by Ellery Lloyd
Irene takes off her Chloé glasses and places them on the desk, flicks her hair from her shoulders and raises a perfectly arched brow. There’s not a single strand out of place in her blunt-cut, jet-black fringe, which frames sharp features and skin so unblemished it looks like it’s been run through a Clarendon filter. Not that it ever has been—like a drug dealer who won’t get high on their own supply, not a single photo of Irene exists on social media. She reels off the list of Mamabare gigs in the pipeline, including a shoot with a toilet paper company, a podcast, and a day judging the You Glow Mama Awards.
“I’ve been chasing them, but we haven’t heard back yet about the BBC Three gig. I’ll keep you posted,” she says, with a little shrug.
While Irene says she supports my plans to pivot into TV presenting, to use the following I’ve built to make a real-life name for Emmy Jackson independent of Mamabare, it’s quite clear she doesn’t actually think I’m cut out to be the next Stacey Dooley. Sadly, this is a view that seems to be shared by most people who work in TV. I’ll admit I’m not a natural—somehow the honest mum stuff that sounds so plausible written down feels fake and forced on-screen, and it’s harder to come up with it off the cuff with a camera trained on my face, so my eyes dart around wildly and I stumble over words. But I didn’t get the Instagram thing right straightaway, and now look where we are. I’m playing the long game here, and every audition is a little less awful than the last, every screen test not quite as awkward.
I can’t be answering 442 daily messages from strangers forever.
“There’s one more thing we need to discuss. You’ve got a busy month coming up, and I don’t think you’re going to manage all your engagements, and keep on top of everything else, on your own with a newborn. So we have found you an assistant.”
Irene can see I am about to object. She holds her hand up.
“Don’t worry. It won’t cost you a thing, I’ll take care of it. She’s one of my new signings, actually. I pitched it to her as an opportunity to be mentored by one of my stars. A pretty little thing. Likes hats,” she says. “Her name is Winter, and she’ll be at your house on Monday morning at ten a.m.”
It is clear that’s the end of that discussion.
Irene spends the last five minutes of our meeting rattling off my media appearances: TV and radio rent-a-mum guest slots for which I generally just have to offer a couple of uncontroversial opinions on whatever parenting topic has hit the news and then, if possible, drop in a mention of the #greydays campaign, as it’s Mamabare’s thing. For an influencer, a pet cause gives us something to bang on about when we run out of things to say about ourselves.
All the mental health stuff has been getting a bit too depressing recently, though—my downbeat posts aren’t doing so well with engagement, and that’s been putting some brands off. It’s hard to sell shower gel the next post along from a heartfelt monologue about forgetting who you are as a human being after having a baby. We can’t drop the campaign entirely in case someone else muscles in on the territory, so we’ve decided to introduce a #yaydays strand for some counterbalance. We need a big wow event to launch it, an authentic reason for a real party that my pod of A-list Instamums can be persuaded to come to without demanding to be paid.
There’s an obvious contender: Coco’s fourth birthday party.
Chapter Five
Dan
We don’t often argue, Emmy and I. Very early on in our relationship, I realized there was no point. Whether or not we argue, she’ll get her way eventually, and at least if we don’t argue I don’t find myself getting the silent treatment or having to apologize. And for the most part, I must admit that once the dust has settled, she does pretty much always turn out to have been right. About that weird thick silver wedding ring I wanted? Right all along. About the lights in the living room? So right. A great many of the things, in fact, that I have tried to dig my heels in about and made a fuss about over the years have turned out to be, in retrospect, absurd.
I guess the truth is that marriage really is about compromise. Which is not to say I always feel that we are compromising equally, or that we are meeting in the middle. Which is not to say that I always feel Emmy has necessarily fully thought through the impact that her life choices will make on the rest of us, the pressures they might place on us as a unit. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are a unit, a team, and if you stop being a team, then a marriage stops being a marriage. If I had been allowed to write my own wedding vows—although thank God Emmy put the kibosh on that idea—that was one of the things I would probably have said.
When it comes to my daughter’s birthday party, though, I really feel like I have to put my foot down.
As usual, by the time I get around to thinking about something, it has already been on Emmy’s mind for weeks. The only reason I even brought the topic up was because Mum reminded me it was Coco’s birthday soon and asked what we were going to do for it. I said I wasn’t sure yet but I was pretty certain Emmy had something planned, and Mum laughed, although I am unclear what part of this she thought I was joking about. The truth is, much as I might sometimes bristle at always having to ask my wife what we are doing on a given weekend, or whether I am free on a particular night, like most modern husbands I do defer to her when it comes to remembering things, organizing our social lives, making most of our plans.
It turned out what Emmy had planned for Coco’s birthday was a proper event.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked her.
I had been envisioning something somewhat lower-key. Something personal. Something private. Something involving slightly fewer people running around with clipboards.
She and her agent had already planned it, she told me. Where it was going to be, who was going to be there, who the brand partner would be—all on account of the content, of course. They had been scouting locations and getting quotes from caterers for ages.
“So it’s an Instaparty,” I said to her. “An Instravaganza.”
She gave me a look.
“And who’s coming?”
She told me.
“What about Coco’s friends from nursery? What about my friends? Am I allowed to invite any of my family along?”
She said she supposed we would have to invite my mother. Although maybe, thinking about it, under the circumstances, it would be better if we made this the official party and then had a separate thing a bit nearer to Coco’s actual birthday for close friends and relatives and those sorts of people.
“Two parties?” I asked. “Like the Queen?”
Emmy shrugged.
“And I suppose all the other Instamums will be at the official party, swanning around?”
“Yes, Dan, that is kind of how it works,” she told me. “We have discussed this.”
I expect it was pretty obvious from the look on my face how I felt about the prospect of spending the afternoon of my daughter’s birthday with that lot. Emmy’s pod? Her clique, more like. What is it that swims in pods, after all, in real life? Is it not, among other things, killer whales? I swear to God you’ve never met a more awful bunch of people in your life. The kind of people who are always looking over your shoulder when you’re talking to them and not even bothering to hide it—and half the time you find they’re actually looking into a mirror. The kind of people who start talking to someone else when you’re halfway through telling an anecdote. The kind of people, to cut a long story short, who I despise.
And yet somehow I seem to be stuck with them.
I probably spend more time these days with Emmy’s pod than I do with any of my real friends, the people I actually like and enjoy seeing and have something in common with.
There are five of them in the inner circle, including Emmy.
I think of all of them the one I like least is Hannah Bagshott, who also happens to be Emmy’s closest rival, with six hundred thousand followers. Instahandle: boob_and_the_gang. The look: blond bob, white slogan T-shirt, distressed jeans, red lipstick. Gimmick:
formerly a professional doula. Posts about: leaky boobs, chafed nipples, and the endless ups and downs of her relationship with her husband, Miles (often accompanied by black-and-white wedding shots of them both). Children: four (Fenton, Jago, Bertie, and Gus). Special issue: breastfeeding in public. To promote greater acceptance of which, she organizes mass feed-ins in places where women who are breastfeeding have been asked to cover up—pubs, restaurants, once a major department store. Her husband, by the way, is an absolute bellend.
Bella Williams, aka themumpowermentcoach—the oldest of the inner circle and a part-time headhunter with a full-time, live-in nanny—is the one I least dread getting stuck in a conversation with. This isn’t saying much. Single. Ismael, the father of her child, Rumi, is a Turkish painter who I think is now back in Turkey. I’ve never been quite sure whether he is a painter of, say, portraits and landscapes or of walls and fences. Apparently I did meet him once. Bella runs networking events for working mums and charges through the nose for them. Insta-issue: imposter syndrome—or, to be more specific, mumposter syndrome, a term I am pretty sure she invented, something about always feeling like you’re about to be exposed as a terrible mother and a useless employee, a fraud both at home and at work. Bella is evidently not big on irony.
Next up is the_hackney_mum. Sara Clarke. Interests: interior design. Also owns a shop selling macramé hanging baskets and chunky jewelry and paintings of people in old-fashioned clothes but with animal heads. Talks a lot about the two or three months she once spent living on a canal boat. Children: Isolde, Xanthe, and Casper, who all have exactly the same haircut despite one of them being a boy. Fun fact: knows themumpowermentcoach from Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Issue she thinks we should all be talking more about: maternal incontinence. I suspect that by the time she got around to trying to identify a maternal taboo to bust, all the good ones had already been taken.
Last and not quite least: whatmamawore. Suzy Wao. Distinguishing features: seems to be wearing a different pair of colorful glasses every time you see her or a picture of her. Otherwise it’s exclusively vintage 1950s dresses. I’d met Suzy Wao at least ten times before she deigned to acknowledge we’d ever been introduced, and at least twenty before she remembered my name or what I do. On several occasions she has introduced me to other people as “Ian.” Her husband is a very quiet man with an enormous beard, who’s usually drinking a stubby beer in the corner of the room and wearing one of those collarless jackets French workmen do. It’s unclear to me what he does for a living, but I think someone once told me he was a potter. Children: Betty and Etta. Starting a conversation about: body positivity.
I asked if we had to invite all of them.
“We have been to all their kids’ birthdays,” Emmy reminded me.
Exactly, I thought to myself. Have we not suffered enough?
At Xanthe Clarke’s, we were all on a narrowboat repainted specially for the occasion in bright stripes and blobs, going up and down the canal from Islington to King’s Cross and back again. This took three hours, before which it had already taken an hour for the various combinations of mums and kids to have their pictures taken in front of the boat. By the time we set off, it was raining and there was only room for half of us in the covered section. I was in my shirtsleeves. At one point the rain was refilling my wineglass faster than I was drinking. At several points I was seriously considering swimming for it.
There is a story—sadly apocryphal—that when Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, visited Crimea in 1787, her lover, Prince Potemkin, had a series of fake villages constructed—villages one wall thick, like stage sets, to be viewed from her passing barge, complete with well-fed waving actors in peasant garb—in order to fool her into thinking that the land was flourishing and her subjects happy.
I often think of these things, these events, as Potemkin parties: pure spectacle, confected entirely for online purposes. They are not about the party games or the food or the drink or about anyone having a good time. They are entirely about the filtered photo of bunting against a brick wall—that perfect snap of someone pretending to smile as they pretend to whack a piñata; the lettering on the cupcakes, the giant foil balloons, the arty video of the entertainer blowing bubbles. Not to mention the contractually requisite number of images of the venue and mentions of its name, the carefully agreed-upon number of tags and hashtags of each sponsoring brand—the caterer, the florist, the makeup artist, the drinks company, the entertainment. It’s all great exposure for them, of course.
What it isn’t, for anyone, is very much fun.
I shall never forget the look Suzy Wao gave me when I picked up a cronut at one of her parties before she’d had a chance to have the arrangement photographed.
When I mentioned this to Emmy, she informed me—with a faint, wry smile—that fun was something people used to have in their twenties.
What I actually meant was fun for the kids. Every time you see a picture of a child having what appears to be a good time at a party on Instagram, just bear in mind how many shots it probably took to get that one perfect picture. How many times they had to pretend to be laughing at something and not get it quite right. How many times they had to pretend to be jumping with glee through a hoop, or zooming with joy down a slide. How all the time they spent pretending to do kid stuff could have been spent doing actual kid stuff.
I ask Emmy where we are having this birthday party and she tells me. I groan, and get a warning look.
“Listen, if you want to organize something yourself . . . ,” she tells me.
“Maybe I will,” I say. Maybe I actually will. A real party, with our real friends, and Coco’s. The sort of thing a normal family might do. No specially commissioned murals, no officially sponsored goody bags, no professional photographers, none of that stuff. A birthday party like the ones I remember from my own childhood: a couple of bunches of balloons taped up around the place, a table with some snacks, a load of kids the same age hopped up on sugar screaming and shouting and having a whale of a time, a load of adults standing around drinking.
Coco is going to absolutely love it.
Emmy
I can spot an influencer at a hundred paces, and that’s definitely one outside the Lord Napier right now. Yellow ditsy-print dress with buttons down the front, box-fresh white Converse, a giant wicker bag with pom-poms, and a Panama hat. So much highlighter on her cheekbones she’s blinding me from across the road, eyebrows that could have been drawn on with a permanent marker, nude matte lipstick that wouldn’t budge in a hurricane, and a choppy, jaw-length peroxide bob.
The dead giveaway, though, is the boyfriend dutifully snapping away with his iPhone (which means she’s an amateur—serious players pay an actual photographer to use a real camera). This one is really going for it—twirling around, looking downward while she fiddles with a single strand of hair, holding his hand so it’s just in shot and making out as if she’s just about to open the pub door (she’s not—it’s nine thirty a.m.). To be fair, the Lord Napier is an unusually photogenic local. Outside, the walls are almost entirely covered with hanging baskets, bursting with yellow and white flowers and dripping with foliage.
If I’d remembered that my Irene-appointed assistant was starting today, I’d have been less surprised when, half an hour later, I opened the door to those eyebrows.
“Hi!” she says, holding out an arm jangling with charm bracelets. “I think you follow me, so you probably know who I am? Irene said you needed some help!”
“I’m sorry, remind me what your name is?” I say, rocking Bear back and forth in the sling to keep him asleep.
“I’m Winter! Wow, it’s really nice in here. It always looks messy on your feed. And you look so, I don’t know, chic? Navy is not your usual thing, is it? You’re more, like, smiley rainbow mum? Oh my GOD, are all those for you? I mean, the dream!” She points at the pile of gifted glossy bags I haven’t yet had a chance to go through, stuffed with clothes, beauty products, and what looks like a brand-new Nutr
iBullet.
“Just a second, I’ve got to WhatsApp my boyfriend and tell him this is the right house and I’ll see him when I get home. Becket is just the best, so protective of me. I keep telling him he would be an amazing influencer, but he’s concentrating on his music right now,” she says earnestly as she types.
I welcome her in just to stop her talking, and ask her to take her shoes off, which she does. Her hat, in contrast, stays on all day.
After a brief tour of the house, I sit Winter down in the kitchen with our spare laptop and my old iPhone along with the relevant passwords she’ll need. Irene calls to remind me what we agreed: Winter will manage my diary and, more important, be Mamabare when I can’t—when I’m on a shoot, or at a lunch, launch, or dinner. I have to admit, I’m not hopeful that Winter’s up to the task. She’s already walked into the closet under the stairs thinking it’s a bathroom.
Luckily, there isn’t anything technical involved in the role, unless you count printing out the labels to mail the odd #greydays sweater or mug to a follower willing to part with forty-five pounds plus shipping and handling, but it is time-consuming. All my posts are photographed and written at least a fortnight in advance. But while she won’t be posting, Winter will be monitoring the influencer gossip forums—it’s all useful feedback, no matter how bitchy or sanctimonious—and answering my DMs, as well as liking and replying to comments. Which means I have to give her a crash course in how to speak Mamabare. Winter takes out her notebook and puts on a serious face. I look winteriscoming up on Instagram. At a tiny eleven thousand followers, presumably at least a few thousand of which are bots Irene has bought, she’s definitely at the micro end of influencer. She’s already posted the shot of her outside the Lord Napier, twirling her dress while looking coquettishly at the ground. It’s captioned: They Call Me Mellow Yellow, with buttercup emojis where the os should be.