The Family Friend C. MacDonald (reading comprehension books .txt) 📖

‘So we’ve all heard.’

‘And now it’s – Well, no one talks to me, it’s sort of cliquey. Not what I wanted to create for the community.’

‘One of the photos was taken from the group. Last week.’ Erin feels her hands tighten on the handle of her buggy. She’s doing it. Why is she doing it? ‘Someone in the lobby outside must have taken it – as you say, it’s so busy at the group, someone would have noticed it being taken.’

‘The twins will be up soon, I’d really like to get this –’

‘But you wouldn’t know anything because on the day of the group, the day that photo of me was taken, you were in Maidstone visiting your sister.’ Lorna looks away, scrunching her nose. ‘Or at least that’s what your Instagram says, but there’s a photo of you on Facebook that tells a different story.’ Lorna’s lips purse into a tiny ‘O’. Erin can see that her tolerance has come to an end and the conversational gloves are on the verge of being taken off and she now seems more intimidating than the sparrow-like woman Erin’s always thought her to be.

‘I haven’t been to see my sister in over a year.’ Lorna crosses her arms. Erin was expecting her to be shocked to have been caught out but she seems unabashed.

‘On Insta—’

‘My mum just joined Instagram. Sister and I aren’t speaking and she doesn’t know. Mum smelt a rat so I put up an old photo of us. So I could have taken the photo of you at the church group and put it up online. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? Well, yeh, I was about. But I don’t go to the group any more because it’s packed with up-themselves wankers. I know none of you like me. I know I’m not as glamorous and smug as you. I’m not cool. And does it piss me off that I don’t feel welcome at the group that I started for the sake of my community, for the sake of the mums who’d lived round here years before any of you turned up, who had nowhere decent to go to get their kids out of the house? Yeh, it does. Makes me sad, actually. But has it affected me so much that I’ve started following you around, taking photos of you, posting them on the Internet? Why would I, do you think? To bring you down a peg or two?’ She intones the last phrase in inverted commas. ‘Truth is, I wouldn’t want to waste the energy on someone as self-involved as you. Now, if you don’t mind.’ She grabs the secateurs off the wall and turns to the back of her garden. Erin stands stock-still watching her, seeing a slight tremor across the line of her shoulder blades. That cost Lorna. She didn’t enjoy having to be so overt, but she felt impelled to do it. Why? Overcompensating because she’s guilty of what Erin was on the road to accusing her of? But it was so vehement, the passion of someone who’s just had the final straw placed on their back. If Lorna is lying to cover herself, can she really be that good an actor?

Erin opens her mouth to say something but neither another question defending herself nor any sort of callow apology seems to be worth it now. Lorna bends down to her flower bed and decapitates a clump of dead flowers leaving Erin no choice but to turn on her heel and head back home.

40

The wheel of Bobby’s buggy sticks in a hole in the cobblestones outside the Cupcake Society in the old town’s minuscule market square. Erin’s jaw tenses as she tries to, very gently, ease it back onto the pavement. Bobby screamed for ten minutes before going to sleep and she can’t have him wake up again.

As she glides the stroller past the old-school tea shop, the former library that now sells second-hand books and the place that looks like an airport bar on the corner, she feels the eyes of the town burning into the back of her head. She used to like the idea that people were watching her, talking about her. She got frustrated with actors who moaned about the extra trappings of celebrity. She’d always known that when she made it she’d enjoy the feeling of being a person who incited curiosity, who carried their mystique with the elan of someone whose lifestyle is envied. It’s the exact sort of flagrant self-involved thinking that Lorna accused her of yesterday. Because now, walking around today, the first time she’s ventured into the heart of town since the pictures were posted, she can see what the A-listers are complaining about.

She wants to go into the handicraft shop where she sees the owner point her out to an older customer and tell them that she loves her baby, that being a new mum is hard, to ask them how they’d feel if pictures of them at their most fallible had been secretly posted online to create some kind of false narrative to tens of thousands of people. It’s not like she can run away from it, take time away from Bobby to sleep, take a break from Instagram so she can think about what it’s done to her, to her relationship. The contract with Phibe is signed, payment should be imminent. Their ‘Tinder for mums’ app launches in six weeks and they’ve just sent her the schedule of posts she has to craft and there’s a lot. To her surprise, her number of followers has increased in the aftermath of the trolling, but in light of her ‘positive mum’ tag being reassessed she feels more pressure than ever to respond to the deluge of messages and comments that she’s getting every day, and the joy she used to feel making these connections has now curdled into