by Ellery Lloyd
All of a sudden, abruptly, she half chucks it onto the table, as if she cannot bear to have it near her, and clamps her hands to her mouth and folds her legs up under her. I reach a hand out to her and she ignores it.
“What?” I say.
She’s shaking her head. Her eyes are wide.
“What is it?” I ask again.
I’m tempted to pick the laptop up and open it. I go to do so. She grabs my wrist.
“Dan,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “What is it? You’re scaring me a bit now.”
“Those photos.”
“Yes?”
“Some of those photos, the most recent ones on that account, the RP account.”
“Yes,” I say encouragingly.
“They’re not photos that we’ve ever posted online.”
I saw him the other day, Jack. Grace’s Jack. I had just been over to the house, checking up on everything, mowing the front lawn and the little bit of verge in front of the hedge, trimming the foliage back around the FOR SALE sign, checking that the place looked okay, and on the way back I popped into the supermarket, the big one on the outskirts of town, to get some milk and a newspaper. Jack looked like he was picking up supplies for the week. He was pushing a loaded shopping cart with one hand, checking his phone with his other. There is a new kid now, of course. A little boy. A new wife, or at least girlfriend. Pictures of them all pop up every so often on Facebook. A birthday party. A trip to the zoo. I’ll not lie. It used to upset me to see him looking so happy, to see them all looking so happy. I thought for a while about muting him, unfriending him even. Why was he always smiling? I kept wondering. Did he never think about the baby, the daughter he had lost? The wife he had lost? And then I remembered, of course: it’s just social media. Who posts a picture of themselves crying, with puffy eyes and snot on their chin? Who posts a picture of themselves feeling blue? Who posts a picture of themselves going through the slow, dull, unphotogenic business of mourning? A snapshot of one of those passing moments on the bus or waiting for one or just walking along when suddenly out of nowhere a sharp pang hits you? A reminder, the sense of something missing, the sudden realization that there are things you will never be able to tell someone, things you experienced together that you are now the only person in the whole world who remembers.
It is a double grief in this case, of course: it wasn’t just baby Ailsa who died; it was also the person she could have, would have been. The fact that she will never go to big school or university or leave home or have a boyfriend, a husband, a family of her own. That the silver christening necklace we got for her to wear when she was older will now never be worn. The baby clothes of hers that Grace kept, that I now have, that I used to look forward to showing her when she was older so she could see how little she used to be—I don’t suppose I will ever show them to anyone now. They are still there, in the attic at my house, carefully wrapped up—and one day when I die and someone comes to clear out the house, it will probably puzzle them for a moment if they even bother to look inside the box.
He did not look particularly happy or sad when I saw him, Jack. Mostly he just looked tired. I watched him going up and down the baby aisle, scanning the shelves, looking for something. I did think about going over and offering to help. Perhaps that would have been the normal thing to do—but, of course, things can never really be normal between Jack and me, not now, not ever again. And so I lurked at the end of the aisle and peeked around the discounted bread and watched him pick things up and read the packet and frown and put them back again.
I’ll always remember their wedding day—the dress, all the speeches. The way they looked at each other.
He must be nearly one now, the new kid, little Leon. Does Jack still think about Ailsa? He must do. It must haunt him. To know that whatever you do, however careful you are, sometimes it is just not possible to keep your baby alive. That sometimes just when it feels like you have everything, life comes and swats you and scatters you and stamps on everything you have worked for and strived toward and treasure. What can you say to someone who has lost a child? What can you possibly say? Even if the child was also your grandchild?
There is nothing to say, and you can never stop saying it.
I got my milk. I got my paper. I was heading for the checkout when Jack came around the end of the aisle right ahead of me. I practically walked straight into him.
“Oh,” I said.
He looked up, raised an apologetic hand, muttered a sorry, steered the cart in a rather exaggerated way out of my path, and kept on going.
And as I turned to watch Jack making his way up the aisle, his shoulders hunched over the cart, his thoughts miles away, this person who had just looked straight through me, I found myself wondering—for a brief, silly moment—whether I had changed as much on the outside as it sometimes feels I have on the inside. Or whether the reason he had not clocked me was something to do with that sort of instinct that prompts you not to look directly at someone who is somehow out of place, damaged, broken. To avoid the eye of the beggar outside the train station. The muttering nutter on the bus. The woman who comes up and tries to talk to you on the street and needs exactly five pounds and sixteen pence to get back to Leicester. There are times when I can imagine myself ending up as one of those people all too easily.
There are times when I can imagine myself as almost anything.
Chapter Thirteen
Dan
Every day now there’s another one. Another post, more made-up nonsense, another photograph not previously in the public domain. Always at the same time—seven o’clock in the evening. Just after Coco goes to bed. There have been three of them. Three new posts since we first discovered the RP account. Each of them rubbing more salt in the wound, each one slightly creepier than the last. The thing is, even now, weird as it sounds, I think that if the posts were clearly labeled #rp, if anywhere on the account the poster had acknowledged that what they were writing was fiction, I probably wouldn’t be quite so freaked out by it all. Angry, sure. Disgusted, sure. A crime would still have been committed. But at least I would feel I had some clearer grasp on what they were doing, what they wanted, what their end goal might be.
The last three days have genuinely felt like being stuck in a nightmare—a nightmare that begins the moment you wake up and drags on all day and from which no escape seems imaginable.
Every time I leave the house I find myself looking over my shoulder, peering into cars, giving anyone I don’t recognize a narrow stare. I spent all of yesterday evening watching a bloke in overalls put another bolt on the back door and reinforce the front doorframe only to spend half the night wide awake asking myself if I could really trust the locksmith.
This person—the one who is posting this stuff, who took Winter’s laptop—has been inside our house. They’ve touched things in our kitchen. Taken things from us.
They have every photo on that laptop. Every photo on the Cloud. Private photos. Personal photos. Photos of our daughter.
And now they’re posting them one by one online.
As soon as we realized what had happened, Emmy went into an immediate war council with Irene. I have to hand it to Emmy’s agent: I’ve never known her not take a call. I’m not sure I’ve ever known her to keep Emmy waiting for more than three rings. Presumably she does at some point sleep, eat, use the toilet. Each of these things is more or less equally difficult to imagine.
Irene was on speakerphone. Emmy was pacing the kitchen with a glass of wine. I was sitting with my laptop on the couch.
The question Irene kept asking Emmy was what she thought the police were going to be able to do. How much help had they been, she asks, when we reported the burglary? As for Instagram, how responsive had they been to any of her previous complaints about anything?
Emmy didn’t answer, so I assumed the questions were rhetorical.
Watching Emmy pace, I felt a little bit sicker and angrier than I had previously. Not just with whoever wa
s doing this. With Emmy. With Irene. Maybe also with myself.
Yesterday’s post, the second new one since Emmy and I discovered the site, was the worst of them yet. A real kick in the guts. At one point as I was reading it, I thought I was actually going to be sick, that I was actually going to hunch over on the kitchen stool I was sitting on and spatter my dinner all over the floor.
“Hello again!!” it opened. Two exclamation marks. (The whole thing, I have to admit, was a pretty convincing pastiche of the way that all the Instamums, my wife included, write. The mangled metaphors, the breathless overenthusiasm. The ingenuous clunkiness. The alliteration. It’s no wonder there are people who follow this account who seem to have really fallen for it.) It was not until I got to the end of what they had written that I experienced genuine nausea.
The post ended with the news that “Rosie” had been to the hospital for some tests and that, although it had hurt at times, she had been very brave.
Oh God, so sorry to hear that was the start of the very first comment under the post, Hope the results come back fine and she feels better very soon! The second person to comment posted a whole anecdote about one time when their own little darling was sick. The third comment was just an emoji with a bandage around its head and a thermometer in its mouth, then a load of kisses.
The picture that accompanied the post was one I had taken of Coco in the back garden last summer, grinning on her new bike as she rides it in circles around the paddling pool.
My daughter.
My daughter.
The real girl who is asleep upstairs, in her little bed with the little ladder up to it, under her Frozen duvet, with her head on her pillow in its Frozen pillowcase. Whose floor is scattered with toys and whose walls ripple with pictures she has drawn at school every time the wind blows or the door opens and who when I last checked on her had fallen asleep still clutching her Elsa doll. Who still does not understand why she can’t go back to her old nursery and see all her old friends.
By the third day I am checking the RP account once every five or ten minutes. Rereading what has been posted. Seeing what new comments have appeared. Scrolling through the latest followers. Driving myself fucking crazy.
The new post drops at seven p.m. on the dot.
Emmy and I are sitting at opposite ends of the living room couch, phones clutched tightly in our hands. The instant she sees the picture, I hear her sharp intake of breath. I stare at the screen.
“What the fuck?” I ask.
The photo is one of Coco curled in a ball on a hospital bed, looking sad, a drip just in shot behind her. It’s not a picture I’ve seen before. A photo I can’t really understand—where it comes from or where it was taken. It takes me a minute to work out that the drip is not actually attached to my daughter. Even then I have more questions than I know what to do with. As my brain slowly, laboriously, pieces together where the photograph was taken, and when, and by whom, and to what purpose, I feel with each realization a little sicker, a little angrier, a little more disgusted. That Emmy could do that. That Emmy could do that to our daughter. That Emmy could even think of doing that to our daughter.
I have to read the words underneath the picture several times before they start to sink in, before they start to make sense as sentences. The post begins with an announcement that it has been a difficult one to write. There follows a load of stuff about what a long day it has been but how brave and cheerful little Rosie was and how proud they are of her. There is a long section about how much it means to them both to know that they are in people’s thoughts and prayers and how they are hoping to reply personally to everyone eventually.
“For the moment,” it concludes, “we’re just waiting for the results and taking things one day at a time.”
“What does that mean?” I keep asking Emmy. “Read that. What does that mean?”
Her face, in the blue light of the screen, is drawn. Her mouth is a tight, straight line. As she reads, she’s turning a bracelet on her wrist. Around and around and around.
“I don’t know,” she says.
She scratches at the corner of her mouth, bites a nail.
“I don’t know what it means, Dan,” she says again.
For the first time my wife looks like she’s genuinely spooked.
I should have done more. I could have done more. This is what haunts me. That if I had known what to do, what to say, who to turn to for help, then Grace might still be here.
I did try to talk to her. I did encourage her to see her GP, see if he could suggest anything. I was always trying to persuade her to get out and do things, talk to her friends, see people, even just come for a walk and get some fresh air. Grace would just look at me and say nothing. Sometimes I would speak to her and it was as if she had forgotten I was there at all. Those last few weeks she looked thinner and more tired every time I saw her. Great dark bags under her eyes. Drawn cheeks. Really unwell. The shaved head did not help. Every time I saw her I asked whether she was going to grow it again, just a little, one of these days. She would get cross with me. I would let it drop.
She always used to have such long, beautiful hair, my daughter.
I just kept hoping the house would sell, that she would get a good price for it and could start over somewhere else, somewhere a bit closer to me and all her friends. Somewhere with fewer memories.
That weekend, that last weekend, Grace seemed, if anything, a bit brighter, compared to how she had been. I spoke to her on the Friday night and she even laughed once, at something I told her, something about one of my neighbors, something silly they had said to me. “I love you, Mum,” she said, as she was hanging up.
It had been agreed that I would pop in on Sunday afternoon for a cup of tea.
I had my own keys to her place. I always had done, just in case she or Jack ever lost theirs, found themselves locked out, or needed me to drive over and wait in for a parcel or a repairman. I would never usually have used them, if I had known Grace was in the house.
I rang the bell for about fifteen minutes.
In the front hall, I shouted her name. I looked into the living room to see if she was in there. I checked the kitchen. Upstairs I stuck my head around the bedroom door. When I tried the bathroom door, at first I thought it was locked. Then I gave it another try and realized it wasn’t locked, that it gave slightly when I put my shoulder to it, but that there was something piled up against it on the other side, stopping it from opening. I kept pushing and the door gave a little. I pushed harder and I could see something trapped under it, stuck between the bottom of the door and the floor of the bathroom. It was the sleeve of one of Grace’s sweaters. I gave it a tug. It was stuck fast. I gave the door another shove. It moved another centimeter or two. I called Grace’s name again. Nobody answered.
The coroner’s verdict was that she had been dead since late Saturday afternoon. She had been to the shops that morning and bought some milk and bread from the co-op. As she was leaving she bumped into someone she used to work with, stopped for a chat, talked about setting a date to meet up some time, seemed in good spirits. Then at some point later in the day she put the cup of tea she was drinking down on the kitchen counter, half finished, and went to the bathroom and lined up everything she needed on the closed toilet seat lid and ran herself a bath and ended her own life. She was thirty-two years old.
Emmy
Just so you know, that little blue tick, the one that Instagram bestows upon you, the sign that you’ve really made it? Those discreet symbols that mark me and my pod out as the alpha mums?
Well, it turns out that little blue tick means a big fat nothing.
As soon as we found out about the RP account, Irene contacted Instagram directly, thinking the fact that I’m verified, that I earn them money with my paid partnerships and #ads, would lend some urgency to the request. I thought the fact that it was horrible and distressing, and made my skin crawl every time I looked at it, would prompt them to act. We hoped the account would instant
ly be taken down when she explained all of this, first via email and then in an increasingly irate series of voicemails to the head of influencer relations, that the photos had been stolen and that the content was, quite frankly, threatening.
They didn’t do anything. They didn’t even respond.
Irene didn’t seem to think I should put much faith in the police being able to help either. Sure, the poster could be the person who stole the laptop, she said, but the police had no leads on who that was. And wasn’t it just as likely that someone had hacked into the Cloud and harvested them from there? The overlapping portion on the Venn diagram between lonely, creepy stalker and very good at computer things was pretty bloody large. And anyway, I put pictures of my family online for a living; followers saved them, shared them, screenshotted them, printed them out and turned them into an elaborate shrine, for all we knew—how sympathetic would the police be to my complaints that these were just the wrong photos?
She was missing the point, of course. The bottom line was, whoever stole those photos is obsessed enough with us to elbow their way into our lives. Not a faceless troll or nameless hater: an actual human being who has publicly commandeered my real-life family, our private memories, as their own.
The only way I can stop feeling queasy about the whole thing is to remind myself that anyone with a public profile will find something unpleasant about themselves if they go raking through the internet for it. For all I know, the kids of every single Instamum I’ve ever met could have an RP account dedicated to them—I’m just unlucky enough to know about mine.
“Try not to think about it,” says Irene, leaning across the back seat of the cab to pat me on the knee. “This might cheer you up: the BBC Three producers called yesterday to say they’re close to a decision. They said your story really moved them, so I have a feeling the job might be yours.”