The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  But now, what’s the point in turning it down? Turn the real me up; blast her out.

  If Ollie didn’t do it, and Mitch didn’t do it, I think, then who the hell did?

  Suddenly there is a knock next to me on the window and I leap. Mitch indicates to me to wind my window down. He leans on it. I turn the music down.

  ‘Just one thing,’ he says, palms up in a gesture that tells me he means no harm. ‘When you got in touch, I googled you. You’re very out there online now with that blog and the kind of numbers you have and it doesn’t take much of a glance at the pictures of your house and clothes and whatever to see that you’re pretty loaded. Maybe someone worth blackmailing? That could be where this is headed.’

  He shrugs. ‘Just a thought anyway,’ he says, and then he walks away, out of my life again.

  And I think again of the secret I’m still keeping close and feel my whole body start to tremble, an earthquake at my core.

  It’s another twenty minutes until I am capable of driving home and I spend the journey wondering if it all has to go now: Cheshire Mama, my side-hustle and the thing I have been clinging to since I walked out of work three days ago. I need to deal with that too. Answer Flick’s calls. Make some decisions. I’m drowning.

  The noise hidden beneath the beat of the music, I cry so hard as I drive that it feels like my face is bruised and like my life is bruised, way beneath its skin.

  Anon

  She drives past me, that evening, no Poppy in the car.

  Where are you going, Scarlett? She hasn’t mentioned anything in her messages and it’s a pretty big deal if one of us makes it out in the evening at the moment, with our young babies making 8 p.m. feel like midnight.

  Out of her window blasts a song that is too familiar to me. My stomach lurches.

  I only get a quick glance through the open window but Scarlett has bare shoulders; lipstick on. She doesn’t make that effort for many people. As I said, Scarlett prefers to be (very deliberately) ‘effortlessly’ casual.

  I watch as her car moves further away, heading towards the station. Into town, most likely.

  After-work drinks with old friends?

  Or the other thing?

  I stare after her, until her car disappears from sight.

  7

  Scarlett

  8 May

  I open my eyes at five thirty when Poppy stirs and I sense a tiny flicker of energy; a trace of fight.

  I am a grown-up, I think. Grown-ups can’t quit their jobs because they feel embarrassed. This isn’t serving double vodkas on offer in a bar in my twenties. We have a child. And a horrifyingly large mortgage.

  I haven’t told Ronnie anything yet, so I still have childcare.

  I could just go to the office. Stand tall. Reclaim my life.

  I dress plainly, in jeans and a thin grey knit. The white trainers that make my heels pinch.

  Ed walks into the kitchen later and sees me wearing eyeliner; Poppy dressed.

  ‘You’re not going to work?’ he says, eyes wide.

  ‘Where else would I go?’ I say, taking a coffee pot off the hob. ‘We have bills to pay.’

  I nod towards the pot.

  ‘Your coffee’s there when you want it,’ I say, then start sweeping up toys from the floor.

  Ed stares at me but doesn’t say a word.

  I drop Poppy at Ronnie’s and it’s been easier the rest of the week, in a ludicrous way, because I am too distracted by obsessing over whether the childminder, in between cutting up my daughter’s carrots for snack, has seen my sex tape, to focus on being away from Poppy. I avoid Ronnie’s eye contact. Dart out of the door quickly.

  I distract myself on the train journey by doing that back-to-work-and-traumatised Cheshire Mama post I meant to do the other day. Most people will never know – I hope – exactly how traumatising that trip back to work really was. I do some housekeeping on my Instagram – so close now to the magic 10,000 that would make me a real player in the social media world that it would be a shame to neglect it – and post the picture of Poppy I took at Ronnie’s gate. There, like it all happened today. If only I could pick and choose what time slot I exist in in real life so easily. Zoom back to a week ago.

  On the train, I message Flick to warn her that I’m coming in and then I email the website operator again, as I did as soon as I got home from the lawyer’s yesterday.

  ‘Just chasing!’

  I delete my exclamation mark when I realise I have never written an email I want to exclaim in less.

  When I get off the train, the reality of what I’m facing by returning to this office hits. I feel my body start to shake. I walk the five minutes from the station and by the time I am there, it’s worse.

  ‘Hey,’ I say to Sanjeeta as I sit down. And she is so eager as she leaps up from her desk to hug me that I feel like she has been told to make me feel included. She is my junior; she pities me.

  Freddie does the opposite, staring straight ahead, apparently intrigued by a social media graphic.

  I turn my computer on and wait for it to power up.

  I think about the time I spent painting layers of thick respectability over my messy years and what a fucking waste of time that was. I’m swearing a lot more in my head the last few days. Drinking more. Old me has risen from the dead online, I think, and now she’s making a play for my real life.

  ‘Morning, Scarlett,’ says Felicity, matter-of-fact as she powers over in skintight jeans and high ankle boots that still don’t make her anywhere near as tall as me. She ushers me straight into a boardroom. As I walk through the door, I see glances exchanged, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Morning,’ I say.

  I sit down and put my hands on my lap. They tremble. It’s not subtle. Felicity sees it too, and looks away. She nudges her glasses back on her nose. Twirls her ruby wedding ring. It’s embarrassing for us both, and I hate that I have piled this on her. My role as Digital Marketing Manager is a senior one, one rung down from the top, AKA Flick, our MD. I am a professional person, an adult. I’m not the woman who hauls her relationship problems to the office or the guy who gets too drunk on tequila at every single leaving do and insults people.

  I can be relied upon. ‘One of the grown-ups,’ Felicity used to say with a wink because there are a lot of twenty-two-year-olds in high-tops in digital marketing. I am a grown-up. I put the bins out. I sweep up the toys. I have a grown-up house and husband and life. I have a grown-up job.

  And now I am this.

  ‘Scarlett, I’m so glad you came back,’ says Flick, smoothing down her T-shirt. ‘I would have hated for you to leave like that, over something so …’

  She struggles for a word.

  ‘Sordid?’ I offer. ‘Grubby? Disgusting?’

  I am angry with her, for reasons unknown to me. Maybe I’m just angry with everybody.

  She stares at me, hard, and thinks.

  ‘Something so past,’ she says, after a while, crossing her legs to the other side. ‘Something so unrelated to your work. Which is brilliant by the way, as you know.’

  I don’t know why this makes me cry, but it does. It feels like a loss. Felicity hands me a tissue then lowers the blind so the rest of the team can’t see in. I wipe my eyes but then I get up.

  ‘I need to get on,’ I say, decisive. I throw the tissue in the bin. ‘It’s time to work.’

  I take out a compact and wipe away AWOL mascara.

  ‘Not too rough?’

  She smiles and hugs me, then gets the door.

  ‘How is Ed doing, by the way?’ she says, casual. ‘Can’t be easy for him either.’

  Flick and Ed aren’t close but they’ve known each other for a long time, as long as I’ve known Ed. After-work drinks when he worked here, the odd double date with whoever Flick was seeing at the time.

  ‘It’s nice of you to ask.’ I smile. It connects the dots of my life. Sometimes it’s like Ed exists in a vacuum. My mum friends barely know him. ‘Typical Ed. Shutting down on the emot
ional stuff.’

  ‘That must be hard,’ she says. ‘For you, I mean.’

  I shrug. ‘You know. That’s what I have mates for.’

  She winks at me and squeezes my hand and I head out to work. But it’s outside in the huge open-plan office with faces and voices and eyes everywhere that it gets me.

  I sit at my desk and know that most people in this room are looking at me and speaking about me. A colleague asks if I want a cup of tea and I see him smirk. I log into my email and feel my skin crawl, thinking about them all, logging into their accounts that day, clicking the link, eyes widening, heads tilting, realising who it was and that this was the gossip of the decade.

  Because whatever anyone says, I know. I would have felt the same if it had happened to someone else. Of course it’s gossip. We’re human.

  Do they still have it? I wonder. Can they picture it? Bring it up for a laugh at 11 p.m. when everyone’s had one too many wines and then they watch it in the pub like a Man United match? Are they messaging about it right now? I glance around. My phone beeps. A group chat message from Asha, asking if anyone is signing up for bloody Tumble Tots. But I reply to it because I want to speak to them, want to be in their reassuring company. Want to be in conversation with people who don’t know. People who care about me.

  I go to the kitchen. I need to breathe. Make a cup of mint tea. Calm down. But as I round a corner, I hear Flick’s voice. She’s in a boardroom but the door is ajar.

  ‘I get it,’ says Flick into the phone and I see the back of her head lean up against the glass wall. ‘But it’s not Scarlett’s fault your guys feel awkward. It’s not her fault the video is out there in the first place, Dom. Jesus!’

  I am like a child playing musical statues. Stopped where I first heard her. Unable to move.

  Dom is a client on a soft drink brand. I won his business and we’ve worked together for four years now, a good working relationship that’s crossed over to a semi-friendship over time. We use meetings as an excuse for brunch and a Bloody Mary; I know the names of his kids and ask about his wife’s start-up. When I was on maternity leave, he kept in touch a bit, a few likes on Instagram, the odd message to see how it was going. He’d been one of the people I was looking forward to catching up with most.

  ‘Okay okay, yes, I do get that,’ says Flick, gentler, head still back against the wall. A sigh. ‘I know it’s not coming from you. Yes, I know you do. We all care about her. She’s one of my closest friends, Dom, but trust me I still get it – this is awkward all round. There’s not exactly a precedent here.’

  Dom and his team have been sent the video. Or heard about it at least.

  Flick bows her head forward now.

  ‘Okay,’ she says with a sigh. ‘Maybe we can do that. Temporarily. I’ll speak to Sanjeeta. See if she can work on the account. Subtlety is going to be key here though, Dom, to not make Scarlett feel any worse than she does. I can spin it as needing Scarlett elsewhere now she’s back but please let’s exercise some discretion from your end too.’

  And as if things aren’t bad enough, now I’m a work pariah, making things awkward for my boss, my clients. Junior members of staff covering for me. Things being spun so I don’t realise the truth. It’s difficult to remember a time I have felt so pathetic.

  I turn back and return to my desk.

  There, my breath gets shallower, rasping, audible. Something tightens in my throat, and moves down to my chest. It sits in my stomach too, in a way that makes me feel like I need sugar. Or perhaps vodka and a couple of lines of coke.

  It’s how I’ve been known to deal with this feeling, when it’s happened in the past.

  It happened in the past, often. But I thought my panic attacks didn’t get me any more.

  It turns out instead that they were there all the time, dormant under the surface like fleas.

  Now I look around and the perspective of the room is wrong.

  I go to the toilet and run straight into Joshua, a senior guy from a sportswear client that I had secured last year. Must be here for a meeting.

  ‘Scarlett!’ he says, taking hold of my arms as I slam into him. I shudder, remembering how he does this every time anyway, touches without warning, creepy, handsy. I leave meetings with him feeling uneasy. He tries to flirt, with no encouragement. Now, I have handed him an easy win by charging into his body.

  I look up.

  And I know, in that second.

  Him too.

  Word has spread, and all of my clients – or enough of them at least – know about the video.

  Joshua smiles.

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ he says. ‘About the video.’

  He still holds on to my elbows.

  I am frozen to the spot.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ he says. ‘I didn’t expect to see you. You caught me on the hop. But I’m …’

  And I run then and I don’t care who sees me fleeing my workplace like a crime scene as long as I don’t have to finish this conversation, or any of them.

  I stop only to grab my bag and when I get outside I gasp the air like I’m being resuscitated.

  An hour later I walk through the door of my house and see Ed, who is working from home, at the table in the kitchen. He turns in surprise. He’s barefoot and bare-legged in shorts. His eyes are heavy.

  ‘The whole industry knows, Ed,’ I say. ‘Not just New Social. But my clients. They sent it to my clients.’

  He throws his head back, desperate.

  We sit in silence for a minute.

  Hug me, I think. Hug me, hug me, hug me.

  Ed has seen me in the aftermath of panic attacks the odd time. He knows that’s what this is. He knows that I don’t want to talk. He knows that what slows my brain down is touch, a hug. But lately, I rarely get one.

  ‘Ed, I don’t think I can go back to work,’ I say eventually.

  My job is central to my self-worth. Walking into that office, sitting in those brainstorms is 101 of being me. Plus, I think, there is always the chance this is heading towards blackmail. To the threat I’m most scared of. And if it does, I’ll need money of my own; money that’s not Ed’s so that I can try desperately to keep a lid on it.

  But work is one of the areas of forest that this fire has burnt through most determinedly. Can I put a mask on and charge back into that burning building?

  I sigh, deeper.

  No.

  I can’t get past that level of humiliation.

  My clients.

  That dickhead Joshua and his team, watching me on their away days.

  I am not going back to work next week, next month, ever. My skin isn’t thick enough. Those fires have charred it to dust.

  Whatever my worries about money, I’ll have to find another way. Delve into the savings we have left from my mum. Forget shutting it down, I need to monetise Cheshire Mama, grow it into a genuine business.

  I feel a sharpness in my chest.

  There is no coming back now.

  Whatever this job meant to me, it can’t mean that any longer.

  Ed nods; grimaces.

  ‘I’ll go and work in the other room,’ he says eventually, and scoops up his things.

  I sit on the kitchen floor for an hour, too tired to move, or even to cry, willing him to come back. But he doesn’t, and I message the girls – Cora, Emma, Asha – instead, and tell them I had a hard day at work, so that the comfort comes in, the warmth, even if it’s the virtual kind when I am longing for hands and breath on my ear and a voice, gentle, to calm me.

  I email a formal resignation to Flick and I weep as I do it, saying goodbye to a slice of my life.

  Anon

  Subjects in our group chat today: fussy eaters, childminders v nursery, is this too early to think about having another baby, anyone know a good waxer, am I too old for leather trousers, how can my child still not sleep, where’s the best place to order pizza from? I’ve accidentally double-dosed on Calpol HELP.

  Subjects Scarlett wa
nts to talk about: her bad day at work.

  And there you have it. Scarlett, in a nutshell. Me, me, me.

  8

  Scarlett

  9 May

  It’s been a day since I ran out of the office for the second, more final, time. Felicity has messaged and called repeatedly since I sent my resignation. I don’t reply.

  At home I function at the lowest level I can for Poppy, no Ronnie to help as it’s the weekend. Ed has gone to the gym, says he needs to burn off some rage. Me too, Ed. I guess I’ll load the dishwasher a bit more aggressively than normal, then?

  I phone Ronnie. Tell her that my company have given me a little longer off; that we won’t need her childminding services after all.

  ‘Not a problem at all, Scarlett,’ she says, but sounds surprised. She’s the Beyoncé of childminders; no one cancels. ‘But you know I need notice normally so I will have to take a couple of weeks’ pay?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say, glad cheeks aren’t visible on phone calls, or for that matter pyjama bottoms with stains on them. ‘Sorry to mess you around.’

  But also, this is the upside. No more leaving my girl. No more traumatised train journeys. No more pondering the effect on a child of not seeing their parents all day before the age of one.

  I end the call and pick up Poppy, who squirms away from me as I try to cuddle her.

  I should take her outside, I know. But I am fearful of leaving the house, wondering if every face I see has watched the video. So we are stuck here and the walls are shifting inwards.

  I look down at Poppy, who is optimistically holding out a small ball that I barely have the energy to take from her.

  ‘In a few minutes, Pops,’ I say, and she crawls away as I lie back on the sofa.

  A message pings in. Flick.

  ‘Please reconsider,’ it says.

  Delete. I’ve never told her about overhearing her chat; never will.