Authors: Nikesh Shukla
‘Doesn’t matter. I like it. It’s good. It’s like … you know … analogue … like … write, mate, innit … It’s a wicked song. I love this song.’
‘I prefer “Shipbuilding”.’
‘Nah, that’s shit. This one. Chaptaaah toooooo-woooooo
…’
‘Get it then!’ Aziz had bellowed. ‘Get the bloody tattoo.’ He’d jumped off the sofa and pretended to be a screaming fan, reaching up to touch me. I let him pull me down. We sang out the rest of the song like we were in the terraces and it was our club’s anthem.
During the fade out, I said, ‘I’m getting it. I’m bloody getting it. I can be impulsive too. In your face, Rach. Not so “a-fray-duh-of-uh-chay-nudge” now am I?’ I looked at Aziz. ‘I miss her.’ Aziz nodded. He scratched at the ugly scar on his neck, from the bike crash. I looked at my hands.
I threw the 2 jars of chutney in the bin defiantly. We shook on the tattoo and then, when Aziz was in the loo, I rescued the chutneys and put them back in the fridge, hiding them in the vegetable box where he would never think to look.
That was last night, I think. Today’s going to be different.
Aziz has left the flat and I’m checking through Twitter – no replies to my bogling tweet, just some chatter about a recently dead obscure musician, everyone’s coming out of the woodwork and saying they love her – and then through Facebook, to see what my wall message is – it’s a reminder from the organisers of the event I’m doing with Hayley Bankcroft to increase numbers by promoting it to my networks. I ignore it. I DM Hayley back and say, ‘It’s been ages … since I got fresh air. Expect barnacles on ol’ Kitab.’
She DMs me back almost immediately: ‘Till then, Barnacle Bill the sailor. I’ll see you down by the docks. Xx.’
No other new interactions. My cousin Veena has just bought a new car. The numberplate says V33D33 – her initials, and accidental comment on her lifestyle.
I need to get up and write something. I check my bank balance on my phone. It’s not what it was yesterday, which was not what it was the day before and so on. It’s still the most I’ve ever had in my account. I am burning through the inheritance and when it’s gone, and that is a matter of 3 months away, 4 if I live off leftover chutney and force Aziz to actually buy some food, there’s nothing else. I’m not a privileged trust-fund boy. When I told my dad I was quitting the job that I hated to become a writer, he said he was going to give me my share of my inheritance now, as insurance that I didn’t become destitute. I took it. The sad truth was, I had been caught printing my book off to send out to publishers. This, coupled with my internet usage, meant I was asked to leave. Luckily, I’d finished the book by then. I wrote the whole thing at work on a Google Doc.
Dad worried about steady income and, being an accountant, made me work on 3 or 4 cash scenarios with him, covering every income-related eventuality. I was able to convince him that I could always find bar work while I looked for a job if I needed to. He wasn’t disappointed, he was apprehensive and mentally prepared himself to lend me emergency money if ever I needed it. When he transferred over the chunk of my inheritance, he specified that it was for a rainy day, in case the writing full-time thing didn’t happen. I was immediately grateful because I was days away from getting a bank loan or a secret job in a pub. It couldn’t have come soon enough. The book didn’t really sell. Thank god for Mum’s life insurance policy. I live off my inheritance. Not for much longer.
In the absence of having anything new to write, I spend 20 minutes looking at my CV, last updated 3 years ago. I have nothing new to add to it except a link to my Twitter profile. Which I take off an hour later, because if they looked, and saw the amount I tweet, they might not see me as a solid bet.
I scroll through Facebook. I click on the photos of someone I used to work with, Anne. She’s just been to Majorca. I’m hoping for some bikini shots. There’s one but it’s a selfie so not too revealing. The rest of the photos are her looking sunburned next to her boyfriend. She’s still hot. Hayley has changed her profile picture from her beautiful face to a picture of a cartoon penguin. Hayley’s book came out the same time as mine. Her book was on a big publisher, mine on my tiny one, but we were booked at a few events and got to know each other. People want her attention all the time because her book was funny and cutting about male/female relations in a digital age and she gave good banter and probably a little because she’s beautiful. She has approximately 3 times as many Twitter followers as me.
I head to YouPorn and look up ‘plump’ and ‘chubby’ till I find someone who looks real enough to watch. I don’t want cartoonish today. I want real. It may be my, the entire world’s, daily tick, but I can retain some sense of diversity. I watch as a static camera records a couple ‘doing it’. They start off by looking at the camera in an approximation of what they think porn stars do. They awkwardly remove each other’s clothes and fall into the patterns, Porn Grammar. But because the camera is grainy, this feels more like watching 2 real people. It feels like an actual rendering of the infinite intimacy at the heart of a couple making love, in tune with each other, in love and unable to contain themselves. The video finishes and asks if I want to watch a related one called ‘Anal fisting POV’. I close the window.
On Facebook, today’s context-less motivational message from my dad’s brother, a mustachioed former disco dancer who has sent me 47 invites to join WhatsApp in 3 months, is an Aum symbol with: ‘WHEN the sun is over your head, there will be no shadow; similarly, when faith is steady in your head, it should not cast any shadow of doubt.’
It links to www.inspirationalvedicquotes.com. I delete it from my wall.
My cousins and aunts and uncles all signed up to Facebook en masse, so they could turn online into one endless family reunion. I’ve met 20% of them. And that 20% I see less than once a year. They spam me with messages, invitations to apps, endless likes and ‘hilarious’ videos. First they had mobile phones, then they had Myspace and now Facebook. My cousins signed up in the first wave and were slowly joined by aunts and uncles. Now they interact with me because we’re family and it’s supportive of them to ‘like’ what I do. I cringe because once I’d written a book, I’d tried to be a bit more about selling myself, and that’s hard to do when you’re reminded you’re a son, a nephew, a cousin.
There’s a private message from a friend I rarely see called Cara. She asks how I am. She’s messaged me to say she’s annoyed I missed our Skype dinner. She knows I was online because I was live-tweeting a rant about chutneys and my Skype was on but set to ‘busy’. Cara lives 45 minutes away by tube but doesn’t meet up unless it’s on Skype. She does this thing called Skype Dinners, where you cook some food and eat together online. It’s supposed to be like a dinner party. I didn’t do it because I feel weird about knowing someone has a full screen of me chewing. Cara’s developing a site, like ChatRoulette, but for the dinner party aficionado. You create a profile, listing things you like to talk about, what you’re looking for – a date or a conversation or to meet interesting people – whether you want politics, or humour, or life-affirming and then you’re matched with someone you have dinner with. It’s still in beta test because she can’t attract funders.
I click ‘hide request’ on the other Kitab’s add friend notification.
I have a job interview with an American internet company. It’s for a community manager position. I would work from home and get to travel to Portland once a year for a global team meet-up. I’ve been asked to look at their website and be brutally honest about it, because part of what I will be doing will be working with developers to create a better user experience. After we’ve done our pleasantries and I’ve tried to impress the American interviewer, Lou-Anne, with my English accent, she asks me to tell her a bit about the website and my thoughts. I’m nervous. I don’t know how to talk intelligently, sell myself, make me seem like a viable candidate. At the same time, I need the job, so I have to. I try to be as enthusiastic as a Skype call can allow me.
‘Well,’ I say. ‘I like the way the interface allows for a granular approach to the user experience.’
‘Mmmm,’ Lou-Anne says. She wants me to keep talking. I don’t know what to say.
‘The thing is, with the landing page, there’s a real need for authenticity. Authenticity is important online. People feel like they trust you more if you’re authentic. And this feels authentic.’
‘What’s authentic about it for you? Tell us what we’re doing right and maybe tell us what we could be doing better.’
‘Well,’ I say. ‘The whole thing feels like … like, I logged into this website when I was having a look and the first thing I see is an empty shell. That empty shell is a reminder that we’re alone online unless we make connections ourselves. We have an innate desire to create our own immersive journeys. But to do that, we need a proactive approach to content aggregation.’ I’m saying words at this point. I applied for this job because I can use Twitter. I don’t know what I’m saying.
‘Right,’ Lou-Anne says. In a clipped way. ‘That’s interesting. Great to hear your thoughts,’ she says with an inflection that makes me think she doesn’t care for my thoughts. There’s a silence. And then:
‘What else? What about the filter mechanism – is it aspirational enough?’ I look around the screen for a filter mechanism. All I see is the empty shell of an account I signed up for 20 minutes before the interview.
‘Well,’ I say, nervously. ‘The greys are very slick.’
‘Kitab, I’m going to stop you there, and let you know: we just spent a quarter of a million dollars redeveloping our site … for a chewier click-through matrix full of snackable content. In terms of the ideation and its agility in the marketplace, I suppose, yes, that is a nifty grey …’ She stops talking. I smile into the calendar and stare at the picture of me, my dad, Aziz and Mum on my noticeboard till it blurs. Lou-Anne waits for me to respond.
I spend an afternoon tweeting in-jokes with other writers. Mostly with Hayley.
We’re trying to write out the plot of
Midnight’s Children
using only gifs. So far, we’re only on chapter 2.
I trawl Facebook for what’s happening with my supposed ‘real friends’. They have been out to places and taken photos of what they had to eat and drink. Who knows if they really did, or perhaps these are stock photos. I ‘like’ a random selection, just to keep a presence.
I check Dad’s account. He’s recently added 6 new females and has been tagged in a photo by his brother, in which he’s falling over in the garden, drunk. I post a comment on it, saying ‘Ahhh, my role model’, and my uncle replies. We go back and forth about my dad’s antics – dating and drinking – until it turns nasty and I’m accused of being judgmental. My uncle comments: ‘Your father has worked hard in his life. Why can he not relax without his son getting high and mighty? We are all on a journey, Kitab-beta.’
I look at the fridge and know there’s nothing in there I want. Beer. Cheese. And the chutneys. Those fucking chutneys. Aziz eats all his meals out. He doesn’t have anything I can steal.
I notice that Rach has decided to join Facebook. And add me, I might add. I look through her feed. There are a few photos and I’m in attendance at all the events they were taken at; they were when we were together. We look happy. We’re smiling, laughing, dancing, cuddling, in one we’re kissing, but this captured intimacy doesn’t feel like something I’ve experienced. I stare at the photo of me kissing her and it doesn’t look like me. For one, this Kitab looks happy. I remember that night. It was my birthday 3 years ago and we had ended up at our flat, shoes off, dancing to reggae. There was a limbo competition. I won. I’m surprisingly good at the limbo. I think about tweeting ‘I’m surprisingly good at limbo’, but I don’t.
There’s a few comments from people welcoming her: ‘finally?!?!>>!’. That’s it. She has made no declaration of her reasons for joining or what she likes or dislikes. She is simply there. Lurking. Watching. It’s weird that she’s on here. One of our main arguments was her ‘Black Ops’ aversion to technology, meaning she didn’t have a mobile phone. She couldn’t understand why we couldn’t make a plan and stick to it; she wasn’t signed up to any social networking site. She didn’t have email or Facebook. ‘Why can’t we just phone each other on a landline and make an arrangement and keep to it?’ she would say. She worked in a job that didn’t require constant email access. You had to be present with her. And bloody hell, that was hard.
I go into my Documents folder, into Admin, and then into CV. In CV there’s another folder called D323. It’s got all my camera phone nude photos of Rach that I promised I’d deleted. I look at the one of her with her bra hanging off her knee, her foot up on the bed. It’s a sideways shot. She covers her right breast and down bits with this angle. I zoom in until the pixels blur into flesh-coloured squares.
I get a Facebook event invite from Rach reminding me about her birthday then a private message from her apologising for including me in it. She asks me ‘How are you?’, and even written down I can hear the emphasis on the
are
. I don’t reply because fuck her for not understanding how social media works. She was constantly irritated that I spent my time self-promoting on the internet and living off my inheritance instead of giving her any attention.
She once told me, ‘I hate how you’re never in the room with me. Even when you’re in the room. You’re just on that bloody phone making lazy self-obsessed quips about nothing.’
‘It’s just fun, this big online conversation.’
‘What about our conversation? I’m in the room.’
‘I just think it’s amazing, having this global audience to interact with.’
‘What? And tell them all the stupid things I say?’
‘You are funny.’
I used to mock her on Twitter. I thought she didn’t mind. People found it funny.
Example tweet: ‘My girlfriend pronounces the B in subtle but calls submarine sumarines.’
I had changed the focus of the tweet slightly to make her look stupid. At the time we had been walking through a village in Devon, making fun of words with silent letters, saying them to each other slowly, like ‘E-NOO-GUH-HUH’ and ‘GA-HOST’. We were falling about laughing, and it kept up for another hour till during lunch, when, while Rach slowly finished her sandwich – she was such a slow eater, it was almost cute – I tweeted.