‘I am. I have some really bad news.’
‘Oh?’
‘You need to remain calm when I tell you. We can fix this; I know we can.’
‘Okay, you’re scaring me now,’ he said, taking another mouthful of his drink and gagging visibly. ‘What is it? Just tell me.’
She reached for her phone and, to his surprise, took a quick selfie of the two of them, before opening her Instagram feed and posting the picture with the following caption:
@ElizCleverley Spending time with @Wilkes4Love
‘Look!’ she said, turning the screen around for him to see.
‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’
‘Your Instagram account has disappeared. There’s no link coming up to your name. And the same thing is happening on Twitter. I tried to tweet earlier that I was meeting you and there was no sign of your feed.’
Wilkes laughed and shook his head. ‘Is that all?’ he asked, sounding relieved. ‘Honestly, I thought it was something serious.’
‘This is serious,’ she insisted, surprised by his nonchalance. ‘It’s about as serious as things can get. Has someone hacked you, do you think? Was it the Russians?’
‘No,’ he replied with a self-satisfied smile, his favourite type. ‘The thing is, I deleted all my social media accounts last night.’
Elizabeth did her best to remain steady as these simple and yet utterly inexplicable words filtered through the complex ecosystem of her mind, but soon reared back in her seat as if she’d been shot.
‘You did what?’ she shouted, the words emerging in a tone that neither she nor Wilkes had ever heard before, but that reminded I Don’t Believe in Names (they/their), who was passing by at that moment, of the little girl in The Exorcist, when the devil’s got a hold of her and expresses its strongly held belief that Father Merrin’s mother is most likely engaging in fellatio with strangers while drifting unaccompanied through the underworld.
‘I deleted them,’ he repeated. ‘Last night. Before I went to bed. Actually, I’m not sleeping in a bed at the moment. I’m sleeping on the floor. To get in touch with the woodwork. Apparently, if you sleep with your ear to wood, you can hear the screams of the trees as the chainsaws ripped through them.’
‘But why?’ she asked in disbelief. ‘Why would you do such a thing?’
‘To share their pain.’
‘Not that; why would you delete your accounts? Have you gone insane?’
‘I just realized that I’d prefer not to be part of the social media world any more,’ he explained. ‘From now on, I simply want to enjoy my life instead of constantly documenting it. To exist in the moment and allow my memories to live up here’ – he tapped the place where his brain might have been in a more forgiving biosphere – ‘instead of in one of these.’ He pointed now towards Elizabeth’s iPhone. ‘We live on these devices now but, in reality, they’re a total waste of time. Think about it. You spent however many minutes telling strangers that you were meeting me for coffee, minutes that you could have spent doing something more productive.’
‘Like what? Lying on the floor listening to what our kitchen tiles might have to say?’
‘And ultimately,’ he said, ignoring this, ‘you achieved nothing. In the end, who cares?’
‘My followers care!’
‘No, they don’t. Look, show me that thing.’
He grabbed her phone off the table, his greasy fingers skating across the screen, leaving a slimy residue behind, and pointed towards the tweet in question. ‘Ninety-four likes and eight retweets. That’s all you got. So ninety-four people who don’t know either of us have now been given the information that you’re meeting me for coffee. And they’ll already have forgotten.’
‘But I have a blue tick!’ she cried. ‘The common people want to know how blue-ticked people fill their days. Otherwise, how can they have aspirations?’
‘Come on, Elizabeth,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s all bullshit. I had an epiphany and I’m responding to it, that’s all. Like Dylan, when he went electric.’
‘This is deeply shocking,’ she said.
‘Tell me this,’ he said. ‘Does getting likes make you happy?’
‘Of course it does! It’s like sex. Only better.’
‘If you think that, then you’re having sex with the wrong people.’
‘I’m having sex with you.’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, laughing. ‘Own goal there.’
‘Look,’ she said, reaching across to take his hand before thinking better of it. She hadn’t carried any hand sanitizer since getting the vaccination. ‘It’s not too late to fix this. You have thirty days to reactivate your account after you’ve closed it. You won’t lose any of your followers and no one will be any the wiser.’
‘But I don’t want to reactivate my account,’ he protested. ‘And anyway, I didn’t choose that option. I just deleted the entire thing. It’s over for me. I’m no longer on social media.’
‘Oh, sweet mother of Jesus,’ she cried, putting her hands to her mouth. ‘What have you done? IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?’
‘I’ve become free,’ he said. ‘I’ve reclaimed my privacy. Social media is over anyway. It’s so last year. The fact is, when you sign up for an account and accept the terms and conditions, there should also be a warning attached: And this will make you miserable. Actually, you should tweet that, that’s some solid wisdom there.’
‘But you’ve—’
‘Seriously, have you ever heard someone say: my life is so much better now that I’m on Twitter? Invisibility is a good thing.’
‘Who has ever found invisibility to be a good thing?’
He thought about it. ‘Lord Lucan,’ he said. ‘Salman Rushdie, for many years. The Invisible Man himself was very big on it.’
‘The Invisible Man wasn’t real!’ she shouted.
‘Wasn’t he, Elizabeth? Wasn’t he? Just because people couldn’t see him doesn’t mean he should be denied an identity. I’m disappointed in you for saying that. Be better.’
‘Are you being serious with me right now? Are you actually being completely fucking serious?’
‘Yes. I’ve changed. I’ve evolved.’
‘Overnight?’
‘Overnight. I think it has something to do with all the toxins that are draining out of me. All I want now is to do good without other people needing to know about it. I want to be virtuous rather than signal my virtue. Isn’t that a good thing? Honestly, Elizabeth, you should try it.’
He reached for her iPhone again, but before he could grasp it between his oleaginous digits, she swiped it off the table and returned it to the safety of her pocket.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ she snapped.
‘Just give it some thought,’ he said. ‘You could deactivate just one platform and see how you get on.’
‘I would rather show up at an open-mic poetry night,’ she insisted, raising her voice again. ‘I would rather be stuck in a lift for three hours with Harry and Meghan while they tell me how to live my best life.’