‘But do you have friends to spend time with, to keep busy now you’re off work?’ he carries on.
I nod. ‘You know the mum friends I made at antenatal classes?’ I say. ‘They’ve become very close. They do stuff for me – babysitting, helping out, we spend a lot of time together.’
My dad nods, fierce. ‘Well I like the sound of these girls,’ he says. ‘Keep them around. Get all the love you can get at the moment, poppet.’
10
Scarlett
11 May
It is 12 p.m. on a Monday and I am in a pair of flannel pyjamas that I sniff occasionally, suspicious. My insides feel achy. Poppy is napping in her usual star shape on her stomach in her cot.
My phone rings. Jonathan White.
‘Sorry you had to cancel the meeting, Scarlett,’ he says about the catch-up we had been due to have after I saw Mitch.
I couldn’t face it. The trip into town, the eyes on me.
‘Just easier to do it on the phone, you know, with childcare,’ I reply in my lawyer voice; swift, aware I’m being charged. ‘So I’m just giving you the update as requested. Mitch says it wasn’t him, same as Ollie.’
‘You believe him?’ I hear him consult his notes.
‘He was pretty convincing,’ I say. ‘But who knows. I’ve lost all perspective.’
‘Keep going,’ he says. ‘Figuring out who did it is the key. You’ll find them. No one can hide in this day and age.’
I hang up on Jonathan with a sigh at how little this has moved on in the week since I first saw the video. Poppy’s still sleeping. Now what?
I click onto my Cheshire Mama Instagram.
With more suspiciously scented pyjamas than dreamy family outings, I am doing a lot of motivational quotes and throwbacks. I fling myself into replying and commenting on other influencers’ posts and liking, liking, liking. How okay I sound, I think. How fine.
Lots to like online, not a lot to like off it.
I sit back against the cushions on the bed. Sigh.
I need structure in this new life of mine.
This morning – a lot of mornings lately – feels too close to the old life without order. Pasta was served with potatoes after Mum died because Dad was too sad to consider a balanced plate. Washing wasn’t divided into colours because grief trumped white washes. Sometimes you were allowed TV before dinner; sometimes you weren’t. Depended how the day had gone. Rules ebbed and flowed.
And we all know that a lot of my twenties didn’t follow much of a routine either.
But my thirties? So far they’ve thrived on systems.
I run a bath and lie in the last of a jar of expensive bubbles, still scrolling social media, when I see a post by Josephine.
I had been blocking out how weird it was that I hadn’t spoken to her since the video, but seeing my dad has brought it to the forefront of my mind. I can’t put it off forever. Even if a little sister and a sex tape is another level of shame.
How’s wedmin going? I message.
I reach over the side of the bath for a glass of water but even that turns my stomach.
I have to do it.
You’ve seen it, haven’t you? I write while she is still typing her response to my other message.
There’s a pause.
Yes, it was sent to me, I’m sorry, she says. You poor thing. I didn’t know whether to get in touch. Dad said you and Ed were dealing with it privately. That you didn’t seem to want to talk about it. I didn’t want to be an extra person for you to deal with, someone else phoning. I also didn’t want to freak you out that I’d seen it too but I can’t lie to you xxx
It’s horrific, even if it’s not surprising.
I think of her watching me having sex with those men and my skin flames.
Josephine as a little girl would come into my teenage bedroom to ask me to play with her dollies or tell her why elephants were called elephants.
Little sisters aren’t far behind dads and husbands in the list of worst people to see your sex tape. I shudder, despite being in a bath so hot it had made me gasp on entry. That had felt oddly like what I needed.
Dad and Faye had Josephine when I was nine, Faye pregnant soon after they got married.
He told me I was getting a half-brother or sister in a pub over burgers, with a tiny bit of ketchup on his chin. It made me laugh because getting tomato sauce on your face didn’t seem like something that would happen to a grown-up.
‘Scarl, I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said, hand playing with my ponytail as the two of us, on a rare excursion alone, sat side by side.
‘Faye is going to have a baby,’ he said gently and I knew suddenly why he had made the effort to make this one happen, where so many other dad-daughter days had fallen by the wayside.
I stopped laughing.
It was like the future was about to rewrite our history with my mum, and I felt unanchored.
Josephine arrived and I did anything to avoid this new family that had sprung up and usurped mine. It felt like a small price to pay.
‘Why don’t you play ball with the baby?’ Faye would ask and I would roll my eyes and stomp out of the door, no idea where I was going other than away, away, to somewhere where the hurt I didn’t understand eased enough to bear.
As she grew up, it got worse. I hated my dad going to Josephine’s sports days. I hated her calling him ‘dad’. And oh God, I hated her having a mum.
Technically, what I had looked like a family. People were relieved. A sister, too! But somehow, Dad and my weird double carb unit of grief and tenacity had felt more like home.
Now I saw my one-man family share himself with a new crew. If other teenagers were pining for boys in their maths class, it was my dad I was heartbroken over. My dad who had, it felt like, abandoned me.
No one noticed that I wasn’t doing my homework; no one cared enough that my grades were dropping.
I became a teenager and looked older than I was and I got into clubs with even older boys who didn’t ask much in return for the help with the fake ID but in retrospect they asked a lot with those kisses that hurt a bit and hands that strayed unwanted up skirts.
I could get on, and I did, and then I got on some more, and more, until I fell out of the door of our house and into my next life.
But by the time Josephine was an adult too, we had grown a friendship, even socialised together sometimes.
My sister changes the subject.
You’re looking gorge on Cheshire Mama by the way, she types. All my friends tell me they want to be you when they have kids, true story.
I pick my phone back up.
Ha! I type. Is that the equivalent of ‘I want to be you when I grow up?’ AKA ‘You’re really old’. It’s fine, I’ll take it as a compliment …
No WAY! she says. That one of you and Pop on the farm makes you look about twenty-two. Anyway, got to go, am at a dress fitting. But this will blow over. I promise. So sorry I can’t help more. Love you.
I nip over to Cheshire Mama to look at the post she is talking about. Hmm. Twenty-two is generous. But I do look all right. Confident. Together. Taken before this all happened, obviously. Now I would need more than a filter to get rid of eye bags, matted hair, knitted brow, sad mouth. All the evidence disaster has happened.
I lean back in the water.
Sigh.
Something is gnawing at me. Something else.
Since this happened, a week ago, nothing else has come up. No email follow up asking for money. No second video.
And I can’t believe that is it; that this is just sent out into the world and stays there, stagnating.
What would be the point of it remaining stagnant?
Where, then, I think, is this going?
If somebody hates me enough to send that video to my friends, my family, my workplace, knowing the impact that would have, they aren’t going to leave it at that, are they?
Like Mitch said too, I am out there.
Should I be deleting Cheshire Mama, I think, in
stead of attempting to grow it, be out there more?
I think of how it looks, our life.
We are quite wealthy now. My own salary might be modest but Ed, high up at an accountancy firm, earns a lot and there was the money I inherited from my mum. We bought a big white listed house on a private road; it looks like something from Escape To The Country. The cars in our drive are fancy. Will this descend to blackmail? It would be worth bothering to ask me for money; from the outside it would seem like I might well have it.
I run my hands through wet hair; think.
And come back to the thing that’s been chewing on my insides since this happened.
I glance at the door of the bathroom.
If Ed thinks a sex tape is my only secret, he is wrong.
I have other secrets, from the past.
Worse secrets.
My worst secret.
My heart starts to pound.
If this person has access to the video, do they know that one too?
Is that where this is headed?
The bath starts to feel chilly.
I submerge myself and wonder if I could do it and stay under. But I picture Poppy’s face, and I just about come back up to the surface.
Anon
She’s starting to break apart, Scarlett, just small pieces of shrapnel coming away, and that’s satisfying. I look at her hair sometimes, and see oily roots, white residue from a rushed application of dry shampoo. Ugh.
I see her eyes starved of sleep, heavy. A brief expression of self-doubt that says her confidence had been delivered a blow. Less alpha, more beta. They are fleeting, but I cling to them. Smile as she walks away. This is what I wanted.
But it isn’t enough. Because Scarlett still functions; the building blocks of her life still in place.
Would money help? Stripping her of that?
The Salloways’ house is a four-bedroomed listed building on a private road and Scarlett calls it ‘the cottage’ like we’d all have to stoop to get in there before we sit, shivering, in the three-foot-squared kitchen eating jacket potatoes with own-brand margarine. Ha.
‘I’m working class!’ she protests when she is boozy, her accent deliberately at its strongest.
But there is no evidence of it, this working-class core she claims.
It is another thing that is hard not to roll your eyes at because Scarlett orders the most expensive wine on the list without thinking about it. Clicks order on designer bags while she watches TV. And we all know there is cash, inherited from her mum.
Money isn’t what this is about though.
It’s about so many things, the unfairness of the world, those rolled eyes, a man I love, but money isn’t one of them.
Or it wasn’t meant to be, at least.
11
Scarlett
14 May
Poppy is looking at me, eager. Earlier she brought me her shoes like a puppy desperate for a run around the park.
‘Okay,’ I say, seized by familiar guilt. ‘Come on.’
‘Yeah,’ she says, whether she understands me or not. ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’
By 2.30 p.m. we are at bounce and rhyme at the library, and Poppy is on the floor making duck noises.
‘How old is she?’ asks the mum to my left, smiling down at our children, not me, as parents at baby groups do.
‘Turned one a couple of days ago,’ I reply. I am not looking at her though but at my phone, which has just beeped. My fingers quiver slightly, as they always do now.
‘Aw,’ says the woman I haven’t looked at yet. ‘Did you do anything nice?’
‘What?’ I say.
My phone beeps.
I leap on it, somehow always hoping for an answer, from somewhere.
Just Ed, saying he’s out for drinks tonight. It’s happening a lot lately. Gym, drinks. Anything but home.
I realise I sound rude.
‘Cake, few presents,’ I mutter. I look at her for the first time. Smile. ‘There are plenty of years for the crazy parties aren’t there?’
Or we didn’t do anything major for Poppy’s birthday because there was a deep air of misery heaving its way around our house. It’s not like we were the Waltons before, but we marked occasions, did the celebrations. We blew out the candles, cracked open the Cava.
This time, Ed and I had stood next to each other as we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Poppy and helped her open her presents, all of which I had bought and all of which Ed was as in the dark about as Poppy as we hadn’t spoken about it, hadn’t spoken about much at all lately except lawyers’ fees and sex tapes.
‘You couldn’t buy a cake, could you?’ Asha had said to me, casually, a few days earlier.
Her big brown eyes were earnest, her trace of a London accent fading with every month that passed.
Everyone nodded in expected agreement.
‘You have to make one, right?’ she said. ‘It’s just a mum thing.’
Is it? Waitrose does great cake though.
But I added crafting Peppa Pig from icing to the mental list of things I needed to be good at.
Not a problem.
After all, I’d crafted a wife and mum from a woman who used to be eighty per cent vodka and a handful of pills. How hard could a cartoon pig be?
Four hours in the kitchen later as Ed watched the golf highlights on TV, Poppy had her cake. Ropey but done. I presented it to an unenthused Ed and then went to bed, exhausted. Those precious evening hours spent on something that would have been better from a supermarket. But no matter. I had done it. It was a mum thing.
I think of Poppy’s face though, when she saw that Peppa Pig cake.
Back at the playgroup, Other Mum sniffs at my low-key approach.
‘Oh we’re going big for Jacob,’ she says. ‘It’s Fireman Sam themed.’
She leans in conspiratorially.
‘Fireman Sam is coming!’ she whispers and I want to explain to her that her ten-month-old son can’t be on the receiving end of spoilers on the basis that he can’t yet speak and also that you do know Fireman Sam is a fictional character?
Instead I look down at Poppy and see her trying to take off, she is waving her hands so excitedly. I love this, being with her, and it’s painful, the twitching of my brain and how much I wish I could be fully here, immersed. I feel another wave of guilt about her birthday. For not throwing that party that I couldn’t face, with the eyes of family and friends on me, all at once, and the loudness, and my paranoia.
I feel a twist of rage again. Fuck you, whoever did this, stealing my daughter’s party from her. And for what?
‘Come on, Pops,’ I say, scooping her up as the final song finishes. ‘We’re off.’
We leave quickly without goodbyes and I am pushing Poppy’s buggy home when I see him, across the road and just cutting through the lane behind the doctor’s surgery.
Mitch.
Mitch, who I hadn’t seen for all these years, then saw so recently.
Mitch, my co-star in the sex tape.
I stand and stare.
Because as a woman he is speaking to shifts around, bringing her profile into view, this picture gets weirder.
Mitch is speaking to my friend Asha.
Asha, without the daughter who is almost always with her in a sling or feeding, as she’s passionate about attachment parenting. Asha, for once, is alone. And she looks intent, focused.
No. Rephrase that. Asha looks angry.
I run down to the crossing and push the button over and over then glance back at them but they have parted ways, and I can see them both getting into separate cars. Come on, lights. But they are driving away. When the lights finally change, I run fast with the pram, to try to see into the car Mitch got into. Poppy thinking it’s a game and whooping.
But if I was right and it was him, he’s gone. More likely it wasn’t and I’m losing it, I think. This is too much. I stand catching my breath in the middle of the street.
Mitch isn’t in Sowerton, chatting to my mum friends
in the street. Come on, Scarlett.
Unless he’s stalking me, and he lied, and none of this is a coincidence?
‘More more!’ shrieks Poppy but I stand still, out of breath and taking in what just happened and how fast my brain invented a scenario that couldn’t have been real, couldn’t have been a genuine picture. Could it?
My heart pounds as we walk down the silent streets towards home. I glance over my shoulder before I go inside. Double lock the door.
Inside, I pull off my tights and replace them with my pyjamas. Human contact for Poppy: done. Now I can retreat again. I put Poppy in her highchair for raspberries that she smears over her face and I log into Instagram to post her bright red face on Cheshire Mama. Work: also kind of done, in its new guise at least.
My numbers are creeping up; the only success story in my life right now.
I message Asha.
I think I just saw you in the village, I say. By the doctor’s?
She replies yes, says she parked there while she nipped to the shop. That she’s sorry she didn’t see me.
And what next, I think? I can’t ask her about the guy she was speaking to, without sounding odd. Without flagging what is happening to my life, which I am still desperate to keep from my mum friends just so I have respite, somewhere.
I put Poppy down for a nap, drink a strong coffee and then – far earlier than there should be – there is a key in the door.
‘Hey,’ I say, confused. ‘What’s wrong?’
Ed sighs. ‘We need to talk,’ he says, business-like in the entrance to the kitchen.
My first thought is You’re leaving me. Another woman? Those long gym visits, the after-work drinks, I know the tropes. I thought the video was the reason we were distant; perhaps the truth is more clichéd.
‘That sounds serious,’ I say, smiling nervously, trying to defuse. He doesn’t smile back.
Instead he sits down next to Poppy, kisses her then wipes raspberry from his lips. I let our kitchen island bear my weight. A few seconds pass, where things feel oddly calm. All I can do is wait. Even if he is leaving me, I am too tired to fight. I could deal with the marriage break-up later, if I could just sleep.
‘Any updates?’ he asks, perfunctory.
The Baby Group Page 9