The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  I shake my head.

  ‘No point in the police, not until I figure out who did it. And beyond the two guys, I have no clue where to start. It’s maddening.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Well, in the meantime, we need to make sure we’re doing everything else we can.’

  He looks up at me expectantly.

  ‘Latest on the website operator?’

  And the way he speaks to me, like I’m in an update meeting at work, makes my edges shake with rage.

  It’s horrible to feel such disdain towards someone that you loved. It’s horrible to think about how you raced each other to beat your 10k times and bored your friends with monologues about their face and about how now, you can feel such loathing towards them.

  I look at Ed.

  Does he grasp how many emails I have sent to the website provider about taking the video down, how many hoops I have to jump through, how humiliating every single one of them feels?

  I wonder if he pictures the video pinging into people’s inboxes, spreading like the snotty noses at Poppy’s playgroups, in his nightmares like I do.

  I stare at my husband with these new bags under his dark eyes. I know he is suffering too. But as much as me?

  ‘I’m chasing them constantly,’ I say.

  ‘So no update then,’ says Ed, frowning, and I am not his wife but an employee who hasn’t done as well as had been hoped. Called in to the office for a warning.

  He looks up. ‘Also, you need to be making money now you’ve left your job, from Cheshire Mama at least.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, wanting this to end. ‘I will try and monetise the blog. Done?’

  Now 7,200 followers; 10,000 is the magic number. Ten’s what I need to start properly making cash, to ease my guilt at what I’ve done to our family finances.

  I pine again for work, for that job I love so much. Work fished me out of the sea when I was floating aimlessly in my twenties. Since then, it’s been fundamental. My first job, at a small start-up. Then New Social, where I’ve worked my way up to this role, working with companies on their digital marketing, educating them on social media. Building relationships with clients so that they trust me. And now what? I have to shrink away from people. Hide. Retreat. I think of Dom on the phone to Flick and wince.

  ‘You can go back to work when this has died down,’ says Ed, kinder now. ‘We’ll get the childminder back too.’

  But it’s half-hearted and Ronnie is in demand, plus I know Ed’s mum stayed at home, and her mum stayed at home, and his brother Liam’s wife stays at home and I feel irrationally like I have been tricked.

  I look at him then. I think of how distant he is. How much more appealing those women at the gym will be, or have been already, than me, at home again in his old hoodie. I know how much Ed fancies me, but it’s the me in on-trend jumpsuits heading to work or skintight lycra after a run.

  The last few weeks, I have only put my head above the parapet – or the literal version, the Marks and Spencer duvet – for Poppy.

  Playdate this week? I type to my mum friends. I’ve already told them I’m taking more time off than planned; couldn’t cope with being away from Poppy.

  That bit is true at least.

  And when she sits on the floor playing with bricks and catches my eye occasionally and I know that she loves me being there and I think Would Ronnie have got that same look? I am happy, deep in my insides.

  It’s just that I am also struggling, since letting Ronnie go, to have the physical capacity to look after her. To pick up the bricks. To stack the rings. To cut up the toast.

  I wonder again why the video didn’t go to my NCT friends. Because they are seen as unimportant to me, an add-on to my real life, when this person wanted to attack the centre?

  If so, that’s wrong.

  Lately, it feels like my ‘real friends’ have retreated into the background. Meanwhile my mum friends have stepped right into the middle.

  Anon

  ‘Love you,’ I say as I hug her goodbye. Because that’s what we do, now. We hug, we kiss, we throw around the L word like honeymooners.

  I can see too that after a sceptical start at NCT, Scarlett is starting to warm to us. Even rely on us.

  I can see that what we faked at first – a crew of friends, just because we happened to have booked onto the same course – is becoming real.

  Scarlett trusts us. Trusts me.

  She looks to Manchester, to the men, with suspicion.

  Not here, amongst the milky lattes and the wedges of chocolate cake and the endless, endless packets of wet wipes. Bad things could never happen among the wet wipes.

  Sometimes, as we budge up closer, I feel bad – even a little sick sometimes – about what I’ve done.

  But now, it’s too late anyway.

  Also, what about what she’s done to me? That’s far worse, surely. I remind myself of that whenever the nausea comes.

  12

  Scarlett

  15 May

  As Poppy naps, an email pings in from the website operator confirming they have taken the video down.

  I sit back on the sofa and wait for the relief to flood me.

  Nothing happens.

  I read it again.

  Nothing.

  Anticlimax, perhaps, after all of the emails, all of the chasing.

  Or just the knowledge that though the video is down, it is still out there.

  So how much difference can this make?

  I message Ed and he at least is euphoric; gives the response that I seem to be missing.

  I sit, waiting for the same mood to wash over me.

  It never comes.

  Poppy wakes up and I pick her up to head to Asha’s, where we are meeting for a playdate. I ignore my ringing phone. Flick. It’s no good talking now; the decision is made.

  ‘It’s insane how fast it’s going,’ says Asha as she hands me a Pantone mug. Is her hand shaking a little? I think of the last time I saw her, speaking to the man who looked like Mitch. ‘I can’t believe I’m back at work in a month. Even the four days a week feels like such a lot.’

  She is holding another Pantone mug, in a different shade. This is perhaps the best way to describe Asha: she is a woman who has throughout her life successfully kept hold of identical sets of mugs. In her late twenties but more grown-up than me, by far.

  This is perhaps the best way to describe me: I have random and disparate and sometimes entirely unknown mugs that have somehow been acquired through life.

  I see Flick calling again. Ignore.

  ‘It is.’ I nod sagely, sipping from my mug with its just right blend of blue-green. ‘Insane.’

  This is approximately the 177th time I have had this conversation about how fast my daughter’s childhood is going.

  My phone beeps. Flick. Ignore.

  While the small talk would normally have me climbing the walls to look over the top for some dark humour and spark, today it’s comforting. It’s the conversational equivalent of putting one foot in front of the other. We’re back to the basics and the basics are what I need. I think I’m acclimatising to the basics.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asks Asha, frowning. ‘You seem distracted.’

  I nod.

  ‘You should write about that on the blog,’ she says, back to her topic. ‘The weirdness of time when you have kids.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll have a think,’ I say. ‘Hey, who was that guy I saw you talking to in the village the other day?’ I ask, spontaneous, just in case, because something has to give, something has to move forward. ‘I couldn’t cross the road in time to say hi.’

  Asha looks caught out.

  ‘Guy?’ she says. Slightly pink? ‘Oh yeah, I was giving him directions.’

  ‘To where?’ I ask and she tells me the pub but Sowerton is small. Who needs directions to our village’s only pub, that cosy old-school hub where the locals turn when you walk in and the gravy comes in slices?

  You can see it from wherever you are. It’s tiny, S
owerton, thirty minutes outside Manchester. We have one coffee shop that doubles as a bar. There is a post office, doctor’s surgery, one of those high-end boutiques only frequented by WAGs and rich retired women who have blow-dries every week and need an outfit for their son’s wedding. And that’s our lot.

  Zoom out from there and it is fields, houses, a small village school. You can climb over a stile and walk for an hour without coming to a road. You don’t nip to the post office without having five conversations with people you know; the doctor’s receptionist, your neighbour three doors down, that octogenarian you don’t remember meeting but who says hello to Poppy by name every time you see her. Friendly, people say. Stifling, I mutter quietly as I scurry away.

  I pass Poppy a Lego brick.

  Sit back on the sofa.

  Sip my peppermint tea.

  I think about how I move quickly in Manchester. How it fuels me. And how I move slowly here, like the countryside depletes me. I don’t know. It’s an odd thing because I’m in my thirties with a child and I’m supposed to spend my life muttering about how glad I am to be out of the city and instead, I pine like I’ve left a hot, wild lover who wore me out but I could never tire of.

  I look at Asha and she seems on edge, twitchier even than her normal anxious state, tidying up around the kids.

  Was she lying to me? And if so, why?

  I come back to the now and look around at Asha’s house, painfully tidy. I glance at her bookshelves, perfectly filed; the rows of framed pictures, of Ananya, minutes old, weeks old, months old. Of Asha in Delhi with her grandparents as a teenager, with Aidan on their wedding day, my friend a doll in her exquisite sari. The pictures line up neatly in matching frames.

  ‘I swear my hair is still falling out after having Ananya,’ Asha says, looking in the mirror above her fireplace and smoothing down her already perfectly smooth black hair. ‘Surely that should have stopped by now.’

  I look up. ‘Sorry, what?’

  I have drifted off, I realise, to thinking about Ollie, sipping his coffee. About Joshua, holding my elbows. About my disintegrating marriage. About that man who looked like Mitch. About Asha, and how she could possibly fit into this.

  ‘My hair,’ she says, looking at me strangely. She ducks her head. ‘Just saying it’s still coming out in clumps in the shower.’

  I stare at her and go into a trance. When I wake up, I panic. Where’s Poppy? But she is there on the floor throwing a ball. I lean across and smooth down a bit of her hair that’s sticking up. She giggles because it tickles and I tickle her properly so that she shrieks and claps her hands together in pure joy. And I laugh then too, genuinely.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asks Asha from above when I come back up.

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry.’

  I feel stupid. Obviously it was just a guy. Not Mitch. How could it be Mitch? We sit in silence for a while and Asha breaks it.

  ‘So what happened with work then?’

  ‘I just decided to take more time off,’ I lie. ‘It’s going so fast, like you say.’

  ‘Wow, that’s generous of them!’ she says, and I detect envy. ‘You must have a decent boss.’

  I think of Flick and want to cry. ‘I do,’ I say.

  I reach down, human yoyo, to pass Poppy her Lego brick.

  The doorbell rings. I nip out to the hall to answer it as I’m closest and Asha shouts, ‘Sorry to be a pain but …’ as she charges urgently towards us, anxiety etched across her thick foundation.

  ‘It’s okay,’ says Emma, holding her hand up to Asha as she puts Seth down on the floor with the others. She yanks off her ballet pumps, knows Asha’s urgency is about the fear of shoes on her cream carpet.

  Emma puts her car keys in her bag and pads across the cream carpet in the living room in her bare feet. She lives in the next village as opposed to the rest of us who are, if we’re not feeling the impossibility of putting one foot in front of the other from sleep deprivation, in walking distance.

  I look around. Asha’s right though, I think, about the footwear. There is too much neatness here for something as risky as pavement grub. Outdoor shoes bring disorder. Then again, toddlers aren’t that neat either. And they’re a little more resistant to being lined up neatly by the door.

  Seth crawls in to join his mates. The toddlers sit alongside each other, some semblance of company for one another but barely interacting.

  We say mates; we just push these one-year-olds together, their friendships as forced as ours were at first. When we used to function simply as something mum-shaped that escorted our babies to sit and play with other babies.

  I think of Flick, Martha, the others. The friends who came for the initial post-birth visit clutching expensive baby leggings and overpriced biscuits and then disappeared back to Manchester and their real lives. With them the baby was the add-on, not me.

  Where are they now though? I was too much effort for them. Consumed in Poppy, to be fair, I didn’t make much effort myself either.

  My NCT friends are present. I feel a swell of love for them. How fast that’s happened.

  My phone pings and this time, I check it. I can’t keep ignoring it, not when there are so many things to check for now.

  Just Ed.

  Gym tonight. Going to do a big session. Not back until late.

  I suspect he will do anything to avoid our home and discussions about the video.

  A few seconds later, another pings in.

  Love you x

  Guilt?

  On the sofa, Asha heaves Ananya across her and feeds her, her eyes drooping as she settles back against a cushion.

  Cora turns up a minute later, raising an extremely dark groomed eyebrow at me and giving half a glance in Asha’s direction. I know she means ‘Daytime breast-feeds? Still?’

  I raise my own slightly overgrown eyebrow back.

  With Asha back at work soon too, this will be one of the last chances in a while for this unlikely foursome of ours to get together on a weekday.

  Outside, Cora’s Range Rover with its personalised number plate is parked in Asha’s drive, dwarfing Asha’s red Corsa. On the side is the branding for Cora’s Cupcakes.

  Cora only lives a ten-minute walk away from here but she likes to remind us that she has a fancy car plus her limit for walking in the heels that are on her feet so frequently she totters with an upward arch around her own house in her slippers, is from car to fancy restaurant and back again.

  ‘Is it okay to park there?’ she asks, gesturing to the driveway from the door. Her WAG-worthy engagement ring catches my eye. I look at her forehead and think: more Botox.

  ‘No problem,’ answers Asha, as she scoops up a pile of toys and casts her eyes anxiously towards Cora’s feet. Cora yanks off a spike-heeled ankle boot. Her own WAG-style mansion has so much white that while she isn’t a natural clean freak, she sometimes imposes these kinds of rules too. The difference though is that if she doesn’t, there is a twice-weekly cleaner who will come and make things good as new immediately anyway. That’s a luxury Asha doesn’t have.

  Cora slips in wearing something I think are called pop socks most often found in the Eighties and sits down, plonking Penelope on the floor. Penelope’s outfit probably cost more than mine. Penelope has just turned one.

  Emma hangs back, twirls her fingers in her hair nervously. As usual she looks like a teenager who’s just grown an adult body. Like her five-eight frame is a surprise to her; like she’s uncomfortable in its newness.

  ‘Tell them your news!’ Cora says to her from the armchair. She glances at her manicure – you’d think they’d file more off for a woman who shoved her hands in cake mix for a living, I think. Told you, zero-hours workers.

  Cora doesn’t look up again when she speaks next. ‘Go on, hon, go on.’

  Emma shifts from one foot to the other, and yanks down her top to cover the bum of her leggings. She gives a quick checking-in glance to Seth, who is cruising along Asha’s freshly vacuumed and plumped sofa with a s
tring of dribble exiting his mouth.

  Emma looks like she might want to scoop Seth up and leave, rather than reveal to the group whatever she has just told Cora on their drive here.

  ‘I had Slimming World,’ says Emma, who’s probably a size sixteen, in her faded Welsh accent. Yanks the leggings this time, upwards over her tummy. Her clothes – perhaps a throwback to a pre-baby bygone era – are more like a fourteen. She looks irritated by them. ‘And I’d lost three pounds.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ says Asha warmly, glancing over her shoulder at Ananya who is waving a toy car around her head. She turns back to grin at Emma and places a tiny doll hand on her arm. I suspect Asha could lose three pounds with a half-hour sweep of this house – her tiny four-eleven body moves like a kitten when she tidies. ‘Well done you.’

  It’s distracted but sincere.

  I glaze over as Emma talks now, staring at her hand, in its usual place over her mouth. Is it her teeth she’s covering up? They aren’t the whitest or straightest but I don’t know if it’s as conscious as that. More that Emma tries to cover everything about her body; to shut it up and stop it trying to show her up.

  ‘Thanks, babe,’ she says. ‘I might even let myself have a cheeky wine and a slice of pizza this weekend.’

  I look down and roll my eyes. Emma is a sweet person. But if I have to hear her talk about cheeky drinks or naughty biscuits as though they are massive piles of drugs one more time, I will reach down her throat and pull out the clichés.

  Emma takes a hesitant step forward and finally makes it into the room properly.

  Momentarily, I remember where I should be now and I’m transported to the office. Creative brainstorms on the beanbags, strong eyeliner and expensed pizza lunches. It hurtles back into my brain, what happened. Why I’m not there. God, I miss that feeling of being good at something.

  I wonder fleetingly if I can build myself another work world I love from blogging.

  I make excuses and go to the toilet to check likes on my last Cheshire Mama Instagram post.

  I sit in Asha’s downstairs loo for five minutes, in front of a Tracey Emin print. Inhaling a scent from a plug-in that I am convinced is getting stuck in my lungs.