People LIke Her(20)
She was sensible enough to know that she couldn’t compete for the established fashion and beauty stars, so she built her own—what’s the collective noun for influencers? An endorsement?—in niche areas. I was one of her first clients, and while she may have cheated slightly and bought my first few thousand follower bots to give me a kick-start, the rest have been real people won with pure graft. I’ve cultivated my prime position in the pod—my inner circle of five Instamums who play the algorithm by liking and commenting on one another’s every post immediately, sending them to the top of our followers’ feeds—with the same care as a CEO would chart the company’s position in the FTSE 100.
Irene takes off her Chloé glasses and places them on the desk, flicks her hair from her shoulders and raises a perfectly arched brow. There’s not a single strand out of place in her blunt-cut, jet-black fringe, which frames sharp features and skin so unblemished it looks like it’s been run through a Clarendon filter. Not that it ever has been—like a drug dealer who won’t get high on their own supply, not a single photo of Irene exists on social media. She reels off the list of Mamabare gigs in the pipeline, including a shoot with a toilet paper company, a podcast, and a day judging the You Glow Mama Awards.
“I’ve been chasing them, but we haven’t heard back yet about the BBC Three gig. I’ll keep you posted,” she says, with a little shrug.
While Irene says she supports my plans to pivot into TV presenting, to use the following I’ve built to make a real-life name for Emmy Jackson independent of Mamabare, it’s quite clear she doesn’t actually think I’m cut out to be the next Stacey Dooley. Sadly, this is a view that seems to be shared by most people who work in TV. I’ll admit I’m not a natural—somehow the honest mum stuff that sounds so plausible written down feels fake and forced on-screen, and it’s harder to come up with it off the cuff with a camera trained on my face, so my eyes dart around wildly and I stumble over words. But I didn’t get the Instagram thing right straightaway, and now look where we are. I’m playing the long game here, and every audition is a little less awful than the last, every screen test not quite as awkward.
I can’t be answering 442 daily messages from strangers forever.
“There’s one more thing we need to discuss. You’ve got a busy month coming up, and I don’t think you’re going to manage all your engagements, and keep on top of everything else, on your own with a newborn. So we have found you an assistant.”
Irene can see I am about to object. She holds her hand up.
“Don’t worry. It won’t cost you a thing, I’ll take care of it. She’s one of my new signings, actually. I pitched it to her as an opportunity to be mentored by one of my stars. A pretty little thing. Likes hats,” she says. “Her name is Winter, and she’ll be at your house on Monday morning at ten a.m.”
It is clear that’s the end of that discussion.
Irene spends the last five minutes of our meeting rattling off my media appearances: TV and radio rent-a-mum guest slots for which I generally just have to offer a couple of uncontroversial opinions on whatever parenting topic has hit the news and then, if possible, drop in a mention of the #greydays campaign, as it’s Mamabare’s thing. For an influencer, a pet cause gives us something to bang on about when we run out of things to say about ourselves.
All the mental health stuff has been getting a bit too depressing recently, though—my downbeat posts aren’t doing so well with engagement, and that’s been putting some brands off. It’s hard to sell shower gel the next post along from a heartfelt monologue about forgetting who you are as a human being after having a baby. We can’t drop the campaign entirely in case someone else muscles in on the territory, so we’ve decided to introduce a #yaydays strand for some counterbalance. We need a big wow event to launch it, an authentic reason for a real party that my pod of A-list Instamums can be persuaded to come to without demanding to be paid.
There’s an obvious contender: Coco’s fourth birthday party.
Chapter Five
Dan
We don’t often argue, Emmy and I. Very early on in our relationship, I realized there was no point. Whether or not we argue, she’ll get her way eventually, and at least if we don’t argue I don’t find myself getting the silent treatment or having to apologize. And for the most part, I must admit that once the dust has settled, she does pretty much always turn out to have been right. About that weird thick silver wedding ring I wanted? Right all along. About the lights in the living room? So right. A great many of the things, in fact, that I have tried to dig my heels in about and made a fuss about over the years have turned out to be, in retrospect, absurd.
I guess the truth is that marriage really is about compromise. Which is not to say I always feel that we are compromising equally, or that we are meeting in the middle. Which is not to say that I always feel Emmy has necessarily fully thought through the impact that her life choices will make on the rest of us, the pressures they might place on us as a unit. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are a unit, a team, and if you stop being a team, then a marriage stops being a marriage. If I had been allowed to write my own wedding vows—although thank God Emmy put the kibosh on that idea—that was one of the things I would probably have said.
When it comes to my daughter’s birthday party, though, I really feel like I have to put my foot down.