Dr Oristo glanced at the clock. Their session was coming to an end and she had yet to tell Nelson her news. It was bad timing, but there was nothing she could do about that now. She put her notepad away and leaned forward.
‘Nelson,’ she said. ‘I have something to tell you and, at first, you might find it upsetting, but I want to assure you that you have nothing to worry about. I need you to trust me and to remain calm. Can you do that for me, Nelson? Can you trust me and remain calm?’
He stared at her and thought about this for a long time. ‘It seems unlikely,’ he said eventually.
SANGERS FOR SKANGERS
A few months earlier, Elizabeth Cleverley had read a novel about a girl born with a halo above her head. Having spent the morning preparing sandwiches for the homeless, she felt she could relate to the girl’s predicament and longed for her shift to be over so she could go somewhere with Wi-Fi to post pictures of her philanthropy online. She, too, deserved a halo, she believed. A digital one, anyway.
Sangers for Skangers – the ‘g’ was hard in both cases – was an initiative dreamed up by her boyfriend, Wilkes Maguire, who spent his evenings trawling through supermarket dumpsters in search of stale, discarded bread before toasting every slice, adding past-its-sell-by-date ham, turkey or cheese, and wandering the streets, handing out his efforts to the homeless, before kissing their hands, taking a selfie and assuring them that he saw them.
Wilkes’s grandmother was Irish and ‘sangers’, he explained to Elizabeth, was Dublinese for sandwiches, while ‘skangers’ was a term used for those unfortunate nomads who spent their days sitting on O’Connell Bridge begging for money. It had always been meant in an offensive way but, by reclaiming the term, Wilkes said he was removing its injurious effects. Intuitively, he understood the struggle of the dispossessed, he insisted, and it was important that others realized just how deeply he felt it, which was why he documented his every charitable move on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr and TikTok, and kept a spreadsheet documenting how many likes each of his posts received and the monthly increase in his follower count.
It was Wilkes’s total obsession with social media that had first drawn Elizabeth to him, along with his perfectly spherical head, scrappy beard and strange, baby-like features that made him look as if he’d spent much of his life as an infant before transitioning to adulthood, skipping all the usual stages in between, both physically and mentally. Others might have found this particular quality repellent, but it sparked a curious desire in her and she’d followed his endless, self-serving tweets – sometimes more than fifty a day – for months before wandering into one of the soup kitchens where he volunteered. As she locked eyes with this modern-day Mother Teresa over an enormous tureen of leek, bacon and potato soup, he told her that hers were the colour of consommé, which she took as a compliment, despite the fact that consommé makes for a rather bland and unexciting meal, although, like Elizabeth herself, it was essentially fat free.
From the start, Wilkes (he/him) had told her that he saw it as his mission to make the world a better place and longed to document his trips to Africa, Asia or South America on social media, where he would help to build houses for those who currently lived in ditches and ate live rats and cockroaches.
‘Do a lot of them live in ditches and eat live rats and cockroaches?’ she asked, sceptical that things hadn’t moved on in those places in quite a big way since Live Aid.
‘Oh God, I hope so,’ he replied. ‘I feel it’s my destiny to help them. I’ve written to Bill Gates, asking him to stop throwing his money at these problems until I’ve had a chance to do my bit.’
‘I’m not really interested in charity work,’ she said on their first date. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I approve of it in principle, but it’s not really my area. I’m more interested in becoming an influencer. Couldn’t your parents just fund your trip if you wanted to go?’
‘That would be such a bourgeois thing to do,’ he said, smiling a little at her naïveté. ‘And if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s a little jejune of you to suggest it.’
Elizabeth didn’t mind in the slightest, since she didn’t understand a word of it, and that same evening, Wilkes took her to a needle exchange, where he got some great pictures with a recovering heroin addict who had once stabbed his grandmother in the foot when she wouldn’t hand over her pension. A few days later, on their second date, he took her to a medical clinic, where he posted a photo of himself giving the thumbs-up sign while witnessing puberty blockers being administered to a child. On their third, they went to Les Misérables. And on their fourth, and most disappointingly, to bed, although he insisted on her logging into a special sex app on his phone first to confirm that she was giving consent. Otherwise, he said, he would feel like he was committing rape. Throughout the eight months of their relationship since then, however, not only had she been forced to give official online consent every time they slept together, but he had refused to stay overnight in Elizabeth’s bed, claiming that he could not possibly justify sleeping in a house that could comfortably fit thirty people but in which only five currently resided, returning to his own apartment as soon as their passion had been spent, which was generally quite quickly.
‘There’s a tortoise now,’ Elizabeth told him. ‘So now we are six, as A. A. Milne would say.’
‘Amazing to think that a tortoise is living better than most humans,’ he replied, shaking his head and immediately posting the comment to Twitter.
‘It’s hardly his fault,’ she protested. ‘He was just shoved into a box and handed over to my mum. I’m sure if he knew about the plight of the homeless, he’d be very sympathetic.’
‘It would behoovened you not to make such comments,’ said Wilkes, turning away from her. ‘It would really behoovened you.’ And she shrugged, making a mental note to look that word up later, since she was certain that it wasn’t actually real. ‘Still, I appreciate you.’
‘I appreciate you too,’ she replied, knowing how important it was to Wilkes that he say this as often as possible, rather than ‘I love you.’ The phrase ‘I love you’, he claimed, was too focussed on his feelings, which only sustained the patriarchy, while ‘I appreciate you’ recognized her special qualities.
Wilkes had chosen to devote himself to social media in the hope that someone, somewhere, would listen to him. He’d always longed to have a voice in the world, to feel special, but his previous attempts at creating a public persona had ended in abject failure. He’d tried being a singer/songwriter, hoping this would give him the attention he craved, but it turned out he hadn’t a note in his head, so he had a go at stand-up comedy instead, to the eternal embarrassment of his friends, who knew that his sense of humour was on a par with Hitler’s. Having been laughed off a stage at an open-mic night, and not for the right reasons, he accepted that he simply wasn’t funny and spent four days writing a novel in his local library. The book remained on his hard drive, a testament to his genius, but publishing houses across London, Europe, America and the Far East had all declined the opportunity to add his name to their list. Finally, feeling depressed and misunderstood, he set up a Twitter account, and the rest, for him, was history. At last, he had discovered a place where people would listen to the magical thoughts that ran through his mind. Almost 1,800 people, in fact. Two or three of whom occasionally liked something he posted.