No WAY! she says. That one of you and Pop on the farm makes you look about twenty-two. Anyway, got to go, am at a dress fitting. But this will blow over. I promise. So sorry I can’t help more. Love you.
I nip over to Cheshire Mama to look at the post she is talking about. Hmm. Twenty-two is generous. But I do look all right. Confident. Together. Taken before this all happened, obviously. Now I would need more than a filter to get rid of eye bags, matted hair, knitted brow, sad mouth. All the evidence disaster has happened.
I lean back in the water.
Sigh.
Something is gnawing at me. Something else.
Since this happened, a week ago, nothing else has come up. No email follow up asking for money. No second video.
And I can’t believe that is it; that this is just sent out into the world and stays there, stagnating.
What would be the point of it remaining stagnant?
Where, then, I think, is this going?
If somebody hates me enough to send that video to my friends, my family, my workplace, knowing the impact that would have, they aren’t going to leave it at that, are they?
Like Mitch said too, I am out there.
Should I be deleting Cheshire Mama, I think, instead of attempting to grow it, be out there more?
I think of how it looks, our life.
We are quite wealthy now. My own salary might be modest but Ed, high up at an accountancy firm, earns a lot and there was the money I inherited from my mum. We bought a big white listed house on a private road; it looks like something from Escape To The Country. The cars in our drive are fancy. Will this descend to blackmail? It would be worth bothering to ask me for money; from the outside it would seem like I might well have it.
I run my hands through wet hair; think.
And come back to the thing that’s been chewing on my insides since this happened.
I glance at the door of the bathroom.
If Ed thinks a sex tape is my only secret, he is wrong.
I have other secrets, from the past.
Worse secrets.
My worst secret.
My heart starts to pound.
If this person has access to the video, do they know that one too?
Is that where this is headed?
The bath starts to feel chilly.
I submerge myself and wonder if I could do it and stay under. But I picture Poppy’s face, and I just about come back up to the surface.
Anon
She’s starting to break apart, Scarlett, just small pieces of shrapnel coming away, and that’s satisfying. I look at her hair sometimes, and see oily roots, white residue from a rushed application of dry shampoo. Ugh.
I see her eyes starved of sleep, heavy. A brief expression of self-doubt that says her confidence had been delivered a blow. Less alpha, more beta. They are fleeting, but I cling to them. Smile as she walks away. This is what I wanted.
But it isn’t enough. Because Scarlett still functions; the building blocks of her life still in place.
Would money help? Stripping her of that?
The Salloways’ house is a four-bedroomed listed building on a private road and Scarlett calls it ‘the cottage’ like we’d all have to stoop to get in there before we sit, shivering, in the three-foot-squared kitchen eating jacket potatoes with own-brand margarine. Ha.
‘I’m working class!’ she protests when she is boozy, her accent deliberately at its strongest.
But there is no evidence of it, this working-class core she claims.
It is another thing that is hard not to roll your eyes at because Scarlett orders the most expensive wine on the list without thinking about it. Clicks order on designer bags while she watches TV. And we all know there is cash, inherited from her mum.
Money isn’t what this is about though.
It’s about so many things, the unfairness of the world, those rolled eyes, a man I love, but money isn’t one of them.
Or it wasn’t meant to be, at least.
11
Scarlett
14 May
Poppy is looking at me, eager. Earlier she brought me her shoes like a puppy desperate for a run around the park.
‘Okay,’ I say, seized by familiar guilt. ‘Come on.’
‘Yeah,’ she says, whether she understands me or not. ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’
By 2.30 p.m. we are at bounce and rhyme at the library, and Poppy is on the floor making duck noises.
‘How old is she?’ asks the mum to my left, smiling down at our children, not me, as parents at baby groups do.
‘Turned one a couple of days ago,’ I reply. I am not looking at her though but at my phone, which has just beeped. My fingers quiver slightly, as they always do now.
‘Aw,’ says the woman I haven’t looked at yet. ‘Did you do anything nice?’
‘What?’ I say.
My phone beeps.
I leap on it, somehow always hoping for an answer, from somewhere.
Just Ed, saying he’s out for drinks tonight. It’s happening a lot lately. Gym, drinks. Anything but home.
I realise I sound rude.
‘Cake, few presents,’ I mutter. I look at her for the first time. Smile. ‘There are plenty of years for the crazy parties aren’t there?’
Or we didn’t do anything major for Poppy’s birthday because there was a deep air of misery heaving its way around our house. It’s not like we were the Waltons before, but we marked occasions, did the celebrations. We blew out the candles, cracked open the Cava.
This time, Ed and I had stood next to each other as we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Poppy and helped her open her presents, all of which I had bought and all of which Ed was as in the dark about as Poppy as we hadn’t spoken about it, hadn’t spoken about much at all lately except lawyers’ fees and sex tapes.
‘You couldn’t buy a cake, could you?’ Asha had said to me,
