Renée Knight - Disclaimer

Nancy comes up behind me and whispers in my ear. She finds his entreaties tedious and is impatient to see Jonathan again, so I pop him back up on the screen. He is still a work in progress, but he is almost complete. We’ve enjoyed picking out photographs: Jonathan on his eighteenth birthday, the camera we gave him hanging around his neck; Jonathan with his new backpack just before he set off for Europe; Jonathan smiling, handsome, on a beach somewhere in England — it could be anywhere, so we’ll say it’s France, the first leg of his journey. His favourite books — we still have them on our bookshelves — up they go. And music, that’s important, that’s a must. His taste is a bit last century, but that’s “cool” these days — shows he has depth, knows his stuff. We have kept him a teenager — we haven’t allowed him to sink into middle age. He is forever young, forever on his gap year, about to start at university. He still hasn’t decided where. Bristol? Manchester? All he needs now are a few friends and he must have a best friend, we must give him that. Friends will make him appear more solid, more bona fide.

Geoff has been a great help in our project. We met up again a few weeks back. He accompanied me to a small event at our local bookshop where I had been invited to do a reading from my book. They are very keen, as Geoff said, to promote local authors. It was, I’m sorry to say, a rather pitiful affair. Me, standing by a small display of books, with only a handful of people turning up to listen to an old man who had published his first novel. The wine was cheap, the crisps were stale, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. It was an ordeal. My voice cracked and I found it hard to get the words out; they lodged in my throat and tripped me up and, even though I knew I should try and make eye contact with my audience, I found myself incapable of looking up from the page. I was uncomfortable being looked at. No, I didn’t like being in the spotlight.

Geoff and I escaped to the pub as soon as we could. He felt guilty for putting me through it. It was his idea, after all. I think he had underestimated how hard it was for an elderly man who had become unused to socialising to be on display like that.

“Geoff,” I said. “Forget about it. I have.” And I picked up his empty pint and took it to the bar. When I returned with the drinks I put my hand on his, in a fatherly way. “You have been a good friend to me,” I said. “If it wasn’t for you, my book wouldn’t even have been in that bookshop. And if it wasn’t for your encouragement, I wouldn’t have had the heart to start another novel.” This got him going.

“Stephen, that’s great. What’s it about?”

“I haven’t worked out the story yet but I have a character in my head. I can see him, I can hear him.” I chuckled as I tapped the side of my head. He was in there all right. “I’m still at the research stage and I wondered whether you might be able to help me with something. I know you’ve already given me a lot of your time so I don’t like to ask…”

“No, no, it’s fine. Ask away.”

So I did. I told him the character was a teenage boy and that, although I felt confident with the characterisation after all my years in teaching, it was the techie stuff I was having difficulty with.

“I want to create a Facebook page for him. A real one…”

“You mean a fake one. A fake page? For a fictional character?”

“Ummm.” I nodded, taking a sip of my beer.

He didn’t say anything. I could hear the cogs turning: old man; teenage boys; fake Facebook page. If I say it myself, I think I handled his misgivings with agility.

“He’s not the main character, it’s actually the grandfather I want to focus on and his relationship with this boy, but still, I need to understand a bit more about the world these kids disappear into when they go online. I mean look,” I said and pointed over to a table of youngsters: drinks on the table, cigarettes standing by, faces ready to break into laughter. All normal. It could have been a scene from any decade, except they weren’t speaking. There was no conversation. They weren’t even looking at each other. Their eyes were down, on their phones, like a bunch of old ladies checking their bingo cards.

“I mean, what are they looking at?” I smiled in bafflement.

He nodded. “I see what you mean,” clunk, clunk went the cogs.

“Maybe it’s a bad idea but I feel such an imbecile around that sort of thing I just hoped you might be able to guide me through it. An idiot’s guide to Facebook and however else young people ‘communicate’ with each other.” And I tickled that word “communicate” with my fingers. “It’s an alien world to me.”

“Me too,” he said.

“Oh well, it was just a thought.” Bugger.

“But my son’s on it all the bloody time.”

“I didn’t know you had a son.”

“Yeah. He’s eighteen. Lives with his mother but he comes over every other weekend. He could probably help.”

And that’s how it started. Sundays on the Net with Geoff’s son. And in exchange for his expertise, I helped him out with his English essays. Geoff was delighted when his son started getting A’s for his homework, although I think we’d both agree that I was the more enthusiastic student. I can’t fault his boy’s teaching though. He was extremely thorough. Fifty friends, he said. At least. And he showed me how to get them. He was a good teacher and I was the perfect pupil. At times my head felt as if it would explode with all this new information, but I was greedy for it. How on earth do you get a photograph taken in the 1990s into a laptop? How do you do it? Well, now I know. And once it’s in there, spread it around. Don’t just put it on Facebook — make sure it’s on Google too.

“What sort of music does he like?” And I shrugged, suddenly the dunce in the class, and that afternoon he sent me home with some tracks on my laptop. Geoff was always there, he never left us alone together. He brought us cups of tea and I would bring with me jars of Nancy’s jam to have with our crumpets. It was a good arrangement and a very pleasant few weeks.

I passed with flying colours, equipped with all the tricks I needed to bring Jonathan to life again. Our son now has a future, and it feels good to hold it in our hands. This time, when he goes off on his travels, we can make sure we keep a firmer grip on his likes and dislikes, and the friends he picks up on the way. You can’t have too many friends, but it’s important he has one special one, a confidante, someone he can open up to.

Catherine takes the bus to work, the simplest route from her mother’s house. It’s pragmatic, not cowardly. Stephen Brigstocke is the coward. She’d kept her phone on all night, but he hadn’t called. She sits on the bus replaying in her head her nightly confessions to her mother and wonders if any of them have filtered through. Her mother hasn’t said anything, but does she know? Does she remember? Tears come at the thought that her mother knows but doesn’t judge her. She blinks them away so she can pull down the mask she must wear to get through the day. It fits her well, no one would know it was there, and she has even got used to the way it inhibits her breathing. By the time she gets off the bus she is in her stride, marching along the stretch of road towards work like a confident woman on her way to a busy day in the office, not noticing anyone she passes. Not noticing the old man in the knitted hat who has stopped to stare at her as she sweeps past. They almost touch. He smells her as she walks by. He watches her until she disappears.

She walks into the office, unwinding her silk scarf from her throat and letting its beautiful print shiver across her chest, moving as she moves. She dumps her bag on the floor and sits down in her chair, swinging round to check who else is in, but she is the first. Odd, it’s ten o’clock. She takes out her diary, thinking there must be a meeting she’s forgotten and then she notices them. Piled up on her desk. Copies of The Perfect Stranger , spines rigid, stare back at her accusingly.