The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  I look around my house, where Emma has been so many times. She’s fed her baby crisps on my sofa and gulped sugary tea from my favourite mug. She’s complimented my colour scheme, got nostalgic at my old CD collection and she’s taken her shoes off and curled her feet under her on my carpet. She’s cooed at pictures of me and Ed taken in twelve-hours-sleep-fuelled days before we had Poppy.

  How, I think suddenly, have I never noticed pictures of Mitch in her house?

  Then I remember: I’ve never been to Emma’s house.

  Is that odd?

  Living in the next village – even if it’s only a five-minute drive away – when the rest of us are walking distance from each other, with a coffee shop close by and various baby groups in the community hall, means that we default to one of ours. Now I’m wondering if that was deliberate.

  I look at Emma.

  ‘What now?’ I ask.

  I glance, then, at Ed’s golf clubs, waiting to be put away, propped up against a bookshelf. I had told him off about them, a danger in a room that Poppy plays in.

  But Emma walks past them. To the candlestick, heavy and decorative and never in any use that actually requires a candle, much to Ed’s bafflement. She examines it closely.

  Will this get physical?

  But if I think she might attack me, Emma already has.

  Her worst was done online, in her messages to Ed, with knowledge, with a false closeness, with emails, with a misuse of intimacy.

  She puts down the candlestick.

  She is done.

  Emma has no desire to hit me because how much worse could those blows be than the ones that she has already administered? She didn’t come here tonight for violence but to ask me questions, to make me promise to end an affair that isn’t real, a relationship that doesn’t exist, to quiet the questions in her head.

  And to tell me that she has ruined me. She has won. My life is even worse than hers; my family ripped apart even more violently. She has scored some sort of point in a game she thinks I’ve been involved in.

  So instead, she gets up from her chair. Plumps my cushions again.

  ‘Don’t let him win,’ I say, quietly, grasping at anything I can. ‘Don’t let him win by trying to ruin my life. There’s no “women like me” or “women like you”. There’s just women – people – trying to get through life. That’s what we’re all doing, Emma.’

  She stares at me.

  ‘Delete the video, Emma,’ I say gently. ‘And tell my husband that I am not cheating on him, with any of those men. That I didn’t do what you said I did for money. That I’m a good mum. Please Emma. Please.’

  But if I think I am getting through, I am wrong.

  ‘I want you to suffer,’ she says, and her matter-of-factness is worse than anger. ‘I want you to suffer what I have. To feel loss.’

  The worst sentiment there is.

  ‘I have suffered,’ I say, quietly now, beaten. ‘Just because people don’t share their stories, doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. I’ve suffered, and I’m suffering, and what you’ve done has hurt me and my family, maybe irreparably. So if that was your aim, it’s done. I’m not sleeping with Robert, Emma, I’m not, I’m not. Now please, can you stop.’

  I taste salt on my lip, and somehow I am on the ground, in front of the fireplace like a cat, and while I am there Emma steps over me, grazing me with a bright purple trainer.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she says.

  Then she walks to the front door, opens it and leaves.

  Emma, guest on a parenting podcast

  Thanks for having me on to talk about the mum blogger sex tape scandal. I know this won’t make me popular. Not very #womensupportingwomen or any of Scarlett’s other painfully forced hashtags. Sorry, I’m bitching already.

  I meant to start by saying that I’m sorry.

  No, I am.

  Really.

  But envy is a difficult emotion to battle, especially when you are as low as I was then.

  I still don’t believe that Scarlett wasn’t sleeping with Robert for months, maybe longer. There was someone local. She ticked every box. Everything about it made sense.

  Ever since I found that video and realised that it was my friend on there having sex with my partner, I was obsessed.

  When he was on a night out, I wondered constantly if he was with her. All I could think about when I was with her was whether she was sleeping with him.

  She was beautiful, my friend Scarlett, with that sporty body and the glossy bob. I knew she’d have kept him, if it had been them who’d had a child together, in a way that I couldn’t.

  She could have made him stay in and be a dad and get married and make a bit of tea for her when their child had colic and she was weak with hunger. And he would have loved her. In a way that he has never loved me.

  I’d cry all the time, angry tears. It was overwhelming, the need to ruin her.

  And so I wished terrible things upon her.

  I wished terrible things upon her as we were jogging, sipping coffee, eating noodles.

  I wished terrible things upon her even as she sat, jigging her tiny daughter up and down on her lap. Yep, you can blow raspberries at a child at the exact same time that you’re wishing misery on their mum.

  I wished terrible things upon Scarlett as she drank turmeric bloody lattes instead of coffee when I ordered my third Americano of the morning and as she flung her toned legs up on an Airbnb sofa and as she flirted with people she really shouldn’t have been flirting with. God, she was greedy, Scarlett Salloway, wanted everyone to want her.

  Old habits, probably.

  Sorry. That was bitchy again.

  Anyway, that’s the story. I did it.

  But I wasn’t the only one.

  There was someone else too.

  42

  Scarlett

  28 July

  Emma leaves my phone on the table.

  She knows it’s no use to me anyway.

  All I can do with it now is make things worse.

  I try phoning Ed again anyway. Nothing. Over and over I call, thinking that surely he will pick up, I’m his wife, but he ignores it. Or it’s in another room, on silent, as he tries to block me from his mind. It is after 11 p.m.

  But Poppy, I think. Poppy.

  I pace the house, hot, panicked and feeling my brain start to twirl out of control as it does when I can’t focus in on one thing.

  I call, and call.

  Liam and his wife too. They don’t pick up their phones either, presumably asleep.

  I need to get out of this house.

  I need to get to Ed.

  I grab the car keys and leave, saturated even in the distance between the front door and the car from rain that while I’ve been speaking to Emma has become torrential.

  I put the key in the ignition and press a boot down on the clutch but something doesn’t feel right and I realise: it’s because I am drunk.

  Even in my chaos, I know I can’t drive while I’m drunk. Can’t risk hurting somebody or hurting myself when I have – and it’s the only thing I can think of that matters now when there used to be a plethora of reasons, the ones that make up a whole life and person – a child.

  I sit in the drive and take my phone out of my pocket.

  Who can I call, at this time of night? Who will help me?

  Josephine is too far away, geographically and in her life, from this whole situation. We are so distant now; another thing the video has taken from me. I look down at my pyjamas and boots and see rock bottom.

  My dad: I still can’t let him see how bad things are. Still can’t paint the whole picture.

  Old friends are so removed now that starting from scratch on how things got here seems impossible and laboured. And so I get out of the car and run through the rain, to the only person I can think of who would let me in now, in the dead of night.

  ‘Cora!’ I shout into the silver intercom as the rain hammers down noisily. ‘I know it’s late. But I nee
d help.’

  And she lets me in like good friends – whatever I know about those, now – always do.

  43

  Scarlett

  28 July

  Here is that good friend, in glasses I’ve never seen her in before and cashmere pyjamas you want to stroke like a kitten.

  ‘Talk about freaking me out,’ she mutters as she opens the door. ‘You would have to choose the night Michael is away to do a late-night surprise call. What the hell’s happened?’

  She looks down at my pyjamas.

  ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘You do not look good, hon.’

  Unlike Cora, even the ‘at home in front of the TV’ version. Slippers that are worth upwards of £300. Brows and lashes dark and groomed as ever. That’s Cora.

  ‘I need to get to Ed,’ I hiss. ‘I’ll tell you everything later but first, I have to get to Ed. To Poppy. And I need you to drive me.’

  She puts her hands on my shoulders.

  ‘Calm down,’ she says. ‘You need to take ten minutes first to breathe. You look like you’re about to collapse. You don’t want to see him in this state. Tell me what the hell is going on. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  She looks at me.

  ‘Actually, fuck the kettle.’

  And then she goes to her drinks cabinet and takes out a bottle of brandy, the drink of the crisis, and pours me one. I don’t argue.

  I start speaking as soon as I have the drink in my hand.

  Everything that Emma has told me in the last couple of hours is tumbling out, too fast, too messy, in the wrong order, disjointed, with the wrong emphasis. Doesn’t matter. I need to expel it, as fast as I can.

  Cora doesn’t ask questions but I give her the answers, as she sits next to me on the sofa.

  ‘And it was her who shared the video,’ I sob, clutching my glass. ‘Emma! Not even Robert. But Emma. How could Emma be capable of that?’

  I look at her and wait for the shocked reaction, the horror.

  But Cora is still staring straight ahead, no matter what I reveal, saying nothing.

  I tell myself it’s because she is taking in the shock. Recalibrating what she knows about Emma, her friend of twenty years. Maybe even doubting me, wondering if I’ve had a breakdown and invented this.

  I glance at her again.

  ‘Why are you not answering me?’ I ask, uneasy. ‘I’m telling the truth.’

  She nods. ‘Just taking it in,’ she says quietly.

  Right.

  But still.

  This isn’t the Cora I know who would want the gossip, the details. To gasp and rant about Emma’s disloyalty and what a bitch she is and how she plans to freeze her out of having any sort of local social life in this area, ever.

  I would expect another reaction too: for her to pretend to be one step ahead of it all. ‘I always knew there was something weird about her’, even if I knew that wasn’t true.

  I look at Cora again. Face straight ahead. Like she’s watching the road while driving in bad visibility.

  What’s going on?

  My stomach does a forward roll.

  Good friends.

  ‘What’s happening, Cora?’

  She stays silent.

  ‘Cora.’ I’m louder now.

  ‘Relax,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you. We just need … a chat.’

  And I stay there, because I have to trust some people, sometimes. Maybe she has important information about Emma. Maybe she did suspect something. Maybe this is all about to make sense.

  But in the dark, with the rain angry and beating up the roof, Cora’s newly built WAG mansion, out here up this isolated country road, is not idyllic, it’s threatening. Same image, different perspectives. Like Emma.

  Could Emma be here? I suddenly think. They are tight. Has she persuaded Cora that I’m the one in the wrong? I look around at the closed door to the kitchen. To the spiral staircase that leads upstairs. To the door that leads down to the cellar.

  I glance at Cora.

  ‘Come on then,’ I say. ‘Are you going to tell me that you knew about Emma?’

  She nods. Shivers, in her very cold house. ‘Yeah. I knew.’

  I’m mad now, furious. ‘When?’

  She says nothing.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ I prompt. ‘God, Cora. I thought we were close.’

  She starts laughing then. ‘Oh come on, Scarlett, don’t be a child.’

  Between them, they are bastardising the last year of my life.

  ‘When I stayed at your house? That wasn’t friendship?’

  She laughs again. ‘No, Scarlett, that was drinking.’

  She pauses. Quieter.

  ‘And you know Emma and I have been mates for years.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, tears threatening now. ‘So that’s where your loyalty lies. Even when she’s done this to me.’

  Cora carries on laughing at me and suddenly, it’s one too many times. One too many times of being laughed at, somewhere, in some home, behind some screen, even if I didn’t see the teeth bared or the sound emitted. One too many mocking tones. One too many feelings of paranoia.

  ‘When did you figure out that it was Emma?’ I demand.

  Something occurs to me before she can answer.

  ‘Does Asha know too?’

  Cora laughs louder then and it’s unpleasant. ‘For someone who rates herself so much, Scarlett, you have a shocking sense of judgement.’

  She doesn’t expand.

  Fuck this. I’ll get a cab to Ed’s brother’s. I stand up to leave.

  ‘Stay,’ she says.

  But I’m done, with all of it.

  I ignore her and walk towards the front door.

  ‘I think you’ll want to know what I’ve got to say,’ she says, breezy. ‘Plus I’ve locked the gate.’

  I turn to look at her and she indicates the intimidating intercom system on the wall with a remote control in her hand.

  So I do as I am told and it occurs to me then that this new life of mine involves a lot of doing what I’m told.

  Ed chose the house we should buy and Cora chooses the playdate locations and I traipse after them, hood up, head down.

  I’m irritated, suddenly, by the realisation that in trying to be respectable, what I’ve become is obedient.

  Cora starts speaking as I shiver harder, more deeply, and wonder why it’s so cold in this house. Why on a night in, with unseasonably bad weather, Cora wouldn’t have stuck the heating on.

  ‘You think,’ she says. ‘That it was Emma who shared the video. And you’re right. Technically.’

  She pauses.

  My heart beats faster.

  ‘There were tens of them,’ she says. ‘These videos of women Robert had sex with. Looks like it was a thing of his.’

  My shivering is impossible to hide now and I vibrate with it.

  ‘What did you mean, “technically”?’ I ask.

  The flash, again.

  ‘She came to me,’ she says. ‘Told me that one of the women in the videos was you. She was devastated, paranoid. Even when she showed it to me and I pointed out that it was obviously made years ago, that you must have known each other when you were younger, she was convinced you had reconnected recently and hooked back up.’

  I throw my head back against the leather sofa in frustration.

  ‘I know, I know you didn’t,’ says Cora. ‘But she’d found all these receipts from hotels round here and was convinced there was someone he was seeing, locally. She put the two things together. Drew her own conclusion.’

  She stops again.

  ‘She thought you were laughing behind her back.’

  And isn’t that always what pushes us to be at our worst?

  Cora continues. ‘We barely knew you at the time,’ she says. ‘The babies were young. But I was building an impression.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I say, defeated. ‘Smug. Superior. Vain.’

  ‘That’s about it,’ she replies, like it’s a fact.

  I feel li
ke someone is pushing down on my chest.

  ‘Emma told me about the video,’ she says. ‘I was just the one who pointed out how we could use it.’

  We is good when you want a team to be behind you. But when you learn who has posted videos of you having sex online, we is worse than I by far. One person trying to ruin your life can be an anomaly. But when it’s more than one, it becomes a conspiracy.

  People have sat down together and decided to hurt you. Plotted it, planned it. Thwarted obstacles and found solutions. Laughed at their successes. Laughed at your pain. If someone does it alone, at least, there’s no one for them to laugh with.

  I stay silent because I know Cora will answer my questions, whether I ask them or not. And I am void of all energy. Beaten.

  ‘Emma was angry with you,’ she says. ‘It built every time you told us a story about Ed and Poppy and your happy life. Meanwhile she was having a hard time with Robert. He’d be staggering in when she was up for the third time that night.’

  Cora shrugs.

  ‘And then in the midst of all that, she found these videos. She got obsessed. Convinced you were sleeping together again, that that’s where Robert was when he didn’t come home.

  ‘You know how awful it is once you start comparing someone’s life to yours. That’s how Emma got. She thought you were thinner than her, prettier, fitter. Cooler. She was sure Robert would rather be with you. She was desperately unhappy, and every time we saw you it seemed like you were rubbing her face in it with your happiness.

  ‘And then of course, she told Robert about the video and he started defending you – even told her what a hard time you’d had back in the day when you didn’t have anywhere to live and had to stay on all your mates’ sofas and even work as a hooker.’

  Cora smirks.

  I can’t speak.

  Instead, I absorb the information of what’s really been happening in all those months I’ve been in the dark, searching for clues.

  I absorb them with the chill in this mansion, feeling it seep into my skin, deeper now, into every layer. I think of the odd looks I would catch Emma giving me sometimes. How I thought she was probably shattered; I was probably paranoid.