Filter This

by Sophie White

  She’s digging, thought Shelly. Being such a talented bullshitter herself, Hazel had an incredible nose for the bullshit of others.

  ‘Well,’ Shelly began, ‘Dan’s been away a fair bit so that’s been difficult.’

  Polly nodded sympathetically and Shelly found herself tempted to confide the truth. It was so lonely pretending all the time. Pretending on her Instagram, and pretending to Amanda and Marni, and pretending to Hazel and Polly, the closest thing she really had to friends aside from Amy and Plum.

  ‘We’ve been going through a tough time.’ Shelly tried out the words, but seeing the horror cloud Hazel and Polly’s faces, she backtracked immediately. ‘Just spending time apart is so hard. We miss each other,’ she explained.

  ‘Christ,’ Hazel yelped. ‘I thought you were talking about’ – she lowered her voice – “marital problems”.’

  Polly shivered.

  ‘Is that the worst thing that can happen?’ Ali was looking confused. ‘I mean, we’re not living in the fifties – it is 2019.’

  ‘Nothing kills a lifestyle brand like trouble in paradise,’ Hazel breathlessly explained, eyes shining with unbridled glee at the thoughts of someone else’s life falling apart. ‘You’re probably a bit young to remember an influencer called @SharonStyleHeaven? It all went completely tits-up for her after she had an affair with her trainer. She told some fairly outrageous lies to try and cover it up but it all came out in the end.’

  Shelly felt panicky. Hazel was like a rabid hyena with the scent of blood in her nostrils. One whiff of any real trouble in camp SHELLY would definitely send her digging. Between keeping frenemies and fully fledged stalker enemies at bay, salvaging her relationship was actually looking like a more realistic option. She drained the rest of her kombucha as Hazel picked over the carcass of @SharonStyleHeaven’s career – was it her imagination or did Ali look every bit as uncomfortable as she felt?

  21

  ‘OK, slow down – the turn is just here.’ Ali was leaning back in the passenger seat of Sam’s cheery little shitbox of a car, directing him through the gates of Ailesend.

  ‘It’s so close to IKEA!’ Sam marvelled. ‘How do you resist not going up there all the time?’

  ‘I resist,’ Ali deadpanned. Though she sorely wished they could ditch this morning’s obligations and hit the showroom, or anywhere else, right now frankly. ‘The car park’s just down here to the right.’

  Sam swung into a space and switched off the engine. ‘Maybe I should go up. I could pick up a few bits for the Sweet Pea.’

  ‘Ick, I told you to drop the cute name.’

  ‘We can’t just call it “it”,’ Sam argued. ‘What about Finn the Foetus? After Ice-T in SVU?’

  Ali laughed wearily. He’s trying to cheer me up. It’d be cute if it wasn’t so stressful. She needed him to stop talking about the baby 24-fecking-7.

  ‘I wish you could come in with me …’ She stared, with dull eyes, towards the entrance. It wasn’t just any old meeting with the care team. She pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down over her hands.

  ‘You know I would in a heartbeat, right?’ Sam drew her towards him, his expression pained. ‘I wish I could, Ali. But I’m guessing this is a family-only kind of activity?’

  It was impossible to bring Sam in there anyway – too many questions – but she was surprised at how much she wished she could.

  ‘I can call in sick to work and wait here, though,’ Sam offered. ‘It’s no big deal – I can catch up on emails and stuff. I’ve loads of candidates I need to chase.’

  ‘No, you go. I’m cool. Well, I’m not cool,’ Ali laughed quietly, ‘but it’s probably not even going to be a big thing,’ though the squirming feeling in her gut and the jagged beat in her chest told her otherwise.

  ‘I’ll come and collect you and we can go on a mega SVU bender – how about that?’

  Shit TV was their hands-down favourite Thursday-night jam, and Ali felt a bit uncomfortable admitting that after the consultation with the geriatric specialist and Mini, she was due at an event, the Glossie Awards Countdown dinner. Plus it was Liv’s birthday. She needed to duck out of the dinner as early as possible and get back to her for cake and prezzies. Things had been so tense around the house and Ali needed to get her back onside.

  Why did everything feel so impossible right now? Especially as she was completely knackered lately. She’d been cramping all morning and, with an apocalyptic period evidently imminent, a glitzy influencer event sounded particularly hellish, especially as this period seemed to be gearing up to be a massacre in her womb – she’d never known PMS to be so vicious.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t tonight. It’s Liv’s birthday but I’ll text to let you know how this goes. Thanks for driving me.’ Ali put her arms around his neck and breathed in his Sam smell for a few moments. He rubbed her back and whispered comforting things to her and her insides wriggled with unease. ‘Have a good day.’ She disengaged and hopped out.

  She waved as the tree-lined driveway seemed to swallow the car, leaving her to turn, dejected, and make her way inside.

  Her phone buzzed a calendar reminder – ‘Glossies Countdown dinner, 7.00 p.m. Ambassador Hotel’.

  The awards were still four weeks away but they really knew how to squeeze every last bit of ‘glam spam’ out of these events. Ali sighed. It was funny how, before, these influencer events were the Holy Grail for Ali. On nights of a big influencer event, her whole timeline would be overtaken with everyone – wannabes to top-level influencers – who’d got the invite and were desperate to eke out every last scrap of content for it. Updates with the hashtag #GlossieAwardsCountdown had already started clogging her feed by eight that morning with all the Insta-crowd filming their facials, their workouts and even, bizarrely, a visit to the chiropodist. Annabel Stevens, an ex-TV presenter with about ten thousand followers, had elected to make a stab at repackaging some poor unfortunate attempting to angle-grind her corns off as #glamprep.

  Now, Ali felt like she would gladly ditch the whole thing if she wasn’t so invested.

  She signed in at the reception visitors’ book, took a seat among other blank-faced loved ones and waited to be called. No sign of Mini yet – she was probably dashing across town shouting down the phone to Erasmus at that very moment.

  Maybe her ambivalence about her new-found success was down to her PMS. She’d been happy that morning scrolling her notifications, reading the comments from her adoring followers, though even those had lost some of their sheen. Somehow the words ‘you look amazing’ really lost their impact after being repeated ad nauseam. Speaking of nausea, Ali could feel a tide of queasiness invading her once more. What is the deal? she wondered. Though she’d been so busy arranging breakfast that morning, she’d actually forgotten to eat any – maybe she was hungry?

  She rummaged in her bag and found a bag of Skips. Better than nothing, she thought, starting on them – the saltiness seemed to assuage the nausea – just as Mini walked through the sliding glass doors of the Ailesend reception. Mini was buried in a phone call – she waved, looking hassled, hung up and added her name to the visitors’ book.

  ‘What are you eating, Ali?’ Mini shook her head as she sat. ‘You complain about gaining weight and then you’re gorging on crap.’

  ‘When have I complained about gaining weight? You complain about me gaining weight!’

  She was obsessed with everyone’s weight. Mini’d be happier walking in on Ali smoking a crack pipe than eating a bag of crisps. Ali had once heard her compliment a cancer survivor on their incredible weight loss.

  ‘I’m not getting into a row.’ Mini folded her arms, adopting the tone of someone who was a permanent fixture on the high road.

  ‘You literally started it.’

  ‘Ali—’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Ali held up her hands in a gesture of surrender.

  Mini was crossing and re-crossing her legs. She brushed some invisible lint from her asymmetrical sheer dress, worn over trousers with slim
patent-leather brogues. Ali felt bad. Along with avoiding Sam and reality in general, she had been keeping her distance from Mini. She’d tried to still her conscience, reasoning that it wasn’t so bad – after all, she was still going up to sit with Miles every second day – but she’d barely spoken to Mini since she’d told her about Marcus. She didn’t even know if they’d gone on their date. Somehow she didn’t feel so furious about it anymore – in light of the things she’d been up to since then, a date with an old friend seemed fairly innocuous.

  ‘Are you doing OK, Mum?’ She reached for Mini’s hand.

  ‘Darling!’ Mini snatched her hand away, horrified. ‘There’s some kind of crisp residue on your fingers.’

  At this, Ali startled the assembled waiting visitors with a raucous laugh. ‘Crisp residue!’

  After a moment, Mini joined in.

  ‘These are Skips.’ Ali feigned indignation. ‘Prawn cocktail is a better class of flavour than your average crisp – everyone knows that.’

  Mini wiped her eyes, and her laugh died away but she looked a bit more relaxed. Her fidgeting subsided.

  ‘Dad would’ve approved,’ Ali continued.

  ‘Hah. I’ve never seen Miles with a crisp in my life.’

  ‘This crisp grudge is off-the-charts snobby,’ Ali said. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mean he’d eat them but the man loved a seafood platter, you can’t deny it.’

  ‘Ah,’ was all Mini said.

  They were getting into tricky territory here. Their unspoken approach to Miles was a careful exchange of information.

  Ali would text:

  Went to Dad today, we listened to Wilco’s last album and I gave him dinner – new levels of gross on that front. Can we not just Deliveroo in something that doesn’t look regurgitated?

  While Mini might respond something like:

  Spoke to Miles’s team this morning, they’re talking about the morphine patch. Sadly they meant for him, not me.

  They were rigid about never veering down memory lane. When, wondered Ali, had her gorgeous dada become such a source of pain? Talking about who Miles had been was like pressing a bruise on her heart. Yet today, perhaps because of the meeting, Ali felt like pressing on.

  ‘D’you remember him and his lobsters?’ Ali ventured. She never could’ve predicted that one day her father’s grotesque, near-cannibalistic relish of lobsters would become a source of nostalgia.

  Mini was reading her emails, but she smiled and then closed her eyes, her mouth a firm, insistent straight line. Ali realised that whatever hurt she felt thinking about her dad’s cruel existence, it was nothing compared with the anguish Mini carried in her very bones.

  For many years, Ali had been angry with her parents for being so bloody Irish and refusing to acknowledge his illness. Then she’d just been angry with Mini because it was easier than blaming an ever-more-helpless Miles. And then when her anger just seemed exhausting, it became easier to disappear – online, into wine, anything rather than face reality.

  A moment of clarity descended on her then, and her mother’s pain was palpable – all the more so for how competently she’d hidden it. All the years since Miles had lain suspended in a terrible middle place, so too had Ali and Mini. Her phone pinged with notifications and she felt hounded. She’d backed herself into a corner where she could neither face up to her life as it was nor escape the life she’d concocted online. She felt jangly. More panic. Ali, this is what you get for lying, she admonished herself.

  ‘Mrs Riordan?’ A sweet-faced older male nurse appeared beside them. ‘The team are waiting for you both.’

  Ali tried to force down the rising dread as they followed him to a part of the home Ali’d never visited before. Upstairs in a large airy office, four different people were introduced but Ali struggled to grasp who each of them was. She studied the plate of biscuits in the middle of the desk – who brings biscuits to a meeting like this? She heard their words, tinny and distant, as though they were coming through a bad phone signal instead of from the lips of people seated just across from her.

  ‘As agreed, there’ll be no more interventions.’

  ‘We just want to make him as comfortable as possible.’

  ‘We suggest you come as often as you can.’

  Ali couldn’t take any more in. Her thoughts were roaring, her heart was charging and she couldn’t breathe. She found herself standing before she’d even thought to get up. Everyone stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t stay. I’m sorry, Mum.’ She turned to Mini, who sat defeated in her chair. ‘I’m not feeling very well.’ Ali could barely get the words out.

  She grabbed her bag and fled before anyone could intervene. Pushing the door from that airless office, with the shitty biscuits and even shittier words, was like surfacing for air. She hurried down the bright corridor, down the stairs and out through reception into the sunny day beyond. Finally, about halfway down the driveway, she paused, taking huge gulping breaths that didn’t seem to quite fill her lungs. He really is going to die – they said as much. That’s what all those euphemistic phrases like ‘make him comfortable’ mean.

  She knew Mini would be pissed at her ditching like that but she just couldn’t cope with the enormity of it all. Even though she hoped against hope that Miles would die and they would be released from the agony of counting hours watching his lifeless eyes, she couldn’t sit with the knowledge without feeling smothered by it.

  Even out here among the trees, with birds singing and the pale March sun shining, she couldn’t get far enough from this truth.

  She rummaged in her bag for something to put some distance between this moment and herself. She came up with her phone and hit the Story function. She carefully checked her face to ensure she looked OK – her hair was in plaits because she wanted a beachy look for the event later. She shook it out now and touched up her lips.

  She checked all around to make sure no one was coming and then stepped off the path into a gap between some trees. She set up the pic, letting a little sunlight drape across her face, accentuating her cheekbones, and took about thirty shots, trying slightly different faces for each. Smile, half-smile, laughing while fixing her hair and looking over to the left. She took some time narrowing down the choices. The final snap was cute – she looked good with her hair in loose waves and her brown eyes open wide, relaxing under the trees. She did some correcting in FaceFix, adding a bit to her lips and losing a bit from her jaw and nose. She could feel her breathing quieting and a calm settling in her chest.

  Thinking about how #blessed I’ve been these last few months. It’s been a pleasure to share this journey with you all. I can’t thank you all enough for everything you’ve given me. Without you guys, I wouldn’t be doing so many incredible things in my life right now. I can’t wait to share some of these with you all soon. #influencer #collab #happydays #loveyouall #AlisBaba #myday #mylife #LittleStoriesFromMyLife #watchthisspace #excitingproject

  She hit Post and sat down on the roots of a large oak to watch the likes roll in, refreshing the feed every few seconds and feeling calmer with every ‘LOVE you!’, ‘Looking gorge Ali’ and kissing emoji. What the hell did it really matter what was going on, so long as the picture looked good?

  ‘So how are you anyway?’ Kate was reapplying her lipstick in the taxi on the way to the Countdown dinner.

  Ali did a quick mental run-through of what she was and was not telling people before she cautiously replied, ‘I’m good,’ as she struggled to steady the card she was writing on her lap.

  ‘Things have been going amazing with your account. Like, I can barely believe it.’ Kate sounded more like she could barely tolerate it but Ali tried not to dwell on this.

  ‘Yeah, it’s been great. I’m getting loads of work, TG, cos I doubt I’ll ever work in TV again!’

  ‘Yeah, that was crazy – that guy was, like, a psycho.’ Kate checked her teeth for lipstick. ‘And how’s Ali’s Baba? And Sam, you guys still all loved-up?’

&n
bsp; ‘Yeah, Sam’s good, he’s great!’

  ‘And are you OK since the Rants stuff?’ Kate added a Sympathetic Head Tilt here.

  ‘The Rants thing? Oh yeah … just weirdos with too much time on their hands. Doctors get the dates wrong all the time.’

  In the flashing lights of passing traffic Kate looked practically disappointed that she wasn’t more upset. ‘Thanks for bringing me as your plus one,’ she muttered, looking out the window as they cruised down the canal and beyond the city centre.

  Ali continued with the card.

  Dear Liv,

  I am so lucky to have such an incredible friend. Love you so much.

  You’re like my sister.

  I hope you have a fab birthday—

  The driver veered slightly and Ali’s pen jerked.

  Crap. She flattened the card – purple with flowers, there’d been a very limited selection in the garage – on the seat beside her and finished by signing her name and adding a few kisses.

  She slipped it into the Dunnes bag along with the cake she’d got and the rose-infused face cream Liv liked. It was all a bit last-minute but at least she was prepared. Ali wanted to try and salvage things with Liv.

  ‘Here we go, ladies. Watch your step getting out.’

  Ali handed the driver a twenty and they hurried inside Vivian’s, the restaurant in Ranelagh hosting the event.

  ‘Oh my god, there’s Shelly,’ Kate whispered, giving Ali a shove in the lower back as they walked in. ‘Let’s try get a selfie with her.’

  ‘Sure.’ Ali smiled through gritted teeth. It had been such a long day she wasn’t sure she was up to mingling, but Kate had been talking non-stop in the WhatsApp about the dinner all week.

  ‘Hi, Shelly! I’m Kate from @ShreddingForTheWedding.’ Kate immediately went in for the full hugs and kisses and a power-sell on her Insta-account. ‘I’m sure your followers would be so interested in my content, Shelly, if you ever wanted to work together on a collab.’