People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  Irene has found me a digital detox retreat where, because I am still breastfeeding, they’ve agreed to let me take Bear. It’s all taken care of, and free, of course, as long as I name-check them. Founded by a born-again tech exec, it promises five Wi-Fi-free days in a cottage so remote there’s no phone signal, with a daily program of soul-searching and self-care. Apparently it’s very popular with burned-out YouTubers. I didn’t want to know any more details. At least the downtime might give me a moment to process it all—the humiliation, embarrassment, and pain I’ve caused.

  I will do a series of heavily scripted stories in the car on the way there, Bear in his seat next to me, explaining tearfully how I hope time away will heal my heart and mind. How it will make me a better mother, a better wife, a better friend to Polly and to all the women—the hundreds of thousands of women—who need me.

  Then I go off-grid.

  Dan

  What does one do in a situation like this? When you realize you can’t trust your wife and you’re not really sure you know her at all, but you can’t be sure if everyone who has ever been married has felt this sort of feeling at one point, or whether you are in fact married to a sociopath? What can one do, as a contemporary husband, a modern father, a feminist?

  I can only tell you what I do.

  I identify a small, manageable task, put everything else to the back of my mind, and set myself to completing it.

  Every time Emmy gets off the phone with Irene, or she returns from one of her meetings, once she has filled me in on the latest developments in the ongoing media shit storm, listed the latest brand partners who have announced they are considering breaking their ties with her, told me the latest news outlets and websites to pick up the story and run with it, I ask her the same simple, impatient, irritating question: What are they planning to do about that RP account?

  There’s a name for it, I’ve discovered. A name for what they’re doing now: medical role-play, #medical #rp. Stolen pictures of sick children, reposted under different names with saccharine comments underneath, requests for prayers, accounts of how bravely they’re holding up, recurring minor characters and subplots and the occasional upbeat post or two (a birthday party, a brief walk on the hospital grounds, a picture from before they got sick). In Illinois, I learn, a couple recently discovered that every picture they shared with the extended family WhatsApp group was being recaptioned by one of the cousins and then posted online. The article I read about it had screenshots, pictures to break your heart. There was a photo of their little girl, their seven-year-old, smiling bravely in a woolly hat, after the chemo. A picture of her looking terrifyingly thin, leaning on a nurse’s arm. Another had her with a birthday cake, her features uplit by the candles’ orange glow, her young face deeply creased and exhausted. By the time they identified the cousin (he kept requesting more photos), the RP account had something like eleven thousand followers. In the US, the UK, Europe, Japan. All over the world.

  The thought that it might be someone we know who is doing this is almost too horrible to think about.

  Every evening, at seven o’clock, another picture. Photos Emmy would never in a million years have shared on her actual account, now out there for all the world to see. Coco in her swimsuit at the beach. Coco playing with a hose in the garden. Coco in her pajamas being read to by my mum. Coco with a cold under a blanket in front of the telly. Coco asleep in my lap. Private pictures. Intimate pictures. All of them now telling the story of a plucky little girl suffering from an undiagnosed mystery illness, baffling the doctors, gradually growing weaker and weaker.

  Every time I think about the way this story seems to be heading, I can feel my throat constrict, my stomach clenching like a fist.

  Under every post now, comment after comment after comment. Public well-wishers, sending “brave little Rosie” whole bouquets of flower emojis, row after row of pink hearts and smiling faces and waving hands and poorly faces and kisses. Other mothers—real mothers? Who can even be sure?—sharing their stories. People suggesting herbal remedies. People asking what hospital she’s having her tests in so they can send flowers and gifts.

  Everything I write gets deleted after about five seconds. Evening after evening we go through the same loop. I post something about this not being true, this account being a fraud, “Rosie” being my daughter, threatening legal action. Almost as soon as it has popped up, it disappears again. Eventually I begin composing my messages in a Word file and copying and pasting them across, cutting and pasting and posting again and again and again. I report the account to Instagram again and again, always getting the same response: We reviewed the account you reported for impersonation and found it does not violate our Community Guidelines.

  It’s Emmy who eventually loses her patience first. She crosses the room and closes the laptop and almost catches my fingers.

  I swivel on my chair, look up at her, furious.

  She meets my gaze and holds it.

  “What the hell do you think you’re achieving, Dan?”

  I suppose one of the things I am hoping for is just that I will piss them off. To feel that I have done whatever I can to spoil and frustrate whatever sick enjoyment they get out of all this. Maybe I just want to feel like I’m doing something.

  Emmy says she’s going to bed. She reminds me that she’s going to be leaving at about eleven in the morning, and that Doreen is going to be picking Coco up at about nine. Have I asked my mum if she wants to come and help with teatime and bedtime a couple of the nights she’ll be away? I tell her that Coco and I will be absolutely fine, that I think I can manage to chuck some pasta and tomato sauce together and tuck her in. Yes, I know where the pajamas live and which towel Coco likes, the soft one. I’ve got the number of the retreat if there’s a real emergency.

  She asks me to try not to wake her when I come up. I tell her I won’t be long.

  I wait until I hear Emmy’s tread at the turn of the stairs, then I go through to the kitchen.

  Ppampamelaf2PF4. That’s the name they post under, their Instagram handle.

  The first time I saw it, it just looked like gibberish. Then I started thinking about being at my mum’s house, asking for the Wi-Fi password and her producing a little scrap of paper and telling me to try this one or maybe this one. And they’re all things like sjsuejackson and suejacksonSUEEJACKS. And if that doesn’t work, she says, try them all again but with an exclamation mark.

  I was beginning to suspect that whoever was posting these pictures of Coco was not an internet wizard either. I was also pretty sure their first name was Pam or Pamela and that their surname began with an F.

  My first thought was to tell Emmy, see what she thought, suggest that she pass on this information, this hypothesis, to Instagram, to the police, to a lawyer.

  Then a second thought occurred to me. A hunch, you might say.

  Under other circumstances I might be annoyed that Winter’s new laptop is just lying on the kitchen counter, pretty much in exactly the same place she left the last one. In full view of the kitchen window, as if to fucking tempt another burglar.

  I suppose I should be grateful she hasn’t stuck all the passwords to it this time. It doesn’t take me long to work out the one I need. You don’t spend as long as I have married to someone without working out the kinds of passwords they rely upon. For ages, Emmy’s password to almost everything was our names and then the date we got married.

  Obviously, all of the passwords have been changed since the burglary.

  The password—the new password—to Emmy’s mailing list is Coco’s name, then her birthday. On it are all the people who have ever ordered a Mamabare sweatshirt or a #yaydays mug or attended a #greydays event. Even after I’ve typed in the password, the document is so massive it takes a little while to open.

  Let me unpack my hunch a little.

  It’s long been my suspicion that you can only really understand the relationship between someone like Emmy, her fans, and her haters if you have some grasp
of the Kierkegaardian concept of ressentiment, as popularized and expanded by Nietzsche. Meaning the projection of all one’s own feelings of inferiority onto an external object, another person, someone you both hate and envy and also sometimes secretly wish to be—or at least tell yourself you could be. Could have been. Given different chances. Given their chances. Someone like Emmy, whom you either idolize because they are just like you but really successful or hate because they are someone just like you but really successful—and no doubt in a lot of ways the line between the fans and the haters is thinner than you might think.

  Both kinds of people obsessively read Emmy’s posts, after all. I know she and Irene have sometimes talked about how many of Emmy’s followers, what proportion, are people more or less consciously hate-following her, who can’t resist keeping up with each infuriating thing she posts, who loathe her yet still keep checking their phones to look at pictures of her. And one of the things that Irene has always drummed into Emmy is how quickly a fan who feels ignored or tricked or slighted can turn on the person they used to admire and identify with. And one way in which the concept of ressentiment is useful is that it helps us conceptualize how suppressed feelings of envy might surface in the strangest of ways.

  The truth is I have pretty mixed feelings about Emmy myself at the moment.

  There has been a lot of talk over the past few days about the practicalities of dealing with the fallout from this Polly business, managing the public relations angle. There have been endless meetings and phone calls and discussions between Emmy and Irene about how to play it. Emmy has talked me through her plans—their plans—and I have sat there in a corner of the kitchen nodding and nursing a beer and occasionally offering a word or proofreading something for tone as she pulls together half apologies and vaguely worded recognitions of fallibility that never quite reach the point of putting their finger on what she did wrong but instead go big on her contrition about it—even if, she implies, it’s at least partly someone else’s fault.

  What Emmy and I have still not had is a proper conversation about what she did and why she did it. I genuinely couldn’t tell you if she even acknowledges to herself that she’s done anything wrong. We used to have drinks with Polly all the time. We used to hang out. I got on really well with her old boyfriend, and her husband is absolutely fine, in smallish doses, especially if you don’t get stuck talking to him one-on-one. When you think about it, Polly has been part of our lives for as long as we’ve had a life together, and part of Emmy’s life practically forever. I did suggest that Emmy reach out to her, try to apologize, try to explain what happened.

  “What, so she can sell that to the papers too?”

  The message I have been getting throughout this whole thing is that I should leave Emmy and Irene to deal with it and keep my helpful suggestions to myself. This is, after all, our livelihood we are talking about here, what keeps food on the table and Bear in nappies and Coco in full-time childcare.

  Which would be fine if what Emmy does for a living weren’t also literally my life.

  I’m sure that for all couples—modern, youngish, professional couples like us—at different times it feels like one person or the other is temporarily in the driving seat. For the last few years, with Emmy and me, it has sometimes felt like I’m in the fucking sidecar. Which isn’t a problem when you’re able to convince yourself you have full trust in the person driving.

  Sometimes I think back to those early dates with Emmy—the dinners and long walks and kisses on park benches and the shared jokes and intimacies—and I find myself wondering how much of it was real. Really real, I mean. Every time I mentioned a film, she’d grip my arm and tell me how much she loved it too. Every time I referenced a book, it was one of her favorites.

  Sometimes I look back on the past eight years and I get a feeling like a door has slammed and the whole set has shivered.

  Sometimes I am almost grateful that the role-play account gives me something else to think about, something to focus on. Sometimes. Almost.

  Pam F. Pamela F. Pammy.

  I pour myself a glass of wine, pull a stool up to the kitchen island, and resettle myself in front of Winter’s laptop.

  There are more than three hundred Fs in Emmy’s mailing list. I try searching surnames beginning with F in combination with first names beginning with the initial P.

  Eighteen names come up.

  I try searching surnames beginning with F in combination with first names beginning with Pam.

  Only one name comes up.

  Pamela Fielding.

  I click on it. Up pops her address, her email.

  I was right. My hunch was right. She is not a troll or a hater, the person who’s been doing all this.

  She’s a fucking fan.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Emmy

  I learned early on in my Instagram career to politely decline the vast majority of the free holidays I’m offered. Would you like a night in a five-star hotel? A stay at a luxury spa? A birthday weekend in a country house with your Instamum pals? The best suite, the tasting menu, the massage, the kids’ club, the babysitter? In exchange for a story, a post, a quick quote they can put on their website. Sure, sometimes they prove just too tempting, but I pick and choose, and when I do say yes, I’m sparing with the smug bikini selfies and lavish with the Aren’t we lucky, knackered mama really needed this captions.

  The rest of the pod fill their boots—and their grids—with endless #presstrips, though. Some of them even complain about packing, or moan about the jet lag, or sharing a room with their toddler twins, or that little Fenton doesn’t like snow or lactose-intolerant Xanthe can’t eat the ice cream. Why they don’t realize that complaining about a free week away is like bemoaning having to bank your lottery win check is beyond me.

  Of all the freebies I’ve ever been offered, I never thought one with no Wi-Fi and vegan food would be the one I’d have to jump at. I’m so irritated by the whole concept, preemptively annoyed by the sort of people I’ll be forced to spend the next five days with, that I’ve barely asked Irene anything about it. What I do know is that they’re not set up for babies, so I’ve spent this morning constantly adding to the enormous pile: The car seat. The travel cot, blackout blinds, white noise machine. A breast pump and bottles and sterilizer. Bags of wipes and nappies and multiple changes of sleep suits. The foldaway baby bath, the towel, the room thermometer. The baby carrier. The pram. Dan has taken himself off to work in a café so he can avoid my swearing as I stomp from room to room and dump it all by the front door over multiple trips. Doreen has taken Coco to the library.

  They return within minutes of each other, to wave Bear and me off in the taxi. Dan avoids my eye even while he makes a show of kissing me goodbye in front of Coco. He takes Bear and sniffs his head, holding him tight, as I lift my daughter and balance her on my hip.

  “Now, are you going to be a good girl for Doreen and Daddy? Mummy won’t be gone very long. And we can do something nice when I come home—how about I take you for an ice cream at Fortnum & Mason? They’re having a lovely party next week.” Dan shoots me a look as I pop Coco back down on the floor.

  “Fucksake, Emmy,” he hisses under his breath. “You’re not taking her to a press launch the day you get back. Can we just have a week off sharing our shit with the entire world?”

  The taxi beeps its horn before I can answer—although I know Dan wasn’t really asking. He hands Bear to Doreen and marches out to strap the baby seat into the car while the driver silently loads the bags.

  All I know about the location of the retreat is that it’s two hours away if the roads are clear and remote enough that my phone—and the contraband one I’ve brought in my suitcase in case they confiscate my first—is unlikely to work.

  “You have the address, right?” I ask him.

  “Yes, Madam,” he says, opening the door for Dan to put Bear into the back seat. Dan takes one last sniff of Bear’s little fluffy head while I climb into the car.


  “Bye-bye, little man. We’ll see you soon. Daddy loves you,” Dan says, still avoiding my eye and instead waving at his son, who’s either smiling back or about to ensure we need to immediately stop the car for a nappy change. I imagine the fact Dan will have to deal with Coco solo all weekend is the only reason he’ll miss me at all right now. Dr. Fairs says five days out of contact is probably the best thing for us both.

  As we drive away, I root around in my bag to double-check I have all the essentials and an emergency supply of chocolate. Within minutes, Bear’s dozed off and is making the really quite extraordinary grunting sounds that got him kicked out of our bedroom and into his own at four weeks old. It’s astonishing how much noise such a small person can make, even when he’s fast asleep.

  The driver tries to start up a conversation, but I point at the peaceful Bear and put a finger to my lips, shrugging apologetically. I settle down for a farewell scroll while we make our way through a steady stream of traffic out of town, through Chiswick, across the river, through Richmond, over the river again. Things are ticking over online as Irene had expected. The rest of the pod are pointedly ignoring the furor, hanging back to see how it plays out before speaking out in support (or otherwise). The most ardent fans have taken on the angriest trolls, and we’ve been watching them slug it out among themselves in the comments for days, Winter tasked with deleting the nastiest rants. Most important, the brands seem to have bought into the excuse and accepted my apology, and Irene’s phone is no longer ringing off the hook with bad news.

  She texts to check I’m en route and ready to start the stories. Nearly, I tell her. Once the roads start to get more rural, I pull out a mirror. Makeup-free and wearing a black polo neck, I look suitably wan and contrite. I give myself a moment, and when my eyes are visibly moist, I press record, pointing the camera first at Bear.