Meatspace. Nikesh Shukla
It covers the whole of his neck. He has chosen a thick red, like it’s the filling of a Jammy Dodger, like it’s jam, in fact. It covers up the scar, which probably makes it look darker and richer. His skin is smoother and newer in that part of his neck. It’s a proper dinner party bow tie. He looks like a clown on his day off.
Aziz grabs my arm and stares at my tattoo nodding furiously. He’s done this 3 or 4 times this morning. He tells me repeatedly to Facebook it, tweet it, Instagram it. I say no. I don’t want any of my family to see it. Or Rach.
Rach would have hated me getting a tattoo. Her and my dad. I feel like I’m 14 again, a rebel, a maverick on the edge with nothing left to lose. She has a tattoo of a rose on her foot. She got it when she was a student and regrets it. She avoids wearing flip-flops to ensure no one can see it. I once joked about getting a matching one and she punched me on the arm, hard. She’s not the boss of me anymore. And I always thought the tattoo was cute. I’d trace it when she was asleep. The game was to not wake her up by tickling her.
Meanwhile my family rule Facebook. It’s become their standard method of communication. When I first joined up, I was indiscriminate about adding people on sites like Facebook and Twitter. You never knew who you might stumble across: girls you liked, people you went to school with, possible networking opportunities. Also, I liked the idea of amassing numbers of people. It was addictive. Like heroin. A numbers game heroin. I got more discerning when the influx of my family arrived. When Dad joined up, and started adding middle-aged females and tagging me in his posts to them as his ‘son’, and I got a glimpse of who he was dating beyond abstract retold stories, I actively started looking at other sites my family hadn’t adopted. I love Vine.
There’s no way they’d let this tattoo slide. They interact with my every status update. Even with them on a family list, with restricted viewing, I know them – they’re too good, they’d find me and my tattoo and tell my dad. Even on the internet, you can still feel like an 11-year-old naughty boy.
Aziz puts his bowl in the sink. ‘Right,’ he declares. ‘I need to get ready for New Yoik. What happened to you last night anyway?’ I look at his back. I have minutes to make him stay. I have a reading tonight. I need him there. I haven’t done anything except go to the pub and the shop and the toilet. This is actual ‘outside’ business. I can’t breathe. I look at him.
‘Nothing, man. Absolutely nothing. I left the tattoo studio with the express intention of showing people my ink. I tweeted a picture of my arm wrapped in cling film.’
‘You didn’t Facebook it though?’
‘Nope. In case Dad saw it.’
Twitter was a safer haven in that my family was far from the zeitgeist, even though, counting all extended Indian relatives, I was related to enough people to stage an invasion of a small country. I deleted all the emails I’d received in the last few hours and prepared for my new life. I saw a Facebook message from my namesake asking ‘Add?!’, which I ignored and prepared myself for a night out I’d never forget. I ignored it because I felt guilty about not accepting his request. Dad called. I sent it to voicemail. Listening back to the message, he sounded drunk, saying something about ‘life being a journey’ – a misquote from what his brother had posted on my Facebook wall. Maybe they crib their Vedic quotes from the same website.
Going out with cling film on your arm doesn’t have the same impact as having a living, breathing tattoo to show. So, last night when I left the tattoo studio, instead of going to bars with my sleeves rolled up, I went to try to find Aziz and ran into my friend Mitch, who was always at the same pub every night, sitting at the bar, reading paperback fiction written by great middle-aged American men. Mitch admonished me for getting a tattoo.
‘Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?’ he said. I smiled.
‘Good to see you, Mitch.’
I met Mitch at a book reading I didn’t know anyone at. I was going out most nights and reading the same passage that would form the opening chapter of my book. I was anxious and hungry then. Mitch approached me afterwards and offered to buy me a drink. He gave me some editorial advice on my book, which I thought was pushy, but he did have a drink for me in his hand. Since then, he’s always been around, very supportive. Mitch thinks the end is nigh and the backs of his ilk will be the first against the wall.
‘But’ – he likes to remind me – ‘I’m the last generation of actual fighters. Any nerd tries to replace me, I’ll box his ears.’
‘It’s been a while,’ Mitch said, blowing hair out of his eyes. ‘Where have you been? Post-break-up solitude?’
‘Something like that,’ I replied, shrugging. As my arm lifted up, Mitch saw the contour of my tattoo.
‘What have you done? Is this your post-break-up statement? A tattoo? You cliché. You’re an idiot,’ he said. ‘Nay, a blithering wannabe-trendy idiot.’
‘Yeah, well … my brother made me do it.’
‘Brother? It is all go, isn’t it?’ he said. He paused. ‘Did you see the Samuel Beckett YouTube thing I put on your wall? It’s hilarious.’
‘I was busy dude, sorry.’
‘That’s you all over, Kit … you have a book out and you think you’re Samuel Beckett. You’ve changed.’
Mitch believed in only maintaining real relationships online. His Facebook friends were family and friends he knew. He was nothing like Aziz, who encouraged me to be a numbers whore to help spread the word about my work.
‘Bruv, truss in an Aziz,’ Aziz would tell me. ‘The more friends and followers you have, the more interactions you create. It’s all about interactions.’
Mitch was just offended I would let people in on my private life.
‘Sorry, Mitch,’ I said. ‘I very rarely go on Facebook. It’s become a quagmire of familial oppression.’
‘Why have an account?’
‘Because my family might be the only people who ever buy my book,’ I said, laughing. I looked around the pub. It was loud. There were quite a few drinkers. It felt okay being out. Just fine. I laid out the statistics for Mitch. ‘I have 843 Facebook friends, I am related to 207 of them, am good friends with another 234 of them, leaving 402 people I am acquainted with. The numbers don’t add up. That’s a lot of interactions, a lot of posts, a lot of Mafia invitations. So sorry I missed your Ginsberg thing.’
‘Beckett,’ Mitch corrected me. ‘Wait. You have 234 close friends? I don’t think I even know 234 people in the entire world.’
Mitch is my favourite person to hang out with apart from Aziz because they represent opposite ends of a spectrum. I’m either destined to be an over-confident buffoon like Aziz or a curmudgeon like Mitch. He is balding but still carries a comb in his blazer pocket. That vintage attitude is why I like him. I may find the concept of hankies revolting, but I’m glad for him having one. He’s Friendster in a Twitter universe, dial-up in a web 2.0 second life. He is my meatspace. Mitch likes to talk about the good ol’ days. I’ve missed him these last few months.
‘That’s cos you’re a barfly.’
‘Very true. But 234 people?’
‘Maybe I need to cull some people,’ I admitted.
‘You definitely do,’ Mitch said and shook his head. He went outside for a cigarette.
I could easily get rid of 400-odd people, I thought. I could reclaim my space. I could hide the ‘add’ button too. Make it harder to approach me. The only 3 requests in my ‘add’ folder were 3 people I didn’t know or have mutual friends with. And the only 2 people in my folder labelled ‘pending requests’ were Kitab 2 and new-to-Facebook Rach. Now she wanted to be friends. I’d left her hanging.
Mitch came back, stinking of fresh cigarette to add to the dull ache of old nicotine ingrained in his