Eventually I picked up my phone again and I automatically navigated my way to Mrs Clean’s account, where I looked at her most recent post. It was an image of a perfect patch of artificial grass with a small neat path next to it that I presumed led back to the house. Just to the right was a shot of the pop-up greenhouse she had been gifted. It was fairly extravagant and almost the size of a full greenhouse. I pressed the tag of the company who had gifted it to her, and it took me through to their profile page. On their personal info was their website. I hit the link and found myself navigating my way to their pop-up greenhouses. There was quite a range, but I soon found the one that Mrs Clean had been gifted, which was almost a hundred pounds; a luxury for many. A memory drifted through of growing seedlings on my windowsills as a child. The look of pure joy on my mother’s face when I showed her the first sprouts of life that were bursting through the soil. As an only child, I never had to fight for her attention.
I had been pushing these sorts of images away, but just recently, something had begun to shift, I had begun to allow myself to ponder over a few memories. In the same way I had begun to assess myself and my feelings whenever Will was around.
I scrolled through the comments on the post and I saw another comment from lucybest65. There she was, moaning again about something that Mrs Clean was doing. I didn’t understand why people followed an influencer, only to criticise them constantly.
Knowing that we could be kindred spirits was one of the reasons I looked forward to seeing Mrs Clean’s posts. I felt a flutter of excitement whenever I saw she had posted something new, and this was something I had not felt for so long, but Lucy’s comments were marring the whole experience.
I thought once more about leaving a comment, something nice. Maybe she would notice it and comment back, but I didn’t bother. I thought again about us as friends. Perhaps if I privately messaged her, told her how inspired I was by her work, she might message me back and we could strike up a rapport. But she had over one million followers. Why would she possibly answer my message? I stood up and went back to my work. I stooped down and began placing all the pans back into the clean, freshly wiped cupboard. They had been filthy, covered in crumbs and grease with pans and pots falling over one another. Once I had them all back in, there was so much more room. I stood back to admire my work.
‘You did a good job there.’ I swung round with force, my heart suddenly beating in my mouth as my body so easily defaulted into flight-or-fight mode.
Steve was leaning against the door frame.
‘How long have you been there?’ Panic rose in my throat as I thought back to how I had spent the last few hours, where I had presumed I was alone.
‘Not long.’ He stretched and yawned. He was wearing a white vest and it rose up a little, revealing a little flurry of hair around his navel. I averted my eyes immediately. ‘I just woke up.’
So he had been in the house for some time. I paid what some might consider to be an extortionate amount of rent every month to live here, and I couldn’t even feel relaxed in my own surroundings.
‘Fancy a cuppa?’ Steve walked over to the kettle, stopped and looked down at me crouched by the pan cupboard. ‘Crouching tiger, hidden dragon.’ He put his hands out and stood statue still. Then he broke into a laugh; it was the first time I had seen him make a joke with me when the others weren’t around. He had a short, hollow laugh. I stood up and headed over to the table to retrieve my phone.
‘Regi, I—’ Steve began to speak, but the panic was raging through my body.
‘Enjoy your tea,’ I cut him off as I left the room.
Upstairs, I threw my phone on the bed and locked and unlocked the door, then ended on a lock. I paced the room for a few minutes, knowing I needed to confront Karen, but thinking about the way she looked at me the night of the party when Steve sought me out in the summerhouse, I wasn’t so sure there would be a good time. I was drunk that night, but one of the last things I remember, even through the darkness of the garden, was her penetrating stare.
I stripped my bed and remade it with the clean sheets in a pile by my drawers. Still, the strain in my chest wouldn’t shift, so I opened my phone and navigated my way to Instagram. It was a relief to see that Mrs Clean had posted a story since I had looked a moment ago downstairs. The calm washed over me.
It was a video of her ragdoll cat. She was stroking it with a brush that she wore on her hand like a mitt. The cat was purring loudly. But underneath that I could hear her breath, small and shallow, just out of sync with the cat.
To hear her breath made me feel her realness and humanness even more. But I couldn’t just reach through the screen and touch her or talk to her. The injustice of this app was infuriating.
We could be friends, I was sure of it.
I was thrust away from my thoughts and scrolling by a knock on my bedroom door. After my series of unlocking, I found Karen on the other side, unable to conceal her annoyance.
‘Hi.’ The tension was fierce in her throat. I stood back to let her in, but she remained in the doorway. ‘I
