People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  I lose sight of it sometimes, how lucky we are to have two happy, healthy children, when I’m treading on a tiny, spiky princess crown or she’s angling for an extra story at bedtime. But the thought of my daughter—of either of my children—hurting is worse than anything that could ever possibly happen to me. She’s my child, my first child, who I held in my arms before she even knew what hurt or fear was. I remember when she was a newborn and Dan and I had to clip her tiny nails and he somehow caught the end of a finger. I remember her puzzled yowl and watching that crescent of blood appearing on her fingertip and the look she gave us, as if we’d somehow betrayed her, and realizing that was the first time she’d ever experienced pain and that it was our fault.

  I remember Coco twirling to impress me once on a raised platform at a play park, and stumbling and falling, and catching her chin on a bar as she fell, cutting her top lip with a tooth, and feeling just as vividly as Coco herself that abrupt transition from joy and exhilaration to sudden hurt and sadness. And nights when Coco was ill and feverish and not knowing how best to help, and whether we should take her to the hospital or just let her sleep. Knowing that something has happened to her now is like experiencing all of those moments again simultaneously, and the whole thing is worse because I don’t know what has happened and I don’t know how serious it is.

  Every time I spot a cab approaching, I start waving more energetically before it gets closer, and I see its light is off and it’s already carrying a passenger. The nearest Uber is somehow seventeen minutes away. When, finally, an available cab does stop, I then spend twenty minutes in traffic calling Winter repeatedly with no response.

  Barging past the people in front of me in the queue at reception with Bear’s buggy, I physically grab the first nurse I see and demand she take me to my daughter.

  “Calm down, Mum. You’re looking for Coco Jackson? She’s fine. Come this way.” She leads me down the corridor. It is only when she puts her hand on my arm that I realize I am shaking.

  “Take a minute, Mum, before you see her,” the nurse says, stopping by a little table with a jug on it and pouring me a plastic cup of juice. “There’s no color in your face—you’ll give her a fright.” I take a couple of deep breaths and a few glugs of weak orange juice while the nurse explains what’s happened.

  When we arrive at her bedside, I find Coco happily propped up with pillows, watching Octonauts on Winter’s phone, having apparently dispatched my PA for snacks. She has a tube bandage on her right wrist. I can’t help but burst out laughing.

  “Pickle, what on earth did you do?” I ask, leaning down to her and pressing my lips against her forehead. “You gave Mama a scare!”

  “Mama, Winter was looking at her phone like you do, but I wanted her to look at me going high on the swings. I stood up on the seat so she could see me, but I fell off and bonked my hand,” she explains. “I didn’t mean to. It was a naxident.”

  I can tell she’s secretly a bit proud of herself and is probably quite enjoying her first-ever trip to hospital.

  Winter arrives back on the ward with what appears to be the entire contents of the vending machine. She stops dead in her tracks when she sees me, probably assuming that she’s about to get her size-eight arse handed to her. I can see that her eyes are red and bloodshot, and mascara is streaked down her cheeks.

  “I’m so, so sorry, Emmy. I don’t know what happened—one second she was on the swing, and the next she was on the ground. I was only looking at my phone for a second, I promise, and then I . . . I . . . ,” Winter stutters as she starts to cry.

  “The nurse said she thinks nothing’s broken, but they need to do an X-ray to check. She’s . . .” Winter can’t get any more words out before she breaks down into great big, snotty sobs.

  I open my mouth to give her the epic bollocking I’ve been mentally rehearsing in the cab, but it won’t come.

  “Oh, Winter, for God’s sake. You don’t need to cry. Coco seems okay. You’re fine, aren’t you, Cocopop?” I say. With some irritation, looking at the state of Winter, I can see that I am going to have to comfort her.

  I put my arms around the girl’s heaving shoulders.

  “We should never have asked you to take Coco; it’s not part of your job.”

  “It’s not that, Emmy. Well, it is that. But it’s also . . . the reason I was looking at my phone, the reason I was distracted . . . Becket dumped me. He says he just wants to concentrate on his music right now. He doesn’t have the headspace for anything else,” she wails as she waves her phone at me. “What am I going to do? Where am I going to live?”

  Sensitive, caring artist Becket has told Winter it’s over and asked her to move out by DM. A really, really long DM. More of a poem, actually, by the looks of it. I’m going to have to dispense relationship advice while we wait for the doctor to show up, I realize. I check that Bear is asleep in his pram, let Coco pick a bag of M&M’s from Winter’s haul, absentmindedly stroke the nape of her neck as she shovels them into her mouth.

  “Come here.” I motion for Winter to sit down next to me on the end of the bed. “What happened? Did you two have a fight?”

  “No, Emmy, that’s just it. I thought it was all going so well. We never fight, we are—we were—totally into each other. I don’t understand. I just don’t know what I’m going to do.” She starts hiccupping, and hands me the phone to read.

  I can’t bear to read the whole whiny, self-important, solipsistic thing, but quickly get the gist. Winter is trying to make a career for herself, and she isn’t giving him—the artist—enough attention. She’s been distracted by her new job and isn’t spending enough time fawning. There is a list of gigs she missed, a DJ set she turned up late for, that time she told him that she couldn’t post a picture of the cover of his EP on her Instagram feed because it interfered with sponsored content she had booked in. And he also sort of thought she’d maybe do more around his flat, like cooking or something, you know? So he could concentrate on creating?

  Christ, this guy sounds like a dick.

  “Winter, I know this feels like the end of the world now. But honestly, I went through the same thing as you over and over again in my twenties, and it all worked out for the best. These are just practice runs, you know, these hot idiots who break your heart? They help you work out what you want, what you actually need. And if you’re anything like me—and I think you are, in a lot of ways—what you need is someone who has your back. Someone who is not always competing with you. Who is willing to support you fully in whatever it is you want to do—even if they don’t entirely understand what that is—and who doesn’t feel threatened when you do it well and people notice,” I say, squeezing her knee. “And I promise, there really are men out there who don’t feel that being in a relationship with a successful woman somehow diminishes or overshadows them.”

  She dabs away a tear. “Are you talking about you and Dan? God, I totally never thought of you guys like that. I just thought that you’re, you know, a mum and dad,” she says, looking at me quizzically, and I can see that in her head she is trying to imagine us as a younger couple, a young couple, trying to imagine the kind of people we used to be when we were her age.

  Oh, come on, I think, is it really that difficult?

  “You’ll meet someone else,” I tell her, resting a hand on her arm. “Someone who goes out of their way to make you feel special, who looks at you like you’re the only woman in the world, who listens and laughs and loves you the way you deserve to be loved. You’ll find your Dan.”

  For some reason this sets her off sobbing again. I offer her a tissue. She dabs her eyes and then blows her nose on it.

  “Oh God,” she moans, “that’s very romantic and everything . . . it’s just . . . it’s just . . . Becket’s parents own our flat. I haven’t really earned anything from influencing since I quit my job to go full-time and I’m already in so much debt I can’t look at the credit card bills. Everyone said it was easy, all this. Irene made it sound like there wo
uld be loads of money right from the start. I mean, I get sent stuff. But it’s, like, never stuff you actually want, is it? Bags in the wrong color, dresses that don’t fit. And some of the hats”—she wrinkles her nose—“they’re so awful, they don’t even sell on eBay.

  “You can’t eat free clothes, or pay your rent with them. And the holidays and the turmeric lattes and smoothie bowls for brunch with the other girls, and the giant bunches of flowers for props, the hair and beauty stuff, and you have to look different in every photo, and . . . and . . . I don’t even have a proper camera . . .” She is now blowing great big snot bubbles, tears dripping from her chin. “Everyone else has an Olympus PEN!” She literally howls at the injustice of it all.

  I could kiss the doctor when he arrives to give Coco a once-over, giving me the excuse I need to hug Winter one more time and send her off home. He says that he is almost certain that her wrist isn’t broken but wants to check. The nurse will be back in a little while to take her down to X-ray, and until then we should just sit tight.

  I take the iPad and the headphones out of my bag and hand them to Coco, who settles down again to watch Octonauts. Bear’s still asleep, and when I pull out my phone I see I have several missed calls from Dan and one from Polly. I text Dan to let him know everything is fine, and Polly to say that I’ll call her later, as Coco is in the hospital. She offers to come straight over to help, to take Bear or bring dinner or a change of clothes, but I reassure her it’s just a minor sprain.

  “Now, Coco,” I say, “you stay there for five minutes while Mummy finds some clothes for you that aren’t covered in mud!”

  I push Bear in his buggy over to the gift shop, where I can only find a set of hideous and overpriced Peppa Pig pajamas in Coco’s size. I buy some jumbo felt-tips too, just in case she does need a cast and we can draw pictures of princesses on it.

  I arrive back at Coco’s bed to find her asleep, her cheek pressed up against the iPad. A warmth fills my chest. All her big-girl attitude fades when Coco sleeps, and she’s my little baby again. And along with that rush of feeling, another thought arrives. I carefully ease the iPad out from under her, pull the curtain all the way around the bed, and draw the pale blue fleece blanket up around her chin. I stop for a second, pull out my phone, and take a photo. I hold her little hand in mine and take another. Then I hop up onto the bed beside her and take another where she’s lying curled up into a ball, spooning with me.

  Obviously, I don’t plan to ever post them, but they are a useful insurance policy. I know from a whole host of other people’s Instagram scandals that distraction is always the best tactic when things go badly wrong. Say sorry for whatever the internet is accusing you of, then swiftly follow up with a personal crisis of some sort. Because who’d continue to kick a mother with a child ill in the hospital?

  Dan

  By the time I finally get around to checking my messages, Emmy is already at the hospital and has taken charge. “Shall I turn the Uber around and join them?” I ask. Which hospital are they at again? My driver raises his eyes to look at me in the rearview mirror. Emmy tells me not to bother, they’re nearly done, Coco has sprained her wrist very mildly and they’ll be back soon. “Just home,” I tell the driver. “The original address, yeah?”

  I’m a bit surprised, when I get home, to find the door is only single-locked. I did specifically say something to Winter about that. Ever since the break-in I’ve been even more fastidious than normal when it comes to making sure the front door is double-locked, setting the alarm, leaving lights on whenever we all go out. It’s not just the thought that someone’s been in the house, it’s that someone was watching it beforehand, scoping out the neighborhood. That whoever broke in before might try the same thing again.

  I go to turn the alarm off and find it’s already been deactivated.

  “Hello?”

  As soon as I have stepped into the hall, I can tell there is someone else in the house. I don’t know what it is. Some kind of animal sense. Something about the air pressure.

  “Winter?”

  No answer. In the kitchen, I hear something move.

  “Emmy?”

  The movement stops. I stop too. I hold my breath. I’m pretty sure I can hear a kitchen cupboard being closed—or a drawer opened.

  Three quick steps, and I am in the doorway, ready to pounce on a burglar, ready to shout the place down, scared but also fueled by a certain sense of self-righteous excitement. My fists are clenched. My nails are digging into my palms.

  My mother is making herself a sandwich.

  She gives a bit of a start.

  I unclench my face to assume a more normal expression.

  “Hello, darling,” she says. “Everything okay?”

  Then it hits me that I completely forgot to call my mum and tell her not to come over.

  “I hope you don’t mind me making myself something to eat,” she says, taking a bite.

  I say, “Of course not.” She eats it, apologizing—she came here directly from dropping Derek home from his appointment at the hospital and she hasn’t had a chance to have a thing all day.

  “Id gogo nod wid du?”

  I hesitate before answering.

  “No, Mum, Coco isn’t with me. Don’t freak out, but she’s actually been at the hospital too.”

  She swallows and puts the rest of her sandwich on the counter, pushing the plate away from her with a flick of her fingers.

  “What?”

  “It’s really nothing. It was silly, the person looking after her took her to the park and got distracted . . .”

  Mum asks who was looking after her.

  I tell her. She thoughtfully removes a bread crumb from her lower lip.

  “And who is Winter?”

  I explain that Winter is Emmy’s PA.

  “And where was Emmy?”

  “At an awards thing. And I had a lunch with my publisher.”

  My mother is looking steadily less impressed.

  “Which hospital did they take her to?” she asks.

  I ignore this question.

  “They’ve just discharged her, and she’s absolutely fine, Mum.”

  I add that Coco’s on her way home now, that she’ll soon be able to confirm this for herself.

  My mum being my mum, the first thing she does is beat herself up about all this—if only she could’ve been there, if only she’d canceled Derek and told him to ask someone else to drive him in for his checkup . . . She feels awful. I keep trying to reassure her this wasn’t her fault, that nothing terrible happened, that everything was fine.

  “But it mightn’t have been,” she keeps saying. “I mean, thank God Coco is okay. But even so, just think if all those people on the internet got hold of it. The things they’d say. About Emmy, about her parenting. All the terrible, unfair things.”

  One of the things my mother worries a lot about is the precarity of what Emmy does for a living. How competitive it all is, the desperate struggle for paid ads and brand partners and all the things you need to turn followers into dollars (as Irene would put it). How long are we going to be able to spin this out for—until both the kids are at school? How will it work once they’re both in lessons all day? What happens when they start reading and understanding what Emmy writes?

  I do try—we both try, Emmy and I—to keep Coco’s feet on the ground as much as we can. We’re always reminding her it’s not normal to be given all this free stuff, for people to recognize you wherever you go, to have complete strangers act like they know you. I often tell her stories about what it was like when I was growing up (No iPhones! No iPads! No cartoons on demand!) and remind her what a lucky girl she is when you compare her life to the lives of lots of people around the world—and in this country too, for that matter. Once a week I try to make sure there’s an evening when phones are put away and we talk over dinner and we all read a story together before bed. When she got sent a ridiculous amount of stuff last Christmas (two wooden rocking horses, several plush b
ears the same size as she was, a playhouse about half the size of my shed), we put some of it in the attic and redistributed or gave away most of the rest. We’re careful how much we spend of it, the money Mamabare makes.

  But when Mum worries about how quickly all this could come crumbling down, I have to admit she has a point.

  Sure, some of the deals Irene has set Emmy up with have sounded like a lot of money for not very much actual work. If you look at the company accounts (Mamabare is, of course, a limited company), it looks like things are going pretty well for us. Then you hear the stories. Then you read about what’s happened to other people. I saw a piece in the Guardian recently about how an influencer’s entire following got stolen in the space of five minutes. Her Instagram account got hacked, her handle and password changed. That was it. Instagram wouldn’t help. Nobody could ever find it again. Years spent building up a following, and bam, they simply didn’t exist.

  When I’m not worrying about Coco’s safety, or what we might be doing to her psychologically, or that some sound I’ve heard downstairs is the burglars back again, what I mostly find myself worrying about in the middle of the night is this: that one false move, one fuckup, one badly judged comment, some cack-handed virtue signaling, could bring the whole thing tumbling down. The paid appearances, the shoots, the campaigns, all of it. It happens to people. It happens overnight. Remember justanothermother? I didn’t think so. Eighteen months ago she was just as big as, say, Suzy Wao or Sara Clarke. Probably bigger. Eighteen months ago she was just as big as Emmy. Probably bigger. She was getting TV adverts, had a big contract lined up with Pampers, had her own (very early) morning show on talk radio. Then in a single evening she blew the whole thing up. Apart from the fact that her twins were quite cute and they all lived in the country, so there was plenty of opportunity for wholesome outdoor shots of them jumping around farmyards in muddy boots and splashing in puddles, the big thing with justanothermother was that she was really nice, really wholesome, really sweet. Then one night, for whatever reason—maybe it had been a long day and the kids had been playing up at bedtime or maybe she’d heard some bad news or maybe there was some particularly nasty trollish comment that had got under her skin—she sat down with a glass of wine (perhaps not the first of the evening) and started responding to her DMs and she just lost it. I mean completely lost it. Started giving the haters a piece of her mind. A dose of their own medicine. Effing and jeffing. Calling people perverts and losers and wankers. Telling people to get a fucking life. Asking them why they were such cunts. I can just imagine the satisfaction it must have given her to click send, to imagine their surprise, to really let them have it with both barrels. We’ve all done that, I think, during arguments, said something, thinking, I am definitely not going to regret saying this in the morning.