‘It’s not crap, B. It’s organic,’ Grace informs her in accentuated tones.
‘I literally wash my face in shower gel so I am the wrong person to ask. She’s even sorting my sanitary pads into rows. Marie Kondo has turned her into a militant organiser of sorts. All her pants are rolled into tennis balls.’
Beth realises I have no idea who this Kondo woman is. ‘She’s on Netflix – she’s Japanese and adorable. It’s a show about tidying your house, decluttering and finding joy in your belongings. It’s nice to watch but one of those things you know is impossible in practice.’
I still look confused. ‘What is the Netflix?’
Grace and Beth sit there for a moment, cups paused to their mouths.
‘Geez… really? Oh, so it’s, like, this magical place where you can watch stuff. TV, films, it all gets streamed to your house or phone, and man, it got me through 2020,’ Beth explains, taking out her phone. ‘And you don’t have to wait for episodes weekly, you just binge-watch everything in one. It’s a beautiful thing.’
She hands me her phone. This touch-screen technology is new, fiddly. Like I’m buying train tickets but it’s just lists of films and TV shows.
‘And is it expensive?’
‘Less than a tenner a month. Though you spend most of the time just choosing something to watch. You and I used to watch stuff together all the time, we had a whole thread of conversation going on about a show calledSex Education.’
‘That I have no recollection of…’
Both of them go a little quiet to think about what I’ve missed and what they need to tell me about. A simple thing like watching the television is new, it’s bigger and brighter and there’s infinite choice. Next they’ll tell me toilets have changed, we don’t cook any more, you can teleport and they’ve made aeroplanes obsolete.
‘Oh, by the way, I got you a new iPhone because your last one got squished by the bus,’ Grace explains to me, reaching over to a box on the table. ‘We’ll walk you through it but you were really good at backing up your stuff so we retrieved lots of it off the Cloud. Notes, photos. There were a lot of photos. I organised some of them for you,’ she explains, with a hint of hesitation.
Beth tries her best not to laugh too hard. I want to know when we started storing stuff in Clouds.
‘Explain…’ I say.
‘I mean, it wasn’t a surprise, but the one thing phones have been good for is that they become a conduit by which you can engage in relations without having to be in the same room,’ she explains.
‘It’s called sexting,’ Beth utters plainly.
‘People don’t even have sex any more?’ I ask, wide-eyed.
‘Oh, they do but people are also lazy and we explained the Tinder thing to you. So people use that to find their long-term loves but they also now use it for hook-ups and things. They use all sorts… Instagram, Snapchat… They’re all ways to just swap photos and videos and chat…’
‘And I take it I was active on those things…’
Grace takes my new slimline fancy phone and goes to a photo icon and clicks on it. There is an album there called Hidden and she clicks on it. She puts a tongue to the inside of her mouth and then shows it to me. I’m not a prude, I never was, but it’s basically a wall of genitalia before my eyes. Female bits, man bits, piercings and tattoos, boobies, chipolatas and one man who seems to be wielding a baseball bat of flesh between his legs. How? More importantly, who?
‘That penis is obscene, that can’t be real?’ says Beth, huddling into me.
‘Are we saying I may have shagged that man?’ I ask.
I wasn’t an angel at eighteen. I’d slept with four boys before I went to university but to approach that penis looks physically impossible. I look at all the photos. That’s me. Andthat’swhat my pierced nipple looked like. I have nice boobs and I seem to have no problem in showing them to people via the medium of photo in a variety of poses. I also seem to have no problem showing them other parts of me too.
‘I don’t have pubic hair. Did it not grow past my teens? Did it fall out?’
‘Oh no, you liked to wax down there.’
I click on a photo with a white triangle to the bottom. It’s moving. He’s holding his penis. He’s moving. Oh my… We all let out a collective screaming laugh and I drop the phone into my lap.
‘The pictures also move?’
‘Yes,’ Beth tells me.
I pick the phone up tentatively again.
‘Hold up, these aren’t my boobs?’ I say, my finger hovering over one picture.
