The O’Hara Affair. Kate Thompson

And there are some dodgy areas you’ll want to stay clear of.’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘Porn, of course. Sometimes you stumble across some pretty icky stuff. Let’s go.’

      The next few minutes were spent choosing a generic avatar for Bethany. They hit upon a pretty girl whom they decided to call Poppet, after Bethany’s cat. Then Bethany dictated her email address and her date of birth to Tara, and supplied her with a password.

      ‘You’re in!’ sang Tara, checking out Bethany’s in-box, and clicking to activate her account. ‘Welcome to Second Life, Poppet! Let’s go and make some friends!’

      She passed her laptop back to Bethany, who took her first stumbling steps into Second Life in the guise of pretty little Poppet in a pink-and-white polka-dot frock. Someone called Arabella flounced past her. Someone called Rambo bumped into her. Someone called Samuel invited her to sit beside him. By the end of the afternoon Poppet had learned how to fly, how to shop, and how to blow kisses. She’d visited a pub, a club, and Trinity College Dublin. She had made friends with a girl from Toulouse and a boy from upstate New York. She’d laughed and joked and stuck her tongue out at a clown who’d tried to dance with her. Bethany wasn’t shy here! She had none of the hang-ups that stymied her socially in real life. And just as she was about to approach a haughty-looking diva and ask where she’d got her hair, Tara’s laptop ran out of juice.

      ‘We’ll meet up tonight, yeah?’ suggested Tara. ‘Mitzy and Poppet could go virtual clubbing together.’

      ‘Cool! What time?’

      ‘Ten o’clock on Welcome Island?’

      ‘It’s a date.’

      Tara shut the lid of her notebook and yawned. Then: ‘Sheesh,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I got so caught up in that that I didn’t even see him go.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Shane Byrne.’

      Bethany glanced over her shoulder. The place where Shane Byrne had been was empty, his coffee cup abandoned. But his dark-haired companion was still working away diligently on his BlackBerry.

      Later that day, Fleur accessed Bethany O’Brien’s Facebook page. She’d changed her status to ‘Tiresia rocks!’

      Tiresia rocks? A bogus fortune-teller with an imperfect understanding of amateur psychology? Fleur gave a mental shrug. Whatever. Maybe she had made a difference to Bethany’s self-esteem, and to the self-esteem of the dozens of other girls who had come to her for consultations. Her mumbo jumbo certainly hadn’t done any harm. She reckoned that, on the whole, she’d provided reasonably good entertainment and had been value for money.

      Scrolling down Bethany’s update, Fleur smiled when she read the following: ‘Got myself a job on The O’Hara Affair! Positive thinking works, mes amis!’

      Bethany had, Fleur noticed, acquired some new friends today, on Facebook. Lola, Kitten, Carrie and Tara had all sent her messages, thanking her for the add. Hmm. Maybe it was time for her to add another one. Clicking on her web browser, Fleur typed ‘sign up Facebook’. Then she entered the following into the relevant boxes.

      First name? Flirty.

      Last name? O’Farrell.

      Password? Tiresia.

      Gender? Female.

      Birthday? Here Fleur hesitated. If she put her real birthday, would Bethany bother responding? Probably not. Why would an eighteen-year-old want to befriend a forty-something, after all? She reread Bethany’s post. Positive thinking works, mes amis! The girl was upbeat, happy. What if she started posting updates like the ones Fleur had read when she was researching her role as Madame Tiresia? She remembered the desperation, the fear, the loneliness in those posts:

      …topping out at a hundred, I have more Facebook friends than real life ones. Sad, or what?…

      some ‘friendships’ should never be resurrected, not even in a virtual sense…

      Even tho I hate this person, I guess I’d better add them as my friend. I’ll take ANYONE now…

      Fleur had helped Bethany recover a little of her self-esteem. She didn’t want to see that self-esteem plummet. Until Bethany was ready to take wing, Fleur would be there for her. She returned her attention to her Facebook application, typed 23/7/88 into the box marked ‘Birthday’, and pressed Save.

      Flirty O’Farrell was just twenty-one, and she was going to make a new friend.

      Poppet was flying over Shakespeare Island, wishing that somebody interesting would come out and play. Mitzy hadn’t turned up this evening in their usual meeting place, and when she’d texted Tara, the word back was that her broadband was malfunctioning.

      Bethany had been visiting Second Life for a week now. Working on the movie kept her busy every day, and in the evening, living vicariously in front of her laptop was proving to be a good way of winding down.

      Although ‘busy’ might be a bit of a misnomer. Hanging around the film set was as dull as ever. It was lucky that she was fed by the caterers, because come seven o’clock when she arrived home to Díseart, the last thing she felt like doing was feeding herself. Her parents had gone back to Dublin, her mother exhorting her not to hold any wild parties in their cottage. As if! Who would she invite?

      It was the first time she had stayed in the cottage on her own. She had thought it might feel spooky, but tucked up in bed as she was now with the full moon shining through the window and the wash of waves within yards of the garden gate, she felt peculiarly tranquil. The lullaby lapping of waves had always had this effect on her. She remembered falling asleep to the sound when, on holiday as a child, her mother had finished telling her her bedtime story, before backing out of the room with a ‘Night, night, sleep tight.’ And Bethany had gone to sleep dreaming of princesses and dragons and unicorns and wizards. It was funny that now, in another century, the princesses and dragons and unicorns and wizards still existed for her, not in the fairy stories of her imagination, but in the virtual world on the screen in front of her.

      Bethany had always had a vivid imagination. Shortly after her sixth birthday she had terrified her mother by readying herself to jump off an upstairs windowsill because she believed she could fly like Peter Pan. She’d queued with her father outside book shops at midnight, waiting for the new Harry Potter, which she would devour in a single sitting. She’d discovered a computer game called Final Fantasy, in which, for her, the characters lived and breathed. She supposed that her imagination, her facility for transforming herself into different people and transporting herself to different worlds, was responsible for her all-consuming desire to become an actress. But as an extra on The O’Hara Affair, so far the only emotion she’d been required to register had been one of resigned stoicism.

      But then, acting – proper acting – bore no relation to extra work, where you were just a piece of furniture, really. A mobile prop. Acting allowed your imagination to soar: an actress could be starry-eyed Juliet one day, tragic Ophelia the next. If she was in belligerent mode, she could be Katherina the shrew; if she was in good form, she could be vivacious Beatrice. All those fabulous heroines who had trodden the boards of the real live Globe Theatre, four hundred years ago! Rosalind, Viola, Portia, Cleopatra…

      What would Shakespeare have made of this virtual world, where the theatre in which his plays had been performed was now displayed digitally, on an LCD screen? Would he applaud it, be excited by it? Or would he—

      Oh! A green dot told her that someone else had arrived onto the island via Teleport. With a click of the mouse, Bethany sent Poppet off in search of the new arrival.

      A youth was standing on a street corner, looking lost. He had floppy hair and Johnny Depp eyes. He was wearing something vaguely piratical: a bandanna, leather jerkin and boots. His name was Hero, and he was a cutie. Poppet moved over to him.

      Hi, she said.

      Hi,