Much earlier on in our friendship, she’d used this to pretty unsettling effect, while we were three sheets to the wind on the good ship Bacardi Breezer.
‘It’s always going to be hard for girls like us– girls with all thisbaggagefrom the past,’ she slurred, deep in philosophicalmode. ‘We’ll always find it hard to outrun our pasts.’ Her ‘past’ meant being the only girl in her entire boarding school without a pony. As for mine… well. She soon realized better than to say it again.
These casual assassinations aside, I like Brigitte a lot, but Facebook Brigitte is a person who is entirely at odds with the quite nice and generally sane person who sits down next to you. Not a single thought goes through Brigitte’s mind that doesn’t end up out there on Facey for the delectation of her 253 friends.
‘Even when things are happening to me in real time, I’m still working out how I’m going to word it in a status update afterwards,’ she admitted once, over a 3 a.m. bag of chips that miraculously missed its chance for an afterlife on her Facebook wall.
There are selfies from nightclub toilets, the canteen at work, a walk in Victoria Park. And here, on a quiet weeknight in a Hackney bar, I see Brigitte’s arm extend at that familiar jaunty angle, aimed right at us. She instantly perks up, shoulders back.
‘Please don’t put that on Facebook, Bee, I’m begging you now,’ I tell her. She waves the resulting photo under my nose, just long enough to notice that I’m sweaty and spuddy and she is luminous and Hepburn-like.
‘My eyes aren’t even bloody well open in that one,’ I protest.
‘Stop it, you’re a total babe,’ she counters, fingers working a mile a minute to post it publicly before I know what’s what.
Brigitte has recently Facebook-friended her ex-boyfriend Miles, and likes every single photo that he posts of his three young children. The Vaguebooking is near-constant.
‘Sad when you let a really good thing go when ur young and stupid, only to realize that so very long after the fact, amirite?’ she posted in a status update yesterday. Miles didn’t ‘like’ the post, but several of her sort-of friends do.
In any case, my friendships with Brigitte and Carrie have endured, needing only the odd lick of paint. It’s not that we’re platonic soulmates, despite what it might look like online. More likely it’s a case of being not-lonely together, or keeping out of the jaws of the city.
When I arrive home from Hackney, Johnny is completely into, and I meanbeatinto, a documentary on steam trains.
‘We need to do something with this place,’ I say, my hand sweeping over the beige non-grandeur of the flat. I always wanted to be a person who lived in a curated space full of Dyptique candles, artisanal food and things bought in art gallery gift shops. Instead, my eyes fall on pizza boxes and tea towels that look like they’ve been to war.
‘What you mean?’ goes he.
I kick the MDF coffee table, which makes the exact sound you think it would. ‘I dunno. De-Ikea the place a bit. Or, at the very least, de-Argos it. It’s like the staffroom of a bloody insurance company in here.’
‘What with.’ He doesn’t take his eyes off the trains. I notice the statement, and the lack of question.
‘Just a nicer TV cabinet, bookshelves… I mean, look at this thing.’ I smack the black pleather sofa. ‘I saw this cool reading chair—’
‘Yeah, I mean,’ he cuts me off, rubbing his fingers together in the universal sign for money.
Neither of us wants to acknowledge the £12,000, an inheritance from a grand-uncle I barely knew. It’s in my savings account, but we’ve talked about it and this is verymuchourmoney. It has been our ‘Just in Case We Need It for a Baby’ money, but the ‘just in case’ has now changed into something else. Neither of us will say it: buying a nicer bookcase with it would be tantamount to an admission of defeat.
‘Jesus, just buy a rug, yeah?’ Johnny says, still not taking his eyes off the trains. I stand there, not wanting the conversation to be over, but knowing anyway that it is.
The following afternoon, in dire need of some sort of existential fortifying, I sit in the nearby park and look at my own Facebook page and try to appraise what exactly it says to everyone else about me.
The profile picture is of Johnny and me, taken on a shorefront I don’t remember. If you didn’t know us, the way our heads are positioned might make you think we fit well together. Below it are a dozen variations of ‘gorgeous couple, swit swoo’ comments. There’s another picture there of the Gherkin building, which I very poetically captioned ‘View on the way to work’. There’s a photo album from the V Festival, in which Johnny and I appear to have well over a dozen friends in our company. In truth, we fell in with a heap of randomers from Sheffield about twenty minutes before the photo was taken. If you didn’t know Johnny, you might see the turn of his head in this photo as a cocky pose, but I know that he’s trying to evade the camera, reserved even in front of the lens of a stranger’s phone. Only a few of us could tell you that he’d much rather be at home than there with people he doesn’t know.
Maybe you’d look at my Facebook profile and think that life has turned out exactly as it was meant to for me. But the disquiet remains. The itch. The feeling I’m not quite doing life right.
3
With the arrival of baby Atticus Stax Burnley, a baby brother for Barnaby and Cosima, Francesca is finally on maternity leave and now deep into her My Three life. Beyond blessed, besotted, madly in love, head over heels. The desk across from me both a relief and an absence. On Facebook, she runs out of ways to describe her euphoria, although Christ alive, it is not for the want of trying. Francesca chucks enough cutesy emojis on to her Facebook wall to constitute actual graffiti.
If Francesca were to appear onMastermind, her specialist subjects would be:
‘I’m one new dental floss regime away from having a total nervous breakdown!’
Holidaying at Center Parcs
Her first kid
Her second kid
