She sent Kate a voicenote with directions for where to find her and pulled out her laptop. She’d spent the weekend replying to the PRs offering money for branded content, setting up meetings and feverishly researching the ‘mumfluencer’ thing. Just what the hell did they do? How much was too much? A browse on the hashtag ‘bumpjourney’ quickly told her nothing was off-limits.
She marvelled at how lucrative kids-as-content seemed to be. Insta-mums at Disneyland and on cruises, snaps showing improbably perfect houses filled with improbably perfect children. Here was an English Insta-mum in her exquisite bathroom in Somerset bathing her baby in a claw-footed bath of milk infused with Earl Grey and lavender sponsored by Twinings. Jaysus, thought Ali. Further investigation uncovered only more bonkers iterations of the same pristine and perfect scenes of motherland.
She knew she needed to be smart about this bump thing. It had to play out perfectly. Not a single scrap of bump content could be squandered. After her little fact-finding mission, she realised that every step of the #bumpjourney had to be engineered to within an inch of its life. At least not actually being pregnant would make all this considerably easier, thought Ali, observing the #bumpshoot of an American mumfluencer who had arranged her artfully nude, heavily pregnant body into an aerial yoga pose. Some of this shit would be hard enough to manage when you weren’t growing a whole other person inside you.
She brought up a Word doc and started to lay out a timeline for the next nine months. She added the date of the Glossies, Thursday, 28 March, and calculated that she’d be roughly fifteen weeks pregnant by then. A bit of image searching told her there’d be no need for bump padding at that stage. Women showed at different stages, according to BumpAndMama.com, and often first-time pregnancies wouldn’t show until five or six months. Bingo. Ali began adding other key dates, consulting the website’s month-by-month pregnancy guide – first doctor’s appointment, first scan. She was getting into the swing of this and feeling productive and excited. She couldn’t wait to do her first #bumpjourney post.
When had she last felt this good? A memory surfaced instantly. It was a memory she usually pushed away – it hurt too much to go there – but today, feeling this good, she felt safe to remember.
It was three years ago, the day she got the job onDurty Aul’ Town. She’d cycled out to her parents’ house in Seapoint. It was early May and the days were stretching, filling – it had seemed – with possibility. Their house, the house she’d grown up in, was the last in a row of five Georgian villas set down a lane below the coast road just south of the city. These houses were special, each painted a pale pastel – pale green, blue, yellow, peach and, theirs, the last in the row, dove grey. The sea was so close, waves practically lapped at the gates. All summer long, day-trippers could be heard marvelling, ‘Imagine living here,’ and that evening Ali missed it. She’d swung her bike through their gate and practically collided with Miles who was trooping barefoot down the path in just swimming shorts with a threadbare maroon towel slung over his broad tanned shoulders.
‘Hey!’ His greeting was warm and ever-so-slightly tinged with a vagueness that had become a familiar aspect of his speech. You wouldn’t notice if you didn’t know him; if Miles’s voice had not been the soundtrack to your life, you wouldn’t hear it. Ali heard it and had to suppress a flinch every time. He hugged her and then, gripping her shoulders lightly, stooped to her level, smiling, seeking her smile in return. Ali recognised this for what it was: a stalling tactic.
Miles was about fifty-seven at the time and had been diagnosed eighteen months before. In that time, he had become adept at fudging the lapses and gaps in his memory. His acting days had come back to help him play his final part: himself. She smiled back. His were the same wide, hooded brown eyes that she possessed.
‘My pal.’ He grinned. That’ll do, Ali’d thought. He knows my name – it’s just not coming this second. He’d always called her ‘pal’ or ‘Ali Pally’. ‘Coming for a dip?’
‘Yep, hang on, I’ll grab a towel.’ Ali hopped off the bike and leaned it across the gate to keep Miles from continuing on to the water. It wasn’t necessary, just a precaution. Miles had a companion for when Mini was out working, Dominique, and she was probably just inside.
Ali started back up the path, spying Dom waving at the bay window to the right of the front door. Ali waved back and headed up the stone steps and into the hall. The evening sun was still streaming into the garden at the back of the house onto which Mini had added the light-filled glass cube mandatory in all south Dublin homes of the wealthy, but Ali preferred the rest of the house, which had mostly retained its unruly, slightly wonky floorboards and mildly maritime mood.
As a kid, crouched at the base of the large bay windows on either side of the front door, you couldn’t even see the front garden or the narrow road in front of the house, and Ali had pretended to steer the house over choppy seas to the tongue of land across the bay. On this evening, Ali had crouched in the fading glow of the hall, rooting through the trunk by the foot of the stairs. She’d grabbed a rough, cardboardy towel, pulled her jersey dress – under which she wore her togs – off over her head and hung it on the end of the banisters. She kicked off her trainers and headed back out the door towards the sea and sky.
She and Miles had swum a lazy, companionable breaststroke out to the far buoy and back. It was amazing that Miles still seemed so confident in the water. He no longer drove or cooked, he couldn’t deal with the Sky box at all, he asked the same questions over and over, but every day of the year he still planted his feet firmly on a smooth flat rock that Ali – and the others on the terrace – called Miles’s Rock. He paused to absorb the moment, raised his arms to make a V, bent his knees and bowed his head.
Ali didn’t like to wonder about how frightened he really must be. What happened when everything became unmoored inside your head? What did it feel like to scrabble after your thoughts and memories as they fled in every direction? And the harder you tried to grasp it, the harder it was to hold on to your life. It was so unfair. When Miles dove in to the sea he seemed at home, for a while at least.
Ali told him about the new job and Miles even fetched up some stories from his theatre years, when he’d acted with people who’d gone on to be the biggest names in Ireland’s entertainment industry. He knew one of the older actors onDurty Aul’ Town, and though he didn’t get his name, he did remember a funny story about how, when they were young, the guy had been in a show and had stolen the toaster and kettle from the props department every night to bring to his bedsit and then brought them back into work every morning.
After the swim, they’d gone in to eat and then Ali buzzed home, leaving Miles safe with Dom until Mini got back. It was a perfect night. Nothing had happened, as such, but those were the good days, as Ali learned later. The days we ignore will be some of our happiest, Ali had realised, since life had become considerably more eventful and more painful. She hated thinking about that day for a whole host of thorny reasons. Revisiting it was like plunging a hand into brambles. She felt bad for being impatient with Miles’s searching for words, getting names wrong as they chatted, for not staying and helping him to bed, for being too scared to deal with the reality of their situation, for leaving it to Dom. For the fact that they had Dom in the first place. She should’ve moved home and been the one to take care of Miles. But trying to sort through the regrets was pointless. Ali emerged from the memory, swallowing hard to combat the tears that threatened.
Good things, Ali, think of good things. She picked up her phone to check on her still-growing following. As she flicked over the notifications, each little heart and new follower felt like a little hit of joy pulling her back to the present and easing the ache inside.
‘Ali!’ Kate flung open the door of the prefab. ‘You dark horse, or should I say broodmare!’ She leapt over, her long brown curls bouncing, to give Ali a hug and a kiss. Then she flung herself into the neighbouring chair. ‘I cannot believe you told Instagram before you told me. Well, actually, maybe I can.’ She giggled. ‘How many followers are you on now?’
Ali, grinning, handed over her phone.
‘Oh you fucking betch.’ Kate’s green eyes widened. Her lashes were so long Ali could practically hear them rustling when she blinked. ‘This is deadly. I am so glad you called. I’ve picked up so much working at Keane Eye and with launching @ShreddingForTheWedding. First things first, we need to brand this fucker. I hope you don’t mind me saying, the pregnancy announcement was a bit haphazard.’
Ali nodded regretfully as Kate carried on sternly. ‘There’s no more room for sloppiness. Marian Keane’s first rule of branding is don’t play in someone else’s backyard. This pregnancy journey has to stand out and be uniquely yours. Any thoughts on a hashtag? You need something catchy. And maybe change your handle to reflect the new direction your Insta’s taking – at work we always advise clients to do that.
‘Well,’ Ali consulted her notes from the weekend, ‘Shelly used #ShellysBelly during her first pregnancy. It’s pretty good – sounds kind of cute and cosy, relatable. I was thinking Ali’s Pally? Or Ali’s Little Pally?’
‘Booze to Bump?’ Kate offered, winking. ‘God, no drinking for nine months. And a baby at the end. It’s mad, isn’t it? I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone.’
‘Well, it was just a hook-up.’ Ali was uncomfortable – it was the first time she’d had to lie directly to someone. ‘Nothing goes with “Ali”,’ she moaned, to change the subject.
‘Muhammad Ali? Momma Ali? Would anyone get the reference?’ Kate wondered. ‘Does the reference even make any sense?’
‘Ali or Nothing? Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? I’m just typing random words now.’
‘Wait! Ali Baba. Ali’s Baba! It’s perfect. #AlisBaba! Ali’s Baba and the 40 Weeks.’ Kate clapped her hands.
‘Yesss.’ Ali deleted the dross and retitled the doc ‘Ali’s Baba’.
‘Nailed it.’ Kate grinned. ‘So have you told your mum?’
‘Eh no, she’s very busy with work so I might leave it a while.’ Ali tried to look busy, flicking through the open tabs on her browser.
