Bobby launches himself onto her torso, wraps his arms around her neck and gives her the most nourishing cuddle she’s ever had. The noise of Raf storming round the kitchen telling Grace how this whole situation is her fault, how she’s failed her duty of care, how he’s going to pick up the pieces, melts away. Bobby moves his head from side to side so his furry angel-hair tickles her chin and she thinks to herself that this, this bundle of pudge pawing at her face with his clammy hands, that this is enough. She’s spent her whole life wanting to be busy, wanting to be in demand, but the reality is that it’s awful. In the last few months, with notifications and emails constantly pinging, everyone looking at her, judging her, wanting something from her, she’s never felt more anxious in her life.
She glances round at Raf stood in the corner of their kitchen, legs twined around each other, listening, face crinkled in measured disdain. He’s trying to save her. He’s trying to smooth things out for her and make things easier like he’s always done, because he’s right. She can’t cope. She isn’t coping with what’s going on. He’s been right all along. She squeezes Bobby into her, almost too hard so he fidgets away. He smiles up at her and she laughs. She doesn’t need the love of tens of thousands of faceless avatars, she just needs this.
‘You’re a cowboy. Erin’s been expecting payment every single day. We need the cash that she’s been promised and we’ve had jackshit.’
‘Raf,’ Erin murmurs, still facing away, not wanting to shout and shock baby Bobby.
‘What else is your job? I mean, seriously, apart from creaming off your twenty per cent and sticking the money in your client’s account, what is your actual job?’
‘Raf, that’s enough.’ Erin stands, Bobby perched still on the side of her hip. Raf looks up at her, she extends her arm to him. ‘Let me.’ Raf listens, his face changes. He looks shocked.
‘She’s gone,’ he says.
‘Oh.’
‘I knew, from the start, I didn’t want to say it, but that woman is a piece of work.’
‘What did she say?’ She bends her head down as Bobby yanks her earlobe.
‘Well.’ He seems pleased with himself as he saunters over from the kitchen towards her. As the gap closes she gets an image of the pasta bake splattered across the tiles. He laces an arm around her hip. ‘You’re going to get paid for all the posts that you’ve already done. Pretty quick I’d say.’ He looks like he’s just beaten up a smaller schoolboy to impress his crush.
‘Great,’ she says. ‘Well done. Thanks.’
‘It’s what I’m here for,’ he says, planting a peck on Bobby’s head that causes him to hug in closer to Erin. ‘You and I don’t have to deal with money-grubbing harpies like her ever again.’ He takes her cheek in his hand and kisses the side of her head. Over his shoulder Erin can see Amanda standing in her studio, watching them.
56
Erin looks down at her ‘mum jeans’ and sees where the fingers of her right hand have scratched into the denim. She’s at the church group and Bobby’s struggling up against the pink plastic walker that’s so encrusted with dirt it reminds her of a pig rolled in mud. She stands to go and help him and notices the lightness of her pocket, the void where her phone should be. She knows she hasn’t got the willpower not to re-download Instagram so she’s let Raf hang on to it for her in exchange for an old Nokia he had at the back of a drawer. She’s heard people talk about how, if you lose your phone or it breaks, the first hour or two feel weird but then it starts to feel liberating, but Erin’s clearly further entrenched in her addiction than most people, because after two days she’s feeling the opposite of freedom. She feels edgy, like she’s had a line of coke and tried to go straight to sleep.
A dad with a lumberjack shirt and a preposterous beard laughs at something an uber-trendy older mum says to him, she might be called Ellerby. They both glance momentarily her way before falling back into conversation with each other. She didn’t want to come today, she spent all of yesterday in the house with Bobby, but Raf said he’d been up all night with him, and although he seemed fine in the morning, Erin knew that she would have to go out and find distraction for her tired boy or face a grave screamathon.
She walks over to the crumbled ‘Nice’ biscuits in the corner by the plastic jugs of squash, greeting a couple of local mums on the way. There’ve been a few snatched conversations this morning, but, and it’s not her being paranoid, there’s been a wariness in whoever she’s spoken to. Before, people would find all sorts of reasons to come and sit on a tiny plastic chair next to her, people would offer to get her tea, push their son or daughter in one of the Fisher-Price toy cars over to where Bobby is and make some comment about his Babygro or his perma-frown, in order to open up a conversation, but now, as she looks over at her boy stumbling his way to push the stroller up against a radiator, and the furtive eyes of a mum called Fran as he gets close, it seems like she’s put an
