People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  “Okay, the first thing to remember is that things work differently for an Instamum. You can get away with a coy look and a five-word caption. Look at your comments—‘Your fringe is on point!’ or ‘Er, hallo SHOES!’ Your followers just want to know where your handbag is from. My followers want to have a good old rummage around inside mine.”

  I run through the dos and don’ts. Everyone must have their comment acknowledged; every DM must have a reply. Sometimes you can’t avoid getting into a longer conversation, but it’s best to try and keep it light and leave it there.

  You keep doing you, Mama! works well. But anything encouraging, with mama on the end, generally does the trick. And the trolls get as much love as the fans. “More, in fact,” I explain, “because they’re the ones that actually need it.”

  I’ve honed my approach over time to make sure I don’t stoke the haters’ rage. I am sure these are often women broken with grief for their old lives, powder kegs packed with fury at the terrible injustice of motherhood. They explode at me—not their husbands, not their health visitors, not the friends who inquire politely how they’re doing with a newborn but don’t really want to know the answer—because it doesn’t matter if I know that they’re not coping.

  Another important lesson I’ve learned is that while I tell my followers that we’re the same, I have to remember we’re not, not really, and that I can’t rub their noses in it. They’re not actually friends, because as a rule, in the grand scheme of things, your friends are people pretty much like you: they live in the same sort of house, earn about the same, and their husbands are similar and do the same kinds of things for a living. They have more or less the same number of children, who pretty much all go to the same kind of school. There are small differences, obviously, but for the most part my friends and I and almost everyone I interact with socially in real life enjoy very much the same kind of generally comfortable, mostly contented, broadly financially stable existence. For better or worse, the same is not true of all those people who follow me online.

  It’s a simple case of knowing your audience—and it’s astonishing how many aspiring Instamums get it wrong. Do you think an hourly employee with no benefits likes watching a well-off, middle-class white woman whine about the cost of childcare? Does a single mother like seeing you moan about your husband not taking the bins out? Does someone whose weekly grocery shop is a stretch think your complaints about the rumbling tummy that your #gifted green juice cleanse has given you are in any way charming?

  Spilling stuff, exploding poos, Peppa Pig–triggered tantrums, tummy bugs. Those are the things I can complain about without alienating anyone. The universal We’ve all been there, Mum stuff. But even then, someone will always heckle and gripe. And when they do, I have to thank them for their valuable feedback and promise I’ll learn and grow as a person.

  “It’s only the pervs who want to drink my breast milk and trolls who want my whole family to die in a fire that you can ignore.” I laugh.

  Winter looks terrified.

  “Oh God, I didn’t know. You never talk about them online!” she gasps.

  “Irene says it’s best not to make a thing of it, because they’re harmless. They don’t think we are real people—just avatars who only exist in a grid of tiny pictures on their phone. You couldn’t do this job if you didn’t believe that no matter what the trolls say, they’d never actually do anything—it’s just sad, lonely people lurking on the internet.”

  It was during her pregnancy that Grace started to really spend a lot of time online. I can hardly blame her. In a lot of ways, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—all of them—were an absolute lifesaver for her. When she first called me and told me she had an incompetent cervix, despite all the years I had spent working in a hospital I had to admit I had never heard of that before. The doctor had told her it was extremely uncommon. “And what does it mean?” I asked her, trying not to sound too obviously worried. “How are you feeling?” They had already been through so much, Jack and Grace, trying for a little one—had so many tests, such a long wait, so many disappointments and so much heartbreak. Everything this time had seemed to be going so well. Grace had not been suffering much from morning sickness so far. She was not as tired as she had been before. But until she went in for that scheduled checkup, she had no idea there was anything wrong with her cervix. It was just one of those things, the doctor had told her, a genetic quirk, that her cervix was shorter than usual, that as a result it might open too early, so she was at a heightened risk of giving birth prematurely. Did that explain . . . ? I asked her, trailing off. She said he thought it might have been a factor.

  The doctor had told her there were a few things they could do. The usual procedure was a cervical cerclage, a stitch to prevent the cervix opening, to prevent her giving birth too soon. That was relatively straightforward, he told her, even if it sounded alarming. She told him she would do, would let them do, whatever it took. She had the operation at twelve weeks. It did not work—either her cervix was too short or it had already opened too far, or both—it was never entirely clear. She had already been warned that prolonged periods of time on her feet, any kind of even mildly strenuous activity, were to be avoided at all costs.

  In the end, she spent almost the entire pregnancy lying down. Imagine. Just imagine. She was not allowed to walk anywhere. She was not allowed to drive. She was not even allowed to get up and make herself a cup of tea. The longest she was allowed to stand was five minutes, to have a shower in the morning.

  Her work was very understanding, fortunately. Jack was brilliant. Even when she was at her lowest, her most frustrated, he could cheer her up, jolly her along. He was always thinking of nice little things to help her pass the time, picking up magazines, things for her to read and look at and do. He moved the TV upstairs so she could watch it, made sure the room looked nice, brought home flowers. He would cook the meals, do the cleaning, fetch her things. We used to joke about getting her a bell.

  Of course, there were times when she got bored, fed up. There were times when she was bloody miserable. Her friends did call and email and send her little messages—but most of them were working all day or busy with their own kids and husbands and lives, and most of them were still living around here, which made it an hour’s drive or even longer to Jack and Grace’s, each way.

  I do sometimes wonder how things might have been different if they had not moved out to the country after they got married, if they had not seen that fateful FOR SALE sign from the motorway that day, had not gone back at the weekend to investigate, decided that out among the fields and the farms and the fresh air was where they wanted their kids to grow up. It was a gorgeous house, don’t get me wrong. Beautiful views, massive great garden with a little stream at the end of it, and Grace and Jack did the whole place up something lovely. But it was not easy to get to. Not somewhere you could just pop around to the neighbors’ or down to the shops; not somewhere where anybody would ever just pop in on you. Even the postman used to complain about having to drive all that way up the lane for just one house, getting his van muddy. I used to go and see her as often as I could. We would sit and watch films, talk.

  Most of the time, though, it was just her and the same four walls, the same cracks in the ceiling, the same door with the same dressing gown hanging off it, the same bit of tree and the same stretch of sky, which were all she could see out the window from her bed. Grace used to spend a lot of time on her phone. First she would check the Daily Mail, then Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram, then her email—and then by that time there would be stuff she had not seen on the Daily Mail website and the cycle would repeat itself.

  She always used to say that what appealed to her about the mums she followed on Instagram was how open they were, how honest about all the things they had been through, their struggles and disappointments and heartaches. It really made her feel less isolated, less alone, she told me. Like someone else out there understood what she was going through.

&nb
sp; It is a gift, that way, the internet, I suppose. Sometimes it is absolutely terrible, being on your own.

  Very occasionally, once or twice a month maybe, there are times when I forget for a microsecond that Grace is gone. When I am half-awake just before the alarm clock goes in the morning, for instance, when I have just had a funny dream and I find myself thinking I must tell Grace about it and then it hits me with a jolt that I can’t, that I won’t ever be able to tell her anything ever again. And then I think about all the other things I want to tell her and I can’t. Like how much I love her. Like how proud I always was to be her mum. How much I miss her.

  And that is when the anger, the real anger, comes.

  Chapter Six

  Dan

  It turns out when you are in your mid- to late thirties it is actually quite hard to get people out on a Saturday afternoon at a week’s notice.

  I guess in some ways what I had been hoping to recapture with Coco’s party was a little of what it used to be like living on this street when I first bought the house, back when I shared it with Will and Ben and we used to drink at the Lord Napier after work every single night. When Emmy and I were first going out, we had our second date there, then our third and possibly our fourth as well. Later in our relationship, after Emmy had moved in and the guys had moved out, we would often pop across the road for a pint or a glass of wine; if there was nothing in the fridge we’d just head over to grab a burger and not even need to take our coats. We used to drift over for Sunday lunch with the papers and stay the whole afternoon.

  Coco’s party was not like that at all.

  It was Monday before I managed to catch the right person at the pub to speak to about booking a room, and it was Tuesday before I finally got around to sending the invitations out. The first responses I got were two bounce-backs saying the email address was not recognized and an out of office. All was silent for a few hours, then steadily the apologies began trickling in. I’d invited around fifty people in total. About twenty of them already had some other London-based social commitment on Saturday—although about half offered to swing by for a quick visit if they got the chance. A dozen or so were away that weekend. One of the couples emailed back to remind me they’d moved to Dubai eighteen months ago, which triggered a vague memory of getting an email I never got around to answering about a leaving drinks thing. Three people were at the football. Two couples would either have literally just had a baby or be very overdue. One person—a writer friend of mine whose first novel came out about the same time as mine did—was reading from his latest at a literary festival in Finland. Polly had a work commitment. Several others replied enthusiastically over the next few days and said they were bang up for it but they had to check with their partner what the plans were and then never got back to me. Quite a few didn’t bother replying at all.

  By three o’clock in the afternoon on the day of the party, only about ten people had shown up—and two of them had already left, having some other kid’s party to pop into elsewhere.

  Around four o’clock, the landlord took me aside and told me he was going to have to open up our bit of the pub to other people. It was absolutely heaving downstairs, he explained apologetically.

  I could hardly object, really.

  At least the children seemed to be having a nice time, kicking balloons around, stamping on them—and I was glad to see that Coco was joining in and enjoying herself and screaming and shouting just as loudly as anyone else.

  While the kids were playing and Emmy was handing out slices of cake, I got stuck talking to a friend from school, Andrew, who had driven down from Berkhamsted with his wife. He seemed disappointed not to see more of the old gang here, kept asking if Millsy was coming, whether I still see Simon Cooper or that bloke Phil Thornton. I do not. I have not seen Phil Thornton since I bumped into him in a club in Clapham in 2003.

  Andrew asked if I was still a writer, and with a slightly forced smile I told him I liked to think so. “Working on a novel at the moment?” he asked. I gave a nod, still smiling. I am still working on the same novel I have been working on for the past eight years, as it happens. This has at times been a source of some slight tension in my marriage. There have been occasions when Emmy has suggested I just send it out or let someone else read what I’ve got or asked if she can have a look and see if she can help with anything. Mostly nowadays we do not discuss the topic at all.

  I am, in a sense, the victim of circumstances.

  The truth is, for most of my twenties and early thirties I didn’t really feel the need to earn a living. Nor did it ever feel like I was under a lot of financial pressure to finish my second book. When my father died, years ago, the summer between my first and second years at Cambridge, he left me a fairly substantial amount of money, to be administered by a trust fund until I turned twenty-five. To that money, my mother added additional funds from the proceeds of my father’s life insurance. It’s basically what I’ve been living on ever since. Quite a lot of it went into buying the house, of course. Quite a lot more went toward redoing the house. I’ve eked out the rest of it pretty well over the last few years. We did sell the film rights to my novel, and for a while it even looked like it was actually going to get made. I’ve penned a couple of screenplays on spec, had meetings with TV producers, tried my hand at short stories. I spent about six months bashing out a thriller, just to bring some cash in—my agent read it and didn’t think it really played to my strengths. As for my second novel proper, the one I have spent all this time laboring over, there have been multiple occasions when I have been tempted just to scrap the whole thing and start writing something new and different and fresh instead. My laptop is full of openings of novels I was briefly very excited about and abandoned after about five paragraphs. There have been multiple occasions, usually in the middle of the night, when I have considered quitting writing entirely, retraining as a teacher or a lawyer or a plumber. Last time I checked, my life savings—all that I have left of them—consisted of about seventeen hundred pounds.

  Sometimes it comes to me with a pang that I will never be one of Granta’s best young British novelists.

  I am aware this is not exactly what Emmy would call relatable content.

  By about half past four, the last of our guests were donning their coats and attempting to gather their children and wandering around making sure they had definitely got everything before they headed off, and Emmy gave me a look to indicate that it was about time we started to think about doing the same.

  I guess one moral I ought to draw from all this is that there is a reason I do not usually get to do the social organizing.

  All afternoon the same woman—white-haired, I would guess in her mid- to late sixties, neatly dressed—had been sitting in her coat at the same seat at the same corner table, nursing the same half-pint glass of Diet Coke and occasionally smiling indulgently as one of the kids careered into the back of her chair, watching fondly as Coco ran around the room shrieking. From time to time we would catch each other’s eye and give each other a little smile of acknowledgment. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the room was booked for a private function. Given the lack of other takers, I was tempted to go over and see if she wanted any cake.

  Emmy’s party, in contrast, Coco’s “official” birthday celebration, is a complete triumph. Of course it is. Emmy has worked bloody hard to ensure that it will be.

  The thing people always get wrong about influencing for a living is that they think this stuff is easy—organizing events, getting the right pictures, planning the various neat little touches and flourishes in the arrangements and the decorations and the layout of this room. That they could do it if they wanted to—which, of course, they don’t. They hardly even look at Instagram, not more than five or six times a day, when they check in to see what my wife has been up to, what she has posted, what a load of other people have had to say about it.

  I probably thought that myself, at the start. That influencing was easy, I mean. That all y
ou had to do was be a bit fit and take a half-decent photo of yourself or a nice meal and say something appropriately banal once or twice a day. That as long as you were pretty enough, bland enough, I took it for granted the followers would flock in—with the only limit on your success being the value you placed on your own privacy.

  This is absolute nonsense.

  It’s not that people should be more cynical about social media or influencers, it’s that they are cynical about them in such naive ways.

  One misconception it took me some time to rid myself of was that the words in an Instagram post don’t matter, that anybody could write this stuff, that just because the syntax is awry and even the cliché they were aiming for has come out garbled, no thought or effort or planning was required.

  This is the kind of intellectual snobbery I often find my mother falling into when we talk about what Emmy does for a living—which is something, for the record, I try to avoid. “Well, of course,” she might comment, “it’s not real writing like you do.” Meaning, I suppose, that Emmy has never spent a whole morning hesitating over a comma, never anguished over the rhythm of a sentence, never felt her heart sink as she realizes the mot juste she’s spent hours grasping for was the same mot juste she used two pages earlier. Meaning, I guess, that her readers are just normal people, looking at their phones in the car waiting to pick the kids up from school, who let her know when they like what she’s saying and it resonates. My imagined readers, on the other hand, are some combination of the ghost of Flaubert, a snarky tutor I failed to impress at Cambridge, a bunch of book reviewers (most of whom I hate), my deceased father, and the agent I suspect gave up any hope some time ago that anyone connected to my literary career would be making any money. The truth is there is something genuinely amazing about Emmy’s ability to find the right words (which are often, technically, the wrong words) to establish a connection with people. It is a talent. It is a skill. It is something she has put time and effort and thought into.