DAY 19
Yolo_230X reworks the comment 6 times, taking long, pensive breaks to make hot chocolate before s/he is happy with it. It is 1.58am, Monday morning and s/he sends the final draft to >Beggzy< who messages back on a MSN Messenger. The two share a virtual laugh, using obsolete (for those who do as they are told) emojis before Yolo_230X posts the finished sting. His/her dry lips peel back, revealing a deck of caffeine-stained teeth, asymmetrically stacked in a screen-lit, snarky grin. Tonight, they hover through the dusty corridors of Myspace. Tomorrow - a glance at the calendar confirms – there’s a dance taking place in the crumbling Bebo ballroom. Yolo_230X and >Beggzy< belong to a cell of impish spectres who haunt the graveyards and edge lands of social media.
In their ranks are tech wizards, who if they wished, could ply their trade for six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley. But they prefer to remain anonymous, supported by unremarkable jobs, hidden away in their bedsit base camps from which they troll dead celebrities, leave flirtatious comments on the profiles of oblivious wives and mothers, frozen in time, here, in their Avril Lavigne eye shadow and low-hanging purple fringes.
The members of this bedroom network of digital-archaeologists are delighted about a 2nd lockdown and hope that things get worse, so they can continue to point-score, competing around the clock in the utopian freedom of internet mausoleums. Soon, XTXT0 will screw the last bolts into the neck of his Geocities Frankenstein and await lightning to shock life back into the corpses of some of the greatest websites nobody visited.
(Day 13 continued) Todd fixes bits around Ena’s house, orders her a new compost bin and does two different shops. He even brings a musty shoebox of old family photographs, dating back to his childhood. Ena thinks some of her aches and pains have eased since she had this to look forward to each week. The photographs trigger all kinds of memories and stories and they each learn from one another’s lived experiences in the same town. Both make mental plans to locate further such artefacts before the next visit and Todd knows some good websites where he can find information which will help Ena answer some of the questions she had about days before his time. As Todd reaches the garden gate, four police officers await him following an anonymous phone call saying he was putting the life of a vulnerable person at risk. He sighs and shrugs his shoulders, gut-wrenching sadness crushing his soul. Honest is the only way he can be so he explains that he’s been helping Ena during a tough time. Foolishly, he names the voluntary services organisation and they are made aware of this breach of COVID rules by the police. Todd is informed his help is no longer required and Ena receives a phone call the same afternoon to inform her that her shopper will be a different person from next week. ‘Todd had to divert his time towards something unforeseen’ is the official line.
***
April is mortified when she hears that the government are set to announce a relaxing of COVID-19 restrictions for Christmas. Immediately, she hears the rustle of uncle Tony’s carrier bag, containing a homophobic joke. His jelly-baby posture, lolloping up the side of the house to seep in through Mum’s back door. The reek of him, those stained, unwashed jogging bottoms. She thought this was the year the nation would be gifted a legal doorman to turn away the family dick-slinger. She was wrong.