The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  Maybe they are new enough in my life that whoever did this doesn’t know about our closeness; doesn’t know they are part of my inner circle. Maybe there’s one area of my life in which I can take a break from this. If there is, I want to keep it protected; keep it safe.

  So I don’t say a word. Or reply at all. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb and turn to Ed.

  ‘I wish the lawyer was a woman,’ I whisper, as we sit alone in the waiting room.

  He looks up from his phone.

  ‘Why would that matter, Scarlett?’ he bristles. ‘The important thing is getting this done, as soon as is humanly possible. Jesus. Priorities.’

  He goes back to his email.

  I sigh and look down.

  I have worn a high neckline today and a long, formless skirt to negate as much as possible of the image that I am convinced this lawyer has already formed of me based on what he knows from our phone call. When I gave the woman on reception my name, I try to mute my broad Manchester accent and sound like I grew up in Kent. Or at least the edge of Cheshire.

  I open my mouth to explain the difference between talking to a woman about my sexual past versus a man and of knowing that they have seen my body but close it again when I realise there is no point. We’re here now and Ed’s right. We need to just get this done.

  ‘Scarlett Salloway?’ asks a short man in his fifties. He pumps Ed’s hand and then mine and leads us through to an office.

  ‘Can I offer you something to drink?’ he says. ‘Tea? Coffee?’

  We both shake our heads, eager to get on. Our hands are clasped to each other’s.

  ‘Okay, thanks for explaining to me on the phone what’s happened,’ says Mr White. He looks at his screen.

  ‘We just appreciate you seeing us so quickly,’ says Ed.

  ‘Handy cancellation,’ he says. ‘So here’s the situation.’

  I’m glad he’s brusque, at this hourly rate brusque is ideal. And I really don’t want to go over the whole story again.

  ‘You can report this to the police, but that would make whoever has done this alert to being investigated, which means evidence could be deleted or destroyed.

  ‘So first, I would suggest that you try to obtain strong evidence on who did this – and I’m presuming in this situation you have a good guess – yourself.’

  I nod.

  ‘I’m meeting Ollie – the man, one of the men – tomorrow,’ I say.

  Ed’s whole body cringes next to me. His fingers loosen in mine.

  ‘And the other?’ asks Mr White.

  I try again to remember Mitch’s proper name.

  ‘Working on it,’ I mutter, head low, mood lower.

  ‘And what about in terms of getting it down?’ asks Ed, letting go of my hand altogether and leaning forwards. I sit beside him, meek, playing with my wedding ring.

  ‘Yes.’ Mr White nods. ‘Obviously important. Must be traumatic for you and your wife and everyone close to you.’

  I think about my dad. I still haven’t called him back, despite his multiple attempts to get through to me. Ed has his head bowed. I think of his parents, and how eventually I’ll have to see them too.

  ‘What you want to do is contact the operators of the website that it’s on directly,’ he says. ‘Some will remove it, some won’t on the basis of freedom of speech.’

  I see my legs begin to shake beneath my skirt.

  ‘What if this one won’t?’ I ask. ‘What then?’

  ‘Well, it’s a more complicated process but you can make an application on the basis of privacy law. You can also make an application to Google to delist all videos from search results. It’ll be easier if it’s a UK website operator.’

  Ed is nodding seriously.

  ‘There’s only one,’ I say. ‘That I know of.’

  Mr White nods, matter-of-fact.

  ‘Yep and hopefully it’ll stay that way but don’t be surprised if it pops up elsewhere,’ he says. ‘If that happens you’ll just have to go to them individually.’

  Ed looks at me, checks I’m getting it all. I nod but I’m shaking harder now. More websites. The video spreading wider. Further. It hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  ‘So you will sort this?’ Ed says, turning back to Mr White. ‘One way or another?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Mr White. ‘It may take time but there is only one video. In many cases there are hundreds, posted to different websites. This should be simple. The most important thing though is finding out who did it.’

  I nod at Ed and at Mr White and think that the situations aren’t too different, right now and in the video.

  Me, with two men, longing to be anywhere but here.

  We leave then, but not before Mr White hands me a glass of water, concerned that I look faint.

  5

  Scarlett

  6 May

  Early Noughties house music plays loudly in the car and the window is down. My head doesn’t nod rhythmically, automatic, like it would normally do. This has taken even that away from me. Shocked my urge to dance into stasis.

  I push my sunglasses up a touch on my nose. Notice that the guy in the car next to me is staring.

  You think I’m somebody else, I think. You think I am Scarlett 1.0, the girl in the video. Ollie’s ‘bird’, party hard, probably high, definitely drunk, life and soul. I won’t sleep with your boyfriend but I’ll probably flirt with him. If you have a proper job, I’ll roll my eyes and call you a sell-out.

  I am doing it.

  I am on my way to meet Ollie.

  I shove my hand in a giant bag of Haribo that I bought at a petrol station earlier in the journey and shovel them into my mouth.

  We met, Ollie and I, when we were both twenty. I worked in a pub; he drank in the pub. I had spent the years since my pre-teens careering through life, unloved, unloving. My dad, at capacity with his young child, believed me when I said I was fine and didn’t push me when I turned down invites to come for minty lamb or a cup of tea or to build a sandcastle with my sister as we shivered on the beach in Blackpool.

  I had friends. But they were really drug dealers or party buddies.

  I got into university but I partied too hard and I fucked up my degree and so I worked at the pub full time instead of part time and shrugged my shoulders and partied harder. Got kicked out of my flat for not paying my rent. Moved into what I suppose was called a squat. Partied even harder. Took the drugs you aren’t supposed to take. Did the stuff you aren’t supposed to do.

  At the pub there were lock-ins. There was a lot of haziness. But in the middle of the haziness, I met Ollie and wanted to be lucid to impress him and to remember being with him and he brought me back from the brink. From the cracks on the edge of society that in retrospect, I had already started to disappear down.

  ‘Scarlett, Scarlett, there is no one like Scarlett,’ he would sing to me as we danced on the streets, at bus stops, bars, wherever we were. We were together for three years of dancing when he stroked my face, held me close and where sometimes I would cry out of nowhere because I was happy, for the first time in years, years, years.

  Ollie and I moved for the same music and it was a uniting factor, but it was music that even though I had taken it down a notch, still went with being drunk, high, out of it.

  We were young enough to handle that though. Just. We weren’t old enough to have to analyse why we got so out of it, or consider our behaviour as destructive. We didn’t see therapists or make up for it at the weekend with a fast day. Chaos was just what you did until something happened that stopped you being chaotic.

  And when, twenty-three and in shock, I told Ollie one day that that vomiting episode hadn’t been a hangover but a baby, we grinned at each other. Because we had our reason to stop being chaotic.

  It wasn’t on the script but we loved that scene. We would do this.

  He kissed my hair and whispered to me: ‘Thank you.’

  ‘They’ll be funny,’ he said, grinning like I’d never seen him grin. �
�Like you. They’ll be funny and beautiful and confident and a big adventurer, just like you, Scarlett Scarlett Scarlett.’

  Ollie started looking for a proper job, and he thrived with the purpose. I stopped drinking and getting high. Until our baby was born too early and didn’t make it and then I drank more, took more, pushed the boundaries and tried desperately to rewrite myself back into the party girl I was before, not the mum I had been planning to be.

  I wanted to be out every night.

  I wanted to try this club, and that club.

  I wanted to submerge myself back in that world so that I could pretend I had never left it, even in my head, and maybe that would work; something had to, God it had to.

  Because I wanted to die, really.

  I wanted to have the threesome because a threesome seemed like the opposite of planning to be parents. Debauched. Irresponsible. Maybe it would be the thing that worked.

  ‘Really?’ said Ollie, concerned as I whispered it to him late one night on a dance floor.

  ‘Yes! Yes! Why not?’ I said, kissing his face, whirling him around the club.

  ‘It will be fun! An adventure! You always say I like adventures!’ I slurred. Except normally they involved impromptu flights to foreign music festivals or a big night out on a Monday. This was left-field.

  But we could reclaim our messy young lives. Fully see off these sensible nearly-parents we had turned into. Live, so that the alternative stopped sidling into my head.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, Scarlett,’ he said, soft in my ear.

  ‘We’ve been together for three years,’ I told him. ‘We don’t want to get old and boring.’

  That was exactly what we had wanted to get.

  But in the absence of that, this.

  Ollie looked concerned.

  ‘But now?’ he said, glancing down my so recently pregnant body. ‘Now?’

  Now. Exactly now. That was the point.

  And I snapped at him that just because I wasn’t at my skinniest, didn’t mean that our friend’s mate Mitch didn’t want to sleep with me.

  ‘Mitch made that clear actually,’ I said, sullen.

  ‘That’s not what I meant, Scarlett,’ said Ollie, sadly. ‘I meant physically, mentally. When you’re still healing.’

  Well, was Ollie in, or was Ollie out? The implication was that I was doing it, either way.

  He finished his vodka.

  I was insistent and Ollie agreed, reluctantly, like he agreed to most things I said around that time in a desperate bid to make me smile again.

  The next morning though, what had happened and what we had done when we were still grieving for our baby born only six months before had felt shocking. And for us, it marked the beginning of the end.

  I shove in more Haribo. More. More.

  After an hour and a half, the sat nav tells me I have one left turn to go. My stomach registers all of the sweets in that second and I fight the urge to vomit.

  Ollie. I’m about to see Ollie.

  You have arrived at your destination.

  I take a deep breath and turn off the engine.

  Out of the window, I see a man walking into the pub who looks like Ollie, except he doesn’t because he is in his early twenties and giddy and Ollie is in his thirties and by the look of his Facebook picture going grey and by the sounds of his messages, wary.

  I unclip my seatbelt and get out of the car.

  Deep breath.

  Head in.

  And it has to be one of the oddest things in life to walk into a pub and see your first love, all grown-up.

  For me, Ollie is frozen in time, his arms in the air on a dance floor moving to Basement Jaxx with a lazy smile on his face. He has a bottle of Stella in his hand as he leans forward to touch the birthmark on my ear in a bar. He is naked, getting out of bed to walk to the kitchen to get us some water the morning after. He’s bringing in greasy packages of chip shop chips that we will devour to ease hangovers.

  But now, he’s defrosted. It’s twelve years later and there is a tired-looking man drinking a coffee next to a pub window. He may well have had soya milk – he’s that kind, looks after himself even if he’s exhausted. The BMW in the car park might be his, but then perhaps it’s the Skoda with the Baby On Board badge in the back window.

  He wanted children. I know that.

  But with your first love you don’t know, you see, if he has a baby on board, because you do not know him, this man who took such a role in forming your whole life. Who is the reason you drink your coffee the way you do because you started drinking coffee when you were together. Who is the reason you get goose bumps from certain songs and cry at certain films.

  You have thought of this moment, though, so many times, as you went to sleep, as you daydreamed on the bus, as you saw a date on the milk that made your stomach flip and realised it was his birthday. You have thought of telling him how well you’re doing, and looking good when you did it. You have thought how odd it is that you’re thinking all of this because why, when it’s so past and you don’t want him back.

  You have thought Not now, when you have gone out with no make-up on and seen someone who looks like him from the back.

  You have thought about not needing him any more, and how freeing that is.

  And then you have wondered if that is real, if it would be, were you to see him again because what if first loves are like tornados; what if they obliterate everything in their path when they come along, even if on a calm day, when the sun shines, you can’t imagine their power? Perhaps you will always need him.

  What am I doing?

  You have thought of the romance of it all, of the depth of that immature love, and of all of that dancing. You have heard songs, and felt tears that contain seven different types of emotions.

  You have thought of his skinny legs and his polo shirts and you have thought of his Midlands accent. He’s gone back home, Ollie, now he lives in Birmingham. To get some help with childcare for his children, perhaps? For extended family to be close to his own new one?

  You have thought of that first love telling you that he wanted to be with you forever, and how that can have derailed. You have thought that well, it’s good that it did because look at you now with your real life, but also that it’s bad because look at you then, so in love and how can that not be sad, that it didn’t last.

  You have thought how old the daughter you had together would be now, and now, and now, and now, and nothing has ever hurt like that does, every time.

  You have thought everything, because twelve years is enough time to do that, and then suddenly there is no more thinking because he is there.

  Before he spots you he is on his phone, because of course, what else.

  We didn’t do that the last time I saw him. Phones were functional, still, for contact not time-wasting.

  And so you stop for a second to try to make your heart stop racing and breathe so that your voice sounds normal, and so that you don’t seem rehearsed, like you haven’t played this out a hundred times, which of course you have because yes, twelve years. Twelve years of thoughts.

  While you do that, you stare at him, at his head bowed, because he hasn’t yet realised you are there.

  Could you have done that to me, I wonder? Are you capable? The man I know is not capable but look at him: his face has shifted. It’s not a leap to think his character may have shifted with it.

  The anticlimax, though, when a moment that was so nostalgic, so loaded in all of those scenes you played out, is dominated by the mundane.

  ‘Hey,’ is the first word I say to this man, this man who adored me, my first baby’s father. ‘Do you want another coffee?’

  He looks up and says nothing, but his face contracts.

  ‘I’m going to order one,’ I say eventually, swallowing hard.

  I walk away but when I get to the bar I am shaking and so I order a glass of wine. Red, large.

  It is very, very like having an affair, except that th
e sex part is out of the way and I regret it already. The one time, with Mitch I mean.

  Then I sit back down next to him and we are silent, taking each other in and recalibrating. I want to fling my arms around him tightly and tell him how much it all meant, but it’s odd and not allowed and we’re grown-ups now and there are boundaries.

  So we observe them. We talk about our journeys today, distances, parking. We move on to houses, locations, jobs.

  ‘You’re quite big news in the mum blogger world, I see.’ He smiles, almost proud and I think that’s okay. He can be proud – he helped to form me.

  I laugh.

  ‘Apparently so,’ I say. ‘Who’d have seen that coming?’

  I am gentler with you, I think. Soft.

  I am enjoying his company like I always did and I have to remind myself to be suspicious of him, wary.

  ‘Just going to the loo,’ I say and when I’m there I check my lipstick and add a little concealer.

  ‘So you’re married?’ I say, back at the table, and Ollie nods.

  ‘Rose,’ he says. ‘We’ve got two girls, Holly and Jade.’

  I am oddly unmoved. This new life of his feels unreal; something unmoored from me, floating around far away. I can’t quite believe it.

  ‘And you have Ed and Poppy, I see.’ He smiles. ‘Easy to find out all about your life from Instagram. Not that I was stalking but once you got in touch, I did have a look.’

  I nod. Of course I know it’s out there but it suddenly hits me how exposed I am.

  We sit for a second. Now For The Main Event, says the pause.

  Ollie breaks the silence with something he has obviously practised. It masquerades as a joke, but his eyes say terror.

  ‘So you didn’t have a kid that’s mine then?’

  There’s a beat as he realises what he’s said.

  ‘I mean …’

  I shake my head to tell him it’s okay but my smile falters.

  ‘No,’ I say eventually as I compose myself. ‘I would probably have mentioned that earlier.’

  He’s a good actor, if he did send the video.

  ‘Do you really not know?’ I say suddenly, downing the last of my wine and fighting the urge to order another one, despite the fact I have to drive home, ‘why I contacted you?’