Filter This

by Sophie White

  ‘I love you.’ She tried out the words. Why were they always so hard to say? They seemed to unlock a terrible abyss of pain that was really better left alone, shored up by everyday faff, rather than confronting the real horror of her dad’s illness.

  ‘I’m doing really well on Instagram these days. Nearly seventy thousand people follow me now. I know you probably don’t know what that really means but, believe me, it’s good. And I have a kind of boyfriend too. Sam. He’s sweet. You’d really like him.’

  Ali switched hands and squeezed out more moisturiser. She sang along to the music and watched Miles. His eyes were open, as was his mouth. His high cheekbones were more defined every day she came. What would happen? How long could someone go on like this?

  A soft knock at the door jolted Ali back to the present. Tabitha, Ali’s favourite of all the care team, stood at the door.

  ‘Ali, do you want to go get yourself a coffee? And maybe an ice cream for your daddy?’

  This was Tabitha’s coded way of saying she needed to change Miles or do some other routine procedure that, mercifully, Ali and Mini were spared knowledge of.

  ‘Yep, sure. Thanks, Tabby. I’ll be right back, Miles.’ She kissed his cheek and hopped off the bed.

  She slipped past Tabitha but, instead of taking a right towards the coffee station, she veered left, heading in the direction of the examination rooms. The screen-grabs had hovered on the edge of her mind all morning. Even the fug of hangover couldn’t dull the stab of anxiety – truth be told, the hangover was probably giving the unease an even more sinister edge. That was the terrible catch-22 of alcohol: it dulled the pain and relieved her angst only for it to come back ten times worse, thus requiring more booze to drown out the effects of the last booze. Exhausting stuff.

  She looked into the doors on either side of the deserted corridor. There were hospital beds and the usual array of table trays on wheels and nurse call buttons. In the last room on the right, she found what she was looking for: some class of medical equipment. She glanced behind to check she was alone and then slipped in and shut the door. The room was small, with grey rubber floors, pale blue walls and a window looking on to the small courtyard. She closed the blinds partially, in case anyone happened to look in, and proceeded to examine the equipment. It looked to be a monitor of some description. Whatever it was, it should do fine. She just needed a hint of ‘hospital’ for her purposes. Provided this thing wasn’t an instrument exclusively associated with the care of old people – like a soul-catcher for the near dead or something – she was grand.

  She stepped out of her boots and took off her jumper. She hopped up on the bed and switched the front camera on so she could talk to her followers. She checked the shot, pulling the monitor closer so it was just behind her in the background, mussed her hair slightly and took a deep breath.

  ‘Hey, gals! Sorry for the whispering but I’m actually in the hospital right now and I’ve just seen little Ali’s Baba for the first time! I was a bit muddled on my dates before – ugh, scatty Ali! – but now they’ve confirmed I’m eleven weeks pregnant. So that’s all straightened out.’

  She watched the clip back, adjusting the filter and scrutinising her delivery. This lie was on a new level – she couldn’t ignore that – but fuck it. She kept thinking back to Kate and those bitches on Rants. She needed to up the ante. The ‘hospital shot’ would give it the ring of truth she needed. Plus, she was doing so well. She’d even been invited to design a new Ali’s Baba range for a pram company. She couldn’t jack it all in now. Not when she was so close. Her resolve sufficiently steeled, she hit the Add to Story button. Then she Google Image searched ‘eleven-week-old foetus ultrasound’, saved the picture and uploaded it to her next Story, adding a little waving-hand emoji and a speech bubble so it looked like the foetus was introducing itself. Cute. She smiled. She paused for a moment, licked her lips, then hit Post.

  20

  The entire kitchen was in a complete state. Flour and eggs had combined to form a cement-like paste, coating surfaces, door handles and somehow even Shelly’s hair. The fairy cakes were a joke. Shelly took in the carnage and decided to axe the whole post she’d had planned. The segue into food blogger was proving way harder than she’d imagined – especially with her phone endlessly pinging with reminders from Amy about doing posts for #WednesdayWellness and #TanningTuesday. It was less than two weeks since Amy had gone on leave – the admin of the SHELLY Insta was off the charts and unfortunately it was all down to her now to stay on top of it.

  She pulled out a soapy sponge and began half-heartedly scrubbing at the polished cement counter-tops. She stole a glance out the large sliding glass doors that ran the full width of the kitchen. Her gaze travelled past Georgie’s toys strewn on the marble patio towards Dan’s man-shed-turned-actual-living-quarters and felt again a rush of disbelief. It had been a number of weeks and still they’d barely spoken to one another.

  Their solicitor, Bernard Sullivan, had temporarily sorted the money situation. Now each of them had an agreed allowance each week, in theory preventing them from dipping into the joint account until a formal separation was underway. It was galling. An allowance. She was convinced Dan had eked out some separate funds for himself – he was off in Lisbon with ‘the lads’ at that very moment, and presumably a good time on a lads’ weekend didn’t come cheap. She still couldn’t get over how acrimonious it had become so quickly.

  ‘How is this my life?’ she’d moaned to Plum on the phone the night before.

  ‘Darling,’ Plum had paused to drag on her cigarette and Shelly wished she could stress-smoke her way out of the situation – she loved the odd illicit cig when she wasn’t pregnant. ‘It’s an adjustment period,’ Plum continued. ‘Dan is angry – Virginia was the same when Curtis left her. She tortured us for the first couple of years. Always being very controlling about when we could take the house in Antibes.’

  Shelly shook her head just thinking of the call. Plum’s definition of hardship was worlds away from the average person’s. Negotiating six-week summer vacations with your husband’s irate ex-wife was a little different to her and Dan’s mangled marriage and her chaotic career. Add a new baby into that mix and, well, it was like pouring gasoline over a dumpster fire. Thank god they had an appointment with a therapist before she headed off to the Mama retreat next week – they badly needed some clarity.

  Abandoning the scrubby, she picked up a knife and began chiselling at the baking aftermath. Where was Marni? She should be doing this, thought Shelly irritably and straightaway felt guilty. What would her mam say to such entitled thoughts? A nanny-slash-cleaner would’ve been a completely foreign concept at the O’Briens’ house growing up. Anyway, it was probably better Marni’d taken Georgie to the park to keep her out of the way during the set-up.

  She picked up her phone: 11.20, forty minutes to get everything in order and do something about her face – at least she still had Amanda – before the Insta-mums arrived for their #MamaMorning (coffee with a side of Instagramming). They had a tacit agreement to promote each other’s accounts, tagging all their handles in every post so that followers would follow the other accounts. It was good for boosting following and supplied everyone with dreamy content for the grid.

  The host was expected to provide supremely ’gram-worthy snacks; luckily she hadn’t been solely relying on the fairy cakes. She’d actually dropped a sizeable portion of that week’s allowance on the #MamaMorning feast in Fallon & Byrne. She’d already laid out the seafood platter; crudités and dips; sugar-free, gluten-free, keto-friendly energy balls; and an enormous fruit platter. She also had smoked salmon blinis for the kids (and frozen pizzas and curly fries to be consumed off-camera).

  Shelly trudged upstairs, WhatsApping Marni to finish the kitchen – she could hear them bustling in downstairs but she didn’t turn back. Georgie would be excited to see her and she didn’t have time for a cuddle and a blow-by-blow of the park. She stopped by Georgie’s bedroom and selected an #O
OTD for her: a peach pinafore with matching knee-socks and gold glitter high-tops. She was also planning a peach palette for her own outfit for that all-essential #twinning post. How would she fare trying to dress a newborn in keeping with their matchy-matchy vibe? Everything seemed insurmountable this morning, with Amy gone and the perfect Hazel and Polly inbound.

  Hazel’s brood (five or six kids at last count) were always working some family-wide tonal palette of tasteful greys with muted pink accents. Hazel seemed to be a kind of motherhood machine, delivering post after beautifully lit post of her children running free in sun-drenched fields, wild flowers in their hair and freckles scattered over their adorable little noses. Or family baking sessions in a kitchen that looked to be lifted straight from a nineteenth-century French farmhouse with hints of a contemporary Scandi finish. ‘Bogus Bohemia’ was what Amy dubbed the Hazel aesthetic.

  The house was actually a fairly standard semi-D in Knocklyon. The fields had been scouted by her location manager (that’s right) for the express purpose of doing a carefree summer-days shoot – complete with outfit changes – so the shots could be rolled out and give the impression that her free-range kids were off living their best lives on the daily, instead of being locked into an immovable schedule of paid posts, sponcon, forced smiles and gruelling home-school hours with tutors who were paid for their silence as much as their academic expertise.

  Hazel had taken the Insta-life to Truman Show levels. You had to admire the commitment, Shelly supposed – though it was definitely bordering on psychotic. Any time Shelly felt uneasy appearing at the playground where Georgie would’ve spent the morning with Marni to do a ten-minute shoot for a new buggy collab, Shelly just thought of Hazel using a stand-in for breastfeeding shots because ‘Of course I couldn’t feed with a schedule like mine … but I can’t be seen to not be breastfeeding – it’d be totally at odds with my narrative’ and Shelly’s guilt was assuaged.

  Hazel was hugely outspoken about her sustainable lifestyle, the home-dyed linen shirts and her Steiner home-schooling, but she had a veritable army working tirelessly to produce the pared-back, simple life she was devoted to projecting. She employed three minders alone to keep the kids at bay while she endlessly trawled the LA Insta-mums to see what next to be stuffing up her vagina – vapours, crystals, positive vibes. There was nothing she wouldn’t shove up there, one of her assistants had once told Amy, who’d gleefully passed it on to Shelly.

  Polly, on the other hand, was completely vanilla, striving to be as uncontroversial as possible. Shelly knew that Polly was seen as a kind of budget version of her. She had about half the following and did collaborations with far less salubrious clients – she just didn’t have a very strong brand identity. She wasn’t cut out for the all-out theatrics of Hazel’s Holistic Heaven, and she didn’t have Shelly’s looks or the acting, which Shelly had to admit was certainly a draw for her followers – they loved a bit of a behind-the-scenes action on set. Polly had a spectacularly dull husband (that she didn’t have the good sense to hide from view à la Hazel) and two little boys. She tried to work the #MotherOfSons angle as best she could but there was less to be mined raising boys – even Shelly could see that. It was all about raising girls these days. Every blogger mama with half a brain did at least one ‘I’m raising my daughter to be a strong woman’ post every week. And having a girl meant you could do one of those posts in the voice of your daughter.

  I love when my mama takes me shopping to @MarksandSpencersOfficial to look at the new #AW19Collection #Ad #Spon #Shopping #BornShopper

  Shelly couldn’t see it landing in quite the same way with a little boy.

  ‘Polly’s content is too flaccid,’ Hazel had announced at their last meet-up, when Polly had gone to the loo. Shelly winced at the memory.

  Hazel was a bitch but she had a point. Ali Jones was already close to overtaking Polly. Maybe even all of us, she sighed, carrying on up the next flight of stairs to her dressing room where Amanda was prepping the perfect, painstaking no-make-up make-up look.

  Shelly settled herself on the stool, closed her eyes and Amanda got to work on the primer and base. God, what would Ali make of the #MamaMorning? Last time, Hazel tried to get all the kids to meditate for an Insta-story and Polly’s older boy bit her. Shelly grinned at the memory of Hazel’s face.

  ‘It’s nice to see you smiling, Shelly.’ Amanda paused in her blending

  ‘Ah, sorry, Amanda – I know it’s been pretty tense around here. It’s just so hard with Amy gone and Dan … off with his pals.’

  She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell anyone except Plum about the separation yet. Saying it aloud would make it real.

  Amanda gave her hand a gentle squeeze and Shelly got the feeling she knew there was more going on than Dan going away for a few days – how could she not? She blotted Shelly’s lips and shooed her down off the stool.

  She jogged back downstairs, ducking in to Georgie’s room to check that Marni had indeed changed her, and then reached the bottom of the stairs just as the doorbell went.

  She opened the door to find Hazel, Polly and Ali, phones held aloft, all facing different directions to get a clear shot and feverishly updating their Stories. Behind them, Shelly counted four bored-looking au pairs just as a swarm of children ran past her into the house.

  Marni joined the au pairs in settling the children. They were like car-park attendants, positioning each child near a power point and plugging them into their various devices before settling back to shoot the breeze.

  What did the au pairs say about them? Shelly dreaded to think.

  ‘Tea, coffee, wine, gals?’ she asked Hazel, Polly and Ali, who were all furiously hashtagging their Stories.

  ‘I brought kombucha,’ Hazel called. ‘Abigail, bring in the kombucha, please.’ One of Hazel’s kids detached from an iPad and carried in a straw shopping basket.

  ‘Here, Mum.’ The tiny Abigail, dressed in a cream knitted smock and blush-coloured tights – a variation of the rest of the clan’s outfits – held the basket out to her.

  ‘Do it again for the ’gram, sweetie,’ instructed Hazel, holding up her phone.

  ‘Here you go, Mum,’ Abigail obediently repeated.

  Hazel captured the moment and replayed it, frowning. ‘Let’s try one with “mama” – OK, sweetie?’

  Abigail was totally unfazed by this bizarre reenactment. ‘Here you go, Mama,’ she intoned, bored.

  ‘OK, thanks.’ Hazel snatched the basket and handed it over. Shelly stole a glance at Ali to see what she made of this little pantomime, but Ali was buried in her own phone and hadn’t caught it.

  ‘So how are we all?’ Hazel settled herself cross-legged on the sofa in the corner of the kitchen. Her silk kimono jacket was the same blush pink as Abigail’s tights and she, like each of her daughters, had a single delicate French plait framing her fine features. Hazel was very pretty – not as striking as Shelly, but she’d nailed a certain surfer-girl-next-door look despite having zero inclination to get her hair wet. Her style directive was Gwyneth Paltrow-meets-LA-tarot-reader-to-the-stars. ‘Ali, I saw you were in the hospital there. All OK?’

  ‘Yep, all good. I was a bit mixed up about the due date but sorted now. I’m … I’m so glad the nausea’s over,’ Ali concluded – a little hesitantly, Shelly thought.

  ‘You’re almost afraid to say it aloud, right?’ Shelly grinned. ‘I’m the same. I feel like the pregnancy gods will hear me and strike me down with the pukes again if I relax too much!’

  ‘The pukes, ick,’ was Polly’s contribution as she snapped a pic of the seafood platter.

  ‘Pregnancy is only as bad as you make it,’ said Hazel like a wise baby-spawning sage.

  Here we go. Shelly suppressed an eye-roll. Now Hazel would be off on one of her favourite riffs about how she’d had six healthy pregnancies and just meditated the babies out when it came time to push. Clearly, she’s forgetting the six epidurals and nine private doulas it had taken, Shelly scoffed.
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br />   For her last birth, Hazel had broadcast an epic fourteen-hour Insta-live of every grunting, moaning, crowning second of Orca’s entrance into the world. For much of that day you could flick over to Hazel, teeth gritted but elaborate braided hair in place, and catch how dilated she was, hear some of the poetry she’d asked to be read throughout or follow the Spotify birthing playlist. A few clever cutaways hinted at some possible trickery in the ‘all natural birth’ – Amy’s theory was they’d staged the whole thing and the baby had actually been a couple of days old at the time of the Insta-live.

  Apparently, according to Amy, conspiracy theorists were all over Rants.ie dissecting the footage. Not that that hurt Hazel – all the websites had covered the spectacle and she’d even gone on the Late Late to talk about how she’d done it to empower women and not at all to increase her visibility on the international Insta-scene. Tubridy had made a valiant effort to hide that he was clearly struggling to keep his food down during some of the more visceral clips shown.

  ‘Ali, what are you doing about the birth?’ Hazel sat up and fixed Ali with a stern look.

  ‘Doing …? Ehm, I dunno. I thought the birth just kind of happened?’

  ‘Only for people without the sense to capitalise on it.’ She threw a withering glance at Shelly and Polly before continuing with a hectoring recitation about the myriad ways Ali could be better exploiting her situation. ‘You need to get on top of the plan now, Ali, because after that baby comes out, you’re gonna be a gibbering wreck – everyone is on their first. Shelly’s still a mess, sure.’ Hazel laughed and Polly joined in. ‘How’re you feeling about your impending joy, Shelly?’