Dialling Tone
Mohammed Zaahidur Rahman
08/01/2020 | short fiction | 12.5 minute read
Lectures finished early. I walked to my sugar-daddy’s, Mr. Kuti’s, house, thinking of a good story to tell him, quietly fearing that he’d find somebody who doesn't baffle him and is better in bed. As I walked, my phone rang with a corny monophonic rendition of The Entertainer. Unknown caller.
“Hi, who’s this?”
“Hello, did you know, you could be owed thousands? Have you been mis-sold PPI on a loan or mortgage taken out before April 2016?” asked a friendly regional accent.
“Have you been mis-sold a career? Piss off.” I hung up.
I returned to my thoughts, rushing through the red bricks and ironwork of an estate. Every week, sharing a post-coital cigarette, Mr. Kuti would say 'tell me a story', so last week I told him this rhyming bit about a pair of siblings, Salma and Salim, and their courthouse trial. Salma who works in a forensics lab gets sectioned, threatening the canteen staff with a scalpel, reeling about the place, calling everyone by the wrong name. Her eyes were like shallow pans of nacre. Nobody got hurt. Meanwhile, the narration was from the perspective of Salim, who sat demure in the witness stand, feeling like Cain, left wordless and brooding, blaming himself and asking 'what now?' at his sibling’s grave.
I proper ad-libbed it, right off the top of my head.
Mr. Kuti stopped me there. He didn't like it at all. He didn’t get it. He asked ‘Why's it gotta be so dark with you?’ eyes shading themselves in concern. He did this all from the other side of the bed; I’m only allowed to lie on the lychee red towel he puts down, arms limp at my sides. See, Mr. Kuti is alright with wounded animals but gets weird about cuddles.
Before we began the affair, Mr. Kuti and I had met at his veterinarian surgery, while he tended to my sickly, tripedal cat, Ferris. We found each other on Grindr and it escalated from there. We’d been doing this for about 3 months, amounting to the longest relationship I’ve ever had. Mr. Kuti didn’t overstep lines like the ones before. It felt easy. He was, by and large a caring top especially in the confines of the act. The formality between us was a turn-on, I’ll admit; but we had to agree that 'Dr. Kuti' was too clinical for the bedroom. Besides, I think that’s something he did with his wife.
“The formality between us was a turn-on, I’ll admit; but we had to agree that ‘Dr. Kuti’ was too clinical for the bedroom. Besides, I think that’s something he did with his wife.”
It exasperated me when he didn’t get my stories. I tried to explain, once an image catches me it doesn't let go. It’s an immunodeficient condition of mine, I’m constantly infected by words. I used to lie a lot as a child and was never caught or punished. Instead they called me a natural talent or were bewildered into agreement. I got really good when I finally started reading decent books and realised there’s no distinction between a good lie and good fiction. At house-parties I honed my craft, sharpening my blade in the company of idiots. I babbled all of this at him.
This explanation was met with a blank stare. Through Salma and Salim, I was really trying to tell Mr. Kuti about a real life cousin of mine who did in fact get sectioned. Although I never said it like that, I couldn’t bring myself to. Instead of hearing more, Mr. Kuti boxed up some of last night’s pad thai and showed me the door. His care expressed itself as food, sex and money.
I felt a tinge of examination with each of these stories, as though I was a beach and Mr. Kuti was waiting for me to pry myself open, oyster by oyster, to reveal some shining lump of iridescent self. I share Mr. Kuti’s conviction that pillow-talk is the purest form of interrogation. I try not to sound suspiciously keen. Although I failed again and again, I wanted to show him my pearls so badly, I wanted to fold a piece of myself into the stories just short of handing myself to him on a plate. He just didn’t delve enough. I felt like one day he would.
“I share Mr. Kuti’s conviction that pillow-talk is the purest form of interrogation. I try not to sound suspiciously keen.”
Anyway, there’s me walking over to his house after uni. Images with subtitles whirled in my mind like a slot-machine, homing in on a winning combination of fruit and jewels. In a gust of inspiration, I said this to myself aloud;
“The sun rode low in the sky. Marmalade warmth seeped upwards off the orange clay. In a puddle, two amoebas float micrometres apart and then touch, breathing in the lukewarm. They’re like two balloons made of velvet and their fine hairs catch and throw a hundred scraps of flotsam between them.
Eventually their two-day lifespan will end, but they meet within the first quarter of life. They’re young and firm. Like translucent hearts floating on a nanocurrent, they beat, spin and drift freely. On that scale, even direction behaves differently.
By night, they’re a whopping millimetre apart. Another night and they’ve split by mitosis into innumerable iterations of themselves, who meet again like strangers while our original pair wither and dissolve on opposite sides of the puddle.
Another day goes by and the marmalade warmth dries away the water, the loves, our heroes.”
I thought I’d talk about youth and ageing, bring up the impossible simultaneity of mine and Mr. Kuti’s, own decay. I thought my metaphor was direct enough. I thought I’d use amoebas, sexless as helium, so there were no characters for him to identify anyone with, no fingers pointed at bodies or other things to get offended by. I think Mr. Kuti is like sixty, he’s from another corner of Grindr where youth is a currency bought. He knew what he was doing with me. His eye was always on the clock. Like the sun in my story, he felt like he had the power to choose when to vanish the puddle we swam in. Well, whatever he may have thought, Mr. Kuti is just another amoeba.
And if he didn’t like the story then we have no future, I suddenly resolved. How are we going to talk about anything? What have we really spoken about up until now, with me, so far away on this fucking towel? Something had to give. I holstered this small trial like a gun and got to his door. Let’s see what he says.
Two hours passed.
I found myself nude on my absorbent red rectangle of heaven, balancing a growing pillar of ash atop a cigarette. The narration completed itself. The column toppled into the ashtray between us with a climactic and inaudible crash. I looked into his eyes.
With a burning stub held in his frown, Mr. Kuti says for the last time, as far as I care, “I don’t get it at all”. His lips moved in slow motion. He got up to pee, and my heart swelled at the sight of him leaving.
The next week, I ignored his messages.
Incidentally, I also found a job at a calling centre, for the Solstice Investment Group. At the interview, after lying about my age, I told them this bit about how I had experience calling up faith groups after the 2005 Handsworth riots and helped to fundraise for local businesses damaged in the chaos. In truth my parents outright denounced organised religion and we didn’t own a house phone because we couldn’t afford the bill. Not to mention I was still in primary school at the time. The suited panel gave each other approving nods and shook my hand with oomph.
My job title is Recruitment Associate, which is true, except obvious to many, I recruit for a pyramid scheme. My oblique charm lands me consistent deals. We’re given a directory of members from small-scale religious groups, churches, mandirs, masjids. We call everyone brother and sister and praise their respective Gods and philosophies. We’re an office of atheists. The prayer room on the premises is only ever used for lunchtime breakdowns. They put out a phrase book of assalamualaikums and namaskars on our desk to help us and they teach us face exercises so our smiles come through in the calls.
“Assalaamualaikum sister.”
“Wa-alaikum salaam. Who is this?”
“It’s me Suleiman Akhtar, I’m also part of the congregation at K------ Al-Din masjid. Have you thought about giving to the children?”
“Yes brother, I pay my Zakat to an orphanage. I have to go-”
“Mashallah, that’s very good sister, but I meant your own children.”
“Excuse me?”
At this point I hook them, we start speaking about intergenerational conflicts, why their children don’t speak to them. I make up life experience about being a child therapist, a lawyer, a doctor. Waxing lyrical about my own fictitious kids, God and the watertight gains from the scheme, I wrest their lucre.
As the last of the bank transfers from Mr. Kuti dry up, the paychecks and bonuses flood in.
One day, it’s Churches Tuesday in the office. Under E------- Ministries, Melissa Kuti appears in my directory.
“Good morning, God bless you Melissa”
“Bless you, can I ask who’s speaking?”
“I’m from E------- Ministries. Listen, I’m the boy your husband has been fucking for-”
“You’re lying!”
“That’s no metaphor, we -”
The dialling tone sounds abruptly. I gulp hard with a dry throat. Everything feels distant for a second, then I re-surface in my body and dial the next number in the directory. My hands shake until I find myself speaking another cocoon of fiction through the phone. Then I’m safe.
I set and rise and throw beams of light until I dry the puddle Mr. Kuti and I once swam in.
about Mohammed Z. Rahman (he/him)
Mohammed Z. Rahman’s passion for writing mostly manifests in longform emails. Heavily institutionalised, he dreams of schools and offices every night, whilst powering through his twenties with a hopeless desire to be deprogrammed. Also a visual artist, entrepreneur, naturefreak and feeder of the people, Mohammed is lowkey scouting for a community that will thrive in the ecological apocalypse.
instagram: @m.z.r.art
zaahid.kson@gmail.com