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

She downs the rest of her flute, gives an expression of mock nerves to Anna Mai and Daisy Froome (21k followers), and follows Philippa into the drawing room next door. Rows of seats begin to fill up as she’s escorted to the front. She hears snatches of conversation. Nap times, poonamis, flexible working, mastitis, mumpreneur conferences, Bach for babies orchestral concerts. These are not the topics that Erin’s interested in, this is not what she likes talking about, and yet, she finds herself posting about them, talking about them to people she meets at groups and cafes. She doesn’t talk about rage, about loneliness, about frustration, about her abject boredom and how much she misses the roller coaster of hope and disappointment of her old life. She talks about positivity, and online sisterhood, and moments of overwhelming love and her style tips and baby fashion. Because, just like every performance she’s ever given, probably the real reason she never made it, she can’t help but play to the crowd.

She reaches the corner of the room, a lectern in the middle of a small temporary stage in front of her. She looks out at the audience. On the far side she catches a middle-aged lady with spiky grey hair leaning into her neighbour, their heads rolling back in laughter at something one of them’s said. Another two women in the front row, nodding together, four hands balled together in the younger one’s lap. Some words to bolster her through some difficult time, Erin thinks, some sage advice from one superwoman to another. Her relationships with her new Insta-friends are more jovial, more banterous. They talk about having a few drinks, laughing at their hilarious, disgusting children, what they’re wearing, where they bought it. The superficial side of being fabulous. What these two women have seems to be deeper, more intimate. Caz aside, despite the tens of thousands of followers and the eyes of all the mums where she lives being on her, she doesn’t have that simpatico with anyone.

Erin thinks of Amanda. She thinks of the two of them walking her sleeping baby down by the front, getting to know each other, talking about their families, laughing, bonding. But, since that first walk they had, Erin hasn’t been able to do that. Her fiancé has. Amanda and her fiancé, with their shared history about which she really doesn’t know much.

Erin leans back on the heels of her new #gifted ankle boots. The leather’s stiff and her feet hurt in them. It’s a good pain that snaps her out of her treacherous thought process. This, tonight, is a big deal. She will smash this speech because this is her opportunity and she’s learned the hard way that you don’t get many. She looks at her audience, so luminous that the chandeliers seem to sparkle brighter with their vitality. Their eyes glisten, their shoulders low with a sense of release. They’re powerful and successful and Erin is one of them.

Philippa gets up on the stage and asks for everyone’s attention. Erin feels a fluttering at the base of her stomach, she breathes out through her nose, the air feels colder than it should. This is fine, this is normal. This is good.

The seats are full now and the room smiling. She spots another cherub looking down from the door opposite on the far side of the drawing room as she walks up onto the stage and goes up to the microphone. She swallows a lump of saliva, takes a sip of the glass of water that someone’s put in front of her. All eyes are on her and she couldn’t feel more comfortable. Her eyes dart to Bobby again, the cherub, it’s not Bobby. She blinks away the guilt she feels at being here, among these strangers instead of being at home with him, caring for him, bonding with him, she shouldn’t need these people to love her, his love should be enough. But it isn’t. She looks out at the expectant faces, looks down at her typed words in front of her, takes a deep breath and decides to give a different speech.

19

Erin speed-walks up the ramp away from the station, nodding to the good mornings of various faces she recognises from her regular circuits of their village’s small high street. For the first four months of his life, Bobby would only nap in the sling, so almost every day, during a particularly rainy late summer, she would walk up and down the section of the street that’s covered by rusted corrugated roofing, trying to stay dry.

She catches her reflection in the window of the shop that sells mobility scooters. She doesn’t look too bad. The dry shampoo she bought at St Pancras has done a decent job of making it look like she didn’t roll out of her hotel and race to catch the train back home. Despite going to bed at 3 a.m., she woke at seven with a rabid compulsion to get back to see her son. She must have still been drunk at the time to make such a gallant decision because, right now, she needs total silence and to sleep off her hangover. Something that definitely won’t happen with Bobby around. Her skin feels greasy, scented with tequila. The post-boozing regret flows up inside her like the contents of a blocked drain.

The speech went well, really well. She had planned to run through her story, putting everything on Insta, putting out an account of herself to the world, how this livestream journaling saved her from what she thought was an inevitable dive into some form of mental health spiral. But when she was up there she sensed a hunger in her audience for something else, a desire to be galvanised. So she went full St Joan and gave a rousing call to action. She went for the jugular of gender equality and how it