Unfiltered

by Sophie White

Genres: Contemporary Romance; General Fiction

Synopsis

The sequel to bestselling novel Filter This.

(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Release date: June 18, 2020

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 336

Sample

Ali woke up in her childhood bed on the morning of her dad’s funeral with a song in her head. ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys. Memories of long-gone Saturday mornings when Miles would sing the Beach Boys as he ambled down the creaking stairs of their ramshackle three-storey Georgian villa by the sea to make rasher sandwiches drifted through her head.

Ali closed her eyes and felt a loss so vast it was like falling. What will I be without you? Even though her dad had been drifting away from them for years, his Alzheimer’s advancing at a glacial pace, in the past two years it seemed that as fast as he’d forgotten her, she’d forgotten him. Or at least she’d forgotten the Miles she’d grown up with – who he was before the vacant stare and food-stained pyjamas.

She rolled over, burying her face in the pillow, and was hit unexpectedly by a glimpse of Miles from her teens, trying to get her up for school. A wet facecloth to the face was his main method. Truly evil. She smiled into the damp pillow.

What’ll I be without you … ?

And what will I be with you? She poked her belly and sighed. Very hard to believe there was a blueberry-sized Sam–Ali mash-up cruising around in there. And, according to the pregnancy calculator she and her best friend Liv had consulted five days before, she was already almost eleven weeks along. And Sam, the father and her former, sort-of boyfriend still didn’t know. Even worse, she was pretty sure he never wanted to see her again.

Her phone buzzed under her pillow. A calendar reminder to share a #spon post about a pregnancy supplement. Awkward. She cancelled the reminder, opened the calendar and scrolled through the endless scheduled sponcon leading all the way to September and her fictional due date. Fucking hell, who has a fictional due date? Then she spotted the email notification and felt a swell of sickening anxiety. She had been ignoring all notifications in the five days since she’d been exposed as a pregnancy faker – there was a tsunami of hatred in her inbox just poised to hit her should she wish to read any of it – but this email address caught her eye: [email protected]. The subject line read: Prime Time Investigates. She gingerly tapped the message to expand it.

Ms. Jones,

David Holmes here. I am a researcher on Prime Time and was hoping to speak to you about participating in a special episode focusing on public shaming. We are keen to work with you to get your side of the story heard. To provide balance, we are also approaching some of the victims of your scheme and the creator of the below video. I know it may be a daunting prospect for you but please don’t worry, we will endeavour to present you as fairly as possible…

Ali glanced at the linked YouTube video at the bottom of the email and threw the phone to the bottom of the bed. Why the Internet Hates Ali Jones (The Full Story with Receipts!!!!) UGH. Ali groaned. She’d been staying as far from the internet as possible to avoid exactly this kind of thing.

She stared at the pale-green, glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling above her, mandatory in all teenage girls’ rooms. I am not watching it. I’m not, I’m not, even as she sat up and searched through the duvet for the phone.

It’s self-harm, Ali. Do not watch that crap.

She retrieved the phone. I’ll just skim-watch it. I need to know what they’re saying. She loaded the video. Gleeful voiceover narrated the screenshots of her Instagram account before finally settling on the picture of her in an unflattering dress that sparked an immense outpouring of congratulations about her being pregnant when she was most certainly not.

‘Ali Jones was just your average insta-nobody until she was announced as a wild card nomination at the 2019 Glossie Influencer Awards. On the day her nomination was announced, it seemed Jones had even more exciting revelations to come. An Instagram post appeared to be breadcrumbing a pregnancy reveal and when host Blake Jordan welcomed her to the stage, she made it official.’

‘That is not what happened,’ Ali hissed as footage of Blake Jordan on the stage at the Glossies WildCard launch appeared. He was holding the envelope that contained her name and keeping the audience in suspense. ‘Phew, sorry for that pregnant pause there! Though our next nominee knows all about that… Please welcome Ali Jones and her “little surprise” to the stage!’ he crowed.

Ali clearly remembered panicking as she struggled through the crowd to the stage. She had just come from her dad’s nursing home, she recalled. It had been a very bleak day. She watched herself scrambling up on stage, helped by two waiters. After she was installed on the third plinth beside the other nominees, Blake had tried to get some banter out of her but it was clear from the video she was utterly paralysed by his announcement of her supposed pregnancy.

If I could just go back to that moment… Ali knew regrets were futile but it was surreal watching the exact point when her life went into a tailspin. Of course, at the time, she was so obsessed with getting big on Instagram and trying anything – drinking, outfits of the day, getting her lips plumped – to distract herself from her dad’s horrendous decline that she didn’t immediately correct Blake. Why didn’t I just explain?

She watched as Blake clicked his fingers in front of her face to try and snap her out of her reverie.

‘You dilating, hun?!’

Here it was, Ali held her breath as the Ali on screen finally spoke, unwittingly setting in motion the events that would ultimately lead to her downfall and this very fucking real baby she was now carrying:

‘Sorry! I was just saying I’m going to double in size, LOL.’

Ugh. Ali X’d out of the video and buried her face back in her pillow.

The last few months of faking pregnancy symptoms on her Instagram to gain followers – she’d gained over 100,000 in the end – felt like a deranged fever dream. If only it had been. And now she was pregnant for real.

What on earth had she been thinking, telling everyone she was pregnant for a few followers and a shot at being named influencer of the year? Of course if it had just been strangers online that would’ve been one thing but she’d dragged Sam down with her. Every time she thought of Sam, who she had allowed to believe was the father of her fake baby, she felt a despair so profound it scared her.

God, how did it all get so fucked? A squirm of sickness in her tummy seemed to be answering her.

‘It was a rhetorical question,’ she muttered to her stomach. It was mad how utterly blindsided she’d felt when she saw the positive pregnancy test and then how quickly she’d come around to the idea. The baby was like a little beacon of promise and hope amid the dreariness of planning her dad’s funeral, being cast out by the Insta world and being publicly shamed online.

‘It must be a biological quirk.’ Liv had laughed grimly in a voicenote the night before, when Ali mentioned her growing optimism. ‘There’s no way you should be buzzing over this baby. You don’t know anything about babies. My sister says parenthood is hellish. And she’s got a husband. How’re you going to raise it?’

‘We’ll raise it together!’ Ali’d mugged, to Liv’s annoyance. ‘Or we’ll convince Sam to move in with us and we can be sister wives while he does the night feeds.’

Despite her joking, Ali knew that telling Sam was not going to be easy. She hadn’t heard from him since he’d found out that the baby that she’d claimed to be expecting with him was an elaborate Insta-sham. And he’d found out in the worst possible way, stumbling across the thesis on Instagram that Liv had been working on for her master’s. Page after page had detailed Ali’s Insta-insanity. Then her dad had died just hours later, and the world had dropped out of orbit.

In the past five days, in between disbelief at her father’s death and planning the funeral, she’d sent lengthy texts and voicenotes pleading with Sam to talk to her. And nothing. He’d blue-ticked every single one but not a word back – torture, 2019-style. Sometimes in the elaborate showdowns she waged in her head at night, she wanted to retaliate. ‘I didn’t tell you the baby was yours. You just assumed after the timing fit our botched Tinder date. And you insisted you wanted to be part of it,’ she’d go, on the defensive, then she’d hear how she sounded. Completely batshit.

Of course, everyone online thought she was completely batshit too. Screengrabs of the fateful pic she’d drunkenly posted after Blake Jordan’s announcement at the Glossies showing a positive pregnancy test had trended online in the last few days. There were even memes of it going around, the haphazard caption ‘So excited to officially announce my pegnancy’ had been ripe for mockery.

‘TFW you’re fake pregnant but too stupid to spell it right’ read one meme. Someone had even added the word ‘pegnant’ to Urban Dictionary. The definition read: ‘A dumb whore who lies about being pregnant for attention.’

Sighing, she pulled up her inbox again, deleting the one from Prime Time and scanning the hundreds of other emails. She hadn’t opened any but the subject lines were vitriolic. ‘You deserve to die’ and ‘Women like you are why victims of abuse are not believed’. The deluge of hate had been relentless. Still, coinciding, as it did, with the death of her father had given Ali a sharp shock of perspective. Her whole Insta-scheme was mortifying but, let’s face it, trivial when compared with the stark brutality of death.

On the less demented end of the inbox spectrum were countless riffs on ‘Termination of contract’ and ‘Ambassadorship revoked’ from the many brands she’d worked with during her brief spell as Ireland’s hottest up-and-coming mumfluencer. At least there was no need to email any of the PRs with some cobbled-together excuse – the one upside of cataclysmic public disgrace.

I’m clutching at straws, she thought as she dragged herself out of the bed and began trawling through her bag for something to wear.

Ali’d spent the last five days locked in some bizarre alternate funeral dimension, sitting around the kitchen in her mum’s house with a constantly rotating cast of family and friends drinking tea and boozing at odd hours of the day and night, fortified with endless rounds of boiled ham and gross mayonnaisey salads. At this stage, all she wanted to do was go home to the house she shared with Liv.

Her mum, Mini, had entered a strange phase of grief that involved becoming bizarrely fixated on tiny details like the socks Miles was to be cremated in and ignoring massively important decisions such as where to even have the funeral. Mini had hired and fired several priests (Ali hadn’t even known you could do that) before deciding that an actor friend of Miles’s would ‘MC’ the funeral.

‘That’s not a thing,’ Ali had tried to protest but gave in when she realised that she had far more important things to talk Mini out of, such as the six pallbearers wearing chef whites in honour of Miles’s career as a restaurateur.

‘Fine, fine, you want him to have a boring “normal” funeral. Fine, the boys can wear suits. But we’re keeping Eric on MC duties. He’s already finalised the soliloquy.’

‘You mean … eulogy?’ Ali was iffy.

‘I mean soliloquy.’ Mini was steely, holding Ali’s gaze.

While Mini focused on the more esoteric aspects of the funeral, Ali had become the production manager of the entire affair, traipsing around pricing horrific, carb-heavy buffets in bland hotels that Miles would have detested.

Ali was relieved that it was all going to be over in a matter of hours and the Mini madness would hopefully end. Then it would be on to the far more complicated task of sorting out her life. She knew people baby-proofed their home ahead of a new baby’s arrival. She’d need to baby-proof her whole bloody life. She flashed on the shambolic state of her room in the house she shared with Liv. Before, she’d like to think her discarded half-eaten takeaways and empty booze bottles stashed everywhere said ‘insouciant wild child’ but, aesthetically, the vibe was probably a bit more ‘cry for help’. How on earth would a baby fit into that picture?

She shook the question from her head. First things first, get Miles sorted. Then tell Mini about the baby. Then tell Sam. Then get on with figuring out how to work a baby and pretending everything was fine.

My speciality, she thought ruefully.

Now among the posters and relics of her teens, Ali pulled off her pyjamas and slipped on her dad’s old Velvet Underground tee-shirt that she’d cut into a crop top. She zipped up the simple black pinafore dress she’d chosen. It was definitely weird, she decided, having eight different Harry Styles watching you get dressed for your father’s funeral.

‘Liv’s here, Ali!’ she heard Mini call from downstairs.

Thank God. Ali pulled on her Docs, headed out the door and down to the kitchen. Not the kitchen of her childhood, they’d had it redone. Now it was a kind of glass-box-style extension – practically a mandatory addition to affluent Dublin homes during the boom years. Its sleek lines and stark atmosphere jarred with the rest of the house, which was still all sagging sofas and warm wood panelling, the shelves stooped under the weight of books and records.

Liv was backed up against the concrete-topped island, a plate of boiled ham already in hand, being booze-bullied into wine by Ali’s aunt Eleanor.

‘Is it even 10 a.m. yet?’ Liv murmured helplessly as Eleanor thrust the enormous glass of white into her hand.

‘This is how the Irish do funerals,’ one of Mini and Eleanor’s distant cousins told her, apparently not realising that Liv, her dark skin and brown eyes courtesy of Meera, her Indian mother, was Irish. He was part of the American contingent, who had arrived late last night and played the piano till 3 a.m. Ali’d met each of them about a million times, but they had all coalesced into a freckly mass of middle-aged, Irish American man meat.

Ali drew Liv away to the farthest corner of the kitchen, where they could avoid the funeral chat in which the main topic of conversation seemed to be who else had recently died.

‘I’m counting down the hours till we can go home,’ Ali whispered to Liv. ‘At least you can drink through this misery.’

‘Yeah, it’s definitely taking the edge off the mourning,’ Liv agreed. ‘How are you doing?’

‘I don’t really know. I feel really numb about Dad. I just can’t keep it straight in my head that all this has happened. Any of it. I feel like the last months weren’t even real. I wish they weren’t real. I keep thinking of all the times I sat up in his room at the nursing home just reading the internet until it was time to go. Some days, I’d barely look at him, Liv.’ Ali stared at the picture of Miles on the wall above them. Miles on his wedding day, squinting into the sun with confetti in his shaggy blond hair and a flower in the lapel of his grey jacket. ‘He’s my age there.’

‘You look so like him, it’s crazy.’

‘That’s not how he looked at the end.’ Ali had a flash of his cracked lips and blank eyes. This grief pain was something new and horrible. She wanted to cry and scream but felt paralysed.

‘Try not to think of him like that.’ Liv took her hand and Ali wished it helped.

‘Why not? It’s what he was at the end. And I did nothing. Nothing. I just keep thinking of the times when he needed me, and I couldn’t even bring myself to kiss him because I was so …’ she searched for the word ‘… so afraid. God, I’m a monster. There’s literally no other word for me. I’m a monster. Who ignores their dad when he’s so goddamn helpless? Running around pretending to be pregnant and loving life on the ’gram?’

‘Ali, please don’t do this to yourself … you did everything you could … you were up there all the time …’

She doesn’t understand. Ali stared down at their hands, gripped in her lap. She doesn’t realise.

‘You don’t get it, Liv. I deserve to feel like shit. I am shit. All these people are right.’ Ali waved her phone.

‘Ali. They are internet trolls. You can’t read this stuff – it’s self-harm. I will take that phone away right now,’ she threatened.

‘I should be reading it. It’s the truth. They’re not trolls, all the stuff they’re saying is true.’ Ali flicked open her inbox. ‘I am a “selfish, lying cunt”. I am. The way I treated my dad … That’s just fact, Liv.’ Ali wasn’t sure why she was getting ratty but at least feeling angry was feeling something. Better than this frightening, fathomless ache. She stood abruptly. ‘I need to get the pamphlets from the printer before the funeral car comes. Will you come with me? We’ve got a couple of hours.’

‘Anything you want, pal.’ Liv took out her phone. ‘Do you wanna do a to-do list? Always makes me feel better.’

Ali managed a grin. Liv’s devotion to to-do lists was verging on pathological.

‘Yep, sounds comforting. I think I’m going to need several. One for the funeral, one for the public shaming and one for the unplanned pregnancy.’ Ali laughed grimly. ‘I’ll dictate on the way to the printer.’

They slipped through the uncles, some of whom were now singing ‘The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee’, while two others were having what looked to be a middle-aged attempt at a fist fight. Ali’s cousin Lily looked bored as she weakly tried to pull them apart.

‘John-John brought up the Christmas Turkey Debacle of ’76,’ she explained, rolling her eyes.

The funeral sesh was hardcore, so much daytime booze and feelings. They headed for the door just as Mini began calling her from upstairs.

‘Jesus, keep going,’ Ali muttered to Liv, jogging down the front steps into the misty April day and jumping into Mini’s car. Liv hastily buckled her seatbelt as Ali slammed into gear and lurched forward, up the narrow road and away from the house.

Indicating right, Ali started towards the cluster of shops in the nearby village. ‘Look, let’s to-do list me. It’ll take my mind off things.’

Liv opened her PimpMyList app and created three new lists.

Funeral

Public Shaming

Pregnancy

‘Let’s go from least to most complicated,’ Liv suggested, while Ali scouted for a spot to park near the printer’s. ‘Funeral. Let’s put printer’s on here so we can tick it off – that always feels good. Outfit?’

‘I’m wearing it.’ Ali backed into a spot outside the off-licence. Parallel parking while making a funeral to-do list is an advanced level of adulting, she mused.

‘Is moody Lou Reed smoking a spliff appropriate funeral attire?’

‘I’m one of the chief mourners. I could wear a black mankini and people would have to put up with it.’

They headed into the printer’s and joined the queue for collections.

‘So, I suppose “public shaming” and “pregnancy” kind of intersect,’ Liv said cautiously. ‘People today are going to have heard about Fake BumpGate, Ali.’

Liv was right, of course. In the last few days, Ali had mainly been around the North American branch of the family but, in just a few hours, she’d be facing down a huge crowd – most of whom had surely heard some version of the story by now.

They stepped forward to the desk.

‘I’m collecting for Jones,’ Ali said and took the hefty envelope proffered. She hugged it to her chest to protect it from the light drizzle as they went back outside.

‘I should’ve included a formal statement in the funeral pamphlet.’ Ali sighed. ‘Something like “Ali recently changed her medication, prompting her to have a mild psychotic break … all over Instagram”.’

‘Well. You definitely weren’t in your right mind. Could you maybe reference it during the eulogy? Get it said and out of the way?’

Ali laughed. ‘Just a quick sidebar? “I’d like to pause in the fond reminiscing and grieving for a moment to clarify that I was drinking and Instagramming heavily during recent months and I am deeply sorry for any of the harm I caused with my actions. Oh, and BTW, I’m pregs for real now!’’’

Liv winced. ‘It’s jarring, you’re right. Maybe you don’t have to say anything at all about it to anyone today? Who’s going to grill the daughter of the dead man?’

The words ‘dead man’ momentarily winded Ali as she sat in behind the steering wheel. Her dad was a dead man now.

On the drive back to the house, she said little. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and made the turn to her parents’ terrace. It was nearly time to go.

‘I haven’t even written the eulogy.’ Ali stared out to sea after she’d parked in front of her parents’ dove-grey house at the end of the row. ‘I’ve sat down a million times to do it but there’s nothing coming. It’s a bad idea to just wing it, right?’

‘Yes.’ Liv was firm. She rooted for a pen in the glove compartment and extracted a pamphlet from the printer’s package. Ali watched her decisively scribble across the back of it and hand it over. ‘Just say this.’

My dad was the most wonderful father to me. I love him so much and I can’t believe he’s not here anymore. Thank you to everyone who came today to remember him as he was. I’ll never stop missing him. We’re all better for having had him in our lives.

Ali swallowed hard to push back the tears. Crying didn’t help. If anything, she felt worse afterwards – raw and wrung out. This is grief, Ali was realising, there was no relief. You couldn’t just cry it out and feel better. How long was it going to be like this?

Liv was on her phone, pulling up PimpMyList again. She added ‘Eulogy’ to the Funeral list and passed it to Ali. ‘Here, tick it off. It’ll help.’

Ali pressed the screen to strike off the eulogy.

It was oddly satisfying. She imagined wading through her myriad swirling problems and anxieties, striking off each one. She X’d out of the Funeral list, selected the Pregnancy list and added three items:

Go to doctor.

Tell Mini.

Tell Sam.

She added a question mark.

Tell Sam …?



Ali sat nervously in the front row of the Victorian chapel where Miles’s distinctly showbiz funeral was underway. She swallowed repeatedly but couldn’t seem to calm the swelling angst. Her throat felt tight and her breathing was constricted. Projected onto the wall in front of her was a scrolling slideshow of Miles’s life. Young, blond Miles looking rakish in a panama hat and flares in an impossibly sunny Stephen’s Green. Miles in a Breton tee squinting into the sunshine. Miles and Mini tanned and relaxed in a village in northern Spain.

Baby Ali began appearing as the shoulder pads and bleached perms gave way to the grungier look of the early ’90s, the nostalgia-tinged Polaroids to the harsher, red-eye-strewn snaps of the pre-smartphone age. The slideshow was beautiful – she’d stayed up late hunched over her laptop lost in the old holidays and raucous house parties of her childhood putting it together. Between her and the projected scrolling feed, the coffin squatted heavy and dreadful.

She snuck a look over her shoulder. It was terrible to be on show like this, in front of hundreds of people. She pulled in another laboured breath. She couldn’t quite get her lungs full enough. She was about to be called up. She’d folded and refolded Liv’s eulogy so much it was fraying at the creases. She flattened it down and scanned the words again.

My dad was the most wonderful father to me. I love him so much and I can’t believe he’s not here anymore. Thank you to everyone who came today to remember him as he was. I’ll never stop missing him. We’re all better for having had him in our lives.

It just feels so flaccid, she frowned, so bland and generic. There’s nothing of him in it or of what he did for all of us. What he did for me. She heaved in more useless oxygen and her lungs contracted weakly. This moment was lasting for ever. She looked up to check how the speaker ahead of her was going. It was Sean De Burca, an old theatre friend of Miles’s, who was taking up quite a lot of his allotted time with plugging his forthcoming play and name-checking the prestigious awards he’d won during his four decades in the business.

‘Of course, as you probably all remember, that was the year that we took the show to Albany and the late, great critic Harold Carthieu himself sat in the front row. I remember texting Miles about it. Carthieu was a bore, but his review was quite complimentary.’ Sean paused to fumble among his pages.

‘Christ, he’s brought the review with him.’ Mini’s voice was hot on Ali’s ear. ‘I never should’ve asked him. He’s trying to get funding for his new play, and this is as bald an attempt at a pitch as any I’ve ever heard. He’s practically reciting his CV.’

Ali glanced around at the bored crowd apparently untouched by the moving tale of one ‘criminally underrated Irish theatre director’s trials and triumphs’.

‘He’s really losing them,’ Ali whispered back, indicating a snoozing Marcus, her dad’s old business partner, a few rows down, whose head was lolling on Liv’s shoulder as she tried to shrug him off.

‘So we plan to begin workshopping in mid-May, ahead of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival, and I know Miles, always such a supportive patron of the arts, would have wanted any who feel they have the means to dig deep here today.’

My God, I have to stop this! Ali pushed herself up to standing, feeling shaky and unmoored, and began to make her way to the podium, trying not to look at the coffin as she passed. Sean looked shocked at her muscling him gently out of the way but reluctantly relinquished the mic and backed off.

‘My father,’ Ali began, ‘would have wanted me to shut down that shameless hard sell, Sean!’ She threw a look over to Sean, who shuffled awkwardly. Ali gazed down the chapel and felt a pang at the size of the congregation. God, the things her dad would never see. This huge crowd of people who loved him, Mini sitting ramrod straight at the head of them all, staring unblinking at the coffin. Then Ali glanced down at herself. Inside her right now was a soon-to-be person, who would contain some tiny element of her dad. If the baby had her brown eyes, then it would have Miles’s brown eyes.

‘I wanted to prepare some words to say today but when I went to write them down, nothing came. In the end, my friend, Liv, wrote something for me but I guess it’s just that words don’t come close to … I guess I just never believed this would happen. I can’t believe he’s gone. He deserved to live. He deserved to live to see this, to see how much all of you loved him. This disease is so cruel – it robs the person of their memories and it robs us of them. I can’t believe I’ll never hear him singing in the car or arguing about who did the best Krapp’s Last Tape.’

Ali looked at the coffin and tried to imagine Miles inside. This was the last time she’d be near his body and she couldn’t even kiss his cheek with the little sandpapery stubble and his Miles smell. ‘I wish I could tell you what an amazing father you were to me.’ Ali could feel her throat clogging with tears. ‘I wish I could tell you how much you mean to me and that I’ll miss you … every … day.’ The words were catching but she had to get them out. ‘I want you to know how much I love you. I want you to know I’m going to name this baby after you … And I’m going to be a mother you could be proud of. I swear to you.’

When 400 people jolt with surprise and gasp in unison, it’s pretty loud. It wrenched Ali from her daze.

Fuck. What did I just say?



After the funeral service, the line of mourners seemed to be unending. Ali was pinned into an alcove in the church feeling hounded by sympathy and shaken by her own insanely cavalier baby announcement.

Jaysus, forget Mercury, this baby is in retrograde: conceived during a social media hoax, the pregnancy test taken in a funeral home and now announced at the emotional climax of a eulogy. Poor baby Miles. Or baby Millie?

Mini had raised a single terrifying eyebrow in the tense seconds after Ali’d announced her forthcoming loinfruit from the altar. When Ali’d returned to her seat, numb from the shock of what she’d just done, Mini’s eyes remained fixed on the coffin as she muttered, ‘I don’t even know where to begin with that, Alessandra. I guess we’ll discuss it when we’re not about to cremate your father.’

Fair, Ali’d thought.

‘Ali, such a beautiful speech.’ Maura Lane, an eminent theatre actress, gripped her shoulders. ‘It had everything, pathos, vulnerability and then the payoff of the baby character. Your father would be so proud, you really produced this whole incredible … homage to him.’

Oh God, they all think I timed that on purpose. With the guts of her parents’ friends being artists and theatre luvvies, really was it any wonder she wound up a fantasist on Instagram?

‘Em, thanks …’ Ali was pulled into a vice-like hug and swore she could feel her bones clicking. Over the black velvet shoulder of Maura Lane, Ali could see her friend Kate looking awkward in the solemn condolence line. They were mates, though during Ali’s Insta-rise things had become strained between them. Kate had been trying to make the influencer thing happen for herself for ages and was understandably jealous of Ali’s sudden success