Page 33 of People Skills

‘New rule. No more commenting on my work. Meal-prep is a very normal task for a personal assistant.’

‘Meal-prep for a dog though?’

‘Aggie is family.’

He shakes his head but says nothing more about it. I finish cutting up the chicken into the containers and put them all in the fridge.

‘So, it’s almost six,’ he says. ‘Do I hand my phone over to you or do we have one of those app blockers or…?’

‘Put it in there,’ I say, pointing, and he bursts out laughing.

I have bought a lockable cage for our phones. I bought it at the local newsagents. It is literally called a phone cage and it has bars and a timed lock.

‘So, we put our phones in there. All night.’

‘All night.’

‘Like overnight?’ he says, as if this is just occurring to him.

‘Yes. Is that a problem?’

‘No,’ he says.

But I feel like he’s sweating at the thought of it. I am a bit too. My phone is my alarm, my clock, my safety blanket when I can’t sleep. If I have a bad dream, I need to reach out and know it’s there, that I can scroll through mindless photos of other people’s lives, laugh at some stupid skit, play a chess game, do a crossword, and not think about my own brain’s problems for a while. But one night without it won’t kill me (will it?). I’ll try just one night and see how I go. Hillary might have an emergency. Aggie might have a heart attack in the night. Is it sad that I am more worried about a French bulldog having a heart attack than I am about something happening to my parents? No. It’s just probability. Aggie’s high risk.

‘What about laptops and iPads?’ he says.

‘We keep them out here,’ I say, tapping a cardboard box I have dug up. Laptops are less of a temptation. I never grab my laptop in the middle of the night to scroll. They don’t need to be behind literal bars.

‘And the TV?’ he says. I hold up the remote, and put it in the phone cage along with our phones.

I shut the cage door and set the timer for twelve hours.

‘It’s done,’ I say dramatically.

We stare at each other and suddenly I feel sick. Give me my phone back, I want to scream. I want to lunge at the cage and smash it against the ground. I can’t be left alone with Xavier, who is basically a stranger, for a whole night with nothing for us to do. I can’t think of anything to say. What did people in the eighties and nineties do all night? I try to picture what happens on Friends. They hung out. They went out. They had conversations. What else? I want to look it up, but I can’t. Why did I think this would be good for our brains? My brain feels like it’s shrinking in on itself. It needs stimulation. It needs internet access to jumpstart it.

I fix a smile on my face, since this is my big idea. This is fine.

Xavier looks equally nervous at the evening looming ahead of us.

‘I feel smarter already,’ I say.

‘So, dinner?’ he says. ‘I could order pizza.’

We both turn and look at the locked-up phones.

‘I’ll walk down the street and get it,’ he says.

‘Okay, great,’ I say. ‘Oh, before you go. I realise we haven’t discussed, uh, a few things. About the house. And inviting people over,’ I say, desperately trying to sound casual. I can’t deal with him bringing randoms home if I can’t even block out the noise by listening to a podcast.

‘Inviting people over?’ he says, looking confused.

‘Partying. That kind of thing,’ I say.

‘Partying with who? My mother?’ he says.

‘You might invite friends down here.’