The Family Friend

by C. C. MacDonald

  She looks out into the garden and sees their guest through her window, sat on the floor, eyes closed, meditating. People used to take the piss out of meditating, bald people in robes chanting ‘umm’. But now it’s another thing that it’s decreed you’re meant to try and carve out the time to do. Erin’s tried, in the aftermath of her various freak-outs over being a mother, it always seemed to be the Internet’s most consistent catch-all for that kind of thing, but she’s not sure she’s doing it right. She can’t turn the thoughts off, no matter how many times she scans her body.

  It’s raining again. Hammering down. The room feels wet, the mossy smell of damp wafting in and competing with the citrus of one of Amanda’s diffusers. It’s coming up to midday and she and Bobby still haven’t left the house.

  Maybe she should try and meditate now. Grace was meant to be calling her this morning and Erin’s concerned she’s forgotten. She hasn’t been able to concentrate on Bobby, waiting for her phone to ring. Not that she ever feels she can fully focus on him when she sits with him, going through the motions of playing. Stacking coloured blocks on top of each other, trying to encourage him to join in, dangling a set of plastic keys in front of him to try and make him smile. That’s meant to be the thing that makes all the sleepless nights and stress worth it, when your baby smiles at you for the first time. But Bobby’s really making her wait. Perhaps he never will. Maybe her frowning, grumpy baby will grow up into a frowning, miserable adult.

  As if on cue, Bobby grabs at the neck of her T-shirt and makes a sound like a baby seagull. He grunts. Pain, a fart, a poo, she never knows how to make him feel better because she doesn’t have a clue what it is that’s wrong with him. He shoves his fist into his mouth and gives her an agonised expression. Teeth.

  She swishes him around the room, a flying tour of the four walls that are beginning to feel like a prison. She drops his eyes down to a banana plant by the entrance to the hall but he wriggles his displeasure. She flies him across the room to the large window, the view of the olive tree outside in the middle of their front garden. The hammering rain doesn’t seem to relax him either so she bounces him over to the mid-century black wire and teak shelving unit at the far side of the living room. He reaches for the shiny foil lettering of one of Raf’s art books before grabbing a clump of her thin Shakespeare editions and tumbling them to the floor. Erin moves him over to the crystal Amanda gave her that now sits on the top right corner of the unit. He runs his fingers over the dual columns of the rock, the surface sparkling like it’s covered in matt glitter. Bobby wants to grab it but it’s too heavy for him and Erin doesn’t want him to break the thing. Although she doesn’t remotely believe in the power of crystals, you still don’t want to be destroying things like that, must be twice the bad luck of cracking a mirror.

  She swings him up away from it and stops in front of the picture that used to be in Raf’s dad’s house. Bobby likes the bright colours but there’s something about it that unsettles Erin. The person wrapped up in a shawl, looking away into some bleak, arid future. The piece is childish. As if the act of putting this enigmatic figure, a nod to the Renaissance, in some sort of Mad Max dystopia would be automatically profound, but it falls flat. Erin’s placed the crystal in this part of the room, next to the painting, because it doesn’t get much natural light from the window and thus she doesn’t often have it as a backdrop in any of her Insta-content.

  She puts Bobby down and lets him shuffle around her legs and back towards the rug where a new wooden train set has been cracked open from the box of #gifted toys they keep under the console table behind the sofa. She recalls Amanda going over to the painting on that first night she was here and declaring it the reason for her visit. That and Mercury doing something, her motivation for booking a flight across the world to visit her old friend. But now Erin thinks of it, she can’t remember ever taking a photo or filming one of her stories in this corner of the room. It wouldn’t make sense to because it’s pretty much the only part of their downstairs she hasn’t put any effort into curating because the lighting is so bad.

  Her phone buzzes on the kitchen counter. As she rushes across the room to answer the call, she glances back at the picture. It must have been in the background once when she was monologuing for her ‘stories’, she thinks, before blowing her lips out and shaking her head like a horse, stretching her face to relax the muscles, an old drama-school warm-up, readying herself to sound happy and breezy for her agent.

  ‘Hi, Grace.’

  ‘Erin, hi. You OK?’

  ‘All good, yeh. How goes it?’ How goes it? She’s trying too hard. Bobby cries out, indignant at being ignored, and bashes a toy egg on the mat next to him.

  ‘Are you OK to talk?’ Grace asks. Erin swings Bobby up and sinks down onto their puffy sofa, bouncing him on her knee while she clutches the phone under her chin.

  ‘Yes. Yes. Sorted now. Bobby.’

  ‘Have you looked at your phone?’ There’s an edge in Grace’s voice.

  ‘Not for a few minutes.’ She infuses the words with a knowing laugh to try and smooth over the instant thought that she’s somehow posted something that’s so bad Grace has decided to stop being her agent after less than a week.

  ‘You’ve just missed it then. I’ve sent you an email. Have you got an iPad to watch something on or shall I call you back?’

  ‘I’ll get the iPad.’

  ‘Put me on speaker.’ Erin does as she’s told and swivels round to the table behind the sofa, nearly knocking over a vase of lilies Amanda must have put there. Bobby jiggles off her knee so she drags him to her side next to her on the sofa.

  ‘Ali-Crow –’ Grace enunciates the words – ‘do we know who an Ali-Crow may be?’

  ‘Never heard of Ali-Crow.’

  ‘Have you got it yet?’ Erin clicks onto an email from Grace, with a video attachment.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ she asks, her voice breathy, artificially breezy.

  ‘Someone called Ali-Crow posted the video I’ve sent you. Are you watching it yet?’

  ‘It’s buffering, just starting now.’ A bank of green. Granite-grey sky behind. The sea. The sound of wind battering the camera’s microphone.

  ‘Let me know when it’s finished.’ Grace’s voice, though she barely hears it because on the video she sees that it’s her, Erin, pushing their buggy, the morning of the church group, looking around, eyes haunted like she’s on drugs. The ‘her’ in the video shakes the buggy and as she and Bobby watch it from the sofa Erin’s stomach lurches like she’s on a roller coaster. The woman in the video shakes the buggy again, her face contorted with the effort, wind-buffeted strands of dark hair making her look like Medusa. Erin feels spit pool at the back of her throat, she could be sick. Erin in the video stops the buggy with a violent dig into the muddy grass and bounds round to the front of the buggy, her arms grab at baby Bobby. The video stops. She reaches forward, puts the iPad on their wooden coffee table and closes her eyes.

  ‘Is it finished? Erin? Have you watched it?’

  ‘Yeh,’ she croaks. Bobby gives her a quizzical look. ‘How – Did you say someone posted this?’

  ‘A brand-new account. No followers, no following. Just @mentioned you. We managed to get it taken down in less than two minutes. There’s been no engagement or mention of it on your feed so I doubt anyone’s seen it.’

  ‘Right, thanks. I’m–’ Bobby’s got his bottom to her, scratching his way across the sofa. ‘I’m so sorry, Grace. It was – He wouldn’t stop screaming.’

  ‘Erin, it’s fine. You’re allowed to get frustrated.’

  ‘I know but –’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up for this. You’re a great mum, you know that. People wouldn’t be so into your feed if you weren’t.’ Erin swallows. She feels nauseous.

  ‘You OK?’ It’s Amanda, standing by the door into the garden, sun breaking through the thick clouds behind her. Erin takes her agent off speaker and puts the phone to her ear. How long’s she been there?
She looks over to the window, scrunches her eyes up and nods, trying to smile off any of the tense conversation she may have overheard. ‘You want me to –?’ Amanda mouths, pointing to Bobby who’s clambering over his mother’s knee towards the edge of the sofa. Erin nods an emphatic yes as Amanda swoops down, Erin puts a grateful hand on Amanda’s upper arm before she soars Bobby into the air and towards the fireplace.

  Erin goes out into the garden. She has trolls spitting bile at her feed every day but she’s always been able to write them off as lonely old arseholes fighting their own private war against the world by meting out insults to strangers. But this is something entirely different. Someone has posted a video of her, minutes from where she lives. A video they know will damage her. Erin begins scratching the inside of her wrist, trying to blink away the shock of it.

  ‘That being said –’ Grace’s tone shifts – ‘as we grow your followership, more people will be watching and – I’ve had it with a lot of my clients – some people can be quite vindictive with influencers, more so perhaps than with others in the public eye. So it’s just important to be aware. When you’re out and about. Assume everyone has their camera on you, because they might. I really am so sorry about all this. Just glad we were onto it before people started sharing.’ Erin looks inside. Amanda’s still got Bobby hoisted up looking down at her from a great height. Erin nods to no one, pinching the ligaments in her wrist together. ‘Any idea who it might be?’ Grace asks.

  Erin shakes her head to no one. ‘Er, no,’ she says, unable to demist her foggy thoughts. ‘There were a fair few people out down by the sea. A church group I was at that morning would have been finishing.’

  ‘It’s most likely to be someone you don’t know to be honest. This sort of stuff. Trolling. It’s the anonymity they get off on. Most likely a man, looking to polish up their self-esteem by taking people like us down a peg or two.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘There’s a guy we use sometimes in these sorts of situations. He’s a digital security expert. He’ll try and get to the bottom of who Ali-Crow is – though, unless he pops up again, I think it’s unlikely we’ll find anything. But I do want you to know, we’re taking this seriously.’

  A gaggle of seagulls shriek overhead making Erin hunch away from them. ‘Thank you, that’s so great to know.’ Bobby is sitting up on the table inside. There must have been some form of leakage onto his vest as he’s now bare-chested. Erin turns her attention to her bamboo hedge. The video’s hollowed her out. The image of that terrifying woman, her, shaking the buggy, groping and pulling at something so tiny, so defenceless. Loathing courses around her and she’s freezing cold.

  ‘It’s horrible stuff, Erin, but as your visibility increases I’m sorry to tell you this sort of thing can become par for the course.’ The afterlife of a shiver runs down the base of Erin’s spine. ‘Now, we’ve got some meetings booked in for the end of this week and the beginning of next. Does that still sound OK?’

  ‘Yeh.’ Amanda’s said she’s happy to help on the days Erin has to go to London and telling her new agent that she’s totally free to meet brands and production companies should feel wonderful but now she’s seen that, seen herself behaving like that, everything tastes sour.

  ‘We’ll talk strategy when I see you. I’ll make sure we carve out some time for a cocktail at some point during the day too.’ Grace leaves the conversation and Erin with her thoughts, standing in her garden eyes locked onto the bamboo as it swats gently in the breeze. The sliding door shushes open and the air is blasted by the sound of Bobby’s screaming.

  ‘Somebody’s hungry,’ Amanda says, appearing at Erin’s shoulder, serene in spite of the racket the baby’s making in her ear. The boy lands in Erin’s arms and she turns him towards a hanging cluster of flowers that hangs down from a planter high up on the fence. She puts a string of petals into his hand, which distracts him briefly as he takes time to yank on it like a tiny Tarzan. She pulls him a little closer to her. It’s an apology to her little boy for every time she’s raised her voice with him, every time she hasn’t understood that he’s confused and in pain and that, to him, the world is a terrifying place. If her new friend weren’t standing behind her, Erin would cry into the blue woolly cardigan Amanda’s put him in.

  ‘All this attention all of a sudden?’ Amanda’s voice is quiet, respectful and full of purpose like someone offering support at a funeral. ‘Must be a lot to deal with.’ Erin turns, Bobby still attached to the greenery over her shoulder. The winter sun behind Amanda makes her red hair shine gold and, in her long green cardigan, she looks like some sort of beneficent wood sprite. She leans forward and squeezes the thick fold of chubby skin on Bobby’s ankle, hard enough that the boy looks round at her in indignation.

  ‘This is too much, isn’t it?’ Amanda says, putting her teeth together in a biting gesture. ‘I could just eat him, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Lunch?’

  ‘How long do you think he’ll take to cook?’ Erin says. Amanda cocks her head in that way she has, it feels like something adults might have found sweet when she was a child that’s become part of her physical lexicon.

  ‘You’re so quick, you and Raf must be just laughing all the time,’ she says, mouth pursed in a tight smile and Erin hasn’t got the heart to say that Raf’s never really been much of a laugher. Perhaps he was as a kid, she’ll have to ask some other time.

  ‘Lunch would be amazing, thanks.’ Erin shifts Bobby from one side to the other. Amanda flicks a lock of hair behind her ear and pirouettes back into the house. She was there, the thought bursts into Erin’s head fully formed. When someone was filming her aggressively shaking her baby’s buggy, Amanda was right there.

  14

  ‘Who you think it is then?’ Caz says, through a mouthful of chips.

  ‘Not a clue,’ Erin says, nudging her friend’s knees with her own.

  ‘Come on, you’ve got a working theory, for sure.’ The potential for beef that comes with Erin’s news of the troll seems to have amplified Caz’s Glaswegian accent, both ‘for’ and ‘sure’ spelled out in two belligerent syllables.

  ‘Such a weird thing to do,’ Erin says, ‘I genuinely have no idea.’

  Caz pokes a hand into the bag of chips that’s resting on Erin’s lap, the greased warmth pressing into her jeans. They’re sitting on the high wall of the harbour arm, the masts of dozens of sailing boats swaying like reeds in a breeze. Bobby sits in his buggy facing them, not sleeping, but not unhappy, gnawing on an oversized fluffy squid like a caveman with a brontosaurus bone.

  They’ve just been at a mums’ coffee morning at a brand-new restaurant just up the road that curves down to the harbour. It was heaving, every inch of the room populated by a mother and at least one young child crawling around the floor, banging their heads on chairs and table edges and screaming intermittently. Erin had had no idea that so many people would turn up but she’d posted about it and after what happened at the church group she shouldn’t have been too surprised. Erin was struggling to focus as a range of different mums vied for her attention. Two days since the video and she hasn’t been able to keep it out of her mind. It was a raven-haired older mother telling Erin that she’d never do some of the #gifted promotional posts she’d done recently – she clearly had a bank balance to match her high-mindedness – that precipitated her catching Caz’s eye and their escaping the coffee morning as quickly as they could. And now they’re sharing a bottomless bag of chips, watching a smattering of fishermen and older gentlemen tinker with their boats. It’s only eleven o’clock but Caz knows the man in the chip shop so he fired up the fryers early. Erin hadn’t intended to tell Caz about being trolled but she blurted the whole thing out before the chips were cool enough to eat.

  ‘Well, I’d say there’s about thirty-five stuck-up mums round here who I’d put in the “massive twat” category, but not sure which of them’s got the onions for something like this,’ Caz says and it makes Erin smile.
She’s missed her so much since she’s gone back to her job as a social worker. On the mum scene they were inseparable, Erin quick to laugh and make an effort, Caz almost the opposite, they formed a good cop/bad cop double act.

  Erin catches Bobby staring up at her from under his brow and it reminds her of Amanda being right there, swooping in to save her as she lost her temper on the grassy verge that overlooks the sea. They had lunch after Erin got the call from Grace. Amanda didn’t ask any questions about the phone call she’d heard snatches of and Erin didn’t elaborate. She doesn’t want Raf to know. He’d overreact. And she doesn’t know whether it would be to the fact she’s being trolled or the way she was behaving in the video but she fears the latter. It took minutes rather than hours after Grace’s call for Erin to decide that it might be best for everyone to keep him in the dark. She dropped Grace an email and agreed that there was no point making a mountain out of a molehill.

  ‘I’ve watched the video twenty or so times, been down to the mound to try work out where it was taken from.’

  ‘And what do the forensics say?’ Caz says and Erin hums out a dry laugh which must be pregnant with misgiving because Caz adds, ‘Erin?’

  ‘Well, um, Raf’s family friend who’s staying with us, Amanda, she was there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She was there, on the grassy knoll,’ she says, trying to make a joke of it, ‘she came and helped with Bobby, helped calm him down.’

  ‘You think it’s her?’

  Erin clears her throat and wipes salt off her fingers with a paper napkin. ‘No. No, she’s lovely, and she was with me pretty much the exact time the video ends so it can’t have been her.’