The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  He shakes his head. Smiles at me. He keeps doing that, a really big, genuine smile like it is nice to see me, and it is contagious and I do it back before I remember, each time, why I am here.

  ‘The kid was my best guess,’ he says.

  ‘Serious?’ I ask.

  ‘God knows,’ he mutters. ‘I could see they weren’t on your Facebook but maybe that was deliberate. I don’t know. It was pretty out of the blue.’

  He reaches for my hand.

  ‘And we had managed it once before.’

  His eyes fill with tears as mine do and we think of our baby girl, just for that second, together. I wonder if that means as much to him as it does to me. It’s such a relief.

  We sit then again in the company of that shared experience and shared loss. There is calm from being able to think about my first baby with the only other person who understands and I tighten my other hand around his. He squeezes back, and it feels like clinging.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I think about her.’

  It takes a few minutes to regroup.

  I let go of his hand and go to the bathroom again. When I come back he stares at me.

  ‘So. Come on then. Tell me what it is, new strait-laced Scarlett. Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.’

  There it is. That singsong. We smile.

  And I realise I would look strait-laced to him in fresh make-up, drinking a glass of red without the wide eyes and the bare legs.

  My heart pounds. He DJ’ed sometimes, too. Staring out at me from the decks as I danced for him. What an odd thing, to go off and live life and procreate and move on, but to leave a bit of you back there, twenty-two and besotted.

  He repeats my name. ‘Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.’

  I’m still back there, which means I can’t speak here, now.

  ‘What is life like now then?’ he asks. He leans forward, onto the table, looking in my eyes. ‘Is it all book clubs and organic kale? Are you …’

  He does a hammy gasp.

  ‘Are you … respectable?’

  I blush, like I’ve been caught out. Like the police have come to the door to arrest me for something I did twenty years ago. I’m a fraud, I think. Whatever facade I’ve put on, it’s not convincing.

  But his teasing is warm. And it’s nice to break the sadness of earlier.

  ‘I am actually, yes,’ I say after a while. ‘And I like it. Like you say, respectable. People respect me.’

  My eyes fill with tears.

  ‘Or they did.’

  He raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Tell me if you did it, Ollie. Tell me if you shared the video.’

  But when I look up, sobbing, I know he didn’t.

  Because while his hair has greyed, his eyes haven’t changed.

  ‘Fuck, Scarlett, what happened to you?’ he says. He goes to touch my face and I see him stop himself, think, about his wife probably, and how this would look, might have looked, as he sits in a pub with his ex. But then he does it anyway.

  I tell him what happened.

  He slumps back in his chair and I realise for the first time that this affects him too. Sure, I’m female, and so I bear the biggest load of it, but it’s his body, his sexuality that’s up there too.

  ‘Rose,’ he says, looking queasy. ‘My parents. The kids, even, when they’re older. The thought of people seeing that …’

  He looks at me.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ he says. ‘To myself as well as you.’

  I flounder now, defensive almost.

  ‘Oh come on, Ollie, everyone knows it’s not as embarrassing for a bloke. There’s no shame for you. Maybe you wanted to get revenge. For me leaving you.’

  He looks at me.

  ‘After all of this time?’ he says. ‘You think I’m that bitter?’

  Then, quietly and sad. ‘You didn’t really think it was me?’

  He says it hoping.

  I say nothing.

  ‘You did,’ he says, devastated, and I duck my head.

  If Ollie didn’t do this, then it isn’t over. And it means I have to contact Mitch.

  ‘Do you have a number?’ I ask, wincing.

  Ollie looks up from the dregs of his coffee.

  ‘For Mitch. Do you have a number?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Sorry, Scarlett,’ he says. He thinks. Scrolls through his phone contacts. ‘I don’t keep in touch with anyone who knows him either.’

  I can’t make eye contact with him because now, more than at any other point in the conversation, we have to picture it. The night that I tried to break our grief, not understanding myself well enough to know that I was really trying to break our relationship, by bringing someone else into our private sphere. Self-destruct didn’t cover it; it was relationship destruct, life destruct.

  I was sad and I had been through something no one should have to go through, not least when they are twenty-three and living in a shared flat and working in a pub and also have done their share of pain already, surely, losing their mum from breast cancer when they were barely able to remember her.

  I’d pressed a button I needed to press to get out, away from Ollie and clubs and grief and drugs and vodka and music and sadness. It was a grim method of making those things happen because I didn’t know how otherwise. That was my whole world.

  Mitch, that friend of a friend, was up for it. God knows how drunk you have to be to have that conversation, but however drunk that is, I was it.

  And Mitch was gorgeous. Grass-green eyes, auburn hair, a cheeky smile. A party boy, another sometime DJ – weren’t they all – an overgrown child, like all of our friends.

  My C-section scar was still pink when I took my clothes off. Mitch didn’t notice. It stung when he touched me. He still didn’t notice.

  Ollie flushes red and I know he is remembering too.

  How it broke us, sharing us and our bodies and our world, especially at that point when all of it was so fragile.

  How that had been the point.

  Because perhaps if it hadn’t been for that night and the awkwardness afterwards, we might have made it. But I didn’t want to make it. I wanted to run away from every memory of our girl and her existence. Including the man who made her.

  I picture it.

  Mitch’s closely cropped hair. His legs, skinny like Ollie’s. But he was different to Ollie with his gym-honed upper body, young enough that it could still work out in the mornings after brutal drug and alcohol binges.

  I remember when we went home together – the same night we discussed it – to mine and Ollie’s flat. I remember chunks, but nothing clearly. Mitch watching as Ollie and I had sex. Sobering up just enough to see Ollie’s face as Mitch touched me. Feeling oddly removed, like I had from all of life for that previous six months too, as I had sex with Mitch. Seeing a look of alarm cross Ollie’s face like he couldn’t believe we were doing this. Could we love each other at that moment?

  I force myself to come back to the present.

  I ask Ollie, despite my shame.

  ‘Can you remember much about that night?’ I mutter quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ he says with emotion. ‘I remember Mitch filming.’

  I think of the quantities of vodka I had drunk. The quantities of vodka I drank a lot of nights. Of how much we used to drink and of how little we used to consider consequences or the future, or the impact of anything on anything.

  I nod. I had vague memories of Mitch filming too.

  I hadn’t cared. This was twelve years ago. The world had barely coined the phrase ‘revenge porn’. It was a bit of fun. We thought the worst a camera phone had to offer was some dodgy pixilation.

  The truth is that when someone was filming the video that would ruin my life, I might as well have turned to the camera phone, grinned and winked.

  ‘Did he send you a copy?’ I ask Ollie, cringing.

  He looks appalled. ‘No! God. Of course not.’

  I tried to remember more. Did Mitch send it to me? Did
I have a copy in the days before I took computer security seriously? Ever show it to anybody? I don’t think so but I couldn’t swear to it. I was drunk, it’s been years, life was blurry then. Life has become blurry again now.

  We sit in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘You know you said you were having trouble tracking Mitch down?’ says Ollie eventually. ‘I know Mitch was short for his surname. Mitcham. If that’s of use.’

  And it is. There was no formality with Mitch. He wasn’t someone you put in your address book and wrote Christmas cards to. You couldn’t imagine him having an oven. Everyone just knew him as the DJ, thingy’s mate, y’know, Mitch. This is more than that. This helps.

  I walk out of the pub loaded with a wedge of guilt, for accusing Ollie, and for inflicting this on him now too.

  We hug for slightly too long and I feel tipsy from what I know, really, was too much wine for a stomach only lined with sweets and too much emotion for a woman and her ex and all the nerves of meeting him in the first place and an increasing feeling of unsettledness for where the hell this mess will end.

  And in the car I email Mr White.

  Met Ollie, I tell him. He denied it and I believe him. Just working on a contact for the other man. Think it’s much more likely to be him.

  And then I shove my hand back in the Haribo, turn the music back up and start my long drive home, hands trembling on the steering wheel.

  6

  Scarlett

  7 May

  DJ Manchester Mitcham.

  And it’s easy, then. Those two extra letters do it.

  I find him on Twitter, still pedalling his DJ skills at the odd fortieth birthday party. I send him a short DM, asking to meet up.

  All right love, he replies. That’s a blast from the past. But yeah, sure. Everything okay? D’you know the Anchor pub in town? Could meet you there after work tonight?

  I’m meeting up with the other guy, I message Ed, who’s at work. I feel victorious. This has to be it, despite the friendliness of Mitch’s messages. If it’s not Ollie, who else? And I never knew Mitch well. Who knows what sort of person he is, what motivation could have led him to this? The story will unravel soon, I’m sure of it. So hopefully some answers soon.

  Keep me posted, he replies. And send me the details of where you’re meeting. I can come, if you want?

  Jesus, I think. Imagine.

  Best if I go alone but I’ll keep in touch, I say. I tell him the name of the pub.

  I pick up the phone to Mr White, who I speak to often enough now that he has become Jonathan.

  ‘Made contact with Mitch,’ I say.

  ‘Great news,’ he says, jovial. ‘Keep all the notes. I’ll ask Lynne to book you in for later this week. We can go through everything then. Let’s get him, Scarlett.’

  I get to the pub early.

  Poppy is still going to the childminder until I figure out what the hell is going on with work; until I’m out of this limbo. Then Ed took her straight from Ronnie’s to Liam’s house so she can play with her cousins.

  I check the clock above the bar. Most likely Ed is watching Poppy create a crime scene from a bowl of pasta about now. I smile thinking of her with tomato sauce smeared around her soft mouth, then take out my phone to scroll through pictures and distract myself. This time, I stay away from wine and order strong coffee.

  I rip the top off a sachet of sugar and see that my fingers are shaking. I’m not sure they have stopped since I met Ollie. This has to be it, surely.

  I try to decant half of the sugar sachet and then think of all the ways my life is now out of control and so I pour the lot in, adding a second.

  Things used to be measured, I think, so recently.

  Oily fish on allocated days and takeaways reserved for weekends. Now they are so out of control, so unordered, it is impossible to imagine getting back on course.

  When Mitch walks in, I see him instantly. He is still large, though now it’s a largeness that speaks of pints and chips for dinner, and having not seen a vegetable for a long time. Before it was a largeness that spoke of whole afternoons in the gym and protein for breakfast at a time when the rest of us thought health food was a sugary cereal bar.

  ‘Mitch.’

  He looks weathered, Mitch. Old. Like the DJ’s packed up and the bar has closed but he’s still at the party, telling twenty-two-year-olds that they are lame for going home; that it wasn’t like this in his day. To stay! Stay! Have one more! Let’s do pills!

  ‘All right,’ he says awkwardly and I’m surprised by how clearly I remember his Manchester accent, strong even for someone who had lived in the city their whole life like me. ‘Drink?’

  I shake my head and Mitch heads straight to the bar, while I sit and wait.

  He comes back and plonks himself in the chair with a bottle of beer like a thirteen-year-old who’s just been picked up from a party earlier than they wanted to be. I stare at him. Confronted by the man who I am sure ruined my life, I am struggling to keep calm.

  He looks up at me, raises an eyebrow.

  ‘So then?’ He smiles. ‘What’s this about?’

  I would never have struggled with this confrontation before; would have been powered through it with rage. Now though, I am dealing with the maternity leave confidence crisis. Too much time in my comfort zone; too much time in pyjamas.

  I hide my hands under the table, so that Mitch does not see them vibrate.

  ‘I’m not sure how well you remember me,’ I begin.

  ‘Yeah sure.’ He grins, amiable. ‘We hung out a lot, back in the day.’

  We did, from a distance. In a wider circle, often at the same parties or the same nights out. It was only that one night though that we moved in closer.

  My nails are out from under the table and in my mouth. I long for something stronger in my coffee. I am remembering, and I am angry with younger me for having sex with this man for performance not pleasure. For doing it when what she actually craved was a hot water bottle.

  I hate that I was playing a part. Party girl, boundary pusher, fun girlfriend and, mostly, non-mum. It hurts that I did that to myself.

  ‘Yeah, so,’ I say, trying to get it together. Wishing for a friend to squeeze my hand. Wishing for kind eyes to meet mine and tell me I am safe. Wishing for Ed, on some level. ‘A video has been posted of me, you and Ollie and sent to my friends.’

  Please don’t make me explain, I think but when I look up, I know I don’t need to.

  ‘Of me, you and Ollie …?’

  ‘Yeah. My boyfriend. I mean my boyfriend then. Yeah.’

  I only get one second to do this so I need to do it right. I stare at him, analysing his face and trying to work out if it was him. I look at his clothes, try to decipher if he’s short of cash; if that could be the reason he’s done this.

  I have been thinking about this more and more – if at some point something worse will be threatened and I will be blackmailed, and that’s where this is going.

  My stomach dives. I know what it is I’m thinking about; the thing I fear being revealed. The story Ed can never, ever know.

  Mitch may know it. It’s possible.

  I look again. His clothes are nice, new. I look at his face. Try to work out in that second if he’s an attention-seeker, or stalker. If he’s cruel, or odd, or both.

  But all he seems is normal.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. Did Ollie post it?’

  ‘No,’ I say, oddly defensive of Ollie now. Ollie at least cared about me. ‘Ollie wouldn’t do that.’

  But I had thought it. I had thought Ollie could. And now he wasn’t in front of me, I wondered it again. It doesn’t take long for human beings to become theoretical when you can’t see their eyes.

  ‘Sure?’ he asks.

  ‘Sure,’ I say, unsure.

  ‘So who?’

  There’s a beat when he gets it but I spell it out anyway.

  ‘You, maybe,’ I say, with a tremble in my voice. ‘I thought maybe y
ou.’

  His eyebrows shoot up. ‘You serious, Scarlett?’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.’

  He sighs.

  ‘Look, I don’t mean this to sound rude, honestly I don’t but …’ he says. ‘Well, I must have slept with fifty people since you. What happened between us, it wasn’t that big a deal to me to be thinking about it or … posting it, all these years later.’

  I flush red. I’m in ballet pumps and cropped jeans. My dark brown hair, hacked bluntly at the nape of my neck, has lost its gloss and is in a tiny ponytail. My bag is tan and large and designer and contains nappies. I clutch it close to me like a child and colour again.

  Most of these women he sleeps with are younger than me, probably. Hotter. I no longer sparkle. So why would he target me? Because I’m rich now? Because Cheshire Mama has made me visible? Because visible and exposed and rich is a tempting combination?

  ‘But it has to be you,’ I say. ‘You were filming.

  He sighs, infuriated.

  ‘Was I? Well, I still didn’t do it,’ says Mitch, and swigs the last of his beer.

  ‘Ok then, did you share it with anybody else? Send it round to your mates?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Not my style. You might want to go back to Ollie about this. Maybe he was filming too. Or got hold of my phone or something. I saw him around a bit for a while. He was broken when you left him. You sure he wasn’t angry enough to take some revenge? It happens, you know. Being dumped can do bad things to a person. Maybe his life didn’t go that well. Maybe he blames you. Maybe he never got over you.’

  I can’t confront him further, can’t press him, because suddenly all I can think is how I need to be home with my child.

  Everything has an added layer of shame when I think of my daughter, who has a mother who did this. I’m not clean enough for her. I’m not good enough.

  I run out of the pub and jump into my car as Mitch – who sounds genuinely concerned as he shouts after me to ask if I am okay, if I am safe to drive – tries to catch up with me.

  In the car park, I put my head on the steering wheel and turn up the Noughties house music that’s been the soundtrack to my life, in secret the last few years, replaced in public with more middle-of-the-road music, news headlines or even – Ed’s preference – a little afternoon play on Radio 4, like we are sixty-five and slowing into our retirement.