I slumped to my door and opened and shut it six times to feed the monster that was growing rapidly this morning. Once in the corridor, I could see and smell the carnage of last night’s activities. I stepped over a beer can, then made my way slowly down the stairs past crisp packets, food debris and puddles of liquid, which I hoped was just alcohol and not where someone hadn’t made it to a bathroom in time. I headed straight to Mini’s room and knocked tentatively. She was the one who had introduced me to Instagram; she could tell me where to find the story I had been looking at last night.
There was no answer after my second knock. I was about to walk away when I heard Mini croak, ‘Yes…’
I opened the door and the smell of stale alcohol hit me. I could see Mini lying on her side on the bed, and there was a body on the other side of her, male, tall and gangly with a wiry-haired chest. Light from the hallway spilled across the bed and onto Mini’s face. She stirred, then slowly opened one eye. I stood holding my breath. As Mini registered my presence, she opened her other eye, sat up and squinted at me. She looked sheepishly across at the other side of the bed and then back at me.
‘Are you okay?’ she said in a loud whisper.
‘I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb, I thought you’d be up. It’s just I wanted to know how to find the stories on Instagram. You know, when someone posts one, I watched one last night and well this morning it’s gone.’
Mini shook her head a little. ‘I don’t know, they only last twenty-four hours, unless the host saved them in their highlights.’
‘Where would that be?’ I whispered back as the body next to her let out a loud snore and shifted in the bed. Mini looked over at him and then back at me. She picked her phone up from the bedside table and rubbed her face.
‘It’s seven fifteen, Regi.’
‘I know, sorry. I thought it was later, I fell asleep pretty early,’ I said and began to back out of the room.
‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. Look, just along the top here.’ Mini pointed at her phone and I took a few tentative steps towards the bed and stretched to look so I wasn’t too close to either of them. I could see where Mini was pointing to; just under the personal information on the personal page of the Instagram host was a row of circles, all with different titles underneath them.
‘Okay, great, thanks. Sorry to disturb.’ I took a few long steps backwards and shut the door. I heard the muffled sounds of Mini’s bed guest saying something and her soothing voice saying something back. I headed back to my room where my phone was charging still. I opened Mrs Clean’s Instagram page and looked under the personal information where Mini had shown me. There were a selection of Mrs Clean’s highlighted stories, all under different headings. I sat and watched through all thirty-six stories in the different categories, but not one of them was the story I had seen last night.
What had I seen last night? My memory of it was already fading. Many of Mrs Clean’s followers talked about how she didn’t have any children. How she presented herself as a single woman living in a house. I had always seen her house as the baby she couldn’t have. Perhaps she had guests round and someone had left a toddler-sized shoe under her bed. That had to be the only explanation. But I felt a new growing interest forming inside me. I wanted, no, needed to know more. I wanted to know her story; who she was, whether she had children but perhaps chose not to photograph them? An Instagram photo was only a moment in time; it didn’t represent someone’s entire persona or their whole life. And it was for this reason that I wanted to know more. The snippets were simply not enough for me.
I went into one of the newest photos on her feed. It was an old-fashioned radiator painted white, and a pink-Marigold-cladded hand with a cloth wiping it down. Underneath she had written about her weekend being full of spring cleaning. I started looking through the comments, to see if anyone had mentioned anything about seeing a red shoe in an Instagram story last night. There were so many – thirty thousand or so. But as I scrolled through, I began to see the odd few negative messages and the one from lucybest65 stood out.
I quickly sped through as many comments as I could and saw nothing. No one else had noticed. I remembered how I had fallen asleep clutching my phone, which could only have meant that I was looking at the story right up until I fell asleep. I must have studied it pretty hard. I doubt anyone else looked as intricately as I did, and it was only because I had looked at it so many times that I spotted it. If I wasn’t looking as much as I was, I certainly would have missed it.
Who was she? Was she a liar? A fraud? Maybe she didn’t even clean her own house and paid someone to do it for her? I was beginning to wish I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol last night as my intrigue grew. I had been given a snapshot into someone’s life and then not been given anything else. It was addictive. It made me want to keep coming back, to find out what other pieces of this woman’s life I
