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.
My dad replies to my text asking if he’s okay, saying: ‘Of course Im ok. seeing you tonight. Please shave. I would like to see my son’s face.’
Aziz, sensing my inert hangover, emails me a motivational message to get me writing. ‘If you are the Captain of a sinking ship, the best example you can set is to get off that ship as soon as you can. Really, you should be the first off.’
I shave. As my stubble comes off, I remember why I’ve kept it thick in recent months: it’s to disguise the bloating of beer and pizza in my cheeks. I look at myself in the mirror. Apart from
