People LIke Her(52)

That was when I started noticing things: How often, when I visited, Grace would be in her pajamas or clothes with food stains on them, or would look like she had just got out of bed. How often she was not at work. How there was never anything in their fridge when I went around but the dregs of a bottle of white wine and some milk on the turn.

It took me a long time to work up the courage to say anything about all this to Jack. He more or less told me to mind my own business. It was Grace, not him, who let slip they were not sleeping in the same bedroom anymore. It was only much later I found out she had moved into the room they had decorated for the baby, that she was sleeping on the floor in there, on a blanket.

Grace was the one who’d asked him to move out. She’d told him it hurt to look at him. That she felt guilty every time they found themselves having a conversation that was not about the baby who was gone. She felt it was all her fault, that he thought it was all her fault but would never say it and it would just fester forever. She flinched every time he touched her. Tensed every time he came into the room. Jack said she spent all her time on her phone, in a lukewarm bath, thumb scrolling, face blank.

When he did move out, he did so with the understanding that it was only a temporary thing. If she needed space, he would give it to her. When she was ready to see him again, to talk about where they went from there, he would be ready. He was only staying about half an hour down the road, with a friend, in their spare room.

One week turned into two weeks, two weeks into four. He told me she was not answering her phone, not replying to the texts he sent her.

And then one morning, very casually, very flatly, she informed me on the phone that she had decided to file a petition for divorce.





Chapter Twelve


Emmy

“Oh, by the way, I meant to tell you, Irene called,” says Winter, several minutes after I came back from putting Bear down for his nap. While I’ve been making myself something to eat, she’s been sitting at the kitchen island, pouting at herself in her phone, adjusting her beret.

“Right,” I say, with a glance at the clock.

“She said it was something about a TV show.”

“Yeah?”

Winter nods. I smile encouragingly. The moment lengthens.

“No message?” I ask eventually.

“Oh,” says Winter after a pause. “And she wants you to call her back straightaway.”

Irene never calls unless she really has to. Emails, WhatsApps, DMs, yes. Picking up the phone? Almost unheard-of.

I didn’t get that BBC Three job. That must be what Irene is calling to tell me. That’s why she didn’t want to leave a message. I can feel it in my bones.

I don’t know why I even let myself get my hopes up, really. We’ve been here too many times before, Irene and I—been through this over and over and over. The meetings, the camera tests, the read-throughs, the waiting. The optimistic glow of that first day waiting to hear back, buoyed by memories of how friendly everybody was and how well it had seemed to go, my phone within grabbing distance at all times. The second day, anxiety starting to creep in, recurring thoughts of things I might have done better, or differently, things I wish I hadn’t said. The third day. The fourth. Then the news that I was great but they’ve gone with someone else. I was great but someone else was even greater. They wanted someone older, someone younger; they’d decided to go with someone with more of an edge, with less of an edge. It’s nothing personal, they just didn’t like my hair or my clothes or my face or my voice or my personality.

Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck them.

“Are you okay?” asks Winter. “Do you want a bit of my kombucha or something?”

“No thanks, Winter. I am afraid there are some things even a seven-quid soft drink can’t fix.” I smile through gritted teeth.

Something that’s really begun to sink in recently, something that has really started to terrify me when I wake in the middle of the night and find myself thinking about the future, is that there may be no escape route from all this. Despite all my plotting and planning, all those years of turning up to the opening of a nappy bag, pretending to love women I’d otherwise dread getting stuck in an elevator with, of flogging bum cream and water wipes, cheese spread and chicken nuggets, of responding to every pissy DM and crazy comment—all with an eye on a bigger prize—I may have just ended up stranding myself in yet another career cul-de-sac. Canoed myself, if you will, up yet another dead-end creek. And this time, I’ve made reversing even harder, as I have just enough celebrity—like a Love Island contestant, say, or an X Factor runner-up—to make returning to normal life at best mortifying and at worst impossible. I’d be like one of those former soap stars the tabloids laugh at for working at Starbucks.

Having left behind the magazine industry as it was crumbling around my ears, it could be that I’m more aware than most about the long-term prospects of this line of work. You know those cartoons where Wile E. Coyote comes to the end of the cliff and keeps going, legs furiously wheeling away, giving it his all, and then he suddenly looks down and there’s nothing underneath him? I know exactly how that coyote feels.

Anyone with any experience of the media, social or otherwise, knows this influencer stuff can’t last. Just as the once-useful Twitter is now full of angry men correcting one another’s grammar and swearing at feminists, like Myspace before it died along with the careers of all those Justin Bieber wannabes, Instagram is poised over a precipice. With women wising up to the fact that we are just saleswomen disguised as sisters, flogging them things they don’t need, can’t afford, and that won’t make them feel better anyway, even if I was willing to pop out a new kid every couple of years to keep the content flowing, Instaparenting feels like a particularly precarious way to make a living. But Dan is unlikely to be finishing that second novel any time soon, so at least one of us needs to have a long-term plan. And mine has always been to make the leap from the tiny screen you hold in your hand to the slightly bigger one in the living room.