The last thing she wanted was for her mother to catch her with a computer. She’d handed over her mobile for the duration of the holiday, apparently willingly. Telephoning at sea was much too expensive and, in any case, she could surf the internet much better with the notebook she’d secretly smuggled on board. Luckily her mother hadn’t noticed the little thing in her rucksack.

Like so much.

To be on the safe side she waited for a while before returning to her online chat.

She had to log in again, because the connection was automatically lost when you closed the screen, but that wasn’t a problem. The Wi-Fi in the rooms was free and worked brilliantly while they were close to the coast. After dinner there didn’t seem to be so many people online. Most were probably spending their first evening in the Aquatheatre, one of the bars where a figure skating show was being performed, or in the 4D cinema, or just promenading up and down the outer decks in the comparatively mild night air.

Lisa had sat through a very strenuous five-course dinner with her mother in a restaurant that made the dining room from the Titanic film look like a canteen for the homeless. At any one time six hundred guests could eat their meal on two levels connected by a large double staircase. A uniformed waiter was responsible for each table; on the face of the dandy who’d been assigned to them, Lisa had detected irritation at the fact that she, in her black pleated skirt and death’s head T-shirt, hadn’t altogether complied with the recommended smart-casual dress code.

So fucking what?

She’d rather he’d served her up a decent curry sausage rather than the underdone meat on a plum-something sauce, which she’d found as unpalatable as the worried questions her mother had asked: ‘Are you alright, my love? Have you got problems? Do you want to talk about them?’

At the end of the dinner, Lisa was so exhausted by her lies that she didn’t need to feign tiredness to be allowed to go back to her room alone. She activated the most recently opened window in her browser.

Easyexit opened within seconds and she was back in the private chatroom which, as Querky had assured her, was encrypted several times over.

Moonshadow: sorry, back online now.

Querky: your mum?

Moonshadow: false alarm

Querky: do you think she suspects anything?

Moonshadow: well, i know she’s found the video.

She wished she could have blurted out the truth to her mother over dinner, when, after much beating around the bush, Julia had finally come out with it and asked apprehensively whether it was ‘real’.

‘Yes, mum, I’m the slut on the internet. But that’s not the reason why I want to slit my wrists or throw myself under a train. Not because of the video.’