Felton seemed pleased, and waited to take his own slow sip.
She watched him drinking in the moonlight, his mask – Euan’s mask – still on top of his head. His white collar was still buttoned but the tie was rolled inside his shirt pocket.
‘Did you come straight from work?’ she asked.
‘Always working.’
Just like Mum, thought Peaches. ‘Mum said you were a city trader or something?’
‘Yeah, I do a little bit of brokering, help people with their investments. Are you after a tip?’
She looked at him dubiously. ‘What kind of a tip?’
‘If you’re looking to invest, I happen to know of a nice little tech import start-up, name of Cromarty Industries.’
‘That’s your name.’
‘That’s lots of people’s names,’ he said with a wink before taking another drink and handing her the flask.
The liquid tasted purpley and rich, like blackcurrants. It was growing on her. She took another numbing mouthful.
‘I bring over electronic devices, from the cheapest mega factory I could find, bog-standard shit, and we repackage it all here in Scotland. Door cams, Wi-Fi speakers, home security solutions, porch lights. You name it, we make it, and we make it cute!’
‘Cute?’
She handed back the flask and he threw the booze back in a gulp.
‘Packaging is everything, you know.’ He swiped a hand across his stained lips, then, to her disappointment, slipped the flask back into his pocket. ‘The home improvement influencers are all dying to unbox one of our products. They’reaesthetic.’ He made air quotes around the word. ‘Even if the tech inside is lame.’ Now he was unlocking his phone. ‘Check this out.’
Peaches shuffled to his side to watch a TikTok of a beautiful young American woman, all rosy-pink skin and long brown hair.
‘Oh my gosh, you guys, look what someone sent me all the way from Scot Land,’ she was saying in an artificial voice, somehow both bubbly and monotone.
Having pitter-pattered her beautiful long nails over the shrink-wrapped package, as though to let her viewers experience the wonder of this freebie audibly as well as visually, the woman deftly sliced along the wrapper’s edge with a tiny, mint-green penknife.
‘I’m already obsessed with this packaging. Ob-sessed!’ she was saying as she discarded the shrink wrap out of sight and inspected the glossy iridescent pink sleeve of the inner box, turning it in her hands.
‘Oh my gosh,’ she said again, before asking her viewers if they wanted to look inside.
The video cut to her slowly sliding the sleeve off the box. Peaches couldn’t resist looking up at Felton to see what he really made of all this, only to see his face illuminated from the phone’s soft glow, smiling in self-assured concentration, like a puppeteer pulling the strings over a child’s toy theatre.
The woman was now lifting something small and shiny from the top of the open box.
‘Get a load of this cute free sticker, you guys! Do you think everyone gets these?’ she asked. ‘Or are they only in influencers’ boxes? You guys, I think everyone gets one…’ She chattered on, barely stopping to draw breath, showcasing close-up for the camera the, admittedly very cute, foiled sticker of a cartoon kitten operating a security keypad with his paw.
‘He’s sweet, I guess,’ said Peaches, aware she was probably expected to express some kind of admiration around about now.
‘Right?’ Felton agreed with a grin. ‘AI. Didn’t cost a thing to design. I can buy them by the thousand for literal pennies.’
‘Oh—’
‘The best part’s coming up, watch this,’ he said, cutting her off.
She’d wanted to say something about the importance of paying human artists and observing good design principles, but he was turning up the volume.
The woman had cast aside the sticker and was lifting the package out of the box, slowly stripping it of a layer of unnecessary white tissue paper sealed with a thin grey ribbon.
‘The thing I love about this company, you guys, is the attention to detail,’ the woman said, before hitting the final layers of packaging – thin white Styrofoam, flimsy bubble wrap, a few packing peanuts – all of which she swept straight off her white table like they hadn’t been there at all, until all that was left was a clear plastic zip bag and the actual gadget inside. She pulled it free, disappeared the un-aesthetic user’s manual, and showed the camera what looked like an insubstantial grey and white plastic numbered touchpad. The plastic creaked in her hands as she gripped it.
