The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

believe in the power of crystals, you still don’t want to be destroying things like that, must be twice the bad luck of cracking a mirror.

She swings him up away from it and stops in front of the picture that used to be in Raf’s dad’s house. Bobby likes the bright colours but there’s something about it that unsettles Erin. The person wrapped up in a shawl, looking away into some bleak, arid future. The piece is childish. As if the act of putting this enigmatic figure, a nod to the Renaissance, in some sort of Mad Max dystopia would be automatically profound, but it falls flat. Erin’s placed the crystal in this part of the room, next to the painting, because it doesn’t get much natural light from the window and thus she doesn’t often have it as a backdrop in any of her Insta-content.

She puts Bobby down and lets him shuffle around her legs and back towards the rug where a new wooden train set has been cracked open from the box of #gifted toys they keep under the console table behind the sofa. She recalls Amanda going over to the painting on that first night she was here and declaring it the reason for her visit. That and Mercury doing something, her motivation for booking a flight across the world to visit her old friend. But now Erin thinks of it, she can’t remember ever taking a photo or filming one of her stories in this corner of the room. It wouldn’t make sense to because it’s pretty much the only part of their downstairs she hasn’t put any effort into curating because the lighting is so bad.

Her phone buzzes on the kitchen counter. As she rushes across the room to answer the call, she glances back at the picture. It must have been in the background once when she was monologuing for her ‘stories’, she thinks, before blowing her lips out and shaking her head like a horse, stretching her face to relax the muscles, an old drama-school warm-up, readying herself to sound happy and breezy for her agent.

‘Hi, Grace.’

‘Erin, hi. You OK?’

‘All good, yeh. How goes it?’ How goes it? She’s trying too hard. Bobby cries out, indignant at being ignored, and bashes a toy egg on the mat next to him.

‘Are you OK to talk?’ Grace asks. Erin swings Bobby up and sinks down onto their puffy sofa, bouncing him on her knee while she clutches the phone under her chin.

‘Yes. Yes. Sorted now. Bobby.’

‘Have you looked at your phone?’ There’s an edge in Grace’s voice.

‘Not for a few minutes.’ She infuses the words with a knowing laugh to try and smooth over the instant thought that she’s somehow posted something that’s so bad Grace has decided to stop being her agent after less than a week.

‘You’ve just missed it then. I’ve sent you an email. Have you got an iPad to watch something on or shall I call you back?’

‘I’ll get the iPad.’

‘Put me on speaker.’ Erin does as she’s told and swivels round to the table behind the sofa, nearly knocking over a vase of lilies Amanda must have put there. Bobby jiggles off her knee so she drags him to her side next to her on the sofa.

‘Ali-Crow –’ Grace enunciates the words – ‘do we know who an Ali-Crow may be?’

‘Never heard of Ali-Crow.’

‘Have you got it yet?’ Erin clicks onto an email from Grace, with a video attachment.

‘Is everything OK?’ she asks, her voice breathy, artificially breezy.

‘Someone called Ali-Crow posted the video I’ve sent you. Are you watching it yet?’

‘It’s buffering, just starting now.’ A bank of green. Granite-grey sky behind. The sea. The sound of wind battering the camera’s microphone.

‘Let me know when it’s finished.’ Grace’s voice, though she barely hears it because on the video she sees that it’s her, Erin, pushing their buggy, the morning of the church group, looking around, eyes haunted like she’s on drugs. The ‘her’ in the video shakes the buggy and as she and Bobby watch it from the sofa Erin’s stomach lurches like she’s on a roller coaster. The woman in the video shakes the buggy again, her face contorted with the effort, wind-buffeted strands of dark hair making her look like Medusa. Erin feels spit pool at the back of her throat, she could be sick. Erin in the video stops the buggy with a violent dig into the muddy grass and bounds round to the front of the buggy, her arms grab at baby Bobby. The video stops. She reaches forward, puts the iPad on their wooden coffee table and closes her eyes.

‘Is it finished? Erin? Have you watched it?’

‘Yeh,’ she croaks. Bobby gives her a quizzical look. ‘How – Did you say someone posted this?’

‘A brand-new account. No followers, no following. Just @mentioned you. We managed to get it taken down in less than two minutes. There’s been no engagement or mention of it on your feed so I doubt anyone’s seen it.’

‘Right, thanks. I’m–’ Bobby’s got his bottom to her, scratching his way across the sofa. ‘I’m so sorry, Grace. It was – He wouldn’t stop screaming.’

‘Erin, it’s fine. You’re allowed to get frustrated.’

‘I know but –’

‘Don’t beat yourself up for this. You’re a great mum, you know that. People wouldn’t be so into your feed if you weren’t.’ Erin swallows. She feels nauseous.

‘You OK?’ It’s Amanda, standing by the door into the garden, sun breaking through the thick clouds behind her. Erin takes her agent off speaker and puts the phone to her ear. How long’s she been there? She looks over to the window, scrunches her eyes up and nods, trying to smile off any of the tense conversation she may have overheard. ‘You want me to –?’ Amanda mouths, pointing to Bobby who’s clambering over his mother’s knee towards the edge of the sofa. Erin nods an emphatic yes as Amanda swoops down, Erin puts a grateful hand on Amanda’s upper arm before