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

tight grin. Erin’s phone buzzes and Amanda notices her attention drift into a different universe. The buzzing in her pocket has been almost constant for the last few minutes. The short buzz of Insta notifications, the two pulses of vibration for a WhatsApp, the longer one of an email. She’s so used to these mini-shocks of engagement that she hasn’t thought to look, but even though she doesn’t know what they are, they still give her a little starburst of happiness. The photo Amanda took up on the promenade was lush. Erin was kissing the sleepy Bobby’s head, strands of hair blowing artistically in the breeze, the sun reaching through a particularly photogenic band of cloud. Amanda captured something, the vastness of the landscape behind making the moment between mother and child both intimate and essential. She’s loath to involve Amanda any further into their lives, but Erin’s feed could do with that sort of photography all the time.

She gets her phone out, hoping that it’s Grace with some news – she’s fishing around a production company that are considering Erin to front an Internet kids’ show and, although she’s being blasé about it to Raf, she’s inordinately excited about the prospect of being on-screen, even if it is just online.

Trying to reach you. Going to voicemail. Please call me now.

It is from Grace. On the email icon she sees she has twenty-three new emails come in. She has forty-plus WhatsApps. And Instagram has gone insane, more than two hundred notifications. Something’s happened. Her chest clenches and, despite the wintery air, she wants to take her coat off.

Up ahead Amanda jumps up onto a crop of shining wet rocks and throws her arms up, causing a flock of seagulls to fly up in the air over Erin. She ducks down though none of them are very close to her. Bobby shifts to the side but doesn’t wake.

‘Fuck sake,’ she says under her breath, brandishing her phone in front of her like a lit stick of dynamite. Grace’s tone does not commute good news. She needs to call her immediately but she can’t risk waking the baby. Erin’s first thought is the video of her shaking the buggy. They never found out who ‘Ali-Crow’ was so there was nothing to stop them from reposting the video.

She goes into Instagram, clicks onto her notifications, scans down the list as fast as her phone will load them. Messages from handles she recognises, but most she doesn’t. Then the words: You have been tagged in four photos by Leister-worcley. She clicks onto the ‘Tagged’ icon. There they are. Four photos.

Erin at the brasserie on the end of the harbour, Bobby on her breast, a pained look of disgust on her face as she looks down at him.

Erin dead-eyed at the church hall baby group, ignoring Bobby as he holds out a block to her.

Erin, face into the buggy, contorted in anguish on the patch of grass near the beach, a still from the video from before.

She’s not in the last photo. It shows Amanda, sat on a sofa somewhere Erin doesn’t recognise, Bobby cradled in her left arm, drinking a bottle. Amanda pouts a big kiss to the baby and Bobby’s eyes are shining.

Amanda’s there, next to her, and Erin flicks the phone away from her so she can’t see the screen. She bends down to the level of Bobby’s head, adjusts his hand that’s become trapped.

‘The stack’s just round the corner,’ she says and Erin gawps at her. ‘All OK?’ The heat on Erin’s chest from Bobby being on her feels excruciating now.

‘Can you, can you take him?’

‘He’s asleep.’

‘Can you get him off me?’ Her voice harsh. When Amanda doesn’t act immediately, Erin begins to tear at the back of the wrap, desperate to get the weight off her. Bobby begins to crotchet but she doesn’t care. She yanks at the knot on her back, pulling the wrong part that abruptly tightens it, waking Bobby with a start.

‘Let me.’ Amanda goes round the back and unties the wrap and takes Bobby into her arms. Erin walks away from them, looking up at antlike figures on the cliff above. Is whoever it is watching her now? she thinks Because someone is following her around town, taking pictures of her. Someone is trying to make it look like she hates her baby. Like she’s a terrible mother. Then rounding it off with a picture of him drinking a bottle, she meant to do a post about him combi-feeding but kept putting it off, but worse, drinking that bottle with sparkly-eyed Amanda, a nanny in all but name that, again, she hasn’t even begun to mention on social media.

Amanda disentangles Bobby from the wrap and drops it onto a patch of rock. He’s fully awake and not happy to be so. She bounces him up and shows him the sea to try and bring him down from his ratcheting grumbles. Erin stalks further up the beach towards the cliff face, stumbling on patches of seaweed, rage swirling within her like a tempest. She doesn’t deserve this. What has she done to be targeted in this way? She’s about to phone Grace but she stops and sits down on the wet sand. She goes through the pictures again. The blankness behind her eyes. The joy in Amanda’s. She flicks down the comments. ‘Inauthentic’, ‘bullshit’, ‘breast is best’, ‘hot nanny’, ‘betrayal’, ‘dishonest’, ‘exploitative’. Incendiary words boom out of each tiny sentence. She can hear Amanda singing ‘wheee’ as she swings her baby boy into the air. Erin’s eyes begin to water, but she’s not upset, it’s the anger leaking out of her. She turns her phone to face herself and presses the record button.

‘Fuck you, you fucking coward,’ she says to a picture of her own angry face on the phone’s screen, the red record button blinking to the side of her. ‘Sneaking around taking pictures of me and my baby. If I look bored, if I look