Those Other Women Page 12

  Throughout the week, the nastier posts on NOP continued to grow, with more and more members keen to take up (and expand upon) Poppy’s original challenge.

  Dianna – I had a go at a family at my local pizza place last night because they were refusing to do a THING about their kid who was tearing around the restaurant, screaming his head off and almost tripping over the wait staff. I actually think the waiters really appreciated me stepping in and saying something.

  Catriona – So I have a stack of nieces and nephews, and all my sisters and brothers expect me to turn up to celebrate every little milestone and I don’t think any of them has ever considered just how much money I have to fork out for gifts for them. Well, last week two of my nephews had birthdays, so when the fam-bam got together at the park to celebrate I decided to mess with them by giving one of ’em a card with fifty bucks in it and the other – the shitty one I once caught breaking a Christmas gift on purpose cause it wasn’t the ‘right brand’ – a card with only ten bucks in it. Totes hilare seeing them compare their spoils and the looks on their faces – priceless. Waiting to see if my sister (the one who has the shitty kid) is going to have the gall to call me out on it and if she does . . . well, who knows just what I might say to her.

  Nicole – I was at the Pear and Fig with a few other women for a business meeting. This group of mums came in and I just don’t understand why they would choose this cafe for their mothers’ group catch-up. There’s so many other cafes that are more suited – you know, more space, more noisy, whatever. The Pear and Fig is known for being a corporate hangout. Anyway, I look over and as I’m watching this kid starts pulling one sugar sachet after another out of the container in the centre of the table and he’s opening each one up and tipping them all over the table. And the mum isn’t doing a single thing to stop it. And I just thought, this is ridiculous. I happen to know the owner of the Pear and Fig and I know they work hard to turn a profit and things like sugar packets are one more expense that this mother was letting her kid completely waste for his own amusement. I’d had enough. I went over and let the mother have it. I’m sorry but I just couldn’t let her get away with it. And you know what she did? She didn’t clean it up, she just LEFT!

  As the stories continued to pour in, there were clearly some people in the group who didn’t like it. They lost a few members – women who said that wasn’t what they thought the group was all about. To be honest, Poppy wasn’t sure she blamed them. But there were others who loved it – they relished completing the challenges, they thought it was hilarious. The group was taking on a life of its own.

  OMG! commented one woman on Catriona’s post. I have two nephews and I refer to one of them as ‘the shitty one’ too! How funny is that. My sister would die if she knew, she thinks he’s an angel.

  Another comment read, Well, I have a thirteen-year-old niece who is the devil incarnate and, same as your sister, my brother thinks she can do no wrong. Yet I can tell she’s the bitchy girl at school who bullies all her friends. What is it with parents and their inability to see past their kid’s big blue eyes?

  If Nolan and Megs had a daughter next, Poppy couldn’t imagine ever thinking about her niece that way, even if she did grow up to be a bit of a queen bee. She’d like to think if she had any concerns about her own niece, she’d be able to chat openly with her brother about it. But then again, maybe this woman was right – maybe her brother would be blinded by his daughter’s ‘blue eyes’ or whatever, and maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to broach such a subject.

  Either way, it was all hypothetical for Poppy, whereas the stuff happening on NOP was very real and very current and she wasn’t sure she could put the lid back on Pandora’s box.

  It was one thing to bitch to each other. It was one thing to tell the world you don’t want kids or you’re just not a kid-person or whatever. But to start waging war against parents? Well, Poppy supposed they were all just doing exactly what she’d told them to do.

  ‘Say something,’ she’d written in that original post. ‘Stand up for yourself.’

  She should have deleted it the moment she was sober. Annalise kept trying to reassure Poppy that it was all harmless fun. ‘So what if some of our issues are creeping out into the real world?’ she reasoned. ‘Why shouldn’t we be allowed to be honest about the way we feel?’

  And then new challenges started popping up. Members who thought Poppy’s idea deserved to be expanded even further.

  I challenge you to choose a venue that’s NOT kid-friendly for your next get-together with your friends or your family. When the parents within the group complain that it doesn’t suit them, tell them you’re done accommodating them!

  Here’s another challenge for you all! If you have to buy birthday and Christmas gifts for your friends’ kids or your relatives’ kids, it’s time to tell the parents it’s not fair and they need to cough up for it themselves! Because you’re never going to have children, which means they’re never going to spend the same amount of money on you, are they? I don’t know about others, but I reckon I spend hundreds each year!

  Poppy didn’t know what to do. Should she put a stop to it? But how could she demand that other members refrain from setting challenges when she was the one who’d kicked it all off?

  Others kept it fun and light though. For instance, Viv was somehow able to continue to tell stories about her annoying neighbours’ kids that Poppy could relate to without being so harsh.

  Kid’s next door were having a screaming match this arvo – something to do with Pokemon (don’t ask because I can’t explain it). It was driving me up the wall. Anyway, next thing their mother is banging on my door. I’ve barely opened it up before she asks, ‘DO YOU HAVE ANY WINE?’ If she wasn’t on the verge of tears I would have killed myself laughing. She snuck inside for a quick vino – not sure if her kids even noticed her missing – and I gifted her with the rest of the bottle to take home and enjoy later after the little monsters went to bed. It was a good reminder that even though I might find their noise annoying, it’s ten times louder and more stressful for her.

  Viv made Poppy empathise with her and she made her laugh at the same time. And to be honest, Poppy thought that was the kind of healing she needed, not this insidious poisonous joy the other women were sharing at someone else’s pain.

  But the worst thing was that sometimes a part of Poppy would want to join in with those nastier conversations. She would remember Garret and Karleen and everything they’d done to her, and she’d see the image of the two of them in that hospital room, holding that neatly wrapped package, and the same hatred she’d felt on the night of the scalpel would surge up inside. She wondered if she was no better than any one of the women on NOP who were turning nasty and cruel. If she saw Garret and Karleen in person, would she have to fight against the desire to say something horrible? Your kid is ugly. I hope your kid ruins your life. I hope your kid screams the house down every single night.

  She didn’t like finding that much hatred still inside her.

  CHAPTER 15

  They were halfway through the next Monday morning meeting when Poppy’s phone started lighting up like a Christmas tree on the table in front of her. She placed a hand over the screen and when the flashes continued through the gaps between her fingers, she flipped the phone face down and tried to pretend nothing was happening, even though several other managers were glancing towards her with curiosity.

  Meanwhile, across the table, Annalise started vibrating.

  ERRRRGH.

  ERRRRGH.

  The buzzing sound from inside her jeans pocket was insistent and she shifted in her chair, pulled out her phone and turned it off.

  Now every manager in the room had their attention on Poppy and Annalise.

  ‘What’s made the two of you so popular all of a sudden?’ Lawrence asked.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Frankie said from the other end of the table, ‘but can we please stay focused? We’ve still got a few more items on the agenda to get through
.’

  The moment the meeting ended, Poppy and Annalise escaped into another meeting room and locked the door behind them.

  ‘All right,’ said Poppy, unlocking her phone to check her notifications, ‘what the hell is going on?’ A second later, a wave of nausea washed over her. ‘This is all hate mail,’ she said, opening one message after another, her fingers fumbling, becoming more and more frantic as she checked each one. They were coming through to her personal Facebook account and appearing in the separate NOP admin inbox. She was being bombarded with angry messages. She couldn’t keep up with them. They just kept coming. She read one aloud to Annalise: ‘‘Who the hell do you women think you are? What gives you the right to judge us, to write these horrible things about us? You’re all a bunch of nasty old bitches who deserve nothing but pain and unhappiness.” Why would someone say something like that to me?’

  ‘It’s me too,’ said Annalise, ‘I’m getting the same messages. Oh, Poppy, I’m so sorry, I should have said something sooner.’

  ‘What do you mean, said what?’

  ‘We got a couple of these messages recently. But I deleted them and blocked the senders. I didn’t want you to be upset.’

  Poppy remembered the phantom notifications. Now it made sense. ‘But why would it matter if you had told me. What difference would it make?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . But maybe we could have stopped it before it got this insane.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  Poppy was transfixed by her screen as the angry messages continued to flood in. She saw horrendous words and snippets of phrases flash up as Facebook gave her a taste of each message.

  Fuck the lot of you.

  Mangy cunts.

  You Utter Bitches.

  ‘Oh no,’ Poppy said suddenly.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I just got an email from my mum . . . look.’

  Annalise leaned over and they both read the email together.

  Hello Darling,

  How are you?

  Listen, I feel awful to ‘cut straight to the chase’ as they say, but my friend Edna just phoned me and well, she was in a bit of a fluster. She said her daughter Susan told her about some ‘FACEBOOK GROUP’ that she claims you’re heading up and she seemed to think you were anti-mothers and making fun of mums like her Susie and well, she was just a bit hurt I suppose. On Susie’s behalf.

  I reassured her of course that that doesn’t sound like you AT ALL and that she must have her wires crossed but well, like I said, she was in quite a state and so I thought I should at least ‘follow up’ as they say.

  I know you’re recovering from your divorce and your dad had a big talk with me about how I need to lay off, so it’s wonderful if you’ve found a bit of an outlet. But I did wonder if this group might have something to do with your new friend Annalise? And maybe that’s where the mix-up has happened?

  Much love to you and give me a call when you can to talk about this.

  Mum X

  They finished reading the email at the same time. ‘Bloody hell,’ Poppy said, ‘Mum’s friend Edna and her daughter Susan don’t even live in Parramatta. They live out Sutherland way. How did they come across it?’

  ‘Maybe she has a mate here in Parra who told her about it. And by the way, you’ve never told me how much your mum clearly loves me.’

  ‘Annalise! Not the point right now.’

  ‘Okay fine, whatever. Let’s check the member posts, see what other people are saying.’

  They pressed their heads together as they clicked through into the group to check for updates.

  ‘Damn,’ Poppy whispered, only a few seconds later.

  It looked like a whole heap of their members were being targeted. There were countless posts and conversations between women within the group all discussing the fact that they’d been the recipient of nasty messages. And many of them said the messages had come from women who signed off as ‘proud members of MOP’.

  ‘So it’s not just random mothers targeting us, it’s all MOP women then?’ Poppy said.

  Annalise read another one out loud. ‘Hey girls, be careful what you say on here, I think someone in this group is not who she says she is. Someone has to be reading what we’re posting here in NOP and passing it back to MOP, because I just got a message where one of my previous posts was quoted back to me, word for word. This group is private, so there’s no way they could have seen it unless they were a member.’

  Poppy looked at Annalise. ‘Do you think she’s right? Do you think one of our members is a mole? An imposter?’

  Annalise nodded. ‘She has to be right,’ she said. ‘How else would they be able to see what we’re saying?’

  ‘I guess I stopped vetting members properly. So many women wanted to join, I got slack.’

  ‘This is utter crap,’ said Annalise. ‘We weren’t actually doing anything to hurt them. They should just stay the hell out of our lives.’

  ‘That’s not entirely true though, is it? Annalise, this is all my fault.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I told people to stand up for themselves and our members got mean. They started letting mothers have it – out in the real world. No wonder these women are angry.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself. As far as I could see, no one stepped over the line. People were only being more honest, that’s all.’

  ‘Check out our member count as well,’ said Poppy. ‘Last time I checked we were about to hit seven hundred. And that was even with the few women who dropped out because they didn’t like the challenges. Now we’re back down to five-fifty. A whole heap of women have been intimidated into leaving. That’s not fair. Lise, what the hell are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to bloody well fight back.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Hang on. Scroll back up, what’s that link Kellie’s posted?’

  They read the post together.

  Kellie – Ladies, I think I’ve just discovered the reason why every mother in the area seems to suddenly have intimate knowledge of NOP. Click through to this article.

  Poppy obediently pressed on the link and they simultaneously gasped when they saw the headline of the article published to the Parramatta Gossip and News site:

  SHOTS FIRED!

  LOCAL MUMS UNDER ATTACK FROM NEW WOMEN’S GROUP

  By Anonymous

  When I was tipped off by a friend that a new local Facebook group had started up, I knew that I had to find a way to get myself on the inside. You might wonder why. Well, membership is restricted to one very specific group: NON-MOTHERS. And digging deeper: no men allowed, just women, but women who not only don’t have children, but they also don’t WANT children. Ever. They call themselves NOP (Non-Mums Online in Parramatta), perhaps out of jealousy that they were unable to join popular local community group Mums Online in Parramatta (affectionately named MOP). I’m sure they thought they were very clever coming up with that one!

  Now, as a mother with two children, I am obviously not eligible, so I created a fake Facebook account. I joined the group and to begin with, it was mostly friendly and harmless. But the mood quickly changed.

  When I found out that the group’s founder, Poppy Weston, was betrayed by her husband and her best friend who went on to have a child together, alarm bells started ringing. Was this about connecting women with a shared interest? Or was it really about getting back at Poppy’s ex best friend? Was it a defence mechanism after her husband took away her chance to have children?

  I knew I had Poppy pegged right when she put up an angry post that could only be described as a call to arms. Our fearless leader has had enough of the mums of the world ‘running the joint’. She’s decided it’s time for the women of NOP to start standing up for themselves. To tell mums what they really think.

  Now I can’t speak for any other mums out there, but as a mother of two little angels/monsters – I sure as hell do not feel like I’m running the joint. And the l
ast thing I need is to start copping crap from other women who think I’m somehow ruining their lives.

  I want to issue a warning to local mums: watch out for childless women in the shops, in restaurants, in cafes or on the street who are raring to have a go at you if you so much as bump their ankle with your pram. Because the ladies of NOP are out for blood.

  In the meantime, I’m still a member under my false name and I’m going to remain there until my cover is blown, because someone needs to keep an eye on these women. Good luck on the streets, mamas!

  Poppy was livid. ‘Who the hell is this person?’ she spluttered. ‘How does she know so much about me? About us? Right down to the fact that Garret left me for my best friend?’

  ‘I don’t . . . I don’t know,’ said Annalise, ‘I seriously don’t get it. I mean, I guess I’ve bitched to some people within NOP about how much of a dick Garret is for the way he treated you . . . but I didn’t think I went into that much detail.’ She looked guilty but Poppy was too caught up in her anger with the writer of the article to pay too much attention.

  ‘And how dare she make those assumptions about my reasons for starting the group! I was jealous of MOP? Please! And she thinks Garret took away my chance to have children? That I don’t even know what I want? It’s absolutely ridiculous!’

  ‘I know,’ said Annalise, ‘it’s horrible. And she claims she’s still a member! We have to figure out who she is. We have to get her the hell out of our group.’

  ‘But . . . but how?’

  ‘Let me have a look and see if there are any comments on the post where the article was shared. Maybe someone has an idea.’

  Once again, they looked down at the phone together. Unfortunately, the comments were filled with women who were just as flummoxed as Poppy and Annalise, and members who were worried their previous posts on NOP were no longer safe: