Flick stands up to pull the blind down.
I stare at the movements on the screen and at the three naked bodies – one of which is my own – having sex with each other, in various shapes and combinations.
Fuck.
I wrap my arms around myself and try and hold the parts of me together.
My head throbs, my vision blurs.
Felicity, moving back towards me, looks alarmed.
She tries to touch me but I shake her off.
‘Let me contact medical,’ she says, concerned.
We work in a large building, with lots of other creative companies. There is a nurse in a small room on the second floor. It’s a forward-thinking place to work. Good mental health is a key focus so he would get me a cup of tea and ask if I need the in-house counselling service phone number for a referral and I would sit there and reply with what? That it’s not too many working hours that’s the problem here, but the fact I just sat in a boardroom with my boss and watched myself have sex.
I shake my head.
‘No medical,’ I manage. ‘I just need a minute.’
She nods.
I know it happened. I do remember it, somewhere in the recesses of my mind.
Felicity has turned the sound off on the video, or it doesn’t have sound, but for whichever one of those is true, I am grateful.
One long minute later I look back at my boss’s bowed head. She is still wiping.
I continue to sit, my heart feeling like it could injure me with its drumming; migraine kicking in. My back is sweating like I have just completed one of the ten marathons I have run in my lifetime. My face is hot like I’ve opened the oven on a bubbling lasagne – ready-made, knowing me – and peered right inside.
‘It was posted to a website but they sent the video link too,’ Felicity says, under her breath.
So it’s not just an email to be deleted but this video is accessible to whoever, whenever. For those people to laugh at me or be turned on by me or to use me for whatever they need.
My eyes, which sting with the urge to weep like a toddler who doesn’t want to share, can’t take themselves off the video.
My hands and my legs shake harder, deeper.
It was pointless, I think, to try and reinvent myself as I look at the woman on the screen. Same arms, same legs, same me.
You attempt so hard to be something, to leave something behind but image is fragile and now my shiny new one is on the floor.
Can someone pop in to sweep it up? You’ve left a shard in the corner. That’s it, all gone now.
The video finally stops.
‘Stay,’ says Felicity weakly, as I stand up to leave. ‘Let’s talk this through.’
But I laugh and she dips her head. Because we both know that what she is saying is preposterous. How can I put either of us through that? What would ‘that’ even involve?
The only option here is surely to run, run, run as fast as I can.
I fight the urge to throw up.
Even if some people didn’t open it without the private IT favours Flick asked for, they would try the link later, at home; less wary, too curious.
To walk to the lift I have to walk past all of them, the colleagues that now know what you would get if you peeled back every single item of clothing that I am wearing.
It feels like that’s exactly what has happened.
3
Scarlett
4 May
Breathe.
Remember to breathe.
I feel discussed and disgust and I am outside the office, calling Ed and sobbing hard as I walk towards the train station.
Ed answers on the first ring and I know the second he says hello.
‘I was about to call you,’ he says. He sounds altered, in the way you do when the seismic stuff happens.
‘They sent it to you,’ I say, stopping still on the street amongst angry shoppers and people running late for work who have to swerve around me.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You know then. Shit, Scarlett.’
We are silent, in shock.
When he speaks next, it’s quieter.
‘Who else was it sent to?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘You’re the first person I’ve called, obviously. But my work colleagues, for starters. I’ve just come out of a room with Flick. Can you leave work and meet me at home?’
‘Yeah of course,’ he says. ‘I’ll leave now.’
He’ll get home sooner than me from his office in Warrington, only half an hour from Sowerton.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, guilty at bringing this into our life. ‘I know you’re busy in work today.’
He doesn’t reply.
‘See you soon,’ he says, then hangs up.
Is that it? I think. No I love you. No We’ll get through this.
Wait until you get home, Scarlett, I think. He probably just wants to see me face to face. It’s not easy to get into this without being in the same room.
On my phone, I am googling lawyers as I walk to the station, bumping into angry people who curse at me.
‘Look where you’re bloody going, love,’ says a city type in a too-small suit.
I stare at him blankly; no capacity to reply.
Finally I arrive at the station and on the platform fire off five emails to different law firms.
I am desperate to pick up the phone to them to speed this along but how can I have this conversation next to a mum with her toddler or the retirees excited about their day trip for a walk and a fish and chip lunch?
A minute after I board the train, one of the lawyers pings back. I have an appointment next week.
Okay. Okay. I’m doing something at least. I’m taking action.
I look out of the window and try now to calm down slightly, to exhale.
Then my phone rings.
It’s one of my closest friends, Martha, and so I pick up, hoping for the comfort of her voice.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I’m on a train so
