People LIke Her(56)
There is nothing to say, and you can never stop saying it.
I got my milk. I got my paper. I was heading for the checkout when Jack came around the end of the aisle right ahead of me. I practically walked straight into him.
“Oh,” I said.
He looked up, raised an apologetic hand, muttered a sorry, steered the cart in a rather exaggerated way out of my path, and kept on going.
And as I turned to watch Jack making his way up the aisle, his shoulders hunched over the cart, his thoughts miles away, this person who had just looked straight through me, I found myself wondering—for a brief, silly moment—whether I had changed as much on the outside as it sometimes feels I have on the inside. Or whether the reason he had not clocked me was something to do with that sort of instinct that prompts you not to look directly at someone who is somehow out of place, damaged, broken. To avoid the eye of the beggar outside the train station. The muttering nutter on the bus. The woman who comes up and tries to talk to you on the street and needs exactly five pounds and sixteen pence to get back to Leicester. There are times when I can imagine myself ending up as one of those people all too easily.
There are times when I can imagine myself as almost anything.
Chapter Thirteen
Dan
Every day now there’s another one. Another post, more made-up nonsense, another photograph not previously in the public domain. Always at the same time—seven o’clock in the evening. Just after Coco goes to bed. There have been three of them. Three new posts since we first discovered the RP account. Each of them rubbing more salt in the wound, each one slightly creepier than the last. The thing is, even now, weird as it sounds, I think that if the posts were clearly labeled #rp, if anywhere on the account the poster had acknowledged that what they were writing was fiction, I probably wouldn’t be quite so freaked out by it all. Angry, sure. Disgusted, sure. A crime would still have been committed. But at least I would feel I had some clearer grasp on what they were doing, what they wanted, what their end goal might be.
The last three days have genuinely felt like being stuck in a nightmare—a nightmare that begins the moment you wake up and drags on all day and from which no escape seems imaginable.
Every time I leave the house I find myself looking over my shoulder, peering into cars, giving anyone I don’t recognize a narrow stare. I spent all of yesterday evening watching a bloke in overalls put another bolt on the back door and reinforce the front doorframe only to spend half the night wide awake asking myself if I could really trust the locksmith.
This person—the one who is posting this stuff, who took Winter’s laptop—has been inside our house. They’ve touched things in our kitchen. Taken things from us.
They have every photo on that laptop. Every photo on the Cloud. Private photos. Personal photos. Photos of our daughter.
And now they’re posting them one by one online.
As soon as we realized what had happened, Emmy went into an immediate war council with Irene. I have to hand it to Emmy’s agent: I’ve never known her not take a call. I’m not sure I’ve ever known her to keep Emmy waiting for more than three rings. Presumably she does at some point sleep, eat, use the toilet. Each of these things is more or less equally difficult to imagine.
Irene was on speakerphone. Emmy was pacing the kitchen with a glass of wine. I was sitting with my laptop on the couch.
The question Irene kept asking Emmy was what she thought the police were going to be able to do. How much help had they been, she asks, when we reported the burglary? As for Instagram, how responsive had they been to any of her previous complaints about anything?
Emmy didn’t answer, so I assumed the questions were rhetorical.
Watching Emmy pace, I felt a little bit sicker and angrier than I had previously. Not just with whoever was doing this. With Emmy. With Irene. Maybe also with myself.
Yesterday’s post, the second new one since Emmy and I discovered the site, was the worst of them yet. A real kick in the guts. At one point as I was reading it, I thought I was actually going to be sick, that I was actually going to hunch over on the kitchen stool I was sitting on and spatter my dinner all over the floor.
“Hello again!!” it opened. Two exclamation marks. (The whole thing, I have to admit, was a pretty convincing pastiche of the way that all the Instamums, my wife included, write. The mangled metaphors, the breathless overenthusiasm. The ingenuous clunkiness. The alliteration. It’s no wonder there are people who follow this account who seem to have really fallen for it.) It was not until I got to the end of what they had written that I experienced genuine nausea.
The post ended with the news that “Rosie” had been to the hospital for some tests and that, although it had hurt at times, she had been very brave.
Oh God, so sorry to hear that was the start of the very first comment under the post, Hope the results come back fine and she feels better very soon! The second person to comment posted a whole anecdote about one time when their own little darling was sick. The third comment was just an emoji with a bandage around its head and a thermometer in its mouth, then a load of kisses.
The picture that accompanied the post was one I had taken of Coco in the back garden last summer, grinning on her new bike as she rides it in circles around the paddling pool.
My daughter.
My daughter.
The real girl who is asleep upstairs, in her little bed with the little ladder up to it, under her Frozen duvet, with her head on her pillow in its Frozen pillowcase. Whose floor is scattered with toys and whose walls ripple with pictures she has drawn at school every time the wind blows or the door opens and who when I last checked on her had fallen asleep still clutching her Elsa doll. Who still does not understand why she can’t go back to her old nursery and see all her old friends.