Smug could have described it if you disliked me; happy would have done if you didn’t.
A month later I was pregnant and then I had Poppy and went on maternity leave and life got busier and my boobs got leakier and friends got more distant and I started Cheshire Mama and I went back to the office to introduce Poppy but it was hard to merge my two worlds. I had thought Sowerton in all of its sleepiness was an extra life, a little bonus. I didn’t realise my Manchester one wouldn’t be there waiting forever.
But I like having friends. I like being popular. And so I found my mum crew.
My old friends picture my world now, I know, as me spending three weeks designing Poppy’s homemade birthday cake and making a Pinterest board for themes for the Christmas tree. I’m the first of our crowd to have a child and I get paranoid that they have written me off as having retreated to the insular world of the parent, with their craft boxes and their playdate schedule and their complete lack of a clue about current affairs or fashion or what’s happening in the world outside their bubble.
But I look into the gloom of the countryside from my taxi now and my skin prickles. Too quiet. Too dark. Not enough everything else. I laugh, now, at how I romanticised it. Sometimes I want to take a pin to the bubble and clamber out.
‘Good night?’ asks the driver and I nod but say nothing.
I lean my head back against the seat, feeling my body shake all over. I have no idea whether it’s from standing outside on an evening when the temperature has suddenly dipped and it’s far cooler than May should be or from the conversation with Emma or whether it’s just from everything that the last two weeks have brought.
Wanting to take up room in my brain so I can’t feel, I open up my Instagram.
And then, something happens.
In the comments, right there on my beautiful, filtered, parenting page, people are talking about my sex tape.
I feel the tickle of sweat in my armpits.
Word has spread. Worlds have collided.
One offers a ‘rerun’. Another compliments my naked body, as though it were public property. Coarse. Terrifying.
Who has seen this? I think. When was it posted? Who would be looking?
I delete and block as fast as I can, but they are from multiple accounts, these messages, and they keep coming. Someone is doing this to me this second.
I hug my own body and the shaking intensifies.
Help me, somebody, help me.
‘You all right, love?’ asks the driver.
I must have emitted a gasp.
I nod, tell him I had too much to drink. Dip my head low into my phone. Keep deleting.
I have tried so hard to contain it, but my workmates, my family, friends, then the clients, now this. The reality, I realise, sadly, is that whether the website operator removed it or not, I can’t contain it. That’s why that email was such an anticlimax. The video is a hurricane, far more powerful than me, blasting through my makeshift walls. I consider the word viral; how perfect it is to describe what is happening to me.
I have gone viral and it is a rotten, unwanted illness. The world is exposed and unvaccinated. There are no limits to what this thing can do and while it keeps coming and coming and coming, I can’t even attempt to recover.
It can kill me, I think, suddenly lucid. The thing is viral and it can kill me.
Tears stream down my face when I think, for a split second, that that could be a relief.
‘You sure you’re okay, love?’ says the taxi driver, brow furrowed in the mirror.
I nod again. Hide my face in my phone.
When I get in, Ed is in bed for an early start at work, which means that I don’t tell him what’s happened. But gradually, seeing Ed’s face has not been the comfort it usually is when I’m nervous, looking up the aisle at him on our wedding day, or in those terrifying seconds when we waited for the nurse to find a heartbeat at Poppy’s scan as he squeezed my hand tight. Now, it would just add to my shame. I lie in bed, missing him, missing myself, missing a clear mind and now I’ve left them, missing the friends who would have hugged me goodbye, told me they loved me, clambered into the taxi with me, held my hand and listened, if I ever decided that I could speak to them about all of this; if I decide one day that actually, I need to.
15
Scarlett
23 May
Scarlett, the message says. Please answer my calls. I do need to speak to you, urgently x PS: I can also help you find something else work-wise. I know you must be climbing the walls in Mum Land!
Flick. It’s the anchor I need.
But I’m irritated too. Mum Land feels patronising. Flick doesn’t know what a support the women of Mum Land have been.
I delete the message without reply. No good can come anyway from talking about a life that doesn’t exist any more, to someone I can no longer look in the eye. I can’t bear the shame; the pity.
And for all my thoughts the other day about telling them, I’m relieved that my mum friends don’t seem to have seen the comments on the blog. That they still don’t know. That being with them is respite.
Flick sends me another message afterwards.
We’ve all been young, Scarlett. No one is judging you xx
And I laugh. Because everyone is judging me every day, everyone is judging everyone every day. What they’re posting, what they’re wearing, what they’re ordering, where they’re going. What their job is, who they’re married to, what car they drive, what make their bag is.
Sling a sex tape into the mix though and you up the stakes.
Everyone has to judge me so that they think I’m different to them. In another bracket. Way more sexually out there. Way more promiscuous. Way less careful. Otherwise it could have been them, and nobody likes thinking it could have been them.
No one is judging you? Ha.
As I sit looking at that text though, I feel something shift. The floundering, the sadness, it’s being replaced with a fury and a desire to scream at somebody for what they have done to me. I loved New Social. Ed and I would have been thinking about a second child soon, I’m sure. Now neither of us have mentioned it because it comes under an umbrella of ‘future’ that no one wants to put their cash on.
Somebody has reached into my life and shifted everything around so that I jiggle, loose, without form now.
But who?
Anon
You see, nothing about this place is good enough for Scarlett.
Not our bars. Not our drinks.
Seems our men are fine, though.
I watch Scarlett leave the bar that night.
In an upstairs room, unused as there is no private function, I climb over a rope and look at her from a window as she waits for her taxi. She paces, infuriated at having to wait, calling the taxi company – I presume that’s who she is calling – over and over. Scarlett doesn’t like to wait for things. Some of us have more patience; have become accustomed to biding our time.
When it finally comes, she steps in wearing her biker boots, looking less drunk than she claimed to be, only minutes ago.
I wish I could see the moment that she reads the messages I posted earlier as I hid in the toilet cubicle, from my multiple fake accounts. But that must happen in the taxi.
I wish I could watch Scarlett’s face as her worlds – so far kept neat and separate as though they were in an office storage system – start to become muddled.
The taxi pulls away. I check, and the messages are already gone. I add some more, flicking between accounts, then I head back downstairs, pick up my drink and make a toast.
‘To Scarlett!’ I say. ‘So drunk she had to go home. That’s got to be a sign that she’s had a good night, right? Even if she did seem to kind of hate the bar.’
We laugh. Because of course Scarlett would hate the bar.
‘To good friends,’ one of the other girls says.
‘To such good friends,’ I echo.
16
Scarlett
25 May
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I put my key in the door and place three large shopping bags and one small person on the floor.
Like often lately, I need coffee. Being ashamed is exhausting; nobody mentions that.
Next to the kettle is a piece of paper.
It strikes me then how rarely I see Ed’s handwriting. Cards. And now notes, telling me he’s leaving me.
It’s short, Ed’s note.
Staying with my parents for a few days. I think we need some space after the pressure of the last month. Let’s talk later. Ed x
A little life holiday. How I wish I could book myself one of those. Thanks for the support, Ed.
It’s been ticking away in the back of my mind, the question of whether he is cheating, and it comes back now. Is that where my husband Ed has really gone?
And where does our child come into this, I think, as the kettle boils? Could I just leave, no matter how angry or hurt I was? Of course I couldn’t.
I make my coffee strong. Message Ed a picture of the note asking what the hell he’s doing and realise that I’m not sad, but furious.
Shaking, now, with rage.
Shaking with rage at Ed, at a skewed world that means I can’t sashay out of our home and our responsibilities but my husband can. It’s hard to do dramatic sashays when you have to make fifteen phone calls to sort childcare and pack a Peppa Pig rucksack first.
But mostly I’m shaking with rage at whoever has done this to me and started the Jenga bricks of my life toppling over. I had it all, I think. Now look at me.
I lean back against the kitchen island with my coffee in two hands and sigh. If not Ollie – and how can I think anything else, really – is Mitch the only credible option?
I can’t imagine he ever thought about me or cared enough to have done this. But he did film it; that’s pretty damning. And then there was the oddness of thinking I saw him that day. Too much to be a coincidence?
I can’t think straight.
I message the girls to see what they’re up to because I need human contact. Adults.
Emma replies.
Bumped into Cora at a baby class so came back to hers, she says. Asha too. Come!
I down my drink and grab my keys and strap Poppy in to the pram to walk the ten minutes round to Cora’s.
‘Coffee?’ Emma asks as I walk in and I nod, mute.
Emma puts Cora’s coffee machine on and does mine, then places her already used mug back underneath it. There are at least three very expensive candles vying for aromatic prominence around the house and making me struggle with the urge to gag.
There are kisses and hugs. I am sweating.
Emma turns to the girls. I see them all exchange looks. I realise I have barely said a word since I got here. That I may look a bit odd.
‘Scarlett, are you … all right?’ asks Asha, soft.
I stare at her and cannot remember how to lie. I wonder if they think it’s odd, me having this extra time off work when I regularly bemoan the size of our mortgage. And all of a sudden something is obvious: my mind has run out of space for all of this secrecy. My lies and evasions are pushing at the seams of my mind; they need out.
I sit down at the table and stare at the ‘Live. Laugh. Love’ sign on Cora’s wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my friends look at each other. I start to cry.
‘Scarlett?’ says Emma.
Put your seatbelts on, friends: I’m about to go off-message. This is nothing to do with sleep deprivation or weaning methods. We are truly friends now, so this is what you get.
‘Everything is a mess,’ I say, relief in admission. In not swerving and dodging.
Asha glances nervously at Cora. Emma goes to check on the babies and then loiters from her mid position at the door, the nearest thing to childcare that we are going to have for the next half hour while everyone prioritises the gossip of my life over the safety of their children.
‘Ed and I are having some problems,’ I say. ‘He’s moved out for a while.’
I know, already, that the girls are thinking of a spark, diminished after having a small child, not an awkwardness that’s come from me making a sex tape.
So I go with that, let them assume. It’s a version of the truth, which is always easier than an outright lie, and it means I have to speak less. It’s like letting a little air out of a balloon, just to stop it popping.
‘Things haven’t been great,’ I start, but after that I don’t need to decide which way to go because they fill in the gaps for themselves.
And suddenly, the story of Ed and I is forgotten. No one cares. Everyone has seized it and taken it as an excuse to say what they wanted to say, like people do.
Everyone wants this to be a mirror.
‘We were at each other’s throats all of last week, babe,’ says Emma, eager, as she sticks her head around the door to check on the babies. She looks back at us. ‘Always bad on my period.’
Then she goes into the living room to check which one of our children has a nappy that is laughing in the face of the myriad scented candles.
‘Cora, it’s you,’ she says as she re-emerges, then looks sheepish. ‘I mean, it’s Penelope.’
‘Penelope,’ mutters Cora darkly under her breath as she stomps off in her designer slippers, because this is just the opener she needs to unleash about her marriage and she’s missing her window. Bloody Penelope.
We all know that Cora is dismissive of her husband, despite the approximately forty-five pictures around the house of their stunning, expensive wedding involving about a hundred guests in the Caribbean. There’s her other man, Hunter, of course. He’s a key sign.
Cora is back in the room, clutching a bag of poo as far as she can away from her vest top and her prominent fake boobs.
‘What did I miss?’
I watch her drop it in the bin.
Cora goes to the fridge and pours a glass of rosé then puts it in front of me.
‘No I’m okay,’ I say, but she holds a hand up.
Glasses arrive all around me along with a tray of pretty gross mint chocolate cupcakes that Cora is ‘trying out’ and suddenly everyone has one or the other or both in their hand and is speaking over each other, with vents about their marriages masquerading as wisdom.
And yet halfway through that glass of too-sweet wine, with a group of women I have known for only just over a year, I feel the nearest to comforted I have been in a long time.
‘You know what we need?’ says Asha, gently. ‘A night away. A spa?’
‘I could ask my mum to have Seth,’ says Emma, nodding. ‘She’d just be glad to see him. Glad I got in touch.’
I know things between Emma and her mum – between Emma and her whole family – are strained because they don’t get on with her husband. It’s not even an option that he would stay home alone with his own son. We all know that by now, as we know a lot of things by now.
‘I’ve got a decent amount of milk in the freezer after the pumpathon.’ Asha smiles.
An almost token eye-roll from Cora.
A weekend of space from Ed and this nightmare sounds idyllic. Glorious. That’s if he’s even at home anyway. Depends how long this life holiday goes on for. I am crying again, suddenly, as the content of Ed’s note hits and I don’t know whether it’s the afternoon wine or the fact that Emma is holding Poppy on her hip and taking some of the weight of life, but I am appreciative of everything they do for me and of their role: new, odd, intense. Crucial.
So what if we have barely anything in common? We’re building something here, something long-term. It takes a village, and all that.
I look at Emma, jiggling a sleepy Poppy whose eyes are drooping. She rubs at them and leans into Emma. I glance at Cora, holding my hand with her silky smooth manicured one and still suggesting, every now and then, that an affair with a beautiful bendy man can do wonders.
I look at Asha, tipping a bag of Waitrose crisps into a bowl and pushing it in front of my face. I think I would like to have an affair, if we could leave
out the other parts and it could just involve someone holding my hand and decanting my crisps.
These women are a team, I think, as I look around at them. And a team is what I’ve been missing.
‘I’m up for a trip,’ I say, as Emma nervously passes me a tissue. ‘I’m absolutely up for a trip.’
Anon
‘You have no idea how much I need a girls’ weekend,’ I say to my friend Scarlett.
And I mean it.
What could possibly be bad about a trip away with Scarlett?
An opportunity to see her up close, twenty-four hours a day.
To observe her, even more than I do the rest of the time, in her pyjamas, as she wipes her make-up off her face, side by side as we brush our teeth.
To see what he sees. Her, then me. Alongside each other.
To see who she really is, this woman whose life is tripping over mine.
To see how she could have done this to me.
Oh, it means putting up with the other stuff, of course. The self-obsession. The drama. My blog! My marriage crisis!
Just let someone else speak, Scarlett, for once.
But it will be worth it.
How could I do that to a friend? Maybe the question needs to be rephrased: how could I do that to somebody who was becoming, even when she didn’t know it, my worst, my closest, enemy? How could I do that to somebody who had, when it came to it, done far worse to me?
I count down the hours to that weekend.
Apart from anything, it means I will know where she is all the time too. That I won’t have to torture myself with wondering if she has her hands, with their elegant long fingers, all over him again.
17
Scarlett
29 May
It’s been months since I went on a night out, and now a second is following closely after the first. Which is especially odd since I hated that one and bolted from it.
Ed is back from his parents’, but stays out a lot. Gym sessions have got longer.
‘What was that about?’ I asked, when he came home but he answered in one-word responses and I was too angry to make any effort.
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