Unfiltered Read online

  PRAISE FOR FILTER THIS

  ‘Ali is one of the best flawed heroines in Irish commercial fiction since Rachel Walsh in Marian Keyes’ ground-breaking

  Rachel’s Holiday’ The Sunday Times

  ‘Hyper current … hugely relevant’ Irish Independent

  ‘Hilarious. Like Sophie Kinsella for the Instagram world’

  Irish Examiner

  ‘Shades of Marian Keyes in this highly entertaining satire’

  Sunday Independent

  ‘Witty and wonderful – I devoured this in a single sitting’ Image

  ‘A cracking read’ Woman’s Way

  ‘Modern and witty’

  Emer McLysaght, co-author of the Aisling books

  ‘So sweet, so funny – I loved it’ Marian Keyes

  ‘Fresh, current and thoroughly enjoyable’ Eithne Shortall

  ‘Written with heart and humour, Filter This peels back the social-media mask so many wear as a disguise and reveals the real people beneath’ Cecelia Ahern

  Sophie White writes regularly for the Sunday Independent, Irish Independent, IMAGE and Irish Tatler, and has been nominated three times for Journalist of the Year at the Irish Magazine Awards. She is co-host of the chart-topping podcasts: Mother Of Pod (comedy), The Creep Dive (comedy) and The Vulture Club (pop culture and commentary). She also co-founded Rogue Collective, an online space for creative non-fiction, long-form journalism and multimedia works. She lives in Dublin with her husband and three sons. Unfiltered is her second novel.

  Also by Sophie White

  FICTION

  Filter This

  NON-FICTION

  Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown

  Copyright © 2020 Sophie White

  The right of Sophie White to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Ireland in 2020 by HACHETTE BOOKS IRELAND

  1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 9781529343410

  Hachette Books Ireland

  8 Castlecourt Centre

  Castleknock

  Dublin 15, Ireland

  A division of Hachette UK Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hachettebooksireland.ie

  Contents

  Praise for Filter This

  About the Author

  Also by Sophie White

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Afterbirth

  Acknowledgements

  For our dads, Kevin Linehan and David White –

  funny, kind, unfailingly generous, the ultimate mensches

  This book is a work of fiction.

  While it contains mentions of companies and people

  in the public domain, the events and the characters

  in the novel are entirely the creation of the author’s imagination.

  Chapter 1

  Ali woke up in her childhood bed on the morning of her dad’s funeral with a song in her head. ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys. Memories of long-gone Saturday mornings when Miles would sing the Beach Boys as he ambled down the creaking stairs of their ramshackle three-storey Georgian villa by the sea to make rasher sandwiches drifted through her head.

  Ali closed her eyes and felt a loss so vast it was like falling. What will I be without you? Even though her dad had been drifting away from them for years, his Alzheimer’s advancing at a glacial pace, in the past two years it seemed that as fast as he’d forgotten her, she’d forgotten him. Or at least she’d forgotten the Miles she’d grown up with – who he was before the vacant stare and food-stained pyjamas.

  She rolled over, burying her face in the pillow, and was hit unexpectedly by a glimpse of Miles from her teens, trying to get her up for school. A wet facecloth to the face was his main method. Truly evil. She smiled into the damp pillow.

  What’ll I be without you … ?

  And what will I be with you? She poked her belly and sighed. Very hard to believe there was a blueberry-sized Sam–Ali mash-up cruising around in there. And, according to the pregnancy calculator she and her best friend Liv had consulted five days before, she was already almost eleven weeks along. And Sam, the father and her former, sort-of boyfriend still didn’t know. Even worse, she was pretty sure he never wanted to see her again.

  Her phone buzzed under her pillow. A calendar reminder to share a #spon post about a pregnancy supplement. Awkward. She cancelled the reminder, opened the calendar and scrolled through the endless scheduled sponcon leading all the way to September and her fictional due date. Fucking hell, who has a fictional due date? Then she spotted the email notification and felt a swell of sickening anxiety. She had been ignoring all notifications in the five days since she’d been exposed as a pregnancy faker – there was a tsunami of hatred in her inbox just poised to hit her should she wish to read any of it – but this email address caught her eye: [email protected]. The subject line read: Prime Time Investigates. She gingerly tapped the message to expand it.

  Ms. Jones,

  David Holmes here. I am a researcher on Prime Time and was hoping to speak to you about participating in a special episode focusing on public shaming. We are keen to work with you to get your side of the story heard. To provide balance, we are also approaching some of the victims of your scheme and the creator of the below video. I know it may be a daunting prospect for you but please don’t worry, we will endeavour to present you as fairly as possible…

  Ali glanced at the linked YouTube video at the bottom of the email and threw the phone to the bottom of the bed. Why the Internet Hates Ali Jones (The Full Story with Receipts!!!!) UGH. Ali groaned. She’d been staying as far from the internet as possible to avoid exactly this kind of thing.

  She stared at the pale-green, glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling above her, mandatory in all teenage girls’ rooms. I am not watching it. I’m not, I’m not, even as she sat up and searched through the duvet for the phone.

  It’s self-harm, Ali. Do not watch that crap.

  She retrieved the phone. I’ll just skim-watch it. I need to know what they’re saying. She loaded the video. Gleeful voiceover narrated the screenshots of her Instagram account before finally settling on the picture of her in an unflattering dress that sparked an immense outpouring of congratulations about her being pregnant when she was most certainly not.

  ‘Ali Jones was
just your average insta-nobody until she was announced as a wild card nomination at the 2019 Glossie Influencer Awards. On the day her nomination was announced, it seemed Jones had even more exciting revelations to come. An Instagram post appeared to be breadcrumbing a pregnancy reveal and when host Blake Jordan welcomed her to the stage, she made it official.’

  ‘That is not what happened,’ Ali hissed as footage of Blake Jordan on the stage at the Glossies WildCard launch appeared. He was holding the envelope that contained her name and keeping the audience in suspense. ‘Phew, sorry for that pregnant pause there! Though our next nominee knows all about that… Please welcome Ali Jones and her “little surprise” to the stage!’ he crowed.

  Ali clearly remembered panicking as she struggled through the crowd to the stage. She had just come from her dad’s nursing home, she recalled. It had been a very bleak day. She watched herself scrambling up on stage, helped by two waiters. After she was installed on the third plinth beside the other nominees, Blake had tried to get some banter out of her but it was clear from the video she was utterly paralysed by his announcement of her supposed pregnancy.

  If I could just go back to that moment… Ali knew regrets were futile but it was surreal watching the exact point when her life went into a tailspin. Of course, at the time, she was so obsessed with getting big on Instagram and trying anything – drinking, outfits of the day, getting her lips plumped – to distract herself from her dad’s horrendous decline that she didn’t immediately correct Blake. Why didn’t I just explain?

  She watched as Blake clicked his fingers in front of her face to try and snap her out of her reverie.

  ‘You dilating, hun?!’

  Here it was, Ali held her breath as the Ali on screen finally spoke, unwittingly setting in motion the events that would ultimately lead to her downfall and this very fucking real baby she was now carrying:

  ‘Sorry! I was just saying I’m going to double in size, LOL.’

  Ugh. Ali X’d out of the video and buried her face back in her pillow.

  The last few months of faking pregnancy symptoms on her Instagram to gain followers – she’d gained over 100,000 in the end – felt like a deranged fever dream. If only it had been. And now she was pregnant for real.

  What on earth had she been thinking, telling everyone she was pregnant for a few followers and a shot at being named influencer of the year? Of course if it had just been strangers online that would’ve been one thing but she’d dragged Sam down with her. Every time she thought of Sam, who she had allowed to believe was the father of her fake baby, she felt a despair so profound it scared her.

  God, how did it all get so fucked? A squirm of sickness in her tummy seemed to be answering her.

  ‘It was a rhetorical question,’ she muttered to her stomach. It was mad how utterly blindsided she’d felt when she saw the positive pregnancy test and then how quickly she’d come around to the idea. The baby was like a little beacon of promise and hope amid the dreariness of planning her dad’s funeral, being cast out by the Insta world and being publicly shamed online.

  ‘It must be a biological quirk.’ Liv had laughed grimly in a voicenote the night before, when Ali mentioned her growing optimism. ‘There’s no way you should be buzzing over this baby. You don’t know anything about babies. My sister says parenthood is hellish. And she’s got a husband. How’re you going to raise it?’

  ‘We’ll raise it together!’ Ali’d mugged, to Liv’s annoyance. ‘Or we’ll convince Sam to move in with us and we can be sister wives while he does the night feeds.’

  Despite her joking, Ali knew that telling Sam was not going to be easy. She hadn’t heard from him since he’d found out that the baby that she’d claimed to be expecting with him was an elaborate Insta-sham. And he’d found out in the worst possible way, stumbling across the thesis on Instagram that Liv had been working on for her master’s. Page after page had detailed Ali’s Insta-insanity. Then her dad had died just hours later, and the world had dropped out of orbit.

  In the past five days, in between disbelief at her father’s death and planning the funeral, she’d sent lengthy texts and voicenotes pleading with Sam to talk to her. And nothing. He’d blue-ticked every single one but not a word back – torture, 2019-style. Sometimes in the elaborate showdowns she waged in her head at night, she wanted to retaliate. ‘I didn’t tell you the baby was yours. You just assumed after the timing fit our botched Tinder date. And you insisted you wanted to be part of it,’ she’d go, on the defensive, then she’d hear how she sounded. Completely batshit.

  Of course, everyone online thought she was completely batshit too. Screengrabs of the fateful pic she’d drunkenly posted after Blake Jordan’s announcement at the Glossies showing a positive pregnancy test had trended online in the last few days. There were even memes of it going around, the haphazard caption ‘So excited to officially announce my pegnancy’ had been ripe for mockery.

  ‘TFW you’re fake pregnant but too stupid to spell it right’ read one meme. Someone had even added the word ‘pegnant’ to Urban Dictionary. The definition read: ‘A dumb whore who lies about being pregnant for attention.’

  Sighing, she pulled up her inbox again, deleting the one from Prime Time and scanning the hundreds of other emails. She hadn’t opened any but the subject lines were vitriolic. ‘You deserve to die’ and ‘Women like you are why victims of abuse are not believed’. The deluge of hate had been relentless. Still, coinciding, as it did, with the death of her father had given Ali a sharp shock of perspective. Her whole Insta-scheme was mortifying but, let’s face it, trivial when compared with the stark brutality of death.

  On the less demented end of the inbox spectrum were countless riffs on ‘Termination of contract’ and ‘Ambassadorship revoked’ from the many brands she’d worked with during her brief spell as Ireland’s hottest up-and-coming mumfluencer. At least there was no need to email any of the PRs with some cobbled-together excuse – the one upside of cataclysmic public disgrace.

  I’m clutching at straws, she thought as she dragged herself out of the bed and began trawling through her bag for something to wear.

  Ali’d spent the last five days locked in some bizarre alternate funeral dimension, sitting around the kitchen in her mum’s house with a constantly rotating cast of family and friends drinking tea and boozing at odd hours of the day and night, fortified with endless rounds of boiled ham and gross mayonnaisey salads. At this stage, all she wanted to do was go home to the house she shared with Liv.

  Her mum, Mini, had entered a strange phase of grief that involved becoming bizarrely fixated on tiny details like the socks Miles was to be cremated in and ignoring massively important decisions such as where to even have the funeral. Mini had hired and fired several priests (Ali hadn’t even known you could do that) before deciding that an actor friend of Miles’s would ‘MC’ the funeral.

  ‘That’s not a thing,’ Ali had tried to protest but gave in when she realised that she had far more important things to talk Mini out of, such as the six pallbearers wearing chef whites in honour of Miles’s career as a restaurateur.

  ‘Fine, fine, you want him to have a boring “normal” funeral. Fine, the boys can wear suits. But we’re keeping Eric on MC duties. He’s already finalised the soliloquy.’

  ‘You mean … eulogy?’ Ali was iffy.

  ‘I mean soliloquy.’ Mini was steely, holding Ali’s gaze.

  While Mini focused on the more esoteric aspects of the funeral, Ali had become the production manager of the entire affair, traipsing around pricing horrific, carb-heavy buffets in bland hotels that Miles would have detested.

  Ali was relieved that it was all going to be over in a matter of hours and the Mini madness would hopefully end. Then it would be on to the far more complicated task of sorting out her life. She knew people baby-proofed their home ahead of a new baby’s arrival. She’d need to baby-proof her whole bloody life. She flashed on the shambolic state of her room in the house she shared with Liv. Be
fore, she’d like to think her discarded half-eaten takeaways and empty booze bottles stashed everywhere said ‘insouciant wild child’ but, aesthetically, the vibe was probably a bit more ‘cry for help’. How on earth would a baby fit into that picture?

  She shook the question from her head. First things first, get Miles sorted. Then tell Mini about the baby. Then tell Sam. Then get on with figuring out how to work a baby and pretending everything was fine.

  My speciality, she thought ruefully.

  Now among the posters and relics of her teens, Ali pulled off her pyjamas and slipped on her dad’s old Velvet Underground tee-shirt that she’d cut into a crop top. She zipped up the simple black pinafore dress she’d chosen. It was definitely weird, she decided, having eight different Harry Styles watching you get dressed for your father’s funeral.

  ‘Liv’s here, Ali!’ she heard Mini call from downstairs.

  Thank God. Ali pulled on her Docs, headed out the door and down to the kitchen. Not the kitchen of her childhood, they’d had it redone. Now it was a kind of glass-box-style extension – practically a mandatory addition to affluent Dublin homes during the boom years. Its sleek lines and stark atmosphere jarred with the rest of the house, which was still all sagging sofas and warm wood panelling, the shelves stooped under the weight of books and records.

  Liv was backed up against the concrete-topped island, a plate of boiled ham already in hand, being booze-bullied into wine by Ali’s aunt Eleanor.

  ‘Is it even 10 a.m. yet?’ Liv murmured helplessly as Eleanor thrust the enormous glass of white into her hand.

  ‘This is how the Irish do funerals,’ one of Mini and Eleanor’s distant cousins told her, apparently not realising that Liv, her dark skin and brown eyes courtesy of Meera, her Indian mother, was Irish. He was part of the American contingent, who had arrived late last night and played the piano till 3 a.m. Ali’d met each of them about a million times, but they had all coalesced into a freckly mass of middle-aged, Irish American man meat.