Niven Govinden - Graffiti My Soul

‘That’s how I know about the cruising.’

‘Veerapen, he’s chatting to me, nothing else. There’s nothing very strange about that.’

‘Why doesn’t he just pick up the phone like normal people?’

‘Online is better. Cheaper, for one thing, and he likes to mix it up a little.’

‘“He likes to mix it up a little”? Mum, that’s what young people say.’

‘Oh, yes, I forgot. Your generation invented everything, including, it seems, the English language.’

Mum’s a proper joker when she wants to be. It still doesn’t make me trust whatsisname. I don’t know anything about him. He could be the world’s biggest internet pervert, for all we know. These legal people are very good at hiding their sick sides. Best alibi in the world.

Like all couples, they have their places: Yates’ Wine Lodge if one of his older mates is riding with them, or up the Bowl if he isn’t.

Bowling’s different. It isn’t about the booze, it’s open to anyone. You can just bump into people by chance. There can’t be any talk of following or creeping about when you’re down the Bowl. You have as much right to be there as anyone.

Jase’s idea, the bowling.

‘Nothing else to do round here, unless we want to watch some shitey film, so we may as well show our faces.’

Also, the place stays open until one.

Double also, the new guy behind the bar used to do security at Tesco. Means we get our beer poured discreetly into Pirate Jack kiddie cups without having to drop our voices to baritone or flash the fake ID, which looks ropier and more bogus by the day.

‘Yeah, Keith’s a good bloke. He’ll get us loaded, and if we’re lucky we won’t even have to pay for it.’

What could be better?

The Bowl kids itself that it provides entertainment for all, but in reality past nine o’clock the only people you find here are the fifteen-year-olds. Every so often you come across a group of twenty-something couples, the men usually being lardy meatheads with Alpha-male competitive streaks, their girlfriends with fat asses in their ponchos and bootcut jeans, who spend more time deciding on which size ball to use than actually throwing the thing.

You see, this lot still have these phases where they kid themselves that they’re young, and that’s when they start hanging out at our places and getting under our feet. Mate, you’re over the age of twenty, forget it! Unless you can buy us a proper drink, or find us someone who sells decent weed, you’re redundant. Stay out of our faces and we’ll stay out of yours, yeah?

Just sending out the signals does the trick. Crossed arms, the kind of stares they shy away from returning. They stay mostly on the outer lanes where they’re out of harm’s way and near-invisible.

The staff are acting like we’re a pair of dorks without dates, but we’re not actually here to play bowling. That’d be ridiculous. We’re just here to hang out and take the piss out of everyone else. If we bump into certain people, we bump into certain people. No need to make a whole song and dance about it.

Jase doesn’t tell me that the guy behind the bar is a Sri Lankan. Birthname Roospen, stage-name Keith.

Short. Moustache. Thick black hair that’s both wiry and wavy, cut into the style of a university lecturer circa 1975. Pudgy. A face that looks like it enjoys a great quantity of food. He has round and heavy cheeks that were born to be smothered in curry sauce or mayonnaise. He looks like a guy who couldn’t stop traffic, let alone stop thieving down Tesco.

‘What’s all this Keith business?’ I go. ‘Couldn’t you have given me some prior knowledge or something?’

‘Leave him alone. Keith’s all right.’

Don’t start loading me up with Munchausen’s By Proxy or whatever it’s called, I don’t have Sri Lanka-phobia or anything. I just have a problem with anyone whose eyes start gleaming whenever they bump into a guy who’s painted the same shade of brown. Don’t get me wrong, I’m nowhere near as dark as Birthname-Roospen-Stagename-Keith, but I doubt that’s going to stop him. In the ethnic desert that is North East Surrey, I appear as a mirage, an oasis. The temptation will prove too much.

‘All right, lads,’ he goes, friendly enough, but still proving me right. Looking me up and down in a couple of seconds like he’s getting a biometric print, going at it until he’s satisfied he’s identified my full genetic history and is able to tell me the exact vendor from which my great-aunt gets her milking goats. Is it any wonder that I do my best to avoid eye contact? I just want my beer, not a layman’s account of my family tree.

‘How’s things going at home? Your mum looked much better when I saw her outside the pharmacy last week.’

‘That’s great that you think so. She has been a lot better the last couple of weeks. Having my auntie down has helped. You met her, didn’t you? That time they came down to Tesco.’

‘Ah, yes. Maureen. Tall lady.’

‘That’s the one. She got Mum to break some of those routines she’d gone back into. You know, staying in bed all day, keeping the curtains drawn, that kind of thing.’

‘Your auntie sounds like a good person.’

‘She’s amazing. She, like, saved my life. And Mum’s.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it. Is your mother ready to be receiving visitors? This place has a shift system too, can you believe it? And I’m on earlies next week, so I could come by after work one afternoon, if that would work.’

‘That would definitely work! She’d love that. So would Auntie Maureen. Any excuse to get the china out.’

Jason’s voice had changed completely. He lost the drawl and got a grip on his consonants, kept the vowels tight and clipped. His hair wasn’t parted to the side with a cowlick like some under-the-thumb church boy, but it may as well have been. The grown-up conversation with an adult without an ounce of cockney, it wasn’t how I was used to seeing him. I stood there, my mouth open like a fish, looking a dork.

Second time tonight, the dork-isms. I was keeping count.

I don’t know what I was more surprised about, that I didn’t know he was so friendly with the darkie, or that I was completely oblivious to how bad his mum had gotten again. I was too busy checking the darkie out to wonder why Jason had stopped confiding in me.

The thing with Sri Lankans is that they have this kind of dark skin, kinda like old sodden wood left to rot in a derelict house, which makes it impossible to tell his age. You can call me racist if you like, but it’s my own parents’ fault for not making a proactive effort with me to mix with other darkie children when I was growing up. There were a couple of brothers I vaguely remember when I started infants, father from Madagascar, mother from Uganda, and there was this Brazilian kid Gabriel who came round to tea a few times and who Mum used to think was so polite and charming, though that didn’t stop him nicking five pounds from my birthday money jar. But they were only moments, brief friendships that never came to anything. Once we moved to Surrey it was game-over at the Commonwealth Institute. Not that my parents did anything underhand, they were busy working. We were the only spot of beige in an area that was blindingly white. They just didn’t think. And then Dad ran off, and I was the only brown spot left. It’s the kind of upbringing that’s meant to turn you into a radical black panther, or, in my case, an enlightened Jew-Tamil Tiger. But I’m dead inside, man, blunted by TV, and girls, and the promise of what I can do when I slip on my running shoes, and the sniff of freshly burning weed at five paces. I got no energy left to be all radical, no time left for brotherhood — maybe for a kid who’s grown up the way I did, but not for some be-pleasing-you-sir who’s just stepped off the boat. They mean nothing to me. It might sound rough, but that’s just how it is.