People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  “Emmy?” I whispered.

  The house was silent. Remembering the flashlight function on my phone, I took it out of my pocket. I was in a living room. In front of me was a couch and a pair of armchairs, and beyond that a door presumably leading to a kitchen. To my right was a dining table, bare apart from what looked like some old, unopened mail. To my left was a staircase.

  “Emmy?”

  I flashed the light from my phone around the kitchen once, detected nothing out of the ordinary. A glass-windowed door to the back garden. A single plate on the worktop. The kitchen curtains, like those in the living room, were closed. Outside on the gravel I could hear Irene pacing, calling my name, calling Emmy’s. That was when I saw them, next to the door.

  Emmy’s shoes.

  I was halfway up the stairs, shouting my wife’s name at the top of my voice, before I even really knew what I was doing. Three steps at a time, crashing into the wall where the stairs turned halfway, I charged up in the dark. I was fucking lucky not to break my neck, especially at the top where the last step caught the end of my trainer and almost sent me flying. The first door I opened was a bathroom. I checked the bath. I pulled the curtain back on the shower.

  Nothing there.

  The second room I tried was painted pink, with a light shade done up to look like a little hot-air balloon, a little teddy bear in the basket underneath. There was a crib in the corner. The crib was empty.

  The third door I opened revealed a bedroom with closed curtains and a bed in the middle of it. I took a step back. The smell was appalling. From downstairs, I could hear Irene stumbling around in the living room in the dark, swearing.

  “Up here,” I tried to shout, then realized that my throat was so dry I could barely croak.

  In the corner of the room, blinking, was some kind of medical drip with a monitor attached. From it ran a tube. I could see its silhouette running down to whatever was under the pile of blankets on the bed.

  Shit. That was one of the things I could smell. Old shit. Also vomit.

  I listened. I could not hear breathing. I ran the light over the blankets—brown, woolen, thick. I could see nothing moving.

  “Emmy?” I said.

  No response.

  I found the light switch and flicked it on. I took two steps forward and threw the blanket back.

  Emmy was lying on her back with her mouth open, something attached to her arm, very pale, the bedsheets sodden, the clothes she was wearing soaked through.

  “Irene!” I shouted. “Up here!”

  I think I probably shouted something about calling an ambulance too. Something about checking the other rooms.

  I tried to remember how they had taught us to check for a pulse in the Boy Scouts. I could feel nothing. Emmy’s skin was cold, clammy.

  Then I felt it. Faint, very faint. It was so faint that at first I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining it, just feeling the pulsing of my own heart throbbing in my own fingertips.

  She was out cold.

  I touched her cheek gently.

  No response.

  I leaned over her, said her name, shook her by the shoulder. Nothing happened. I shook her harder, tried lifting her up a little. Her head slumped forward. I tried lifting one of her eyelids with my thumb. She offered no resistance. I shone the light from my phone directly into the open eye.

  She gave a very faint groan.

  I became aware that Irene was standing in the doorway. She seemed uncertain whether to cross the threshold, what to do next. She asked me if Emmy was okay.

  “She’s alive,” I said. “She is definitely alive.”

  “Bear?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Not here,” I told her.

  There was a little pile of whitish vomit on the pillow. There was more of it in Emmy’s hair. I turned her arm to look at where the tube had been taped to her, to see where she was hooked up to it. Whatever had been in the bag was finished now.

  “Bear? Bear?”

  I could hear Irene opening the remaining doors on the corridor, swinging open cupboard doors and peering under beds and trying wardrobes, crashing around.

  Emmy will know, I thought. Emmy will be able to tell us what had happened, who did this, what happened to Bear. Digging my fingers into her shoulders, I gave her a shake, harder and more urgent than I’d shaken her before.

  Emmy let out another little groan. Her lips were chapped and cracking. Her face looked drawn. She was barely breathing. But she was alive.

  “Emmy? Emmy, can you hear me?”

  A sound that might have been almost anything passed her lips.

  Her tongue looked swollen, sore.

  “Emmy, where is Bear? What happened to Bear, Emmy?”

  It was only as I was trying to lift her out of the bed, trying to swing her legs over the side and get her upright, that I realized I didn’t need Emmy to tell me where my son was.

  My baby son, grey and unmoving, lay curled up on the mattress next to her. He was so small, so still, that I hadn’t even noticed him, had been practically kneeling on him.

  I’d never seen him looking so tiny.

  When I picked him up, he was so light it was like picking up something hollow, a husk.

  His eyes were closed tight, his swollen lips parted, almost purple. I lifted him to my ear, and I couldn’t hear him breathing. I kept checking his wrists, his neck, for a pulse, for the faintest flickering of a pulse. Nothing.

  It was easily the worst moment of my life.

  Irene was talking to me from the doorway, but it was like someone trying to make themselves heard over a howling wind across a wide river.

  When I opened my son’s eyes and shone a light into them, they were as dull and lifeless as the eyes of a fish on a slab.

  Emmy

  He always pauses at that point, Dan. Shuts the book. Takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes. As if reliving that moment. As if overcome by emotion.

  There must be three hundred people in this tent. It feels as if every single one of them is holding their breath.

  Dan looks around, locates his glass of water, takes a swig from it. His thumb is still inserted at the spot he left off reading in the book he is holding to his chest. I can see the photo of us holding hands, looking meaningfully into each other’s eyes, on the back of the dust jacket. These Little Squares: The Bare Truth, by Mamabare and Papabare. Half a million copies sold in the first six months.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice cracking a little, addressing his words somewhere over the top of the audience, up toward the roof of the tent. He puts his glass down as he clears his throat.

  Christ, what a ham.

  On every face I can see is the same look of sympathetic concern. The same look I used to get when I shared my maternal struggles with a room of paying mums. Shit, he might actually be better at this than me. I’d say 80 percent of the eyes focused on my husband are at the very least a little misty. In the third or fourth row a woman is blowing her nose loudly. One girl in the front row has an arm around her friend’s shaking shoulders.

  Am I imagining it, or does Dan make a quick little gesture as if he is wiping a tear away from his eye? If so, that’s a new flourish. I wonder how long he’s been planning that. He certainly didn’t do it the last time we did one of these festival readings in Edinburgh two weeks ago.

  Don’t get me wrong. I think both Dan and I found that part of the book hardest to write. To force ourselves to go through it all again. Actually, if I’m honest, I barely remember being in the hospital, let alone that horrible house. While it is permanently etched into Dan’s memory, I have only the vaguest sense of those terrible hours.

  They tell me the very first thing I did, when I woke up in that stinking bed, and then again on the hospital ward, was ask where Bear was. I can remember the brightness of the room, the unfamiliar ceiling, the expression on Dan’s face. They were doing all they could, he said. Bear was very malnourished, very weak, very dehydrated. Thankful
ly the ambulance had got there quickly. Thankfully Dan and Irene had not arrived even an hour or two later.

  The police found the woman’s car, abandoned, in a parking lot somewhere on the south coast, about a ninety-minute drive away. Her wedding ring was in the glove compartment. Her shoes were on the floor in the front. Jill, her name was. They found it on a hospital parking pass on the dashboard.

  “In my darker days, the harder nights, I have cursed these little squares, questioned whether I should really be sharing my life with what is now nearly two million of you, as Papabare. Of course, I understand my wife’s urge to switch off from social media entirely, and I totally respect it.

  “But as a writer, I felt compelled to do the only thing I know how to, to process those dark moments—which is write my story, our story, alongside my incredible partner, my wise and luminous wife. In part, we have our talented editor to thank for that too.” Dan smiles at her as he says this. She is standing just stage left, clutching what I notice is a very expensive Prada handbag.

  “I know that it would be easy to blame social media for what happened to us—for the suffering that terrible woman inflicted on our family,” Dan says, shaking his head, biting his lip. “Perhaps—and I know this is an awful thing to say—the fact I know that woman is dead and can’t hurt us any more than she already has makes it easier.

  “But what I also realized in the process of writing this book—now, extraordinarily, a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller—is that when we really needed them, this amazing community came together. That for every evil soul like Jill, with an axe to grind for no reason at all, there are a thousand hearts brimming with kindness.”

  I survey the tent—clocking my mother at the back grabbing another glass of prosecco from the penned-off VIP area, tottering slightly on her heels—and wonder what they would think if they knew the truth. The reason that lunatic woman blamed me for her daughter and granddaughter’s death.

  I didn’t know it for a long time. Dan didn’t tell me about the letter until I’d regained some of my strength. With the eagle eye she usually reserves for contracts, Irene noticed my name on a brown envelope sitting on the living room table, and before the police arrived at that house—while Dan was screaming, cradling our son’s limp body in his arms—she pocketed it.

  She really is unflappable, my agent.

  She didn’t even tell Dan about the letter for a fortnight, presumably while she watched how the media storm panned out, how the situation would work out for us. Whether we were worth sticking with at all. She watched as the story turned me into a genuine, bona fide celebrity—not just Instafamous, but famous famous. There were Indonesian radio stations, Australian talk shows, American cable news, Newsnight and Panorama and even Ellen all clamoring for interviews.

  More important, she monitored Dan’s reaction to the global acclaim—how he handled the endless news stories about the novelist-turned-detective who, when the situation demanded it, turned into a cross between Sebastian Faulks and Sherlock Holmes to save his wife and child from certain death. The fact Irene gave them his author’s photo from a decade ago wouldn’t have hurt. Anyway, all the international interest, the world’s attention? It turned out Dan fucking loved it.

  By the time they showed me Jill’s typed pages, her confession, her whole life story practically, my husband had already pitched a book, a memoir, based on the events surrounding my abduction, using it as a springboard to explore the darker side of internet fame. Jill’s personal motives were not to feature.

  Winter’s, on the other hand, are fully picked over. Dan kept what she did a secret for a while—to be honest, I think he forgot about the stolen pictures until I asked why she hadn’t visited us in hospital. I have to admit that staging the break-in showed a level of competence that I’d never have given her credit for, not to mention keeping up the act when Dan was exploding over that RP account—even if the moron did use her own PayPal account to pocket the cash for the photos.

  It started off, Winter said, with taking little things, mostly gifts, that she knew I didn’t care about and wouldn’t miss, but that she could easily sell on eBay. When it snowballed and she thought I’d start to notice—the two-thousand-pound Acne jacket and the Burberry boots were the tipping point—she decided to cover her tracks with the smashed window and the stolen laptop. Only when Becket kicked her out of their love nest, when she was completely and utterly broke and up to her fedora in credit card bills, did she hit upon the idea of selling my photos as special fans-only content, through one of the forums I had asked her to monitor. She didn’t think a few pictures were a big deal, she said; they were just the spare ones we hadn’t used.

  There is a long interview in the book with Pamela Fielding too, practically a chapter by itself, all about her problems at home, her troubles at school, the validation she found she could get online, the elaborate fantasies of family life she constructed. I found myself feeling quite sorry for her in the end, really. I think we both did.

  It was decided—probably rightly—that my glorious reentry into the world of social media would look too cynical after all that had happened. Much better to let Dan take over my account, renaming it the_papabare, have custody of my followers, promote the book online, and chronicle our family’s slow and ongoing recovery from almost unimaginable horror. Irene knew, by that point, with offer after offer rolling in from ITV, Sky, NBC, that my career was about to go stratospheric. She’d already tentatively accepted my family talk show, Mama Bare, by the time I was out of hospital.

  Luckily, Dan is better at all of this than I could ever have imagined. He likes to joke that for social media, he just writes as if someone has shaved twenty points off his IQ, or dropped a brick on his head. It’s also astonishing how much easier everyone goes on him—his comments are all hearts and winks and racy DMs about how he can save them from a murderous stalker any time he likes.

  Would Dan have two million followers today if those people knew what really drove that woman to do what she did? Probably not. On the other hand, who knows if it was even my advice that her daughter took? She could just as easily have read it on Mumsnet or heard it from some other influencer. I’m sorry for what happened to her, to her baby, of course I am, but why should I feel guilty? I’ve never claimed to be an expert on anything—least of all parenting. The truth is, all I have ever done is tell people what they want to hear.

  Irene certainly did not think the whole messy story worked for Dan and me, brand-wise. Better to keep Jill vague, she reckoned, a motiveless online bogeywoman made flesh. Slightly to my surprise, Dan very quickly came around to the same point of view. It was certainly, he reckoned after some reflection, in some ways a more resonant story that way, a whydunnit for the social media age, a timely invitation to reflect on all our online behavior, a reminder of the dangers that lurk in the shadows of the everyday. It was also, of course, a good way to ensure that we emerged as the untarnished heroes of our story.

  On similar grounds, it was maybe a good thing that Polly didn’t want to be interviewed for the book. I was asleep when she came to visit me in the hospital, still hooked up to drips and beeping monitors. She brought flowers and left a card to say she was glad I was safe, that Bear was okay. I haven’t heard from her since, despite emailing and calling many, many times.

  Dan reckoned that was probably all for the best too. Better, he suggested, to keep all that Polly stuff as elusive and indirect as possible, for her sake as much as ours.

  He was the storyteller, he said. Let him take the lead.

  Five hundred thousand books sold so far suggests he wasn’t wrong.

  I watch him up onstage, looking more like that author’s photo than he has in years, and I feel a little flutter in my stomach.

  “Even after everything that has happened, my wife and I,” he says, gesturing toward the back of the tent, where I’m standing between the stall with the signed copies of our book and a whining Coco, “are eternally grateful.” I see three hundr
ed necks crane to see me, and hear an audible gasp—one or two people even clap here and there—as they notice my six-months-pregnant belly.

  Doreen, who’s been standing by the front of the stage the whole time, allows Bear to toddle over to climb onto his father’s lap. Our boy, our darling boy, just a few months shy now of his second birthday and as healthy and rambunctious as anyone could wish for.

  When the heads turn back around, I don’t imagine there is a dry eye in the house.

  It is a lot harder than you would think, being dead.

  Legally dead, I mean. Missing, presumed.

  For one thing, you can’t just ring up and book a ticket for a talk at a literary festival and pay for it with a credit card.

  Mine is very much a cash-only existence, these days. Cash-only, cash-strapped, and strictly hand-to-mouth.

  Sometimes it does tempt me, the thought of all my life savings just lying there in my bank account. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I tried to withdraw them. You’d have been tempted too, with some of the places I have found myself staying these last eighteen months, some of the jobs I have found myself doing to keep body and soul together.

  I meant to do it. That was always the plan. As soon as I was sure, as soon as I had achieved what I had set out to.

  All I needed was a little more time. A few hours probably would have done it. Half a day, at most. When I looked in on Emmy and Bear one last time, there were no signs of movement, no stirrings among the bedclothes.

  I had been keeping a close eye on her Instagram account, of course. I saw the announcement that she was missing. Then I saw all the people chipping in, helping identify the landmarks in her video. I could see them piecing together the route, getting closer.

  It was all so fast. The whole thing fell apart so quickly.

  Even when I got to the beach, I thought I was still going to do it. I parked and took my rings off and put my phone and purse in the glove compartment, as if I were going for a swim. It was a place I always used to notice when I drove past, years ago, because of all the signs about the currents, all the warnings about the undertow. An eerie place, desolate, with a greyish beach that appears to stretch almost to the horizon at low tide, then seems to disappear within minutes as soon as the tide starts coming in.