Rewind

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  ‘Yes.’

  Dee held out her left arm and rotated it until Audrey could see the face of her slim, silver watch.

  Audrey blinked at it. ‘Oh, for …’

  She’d overslept.

  She was an hour late for work and counting.

  _________

  By skipping a shower and taking a cab she could ill afford, Audrey made it to the office just in time for what they called the ‘Now’ meeting, held every morning at nine thirty. ThePaper.ie was run out of Hive, a trendy open-plan co-working space off Leeson Street that was populated with beanbags in primary colours, complimentary fruit water stations and men who dressed for their cycle to work as they would for the Tour de France.

  The rest of the Ents team were already gathered around AltaVista, a giant slab of a conference table named after an early internet search engine. Audrey was confident that she was the only member of the team who knew what AltaVista actually was. The rest of them would probably keel over if they knew she was old enough to have used it.

  Everyone was heads down, their eyes fixed on their phones. Audrey slipped into one of two vacant seats – the other one, at the head of the table, awaited the imminent arrival of their boss, Joel – and took out her phone too.

  She had a new email. It was from Joel, a master of devastating brevity. The message consisted of only one word. All caps, no punctuation.

  LATE

  It had been sent three minutes ago. Audrey wanted to twist in her seat and see where Joel was watching them from, but if he’d seen her come in, he’d see her do that too. Besides, it was no mystery. His vantage point was most likely his office, a tiny box made entirely of glass partitions, parked in the middle of Level 1. His very own Panopticon.

  Audrey deleted the email and swiped at her phone’s screen until Daft, the property-search app, had started downloading itself to the device.

  Three weeks. She had three weeks to find a place she could afford that didn’t also look like it had been a drug den in a previous life or had the potential to be a crime scene at some point in the future. Audrey knew what was ahead of her; she’d seen the TV documentaries, read the reports. Professionals sleeping in bunk-beds. Bedsits that offered the convenience of being able to work the microwave without having to get off the toilet. A queue of fifty-odd twenty-somethings waiting obediently outside every half-decent listing, eyeing up their competition, trying to assess where they were likely to come in this latest round of Dublin’s Private Tenancy Pageant, founded in 1999 and back now, bigger than ever, after a little devastating-economic-downturn break that was already fading from everyone’s memories. Audrey did some mental arithmetic and then entered what she thought she could stretch to, rent-wise, in the Search box. The only result was a single bedroom in a house in Stillorgan. There were no photos at all, which probably meant the place looked like an episode of Hoarders featuring Fred and Rosemary West. Yet in the five days since the listing had gone up, it had been viewed almost fifteen thousand times.

  ‘Morning all.’

  Joel had appeared as if from nowhere, like he did every morning. The man didn’t arrive so much as materialise.

  Audrey slipped the phone into her pocket and waited to catch his eye so she could mouth a sorry at him but, before she could, he said her name, sending a ripple of interest running around the table like an electrical current. Then:

  ‘My office. Straight after this.’

  Audrey just about managed a weak nod of acknowledgement. She’d never been called into his office before. She must really be in trouble.

  ‘Right,’ Joel said then, loudly, signalling the meeting’s start. ‘Everybody ready?’ He sat down and flipped open his laptop, tapped a key and started reading from the screen. ‘Here’s what we’ve got so far. Rumour has it there’s a snap of a certain rugby star and a certain girlfriend of another certain rugby star getting up to no good in The Grayson on Saturday night. Snap as in Snapchat. Find it for me. That’s our top priority. Across the pond: Lena got a tattoo with no bra on and some magazine has a video of it. Embed is our friend. Across the other, smaller pond: Piers thinks KK shouldn’t have used a Snapchat filter on O’Hare, so we have the snap and we have a screen-grab from the show there. That’s two paras already and you haven’t even had to make anything up yet. Fresh in from the paps: some actress going somewhere with no make-up on. One of the models going somewhere with not enough make-up on. An X-Factor reject going somewhere with lots of make-up on. Danni, I’m going to give those last three to you.’

  Danielle, sitting directly across from Audrey, lifted a flattened hand to her forehead in a mock military salute. She was the team’s MVP when it came to coming up with different angles on Woman Somewhere On Celebrity Spectrum Goes About Her Daily Life. For Christmas last year, they’d got her a T-shirt with STEPS OUT AMID, her favourite phrase, printed on the front.

  ‘And we’re trying something new this week,’ Joel continued. ‘Find someone interesting, scour the ’Gram for shots taken at home with lots of background and use them to flesh out “Inside the home of …” pieces. Our angle should be “this person clearly gets paid way too much of the licence fee because look how swanky their home is despite them being utterly shit” or “secret shame of the washed-up former star forced to live in a three-bed semi”. Okay?’

  Audrey nodded along absently with the other bobbing heads. Her mind had started to wander. What was she going to say to Joel? He always seemed to expect more of her than he did of the others, presumably because she was older, more mature, more sensible, and on every other day she appreciated that distinction. But now she feared it might mean she was in actual trouble for a silly infraction.

  It was excruciating to care about something that mattered so little. Audrey didn’t know which was worse: having to do this job or the prospect of losing it.

  The Paper was an online news site that had started life as a content aggregating upstart during the Celtic Tiger, when Ireland suddenly got money and discovered feta cheese and flat whites and investment properties in Bulgaria and everyone collectively lost their minds. But the arrival of the Bust coincided with the arrival of the smartphone and, after pivoting away from its original website into an app and mobile offering, The Paper had survived – and thrived. It now employed a team of reporters who wrote original pieces and broke actual news in 250-word Lean Cuisine-style stories, just the right portion size for the eternally distracted Millennial scrolling through his phone while in line for a burrito bowl.

  The problem was that Audrey wasn’t one of those reporters. Her job was in The Paper’s entertainment section, infamous for doing the opposite of their Serious News colleagues upstairs: squeezing 250 words out of nothing of import at all. Usually a single, pixelated paparazzi shot and an allusion to some unsubstantiated rumours that just about stayed within the legal lines. Their model was the universally despised but yet also phenomenally successful Sidebar of Shame. They worked to traffic targets – clicks – set by the Powers That Be each morning. Every minute counted and every story had to pull its weight. It was the only position a newly graduated and totally inexperienced Audrey was offered that was even remotely related to what she wanted to do. What she’d decided to finally try to do, aged twenty-eight, after nearly a decade in recruitment.

  What she really wanted was only one floor away: the rest of The Paper’s staff, the ones who wrote about the actual news, had the whole of Level 2, upstairs.

  Audrey would get there.

  That was the plan.

  And so, for now, she would suck it up. She would spend her days coming up with different ways to say ‘Famous woman goes outside, does mundane things’ and she would do it well. She would bide her time until an opportunity arose.

  That’s what Dee didn’t understand, that waiting was trying.

  Snap.

  Joel had closed his laptop.

  Audrey had zoned out on half the meeting.

  ‘Let’s get those clicks,’ he said to the group. Then to her:
‘Let’s go.’

  She got up and followed him away from the table.

  Joel’s office was so small that the only seat was the one behind his desk, so Audrey stood in the doorway, facing him.

  He had barely sat down when she blurted out, ‘I’m so sorry I was late today. I don’t know what happened, but it won’t happen again. I promise.’

  ‘Good, but this isn’t about that.’ Joel rested his elbows on the desktop. ‘Audrey, I may have a story for you. It’s a bit TMN for us, this …’ TMN was Too Much News, Joel’s shorthand for stories that had some viable content for Ents but mostly involved details their core readership would skim. Like when celebrities made speeches at the United Nations. What they wore: yes, in excruciating detail. What they said: no one cares. ‘But upstairs aren’t interested and I don’t want to let it go to waste. You’d get the by-line. You’d be off the click-factory for the day. And if you strike the right tone – if you can get the balance right – I can probably get it listed on the main page as well as in Ents, so, you know …’ He turned his palms to the ceiling. ‘Actual news.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Audrey said.

  Joel snorted. ‘I haven’t told you what it is yet.’

  ‘Whatever it is, I’ll do it.’

  ‘I’m sure you will. The question is can you?’ Joel paused. ‘Do you know who Natalie O’Connor is?’

  Of all the things Audrey thought he was going to say next, that had been the very last one.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of her, anyway.’

  Audrey wasn’t about to admit it to Joel – or anyone else – but she had spent hours of her life scrolling through Natalie O’Connor’s life on Instagram. Dubliner Natalie was beautiful. Glossy. Perfect. Nice. Living in an Ideal Homes spread and married to a Prince Charming in a non-problematic way. She had thousands of followers and had parlayed her popularity into a lifestyle brand called And Breathe. Its website flogged scented candles made by hard-to-pronounce brands and un-ironically shared articles with titles like ‘Digital Detox: What Happened When I Put Down My Phone and Picked Up My Life’. Since both Natalie O’Connor and Audrey were the same age – since they’d both had the same amount of time to get their lives in order – it was, inevitably, a depressing spectator sport.

  What had Natalie done?

  Audrey was thinking scandal. A few exposés had hit the blogging world recently. Girls with caterpillar eyebrows getting paid thousands to say beauty products worked when what actually worked was Photoshop. Someone caught pretending a hotel room was the inside of her own home. Becoming the face of a national stop-smoking campaign and then getting pictured on Grafton Street at 3 a.m. lighting a fresh Marlboro off your last one.

  ‘Natalie is missing,’ Joel said. ‘She’s been missing for a week. And her husband didn’t bother to tell anyone that – including the Gardaí – until today.’

  _________

  Audrey walked back to AltaVista with her eyes fixed firmly on the floor. She grabbed her coat and laptop bag from her vacated chair, studiously ignoring the searching looks of everyone else still sitting there. Their collective curiosity pulsed in the air like a bass-line, but Audrey wasn’t going to enlighten them. This was her story.

  There was a Starbucks five minutes’ walk away and a Starbucks ten minutes’ walk away. In Audrey’s experience, no one from Hive could be bothered to trek to the further one, so it was the perfect place to work undisturbed. She ordered a large filter coffee, the one item at the intersection of lowest price and longest lasting. She was starving but couldn’t stretch to any overpriced, barely defrosted pastries after forking out for that cab this morning, but she thought there might be a half-melted cereal bar thingy in the bottom of her bag if she got desperate. She settled into a low armchair in the far corner of the café’s upper level, her laptop balanced on her knees.

  The first thing Audrey did was open a new Word document and copy the text from the Garda press release into its blank white space. It was the standard fare.

  Gardaí are appealing for the public’s help in finding a Dublin woman missing since 5 November. Natalie O’Connor, 30, was last seen at her home on Sydney Parade Avenue in Sandymount on Monday 5 November at approximately 8 a.m. O’Connor is described as being 5’5” in height with long brown hair and brown eyes. Anyone with information is asked to contact Donnybrook Garda Station on …

  The Paper got sent at least one of these notices from the Garda Press Office every week and only the personal details ever changed. Joel had explained to her that it was largely up to the family of the missing person whether or not to release an appeal like that, so this didn’t mean that the Gardaí were out in their crinkly white overalls combing the Wicklow Mountains for decomposing Natalie parts. Whatever this incident was, it probably fell somewhere on a spectrum between personal crisis and a domestic dispute. This appeal was destined to become one of the thousands of missing person reports Gardaí released each year that were followed a few days later by the good news that the public could stand down. Which was why, for The Paper, this wasn’t really news. But Joel had recognised the name and seen an opportunity.

  One hundred thousand of them, to be exact.

  That’s how many followers Natalie O’Connor had on Instagram. With no updates from the woman herself, those followers would be desperate for information and they’d look for it in the same place they found everything else: online. If Audrey could come up with a few plausible explanations for Natalie’s week-long disappearance and put them in virtual print without incurring the wrath of the legal department, those 100,000 clicks – and perhaps many more besides – would be theirs.

  And Joel would love her for it.

  She chugged some coffee and then did a bog-standard Google search for Natalie’s name.

  There was less than a page’s worth of relevant results. Two bare-bones news stories from that morning, which were basically the Garda appeal, an old interview about her diet with an Irish glossy magazine and a somewhat snarky article by a broadsheet listing Ireland’s top-ten influencers arranged in descending order by their follower numbers that had been published six months ago.

  Behold the strange, self-regulating confinement of Internet fame.

  There seemed to be no Twitter account for Natalie and no Facebook profile, at least none that were publicly accessible. Instagram, then, was going to be the start and end of Audrey’s research.

  She picked up her phone and tapped on the app’s icon.

  Since April 2012, Natalie O’Connor had posted well over 3,000 photographs to Instagram. It took Audrey nine minutes and a very real risk of Repetitive Strain Injury to scroll down to the start of the stream. The posts there were badly lit and often blurry pictures of an entirely different girl altogether.

  Natalie the missing person was unfailingly elegant, wearing glowing make-up on perfect skin, sporting shiny raven hair in sleek waves and a wardrobe that was Dry Clean Only. But Natalie from six years ago had over-plucked eyebrows, streaky yellow highlights and a wardrobe of fast fashion that didn’t look like it would survive more than one spin in the wash.

  Audrey took a screenshot of the very first post: a selfie of Natalie wearing an ill-fitting mini-dress, taken in a mirror that inadvertently captured a messy bedroom with clothes scattered on the floor and mismatched sheets on an unmade bed.

  Scrolling back up, it was easy to track the woman’s transformation. The quality of the photos got better – and Natalie herself started to look better, glossier, more put-together – but what was in the photos changed too. A careful curation set in, gradually narrowing the range of images to just three subjects: places Natalie went, outfits she wore and shots of the inside of her immaculate home.

  Mike, her husband, rarely featured in the photos but was often credited with taking them, the perfectly compliant Instagram Husband. He made most of his appearances in a series of shots from their wedding day. Him and Natalie on the shores of some impossibly picturesque lake, every last pixel perfect.

 
; Audrey banked another screenshot: a close-up of the newlyweds gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, not a pore nor a smudge of make-up or a stray hair in sight.

  Then she scrolled back up to the very top. The most recent post was a picture of a grooved, hard-shell suitcase in pastel pink, parked on a hardwood floor in a hallway filled with natural light. A smaller, matching bag was leaning against it and a crimson passport was resting on top of that. The caption read:

  Taking a few days to myself. I hate to be one of those insufferable people who tell you they’re taking a break from their phone and social media by posting to social media using their phone, but I don’t want you thinking I’ve mysteriously disappeared. Sometimes I just need to live up to my own brand. Back soon! #outoftheoffice #timeout #andbreathe

  Audrey took a screenshot of that too, then moved on to the comments Natalie’s followers had left underneath.

  Nice! Enjoy!

  You deserve it x

  Where did you get your case?

  Omg where are you going?

  LOVE the suitcase! Where’s it from?

  Where can we buy that case?

  O fuck off who cares

  Another all expenses paid trip I suppose. Fugly bitch.

  Jesus get over yourself!! Like anyone would even notice.

  But you’ve barely been posting as it is!!

  She’s probably not even going anywhere.

  #attentionseekermuch

  FRESH OUT OF FUCKS OVER HERE!

  This is probably her cover story for going off to get her

  lips done like the rest of them …

  By Thursday, three days after the post had been published, the insults and the demands to know where the suitcase was from had fallen away and followers were using the comments to talk to each other about Natalie’s absence.

  This is so weird. She always updates, even when she’s travelling. I know she said she was taking a break but still …

  --- SO weird. Wonder what’s going on.

  --- Friend of a friend knows her BFF and she said no one can get a hold of her.