“Marvelous, dear girl. Very well done. If I hadn’t been there I would have sworn that nothing had been done to this footage whatsoever.”

I have to work hard to smile back at her. It’s like that last push-up that makes you strain and grimace and grunt.

“Just one thing, my darling. I have to say, I’m not wild about Lolly. It makes one think about . . . licking.” She makes a face. I hear my molars grind. I could kill you. I could rip out your throat with my teeth. “Could you change it to Priss? You don’t mind, do you?” My smile grows wider and all of my features start to fall sideways off the edges of my face.

But she can’t just leave. She has to go on: “You really work magic, you know. It’s astounding. Magic.”

She’s paying me by the hour, so I really shouldn’t care. It’s her money. The waste is hers. My time is worth five dollars an hour. Eight cents a minute. It’s pretty much a long-distance call. Dish out your money, you ignorant old bag. Sit there and toss dimes at me all day since you’re too helpless to do anything else. Get someone to tug a smile onto your face and pin it in place today and I’ll take care of all the days that you neglected. I’ll do all the work that you didn’t do.

When she finally does walk out, her bleached platinum head smug with her nice new history, I decide to claw back some time to look for my folks. I take out my list of places we’ve lived in and pick up where I left off. As the little fat yellow stick figure, grabbed by the scruff and dropped into Street View, I navigate systematically, inching my way around city blocks, checking out the blurry people, frozen in their errands. Everyone looks familiar, like no one in particular. I trawl the streets unseen for miles, scanning, chasing every promising body but always finding strangers’ frames, alien limbs, the postures of other people’s families under the pixilated faces. There’s an ugly new apartment block on the lot where we picked dandelions that time; people are shuffling out of the food bank at the back of the church near our old house. When I finish one city, I slide the cursor to whatever city’s next on the list and start again. It made me feel better at first; now it’s starting to make me feel sick.