People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  I could really do with my best friend right now.

  Polly xx

  I take a deep breath, start to type a response, delete it, then read the email again as I head toward the park, a milk-drunk Bear dozing in the carrier as I walk. I had forgotten, before he was born, just how little time newborns spend awake. Feed, burp, doze, repeat. I look at his little head, topped with a cashmere beanie, beneath my chin. Feel his heartbeat against my chest. Try to imagine what it would feel like without him, without Coco. What it would be like to be in Polly’s shoes. I press my lips against his head and think about all that heartache, about everything Polly must have gone through without ever breathing a word of it to me.

  I also have to try to stifle a very faint sensation that feels—in a sort of queasy way—a bit like jealousy.

  Sometimes I do wonder what the girls from our school think about where Polly and I are in life. When I am being kind to myself, I think they must be envious, amazed at where I’ve landed—a million followers, the biggest name in parenting. When I’m in a worse mood, I think that most of them probably don’t have a clue who or what Mamabare is. That being Instagram famous is like being a Monopoly millionaire, and it’s Polly and her husband, their pretty cottage in the suburbs and their secure jobs at a prestigious private school, that would impress them more.

  The terrible irony, the thing that now stabs at me, is that I have sometimes been envious of what Polly has, or doesn’t have, of how uncomplicated and comfortable her life looks. But doesn’t every mother sometimes imagine what their world would be like without kids? Well, obviously I wouldn’t be walking to a #greydays meetup. But what would I be doing? In a parallel universe, I’m editing Vogue and married to a Booker Prize winner. This—this desolate park, the low sky of unbroken cloud, the wind-scattered litter, a child strapped to my front, these fucking leggings, this slogan T-shirt—is certainly not what I thought my life would look like, but that’s what happens, isn’t it? You make a series of small decisions in your twenties, and they slowly bind you until they become a straitjacket. Whether or not to stay for that third drink. Whether to give that guy your number. Whether or not to answer when he rings. Whether or not you fall in love with him. Whether or not you have his babies and when.

  I wouldn’t say any of that to Polly, of course. But, right now, I can’t think of anything to say to her. Because, really, what is there to say? I’ve seen it all on Instagram—all the stupid, ignorant, crass advice that people give to women who can’t make babies. At least you know you can get pregnant . . . Have you thought about adoption? Tried acupuncture? Taken folic acid? Gone vegan? Done yoga? Stuck a rose quartz egg up your hoo-ha and squeezed? I can’t reassure her it will all be okay, because sometimes women’s bodies just don’t play ball with this shit. Things do not always work out for the best.

  She’s not a follower expecting an emoji and a platitude—better to send something properly considered and carefully crafted than fire off a hurriedly glib or accidentally callous response. I flag the email and put my phone back in my bag.

  It sometimes takes me a minute, out here in the real world, to go from being Emmy Jackson to Mamabare. To dial down the cynicism and amp up the empathy. Very slightly roughen the edges of my public-school accent. Take a deep breath and get ready for showtime. Because it’s no exaggeration to say that to the kind of women I’m meeting today, I am basically a rock star.

  These #greydays meetups started soon after I launched the campaign so I could meet my followers in real life, build an even deeper connection with them. I could tell by my low engagement figures that I wasn’t getting it quite right on those particular posts, that they didn’t ring true. Brought up as I was, taught to squash unpleasant, unwanted feelings before they made it to the surface, I found it hard to write about battling with the blues in an authentic way. But I had no choice. Women like me are expected to pick at emotional scabs for popular entertainment; we’re meant to have a rich back catalogue of anxieties, insecurities, and failures that we can draw upon in podcasts and Instagram posts. It was really not until I began engaging with my followers face-to-face—hearing their stories, listening to the words they use to describe their own feelings—that I discovered how to do this in a way that connects with them, that really resonates.

  The best approach, I have found, is to keep things as vague as possible, offering a suggestion of stress, a distant whiff of sadness, an oblique hint of loss. I’m careful never to go into specifics, so they can read what they need into my emotional outpourings online. Like a horoscope or a Rorschach test, they interpret the inkblots in the way that best suits them, that most helps them get through their own struggles. And I really think they do help, my posts, these monthly get-togethers, these gentle rambles around the park that have grown into a giant girl gang all sharing their battles with PND and PMT and IVF.

  One harassed-looking mother with a toddler being pulled along on a scooter behind his sleeping baby sibling in a pram falls in step with me as I walk through the park gates.

  “Emmy! That is you, isn’t it? I’m Laura—we’ve met at a few of these before, when I was on maternity leave with Wolf.” She points to the three-year-old angrily squishing a banana in his fists while screaming for crisps.

  “This is the first time I’ve been out solo with him and my little Rosa,” she continues breathlessly. “They say your second is easier. I mean, as you know, I had PTSD after my first birth. I thought this time round I’d be a natural, but I just can’t seem to get on top of everything. I wanted to talk to you about it as I just feel you really get me.” Her eyes are brimming with tears, and I know if I let her go on, they’ll be spilling out in sobs, and then I’ll have to spend the best part of five minutes patting her back.

  I touch my shoulder to hers as we walk. “Of course I remember you, Laura. My goodness, little Wolf is so big now! He must be almost exactly the same age as Coco.” I go to ruffle his hair, and he jerks his head away.

  “And Rosa and Bear are nearly the same age too. It’s almost like I timed it that way! Sorry to be such a fangirl, but just to know someone else is going through the exact same thing, in the exact same way, is so uplifting,” she says, fiddling with a button that’s about to fall off her cardigan. “It’s like you see into my soul.”

  Pretty once, I’m sure, Laura now has huge brown patches of melasma on her face, a halo of wispy hair regrowth, and an undeflated baby bump, and is walking like someone sliced open her undercarriage and did it back up with a stapler. This baby-making business is brutal.

  “That’s so incredible to hear,” I say, tilting my head and squeezing her hand. “It moves me so much to know my story has touched someone. You just need to remember that you are enough.”

  She dabs at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan and nods her head. The thing about these women—Laura, standing here in front of me, and the other million-odd who follow me—is that they feel like they’ve ceased to exist. The media, their husbands, their friends—none of them ever really acknowledge what it means to spend day in, day out mopping up puke, shit, and uneaten puree. To spend every night racking your brains trying to work out how to make tomorrow a little different to stop you going mad from boredom—not just another trip to the swings, the same baby gym that smells of feet, the café that doesn’t really want you and your fussy toddler taking up space, sharing one croissant and spilling a hot chocolate on the floor.

  And of course, yes, some dads do this, and go through this too. But it is not dads who follow me, and it is never men who come along to these #greydays meetups. Which used to puzzle me. Then I thought about the reaction Dan gets, walking down the street with Bear in his pram, or with Coco on her scooter. The friendly smiles, the compliments, the little nods and winks and gestures of approval and affirmation. The indisputable fact that when a man does even the very basics of childcare, however awkwardly, ineptly, or begrudgingly, he gets applauded for it. Whereas when a woman walks down the street with a baby, the only time anyone eve
n notices is if they think she is doing something wrong.

  I may be selfish. I may be cynical. But that does not mean that Mamabare does not provide a genuine public service.

  I see these women, I listen to them, I understand them. I don’t judge them, and I encourage them to be a bit less judgmental about themselves.

  And they love me for it.

  Dan

  It’s my mum I have to thank, really. She’s the one who happened to take Coco to the park that day and strike up a conversation with the woman sitting next to her, only to find out that she was in fact a retired former nurse, now working as a nanny. She was just about to start looking for a new kid to mind, the woman (she introduced herself as Doreen Mason), because the one she was currently caring for—she gestured at a boy with longish hair on the seesaw—was about to start big school this September and wouldn’t be needing her anymore. “Oh,” said my mum. “That’s funny.”

  Mum asked where Doreen lived. Doreen told her. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from our place. Mum had walked across the estate with Coco loads of times. Sometimes she pushed Coco on the swings in the little playground in the middle of it. Mum said you could tell Doreen really enjoyed spending time with children, playing with them, talking to them, from the way she spoke about the kids she had looked after over the years. She still sent them all birthday cards, she said, always got Christmas cards back. According to my mother, Doreen had a very reassuring, down-to-earth manner.

  I said I hoped Mum had taken her number.

  It’s absurd how difficult it is to find reliable, affordable childcare. You’d think in an area full of affluent youngish working couples, an area like ours, in this day and age, it would be the sort of thing someone would do something about, wouldn’t you? That if you were willing to spend a bit of money and do a bit of research then at least a couple of viable options would present themselves.

  You would be wrong.

  I’ve tried. I’ve spent ages online. Sent emails. Asked around. I called all the different nurseries in the vicinity. I even went to see one the other day. I turned up at the right time and no one answered the buzzer. I pushed the door and it swung right open. Probably not the best start, I thought to myself. There was a little row of pegs at adult waist height hung with coats in the corridor, a little row of boots lined up underneath. A child appeared at the top of the stairs, sucking on a plastic spoon. It looked down at me, then turned and wandered off. From a room to my left, I could hear a child screaming. The whole place smelled of boiled cabbage.

  I didn’t need to see any more.

  Which left us on the waiting list for about five other places, all of which were currently operating on a one-out-one-in basis, and none of which could foresee any new spaces becoming available until the start of next year at the earliest. I did try dropping Emmy’s name into at least one conversation. The woman at the other end of the line, her English thickly accented, asked me to spell it.

  When Emmy last asked me how things were going I told her I was on the case. That was three days ago. Coco keeps asking when she’s going back to her old nursery and when she’s going to see her friends again. Did she not enjoy hanging out with me and with Gran-Gran? I asked. Coco’s answer was a kind of apologetic shrug.

  When I ring Doreen, she answers pretty much right away and tells me she can come over that afternoon. “And how old is little Coco?” she asks. I tell her. Doreen says she is looking forward to meeting her. The first thing, she says, will be to make sure that we all get on and understand how this is going to work. “Of course,” I say, literally crossing my fingers. I tell her our address and she makes a note of it.

  Thankfully, she and Coco hit it off at once. I go to make Doreen a cup of tea—two sugars—and by the time I get back, she’s on her hands and knees playing with Coco and they’re both having a whale of a time. Once I reappear, Doreen stands up, aided by the arm of the couch. We start chatting and, quite without prompting, Coco goes over and sits next to her and sort of curls up against her.

  “Sweet little girl,” says Doreen when Coco has gone off to play at the other end of the living room for a bit. “Lovely name.”

  “It was my wife’s idea, actually,” I reveal, as I always do when I get the chance.

  When Doreen tells me her hourly fee, I say that sounds perfectly reasonable to me—only marginally more than we were paying the nursery. “Would you prefer cash?” I ask. She says a check is fine. “Oh,” she adds, as if she has just remembered. “I’d better ask—does little Coco have any allergies?” I say not that we know of, although she does get a little sniffly on very polleny days in the summer, but she’s okay with milk and nuts and penicillin. “That’s good,” says Doreen. “So many kids seem to have them these days, allergies.” The little boy she looks after at the moment, Stephen, has to be very careful with shellfish. His mother gave her a little allergy pen to carry with her at all times. Doreen never goes anywhere without it; she wouldn’t dare. “You would never forgive yourself, would you? If anything happened to one of them and it was your fault?”

  I agree not.

  As she’s drinking her tea, her eyes are giving our bookshelves the once-over.

  “I expect you’ll want to know what Emmy and I do for a living,” I suggest.

  Doreen raises her shoulders gently.

  “Is it something to do with books?” she asks.

  I tell her I am a writer, and she nods, as if this explains a lot. Trying to describe what Emmy does proves trickier. I keep thinking Doreen has got it, then she asks a question like, “What is Instagram?” or expresses surprise that some people have the internet on their phones. She’s pretty sure she’s on the Facebook, she says. She thinks one of her great-nieces set her up an account.

  We arrange for Doreen to come back and do a half day with Coco to start off with, the following morning. If you come at eight, I say, that will give you the chance to meet Emmy too.

  “I’ll look forward to that,” she says. “And to seeing you again, Coco.”

  Coco looks up and smiles and waves.

  “See you tomorrow!” she says.

  Once I’ve closed the door behind her, I check the time, wondering where Emmy has got to. That thing in the park must be over by now, surely; it’s nearly time for Coco’s dinner. I’m looking forward to her getting home and to telling her what Coco and I have been up to and seeing her reaction.

  All in all, I reckon it’s been quite a successful day. My status in our relationship as a mature adult who can be entrusted with a responsible task—in this case, arranging childcare that doesn’t involve Winter or my mother—has been reaffirmed. Not only that, but apparently there was another seemingly random midafternoon attempted burglary two streets over the day before last, which means that I’ve almost managed to put my panic about the stolen laptop out of mind entirely.

  It is hardly surprising the relationship broke down, really, after what happened. I know they tried their best to get through it, to help each other through it. Neither of them ever thought they could get over it, obviously. Neither of them ever wanted to get over it. At the funeral, Grace and Jack clung to each other, keeping each other upright. All through the inquest, they sat shoulder to shoulder, holding hands tightly under the table. Afterward, she clutched the shoulder of his suit as their lawyer read their prepared statement. Death by misadventure, that was the coroner’s finding.

  It was only after they had got through all that, I think, that things really started to go wrong. When the funeral was over and the people had gone home and they were left to face the rest of their lives together.

  The person who first noticed how oddly Grace was behaving was not me or Jack. It was my friend Angie, who hardly knew Grace at all. We were out having a cup of coffee one Saturday morning in town, and as we were sitting at our table in the window of Costa, Grace walked past. Well, that was strange, for one thing, because she hadn’t said anything to me about driving over, but I guessed maybe she had arranged to meet up
with some of her old friends for brunch; maybe it was a last-minute thing, something like that.

  Angie spotted Grace and asked me if that was her and at first I said it couldn’t be. Then I looked, and it was her and I knocked on the window. She looked up and saw me and sort of faintly smiled. I beckoned her in. She hesitated a minute. It was not until later that I found myself wondering what Grace was doing wandering around town in the middle of the morning. At the time I found myself noticing—as a mum does—that her hair looked a bit unwashed and wondering—as a mum does—whether I should say anything about it. She did seem a bit distracted, but I put that down to her having other things to think about. And while she did look a bit thin, I knew she hadn’t had much appetite of late. It was hardly surprising.

  Not until Angie asked me if Grace was looking after herself did I really start wondering about my daughter’s state of mind. About whether she was okay. There had been a couple of times when she fazed out of the conversation completely. Admittedly, Angie is not the most scintillating conversationalist. She was telling us about a recent trip to hospital, to get some regular tests done, the trouble she had parking. But under any normal circumstances, a kind, gentle, generous girl like my daughter would at least have pretended to be listening. She got up and went to the loo. She came back again. She said she had to go. She promised she would call me. She barely even said goodbye to Angie.

  That was when I started noticing things: How often, when I visited, Grace would be in her pajamas or clothes with food stains on them, or would look like she had just got out of bed. How often she was not at work. How there was never anything in their fridge when I went around but the dregs of a bottle of white wine and some milk on the turn.

  It took me a long time to work up the courage to say anything about all this to Jack. He more or less told me to mind my own business. It was Grace, not him, who let slip they were not sleeping in the same bedroom anymore. It was only much later I found out she had moved into the room they had decorated for the baby, that she was sleeping on the floor in there, on a blanket.