People LIke Her(66)
He must have told me the whole thing three or four times, and that was always the point at which he broke down uncontrollably.
When she came back from her walks, Grace would open the door and step inside and stay silent for a minute, listening, checking to see if he was finished talking. Then, when she was sure it was over, she would open the back door again and close it with a slam.
The funny thing is, I didn’t even remember Emmy’s advice to Grace, didn’t even start holding her responsible, until a couple of months afterward. I was at work, actually, in the staff room, having a cup of tea and waiting for a shift to start, and I heard the name Mamabare and I looked up and there she was on Loose Women. And it just so happened that one of the topics that day was cosleeping. All the women were talking about their experiences. Emmy just shrugged and said it was never something she had tried and she didn’t know a lot about it.
I thought I was going to go mad. I thought I was going mad. I could feel my brain throbbing. Even though my eyes were open I could see paisley-ish patterns swirling on the backs of my retinas.
Her laugh. That’s what I remember. The little affected giggle she did, before launching into the usual spiel about doing whatever works best for you and how she wasn’t setting herself up on a pedestal or claiming to get everything right. A laugh that seemed to me to be directed at anyone who had ever been fool enough to follow her, to trust her, to believe in her. A laugh that said the joke was on them, on Grace, on Ailsa, on us.
I do not regret what I am about to do to that woman at all.
Emmy
There is no such thing as bad publicity. That’s what they say, isn’t it? Well, “they” have a point.
Ninety thousand new followers overnight, my name trending on Twitter, the story picked up by the broadsheets, then internationally, on news websites from Manila to Milan. Offers from other tabloids and weekend supplements to give my side of things with what I presume they think is big money but wouldn’t even pay for a single #ad on my grid in normal circumstances.
BBC Three, however, are not “they.”
I can see that even Irene is shocked at how many BBC big boys have turned up to discuss the fate of From Miscarriage to Mamabare. A room full of middle-aged men all desperate to be there so they can tell the story at their next west London dinner party, smugly giving their mates the scoop on what I’m really like. I feel like a circus sideshow—Roll up, roll up, come help knock the silly internet lady who earns far too much off her high horse.
Josh, the director, who looks barely old enough to be in charge of an iPhone, let alone a TV series, is still gunning to get it made. It quickly becomes clear he is not going to be successful.
“What we just don’t understand, Emmy, is why you would agree to present a show based on personal experience when you had none. We might as well have hired Simon bloody Cowell to tell us about his miscarriages,” guffaws a man in selvedge jeans and a Supreme sweatshirt who I think may be called David, although he never introduced himself. “He’d probably have cost less too.”
“That’s the thing,” I explain, shaking my head, allowing my eyes to fill with tears. “I would never lie about something this serious. Polly just doesn’t know about what I’ve been through, my babies who didn’t make it. I’m really a very private person. I give so much to my followers, but this is a pain I haven’t chosen to share before. She just didn’t know. Nobody did.”
David laughs so hard that at first no sound comes out, and I am genuinely concerned that he’s having a heart attack. “Listen, we aren’t stupid. There isn’t a single aspect of your life you haven’t already sold to a million mothers; that’s why we hired you.”
I shoot Irene a look, silently imploring her for backup. In the process of the story breaking, not once did she ask me why I had used Polly’s words when I’m usually perfectly proficient in inventing my own. I’m not even sure that I have an answer for that. I felt like an actress reading a script when I filmed it—detached from what the words actually meant, focused on doing what I’d been asked, on saying what I knew the director wanted to hear, making him like me. Not thinking for a minute what I would do if I actually got the job and had to repeat it all on national TV. But I would never have done it if I’d thought Polly would see the video. How could I have known they’d send it to a journalist?
Irene was the one who stopped me, in a split second of madness, when I saw that headline, from simply deleting my whole Instagram account permanently.
She was already at our house and had one of her PAs waiting outside a newsstand in Victoria for the first copies of the paper to be unloaded, poised to grab one, primed to send us pictures.
So at the crack of dawn, just as we were finishing our second pot of coffee, her phone rattled on the counter. She picked it up, glanced at it, and handed it to me. Her face was expressionless.
There it was. The screaming headline. A picture of Polly and her husband looking sad and angry. Me, head thrown back in laughter, standing in front of the brightly colored mural at Coco’s birthday party. A picture of Polly and me together “in happier times.”
I could feel Dan’s eyes on me. I could feel Irene’s eyes on me.
In that moment, I just wanted to kill Mamabare. Not to take Instagram off my phone for a while or go off grid for a bit, but to bury her six feet under with no chance of resurrection. Who, after all, would mourn her? Not me. Not Dan. Most of my followers would just transfer their loyalty to one of the others snapping at my heels, and the waters would close over Mamabare forever.