The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  You think you are so perfect!!! You think u are better than the rest of us. I dot. You deserve this, Im glad I shared the video.

  From the same pay-as-you-go phone as before.

  Someone that has my number but that doesn’t narrow it down. As Mitch and Asha both pointed out, I am public property, with contact details that until recently were easily available online. And anyone can pick up a spare pay-as-you-go phone.

  I look at the spelling errors. Possibly drunk.

  I check the large clock above the fireplace: after eleven.

  My heart drums in my chest because I tell you what else happens when Ed is not here, and I know somebody is trying to harm me: I get frightened.

  I glance towards the living room door.

  And then, when I realise that the person in the house who is supposed to get frightened is dependent on me not to be frightened, I get more frightened.

  Because here’s the reality that has made my body unable to stay still lately, like it refused to so often when I was young, foot tapping, hand twitching. If they’ll come at me online, they will come for me in real life too. They know, most likely, where I live. They may have been deleted now but they were up there for long enough – the many, many pictures of my home, my view, in such a tiny village make it easy to find. And there are expensive things in this house, for someone in the mood for blackmail.

  This person knows things about me, my life and maybe my finances. They know what I used to do, about that penthouse apartment in Manchester. My hand twitches faster.

  I go to get a second glass of wine but stop because she needs me to be alert, Poppy, doesn’t she? See, Ed, I think. Not such a lush after all.

  Instead I stalk the house, flinging open cupboard doors, bursting into rooms. I crouch down and peer under the dining table. I spirit in and check Poppy’s wardrobe. I sit on the plush carpet of her bedroom and I reach through the bars of her cot and stroke her face. Then I stay there on the floor again.

  I feel the dull sensation of tears but even I can’t bear to cry again and I stop, angry, and then I pull the door to her room closed and go back downstairs.

  Something has just occurred to me about that message.

  I pick up my phone, to reread it and check.

  But it’s been deleted.

  And she would delete it, wouldn’t she?

  Because suddenly I know. It has to be a she. Outside of Ed, I only belong in an ‘us’ with groups of women. I’m certainly not an us with Ollie; with Mitch. Neither would think I thought I was better than them.

  That’s why I shared it.

  Us. Us. Us.

  Whoever is out to get me is firmly in the present, on the inside of my life. Known.

  And there aren’t that many people in the present, on the inside of my life. Known.

  Particularly in Cheshire.

  Who do I even speak to really? I make small talk with my sister-in-law Jaclyn, or I did before this happened and she stopped inviting us round, preferring to see Ed and Poppy on their own now, or maybe that’s just what Ed wants. I pass those people in the village and swap generics on the weather, the upcoming season, back and forth. I flirt a little as I order coffee from Joseph. I make faux pas to Emma’s sister-in-law. I am too distant from the playgroup floor chat to make friends. I no longer have any reason to see Ronnie.

  You think you’re better than the rest of us.

  Who has welcomed me and ruined me at the same time?

  Us. Us.

  I feel my stomach flip.

  It couldn’t be, could it?

  Because it occurs to me then that there is only one group of ‘us’ that I am truly part of here, in Cheshire.

  I look at our group chat, at the obscene amounts of information shared in there. Emotions, plans, personal details. I think of how I sent a close-up of my nipple to people I had known, at the time, for three months. Of everything I have shared.

  I pace around the house, body twitching more now, deeper, unable to stay still.

  I walk into the kitchen and pour a glass of water. Try to breathe.

  My stomach lurches as I realise that all of my mum friends could believe I thought I was better than them, rolling my eyes, drifting off, posing for selfies for Cheshire Mama while they hold my coffee.

  These women have seen a version of me that did look haughty.

  That, lost in the countryside, at first cringed and viewed them as too local, too limited, too clichéd, too middle-aged, too WAG, too uncultured, too unaware, too stupid, too unfit, too aggressive, too too too.

  The rest of us.

  I see myself through their eyes and it’s horrifying.

  Could Emma be this angry with me, resentful that our relationship is like the seesaw we put the babies on but always swung up my way? As she asks me questions and gives me compliments and arranges to see me and I struggle to concentrate when she tells me stories or to remember what’s going on in her life?

  I pad back to the living room, my bare feet cold on the wooden floor that surrounds the rug in front of the wood burner. I don’t have the energy to locate socks.

  There’s what I think of Asha, my brain grimacing at her attachment parenting. I judge Asha for the fussiness we’d have called OCD before we knew what OCD really was and that using it to point at someone who likes to plump cushions is pretty awful.

  ‘I have to wear contacts,’ she told me once, genuinely traumatised. ‘Because it stresses me out how much babies put smudge marks all over glasses. I can’t cope with it.’

  I cringe at Emma’s clichés, at her constant diets, her relationship. If you’re that miserable, just leave, I think regularly. Like it’s that simple. Like I’m not now in an identical situation anyway and what do you know: not left yet.

  Then there’s Cora, with her nails like knives, an engagement ring designed for Instagram and a made for Mills and Boon yoga teacher lover. I’ve judged her too, even as I’ve laughed with her, slept next to her, kept her secrets.

  You think you are so perfect.

  Of course someone would come to that conclusion, I realise with a crash, when the picture I am trying to present is so fraudulent.

  When I’ve wiped out my past, my grime, my pain. When I kept my sadness inside. I thought it was better not to expose everything. I thought presenting a strong, cohesive, respectable package was the best thing. But perhaps the world needed to see my weakness to not hate me. And perhaps I needed to expose it, to make real friends; for Scarlett 3.0 to be fully formed.

  I shiver, deep in my insides.

  Here’s the real picture, I think, sitting now paranoid on the sofa in tracksuit bottoms in a starkly lit living room strewn with toys. Not a perfect mum. No longer a blogger. Not someone who commutes into town to do a cool job in an on-trend midi. Barely, these days, a wife. A friend? I thought so. I don’t any more.

  Suddenly, I feel lucid.

  Cora. Asha. Emma.

  I don’t know them.

  I wanted to have real friends, to belong, so I fast-tracked it, emulated closeness that really should take years to build. One minute they were the add-ons, the next I was replacing my husband with them when I needed someone to talk to.

  The rest of us.

  I let them in, close, without vetting, without time.

  I let them in and I shared too much with no idea who any of them were.

  On the sofa, I try to breathe and I try out both theories.

  The person who has broken me is one of my mum friends.

  The person who has broken me is sleeping with Ed.

  It feels like my own mind needs a glasses wipe. I see very different things there, minute to minute, like I am at the optician’s. Which is clearer, I’m asked, as the lens is swapped, A or B?

  But what if there is option C?

  And my body feels flooded with the adrenalin that tells me I am right, I am right, this is it, finally.

  Option C: the person who has broken me is one of my mum friends. And the person who has broken
me is sleeping with Ed.

  The person they want me to leave alone? My own husband.

  My fingers slip away, then, from the cliff they’ve been clinging on to.

  I feel stupid and sad and livid and in pain.

  I feel desperate.

  Sweat oozes through my top.

  And I pace, like Ed the first day, at our emergency summit in my kitchen.

  Asha is beautiful, young; Ed would fancy her. Emma has been going to a gym, possibly Ed’s, and is looking lovely for it. I know Cora has no issue with cheating.

  New messages are there even now from them, in our group chat, as they are every day, almost every hour.

  Bring me evidence, said Jonathan though, and what version of that do I have?

  Think, Scarlett, think.

  Tomorrow, a Saturday morning meet-up arranged, I will sit in the coffee shop with Asha, Cora and Emma.

  Whoever has derailed my life will be waiting for me. Asking if I want to share a piece of ginger cake. Holding my hand if I cry. Taking care of my baby. Passing me the wet wipes. Being my friend. Ruining my life at the same time.

  The circle has shrunk.

  And only my mum friends are left in it.

  Anon

  Bloody wine. I never would have slipped up, if it hadn’t been for wine.

  Is it a big enough thing, I think, the us?

  Scarlett is sharp. But Scarlett is distracted lately, weighed down, more and more broken. I think of her face when she left the playdate the other day, haunted, hunted.

  I delete the message straight away, hope for the best and walk through my silent, empty house to find more wine.

  But then, flopping back down onto my sofa with a topped-up glass, I think. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if she knows. Maybe this is where this is going, inevitably. Maybe I subconsciously wrote the us because I want her to know.

  That wasn’t what I wanted at first. I just wanted to watch from afar as she was ruined; as she fell apart.

  But now he has ended things, the goalposts have moved.

  I can’t take it, him going back to her.

  Not when I have lost him.

  I start picking up toys from the floor but I need an outlet; a punchbag and I throw them one at a time at the wall. Some break, some begin playing songs that could drive you insane, even on a good day.

  This isn’t a good day. I can’t imagine having a good day again. I need more.

  I stagger back to the kitchen for more wine.

  I need to stand face to face with Scarlett, and tell her what she has done to me.

  And then I need to make sure she never goes near him again. Is incapable of going near him again. Ruin her.

  I lie there on my sofa and fantastise about telling her.

  It was me, Scarlett, it was me.

  Gobbling up her shock. Watching her shrink, shrink, right down in front of me. Who’s the alpha now, Scarlett, who’s the alpha now?

  34

  Scarlett

  25 July

  And so I walk in to ‘our’ coffee shop the next day, feeling the tickle of sweat. Outside it is chilly for July but in here there are bodies and steaming tea. And fear.

  I sweat with the belief that one of these women could have betrayed me. I smell the coffee beans as I park the pram up in the corner of the café and they make me feel nauseous like I am eight weeks pregnant.

  I look across the room, register their familiar faces in profile.

  My friends.

  There’s a film over this setting now and it’s been turned twenty degrees, thirty.

  I walk slowly to Cora and Emma, at our usual table.

  ‘No Asha?’ I say, quiet, but if my voice sounds different to me, they don’t notice.

  Cheshire.

  Us.

  I sit Poppy in her highchair next to Penelope, across from Seth.

  I thought it would be a full house. That I could nail this, once and for all, with them all here. That now I suspect, it would be obvious who had done this to me.

  Cora doesn’t answer though, her nails clacking on her phone and I bristle. On top of everything else, do not fucking ignore me.

  I’m not the only one being ignored; Penelope blows raspberries to try and get her mum to make eye contact.

  ‘Realised she had double-booked. Ananya’s got swimming,’ fills in Emma. ‘Got your drink.’

  I take a sip of turmeric latte – thinking how much I could do with a strong coffee – and thank her.

  Emma looks at Cora who is still oblivious and back at me, raising an unruly eyebrow with flecks of grey through it.

  I look away.

  Sharing a wordless grumble about how distracted Cora is, is too much today when I no longer trust these women. When I think somebody is faking being in my camp.

  But how difficult it is not to bitch or judge when people bitch and judge and will you along with them. You look pious or awkward. You look po-faced and no fun.

  And apparently I do enough of that already.

  I stare at my latte. When I look back up, does Emma look irritated?

  You think you are better than us.

  The Welsh one has a girl crush, said Ed.

  What if it was something darker, a fixation?

  I take a sip of my drink and watch Emma walk to the counter for a teacake for Seth.

  I turn back to Cora, still messaging.

  ‘What?’ she scowls, looking up.

  When I tell her nothing, she goes straight back to her messages.

  If I have judged or criticised these women, I think, then bloody hell I have envied them too. Emma’s surety in where she is, where she wants to be forever, while I flail around the countryside, dreaming about the city. Cora’s flippancy; her lack of worry about where her affair is leading, what will happen to her marriage. Asha’s neatness, the order in her life while mine needs a deep clean.

  I think that’s how human emotions in their messy, crossover way, work. Yin, yang. Dislike, envy.

  I slump forward.

  Cheshire. Us.

  Ed. Is one of these women sleeping with Ed?

  ‘You okay, hon?’ Cora asks, still messaging, and I mutter a vague yes.

  I’m not okay.

  This was my only respite, I now realise, and the room feels like it’s underwater.

  These women, odd band of sisters that they are, were my swaddling blankets.

  ‘I have a headache, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come,’ I say, this tiny room shrinking smaller, smaller and I need to get out before I am crushed between its walls.

  The glances behind me are worried or fake.

  ‘Message us later, babe.’

  ‘Hope you feel better, hon.’

  I battle the urge to retch.

  Surely it can’t be one of them.

  But it’s the only thing that makes sense.

  ‘Jesus!’

  Someone has stepped in front of me.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Just wanted to help you with the pram.’

  Joseph opens the door.

  Even now, and with everything that is in my head, I think of my lank hair and my eyes, puffy from a lack of sleep.

  I manoeuvre the pram past him and we stand still, outside the door.

  ‘Not spoken to you much since …’ he starts.

  I look down. ‘Just busy,’ I mutter.

  ‘You back at work now?’ he says, trying for small talk, like we are pals. ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘I put it off until a bit later,’ I say. ‘Not quite ready to be parted from this buddy of mine.’

  I tickle Poppy’s chin and she shrieks. And even today, it’s a jab of joy. The only thing that provides them at the moment.

  Joseph smiles and I fancy him and then I think: How is there space in my brain for this? Perhaps it’s pleased to zone in on something primal, physical, instinctive? Instead of all of this other stuff: complex, unknown, modern.

  But should I be suspecting him, as Cora said? Local, interested in me.
I look at his face. My brain may combust.

  Us though, us.

  I glance over Joseph’s shoulder through the glass door and see Cora watching me. She looks away quickly, goes back to her phone. Emma rescues pieces of teacake, over and over, from the floor to feed to Seth. Up, down, up, down.

  I look at Joseph again, his brow furrowed.

  ‘You sure you’re good?’ he says. ‘You know, if you ever want to talk …’

  His fingers graze my arm and I pull back because I want him to stay there.

  ‘All good,’ I say, moving away. ‘Cheers for the drink.’

  And I walk away before I am too tempted by touch and words and before I fall open and everything unravels.

  35

  Scarlett

  27 July

  ‘She loves this one,’ says a woman with a scarlet smile next to me.

  I stare at her. Can’t summon the energy for the requisite small talk.

  Her smile drains away and she turns to the woman on the other side in the circle instead, moves a barely perceptible centimetre.

  I say woman. She is – here – a mum. That’s what we all are, solely.

  I don’t know her name, or her job, or what gives her goose bumps but I know she had a third-degree tear and her daughter has three middle names.

  But hey, I can’t exactly hang out with my own friends, merrily whistling Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes with someone I am sure has ruined my life, right now.

  Poppy totters back over to me and grins, arms raised ready for me to sing and my insides hurt with how brilliant she is. But even for her, I can’t do it today.

  I shift uncomfortably on the floor. Notice everyone else has taken their shoes off. I stare at the feet clad in Muppets socks across the circle. The odd socks with the hole in the toe next to them. I remove my trainers and think about how infantilising it is.

  Mums have started to be replaced by grans and grandpas and nannies at these baby groups. We are out of the newborn classes now and a lot of the parents have gone back to work.

  I listen to the tuneless singing; look at the woman leading the class in her branded T-shirt and her kids’ TV presenter dungarees. And I am suddenly filled with a desperate panic.