‘Bet they’re sending you loads of free stuff now.’
‘No more than before really.’
‘Look at this.’ Her shellac scratches at a patch of dirt on the hood of her huge buggy. ‘Got it on Buy, Sell, Swap. Mould. Actual mould. Twenty quid though. Couldn’t say no.’ Lorna doesn’t look down at Erin’s gleaming #gifted Bugaboo Buffalo, but her meaning’s more explicit for it. ‘Anyway, must be nice.’
‘It’s a lot of work, and you’ve seen at the church, he’s not the easiest baby.’ Jesus, Erin thinks to herself, sweating now, why am I playing the victim in front of this woman?
‘I’ve not been to the group for the last six weeks.’ Lorna peers her head over her buggy to check the boys are sleeping. They are; she folds her arms and stares straight ahead. Her coat is enormous, far too wide for her slight figure. Erin can’t help herself thinking that she looks like when multiple children put on a trench coat in a cartoon and pretend to be an adult. Lorna’s dislike of Erin seems to squeeze out of her pores, olfactible almost. For someone who feels the need to denigrate everyone in order to inflate her own status and who probably saw herself as the queen bee in waiting for all the various children’s groups, it must be galling that someone living two streets away, a woman new to the town, is, both at the groups and by the clear metric of Instagram followers, far more popular than she has ever been. But would Lorna troll her? It’s such a strange way to attack someone, and if she did would she hide behind anonymity? Wouldn’t bringing down the mighty BRAUNEoverBRAINS be exactly the kind of thing someone like Lorna would get off on?
‘You Airbnbing at the moment?’ Lorna asks.
‘Um, no, no. I’ve not really got that sorted yet.’ Lorna runs holiday rentals for second-homers and has a couple of holiday-park rentals she owns so Erin must have mentioned her and Raf’s plan to rent out the studio in the garden at some point. The chemist’s assistant finally arrives with Bobby’s prescription.
‘Oh. Oh, right,’ Lorna says, turning back to face the counter. She looks shocked, though she has very fair eyebrows so it’s hard to tell whether that’s just her face.
‘Hope you’re not here too long,’ Erin says, executing a three-point turn that gives Bobby the scope to grab at a clutch of toothbrushes and knock them to the floor. Erin considers leaving them, a quick glance at the clock above the door, but she can’t face Lorna’s judgement so bends down to pick them up. From the floor she clocks the woman looking down at her, making a strange face, eyes wide, cheeks sucked in like she’s chewing a sherbet. ‘Is there something wrong? Erin doesn’t mean to sound so confrontational, but she doesn’t want to get dragged into nudges and winks.
‘I … ’ She puts a hand up to her mouth. ‘I don’t know, I probably shouldn’t say.’
‘I think you kind of have to.’
‘Well,’ Lorna feathers her chest with her hand, ‘I saw a red-headed woman coming out of the back of your house.’ Her head wobbles like a toy dog in the back of a car as she waits for her response. ‘If it’s not an Airbnb guest –’
‘Raf’s old friend from Australia.’ Erin enunciates each consonant to crush whatever Desperate Housewives fantasy the woman’s trying to allude to. ‘She’s staying with us for a bit.’
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she says, hugging her padding tighter. ‘I’ve seen her with your partner, Raf is it? Out walking together with Bobby on the prom –’ Erin flushes with heat – ‘and I thought it was a bit odd. That’s a relief.’ Lorna’s not relieved.
‘What do you mean, seen them?’ Erin asks. ‘When?’ Bobby’s trying to lift himself up to grab more things from the shelf.
‘One time earlier this week, and once last week as well.’ Lorna shrugs but keeps her eyes front, suddenly far more interested in the activities of the team of chemists up behind the counter. ‘Can’t remember what day. She wears such funny clothes, like something out of Merlin.’
Erin ‘hmps’ in reply. She looks around the chemist, the sea of grey heads in their brightly coloured coats seeming to merge into each other. Raf’s the busiest he’s ever been. Erin’s never seen him so stressed with work. He’s going back to it after Bobby’s down and they’ve had dinner, sometimes until one in the morning he says, and yet he’s taking time off work to go for walks with Amanda. He hasn’t mentioned that to her. He hasn’t said anything about it.
‘Well, it’s lovely that he’s got company if he’s holding the baby for you.’ Erin wants to get away from here. She doesn’t want to know what Lorna thinks of her fiancé going for walks in the middle of a workday or her opinions about Amanda’s Arthurian get-up. Raf works in London one or two days a week and a studio in town the rest of the time, so it’s not like he’s necessarily been skipping whole days, but why wouldn’t he mention it? Erin wheels the buggy back towards the chemist’s desk, seeing a woman with a Zimmer frame now blocking the aisle she was planning to escape down. ‘Funny old time to visit.’ Erin wants to get home, get changed and get out of this incestuous little place for a few hours. ‘Bridget, do you know Bridget? Has the three huge cats, lives on Plandell Road?’ Erin nods though she’s not listening as her eyes dart around the lines of pensioners, desperate to find the quickest way out. ‘She said she saw her doing some exercises, as the sun was setting a couple of afternoons ago. Must have been about four degrees. Australians are very outdoorsy so that does make more sense.’
‘I’ve got to go to London,’ Erin says, seeing a window to the exit.
‘Course,’ Lorna says, giving her a three-fingered wave as Erin shoves the buggy towards the photo booth, nearly kneecapping an older gentleman who’s staring at a selection of combs.
18
Erin stares at the three cherubs playing their gold-plated instruments looking down on her from above the open double door frame. She slurps about half her flute of champagne. Her friend Anna Mai (89k followers) is telling a story about this wine-tasting holiday some company #gifted her and her family. Erin wasn’t listening fully but it seemed to be a cautionary tale about checking the travel company’s credentials before agreeing to go on their trips. ‘It wasn’t quite as bad as the Fyre festival, but not far off,’ a phrase she’s fairly sure she’s heard Anna use already tonight.
The French Salon at Claridge’s is the venue for her speech tonight. It’s astoundingly beautiful but its ostentation makes Erin feel sad, mournful almost for a life she hasn’t lived. The bald reality is that she’d imagined spending her life at places like this. When she played Nora in A Doll’s House at university, her director said she’d be a movie star, no doubt about it. An agent who’d come to see her told her to go to drama school, that he’d see her on the other side. She directed herself in a production of The Seagull, not at the university theatre but at the Theatre Royal in town, that caused such a stir that she had university tutors and bigwigs in the regional theatre scene buzzing around her like flies at a butcher’s shop. Drinks parties at Claridge’s were the least she was expecting. But they never materialised, the career she had been promised by teachers at secondary school, by self-aggrandising tutors at her drama school and any man over the age of forty who worked ‘in the industry’, never materialised.
Success was meant to pool around her like molten gold, so she spent years in denial, still believing something would switch and the industry would realise that she’d slipped through the net. So she refused to get a full-time job in case it stopped her auditioning, paid intergalactic rent to live close to the West End, went drinking with her old uni theatre crowd who’d all realised the creative pathway was a torrid and self-immolating one and gone and got jobs in PR and advertising but, ten years later, would still tell her she should keep at it because she was so good in their first-year production of Blood Wedding.
It was Raf who saved her from it all. He saw her playing a too-old Isabella in Measure for Measure above a pub and got talking to her afterwards. She fell quickly for him. He was tall, she’d always had a thing for tall, and so kind. He put her first. She’d never
had a boyfriend that had done that before. A nice guy as it were. From very early on he focused his life around hers but there was nothing desperate or clingy about it. He was matter-of-fact about his feelings for her, his desire for her. He wanted to spend time with her more than he wanted to do anything else, it was that black and white for him. There was none of the neuroses of actors or writers she’d been out with. He didn’t put her on the manic pixie dream-girl pedestal like some of the corporate wonks she’d dated. He was remarkably comfortable in his skin, something that Erin hadn’t been for seven or eight years. She was drawn to his stillness, a serenity, the sense that no matter how turbulent the sea was, he’d always stay anchored near the shore and she was delighted to tie herself to his strength, his solidity.
After about eighteen months he said he couldn’t take seeing how low she was as her auditions, the attention from her agent, from her friends dried up. He tried everything to dig her out of the trench of disillusionment she’d dug herself into. He paid off her numerous credit cards to give her a chance to do something different, got her prospectuses for evening classes, but she railed against it, told him he was trying to crush her dream. When he suggested that he thought she seemed especially low after she’d spent time with certain groups of her friends, the actor crowd particularly, she nearly broke things off with him entirely. But then, after the brutal serendipity that led to her being on holiday when a chance to lead a film came up, an actual feature film that would have led to people knowing who she was, knowing her talent, she realised that she’d moored her ambition to something that was based around blind luck and that Raf was right, she didn’t have the temperament for it. And that in still trying to be an actor, she was hanging on to some childish desire, chasing the same feeling of adoration she used to get when she did shows for her mum’s friends.
And she was one of the lucky ones, she had a wonderful man who was offering her a fresh start. She rang her agent and said she was giving it all up. And a few months down the line, when Raf asked her if she wanted to have a baby, it seemed like it could be the right thing to do. The purpose she’d always had, the meaning she’d sought through fame, craft, acclaim, ridiculous abstract nouns that had meant so much to her for so long, had delivered only misery. So although she’d hadn’t been planning to have a baby until much later, when Raf suggested it might be something they could do, the thought of having something concrete, something that was hers, that was known the world over as providing joy, made it seem like a no-brainer.
‘Erin, do you want to come and get ready?’ Philippa, the lady who is ‘looking after’ her this evening taps her on the shoulder. And it’s having a baby, with a little help from her mother’s put-on-a-smile-for-the-world attitude and Erin’s high, photogenic cheekbones, that has brought her here. Here to talk in front of a crowd of amazing, beautiful, inspiring mothers. Acclaim, applause, adoration. What she’s always wanted.
She downs the rest of her flute, gives an expression of mock nerves to Anna Mai and Daisy Froome (21k followers), and follows Philippa into the drawing room next door. Rows of seats begin to fill up as she’s escorted to the front. She hears snatches of conversation. Nap times, poonamis, flexible working, mastitis, mumpreneur conferences, Bach for babies orchestral concerts. These are not the topics that Erin’s interested in, this is not what she likes talking about, and yet, she finds herself posting about them, talking about them to people she meets at groups and cafes. She doesn’t talk about rage, about loneliness, about frustration, about her abject boredom and how much she misses the roller coaster of hope and disappointment of her old life. She talks about positivity, and online sisterhood, and moments of overwhelming love and her style tips and baby fashion. Because, just like every performance she’s ever given, probably the real reason she never made it, she can’t help but play to the crowd.
She reaches the corner of the room, a lectern in the middle of a small temporary stage in front of her. She looks out at the audience. On the far side she catches a middle-aged lady with spiky grey hair leaning into her neighbour, their heads rolling back in laughter at something one of them’s said. Another two women in the front row, nodding together, four hands balled together in the younger one’s lap. Some words to bolster her through some difficult time, Erin thinks, some sage advice from one superwoman to another. Her relationships with her new Insta-friends are more jovial, more banterous. They talk about having a few drinks, laughing at their hilarious, disgusting children, what they’re wearing, where they bought it. The superficial side of being fabulous. What these two women have seems to be deeper, more intimate. Caz aside, despite the tens of thousands of followers and the eyes of all the mums where she lives being on her, she doesn’t have that simpatico with anyone.
Erin thinks of Amanda. She thinks of the two of them walking her sleeping baby down by the front, getting to know each other, talking about their families, laughing, bonding. But, since that first walk they had, Erin hasn’t been able to do that. Her fiancé has. Amanda and her fiancé, with their shared history about which she really doesn’t know much.
Erin leans back on the heels of her new #gifted ankle boots. The leather’s stiff and her feet hurt in them. It’s a good pain that snaps her out of her treacherous thought process. This, tonight, is a big deal. She will smash this speech because this is her opportunity and she’s learned the hard way that you don’t get many. She looks at her audience, so luminous that the chandeliers seem to sparkle brighter with their vitality. Their eyes glisten, their shoulders low with a sense of release. They’re powerful and successful and Erin is one of them.
Philippa gets up on the stage and asks for everyone’s attention. Erin feels a fluttering at the base of her stomach, she breathes out through her nose, the air feels colder than it should. This is fine, this is normal. This is good.
The seats are full now and the room smiling. She spots another cherub looking down from the door opposite on the far side of the drawing room as she walks up onto the stage and goes up to the microphone. She swallows a lump of saliva, takes a sip of the glass of water that someone’s put in front of her. All eyes are on her and she couldn’t feel more comfortable. Her eyes dart to Bobby again, the cherub, it’s not Bobby. She blinks away the guilt she feels at being here, among these strangers instead of being at home with him, caring for him, bonding with him, she shouldn’t need these people to love her, his love should be enough. But it isn’t. She looks out at the expectant faces, looks down at her typed words in front of her, takes a deep breath and decides to give a different speech.
19
Erin speed-walks up the ramp away from the station, nodding to the good mornings of various faces she recognises from her regular circuits of their village’s small high street. For the first four months of his life, Bobby would only nap in the sling, so almost every day, during a particularly rainy late summer, she would walk up and down the section of the street that’s covered by rusted corrugated roofing, trying to stay dry.
She catches her reflection in the window of the shop that sells mobility scooters. She doesn’t look too bad. The dry shampoo she bought at St Pancras has done a decent job of making it look like she didn’t roll out of her hotel and race to catch the train back home. Despite going to bed at 3 a.m., she woke at seven with a rabid compulsion to get back to see her son. She must have still been drunk at the time to make such a gallant decision because, right now, she needs total silence and to sleep off her hangover. Something that definitely won’t happen with Bobby around. Her skin feels greasy, scented with tequila. The post-boozing regret flows up inside her like the contents of a blocked drain.
The speech went well, really well. She had planned to run through her story, putting everything on Insta, putting out an account of herself to the world, how this livestream journaling saved her from what she thought was an inevitable dive into some form of mental health spiral. But when she was up there she sensed a hunger in her audience for something else, a desire to be galvanised. So she went
full St Joan and gave a rousing call to action. She went for the jugular of gender equality and how it affects mothers, the hypocrisy and contempt that society seems to have towards them. She talked about a new mother’s loneliness and the many practical, institutional and financial factors that reinforce it. And it went down like a basketful of Labrador puppies.
The whole of Claridge’s seemed desperate to speak to her afterwards. Grace told her she’d played the room perfectly and, judging from how it felt when she was up there, it didn’t feel like her agent was flattering her. Fearne Cotton made a point of coming up to her before she left and asking her if she’d like to come and do a short segment on her podcast. The whole thing was pretty overwhelming.
A feeling which led her straight to the free bar and an evening with Anna Mai, Daisy and Elana Clarkson-Wells (134k followers) who Erin had never met but was as much fun in real life as on her Insta. Amid the mood of jubilation, egging each other on, they steamed into the drinks, ending up at a private members’ place called Black’s, on Grace’s company membership naturally. There were celebrities, old English gentlemen in three-piece suits and the most beautiful bar staff and hostesses she’d ever laid eyes on. Erin got caught up in it, drinking espresso martinis and quaffing late-night mix plates of cheeses and charcuterie.
And now her tongue feels like an offcut of carpet as she scrapes it against her teeth. She rounds the corner onto her street, pulling her keys out of her bag, swearing as she catches her hip on the latch of their half-open gate. She puts the key in the lock and stops, squeezing her eyes shut and popping them open. Unsurprisingly she doesn’t feel magically better and ready to face her screaming baby. Remorse squeezes through her pores like playdough spaghetti. She needs to spit but someone will probably film it and put it up online.
The Family Friend Page 8
