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  ‘Yeah, I know. You’re right.’ Ali composed a short reply asking Amy to meet and hit Send. ‘I dunno how I’m supposed to pay her, though.’

  ‘What’s the deal with the ill-gotten free swag? You’ve a fuck-ton of stuff down in your room – could you sell it?’

  ‘I feel like that’s probably not great, karma-wise.’ Ali frowned. ‘Ugh, my room. It’s a frickin’ hellhole in there. I can’t face it.’

  ‘Well … I gave it a clean over the weekend and I cleared out the box room too … for the baby.’ Liv looked a bit awkward and turned back towards the kitchen. ‘Chicken needs a poke, I’d say.’

  Ali hopped up after her and watched her from the kitchen door fiddling with the oven glove. She seemed off and Ali slipped uneasily down the hall to her bedroom door – a quick glance told her why Liv was so uncomfortable. There were three black bin bags lined up on the right of the door. Ali had let things go pretty badly in there. She quaked at the thought of what Liv had found. She nudged the first bag, causing an unmistakable clink of bottles. She winced. When had she last done a bottle bank run? She shuddered to remember. The next bag was slightly smaller, but another nudge produced the same vaguely accusatory sound of glass on glass.

  Ali felt sick at the idea of Liv finding all the bottles. She’d stashed them in the drawers, under her bed, even in the wardrobe. She’d never analysed her drinking and the hiding of her drinking. It had helped her to cope on the bad days and that was the most she’d been willing to explore. She didn’t like to think about why she’d let it get so bad. Seeing the bags laid out like this was crushing the little line she’d been feeding herself – that it was all perfectly fine and nothing serious.

  She eased herself down onto the edge of the bed opposite the incriminating bags. A pain low down in her abdomen had started up. The stretching pains. She bit her lip. Pregnant. It was so surreal. She’d figured out her dates and reckoned that the night she got pregnant for real was the night she had met Sam in Grogan’s after he had called her panicking having seen her pregnancy announcement on her Instagram.

  I wasn’t drinking that night, she reasoned. But she knew she’d have been if she could have. Still, the unsheathed mickey was not a drunken slip but an act of pure stupidity on her part. But, argued Rational Brain, the whole reason you were there was a drunken slip. You weren’t stone cold sober when you announced at the Glossies launch party that you were preggers. All right, all right. Ali sighed. Rational Brain was such a fucking pedant.

  Yes. I’d had a few drinks in the taxi on the way to the Glossies launch party. Everyone does that.

  Even as she argued with herself right in front of the tangible evidence of her drinking, she could hear how illogical she sounded. Not everyone drinks by themselves in a taxi on the way to an event. Not everyone hides bottles and not everyone goes along with being pronounced pregnant by some random male Instahun while in the middle of a gin haze.

  ‘They’d say, “Oh, weird, I’m actually NOT expecting lol!”’ Ali muttered.

  ‘What’s that?’ Liv appeared at the door.

  ‘I’m just going over what I should have done at the Glossies launch night.’ Ali budged over as Liv settled down beside her and put her arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Never too late for self-reflection,’ Liv said as they both stared straight ahead at the bin bags. ‘It was like an episode of Hoarders in here.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Ali flopped backwards on the bed.

  ‘I thought I was going to find a haunted tampon or at least some homegrown penicillin. There was a half-eaten spice bag from November, according to the receipt.’

  Ali moaned. ‘I don’t know how I let it get so bad in here. I’m sorry.’ She pulled a pillow – fresh sheets! – over her head.

  ‘Mm-hmm. Well, let’s just say nothing in here was sparking joy. Don’t worry, I did get a precautionary tetanus shot afterwards just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘So, I guess we need to go to the bottle bank?’ Ali kept the pillow over her face. She couldn’t look at Liv right now. Still, Liv picked up the corner of the pillow and peered down at her.

  ‘Ali, we needed to go to the bottle bank, like, six months ago.’

  Ali rolled over onto her stomach and then shot up.

  ‘What? WHAT?’ Liv yelped.

  ‘Oh, I dunno. I suddenly thought maybe I shouldn’t be lying on my tummy when I’m preggers.’ Ali sat up and tucked her legs underneath her.

  ‘We need a list of the shit you’re not supposed to be doing. Like drinking, Ali, you shouldn’t be drinking when you’re pregnant.’

  ‘I know.’ Ali was quiet. ‘Luckily, Sam was around so much the last few months I wasn’t really having any. Hardly at all.’

  Liv stared disbelieving at her. ‘This looks like quite a fair bit.’ She flicked her head at the bags.

  ‘I was having a really hard time, Liv.’ Ali’s cheeks burned. ‘I promise I wasn’t drinking as much after I met Sam. Thank God.’

  Liv pulled her in for a hug and kissed her cheeks. ‘That’s good. It’ll be OK. My cousin, Rachel, found out she was preggers with her first after a hen do in Ibiza, sure.’ She paused. ‘You were drinking a lot, though. Before, I mean. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realise.’

  Ali rubbed her forearm self-consciously. ‘I think I was trying to numb everything with Miles. I just didn’t want to feel things.’ She spoke carefully, aware of Liv’s eyes on her. ‘God, this is depressing,’ she finished, trying to laugh.

  ‘Yeah, it’s bleak as fuck. Oh God, FUCK!’ Liv jumped up. ‘The chicken!’ she roared and fled the room.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Mamas, how are you all on this beautiful April evening? I’ve just led the family in a cleansing meditation and now I’m off on a mamas’ night out – hashtag balance! Orca is getting into the swing of shivasana now that I’ve realised he’s more comfortable journeying within when strapped into his car seat …’

  Shelly was catching up on Stories in the taxi into town. The eighteenth-month-old Orca was strapped, Hannibal Lector-style, into his car seat amid the flickering candles and sheepskin blankets where the rest of the brood obediently meditated for the ’gram. Orca, Hazel’s youngest, hadn’t played ball with the Holistic Hazel brand since the day he was born – a fact that Hazel valiantly coped with by killing the sound on most of the stories featuring him and occasionally sharing lengthy posts about overcoming the challenges of oppositional children through crystal work. Though it’s hardly oppositional when a toddler doesn’t want to down-dog all day. Shelly rolled her eyes.

  ‘So I have to ask,’ the taxi driver piped up from the front seat as they made their way to the city centre in fits and starts in trudging traffic. ‘You’re one of these influencers, right? So is yer one a mentaller or what? I heard she faked having a baby on Facebook.’

  Shelly X’d out of the app and arranged her features into what she hoped was an impassive smile.

  ‘Oh, I have no idea.’ Experience had taught her that taxi drivers were hounds for gossip and there was no way she was giving him anything.

  ‘My young one says she tricked a boy into thinking she was expecting and then started a Facebook page all about it – nasty little wagon.’

  ‘Hmmmm.’ Shelly remained staunchly non-committal. Better not to engage, even to correct him on his facts. Poor Ali Jones. It was an utterly bizarre and horrible thing to do but what little she knew of Ali, she felt there must be more to the story. She wasn’t a ‘mentaller’, as this guy was so delicately putting it. She was young and she seemed so alone. Where was she right now? Shelly wondered, and how was she handling it all?

  Shelly googled Ali Jones and pages and pages of headlines from the last week since Ali’s downfall appeared:

  Desperate Blogger Fakes Pregnancy

  Conniving Instagrammer Goes to Ground after Pregnancy Revealed a Hoax

  A New Low for Influencers as Instagrammer Ali Jones Outed as a Liar

  Oh God. It was an online hounding made acceptable b
y sites like Notions.ie pretending to condemn Ali but actually revelling in the takedown. Shelly tried to imagine it was her at the centre of this venomous attention.

  Shelly Devine’s Marriage in Flames after Hiring an Actor to Play her Husband

  Insta-maven Shelly Devine Used Photoshop on her Baby

  Shelly Devine Fakes the Perfect Life for Money

  She shuddered. It wasn’t some remote possibility. She glanced down at the black screen of her phone. Mad to think this little device was a portal to so much. On the other side of the screen were all her adoring Shell-Belles and her success of the last few years. But there was also @__________ poised to take her down if she didn’t comply with their strange demands. A heavy feeling lodged in her chest.

  She pulled up Detective Bríd’s email from earlier.

  Hi All,

  Shelly, since @__________ has escalated lately with images that appear to be taken in and around your home, not to mention images suggesting surveillance of your family, I have cc’d Detective Eamon Mitchell from the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau to bring him up to speed on what’s been going on. The GNCCB is the national unit for investigating these types of crimes and they have access to the most advanced facilities in the country. As I said last week, after our interview with Ms Kelly Byrne aka @KellysKlobber, the IP address linked to the @__________ Instagram account is not locatable. It appears the person(s) is using a VPN (virtual private network) to avoid detection.

  Garda Mitchell is recommending we take your phone for examination, in case the person(s) has installed spyware without your knowledge.

  Let me know a good time to arrange a meeting in the station. We imagine initial examination of the device shouldn’t take longer than a day. In the meantime, keep up with the advised security measures.

  Kind regards,

  Detective Bríd Nolan

  Shelly knew she should be relieved that the guards were taking this seriously but equally their official-sounding email was scary. VPNs and spyware made @__________ seem even more threatening. Had she really thought @__________ would just disappear back into the shadows? That a person with the drive to gather all these photos and lie in wait for so long would just give up so easily? Shelly picked at her nails, worrying a little bit of cuticle skin.

  The taxi driver had started up about some other Insta girl but Shelly wasn’t paying attention – a plan was coming into focus. She needed to appease @__________, keep them happy and do what they asked – at least until Bríd and this Mitchell guy came back with an update on the phone. She couldn’t take a pile-on like the one Ali Jones was under. She also couldn’t bear the thought of Georgie one day reading that her mother had FaceFixed her sweet little baby face. She couldn’t risk it. She clicked into Insta and found the last few messages from @__________ demanding updates. An outfit of the day should do.

  ‘We’re going right down here, is it?’ The taxi man glanced back at her.

  ‘Yep, you can leave me anywhere here.’ Shelly began gathering her bits. She was early but she could hang back a minute and get this post out. Luckily, the weather had cheered up. She handed over the fare, did a quick pic with the driver for his ‘young one’ and hopped out.

  She uploaded an outfit of the day shot and hit Post, feeling a stab of trepidation. She’d been mostly hanging back from Insta since her video rant about how hard motherhood was. She’d been lucky that a few journalists had been quick with the hot takes lauding her ‘bravery’ in ‘lifting the filter on the struggle of millennial motherhood’, as Deborah Winters wrote on Notions.ie. Ironically, Hazel seemed to have suffered most for being less than supportive. It didn’t go down well when she appeared on TV in the immediate aftermath apparently eager to chastise her fellow mumfluencer. Not very #WomenSupportingWomen of her.

  Shelly watched the phone tensely, flicking down on the screen to refresh the post. Here they come. Likes and comments were cascading in and Shelly exhaled, relieved.

  @RamonaT: Lookin stun, where’s the blazer from?

  @HeathersPix: Yay you’re back, we missed you

  @OrlaLuvs: So happy to have you back on. Screw those haterz, Shelly you were SET UP. We know it was a witch hunt.

  Hmmm, it’d be better if they didn’t keep bringing the video rant up but at least, so far so good, everyone was being supportive.

  @MaireNicAnBhord: Yay looking GORGE, hope @HolisticHazel sees this and knows she won’t be tearing you down ever again. The #Shell-Belles will see to that.

  Uh oh, Christ. @MaireNicAnBhord was a bit intense.

  Shelly fired off a rapid response:

  @ShellyDevine: @MaireNicAnBhord you are so sweet to defend me but honestly me and @HolisticHazel are total #bffs, we’re on a #MamasNightOut this very second.

  Hopefully some storying with Hazel and Polly tonight would quell any rumours of trouble in the Insta-mum camp.

  She checked her lipstick and headed into The Landing.

  ‘Shelly!!!’ Alan, the maître’d, was ecstatic. ‘Good to see you out!’

  Oh God, ‘good to see you out’ was basically Irish for ‘good to see you out when you probably shouldn’t be’.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve been taking it easy with the little bump here.’ She placed a perfectly manicured hand over her teeny belly, daring him to so much as mention the recent video scandal.

  ‘Now that’s a legit bump there, Shelly!’ He winked. ‘You’re not another wan getting “pegnant” for the ’gram. Mad stuff altogether.’ He led the way through the busy and highly decorated bar – The Landing was the spot for the Insta crowd, every inch of the place the perfect Insta backdrop. As they squeezed past tables of women dressed to the nines even on a Tuesday night, Alan kept up a stream of rambling hearsay he’d apparently gleaned about Ali Jones. ‘I heard she was planning on getting out of it by faking a … well … you know.’

  ‘Alan! No!’ Shelly gasped. Poor Ali! God, the whole town was on this gossip train. ‘I know Ali and she’d never have done that. Ever. I think she just let a little thing get way out of control.’

  Even hearing herself saying that wasn’t convincing to Shelly. How, she wondered, and not for the first time, how had Ali done this? She’d seemed normal enough any of the times they’d spent together on set. How do you ‘accidentally’ lead people to believe you’re pregnant? And for nearly three months?

  ‘Now, here are my favourite MILFs in the whole wide world,’ announced Alan as they arrived at the large banquette where Hazel and Polly were both engrossed in their phones. Hazel was rocking her usual Gwyneth Paltrow homage, a well-judged tan, pale floaty slip dress, her blonde hair braided intricately around her head and studded with rose quartz. Polly, on the other hand, was draped in a uniform of various beiges with suede knee-high boots and a tan only a few shades lighter than her glossy brown hair.

  ‘You’re not ready for my mama jelly, Alan.’ Hazel giggled, looking up coquettishly.

  Yuck! Shelly grimaced, but Alan was happy to play along gamely. That was his job, after all.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. If I wasn’t betrothed to himself at home, I think I’d take a shot – a mama jello shot.’

  Shelly slid in, giving Polly and Hazel pecks on the cheeks. As Alan headed back to his spot by the hallway, she wondered how he put up with all the schmoozing. He must go home to ‘himself’ just utterly fed up with it all.

  ‘Right, group selfie,’ Hazel announced, and Polly and Shelly obediently leaned in on either side of her. The miniature ring light mounted on the phone was blinding but when Hazel tagged her in the pic a few moments later, they looked amazing. All white teeth, glowing tans, tasteful extensions and delicate rose-gold jewellery.

  ‘Don’t forget the #MamasNightOut.’ Hazel seemed even more het up than usual as she clapped her hands together to call the night to order. ‘First things first: Shelly, well done on the first post in a week. I’m glad you’re back. Maybe now you’re active again the Shell-Belles will back the fuck off. My mentions are a goddamn mess. We need to pull back togeth
er. I don’t want anymore “think pieces” from Deborah Winters on why Instagram is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with female friendships, thank you very much.’

  Shelly and Polly exchanged a look, the tail end of which Hazel caught.

  ‘You two can pretend that I’m the hysterical maniac all you want but this stuff matters. This is our livelihood. We have taken a serious hit with this Ali Jones crap. Holly from GHM agreed to meet with me and Jenny for a tête à tête and she was kind enough to appraise me of some of the sentiment floating around the agencies and marketing departments. The vibe is that some of the recent public debacles have seriously damaged the credibility of the influencer in the eyes of some of the more prestigious brands. Shelly, I know you’re fannying about pretending that you “want out” or whatever, but you need to cop on, you can’t quit in a blaze of viral rants and some wayward girl who, whether you like it or not, has some connection to you – you won’t get acting gigs as a washed-up influencer.’

  God, she’s really off on one, Shelly thought darkly.

  ‘I haven’t even ordered a drink yet, Hazel. Can we take it down a notch?’

  Hazel picked up her phone, still glaring at Shelly, held her thumb over the voicenote key and spoke into it:

  ‘Alan, we need a non-alcoholic prosecco for Shelly.’

  ‘Alan’s a lovely guy,’ Polly offered quietly, but Hazel ploughed on, barely listening to her.

  ‘Gals, I’m afraid there’s worse to come.’ She paused as the waitress came to set Shelly’s raspberry-topped faux-secco down. They all smiled tightly – you always had to be aware of being watched when you were high profile. Shelly murmured her thanks and the girl slipped away – probably to tell her co-workers just who was sitting in the back booth. ‘Quick boomer for the ’gram,’ Hazel hissed.

  They picked up their glasses, Hazel held her phone high above to capture the best angle and Polly counted them in.