kids called it. I was happy to collude with their mockery; it made me feel momentarily light-hearted, like the relaxed, laid-back parent I knew I never really could be. I suppose I was proud that these beings I had given life to, recently so small and helpless, had become so enviably proficient, such experts in this new tongue that was Mandarin to me. I probably thought it was a harmless way for Emily and Ben to feel superior to their control-freak(ish) mother, who was still boss when it came to all the important things like safety and decency, right?
Wrong. Boy, did I get that wrong. In the half hour we have been sitting at the kitchen table, Emily, through hiccups of shock, has managed to tell me that she sent a picture of her bare backside to her friend Lizzy Knowles on Snapchat because Lizzy told Em that the girls in their group were all going to compare tan-lines after the summer holidays.
‘What’s a Snapchat?’
‘Mum, it’s like a photo that disappears after like ten seconds.’
‘Great, it’s gone. So what’s the problem?’
‘Lizzy took a screenshot of the Snapchat and she said she meant to put it in our Facebook Group Chat, but she put it on her wall by mistake so now it’s there like forever.’ She pronounces the word ‘forever’ so it rhymes with her favourite, ‘Whatevah’ – lately further abbreviated to the intolerable ‘Whatevs’.
‘Fu’evah,’ Emily says again. At the thought of this unwanted immortality, her mouth collapses into an anguished ‘O’ – a popped balloon of grief.
It takes a few moments for me to translate what she has said into English. I may be wrong (and I’m hoping I am), but I think it means that my beloved daughter has taken a photo of her own bare bum. Through the magic of social media and the wickedness of another girl, this image has now been disseminated – if that’s the word I want, which I’m very much afraid it is – to everyone in the school, the street, the universe. Everyone, in fact, but her own father, who is upstairs snoring for England.
‘People think it’s like really funny,’ Emily says, ‘because my back is still a bit burnt from Greece so it’s like really red and my bum’s like really white so I look like a flag. Lizzy says she tried to delete it, but loads of people have shared it already.’
‘Slow down, slow down, sweetheart. When did this happen?’
‘It was like seven thirty but I didn’t notice for ages. You told me to put my phone away when we were having dinner, remember? My name was at the top of the screenshot so everyone knows it’s me. Lizzy says she’s tried to take it down but it’s gone viral. And Lizzy’s like, “Em, I thought it was funny. I’m so sorry.” And I don’t want to seem like I’m upset about it because everyone thinks it’s really hilarious. But now all these people have got my like Facebook and I’m getting these creepy messages.’ All of that comes out in one big sobbing blurt.
I get up and go to the counter to fetch some kitchen roll for Em to blow her nose because I have stopped buying tissues as part of recent family budget cuts. The chill wind of austerity blowing across the country, and specifically through our household, means that fancy pastel boxes of paper softened with aloe vera are off the shopping list. I silently curse Richard’s decision to use being made redundant by his architecture firm as ‘an opportunity to retrain in something more meaningful’ – or ‘something more unpaid and self-indulgent’ if you were being harsh, which, sorry, but I am at this precise moment because I don’t have any Kleenex to soak up our daughter’s tears. Only when I make a mess of ripping the kitchen paper along its serrated edge do I notice that my hand is shaking, quite badly actually. I place the trembling right hand in my left hand and interlink the fingers in a way I haven’t done for years. ‘Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Look inside and see all the people.’ Em used to make me do that little rhyme over and over because she loved to see the fingers waggling in the church.
‘’Gain, Mummy. Do it ’gain.’
What was she then? Three? Four? It seems so near yet, at the same time, impossibly far. My baby. I’m still trying to get my bearings in this strange new country my child has taken me to, but the feelings won’t stay still. Disbelief, disgust, a tincture of fear.
‘Sharing a picture of your bottom on a phone? Oh, Emily, how could you be so bloody stupid?’ (That’s the fear flaring into anger right there.)
She trumpets her nose on the kitchen roll, screws up the paper and hands it back to me.
‘It’s a belfie, Mum.’
‘What’s a belfie for heaven’s sake?’
‘It’s a selfie of your bum,’ Emily says. She talks as though this were a normal part of life, like a loaf of bread or a bar of soap.
‘You know, a BELFIE.’ She says it louder this time, like an Englishman abroad raising his voice so the dumb foreigner will understand.
Ah, a belfie, not a belfry. In my dream, I thought she said belfry. A selfie I know about. Once, when my phone flipped to selfie mode and I found myself looking at my own face, I recoiled. It was unnatural. I sympathised with that tribe which refused to be photographed for fear the camera would steal their souls. I know girls like Em constantly take selfies. But a belfie?
‘Rihanna does it. Kim Kardashian. Everyone does it,’ Emily says flatly, a familiar note of sullenness creeping into her voice.
This is my daughter’s stock response lately. Getting into a nightclub with fake ID? ‘Don’t be shocked, Mum, everyone does it.’ Sleeping over at the house of a ‘best friend’ I’ve never met, whose parents seem weirdly unconcerned about their child’s nocturnal movements? Perfectly normal behaviour, apparently. Whatever it is I am so preposterously objecting to, I need to chill out, basically, because Everyone Does It. Am I so out of touch that distributing pictures of one’s naked arse has become socially acceptable?
‘Emily, stop texting, will you? Give me that phone. You’re in enough trouble as it is.’ I snatch the wretched thing out of her hands and she lunges across the table to grab it back, but not before I see a message from someone called Tyler: ‘Ur ass is well fit make me big lol!!!
Christ, the Village Idiot is talking dirty to my baby. And ‘Ur’ instead of ‘Your’? The boy is not just lewd but illiterate. My Inner Grammarian clutches her pearls and shudders. Come off it, Kate. What kind of warped avoidance strategy is this? Some drooling lout is sending your sixteen-year-old daughter pornographic texts and you’re worried about his spelling?
‘Look, darling, I think I’d better call Lizzy’s mum to talk about wha—’
‘Nooooooo.’ Emily’s howl is so piercing that Lenny springs from his basket and starts barking to see off whoever has hurt her.
‘You can’t,’ she wails. ‘Lizzy’s my best friend. You can’t get her in trouble.’
I look at her swollen face, the bottom lip raw and bloody from chewing. Does she really think Lizzy is her best friend? Manipulative little witch more like. I haven’t trusted Lizzy Knowles since the time she announced to Emily that she was allowed to take two friends to see Justin Bieber at the O2 for her birthday. Emily was so excited; then Lizzy broke the news that she was first reserve. I bought Em a ticket for the concert myself, at catastrophic expense, to protect her from that slow haemorrhage of exclusion, that internal bleed of self-confidence which only girls can do to girls. Boys
