So Lucky

by Dawn O'Porter

  I keep my voice calm. I don’t want to upset her, but I don’t want her to talk to me that way either. She finds my response unbearable and exits the bedroom, thumping her way down the stairs. I sit on the floor, surrounded by plastic food, and I have a major revelation. Toddlers are crazy no matter what I do. It isn’t my fault.

  As Bonnie plays alone with her kitchen upstairs, I make her a dinner of sausages and mashed potato. She eats it in her chair with a big cushion on it, while I play The Gruffalo audiobook through my Amazon Alexa. I ask her if she would like more, but she turns her head to the side as if I have said the cruellest thing imaginable. It makes me laugh. I’m not sure I have ever laughed at this behaviour before, but parenting is slowly becoming clearer to me. It isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be doing it. All I have to do is think of Ross, and what he has been through. I bet he’d swap his agony for even just one more day with Verity, whether she was having a meltdown or not.

  I let her watch the TV for a bit before we battle through a bath. She refuses to get in, then thrashes about so much that she slips and bangs her head on the side. No real damage is done, but the tantrum elevates to a solid nine. Getting her into pyjamas is like trying to dress an octopus. Eventually she is in bed, a story has been read, soft lighting fills the room and a vaporiser emits a gentle lavender scent. She falls asleep within minutes, holding onto Mummy the mouse like they have shared a lifetime of love.

  I watch her from the door. Maybe the trick to parenting isn’t trying to manage her reactions, but rather, it’s trying to manage my own. And above all else, at least my daughter is alive. Maybe I am lucky after all.

  Lauren Pearce – Instagram post

  @OfficialLP

  The picture is of Lauren in workout gear, sitting in the classic Dandasana yoga pose. She has taken the photo herself, using a mirror’s reflection. She is smiling. Fully made-up. There is a green juice on the mat next to her.

  The caption reads:

  I’m doing better. Much better today. Silly me getting myself in a state and sharing that with you all. As if you don’t have your own problems to worry about. The thing about anxiety is that we all have it on various levels. We all have to manage it. And I can, and I will. Less than two weeks until I say ‘I DO’ to the man I love. Feeling thankful for him, and for the people I have around me. And I am grateful for the large and the little things in my life that bring me joy. Everything from my smoothie, to my dog, to the clothes on my back. Am grateful to be alive. We all should be. #loveyourself #selfcare #womensupportingwomen #greenjuice #yoga #vegan

  @quincybones: That’s it girl, get those pelvic floors nice and snappy and cheer the f*ck up.

  @delorously: I like it when you share about your anxiety. If someone like you has it, then it makes me feel like less of a mess.

  @reason675: oh my fucking god when will you actually shut the fuck up you vain vacuous asshole.

  @eagerbeaveronly: So much respect for you. QUEEN. You are beautiful inside and out.

  @lovelollyed: literally never loved another human as much as I love you.

  Ruby

  With Bonnie upstairs sleeping like an angel, I sit on the sofa looking at the pictures of Lauren. I keep flicking between the originals and the ones that I have worked on. Of course I have made her more beautiful. In fact, I have made her perfect. But she really wasn’t so bad to begin with. There are plenty of untouched photos of her and Gavin leaving various parties and on red carpets. Her dresses are always skin-tight. Either her boobs or legs are shown off, sometimes both. She is every bit the stereotype of the trophy wife. A bit of an airhead, laden with designer clothes, if she is wearing anything at all. The Internet is full of quotes that her PR has made on her behalf. Banging on about empowerment and anxiety like she has a clue about it. She needs to spend a week with my mother, then tell me she understands mental health.

  She is a fraud. But she is also my source of income at the moment, and all of this will buy me an exceptional new handbag and very possibly a new painting for my living room. What is the expression? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure? Maybe in my case, it’s more ‘One woman’s insecurity is another woman’s art budget.’ I shouldn’t joke. Mental illness is nothing to take lightly. Which is why Lauren Pearce using it to gain career traction is so offensive to me.

  I text my mother.

  Mum, how are the cats today?

  ‘Delivered’ turns to ‘read’ immediately on iMessage. Luckily she has never realised she can turn that function off, as it’s very useful to know she has seen the message, and that she isn’t dead. I get back to the images of Lauren.

  My job is to make something that isn’t real, not look fake. That takes a lot of skill. When I used to work for an advertising company, which was awful, there was never the concern that something looked fake, all we had to do was create a picture that lied about how life-changing the product was. I was forever making some anorexic model with limp hair look like she had the locks of a Grecian goddess, just to sell some shampoo that didn’t even work (I know this, because I tried all of the products myself), but all anyone cared about was that the hair looked incredible. A level of incredible that is literally unachievable by anything other than a wig. So full, so shiny, not a split end in sight. I’d create the impossible hair to promote the impossible product. And the people who were behind it were vile. They spoke about women like they were idiotic pieces of meat, stupid enough to believe they could look like a digitally created picture. It made me very uncomfortable. Rebecca used to work for them a lot too, but she moved more into celebrity photo shoots with magazines and took me with her. That was never a moral decision for her – I’m not sure Rebecca has morals about what she does – but then I’m part of the machine so what good are my morals really?

  Rebecca used to send me some really horrific emails back then. The agency would book models that were so thin, so ill-looking. I can spot a girl with an eating disorder a mile off. One time, the photos of this poor girl were so upsetting to look at. The ad was for a denim brand. They claimed these jeans gave you the perfect bottom. This woman had no bottom. She was gaunt and pale and her legs looked hardly able to hold her up. Whoever cast her should have been fired, but apparently she was a well-known model and quite a catch for the campaign. Rebecca sent me the images with the simple instruction: ‘Make her look like she isn’t dying.’ It broke my heart. I felt for her as I warmed her skin tone, took away the dark shadows under her eyes, fleshed out her thighs, and gave her the bottom that the jeans promised to give every woman. What I did to her would make her problem worse. She looked fantastic by the end, meaning she would get booked for more work. Her credibility as a model would continue to rise, and she would continue to starve herself. I always wondered what it must feel like for a model like her to know that she’ll be ‘fixed in post’. Was it a relief to know it didn’t really matter how she looked, because someone like me would alter it anyway? Or did it destroy her, to see that her real image was never good enough, and that it needed to be reworked on a computer to make it printable? Either way, the entire experience of advertising was excruciating. These days I mostly work off the demands of the women in the photo, although Rebecca requests changes too and the subject of the photo never contests them. I have no reason to feel bad about it. Even though I do.

  Unable to stop snooping on Lauren Pearce, I find an interview that she did with the Daily Mail a few years ago. They ask her when she plans to have children. A stupid question to ask a twenty-five-year-old (as she was at the time) who isn’t even married yet. Her answer is breathtaking.

  The lemon-haired beauty wants her daughters to know the value of their bodies.

  ‘If I am lucky enough to have daughters, I’m sure it will be very hard. I want them to love their bodies, like I love mine. But it’s hard, especially with Instagram and Snapchat and other social media apps where filters can make anyone look perfect. It’s a fake world, but my job as their mum would be to keep it real.
’

  I have no sympathy for this woman or her hypothetical daughters. She is a liar and a hypocrite. Living in her perfect bubble of money, fame and potential motherhood. Trying to make a dime out of her fashionable issues with mental health, and the fake body she flaunts as real. It really shouldn’t be allowed.

  ‘Come on, please, Bonnie, Daddy will be here soon,’ I say, holding her shoes and coat. It is finally Friday evening, Liam is due at six and he is rarely late. I am waiting for him in the hallway.

  ‘What will you do when I’m with Daddy?’ she asks me, as I tie her laces. It is the first time she has ever asked such a question.

  ‘Tonight, I have a dinner with friends, and the rest of the weekend, I will work,’ I tell her. Because that is what I do at the weekends, along with taking long walks, sometimes buying a new handbag, occasionally making a dress. I spare the detail that I will spend most of tomorrow in a salon, having hair ripped out of my body by someone I don’t know, who may or may not send a message on WhatsApp to a group of her friends later in the day, telling them they won’t believe the woman that came in that day. Before describing me as disgusting.

  ‘What is work?’

  ‘It is what grown-ups do so that they can earn money to buy food and clothes, and other essential items.’

  ‘Do I work?’

  ‘Do you earn money?’ I ask her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, you are a child. You don’t work, you play. When you are a grown-up you will work, and you will have to choose what it is you do.’

  ‘What work did you choose?’

  I pause. Did I choose what I do? Not exactly. I have landed in a place I never expected to land.

  ‘I make pictures look pretty,’ I tell her.

  ‘Pictures of what?’

  ‘Of people.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Women.’

  ‘How do you make them pretty?’

  ‘I … I colour them in, I suppose.’

  ‘Can you colour me in, to make me pretty?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  She lets out a moan. A moan way more in keeping with the version of her I am used to. She wants me to answer the question.

  ‘So why are the women in the pictures not pretty?’

  ‘Because they don’t think they are.’

  ‘Why don’t they think they are?’

  ‘Because they think there is something wrong with them.’

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why do you need to change them?’

  I stare at my daughter. She stares back at me. She wants an answer to a simple question but I have no idea what to say. When explaining my job to an innocent child, it feels completely ridiculous.

  ‘Why can’t you make me pretty, Mummy?’

  ‘Because, because …’

  The doorbell rings and I feel, quite literally, saved by it.

  ‘Daddy!’ yells Bonnie, exercising an immediate mood change, and running to the door and knocking me over. I’ve always been cast aside by Bonnie’s love for her dad. It’s something I came to accept from around five minutes after she was born. Bonnie opens the door before I have the chance to get up. Liam sees me on my bottom in the hall and rushes in to my aid.

  ‘Ruby, Christ, are you OK, did you fall?’

  I brush off his hands and shoo him away. He knows I don’t like to be touched.

  ‘No, I was just putting on her shoes and she knocked me over.’

  ‘Oh, OK, good. Hey Bon Bon!’

  Bonnie jumps up into his arms. That used to be my favourite place too.

  ‘How was your trip?’ I ask him, knowing it’s important that we manage polite conversation in front of our daughter.

  ‘Oh, it was OK. You know, work. How was your week in the end?’

  ‘Hard, actually. I have a lot of work on at the moment.’

  ‘Mummy makes women look pretty for her work but she won’t make me pretty,’ Bonnie says, jutting out her bottom lip.

  ‘That’s because you’re already as pretty as you could possibly be,’ he says, reminding me of the answer I should have given her.

  ‘Anyway, she’s started at her new nursery now so that’s good.’

  ‘And how was it, do you like it?’ he asks Bonnie, to which she shakes her head violently and then rests it on his shoulder.

  ‘It’s smelly,’ she answers.

  ‘She’s being silly, it was great. It will just take a bit of time for her to settle in,’ I add, not looking him in the eye.

  ‘Right, well I’m glad that’s sorted. And it probably didn’t do any harm for you guys to spend a bit more time together anyway,’ he says, putting on the brakes and stopping the world from turning.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I ask him, slowly. Possibly with some steam coming out of my ears.

  ‘Well, you know, you two spending some quality time together would be nice, no?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? All I do is work, and parent, work and parent. Is that not enough for you?’ I am saying this through a fake smile, as if Bonnie doesn’t understand English.

  ‘All I mean is you drop her off at eight every morning, and pick her up after five. She comes to me every weekend. So maybe spending a few weekdays together isn’t such a bad thing. Did you like spending time with Mummy, Bonnie?’

  She nods her head furiously. ‘We caught a mouse,’ she tells him. He raises his eyebrows with surprise; he is well aware of my phobia. ‘We set it free in the park.’

  ‘You did?’ he asks me. But I have frozen, both physically and emotionally. I can’t think of a damn thing to say.

  ‘OK, well we better get going if we want to get a movie in before bedtime,’ Liam says, snapping me back into the hallway.

  ‘Her bedtime is at seven, please don’t keep her up late.’

  ‘I know, don’t worry,’ he says, offering Bonnie a cheeky smile that she delivers right back to him. He’s the fun one. I’m the boring one who never spends any time with my child, apparently.

  I give him the bag I packed for her. It’s a nice bag, a Kate Spade tote, I tell him not to lose it. I shut the door behind them as they walk off down the street making silly faces and laughing.

  It isn’t my fault I am not as much fun as him.

  Beth

  All of my feelings about Michael not touching me are turning to rage. I am so angry I could burst. I have the right to a sex life. What if I have married a man who never works this out, and I have to either break my family in half to satisfy my own needs, or just commit to a life of no sex? Could I do that? Live a sexless life? Maybe I could. I mean, do we even need sex?

  I do. I need sex. That doesn’t make me crazy.

  All that has happened so far is accidental voyeurism, and continuous erotic fantasies both when I am awake and asleep. If I don’t get laid soon, I’m worried I might jump Risky.

  I came home early from work today, in time to feed Tommy before bed. And early enough that Michael can’t possibly tell me he is too tired to speak to his wife.

  ‘We need to talk about the other night,’ I say to him, as I tuck into a jacket potato with tuna that I brought home with me. He was offended that I didn’t want his shepherd’s pie with a parsnip topping. But the second best thing to sex are carbohydrates, so it’s happening. He can’t deny me them both.

  ‘Oh, Mum will be OK, she just loves Tommy, that’s all,’ he says, choosing a subject he can handle rather than the one he knows I am referring to.

  ‘I don’t mean what happened with your mother, I mean what happened with us, in bed. Michael, can you look at me, please?’ He does as I ask but looks terrified, then cross. I refuse to allow our sex life to be a forbidden subject. I have been fantasising about watching strangers fuck in forests, this simply can’t go on. I am not enjoying feeling like a pervert. ‘Michael, I love you so much, but we have a problem, you know that, don’t you?’

  He sits down next to me. ‘I know,’ he says, pitifully. Th
is feels like progress.

  ‘Michael, do you fancy me?’ I ask, bracing myself for an answer that I am not emotionally prepared for.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he says, tenderly.

  ‘Then what? What is the problem?’

  ‘There isn’t a problem, Beth. Why are you always making me feel guilty?’

  OK, here we go …

  ‘I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I just need to know. Is your lack of interest in me my fault, or is it something else?’

  I want to avoid suggesting that there is anything wrong with him, even if it means aiming the blame at myself, because I am trying to create a safe space for him to tell me why this is happening. I think I am doing quite well.

  ‘Yes, it is your fault,’ he says.

  I immediately want to cry.

  ‘My fault, how?’ I ask, telling myself to stay strong. I am not the one in the wrong. I am a good wife, I am a good person, I am not the one with the problem.

  ‘There’s nothing sensual about you anymore, nothing subtle. You make me feel like all that matters is sex. If I don’t want it, there’s something wrong with me. Well, have you ever thought that there might be something wrong with you?’

  ‘Yes, Michael. All the time. I wonder if there’s something wrong with me every single day.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And have you worked out what it is?’ he asks.

  Is this really the man I married?

  ‘No,’ I say, knowing he is about to tell me, and knowing it will hurt.

  He takes his time, as if really working out how he will say it. And then he does.

  ‘You aren’t very good in bed.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You make love like you’re alone. It isn’t very sexy. It’s not what I like. Take the other night as an example, I was clearly not in the mood but you forced yourself on top of me and writhed around like you were possessed. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was there or not.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered if you were there or not? We were making love! You kissed me. You had an erection?’ I say, feeling like I can’t stand up, or raise my voice, or do anything else that might emphasise the fact that he clearly thinks I am a sexual monster. I take a deep breath and force myself to speak calmly. ‘You could have asked me to stop, Michael.’