The Cows Read online

  ‘I think maybe you thought she was busy?’ I say, convincingly. I’m not letting her do this to Annie, it’s really cruel.

  ‘Trudy, would you like Annie at your party?’ I ask, reaching for the big guns.

  ‘Yay!’ Trudy shouts, with pure joy on her face. Annie also lights up. I look at Trudy’s mum with persuasive eyes that leave her no choice but to cave. She leans in to me, while Trudy and Annie try to hear what she says.

  ‘I think you need to know that Annie has been saying inappropriate things to Trudy. I don’t know what goes on in your home but I do not like it when my daughter comes home and asks me what a pervert is because her friend has told her that her mummy knows one.’

  A lump forms in my throat. Annie’s being pushed out of her social group because of me? That’s a nice big mother’s guilt pill for me to choke on.

  ‘Look, she’s obviously heard me on the phone talking about a programme I’m making about sexual harassment. I can assure you there is nothing untoward happening in our house. There are no perverts. In fact, I couldn’t even tell you the last time a man came round. So, there you go, now you know about my job and my sex life. Now, Verity, can Annie come to the party or not?’

  My job has trained me to ask for what I want. You don’t get much from someone you are interviewing if you don’t ask them questions.

  Verity makes a strained ‘for God’s sake’ face as she covers Trudy’s ears in case I say anything else appalling. She then lets out a big, over-the-top huff. Annie, Trudy and I all stare at her, waiting for an answer.

  ‘Come on, Verity,’ I say. ‘I’ll speak to Annie about what she heard and I’ll be more careful with my work calls. Please, don’t take this out on her.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ she says, buckling. ‘Disney. One till three.’ She snatches Trudy’s hand and pulls her away. ‘And my name is Amanda, not Verity.’

  Wow, I was way off. God, not even close.

  ‘There you go,’ I say, kneeling back down to Annie. ‘It’s all fine, she just didn’t realise how much you wanted to go. Happy now?’

  ‘Yes. I need a costume,’ she says, sweetly, and a little piece of me dies as I realise I now have to work out what she’s going to wear. ‘Can I be a princess?’

  I stand up and take her hand as we walk back to the car.

  ‘What did I say about girls being princesses? Remember?’

  ‘You said that little girls don’t have to be princesses.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s what all the other little girls will do, so we should do something different, right?’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘That’s my girl!’

  ‘Mummy,’ she says as I strap her into the car, ‘what’s a sex life?’

  OK, I really need to watch my mouth.

  Cam

  ‘OK, love, that’s all the shelves up,’ says Cam’s dad, coming out of her bedroom. She’s sitting in the window seat of her gorgeous new flat, wondering where to put the chaise longue she found on eBay that just got delivered. ‘Need anything else before I go?’

  ‘No thanks, Dad. That’s it.’ She looks at him lovingly. ‘It doesn’t matter how grown up I am, I’ll always need my dad to come and put my shelves up for me, won’t I?’

  ‘I hope so. Even if you don’t, you always have to pretend you still need me, OK?’ he says, going over to her for a cuddle. They both know Cam is as good at DIY as he is. Her asking him to help is always for his benefit, not hers.

  ‘I’m so proud of you, Camilla. I worked all my life and I’m not sure I ever achieved as much as you have.’

  ‘You kept four daughters alive, Dad. I’d say that was a pretty big achievement.’

  ‘Yup, my life certainly became about you guys, that’s for sure.’

  Cam looks at him sympathetically. She’s always been so tuned-in with her dad, much more than her siblings were. Before Tanya was born, the oldest of Cam’s three sisters, he worked as a comedy promoter all over the country. It wasn’t stable work, and involved lots of late nights that didn’t work well with a baby, so he quit. Not really being qualified in anything, he got a job in a local school as a caretaker, and was there until he retired four years ago. He never enjoyed it; it was uncreative, hard and demanding. But he stuck with it, because he’s a great dad, and that’s the kind of sacrifice people make when they have kids.

  ‘I always told you that success is just being happy, didn’t I?’ he says. ‘People put too much emphasis on it being about money. I was never rich, but you guys were all healthy and happy and no matter what I ended up having to do during the day, coming home to that made me feel like the wealthiest man alive.’

  ‘Yup, you always said that,’ Cam says. She knows he doesn’t really mean it. If it had been down to him, he’d have carried on promoting comedy and they’d all have made do. But Cam’s mum wanted stability, and her dad is a good enough guy not to argue with that. ‘But I fucking love being rich,’ she says, giving him a gentle dig in the ribs.

  They both laugh.

  ‘Don’t let your mum hear you use that language,’ he says, and of course she never would. Cam and her dad have always shared the same sense of humour and a mutual understanding. He’s the only person in her family who doesn’t question her choices, and she’s desperately in love with him because of that.

  ‘You were always different from the others, Camilla. You stuck to your guns, never tried to be what people expected of you. I’m proud of you, kid.’

  ‘Jesus, Dad! Will you stop. I’ve just moved in, no tears are allowed in this flat, even happy ones.’ They hug again. Before she pulls away she whispers in his ear, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What are you thanking me for? You did this all by yourself.’

  ‘I did, yes. But because you always encouraged me to be myself. I’m not like the other girls, and you let me work out how to be happy my own way.’

  ‘I had no choice. There was no other way you could be,’ he says, as he leaves their embrace and heads for the door. ‘Call me if you need anything else doing, OK?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And don’t have any boys round.’

  ‘Oh, Dad! OK, go. Mum will shout at you for being late for dinner. I love you. Bye.’

  Cam pushes him out of the door. ‘Careful on the stairs,’ she says as she closes it, and leans back against it when it’s shut. Looking around her flat, she lets a huge smile creep across her face. A 1.2 million, two-bedroom, Victorian flat in Highgate, with views across London. She’s sourced furniture from the period the house was built, and she’s mixing that with huge pieces of bold, modern art. It’s bright, beautiful and all hers. It’s in an area of London people only dream of living in. She can’t believe it.

  Falling back onto the pea green, Victorian-style chaise longue, she reaches for her laptop and rests it on her thighs. Opening HowItIs.com, she gloats at what it has become. It not only earns her in the region of £20,000 a month in advertising revenue, but it also earns her notoriety, an audience. It gives her a voice. Cam was never great with people, but she always had a lot to say. This unfortunate mix made school tough going; someone with a head full of thoughts but no outlet for them tends to think too much and say too little. In her case, this personified itself as social awkwardness that other kids saw no fun in, so she inevitably became bit of a loner. Until the Internet burst onto the scene in her early twenties and she finally had a way to show the world who she really was, a chance to express herself without the pressure of social interaction. It completely changed her life.

  There are boxes stacked up along the walls, and the TV is still in the box on the floor. Her Internet won’t be connected for a few days, so she’s using a dongle, meaning she’ll never be anywhere she can’t blog from. This commitment to her output is what’s made her what she is.

  As one of the first successful lifestyle bloggers, she has held her place as the ‘go-to destination for straight-talking women’. Or so said The Times in their list of ‘what’s hot for the year ahead’. �
�The Cam Stacey seal of approval is what every woman wants …’ (Guardian, Jan 2016). With nearly two million subscribers and eight major advertisers signed up, she is raking in the pennies and clawing in the love. But that isn’t to say she doesn’t have to be careful. Blogging is a dangerous game, especially if you’re talking about women and being as outspoken as Cam so often is. Women want role models; they get behind high-profile females who pave the way for forward thinkers and they hail them as heroes, but if they drop the ball, say the wrong thing or talk a little too controversially, they get thrown to the lions.

  It happened to a friend of hers last year. A lovely woman, Kate Squires. She wrote about being a working mum, with a high-powered job in a PR firm, and became a real inspiration, with nearly 50,000 Twitter followers. Working mums everywhere looked to Kate for positive inspiration on how to ‘juggle’ the work–life balance, but then one day she fucked it all up with one little tweet. One silly little tweet that changed the course of her life.

  Women without kids, u just don’t understand how hard it is to get home & have to look after something other than yourself. #NeedMeTime

  The infertile population of the planet came out in their droves. Kate had personally offended every woman with reproductive issues on Twitter and beyond. What she had said was so hurtful that The Times covered a story of one woman who, after three miscarriages, tried to commit suicide after reading Kate’s tweet. ‘It just struck me when I was so, so down,’ she’d said. ‘I felt like society was telling me I have no value as a woman because I can’t have kids.’

  People were right to be offended – it was an insensitive thing to say, but did she deserve an online hate campaign and the succession of terrible things that happened next? Cam followed the case with sympathy but a sharper eye on what she could learn. That tightrope between leading the social commentary and following it is hard to walk. It takes focus, planning and careful attention to detail not to fall off when you live in a world where 140 characters could ruin your life.

  Kate wrote the customary, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, I just had a really hard day,’ tweet, but it didn’t do any good. She went on Loose Women and made some heartfelt but slightly pathetic apology wearing a floral dress and batting her best Princess Diana eyes. On leaving the studio, she was confronted by campaigners with placards saying ‘NON-MOTHERS HAVE FEELINGS TOO’. This was televised on almost every news channel and Kate’s image was branded as the face of society’s issues with childless women. She appealed to be forgiven, but social media just couldn’t do it. Within weeks, she was offline and out of sight. Her PR firm sacked her, saying it was impossible to have someone with a public image like Kate’s representing them. She’s now out of work and struggling to get a job, her husband left her because she went so nuts, and she lives in a small flat in south London as opposed to her big house in Penge. Kate barely answers the phone; Cam hasn’t spoken to her for months. Her whole life turned upside down because of one sleepy little tweet.

  Cam watched and learned.

  She’s managed to find that careful balance of pushing boundaries, being brave, but not offending. Of course she gets the occasional knob who hates her, but she’s generally strong enough to ignore those. She’s often the target of more conservative feminists who seem to think her attitude to sex is why so many men sexually abuse women, but Cam’s aim is to promote the many facets of modern feminism, and pissing off ‘The Traditionalists’ is just a part of that. Even the rape threats she got after writing quite a punchy piece about Bill Cosby didn’t knock her down. It would take a lot more for someone to turn up at her door and physically assault her than it does for them to tweet, ‘I’d bend you over a car and make you sorry for saying that.’

  Most people online are full of shit. Part of survival in the digital age is to fully appreciate that, and Cam’s down with it. But women’s rights are a delicate subject. There is one fight – feminism – but there are many different types of woman, and pleasing them all is impossible.

  Just as her eyes are falling closed, she gets a text.

  This must be yours, it’s got your name on it. Want it back?

  Attached is a picture of her twenty-eight-year-old lover’s erect penis; he has written CAM around the base in felt-tip pen. She thinks of her 600-count cotton sheets and hopes that it is washable …

  bring pizza and penis x

  Suddenly, she’s not so tired.

  Stella

  ‘I’ll get the cod fritters and the lamb,’ I tell the waiter taking our order. He’s been standing there for ages, waiting for me to decide what to have. It’s my birthday, I’m allowed to be annoying. I’m also trying to kill some time; Phil is being weird and Jessica is being excitable, and I’m not really in the mood for either of them.

  ‘Sooooo, Mike and I have some news,’ says Jessica, my oldest friend, the only one who made any particular effort with me after Alice died, and didn’t make it all about her. She’s one of those rare and extraordinary people who genuinely likes herself, and doesn’t rely on affirmation from pretend friends. She’s sweet, but her energy levels are challenging. Phil doesn’t understand why I haven’t told her what I’m going through, why he alone is shouldering the knowledge of my family legacy. But it’s not straightforward with Jessica; she’s never experienced trauma. She’s a good friend because she’s loyal, but trying to talk to her about my life makes me feel like the most fucked-up person of all time. What is the point in sharing your pain with someone who can’t empathise anyway? One of the reasons I got together with Phil was because his dad died when he was fourteen. Something in his tragedy allowed me to open up about mine. And anyway, he’s my boyfriend, it’s his job to take the burden of my problems. The only thing Jessica and I really have in common is history, but as Phil so often says, I should have at least one female friend, so here I am, about to hear her announcement.

  Phil stiffens and goes to leave the table, but I put my hand on his knee and make him stay. I need him to stay. Whether we are falling apart or not, he is my partner, and I need a partner. One person by my side. I’m not enough on my own.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Jessica bursts, as if we didn’t know what it means when a newlywed says she ‘has some news’. She’s so happy, it’s oozing out of her. I know I can be a real bitch in situations where people around me express joy, so I try not to do that to Jessica; she doesn’t deserve it.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I say, leaning across the table and taking her hand in some weird, regal way. ‘When are you due?’ I ask, doing my best not to look jealous.

  ‘January 1st. I bet it comes New Year’s Eve, the party animal,’ she says, snuggling up to Mike, who is also incredibly nice if quite boring. He is smiling, looking happy as anything with his new wife and embryo. In contrast, Phil is playing with his fork like a six-year-old staring at an iPad. I feel the need to overcompensate for both of us, so I get up, walk around the table and give Jessica a proper hug. ‘So happy for you,’ I say, reaching over to Mike and hugging him too. ‘You’ll be the best parents.’

  ‘Thanks, we are so happy. Now hurry up you two, this little one is going to need a playmate,’ she says, beaming.

  ‘Yup, we’re on it,’ I say, a little too enthusiastically. Phil drops the fork and starts reading the menu, even though we have already ordered. He used to be so sociable, so upbeat. It’s what attracted me to him. I need that person by me, someone more flamboyant, more attractive to others, more sociable. It’s how Alice was. Her social skills made us the most popular girls in school. Everyone wanted to hang out with the Davies Twins. But in truth, they liked the novelty of twins but only one of the set. I wasn’t a good friend to people like Alice was. My spiky nature didn’t draw them in like her warmth did. Without her, I would never have been popular. When she died, it didn’t take long for it to be screamingly obvious that without a more likable counterpart, no one was bothered about keeping me as a friend. Apart from Jessica, whom I keep sweet to stop Phil trying to set me up with other potent
ial girl mates, because he thinks that is what I need.

  ‘OK, who is the birthday girl?’ says the waiter, coming back to the table. He’s carrying a bottle of champagne and four glasses.

  ‘That’ll be that one,’ says Mike, pointing at me. Jessica grins at him.

  ‘Wow, champagne? Thanks,’ I say, rubbing Phil’s leg. He hasn’t done anything like this in a while. Romantic gestures used to be quite normal.

  ‘No, what?’ he says, looking concerned. ‘We didn’t order this?’

  ‘No you did not! A “Jason Scott” called the bar and asked us to bring this over,’ the waiter says, clarifying. I feel myself blush a little, I’m not sure why.

  ‘Ooooooh, that’s so sweet,’ says Jessica. ‘Maybe I’m allowed a tiny glass?’ she says, looking to Mike for approval. He nods, and the waiter starts to pour. ‘So, is Jason still as dreamy as ever?’ Jessica asks.

  ‘Ha!’ I say, genuinely touched by the gesture; a little gobsmacked, if I’m honest. ‘Yeah, he’s still pretty dreamy. But no, weird, he’s my boss. And I’ve only got eyes for Phil. Cheers.’ I hold up my glass, but only two join it in the air. A huge screech fills the restaurant as Phil scrapes his chair back and stands up.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, realising he caused a scene. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ He walks off quickly towards the toilets, and I sit alone with Jessica and Mike, trying to pretend like everything is normal.

  Tara

  ‘I’ll come pick you up by noon tomorrow,’ I say to Annie, kissing her goodbye.

  ‘Come any time, we’ll take the dog out in the morning and have bacon and eggs,’ says Mum. She’s so brilliant, despite finding my choices and lifestyle almost impossible to think about. She’s so desperate for me to find a father figure for Annie that she has agreed to have her every Friday night so that I can go on dates. ‘Just don’t tell your father about this,’ she tells me every week as I leave the house. ‘You know he can’t bear to think of you with boys. The fact you got pregnant as you did, well, it nearly killed him. You proved all fathers right!’