People LIke Her(17)
We did laugh about some of that stuff afterward, once we’d put Coco to bed that night. We laughed, but I could tell that Emmy was secretly still pretty pissed off about the whole thing too. “That judgy cow,” she suddenly huffed, apropos of nothing, about twenty minutes after I thought we’d both let the subject drop. “You realize whose benefit all that was really for, don’t you?”
I said something bland that I hoped would be placatory.
“Do you think she’d have talked to us—to me—like that if I were a lawyer? If I worked in advertising? If I did literally anything else for a living? There’s a kid in Coco’s year with double ear piercings and a kid who craps themselves every morning and just sits there in it and a kid who only eats sausages and a kid who has had nits since last spring and I’m the parent who’s being invited to feel shit about myself?”
“It’s completely absurd,” I said.
“You’re absolutely right,” I added.
“Kids make stuff up all the time,” I observed. “All kids do that.”
Another lull in the conversation followed.
There would also be more cause for concern, I pointed out, with the whole lying thing, if our daughter was actually any good at it. To be an effective liar you need to be able to remember all the things you have made up, keep track of each tiny tweak to the truth, always have your story straight. Emmy is excellent at this. Coco is not. Without blinking, she’ll tell you three contradictory things in the same sentence. She’ll claim she didn’t do something that you’ve just stood there and watched her do. I wouldn’t put it past her to deny she’s doing something even as she’s right in front of you doing it. If I say that my daughter is a terrible liar, I mean that in every sense.
To be perfectly honest, I generally find this quite funny under normal circumstances. Like when Coco tells her little friends there’s a secret room at our house that is full of sweets. Or when she’s telling everyone all about our holiday on the moon. Most of the time Coco’s lies are so nonsensical and transparent there’s nothing else you can do but laugh.
These are not normal circumstances.
As my immediate relief at finding my daughter safe and sound has ebbed, so my frustration at not knowing exactly what happened in those eight and a half minutes has grown. I still have no idea why Coco went off or where she went or how she got down to the bottom floor of the shopping center. I still have no idea where she acquired that teddy. As I give her a bath, as I’m brushing her teeth, I keep asking her questions, and I keep getting answers that are vague or can’t be true or contradict the answer she gave me to some other question just two minutes ago.
I ask Coco why she wandered off in the first place, and she tells me she doesn’t know. I ask her why she was going to the bookshop, and she says she can’t remember that either. I ask her if anyone tried to stop her, if anyone tried to speak to her at all. She yawns. She says she doesn’t remember. We’re getting nowhere. It’s past her bedtime. In the hall I can hear Emmy hurriedly kicking her shoes off and hanging her coat on the banister.
I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off Coco. Not for a second.
The truth is, I’ve always been paranoid about all this stuff. About three months after we found out Emmy was pregnant with Coco, we went to the cinema. It was a film about some creep kidnapping a kid, and I actually had to get up and stumble over everyone’s legs and shoes and walk out. I’m not talking about a horror movie or anything. I am talking about some stupid thriller. It was horrible. The film. The experience. I was sitting there in the cinema, and I could feel my throat closing up, my heart pounding. To be fair, I was quite hungover. But what kept going through my head was that there really are people out there in the world like that. Weirdos. Predators. Pedophiles. And this is what I was like even before we decided to share our family life online. Before the world was full of people who know or think they know how much money we’re making from this gig, know exactly what we look like and what our son and daughter look like, what kind of life we live.
How do you impress on your child the importance of not speaking to strangers when they see Mummy greet every fan who says hi like a long-lost friend?
I suspect that in every marriage there are one or two big topics that it is impossible to discuss without things quickly getting heated. Topics that lurk beneath the surface and most of the time you both manage to navigate around or avoid entirely. Topics that you have argued about so many times or so sharply that every time they come up you find your hackles preemptively rising, your defenses going up, a series of half-repressed memories of previous fights resurfacing.
Just like the time I thought I saw someone surreptitiously taking pictures of Coco at the café in the park and freaked out, just like the time I convinced myself someone was staring at her at the pool, I already know that the discussion I am about to have with Emmy—at least the discussion we have once I explain what happened and stop apologizing—is going to go in exactly the same circles as it always does. Have we made a mistake? Are we doing something awful? Is there anything else we could do to make ourselves safer? Have we, by putting our lives and our children’s lives out there on the internet for all to see, done something monumentally foolish? Are we putting Coco and Bear at risk? Is all this bad for them? Is it going to skew their sense of self, how they see the world? Is it going to fuck them up somehow, in the long term? Are we terrible people?