All the vegans they knew were freegan now. The chatroom where people used to post recipes for scrambled tofu and soaking times for beans was only for sharing what time Starbucks threw out the sandwiches they didn’t sell and how to get weevils out of rice. Peggy and Greta hid it well – still being vegan. No one ever really knew. It was bourgeois to be fussy about what you ate when people were starving. The freegans ate anything they found. The prime minister of Britain had called Africa’s poverty ‘the fundamental moral challenge of our generation’. Vegans were part of the problem, one of the people on the ‘Making Poverty History’ Reddit said. Peggy and Greta agreed. They felt bad but this was the way it was. They couldn’t bring themselves to eat meat or milk or cheese or eggs or honey. They understood completely why that was bad, but it was just the way they were, so they tried to eat things that came from close by, and toast. The peanuts had been grown in Australia.

They were watching a TV show about the office of a paper company. There was an American version, but they also watched the older British version. They bit-torrented episodes. They weren’t very good seeds, but they downloaded a lot. They’d found an old computer in a skip on one of their walks. It was a heavy laptop that didn’t work when they plugged it in. They fixed it, but it was so big they only used it for file-sharing now and watching the things they downloaded. It was set up in the computer bedroom, but they’d bring it into the lounge if they were going to watch a lot.

They sat on the couch, reclining with their legs tangled, and ate toast and watched the episodes without laughing. They liked the show well enough and it gave them something to talk to everyone at work about, but they didn’t laugh a lot. Lots of people didn’t, it was that kind of show. That’s what people talked about at work – that maybe it was a bit too close to the bone. That you only laughed to get some relief from the tension of it being like working. A bit too much like working at the call centre.