People LIke Her(69)

I swivel on my chair, look up at her, furious.

She meets my gaze and holds it.

“What the hell do you think you’re achieving, Dan?”

I suppose one of the things I am hoping for is just that I will piss them off. To feel that I have done whatever I can to spoil and frustrate whatever sick enjoyment they get out of all this. Maybe I just want to feel like I’m doing something.

Emmy says she’s going to bed. She reminds me that she’s going to be leaving at about eleven in the morning, and that Doreen is going to be picking Coco up at about nine. Have I asked my mum if she wants to come and help with teatime and bedtime a couple of the nights she’ll be away? I tell her that Coco and I will be absolutely fine, that I think I can manage to chuck some pasta and tomato sauce together and tuck her in. Yes, I know where the pajamas live and which towel Coco likes, the soft one. I’ve got the number of the retreat if there’s a real emergency.

She asks me to try not to wake her when I come up. I tell her I won’t be long.

I wait until I hear Emmy’s tread at the turn of the stairs, then I go through to the kitchen.

Ppampamelaf2PF4. That’s the name they post under, their Instagram handle.

The first time I saw it, it just looked like gibberish. Then I started thinking about being at my mum’s house, asking for the Wi-Fi password and her producing a little scrap of paper and telling me to try this one or maybe this one. And they’re all things like sjsuejackson and suejacksonSUEEJACKS. And if that doesn’t work, she says, try them all again but with an exclamation mark.

I was beginning to suspect that whoever was posting these pictures of Coco was not an internet wizard either. I was also pretty sure their first name was Pam or Pamela and that their surname began with an F.

My first thought was to tell Emmy, see what she thought, suggest that she pass on this information, this hypothesis, to Instagram, to the police, to a lawyer.

Then a second thought occurred to me. A hunch, you might say.

Under other circumstances I might be annoyed that Winter’s new laptop is just lying on the kitchen counter, pretty much in exactly the same place she left the last one. In full view of the kitchen window, as if to fucking tempt another burglar.

I suppose I should be grateful she hasn’t stuck all the passwords to it this time. It doesn’t take me long to work out the one I need. You don’t spend as long as I have married to someone without working out the kinds of passwords they rely upon. For ages, Emmy’s password to almost everything was our names and then the date we got married.

Obviously, all of the passwords have been changed since the burglary.

The password—the new password—to Emmy’s mailing list is Coco’s name, then her birthday. On it are all the people who have ever ordered a Mamabare sweatshirt or a #yaydays mug or attended a #greydays event. Even after I’ve typed in the password, the document is so massive it takes a little while to open.

Let me unpack my hunch a little.

It’s long been my suspicion that you can only really understand the relationship between someone like Emmy, her fans, and her haters if you have some grasp of the Kierkegaardian concept of ressentiment, as popularized and expanded by Nietzsche. Meaning the projection of all one’s own feelings of inferiority onto an external object, another person, someone you both hate and envy and also sometimes secretly wish to be—or at least tell yourself you could be. Could have been. Given different chances. Given their chances. Someone like Emmy, whom you either idolize because they are just like you but really successful or hate because they are someone just like you but really successful—and no doubt in a lot of ways the line between the fans and the haters is thinner than you might think.

Both kinds of people obsessively read Emmy’s posts, after all. I know she and Irene have sometimes talked about how many of Emmy’s followers, what proportion, are people more or less consciously hate-following her, who can’t resist keeping up with each infuriating thing she posts, who loathe her yet still keep checking their phones to look at pictures of her. And one of the things that Irene has always drummed into Emmy is how quickly a fan who feels ignored or tricked or slighted can turn on the person they used to admire and identify with. And one way in which the concept of ressentiment is useful is that it helps us conceptualize how suppressed feelings of envy might surface in the strangest of ways.

The truth is I have pretty mixed feelings about Emmy myself at the moment.

There has been a lot of talk over the past few days about the practicalities of dealing with the fallout from this Polly business, managing the public relations angle. There have been endless meetings and phone calls and discussions between Emmy and Irene about how to play it. Emmy has talked me through her plans—their plans—and I have sat there in a corner of the kitchen nodding and nursing a beer and occasionally offering a word or proofreading something for tone as she pulls together half apologies and vaguely worded recognitions of fallibility that never quite reach the point of putting their finger on what she did wrong but instead go big on her contrition about it—even if, she implies, it’s at least partly someone else’s fault.

What Emmy and I have still not had is a proper conversation about what she did and why she did it. I genuinely couldn’t tell you if she even acknowledges to herself that she’s done anything wrong. We used to have drinks with Polly all the time. We used to hang out. I got on really well with her old boyfriend, and her husband is absolutely fine, in smallish doses, especially if you don’t get stuck talking to him one-on-one. When you think about it, Polly has been part of our lives for as long as we’ve had a life together, and part of Emmy’s life practically forever. I did suggest that Emmy reach out to her, try to apologize, try to explain what happened.