by Lindsey Kelk
‘Hello,’ I said, checking both directions before I crossed the road. I refused to lose any more bloody phones or bags this month. ‘What’s up?’
‘Why are you changing phones so often?’ Mum grumbled. ‘I don’t like it and neither does your father.’
‘I love it!’ I heard him call in the background. ‘Keeps me on my toes!’
‘It’s because I’m secretly a drug kingpin,’ I replied, smiling happily at the sight of a yellow taxi. It was good to be home. And three and a half thousand miles from my mum. ‘This is my burner. If anyone calls and asks you anything, tell them you’ve never even heard of me.’
‘Ha ha, Angela, very droll,’ she said with a theatrical sigh. ‘Where are you now? Australia? Japan? Timbuktu?’
‘I’m on my way to work.’ I loitered at the edge of the pavement, eyeing an Apple Store that used to be a bagel place and Whole Foods that had replaced … I couldn’t remember what. ‘Alice is with the nanny who she now calls mum and Alex has run off with his mistress.’
‘You’re not funny, you know,’ she replied, her voice clipped and prim. ‘Karen, who runs the knitting shop in the village, her daughter married this man and he was completely besotted with her. Whisked her off her feet, ran off to Gretna Green to get married, pregnant on the honeymoon, the whole job. And then she started working at the little Asda on the high street and guess what happened then?’
‘They lived happily ever after and never had so much as a cross word?’
‘She found out he was gay and having it away with a fella at the service station up in Bingley.’
Mum really did have excellent timing. The stand-up comedy world had missed out on this one.
‘Seems to me there’s a slim chance that had more to do with her husband being gay than her taking a job at Asda,’ I said. ‘And why did they run off to Gretna Green? How long ago was this?’
‘A while ago,’ she said, non-committal as she always was when facts didn’t necessarily support her story. ‘Regardless, you know what I’m saying.’
‘I do,’ I agreed, nodding hello to the man who ran the street meat cart on the corner of Metropolitan. ‘And I am honestly saying this with love because I don’t want to argue with you but the way Alex and I do things works for us.’
Most of the time, I added silently. Which was still better than a lot of people managed.
‘I’m sure it does,’ Mum replied. ‘I don’t want to argue about it. If you want strangers raising Alice, then that’s up to you.’
I hovered on the edge of the road, tiptoes clinging to the edge of the kerb as I took a deep breath in and let it out slowly.
‘I really wish you lived closer,’ I said calmly. ‘I’m sure she’d love to have Granny Annette looking after her more often.’
I waited patiently for a response. Was that a sniff I heard down the line?
‘Yes, well,’ she said with a slight wobble in her voice. ‘You will insist on staying in that godforsaken country and keeping our only grandchild thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away, won’t you?’
So that was it. I’d been so stressed out defending myself, I really hadn’t put any effort into working out what had upset her so much in the first place. She wasn’t angry I was working and I very much doubted she cared about me having a nanny, having spent a great deal of my childhood loudly wishing for ‘bloody Mary Poppins to appear out the bloody chimney so I can have five minutes’ peace’. She just wanted to spend more time with Alice. I couldn’t blame Mum; my daughter was the best baby ever.
‘I was thinking.’ I started talking quickly before I could second-guess myself. ‘Why don’t you come out for Alice’s birthday?’
‘We were already coming out for her birthday!’ Mum bellowed, nearly taking my ear off. ‘Did you think I was going to miss my only grandchild’s first birthday? Not likely. We’ll be there. We’ve already got her present. Have Alex’s lot already got something? I bet they haven’t. I was about to ask what you were doing for Christmas. Your dad wants to book a table at the Coach & Horses but if you’re all coming over, I’d rather we were at home.’
It would serve me right for trying to do something nice.
‘Can I let you know tonight?’ I asked as I ran across the road against the light. Why wasn’t there a Hawaiian horse around to step on your phone when you needed one? ‘I should check with Alex.’
She really was testing my new-found commitment to being kind and finding the truth and all that shit. Another word and she was getting a tube of Précis mascara for her birthday.
‘I’ll let you get back to work, dear. Do you want to have a word with your dad?’
‘Is he behaving himself?’ I asked.
‘She says are you behaving yourself?’ Mum shouted across the living room.
‘Do I ever?’ he shouted back. ‘You know me, Angela, always up to no good.’
‘He’s fighting with the neighbours over the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. They say the roots are on their property but your dad is insistent it stays.’
‘It’s my bloody tree and they’re my bloody apples,’ he called. ‘If they want to cut it down, they can buy me a new, fully mature bloody tree and plant it six feet over. Or they can buy me a bag of apples every week for the rest of my life. Entirely up to them.’
‘He’s fine then,’ I smiled softly. As long as he wasn’t blowing up the microwave or ending up in hospital from one too many accidental weed brownies, I was happy. ‘I really have got to go, I’m almost at the office. Love you, Mum.’
‘We love you too,’ she replied, in her grudging but certain way. ‘Give Alice a squeeze from us when you get home.’
Well, I thought, dropping the phone in my impossibly wonderful new bag and fishing around for my key card to get into the building. Now I was very tired, extremely emotional and staring down the barrel of two parental visits in the next six months.
But at least my mum was happy.
One day Alice will think like this about you, whispered the voice in my head.
I shuddered at the very idea. Alice would never think of me the way I thought of my mum.
I was definitely going to be worse.
Going back into the office after any time away was always a pain in the arse. It was the only real time I missed my school days, that first day back after a fortnight in Minorca, armed with a shitty friendship bracelet for Louisa, long plastic strips of weird boiled sweets for the rest of the class and a breathless story about how I’d held hands with a Geordie called Nicholas at the kids’ club disco on my last night. You were never more popular or exotic than that one Monday. Now I had zero friendship bracelets, we were banned from bringing anything in for the rest of the class in case it upset someone’s allergies and the only story that left me breathless was almost being thrown from a horse.
‘Angela!’
I spotted Paige as soon as I walked inside, stuck in the hot desk farm with the rest of us. I had wondered whether or not she’d be given a spot up on Cici’s executive floor but that would have meant Cici getting rid of her personal pedicure station so it did seem unlikely.
‘I wasn’t expecting you in today,’ she said. Her blonde hair was piled up on top of her head and the neon green of her midi-length floral dress would have made me look like I’d been at a tablecloth with a pack of highlighters, but on Paige, it set off her perfect tan and her worn-in Doc Martens and just looked cool.
‘I know,’ I replied, twisting the ends of my ponytail before throwing it over my shoulder. Note to self, get your bloody hair cut. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘It’s brilliant timing actually.’ Paige picked up a cup of coffee in one hand, gripped her phone in the other, tucked an iPad under her arm. ‘I’m on my way to show Cici the intro video we’ve put together for Recherché.’
Either she hadn’t heard what I said or she didn’t care.
‘That was bloody quick,’ I said, following her as she walked back towards the lifts.
Quick and weird. Shouldn’t I be the first person to see the video for my website?
‘The team here are amazing,’ she replied with a nod. Paige didn’t think it was weird, clearly. ‘I was sending stuff through while we were in Lanai and last night I couldn’t sleep at all so I stayed up and wrote the basic script. I’m sure you were the same?’
I nodded weakly as we zoomed up to the penthouse. Work hadn’t even crossed my mind.
‘You’re going to love the vid,’ Paige promised. ‘There are still a couple of technical touches I want to add, a few flourishes to really make it feel slick, but it absolutely screams Recherché dot com.’
Slapping on my brightest smile, I pushed up my sleeves and followed her into the boss’s office.
‘You don’t look like you’ve been to Hawaii,’ Cici said without taking her eyes off her phone screen. Her assistant was sitting in the next chair, quivering every time she raised her hand.
‘Why?’ I asked, taking a seat as far away as my British-born manners would allow. ‘What does someone who went to Hawaii look like?’
‘They look tan.’ She looked up at me and waved a hand in front of her face. ‘They look relaxed.’
‘I wouldn’t describe it as an especially relaxing trip,’ I replied, already regretting my decision to come into the office. ‘But it was amazing. Lanai is gorgeous.’
‘It used to be much nicer,’ she sniffed. ‘It’s gotten so commercial now.’
Paige and I shared a glance.
‘But aren’t there only three thousand people there?’ I said. ‘And two hotels?’
‘Ha,’ Cici scoffed. ‘When I used to go to Lanai, there was only one hotel.’
They probably built the second one when they knew Cici had stopped coming, I thought to myself.
Two people I recognized from the main floor of the office but didn’t yet know walked into the room, carrying their laptops.
‘While Angela and I were away, Ember and Tennyson were working on an intro video for Recherché,’ Paige announced as the duo tapped away at their computers. I jumped out of my skin as a projector screen whirred out of the ceiling, covering the floor-to-ceiling windows and casting the room into darkness.
‘Think of this as a promo for your site, AC,’ she went on. ‘We want to connect with all the potential readers out there, let them know who you are and what they can expect from their new favourite site.’
A rush of either excitement or sugar from the Pop-Tart I’d eaten for breakfast ran through me as the screen lit up and a shot of the New York City skyline filled the screen.
‘My name is Angela Clark.’
The sound of my voice filled the room.
The video cut from New York to a slow-motion video of me posing by the pool in Hawaii.
‘I’m a mom, I’m a wife and I’m a career woman. You’re probably wondering, how does she manage to have it all?’
I suddenly came over very queasy. Christ, I thought as I watched myself throwing shapes in front of Jenny and Louisa. What a complete tit. I swallowed. Definitely should have had more than a Pop-Tart for breakfast.
The video of our photoshoot cut to images of me that I hadn’t seen in years. Photos Jenny took when I first arrived in New York, pictures of me, Alex and Alice from last Christmas, me and Louisa together in Paris, hanging out with James in LA, me, Jenny and Sadie in Vegas. They’d all been taken from my Facebook page, which would teach me not to accept a friend request until I got to know someone better.
‘You’re probably wondering,’ the voiceover said as we cut to a video of me in the office, wearing a stripy T-shirt I’d had on last week. But I didn’t remember being filmed … ‘How does she do it?’
Another fast cut, filtering through more pictures, more clips pulled from social media. A quick clip of me laughing at the luau, a video of Jenny pulling me out of the pool after James pushed me in and a very attractive shot of me passed out on the plane, complete with my eye mask askew and mouth open wide.
‘The truth is, I’m just like you.’
It was then I realized I had my hands over my face, as though I was watching a horror movie. And it kind of felt like I was.
‘Follow my adventures on Recherché dot com to see my real life, my amazing friends, gorgeous husband and see what motherhood in New York is really like … Fabulous.’
The last photo of me, wearing the ice-blue sequined Elie Saab gown and looking back over my shoulder, laughing at something Tess had said, faded away and was replaced with the Recherche.com logo and a heavily retouched photo of my giant face.
The film ended, the screen rolled up and Paige sat back in her seat, so satisfied she looked as though she needed a cigarette, while Ember and Tennyson stared at Cici like a pair of golden retrievers waiting for a treat.
Cici looked over at me.
‘Angela,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
All eyes turned my way.
‘It’s awful,’ I said, blinking as my eyes readjusted to daylight.
‘Sorry, what?’ Paige said, the smile frozen on her face.
Oh god, it was too much pressure. I definitely should have had more than just a Pop-Tart for breakfast and I definitely should have bloody well stayed at home.
‘OK, not awful, sorry,’ I said, looking around for a shovel to dig myself out of this giant hole. ‘But it’s not me, is it?’
‘What do you mean, it’s not you?’ Cici pointed at my huge, gurning face on the screen. ‘That’s literally you. In great lighting. On your best day.’
‘Would I be right in thinking there was some editing on the voiceover?’ I glanced at Ember and Tennyson and saw nothing but pride on their faces.
‘If I may, I’d like to add some context to the video,’ Paige said, focusing on Cici and ignoring me entirely. ‘Without wanting to be confrontational, I talked about this with Angela. I think her ideas for Recherché are fantastic but they’re hardly original, are they?’
Even though I didn’t say anything, I felt my eyes open wide and my head turned very, very slowly towards my vice president of content.
‘There are already a million mommy bloggers out there, showing everyone all the boring everyday stuff. We wanted to give this a Besson Media slant, make it sexy and cool while still keeping her humour and honesty.’
‘But it’s not honest,’ I blurted out.
‘It’s honest enough,’ Paige argued. ‘I can’t sell this Angela, can I? Take your ego out of the equation and ask yourself, who would want to read about you?’
Welp, here we go, I thought, chucking the metaphorical shovel out the window before I bashed Paige in the head with it.
‘This is the problem we’ve got,’ I told her. ‘We’re not on the same page about this at all. I don’t want to write about myself, I want to write about the things I care about, about the things women like me care about. If I was me, sitting at home or on my way to work, scrolling through my phone with a spare five minutes, this wouldn’t make me feel good about myself.’
‘It should,’ Cici said. ‘You looked great in that last photo.’
‘Well, obviously me looking great in a photo makes me feel good,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I mean, as a random human being, it wouldn’t make me feel better. Why would I want to hear what that woman has to say about anything? She sounds like a complete tit.’
‘She’s right about that part,’ Cici nodded. ‘When she fell in the pool, I was hoping she wouldn’t get back out.’
‘Thank you for the constructive input,’ I said. ‘My point is, I wouldn’t want to watch this and, if I did force myself through it, I’d be hate-watching. None of this is real, all this video does is create another way to make women – all women, not just mums – feel like they’re not good enough. It says you should be glamorous and sexy and perfect all the time. Isn’t that the opposite of what we talked about in Hawaii?’
‘I think you’re wrong,’ Paige said, crossing her arms and staring dead ahead. ‘I think this promo is exactly what we ne
ed to make noise for you. This will get eyes on the site.’
‘Have you not heard a single word I’ve been saying?’ I asked. She fussed with a button on her sleeve and refused to make eye contact. ‘You can’t have forgotten what happened in the garden?’
‘You guys,’ Cici said, leaning forwards with a salacious smile on her face. ‘Just what exactly happened in Hawaii?’
‘I’m not saying this isn’t gorgeous,’ I said, giving Ember and Tennyson a thumbs up, even though they were already looking at their phones and really didn’t give a fuck. ‘But it’s not me, it’s not what I want to do and, as much as I want that to be my life, it isn’t. I’m sorry, Paige. I don’t feel comfortable going forward with this.’
Two tiny red spots appeared in the centre of Paige’s perfectly porcelain cheeks.
‘Authenticity is really hot right now …’ Cici mused out loud. ‘Angela could be onto something.’
‘I don’t want to jump on a trend,’ I argued, thinking of Louisa sitting at home, flicking through Instagram stories on the sofa. ‘I want to be real. We’re so used to only having beautiful things pushed down our throats, we don’t know what real life is any more. That’s why we all get depressed when our own life doesn’t look like an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.’
‘Ew,’ Cici gasped.
‘No one watches that any more,’ Paige muttered.
‘Kendall is the only cool one,’ Ember whispered.
I flicked my hand in irritation. ‘The point is, I don’t think we should be promoting a website designed to make women feel better about the world by putting out videos that make other women feel like shit,’ I said, trying to control my voice, trying not to lose my temper. Trying, not necessarily succeeding. ‘I’m sorry for all the work that went into this but I don’t want it out there with my name, my website or something approximating my face on it.’
Cici forced all her energy into her left eyebrow and raised it by roughly three millimetres.
