by Ellery Lloyd
Don’t think for a minute that either Emmy or I were unaware of the ironies of the situation. The point I kept emphasizing, every time I was given the opportunity, was that nothing Coco was accused of doing came from a place of malice. She does not have a mean bone in her body, my daughter. Nor do I believe she has any difficulty distinguishing fact from fantasy. She likes to entertain people, to make them laugh. The point I kept wanting to make is that she is a bloody clever kid. A lot cleverer than anyone else in that class. A lot cleverer than most of the people she is going to spend her childhood being taught by, if I am perfectly honest. A lot of the things they were describing were clearly jokes, obviously pranks. Like hiding her shoes and mixing up everyone else’s. Like swapping plates with the person next to her and pretending she was going to eat their lunch as well.
We did laugh about some of that stuff afterward, once we’d put Coco to bed that night. We laughed, but I could tell that Emmy was secretly still pretty pissed off about the whole thing too. “That judgy cow,” she suddenly huffed, apropos of nothing, about twenty minutes after I thought we’d both let the subject drop. “You realize whose benefit all that was really for, don’t you?”
I said something bland that I hoped would be placatory.
“Do you think she’d have talked to us—to me—like that if I were a lawyer? If I worked in advertising? If I did literally anything else for a living? There’s a kid in Coco’s year with double ear piercings and a kid who craps themselves every morning and just sits there in it and a kid who only eats sausages and a kid who has had nits since last spring and I’m the parent who’s being invited to feel shit about myself?”
“It’s completely absurd,” I said.
“You’re absolutely right,” I added.
“Kids make stuff up all the time,” I observed. “All kids do that.”
Another lull in the conversation followed.
There would also be more cause for concern, I pointed out, with the whole lying thing, if our daughter was actually any good at it. To be an effective liar you need to be able to remember all the things you have made up, keep track of each tiny tweak to the truth, always have your story straight. Emmy is excellent at this. Coco is not. Without blinking, she’ll tell you three contradictory things in the same sentence. She’ll claim she didn’t do something that you’ve just stood there and watched her do. I wouldn’t put it past her to deny she’s doing something even as she’s right in front of you doing it. If I say that my daughter is a terrible liar, I mean that in every sense.
To be perfectly honest, I generally find this quite funny under normal circumstances. Like when Coco tells her little friends there’s a secret room at our house that is full of sweets. Or when she’s telling everyone all about our holiday on the moon. Most of the time Coco’s lies are so nonsensical and transparent there’s nothing else you can do but laugh.
These are not normal circumstances.
As my immediate relief at finding my daughter safe and sound has ebbed, so my frustration at not knowing exactly what happened in those eight and a half minutes has grown. I still have no idea why Coco went off or where she went or how she got down to the bottom floor of the shopping center. I still have no idea where she acquired that teddy. As I give her a bath, as I’m brushing her teeth, I keep asking her questions, and I keep getting answers that are vague or can’t be true or contradict the answer she gave me to some other question just two minutes ago.
I ask Coco why she wandered off in the first place, and she tells me she doesn’t know. I ask her why she was going to the bookshop, and she says she can’t remember that either. I ask her if anyone tried to stop her, if anyone tried to speak to her at all. She yawns. She says she doesn’t remember. We’re getting nowhere. It’s past her bedtime. In the hall I can hear Emmy hurriedly kicking her shoes off and hanging her coat on the banister.
I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off Coco. Not for a second.
The truth is, I’ve always been paranoid about all this stuff. About three months after we found out Emmy was pregnant with Coco, we went to the cinema. It was a film about some creep kidnapping a kid, and I actually had to get up and stumble over everyone’s legs and shoes and walk out. I’m not talking about a horror movie or anything. I am talking about some stupid thriller. It was horrible. The film. The experience. I was sitting there in the cinema, and I could feel my throat closing up, my heart pounding. To be fair, I was quite hungover. But what kept going through my head was that there really are people out there in the world like that. Weirdos. Predators. Pedophiles. And this is what I was like even before we decided to share our family life online. Before the world was full of people who know or think they know how much money we’re making from this gig, know exactly what we look like and what our son and daughter look like, what kind of life we live.
How do you impress on your child the importance of not speaking to strangers when they see Mummy greet every fan who says hi like a long-lost friend?
I suspect that in every marriage there are one or two big topics that it is impossible to discuss without things quickly getting heated. Topics that lurk beneath the surface and most of the time you both manage to navigate around or avoid entirely. Topics that you have argued about so many times or so sharply that every time they come up you find your hackles preemptively rising, your defenses going up, a series of half-repressed memories of previous fights resurfacing.
Just like the time I thought I saw someone surreptitiously taking pictures of Coco at the café in the park and freaked out, just like the time I convinced myself someone was staring at her at the pool, I already know that the discussion I am about to have with Emmy—at least the discussion we have once I explain what happened and stop apologizing—is going to go in exactly the same circles as it always does. Have we made a mistake? Are we doing something awful? Is there anything else we could do to make ourselves safer? Have we, by putting our lives and our children’s lives out there on the internet for all to see, done something monumentally foolish? Are we putting Coco and Bear at risk? Is all this bad for them? Is it going to skew their sense of self, how they see the world? Is it going to fuck them up somehow, in the long term? Are we terrible people?
Round and round the conversation will go, one of us self-accusing, the other trying to reassure them, to justify what we’re doing, both of us pointing out the flaws in each other’s arguments, both of us wrestling with ourselves as much as each other but still quick to pick up on the other’s turn of phrase or tone of voice, both of us getting tenser and tenser, the air in the room steadily thickening. And what it will come down to, after all’s said and done, the horrible truth, the bottom line, the limiting factor in all our discussions, nutters or no nutters, qualms and quibbles or no qualms and quibbles, is this: that if we pull the plug now there’s no way we can pay the bills.
Emmy
I can’t say I wasn’t warned.
Irene and I did sit down and have a long conversation before I signed with her about what being an influencer involves. I showed her my own personal Instagram account—emmyjackson, 232 followers, all of whom I’d met in real life, whose surnames I knew—and she used it as a show-and-tell to explain why my badly lit photos of brunch, the occasional bouquet or cupcake, unphotogenic friends and bathroom selfies with my cheeks sucked in, would not cut it. To turn this into a career, I’d need precision-planned hashtags, content streams and topical themes, fellow influencer friends I could tag and who would tag me back, photos shot weeks in advance and edited to perfection (or, as it turned out, imperfection).
She made it sound a lot like Mamabare would be similar to editing my own little magazine, each Instagram post a new page. In a way it was, back then. Followers would comment with hearts and winks. Nobody seemed to realize they could send me private messages, or if they did, they never bothered. Twitter was for sniping and snark; Instagram was a friendly space for pretty pictures and smiley faces.
The shift was imperceptible at first. Slowly,
the comments stopped being total love-ins. Direct messages started to trickle in, at first mainly from happy mamas high on oxytocin during four a.m. feeds. But they soon became a torrent, all expecting an immediate response whether they were telling me I should be ashamed of myself for selling my family online or that they liked my lipstick. Gossip sites launched. Tabloids started to report on our spats and slipups as if we were genuine celebrities.
Dan and I used to be the couple who were so in demand that we had to turn down dinner parties because our calendars were too tightly packed—the hot fashion girl and the up-and-coming author who you simply must meet. We would arrive looking like we might have just had sex (we usually had), with two bottles of well-chosen wine, deliver each other’s punch lines all night, be first on the dance floor at the kitchen disco and then the last to leave. But we stopped going to those dinner parties long ago, knowing that I’d inevitably have my phone out by the time the second bottle of wine was opened, trying to keep on top of my messages and comments. Come to think of it, perhaps we just stopped being invited.
Eventually, Instagram felt less like editing my own personal magazine and more like hosting a daily talk radio show where a thousand listeners get to call in every episode and are allowed airtime no matter how vicious or incoherent they are. Overnight, instead of lovely little snapshots in discreet little squares, thanks to Instastories—those fifteen-second videos that gobble up our lives—now it feels like I have a GoPro strapped to my head at all times of the day and night. I can barely take a wee without feeling the need to beam the fact out for public consumption.
I sometimes look back at the private emmyjackson profile I never deleted, with those ninety-seven unplanned posts, preserved in internet aspic, and I barely recognize myself. I scroll through photos that show Emmy grinning over avocado toast, hugging Polly on a picnic blanket in the park, standing under the Eiffel Tower with Dan, or drinking shots on her wedding day, and I feel a little bit jealous of her.
Who could have predicted how big, how life-altering Instagram would become? One hundred million images uploaded a day, they say. One billion users. It boggles the mind.
Still, I’m not some ingenue who just stumbled into influencing for a living. Dan knew what we were getting into as well. We did discuss all this before Mamabare was born, but it does strike me sometimes that when he agreed I should give it a go, neither one of us really anticipated how quickly it would take off or how famous it would make us, as a family, or how exposing that would feel.
He gave himself a real scare yesterday.
I have told Dan, I have warned him, so many times, that you can’t take your eyes off Coco for a second. It’s one of the reasons why I’m paranoid about letting Dan’s mum look after her: the thought that in the time it takes her to open her handbag and get a tissue for Coco’s snotty nose, our daughter might go from riding her bike along the pavement to riding it under the wheels of a truck. And on top of the usual things that could happen to an unsupervised three-year-old—sticking a fork in an uncovered socket, say, or choking on the fifty-pence piece they inexplicably decided to suck on—there are also more than a million people out there, not all of them nice, who know Coco’s face, her name, her age, her favorite food, her favorite TV program.
Of course, Dan being Dan, he was so self-flagellating about the whole Westfield thing—so dramatic about what might have happened, so emphatic about how terrible he felt—that losing my temper and shouting was not an option. And so I just had to swallow whatever irritation or anger or fear I might have been feeling about all those panicky missed calls, about having had to cancel the meeting with my agent, about not being able to leave my husband in charge of either one of our children for three fucking minutes. Instead, I found myself rubbing his shoulder, telling him it was really not such a big deal, that it could have happened whoever was watching her.
It hadn’t, though, had it? It had happened on his watch. And just because I did not give Dan the dressing-down he deserved, that does not mean I am not furious with him about what happened—and as for what did happen, I can imagine it all too easily.
I’d be willing to bet you almost anything that he was thumbing some novel idea into his phone when she wandered off. Some plot point, some line of dialogue that had just occurred to him. I can picture the expression he would have had on his face as he did it too. The intense frown. The puckered mouth. The air of complete self-absorption.
Anyone who has two kids, and has been married for as long as Dan and I have, knows what it is like to seethe with righteous anger about something that might have happened, or to silently boil with resentment about what someone was probably doing when they should have been doing something else—especially when, as in this case, that something else was looking after our daughter. Which in the overall scheme of things is quite important, or so you might have thought.
Equally, I have no doubt that in his head Dan has found some way to make all this somehow my fault.
After yesterday’s panicked cancellation, I hoped I could get away with just a phone chat with Irene, but she was adamant we reschedule. Because Bear the grumpy milk guzzler can’t be away from my boobs for long, I bundled the tiny sling refusenik into his snowsuit and did the whole annoying journey for the second day in a row. I drew the line at lugging the Bugaboo up five flights of stairs, though, so there’s currently an intern walking him around the block to keep him asleep.
To be honest, I always try to avoid Irene’s office if I can. The clichéd neon art, the sketchy Tracey Emins, and the expensive mid-century modern furniture never fail to remind me how much her contracted 20 percent of my annual earnings adds up to. I would rather not know what Irene is worth, but as she is the owner of one of the most profitable influencer empires this side of the Atlantic, with a staff of forty, an office adjacent to Liberty, a mansion-block apartment in Bayswater, and a house in the South of France, it’s not inconsiderable.
My mood is not improved by having spent most of yesterday evening—once I had talked Dan down off the ceiling—slogging through what felt like even more DMs than usual, replying to every single one with enthusiasm, even if an unusually high proportion were from the creepier end of my follower contingent, knowing that if I don’t, they’ll complain in my comments or bitch on the gossip sites that I’m getting too big for my boots. So it’s a jolly response to the pensioner who has been following me ever since the Barefoot days and who asks insistently for pictures of my bare feet. Ha ha, sorry, Jimmy, my bunions are already swaddled in their M&S slippers! The man who sends me poems about childbirth. Thank you so much for this, Chris, can’t wait to get around to reading it properly. The woman who wants to paint Coco’s portrait in Victorian dress and keeps asking when she’s free to sit for her.
I should have known better than to expect much sympathy from Irene on this front.
“Emmy, you know this stuff is just an occupational hazard.” She laughs. “You’d get worse abuse, have to deal with creepier people, working at the council, or in a call center.”
She can be bracingly direct, my agent.
Whatever happened yesterday, whatever impact it may have had on Dan and me, on our relationship, Irene certainly doesn’t want to hear about it in any more detail—that’s why she insists on paying for me to see Dr. Fairs. A trained psychotherapist that Irene also represents, Dr. Fairs has carved out a niche treating anxious influencers and angry trolls, building up an online following of a hundred thousand herself, with daily #mindfulmantras and an eponymous line of #selfcaresupplements. It’s a stipulation of all Irene’s contracts that her clients spend at least an hour a month on the therapist’s couch.
She also makes all the talent take a personality test before she signs them.
“I like to know if my influencers are narcissists or sociopaths,” Irene once joked when I asked her why. “I won’t sign them otherwise.” At least, I presume it was a joke.
To be honest, the therapy arrangement probably works best for all of us. I
’ve known Irene for years, and she’s always had the human warmth of a walk-in fridge—ambition is her defining characteristic. We met when I worked in magazines and she was the agent for every hot British actress you could name, feeding me a steady stream of them for shoots. That was always the best bit of my job—creating visual confections of pure fantasy with the most gorgeous women and the most beautiful clothes, every single month. Flying off to studios or locations in LA, Miami, Mustique, spending days with armfuls of couture and armies of photographers, makeup artists, and publicists, then seeing our handiwork stare back at me from the newsstands a few weeks later.
It never got old, the delight of seeing those images, of reading my name in print. Of knowing that I had created a real, permanent thing that people would see and touch and love and keep. I used to think of girls, like the teenage me, buying those magazines, taking them home to their suburban bedrooms and savoring every photograph, every word, just like I used to. Keeping them piled up by the bed and poring over the pages of beautiful people and places and things when they needed to escape their own suffocating, humdrum lives, just for a moment. But of course I know that no teenage girl does that anymore, which is why I no longer have that job.
Irene saw early on where it was all heading. She and I were tipsy together one night after a shoot when she told me about the new business she was starting. “I’ve seen the future, and it’s social media. I’ve had enough of actors. Too much talent. Too many opinions. Influencers are where the money’s at. And they’re so malleable. They’re like people, only in two dimensions.”
She was sensible enough to know that she couldn’t compete for the established fashion and beauty stars, so she built her own—what’s the collective noun for influencers? An endorsement?—in niche areas. I was one of her first clients, and while she may have cheated slightly and bought my first few thousand follower bots to give me a kick-start, the rest have been real people won with pure graft. I’ve cultivated my prime position in the pod—my inner circle of five Instamums who play the algorithm by liking and commenting on one another’s every post immediately, sending them to the top of our followers’ feeds—with the same care as a CEO would chart the company’s position in the FTSE 100.