Kiss Me First Read online

  I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes, to calm down. By that point, it wasn’t really a kitchen any more; more like a store cupboard for mum’s equipment and pills. I remember staring at the boxes of nappies stacked up on the table – the same table that mum used to lay for breakfast each evening before bed, where I had taught her how to play chess, where she had plaited my hair before my interview at Caffè Nero – and I had what I suppose you could call a realization. I won’t go into details because, as I say, I intend this to be a factual account, not personal. Suffice to say, I realized that every hour I spent looking at flats would mean one less hour spent with mum, and, besides, it didn’t really matter what my new flat was like. I hadn’t heard of the Mediocrity Principle then, which states that nowhere is more special than anywhere else, but I think that’s what I was applying.

  I went back into the living room. Mum’s head was flopped over to one side, her eyes closed. She wore these red satin pyjamas to assist her movement and the front of the top was darkened with drool. Penny was ineffectually wiping her chin, and so I took over and stroked her hair and apologized, and then I held her dead-bird hands and said that, actually, the flat was lovely, perfect, and we should definitely buy it.

  So that’s how I came to live in Rotherhithe.

  At the funeral, friends of mum – including some distant relatives from York whom I’d never even met before – said that they would come and visit me in my new place, and to get in touch if I ever needed anything. But I didn’t encourage them, and no one pressed the issue. I suppose they didn’t want to intrude, and presumed that my own friends were looking after me.

  Rashida was the only person I wanted to tell, because she had actually met mum. We became friends in Year Eight, and because her dad rationed her computer time she used to come over after school to play on mine. Mum would bring us Boasters covered in whipped cream and tell Rashida about how she had once hoped to go to India but then got pregnant with me and so never did, and that she hoped I would go there one day instead. Back then, before she got ill, I’d show my impatience when she repeated herself and said silly things. ‘But I don’t want to go to India!’ I’d say, and Rashida would giggle and whisper to me, ‘Neither do I.’

  I hadn’t spoken to Rashida for a few years, but had kept track of her on Facebook, and knew she had moved to Rottingdean with her fiancé, a management consultant. I sent her a message telling her mum had died, and she said she was sorry, and that if I was ever in Rottingdean I must visit her and Stuart. I noticed that she had posted a new picture showing off her engagement ring, and she had done her nails like the girls at school, with a stupid white stripe across the top, which was disappointing.

  I didn’t tell anyone else, but I announced my change of address on Facebook. In reply a girl called Lucy, who I’d worked with at Caffè Nero, sent a message saying she was now managing a sandwich shop nearby in Canary Wharf, and that we should meet up. But Lucy was always quite odd. On her breaks she used to go to the Superdrug down the road and steal make-up testers. She was always asking whether I wanted her to steal me something, and got offended when I said no, even though she could see I didn’t wear make-up.

  I had seventy-three other friends on Facebook, girls from school mostly, but they weren’t proper friends. Our entire year was ‘friends’ with one another. It was like at Christmas, when everyone would give everyone else a card whether they liked them or not, just so they’d get one back in return and could compare the thickness of their hauls over lunch. A couple of them used to be actively mean to me and Rashida but that tailed off in Year Ten when they got interested in boys and turned their attention to the girls who were their competition.

  Every so often, someone would post details of an open invitation party. Once, I went along to one, organized by Tash Emmerson. This was in 2009; mum suggested it when we realized that I hadn’t been out for seven months. The party was in a cavernous bar in Holborn with horribly loud music; I remember this one song that went, over and over again, ‘Tonight’s going to be a good night’, which was ironic. A glass of orange juice cost £3.50. Everyone was talking about their experiences at ‘uni’, which I couldn’t contribute to, and when they weren’t doing that they took photos of each other. I felt so drained just being around them I had to prop myself up against a wall in the corner.

  What was odd was that a lot of them were keen to have their photos taken with me even though, as I say, we could not be described as proper friends. I remember Louise Wintergaarden and Beth Scoone advancing on me at the same time from both sides and throwing their arms around me, as if we were really close. When the picture was taken, they dropped their arms and walked off without a word. Then it was Lucy Neill and Tash and Ellie Kudrow. When they put the photos up on Facebook, they didn’t even bother to tag me. I showed one of the pictures to mum and she said the girls looked really tacky, with their bleached hair and orange faces, and that I looked like Cinderella sandwiched between the two wicked stepsisters. I didn’t tell her that under one of the pictures someone had commented, Ah, the old stand next to a munter trick? I didn’t care, but I knew she’d get upset.

  After that I didn’t go to any more parties, but I read their updates. I didn’t understand what they were on about most of the time. It’d be gossip about people I didn’t know or references to TV programmes and celebrities and YouTube clips I didn’t recognize. Sometimes I’d follow the links they were all getting so excited about but they’d always turn out to be some idiotic thing, like a photo of a kitten squashed into a wine glass or a video of a teenager in Moscow singing badly in his bedroom. And always, these pictures of them dressed up to the nines, sucking in their cheeks, cocking one leg in front of the other like horses. It was like they had all had a lesson I hadn’t been invited to – nor wanted to be invited to – in which they learned that hair must be straightened, nails must have that white stripe across the tip, and that you had to wear your watch on the inside of your wrist and your handbag in the crook of your elbow, with your arm stuck up like it’s been broken.

  It was the same with their status updates. Sometimes they’d post these elliptical messages, which didn’t make sense by themselves, like sometimes it’s better not to know or well, that’s fcked it then, without making clear what they were referring to. Their lives were filled with banal drama. I remember that Raquel Jacobs wrote once that – OMG!!! – she had dropped her Oyster card down the toilet. I mean, who needs or wants to know that? It seemed incredibly stupid and pointless, yet they all responded to each other as if these things were interesting and important and funny, using all this made up language like whhhoooop, or misspelling words like hunny, or abbreviating words for no reason, and putting XXX at the end of everything they wrote.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to be like that myself. But I just didn’t understand how everyone seemed to have mastered it, to know what language to use and respond instantly to comments in the ‘right’ way. Even people who were really stupid at school, like Eva Greenland, seemed able to do it.

  Very occasionally, someone would post a proper question, such as what were the advantages of using an external hard drive with their PC versus an internal one. Those I would reply to, and sometimes got a response. Esther Moody wrote back Thnx u r star xxx when I advised her how to change her Google settings from Autofill. However, the vast majority of what they wrote was nonsense and had no relevance to my life.

  I suppose what I’m saying is that if I was ‘isolated’, it was through my own choice. If I really wanted to, I could have met up with Lucy from Caffè Nero, or gone along to another one of the open parties from Facebook. But I had no desire to.

  I liked being by myself. Before mum had become ill it’d been perfect. I’d spend evenings and weekends upstairs, reading or on the computer, and she’d be downstairs, cleaning or watching TV or doing her miniatures, then she’d call me every so often for meals and cuddles. It was the best of both worlds.

  I had inherited the furniture from the old hou
se, which had been put into storage; before she died, mum arranged with Penny that her son would pick it up in his van and bring it to my flat. But Penny and I were not on good terms by the end. We had a ridiculous argument over her Sudoku book, when she discovered that I had filled in some of the puzzles. I explained to her that I had only done the advanced ones that I knew she wouldn’t be able to complete herself, but she took offence.

  Then, when mum died, Penny kept going on about how odd it was because mum hadn’t displayed the signs of imminent death the day before: ‘her feet weren’t cold, and she had a whole Cup-a-Soup’.

  Anyway, the upshot was, her son never got in touch about the furniture. That was all right, though, because I found that I didn’t even want it. Once I took the tube to the storage unit and saw it all there – the coffee table with the smoked-glass top; the white chest of drawers, still with the rubber bands around the handles which we put on to help mum open them; the black leather lounge set; the dinner gong; the tall, framed family tree which she spent £900 getting done and proved that a distant relative once married the aunt of Anne Boleyn. I remember especially the glass corner cabinet, which mum used to display her miniatures. It had been in the house ever since I could remember, and I had always loved looking at the things in it. But now in the storage room, it was just a bit of cheap shelving, and the miniatures were in one of a pile of taped-up boxes. I thought that even if I brought the shelves and the box back, and wiped them clean and arranged the miniatures in exactly the same way as mum had them, it still wouldn’t be the same. I decided to leave everything there, and just keep paying the £119.99 monthly storage fee.

  Instead, I bought everything new, from the huge Tesco Extra in Rotherhithe. I didn’t need much: a blow-up mattress and sheets, a little desk, a beanbag, a toasted-sandwich maker. I put my books in stacks against the wall, arranged by colour, and kept my clothes in bin bags: when they got dirty I put them in another bin bag, and when that was full I took it to the launderette. I was working from home anyhow, so I didn’t need to dress up. I passed the computer course easily, and began my new job for Damian, mum’s friend’s son, as soon as I had settled in to the flat. It wasn’t hard. Every few days he’d send me a link to a beta site that needed testing, and I’d run it through a quality assurance program, checking for faults and bugs and weak spots, and then send back a report. I got paid per job; most would take less than a day, but the more complicated ones might require two. After I had finished my work, I would stay on the computer, playing games or, later, posting on Red Pill. I had set up my desk next to the window and quickly realized that there was a big advantage to the restaurant sign blocking the lower half of the glass; it meant there was never any glare on my laptop screen.

  Afterwards, the police kept asking me exactly what led me to Red Pill. I told them I couldn’t remember, that I just followed a random link, but of course I knew exactly how I got to it. I just didn’t want to tell them.

  As I say, after moving into the flat my time playing games increased, to around eight hours a day. There was one game in particular, World of Warcraft. I suppose it was as if that was my fulltime job, and I fitted my testing work around it. I enjoyed how quickly time went by when I was playing: whole afternoons were effortlessly dispensed with, like eating a doughnut in two bites. I soon reached level sixty and was invited to join a nice guild, which got together for raids two or three times a week. On several occasions I was nominated as leader, and it was during one pre-raid meeting, discussing strategy, that another player started a debate about how the decisions one took in the game revealed one’s own philosophy. For instance, whether, after a raid, you distributed the gold you personally gained amongst the other members or took it all for yourself. I hadn’t previously thought of the game in those terms and found it interesting, and he suggested that I check out this website, redpill-uk.info. A very cool philosophy site, he wrote. It’ll blow your mind. He emailed me a link to a podcast on the site by the man who ran it, Adrian Dervish.

  Although I ended up listening to nearly a hundred of Adrian’s podcasts, I can remember that first one clearly. I made notes on it – I make notes on all the important things that happen – but I don’t need to look them up now. The title was Is This a Laptop I See Before Me? and Adrian’s opening words were, ‘So, folks, today’s question is – how much can we really know?’ He then gave a whistle-stop tour of classic epistemology, starting with Socrates and ending at The Matrix, which happened to be one of my favourite films. He’d pose a statement – ‘I’m 100% sure that I’m speaking into a microphone right now’ – and then say, ‘But! What does 100% actually mean?’ The best way I can describe it was like a never-ending game of Pass the Parcel: each idea was unwrapped to reveal another inside. I remember that as the podcast went on, he started chuckling over those ‘But!’s, as if this was the best fun a person could ever have.

  There was something immediately compelling about Adrian’s voice. He was American, and his accent was warm and intimate. He would be saying these mind-expanding things but in a cosy way, using these quaint words like ‘folks’ and ‘gosh’. ‘This is really something to get your philosophical chops around,’ he’d say. Or, ‘If you thought that was interesting, golly, just wait till you hear what I’ve got for you next.’ After a few minutes, I stopped the podcast, got down on the floor and brought my laptop close to my head to drown out the noise on the street below, before listening to it all over again.

  After that first podcast, I made myself a cheese toastie and then came back and listened to another four, back to back. As I did so, I explored the site. Its motto was ‘Choose the Truth’. The name Red Pill was another reference to The Matrix: the film’s characters, unaware that they are in a virtually simulated world, are invited to take either a blue pill to stay ignorant or a red pill to be faced with reality, however upsetting it might be.

  I investigated the forums. In one, members were debating the ‘laptop’ podcast. I remember being impressed by their ability to articulate and argue persuasively. I’d read a viewpoint and think it was entirely reasonable, and then someone would challenge them and make a counter-argument that seemed equally convincing. For instance, I remember one member – Randfan, I think it was – posting his opinion that only a cretin would claim to be certain that anything in the material world actually existed. We know our perceptions and that is all we can ever know. In reply, Juliusthecat said, But how do you know that is the case? Or rather, how do you know that you know that this is the case? They’d discuss these vast, abstract ideas as if they were everyday topics of conversation, as casually as mum and Penny used to talk about which supermarket had the best deals on that week.

  As well as forums for ‘pure’ philosophy, there were others dedicated to more specific and contemporary subjects, such as whether taking someone out for dinner was the same as using a prostitute, or the ethics of downloading music. There was also a place for people to post their personal real-life dilemmas and get rational advice. One member, for instance, wrote how she had made a new friend at work who had seemed like-minded, but had then discovered this friend believed in angels, and now she didn’t know how to talk to her any more.

  On the home page was a statement from Adrian, in which he introduced himself as the founder of the site and stated that although he was interested in all philosophy, he was a Libertarian at heart. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know what that word meant. I hadn’t even heard it before. He explained that Libertarians believed that people owned their own bodies, and the products of their labour, and were against force: essentially, that we should all be free to do whatever we wanted as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else. There didn’t seem anything to disagree with about that.

  Some members were obsessed with the political and economic sides of Libertarianism, full of plans to banish governments and railing against taxes, but they tended to stay in their respective forums, so it was easy to avoid them. People tended to stick to one or two topics that most interest
ed them: I found I spent most of my time in Ethics, but there were forums for Religion, Arts, Logic and Maths, and so forth.

  The site was an antidote to the rest of the web: to the rest of the world, really. Only rational thinking was tolerated, and anyone who wavered off course was immediately called up on it. There was no casual use of words – ‘literally’ meant ‘literally’ – and unlike other forums, proper punctuation and spelling were expected.

  That’s not to say that it wasn’t a supportive community. Banishment was only enforced if a member was fundamentally opposed to a basic tenet of the site – if they weren’t an atheist, for instance – or as a last resort for persistent troublemakers, like JoeyK.

  You could see it coming, when someone was going to be banished. They, the member, would start to get all cocky on the forum, challenging Adrian just for the sake of it, thinking they were being clever. He would patiently engage with them, rationally argue, but if they continued being difficult and hogging the board and ruining things for everyone else, he would have no option but to ask them to leave. As he said, if they disagreed so strongly with what he was saying, there must be a better place for them. There were plenty of other philosophy sites out there.

  After a few weeks of listening to the podcasts and lurking on the forums, I took the plunge and joined. I chose a username, Shadowfax, and spent some time deciding which of my favourite quotes I should have as my ‘sig’. In the end I went for Douglas Adams’ ‘Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose’, which always made me laugh.

  I posted my first comment on a discussion about altruism: whether an act can really be selfless, or whether we’re just doing things that ultimately benefit ourselves. The posters were in broad consensus that nothing we did was selfless, but I felt differently. I put across the point that when we are close to other people, the distinction between what is ‘best for me’ and ‘best for others’ is artificial. What is ‘best for me’ is often to sacrifice some self-interest in order to help others. Within seconds, someone replied, broadly agreeing with me but pointing out something I had missed, and soon others joined in and it became a full debate. Hobbesian2009 wrote Good entrance, Shadowfax! Most newcomers to the site, you see, just posted a timid introductory message, rather than launching straight into a debate. I had made something of an impact.