The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  And I was right, in many ways. Emma tells me often they spend no time as a family, heaving the changing bag around National Trust houses as Ed and I do. As Ed and I did.

  That man I met in the pub wasn’t a dad, not really. He had a child but chose to live life like he did not, making – in the process – Emma miserable and bitter. And vengeful.

  She stands in front of me, this new Emma, watching me think.

  ‘There we go.’ She smirks. ‘She finally gets it.’

  But I don’t, I think. There are so many steps I still don’t understand.

  ‘I was your friend,’ I say sadly, and all that Emma does is laugh and laugh and laugh, as pop songs that we have danced together as we held on to our drinks this year play, taunting us, in the background about who we used to be, and a friendship I thought we had.

  38

  Scarlett

  28 July

  Mitch. Robert.

  Emma laughs with me in coffee shops, just after she has eaten her cereal with the man I’m on the internet having sex with.

  She sits there in an oversized hoodie taking a long slug of her coffee, and talks about the terrible husband who barely lifts a finger in their life and all the time it is him, a man who saw me naked.

  I nod along and tut about him, this husband, this half-hearted dad, this party boy. Not knowing that he is also the man who didn’t notice the slice across my stomach as I sabotaged my own life by sleeping with him in front of my boyfriend.

  I think of Poppy, playing with Mitch’s son. Of Emma, sleeping with him. Of a different me, sleeping with him too.

  My thoughts hurtle forwards, backwards, sideways. Was there a moment that Emma changed towards me? A moment I could pin down, when she must have found out what had happened between us back in the day?

  ‘Got it now?’ asks Emma.

  No Emma. Not really.

  But I don’t say anything out loud.

  I don’t say anything out loud because she is the woman now who broke into my house and is trying to ruin my life and who has a laugh that is different to her normal laugh; eyes that are different to her normal eyes.

  I look at her face and there is no trace of the friend I’ve known. Robert is one shock but that is a second.

  But then I’ve thought it so often lately when I’ve started to suspect these women, haven’t I?

  Did I know you? And I’m not sure I did, in the way that I wanted to believe I did.

  One of the reasons I’ve never connected Emma to Mitch: I don’t even know her surname.

  I don’t have her email; it’s not on her social media.

  I’ve talked about everything with this woman – the mastitis that I battled through in the early weeks after having Poppy, what’s happened to my marriage, even the video.

  And yet, I don’t know her surname.

  I look at her.

  ‘We don’t know each other really, do we?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course we don’t,’ she snaps. ‘We were desperate for adult company. We’d have taken anyone.’

  ‘I told you such a lot,’ I say. ‘I told you my worries that Ed was cheating. I told you about the video.’

  Emma shrugs. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You did, babe. Bit odd really. We haven’t known each other long. You want to be more careful with how much you share.’

  But I had been desperate. Desperate to make friends; desperate to skip forward through the awkward parts where you exchange small talk. I wanted something to absorb me into its sphere. I wanted, as a new mum with an unsure identity, to make myself feel constructed and real. To build a whole world so I didn’t feel quite so much like I had strayed into someone else’s.

  A feeling runs from my chest to my stomach and it is familiar.

  The feeling, I think, of blaming myself, of thinking – deep down – that all of this has been brought on by me because I was bad and shameful and not good enough.

  Did someone say it to me, as a teenager? That that was why I didn’t have my own mum. Something is sparking a memory. Of Josephine climbing into my bed while I cried, to cuddle me afterwards, telling me I could share her mum, if I wanted. I have the feeling again, of losing my last hold on things. Of this being too much. Of not being able to breathe.

  Emma walks over and shuts the living room door, leaning against it.

  I stand up.

  ‘Sit down and listen,’ she tells me.

  But I speak before I can stop myself. ‘So it was Mitch then,’ I say, deadpan and wanting to get in there first. ‘Mitch leaked the video and now you hate me, because you’ve had to watch me having sex with your husband.’

  She laughs, then, as she sits down in the chair opposite me.

  ‘Not quite.’

  Her voice slurs with the booze and something else, unknown. An edge that is unnerving.

  I stay silent.

  Emma looks right at me again.

  ‘Robert has sex with a lot of people,’ she says. ‘Before he was with me, now he’s with me. It makes no difference to Robert.’

  ‘But I’m not sleeping with Mitch,’ I protest.

  I correct myself, out of some sort of respect to her marriage.

  ‘I’m not sleeping with Bobby. With Robert. We were barely even mates then, just mixed in the same circles, went to the same clubs. What happened between us was twelve years ago. Way before you met, I would imagine?’

  She nods. ‘Yeah. We only got together two years ago.’

  ‘Well then!’ I say, rallying, hopeful. ‘We were kids. Different people. And you and I can move on from this. It’s weird, yeah, but I barely knew Mitch. He wasn’t some big love of mine or anything.’

  I think I see judgement in her eyes – so why have sex with him on camera then, why wasn’t your boyfriend enough for you – or am I so used to looking for it that I see that judgement anywhere now?

  ‘Look,’ I say, picking up pace. ‘I don’t know why Mitch … Robert did this. Perhaps because he has some issue with my ex Ollie? But now I know it was him, I can move on. You can help me make sure it doesn’t go up on any more sites, right? Get him to delete the video. To leave me alone.’

  I think of the messages, to Ed, to me, of the threats of what could come next.

  She can help, I think, surely. I sizzle with the hope of bringing this to a conclusion. I can move on.

  But then I look at Emma’s face. Still so different to the meek, apologetic one I’ve known before and I’m reminded of characters on TV dramas whose faces change shape once you find out they’re the bad guy. Once you see them through the lens of evil and it’s impossible to imagine the original version.

  This is Emma. My friend, my enemy, the surprisingly impressive actor.

  And suddenly the fear is back. Because this woman, whoever she is, waited for an opportunity to break into my house. Planning went into this. Ed wasn’t here. This wasn’t her first attempt.

  What sort of person does that, angry or not? I picture her holding Poppy, hugging me, offering me a bite of her carrot cake. I shudder.

  ‘I won’t go to the police, if that’s what you want,’ I say. ‘Especially when there is Seth to think of. We’ll just get Robert to leave me alone and I’ll move on. There’s no way I could face court anyway.’

  It’s true.

  Emma looks up slowly and deliberately and for a minute I think she is falling asleep. Has she downed something more than gin? But she smiles, lazily.

  ‘You don’t think much of Robert, do you?’ she asks.

  I deliberate. What’s the right response, at this moment, when he has left her anyway?

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘When I met up with him a few weeks ago to ask if he had done this to me, he lied to my face. Said point blank it wasn’t him.’

  ‘Do you think you’re important to him?’ she asks. ‘More than just some girl he shagged?’

  I cringe, every time I remember this is her husband we are talking about.

  ‘Well I didn’t,’ I say, defensive. ‘But then he did this to me.
So otherwise, why?’

  I focus in on the silence of the house. No baby crying. No Ed dashing from room to room picking up his jacket, his wallet, his keys. The TV has turned itself off from inactivity. No music, because slowly, slowly through this whole thing even that has gone from my life. My mood doesn’t deserve music. It doesn’t deserve beats or dancing or lyrics that are poetry. My mood only deserves heavy loaded silence.

  The room feels small. Not in the cosy way that it does in the daytime when I read stories to Poppy in here; cuddle her in for a sleep.

  Emma looks up.

  ‘Why?’ I repeat.

  As soon as I have said the why out loud, my brain skips on and tries to answer its own question.

  Is Mitch obsessed with me? Has he seen me around locally and remembered me? Stalked me? I shiver. Was it something that came back to him when he realised one day that his wife’s friend Scarlett was the woman he’d once filmed having sex?

  I’m still flitting from theory to theory, trying to work it out, when Emma speaks. And if her face has contorted into a different person’s face during this conversation, now her voice is doing the same.

  Unrecognisable.

  Emotionless.

  Bleak.

  Terrifying.

  Because what she says is:

  ‘It wasn’t Robert who posted the video, Scarlett. It was me.’

  39

  Scarlett

  28 July

  Emma is sitting in the hug of a grey armchair that I used to sit in to breastfeed Poppy in the eerie world of 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m. as she tells me the story of exactly how she ruined my life.

  She is relaxed about it, a little dazed, and I wonder again if she has had something more than alcohol. Drugs may well be kicking around their house; Mitch was always a fan.

  But not Emma, I think temporarily, as I picture her bursting through the door of the café half an hour after everyone else, agonising over whether to have a brownie.

  Not Emma.

  This is a different Emma though, I remind myself.

  Normal rules do not apply. Normal rules, it turns out, were bullshit.

  She gets comfortable against my deep purple cushions and I feel like I am emptying out, the final traces of hope and human connection gone now.

  They were all I had, those women, and if it sounds ridiculous, it is.

  But this has been a ridiculous few months and I have clung to all that I have been able to cling to and slowly, slowly, it has crept up on me: Asha, Emma and Cora were my closest friends.

  ‘Robert cheats on me all the time,’ she says now, not a sliver of emotion in her voice. ‘And I’ve become numb to it. The way you do to anything that happens constantly. He comes in at 4 a.m., showers, and I pretend to be asleep. I have my life; he has his.’

  She slumps further back.

  I listen to this new Emma, like I have listened so many times to Old Emma, and I will her to transition back.

  ‘I thought I could change him,’ she says and maybe there is something softer in there now. ‘And like every smart friend has ever told me – including you actually, once or twice – of course I couldn’t.’

  ‘But what was he like when you met him?’ I ask because I am genuinely curious. ‘Did he settle down then?’

  Emma laughs but it’s angry, and I think it’s angry with me.

  ‘No,’ she snaps. ‘Of course not.’

  I stay silent, scared I might throw our precarious balance off if I speak.

  There’s a gap then.

  ‘I got pregnant quickly,’ she says eventually. ‘We were only casually dating. Partying a lot. I think he thought it was the ultimate rebellion. What’s the craziest thing you can do when you’re this party-boy DJ? His friends thought it was wild. Move to the country! Have a kid!’

  ‘Get married,’ I fill in.

  Emma looks up, surprised.

  ‘We aren’t married,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  Of course I didn’t. We’ve established: I know nothing. I look at her wedding finger. There’s a thin band of gold around it. She glances at it too. Shrugs.

  ‘Just fits that finger best,’ she says. ‘And I’ve always felt like we might as well be married. No difference, once Seth came along.’

  I assumed, of course. I skipped the steps of actual conversation like I did with her job as we focused solely on the babies.

  If I was irritated by my friends at first for not asking me questions about the real me, then I have done the same, I realise. Not been interested, inquisitive, curious.

  Just used, for what I needed. Hours filled, advice given.

  It wasn’t Robert, it was me.

  I look at her, this stranger.

  ‘So what happened?’ I ask as I see her eyes lose focus; her lids droop.

  She is, I think, she is on something.

  Emma has been pushed so far that she has got drunk at home and taken some sort of drugs.

  A shrug.

  ‘I still wanted him to stay,’ she says. ‘I know it sounds pathetic but I always hoped he’d grow out of it. I wanted our family together. That was my only focus. For Seth.’

  I nod, empathy surging.

  I reach for her hand but she pulls it away.

  ‘A few weeks ago we had a row, a particularly bad one,’ she says. ‘And I told him that I knew about him sleeping with you. That this was worse than all the others, that you were my friend. He didn’t know that. Didn’t realise I knew you, of course.’

  Her body crumples like a newspaper on our fire as mine stiffens.

  ‘I wanted him to know I could act too,’ she says. ‘That I wasn’t passive all the time. So I told him what I had done to you too. Posting the video. Sending it to everyone. I suppose I was kind of … proud of myself. But he was furious. Told me how upset you’d been by the video when he met you that day, what a disgusting thing it was to do. Said you were a nice person, and that back in the day you’d had a hard time of life. Told me some other things while he was at it. About just how low things had got for you. It was supposed to make me feel bad, I think.’

  She raises an eyebrow.

  I go cold. Freeze. Of course.

  ‘You sent those messages too,’ I say. ‘About the other thing.’

  The penthouse. The fancy gin. Emma knows it all, the grimiest corners of my past.

  She grimaces.

  ‘Say what you mean,’ she mutters. ‘We don’t need to call it “the other thing”. We can call it you having sex for money but only as long as the men had fancy pads, right? That about the size of it?’

  My cheeks sting.

  And even now, I’m ashamed.

  ‘It wasn’t sex,’ I whisper, and I can’t believe this secret, so long buried, is living and breathing in my living room. Tears of release pour down my face. ‘It was escort work before I met Ollie when I was all over the place and had no job and was desperate for cash. I didn’t even have a home, Emma. I had to stay on friends’ sofas. Once even on a bench. I knew I was getting my inheritance from my mum when I was twenty-five and it made me lazy. I got into a lot of debt and panicked.’

  She raises an eyebrow. ‘It wasn’t sex? Ever?’

  I stay silent.

  She scoffs.

  The dam opens and shame floods me, drowns me, way beneath the surface.

  Yes. One time there was a lot of money on offer, and I convinced myself it was a simple transaction and I did it. I slept with that man, twenty-five years older than me, maybe, and it was so much more than a transaction and the dam opened then and the shame flooded, over and over, just like now and I hated me, just like now.

  ‘I shouldn’t have to justify anything I’ve done in my life to you, Emma,’ I say but I don’t feel that way. I want to justify, like I spend so much time in my head trying to do too, to real people, to imaginary people, to myself. On a good day it works. On bad days, nothing does. I could have gone to my dad for money, instead of that man. My eyes sting. He’d have taken me in, any da
y, any hour. But I was too proud; still sulking about his new family. How can I have made that choice? I picture my dad knowing this and it hurts in my insides.

  She ploughs forward, like I haven’t even spoken.

  ‘Robert was appalled by what I’d done to you,’ she says. ‘Asked why the hell I would share the video. And then said he had fallen out of love with me a long time ago but this was the final straw, he didn’t want to be with a person who could do this to somebody else, especially somebody they called a friend, and he left me.’

  It wasn’t Robert, it was me.

  This isn’t a friendly chat.

  I’m not here to counsel her over her marriage.

  She did this to me.

  Not Mitch.

  Emma.

  And now she has let herself into my home and she is high and drunk and angry.

  My heart starts thudding. The sweat drips again.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  I need to keep Emma talking, because otherwise I don’t know what comes next. Will she tell Ed, tell everybody, what I did?

  ‘And why did you do this to me?’ I say. ‘Robert made some sort of sense. But you? I don’t get it, Emma.’

  Emma settles back on the cushions; refocuses. Looks right at me.

  ‘I’ve suspected for a long time,’ she says. ‘That you were back on the scene.’

  I open my mouth to protest but there is no chance.

  ‘Receipts of Robert’s I found, for local places, local hotels. It’s always been Manchester before, but for a while I’ve known Robert’s been sleeping with someone on our doorstep. Knowing you two had a history, it made sense. Clicked into place.’

  Her stare is intense.

  ‘Was it still the same?’ she snarls. ‘After all of those years?’

  I shake my head no, hard – no it didn’t happen, no, no, no.

  ‘You have no idea how much I hate you.’ She hurtles forward. ‘I was going to watch you fall apart from a distance, just do enough that he wouldn’t want you any more and the affair would stop. But then he left, and I needed to stand in front of you and tell you to leave him alone. Stay away from him. And from me. I am not your friend. I hate you. You’re the reason my husband’s left me. You have ruined my fucking life.’