‘When they became push button, that was quite exciting.’

‘I wonder if …’

‘If what?’

‘If we should take them off the children. Until they’re eighteen. Or twenty-one.’

Beverley laughed. ‘Good luck with that,’ she said.

‘I mean it. What I worry about is that we all get so addicted to them that—’

Before he could say anything more, the door to the kitchen opened and a scrawny little boy in a pair of bright pink underpants stood before them, looking deeply sorry for himself. Beverley placed her phone on the island and turned to him.

‘Darling,’ she said. ‘You look awful!’

Achilles opened his mouth to answer but, before he could say a word, he lurched forward and a stream of vomit poured from his mouth, covering his mother’s brand-new iPhone.

And at that precise moment, in Beijing, a man named Zhang Yiming turned to his high-school girlfriend and said, ‘I think I’ll call it TikTok.’

Friday

HE/HIM

George was sitting in the kitchen, drinking his morning cup of coffee, staring at the sealed box containing the dead body of Ustym Karmaliuk. For some inexplicable reason, Beverley had elevated it to the top of a pile of six thick hardback books, the uppermost one being the eight-hundred-page biography that George had bought on Monday and still hadn’t opened. It gave the sarcophagus a faintly deified air.

‘He’s still here, then,’ he muttered, looking across at Elizabeth, who glanced up from her phone for a moment. She didn’t like being distracted from her Twitter arguments.

‘I’m sure Mum has a plan,’ she replied. ‘I’m not going anywhere near him.’

‘He was definitely male, then?’

Elizabeth shrugged. ‘Well, I didn’t turn him over to look, but the real-life Ustym Karmaliuk was a man, so I would assume so.’

‘Actually, the way to tell the gender of a tortoise is not how you might expect. The females have shorter tails than the males, and they also have a U-shape notch on their underside, unlike the males, who have a V.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I’ve interviewed thousands of people over the years,’ he said. ‘I’m a fount of useless information. I hope your mother isn’t going through some sort of mid-life crisis. God only knows what she might bring home next. A starving child from Malawi, for example. Didn’t Madonna do that? And she liked her so much that she went back for more?’

‘That,’ said Elizabeth, fixing him with a sharp look, ‘is exactly the kind of comment that gets you into such deep trouble.’

‘Oh, there’s no one else here,’ he said, waving her criticism aside. ‘Just you, me and a dead tortoise. It’s not as if that @TruthIsASword bastard is going to hear any of it.’

‘Still,’ replied Elizabeth, avoiding his eye, ‘you need to be more careful from now on if you want to make people like you again.’

Before he could reply, his phone rang. He glanced at the screen.