by Ellery Lloyd
Within about fifteen minutes screenshots had started appearing—on Instagram, on Twitter, on Mumsnet. Within three hours it had been picked up as one of those little clickbait stories on BuzzFeed. By the next morning there was an account of her “four-letter fury,” complete with screenshots and pictures of her from her feed, in the Mail Online. By that afternoon the pictures had been supplemented with grainy long-range shots of her getting into a Land Rover and the story was about her losing the Pampers partnership and being in talks with her radio bosses about whether or not they still wanted her to host one of their shows. They did not, as it transpired. Presumably she’s now gone back to doing whatever it was she did with her life before she became an influencer—if that’s still an option for her. The last time I looked on Instagram, she’d deleted her account. Not in the Sorry, guys, I’m stepping away from these little squares for a few days for my mental health way they all seem to do intermittently whenever they are getting criticized for something or want a bit of extra attention and reassurance. The way you would properly delete your account if you’d signed up to retrain as a teacher or lawyer.
And that was someone we used to see at events and say hello to and who once or twice was down to the final two or three in competition for things with Emmy, just a year and a half ago. Someone whose kids I could pick out of a lineup, whose kitchen I could describe.
I did suggest once to Emmy we drop her a line and see how she’s doing, and my wife asked me why we would do that in what looked like genuine bafflement.
Twenty-three years. That is what people kept saying to me, reminding me of. Twenty-three years in the same hospital, the same department, for the last ten years the same job. It seemed to be hard for some of my younger colleagues to get their heads around. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I would find it hard to get my head around it myself.
I was not sorry to be retiring. It is tough work, being an intensive care nurse. That is the first thing most people say when I tell them what I do for a living. What I did for a living. That it must be tough. It’s certainly intense, I would sometimes tell them. Knowing that when someone comes around from major surgery yours will be the first face they see. Knowing that you are going to be dealing all day with people who are scared, confused, in pain. Knowing that for every one of the people you are looking after, your diligence, your experience, your sense of when something is not quite right, could literally mean the difference between life and death.
That is something, isn’t it? Not everyone can say that. That the work they do, every day, every shift, literally saves lives.
Sometimes when I think about all the people I have kept alive over the years, professionally, and of all the people who have been taken from me, personally, it almost feels like I would be within my rights to even the score a little with the universe. Just by one or two.
Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and I wonder what I have become, what kind of person thinks like that.
Sometimes I feel like it was actually my job that was holding me together, all that time. When George died. When we lost Ailsa. When I lost Grace. Maybe that was what gave me the strength to get through the days: being able to go to work and focus on dealing with someone else’s suffering, someone else’s pain. There’s not a lot of time for moping and introspection in an intensive care unit. There’s not a lot of time to think about your own problems.
Which is not to say the sadness or the hurt or the anger go away.
I had repeatedly told everyone I did not want a retirement party. For weeks and weeks I kept dropping hints that I did not feel like a big thing, with speeches and balloons and a cake and all that. I have always hated being the center of attention at the best of times, and I had my own very good reasons for wanting to avoid the spotlight in those last few months.
They did it anyway. A surprise party, no less. Or that was the plan, anyway. I had just finished scrubbing out at the end of a shift, and someone messaged me and asked if I would pop up to the big meeting room on the seventh floor, and my heart sank and I knew before I opened the door that a load of people were going to be sitting there in the dark, all poised to turn the lights on and shout, “Surprise!” And so it was. And, as I had expected, they had all gone in together and bought me some flowers, some chocolates, a mug with a joke about retirement on it, something to do with gardening. There were speeches. And all through the speeches, as people were talking about how “kind” and “thoughtful” and “patient” and “sweet” and “lovely” I am, as they were saying things about never having seen me flustered, how they had never seen me lose my temper, never heard me snap or say a cross word about anyone, I kept looking from face to face to face, and I kept thinking, If only you knew.
If only you fucking knew.
Chapter Ten
Dan
There are some days when everything just seems to go wrong from the start. Take this morning. For some reason, completely out of character, Bear decides to wake up at four thirty and start screaming. I go through and check his nappy and settle him. Fifteen minutes later, he starts screaming again. Emmy goes in. For about half an hour I can hear her through the wall, jouncing him and shushing him and soothing him back to sleep. The instant she tries to put him down, he starts screaming again. From Coco’s bedroom, through the door, I can hear a plaintive voice asking what’s going on. It’s now five fifteen, and since Emmy has a photo shoot later I get up and offer to take the baby for a few hours.
Before Bear came along I think I had forgotten what it was like, having a very young baby. The relentlessness of it. The constant stream of things to worry about. The never-ending to-do list of baby-related tasks. The amount of pressure it puts on you as a couple even at the best of times.
When I get tired, I get cranky and I get clumsy. Not a great combination. The first thing I do when I go down to the kitchen is open a cupboard door to get a bottle out to decant Bear’s milk into, turn to grab something out of the fridge, then turn back to bash myself on the open cupboard door, right between the eyes.
Emmy shouts down to see what is going on. I shout back, “Nothing.” She asks what all the swearing is about then.
It takes me about five minutes to find the empty plastic bottle I got out of the cupboard, which seems to have immediately vanished. Eventually I find it, right in front of me on the counter.
By this time Bear is getting hungry and whiny and irritable.
It’s mornings like this when I find myself reflecting in amazement on how little childcare they did, the men of my father’s generation. Did he ever change a nappy, my dad? Perhaps once, badly. I know he used to complain sometimes about the smell of the nappy bucket, the one by the back door, and there was a family story about the time he was leaving for work in his best suit (I picture it flared, acrylic, with wide lapels) and managed to kick the bucket over or step in it. But I can’t remember ever hearing about him getting up in the night to do a midnight feed with a bottle or pushing a pram around the block to get me to sleep. Or even taking me to the playground or park on his own. And this is the early eighties we’re talking about, not the fifties. My mum had been to college and read The Female Eunuch and had her own full-time job—and she still cooked all the dinners too. I just can’t understand how they used to get away with it, the men in those days.
By the time Emmy and Coco get up and start going through clothes and picking an outfit for today’s shoot, it’s eight fifteen and I feel like I’ve done a full day’s work already.
It is clear that Emmy and I need to get our childcare arrangements sorted, pronto.
Among the many little bits of domestic admin I’ve been assigned to do while Emmy’s out at this shoot with Coco and Bear today is the task of finding a nanny. We have, in the end, decided to go about finding a suitable candidate in the conventional manner, after Emmy and Irene investigated without success a potential partnership with a nanny agency and I had vetoed Irene’s suggestion we hold a competition to find one on Instagram. Given that Emmy�
��s agent was probably at least half joking, I was perhaps a bit more snappish about this last proposal than the situation demanded. Emmy gave me a long, cool stare.
“Well, why don’t you sort something out, then?” she asked.
She’d then gone to do something in the bedroom that involved quite a lot of banging around and drawer-slamming while I stomped through to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and grab my laptop. About twenty minutes later I stuck my head around the bedroom door to tell Emmy I’d signed us up with a new online matchmaking service for families in search of nannies and nannies in search of families. We sat down later that evening with a glass of wine in front of the telly and filled in an online form about who we are and the sort of person we’re looking for.
While Emmy is getting Bear ready and Coco is watching cartoons at the kitchen table on her iPad I log back into the site and find we’ve had seven responses overnight. I cross off the one with mysteriously long gaps in her CV. Ditto the one with three typos in her personal description. I do not much like the look of the one with the nose rings and slightly divergent eyes and the purple hair. Judge me. That still leaves four promising leads. Of these, three are smiling and one looks very serious. Of the three smilers, one is twenty-two, one is forty-five, and one is in her midsixties. I can just imagine Emmy’s reaction if I chose the twenty-two-year-old. The forty-five-year-old mentions in her profile that she considers herself spiritual. And so, in the space of less than ten minutes’ scrolling and clicking, we have our winner. Annabel Williams, sixty-four, an Edinburgh-born, London-based childcarer with three decades’ experience. Her look? No-nonsense. Nannyish, if you will. Someone reliable, trustworthy, unflappable. Just the sort of person we’re looking for. She has qualifications and references. She can start immediately.
Well done, Dan, I think.
I click APPROVE and the system matches us up and invites me to submit a time for a face-to-face meeting, an interview. I do so.
I’m already imagining how casually, how smugly, I’m going to drop this into conversation with Emmy.
Two minutes later I get an automated message saying we’ve been rejected, with no further information.
As I am waiting for the kettle to boil and thinking about what to do next, Winter turns up. She’s late, of course, as usual. Evidently not having expected any of us to be around, she clomps into the kitchen, gives a little start, says good morning, glances at the clock, pretends to be surprised by what time it is, puts her Starbucks down on the kitchen table, asks Coco how she is doing.
“Fine,” Coco answers, without looking up.
It’s then that the day really goes tits up.
It’s then that—having shrugged her coat off and settled herself diagonally opposite me at the kitchen counter and plugged her phone in and taken a slurp of coffee—Winter asks me where her laptop is.
I ask her where she left it.
She gestures vaguely toward the corner of the countertop where all the chargers are.
At that exact moment, Emmy walks in, carrying Bear (who’s wearing, I note, a bear outfit).
“What?” she asks.
I tell her.
The next half an hour is spent turning the house upside down to make sure the laptop is definitely gone. While Winter floats around looking in all sorts of implausible places (laundry basket, bread bin), I root through the boxes of toys and jigsaws and kid’s books in the playroom and Emmy checks the bedrooms upstairs.
The laptop is definitely not here. The inevitable conclusion is that it was taken in the burglary—Winter, of course, what with it having been the weekend and then with all that drama yesterday, hasn’t needed it since, and neither Emmy nor I ever use the thing.
While Emmy is on the phone to Irene, explaining what’s happened, I keep reminding myself that things could be worse. It was not like it had been particularly expensive, that laptop. All the contents were password protected. Whoever stole it—no doubt some junkie—had probably wiped the thing and sold it by now. Irene can afford to replace it. We just need to inform the police, update our insurance claim. It wasn’t Winter’s fault, really. I probably should have put the thing away somewhere, in one of the drawers, before we went out.
By the time Emmy gets off the phone she’s already almost an hour late for the shoot. “Right,” she says to Winter and me. “Dan, you need to call the police and insurance people, okay?”
“Sure thing,” I say. “That had already occurred to me, actually . . .”
“Winter?”
Winter puts her phone down.
“Irene is couriering another laptop over so you can get on with stuff here. Is that okay? Same username, same passwords as before. Once it gets here, you are good to go.”
Winter looks puzzled.
“Problem?”
The problem is the passwords, says Winter.
“You don’t remember them?”
She shakes her head.
“I always had them written down,” she says. “I wrote them all down, all the different passwords you gave me.”
“Wrote them all down where?” asks Emmy.
“On a Post-it note.”
“And where did you stick that Post-it note?”
Winter tells us.
“Jesus,” says Emmy.
“I’m really sorry,” says Winter.
There are times, I think, when sorry really doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Emmy
Every. Single. One.
Every single password was on that Post-it.
And so it wouldn’t get lost, she stuck the Post-it to the screen of the fucking laptop.
Which means that whoever stole it has had three days’ unrestricted access to everything Mamabare has ever done, all helpfully saved on my desktop or in the Cloud. Thousands and thousands of photos, emails, contracts. The task I’ve set Dan and Winter for this afternoon is to sit down and make a list of absolutely everything they could have got their hands on. Which is not just the stuff on the laptop itself, of course. It’s every picture I have on my phone or Dan has on his phone. Every DM Mamabare has received. Text messages. WhatsApp messages. Passport scans. The guest list for Coco’s party.
I literally don’t have time to deal with this shit today. I don’t even have time to think about it. I could have strangled Winter, I really could. If there’d been more time, I might have.
Of all the days.
In the back of the cab on the way to the shoot, I call Irene again. She promises me she’ll speak to Dan and Winter, take charge, give them instructions. She thinks for a minute. “Maybe I’d better go over there myself,” she says. There will be a lot of passwords to change, for one thing. There will be a lot of people to notify. She asks me how I’m feeling. She reminds me about today, how important it is. She’s sure they won’t mind that I am a little late, so long as I turn it on when we get there.
I tell her not to worry about that. One thing I learned very early, growing up in my family, was how to compartmentalize.
Anyway, Irene doesn’t have to remind me how lucky I am to be involved in this shoot. I will be—and believe me, this is more of a coup than it sounds—one of the faces of a major toilet paper brand’s #tothebottomwiperinchief Mother’s Day campaign.
It’s also something of a personal triumph for Irene.
She’s booked all five of the pod, plus our own mothers and children, for this one. It’s no accident that, as a group, we have a lot of bases covered, personality-wise, like a low-energy Spice Girls tribute act. There’s Hannah with her earth mother schtick, Bella and her empowerment, Sara’s small business owning, and Suzy’s vintage style. Our own mothers are even more of a mixed bag—only mine has wholeheartedly embraced the influencer thing.
Virginia has been texting me for about an hour now, wanting to know where I am.
Having always been pretty sniffy about my career in magazines—not to mention my choice of a novelist over a hedge-fund husband—once she realized what was in it for her, my moth
er was delighted by my segue into social media. Being an Instagram grande dame suits her down to the ground and, to be fair to her, she has proven herself to be a very useful Mamabare brand extension.
It’s been fascinating to see Ginny share her pearls of parenting wisdom on her own little squares (sandwiched in among an increasing number of paid-for #ads for wrinkle cream, hair dye to cover up the greys, and Windsmoor coats—although it is a personal bugbear of hers that only what she calls “old-lady labels” have been flash with the cash). Hearing her wax lyrical about all the nursery rhymes she used to sing me, all the cakes we baked together, all the fun we used to have almost makes me believe I had an idyllic childhood.
The photo from the family album of six-year-old me pointing at the gap where a front tooth should be with a lengthy caption about putting fifty pence and a handwritten poem under my pillow? I’m sure I’m not misremembering her, hungover, throwing a fiver in my face when I cried because the tooth fairy hadn’t visited. As for the heartfelt words she shared on December twenty-fifth, about how I believed in Father Christmas until I was thirteen because she always took a bite out of the carrot and left size-ten footprints in icing-sugar “snow” on the porch? My only memories from the festive season are of her necking Santa’s brandy, burning the Brussels sprouts, and accidentally showing off her red wine teeth when shushing me for the Queen’s speech.