by Sophie White
She thought back to the time she collabed with a buggy company to ‘design’ a new pram. It was the kind of thing she’d always thought she’d love to do when she watched other influencers bring out their tans and their accessory lines. However, in reality, it had been such a miserable experience, an utterly shallow process. She didn’t ‘design’ anything; the designers just had her pick a colour and mocked up a new logo for the Insta post. This was infinitely more satisfying. She was writing something new and original, working on a real show with a real producer and a real director. She’d stick with Instagram for this alone. She needed to sell out four shows, after all. Plus, any money, even what Hazel’s cult-like W Y N D summit brought in, would mean more stability for when the baby came. But between CatAnon and the posing and posturing of some of the more demented Instagrammers, she’d seen behind the Instagram curtain and she knew it would never again take hold of her the way it had before.
She spent the rest of the car journey making forced small talk with Polly and idly deleting pics and screengrabs to clear space on her phone when she found herself face to face with a photo of Sam from early March. From the date, she could see that they were only weeks from imploding. At the time she’d snapped the pic he had been cocking one eyebrow in a playfully mocking fashion, but now, in the wake of everything that had happened, she felt that he was gazing straight down the lens at her.
She was trying not to get her hopes up too much but a small (OK big) part of her was just the teeniest bit optimistic about their first face to face in weeks at tomorrow’s scan. In the various daydreams she’d written in her head, the reunion was romcom-worthy. Sam would see the baby on the little TV yoke, see her blooming with his baby and, perhaps most importantly, see the mega preggo tit job she’d been enjoying since getting duffed up.
Of course, the daydream was constantly being interrupted by a far less enjoyable montage of Sam’s face: when she’d found him holding Liv’s thesis, in the graveyard at her dad’s funeral and the last time she’d seen him, storming to his car after the dinner party at the Khans’.
She tried to shake the whirling thoughts from her head. Focus, Ali. Making the show work and getting her shit together for the baby had to be her first priorities.
Polly pulled into the community centre car park. Ali still hadn’t really spoken at any of the meetings since the first one. She’d listened and, as the weeks had passed, she’d surprised herself by starting to feel that maybe she did belong there after all. At the beginning, she’d spent the hour listing the ways that she was so not like these people, insisting to herself that she wasn’t a catfisher, just someone who’d stumbled into a lie and had failed to extract herself quickly enough. But slowly the denial had ebbed away. Especially as the words that were gradually becoming her Stage Fest show began to assemble into a cohesive narrative. Everyone in CatAnon had, at one stage, been on the run from reality and so had she.
Ali and Polly slipped into the meeting just as the secretary was introducing this morning’s speaker. Ali eased herself into a chair beside Kelly, who immediately began affectionately mauling the bump. People just cannot help themselves, Ali noted with resigned exasperation.
The speaker cleared his throat awkwardly.
‘Hi everyone. My name is @SecretRteProducer and I am a catfisher.’
‘Hi @SecretRteProducer,’ everyone chimed back at him.
Shit! Ali sat up a little straighter. This should be interesting. She wasn’t that up on Twitter, but she vividly remembered the hoo-ha surrounding this account from a couple of years before. For a few weeks RTÉ had been more dynamic than she’d ever seen it, with people on an absolute mission to ferret out whoever was behind the tweets purporting to be coming from inside the national broadcaster.
It was the kind of thing that would have been considered small catfish fry in any other country, but given it was a national pastime of the Irish to bitch about the channel for having to pay the TV licence fee, an anonymous RTÉ truther was too delicious to resist and the public and the newspapers couldn’t get enough of the tweets. She vividly remembered the one about how bad the RTÉ canteen food was and that the station’s employees lived for Fridays, which were supposedly beans, bangers and chips day. The tweeter had also devoted many characters to complaining about the flabby layer of middle management stifling creativity in the company. She couldn’t help but flash on Stephan, as she remembered that particular rant.
‘So, firstly, I’d like to say thank you to @BigDickY2K for asking me along tonight to share my experience, strength and hope in recovering from my catfishing addiction with you all.’ He nodded at the woman beside him. She smiled back graciously.
‘I came to catfishing quite late, as you can all probably tell!’ A few chuckles came from the older group members. ‘I didn’t really start using the social media things until a couple of years ago. Before that I was strictly a check the old email, read the Guardian kind of guy. Then a friend showed me Twitter and I started hanging around on there, “lurking”, they call it. I’ve been working in TV for decades, but I’ve never been staff in RTÉ. I have my own production company. We do entertainment, bit of factual, the odd drama. I suppose the reason I liked Twitter so much at first was for the tweeting on a Saturday night. I could go on there and click the Saturday Night In show hashtag and see all these people bitching about how shite it was. It was immediately addictive. I’d notice myself reading back over it during the week while waiting for the next Saturday to roll around. Thirty years making telly – I’ve had some winners, but I’ve had some real losers too and you get resentments, you know. Few commissioning editors have really had it in for me over the years. I know entertainment. I put a pitch in to revamp the Saturday slot and was of course shot down. Then I’d see my segment trotted out the next month. Tubridy’s Tender Talent was one of mine. Killer idea, he goes around the country looking for local talent but there’s gotta be a sob story, see? Pathos. Great telly, and not tough on the budget.’
Ali snuck a look around. Jeez, he’s really losing them. For someone who knew entertainment, he was having trouble keeping some of the assembled catfishers engaged.
@BigDickY2K’s back story the week before had waaaay more juice. Ali had not seen the whole ‘tweets were coming from inside the house’ plot twist coming. It had been a bit unseemly for sure, very Oedipal, but damn, a good cautionary tale, which surely was the point of these soul-baring sessions.
Ali felt herself nodding off as @SecretRteProducer trotted out his litany of woes, the working title of which could have been 37 Times RTÉ Rejected My Proposal, The Wankers.
‘By the time they didn’t even invite me for a face to face for the doc I proposed about why so many of our older celebrities are dying these days, I’d just fucking had it with the mediocrity and lack of vision. I got pissed one night and took a taxi out there to Montrose. I walked straight up to RTÉ and I punched it. Just fucking punched the fuck out of the building. Wrecked my hand that night but I knew just what I had to do. I set up the account while waiting in A&E down in Vincent’s and by the next day I had a million followers.’
Did you? Ali crossed her arms sceptically. This guy was pissing her off. He seemed thrilled with himself. They were here to get better, not revel in all the bullshit schemes they had perpetrated.
She did wish she could tell Sam about the fistfight with the RTÉ reception building – that was hilarious. She sighed. It would be breaking anonymity. Maybe she could tell him about the W Y N D craziness. That shit was ridiculous. Hazel had sent them all a tile to post on Insta at an agreed time to herald the launch; it was cryptic, showing only rose-gold glitter strewn across limestone rock. It was hard to gauge, though. It could just piss Sam off further. Anything could. Her continued existence was probably pissing him off at this point. Maybe she could make him a present, something to remind him of all the fun they had before she’d turned out to be a total psychopath.
She was tempted to pull out her phone and research Law & Order: SVU
merchandise but phones were heavily frowned upon for obvious reasons. She zoned back into the room to see if @SecretRTEProducer was wrapping up any time soon.
‘Thank you so much for that exhaustive history, @SecretRte Producer.’ @BigDickY2K was looking slightly dazed by the tirade they had all just endured, but she gave him an encouraging little wink. ‘We’ll open the meeting for general sharing now, please, though I would love to encourage any of our newer members to speak up if you feel ready.’
Shite, she is so talking about me … Since the first meeting when she’d spoken briefly, Ali hadn’t said a word. She knew she’d been avoiding this quite crucial element of the meeting for too long for it to have gone unnoticed.
She cleared her throat and awkwardly introduced herself.
‘My name is @AlisBaba and I am a catfisher.’
‘Hello @AlisBaba’, ‘Welcome @Alisbaba’, ‘Hi @AlisBaba’ came the various replies around the room.
‘So, I’m pretty new to this, as you can probably tell. I haven’t shared since my first meeting. Lots of you might remember I had an Instagram account – well, I still have it – and I sort of accidentally told my followers that I was pregnant. This is real by the way. It’s not a pillow up the old jumper trick. Anyway, the whole thing got completely out of control. I’ve just been so messed up. My dad died the day everything came out and everyone on the internet totally hated me but it’s the thought of Sam hating me – he’s the baby daddy – I really can’t cope with that. I just wish there was some way to make him see me the way he used to see me. He loved me and I was too stupid and too obsessed with getting big on Insta to realise that. I let my Insta-obsession overshadow everything. I destroyed Sam and I wasn’t there for my dad.’
Ali’s voice broke as the last words tumbled out and Kelly gave her a reassuring pat, which only served to undo her completely.
‘I’m sorry, oh Jesus, I’m fully crying now.’ She tried to laugh. ‘It’s somehow even harder to cope with people being nice to me. I don’t deserve it. Anyway, coming here is helping me so much. I know I can’t take back what I’ve done but I have this baby to think about now and I’m going to be better for little Miles or little Millie – whoever is floating around in there.’
The catfishers thanked her for her share and Ali sat back feeling lighter. A few seats over, Polly cleared her throat.
‘My name’s @Always_Watching and I’m a catfisher.’
‘Hi @Always_Watching.’
‘@AlisBaba’s share just really brought so much up for me there. I’ve been having a really tough time lately and … well, I feel like some old habits might be slipping back in … My husband has been spending a lot of time abroad for work. And when he is home, he’s so into his VR gaming. He’s great with the boys, don’t get me wrong. Very present and he loves them to bits. But every night once they’re gone to bed and it’s just us, he puts the helmet on and it’s like I may as well not even exist.’
This bleak set-up flashed in Ali’s mind. Polly arranging a flat-lay of nibbles, wine and a scented candle captioned:
#datenight on the couch with this one #mylove #marriage #soulmates
while some burly husband-type sat in a VR helmet beside her. That was possibly one of the most depressing things she’d ever heard.
Unbidden, a memory of Sam jumping up and perfectly lip synching the opening monologue of SVU one night when they were curled up on the couch popped into her head. She’d accidentally inhaled a Banshee Bone from laughing so hard, which had naturally led to a heated debate regarding the potential for death-by-crisp. It was the kind of shite-talk that couldn’t be explained to anyone really. She pictured someone asking, ‘Oh, what do you miss most about Sam?’ And her responding: ‘His appetite for pointless analysis of crisp varieties?’
But maybe that was kind of what love was, finding that person who knew you so well that they knew you would be more embarrassed dying choking on a Dorito than a Banshee Bone. There’s no shame in being felled by a crisp Titan, she remembered telling him, to which he solemnly agreed. You couldn’t even get Banshee Bones anymore. RIP Banshee Bones and RIP her and Sam.
Polly was still outlining the grim details of her marriage to the wannabe third member of Daft Punk when Ali picked up the thread of her share.
‘… I was getting so down about it all and I was feeling lonely. I didn’t think at first that what I was doing was a problem. I set up a new Insta account just to follow Bloggers Uncovered. I couldn’t be seen to be following as my real self – that would be a huge problem for me.’ She was staring down at her lap, clearly too ashamed to make eye contact with any of the catfishers. She’d tucked her hands under her legs and looked like a guilty little girl caught being bold.
‘It was just such a slippery slope. I was only using the account to make sure nothing was being said about me on these vicious pages and then the next thing I knew, I was checking every hour and starting to comment on things.’ She shrugged, looking bereft. ‘It just got such a hold of me again. I want to get back to where I was a few months ago. That’s why I’m sharing this now. I need to be honest and accountable. Thank you all for listening.’
‘Thank you, @Always_Watching.’
The meeting concluded and the catfishers filed out looking much more solemn than usual. It had been a heavy one. Ali looked for Polly outside, but she’d scarpered, probably to avoid any well-meaning tête-à-têtes from the veterans about relapsing.
Ali started towards home. It was a good twenty-minute walk, but she needed time to clear her head. She hadn’t woken up that morning thinking ‘I must cry in front of a roomful of strangers today’ but, damn, she actually felt strangely lighter. Admitting how hard the last months and even years had been seemed to have gone some way towards her forgiving herself. She hadn’t realised just how guilty she’d been feeling about Miles and Sam until she’d said the words aloud in there. Everything in the last while had been about keeping her head down and trying to weather everything, trying to hide her pain and trying to perch just out of reach of the crushing words and comments about her online.
You deserve it, she’d cruelly told herself every day when the fresh onslaught came and she swallowed the rising guilt and hurt.
Punishing herself seemed like the right thing to do, but at the end of the day it couldn’t go on for ever. She turned left and continued towards the gates to the Botanical Gardens.
Maybe I did something bad, but I’m not a goddamn monster, she mused. I can’t feel shitty about this every day for the rest of my life. Sam thinks I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t but it’s not true. I was completely myself with him, maybe more than I’ve ever been with anyone else, even Liv.
She saw a chalkboard proclaiming ‘Carvery All Day’ outside O’Hara’s pub and veered through the doors practically on autopilot.
This was how pregnancy cravings worked, it seemed. The pregnant appetite was powerfully suggestible. In this moment everything else in the entire world seemed disgusting. Right now, all she wanted was some cooked-to-fuck meat, powdered gravy and a bowl of potatoes.
Once the meal arrived, she took a grinning selfie. She looked cute, the carvery looked almost aggressively unattractive – it’s not the most photogenic genre of food, she observed. She sent it to her thread with Sam and followed up with a message:
TFW the foetus who is possessing your uterus won’t stand for anything but a completely disgusting but oddly iconic meal #carveryvirgin
It was time to stop apologising and instead try to remind him of who she was and why they had worked so well together in the first place.
Chapter 19
‘Can I ask again, what is the fucking point of this?’ Liv was grappling with the stencil Ali had carefully made the night before after getting back from solo carvery.
‘I want to him to remember why he ever liked me in the first place.’ Ali shifted around on the living room carpet so that Liv could get better purchase on the bump.
‘This seems like a weird way to
do that?’ Liv observed, pressing the card to lie flat on the belly and trying to position the black marker to draw on Ali’s taut skin.
‘It’s a gesture, Liv.’ Ali didn’t need any unsolicited editorial feedback from Liv at this late stage. She’d been awake most of the night trying to come up with something and this flimsy scheme was what she’d arrived at at 3 a.m. after watching countless YouTube roundups of favourite romcom moments of all time and best romantic gestures ever.
‘Well, I suppose it’s less creepy than some of the shite men are going on with in movies.’ Liv shook her head ruefully.
‘Yeah, what is with that?’ Ali giggled. ‘I mean, the cue cards in Love Actually? Though Sam would probably love something like that. He has a misguided grá for that film.’ She was feeling flickers of optimisim since he had sent her a Parks and Recreation GIF in reply to her message about the carvery. Sure, it wasn’t words exactly but a GIF was promising.
‘Can you just lie still,’ Liv muttered. ‘What if the midwife sees this and is familiar with the Law & Order canon? She might think you two are totally fucked up and pre-emptively confiscate this foetus.’
‘Look, you’re nearly finished the first line. We’re going with it,’ Ali barked. ‘I have zero other ideas so this’ll have to do.’
Once Liv had finished, Ali went to survey her lettering work in the mirror. She’d done a very good job – it was perfect. She pulled her dress back down, snapped a quick #OOTD and grabbed her bag. She was getting the bus so she could catch up on emails. Now that she was back in the Insta fold, there was a pile of messages from various PRs, who were apparently interested in having her tout their products again. She was polite in her responses. She’d be using her Insta very selectively from now on. She wanted to be herself. No more ‘aligning with brands’ and other wankery. She’d chat to her followers – she needed to keep up a level of interest in her ahead of My So-Called Best Life – and she’d do the well-paid prestige stuff like W Y N D to add to the baby fund, but beyond that ‘no, thanks’.