People LIke Her(83)
By the time they showed me Jill’s typed pages, her confession, her whole life story practically, my husband had already pitched a book, a memoir, based on the events surrounding my abduction, using it as a springboard to explore the darker side of internet fame. Jill’s personal motives were not to feature.
Winter’s, on the other hand, are fully picked over. Dan kept what she did a secret for a while—to be honest, I think he forgot about the stolen pictures until I asked why she hadn’t visited us in hospital. I have to admit that staging the break-in showed a level of competence that I’d never have given her credit for, not to mention keeping up the act when Dan was exploding over that RP account—even if the moron did use her own PayPal account to pocket the cash for the photos.
It started off, Winter said, with taking little things, mostly gifts, that she knew I didn’t care about and wouldn’t miss, but that she could easily sell on eBay. When it snowballed and she thought I’d start to notice—the two-thousand-pound Acne jacket and the Burberry boots were the tipping point—she decided to cover her tracks with the smashed window and the stolen laptop. Only when Becket kicked her out of their love nest, when she was completely and utterly broke and up to her fedora in credit card bills, did she hit upon the idea of selling my photos as special fans-only content, through one of the forums I had asked her to monitor. She didn’t think a few pictures were a big deal, she said; they were just the spare ones we hadn’t used.
There is a long interview in the book with Pamela Fielding too, practically a chapter by itself, all about her problems at home, her troubles at school, the validation she found she could get online, the elaborate fantasies of family life she constructed. I found myself feeling quite sorry for her in the end, really. I think we both did.
It was decided—probably rightly—that my glorious reentry into the world of social media would look too cynical after all that had happened. Much better to let Dan take over my account, renaming it the_papabare, have custody of my followers, promote the book online, and chronicle our family’s slow and ongoing recovery from almost unimaginable horror. Irene knew, by that point, with offer after offer rolling in from ITV, Sky, NBC, that my career was about to go stratospheric. She’d already tentatively accepted my family talk show, Mama Bare, by the time I was out of hospital.
Luckily, Dan is better at all of this than I could ever have imagined. He likes to joke that for social media, he just writes as if someone has shaved twenty points off his IQ, or dropped a brick on his head. It’s also astonishing how much easier everyone goes on him—his comments are all hearts and winks and racy DMs about how he can save them from a murderous stalker any time he likes.
Would Dan have two million followers today if those people knew what really drove that woman to do what she did? Probably not. On the other hand, who knows if it was even my advice that her daughter took? She could just as easily have read it on Mumsnet or heard it from some other influencer. I’m sorry for what happened to her, to her baby, of course I am, but why should I feel guilty? I’ve never claimed to be an expert on anything—least of all parenting. The truth is, all I have ever done is tell people what they want to hear.
Irene certainly did not think the whole messy story worked for Dan and me, brand-wise. Better to keep Jill vague, she reckoned, a motiveless online bogeywoman made flesh. Slightly to my surprise, Dan very quickly came around to the same point of view. It was certainly, he reckoned after some reflection, in some ways a more resonant story that way, a whydunnit for the social media age, a timely invitation to reflect on all our online behavior, a reminder of the dangers that lurk in the shadows of the everyday. It was also, of course, a good way to ensure that we emerged as the untarnished heroes of our story.
On similar grounds, it was maybe a good thing that Polly didn’t want to be interviewed for the book. I was asleep when she came to visit me in the hospital, still hooked up to drips and beeping monitors. She brought flowers and left a card to say she was glad I was safe, that Bear was okay. I haven’t heard from her since, despite emailing and calling many, many times.
Dan reckoned that was probably all for the best too. Better, he suggested, to keep all that Polly stuff as elusive and indirect as possible, for her sake as much as ours.
He was the storyteller, he said. Let him take the lead.
Five hundred thousand books sold so far suggests he wasn’t wrong.
I watch him up onstage, looking more like that author’s photo than he has in years, and I feel a little flutter in my stomach.
“Even after everything that has happened, my wife and I,” he says, gesturing toward the back of the tent, where I’m standing between the stall with the signed copies of our book and a whining Coco, “are eternally grateful.” I see three hundred necks crane to see me, and hear an audible gasp—one or two people even clap here and there—as they notice my six-months-pregnant belly.
Doreen, who’s been standing by the front of the stage the whole time, allows Bear to toddle over to climb onto his father’s lap. Our boy, our darling boy, just a few months shy now of his second birthday and as healthy and rambunctious as anyone could wish for.
When the heads turn back around, I don’t imagine there is a dry eye in the house.
It is a lot harder than you would think, being dead.
Legally dead, I mean. Missing, presumed.
For one thing, you can’t just ring up and book a ticket for a talk at a literary festival and pay for it with a credit card.