But customer-facing was all that was left, and Kelly, attractive, fit and trim, able to play any convivial role in exchange for her needs being met, was speaking from the higher status of one whose very appearance did not trigger customer complaints. Gordon was a shambling ruin, his scant resources of social conformity exhausted by the putting on of clothes each morning. What could he do? His chosen trade—he had been a journalist and long-serving editor of the now-defunct Bluebird News until he followed his staff into redundancy at the age of forty-seven—had gone the way of lamplighting, wet nursing and elevator operating. Some local-paper journalists were still, like radioactive waste, rolling over into new half-lives, but Gordon hadn’t been able to summon sufficient energy for the ‘citizen journalism’ that had taken up residence on the internet but seemed a fancy name for what used to be known as the letters page. He was good for little else, in too deep for career reinvention. As far as he was concerned, it could all go to bloggery. In his first year of redundancy, when his family had still been intact and he needed to keep putting on a show as protector and provider, he had sent out begging letters hawking himself as a freelance copywriter and subeditor. One company replied that they had no position available but would keep him on their ‘flies’. He thought about sending a correction as evidence of how much they needed him, but heeded Kelly’s warning that it wouldn’t get the reaction he hoped for.

After that, he had done some thinking. If the family cut their costs right back, they could exist on his trickle of income from the journalistic afterlife—irregular press releases for local businesses, a short-lived foray into ‘mentoring’ (too customer-facing, it turned out), the patchy investment earnings from his redundancy payout—until his superannuation came through. This strategy of exhausted desperation, or desperate exhaustion, far from making him an outlier, embodied the Old Bluebird state of mind in the new Bluebird demography. Nobody he knew worked. ‘You gotta work to live, not live to work!’ claimed Tonsure Man, who had never held a job for more than six months. ‘What’s the point of living in God’s Country if you’re the working dead?’ asked Red Cap, who had last worked in the pre-internet age. Old Bluebird was a workers’ aristocracy, except for the work part. Work was beneath them, even if living in their elderly mothers’ spare rooms was not. So, after his fruitless efforts at finding post-redundancy employment, Gordon had decided to finally acknowledge membership of his own type—and fuck it, he thought, why not; he was as Bluebird as anyone else. When Kelly had raised the occasional murmur about just how frugally they had to live to stretch out his redundancy, Gordon had replied, ‘Something will turn up.’