We’d only been talking for two minutes and things were already frosty. ‘You were the one who said the power had gone out!’
‘Well, that’s because, as you know, I spend Monday to Friday outside the city in a very remote region of—’
‘Oh yes, how are the Peruvian women prisoners?’ I asked pointedly, disdain curling round every syllable.
‘Do you have to be so flippant about everything?’
‘I’m not being flippant,’ I said, although I was. Not that she could ever tell either way. ‘Really, I want to know. How are they?’
I knew the Peruvian women prisoners would keep her talking for a good ten minutes. After all, they were the reason, or the flimsy excuse, she’d given for packing two holdalls and a wheeled suitcase and hotfooting it over the Atlantic so she could spend two years writing a research paper on The Effects of a Tree-Hugging, Happy Clappy Approach to Incarceration on the Homicidal Tendencies and Behaviour of Long-Term Female Inmates in the Peruvian Prison System. I’m paraphrasing because the actual title of her research paper would make anyone fall asleep before they finished reading it.
Pat waffled on and I just ‘Hmm’ed every now and again as I thought about what my first tweet of the evening would be. Usually I tweet at least once every five minutes, but Barney said it was really antisocial to keep prodding at my iPhone when we were together and I was now experiencing severe Twitter withdrawal.
‘Anyway, Jeane, how are you?’ Pat had got to the end of extolling the virtues of teaching violent, serial-killery women how to meditate and was now ready to get on my case about, well, everything. ‘How’s the flat?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘The flat’s fine too.’
‘You are keeping it tidy, aren’t you? And you are doing the washing up and cleaning the kitchen floor because otherwise you’ll get ants—’
‘We’re on the sixth floor. I don’t see how any ant would be able to climb up that many flights of stairs, unless they took the lift.’ Pat sucked in her breath. ‘Everything’s very tidy.’ It wasn’t as if she ever looked at my blog and saw that I’d set up a DustCam (which was my old laptop trained on a patch of sideboard) to try and prove Quentin Crisp’s theory that, after four years, the dust didn’t get any worse.
‘Well, if you say so.’ I could tell she didn’t believe me. ‘How’s school? Ms Ferguson has been emailing me. She says everything seems all right.’
Ms Ferguson and I were tight and unless I suddenly marched across the school grounds spraying people with gunshot, she wasn’t going to spill to my mother my lesser crimes of arguing with my teachers, setting my iPhone with an alert and ringtone only audible to sensitive teenage ears so I could receive emails in class, and the battle of wills I was currently locked in with Mrs Spiers, my A-level Art teacher, over my refusal to paint a boring life study of some twigs. Y’know, the usual stuff.
‘That’s because everything is,’ I said. ‘So, I should probably let you go.’
‘Wait! Have you heard from Roy?’
‘Yeah. He’s coming to London soon and we’ll get together then,’ I told her, gazing round at the mess and thinking about the time in the not-so-distant future that I’d have to clear it up before my father saw it.
‘And you’ve spoken to Bethan?’
‘Yes.’ I was starting to sound a little exasperated. ‘We Skype each other all the time. You could Skype me. It would be cheaper than calling.’
‘You know I’m not very good at computers.’
‘There’s nothing to be good at. You just download the app and click on install and your computer does the rest. It’s easy. Even you can do it.’
‘Jeane, don’t start.’
‘I’m not starting anything. I’m just saying that I’m online all the time and if you had Skype, you could just get in touch whenever—’
‘Well, I’m not online much. There isn’t an internet café on every corner.’
‘You said they had Starbucks, which all have free Wi-Fi so I don’t see what the problem is.’
‘No, you never do.’ She gave a bitten-off sigh. ‘Why do you always have to turn every conversation into an argument, Jeane?’
‘It takes two people to have an argument, Pat,’ I reminded her, because when I did have an argument, I never backed down. Even when I knew I should. I was born to be ornery. ‘I have to go now.’
‘Will you at least say goodbye properly?’ she demanded.
‘Goodbye properly,’ I drawled, which was mean when Pat couldn’t help what she was any more than I could help being a snarky little cow. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I still have a ton of coursework to get through and the thought of my Business Studies spreadsheets is making me cranky.’
‘Well, I’m relieved that it’s not me that’s making you so cranky,’ she said in a slightly less huffy voice. ‘But you promised you wouldn’t leave your homework to the last moment.’
It wasn’t the last moment. The last moment would be filling in columns as the register was read out. ‘I know,’ I gritted out. ‘Sorry about that.’
There was another two minutes and thirty-seven agonising seconds of content-free conversation before Pat finally rang off.
I stretched my arms over my head to ease all the aches and pains in my neck and shoulders that always occurred when I talked to Pat, then I double-clicked on Firefox, then on TweetDeck, and connected my iPhone to my computer so I could upload the pictures I’d taken that afternoon.
My fingers flew over the keys as I wrote my first tweet of the evening. Then I hit return and within ten seconds someone had replied.
And, just like that, I wasn’t alone any more.
I love Sunday evenings. The other six evenings of the week are so crammed full of homework, football practice, school council meetings, debating society business and doing admin work for my parents that even going out with my friends feels like one more thing to be ticked off my to-do list. Besides, my parents are adamant that I need ten hours’ sleep to prepare me for the week ahead so I’m strongly discouraged (some people might even call it forbidden) from going out on Sunday evenings.
My mum was bathing my little sisters and as I padded up the narrow stairs to my attic bedroom I could hear Melly complaining bitterly about sharing a bath with Alice. ‘She’s five, I’m seven. I need my dignity, Mum.’
I grinned as I shut my bedroom door and carefully placed my laden tray on the desk. On Sunday evenings my mum expects me to clean out the fridge of all the food that’s left over from the weekend before the supermarket delivery arrives on Monday morning. Also we’re not meant to eat what they call ‘rubbish’ Monday to Thursday so it’s the last chance to stuff my face with greasy, sugary food.
Munching on a cold spring roll, I switched on my computer so I could finish my Physics homework. They think I finish all my assignments before I go out on Friday night, but they couldn’t be more wrong.
Mum knocked on the door as I was jotting down the last of my formulae. ‘Michael? Everything all right in there?’
She wasn’t allowed to come in unless she had my express permission since the time she’d caught me with Megan, my girlfriend before Scarlett, in a compromising position on my IKEA rug.
There’d been a week of long, excruciating discussions about personal boundaries and getting girls into trouble. Now, whenever Mum put my clean clothes in a laundry basket outside my door, there were always packets of condoms stuffed into the pockets of my jeans. I had ninety-three condoms still in their shiny foil wrappers at the last count.
‘Yeah, everything’s cool,’ I called out. ‘I took the last of the chocolate chip pancakes Dad made yesterday, was that OK?’
‘Better in your mouth than on my hips,’ Mum said. ‘What are you doing in there anyway?’
Sometimes I thought back with fondness to those halcyon days when she used to barge into my room without knocking. It was almost preferable to the way she stood outside my door and bombarded me with questions.
‘Just mucking about on the
computer,’ I said vaguely.
‘Well, Dad and I are about to watch a DVD if you want to join us,’ she persisted. ‘Nothing too chick-flicky.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ I ground out, ‘Really, Mum, I’ll be down later.’
‘If you’re sure …’
I didn’t answer, just grunted, because if I carried on talking she’d be there for ever. Eventually I heard her tread on the stairs – she was the only person I knew who could make her footsteps sound reproachful. I turned back to Facebook. Scarlett was online but as soon as I logged on, she logged off. Or turned her status to ‘invisible’ so I’d think she’d logged off – either way, it didn’t look good for the limping, bleeding beast that was all that was left of our relationship.
Almost as if my fingers were acting independently of my brain, I saw them type ‘Jeane Smith + blog + Twitter’ into the Google search box. I didn’t know why I was bothering when the five minutes I’d had of Jeane Smith that afternoon were enough to last me the rest of the decade and anyway, there had to be thousands of women called Jeane Smith who had blogs. Even if it seemed like a really poseurish thing to do, to stick an e on the end of your name so it sounded French or something and … oh!
The very first link of the 1,390,000,000 search results directed me to her blog, Adorkable.
There was a picture of Jeane, so I knew I’d come to the right place. Underneath were the words, ‘I have nothing to declare but my dorkiness’. Well, she’d got that right.
Jeane Smith lives in London and is a blogger, a tweeter, a dreamer, a dare-to-dreamer, an agent provocateur, a knitter and an iconoclast in training.
One day, a few years ago, she started a blog called Adorkable, so she’d have somewhere to talk about the many, many things she liked. And also the many, many things that gave her conniptions. Then people started reading this blog and a year after its creation it was voted Best Lifestyle Blog by the Guardian, as well as winning a Bloggie Award, and has since been featured in The Times, the New York Post, the Observer and on the websites Jezebel and Salon.
Your humble and articulate blogmistress also made it to number seven in the Guardian’s ‘30 People Under the Age of 30 Who are Changing the World’ list and is also considered to be a social networking and social trends expert (whatever the hell that is) and consults for all sorts of trendy companies with offices in Soho and Hoxton. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, The Times, NYLON, i-D and Le Monde and she’s spoken about youth trends at conferences in London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan and Berlin. Jeane also writes a style column for the Japanese teen magazine KiKi and has a regular stall at several very wellattended jumble sales in the Greater London area.
As well as being a blog, lifestyle brand and trend-spotting agency, Adorkable is also a state of being. On our own we’re dorks, geeks, misfits, losers, weirdos, the downtrodden – but together we’re heavy. Oh yeah.
Whatever, I thought to myself because it was all so much bollocks. Obviously. She was just a seventeen-year-old girl with serious attitude problems – and people who went to school and lived with their parents and had to stick their hand up and ask permission to go to the loo in the middle of a study period did not change the world or have wanky consultancy gigs. They just didn’t.
Jeane Smith was full of shit and I didn’t even know why I was still staring at her blog and something called a DustCam. It seemed as if she updated her blog at least once a day so she must have a lot of downtime to kill when she wasn’t sourcing smelly second-hand dresses and being an iconoclast in training. I scrolled down lots of pretentious posts about getting in touch with your inner dork and the entries she made at 8.15 every morning so she could show off that day’s colour-clashing ensemble with running commentary:
Swirly patterned frock: donated by Ben’s grandma
Stripy tights: GapKids (Shouldn’t I have outgrown the children’s department by now?)
Cherry blossom sneakers: jumble sale
Candy necklace: from my local newsy
I didn’t get why Jeane was so proud of her truly appalling sense of fashion. OK, I wasn’t rushing out to buy a copy of Vogue Pour Homme each month but I bought my clothes from Hollister, Jack Wills and Abercrombie & Fitch so I obviously knew what looked good and swirly patterns and stripes on fusty old clothes didn’t. Anybody that had two working eyes in their head could see that.
At least the Jeane striking a variety of exaggerated modelly poses (she gave her poses names like ‘PoutyFace’ and ‘Oldtime PoutyFace’ and even ‘Oooh, my sciatica’) was a bit happier-looking than the snarling version I’d seen that afternoon, but apart from that I didn’t know what this whole exercise had proved. Well, other than that Jeane Smith was even more up herself online than she was in real life and it was no wonder that Barney was sick of her. I was all ready to find a corner of the internet that didn’t have Jeane’s dumb dork agenda all over it when I came across a YouTube link and clicked on it without thinking.
I reared back in my chair with an alarmingly girly shriek as Jeane appeared in shiny tights, leotard and with a towelling headband strapped across her forehead. She looked ridiculous but very pleased with herself as she was joined by two older girls, at least a head taller than her but wearing the same stupid workout gear.
Then I heard the unmistakeable hook from ‘Single Ladies’ and the three of them started doing the dance. The Beyoncé dance. There was even the hand flick, which didn’t make up for the fact that Jeane insisted on going left every time her backing dancers went right, resulting in giggles and a lot of good-natured pushing and shoving. I couldn’t help sniggering too because watching someone you didn’t like make a tool of themselves was always comedy gold but soon my sneering became smiling because … I don’t know … Maybe it was the way Jeane swung her non-existent hips and sucked in her cheeks and was absolutely unself-conscious, unlike every other girl I knew. They were always checking their hair and thrusting out their tits like everyone was watching them, even when nobody was.
Finally, Jeane attempted to leap in the air and knocked into one of the other girls during her very shaky landing. The pair of them collapsed on the floor. The last girl standing struggled on but she was laughing so hard that when Jeane hooked her foot round her ankle, she gladly sank down on the pile so all I could see was a gangle of shiny-tighted legs. The song stopped and before the screen went blank, I could hear a voice saying, ‘Jeane, you are such a muppet.’
I skipped past the link to her Etsy and CafePress shops (was there any part of the internet that she hadn’t got her sticky paws on?) selling branded mugs, T-shirts and tote bags that said stuff like ‘I Heart Dorks’ and ‘Dork is the New Black’, so I could go directly to her Twitter page.
It didn’t make much sense. But Twitter didn’t make much sense to me. All those people posting about what they’d eaten for breakfast or how much they didn’t want to do their German homework all seemed a bit too self-indulgent. Like, every single random thought had to be tweeted for posterity. Obviously they were all total losers who didn’t have any friends, so they went on Twitter and talked bollocks with a whole load of other social rejects who didn’t have any friends.
OK, I was on Twitter, like I was on Facebook and MySpace and Bebo, but apart from one tweet (‘So, what happens next?’) I’d never bothered with it. From the look of Jeane’s Twitter, I’d been right to leave the tweeting to other people because her Twitter feed was mostly replies to other tweets and it was like reading thirty in-jokes that weren’t that funny.
I also didn’t find it funny that Jeane had over half a million deluded fools following her tweets. How was that even possible? Were her tweets sprinkled with magic dust? There were actual proper celebrities who were on TV and in the papers who had fewer followers than she did.
As I was staring in disbelief, the page updated itself.
adork_able Jeane Smith
Can this really call itself a cake when its main ingredients are cheese and carrots?
I clicked on t
he link to see a picture of a slice of the moist and delicious carrot cake I’d eaten earlier at the jumble sale.
Jeane spent the next five minutes debating the finer points of carrot cake and cake in general with the multitudes hanging off her every tweeted syllable.
adork_able Jeane Smith
I’m not adverse to a smidgeon of chilli in my chocolate (quite yummy) but not sure where I stand on rosewater cupcakes.
I was automatically logged in as @winsomedimsum (all combinations of Michael Lee and my date of birth had been taken) and I was leaping into the fray before I had time to come up with a million and one reasons why it wasn’t a good idea.
winsomedimsum is yum
@adork_able How do you feel about parma violets?
She shot back a reply instantly.
adork_able Jeane Smith
@winsomedimsum I like the idea of them more than the reality of them. They taste like the smell of old ladies’ handbags. You feel me?
I knew exactly what she meant. When my grandmother came to stay, she was always asking me to fetch her reading glasses or her spare handkerchief or ‘fifty pence to get yourself something nice’ from her handbag and it smelt all powdery and faintly floral and musty, just like a tube of Parma Violets.
winsomedimsum is yum
@adork_able Anyway, once you’ve eaten water chestnut cake, carrot cake is for lightweights.
adork_able Jeane Smith
@winsomedimsum OMAG! I so want to try that. And what’s the red stuff in Chinese buns? It’s muy moresome.
winsomedimsum is yum
@adork_able Red bean paste. It’s kind of an acquired taste.
adork_able Jeane Smith
@winsomedimsum Oh, I’ve definitely acquired it.
Then we talked about how we both hated milk, ‘except in tea, of course,’ which led to talk of yoghurt and cottage cheese, which a friend of Jeane’s called Patti swore blind they dyed red and used as gore in horror films.