I drink again.
It burns, and I need it.
Vodka doesn’t mess around.
I touch my tongue to my lips and remember other times, old bouts of pain.
Of drinking vodka straight too in the days after Ollie and I lost our baby, nearly thirteen years ago.
We drove back from the hospital at 3 a.m. that night, a time we would normally have been heading to another club. I pulled the sleeves of his hoodie, which I had been wearing for a couple of months as my body had spread out beyond my own clothes, over my hands. I shook with horror at what had happened to us over the last seventy-two hours, since I had gone into labour two and a half months before my due date.
We drove past a club where we had danced with each other with smiles on our faces and beer in our hands, and it felt ghoulish. Stupid us, not knowing what was ahead. That Ollie and me weren’t this Ollie and me. They were ‘those people’. Those naive, drunk people who thought the catastrophes happened to someone else, someone who – don’t we all think – was probably ready for them; knew somehow that they were coming. Not us. Never us. We had to think that, to believe we were protected.
I wanted to shake that Scarlett, drag her off the dance floor and scream at her to watch out.
Don’t get pregnant.
Don’t love.
Look what that horrible emotion is capable of.
At home, I took off every item of my clothing, wanting to distance myself from the hospital scents, the sterility, the beeps, those too-fast footsteps.
I climbed, silent and naked, into our bed, and curled up with my youthful body that had been re-formed by a baby that was no longer here. How could I escape from this when it was me?
And I drank, drank, drank, that same straight vodka.
I thought about single people, as I sat in bed with the bottle. About the ones without children, and they seemed wise or lucky beyond measure.
I didn’t belong in our world now of parties and euphoria but I had not moved on. That meant a grotesque limbo with my stretch marks and my bleeding and no baby and two layers of deep grief that these people had never known. That meant existing at the very edges of being human, far away from most people and their centred, normal experiences.
I couldn’t go out in case I saw people who I had made small talk with when I was pregnant. ‘Not too long to go!’ they had said last time but there was less time than we thought and it wasn’t enough. Now here I was, my body absent of the baby, and my arms too. How would they small talk that?
Eventually, no vodka left at home, I went to the pub, to clubs, to anyone’s party who would have me.
As I sat on a bench at 2 a.m., out of it, a teenage girl walked past carrying her strappy sandals. She glanced quickly at me, relief crossing her face: I wasn’t a man; I posed no threat.
‘Are you single?’ I asked and she nodded.
‘Stay that way,’ I said. ‘It’s safer.’
She nodded gravely, as though the subtext was a bad break-up.
‘Don’t love anybody,’ I carried on, believing these were the wisest words. I was twenty-three and ancient. I had discovered a truth about the universe.
The girl started to walk away. Not a man who would sexually assault her, but maybe an unstable woman. Still not ideal.
We stayed together, Ollie and I, not solid glue but more like old, tired Blu Tack that only vaguely does the job. We lost our stick sometimes but in the end we could form ourselves into a ball and keep going.
Ollie, reluctantly, began to come on nights out with me again but more as a chaperone than a boyfriend until I pressed the destruct button and pushed for the thing that would kill off lovely dancing us.
The feelings come back now compounded, extreme, but reminding me what happiness looks like when you’re hurtling, fast, towards a breakdown.
I drink the vodka.
I can’t access the happiness, even if I know it’s there in Poppy’s perfect form. It’s like it’s a person on the other side of a locked prison wall.
The rest of the day passes in a blur.
I think I open the door to take in a parcel.
Or did I dream that?
More vodka.
And suddenly I am waking up on my sofa, and think I am dreaming.
Because over the top of the chart songs on a chirpy reality show on TV, there is a woman’s voice, in my house, saying my name over and over and over and shaking me awake. Shaking me awake, hard. So it hurts.
A woman, when I am here alone.
I open my eyes.
And there, after all of these months, is my answer.
Cheshire.
Us.
Inside.
Present.
I stare at her. And for once, she makes eye contact.
37
Scarlett
28 July
She’s drunk, I can tell that immediately. Gin and slim, it’ll be.
‘Emma, what are you doing?’ I say, sitting upright, blurry.
She says nothing. Looks around. Her eyes look darker than usual. Glazed.
‘Did you knock? Did I not hear you?’ I mutter, trying to buy time for my brain to catch up.
‘Look at you, hey, Scarlett?’ she says, slowly. ‘Look at you. At home alone in such a stupor that you don’t even hear somebody break into your house. I say break in, you were so drunk you left the front door unlocked. Wow. I literally turned the handle, walked in and strolled past you, snoring on the floor with a bottle of vodka next to you like a tramp.’
I wince. Don’t call me that, Emma.
I stare at her. My friend, the shy one who gets talked over is gone now. Replaced.
There was someone outside my house last night, I think.
I had held off from calling the police because I was worried they would find nothing and that again Ed could use it as evidence of me being off the rails, delusional, drunk.
But there was someone.
It was Emma.
This isn’t a one-off. This isn’t about her being drunk tonight. This has a backdrop.
‘You tried to get in last night,’ I carry on. ‘Maybe other nights. Kept going until you found a way.’
‘Only last night,’ she murmurs, mostly under her breath.
A happy Kylie song plays on TV.
‘Me,’ she says quietly. It’s a one-word confession.
I am disorientated and I don’t know if I can be scared in the company of somebody I know so well. If I can be scared by a woman I have seen cry and laugh and feed her baby. But I don’t know you, I think. I have no idea who you are. And the realisation is terrifying because if I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what you can do.
She sits down then, on the fancy armchair I bought before we had Poppy, when we used to buy things like fancy armchairs.
‘Cosy,’ she says, looking up at me. She touches the chair. ‘Pricey, I bet.’
You think you’re so much better than us. Us. Us.
It wasn’t Asha, in some sort of deal with Mitch, something I’ve thought about often after I saw them together – thought I saw them together – that day.
It wasn’t Cora, suspecting that I was coveting her position as local queen bee, wanting to keep me in my place.
But Emma.
Emma looks good at the moment, even now when her voice is slurring and her head lolls.
Emma has been going to the gym, getting fit. Martha says the woman he’s sleeping with is from the gym. Is this the story here? That love rival I had feared?
Emma has always been okay with silence. And right now, that’s one thing about her that hasn’t changed. She looks around at our house. The beams on the ceilings. The original fireplace. The empty buckets that used to be piled high with wood until we stopped bothering because fires are happiness and joy, and instead now we go to bed early in separate rooms or put another jumper on or shiver, bleak.
‘Robert has left me,’ she says. ‘He left me a few weeks ago.’
‘He’s left you?’
I say, trying to focus, to wake up. ‘Emma, I’m sorry.’
‘Oh come on, as if this is news to you,’ she slurs. ‘As if you don’t already know.’
I shake my head, not comprehending.
‘From Cora, you mean?’ I say, frowning. ‘She hasn’t said a word. I didn’t know.’
‘Oh give me a fucking break, Scarlett,’ she snarls. ‘Not Cora. I mean you probably already know from Robert.’
I stare at her.
What does this have to do with her sleeping with Ed?
Robert is Emma’s husband. The useless one; the one I’ve never met because he couldn’t be bothered to come to antenatal classes. And he certainly doesn’t sit in the coffee shops or the classes, infiltrating our new all-female world.
‘How would I know Robert has left?’ I ask.
She laughs in that awful bitter way; the opposite type of laugh to the one babies do at playgroup.
‘Well,’ she chimes, slumped in the chair. ‘You know a lot about Robert.’
I wish the vodka hadn’t taken its toll on my brain. I feel like I could keep up with what she is saying without that glugging around my head, engulfing my thoughts with jelly.
‘I’ve never met Robert, Emma, remember?’ I say, patiently like I’m talking to a child. ‘He didn’t come to NCT.’
She looks up at me, still stroking the chair like a cat.
‘Don’t speak to me like I’m an idiot, Scarlett. You do it all the time. Not any more.’
I’m chastised and duck my head. But I still have no clue what she’s on about.
‘You still haven’t caught up, have you?’ she snarls. ‘And I’m the idiot. You were supposed to be the smart one.’
The laugh again.
You think you are better than us.
I stare at her, trying to compute.
‘Did you send me the message about thinking I’m better than you?’ I ask, removing my jigsaw puzzle pieces, replacing them in a different formation.
She ignores the question.
‘Remember when I had that bad week juggling work and Seth without any help and all you did was talk about how much you love spending time with Poppy?’ she says.
Because I feel so guilty that I miss work. That’s why I had laboured the point.
‘And the blog. Jesus, the way you went on about that blog.’
‘I just … wanted a project,’ I say, the jelly getting thicker. ‘Something for me.’
Is this honestly the impression I give?
I hold my temples.
What a precarious balance it is, I think, of being happy in public but not too happy. Celebrating your wins but not being smug. Making it clear that you’ve had your allocated amount of shit times without spending your life moaning.
I am drained, thinking about it.
But that’s not why she’s done this. It hasn’t helped, clearly, that she’s had these thoughts about me. But it’s not why. Get to the point, Emma, I think, get to your point so I can get my answers finally, about what has been going on with Ed.
I glance towards the door then remind myself, relieved, that Poppy isn’t here.
I look back.
Emma’s eyes flash rage.
‘You talk over me. Dismiss me. Look at me like I’m this local, tedious frump,’ she says, with such venom that she is unrecognisable from the woman who drunk her lime and soda and ate noodles in the Peak District with me and ran behind me with her buggy.
She looks down at herself.
She broke into my house, I think, this shy woman with her ponytail from antenatal classes. She lurked outside until she got a window of opportunity and then, whatever the specifics about the locks, she broke into my house.
‘You work in medicine, Emma,’ I say, trying to reach her. ‘You’re a good person.’
‘Oh Scarlett!’ she shouts, flinging her head back. ‘Don’t patronise me, either.’
She carries on.
‘We all know you only consider real work the type that’s done on a beanbag in the city next to a load of people much cooler than us,’ she rants, bitter. ‘Or by influencers, from a shared office space in Bali. Not by us, out in the sticks.’
Us, us.
I blush. That’s how I felt when we first moved. It’s true. And it’s awful that it was so obvious. That I was so shallow. But not now! It’s changed since then, I think. It’s changed so very much. You’re my friends. You were my friends.
‘You know I fucked my education because I was too busy getting off my face?’ I try, to burst her bubble of my perfect career path, unblemished life.
But of course she doesn’t know that. Why would I have shared that when I spend as much time as I can trying to paint the picture with the fancy soap and the good job and the designer bag and the perfect family standing next to the newborn lambs in their wellies?
‘Does everybody think this?’ I ask and it comes out in a croak, a whisper. ‘That I think I’m better than you?’
She shrugs. ‘Probably.’
I look at her, closely.
‘But what about when I told you my marriage was in trouble?’
She smiles, sort of sadly. ‘Yeah, that helped humanise you. But it was only because of the video. That was your only bloody problem.’
I laugh, incredulous. ‘My only problem! It was a big one, Emma.’
And so far from my only problem.
She looks up, shrugs. Looks down at her hands and pauses to pick off a hangnail.
‘True, true,’ she concedes, eyebrows raised as she nods. ‘A sex video, of all things! And then look at you now.’
Emma shakes her head in faux disbelief.
‘Scarlett Salloway. Not quite the perfect woman we all thought. More like your common garden slut next door.’
Don’t call me that, don’t call me that.
‘And still he wanted you over me,’ she murmurs. ‘No wonder.’
So that’s it, I think. Ed has dumped her and she has fallen for him. They were sleeping together. That is where this came from.
‘Are you having an affair with Ed?’ I ask. ‘Is that what this is about?’
She laughs.
The murmur again.
‘I’m not talking about Ed,’ she says. ‘I’m talking about Robert.’
I can’t keep up.
‘You think Robert has left you for me?’
I am baffled. Wish again I wasn’t drunk.
‘Okay, you have some crossed wires here,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t know Robert. Never met him. I’m certainly not having an affair with him.’
But it feels like the more I speak, the further she retreats and I am starting to feel that I will never be able to bring her back.
I look at her eyes, dark, glass, and think of her loitering outside for an opportunity to break into my house.
I’m scared, that’s the truth.
I can hear her words but my mind is whirring back to my husband, to hers.
I’ve never met Robert, never even seen a picture of him as far as I can remember. Like I say, he doesn’t come up much.
But Ed. I know Ed is sleeping with someone else. This has to be where this has come from, whatever Emma – drunk – is muttering about her husband. I ask again.
‘Emma, are you sleeping with Ed? Is that what this is about?’
I think of them, that day in the hospital, shaking hands. Was it happening then?
I look at her. Pretty. A lot slimmer than she used to be. I hadn’t noticed it happen. Clearly wasn’t watching her closely.
So maybe this is a new thing, his head turned when she looked different, when he bumped into her next to the rowing machine. It would make more sense. Ed likes slim figures.
And while Emma barely knows Ed in the world that I inhabit, clearly there is an alternate universe somewhere that I am slowly being given access to and in that universe she has slept with Ed and I am the enemy.
Emma guffaws, holds her side, laughs out loud for half a minute.
‘Oh fucking
LOOK at me, Scarlett,’ she says. ‘Even a bit trimmed down, as if your husband the Instagram model would go near me. God you are stupid.’
She shakes her head. Then cocks it to one side, teacher to pupil.
‘Scarlett,’ she says slowly. ‘I didn’t sleep with your man. You slept with mine.’
Robert.
Rob?
Someone I knew when I was younger? One of those love stories in miniature?
I think.
Robert.
Rob.
Bob.
Bobby.
None of them mean anything.
But with a sinking feeling, I realise something else.
Seth has bright-red hair.
There isn’t a hint of auburn in Emma’s blonde.
‘Emma, what’s Robert’s full name?’
There’s a beat.
‘Robert Mitcham,’ she says. ‘That helps, doesn’t it? To connect the dots.’
Robert Mitcham.
And my stomach plummets.
Robert Mitcham.
Bobby Mitcham.
The man I found on Facebook, after Ollie told me his surname and I did some googling around DJs in Manchester. I found his first name, eventually. Bobby Mitcham.
Mitch, who I met in Manchester to ask him if he had posted a video of us having sex online, is Robert, Emma’s uninvolved husband. The man who made her weep when he said that for once he would spend time with them together as a family and they would go for pizza, but then slept through it even after she shook him awake and begged, for Seth, for Seth, but he had only got in from a club at 5 a.m., and he smelt of Vivienne Westwood perfume.
A man who it makes sense I would have never seen around here – unless I did that one time, with Asha – because they live in the next village, not Sowerton, and my world is parks and playgroups; Mitch’s is clubs and bars.
I presumed he lived in Manchester because we met there and all his reference points were there; not because he ever said it. Emma tells me freely that he is at home rarely, spends a lot of time in Manchester with friends. And now, inevitably, they are done.
Emma, or this version of Emma, watches my face as it dawns.
I stay still as she looks down at me on my sofa and I absorb this new reality and the picture I have in my mind of Emma’s husband shifts to be the man I once had sex with. Robert is Mitch. The man I thought when we met up in the pub two months ago had no children and no wife but again not – in retrospect, I realise – because he told me that, just that fatherhood didn’t seem to fit with the picture I saw.
The Baby Group Page 23