The conversation has sapped my appetite. I put down my knife and fork. ‘I hardly use Facebook. I only joined to stay in touch with family.’ My sister Sarah lives in New Zealand, with a tanned, athletic husband and two perfect children I’ve only met once. One’s a lawyer and the other works with disabled children. It doesn’t surprise me that Sarah’s kids have turned out so well; she was always the golden girl when we were growing up. My parents never said it, but it was always in their eyes: why can’t you be more like your sister?
Sarah was studious; helpful round the house. She didn’t play her music loud or sleep till noon at the weekends. Sarah stayed on at school, left with good grades and a place at secretarial college. She didn’t drop out, pregnant. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if she had done; if our parents would have been as hard on her as they were on me.
Pack your bags, my dad said, when he found out. Mum started crying, but whether it was because of the baby or because I was leaving, I couldn’t tell.
‘You’d be surprised what you can get from Facebook,’ Isaac says. He pulls his phone – a sleek iPhone 6s – from his pocket and swipes deftly across the screen. Everyone watches him, as though he’s about to perform a magic trick. He flashes the screen towards me and I see the blue-and-white branding of Facebook. My name is written in the search field, and beneath it is row upon row of Zoe Walkers, each with a thumbnail photo. ‘Which one is you?’ he says, scrolling through them. He taps through to the second page.
‘There.’ I put my hand out to point. ‘That one, third from the bottom. The one with the cat.’ It’s a picture of Biscuit sunning himself on the gravel at the front of the house. ‘You see,’ I say triumphantly, ‘I don’t even use my own photo for my profile. I’m quite a private person, really.’ Not like my kids, I think, who let their whole lives play out on Instagram, or Snapchat, or whatever’s flavour of the month right now. Katie’s forever taking selfies, pouting this way and that, then swiping through endless filters to find the most flattering.
Isaac opens my page. I don’t know what I expected to see, but it wasn’t my entire Facebook profile.
￡50k a year and they think they’ve got the right to strike? I’d swap jobs with a train driver any day!
Stuck on a train … AGAIN. Thank heavens for wifi!
6??! Come on Len that was worth at least an 8!!
‘Strictly,’ I explain, embarrassed to see my life reduced to one-liners about TV shows and hellish commutes. I’m alarmed by the ease with which he appears to have accessed my account. ‘How have you been able to log on as me?’
Isaac laughs. ‘I haven’t. This is what anyone can see if they click on your profile.’ He catches sight of my horrified face. ‘Your privacy settings are wide open.’ To prove it, he clicks on the ‘about me’ tab, where my email address is there for anyone to see. Studied at Peckham Comprehensive, it says, as though that were something to be proud of. Worked at Tesco. I half expect it to say ‘knocked up at seventeen’.
‘Oh God! I had no idea.’ I vaguely remember filling out these details: the jobs I’ve had, the films I like and the books I’ve read, but I’d thought it was just for me; a sort of online diary.
‘The point I’m trying to make,’ Isaac says, clicking once more, on a tab marked ‘photos of Zoe’, ‘is if someone wanted to use a picture of you, there are plenty to choose from.’ He scrolls through dozens of images, most of which I’ve never seen before.
‘But I haven’t uploaded these!’ I say. I see a photo of me from behind, taken at a barbecue at Melissa’s and Neil’s last summer, and consider whether my bum is really that big, or if it’s simply an unflattering angle.
‘Your friends have. All these photos’ – there must be dozens of them – ‘are ones other people have uploaded and tagged you in. You can untag yourself if you want, but what you really need to do is sort out your privacy settings. I can help you, if you want?’
‘It’s fine. I’ll sort it out.’ Embarrassment is making me abrupt, and I make myself say thank you. ‘Has everyone finished? Katie, love, will you give me a hand clearing the table?’ Everyone starts stacking plates and carrying dishes out to the kitchen, and Simon squeezes my hand before very obviously changing the subject.
When everyone has gone I sit in the kitchen with a cup of tea. Simon and Katie are watching some black-and-white movie, and Justin has gone out to see a mate. The house is quiet and I bring up Facebook on my phone, feeling as though I’m doing something wrong. I look at the photos, recognising the album Isaac showed me on his own phone. I scroll through them slowly. Some of the photos aren’t even of me, and eventually I understand I’ve been tagged in pictures of Katie, or old school photos from back in the day. Melissa’s tagged me and a bunch of other people in a photo of her own legs, taken by the pool on a holiday last year.
Jealous, girls???!! reads the caption.