People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  “Hmm,” I said.

  What I was thinking was: Who is this woman and what qualifies her to go around giving out advice? Was she someone with a background in this sort of thing, some kind of training? Was she a former midwife, something like that?

  I was going to ask Grace, but just that moment Ailsa started crying again upstairs.

  Grace let out a sigh.

  “How has she been?” she asked.

  “A little restless,” I told her. “I’ve been up a couple of times to settle her and give her some milk and she went back to sleep eventually each time.” Eventually being the key word. A couple of times being an understatement.

  Don’t get me wrong, I have every sympathy for what Grace was going through. Knowing that even after you have finally put your child down the slightest sound, or shift in temperature, or fluctuation in air pressure, will wake them up. Always on edge. Always listening out for a plaintive cry. Getting more tired and frazzled by the night, by the hour, by the minute. Feeling that this will never end and that there is nothing you can do. Resenting things. Resenting each other. Resenting the baby, sometimes.

  I don’t blame Grace for what happened, and I have never blamed her for a minute. She would never have done anything deliberately to hurt that baby. The truth is that she agonized about it for ages, the cosleeping, the risks, the safety issues. She researched it online and she asked her GP, and she talked to me about it and she talked about it with her friends. She ummed. She aahed. She kept reading things that put her off the idea and then reading something else that said it was absolutely fine. But it was what Emmy said that nudged her over the line. That I am sure of. That it was thanks to Emmy that Grace eventually came to the conclusion that she needed sleep and the baby needed sleep and there was only one way she could ensure that.

  It was Jack who called and told me what had happened.

  He had been sleeping on the couch in the living room, as I gather he had been doing quite a lot, to let Mum and baby have the whole double bed to themselves. It was six o’clock on the Saturday morning when he woke up, and he told me later the first thing that struck him as odd was that he couldn’t hear Ailsa crying. He couldn’t hear a thing from the bedroom. He checked the time on his phone and then he closed his eyes and when he opened them again it was seven thirty. Seven thirty! Still no sound from the girls.

  This was not how he conveyed the news to me, of course. It was only afterward that I managed to piece it all together. When I answered my phone all I could hear at the other end was Jack sobbing so hard he could barely get a word out and a sort of keening noise in the background. “She’s dead” was what he eventually managed to get out, and it wasn’t even clear to me at first which one of them he was talking about.

  He had tiptoed along the corridor, crept up to the door, turned the handle very slowly to prevent it squeaking, let the door sort of fall open in the way that it did under its own weight, that particular door. He had a bottle of lukewarm milk for Ailsa in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other, had to put one of them down to turn the handle, was still half-bent over when the door swung open enough to reveal the bed.

  Later on, he told me the whole thing, talked me through it all, second by second. It seemed necessary to me to know, to understand the details, to be able to get a grip on as much of what had happened as I could. It seemed to help him to share it. Grace could not bear to hear it and left to go for a walk, closing the door with a slam behind her.

  The first thing he saw was that Grace was still asleep. She looked completely peaceful, he told me. There was sunlight coming in around the curtains; she was lying on her back, out cold, as rested and relaxed as he had seen her in months. Maybe over a year, if you counted how impossible it had been trying to get a proper night’s sleep late in the pregnancy. Everything was all set up just as they had left it, when he had kissed the girls good night the previous evening. The cushions arranged so that Grace could sleep with Ailsa resting against her, arranged so that there was no way she could roll over and squish the baby. The blankets were gathered and tucked so they did not ride up.

  Even from the doorway, even before he took a step closer or opened the curtains, Jack said, he could tell that something was not right with Ailsa. The way she was lying. How still she was. The color of her. The sort of bruised-looking, mottled color of her little hands.

  At first he thought it was just a shadow, but when he did take a step forward he could see something around her throat. Something dark wrapped around her throat.

  Grace’s hair.

  Her long, thick hair.

  Afterward, at the inquest, when they talked about how it must have happened, Jack had to walk out and stand in the corridor. Grace and I stayed. I was holding her hand tight in mine, and we were both sobbing as they described in detail how Ailsa must have snuggled in closer to her and wriggled, and snuggled in closer to her and wriggled, and snuggled in closer to her and wriggled, and each time she wriggled the bit of Grace’s hair that was accidentally tucked under her chin would have wrapped itself tighter around her neck and throat. It would have started contracting her windpipe a little more and allowed a little less oxygen to her brain each time, but it was a process too gradual to wake either of them. She was too tiny to struggle. Grace was too fast asleep to know. Apparently this was a thing that happened very occasionally, the reason they sometimes advised that if you were cosleeping you tied your hair back. Grace must have known that, all the research she had done, must have forgotten that one night, or perhaps she had remembered to tie her hair back and it had somehow come undone. It was not something we ever talked about, she and I, that night, in much detail. There were some questions I could never bring myself to ask her.

  Jack told me that waking Grace that morning was the hardest thing he had ever had to do in his life. It was clear Ailsa wasn’t moving or breathing, and that she hadn’t moved or breathed for a long time—when he felt the back of her neck it was stone-cold. Grace was still asleep and smiling, and when he first touched her arm and said her name she was still smiling. He patted her gently on the shoulder and said her name again and she mumbled something to herself—his name, Ailsa’s name—and then she opened her eyes.

  He must have told me the whole thing three or four times, and that was always the point at which he broke down uncontrollably.

  When she came back from her walks, Grace would open the door and step inside and stay silent for a minute, listening, checking to see if he was finished talking. Then, when she was sure it was over, she would open the back door again and close it with a slam.

  The funny thing is, I didn’t even remember Emmy’s advice to Grace, didn’t even start holding her responsible, until a couple of months afterward. I was at work, actually, in the staff room, having a cup of tea and waiting for a shift to start, and I heard the name Mamabare and I looked up and there she was on Loose Women. And it just so happened that one of the topics that day was cosleeping. All the women were talking about their experiences. Emmy just shrugged and said it was never something she had tried and she didn’t know a lot about it.

  I thought I was going to go mad. I thought I was going mad. I could feel my brain throbbing. Even though my eyes were open I could see paisley-ish patterns swirling on the backs of my retinas.

  Her laugh. That’s what I remember. The little affected giggle she did, before launching into the usual spiel about doing whatever works best for you and how she wasn’t setting herself up on a pedestal or claiming to get everything right. A laugh that seemed to me to be directed at anyone who had ever been fool enough to follow her, to trust her, to believe in her. A laugh that said the joke was on them, on Grace, on Ailsa, on us.

  I do not regret what I am about to do to that woman at all.

  Emmy

  There is no such thing as bad publicity. That’s what they say, isn’t it? Well, “they” have a point.

  Ninety thousand new followers overnight, my name trending on Twitter, the story picked up by the br
oadsheets, then internationally, on news websites from Manila to Milan. Offers from other tabloids and weekend supplements to give my side of things with what I presume they think is big money but wouldn’t even pay for a single #ad on my grid in normal circumstances.

  BBC Three, however, are not “they.”

  I can see that even Irene is shocked at how many BBC big boys have turned up to discuss the fate of From Miscarriage to Mamabare. A room full of middle-aged men all desperate to be there so they can tell the story at their next west London dinner party, smugly giving their mates the scoop on what I’m really like. I feel like a circus sideshow—Roll up, roll up, come help knock the silly internet lady who earns far too much off her high horse.

  Josh, the director, who looks barely old enough to be in charge of an iPhone, let alone a TV series, is still gunning to get it made. It quickly becomes clear he is not going to be successful.

  “What we just don’t understand, Emmy, is why you would agree to present a show based on personal experience when you had none. We might as well have hired Simon bloody Cowell to tell us about his miscarriages,” guffaws a man in selvedge jeans and a Supreme sweatshirt who I think may be called David, although he never introduced himself. “He’d probably have cost less too.”

  “That’s the thing,” I explain, shaking my head, allowing my eyes to fill with tears. “I would never lie about something this serious. Polly just doesn’t know about what I’ve been through, my babies who didn’t make it. I’m really a very private person. I give so much to my followers, but this is a pain I haven’t chosen to share before. She just didn’t know. Nobody did.”

  David laughs so hard that at first no sound comes out, and I am genuinely concerned that he’s having a heart attack. “Listen, we aren’t stupid. There isn’t a single aspect of your life you haven’t already sold to a million mothers; that’s why we hired you.”

  I shoot Irene a look, silently imploring her for backup. In the process of the story breaking, not once did she ask me why I had used Polly’s words when I’m usually perfectly proficient in inventing my own. I’m not even sure that I have an answer for that. I felt like an actress reading a script when I filmed it—detached from what the words actually meant, focused on doing what I’d been asked, on saying what I knew the director wanted to hear, making him like me. Not thinking for a minute what I would do if I actually got the job and had to repeat it all on national TV. But I would never have done it if I’d thought Polly would see the video. How could I have known they’d send it to a journalist?

  Irene was the one who stopped me, in a split second of madness, when I saw that headline, from simply deleting my whole Instagram account permanently.

  She was already at our house and had one of her PAs waiting outside a newsstand in Victoria for the first copies of the paper to be unloaded, poised to grab one, primed to send us pictures.

  So at the crack of dawn, just as we were finishing our second pot of coffee, her phone rattled on the counter. She picked it up, glanced at it, and handed it to me. Her face was expressionless.

  There it was. The screaming headline. A picture of Polly and her husband looking sad and angry. Me, head thrown back in laughter, standing in front of the brightly colored mural at Coco’s birthday party. A picture of Polly and me together “in happier times.”

  I could feel Dan’s eyes on me. I could feel Irene’s eyes on me.

  In that moment, I just wanted to kill Mamabare. Not to take Instagram off my phone for a while or go off grid for a bit, but to bury her six feet under with no chance of resurrection. Who, after all, would mourn her? Not me. Not Dan. Most of my followers would just transfer their loyalty to one of the others snapping at my heels, and the waters would close over Mamabare forever.

  It took Irene to remind me, as my finger hovered over delete, quite how much money I would have to pay back, how many of the big brands I was contracted to would call in the lawyers the second I stepped away from my social media and could no longer flog their toilet paper or T-shirts or cars. And anyway, who would it help now, to implode my entire career? Not Polly, not my family.

  So while Dan continued, visibly disgusted with me, to dole out blame and recrimination, Irene spent all day Sunday helping me out of the hole, sitting in our kitchen coming up with a defense for the indefensible. I was too exhausted, too ashamed, to do anything other than limply agree to everything she said.

  I could not, under any circumstances, admit that I had deliberately stolen Polly’s experience as my own, or anything even approaching that. Honesty was my thing. She toyed aloud with the idea of me explaining that it was the sort of mistake you make when your heart is just too big. That this is the danger inherent in taking on board the trials, the struggles, the anguish of so many other mothers: their pain had become indistinguishable from my own. Then Irene had a better idea.

  “She’s telling the truth,” says my agent icily. “Yes, the words in that clip may be Polly’s, but it was an honest mistake. Emmy recorded herself on video reading Polly’s email first as she needed to make sure the lighting was right, that the angle of the camera worked. She tried to rehearse with the words she had written about her own experience, but every time she tried, she broke down. She knew that it would be so emotionally draining to share her own story that she would only be able to manage one take. Sadly, her PA, Winter, emailed you the wrong video. Simple human error.” She sits back in her chair, looking pleased with herself.

  “We had no idea you had the wrong one, of course, let alone that you would share it with anyone, until the Mail on Sunday called. Of course Emmy has been through that heartache. There is nobody who understands the pain better—that’s why she agreed to present the documentary.”

  “I knew there would be a simple explanation!” says Josh triumphantly, a little pathetically. “Emmy, you just need to tell everyone that, maybe on your Instagram feed?”

  “You can tell everyone whatever you like, Emmy.” David pulls a face as if my name has left a nasty aftertaste. “We’ll be announcing that the show will go ahead, but with ivfandangels, and that we have no further plans to work with Mamabare because we are as appalled by your behavior as everyone else.”

  “And what do you think the optics of that will be, David? When you force Emmy’s hand and she gives the exclusive interview that every newspaper wants? She’d have to say that she was pitted against another mother in pain, backed into a corner by a male director, male producer, and male researcher, to bare her soul to win a job she so desperately wanted,” says Irene, looking genuinely interested at what his response might be. “It sounds quite manipulative when you say it like that, doesn’t it? Feels like that could turn into a bit of a scandal.”

  Irene pauses for a moment to let this sink in.

  There is a shuffling of papers, some throat-clearing, what looks like a little doodling. No one is making eye contact with anyone else. For the first time in an hour, even David seems to have nothing to say for himself.

  “So how about this,” Irene says as she looks about her. This tiny woman, commanding the attention of a roomful of men, some of whom are nearly twice her age. She is quite something to behold—definitely someone you want on your side in a crisis.

  “If you don’t want the job to go to Emmy, that is your call. But we will have a clean parting of the ways,” she says decisively. “Which I will manage.”

  The room remains silent as everyone waits to see how everyone else will react.

  It is David who eventually speaks first.

  “Fine. But however you handle it, don’t drop us any further in it and do it today,” he says, getting abruptly up from his chair. “I think I’ve had enough of you Instapeople now.”

  It dawns on me as we walk back down Regent Street toward Irene’s office that she never intended to save the show. It was never going to make her that much money. Her priority is protecting her bottom line.

  “Right, Emmy. Here’s what you’re going to do,” she says, sitting behind he
r desk and looking me up and down in the way a headmistress might after discovering cigarettes in your school bag. “And let me be honest before I even start: This is nonnegotiable. You either do what I say, or you’ll have to find yourself another agent.

  “You see that?” She points to her PA, who has been on the phone since we walked in. “Since Sunday morning, we have had almost every brand you work with on the line. A handful have dropped you already. Those that haven’t are seriously considering it. This is not about your fans—they are so loyal they wouldn’t unfollow if you committed a murder on Instagram Live—it’s about the money. And unless we sort this out, you—we—will not be making any more of it. You have to serve up an explanation, make your apology, and then disappear until it blows over. No advertiser is ever going to touch you again otherwise.”

  Her plan is pretty simple. We use the photo, the one I have as my screen saver, of Coco holding a newborn Bear. First I share that, with a long post, written as an open letter to my oldest friend, Polly, explaining exactly what Irene told the BBC—but that I would still, for personal reasons, be backing out of the show. That I have, in fact, suffered from similar misfortunes as her but have never shared them with anyone before, apart from Dan, that the wrong video was sent, that I never meant for anybody to see it, that I deeply regret the hurt and upset I have caused, etcetera.

  This will be followed up a few days later with another post, this time accompanied by one of me, walking away from the camera but looking back apprehensively. In the caption, I’ll say that I’ve had time to reflect on these little squares and what they mean to me. That perhaps I had come back too soon from maternity leave—that in juggling my career and looking after my darling Bear, in trying to have it all, I had simply taken on too much. Instead of pulling up the drawbridge, I had let the world across the maternal moat too soon. So I need to take stock. To have a frank and open dialogue with myself. To manage my anxiety. To work out a way forward for me and my family.