They would laugh outright, and Heidi would hear them and laugh too. ‘I’m teaching her,’ she’d say. ‘She’s getting way better.’ Which was probably true. ‘Ten years from now, when you’re using a seamless natural language interface, you’ll have me to thank,’ she’d shout. Then they’d hear Alexa say, ‘Here are the Google results I have for that.’

And everyone would laugh again, including Ash. Nine years old seemed like a nice age, Margaret would think as she watched them laughing with Bisi. But Ash had always been a pretty great kid. Heidi and Bisi were amazing parents in a very light-touch way. ‘It’s only having one,’ Bisi said once. ‘It’s easy when there’s only one. And Ash is a fucking great person. We can’t take credit for most of that.’

Ash was lying on a chair in Margaret’s lounge now, legs flung over the arms on one side, looking at their phone. Everyone was looking at their phones. The bread was in the oven smothered in garlic and oil. Margaret had roasted the fennel bulb and was cooking some potatoes to mash with it. She’d made a large pot of spinach dhal. Everything would be ready soon. Margaret’s house was an extension of Heidi and Bisi’s house and vice versa. Generally, everyone just lay around. Sometimes they would all sit for hours just doing their own thing, but they liked to be in the same room doing it. Ash liked to draw as much as look at their phone. Right now, they were on TikTok. They had earbuds in and every now and then they would act into their phone, lip-syncing something. Bisi was usually looking at Instagram or Twitter or an article Twitter had sent her to. She was interested in injustice. She liked to get angry. All the social media platforms were anger machines. They all admitted it. They talked a lot about algorithms and about how rage gets attention and everything online was geared towards that. But it didn’t stop them going back and scrolling through the platforms for ages. They all talked about doing something different. Heidi had switched her phone’s display to monochrome, but she still found it hard not to spend hours, head bowed, sucked into it, scrolling down and then back to the top – they all did.