Seeing the Wires

‘No. It hurts, but that’s not all of it. That’s the start. You break your arm, you’ve got a bond with any other bloke with a broken arm. Start a conversation like that.’ He clicked his fingers without making a noise. He’d never got the hang of it. ‘Everyone pierced is with you. Everyone else is waiting to come in. It’s a ritual thing isn’t it? I don’t know, mate. You’re the fucking graduate. Why do you think I do it?’

‘Because you’re unstable.’

‘Could be that, granted.’

He had a mouthful of beer and looked thoughtful. At that time the eyebrow ring was new, and he was swollen and intrusively red. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I had to look at the wound.

‘You do it for attention,’ I thought out loud.

‘Course I don’t. What about all the stuff you can’t see? How’s that attracting attention? Take away the stuff in my face and I’m normal.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were normal.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were.’

‘At least I don’t set alarms off at airports.’

‘You don’t go to airports. You don’t go anywhere. That’s what this is. That’s why you don’t get it. I’ve gone somewhere else. I’ve become someone else. I’ve taken my body and changed it.’

I wasn’t sure about that. The more I knew about body modification, the more I thought it was all to do with filling in blanks. If you weren’t complete, if your identity wasn’t fully drawn, then you coloured yourself in or nailed a new identity to yourself. It was all about superheroes. Outwardly, they were normal, but under the clothes someone else, run through with metalwork, extravagantly tinted.

‘I set off alarms,’ he said, ‘because I transmit. I have wires and connections. I’m a radio. I pick up traffic reports. I pick up messages people like you don’t get. I send out signals.’

‘You’re sending some out now,’ I said. I’d known Jack for many years but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that he wouldn’t produce a knife and lay waste to the local population. Which, at the moment, was me. I looked for help. There was the landlord. He would be useless. It was down to me to deal with Jack’s insanity. I’d always thought he might have a screw loose. Possibly an actual screw, somewhere around his genitals. So I did what I had to do. I let Jack carry on, and I nodded from time to time. I can’t help it. I’m British.

‘Different signals,’ Jack was saying. I’d missed something.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘very true.’

‘I’ve become a matrix,’ he said.

‘Spin used to say there were matrices at building sites,’ I said.

‘The scaffolding?’

I nodded.

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Jack.

That had been a month ago, in the same pub, at about the same time of night. Since then Jack had had the bodywork touched up in a few new places. He turned up late, halfway through my second pint. I knew he’d had something new pierced, because he was walking as though he had a porcupine between his thighs. He was wearing a jumper that had been washed on the incorrect cycle. The sleeves ended inches before his hands began. His wrists were covered in bright swirls and healing scabs. He bought us a pint each and sat, wincing.

‘Oof,’ he said, reaching under the table and tugging at something.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Ow. Ow. I don’t think that’s where you belong, is it?’

He fidgeted and fiddled and finally settled, nicely uncomfortable.

‘What’s it this time?’ I asked. I had to know, even though I didn’t really want to. It was like watching operations on television. I’d want to switch channels or put my hands over my eyes. Instead I’d sit and watch, horrified. He shuffled carefully. When he winced, his eyebrow ring stood straight out from his brow.

‘Perineum ring,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Perineum. It’s the hairy bit at the back of your bollocks.’

‘I know what it is. I meant, “What?”’

‘I hadn’t had it done yet.’ As if that explained it. ‘These stools are a bit hard, aren’t they?’ He adjusted himself indecorously.

‘Not really, no. Perhaps having your perineum pierced has made you sensitive.’

‘I won’t be riding my bike for a couple of weeks, that’s fucking certain.’

‘So it’s the bus, is it?’

‘It will be this week. Perhaps I’ll catch you on your way home. Everything nice at the office, is it? No sudden shortages of pens or anything?’

Jack often baited me like this. He was saying my life was mundane. I knew that. I was the one living it. I sometimes had an urge to hide a powerful magnet somewhere near Jack, just to see what happened. He settled at an angle, as though preparing to fart. The landlord eyed him sleepily.

‘You should try piercing,’ Jack said.

‘I don’t want to try it, but if I’m ever taken captive by the Spanish Inquisition I’ll put them on to you. You’d get on like a castle on fire.’

‘What’s that? History jokes from the history student? Three years taking drugs care of Johnny taxpayer and you think you know everything. Seeing as I kept you in beer all that time, while I was working for a living, I’ll let you get the next round in.’

I got the next round in.

‘Is he the full shilling?’ the landlord asked me, nodding at Jack.

‘He’s missing some loose change. Actually, he’s all loose change.’

‘Looks like he’s wearing it in his ears. My daughter goes in for all that. Face like a cheesegrater. I tell her she’ll end up no good, attracting some pervert into kitchenware.’ He subsided and looked miserably at the crisp boxes.

‘It’ll just be a phase,’ I said. He gave me a gloomy look.

‘They said that about bloody disco music.’ He returned to his inspection of the crisps and I returned to Jack.

‘Cheers,’ said Jack, taking his pint. His mouth was pierced but he didn’t have any liprings in. They interfered with drinking. He had a small barbell through his nasal septum, his eyebrow ring, and a cluster of rings and studs in each ear. It was all low-key. I saw worse at the bus stop. But it gave me an iceberg feeling; his most dangerous features were out of sight. Under his clothes there would be all sorts of awful things, tintacks and fishhooks, staples and cutlery. He didn’t have many in his face because of his job. He worked at a printers outside Oldbury and the management didn’t allow facial jewellery. They feared that some dangling item might get caught in the machinery, leading to death or litigation. At the least, that day’s print run would be ruined. It wasn’t a big company. They did special supplements for the local papers, posters for local rock groups, one-off histories of the local area, that sort of thing. Sometimes they’d bring out limited runs of the latest book by one of the local authors. These were sold in local shops to nobody I ever met. Jack had joined as an apprentice and had worked his way up to foreman.

I hadn’t been to the printers. I imagined it to be a huge dark building, enormously lengthy and tall, with remote thin windows. It would be full of complicated machinery, wheezing and huffing; wetly-printed papers would be shuffled all over the place by conveyor belts, carried to the ceiling and thrown into loops and vertical drops like screaming people at a theme park. Apprentices in inky overalls would pull tall levers and operate sprockets; from time to time, with a thin shriek, one of them would be gathered by the machinery and whirled around the room.

Jack emptied his glass.

‘That’ll be your round,’ he said. He’d lost count. It wasn’t worth arguing about. That was all I seemed to do with Jack, hang about on the outskirts of an argument we never actually visited. I couldn’t remember how we’d been at school. Perhaps we’d been exactly the same. I got another two pints. When I took them back to the table, Jack was fiddling with a beermat. I was relieved to see that he’d stopped adjusting his metalwork. It was embarrassing, even though there was only the landlord there and he was more interested in his crisps. He held up the beermat and studied it.

‘We did a run of these,’ he said, ‘with jokes on. For a beer festival in Humberside. We all had to bring a joke in. They didn’t use mine.’