Chapter Twenty-Two #3
‘But I just can’t figure out who would want to do this. I mean, it’s an attack on both of us. I come off like an absolute bitch, and you . . . well, someone’s having a go at your looks. Who would do that?’
‘I can think of some people who want to take me down,’ Darla said, slowly.
‘You know how it is. You build a following on social, and you make enemies. People who want what you’ve got.
People who think you got it easy. People who did exactly what I did, only it didn’t work for them, and they just want to take me down. ’
‘You think a rival did this?’ Elsa said.
‘I think . . . maybe . . . yeah, it’s possible.’
Elsa let the words sit for a minute. ‘Okay, well, we need to have a crisis meeting now. Your team and my team. We’re going to take this thing and we’re going to make it work for both of us.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. We need to work out the details.
But I think we make a statement together, on video, saying that the audio is a fake, that it’s an attack on women.
Mine is a female-owned business, yours is a female-built brand.
Someone’s trying to drive a wedge between us with this, like, 1950s attack on your body.
Like, as if we haven’t moved past the concept of a perfect body. ’
‘Yeah . . .’ Darla said slowly. ‘But you don’t make clothes above a size fourteen, right?’
‘That’s more a supply issue than anything else,’ Elsa said, as lightly as she could manage. ‘But I’ve been working on resolving that for the past two years. We’re bringing out a much more inclusive range next year.’
‘Why not now?’
‘Because I don’t just want to size up designs.
That’s why larger women are so badly served.
Designers design stuff that looks great on a size six, and then they just size up, and everything looks rubbish.
I want to sell clothes that are designed from the first sketch, built from the first stitch, for the fuller female body. I want to do it right.’
Maybe she should start a plus-size range.
She was convincing herself, the more she spoke.
Maybe she and Darla and Robyn Henson should team up together.
They could point to this ‘fake’ audio, this attack on all of them, as a starting point.
It would make for great publicity. Oh god. She was sickening herself now.
‘Look, let’s meet at the warehouse at two, yeah? You bring your publicist, I’ll bring mine. Let’s make whoever did this sorry they ever came up with this horrible idea.’
‘Yes,’ said Darla. ‘And I’m sorry, Elsa. I’m really sorry this happened.’
‘Me too.’
Elsa ended the call. She put her phone carefully down on the table, and buried her face in both hands.
Her head was spinning. Relief, guilt and fear warred for supremacy.
How badly should she feel about this? Did she feel guilty because she really believed she’d done something wrong?
Or was she just afraid of a public shaming?
Elsa’s words replayed themselves in a loop in her head.
Her words and her tone of voice. When she’d been talking to Nathan all she’d been feeling was fear, but on the recording you couldn’t hear any of that fear.
There was only snark and meanness. Oh god.
She’d screwed up. She’d really screwed up.
If Darla walked away, Elsa would be cancelled—her entire business would die.
Worse than that, they’d lose the house too.
She was over-leveraged. She’d bet everything on this one endeavour working out.
She’d been so stupid. She’d been stupid too when she’d ranted to Nathan.
She could have talked to him about the Darla problem in a respectful way, a kind way even.
But she’d wanted to blow off steam, so she’d ranted like a child.
And because of that, she could lose everything.
She’d hurt Darla, really hurt her.
Elsa comfort ate two more marshmallows, then put the jar away before Doris could see it again. She hated herself. For gorging on sugar and for being stupid and thoughtless and childish.
But . . .
But . . . she’d been stupid and thoughtless and childish in her own home, in a private conversation with her husband.
So . . . how exactly had it gone public?
Her eyes turned to her phone and laptop, where they sat side by side on the benchtop.
These things were hackable. It happened all the time.
Hackers took over your mic and your camera.
She tried to think of all the conversations she’d had over her phone, or even in the vicinity of her phone or her laptop.
She thought of the bath she’d had a couple of nights before.
She’d been watching Schitt’s Creek on her iPad; she’d walked around the bathroom naked.
With shaking hands, Elsa turned her phone off.
She closed her laptop, and shoved them both into a kitchen cupboard, firmly closing the door.
Without her phone she felt bereft—completely powerless and cut off from the world.
And she had so much work to do. She went to the living room to get her daughter.
‘Come on, baby. We’re going to the shops.’