‘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 human 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 onDurty Aul’ Townand 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!’
Ali posted the video to her Stories and headed for the kitchen.
2
Liv was eating toast and frantically highlighting her notes when Ali slumped into the cramped kitchen. It was a heavily linoed space. Liv’s granny had apparently liked her orange faux-tile lino so much she’d not only covered the floor and backsplash with it but also the chair seats.
