The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  And I am a person.

  I am this person who is holding my arm across her neck, and I am that person who slept with her beneath her silk sheets.

  And as I look at Cora’s face, which has started to lose some of the fight, my grip lessens.

  When I let her go, she falls to one side, sobbing, scrabbling to get away from me. I don’t look back at her as I walk to the door and she opens the gate to let me out, locking the door with scrabbling fingers and those awful nails the second she can behind me.

  It still pours down and I walk home, pick up the car, drive, taking wrong turns, still too drunk really, not stopping to cry, not stopping to focus. Until I remember: Ed’s brother and his family have moved and I have no idea where I’m heading to. Ed goes alone. Fuck. On the off chance, I check the sat nav history and it’s in there. Ed used this car when he went to see him last week. Ten minutes later I pull up outside Liam and Jaclyn’s new house.

  I try to wipe some of the rainwater off me before I knock but it’s pointless.

  I can’t clean myself even if I want to.

  Now the shock has worn off I realise I am freezing and I shake uncontrollably in my sodden clothes. I think of what will happen next. I don’t have Cora’s money. Know I can’t give in to blackmail anyway. I can report Emma and Cora to the police. Likely I will still go viral now though, as the mum blogger with the sex tape. Thoughts scramble on top of each other. I am sliced open again, like I was all those years ago. The shaking intensifies.

  Ed’s brother Liam answers the door to their bungalow in pyjamas and dressing gown with a golf club badly concealed behind him. The walls in the hall have been stripped bare.

  ‘Scarlett! What the hell? Come in. Jesus.’

  He opens the door but then he gives me the once-over.

  I’m not sure he’s yet entirely unconvinced that he doesn’t need the golf club. Probably wise; you have just opened your door in the early hours to a woman who drunk-drove here after her recent attempt to strangle her friend.

  How did I get here, I think? How did I wander so far from my dinner parties – albeit bought in because nobody changes that much and I always was a terrible cook – and my fancy brownies to this?

  I had done such a good job.

  Worked so hard.

  I try to tell Liam what has happened, there in my pyjamas, with words and sentences falling out of mouth unevenly, in the wrong order. But I can’t see clearly. Can’t remember it all. Feel like I may faint.

  The words jumble and collide and climb over each other. I try to straighten them up but don’t have the capacity.

  I don’t sound sane – I know that.

  Liam backs away, looks nervous.

  ‘Scarlett, Scarlett, okay, calm down,’ he says, edging away from me.

  ‘Ed! Get up. Scarlett is here. I’m not sure what’s going on.’

  A bedroom door opens and Ed bustles down the hall in his pants and a T-shirt.

  Liam places a gentle hand on his brother’s shoulder. Leaves. Comes back a few seconds later with a towel which he passes to Ed rather than me, then heads down the hall, closing his and his wife’s bedroom door audibly and leaving us to it.

  Ed and I look at each other. And I think I have run out of emotions to feel. Is that possible? To exhaust them all and be hollowed out?

  I am done feeling it all and dealing with it and analysing it and trying to save it. I am done tending and lamenting and blaming.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls earlier?’ I say quietly. Ed doesn’t miss a beat.

  ‘I turned my phone off, Scarlett,’ he says, as he silently pats me and my pyjamas dry in the hall like I’m a wet dog. ‘I needed an early night and Poppy was in bed with me. I didn’t look at it. What the hell has happened?’

  I stand still, obedient.

  Ed looks scared. He glances nervously towards the bedroom door, where Poppy sleeps. I try to move towards it and he blocks me, with an arm.

  ‘She does not need to see you like this, Scarlett,’ he hisses. ‘And it’s the middle of the night.’

  I stare at him. Think about what he could have saved me from this evening, if he had just answered the phone to his wife.

  ‘So you didn’t listen to the voicemail?’ I say.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘It was Emma,’ I say to Ed.

  What follows is another diatribe of nonsense and what sounds like hyperbole as I speak of blackmail and coercion and a showdown in a WAG mansion.

  ‘I did flirt with the guy from the coffee shop but that was it, Ed,’ I say. ‘Nothing happened, I swear. But Emma thought I was sleeping with her husband Robert – Robert is Mitch, the guy from the …’

  ‘Video,’ fills in my husband, grimacing.

  I look at him then, closely. His hair has moved even further towards grey lately, sticking up now as it does when it doesn’t contain product. It feels like months since I’ve seen him like this, sleepy and exposed.

  I notice the lines around his eyes and from nothing, I feel everything at once.

  ‘You act like it is a terrible thing I did, Ed,’ I say. ‘Sleeping with other people such a long time ago. Shall we talk next about who you’re sleeping with now?’

  Perhaps it wasn’t Emma. But what Flick and Martha said still exists.

  ‘What are you on about?’ he says but he’s always been a terrible liar and now is no different. His cheeks colour; his voice shakes.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Ed?’ I say, calmer now, somehow. ‘Would you have supported me more if you weren’t seeing someone else? Or was the video enough to kill us dead anyway?’

  Ed sighs. ‘Sleeping with someone else?’ he says but the cheeks are redder, the vibrations more audible. ‘Who am I supposed to be sleeping with?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ed,’ I say. ‘You would know that, not me. Someone from the gym?’

  He refutes and blusters. Then he pauses. ‘And also, I did support you!’ he says. ‘I got you a lawyer’s appointment, went there with you.’

  You, you, you. Still no we.

  ‘I was having a crisis, Ed. You’re my husband. That’s the 101 level,’ I say. ‘I needed emotional support, comfort, love, a hug to tell me everything was going to be okay.’

  He ducks his head because he knows he can’t claim to have given those things.

  ‘You didn’t comfort me, Ed. You never comforted me.’

  ‘Well aren’t I the worst husband?’ he mutters. ‘You’ve not exactly been perfect, Scarlett.’

  That inflames me again. ‘Somebody has just tried to blackmail me, do you understand?’ I yell, and he hisses at me to quieten down. All the bedrooms are on the same floor as us. If I shout like this I’ll wake Poppy. I’ll wake Liam again. I’ll wake Liam’s wife and their three kids.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck, Ed!’ I scream. ‘I don’t give a fuck if I wake up everybody!’

  Ed raises an eyebrow and puts out a placating hand.

  Patronising bastard, I think, patronising bastard.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ he says. ‘Emma tried to blackmail you.’

  ‘No,’ I simmer, impatient for him to understand. ‘Cora did. Emma posted the video.’

  He furrows his brow, this man who is supposed to support me, who has let me deal with all of this by myself, and made me feel grubby, all the while sleeping with somebody else.

  ‘And these are the women we met at NCT, right?’ he says, sceptical.

  I nod. ‘Just because they know nursery rhymes, Ed, doesn’t mean they can’t be cruel too,’ I snap. ‘They are human beings. They don’t exist in a box.’

  ‘But why would Cora want money?’ he says. ‘Isn’t she the one who’s loaded? With that big house off Woodland Lane?’

  I nod. ‘But their financial situation isn’t what I thought,’ I say.

  What is?

  I look at him.

  He pats me more with the towel and it’s so pointless that it’s making me furious. I shake him off.

 
‘Again, you’re not supporting me!’ I shout. ‘My life was at risk tonight. Emma broke into our house. And you weren’t there to help me because you’d given up on us, when I stayed and tried and clung on.’

  He ignores the last part – typical Ed, zoning out on the emotional element. He interrupts me.

  ‘Emma? But it was Cora who asked for money?’

  He is more like a police interrogator, trying to pick holes in my story, than a man who stood up in front of one hundred people and said he’d love me for our lives.

  I stare at him, incredulous.

  And suddenly, I fly. ‘You, you, you!’ I scream. ‘All I’ve been through tonight, all I have been through, and you start accusing me of lying when it’s you who’s having sex with someone else.’

  ‘I’m not accusing you of lying,’ he says as I hit him and he puts his arms up. ‘Stop that, Scarlett, stop that. How can you be the one going for me when I know what I know about you now? That it’s not just threesomes. According to these anonymous messages I’ve been getting, you cheat on me. And you used to be a prostitute, for god’s sake.’

  The fog drifts in again that was there earlier in the night with Cora. And I roar in fury.

  Arms that could almost strangle a friend are more than enough to beat at a man, hard, ferocious.

  I am powered by his not backing me, by his doubting me, suspecting me. By him leaving me so alone that I felt I needed to confide in and put everything in the hands of women I barely knew. By him being so distant from me that I honestly believed I was closer to them than my husband.

  That raised eyebrow and those barely perceptible sighs and that fucking arm, telling me to calm down when my world had fallen apart and he wasn’t listening.

  I could just about weather public shame but private shame emanating from my own husband – maybe that was the form that would tip me over the edge.

  And as I beat at him his voice rises up in the chaos and he says to me, clear, ‘You know, it might be time to stop being so obsessed with who did this or trying to accuse me of things and accepting that you slept with those men and made a video of it. It’s all somebody else’s fault or it’s because of the booze or it’s because you lost the baby. But really, Scarlett, is that just a way of persuading yourself that it’s not your fault, how you used to live? Take some bloody responsibility.’

  All of our good moments and our close moments didn’t matter in the end, I think, versus this. I learnt too late that my husband thought it was bad that somebody shared a video of me having a threesome but if he truly admitted it, he thought it was worse that I had done it in the first place.

  I let him finish, because I want to hear it all.

  ‘And all of this business about me sleeping with somebody else? That’s a complete falsehood.’

  I stare at him and make a split-second decision.

  ‘Let’s see, shall we?’ I say, and I walk out and open the car door and start it in the dark, forgetting to turn the lights on. I shout behind me. ‘Because on the way here I realised I’ve never been to Liam’s new house so I put the address in the sat nav, and in the recent history was a random address in Chorlton. We don’t have much reason to go to houses in Chorlton at the moment, do we, Ed?’

  Ed reddens.

  ‘The only good thing about the fact we used to live there is that I know it pretty well. That’s the street just on the left after the wine bar, right? God, we used to love their Chablis, didn’t we? Little sharing platter on the side on a Friday night after work.’

  I pause.

  ‘Or maybe for you, there’s no “used to” about it.’

  I pull out hard, screeching into reverse to turn out of Liam’s drive and head to Chorlton where Ed and I used to nip out for brunch and watch films under a blanket on our sofa and kiss and dream about a future that was incomprehensibly old, with a garden and a baby and a wedding, thinking it would be rose-tinted when really it is edged in grey.

  I pull out to drive back into our past and see what is lurking there, and how long it’s been lurking for. A few months? Our whole marriage? Did it start before Poppy was born, or was it in that newborn phase, when I thought we were such a unit?

  I pull out to find out if this is true and who it’s been happening with. I will look at this woman right in her sleepy, middle-of-the-night eyes and ask if it was before my sex tape was sent to everybody, or after, when she started sleeping with my husband. I will wake her, whatever time it is, whoever she is, and finally, I will know everything. Finally there will be no more limbo.

  But I pull out too fast, too irresponsibly, miles away from the mum driving of the daytime with its mirror checks and its car seats and its slowness.

  And its sobriety.

  Because yes, I also pull out of Liam’s drive ignoring the fact that I am too drunk to drive, still, the rationale of earlier having left me now and on the drive over here as the events of tonight spiralled.

  I hear a shout. Ed’s lovely accent-free voice, the one that I used to tease him about when we met, gently, inexplicably, because I barely knew anybody else who didn’t sound like they were from the heart of Manchester.

  My husband’s lovely voice shouting stop to me, shouting no, shouting Scarlett, shouting please, shouting listen. And then the thud.

  And it’s only when I feel that thud I’ve never heard the car make before that I know that I have hit him, Ed, and that as I step out of the car in what feels like slow motion, there is no sound coming from him.

  This man who kissed my head at the hospital. This man who put the hot water bottle on my feet in our new bed. This man who poured me a glass of wine. The man who told me, as Poppy came into the world, that she was a girl, and knew what that meant to me and held me as we wept together.

  And as I round the back of the car, I see Ed, not moving and I crouch down to check him, to revive him, to tend to him.

  ‘Be okay, Ed, be okay,’ I murmur in his ear, and then I stand up and look up for Liam, for Jaclyn.

  ‘Call an ambulance!’ I yell, though I am scared simultaneously because my drinking will have repercussions. Huge ones, potentially – depending what happens next. But what else can I do?

  I look up.

  But it’s not Liam or Jaclyn at the door.

  Instead it is my daughter. Gummy smile, sleepy eyes, in her baby pink pyjamas with elephants on them. She holds her toy dog close to her soft tummy. Her chubby feet are bare.

  She is excited to see me, my love, after we have been apart. But her smile fades and she is simultaneously worried, because her dad is on the ground and I am stood above him, screaming.

  45

  Scarlett

  Three years later

  ‘This is really not the ideal place to raise a child,’ he says, as Poppy heaves her scooter in through the door of our tiny flat, leaving the latest batch of scuff marks on the wall.

  I mutter about it too on a weekly basis but I’m smiling.

  We are home.

  This home is in central Manchester, the place I thought I had to flee from for the next phase of life, because I would be too old to be there in my thirties and there was a sleepy pub that did a good roast dinner in the countryside calling my name. They were the rules; that was the trajectory.

  But now a moderately rough bit of town is where late thirties me puts the chain on at night, double bolts the door and calls home.

  Turns out, there are all kinds of ways of doing things.

  Poppy needs space, and she gets it. We just have to work a bit harder to get it than opening the back door and pushing her out of it into a big, luscious Sowerton garden with its very own swing.

  Ideal places to raise a child can be far from ideal if they create miserable parents who feel like a section of their insides have been hollowed out because they don’t belong there, because for them it is wrong, wrong, wrong.

  People are different. I need the city. I need songs. I need to dance. I need noise. I need edge and culture.

  Nobody wrote
a rulebook for a life and there’s a reason. Something was right, and I tried it, and something else was right, and I am trying that. Now though, I try not to bury all the old versions of life, all the old versions of me. I try to let them live too.

  I am back at work; a new job at a painfully cool agency that I got partly thanks to an incredible reference from a guilt-ridden Felicity who I catch up with regularly for a drink and a conversation in which we try to avoid the topic of the time we watched me have sex.

  Martha comes too. I apologised for being so distant when I moved; she said no, it was her. She had been dealing with a new situation, trying to be a step-parent to her boyfriend’s daughter and she was drowning. She had to retreat. I had been too focused on me to think about everyone else’s narratives. Everyone else’s battles.

  I stop at two wines these days. I should probably quit altogether; there’s no doubt I see alcohol as a crutch and I definitely abused it for a while. But I’m a work in progress. Leave that with me.

  Now I don’t mind being a work in progress though; I don’t mind looking grimy. I don’t mind having a past. I don’t mind that I am, like most, a little bit fucked up.

  Sometimes I am almost glad the video was uploaded that day, and that Emma and Cora did that to me: it pressed restart on my life, and restart was what I needed. Everybody needs restarts sometimes. Life’s never one long go.

  I am even almost able to laugh about the thing that ruined my life. Mostly because I’ve realised: your life being ruined isn’t always a bad thing. There might be a better one available.

  It takes me a long time now though to make new friends not least because those websites did write posts on me, the mum blogger with the sex tape. Anyone in my life who didn’t know – though there weren’t many anyway – was filled in after that. Cora denies that she leaked it, in the only contact we’ve had since, but I’ll never know.

  Whatever happened afterwards though, on the internet what Ollie, Mitch and I did is there forever. I am the mum blogger with the sex tape. In my lowest moments, I worry that everyone who meets me sees me as solely that.

  Joe often tells me I need to let people in more. That not everybody’s like Emma and Cora, whose names I struggle to say still, like they are Voldemort, when what happened then comes up.