The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  At 3 p.m. Ed walks in, looking like I look: smaller, broken down, tortured.

  ‘Jared has seen the video,’ he says without a hello, as he walks into the kitchen. He slams his hand down next to the hob. ‘Jared has seen the video of you.’

  Ed’s friend, the guy from the lift, who still works in my company. I didn’t even think.

  This keeps finding new ways to torment.

  I groan, vicious.

  ‘It was a horrible conversation, Scarlett,’ says Ed, ignoring the sound.

  I nod. Yes. Horrible.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and he says nothing back.

  ‘Are you ashamed of me?’ I ask quietly, as I’ve wanted to ask all week.

  The tears are wide and chunky, saturating my face.

  He winces. ‘Of course not,’ he says with a sigh.

  Stock answer. What else would he say?

  ‘It’s not your fault, is it?’ he says but it’s like he’s reading from a script, approved for use in a #metoo generation. ‘You’re allowed to have a sexual past.’

  He stumbles over the words. Ed’s family don’t discuss things so uncouth as sex. Ed is repressed, but he tries.

  ‘You’re allowed,’ he says, head lowered. ‘To have made mistakes.’

  My own face snaps upwards.

  Because was it a mistake? Or just a part of a full, messy life?

  ‘It happened because of what Ollie and I went through, Ed,’ I say.

  He knows that Ollie and I lost a baby when I was seven months pregnant.

  ‘Do I need to transfer money for the lawyer?’ he replies.

  I stare at him. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  He nods and reddens. Takes his laptop out of his bag and opens it.

  I probably wouldn’t have told him, to be honest, but while a man you sleep with once after untold amounts of vodka might not notice your C-section scar, your husband does. I told him weeks after we met, tears rolling down my young un-made-up face, as we lay hungover in bed and he asked about my scar, finger near its edge. And of course, when you come to have a baby together, you tell midwives and doctors about it in front of him too. Yes, I have been pregnant before. No, it wasn’t a successful pregnancy.

  Ed looks up.

  ‘I know it sounds crazy,’ I say, trying to explain. ‘But I didn’t want to be this victim who had lost her baby, who everyone pitied. I wanted to be back to the me from before. The party girl who liked adventures. But more extreme, more wild, more crazy. That’s how we ended up doing it. It was my idea.’

  I blush. Because Ed knows I used to like three-day festivals I couldn’t remember much of and coming home at 7 a.m. But I gloss over the drugs I took; how dark things got sometimes, how grimy. Ed wouldn’t want to think that about me, preferring the version that beats her PB on her lunch break and sets the table in a fancy way for a dinner party and paints her nails neatly, so I spare him, keep his mind clear of the images.

  ‘I went too far,’ I say. ‘Obviously. But in retrospect I was pushing the self-destruct button on that whole life. Taking it to an extreme so that I could get out of it and move on and start again.’

  Again, he wouldn’t want to know that yes, that’s all true, but also it was the kind of crazy thing we did anyway; the kind of debauched time we had.

  Best to focus on this part.

  I give him a hint of a smile.

  ‘Start again with you, and our life.’

  But this doesn’t please him. In fact, Ed’s face is contracted in discomfort. Of not having it in him to be compassionate, despite the fact that this is one of only a handful of times I have spoken to him about the baby I lost.

  ‘I knew Ollie and I wouldn’t come through that, not with the grief too,’ I say, voice catching now too.

  I stare at Ed.

  He looks like he would do anything to walk away from this conversation and exist anywhere but here.

  Well, Ed, I think, I have to deal with this so you have to deal with this too. That was part of the vows.

  ‘So was it a mistake then?’ I push. ‘Because it brought me to where I am now. Sparked a change. Like things do in life.’

  But Ed looks at me, incredulous.

  ‘You’re saying that doing … that on film wasn’t a mistake?’ he asks.

  I stare at him.

  To him it’s one plus one equals two, as life always is. It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done it. If I wanted to leave the relationship and the life I was living, I should have left. I shouldn’t have got drunk and high and had sex.

  I look at Ed again.

  Did you ever go wild? I think. Did you ever go crazy?

  He is staring at the floor.

  It’s been less than a week since the video but the chasm that’s opening up between us is vast and that shocks me. It should be a moment we are pulling together, tight. Surely.

  Hug me, I think again. But Ed walks out of the room. He pauses by the door as though to turn, but it’s like he physically can’t. I hear him go up the stairs as I stand with my arms wrapped around my own body. But you can’t hug yourself, no matter where you position your limbs.

  9

  Scarlett

  10 May

  Scarl, says a message from the only person in the world who calls me Scarl because there is no word he doesn’t shorten, first thing that Sunday morning. Can I come over? We really do need to talk about this.

  I turn back to the bathroom mirror and tie a bobble in my hair. I glance at my puffy eyes in the mirror. Poke at a spot-cum-boil on my chin.

  I look back at my phone and sigh. Everyone’s messages are difficult at the moment but this one is the worst.

  Since I replied to my dad’s voicemail with a text, I’ve been avoiding speaking to him directly about the video. I told him I was consulting a lawyer, I was sorry he received it. He told me not to say sorry, never to say sorry, please would I answer his calls. I made excuses.

  But I think I’ve run out.

  He’s seen the video. My dad, who calls me Scarl and tried to plait my hair and be interested in my ballet classes after mum died, has seen the video. I struggle against the urge to be sick again.

  Since I left work that day, a steady drip feed of friends has messaged to tell me they were sent the video too.

  Some are concerned, some are disbelieving, some are angry, some send me links to revenge porn articles as though reading about revenge porn is now my hobby. Some, incredibly, act as though it’s something we should be laughing at. Come on, it’s hilarious, Scarlett. They’re generally the richer ones, to whom sex has always been funny. Sex hasn’t always been funny to me. It’s been grimy and embarrassing and a currency and a stain.

  But yes, the pattern is set. If you’re a major part of my life, you’ve been sent the video. My family. Ed’s family. My old friends. My colleagues. Not the NCT girls, though. As far as I know – and Cora, for one, would be telling me if she had seen that – they’ve still not had it.

  I think of the lawyer telling me that if I’m even going to think about taking this to the police, I need evidence first. Of Ollie denying it; Mitch too. Of the dead end I stand in front of.

  Yes, Dad, I reply, weary. Come round. But there’s not much to update you on.

  I turn to Ed.

  ‘My dad is coming over,’ I say.

  He inhales sharply at the thought of being involved in that conversation.

  ‘I’ll take Poppy out,’ he says.

  What’s the only thing more awkward than speaking to your dad about your sex tape? Your husband being in the room while you do it.

  ‘You go out,’ I agree. ‘But leave her here for protection.’

  I give him a wry smile.

  ‘Will you be okay?’ he asks, gentle. In between his pragmatism and his pacing, there are moments of softness, of old Ed, and that is all that’s getting me through.

  I nod, unconvincing. What counts as okay?

  But surely there’s only a certain level of brutality that this con
versation can reach if a nearly one-year-old is cruising along the sofa. She’s an unlikely defender, as she blows raspberries over and over and tries to eat her own foot, but she’s my best hope. ‘It’s probably best you’re not here. Get another gym session in or something.’

  Once upon a time Ed and I were fit. Ed lifted weights and drank protein shakes. I ran the grimness of my past away in twenty-six-mile increments, all over the world. The Chicago Marathon, the Paris Marathon, the Berlin Marathon and in between as many half-marathons and 10ks or stints on the treadmill at the gym as I could. If I could have run a marathon every day, I would have. I’m a person of extremes; always have been.

  Now, of course, we’re made of Americanos and blueberry muffins and sausages stolen from a toddler’s plastic plate. We’ve abandoned tending to our own bodies for a while, as we help to grow somebody else’s.

  Ed is already packing his rucksack, grabbing the opportunity to work out and the even better opportunity to get away from this.

  And I’m relieved.

  As I wait for Dad to arrive, I try to steel myself but I’m made of materials that are the opposite in form to steel. Plasticine maybe. A big lump of Play-Doh.

  And when my dad arrives, I lose my shape fast.

  It’s thirty seconds since he walked through the door and we are standing in the hall with my head bowed on his shoulder as I weep.

  He is holding me tightly, and the sobs are coming violently now. It’s a release.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say when I come up for air. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ he reiterates, rage all over his face.

  ‘It’s that piece of shit who posted this who’s to blame. You were young. We all do daft things when we’re young. We’ll have a pint one day and I’ll tell you some of the stuff I did in the Sixties.’

  I try to smile. Manchester born and bred, utterly working class, my dad. I can believe him. There would be a plethora of stories.

  We move into the living room and sit on the sofa. Normality goes out of the window. I don’t offer drinks; I haven’t tidied up. I wear leggings that once were black. Sport hair that once was washed. Mascara that once was on my eyelashes. I’m a bleak homage to what once was.

  This is an emergency summit. The gloss of life – manners, politeness, routine, ceremony – is gone.

  ‘The problem is,’ I say to my dad, ‘that piece of shit is currently unidentified.’

  ‘But it’s him obviously?’ he says, brow furrowed. ‘That ex of yours?’

  I sigh. ‘He says it isn’t,’ I mutter, knowing how naive I sound but believing it, fully.

  But also, I can’t accept that somebody who used to whisper all the things he liked best about me into my ear until I slept when I had insomnia, could go for me like this.

  Ollie and I were together from when I was twenty to twenty-three. We discovered Eighties teen films together and shared a deep love for dance music. We drank one-euro red wine from plastic bottles on European campsites at festivals. I loved the dollop of freckles on his thigh. He loved that birthmark on my ear. But we loved each other beneath our skin too. We were young and obsessed.

  My dad would know this, surely?

  But then, I think back to the time Ollie and I were together and it was when my dad and I were furthest apart. I had dived into the world to drink and get high and be hedonistic and dance until I was ready to come up for air in whatever part of the grown-up universe I had figured out was for me.

  Meanwhile he was at home in the world that he’d rebuilt.

  A few years after my mum died, Dad went to French classes to keep himself busy and met his new wife, Faye, over irregular verbs and extra-curricular Cremant. Tentatively I was introduced to Faye and the three of us spent summer holidays in Brittany and Bordeaux. In between, I peered down the stairs when I was supposed to be in bed, watching them get to know each other, only seven years old and my tummy nervous about what their closeness meant for the future.

  Faye started leaving her toothbrush and her blender and eventually her nightie and we were polite but not close and eventually she moved in and they got married and people got weepy at my flower girl dress and it seemed impossible after all of that that we still weren’t that close but we weren’t, even though she tried, and sometimes I wasn’t even polite.

  It affected my dad and me too and until I had a family of my own, we weren’t as close either.

  And so when I was with Ollie in my twenties, my dad wasn’t in my day-to-day life enough for me to go to him with scan pictures when I got pregnant or, later, howling grief.

  Dad was excited for me, and then sad for me, but from a distance and I did most of my crying away from him, then I went travelling and arrived back to him in a different form. Ta-da. Good as new. Mended. I’ve always been more comfortable presenting a polished version of me. I hate exposing my pain.

  But here we are. Consider it exposed, Dad, I’m out of polish. I look at him then, sitting on my sofa, face red like the socks that he is wearing beneath the jeans that have sneaked up his crossed leg. Red like an emergency.

  ‘I believe him, Dad,’ I say, sighing back into a cushion and pulling Ed’s hoodie sleeves over my bitten nails. The hoodie smells of Ed and I am nostalgic for us before Poppy. For us before the kind of shame that sends you to opposite corners of the house. ‘And he did love me.’

  My dad raises an eyebrow.

  ‘He did,’ I say firmly. ‘I don’t know many things as fact, but that I do.’

  He nods, grimly.

  Then he goes to put the kettle on. God, I think, there’s no sign that you are in the middle of a catastrophe as clear as someone else putting on your kettle.

  ‘I take it there’s none of those fancy cakes you normally get in,’ he says. Wry smile. ‘I’m going to waste away. Tell me there’s a biscuit at least.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, weak smile. ‘You’re sorry you came now aren’t you?’

  There used to be brownies that I would buy from our local deli. A spotless hob.

  I glance out of the window to see weeds that would come up to my knees. If we stopped living the day that Felicity showed me the video six days ago, other things have grown up like those weeds in our place. Grime, mess, distance.

  I flush pink because my relationship with my dad goes like this: we meet up, I spend the entire time proving that I am not the car crash I once was. I tell him stories of presentations I have given at work, I dress my child in overpriced clothes because I am middle-class and successful. I tick as many boxes as I can, without even realising what I am doing. I am like product placement, attempting to sell you something without you realising it. I am as good as the one I think of, truthfully, as your ‘proper’ daughter, the subliminal message goes, love me, love me, love me.

  I spray some Dettol on the coffee table and wipe it down and wish they sold a human version. If only it was so easy. I touch the grease at the top of my hair, self-consciously, where the greys peek through. The kettle boils and Dad goes out to get it.

  He comes back into the room and hands me a mug that I usually reserve for builders, containing tea when I rarely drink it.

  ‘Okay then so what about the …’

  He looks away from me before he continues his question.

  ‘… other fella?’

  I cradle my hot mug away from her direction as Poppy pulls herself along the sofa.

  ‘Well done, chicken.’ I smile as she takes her hands off for a second and stays upright. I reach down to stroke her hair and kiss her. ‘Well done, clever girl.’

  The other fella you were having sex with at the same time as this boyfriend who loved you. No wonder this is difficult for my dad to compute. Not for the first time I think of my half-sister Josephine and how much cleaner she is than me. How much more glossy. How much less ruined. She must have been sent the video, Josephine, but she hasn’t said a word to me. I can’t face asking her. I can’t face adding another layer to this conversation and asking my dad.
I think about Josephine’s upcoming wedding, and how she is at the start of things, unblemished. I scratch at my skin. I’ve covered it in expensive moisturiser and fancy bath oil for a few years now but it’s still me under there.

  ‘Well,’ I say, with a cough. ‘He says no too.’

  ‘But it has to be one of them, doesn’t it?’ he says, looking astounded that the daughter who takes the phone off him when he calls his utilities companies to take them down and make them quiver and offer refunds would be so meek; so accepting.

  I sigh.

  ‘Dad, you’re not ashamed of me, are you?’ I ask.

  I look down at my odd socks, a tiny hole forming at the ankle. I think of the chaos in my kitchen. I picture my ethereal sister, kindly keeping her sex life hidden from view so no one has to think about it.

  Then I feel myself enveloped, so tight it is hard to breathe but I don’t want it to stop.

  ‘Now you listen here,’ my dad says, firmly. ‘You never say that again. I have never been ashamed of you for one day in your whole life and I never will be. Don’t let anyone make you feel ashamed, my lovely girl, ever. You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re bloody gorgeous. You’re a huge success at work, you’re making money somehow from posting pics on the internet even when you’re on maternity leave, which I don’t fully understand but sounds bloody savvy to me. And you made that perfect girl.’

  He nods towards Poppy then pulls away from me.

  ‘You make me proud as punch. Every single day. As much as Josephine, but we will always have our special bond – me and you, my love – we will always have that. And I will look after you, because your mum can’t, and that’s not bloody fair.’

  I cry hard then because I want her, for the first time in years, and it’s horrific that I can’t have her, but it’s also the biggest relief that she has left my dad behind to put his arm around me.

  ‘Now listen,’ he says, as he pulls on his trainers to leave. ‘I know that Jos is a bit off radar, with all her wedding admin. “Wedmin”, she tells me it’s called, you heard that?’

  I smile, at this strange word coming out of my dad’s mouth.