Ten days earlier
The day of Jessie’s unravelling started early. Her alarm went off at seven. Without changing out of her pyjamas, she stepped into the kitchen, made a milky coffee and flicked on her laptop.
She was writing up an interview for Inspire, the magazine for which she did most of her work. The interviewee, an influencer-cum-online-TV-presenter-cum-eyelashes-entrepreneur called Hollie Garland, looked as though she was straight out of a box. Untouched. Untroubled. She was successful, glossy, willowy – and dull as a weekend pilgrimage to Lough Derg. On Instagram, Hollie exuded well-being and cheer. In real life, she was the same. That was the problem. She spoke in hashtags. She was truly #blessed and #livingherbestlife. She was an advocate for #metime and #selfcare. And she used these phrases without any apparent irony. She was also keen on the word ‘curate’ without seeming to know what it meant.
Jessie had attempted to ask about the morality of influencers shilling products they didn’t use. She might as well have been asking the parish priest about death metal. Hollie had greeted the questions with a blank look before returning to her well-practised monologue on the transformational powers of clean eating and lip-liner. The only time she was even slightly negative was when bemoaning the trolls who targeted people like her. Jessie began to suspect that if she had nothing to sell, she had nothing to say.
Because of this, she suggested to her editor, Eimear Bird, they do a broader piece about what Hollie represented. Eimear wasn’t interested.
‘You know what Hollie represents?’ she said. ‘She represents a boost to circulation and a rise in advertising.’
The editor went on to point out that Inspire’s readers saw her as a role model, the star at the centre of their gluten-free universe. They didn’t want an exploration of her psyche. They wanted to know about her new eye-shadow palette and how it would transform their lives.
Call her naïve, but Jessie would have liked to credit the readers with a little more intelligence. Still, she needed the fee, so she wrote and stared and tinkered and wrote again. If the finished piece wouldn’t win any prizes, it wasn’t completely embarrassing either.
Two thousand words of Hollie would sap anyone’s spirit, so by the time she met her friend Shona, Jessie craved entertainment. She’d had three vodkas and was beginning a fourth when her phone rang. It was a researcher from one of the late-night TV current-affairs shows. The researcher took a deep breath before announcing that a guest had pulled out at the last minute, which meant they were without a woman on the panel, and they were in trouble for lack of gender balance so she had to find a woman, and would Jessie do it, please? The high note of desperation in her voice spoke to Jessie. Plus, Shona was being a bore about a man she might or might not have sex with. Sometimes her friend had a toddler’s ability to ramble around a story without ever getting to the point, and this was one of those times.
‘Okay,’ she said to the researcher, barely pausing to ask about the theme of that night’s show. They would, she was told, be discussing the big news of the day. Confident that she was on familiar ground, Jessie explained the situation to Shona, who insisted she finish her drink.
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Anyone watching will probably have been in the pub themselves. And you look perfectly sober to me. Your hair’s gorgeous, by the way.’
That much was true. Jessie had been to the salon the previous day to have her blonde balayage refreshed. She’d also had it cut into a long bob. That this had cost far more than she could afford was beside the point. She looked good, and with television, that was what mattered. Trite as it might sound, entire TV careers had been built on good hair and the careful use of filler. The younger and more attractive you were, the less you needed to say.
TV and radio punditry had become a useful side-line for Jessie. Although she didn’t kid herself that she was in demand for her profound political insights, she could string together a few sentences. She also ticked both the ‘token young person’ and ‘token woman’ boxes. While, in the real world, few would describe twenty-nine as particularly young, on the current-affairs circuit anyone under forty was viewed as slightly edgy.
The first indication that she’d made a mistake came in the green room when one of her fellow guests, an earnest guy whose glasses needed a polish, asked what she’d made of the evening’s developments in the House. She felt a twitch of panic. She was primed to talk about the story that had dominated the news all week: a row about corporate landlords buying up entire housing developments. Surely if anything important had happened in the past few hours her phone would have lit up with notifications? Then she remembered that to minimise distractions she’d turned off her alerts. She could, of course, have looked up the news sites while she was in the taxi, but time had been limited, and she’d focused on sobering up and composing some caustic lines about vulture funds.
‘I reckon it’s pretty serious,’ she said, hoping he’d reveal more information. ‘What do you think yourself?’
Before he could reply, a third panellist, a politician with boundless self-regard, slapped Mr Dirty Glasses on the back and said something about his boys being on the back foot.
With that, they were whisked into the studio.
When the producer thanked her for being available at short notice, she asked again about the topics they’d be discussing. ‘Mainly the obvious,’ he replied, ‘and we might get to something lighter before the end.’
Jessie was in trouble. She didn’t know what the obvious was and couldn’t ask. She’d had to leave her phone in the green room, and the other guests – Dirty Glasses, Back Slapper and a cantankerous political correspondent called Killian McGill – were chatting among themselves. At this point, the presenter arrived. Barry Fogarty was a current-affairs veteran, who smelt of mothballs and privilege. Under the studio lights, he was as orange and wrinkled as an aged apricot. Those same lights were making Jessie feel woozy.
Focus, she told herself. Focus.
She asked Barry what he wanted from the discussion. With an airy wave, he said that, no doubt, she’d be able to bring her own perspective to events. For some reason, nerves she supposed, this made her laugh. The others, gathered in an insider huddle, continued to ignore her. The opening credits began, and she still wasn’t sure what they’d be talking about.
The show had been on air for several minutes when she came to grips with the story. While she’d been writing about Hollie Garland and drinking vodka with Shona, vulture funds had slipped out of the news. The new political scandal centred on the premature release from prison of a drug dealer who’d gone on to commit further crimes. It had emerged that, some years earlier, the minister for justice had written a letter to the prison authorities in which she’d said that Vincent McPartlin was from a fine upstanding family and should be considered for early release. The opposition parties were demanding her resignation, as were the families of McPartlin’s victims.
Jessie was feeling increasingly lightheaded. The absurdity of the situation made her face tingle, and she found her mouth curving into a smile. She shouldn’t be there. She had nothing to contribute, she was exhausted – and she was drunk. She wondered if she could slip out during the break. Maybe she could say she was ill. The others were only interested in their own opinions: they didn’t need to hear from her.
It was while her thoughts were drifting that Barry Fogarty asked her a question. She’d missed the start so, urging herself to stay calm, she opted for a generic answer.
‘Um, yeah,’ she heard herself say. ‘This is what happens, isn’t it, when people aren’t listened to? When officialdom loses its way and ignores the consequences of its decisions.’
Killian the cantankerous correspondent squinted in her direction. ‘Surely, in this instance, the problem was that no one listened to the officials. The minister paid too much attention to the convicted man’s family, whose votes she wanted to secure, and ignored the misgivings of civil servants.’
‘I guess you could look at it like that, but in the round, and bearing in mind what’s occurred in the past . . .’ She searched for a coherent way to end the sentence but, when nothing came, said something about the minister’s record in a previous department. The others, she realised, were staring at her.
Cantankerous shook his head. ‘Were you paying any attention to what was going on today or are you spoofing?’
Barry Fogarty intervened. ‘Ah, now, Killian—’
‘Barry, she doesn’t have the foggiest notion what she’s talking about.’ Once more, he turned to Jessie. ‘Do you?’
She felt the heat rising from her neck. The studio tilted. They were waiting for an answer, so, with what she later saw as the worst kind of drunken logic, she decided to brazen her way through by telling the truth.
‘I wasn’t able to follow all of it because I had other things to do. That’s what you guys tend to forget. Most people can’t spend all day thinking about politicians.’
‘What else did you have to do?’ asked Barry. Almost immediately, he looked as though he regretted the question.
The studio tilted in the other direction. It occurred to Jessie that she might be swaying. Her tongue seemed to have swollen. ‘I was writing a feature, well . . . it was sort of an interview, except I had to gild it a bit because the woman I was writing about . . . Hollie Garland, y’know? Well, she—’
Concern flashing across his face, Barry attempted to take charge. ‘I’m not sure what this has got to do with our discussion. Perhaps, we should—’
‘Hollie who?’ said Cantankerous Killian.
‘She’s a famous influencer,’ replied Jessie. ‘She mightn’t mean much to you, but I guarantee you, she means more to anyone under thirty than the minister. She probably earns more too.’ For a moment, she paused. She didn’t want to go too far. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that’s right. I doubt Hollie could name the president let alone the minister for justice.’ Again, she hesitated. ‘Actually, you know what? I’m being unfair. I’d say she could buy and sell everyone here. She’s got the right kind of commercial cunning. Like, she was a vegan until a burger chain offered to pay for some #sponcon. But, hey, it is what it is.’
‘I think we should get back to this evening’s agenda,’ said Barry, the colour seeping from his cheeks.
The others, clearly enjoying the diversion, disagreed. ‘What’s #sponcon?’ asked Back Slapper.
Dirty Glasses replied, ‘It is what it is,’ prompting a dry laugh from Killian, who leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Hollie Garland? I’d say she’s busy at Christmas.’
‘Ha!’ said Jessie. ‘You’re a very witty man, though I doubt Hollie would like you pulling the piss out of her name. She’s really serious about her brand.’ She attempted to make air quotes around the final word but in doing so knocked over a glass of water. It skittered across the desk and crashed onto the floor.
‘Jesus,’ said Dirty Glasses.
Barry, who had given up trying to restore order, leaned in and asked if, by any chance, she’d had a drink before joining them on air. Jessie, sensing there was no way back, conceded that she might have had one or two.
The rest was a blur. Well, obviously, that wasn’t true. For people watching at home, and for countless others who saw the clip, it all played out in sharp focus. It was high-definition entertainment, the subject of a hundred Facebook memes, countless Twitter jokes and at least four pompous newspaper columns. She was what happened when a culture was swamped by triviality: she was the standard bearer for people who didn’t know or care about their limitations; she was the self-confident face of a self-indulgent generation.
And the drink? Oh, the drink. The way the columnists carried on you’d swear she’d been off her head on red biddy. She’d been a bit jarred, that was all.
The column that hurt most was the one in which a man argued that, by turning the show into a pantomime, she’d insulted Vincent McPartlin’s victims. In her mind, he claimed, they were of less significance than an online huckster.
If the men in the papers had contempt for her, the women on Instagram and the gossip forums were rougher still. Hollie’s fellow influencers claimed Jessie was ignorant, jealous and a disgrace to the sisterhood. They wallowed in performative solidarity. Can we all agree that Jessie Daly is cancelled? one wrote.
They could.
A tearful Hollie called the editor of Inspire to claim that her business had been sabotaged by the cow they’d sent to interview her. (In fact, she’d gained thirty thousand followers.) Eimear Bird pledged to redo the interview herself. She also rang Jessie to tell her the magazine wouldn’t be using her again. ‘It’s a shame,’ she said, ‘because you’ve a great eye for detail, and your writing isn’t too bad either. But you need to sort yourself out. Oh, and for the avoidance of doubt, our arrangement was a casual one, so I’m not breaking any laws here.’
Jessie had identified a group of women whom she called five-star feminists. They wore jewel-coloured shift dresses in Sunday supplement features and attended empowerment conferences in expensive hotels. They had a particular skill for corporate buzzwords and phrases, like ‘synergy’ and ‘holistic’ and ‘across the piece’. Their tweets were filled with admiration for Jacinda and Angela and AOC. When it came to supporting female colleagues, however, they vanished. It wasn’t that they had a point to prove. They simply didn’t care. Eimear was her theory made flesh.
Every time Jessie came across a mention of the incident, her name jumped out as though printed in forty-eight-point capitals, and self-loathing swelled within her. Yet some perverse part of her sought out references to the night she’d turned herself into a national joke. She doom-scrolled obsessively. Not that this required much effort: her phone was aglow with notifications.
She decided to watch the show. Could it really be that bad? She saw her flushed face, her unfocused green eyes, the way she’d appeared to smile to herself while everyone else was discussing serious crime. She heard her incoherent thoughts and mangled sentences and the way the others had laughed at her. Afterwards, she lay flat on the floor, too upset to cry. The carpet felt rough against her back; the apartment needed hoovering. The place was cold and smelt of dust and cigarettes. She wished as fervently as she had ever wished for anything that she could go to sleep and never wake again.
Friends called and messaged. Although supportive, she could tell they didn’t know what to say. They asked her out, but she was reluctant to be seen. They didn’t hide their relief at her refusals. She risked the local Tesco, a woolly hat pulled low, a scarf stopping at the tip of her nose like a teenage rioter.
In the main, though, she sat in the apartment and chain-smoked. She felt bad about every damn thing, but mostly she felt bad about her parents. They’d made sacrifices so she could pursue her degree in English followed by a post-grad in journalism. Even after she’d started work, they’d continued to fund her. How often had she returned to Dublin to find an envelope containing a fifty-euro note tucked into the pocket of her backpack?
If she was honest, there was more to it than that. She had diminished their achievements to magnify her own. In Dublin, her acquaintances were overwhelmingly middle class, her classmates and colleagues the sons and daughters of surgeons and barristers. They had rich-girl hair, rich-boy self-belief, and skin that revealed generations of good nutrition. Early on, Jessie had learnt how to exploit her comparative lack of privilege. For years, she’d emphasised that her background was different. She’d told stories about her family’s eccentricities: the aunt who cried when anyone went to America, even for a two-week holiday; the cousin who played the concertina to his calves; the uncle who’d fallen into a grave at a neighbour’s funeral. This inverted snobbery had served her well but hadn’t been fair to her parents. And now she had humiliated them.
After ten days, she decided she couldn’t take any more silence. Being on her own meant she spent too long indulging in self-examination, and even in good times, introspection wasn’t her friend. She gathered up the remains of her dignity, did what she had to do and set out for home.
In the family kitchen, Jessie was trying to explain herself. She’d given Lorna and her parents a tightly edited version of events. Her sister had tut-tutted, her dad had rubbed his nose, her mother had dabbed at a tear. Thankfully, they’d said little.
The quiet was broken by her father. ‘How’s Phelim?’
‘Fine,’ said Jessie.
‘Seriously? I mean . . .’
She sought refuge in inarticulacy. ‘Ah, you know how it is. Like, he’s kind of embarrassed . . . but . . .’
‘He didn’t think of coming down with you?’ asked her mother, as she touched Jessie’s hand. ‘He’d have been welcome.’
‘He’s busy.’
Lorna raised a well-shaped eyebrow. ‘How long are you planning on staying in Clooneven?’
‘Just a week or so,’ replied Jessie, hoping this was true.