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  #tbt when @BabyGeorgie was the most perfect baby and I was bathed in all the new mum love vibes, and #blessed with the most wonderful breastfeeding journey thanks to NaturPro9400 the #supplement with the most effective blend of vitamins to promote milk supply and bonus (!) it does wonders for your hair and nails too, ladies. #spon #ad #NaturPro9400 #workingmama #collab #brandambassador #supplement #lovethis #workwithshelly #georgiedevine

  Georgie Devine was only three but she had her very own Instagram account (189K followers) and endorsement deals and was brand ambassador for several well-known products including, somewhat bafflingly, a de-icing agent for cars. At least, I don’t have to sell my baby on Instagram for a bogus supplement, Ali thought cattily.

  Leaning in and peering closer at the picture, Ali could see it looked like Shelly had done a bit of photoshopping on a little rash on Georgie’s cheek.

  Then Ali felt mean. She couldn’t blame Shelly for cashing in on that sweet baby dollar; you have to work with what you have in this game. The problem was Ali didn’t have much by way of aspirational fodder for Insta.

  She lived with Liv, who’d been her best friend since Ali had mistaken her for a foreign-exchange student on day one outside St Margaret’s secondary in Killiney.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she’d asked the small girl with dark hair, brown skin and headphones around her neck.

  ‘Bray,’ Liv had responded flatly.

  ‘Ah.’ Ali had been thrown.

  ‘We have Indian people in Bray, like.’ Liv was sarcastic.

  ‘Yeah, alright. I’m not a racist.’

  ‘You just assumed I was foreign!’

  ‘Well I’m not the biggest racist here then.’ Ali indicated the other kids in uniform awkwardly milling, waiting for the doors to open at 8.15. ‘I’m talking to you, at least.’

  It was a gamble, but luckily Liv had laughed and that had been that for them, friends ever since. Though, while she loved her, Liv wasn’t much of a one for Prosecco boomerangs. Ali usually called on Jess, Clara and Kate, their school gang, who were much more up for nights out, though irritatingly they’d all coupled up in recent months and were forever making arbitrary trips to Ikea with What’s-his-name-again and staying in for takeaways and Netflix.

  You’re twenty-fucking-five, Ali wanted to scream. You’re supposed to be out making the most of your youth. Though now at the midway point, Ali felt her twenties had been a bit of a dud thus far. A useless degree in Drama Studies and English and a ropey economy meant Durty Aul’ Town was the only thing between her and all-out failure, aka an unpaid internship. Writing was lonely and hard and when her Insta started to take off with her #wellness posts, selfies, carefully curated #OOTDs and behind the scenes posts of #TVlife on Durty Aul’ Town, she’d switched her focus almost instantly.

  She saw so many other girls being plucked from Insta to go on to TV-presenting gigs and modelling gigs, getting book deals, make-up deals, tan deals – surely it would get her somewhere, even if she wasn’t exactly sure where she wanted to go right now. It could only be a matter of breaking in. She made sure she went to all the media events in town, trawling for freebies to open on her ’gram and being snapped for the social pages.

  Liv liked going out, but her tastes ran more to pints and experimental instrumental metal gigs than anywhere the influencer crowd flocked. If Ali wanted to do a selfie when they were out, she’d practically hide rather than face Liv’s ribbing. Anyway she much preferred staying in with Liv. Watching crap TV and offering their own sarky commentary was more fun.

  They’d moved in together during the second year of college. The house had belonged to Liv’s granny and looked and smelled accordingly but it was close to Dublin City University, where Liv had studied sociology and psychology and, after a year’s break, had now plunged into a two-year master’s in sociology with a view to pursuing academia. Social media was, in fact, her area of research. Ali had a major trek out to work and her mum’s house on the south side, but Liv’s parents charged them next to nothing, plus it was close to Ali’s dad, Miles.

  She waded through the sea of clothes that covered most of the carpet towards the far corner of the room, where she’d fitted a small section of pale laminate wood-effect flooring on top of the frankly offensive brown carpeting that Liv’s granny was so devoted to – it covered the floor of nearly every room in the house including, most creepily, the bathroom.

  Ali cleared the faux-marble-topped dressing table in her ‘Insta-studio’, swept a face wipe over her face and scrubbed at last night’s smudged eye make-up. She switched on an enormous ring-light mounted to the wall to her right beside a large round mirror and appraised her face. The lasting effect of Esso wine meant her wide brown eyes were looking more than a little bleary and her dirty-blonde hair which fell in waves past her shoulders was attempting to form a single giant dreadlock. She consulted the time – 7.20. Better get going. Mini was never late and it’d be a terrible shame to cut into her berating time. She whacked in some eye drops and began the lengthy hair battle. Ali’s face had come good since the days when the boys at school had called her a ‘fugly dog’. She’d had a pretty intense awkward stage spanning about a decade – who didn’t? And options for self-improvement were limited back then; you couldn’t just filter yourself into oblivion in every pic. After such a shitty adolescence, Ali saw her creamy skin and high cheekbones as a form of karmic redistribution.

  Of course, the definition of ‘pretty’ had changed drastically, even over the last couple of years, and Ali, like most of the influencer crowd, had made some subtle improvements. Her top lip had always seemed a little thin so she’d had it filled last year – which meant, of course, that her bottom lip definitely looked a little thin so she’d plumped that one up as well. A little filler in the cheeks and Botox around the eyes were all pretty standard but lately she’d been more and more concerned with her nose. It was more prominent than she liked, though that would be a different level on the surgery scale. Filler you could do on a lunch break but noses were an undertaking.

  Liv, naturally, did not approve. ‘You’re looking more like that crazy cat face lady by the day,’ she’d erupted when she found Ali scrolling through #newnose on Insta one morning.

  Mini hadn’t even mentioned the little adjustments. Either she thought they were an improvement or she was too preoccupied with work to notice. Mini Riordan was a key player in the Irish art scene – her gallery, Ait Art, represented the biggest artists and she chaired about a million boards. Plus Mini had Miles, Ali’s dad, to deal with, who they would no doubt be discussing over this coffee. Ali grimaced at the prospect.

  Ali propped her phone up on the dressing table and hit View All on the Stories function while she moisturised her skin and began hurriedly painting her face.

  ‘Hey guys!’ A peppy, faux-American-by-way-of-Dublin-4 accent squealed out of the phone. ‘I’m so sorry I haven’t been on for a while …’

  Ali scoffed. ‘You were on last night, Laura! I think we can survive without you for a couple of hours.’

  ‘It’s been a crazy morning …’ Laura continued earnestly.

  Already? Please. Ali rolled her eyes.

  ‘I’ve been visiting Pegasus Pilates and it just clears your head, ya know? I can’t wait to tell you how amazing it’s been for my day so far …’

  Yeah, yeah your day’s already amazing. It’s not even fucking 8 a.m., Laura, chill out. Laura (a wannabe MUA from Shankill, 11,374 followers) had had a breakthrough lately and had started doing sponcon with a beauty subscription service, Bellabox Ireland, which was fairly major, and Ali couldn’t help it: she was jealous.

  What did she have? Ali glared at the eerily flawless face filling the phone screen. It had a touch of the uncanny about it – it looked very close to human but also unnatural in a way that was hard to put a finger on. The filter had blunted the things that would have rooted the face in reality – things like normal unevenness in texture and skin tone, things that are suggestive of actual huma
n flesh. Also the stripy, clunky shading and a heavy hand with the highbeam gave Laura a distinctly tigery look. I mean, really, thought Ali, if you’re claiming to be a professional make-up artist, there’s no excuse. But still, tiger face and all, Laura was doing well for herself.

  The problem was Ali didn’t have the kind of commercial USP that would elevate her in the scene. She did the twenty-something thing, chatting about her Tinder dates. She did a bit of beauty, a bit of skincare, but she didn’t have any really good hook. Her content was a bit unfocused – like her life, she sighed. Why does everyone go on about your twenties? If this shitshow of crap jobs and no money are the best years, I wanna get off.

  It definitely didn’t help that everyone else seemed to have it together. There were, of course, Instagrammers who didn’t go in for the Insta-bullshit, they kept things a little less rose gold on there. Posting funny videos and cool stuff. She followed several who used the app to show their creative work and campaign for causes they believed in. They were completely themselves but the fact was that Ali figured she had even less to offer being her real self on Instagram.

  Laura was now prattling on about her plans for spoiling her dad on his birthday in a few days. ‘Are we all just major daddys’ girls?’ she’d written in pink over a pic of Laura and a middle-aged man in matching charity-run tees. Ali abruptly tapped forward on the Stories until the dad chats were done.

  Glancing around her dismal room, her gaze came to rest on the Christmas card she had made and then neglected to hand over when the appointed day had arrived a few weeks earlier. What was the point? Miles wouldn’t know what she was giving him. Christmas, birthdays and Hallmark holidays were the bleakest of all the days she’d spent by his bedside.

  What did they add up to now? Three Father’s Days since he’d known her name. Three depressing birthdays. ‘We’ll help you, darling,’ Mini’d say, holding a small cake and bravely making it through ‘Happy Birthday’. Ali’d leaned forward and blown out his candles while Miles stared at the wall, his empty eyes never registering their presence in the room. Then they sang the family favourite ‘Oh Why Was He Born So Beautiful’, the song Miles used to strum along to on his old ukulele.

  She now kept the ukulele beside her bed and ran her fingers over it every night, pressing the strings he used to pluck during singsongs at her parents’ raucous parties. When one of the strings broke last year it took a month for her to finally replace it, feeling the loss so sharply it took her by surprise. Now the ukulele had one new string that Miles had never touched and Ali had lost another precious piece of her dad.

  For his fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth he’d sat up in his chair in the nursing home and wordlessly accepted proffered morsels of the cakes Ali’d stayed up late the night before baking. By the last one, sixty, he just lay on the bed, still staring but by now unable for food that wasn’t puréed. Mini and Ali had eaten that cake.

  As Laura breathlessly extolled the virtues of an early-morning Pilates session, Ali snapped back from the airless room at Ailesend Home where even now, as she sat in her bedroom and put on her make-up, Miles was trapped, suspended in some terrible limbo. Ali paused in her involved make-up routine and pressed her fingers to her eye sockets – it was here that she felt the unbearable pressure building any time she thought of Miles and, by extension, Mini.

  Most of the time, Ali and her mother were at war, engaged in a decades-long battle of wills. Mini was never satisfied with her only child. Or at least it seemed that way to Ali. They’d been fighting forever, hence Ali’s eager departure at twenty to live with Liv in Grannyland. The house was a godsend, as Ali couldn’t have afforded to rent properly back then with just a job in her dad’s old restaurant in town a few nights a week. Miles had been starting to show signs of forgetting, and a few weeks after she’d moved in with Liv they got the diagnosis. Early onset Alzheimer’s. Ali had debated moving home, but she got on better with her mother with a bit of distance, and Miles wasn’t so bad back then – at least not at first. By the time two years had passed, they had to move him to a home.

  In generous moods, Ali reminded herself that Mini didn’t mean to be hypercritical – she just rarely had an opinion she didn’t voice. Ali’s hair, her clothes, her Leaving Cert subjects, Ali’s insistence on wearing peach (‘very unflattering, darling’) were all an affront to Mini.

  However, when they sat side by side in Miles’s bleak little room with the stack of adult nappies in the bedside locker and the hopeless stench that no amount of Jo Malone candles could cover, Ali felt close to her mother. But no one welcomes that type of closeness – she’d rather they were out shopping and having the kind of mother–daughter fun that she could at least mine for Instagram.

  Ali swallowed hard and shook her head slightly in a bid to dismiss the dark thoughts that could gather so quickly like clouds on some inner horizon. She began to apply the first of many layers of light-reflecting base to her now-primed skin. Make-up had come a long way since her teenage love affair with Juicy Tubes and glitter mascara. Now even the plainest girls had so much scope for improvement with contouring and highlighting. Some of the influencer wannabes took it to ridiculous levels, using their original features as the mildest of suggestions as to where their eyes, lips and noses began and ended, shading in unwanted chins and reshaping their most unfortunate features with expert blending of light and dark. In the pics on their feeds, it was flawless. It didn’t work in person, though. Often Ali would meet a fellow wannabe in the pleb pen at an event and the girl would be unrecognisable. So much can be done with a bit of highlighter and a knack for angles. Ali didn’t quite need that help which was why, she was sure, the influencer game would pay off for her.

  She had a toe in the fame pool with her TV job, and she kept its details vague to the other Insta-mavens – not wanting to reveal that she spent much of her day just enacting the whims of the megalomaniac series producer, Stephan. She also got invited to the media ligger events where everyone shouted in each other’s faces about how busy they were while sipping champagne from mini bottles through a straw and tried to get selfies for their feed with the big fish like Shelly Devine.

  Speak of the devil! Now Shelly Devine’s beautiful face filled the phone screen. She looks like another species, thought Ali glumly. Shelly played a minor character on Durty Aul’ Town and even at 6 a.m. calls she looked perfect. Her dark hair, pale skin and grey-blue eyes were a striking combination, and even dressed down in her uniform of skinny jeans, boots and boyfriend blazer, she looked worlds away from the other influencers. On set, Ali was constantly checking herself in an effort not to come on too strong whenever they crossed paths.

  ‘Good morning, Shell-Belles!’ Shelly was beaming into the camera. ‘I’m going to take you through my morning routine in a few minutes but first I just had to show you the absolute best guy in the world …’

  The camera on Shelly’s phone switched to front cam as she began to creep through a textbook Celtic Tiger pad, ridiculously plush cream carpets stretching in every direction. She kept up a running, whispered commentary about the ‘state of the place’ as she made her way upstairs (past some obscenely cringe studio shots of ‘her lovelies’ – the lucrative Baby Georgie and the Divine Mr Devine).

  A manicured hand eventually pushed open a door to a darkened bedroom strewn with chocolate-coloured fur throw pillows. A couple of scented candles flickered improbably – who lights those ever, never mind first thing in the morning? – on the bedside tables. The camera panned to the chiselled torso of a sleeping Dan Devine, covered from the waist down with a light sheet. Ali was watching with interest (it’d been a while) when Dan started awake. There was a truncated exclamation – ‘The fuck are you do—?’ – from the absolute ride who, Ali knew from extensive stalking, was ‘in finance’.

  In the next Story, Shelly, now back downstairs, was fiddling with the Nespresso, making coffee for ‘Mr Devine’.

  ‘He’s a grumpy bear in the morning …’ She laughed lightly into the
phone, the spotless kitchen gleaming in the early-morning sun behind her.

  Ali looked up momentarily to cast her eye around her own decidedly more grim surroundings. It was a granny house and there was only so much you could do with it. Though even the light in Shelly’s world looked cleaner. The light seeping around her own curtains (brown, of course, Granny standard issue) was murky and the air in the room felt heavy. Heavy like you could chew on it. Ali’s eyes roamed the small space, the crumpled bed, the grubby sheets and several old takeaway bags from last weekend on the floor crowding the side of the bed.

  Another bottle of Sauvignon (this one only nearly empty) stood on the top of the white plasticky chest of drawers, the kind every eighties child once had, complete with half-peeled-off stickers. The wine was no big deal – it wasn’t even finished. Then she flashed on the empty bottles stashed in the drawers beneath. She hadn’t gotten around to the recycling in weeks. ‘I’ll do it … when Liv’s not around,’ she murmured.

  Ali finished her face, roughed up her hair so that it was just the right level of dishevelled and launched the camera app on her phone. She hopped back over to the bed, flicked on the ring-light she had screwed to her bedside table and slipped under the sheets, careful to move any curry-chip detritus out of view of the phone lens. She cleared her throat a couple of times, practising a husky, sleepy voice: ‘Morning, babes, morning, bitches, namaste, babes …’ Giving the frame of the shot a final check, she hit Record. ‘Aloha, ladies, how’s my Insta-fam? I can’t believe I am such a slob this morning …’

  She exhaled heavily at this, managing to both sigh and pout at the same time – it was a textbook Insta-face meant to appear adorably weary.

  ‘I have a crazy day of meetings and appointments ahead so I need to kick this booty straight into my morning routine. The first thing I do is a little journaling to record my positive intentions for the day, then I’ll do my sun salutations and enjoy my fave breakfast proats. The recipe’s down on my feed – you guys have got to try it. Chat later, babes!’