shit-eating grin and sunglasses doesn’t look so much like Aziz. There’s no obvious reason for why this brown guy has a white name. Bow tie aside, he looks ordinary, solid, just like one of the guys.

He lists his likes as ‘vigilante justice, weapons, Megadeth, PVC, abattoir politics’ but that’s it. The rest of his profile is sparse to the public. He has ‘liked’ Taylor Swift and the NRA. I hope ironically.

Aziz catches me from the doorway peering at his laptop. ‘You fraping me, bro?’ he asks.

‘Frape … what a lovely reappropriation of the word “rape”. Because outside of Facebook, making it look as if your friend is saying weird stuff is pretty much exactly what rape is.’

‘Mate, it’s just LOLZ.’

Aziz started off saying LOLZ in conversation because he thought it was funny – I had told him about Cara once Skyping me, me making a joke and her saying wearily, ‘Oh … LOL, etc.’ Aziz said she was a linguistics genius. Now it’s become a grating habit. I’ve long since given up trying to get him to stop.

‘Yeah … tell that to a rape victim,’ I say and leave the room to brush my teeth.

‘If I blog about the trip, do you promise to read it?’ Aziz asks me over breakfast. ‘So you can follow my adventures?’

‘You’re still going away then?’

‘I’ve called the tag “The Boy with the Bow Tie Tattoo”. You know I have to go.’

‘Catchy,’ I say dismissively. If he goes, who’ll look after me?

‘Will you tweet about it?’

‘You hate Twitter.’

‘I don’t hate Twitter. I’ve just got too much game for Twitter. Who cares about breakfasts and live-tweeting reality television. I just want people to read my blog. This is a writing thing. I want your respected followers, the writers and editors and whatnot, to know what I’m up to.’

‘Why would those ponces care?’

‘What? Don’t all your illustrious boring literati peeps like laughing?’

‘Not if it’s over some tattooed hooligan stalking a stranger off the internet. I’m a serious novelist now. Only serious novelist tweets.’

‘You’re right. I’ll use lots of metaphors,’ Aziz says, thumping the table.

‘Who cares what they think?’ I say, knowing in my heart of hearts that I care and thus wouldn’t want to associate myself with a bro/lad challenge for fear of loss of credibility points from the spurious few who bestow them.

Aziz’s bow tie tattoo is cartoonish. It’s huge. It covers the whole of his neck. He has chosen a thick red, like it’s the filling of a Jammy Dodger, like it’s jam, in fact. It covers up the scar, which probably makes it look darker and richer. His skin is smoother and newer in that part of his neck. It’s a proper dinner party bow tie. He looks like a clown on his day off.

Aziz grabs my arm and stares at my tattoo nodding furiously. He’s done this 3 or 4 times this morning. He tells me repeatedly to Facebook it, tweet it, Instagram it. I say no. I don’t want any of my family to see it. Or Rach.

Rach would have hated me getting a tattoo. Her and my dad. I feel like I’m 14 again, a rebel, a maverick on the edge with nothing left to lose. She has a tattoo of a rose on her foot. She got it when she was a student and regrets it. She avoids wearing flip-flops to ensure no one can see it. I once joked about getting a matching one and she punched me on the arm, hard. She’s not the boss of me anymore. And I always thought the tattoo was cute. I’d trace it when she was asleep. The game was to not wake her up by tickling her.

Meanwhile my family rule Facebook. It’s become their standard method of communication. When I first joined up, I was indiscriminate about adding people on sites like Facebook and Twitter. You never knew who you might stumble across: girls you liked, people you went to school with, possible networking opportunities. Also, I liked the idea of amassing numbers of people. It was addictive. Like heroin. A numbers game heroin. I got more discerning when the influx of my family arrived. When Dad joined up, and started adding middle-aged females and tagging me in his posts to them as his ‘son’, and I got a glimpse of who he was dating beyond abstract retold stories, I actively started looking at other sites my family hadn’t adopted. I love Vine.

There’s no way they’d let this tattoo slide. They interact with my every status update. Even with them on a family list, with restricted viewing, I know them – they’re too good, they’d find me and my tattoo and tell my dad. Even on the internet, you can still feel like an 11-year-old naughty boy.

Aziz puts his bowl in the sink. ‘Right,’ he declares. ‘I need to get ready for New Yoik. What happened to you last night anyway?’ I look at his back. I have minutes to make him stay. I have a reading tonight. I need him there. I haven’t done anything except go to the pub and the shop and the toilet. This is actual ‘outside’ business. I can’t breathe. I look at him.

‘Nothing, man. Absolutely nothing. I left the tattoo studio with the express intention of showing people my ink. I tweeted a picture of my arm wrapped in cling film.’

‘You didn’t Facebook it though?’

‘Nope. In case Dad saw it.’

Twitter was a safer haven in that my family was far from the zeitgeist, even though, counting all extended Indian relatives, I was related to enough people to stage an invasion of a small country. I deleted all the emails I’d received in the last few hours and prepared for my new life. I saw a Facebook message from my namesake asking ‘Add?!’, which I ignored and prepared myself for a night out I’d never forget. I ignored it because I felt guilty about not accepting his request. Dad called. I sent it to voicemail. Listening back to the message, he sounded drunk, saying something about ‘life being a journey’ – a misquote from what his brother had posted on my Facebook wall. Maybe they crib their Vedic quotes from the same website.

Going out with cling film on your arm doesn’t have the same impact as having a living, breathing tattoo to show. So, last night when I left the tattoo studio, instead of going to bars with my sleeves rolled up, I went to try to find Aziz and ran into my friend Mitch, who was always at the same pub every night, sitting at the bar, reading paperback fiction written by great middle-aged American men. Mitch admonished me for getting a tattoo.

‘Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?’ he said. I smiled.

‘Good to see you, Mitch.’

I met Mitch at a book reading I didn’t know anyone at. I was going out most nights and reading the same passage that would form the opening chapter of my book. I was anxious and hungry then. Mitch approached me afterwards and offered to buy me a drink. He gave me some editorial advice on my book, which I thought was pushy, but he did have a drink for me in his hand. Since then, he’s always been around, very supportive. Mitch thinks the end is nigh and the backs of his ilk will be the first against the wall.

‘But’ – he likes to remind me – ‘I’m the last generation of actual fighters. Any nerd tries to replace me, I’ll box his ears.’

‘It’s been a while,’ Mitch said, blowing hair out of his eyes. ‘Where have you been? Post-break-up solitude?’

‘Something like that,’ I replied, shrugging. As my arm lifted up, Mitch saw the contour of my tattoo.

‘What have you done? Is this your post-break-up statement? A tattoo? You cliché. You’re an idiot,’ he said. ‘Nay, a blithering wannabe-trendy idiot.’

‘Yeah, well … my brother made me do it.’

‘Brother? It is all go, isn’t it?’ he said. He paused. ‘Did you see the Samuel Beckett YouTube thing I put on your wall? It’s hilarious.’

‘I was busy dude, sorry.’

‘That’s you all over, Kit … you have a book out and you think you’re Samuel Beckett. You’ve changed.’

Mitch believed in only maintaining real relationships online. His Facebook friends were family and friends he knew. He was nothing like Aziz, who encouraged me to be a numbers whore to help spread the word about my work.

‘Bruv, truss in an Aziz,’ Aziz would tell me. ‘The more friends and followers you have, the more interactions you create. It’s all about interactions.’

Mitch was just offended I would let people in on my private life.

‘Sorry, Mitch,’ I said. ‘I very rarely go on Facebook. It’s become a quagmire of familial oppression.’

‘Why have an account?’

‘Because my family might be the only people who ever buy my book,’ I said, laughing. I looked around the pub. It was loud. There were quite a few drinkers. It felt okay being out. Just fine. I laid out the statistics for Mitch. ‘I have 843 Facebook friends, I am related to 207 of them, am good friends with another 234 of them, leaving 402 people I am acquainted with. The numbers don’t add up. That’s a lot of interactions, a lot of posts, a lot of Mafia invitations. So sorry I missed your Ginsberg thing.’

‘Beckett,’ Mitch corrected me. ‘Wait. You have 234 close friends? I don’t think I even know 234 people in the entire world.’

Mitch is my favourite person to hang out with apart from Aziz because they represent opposite ends of a spectrum. I’m either destined to be an over-confident buffoon like Aziz or a curmudgeon like Mitch. He is balding but still carries a comb in his blazer pocket. That vintage attitude is why I like him. I may find the concept of hankies revolting, but I’m glad for him having one. He’s Friendster in a Twitter universe, dial-up in a web 2.0 second life. He is my meatspace. Mitch likes to talk about the good ol’ days. I’ve missed him these last few months.

‘That’s cos you’re a barfly.’

‘Very true. But 234 people?’

‘Maybe I need to cull some people,’ I admitted.

‘You definitely do,’ Mitch said and shook his head. He went outside for a cigarette.

I could easily get rid of 400-odd people, I thought. I could reclaim my space. I could hide the ‘add’ button too. Make it harder to approach me. The only 3 requests in my ‘add’ folder were 3 people I didn’t know or have mutual friends with. And the only 2 people in my folder labelled ‘pending requests’ were Kitab 2 and new-to-Facebook Rach. Now she wanted to be friends. I’d left her hanging.

Mitch came back, stinking of fresh cigarette to add to the dull ache of old nicotine ingrained in his sports coat. ‘The reason I hate modern life,’ he declared, loud enough for those around us to hear, sermonising, ‘why I love books, is all this bullshit you’re saying … that’s what we’re reduced to, isn’t it? Etchings and imprints … Connections used to be important. Now it’s all selfies and sandwiches on Twitter. Now the very meaning of the word, it doesn’t mean shit. Associations have some weird cultural capital now.’

‘Innit,’ I said, to purposely undercut him.

‘Did you get a friend request from Rach?’ I nodded. ‘You know she has a new boyfriend?’

‘You’re Facebook friends with Rach?’

‘Oh, yes. Dunno why you don’t go out anymore.’

‘She dumped me. She said because I was a self-obsessed depressive.’

‘She does have a joie de vivre you don’t really do …’ he said, downing the rest of his pint and signalling for another 2.

‘I’m going through a lot of stuff, man.’

‘No need to act like a bore about it.’

‘Anyway, what’s your problem with Twitter?’

‘I don’t “do” Twitter. It’s all pictures of sandwiches and misspelled signs, no?’

‘Only for those who don’t use it properly.’

‘That’s what your feed is full of … Anyways, I hate how we’re all diminishing circles of actual friendship.’

‘What?’

‘All your followers and all your Facebook friends know your every movement. Your real friends know what you’re like. Where’s someone who knows both?’

‘That used to be Rach. But then she hated it when I was always online.’

‘Look at her now. She can’t get enough of the stuff.’

‘She’s a social animal,’ I mumbled. ‘Just another content queen.’

When I got home, I Googled Mitch to verify how off-radar he was. It didn’t take many search results to discover Mitch had a secret blog that no one knew about, called ‘The Weird Shit People Say to Me’. Of the entries, 3 could be attributed to me. I don’t mind.

‘I’m really excited about this trip,’ Aziz tells me as we’re sitting in his room. ‘I packed your camera, for the posterity.’

‘It is effectively yours. You use it all the time.’

‘How else can I document my lifestyle? No one would believe me otherwise.’

‘Just keep it,’ I said of the unwanted present Dad bought me Duty Free when he returned from a singles holiday to Prague last year.

‘Yeah, you can’t frame a decent shot.’

‘Decent framed pictures do rule the world.’

‘If only I could Instagram some of those sexcapades. The world isn’t ready.’

Aziz has packed enough underwear for a week, but only 3 t-shirts, because they’re his coolest. He bought a black vest that resembles the one Teddy Baker’s wearing in his photograph. He and I debate the word wife-beater. He ends it by telling me to man up, which irks me into a sulk. I then ask whereabouts in New York Teddy Baker lives.

‘Well, it says Brooklyn on his account,’ Aziz says, lifting his suitcase up and down like he’s weight training with it.

‘Wait, you didn’t message him?’

‘Nah, man, that’s part of the surprise.’

‘You’re going to just turn up? He’ll think you’re weird.’

‘Part of the challenge is getting through the awkwardness and getting to be best friends,’ Aziz says, downing his tea.

‘How do you know how to find him? You know New York’s pretty massive, right?’

‘Dude, give me some motherfrickin’ credit. I Googled him. I found his Facebook, his Twitter, his Foursquare and his Linkedin. I know where he works right now. I can see where he checks in on Foursquare or just follow his Twitter. Mate, I’ll find the guy. All I have to do is turn my wi-fi on.’

‘And your data roaming off. I ain’t helping you with another mobile phone bill.’

‘That was different. That was phone chat lines.’

‘Yeah, I’m not helping you pay another mobile phone bill because you’re too much of a dick to use your phone wisely.’

‘Fine, anyway, stop making this awkward for me. I was excited till I spoke to you. You know, Kit, you’re such a hangover depressive. You just gotta smiley face up. Smiley face up.’

Aziz points at me. I force a smile.

‘Yeah. Sorry, man.’

‘What’s your 5-point plan for your new tattoo? It’s new tattoo day. Today your life will change, just a little bit. And it’ll be fucking awesome.’

‘I dunno, get some breakfast, do some writing. I got a reading later. Whatever.’

‘Okay, so have you made a list of fit and female acquaintances you can impress with your tattoo? Have you made a list of places people might approach you and say, wow, that looks cool. Is that Hayley going to the reading?’ Aziz raises his eyebrows at me, waving air glasses up and down.