Hope Read online

  Mona cares about job creation too, oh yes; she eschews the self-drive cars favoured by many of her ilk, and makes a big deal out of her driver being unemployed for three years before she honoured him with the job.

  Go #MoMo.

  The whole country has fallen in love with the Morrisseys.

  MoMo launched her fitness empire a year before Guy was put forward as the next party leader (perfect timing!), with her YouTube channel Mo-TV8, her family health advice coffee-table books, and MoJo fitness and health centres across the UK. MoJo as in 'get your MoJo back'. Her name was made for promotional slogans. I bet there's even a hashtag on her birth certificate.

  The Morrissey administration is the perfect marriage of commerce and politics.

  Some say that the real PM is Nutricorp.

  The company's smoothies, protein bars and detox juices, its vitamin packages, green teas and vegan pots-to-go, are all on sale at MoJo centres. Every day there is another news story about the latest Nutricorp takeover: supermarkets become Nu-Marts, restaurant and fast food chains morph into their eatery brands: Zest, Omnivore and Plant Base. What with subsidiaries Nu-Pharm, Nu-Media and Nu-Tek, I am sure we will soon appear on maps as Nu-Britain.

  Meanwhile, MoMo appears on TV chat shows, talking about her aim to 'change the BMI of the nation'. #MoMo trends on social media more often than #GuyMo.

  In our flat, we're split. Nick and I think the Morrisseys are puke-making at best, dangerous at worst. Kendall thinks they're fabulous. She exercises in front of the Mo-TV8 channel in our living room. Nick threatens to turn off the electricity when she starts the street dance routine. He calls it 'the pimp and ho-down'.

  I keep the peace and tell Nick to go to his room if he doesn't like it.

  I'm the reasonable middle ground between the two of them, in that I agree with Nick but am sympathetic towards Kendall. She's a sweetie, and I don't want her upset, though she's not above telling Nick to fuck off if he lays it on too thick. You need a mediator in a three-person household. But we're good, mostly. Which is just as well; in these days of high rental prices and ruthless letting agency criteria, none of us could afford a decent flat without the other two.

  And none of us have got anywhere else to go.

  3

  Blog Life

  Before I shared with Nick and Kendall, I rented the attic of a trendy top floor maisonette owned by aspirational couple Seth and Lucy, who loathed the fact that they needed my rent in order to pay the mortgage, so pretended I wasn't there.

  I'm fine with solitude; growing up in foster homes, I learned self-reliance even before I'd heard of the term. I loved my little room in the roof, but sooner or later I'd need to use the bathroom, so I'd creep downstairs, praying I wouldn't bump into Seth coming out of the bedroom in his underpants. I actually used to limit the amount I drank so I wouldn't have to go to the loo too often. How crazy is that? As for cooking, after three days of Lucy walking into the kitchen and saying, "Oh. Are you going to be long?" in a tone that implied my opening a tin of soup in her living space was a massive inconvenience, I bought a microwave and kettle for my room.

  I've lived here with Nick and Kendall for seven months. It's the best home I've ever had. They have become my family; we're all so happy here, and I feel secure, for the first time in my life. In a shared rental. Is that terrifically sad?

  Our flat is the top half of a Victorian end-of-terrace, with three bedrooms. I get the attic again, but this time I chose it. It's perfect. It has a sloping roof and a window that looks out onto leafy back gardens, which is where I have my desk. Because my blog is my main income, I spend most of my time at that desk.

  Sometimes, when I'm sitting there in my pyjamas on a weekday afternoon, I stop, and think how lucky I am. That I am able to make a living online, unlike thousands of others who have tried and failed to do so.

  Nick and I laugh about it. The online economy, I mean. He says that one day someone's going to stop and say, "Hang on. None of this is real," and it'll all crumble.

  It's like this. I pay Jack to design graphics for my blog. He buys images from Animart. Jill from Animart pays Laura to write the content for her site. Laura pays to advertise her services on Writers For Hire. Tim from Writers For Hire pays Sam from ShoutOut to tweet about the site. Sam also writes photicular Sci-Fi ebooks, which he pays me to review; once I've read his latest and am ready to write up my thoughts, I pay Jack for a fabulous blog header with spaceships and stars―and so it goes on.

  Everything we do exists only in cyberspace. If the internet disappeared tomorrow, it would all be gone.

  So who cares? Thank you, cyberspace, you pay my rent.

  I work on the blog in the afternoon and evenings, when I come home from my four mornings a week at Aduki.

  Oddly enough, it is to Aduki that I owe my online success.

  The blog used to be just a hobby. Two posts a week, one the snarky social stuff, the other a review: book, film, whatever. Then came the post that went viral, the #OfflineDay movement, a blow up in my social media following, and offers of representation by publicists. Being the lone wolf that I am, I turned the latter down. I wasn't bothered about those fifteen minutes of fame, I said. Someone else could have mine.

  This all happened because of my Aduki interview.

  Out of the hundreds who applied for the position of part-time manager, Esme invited the final twelve to the café one evening, to attend a presentation about the business.

  It was a test.

  Once we were all seated, her assistant (actually her daughter, Tilly) delivered the news that she had been held up. Esme kept us waiting for half an hour.

  I got the job because I was the only person who didn't spend that waiting time scrolling through my phone. Not only did it feel somehow inappropriate, it being a job interview and all, but I like to just sit. I do the same on bus rides and train journeys; it's an opportunity to observe, think, without my brain being constantly bombarded with opinion and information.

  Esme is fifty-six, so the first twenty years of her life were pre-internet; she didn't own a mobile phone until she was thirty. She's an Offliner as much as the owner of a business can be, these days. Hates the way everyone is always glued to their devices.

  "I resent that it's almost impossible to live a normal life without constantly adding to the great data compilation," she told me, on my first day. "I was an Offliner before they were called Offliners. I need a part-time manager who won't be picking up their bloody phone whenever they have five minutes of downtime."

  So I got the job, wrote my blog post about why it happened, and idly suggested an internet-free day once a month, for anyone who fancied putting all their devices in a drawer for the day. No texting, no social media, no apps or biometric sensors; if you were about to come down with a deadly disease, AutoDoc could wait until the next day to tell you. No Step 10K, no calorie limit alerts―just eat that cupcake if you want the damn thing. No Netflix, no SneekPeek, no Global Online.

  I tweeted, Would anyone like to join me, this Sunday, for #OfflineDay?

  I hasten to add that the irony of publicising this on social media is not lost on me.

  I didn't expect many to take me up on it. I certainly didn't expect it to go viral.

  That I got the job because I was taking notice of real life around me, instead of that virtual world in which we live for so much of the time, resonated with many. Soc med users everywhere began posting pictures of what they did on their #OfflineDay.

  On Twitter, I was everywhere.

  Have you read @LitaStone? Go offline and #GetReal! #OfflineDay

  I saw posts on Imagio, thanking me:

  Thanks for the #inspiration @LitaStone! On my #OfflineDay I: (cue picture of carefree person walking in woods, writing a letter in longhand, doing long-neglected jobs around the house).

  #OfflineDay still trends on various sites on some days of every week, mostly Mondays; many choose Sunday to #GetReal.

  My blog's view count soared through the
roof. My email was deluged with requests to review not only books and indie films, but beauty products and cosmetics, gadgets and apps.

  "You could make some money out of this," Esme said. So this is where I am now. I sell advertising space and charge for reviews. Doesn't even matter if the review is not positive, apparently; your product's appearance on Lita Stone gives it kudos. My honesty has become my trademark. My readers know that if I say something is good, I really mean it. Under my submission guidelines is the phrase 'if you praise everything, you praise nothing'.

  Sometimes I feel assauged by 'imposter syndrome'; I'm just one person sitting at her ancient laptop in an attic of the flat she rents with her mates. Who cares what I think about anything? The cool chick in the black and white photo isn't me; it's Lita Stone, blogging superstar. Head bowed, eyes looking up over heavy-rimmed glasses. I don't even wear glasses. Tilly took it in the bathroom of Aduki.

  Lita Stone has to take her blog seriously, because thousands read her words. I have to justify, give an objective viewpoint. The more caustic the review, the more views it gets, but best of all, I love being able to praise. My words affect sales. It's a great feeling.

  Since I wrote an advertisement piece for Aduki, I've been asked to sample and review new health food products. This needs to be taken seriously. I ask for two samples: one for me to try, and one to be tested by Esme's friend Cameron, a nutritionist, so I can tell my readers whether the product is really of nutritional value, or all packaging and promises.

  Cosmetics I pass to Kendall and Tilly; they're my test subjects. For these products and over-the-counter meds, though, I have another secret weapon: an old friend of Nick's called Andy Reynolds. He's a technician at a small pharmaceutical company called Wendell Laboratories that has, so far, escaped the clutches of Nu-Pharm. Andy used to work for Nu-Pharm but would not be party to their clinical testing practices, i.e. offering money to hard-up students and the unemployed to act as guinea pigs for new medical products. Of course, companies have been doing this for years, but Andy told me they underplayed possible side effects to what he considered a dangerous extent.

  Andy and I had a meaningless fling for a few weeks, which ended when he dumped me (by text). I suffered nothing worse than slightly bruised pride, we remained friends and he has continued to test products for me before I review them, because, like me, he believes that bullshit should be exposed.

  So that's my blog. Within six months of my elevation to online stardom, the revenue provided enough to live on, albeit in a modest fashion. I still work at Aduki because I enjoy it, because Esme is my friend, and because I need to get off my arse now and again―it's important for me to interact with live human beings as well as Twitter and LifeShare avatars. I can't do social comment if I see only the virtual side.

  I don't get too political; that's not what my readers want.

  Sometimes I'm itching to have a go at MoMo, but I don't, because I can't compete with the most popular in that field. Besides, there is only room for one political commentator in this house, so I leave the heavier stuff to the caustic pen of the notorious Widow Skanky.

  The razor-tongued, bewigged widow has sixty thousand email subscribers―and counting―but, despite much discussion, nobody knows her true identity.

  No one except Kendall and me, that is; it's Nick.

  He and I met online. We got chatting when I messaged him about an article he'd written on Global, and discovered we lived only twenty miles apart, so we met up for a drink. Unlike most of the journos on the site, Nick has a cartoon avatar instead of a photo of himself, so I didn't know who I was meeting. Turned out he was as I imagined: a male version of me. Dark, tall, thin and still dressed like a student despite being in his early thirties, except that he wears a beanie hat most of the time, whereas I only wear one when it's cold. We semi-fancied each other alongside the cerebral connection, but the moment passed, if there was ever to be one, and our chemistry simmered down into 'just mates'. At the time, he was shacked up with friends, and hating it; he'd been back from travelling for six months, and getting a regular spot on Global was his first step towards establishing a more stable life.

  It wasn't working too well; his travelling years made it hard for him to reconnect with his old friends.

  "They take the piss because I haven't 'grown up' yet―by which they mean I haven't got a mortgage and don't spend forty-five hours a week chained to a desk―or they yap on about the time they went backpacking, like they think we have something in common. Most of them, it was one summer getting loaded on Thai beaches on their parents' money."

  Life as an online journo is not as creatively fulfilling as I'd imagined. Basically, Nick creates articles from press releases given to the site by the press secretaries of various government departments, or the businesses that finance the site. When he gets too frustrated by this and wants to say what he really thinks, he puts on his Widow Skanky hat, secrecy maintained by VPN proxy servers, which impresses me greatly. A necessity, he says; he wouldn't be Nick Freer of Global Online for much longer if they found out.

  He has another site called Naked Truth, run with a friend called Cole, but this is orientated towards what some call conspiracy theories; it's used more by Cole than him.

  I met Nick around the time my blog really kicked off, and was having vague thoughts about asking him if he wanted to share a flat―I was dying to move out of Seth and Lucy's―when I met Kendall.

  Kendall was lured into Aduki by our stupendously sumptuous carrot cake.

  At first she joked that she was checking out the competition, because she works at the local Zest―Nutricorp's health food café chain―but then she admitted the real reason. She is the least slim ('not the fattest, the least slim') amongst her female colleagues, and suffers bitchy comments ill-disguised as advice if she eats anything more calorific than an alfalfa sprout.

  "Aduki's nicer, anyway," she said. "It's more relaxed, and you don't upsell. We have to do that all the time at Zest. I hate it."

  I'd pass the time of day with her, and she subscribed to my blog, followed me on Twitter, sent me friend requests on LifeShare and uChat, all that stuff you do when you first establish a friendship. I soon discovered that she's a social media super-sharer: a thought is not worth thinking unless it's tweeted or uChatted with relevant emojis and gifs, a meal not truly enjoyed unless captured on camera and posted on Imagio.

  I thought she was a total fluff-brain, at first. Nice girl, but a fluff-brain. I was wrong, but I forgive myself for my initial assessment. During an early conversation, she talked about her colleague Dallas who lives with a guy called Austin. I asked her if they had a dog called El Paso and she didn't get it.

  But then I got to know her.

  She has a quality rarely found in this 'likes' collecting world in which we live: she listens. I mean, she genuinely listens, and gives considered answers. A world away from a ghastly trend I've noticed amongst teenagers, like Esme's daughter Tilly and her friends:

  Teen A says, 'My IT tutor was really getting on my case today.'

  Teen B selects sad face emoji on phone screen and shoves it in Teen A's face, then goes on to talk about own bad day.

  When Kendall discovered that I was Lita Stone, she did all the OMG stuff, and I braced myself, waiting for the selfie request, to be posted on Imagio with an 'In @AdukiCafé with @LitaStone―yay! #healthfoods #OfflineDay' caption, but it never came. She asked me how it happened, and she listened. So much so that I found myself offloading about my imposter syndrome.

  After a few weeks of messaging and chats over carrot cake, I realised she had become a friend.

  Historically, those with whom I've hung out have tended to be like me. A bit cynical. Anti-trends, keen to cut through the bollocks. Kendall, on the other hand, is a marketer's dream. She gets excited about labels and drools over articles that show you what celebs are wearing, which is daft, because she is seriously gorgeous and doesn't need to try to look like anyone.

  When I say she's
gorgeous, I'm not doing that thing when girlies tell each other how stunning they are as a matter of course. I mean it. She's got these amazing, wide-apart green eyes that a book would call 'almond-shaped'. Her mouth has the pouty, bee-stung look that ten thousand Botox addicts fail to achieve, and her hair is thick, waist-length, dead straight and a gorgeous ashy-light brown with natural gold highlights. Sometimes I can't stop staring at her, not in a gay way, but because she's so damn pretty. All she can see, though, are the size sixteen and sometimes eighteen labels on her clothes that are likely to stay that way because she wolfs down Aduki carrot cake and, I have discovered since living with her, half a ton of grated cheese on top of whatever dinner is, usually pasta.

  She can carry it, though; she has an hourglass figure, albeit more well-covered than she would like.

  Her low self-esteem is down to her mother, an alcoholic bitch who has been chipping away at it since she was a kid. When we met, Kendall was living at her house, along with the mother's slimy boyfriend who would grab a handful of Kendall's arse whenever he thought he could get away with it. Then there was her ex, Wes. Three years of commitment evasion followed by rejection in favour of her size eight former friend. Oh, but it was Kendall's fault for being so enormous, of course.

  She told me all about it one afternoon in Zest, over two glasses of vastly over-priced cucumber and avocado mulch.

  I said, "If he's so averse to flesh, why didn't he just go out with a skinny girl in the first place?"

  "He said he thought I was beautiful but hoped I'd lose weight," she said, giving the green gunk an absentminded stir; she looked so defeated.

  "More like he wanted a psychological punch-bag to make him feel like a big man."

  "Do you think so? He said once that if I lost two stone he'd put a deposit on a flat for us." She laughed. "I think that made me eat more."

  Of course, she was best off without him, but saying that sort of thing never helps at the time, so I did her the honour of being the one to listen.