‘Yeah, but we mostly talk over text. I don’t even check his tweets most of the time. They’re, like, more for the public, you know?’

‘You have his number?’

‘Sure.’

She felt sick.

‘God, sometimes I forget that he’s so famous,’ said the boy, laughing. ‘To me, he’s just Haz, you know? He’s just a mate.’

‘Of course,’ said Elizabeth, trying to play it cool and not feel utterly resentful that this boy, this receptionist, this nobody, had hit the social media motherlode. ‘He’s such a great guy.’

‘Oh, do you know him, then?’

‘Well, not personally, no.’

‘Then, can I ask that you don’t talk about him as if you do? He’s not public property, even though so many of you think he is. Just give the guy some space, yeah? Anyway, my point is, you’ve got an NTR of 10.2. You need to stop tweeting and concentrate on building your followers.’

Elizabeth stared at him. As much as she was torn between wanting to rip him limb from limb and have sex with him on the desk, she began to feel that she was in the presence of a social media Yoda and it was best to learn what she could from him before he kicked her out of Dagobah.

‘But if I stop tweeting,’ she asked, ‘then how will my followers build?’

‘It’s not that you stop entirely,’ he explained with a sigh. ‘You just need to give it more thought, that’s all. You slow it down and ask yourself, is this something that people are going to be interested in? Will they like it, retweet it? Will others follow you because of it? Or will it just attract trolls?’ He picked up his phone and started scrolling. ‘Like, there’s way too much virtue signalling on your timeline. No one’s interested in that shit. Not any more. People picking a topic and tweeting about it all day, every day. Total waste of time. What’s all this bullshit about a leper colony, for example?’

Elizabeth looked down at the ground, feeling a little embarrassed by the question.

‘My boyfriend and I – well, he’s not my boyfriend any more,’ she added, glancing up to see whether he might react in some way to this, but nothing. ‘We were thinking about going to Indonesia to help out in a leper colony.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

She shrugged and, honestly, felt too exhausted even to try dressing it up. ‘Oh, I have no fucking idea,’ she said, throwing her arms in the air. ‘He wanted to go and I wanted to be with him so I said sure, whatever.’

‘And did you go?’

‘Christ, no. I ended up dumping him. So that was the end of that.’

‘Then why are you posting this shit? No one wants to read about lepers. Do you honestly think Kendall is interested in lepers? Or Billie? Or Harry – actually, he probably is. He’s such a caring guy, but don’t spread that around, please. It’s a private thing. Anyway, what I’m saying is that this kind of polish-my-halo tweeting is the absolute worst. It’s olden days, man. It’s got fleas. It’s on a Zimmer frame.’