We have become closer, in ways, than most friends do. We talked about our fears of having our vaginas ripped open as we practised putting nappies on in antenatal class. Then the babies came and we helped each other position our breasts into our children’s mouths and fed each other toast, desperate for the carbs but unable to free a hand.
We have sat with each other while we wept, not sure why, checking in to see if it’s exhaustion or something more. In the odd moment when we have had something to give, having had an extra hour’s sleep or with our own baby napping, we’ve snuggled in the other’s child, given the gift of a two-minute break with a still-hot tea.
We have discussed, in detail, the way we bled until simply standing up was torture in the weeks after childbirth. We have relayed the hours that we spent pushing or having our babies cut from us, of the emergency button that was pressed or the forceps that came, gunning for us.
We have talked when we couldn’t talk to anyone else about the loneliness of those days home alone with what is technically another human but one that is unable yet to provide any company. About the oddness of that unique time: how special, how scary, how quiet.
We have sighed with relief when we’ve walked into a baby group and seen each other because that means that we can hand our baby over when we go to the toilet, instead of passing them to a stranger and spending the 10 second duration of our wee convinced that they are at that moment being kidnapped.
I look at the table and see Cora’s eyes on us. I grin and motion to her to join but she shakes her head, looks at her phone.
The alcohol hits me then; my drinking stamina isn’t back to its former glories, post Poppy.
Emma leans forward and shouts into my ear over the music.
‘My sister-in-law told me about the row you had over the photo of her little boy,’ she yells, and I go cold.
While it may have been overshadowed lately by my own online dramas, that row had kept me awake at night. Because that woman had been right. And I should understand how having your privacy breached online feels.
That was her child and her decision and I had belittled it and I wanted to say sorry to her, but I felt too embarrassed now, ashamed by my response.
‘Your sister-in-law?’ My voice sounds sharp.
Emma nods. ‘Oh, you didn’t know?’ she says, leaning right in. ‘Yeah she’s married to my brother, babe.’
I shake my head. All I can think is how I love these women but the rest of it? I am sick, sick, sick of this parochial village. I hate that I put make-up on to walk the five minutes from my house to the post box because it’s almost impossible to get there without seeing someone I know. That I have to spend £10 minimum to pay on card at the pub. That I used to stare at the sky and think it was lovely, unobscured by Seventies office buildings, and now it feels like it’s closing in on me, and it’s darker than before, gloomier. That everyone here wears jeans, walking boots, sensible coats and how they all seem content, as they let you pass on the narrow part of the village where there is no pavement. That I envy that contentment, as I long for eccentricity and colour and even misery and extremes, but there is none, ever; there is just someone wishing me a good afternoon, as they pull a beanie hat down over their ears.
I think of how much I miss the anonymity of the city. How creepy it is that everyone here is related and linked and known.
I look at the walls of the bar with their IKEA art and beer stains, and they feel like they’re inching closer too.
It’s breeding paranoia, this feeling.
If the men were telling the truth, then it’s someone else rather than Ollie or Mitch who posted the video. Someone, somehow, however impossible that seems, got hold of it. Is it weird altercations like the one with Emma’s sister-in-law that I need to be looking out for? Is the person who did this a stalker? Someone close?
‘Are you okay?’ shouts Emma over the music, panicking, I can see, that she has upset me but her face is blurring at the edges.
My heart is beating at a rate that would score off the chart on a blood pressure test.
It’s like I have a migraine. Or am having a bad trip.
I need to get out of here.
I stumble as I head back to the table for my bag.
‘Drunk too much,’ I shout back to Emma, then I signal to the door and flee without goodbyes. Knowing I appear rude again, to these friends that do so much for me.
Outside, I flag a cab. Oh, I mean I call a cab and wait forty-five minutes for it and when it arrives, it is inexplicably a minibus because that’s what happens in the countryside.
I look into the darkness out of the window and it seems, still, so alien and I think about how Ed and I ended up here.
We decided on it when we were engaged. I had taken some persuading but Ed had painted a tempting picture.
‘Hot toddies in the local,’ he said, dreamy as we lounged, legs on top of each other, on our tiny sofa in the Chorlton flat we had been renting together for a year. ‘We can get a dog, buy wellies. Do our house up like something off Instagram.’
My head snapped up, like he knew it would. I did a lot of social media in my job and I had aspirations of becoming some sort of influencer then. I had been thinking about a direction I could go. Home renovations?
