by Ellery Lloyd
We’re greeted at the recording studio by Hero Blythe, a feminist Instagram poet and the presenter of Heavy Flow, a period-focused podcast. She is an extremely pretty, waifish blonde, wearing a white head scarf and tasseled green kaftan over a white crop top and cutoff denim flares, wafting a bunch of smoldering sage leaves around the place.
“Well, hello, you supernova of a woman! This is just to welcome and cleanse.” She gestures to her stinking fire hazard as she ushers us into a soundproof room where Hannah, Bella, Suzy, and Sara are already in their seats in front of giant microphones. “I’m just going to get us all some raspberry leaf tea, then we’ll be ready to start.”
I take a seat in between Suzy and Sara, and take a moment—as I do whenever I am about to record anything—to put all my distractions, all my personal problems and worries and fears to one side and focus for the next half an hour on the job in hand. One of the very few useful things my mother taught me, apart from how to mix a mean martini, is how to put on a brave face.
The way she does it, she once told me, is literally to picture a box in her head and all the things she doesn’t want to think about she just puts in there, and then she forces the lid down, plasters a smile on her face, and gets on with it.
“Are you sure that’s healthy?” I asked her once. “What happens when the box gets full? What happens when there are things you can’t fit in it?”
Her answer was to imagine a bigger box.
Hero wafts back in with a tray of steaming #yaydays mugs. “Shall we hit record?”
I give her the thumbs-up.
“Welcome, blood sisters and regular listeners,” she says, gesturing for us all to hold hands. “This week’s edition of Heavy Flow is sponsored, as always, by Goddess Goblets, the world’s most eco-friendly way of embracing your monthly blessing. These miraculous moon cups for women who truly care about the planet are available in four colorways, including a new, limited-edition rose gold, and are totally dishwasher safe.
“Today I have with me a group of game-changing mamas who are everything. Seriously, you are all just heroes, redefining what it means to be a modern mother. Before we start, I’d like to share with you a poem I’ve written called The Blood of Creation.” She presses pause briefly. “I prerecorded that from the bathroom because of the acoustics, so I’ll add that in later,” she explains.
Irene looks like she wants to suffocate herself with a moon cup.
“Now, ladies, first question: Can you talk me through your first-ever period?” Hero asks earnestly.
Sara, the_hackney_mum, almost springs off her chair. “I’m so lucky that I had a wise mother who always taught me that periods were a woman’s gift from the universe. That my womb is a garden where human life grows and that every month my menses were simply watering its flowers. So when it arrived, when I was eleven, she threw me a period party, celebrating with a flower-arranging class. Isolde is nearly that age now, and we are already planning hers, although we’ll be making flower crowns.”
Utter rubbish, of course. Like everyone else’s mother in the nineties, Sara’s mum had handed her a pack of those terrible sanitary pads with a single stripe of glue down the middle and all the absorbency of an umbrella, and told her she shouldn’t go swimming that week. Still, Tampax has lapped it up, and as soon as poor Isolde starts bleeding, she is lined up for an #ad and a photo shoot in a white dress with a load of red roses on her head. I suppose she should just be grateful she doesn’t have to roller-skate down a beach in Lycra.
“That’s so moving: honoring the mother goddess in that way is just magical. Ob. Sessed. Okay, another one for you wonderful women. Do you all ever talk about your cycles together? I’m fascinated by them as, really, aren’t they what defines us as women, the source of our power and strength? I like to keep a discharge diary, so I have a record throughout the whole month. I think it’s so important to be honest about our hormones,” says Hero.
“Oh yes.” I nod, dying a tiny bit inside. Imagine thinking the most interesting part of a woman is what you mop up and flush down the toilet each month—and then building an entire bloody brand around it.
“As you know, we are all about honesty,” I continue solemnly. “We want to use our platforms to lift other women up, support them to tell their own truth.” I hold Sara and Suzy’s hands a little tighter. “Of course, we’ve all managed to sync cycles too—remember when that happened in school with your BFFs?—because clearly even my womb loves these ladies to bits!” I laugh.
A thought suddenly occurs to me: It couldn’t be one of them, could it, posting those pictures of Coco? Driving me off Instagram would certainly grow their share of the pie. And it was Suzy who’d told us. Maybe it’s all of them? It’s hard to imagine any of them actually breaking in, of course. But it’s not entirely impossible to imagine them getting someone else to do it.
For goodness’ sake, Emmy, just listen to yourself.
Maybe it’s getting to me more than I thought, all this.
“How do you cope with the changes in your body during your time of the month? As you all know, I founded the #positiveperiod movement because I really, truly believe that celebrating the physical sensations that come along with menstruation is such a radical act of self-care. The patriarchy wants us to medicalize it, but I say we should embrace it. For example, I am wearing a moonstone, which I sell on my Etsy page—link in bio, ladies—as it has been proven to be more effective than painkillers.” Hero smiles, pointing to her necklace. “Then there’s lapis lazuli . . .”
As she drones on about her enchanted rocks, I can see Irene receive a text, her eyes suddenly widening. She winks and motions at me to leave the room with her, silently mouthing, Sorry, to Hero, who’s moved onto the healing properties of sticking cabbage leaves down your pants. We quietly shut the door and, out in the corridor, Irene squeezes my arm.
“It’s the BBC,” says Irene. “They’ve asked me to call them back. Just a second.”
She leaves me in the corridor while she wanders off to find better phone reception, returning moments later with a huge smile on her face. “It’s a yes, Emmy. Your own show. ‘Blown away by your raw honesty’ were the words they used, in fact. You must have really nailed it with that video!”
“You didn’t watch it before you sent it over?” I ask incredulously.
“I didn’t have time! Show it to me now—I want to see what won them over.”
I pull my phone out, find the clip, and press play. There I am. No makeup on, grey T-shirt that only makes me look more washed-out and tired. Eyes downcast. Clutching one of Bear’s teddies, sitting in the armchair by his cot.
I’m Emmy Jackson—Mamabare to lots of you—and I have something I’d like to share. I built my platform, my following, on honesty. But I haven’t been quite honest with the world, until now.
I have been thinking for a long time about how to tell you what I am about to—whether to share it at all. This will sound crazy, but I think I have been a bit embarrassed maybe, a bit ashamed. I have to open up now though as I feel like there is a huge part of my life, a huge part of me, that you just don’t know about. I feel that by denying it, I’m denying the three little lives we lost ever had the right to exist at all, when actually they are as important as if they were here right now.
Three miscarriages. And that pain, the guilt, the desperation, they just don’t disappear. I can be happy one minute, or perhaps not quite happy but not achingly sad, and then it will just hit me. Three people who would have been part of our lives, just gone. The first pregnancy didn’t make it past twelve weeks. A missed miscarriage, they call it. We had no bleeding, nothing. There we were at the first appointment, holding each other’s hands, waiting to see the heartbeat. There was none. It’s amazing how impassive the faces of the people who do the scans are, isn’t it? I guess they must see it all the time.
Then it happened again. We were away for the weekend in Norfolk, and I started bleeding as we were walking along the beach. The next we lost
at twenty weeks. Nobody could tell us why it happened. The hope is the worst, I think. The hope that you try not to nurture from the moment that little blue line appears, that finds its way out at night when you start to imagine that you’re lying there with your baby in your arms. Maybe I felt I shouldn’t talk about it because I have my Bear and Coco now, and I know that should make it feel better. Maybe the reason I haven’t spoken about it is that it’s so hard to find the words. Maybe there are no words. Who knows if these are even the right ones? All I know is that I’ve tried everything else—so maybe telling my story, and helping other women to tell theirs, is the only way to heal.
Fade out to black. My voice plays over the dark screen. I allow myself a little surge of pride at my video editing skills, my eyes flitting to Irene’s face and back to the phone.
“From Miscarriage to Mamabare: A Personal Look at Baby Loss. Coming soon to BBC Three.”
Chapter Fourteen
Dan
Something it takes me a long time to get my head around is the idea of Emmy taking photos of our daughter in the hospital, our pale, injured, sleeping daughter. I do try to put myself in Emmy’s shoes, to see things through her eyes, to piece together what the hell was going through her mind.
I can’t do it.
There are moments when I am not even sure I want to.
The thought of leaving Emmy, the thought of walking out on my marriage, is genuinely not something that has ever occurred to me. Not seriously. Not even before we had children. Not for more than a furious few minutes, at any rate. What would I do with myself? Where would I end up? In some bedsit somewhere probably. Eating biscuits in bed and spending too much time on the internet. That’s what I always say, jokingly, when the subject comes up, as it does occasionally. The truth is I can’t really imagine it.
There have been times in the past twenty-four hours when I have seriously, and with a cold, settled fury, considered the practicalities and the logistics of such a move. There have been times when I have considered the implications of taking my daughter with me, tried to imagine the logistics of taking my son. There have been times when the only thing that has prevented me storming into the kitchen and telling Emmy I am leaving is not wanting her in sole charge of Bear and Coco. Free to use my children as props, as accessories, as sympathy grabbers whenever the fancy takes her.
Am I overreacting? I don’t think so.
We are supposed to be going out for dinner tonight to celebrate Emmy’s new TV show.
It is hard to think of anything I want to do less.
She does an Instastory in our hallway mirror of us ready to leave, another of the menu, takes a picture of her cocktail, takes a picture of her starter, a picture of me scowling across the table at her. Over the years I have got so used to this sort of thing that most of the time I barely even register it, but tonight, suddenly, it all seems monstrous. God knows which ones she actually posts. I’ve barely been able to look at her these past few days, let alone her Instagram feed.
Emmy tells me all about recording the Heavy Flow podcast and plays me a clip of Hero Blythe performing her period poem, and I don’t even crack a smile.
I finish my first beer about the same time they are clearing our starters away and order myself another.
The line that keeps running through my head is that I used to think it was only our online life that was a lie.
“They’ll be all right with Doreen babysitting, won’t they?” Emmy accompanies this with a hesitant smile.
It is clear how I ought to respond to this. Everyone knows, when you are out on a date with someone and they ask you a question like that, how you are supposed to respond.
I shrug and take a swig from my bottle of beer. It was not my idea to go out, I feel like telling her.
The waitress asks if I want another and I say yes and Emmy points out I haven’t even finished that one yet. I chug the last third of it and ask for the same again.
When Emmy texts Doreen to check that all is fine, she gets an answer back almost immediately. There was a bit of sleep-whimpering from Bear’s room about half an hour ago, but now all’s quiet on the Western Front.
We exchange platitudes about how lucky we are to have found Doreen and then fall silent again. It occurs to me that this is the first time we’ve been out to dinner together, have been out anywhere together, since Bear was born. I must admit, she looks beautiful. She has done her makeup carefully and has her hair up and is wearing a dress and looks like the Emmy I remember from the old days, the magazine days. They’re allowed to glam up occasionally, the Instamums, if they accompany any pictures with self-flagellating captions about how rarely they get to do this, how the shoes gave them blisters and it’s a special occasion because there’s #bignews coming, but the baby was still up crying when they got home and they regretted it all the next morning because of the #adultheadache.
Now that we know all’s well at home, Emmy is back to telling me about the TV show. I am nodding, half listening. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased for my wife. This is big news, huge news. What I don’t understand is why they’ve chosen her to present a program on this particular topic. I mean, it’s not like this is something we have experienced ourselves. Are there going to be talking heads on it? I ask her. Is she going to be talking to doctors, or mums who have been through all that stuff, or what? She tells me they haven’t really ironed out those details yet.
By the time we’re looking at the dessert menu, I’ve remembered why it is that Emmy and I so rarely go out. We are both about ready to fall asleep in our shoes. By the time the bill arrives, I am genuinely having trouble keeping my eyes open. The lights in the room seem to get dimmer and then brighter again. The conversation trails off. Emmy starts scrolling through her messages. As I am paying, Emmy and I both yawn simultaneously and then apologize to the guy with the card machine.
I check my phone, and it is 8:47.
“That was nice,” she says as we’re standing outside waiting for the Uber.
I put my arm around her shoulders and give her a squeeze, but say nothing.
“Now, what route is this guy taking?” she asks, observing our driver’s progress on her mobile.
I take my phone out and check the RP account.
She doesn’t even need to turn her head to know what I am doing.
“Anything?”
Not since seven o’clock, when there was another new picture posted (a shot of Coco asleep on the couch in front of the TV, clutching a sweater of Emmy’s like a teddy or comforter), the text accompanying it something about seizing each day as it comes and treasuring each moment with your little one. Ninety-three likes and counting. Almost forty comments.
Every day they’re getting worse. A little more vivid, a little more detailed, more mawkish. Almost the worst of it is, they don’t just have access to hundreds of photos; there are thousands. Pictures of Coco sleeping. Pictures of Coco in the bath. Pictures of her in her swimsuit in the garden. And every day another one enters the public domain. And every day the text accompanying them gets creepier. And any day now, the person posting all this shit keeps reminding us, she and Coco will get those test results back and know the verdict. Keep your fingers crossed, they keep saying. Say a prayer for us and keep us in your thoughts.
I want to kill them.
That’s the thought that comes to me as the Uber is waiting at a light and the driver asks us both again if we want him to put the window up or turn the music down, whether we’ve had a nice evening.
Whoever is doing this, I want to kill them.
Let me make this plain. I’m not speaking rhetorically. I want to kill them in the same way you would want to kill someone in the exact moment that they harmed or nearly harmed your child, in that immediate flash of parental rage you feel when some prick on a modified fixed-gear bike ignores a red light and swoops across the pedestrian crossing about six inches in front of the pram you are pushing. That feeling you get when some dickhead starts reversing their car at
speed in your direction as you’re crossing the Sainsbury’s parking lot hand in hand with your toddler.
If I could get my hands on them, I’d strike them down with all the self-righteous fury of a man defending his family, of a good man pushed beyond his limit.
There are times too, when I think I would be slightly less upset, less angry, if I could work out what they were doing all this for. What kick, what satisfaction they were getting out of it. Even if it was just a financial scam, if there was a GoFundMe and they were asking for money for flights abroad and some groundbreaking operation not available on the NHS, that I think I would find less baffling—or perhaps I would be just as angry but in a slightly different way.
Emmy reaches over to pat me on the back of the hand as we’re turning onto our road and she finds that my hand is balled into a fist in my lap.
“I am going to fucking kill them,” I say.
She doesn’t react, except to lean forward in her seat and point out to the driver where it would be best to pull over. Her hand rests on the back of mine.
“I mean it,” I say. “I swear to God I mean it.”
As the car pulls up, the driver puts on the overhead light to help us check we haven’t left anything in the back, and we find ourselves, Emmy and me, face-to-face, abruptly illuminated. She looks tired in the sudden harsh light. Her forehead is lined, her eyes a little puffy. Her expression is hard to read.
“Who?” she asks, quietly but with a note of exasperation and perhaps even contempt in her voice . . . “Who are you going to kill, Dan?”
I stare at her for a moment, then look away.
“Thanks a lot, mate,” she says to the driver.
There is a brief pause at the front door as I locate my keys in the pockets of my coat, our breath hanging in the air, neither of us speaking.
I open the door as quietly as I can, gesture Emmy through ahead of me, wave silently at Doreen as her head appears from the living room, return her smile and her double thumbs-up. I slowly place my keys very quietly on the sideboard in the hall. Did we have a lovely evening? Doreen asks, and Emmy tells her it was fantastic. Wonderful food. Then Emmy sees her out and makes sure to close the door gently behind her. She tells me she’s going to get a glass of water from the kitchen and go to bed.