Page 2 of The Snag List
1
5 months earlier …
‘HEY, GUYS, WELCOME … UH … WELCOME BACK TO my channel …’ Pale morning sun stretched languidly across Lindy’s bed, where she lay propped on pillows watching her favourite old video of her son on her phone – the date in the YouTube description read 26 March 2017.
‘Can it see me, Muma?’ the little six-year-old Max on screen was asking.
‘Of course it can – see the green light? That means it’s working.’ Her younger self was off to the33 side, out of shot.
‘OK. You go and I’ll call you when it’s ready,’ Little Max on screen instructed.
Lindy watched her younger self lean down into shot. ‘OK. Can I give you a kiss?’ The boy obliged and leaned slightly forward so she could kiss the back of his neck. It was a soft little stem of a neck and something of a special ritual between her and her son. Even now, five years later, if she asked to give him a kiss, he would do the exact same movement. On the screen, Max was talking to himself, acting out a story with tiny Lego figures and a Megatron toy so large only the legs were visible.
‘This video is so embarrassing!’ The now eleven-year-old, long-limbed Max lounged beside her. He had just brought her up a coffee because it was 26 March, her birthday –How am I thirty-six years old?!– and this coffee, along with watching this video, was their tradition.
She laughed at his disdainful face. ‘At least production values have improved since then!’
It was the first toy video Max had ever made that they’d put on YouTube. Little did they know this little Lego melodrama would become a multimillion-hit channel. Five years on, Maxxed Out operated exactly like a TV station powered by ad revenue and branded content. The difference was every ‘show’ was created by her husband, Adam, their son was the star, and Lindy helmed the entire business end of the Maxxed Out juggernaut.
It was a life they’d stumbled into. On her birthday, the year she turned thirty-one, six-year-old Max had demanded to know what presenthewas getting. She’d explained that on other people’s birthdays you gotthempresents. He announced that he wanted to make her a video like the ones on YouTube. Even though she could smell a kid agenda at thirty paces, she said she’d love that.Little did I fucking know.
Soon Adam was in on it too. They played together for the camera, and Adam would edit the videos and upload them to a YouTube account. The videos were unlisted – only people with the specific link could access them, and they only doled the link out to family and friends. It was a way to keep Adam’s parents and brother in America in the loop and make sure they didn’t miss out on Max growing up. It was also, Lindy suspected, an Adam-engineered opportunity for him to showcase his hyper-fun, super-engaged ‘dadding’ skills, for which he received lavish praise from the American contingent and a lukewarm, slightly baffled reception from Lindy’s family. After about a year, Max became obsessed with a kid YouTuber called Axel who hosted his own show on the platform and had more than a million subscribers. Even though he was young, Max soon cottoned on that his videos weren’t being seen by anyone other than family. He wanted to have a ‘real’ channel. Lindy was extremely wary. She’d sit beside her son as he watched Axel, and when Axel, who couldn’t have been more than nine himself, reminded his viewers to hit the ‘thumbs-up’ on the video, tiny Max unquestioningly obeyed. It was unnerving, like wholesome, peppy mind control.
Adam was very pro the idea, reasoning that all kids now would be online to an unprecedented degree and this could be a safe kind of on-ramping for Max. With Max pleading, and without Adam’s backup, Lindy’s resolve crumbled and she agreed to open up the Maxxed Out videos for public consumption. With hindsight, she felt the timing had a lot to do with it. Just weeks before they set Maxxed Out live, she’d lost a pregnancy. Lindy had been delivered the body blow of a silent sonogram on a Thursday morning, then gone back to her desk at the psychology practice, Heart Mind Solutions, where she had managed logistics, that afternoon. It had hit very hard. And because of the cack-handed way the world dealt with grief of this nature, she’d never taken compassionate leave from her job, never even told any of the actual therapists that she worked with, even though it would have surely helped immeasurably.
At home, Adam was as devastated as she was, and every moment with Max brought a two-pronged thrust of pain: he was a constant reminder of the child that wouldn’t be; and he was her baby, bewildered at the recent shift in the atmosphere of his previously safe and cosy home. The channel made Max happy, and at that moment, from the depths of her grief and guilt, she’d clung to that.
And then it had made them money.
Four years ago, she and Adam had both gone full-time on the channel, and two years in they’d been busy enough that they’d needed to hire the extremely commercially minded Jamie Bell, who was now managing director. Adam’s days were now spent literally playing with their son for their captivated fanbase. Hers were filled with sponsorship negotiation, financial negotiation and talent negotiation – tricky given the ‘talent’ was her husband and son. It had been four years of being the fun police in every single respect, from no to dessert on a Tuesday to a massive NO to a potentially lucrative collaboration with an alt-right YouTuber in Minnesota, no matter how big his audience was.
Adam’s background in advertising was an advantage in the new venture, and she enjoyed running the business, though she’d also vaguely hoped it would eventually leave space for her to resume her abandoned psychology training and perhaps embark on a venture of her own – wishful thinking of the highest order.
When the pandemic hit, her misgivings about both working with family and putting her son to ‘work’ on the internet were instantly drowned out by terror at the fact that they had put all their financial eggs in one basket. She couldn’t have known in early 2020 that, with everyone about to be under mandated house arrest and desperate for childcare in any form whatsoever, conditions were perfect for channels like theirs to thrive. Max and Adam were essentially babysitting swathes of children around the world while their parents clung to jobs.
And so she and Max rewatched this funny little video every year, and the coffee was historically bad but she was detecting an improvement with each birthday that passed.
‘You were only six, Max! You were so creative.’
‘I know, you’re sooo proud of me,’ he said, doing his bored pre-teenage voice.
‘You’re lucky you’re sick of me saying I’m proud of you – that’s a good sign, you know!’
‘OK, I know, Granny and Grandad never said it enough and now you haveissues.’
Lindy laughed. ‘Oh, they said it! About as much as anyone’s parents did in the nineties.’
‘Can I go now, Mom? I’m setting up a safari video with Dad. Cannot wait for all the new kit we’ll have in the new house – Dad says a whole room just for my Lego – the Legostudio.’
‘Yes, amazing. Go! You’re dismissed. Thank you for humouring me.’
Lindy stretched out and sipped at the coffee before immediately dribbling it back into the cup, grimacing.By the time he’s seventeen, I’ll be drinking it, she calculated, placing the cup on the sagging shelf above her bed.
It was her last birthday in the house – a slightly ragged red-brick terraced cottage with a cherry blossom in the garden. They could be gone before it bloomed; they had just over two weeks left. She’d miss this tiny bedroom under the eaves. It had been the attic; they’d converted it when Max was six months old. Even before he was crawling, the house had felt like it was shrinking around them, but Lindy loved the sash windows and the bockety wooden floors, not to mention being able to walk into town or around to her parents’ house on the other side of the park. Lindy would have happily stayed, but she couldn’t deny that both their family and the business had long ago outgrown the place. It was time. The channel was doing well, and what was it all for if not to live well too? A text interrupted the rationalising that had become a round-the-clock refrain in the lead-up to this move. It was Fionnuala.
Don’t forget we moved your birthday brunch to 10.30.
You’re an old bitch now – don’t be a late bitch too.
