‘What about that boy you said was coming round? Um, Tyler?’ I close and open my eyes quickly to wipe the boy’s lewd text.
‘He saw it on Facebook. Lizzy tagged my bum #FlagBum and now everyone on Facebook can see it and knows it’s like mine, so now everyone thinks I’m like just one of those girls who takes her clothes off for nothing.’
‘No they don’t, love.’ I pull Em into my arms. She lays her head on my shoulder and we stand in the middle of the kitchen, half hugging, half slow-dancing. ‘People will talk about it for a day or two then it’ll blow over, you’ll see.’
I want to believe that, I really do. But it’s like an infectious disease, isn’t it? Immunologists would have a field day researching the viral spread of compromising photographs on social media. I’d venture that the Spanish flu and Ebola combined couldn’t touch the speed of photographic mortification spreading through cyberspace.
Through the virus that is Internet porn, and in the blink of an eye, my little girl’s bare backside had found its way from our commuter village forty-seven miles outside London all the way to Elephant and Castle where Tyler, who is what police call ‘a known associate’ of Lizzy’s cousin’s mate’s brother, was able to see it. All because, according to Em, dear Lizzy had her settings fixed to allow ‘friends of friends’ to see whatever she posted. Great, why not just send it directly to the paedophile wing of Wormwood Scrubs?
4.19 am: Emily is asleep at last. Outside, it’s black and cold, the first chill of early autumn. I’m still getting used to night in a village – so different from night in a town, where it’s never truly dark. Not like this furry black pelt thrown over everything. Quite close by, somewhere down the bottom of the garden, there is the shriek of something killing or being killed. When we first moved here, I mistook these noises for a human in pain and I wanted to call the police. Now I just assume it’s the fox again.
I promised Em I would stay by her bed in case Tyler or any other belfie hounds try to drop in. That’s why I’m sitting here in her little chair with the teddy bear upholstery, my own mottled, forty-something backside struggling to squidge between its narrow, scratched wooden arms. I think of all the times I’ve kept vigil on this chair. Praying she would go to sleep (pretty much every single night, 1998–2000). Praying she would wake up (suspected concussion after falling off bouncy castle, 2004). And now here I am thinking of her bottom, the one that I trapped expertly in Pampers and which is now bouncing around the worldwide web all by itself, no doubt inflaming the loins of hordes of deviant Tylers. Uch.
I feel ashamed that my daughter has no sense of modesty because whose fault is that? Her mother’s, obviously. Mine – Emily’s Grandma Jean – instilled in me an almost Victorian dread of nakedness that came from her own strict Baptist upbringing. Ours was the only family on the beach that got changed into swimwear inside a kind of towelling burqa, with a drawstring neck my mum had fashioned from curtain flex. To this day, I hardly glance at my own backside, let alone offer it up to public view. How in the name of God did our family go, in just two generations, from prudery to porn?
I desperately need to talk to someone, but who? I can’t tell Richard because the thought of his princess being defiled would kill him. I flick through my mental Rolodex of friends, pausing at certain names, trying to weigh up who would judge harshly, who would sympathise effusively then spread the gossip anyway – in a spirit of deep concern, naturally. (‘Poor Kate, you won’t believe what her daughter did.’) It’s not like laughing with other mums about something embarrassing Emily did when she was little, like that Nativity play when she broke Arabella’s halo because she was so cross about getting the part of the innkeeper’s wife. (A dowdy, non-speaking role with no tinsel; I saw her point.) I can’t expose Em to the sanctimony of the Muffia, that organised gang of mothers superior. So, who on earth can I trust with this thing so distressing and surreal that I actually feel sick? I go to my Inbox, find a name that spells ‘unshockability’ and begin to type.
From: Kate Reddy
To: Candy Stratton
Subject: Help!
Hi hon, you still up? Can’t remember the time difference. It’s been quite a night here. Emily was lured by a ‘friend’ into posting a photo of her naked derrière on Snapchat which has now been circulated to the entire Internet. This is called a ‘belfie’, which I’m old enough to think might be short for Harry Belafonte. Worried that heavy-breathing stalkers are about to form a queue outside our house. Seriously, I feel Jurassic when she talks to me. I don’t understand any of the tech stuff, but I do know it’s really bad. I want to murder the little idiot and I want to protect her so badly.
I thought this parenting lark was supposed to get easier. What do I do? Ban her from social media? Get her to a nunnery?
Yours in a sobbing heap,
Kx
A Technicolor image pings into my head of Candy at Edwin Morgan Forster, the international investment company where we both worked, must be eight or nine years ago. She was wearing a red dress so tight you could watch the sashimi she ate for lunch progressing down her oesophagus. ‘Whad you lookin’ at, kid?’ she would jeer at any male colleague foolish enough to comment on her Jessica Rabbit silhouette. Candace Marlene Stratton: proud, foul-mouthed export of New Jersey, Internet whizz, and my bosom buddy in an office where sexism was the air that we breathed. I read about a discrimination case in the paper the other day, some junior accountant complaining that her boss hadn’t been respectful enough in his use of language. I thought: Seriously? You don’t know you’re born, sweetie. At EMF, if a woman so much as raised her voice, the traders would yell across the floor, ‘On the rag are you, darling?’ Nothing was off limits, not even menstruation. They loved to tease female staff about their time of the month. Complaining would only have confirmed the sniggerers’ view that we couldn’t hack it, so we never bothered. Candy, who subsisted on coke back then – the kind you gulped from a can and the kind you snorted up your nose – sat about fifteen feet away from me for three years, yet we hardly spoke. Two women talking in the office was ‘gossiping’; two men doing exactly the same was ‘a briefing’. We knew the rules. But Candy and I emailed the whole time, in and out of each other’s minds, venting and joking: members of the Resistance in a country of men.
I never thought I would look back on that time with affection, let alone longing, only suddenly I think how exciting it was. It tested me in a way that nagging kids to do their homework, cooking nine meals a week and getting a man in to do the gutters – the wearisome warp and weft of life – never does. Can you be a success as a mother? People only notice when you’re not doing it right.
Back then, I had targets I could hit and I knew that I was good, really good at my work. Camaraderie under pressure; you don’t realise what a deep pleasure that is until it’s gone. And Candy, she always had my back. Not long after she gave birth to Seymour, she headed home to the States to be near her mom, who longed to babysit her first grandchild. It allowed Candy to start an upmarket sex-toy business. Orgazma: for the woman who’s too busy going to come (or maybe the other way around). I’ve only seen Candy once in the years since we both left EMF, although, forged in the heat of adversity, ours are the ties that bind. I really wish she was here now. I’m not sure I can do this by myself.
From: Candy Stratton
To: Kate Reddy
Subject: Help!
Hey Sobbing Heap, this is the Westchester County 24-Hour Counselling Service. Calm down, OK. What Emily did is perfectly normal teen behaviour. Think of it as the 21st century equivalent of love letters tied with a red ribbon in a scented drawer … only now it’s her drawers.
Count yourself lucky it’s just a picture