The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  I loved this when it was temporary, precious, limited.

  Now that life stretches before me with no other focus and no idea how the hell I can go back to my job or my entire industry – what if word’s spread? – it’s terrifying.

  What happens when Poppy is older? No job. No friends. No marriage?

  The music changes to another generic nursery rhyme and I am observing from outside the community centre windows.

  This is it.

  No job, I repeat to myself, like a mantra.

  No marriage?

  No friends.

  Whoever posted that video has taken my life away from me, whole. When that night happened it seemed a tiny part but now it’s pushed itself into the furthest corners of my life and everything is infested, everything is dying.

  And then there is the knowledge: the worst could still come. I picture the penthouse. Taste that expensive gin. Shiver.

  At the same time sweat, I realise, is pouring down my back.

  I feel dizzy.

  It’s happening again.

  I have got to get out of here.

  I grab Poppy and my bag and I almost run to the door as I mutter about a migraine.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I murmur to a one-year-old who is mad at me for ending her class prematurely. ‘I’m sorry.’

  And I am.

  I’m sorry I can’t sit back and enjoy this bonus extra time with her.

  I’m sorry that when I take her out, in this dreamy village to its traditional classes, that I scour the room for evidence, feel my mind drift off, instead of drinking up that time with my daughter.

  Later when Poppy is in bed, I am the worst combination to message my boss – morose, self-pitying, drunk – but that is what I do.

  I need my job back, Flick, it says. I know I’m an idiot for only realising this now but I do. I need it. Especially if Ed is fucking about. I need to be me again x PS: If it’s already gone to somebody else, can’t you just kick out that useless shit Carl and give me his job instead? HA!

  I need to extricate myself from Cheshire, and whatever the hell is going on here. I convince myself that if I can just claw my way back to Manchester, to Scarlett 2.0, it will all be okay. If Ed is cheating, I will leave him, get an apartment, register Poppy with a nursery near work. This is manageable. Breathe, I think, breathe.

  At 4 a.m. the next morning, I wake up on the sofa with a gasp from a nightmare. I get out of bed and look down the stairs and I can see Ed’s shoes by the door. I didn’t hear him come in, late again. Have barely seen him since he got back from his weekend away. He is in the spare room, I presume. I think about going in there and confronting him. Are you sleeping with one of my friends, Ed? But treat this like Jonathan would treat it, I think. Get your evidence first. Then act.

  I remember the text to Flick then. Groan.

  It had seemed like the perfect tone at the time. Felicity is my friend. Felicity hates Carl too. But now, from the outside, when Felicity is Carl’s boss, it’s awful. I am not being the grown-up.

  There is no reply.

  By mid afternoon, trapped home alone with nowhere to go and no one to see. I send a follow-on.

  Sorry about that message, it says. Bit too much wine! But it would be great to talk, if you get a chance. Sx

  Still nothing, and my shame, already meandering around parts of my skin, speeds up, spreads out and multiplies until it covers me like a onesie.

  Ed comes down, dressed, kisses Poppy, says a cursory hello to me and heads out. Poppy plays on the living room floor. Brings me books and toys that she wants me to read and play with. I say no, I can’t. Feel shame at that too.

  I keep the curtains closed, even though no one walks past. Poppy’s getting used to playing without daylight.

  This village is small and I am convinced my only friends here are involved in this. I am convinced too that everyone knows that I am the woman in the video, the glassy-eyed mum who runs out of playgroups or the one who gets drunk and flirts with waiters. All these versions of me, and all of them the bad kind.

  If they feel like you are good gossip here, in Sowerton, they will detect you like metal, and they will wrestle you out of your sensible mum coat and make you expose your soul so they can pass it on at their next coffee date with the girls like the baton at primary school sports day.

  I can’t face that. Can’t cope with being exposed any further.

  So when I have to go out, I choose paths that are off the beaten track; the unadopted roads. I keep my head low. I walk like I am nineteen and scared, being followed from the night bus by a big, leering man. Instead of thirty-five and being followed around the internet by someone without height, breadth, without any physicality.

  Could it really be them?

  And why?

  How?

  I long for Manchester and its grime and the smell of eighteen different types of food cooking as you walk along the street and see a fox just stroll by like it’s on its way home from the pub at closing time. I long for its refusal to go slow.

  When I leave my unhappy home, I want to fall into the sea of a city. Swim deep into it. Float around, alone, while I get my head clear. But here, there is nowhere to go.

  Poppy sleeps and I stop in the middle of a field and sit next to her pram. Poppy is protected with a rain cover but my trousers soak through as I sit, numb in the rain. Eventually, I go home and as Poppy continues to sleep in her pram, stand under a steaming shower for a long, long time.

  In there, I think.

  Us. Cheshire.

  The water is so hot it stings as I think about them, my mum friends.

  Cora, fixated on finding a plan to get a night away with Hunter around childcare.

  Emma, juggling shifts, stressing about her late-night chip binge.

  Asha, frowning about the wrong number of magpies, pining for her books, frantically trying to wipe her house clean of all traces of the child who is at that second careering through it with buttery fingers and a rogue felt tip pen.

  How can I be looking for the person who has ruined my life within this crew of busy, preoccupied women with their young babies and their tunnel vision? Who would have the time, the energy?

  And yet, something about it makes sense, in my gut.

  I hear Poppy cry and I turn off the shower and step onto the bath mat that’s lost all bounce and should have been washed a month ago. I go down to Poppy wrapped in a too-small towel, hair dripping, and I am standing like that next to her pram in the hall when Ed puts his key in the door. He’s early.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, unstrapping her and picking her up as he looks away from my bare skin. ‘Dentist. Working from home this afternoon.’

  We stand there in the most painful silence there is; the one in the space where there used to be in-jokes and kindness.

  Ask him, I think.

  Get your evidence first, I tell myself.

  Ed keeps his eyes trained on our daughter even as he speaks to me.

  ‘You remember tonight’s the night I’m taking Poppy to Liam’s new house for a couple of days?’ he says. ‘I booked the time off work. Going to help Liam decorate and put furniture together while the kids play with Poppy.’

  His brother. Right.

  He goes to walk away then turns back, cheeks a little pink.

  ‘Are you drinking more lately?’ he says, clearly having rehearsed this. ‘We are getting through a lot and I’m not having much and I worry. When you’re with Poppy.’

  I wonder how much he got through on his ‘boys’ weekend’.

  Fucking hypocrite.

  I walk away without answering and a little while later, they head off, leaving me with a house that is so empty, eerily still.

  I sit in the silence and think about what happens if we split up. Of shared custody and solitary weekends and of how the hell I am ever going to fill them when I have a life that looks as empty as mine now does.

  At 8 p.m., Cora messages.

  Want to come round? she
says. Michael’s at the pub.

  No, I think. No. I don’t want to hang out with any of you until I know, for sure, which one of you has betrayed me.

  And yet … I am desperate for company; desperate for noise.

  And the terrible realisation, there is nowhere else I can go.

  Perhaps spending time with Cora, one on one, will elicit some information too. Perhaps this will clear things up, one way or another. Get your evidence, Scarlett, get your evidence.

  I walk round to Cora’s house and we drink wine quickly, before moving on to her spirits cupboard. If I’m holding back and on edge, she doesn’t notice. Too drunk. Too self-absorbed. I look up at the giant picture of her on her own living room wall. A faux fur wrap falls from her shoulder.

  ‘So, we think Ed’s not keeping it in his pants, right?’ is her opener, as she pours me a large red.

  I bristle.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it tonight,’ I say. ‘Can we just … talk about something else?’

  She looks offended and we sit in silence for a few seconds.

  ‘God, Emma today,’ she starts, eventually. ‘Driving me crazy about bloody Slimming World points.’

  ‘But you like Emma, don’t you?’ I say. ‘She’s your mum bestie.’

  If Emma did have some weird obsession with me, would Cora know?

  ‘Oh Emma,’ she says with a dismissive tone. ‘Well, we just bond over our shitbag husbands. And we’ve known each other a long time.’

  But there’s affection in her voice.

  ‘Now,’ she says. ‘Talk to me about what’s happening with this video. We find out who posted it yet?’

  I like the we. I am always so grateful for a we.

  I try hard to remember that I suspect her, that I can’t relax here but there is alcohol and sugar and a giant faux fur cream throw over my legs and it is difficult. I want this to be real.

  ‘Well, Mitch was the one filming,’ I sigh. ‘But it makes no sense, why he would. I can’t stop thinking it’s somehow linked to Ed. To the way Ed is being with me.’

  I glance at her for any reaction. The edge of a blush. Eye contact dipping away. But there is nothing.

  And then Cora’s husband Michael comes through the door and I say my goodbyes.

  I walk home, brain mushy with suspicion and unease layered over with amaretto and wine. I collected no clues. Learnt nothing. Surely it’s not her, I think. But then.

  Turning into my path, I see darkness where there used to be candlelight and early nights and a man who loved me passing me a glass of red and smiling as he listened to tales of my night. Now, there is just an empty house, unlit and unwarmed. I shiver.

  I have to claw my marriage back, I think melancholy. I don’t want this. I want cosy and candles and a house full of people.

  But suddenly there is something to distract me from the future. Out of the corner of my eye, somebody moves, quickly, in the side passage of my house. Too scared to investigate I put my key in the door and slam it behind me, double locking once I’m inside, willing myself to go and investigate. But I can’t.

  Bury your head in the sand, Scarlett, about this as with everything. I don’t sleep until the early hours of the morning when the sun is coming up and I feel almost safe again.

  Anon

  It’s not my style, really, loitering next to wheelie bins, ducking into the shadows just along from the tomato plants and the pergola; honeysuckle rampaging over it.

  That, Scarlett, is what you have driven me to.

  I have been drinking more these last few weeks. Days are blending into night. At home I watch the video, over and over. Study you. Hate you.

  If your intent was to break my life, then it’s worked. All I ever wanted, gone. I can’t see a way forward. Can’t see sky above me.

  An existence that was grey when I started this has, as time has gone on, edged darker and darker to black.

  And so, I will do the same to yours. What will hurt most, Scarlett? You have already lost your job, your reputation, your pride, your blog. But they have nothing, do they, on what you prize most. Your family. Are you fit to look after Poppy, really? A woman like you? Will you even be able to, once this has finished? Ed certainly doesn’t think so any more, not after the things I’ve told him. Where did he say he had taken her this weekend? You sure he was telling the truth, Scarlett?

  Now I have nothing to risk. It is all lost. He is gone. I am smashed into pieces. And you did that, Scarlett, you.

  But when I see you there, you dart in and put your key in the door faster than I can act, as my heart hammers in my chest, as I think about what I want to do to you, as I hesitate just for that second and the lock is turned, the door bolted.

  But it will happen soon, Scarlett.

  I think you know that too, really.

  Two women. Such good friends. Such bad choices.

  It has become inevitable what will happen between us two.

  36

  Scarlett

  28 July

  Only a few hours later, I wake up groggy and hungover and drink three coffees, back to back.

  I message Ed. I know he’ll be up with our early-rising Weetabix fiend of a daughter.

  How’s Poppy? I write. Give her a squeeze from me.

  But there’s no reply.

  My body tenses as I think about what will happen if Ed and I split up.

  Weekends will be like this, without Poppy. Nights roaming around the house alone. Nothing to stop the panic coming. The vodka being opened. The bleakness kicking in.

  I try Ed again. Nothing.

  Maybe there would be bigger changes too.

  Would we need to sell the house if Ed moved out?

  I think about when we moved in here. Ed’s face when Poppy was born. I think about us all on base, barely leaving the house in those weeks after we brought her home as we worked out how to be a family and how to keep her safe here in a sanitised environment before we could consider exposing her to the dangers of the outside world.

  I start to cry.

  I don’t remember how I get there but I am sitting on the bottom stair, a pile of Ed’s coats on my lap. I check his pockets and I don’t know what I am searching for because these days nothing is in hard copy anyway and so I stop and I just sit there, buried in coats like I have crawled into a den, sad.

  I message Martha.

  Flick says you know some stuff about Ed, I say. Can you tell me everything?

  And she calls me.

  ‘I don’t know for certain,’ she sighs. I hear it, attuned to it now: pity. ‘But I work with this guy who used to work with Ed, when he was at your place. Paul?’

  ‘Yeah, Paul Costello.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Ed still sees Paul.

  ‘Paul got a bit loose-lipped at the pub. Says it’s … the worst-kept secret. That all their mates know what Ed’s up to with some woman from the gym.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ I ask. ‘You’re my friend.’

  She sighs again. ‘I’m sorry – I am,’ she says. ‘But it’s been hard, Scarlett. You went off radar and you didn’t seem in a great place. Or like you wanted to speak to me. I didn’t have any proper evidence – I still don’t – and I just thought that I couldn’t drop that on you with the situation like this. It was only when Flick heard it from Jared too and told me that I thought, well, that seems a bit more conclusive.’

  She goes quiet.

  ‘We weren’t talking very much either,’ she says.

  I say goodbye to her and thrust the raincoats and the puffas and the smart suit jackets off me, onto the hall floor.

  Alone in my big house in the countryside, I take a large swig of the same cheap brand of vodka that I used to drink, back in the day.

  I ignore the beautiful bottles, the drinks brought back from holidays and adventures. Because it is beauty again, the icing of life, and whether it is because I feel I don’t deserve to enjoy that or simply can’t see it any more, it feels li
ke that part of life is gone for me now.

  ‘Fuck you, Ed,’ I mutter to myself.

  I may not have made much effort but at least I have tried to keep our marriage going. Meanwhile Ed has shamed me, for sex I had with someone else twelve years ago, when he had sex with someone else – what – twelve weeks ago, a few days ago?

  I think of all those evenings out, nights away – at his brother’s, with the boys, staying at his parents. So many opportunities.

  Check.

  No messages.

  No wonder he can no longer touch me.

  More vodka.

  Cora tries to call me but I don’t pick up, knowing that I am more drunk now than anyone is supposed to be at 2 p.m. and that it’s not in a socially acceptable way, with friends and oily roast potatoes and shared bottles of Prosecco or a good red. Knowing that it could be her. That I can’t trust anybody.

  I long for Poppy and look at old pictures and videos of her laughing. Time dawdles.

  I try to FaceTime Ed again but he doesn’t pick up.

  Paranoia hits.

  I need to see my daughter. What if something has happened to my daughter?

  Having Poppy has meant that I have still remained loosely in the world, when without her I would have locked the door and climbed under a duvet.

  Josephine, after a month’s travelling for her honeymoon, has barely been in contact. Maybe she’s in a post-wedding love bubble. Maybe she’s just a bit grossed out by what’s happened.

  It’s weird, what sex does. To a lot of people I’m different now.

  You spend years building these worlds and sprawling networks that you think are carved into the earth’s core and then you realise that they were floating above it, temporary, ready to be blown apart when you move house, or stop messaging, or are publicly shamed.

  No messages. I wander into the kitchen and leave my phone there. I know I have had too much to drink now to speak to Ed. He’s already watching my drinking. And I know what happens when people split up. It’s the kind of thing that’ll get flung in my face during a custody battle.

  Back in the living room my lips taste it again, the harshness of that same straight vodka I’ve always turned to at the worst times.