Meatspace (20 page)

‘I don’t think they did.’

‘And they fucked so many women. Do you know how many wives Hemingway had? Do you know how many girls Oscar Wilde went to town on, dude?’

‘I don’t think many.’

He ignores me. ‘And I think, look at Kitab … no one knows who he is. If I show the world a little something, the world will know who we are. Give the world a little D, get a big lot of P. Yes?’

‘We?’

‘Sex sells, dude.’

‘So, you thought you’d try to help my sales by putting your penis on my Twitter stream?’

‘Our penis, dude. Your penis. I saw your sales ranking went up. It worked.’

‘Why? Why would you do that?’

‘I was trying to help. You’re sad. You’re failing, dude. You’re nothing. You can’t even sign books in public. I want to help you. Because you’re me. I love you.’

He thinks about it.

‘Kit …’ I start to say.

‘I love you and I want to help you. Like you help me. But you’re unhappy, dude. Why else would you have left me like that? That’s not what a friend would do. Because you’re sad and you’re failing, dude, I thought I would help. Everyone thought it was you, too. I love you.’

‘How did you get into my account, Kitab?’ I ask, changing the subject, deflecting from his misplaced love. He looks at me with attempted cute eyes, like a cat gif, like he wants to kiss me but is showing me he’s not a threat first.

‘When you were in the toilet, I set it up so all your email would be automatically forwarded to my account. I requested a forgotten password. It gave me your password.’

I automatically filter out any emails from Twitter into a folder I never check. This guy’s good. He preyed on my lack of attention to detail.

‘Totes LOLz yaar? I’m like Lulz. Hacking, dude. Anonymous.’ Kitab 2’s head shakes, half-slurring.

‘Yeah, but why did you do that? What possessed you? It can’t just be because I didn’t want to be friends with you?’

‘Wait, what? You don’t want to be my friend?’

Rach once said, after reading through my Twitter stream, that she couldn’t believe I’d had all these thoughts and opinions and never thought to share them with her. Somehow I had more to say online than in person. I was glad for the attention, happy anyone was listening at all.

‘The mistake you’re making,’ I’d whine, ‘is just because I’m a prolific tweeter, it’s not like I’m giving 100% of my personality out to the world. I think long and hard about those quips and opinions. They’re carefully curated.’

‘Why can’t you put that much effort into a conversation with me? Especially when you’re checking your phone every few minutes. Telling people where you are. Talking about the stupid things I say.’

‘I never tweet about where we are.’

‘But you make fun of me.’ I knew the tweet Rach referred to: ‘My girlfriend calls tracksuit bottoms trackie bo-bo’s. No opinion offered.’

‘That’s affectionate.’

‘No. You’re taking the piss out of me. So instead of being in the room with me, you’re taking the piss out of me.’

‘But I never tweet about where we are …’

This was a conversation we had near the end. She was right though. I never tweeted about the nice things we did. Who would have cared?

As a break from this conversation with Kitab 2, I hover over my phone for 5 minutes at a time, the cursor blinking, willing something to say to occur to me.

Not being able to think of anything, I look at Kitab 2. He’s asleep, purring like a lawnmower 4 streets away.

‘You’re not here to study are you?’ I ask him when he wakes. Kitab 2 looks tired and smiles. He shakes his head. He’s tired. ‘Are you shaking your head to say no you’re wrong I am here to study or no I’m not here to study?’

‘I’m not here to study. I do not possess a student visa.’

‘Then what are you doing here, man?’

‘My dad, he bought me the tickets. But he did not know my student visa was not approved. I could not disappoint him.’

‘So you came here anyway?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a free ticket to the UK. I can find a job while I am here.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I am a great coder, man. I can do all the codes. I have the facility to work as a coder on database systems. I trained at the best technical college. I thought, I could just come here with my CV and maybe meet you and see if you could help me find a job. I don’t want to do electrical engineering like my dad. I want to write computer games, dude.’

‘Why don’t you study that?’

‘You kidding me? I have a very strict father, dude. I have to do what he tells me. Video games? Bitch please, dude. He thinks they are a waste of time with no money. He doesn’t realise how much money you get for good games.’

‘What happened to your paperwork?’

‘I sent it too late.’

Kitab 2 tells me his story.

‘I grew up in Bangalore, dude. My dad’s from Gujarat, just like you, but he got this job teaching engineering at Bangalore University. It’s the 9th best university in the whole of India. He’s a respected electrical engineering lecturer …’

‘The 9th most respected engineer …’

‘Huh?’

‘Sorry, carry on.’

‘He has always been a lecturer. His dream was always to teach in the UK at Imperial College in London. When I showed signs of being good with computers and coding, he made me apply towards a masters in the UK.’

Kitab 2 talks on – he tells me about the degree he got at Bangalore University. He had graduated cum laude and was all but guaranteed a place at a decent university here in the UK. However, it sounded like he got lazy – hubris and an encroaching lethargy that came with having a mother and father who handled all his life administration for him meant that he wasn’t very organised.

‘Then my mummy died of breast cancer.’ Like mine, I think. ‘One year ago … and I got very depressed …’ Oh god, this is so cringeworthy, it’s so familiar. Maybe he is my ‘other’ after all. ‘I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I deferred my masters. Dad took a year off to write a new textbook for the course he was teaching, but instead, we both just lived in our flat. He in one room and me in another. We lived on campus. I didn’t leave my room, dude. I just played video games, talked to sexy girls on Facebook. I’d go online and play
Call of Duty
with all these American college boys and pretend I was some big shot football player from Harvard. They thought I was so cool. They always wanted me on their teams, because I knew where all the rocket launchers were and I knew the best hiding places, which meant I lived longer than all of them and always won by blowing up the other team.’

He demonstrates his best American accent for talking trash online or talking tactics with teammates: ‘Dude, you are
so
beyond shit. Dude, you suck.’

His name was Chandler, like on
Friends
, and what he lacked in tactical nous in
Call of Duty
, he made up for in loyalty and falling on his sword for the sake of a team.

He lost friends that year because he only ever left his room for ablutions and refreshments and only ever really left the apartment when he was required to do something functional like get new pieces of kit from the shop for his ever-expanding entertainment centre.

‘Dad and I ate separately. We didn’t have to do anything, dude. We had a cook and a cleaner who we never saw. The house was always clean. The clothes were washed and folded and left by our doors. The food was cooked and left served on plates with cling film over them. It was awesome, dude. I could play video games for hours and then go to the kitchen and have sandwiches made for me. I was like a prince. But after one year of Dad not talking to me and me feeling depressed and getting fat, things changed, dude.’

Kitab 2’s dad announced he was returning to work having finished the textbook he was working on, and he insisted that Kitab 2 snap out of his online world and go do his masters. He paid for the tickets to London and gave Kitab 2 a cheque for accommodation and books. Kitab 2 was to get a job when he was here to supplement his income.

‘I forgot to submit my application online in time. I was playing
Call of Duty
on the day and missed the deadline by, like, 15 minutes. Can you believe it, dude? Only 15 minutes! I was so scared because my flight was in the next few days.’

‘Wait, your dad booked your flights a month before you came and you still missed the deadline for applications?’

‘Listen, man … I’m a busy guy, okay? I can’t just drop everything for my dad when he needs it.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say, grimacing.

‘That’s why I messaged you. To see if you were around. I knew one person in London.’

He panicked, he told me, about finding a job or having stuff to do. He tried to hack iTunes so he could sell the code online. He failed. He tried to hack PayPal so he could PayPal himself some money. He failed. The departure time loomed. While Googling himself in a panic, he found me. And when he found me, he did what most people with obscure names would do if they found their other online – he added me. Doing a bit more research, he found out I lived in London. ‘It was like fate,’ he says. ‘My other lives where I’m going. I thought, you could show me the world.’

‘Why me?’ I ask.

‘I thought, you’re a dude. And you seemed like a nice guy from Twitter, from your book, from your blog – I thought, he’ll look after me. We’re brothers.’

‘I have a brother.’

‘London’s the best city in the world and it needs coders. I can do so much. All I have to do is find these people and I’ll find a job. I don’t need university. I can work for a year then apply next year.’

‘How’s that going for you?’

‘I don’t know how to find the companies.’

‘What about a job agency?’

‘You need a CV for that, dude.’

‘So write a CV then.’

‘I don’t have anything to put on it.’

It wasn’t the best thought-out plan. It was plain stupid. But he had made his bed. And now he was lying in a hospital bed.

Every now and then Kitab 2 says, ‘Money over everything.’ I know it’s from a rap tune but I ask him about it.

‘You know, dude. I need to make money. Over everything. Like Kanye West.’

‘He doesn’t sing that song.’

‘I know, dude, but I could be that guy. From nothing. To something. Hashtag game, recognise game, dude.’

I shake my head. Kitab 2 can’t live his life by rap aphorisms. I think back to the longest conversation I’ve had with anyone before today with Kitab 2 and with Hayley. It’s been a while. With Dad it’s a one-way street. He’s texted me while I’ve been in the hospital. He wrote:
wot is cheapest condom???
I ignored it. With Aziz, it’s relentless piss-taking. I haven’t spent this much time talking to anyone in a long time. Even the break-up with Rach didn’t take that long, because I got distracted by my phone vibrating halfway through the conversation.

‘Do you need to contact your dad and tell him you’re in the hospital?’

‘No. Because then I have to tell him why I’m in trouble.’

‘That’s not the worst thing in the world.’

‘It is. He does not handle disappointment well. He once set fire to my Xbox, dude. While I was playing it. I’d nearly finished
Assassin’s Creed
.’

‘What had you done wrong?’

‘I was late to my mum’s cremation.’

I shrug. I look at him and see a boy shrouded in swaddling clothes. With the pirate eyepatch, he looks like he’s stoned. His one open eye is squinting and moving slowly across his peripheral vision.

‘Have you played
Assassin’s Creed III
?’

‘No.’

‘Dude, you should. It’s totally rad.’

‘I haven’t played a computer game since … I was a child.’

‘Too busy reading … I bet the girls find that sexy, dude.’

‘Sexier than playing computer games in cum-crusted pyjamas.’

‘Dude, I don’t want to leave England a virgin,’ he says as I get up to go. ‘I have to go back soon, before I run out of money. I can’t go home a virgin. I can’t.’

There’s something pathetic in his voice that reminds me of me when Aziz and I were young and he was going out with a girl called Becky from a local school, and I was desperate to be kissed. ‘Dude, I don’t want to die a virgin.’

Aziz had replied, ‘It’s during our successes that we discover our true desire for failure.’

‘What does that mean?’ I’d asked. He shrugged. ‘Dunno. Sounds cool though, right?’

I take my leave of Kitab 2 but promise to return the next day. In the last hour, he has ingratiated himself to me. I like the kid. He’s a nice boy. He should have opened with his life story, I might have been more amenable to letting him stay. Maybe I feel a kinship for the fact that we’re both mourning mums and we’re namesakes. Maybe I’m just a softy. I am happy to swiftly forget the identity theft, the tweeting as me, the weird taking over of my personal space and the lies. Apart from that he’s not all that bad. I mean, it’s not like he stole my passport.

I head home. I try Aziz’s mobile, but it just goes straight to voicemail. Once I’m walking from the train station to my flat, I phone Hayley to see if I can recapture some of the magic. I can’t. She won’t be interested in me after I shut down our make-out session. I owe her a phone call though. Just as a courtesy.

I dial her number. Her phone goes to voicemail and I don’t leave a message. While I’m feeling benevolent, I call my dad. He answers almost immediately, like he was staring at his phone hoping for messages from the outside world.

‘Kitab-san,’ he says, happy as ever to hear from me.

‘Hey, Dad.’

‘I’ve been sitting here thinking about you,’ he says. ‘I think you’re unhappy.’

‘I am unhappy, Dad. I told you last time we spoke.’

‘About what?’

‘I dunno. The flat feels very empty at the moment.’

‘I know, son.’

‘So, yeah, I dunno, whatever,’ I say, staring at myself in the reflection of a newsagent. I realise I’m looking at a poster for an Indian wedding magazine. ‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’

‘I do not like this. I have realised I am not being a father to you. I am being a friend. A father would see that his son is suffering from writer’s block. I found this site called Wikipedia and I started reading about writer’s block. Have you heard of Wikipedia?’